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[Stones] [Editorial] Modernize hyphenation and spelling
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
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<p><span class="xlarge"><b>THE ROLLING STONE</b></span>is a weekly paper published in Austin, Texasevery Saturday and will endeavor to fill along-felt want that does not appear,by the way, to be altogether in-satiable at present.<b>THE IDEA IS</b>to fill its pages with matter that will make aheart-rending appeal to every lover ofgood literature, and every person whohas a taste for reading print;and a dollar and a half fora year’s subscription.<b>OUR SPECIAL PREMIUM</b>For the next thirty days and from that timeon indefinitely, whoever will bring two dol-lars in cash to <i>The Rolling Stone</i> officewill be entered on the list of sub-scribers for one year and willhave returned to himon the spot<b>FIFTY CENTS IN CASH</b></p>
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<p><span class="xlarge"><b>THE ROLLING STONE</b></span>is a weekly paper published in Austin, Texasevery Saturday and will endeavor to fill along-felt want that does not appear,by the way, to be altogether insatiable at present.<b>THE IDEA IS</b>to fill its pages with matter that will make aheart-rending appeal to every lover ofgood literature, and every person whohas a taste for reading print;and a dollar and a half fora year’s subscription.<b>OUR SPECIAL PREMIUM</b>For the next thirty days and from that timeon indefinitely, whoever will bring two dollars in cash to <i>The Rolling Stone</i> officewill be entered on the list of subscribers for one year and willhave returned to himon the spot<b>FIFTY CENTS IN CASH</b></p>
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<h5>The editor’s own statement of his aims</h5>
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<h2 epub:type="title">INTRODUCTION</h2>
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<p>This the twelfth and final volume of O. Henry’s work gets its title from an early newspaper venture of which he was the head and front. On April 28, 1894, there appeared in Austin, Texas, volume 1, number 3, of <i>The Rolling Stone</i>, with a circulation greatly in excess of that of the only two numbers that had gone before. Apparently the business office was encouraged. The first two issues of one thousand copies each had been bought up. Of the third an edition of six thousand was published and distributed <i>free</i>, so that the business men of Austin, Texas, might know what a good medium was at hand for their advertising. The editor and proprietor and illustrator of <i>The Rolling Stone</i> was Will Porter, incidentally Paying and Receiving Teller in Major Brackenridge’s bank.</p>
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@ -36,7 +36,7 @@
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<p>It is, of course, jolly larks for Van Sweller, who has wealth and social position enough for him to masquerade safely even as a police commissioner doing his duty, if he wished to do so. But society, not given to scanning the countenances of mounted policemen, sees nothing unusual in the officer on the beat.</p>
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<p>And then comes the runaway.</p>
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<p>That is a fine scene—the swaying victoria, the impetuous, daft horses plunging through the line of scattering vehicles, the driver stupidly holding his broken reins, and the ivory-white face of Amy Ffolliott, as she clings desperately with each slender hand. Fear has come and gone: it has left her expression pensive and just a little pleading, for life is not so bitter.</p>
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<p>And then the clatter and swoop of Mounted Policeman Van Sweller! Oh, it was—but the story has not yet been printed. When it is you shall learn bow he sent his bay like a bullet after the imperilled victoria. A Crichton, a Crœsus, and a Centaur in one, he hurls the invincible combination into the chase.</p>
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<p>And then the clatter and swoop of Mounted Policeman Van Sweller! Oh, it was—but the story has not yet been printed. When it is you shall learn bow he sent his bay like a bullet after the imperilled victoria. A Crichton, a Croesus, and a Centaur in one, he hurls the invincible combination into the chase.</p>
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<p>When the story is printed you will admire the breathless scene where Van Sweller checks the headlong team. And then he looks into Amy Ffolliott’s eyes and sees two things—the possibilities of a happiness he has long sought, and a nascent promise of it. He is unknown to her; but he stands in her sight illuminated by the hero’s potent glory, she his and he hers by all the golden, fond, unreasonable laws of love and light literature.</p>
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<p>Ay, that is a rich moment. And it will stir you to find Van Sweller in that fruitful nick of time thinking of his comrade O’Roon, who is cursing his gyrating bed and incapable legs in an unsteady room in a West Side hotel while Van Sweller holds his badge and his honor.</p>
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<p>Van Sweller hears Miss Ffolliott’s voice thrillingly asking the name of her preserver. If Hudson Van Sweller, in policeman’s uniform, has saved the life of palpitating beauty in the park—where is Mounted Policeman O’Roon, in whose territory the deed is done? How quickly by a word can the hero reveal himself, thus discarding his masquerade of ineligibility and doubling the romance! But there is his friend!</p>
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@ -44,7 +44,7 @@
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<p>As I have said, Van Sweller carried off the park scene to my decided satisfaction. Even to me he was a hero when he foreswore, for the sake of his friend, the romantic promise of his adventure. It was later in the day, amongst the more exacting conventions that encompass the society hero, when we had our liveliest disagreement. At noon he went to O’Roon’s room and found him far enough recovered to return to his post, which he at once did.</p>
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<p>At about six o’clock in the afternoon Van Sweller fingered his watch, and flashed at me a brief look full of such shrewd cunning that I suspected him at once.</p>
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<p>“Time to dress for dinner, old man,” he said, with exaggerated carelessness.</p>
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<p>“Very well,” I answered, without giving him a clew to my suspicions; “I will go with you to your rooms and see that you do the thing properly. I suppose that every author must be a valet to his own hero.”</p>
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<p>“Very well,” I answered, without giving him a clue to my suspicions; “I will go with you to your rooms and see that you do the thing properly. I suppose that every author must be a valet to his own hero.”</p>
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<p>He affected cheerful acceptance of my somewhat officious proposal to accompany him. I could see that he was annoyed by it, and that fact fastened deeper in my mind the conviction that he was meditating some act of treachery.</p>
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<p>When he had reached his apartments he said to me, with a too patronizing air: “There are, as you perhaps know, quite a number of little distinguishing touches to be had out of the dressing process. Some writers rely almost wholly upon them. I suppose that I am to ring for my man, and that he is to enter noiselessly, with an expressionless countenance.”</p>
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<p>“He may enter,” I said, with decision, “and only enter. Valets do not usually enter a room shouting college songs or with <abbr>St.</abbr> Vitus’s dance in their faces; so the contrary may be assumed without fatuous or gratuitous asseveration.”</p>
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@ -56,7 +56,7 @@
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<p>I sprang up, angrily, at his words. This, then, was the paltry trick he had been scheming to play upon me. I faced him with a look so grim that even his patrician poise was flustered.</p>
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<p>“You will never do so,” I exclaimed, “with my permission. What kind of a return is this,” I continued, hotly, “for the favors I have granted you? I gave you a ‘Van’ to your name when I might have called you ‘Perkins’ or ‘Simpson.’ I have humbled myself so far as to brag of your polo ponies, your automobiles, and the iron muscles that you acquired when you were stroke-oar of your ‘varsity eight,’ or ‘eleven,’ whichever it is. I created you for the hero of this story; and I will not submit to having you queer it. I have tried to make you a typical young New York gentleman of the highest social station and breeding. You have no reason to complain of my treatment to you. Amy Ffolliott, the girl you are to win, is a prize for any man to be thankful for, and cannot be equalled for beauty—provided the story is illustrated by the right artist. I do not understand why you should try to spoil everything. I had thought you were a gentleman.”</p>
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<p>“What it is you are objecting to, old man?” asked Van Sweller, in a surprised tone.</p>
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<p>“To your dining at ⸻,”<a href="endnotes.xhtml#note-5" id="noteref-5" epub:type="noteref">5</a> I answered. “The pleasure would be yours, no doubt, but the responsibility would fall upon me. You intend deliberately to make me out a tout for a restaurant. Where you dine to-night has not the slightest connection with the thread of our story. You know very well that the plot requires that you be in front of the Alhambra Opera House at 11:30 where you are to rescue Miss Ffolliott a second time as the fire engine crashes into her cab. Until that time your movements are immaterial to the reader. Why can’t you dine out of sight somewhere, as many a hero does, instead of insisting upon an inapposite and vulgar exhibition of yourself?”</p>
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<p>“To your dining at ⸻,”<a href="endnotes.xhtml#note-5" id="noteref-5" epub:type="noteref">5</a> I answered. “The pleasure would be yours, no doubt, but the responsibility would fall upon me. You intend deliberately to make me out a tout for a restaurant. Where you dine tonight has not the slightest connection with the thread of our story. You know very well that the plot requires that you be in front of the Alhambra Opera House at 11:30 where you are to rescue Miss Ffolliott a second time as the fire engine crashes into her cab. Until that time your movements are immaterial to the reader. Why can’t you dine out of sight somewhere, as many a hero does, instead of insisting upon an inapposite and vulgar exhibition of yourself?”</p>
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<p>“My dear fellow,” said Van Sweller, politely, but with a stubborn tightening of his lips, “I’m sorry it doesn’t please you, but there’s no help for it. Even a character in a story has rights that an author cannot ignore. The hero of a story of New York social life must dine at ⸻<a href="endnotes.xhtml#note-6" id="noteref-6" epub:type="noteref">6</a> at least once during its action.”</p>
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<p>“ ‘Must,’ ” I echoed, disdainfully; “why ‘must’? Who demands it?”</p>
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<p>“The magazine editors,” answered Van Sweller, giving me a glance of significant warning.</p>
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@ -70,7 +70,7 @@
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<p>“You will fail this time,” I said, emphatically.</p>
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<p>“Perhaps so,” admitted Van Sweller, looking out of the window into the street below, “but if so it will be for the first time. The authors all send me there. I fancy that many of them would have liked to accompany me, but for the little matter of the expense.”</p>
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<p>“I say I will be touting for no restaurant,” I repeated, loudly. “You are subject to my will, and I declare that you shall not appear of record this evening until the time arrives for you to rescue Miss Ffolliott again. If the reading public cannot conceive that you have dined during that interval at some one of the thousands of establishments provided for that purpose that do not receive literary advertisement it may suppose, for aught I care, that you have gone fasting.”</p>
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<p>“Thank you,” said Van Sweller, rather coolly, “you are hardly courteous. But take care! it is at your own risk that you attempt to disregard a fundamental principle in metropolitan fiction—one that is dear alike to author and reader. I shall, of course attend to my duty when it comes time to rescue your heroine; but I warn you that it will be your loss if you fail to send me to-night to dine at ⸻.”<a href="endnotes.xhtml#note-8" id="noteref-8" epub:type="noteref">8</a></p>
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<p>“Thank you,” said Van Sweller, rather coolly, “you are hardly courteous. But take care! it is at your own risk that you attempt to disregard a fundamental principle in metropolitan fiction—one that is dear alike to author and reader. I shall, of course attend to my duty when it comes time to rescue your heroine; but I warn you that it will be your loss if you fail to send me tonight to dine at ⸻.”<a href="endnotes.xhtml#note-8" id="noteref-8" epub:type="noteref">8</a></p>
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<p>“I will take the consequences if there are to be any,” I replied. “I am not yet come to be sandwich man for an eating-house.”</p>
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<p>I walked over to a table where I had left my cane and gloves. I heard the whirr of the alarm in the cab below and I turned quickly. Van Sweller was gone.</p>
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<p>I rushed down the stairs and out to the curb. An empty hansom was just passing. I hailed the driver excitedly.</p>
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@ -91,7 +91,7 @@
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<p>Your short story, “The Badge of Policeman O’Roon,” is herewith returned.</p>
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<p>We are sorry that it has been unfavorably passed upon; but it seems to lack in some of the essential requirements of our publication.</p>
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<p>The story is splendidly constructed; its style is strong and inimitable, and its action and character-drawing deserve the highest praise. As a story per se it has merit beyond anything that we have read for some time. But, as we have said, it fails to come up to some of the standards we have set.</p>
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<p>Could you not re-write the story, and inject into it the social atmosphere, and return it to us for further consideration? It is suggested to you that you have the hero, Van Sweller, drop in for luncheon or dinner once or twice at ⸻<a href="endnotes.xhtml#note-10" id="noteref-10" epub:type="noteref">10</a> or at the ⸻<a href="endnotes.xhtml#note-11" id="noteref-11" epub:type="noteref">11</a> which will be in line with the changes desired.</p>
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<p>Could you not rewrite the story, and inject into it the social atmosphere, and return it to us for further consideration? It is suggested to you that you have the hero, Van Sweller, drop in for luncheon or dinner once or twice at ⸻<a href="endnotes.xhtml#note-10" id="noteref-10" epub:type="noteref">10</a> or at the ⸻<a href="endnotes.xhtml#note-11" id="noteref-11" epub:type="noteref">11</a> which will be in line with the changes desired.</p>
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<footer>
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<p epub:type="valediction">Very truly yours,</p>
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<p epub:type="z3998:sender">The Editors</p>
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<p>He draws his collar higher, and moves out, slowly. He stops under an electric light at the corner, and juggles absorbedly with three or four little pasteboard boxes. “Thirty-six,” he announces to himself. “More than plenty.” For a gray mist had swept upon Santone that night, an opaque terror that laid a hand to the throat of each of the city’s guests. It was computed that three thousand invalids were hibernating in the town. They had come from far and wide, for here, among these contracted river-sliced streets, the goddess Ozone has elected to linger.</p>
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<p>Purest atmosphere, sir, on earth! You might think from the river winding through our town that we are malarial, but, no, sir! Repeated experiments made both by the Government and local experts show that our air contains nothing deleterious—nothing but ozone, sir, pure ozone. Litmus paper tests made all along the river show—but you can read it all in the prospectuses; or the Santonian will recite it for you, word by word.</p>
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<p>We may achieve climate, but weather is thrust upon us. Santone, then, cannot be blamed for this cold gray fog that came and kissed the lips of the three thousand, and then delivered them to the cross. That night the tubercles, whose ravages hope holds in check, multiplied. The writhing fingers of the pale mist did not go thence bloodless. Many of the wooers of ozone capitulated with the enemy that night, turning their faces to the wall in that dumb, isolated apathy that so terrifies their watchers. On the red stream of Hemorrhagia a few souls drifted away, leaving behind pathetic heaps, white and chill as the fog itself. Two or three came to view this atmospheric wraith as the ghost of impossible joys, sent to whisper to them of the egregious folly it is to inhale breath into the lungs, only to exhale it again, and these used whatever came handy to their relief, pistols, gas or the beneficent muriate.</p>
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<p>The purchaser of the morphia wanders into the fog, and at length, finds himself upon a little iron bridge, one of the score or more in the heart of the city, under which the small tortuous river flows. He leans on the rail and gasps, for here the mist has concentrated, lying like a foot-pad to garrote such of the Three Thousand as creep that way. The iron bridge guys rattle to the strain of his cough, a mocking phthisical rattle, seeming to say to him: “Clickety-clack! just a little rusty cold, sir—but not from our river. Litmus paper all along the banks and nothing but ozone. Clacket-y-clack!”</p>
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<p>The purchaser of the morphia wanders into the fog, and at length, finds himself upon a little iron bridge, one of the score or more in the heart of the city, under which the small tortuous river flows. He leans on the rail and gasps, for here the mist has concentrated, lying like a footpad to garrote such of the Three Thousand as creep that way. The iron bridge guys rattle to the strain of his cough, a mocking phthisical rattle, seeming to say to him: “Clickety-clack! just a little rusty cold, sir—but not from our river. Litmus paper all along the banks and nothing but ozone. Clacket-y-clack!”</p>
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<p>The Memphis man at last recovers sufficiently to be aware of another overcoated man ten feet away, leaning on the rail, and just coming out of a paroxysm. There is a freemasonry among the Three Thousand that does away with formalities and introductions. A cough is your card; a hemorrhage a letter of credit. The Memphis man, being nearer recovered, speaks first.</p>
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<p>“Goodall. Memphis—pulmonary tuberculosis—guess last stages.” The Three Thousand economize on words. Words are breath and they need breath to write checks for the doctors.</p>
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<p>“Hurd,” gasps the other. “Hurd; of T’leder. T’leder, Ah-hia. Catarrhal bronkeetis. Name’s Dennis, too—doctor says. Says I’ll live four weeks if I—take care of myself. Got your walking papers yet?”</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>The words of it they do not understand—neither Toledo nor Memphis, but words are the least important things in life. The music tears the breasts of the seekers after Nepenthe, inciting Toledo to remark:</p>
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<p>“Those kids of mine—I wonder—by God, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Goodall of Memphis, we had too little of that whiskey! No slow music in mine, if you please. It makes you disremember to forget.”</p>
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<p>Hurd of Toledo, here pulls out his watch, and says: “I’m a son of a gun! Got an engagement for a hack ride out to San Pedro Springs at eleven. Forgot it. A fellow from Noo York, and me, and the Castillo sisters at Rhinegelder’s Garden. That Noo York chap’s a lucky dog—got one whole lung—good for a year yet. Plenty of money, too. He pays for everything. I can’t afford—to miss the jamboree. Sorry you ain’t going along. Good-by, Goodall of Memphis.”</p>
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<p>Hurd of Toledo, here pulls out his watch, and says: “I’m a son of a gun! Got an engagement for a hack ride out to San Pedro Springs at eleven. Forgot it. A fellow from Noo York, and me, and the Castillo sisters at Rhinegelder’s Garden. That Noo York chap’s a lucky dog—got one whole lung—good for a year yet. Plenty of money, too. He pays for everything. I can’t afford—to miss the jamboree. Sorry you ain’t going along. Goodbye, Goodall of Memphis.”</p>
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<p>He rounds the corner and shuffles away, casting off thus easily the ties of acquaintanceship as the moribund do, the season of dissolution being man’s supreme hour of egoism and selfishness. But he turns and calls back through the fog to the other: “I say, Goodall of Memphis! If you get there before I do, tell ’em Hurd’s a-comin’ too. Hurd, of T’leder, Ah-hia.”</p>
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<p>Thus Goodall’s tempter deserts him. That youth, uncomplaining and uncaring, takes a spell at coughing, and, recovered, wanders desultorily on down the street, the name of which he neither knows nor recks. At a certain point he perceives swinging doors, and hears, filtering between them a noise of wind and string instruments. Two men enter from the street as he arrives, and he follows them in. There is a kind of ante-chamber, plentifully set with palms and cactuses and oleanders. At little marble-topped tables some people sit, while soft-shod attendants bring the beer. All is orderly, clean, melancholy, gay, of the German method of pleasure. At his right is the foot of a stairway. A man there holds out his hand. Goodall extends his, full of silver, the man selects therefrom a coin. Goodall goes upstairs and sees there two galleries extending along the sides of a concert hall which he now perceives to lie below and beyond the anteroom he first entered. These galleries are divided into boxes or stalls, which bestow with the aid of hanging lace curtains, a certain privacy upon their occupants.</p>
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<p>Thus Goodall’s tempter deserts him. That youth, uncomplaining and uncaring, takes a spell at coughing, and, recovered, wanders desultorily on down the street, the name of which he neither knows nor recks. At a certain point he perceives swinging doors, and hears, filtering between them a noise of wind and string instruments. Two men enter from the street as he arrives, and he follows them in. There is a kind of antechamber, plentifully set with palms and cactuses and oleanders. At little marble-topped tables some people sit, while soft-shod attendants bring the beer. All is orderly, clean, melancholy, gay, of the German method of pleasure. At his right is the foot of a stairway. A man there holds out his hand. Goodall extends his, full of silver, the man selects therefrom a coin. Goodall goes upstairs and sees there two galleries extending along the sides of a concert hall which he now perceives to lie below and beyond the anteroom he first entered. These galleries are divided into boxes or stalls, which bestow with the aid of hanging lace curtains, a certain privacy upon their occupants.</p>
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<p>Passing with aimless feet down the aisle contiguous to these saucy and discreet compartments, he is half checked by the sight in one of them of a young woman, alone and seated in an attitude of reflection. This young woman becomes aware of his approach. A smile from her brings him to a standstill, and her subsequent invitation draws him, though hesitating, to the other chair in the box, a little table between them.</p>
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<p>Goodall is only nineteen. There are some whom, when the terrible god Phthisis wishes to destroy he first makes beautiful; and the boy is one of these. His face is wax, and an awful pulchritude is born of the menacing flame in his cheeks. His eyes reflect an unearthly vista engendered by the certainty of his doom. As it is forbidden man to guess accurately concerning his fate, it is inevitable that he shall tremble at the slightest lifting of the veil.</p>
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<p>The young woman is well-dressed, and exhibits a beauty of distinctly feminine and tender sort; an Eve-like comeliness that scarcely seems predestined to fade.</p>
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<p>“Talk of death when the world is so beautiful!” says Miss Rosa, laying her hand on his shoulder. “Do something to please me, Walter. Go home to your rest and say: ‘I mean to get better,’ and do it.”</p>
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<p>“If you ask it,” says the boy, with a smile, “I will.”</p>
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<p>The waiter brings full glasses. Did they ring? No; but it is well. He may leave them. A farewell glass. Miss Rosa says: “To your better health, Walter.” He says: “To our next meeting.”</p>
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<p>His eyes look no longer into the void, but gaze upon the antithesis of death. His foot is set in an undiscovered country to-night. He is obedient, ready to go.</p>
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<p>His eyes look no longer into the void, but gaze upon the antithesis of death. His foot is set in an undiscovered country tonight. He is obedient, ready to go.</p>
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<p>“Good night,” she says.</p>
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<p>“I never kissed a girl before,” he confesses, “except my sisters.”</p>
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<p>“You didn’t this time,” she laughs, “I kissed you—good night.”</p>
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<p>Written at the prime of his popularity and power, this characteristic and amusing story was published in <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Everybody’s Magazine</i> in August, 1906.</p>
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</blockquote>
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</header>
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<p>I walked the streets of the City of Insolence, thirsting for the sight of a stranger face. For the City is a desert of familiar types as thick and alike as the grains in a sand-storm; and you grow to hate them as you do a friend who is always by you, or one of your own kin.</p>
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<p>And my desire was granted, for I saw near a corner of Broadway and Twenty-ninth Street, a little flaxen-haired man with a face like a scaly-bark hickory-nut, selling to a fast-gathering crowd a tool that omnigeneously proclaimed itself a can-opener, a screw-driver, a button-hook, a nail-file, a shoe-horn, a watch-guard, a potato-peeler, and an ornament to any gentleman’s key-ring.</p>
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<p>I walked the streets of the City of Insolence, thirsting for the sight of a stranger face. For the City is a desert of familiar types as thick and alike as the grains in a sandstorm; and you grow to hate them as you do a friend who is always by you, or one of your own kin.</p>
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<p>And my desire was granted, for I saw near a corner of Broadway and Twenty-ninth Street, a little flaxen-haired man with a face like a scaly-bark hickory-nut, selling to a fast-gathering crowd a tool that omnigeneously proclaimed itself a can-opener, a screwdriver, a buttonhook, a nail-file, a shoehorn, a watch-guard, a potato-peeler, and an ornament to any gentleman’s key-ring.</p>
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<p>And then a stall-fed cop shoved himself through the congregation of customers. The vender, plainly used to having his seasons of trade thus abruptly curtailed, closed his satchel and slipped like a weasel through the opposite segment of the circle. The crowd scurried aimlessly away like ants from a disturbed crumb. The cop, suddenly becoming oblivious of the earth and its inhabitants, stood still, swelling his bulk and putting his club through an intricate drill of twirls. I hurried after Kansas Bill Bowers, and caught him by an arm.</p>
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<p>Without his looking at me or slowing his pace, I found a five-dollar bill crumpled neatly into my hand.</p>
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<p>“I wouldn’t have thought, Kansas Bill,” I said, “that you’d hold an old friend that cheap.”</p>
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<p>Then he turned his head, and the hickory-nut cracked into a wide smile.</p>
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<p>“Give back the money,” said he, “or I’ll have the cop after you for false pretenses. I thought you was the cop.”</p>
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<p>“I want to talk to you, Bill,” I said. “When did you leave Oklahoma? Where is Reddy McGill now? Why are you selling those impossible contraptions on the street? How did your Big Horn gold-mine pan out? How did you get so badly sunburned? What will you drink?”</p>
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<p>“I want to talk to you, Bill,” I said. “When did you leave Oklahoma? Where is Reddy McGill now? Why are you selling those impossible contraptions on the street? How did your Big Horn goldmine pan out? How did you get so badly sunburned? What will you drink?”</p>
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<p>“A year ago,” answered Kansas Bill systematically. “Putting up windmills in Arizona. For pin money to buy etceteras with. Salted. Been down in the tropics. Beer.”</p>
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<p>We foregathered in a propitious place and became Elijahs, while a waiter of dark plumage played the raven to perfection. Reminiscence needs must be had before I could steer Bill into his epic mood.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Yes,” said he, “I mind the time Timoteo’s rope broke on that cow’s horns while the calf was chasing you. You and that cow! I’d never forget it.”</p>
|
||||
@ -37,10 +37,10 @@
|
||||
<p>“I see there is talk of further outbreaks among the Russian peasants,” I remarked.</p>
|
||||
<p>“His name was Barney O’Connor,” said Bill.</p>
|
||||
<p>Thus, because of our ancient prescience of each other’s trail of thought, we travelled ambiguously to the point where Kansas Bill’s story began:</p>
|
||||
<p>“I met O’Connor in a boarding-house on the West Side. He invited me to his hall-room to have a drink, and we became like a dog and a cat that had been raised together. There he sat, a tall, fine, handsome man, with his feet against one wall and his back against the other, looking over a map. On the bed and sticking three feet out of it was a beautiful gold sword with tassels on it and rhinestones in the handle.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I met O’Connor in a boardinghouse on the West Side. He invited me to his hall-room to have a drink, and we became like a dog and a cat that had been raised together. There he sat, a tall, fine, handsome man, with his feet against one wall and his back against the other, looking over a map. On the bed and sticking three feet out of it was a beautiful gold sword with tassels on it and rhinestones in the handle.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘What’s this?’ says I (for by that time we were well acquainted). ‘The annual parade in vilification of the ex-snakes of Ireland? And what’s the line of march? Up Broadway to Forty-second; thence east to McCarty’s café; thence—’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Sit down on the wash-stand,’ says O’Connor, ‘and listen. And cast no perversions on the sword. ’Twas me father’s in old Munster. And this map, Bowers, is no diagram of a holiday procession. If ye look again. ye’ll see that it’s the continent known as South America, comprising fourteen green, blue, red, and yellow countries, all crying out from time to time to be liberated from the yoke of the oppressor.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I know,’ says I to O’Connor. ‘The idea is a literary one. The ten-cent magazine stole it from “Ridpath’s History of the World from the Sand-stone Period to the Equator.” You’ll find it in every one of ’em. It’s a continued story of a soldier of fortune, generally named O’Keefe, who gets to be dictator while the Spanish-American populace cries “Cospetto!” and other Italian maledictions. I misdoubt if it’s ever been done. You’re not thinking of trying that, are you, Barney?’ I asks.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Sit down on the washstand,’ says O’Connor, ‘and listen. And cast no perversions on the sword. ’Twas me father’s in old Munster. And this map, Bowers, is no diagram of a holiday procession. If ye look again. ye’ll see that it’s the continent known as South America, comprising fourteen green, blue, red, and yellow countries, all crying out from time to time to be liberated from the yoke of the oppressor.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I know,’ says I to O’Connor. ‘The idea is a literary one. The ten-cent magazine stole it from “Ridpath’s History of the World from the Sandstone Period to the Equator.” You’ll find it in every one of ’em. It’s a continued story of a soldier of fortune, generally named O’Keefe, who gets to be dictator while the Spanish-American populace cries “Cospetto!” and other Italian maledictions. I misdoubt if it’s ever been done. You’re not thinking of trying that, are you, Barney?’ I asks.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Bowers,’ says he, ‘you’re a man of education and courage.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘How can I deny it?’ says I. ‘Education runs in my family; and I have acquired courage by a hard struggle with life.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘The O’Connors,’ says he, ‘are a warlike race. There is me father’s sword; and here is the map. A life of inaction is not for me. The O’Connors were born to rule. ’Tis a ruler of men I must be.’</p>
|
||||
@ -52,11 +52,11 @@
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I’m not joking,’ says O’Connor. ‘And I’ve got $1,500 cash to work the scheme with. I’ve taken a liking to you. Do you want it, or not?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I’m not working,’ I told him; ‘but how is it to be? Do I eat during the fomentation of the insurrection, or am I only to be Secretary of War after the country is conquered? Is it to be a pay envelope or only a portfolio?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ll pay all expenses,’ says O’Connor. ‘I want a man I can trust. If we succeed you may pick out any appointment you want in the gift of the government.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘All right, then,’ says I. ‘You can get me a bunch of draying contracts and then a quick-action consignment to a seat on the Supreme Court bench so I won’t be in line for the presidency. The kind of cannon they chasten their presidents with in that country hurt too much. You can consider me on the pay-roll.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘All right, then,’ says I. ‘You can get me a bunch of draying contracts and then a quick-action consignment to a seat on the Supreme Court bench so I won’t be in line for the presidency. The kind of cannon they chasten their presidents with in that country hurt too much. You can consider me on the payroll.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“Two weeks afterward O’Connor and me took a steamer for the small, green, doomed country. We were three weeks on the trip. O’Connor said he had his plans all figured out in advance; but being the commanding general, it consorted with his dignity to keep the details concealed from his army and cabinet, commonly known as William T. Bowers. Three dollars a day was the price for which I joined the cause of liberating an undiscovered country from the ills that threatened or sustained it. Every Saturday night on the steamer I stood in line at parade rest, and O’Connor handed ever the twenty-one dollars.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The town we landed at was named Guayaquerita, so they told me. ‘Not for me,’ says I. ‘It’ll be little old Hilldale or Tompkinsville or Cherry Tree Corners when I speak of it. It’s a clear case where Spelling Reform ought to butt in and disenvowel it.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“But the town looked fine from the bay when we sailed in. It was white, with green ruching, and lace ruffles on the skirt when the surf slashed up on the sand. It looked as tropical and dolce far ultra as the pictures of Lake Ronkonkoma in the brochure of the passenger department of the Long Island Railroad.</p>
|
||||
<p>“We went through the quarantine and custom-house indignities; and then O’Connor leads me to a ‘dobe house on a street called ‘The Avenue of the Dolorous Butterflies of the Individual and Collective Saints.’ Ten feet wide it was, and knee-deep in alfalfa and cigar stumps.</p>
|
||||
<p>“We went through the quarantine and customhouse indignities; and then O’Connor leads me to a ‘dobe house on a street called ‘The Avenue of the Dolorous Butterflies of the Individual and Collective Saints.’ Ten feet wide it was, and knee-deep in alfalfa and cigar stumps.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Hooligan Alley,’ says I, rechristening it.</p>
|
||||
<p>“”Twill be our headquarters,’ says O’Connor. ‘My agent here, Don Fernando Pacheco, secured it for us.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“So in that house O’Connor and me established the revolutionary centre. In the front room we had ostensible things such as fruit, a guitar, and a table with a conch shell on it. In the back room O’Connor had his desk and a large looking-glass and his sword hid in a roll of straw matting. We slept on hammocks that we hung to hooks in the wall; and took our meals at the Hotel Ingles, a beanery run on the American plan by a German proprietor with Chinese cooking served à la Kansas City lunch counter.</p>
|
||||
@ -78,7 +78,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“As I passed the window I glanced inside and caught a glimpse of a white dress and a pair of big, flashing black eyes and gleaming teeth under a dark lace mantilla.</p>
|
||||
<p>“When we got back to our house O’Connor began to walk up and down the floor and twist his moustaches.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Did ye see her eyes, Bowers?’ he asks me.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I did,’ says I, ‘and I can see more than that. It’s all coming out according to the story-books. I knew there was something missing. ’Twas the love interest. What is it that comes in Chapter <span epub:type="z3998:roman">VII</span> to cheer the gallant Irish adventurer? Why, Love, of course—Love that makes the hat go around. At last we have the eyes of midnight hue and the rose flung from the barred window. Now, what comes next? The underground passage—the intercepted letter—the traitor in camp—the hero thrown into a dungeon—the mysterious message from the señorita—then the outburst—the fighting on the plaza—the—’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I did,’ says I, ‘and I can see more than that. It’s all coming out according to the storybooks. I knew there was something missing. ’Twas the love interest. What is it that comes in Chapter <span epub:type="z3998:roman">VII</span> to cheer the gallant Irish adventurer? Why, Love, of course—Love that makes the hat go around. At last we have the eyes of midnight hue and the rose flung from the barred window. Now, what comes next? The underground passage—the intercepted letter—the traitor in camp—the hero thrown into a dungeon—the mysterious message from the señorita—then the outburst—the fighting on the plaza—the—’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Don’t be a fool,’ says O’Connor, interrupting. ‘But that’s the only woman in the world for me, Bowers. The O’Connors are as quick to love as they are to fight. I shall wear that rose over me heart when I lead me men into action. For a good battle to be fought there must be some woman to give it power.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Every time,’ I agreed, ‘if you want to have a good lively scrap. There’s only one thing bothering me. In the novels the light-haired friend of the hero always gets killed. Think ’em all over that you’ve read, and you’ll see that I’m right. I think I’ll step down to the Botica Española and lay in a bottle of walnut stain before war is declared.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘How will I find out her name?’ says O’Connor, layin’ his chin in his hand.</p>
|
||||
@ -87,20 +87,20 @@
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Maybe she meant the rose for me,’ I said, whistling the Spanish Fandango.</p>
|
||||
<p>“For the first time since I’d known O’Connor, he laughed. He got up and roared and clapped his knees, and leaned against the wall till the tiles on the roof clattered to the noise of his lungs. He went into the back room and looked at himself in the glass and began and laughed all over from the beginning again. Then he looked at me and repeated himself. That’s why I asked you if you thought an Irishman had any humor. He’d been doing farce comedy from the day I saw him without knowing it; and the first time he had an idea advanced to him with any intelligence in it he acted like two twelfths of the sextet in a ‘Floradora’ road company.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The next afternoon he comes in with a triumphant smile and begins to pull something like ticker tape out of his pocket.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Great!’ says I. ‘This is something like home. How is Amalgamated Copper to-day?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Great!’ says I. ‘This is something like home. How is Amalgamated Copper today?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I’ve got her name,’ says O’Connor, and he reads off something like this: ‘Dona Isabel Antonia Inez Lolita Carreras y Buencaminos y Monteleon. She lives with her mother,’ explains O’Connor. ‘Her father was killed in the last revolution. She is sure to be in sympathy with our cause.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“And sure enough the next day she flung a little bunch of roses clear across the street into our door. O’Connor dived for it and found a piece of paper curled around a stem with a line in Spanish on it. He dragged the interpreter out of his corner and got him busy. The interpreter scratched his head, and gave us as a translation three best bets: ‘Fortune had got a face like the man fighting’; ‘Fortune looks like a brave man’; and ‘Fortune favors the brave.’ We put our money on the last one.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Do ye see?’ says O’Connor. ‘She intends to encourage me sword to save her country.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘It looks to me like an invitation to supper,’ says I.</p>
|
||||
<p>“So every day this señorita sits behind the barred windows and exhausts a conservatory or two, one posy at a time. And O’Connor walks like a Dominecker rooster and swells his chest and swears to me he will win her by feats of arms and big deeds on the gory field of battle.</p>
|
||||
<p>“By and by the revolution began to get ripe. One day O’Connor takes me into the back room and tells me all.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Bowers,’ says he, ‘at twelve o’clock one week from to-day the struggle will take place. It has pleased ye to find amusement and diversion in this project because ye have not sense enough to perceive that it is easily accomplished by a man of courage, intelligence, and historical superiority, such as meself. The whole world over,’ says he, ‘the O’Connors have ruled men, women, and nations. To subdue a small and indifferent country like this is a trifle. Ye see what little, barefooted manikins the men of it are. I could lick four of ’em single-handed.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Bowers,’ says he, ‘at twelve o’clock one week from today the struggle will take place. It has pleased ye to find amusement and diversion in this project because ye have not sense enough to perceive that it is easily accomplished by a man of courage, intelligence, and historical superiority, such as meself. The whole world over,’ says he, ‘the O’Connors have ruled men, women, and nations. To subdue a small and indifferent country like this is a trifle. Ye see what little, barefooted manikins the men of it are. I could lick four of ’em single-handed.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘No doubt,’ says I. ‘But could you lick six? And suppose they hurled an army of seventeen against you?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Listen,’ says O’Connor, ‘to what will occur. At noon next Tuesday 25,000 patriots will rise up in the towns of the republic. The government will be absolutely unprepared. The public buildings will be taken, the regular army made prisoners, and the new administration set up. In the capital it will not be so easy on account of most of the army being stationed there. They will occupy the president’s palace and the strongly fortified government buildings and stand a siege. But on the very day of the outbreak a body of our troops will begin a march to the capital from every town as soon as the local victory has been won. The thing is so well planned that it is an impossibility for us to fail. I meself will lead the troops from here. The new president will be Señor Espadas, now Minister of Finance in the present cabinet.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘What do you get?’ I asked.</p>
|
||||
<p>“”Twill be strange,’ said O’Connor smiling, ‘if I don’t have all the jobs handed to me on a silver salver to pick what I choose. I’ve been the brains of the scheme, and when the fighting opens I guess I won’t be in the rear rank. Who managed it so our troops could get arms smuggled into this country? Didn’t I arrange it with a New York firm before I left there? Our financial agents inform me that 20,000 stands of Winchester rifles have been delivered a month ago at a secret place up coast and distributed among the towns. I tell you, Bowers, the game is already won.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, that kind of talk kind of shook my disbelief in the infallibility of the serious Irish gentleman soldier of fortune. It certainly seemed that the patriotic grafters had gone about the thing in a business way. I looked upon O’Connor with more respect, and began to figure on what kind of uniform I might wear as Secretary of War.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Tuesday, the day set for the revolution, came around according to schedule. O’Connor said that a signal had been agreed upon for the uprising. There was an old cannon on the beach near the national warehouse. That had been secretly loaded and promptly at twelve o’clock was to be fired off. Immediately the revolutionists would seize their concealed arms, attack the comandante’s troops in the cuartel, and capture the custom-house and all government property and supplies.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Tuesday, the day set for the revolution, came around according to schedule. O’Connor said that a signal had been agreed upon for the uprising. There was an old cannon on the beach near the national warehouse. That had been secretly loaded and promptly at twelve o’clock was to be fired off. Immediately the revolutionists would seize their concealed arms, attack the comandante’s troops in the cuartel, and capture the customhouse and all government property and supplies.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I was nervous all the morning. And about eleven o’clock O’Connor became infused with the excitement and martial spirit of murder. He geared his father’s sword around him, and walked up and down in the back room like a lion in the Zoo suffering from corns. I smoked a couple of dozen cigars, and decided on yellow stripes down the trouser legs of my uniform.</p>
|
||||
<p>“At half-past eleven O’Connor asks me to take a short stroll through the streets to see if I could notice any signs of the uprising. I was back in fifteen minutes.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Did you hear anything?’ he asks.</p>
|
||||
@ -110,25 +110,25 @@
|
||||
<p>“Just at twelve o’clock we heard the sound of a cannon—BOOM!—shaking the whole town.</p>
|
||||
<p>“O’Connor loosens his sword in its scabbard and jumps for the door. I went as far as the door and stood in it.</p>
|
||||
<p>“People were sticking their heads out of doors and windows. But there was one grand sight that made the landscape look tame.</p>
|
||||
<p>“General Tumbalo, the comandante, was rolling down the steps of his residential dugout, waving a five-foot sabre in his hand. He wore his cocked and plumed hat and his dress-parade coat covered with gold braid and buttons. Sky-blue pajamas, one rubber boot, and one red-plush slipper completed his make-up.</p>
|
||||
<p>“General Tumbalo, the comandante, was rolling down the steps of his residential dugout, waving a five-foot sabre in his hand. He wore his cocked and plumed hat and his dress-parade coat covered with gold braid and buttons. Sky-blue pajamas, one rubber boot, and one red-plush slipper completed his makeup.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The general had heard the cannon, and he puffed down the sidewalk toward the soldiers’ barracks as fast as his rudely awakened two hundred pounds could travel.</p>
|
||||
<p>“O’Connor sees him and lets out a battle-cry and draws his father’s sword and rushes across the street and tackles the enemy.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Right there in the street he and the general gave an exhibition of blacksmithing and butchery. Sparks flew from their blades, the general roared, and O’Connor gave the slogan of his race and proclivities.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Then the general’s sabre broke in two; and he took to his ginger-colored heels crying out, ‘Policios,’ at every jump. O’Connor chased him a block, imbued with the sentiment of manslaughter, and slicing buttons off the general’s coat tails with the paternal weapon. At the corner five barefooted policemen in cotton undershirts and straw fiats climbed over O’Connor and subjugated him according to the municipal statutes.</p>
|
||||
<p>“They brought him past the late revolutionary headquarters on the way to jail. I stood in the door. A policeman had him by each hand and foot, and they dragged him on his back through the grass like a turtle. Twice they stopped, and the odd policeman took another’s place while he rolled a cigarette. The great soldier of fortune turned his head and looked at me as they passed. I blushed, and lit another cigar. The procession passed on, and at ten minutes past twelve everybody had gone back to sleep again.</p>
|
||||
<p>“In the afternoon the interpreter came around and smiled as he laid his hand on the big red jar we usually kept ice-water in.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘The ice-man didn’t call to-day,’ says I. ‘What’s the matter with everything, Sancho?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘The iceman didn’t call today,’ says I. ‘What’s the matter with everything, Sancho?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Ah, yes,’ says the liver-colored linguist. ‘They just tell me in the town. Verree bad act that Señor O’Connor make fight with General Tumbalo. Yes, general Tumbalo great soldier and big mans.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘What’ll they do to <abbr>Mr.</abbr> O’Connor?’ I asks.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I talk little while presently with the Juez de la Paz—what you call Justice-with-the-peace,’ says Sancho. ‘He tell me it verree bad crime that one Señor Americano try kill General Tumbalo. He say they keep señor O’Connor in jail six months; then have trial and shoot him with guns. Verree sorree.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘How about this revolution that was to be pulled off?’ I asks.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Oh,’ says this Sancho, ‘I think too hot weather for revolution. Revolution better in winter-time. Maybe so next winter. Quien sabe?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Oh,’ says this Sancho, ‘I think too hot weather for revolution. Revolution better in wintertime. Maybe so next winter. Quien sabe?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘But the cannon went off,’ says I. ‘The signal was given.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘That big sound?’ says Sancho, grinning. ‘The boiler in ice factory he blow up—BOOM! Wake everybody up from siesta. Verree sorree. No ice. Mucho hot day.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“About sunset I went over to the jail, and they let me talk to O’Connor through the bars.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘What’s the news, Bowers?’ says he. ‘Have we taken the town? I’ve been expecting a rescue party all the afternoon. I haven’t heard any firing. Has any word been received from the capital?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Take it easy, Barney,’ says I. ‘I think there’s been a change of plans. There’s something more important to talk about. Have you any money?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I have not,’ says O’Connor. ‘The last dollar went to pay our hotel bill yesterday. Did our troops capture the custom-house? There ought be plenty of government money there.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I have not,’ says O’Connor. ‘The last dollar went to pay our hotel bill yesterday. Did our troops capture the customhouse? There ought be plenty of government money there.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Segregate your mind from battles,’ says I. ‘I’ve been making inquiries. You’re to be shot six months from date for assault and battery. I’m expecting to receive fifty years at hard labor for vagrancy. All they furnish you while you’re a prisoner is water. You depend on your friends for food. I’ll see what I can do.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“I went away and found a silver Chile dollar in an old vest of O’Connor’s. I took him some fried fish and rice for his supper. In the morning I went down to a lagoon and had a drink of water, and then went back to the jail. O’Connor had a porterhouse steak look in his eye.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Barney,’ says I, ‘I’ve found a pond full of the finest kind of water. It’s the grandest, sweetest, purest water in the world. Say the word and I’ll go fetch you a bucket of it and you can throw this vile government stuff out the window. I’ll do anything I can for a friend.’</p>
|
||||
@ -141,7 +141,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“As soon as she said that, I knew that O’Connor and me would be doing things with a knife and fork before the day was over. I drew a chair beside her, and inside of half an hour we were engaged. Then I took my hat and said I must go out for a while.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘You come back?’ says Izzy, in alarm.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Me go bring preacher,’ says I. ‘Come back twenty minutes. We marry now. How you likee?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Marry to-day?’ says Izzy. ‘Good!’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Marry today?’ says Izzy. ‘Good!’</p>
|
||||
<p>“I went down on the beach to the United States consul’s shack. He was a grizzly man, eighty-two pounds, smoked glasses, five foot eleven, pickled. He was playing chess with an india-rubber man in white clothes.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Excuse me for interrupting,’ says I, ‘but can you tell me how a man could get married quick?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“The consul gets up and fingers in a pigeonhole.</p>
|
||||
@ -153,22 +153,22 @@
|
||||
<p>“All at once I sprang up in a hurry. I’d forgotten all about O’Connor. I asked Izzy to fix up a lot of truck for him to eat.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘That big, oogly man,’ said Izzy. ‘But all right—he your friend.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“I pulled a rose out of a bunch in a jar, and took the grub-basket around to the jail. O’Connor ate like a wolf. Then he wiped his face with a banana peel and said: ‘Have you heard nothing from Dona Isabel yet?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Hist!’ says I, slipping the rose between the bars. ‘She sends you this. She bids you take courage. At nightfall two masked men brought it to the ruined chateau in the orange grove. How did you like that goat hash, Barney?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Hist!’ says I, slipping the rose between the bars. ‘She sends you this. She bids you take courage. At nightfall two masked men brought it to the ruined château in the orange grove. How did you like that goat hash, Barney?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“O’Connor pressed the rose to his lips. “ ‘This is more to me than all the food in the world,’ says he. ‘But the supper was fine. Where did you raise it?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I’ve negotiated a stand-off at a delicatessen hut downtown,’ I tells him. ‘Rest easy. If there’s anything to be done I’ll do it.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“So things went along that way for some weeks. Izzy was a great cook; and if she had had a little more poise of character and smoked a little better brand of tobacco we might have drifted into some sense of responsibility for the honor I had conferred on her. But as time went on I began to hunger for the sight of a real lady standing before me in a street-car. All I was staying in that land of bilk and money for was because I couldn’t get away, and I thought it no more than decent to stay and see O’Connor shot.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I’ve negotiated a standoff at a delicatessen hut downtown,’ I tells him. ‘Rest easy. If there’s anything to be done I’ll do it.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“So things went along that way for some weeks. Izzy was a great cook; and if she had had a little more poise of character and smoked a little better brand of tobacco we might have drifted into some sense of responsibility for the honor I had conferred on her. But as time went on I began to hunger for the sight of a real lady standing before me in a streetcar. All I was staying in that land of bilk and money for was because I couldn’t get away, and I thought it no more than decent to stay and see O’Connor shot.</p>
|
||||
<p>“One day our old interpreter drops around and after smoking an hour says that the judge of the peace sent him to request me to call on him. I went to his office in a lemon grove on a hill at the edge of the town; and there I had a surprise. I expected to see one of the usual cinnamon-colored natives in congress gaiters and one of Pizzaro’s cast-off hats. What I saw was an elegant gentleman of a slightly claybank complexion sitting in an upholstered leather chair, sipping a highball and reading <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Humphry Ward. I had smuggled into my brain a few words of Spanish by the help of Izzy, and I began to remark in a rich Andalusian brogue:</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Buenas dias, señor. Yo tengo—yo tengo—’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Oh, sit down, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bowers,’ says he. ‘I spent eight years in your country in colleges and law schools. Let me mix you a highball. Lemon peel, or not?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“Thus we got along. In about half an hour I was beginning to tell him about the scandal in our family when Aunt Elvira ran away with a Cumberland Presbyterian preacher. Then he says to me:</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I sent for you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bowers, to let you know that you can have your friend <abbr>Mr.</abbr> O’Connor now. Of course we had to make a show of punishing him on account of his attack on General Tumbalo. It is arranged that he shall be released to-morrow night. You and he will be conveyed on board the fruit steamer Voyager, bound for New York, which lies in the harbor. Your passage will be arranged for.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I sent for you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bowers, to let you know that you can have your friend <abbr>Mr.</abbr> O’Connor now. Of course we had to make a show of punishing him on account of his attack on General Tumbalo. It is arranged that he shall be released tomorrow night. You and he will be conveyed on board the fruit steamer Voyager, bound for New York, which lies in the harbor. Your passage will be arranged for.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘One moment, judge,’ says I; ‘that revolution—’</p>
|
||||
<p>“The judge lays back in his chair and howls.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Why,’ says he presently, ‘that was all a little joke fixed up by the boys around the court-room, and one or two of our cut-ups, and a few clerks in the stores. The town is bursting its sides with laughing. The boys made themselves up to be conspirators, and they—what you call it?—stick Señor O’Connor for his money. It is very funny.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Why,’ says he presently, ‘that was all a little joke fixed up by the boys around the courtroom, and one or two of our cut-ups, and a few clerks in the stores. The town is bursting its sides with laughing. The boys made themselves up to be conspirators, and they—what you call it?—stick Señor O’Connor for his money. It is very funny.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘It was,’ says I. ‘I saw the joke all along. I’ll take another highball, if your Honor don’t mind.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“The next evening just at dark a couple of soldiers brought O’Connor down to the beach, where I was waiting under a cocoanut-tree.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The next evening just at dark a couple of soldiers brought O’Connor down to the beach, where I was waiting under a coconut-tree.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Hist!’ says I in his ear: ‘Dona Isabel has arranged our escape. Not a word!’</p>
|
||||
<p>“They rowed us in a boat out to a little steamer that smelled of table d’hote salad oil and bone phosphate.</p>
|
||||
<p>“They rowed us in a boat out to a little steamer that smelled of table d’hôte salad oil and bone phosphate.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The great, mellow, tropical moon was rising as we steamed away. O’Connor leaned on the taffrail or rear balcony of the ship and gazed silently at Guaya—at Buncoville-on-the-Beach.</p>
|
||||
<p>“He had the red rose in his hand.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘She will wait,’ I heard him say. ‘Eyes like hers never deceive. But I shall see her again. Traitors cannot keep an O’Connor down forever.’</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -15,7 +15,7 @@
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<p>The person who sweeps the office, translates letters from foreign countries, deciphers communications from graduates of business colleges, and does most of the writing for this paper, has been confined for the past two weeks to the under side of a large red quilt, with a joint caucus of la grippe and measles.</p>
|
||||
<p>We have missed two issues of <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Rolling Stone</i>, and are now slightly convalescent, for which we desire to apologize and express our regrets.</p>
|
||||
<p>Everybody’s term of subscription will be extended enough to cover all missed issues, and we hope soon to report that the goose remains suspended at a favorable altitude. People who have tried to run a funny paper and entertain a congregation of large piebald measles at the same time will understand something of the tact, finesse, and hot sassafras tea required to do so. We expect to get out the paper regularly from this time on, but are forced to be very careful, as improper treatment and deleterious after-effects of measles, combined with the high price of paper and presswork, have been known to cause a relapse. Any one not getting their paper regularly will please come down and see about it, bringing with them a ham or any little delicacy relished by invalids.</p>
|
||||
<p>Everybody’s term of subscription will be extended enough to cover all missed issues, and we hope soon to report that the goose remains suspended at a favorable altitude. People who have tried to run a funny paper and entertain a congregation of large piebald measles at the same time will understand something of the tact, finesse, and hot sassafras tea required to do so. We expect to get out the paper regularly from this time on, but are forced to be very careful, as improper treatment and deleterious aftereffects of measles, combined with the high price of paper and presswork, have been known to cause a relapse. Any one not getting their paper regularly will please come down and see about it, bringing with them a ham or any little delicacy relished by invalids.</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -14,10 +14,10 @@
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<p>Whenever you visit Austin you should by all means go to see the General Land Office.</p>
|
||||
<p>As you pass up the avenue you turn sharp round the corner of the court house, and on a steep hill before you you see a mediæval castle.</p>
|
||||
<p>As you pass up the avenue you turn sharp round the corner of the court house, and on a steep hill before you you see a medieval castle.</p>
|
||||
<p>You think of the Rhine; the “castled crag of Drachenfels”; the Lorelei; and the vine-clad slopes of Germany. And German it is in every line of its architecture and design.</p>
|
||||
<p>The plan was drawn by an old draftsman from the “Vaterland,” whose heart still loved the scenes of his native land, and it is said he reproduced the design of a certain castle near his birthplace, with remarkable fidelity.</p>
|
||||
<p>Under the present administration a new coat of paint has vulgarized its ancient and venerable walls. Modern tiles have replaced the limestone slabs of its floors, worn in hollows by the tread of thousands of feet, and smart and gaudy fixtures have usurped the place of the time-worn furniture that has been consecrated by the touch of hands that Texas will never cease to honor.</p>
|
||||
<p>Under the present administration a new coat of paint has vulgarized its ancient and venerable walls. Modern tiles have replaced the limestone slabs of its floors, worn in hollows by the tread of thousands of feet, and smart and gaudy fixtures have usurped the place of the timeworn furniture that has been consecrated by the touch of hands that Texas will never cease to honor.</p>
|
||||
<p>But even now, when you enter the building, you lower your voice, and time turns backward for you, for the atmosphere which you breathe is cold with the exudation of buried generations.</p>
|
||||
<p>The building is stone with a coating of concrete; the walls are immensely thick; it is cool in the summer and warm in the winter; it is isolated and sombre; standing apart from the other state buildings, sullen and decaying, brooding on the past.</p>
|
||||
<p>Twenty years ago it was much the same as now; twenty years from now the garish newness will be worn off and it will return to its appearance of gloomy decadence.</p>
|
||||
@ -48,7 +48,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Out of file.”</p>
|
||||
<p>It has been missing twenty years.</p>
|
||||
<p>The history of that file has never been written before.</p>
|
||||
<p>Twenty years ago there was a shrewd land agent living in Austin who devoted his undoubted talents and vast knowledge of land titles, and the laws governing them, to the locating of surveys made by illegal certificates, or improperly made, and otherwise of no value through non-compliance with the statutes, or whatever flaws his ingenious and unscrupulous mind could unearth.</p>
|
||||
<p>Twenty years ago there was a shrewd land agent living in Austin who devoted his undoubted talents and vast knowledge of land titles, and the laws governing them, to the locating of surveys made by illegal certificates, or improperly made, and otherwise of no value through noncompliance with the statutes, or whatever flaws his ingenious and unscrupulous mind could unearth.</p>
|
||||
<p>He found a fatal defect in the title of the land as on file in Bexar Scrip <abbr>No.</abbr> 2692 and placed a new certificate upon the survey in his own name.</p>
|
||||
<p>The law was on his side.</p>
|
||||
<p>Every sentiment of justice, of right, and humanity was against him.</p>
|
||||
@ -105,10 +105,10 @@
|
||||
<p>He leaned his head on his hands for a moment, and as he did so a sound behind him caused his heart to leap with guilty fear, but before he could rise, a hand came over his shoulder and grasped the file.</p>
|
||||
<p>He rose quickly, as white as paper, rattling his chair loudly on the stone floor.</p>
|
||||
<p>The boy who land spoken to him earlier stood contemplating him with contemptuous and flashing eyes, and quietly placed the file in the left breast pocket of his coat.</p>
|
||||
<p>“So, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Sharp, by nature as well as by name,” he said, “it seems that I was right in waiting behind the door in order to see you safely out. You will appreciate the pleasure I feel in having done so when I tell you my name is Harris. My mother owns the land on which you have filed, and if there is any justice in Texas she shall hold it. I am not certain, but I think I saw you place a paper in this file this afternoon, and it is barely possible that it may be of value to me. I was also impressed with the idea that you desired to remove it again, but had not the opportunity. Anyway, I shall keep it until to-morrow and let the Commissioner decide.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“So, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Sharp, by nature as well as by name,” he said, “it seems that I was right in waiting behind the door in order to see you safely out. You will appreciate the pleasure I feel in having done so when I tell you my name is Harris. My mother owns the land on which you have filed, and if there is any justice in Texas she shall hold it. I am not certain, but I think I saw you place a paper in this file this afternoon, and it is barely possible that it may be of value to me. I was also impressed with the idea that you desired to remove it again, but had not the opportunity. Anyway, I shall keep it until tomorrow and let the Commissioner decide.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Far back among <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Sharp’s ancestors there must have been some of the old berserker blood, for his caution, his presence of mind left him, and left him possessed of a blind, devilish, unreasoning rage that showed itself in a moment in the white glitter of his eye.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Give me that file, boy,” he said, thickly, holding out his hand.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am no such fool, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Sharp,” said the youth. “This file shall be laid before the Commissioner to-morrow for examination. If he finds—Help! Help!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am no such fool, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Sharp,” said the youth. “This file shall be laid before the Commissioner tomorrow for examination. If he finds—Help! Help!”</p>
|
||||
<p>Sharp was upon him like a tiger and bore him to the floor. The boy was strong and vigorous, but the suddenness of the attack gave him no chance to resist. He struggled up again to his feet, but it was an animal, with blazing eyes and cruel-looking teeth that fought him, instead of a man.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Sharp, a man of high standing and good report, was battling for his reputation.</p>
|
||||
<p>Presently there was a dull sound, and another, and still one more, and a blade flashing white and then red, and Edward Harris dropped down like some stuffed effigy of a man, that boys make for sport, with his limbs all crumpled and lax, on the stone floor of the Land Office.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -20,7 +20,7 @@
|
||||
<p>The lines about Bertram D. Snooper’s hands and mouth were drawn tighter as he paced to and fro, waiting for a reply to the question he intended to ask Gladys as soon as he thought of one.</p>
|
||||
<p>At last an idea occurred to him.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why will you not marry me?” he asked in an inaudible tone.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Because,” said Gladys firmly, speaking easily with great difficulty, “the progression and enlightenment that the woman of to-day possesses demand that the man shall bring to the marriage altar a heart and body as free from the debasing and hereditary iniquities that now no longer exist except in the chimerical imagination of enslaved custom.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Because,” said Gladys firmly, speaking easily with great difficulty, “the progression and enlightenment that the woman of today possesses demand that the man shall bring to the marriage altar a heart and body as free from the debasing and hereditary iniquities that now no longer exist except in the chimerical imagination of enslaved custom.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It is as I expected,” said Bertram, wiping his heated brow on the window curtain. “You have been reading books.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Besides that,” continued Gladys, ignoring the deadly charge, “you have no money.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The blood of the Snoopers rose hastily and mantled the cheek of Bertram D. He put on his coat and moved proudly to the door.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -24,13 +24,13 @@
|
||||
<section id="helping-the-other-fellow-2" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="title z3998:roman">II</h3>
|
||||
<p>“Don’t you ever have a desire to go back to the land of derby hats and starched collars?” I asked him. “You seem to be a handy man and a man of action,” I continued, “and I am sure I could find you a comfortable job somewhere in the States.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Ragged, shiftless, barefooted, a confirmed eater of the lotos, William Trotter had pleased me much, and I hated to see him gobbled up by the tropics.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ve no doubt you could,” he said, idly splitting the bark from a section of sugar-cane. “I’ve no doubt you could do much for me. If every man could do as much for himself as he can for others, every country in the world would be holding millenniums instead of centennials.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Ragged, shiftless, barefooted, a confirmed eater of the lotus, William Trotter had pleased me much, and I hated to see him gobbled up by the tropics.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ve no doubt you could,” he said, idly splitting the bark from a section of sugarcane. “I’ve no doubt you could do much for me. If every man could do as much for himself as he can for others, every country in the world would be holding millenniums instead of centennials.”</p>
|
||||
<p>There seemed to be pabulum in W. T.’s words. And then another idea came to me.</p>
|
||||
<p>I had a brother in Chicopee Falls who owned manufactories—cotton, or sugar, or A. A. sheetings, or something in the commercial line. He was vulgarly rich, and therefore reverenced art. The artistic temperament of the family was monopolized at my birth. I knew that Brother James would honor my slightest wish. I would demand from him a position in cotton, sugar, or sheetings for William Trotter—something, say, at two hundred a month or thereabouts. I confided my beliefs and made my large propositions to William. He had pleased me much, and he was ragged.</p>
|
||||
<p>While we were talking, there was a sound of firing guns—four or five, rattlingly, as if by a squad. The cheerful noise came from the direction of the cuartel, which is a kind of makeshift barracks for the soldiers of the republic.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Hear that?” said William Trotter. “Let me tell you about it.</p>
|
||||
<p>“A year ago I landed on this coast with one solitary dollar. I have the same sum in my pocket to-day. I was second cook on a tramp fruiter; and they marooned me here early one morning, without benefit of clergy, just because I poulticed the face of the first mate with cheese omelette at dinner. The fellow had kicked because I’d put horseradish in it instead of cheese.</p>
|
||||
<p>“A year ago I landed on this coast with one solitary dollar. I have the same sum in my pocket today. I was second cook on a tramp fruiter; and they marooned me here early one morning, without benefit of clergy, just because I poulticed the face of the first mate with cheese omelette at dinner. The fellow had kicked because I’d put horseradish in it instead of cheese.</p>
|
||||
<p>“When they threw me out of the yawl into three feet of surf, I waded ashore and sat down under a palm-tree. By and by a fine-looking white man with a red face and white clothes, genteel as possible, but somewhat under the influence, came and sat down beside me.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I had noticed there was a kind of a village back of the beach, and enough scenery to outfit a dozen moving-picture shows. But I thought, of course, it was a cannibal suburb, and I was wondering whether I was to be served with carrots or mushrooms. And, as I say, this dressed-up man sits beside me, and we become friends in the space of a minute or two. For an hour we talked, and he told me all about it.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It seems that he was a man of parts, conscientiousness, and plausibility, besides being educated and a wreck to his appetites. He told me all about it. Colleges had turned him out, and distilleries had taken him in. Did I tell you his name? It was Clifford Wainwright. I didn’t exactly catch the cause of his being cast away on that particular stretch of South America; but I reckon it was his own business. I asked him if he’d ever been second cook on a tramp fruiter, and he said no; so that concluded my line of surmises. But he talked like the encyclopedia from ‘A–Berlin’ to ‘Trilo–Zyria.’ And he carried a watch—a silver arrangement with works, and up to date within twenty-four hours, anyhow.</p>
|
||||
@ -51,20 +51,20 @@
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Then we’ll drink,’ says Wainwright.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Not me,’ says I. ‘Not any demon rum or any of its ramifications for mine. It’s one of my non-weaknesses.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘It’s my failing,’ says he. ‘What’s your particular soft point?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Industry,’ says I, promptly. ‘I’m hard-working, diligent, industrious, and energetic.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Industry,’ says I, promptly. ‘I’m hardworking, diligent, industrious, and energetic.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘My dear <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Trotter,’ says he, ‘surely I’ve known you long enough to tell you you are a liar. Every man must have his own particular weakness, and his own particular strength in other things. Now, you will buy me a drink of rum, and we will call on President Gomez.’ ”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
<section id="helping-the-other-fellow-3" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="title z3998:roman">III</h3>
|
||||
<p>“Well, sir,” Trotter went on, “we walks the four miles out, through a virgin conservatory of palms and ferns and other roof-garden products, to the president’s summer White House. It was blue, and reminded you of what you see on the stage in the third act, which they describe as ‘same as the first’ on the programs.</p>
|
||||
<p>“There was more than fifty people waiting outside the iron fence that surrounded the house and grounds. There was generals and agitators and épergnes in gold-laced uniforms, and citizens in diamonds and Panama hats—all waiting to get an audience with the Royal Five-Card Draw. And in a kind of a summer-house in front of the mansion we could see a burnt-sienna man eating breakfast out of gold dishes and taking his time. I judged that the crowd outside had come out for their morning orders and requests, and was afraid to intrude.</p>
|
||||
<p>“There was more than fifty people waiting outside the iron fence that surrounded the house and grounds. There was generals and agitators and épergnes in gold-laced uniforms, and citizens in diamonds and Panama hats—all waiting to get an audience with the Royal Five-Card Draw. And in a kind of a summerhouse in front of the mansion we could see a burnt-sienna man eating breakfast out of gold dishes and taking his time. I judged that the crowd outside had come out for their morning orders and requests, and was afraid to intrude.</p>
|
||||
<p>“But C. Wainwright wasn’t. The gate was open, and he walked inside and up to the president’s table as confident as a man who knows the head waiter in a fifteen-cent restaurant. And I went with him, because I had only seventy-five cents, and there was nothing else to do.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The Gomez man rises from his chair, and looks, colored man as he was, like he was about to call out for corporal of the guard, post number one. But Wainwright says some phrases to him in a peculiarly lubricating manner; and the first thing you know we was all three of us seated at the table, with coffee and rolls and iguana cutlets coming as fast as about ninety peons could rustle ’em.</p>
|
||||
<p>“And then Wainwright begins to talk; but the president interrupts him.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘You Yankees,’ says he, polite, ‘assuredly take the cake for assurance, I assure you’—or words to that effect. He spoke English better than you or me. ‘You’ve had a long walk,’ says he, ‘but it’s nicer in the cool morning to walk than to ride. May I suggest some refreshments?’ says he.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Rum,’ says Wainwright.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Gimme a cigar,’ says I.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, sir, the two talked an hour, keeping the generals and equities all in their good uniforms waiting outside the fence. And while I smoked, silent, I listened to Clifford Wainwright making a solid republic out of the wreck of one. I didn’t follow his arguments with any special collocation of international intelligibility; but he had <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Gomez’s attention glued and riveted. He takes out a pencil and marks the white linen tablecloth all over with figures and estimates and deductions. He speaks more or less disrespectfully of import and export duties and custom-house receipts and taxes and treaties and budgets and concessions and such truck that politics and government require; and when he gets through the Gomez man hops up and shakes his hand and says he’s saved the country and the people.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, sir, the two talked an hour, keeping the generals and equities all in their good uniforms waiting outside the fence. And while I smoked, silent, I listened to Clifford Wainwright making a solid republic out of the wreck of one. I didn’t follow his arguments with any special collocation of international intelligibility; but he had <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Gomez’s attention glued and riveted. He takes out a pencil and marks the white linen tablecloth all over with figures and estimates and deductions. He speaks more or less disrespectfully of import and export duties and customhouse receipts and taxes and treaties and budgets and concessions and such truck that politics and government require; and when he gets through the Gomez man hops up and shakes his hand and says he’s saved the country and the people.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘You shall be rewarded,’ says the president.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Might I suggest another—rum?’ says Wainwright.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Cigar for me—darker brand,’ says I.</p>
|
||||
@ -88,7 +88,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“I’ll guarantee,” said I confidently, “that my brother will pay you seventy-five dollars a month.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“All right, then,” said William Trotter. “I’ll—”</p>
|
||||
<p>But a soft voice called across the blazing sands. A girl, faintly lemon-tinted, stood in the Calle Real and called. She was bare-armed—but what of that?</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s her!” said William Trotter, looking. “She’s come back! I’m obliged; but I can’t take the job. Thanks, just the same. Ain’t it funny how we can’t do nothing for ourselves, but we can do wonders for the other fellow? You was about to get me with your financial proposition; but we’ve all got our weak points. Timotea’s mine. And, say!” Trotter had turned to leave, but he retraced the step or two that he had taken. “I like to have left you without saying good-bye,” said he. “It kind of rattles you when they go away unexpected for a month and come back the same way. Shake hands. So long! Say, do you remember them gunshots we heard a while ago up at the cuartel? Well, I knew what they was, but I didn’t mention it. It was Clifford Wainwright being shot by a squad of soldiers against a stone wall for giving away secrets of state to that Nicamala republic. Oh, yes, it was rum that did it. He backslided and got his. I guess we all have our weak points, and can’t do much toward helping ourselves. Mine’s waiting for me. I’d have liked to have that job with your brother, but—we’ve all got our weak points. So long!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s her!” said William Trotter, looking. “She’s come back! I’m obliged; but I can’t take the job. Thanks, just the same. Ain’t it funny how we can’t do nothing for ourselves, but we can do wonders for the other fellow? You was about to get me with your financial proposition; but we’ve all got our weak points. Timotea’s mine. And, say!” Trotter had turned to leave, but he retraced the step or two that he had taken. “I like to have left you without saying goodbye,” said he. “It kind of rattles you when they go away unexpected for a month and come back the same way. Shake hands. So long! Say, do you remember them gunshots we heard a while ago up at the cuartel? Well, I knew what they was, but I didn’t mention it. It was Clifford Wainwright being shot by a squad of soldiers against a stone wall for giving away secrets of state to that Nicamala republic. Oh, yes, it was rum that did it. He backslided and got his. I guess we all have our weak points, and can’t do much toward helping ourselves. Mine’s waiting for me. I’d have liked to have that job with your brother, but—we’ve all got our weak points. So long!”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
<section id="helping-the-other-fellow-4" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="title z3998:roman">IV</h3>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -22,7 +22,7 @@
|
||||
<table>
|
||||
<tr>
|
||||
<td epub:type="z3998:persona"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</td>
|
||||
<td><p>Good morning, Miss Lore. Glad to see you so prompt. We should finish that June installment for the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Epoch</i> to-day. Leverett is crowding me for it. Are you quite ready? We will resume where we left off yesterday. (<i>Dictates</i>.) “Kate, with a sigh, rose from his knees, and—”</p></td>
|
||||
<td><p>Good morning, Miss Lore. Glad to see you so prompt. We should finish that June installment for the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Epoch</i> today. Leverett is crowding me for it. Are you quite ready? We will resume where we left off yesterday. (<i>Dictates</i>.) “Kate, with a sigh, rose from his knees, and—”</p></td>
|
||||
</tr>
|
||||
<tr>
|
||||
<td epub:type="z3998:persona">Miss Lore</td>
|
||||
@ -46,7 +46,7 @@
|
||||
</tr>
|
||||
<tr>
|
||||
<td epub:type="z3998:persona"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</td>
|
||||
<td><p>(<i>dictates</i>)—“Kate had abandoned herself to the joy of her new-found love so completely, that no shadow of her former grief was cast upon it. Cortland, with his arm firmly entwined about her waist, knew nothing of her sighs—”</p></td>
|
||||
<td><p>(<i>dictates</i>)—“Kate had abandoned herself to the joy of her newfound love so completely, that no shadow of her former grief was cast upon it. Cortland, with his arm firmly entwined about her waist, knew nothing of her sighs—”</p></td>
|
||||
</tr>
|
||||
<tr>
|
||||
<td epub:type="z3998:persona">Miss Lore</td>
|
||||
@ -218,7 +218,7 @@
|
||||
</tr>
|
||||
<tr>
|
||||
<td epub:type="z3998:persona">Miss Lore</td>
|
||||
<td><p>Shall I come again to-morrow?</p></td>
|
||||
<td><p>Shall I come again tomorrow?</p></td>
|
||||
</tr>
|
||||
<tr>
|
||||
<td epub:type="z3998:persona"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</td>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -16,7 +16,7 @@
|
||||
<p>I saw a light in Jeff Peters’s room over the Red Front Drug Store. I hastened toward it, for I had not known that Jeff was in town. He is a man of the Hadji breed, of a hundred occupations, with a story to tell (when he will) of each one.</p>
|
||||
<p>I found Jeff repacking his grip for a run down to Florida to look at an orange grove for which he had traded, a month before, his mining claim on the Yukon. He kicked me a chair, with the same old humorous, profound smile on his seasoned countenance. It had been eight months since we had met, but his greeting was such as men pass from day to day. Time is Jeff’s servant, and the continent is a big lot across which he cuts to his many roads.</p>
|
||||
<p>For a while we skirmished along the edges of unprofitable talk which culminated in that unquiet problem of the Philippines.</p>
|
||||
<p>“All them tropical races,” said Jeff, “could be run out better with their own jockeys up. The tropical man knows what he wants. All he wants is a season ticket to the cock-fights and a pair of Western Union climbers to go up the bread-fruit tree. The Anglo-Saxon man wants him to learn to conjugate and wear suspenders. He’ll be happiest in his own way.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“All them tropical races,” said Jeff, “could be run out better with their own jockeys up. The tropical man knows what he wants. All he wants is a season ticket to the cockfights and a pair of Western Union climbers to go up the breadfruit tree. The Anglo-Saxon man wants him to learn to conjugate and wear suspenders. He’ll be happiest in his own way.”</p>
|
||||
<p>I was shocked.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Education, man,” I said, “is the watchword. In time they will rise to our standard of civilization. Look at what education has done for the Indian.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“O-ho!” sang Jeff, lighting his pipe (which was a good sign). “Yes, the Indian! I’m looking. I hasten to contemplate the redman as a standard bearer of progress. He’s the same as the other brown boys. You can’t make an Anglo-Saxon of him. Did I ever tell you about the time my friend John Tom Little Bear bit off the right ear of the arts of culture and education and spun the teetotum back round to where it was when Columbus was a little boy? I did not?</p>
|
||||
@ -24,11 +24,11 @@
|
||||
<p>“John Tom and me got together and began to make medicine—how to get up some lawful, genteel swindle which we might work in a quiet way so as not to excite the stupidity of the police or the cupidity of the larger corporations. We had close upon $500 between us, and we pined to make it grow, as all respectable capitalists do.</p>
|
||||
<p>“So we figured out a proposition which seems to be as honorable as a gold mine prospectus and as profitable as a church raffle. And inside of thirty days you find us swarming into Kansas with a pair of fluent horses and a red camping wagon on the European plan. John Tom is Chief Wish-Heap-Dough, the famous Indian medicine man and Samaritan Sachem of the Seven Tribes. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters is business manager and half owner. We needed a third man, so we looked around and found J. Conyngham Binkly leaning against the want column of a newspaper. This Binkly has a disease for Shakespearian rôles, and an hallucination about a 200 nights’ run on the New York stage. But he confesses that he never could earn the butter to spread on his William S. rôles, so he is willing to drop to the ordinary baker’s kind, and be satisfied with a 200-mile run behind the medicine ponies. Besides Richard <span epub:type="z3998:roman">III</span>, he could do twenty-seven coon songs and banjo specialties, and was willing to cook, and curry the horses. We carried a fine line of excuses for taking money. One was a magic soap for removing grease spots and quarters from clothes. One was a Sum-wah-tah, the great Indian Remedy made from a prairie herb revealed by the Great Spirit in a dream to his favorite medicine men, the great chiefs McGarrity and Siberstein, bottlers, Chicago. And the other was a frivolous system of pick-pocketing the Kansasters that had the department stores reduced to a decimal fraction. Look ye! A pair of silk garters, a dream book, one dozen clothespins, a gold tooth, and ‘When Knighthood Was in Flower’ all wrapped up in a genuine Japanese silkarina handkerchief and handed to the handsome lady by <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters for the trivial sum of fifty cents, while Professor Binkly entertains us in a three-minute round with the banjo.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ’Twas an eminent graft we had. We ravaged peacefully through the State, determined to remove all doubt as to why ’twas called bleeding Kansas. John Tom Little Bear, in full Indian chief’s costume, drew crowds away from the parchesi sociables and government ownership conversaziones. While at the football college in the East he had acquired quantities of rhetoric and the art of calisthenics and sophistry in his classes, and when he stood up in the red wagon and explained to the farmers, eloquent, about chilblains and hyperæsthesia of the cranium, Jeff couldn’t hand out the Indian Remedy fast enough for ’em.</p>
|
||||
<p>“One night we was camped on the edge of a little town out west of Salina. We always camped near a stream, and put up a little tent. Sometimes we sold out of the Remedy unexpected, and then Chief Wish-Heap-Dough would have a dream in which the Manitou commanded him to fill up a few bottles of Sum-wah-tah at the most convenient place. ’Twas about ten o’clock, and we’d just got in from a street performance. I was in the tent with the lantern, figuring up the day’s profits. John Tom hadn’t taken off his Indian make-up, and was sitting by the campfire minding a fine sirloin steak in the pan for the Professor till he finished his hair-raising scene with the trained horses.</p>
|
||||
<p>“All at once out of dark bushes comes a pop like a firecracker, and John Tom gives a grunt and digs out of his bosom a little bullet that has dented itself against his collar-bone. John Tom makes a dive in the direction of the fireworks, and comes back dragging by the collar a kid about nine or ten years young, in a velveteen suit, with a little nickel-mounted rifle in his hand about as big as a fountain-pen.</p>
|
||||
<p>“One night we was camped on the edge of a little town out west of Salina. We always camped near a stream, and put up a little tent. Sometimes we sold out of the Remedy unexpected, and then Chief Wish-Heap-Dough would have a dream in which the Manitou commanded him to fill up a few bottles of Sum-wah-tah at the most convenient place. ’Twas about ten o’clock, and we’d just got in from a street performance. I was in the tent with the lantern, figuring up the day’s profits. John Tom hadn’t taken off his Indian makeup, and was sitting by the campfire minding a fine sirloin steak in the pan for the Professor till he finished his hair-raising scene with the trained horses.</p>
|
||||
<p>“All at once out of dark bushes comes a pop like a firecracker, and John Tom gives a grunt and digs out of his bosom a little bullet that has dented itself against his collarbone. John Tom makes a dive in the direction of the fireworks, and comes back dragging by the collar a kid about nine or ten years young, in a velveteen suit, with a little nickel-mounted rifle in his hand about as big as a fountain-pen.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Here, you pappoose,’ says John Tom, ‘what are you gunning for with that howitzer? You might hit somebody in the eye. Come out, Jeff, and mind the steak. Don’t let it burn, while I investigate this demon with the pea shooter.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Cowardly redskin,’ says the kid like he was quoting from a favorite author. ‘Dare to burn me at the stake and the paleface will sweep you from the prairies like—like everything. Now, you lemme go, or I’ll tell mamma.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“John Tom plants the kid on a camp-stool, and sits down by him. ‘Now, tell the big chief,’ he says, ‘why you try to shoot pellets into your Uncle John’s system. Didn’t you know it was loaded?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“John Tom plants the kid on a campstool, and sits down by him. ‘Now, tell the big chief,’ he says, ‘why you try to shoot pellets into your Uncle John’s system. Didn’t you know it was loaded?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Are you a Indian?’ asks the kid, looking up cute as you please at John Tom’s buckskin and eagle feathers.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I am,’ says John Tom. ‘Well, then, that’s why,’ answers the boy, swinging his feet. I nearly let the steak burn watching the nerve of that youngster.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘O-ho!’ says John Tom, ‘I see. You’re the Boy Avenger. And you’ve sworn to rid the continent of the savage redman. Is that about the way of it, son?’</p>
|
||||
@ -36,25 +36,25 @@
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Now, tell us where your wigwam is, pappoose,’ says John Tom—‘where you live? Your mamma will be worrying about you being out so late. Tell me, and I’ll take you home.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“The kid grins. ‘I guess not,’ he says. ‘I live thousands and thousands of miles over there.’ He gyrated his hand toward the horizon. ‘I come on the train,’ he says, ‘by myself. I got off here because the conductor said my ticket had ex-pirated.’ He looks at John Tom with sudden suspicion ‘I bet you ain’t a Indian,’ he says. ‘You don’t talk like a Indian. You look like one, but all a Indian can say is “heap good” and “paleface die.” Say, I bet you are one of them make-believe Indians that sell medicine on the streets. I saw one once in Quincy.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘You never mind,’ says John Tom, ‘whether I’m a cigar-sign or a Tammany cartoon. The question before the council is what’s to be done with you. You’ve run away from home. You’ve been reading Howells. You’ve disgraced the profession of boy avengers by trying to shoot a tame Indian, and never saying: “Die, dog of a redskin! You have crossed the path of the Boy Avenger nineteen times too often.” What do you mean by it?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“The kid thought for a minute. ‘I guess I made a mistake,’ he says. ‘I ought to have gone farther west. They find ’em wild out there in the canyons.’ He holds out his hand to John Tom, the little rascal. ‘Please excuse me, sir,’ says he, ‘for shooting at you. I hope it didn’t hurt you. But you ought to be more careful. When a scout sees a Indian in his war-dress, his rifle must speak.’ Little Bear give a big laugh with a whoop at the end of it, and swings the kid ten feet high and sets him on his shoulder, and the runaway fingers the fringe and the eagle feathers and is full of the joy the white man knows when he dangles his heels against an inferior race. It is plain that Little Bear and that kid are chums from that on. The little renegade has already smoked the pipe of peace with the savage; and you can see in his eye that he is figuring on a tomahawk and a pair of moccasins, children’s size.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The kid thought for a minute. ‘I guess I made a mistake,’ he says. ‘I ought to have gone farther west. They find ’em wild out there in the canyons.’ He holds out his hand to John Tom, the little rascal. ‘Please excuse me, sir,’ says he, ‘for shooting at you. I hope it didn’t hurt you. But you ought to be more careful. When a scout sees a Indian in his wardress, his rifle must speak.’ Little Bear give a big laugh with a whoop at the end of it, and swings the kid ten feet high and sets him on his shoulder, and the runaway fingers the fringe and the eagle feathers and is full of the joy the white man knows when he dangles his heels against an inferior race. It is plain that Little Bear and that kid are chums from that on. The little renegade has already smoked the pipe of peace with the savage; and you can see in his eye that he is figuring on a tomahawk and a pair of moccasins, children’s size.</p>
|
||||
<p>“We have supper in the tent. The youngster looks upon me and the Professor as ordinary braves, only intended as a background to the camp scene. When he is seated on a box of Sum-wah-tah, with the edge of the table sawing his neck, and his mouth full of beefsteak, Little Bear calls for his name. ‘Roy,’ says the kid, with a sirloiny sound to it. But when the rest of it and his post-office address is referred to, he shakes his head. ‘I guess not,’ he says. ‘You’ll send me back. I want to stay with you. I like this camping out. At home, we fellows had a camp in our back yard. They called me Roy, the Red Wolf! I guess that’ll do for a name. Gimme another piece of beefsteak, please.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“We had to keep that kid. We knew there was a hullabaloo about him somewheres, and that Mamma, and Uncle Harry, and Aunt Jane, and the Chief of Police were hot after finding his trail, but not another word would he tell us. In two days he was the mascot of the Big Medicine outfit, and all of us had a sneaking hope that his owners wouldn’t turn up. When the red wagon was doing business he was in it, and passed up the bottles to <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters as proud and satisfied as a prince that’s abjured a two-hundred-dollar crown for a million-dollar parvenuess. Once John Tom asked him something about his papa. ‘I ain’t got any papa,’ he says. ‘He runned away and left us. He made my mamma cry. Aunt Lucy says he’s a shape.’ ‘A what?’ somebody asks him. ‘A shape,’ says the kid; ‘some kind of a shape—lemme see—oh, yes, a feendenuman shape. I don’t know what it means.’ John Tom was for putting our brand on him, and dressing him up like a little chief, with wampum and beads, but I vetoes it. ‘Somebody’s lost that kid, is my view of it, and they may want him. You let me try him with a few stratagems, and see if I can’t get a look at his visiting-card.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“So that night I goes up to <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Roy Blank by the camp-fire, and looks at him contemptuous and scornful. ‘Snickenwitzel!’ says I, like the word made me sick; ‘Snickenwitzel! Bah! Before I’d be named Snickenwitzel!’</p>
|
||||
<p>“So that night I goes up to <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Roy Blank by the campfire, and looks at him contemptuous and scornful. ‘Snickenwitzel!’ says I, like the word made me sick; ‘Snickenwitzel! Bah! Before I’d be named Snickenwitzel!’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘What’s the matter with you, Jeff?’ says the kid, opening his eyes wide.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Snickenwitzel!’ I repeats, and I spat, the word out. ‘I saw a man to-day from your town, and he told me your name. I’m not surprised you was ashamed to tell it. Snickenwitzel! Whew!’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Snickenwitzel!’ I repeats, and I spat, the word out. ‘I saw a man today from your town, and he told me your name. I’m not surprised you was ashamed to tell it. Snickenwitzel! Whew!’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Ah, here, now,’ says the boy, indignant and wriggling all over, ‘what’s the matter with you? That ain’t my name. It’s Conyers. What’s the matter with you?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘And that’s not the worst of it,’ I went on quick, keeping him hot and not giving him time to think. ‘We thought you was from a nice, well-to-do family. Here’s <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Little Bear, a chief of the Cherokees, entitled to wear nine otter tails on his Sunday blanket, and Professor Binkly, who plays Shakespeare and the banjo, and me, that’s got hundreds of dollars in that black tin box in the wagon, and we’ve got to be careful about the company we keep. That man tells me your folks live ‘way down in little old Hencoop Alley, where there are no sidewalks, and the goats eat off the table with you.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“That kid was almost crying now. ”Taint so,’ he splutters. ‘He—he don’t know what he’s talking about. We live on Poplar Av’noo. I don’t ‘sociate with goats. What’s the matter with you?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Poplar Avenue,’ says I, sarcastic. ‘Poplar Avenue! That’s a street to live on! It only runs two blocks and then falls off a bluff. You can throw a keg of nails the whole length of it. Don’t talk to me about Poplar Avenue.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘It’s—it’s miles long,’ says the kid. ‘Our number’s 862 and there’s lots of houses after that. What’s the matter with—aw, you make me tired, Jeff.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Well, well, now,’ says I. ‘I guess that man made a mistake. Maybe it was some other boy he was talking about. If I catch him I’ll teach him to go around slandering people.’ And after supper I goes up town and telegraphs to <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Conyers, 862 Poplar Avenue, Quincy, Ill., that the kid is safe and sassy with us, and will be held for further orders. In two hours an answer comes to hold him tight, and she’ll start for him by next train.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The next train was due at 6 <abbr class="time">p.m.</abbr> the next day, and me and John Tom was at the depot with the kid. You might scour the plains in vain for the big Chief Wish-Heap-Dough. In his place is <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Little Bear in the human habiliments of the Anglo-Saxon sect; and the leather of his shoes is patented and the loop of his necktie is copyrighted. For these things John Tom had grafted on him at college along with metaphysics and the knockout guard for the low tackle. But for his complexion, which is some yellowish, and the black mop of his straight hair, you might have thought here was an ordinary man out of the city directory that subscribes for magazines and pushes the lawn-mower in his shirt-sleeves of evenings.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The next train was due at 6 <abbr class="time">p.m.</abbr> the next day, and me and John Tom was at the depot with the kid. You might scour the plains in vain for the big Chief Wish-Heap-Dough. In his place is <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Little Bear in the human habiliments of the Anglo-Saxon sect; and the leather of his shoes is patented and the loop of his necktie is copyrighted. For these things John Tom had grafted on him at college along with metaphysics and the knockout guard for the low tackle. But for his complexion, which is some yellowish, and the black mop of his straight hair, you might have thought here was an ordinary man out of the city directory that subscribes for magazines and pushes the lawn-mower in his shirtsleeves of evenings.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Then the train rolled in, and a little woman in a gray dress, with sort of illuminating hair, slides off and looks around quick. And the Boy Avenger sees her, and yells ‘Mamma,’ and she cries ‘O!’ and they meet in a clinch, and now the pesky redskins can come forth from their caves on the plains without fear any more of the rifle of Roy, the Red Wolf. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Conyers comes up and thanks me an’ John Tom without the usual extremities you always look for in a woman. She says just enough, in a way to convince, and there is no incidental music by the orchestra. I made a few illiterate requisitions upon the art of conversation, at which the lady smiles friendly, as if she had known me a week. And then <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Little Bear adorns the atmosphere with the various idioms into which education can fracture the wind of speech. I could see the kid’s mother didn’t quite place John Tom; but it seemed she was apprised in his dialects, and she played up to his lead in the science of making three words do the work of one.</p>
|
||||
<p>“That kid introduced us, with some footnotes and explanations that made things plainer than a week of rhetoric. He danced around, and punched us in the back, and tried to climb John Tom’s leg. ‘This is John Tom, mamma,’ says he. ‘He’s a Indian. He sells medicine in a red wagon. I shot him, but he wasn’t wild. The other one’s Jeff. He’s a fakir, too. Come on and see the camp where we live, won’t you, mamma?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“It is plain to see that the life of the woman is in that boy. She has got him again where her arms can gather him, and that’s enough. She’s ready to do anything to please him. She hesitates the eighth of a second and takes another look at these men. I imagine she says to herself about John Tom, ‘Seems to be a gentleman, if his hair don’t curl.’ And <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters she disposes of as follows: ‘No ladies’ man, but a man who knows a lady.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“So we all rambled down to the camp as neighborly as coming from a wake. And there she inspects the wagon and pats the place with her hand where the kid used to sleep, and dabs around her eyewinkers with her handkerchief. And Professor Binkly gives us ‘Trovatore’ on one string of the banjo, and is about to slide off into Hamlet’s monologue when one of the horses gets tangled in his rope and he must go look after him, and says something about ‘foiled again.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“When it got dark me and John Tom walked back up to the Corn Exchange Hotel, and the four of us had supper there. I think the trouble started at that supper, for then was when <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Little Bear made an intellectual balloon ascension. I held on to the tablecloth, and listened to him soar. That redman, if I could judge, had the gift of information. He took language, and did with it all a Roman can do with macaroni. His vocal remarks was all embroidered over with the most scholarly verbs and prefixes. And his syllables was smooth, and fitted nicely to the joints of his idea. I thought I’d heard him talk before, but I hadn’t. And it wasn’t the size of his words, but the way they come; and ‘twasn’t his subjects, for he spoke of common things like cathedrals and football and poems and catarrh and souls and freight rates and sculpture. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Conyers understood his accents, and the elegant sounds went back and forth between ’em. And now and then Jefferson D. Peters would intervene a few shop-worn, senseless words to have the butter passed or another leg of the chicken.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Yes, John Tom Little Bear appeared to be inveigled some in his bosom about that <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Conyers. She was of the kind that pleases. She had the good looks and more, I’ll tell you. You take one of these cloak models in a big store. They strike you as being on the impersonal system. They are adapted for the eye. What they run to is inches around and complexion, and the art of fanning the delusion that the sealskin would look just as well on the lady with the warts and the pocket-book. Now, if one of them models was off duty, and you took it, and it would say ‘Charlie’ when you pressed it, and sit up at the table, why, then you would have something similar to <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Conyers. I could see how John Tom could resist any inclination to hate that white squaw.</p>
|
||||
<p>“When it got dark me and John Tom walked back up to the Corn Exchange Hotel, and the four of us had supper there. I think the trouble started at that supper, for then was when <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Little Bear made an intellectual balloon ascension. I held on to the tablecloth, and listened to him soar. That redman, if I could judge, had the gift of information. He took language, and did with it all a Roman can do with macaroni. His vocal remarks was all embroidered over with the most scholarly verbs and prefixes. And his syllables was smooth, and fitted nicely to the joints of his idea. I thought I’d heard him talk before, but I hadn’t. And it wasn’t the size of his words, but the way they come; and ‘twasn’t his subjects, for he spoke of common things like cathedrals and football and poems and catarrh and souls and freight rates and sculpture. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Conyers understood his accents, and the elegant sounds went back and forth between ’em. And now and then Jefferson D. Peters would intervene a few shopworn, senseless words to have the butter passed or another leg of the chicken.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Yes, John Tom Little Bear appeared to be inveigled some in his bosom about that <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Conyers. She was of the kind that pleases. She had the good looks and more, I’ll tell you. You take one of these cloak models in a big store. They strike you as being on the impersonal system. They are adapted for the eye. What they run to is inches around and complexion, and the art of fanning the delusion that the sealskin would look just as well on the lady with the warts and the pocketbook. Now, if one of them models was off duty, and you took it, and it would say ‘Charlie’ when you pressed it, and sit up at the table, why, then you would have something similar to <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Conyers. I could see how John Tom could resist any inclination to hate that white squaw.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The lady and the kid stayed at the hotel. In the morning, they say, they will start for home. Me and Little Bear left at eight o’clock, and sold Indian Remedy on the courthouse square till nine. He leaves me and the Professor to drive down to camp, while he stays up town. I am not enamored with that plan, for it shows John Tom is uneasy in his composures, and that leads to firewater, and sometimes to the green corn dance and costs. Not often does Chief Wish-Heap-Dough get busy with the firewater, but whenever he does there is heap much doing in the lodges of the palefaces who wear blue and carry the club.</p>
|
||||
<p>“At half-past nine Professor Binkly is rolled in his quilt snoring in blank verse, and I am sitting by the fire listening to the frogs. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Little Bear slides into camp and sits down against a tree. There is no symptoms of firewater.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Jeff,’ says he, after a long time, ‘a little boy came West to hunt Indians.’</p>
|
||||
@ -63,10 +63,10 @@
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I know it,’ says I. ‘And I’ll bet you his pictures are on valentines, and fool men are his game, red and white.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘You win on the red,’ says John Tom, calm. ‘Jeff, for how many ponies do you think I could buy <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Conyers?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Scandalous talk!’ I replies. ”Tis not a paleface custom.’ John Tom laughs loud and bites into a cigar. ‘No,’ he answers; ”tis the savage equivalent for the dollars of the white man’s marriage settlement. Oh, I know. There’s an eternal wall between the races. If I could do it, Jeff, I’d put a torch to every white college that a redman has ever set foot inside. Why don’t you leave us alone,’ he says, ‘to our own ghost-dances and dog-feasts, and our dingy squaws to cook our grasshopper soup and darn our moccasins?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Now, you sure don’t mean disrespect to the perennial blossom entitled education?’ says I, scandalized, ‘because I wear it in the bosom of my own intellectual shirt-waist. I’ve had education,’ says I, ‘and never took any harm from it.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Now, you sure don’t mean disrespect to the perennial blossom entitled education?’ says I, scandalized, ‘because I wear it in the bosom of my own intellectual shirtwaist. I’ve had education,’ says I, ‘and never took any harm from it.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘You lasso us,’ goes on Little Bear, not noticing my prose insertions, ‘and teach us what is beautiful in literature and in life, and how to appreciate what is fine in men and women. What have you done to me?’ says he. ‘You’ve made me a Cherokee Moses. You’ve taught me to hate the wigwams and love the white man’s ways. I can look over into the promised land and see <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Conyers, but my place is—on the reservation.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“Little Bear stands up in his chief’s dress, and laughs again. ‘But, white man Jeff,’ he goes on, ‘the paleface provides a recourse. ’Tis a temporary one, but it gives a respite and the name of it is whiskey.’ And straight off he walks up the path to town again. ‘Now,’ says I in my mind, ‘may the Manitou move him to do only bailable things this night!’ For I perceive that John Tom is about to avail himself of the white man’s solace.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Maybe it was 10:30, as I sat smoking, when I hear pit-a-pats on the path, and here comes <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Conyers running, her hair twisted up any way, and a look on her face that says burglars and mice and the flour’s-all-out rolled in one. ‘Oh, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters,’ she calls out, as they will, ‘oh, oh!’ I made a quick think, and I spoke the gist of it out loud. ‘Now,’ says I, ‘we’ve been brothers, me and that Indian, but I’ll make a good one of him in two minutes if—’</p>
|
||||
<p>“Maybe it was 10:30, as I sat smoking, when I hear pita-pats on the path, and here comes <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Conyers running, her hair twisted up any way, and a look on her face that says burglars and mice and the flour’s-all-out rolled in one. ‘Oh, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters,’ she calls out, as they will, ‘oh, oh!’ I made a quick think, and I spoke the gist of it out loud. ‘Now,’ says I, ‘we’ve been brothers, me and that Indian, but I’ll make a good one of him in two minutes if—’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘No, no,’ she says, wild and cracking her knuckles, ‘I haven’t seen <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Little Bear. ’Tis my—husband. He’s stolen my boy. Oh,’ she says, ‘just when I had him back in my arms again! That heartless villain! Every bitterness life knows,’ she says, ‘he’s made me drink. My poor little lamb, that ought to be warm in his bed, carried of by that fiend!’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘How did all this happen?’ I ask. ‘Let’s have the facts.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I was fixing his bed,’ she explains, ‘and Roy was playing on the hotel porch and he drives up to the steps. I heard Roy scream, and ran out. My husband had him in the buggy then. I begged him for my child. This is what he gave me.’ She turns her face to the light. There is a crimson streak running across her cheek and mouth. ‘He did that with his whip,’ she says.</p>
|
||||
@ -74,7 +74,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“On the way she tells me some of the wherefores. When he slashed her with the whip he told her he found out she was coming for the kid, and he was on the same train. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Conyers had been living with her brother, and they’d watched the boy always, as her husband had tried to steal him before. I judge that man was worse than a street railway promoter. It seems he had spent her money and slugged her and killed her canary bird, and told it around that she had cold feet.</p>
|
||||
<p>“At the hotel we found a mass meeting of five infuriated citizens chewing tobacco and denouncing the outrage. Most of the town was asleep by ten o’clock. I talks the lady some quiet, and tells her I will take the one o’clock train for the next town, forty miles east, for it is likely that the esteemed <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Conyers will drive there to take the cars. ‘I don’t know,’ I tells her, ‘but what he has legal rights; but if I find him I can give him an illegal left in the eye, and tie him up for a day or two, anyhow, on a disturbal of the peace proposition.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“<abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Conyers goes inside and cries with the landlord’s wife, who is fixing some catnip tea that will make everything all right for the poor dear. The landlord comes out on the porch, thumbing his one suspender, and says to me:</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Ain’t had so much excitements in town since Bedford Steegall’s wife swallered a spring lizard. I seen him through the winder hit her with the buggy whip, and everything. What’s that suit of clothes cost you you got on? ‘Pears like we’d have some rain, don’t it? Say, doc, that Indian of yorn’s on a kind of a whizz to-night, ain’t he? He comes along just before you did, and I told him about this here occurrence. He gives a cur’us kind of a hoot, and trotted off. I guess our constable ‘ll have him in the lock-up ‘fore morning.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Ain’t had so much excitements in town since Bedford Steegall’s wife swallered a spring lizard. I seen him through the winder hit her with the buggy whip, and everything. What’s that suit of clothes cost you you got on? ‘Pears like we’d have some rain, don’t it? Say, doc, that Indian of yorn’s on a kind of a whizz tonight, ain’t he? He comes along just before you did, and I told him about this here occurrence. He gives a cur’us kind of a hoot, and trotted off. I guess our constable ‘ll have him in the lockup ‘fore morning.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“I thought I’d sit on the porch and wait for the one o’clock train. I wasn’t feeling saturated with mirth. Here was John Tom on one of his sprees, and this kidnapping business losing sleep for me. But then, I’m always having trouble with other people’s troubles. Every few minutes <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Conyers would come out on the porch and look down the road the way the buggy went, like she expected to see that kid coming back on a white pony with a red apple in his hand. Now, wasn’t that like a woman? And that brings up cats. ‘I saw a mouse go in this hole,’ says <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Cat; ‘you can go prize up a plank over there if you like; I’ll watch this hole.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“About a quarter to one o’clock the lady comes out again, restless, crying easy, as females do for their own amusement, and she looks down that road again and listens. ‘Now, ma’am,’ says I, ‘there’s no use watching cold wheel-tracks. By this time they’re halfway to—’ ‘Hush,’ she says, holding up her hand. And I do hear something coming ‘flip-flap’ in the dark; and then there is the awfulest war-whoop ever heard outside of Madison Square Garden at a Buffalo Bill matinée. And up the steps and on to the porch jumps the disrespectable Indian. The lamp in the hall shines on him, and I fail to recognize <abbr>Mr.</abbr> J. T. Little Bear, alumnus of the class of ’91. What I see is a Cherokee brave, and the warpath is what he has been travelling. Firewater and other things have got him going. His buckskin is hanging in strings, and his feathers are mixed up like a frizzly hen’s. The dust of miles is on his moccasins, and the light in his eye is the kind the aborigines wear. But in his arms he brings that kid, his eyes half closed, with his little shoes dangling and one hand fast around the Indian’s collar.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Pappoose!’ says John Tom, and I notice that the flowers of the white man’s syntax have left his tongue. He is the original proposition in bear’s claws and copper color. ‘Me bring,’ says he, and he lays the kid in his mother’s arms. ‘Run fifteen mile,’ says John Tom—‘Ugh! Catch white man. Bring pappoose.’</p>
|
||||
@ -83,7 +83,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“It is ten o’clock next day when John Tom wakes up and looks around. I am glad to see the nineteenth century in his eyes again.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘What was it, Jeff?’ he asks.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Heap firewater,’ says I.</p>
|
||||
<p>“John Tom frowns, and thinks a little. ‘Combined,’ says he directly, ‘with the interesting little physiological shake-up known as reversion to type. I remember now. Have they gone yet?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“John Tom frowns, and thinks a little. ‘Combined,’ says he directly, ‘with the interesting little physiological shakeup known as reversion to type. I remember now. Have they gone yet?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘On the 7:30 train,’ I answers.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Ugh!’ says John Tom; ‘better so. Paleface, bring big Chief Wish-Heap-Dough a little bromo-seltzer, and then he’ll take up the redman’s burden again.’ ”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -21,7 +21,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Bonifacio’s great booming voice with its indestructible singing quality called out:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Eh, Meestro Murray; how you feel—all-a right—yes?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“All right, Bonifacio,” said Murray steadily, as he allowed the ant to crawl upon the envelope and then dumped it gently on the stone floor.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Dat’s good-a, Meestro Murray. Men like us, we must-a die like-a men. My time come nex’-a week. All-a right. Remember, Meestro Murray, I beat-a you dat las’ game of de check. Maybe we play again some-a time. I don’-a know. Maybe we have to call-a de move damn-a loud to play de check where dey goin’ send us.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Dat’s good-a, Meestro Murray. Men like us, we must-a die like-a men. My time come nex’-a week. All-a right. Remember, Meestro Murray, I beat-a you dat las’ game of de check. Maybe we play again some-a time. I don’-a know. Maybe we have to calla de move damn-a loud to play de check where dey goin’ send us.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Bonifacio’s hardened philosophy, followed closely by his deafening, musical peal of laughter, warmed rather than chilled Murray’s numbed heart. Yet, Bonifacio had until next week to live.</p>
|
||||
<p>The cell-dwellers heard the familiar, loud click of the steel bolts as the door at the end of the corridor was opened. Three men came to Murray’s cell and unlocked it. Two were prison guards; the other was “Len”—no; that was in the old days; now the Reverend Leonard Winston, a friend and neighbor from their barefoot days.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I got them to let me take the prison chaplain’s place,” he said, as he gave Murray’s hand one short, strong grip. In his left hand he held a small Bible, with his forefinger marking a page.</p>
|
||||
@ -34,7 +34,7 @@
|
||||
<p>So, of the seven condemned only three called their farewells to Murray as he marched down the corridor between the two guards—Bonifacio, Marvin, who had killed a guard while trying to escape from the prison, and Bassett, the train-robber, who was driven to it because the express-messenger wouldn’t raise his hands when ordered to do so. The remaining four smoldered, silent, in their cells, no doubt feeling their social ostracism in Limbo Lane society more keenly than they did the memory of their less picturesque offences against the law.</p>
|
||||
<p>Murray wondered at his own calmness and nearly indifference. In the execution room were about twenty men, a congregation made up of prison officers, newspaper reporters, and lookers-on who had succeeded</p>
|
||||
<hr/>
|
||||
<p>Here, in the very middle of a sentence, the hand of Death interrupted the telling of O. Henry’s last story. He had planned to make this story different from his others, the beginning of a new series in a style he had not previously attempted. “I want to show the public,” he said, “that I can write something new—new for me, I mean—a story without slang, a straightforward dramatic plot treated in a way that will come nearer my idea of real story-writing.” Before starting to write the present story, he outlined briefly how he intended to develop it: Murray, the criminal accused and convicted of the brutal murder of his sweetheart—a murder prompted by jealous rage—at first faces the death penalty, calm, and, to all outward appearances, indifferent to his fate. As he nears the electric chair he is overcome by a revulsion of feeling. He is left dazed, stupefied, stunned. The entire scene in the death-chamber—the witnesses, the spectators, the preparations for execution—become unreal to him. The thought flashes through his brain that a terrible mistake is being made. Why is he being strapped to the chair? What has he done? What crime has he committed? In the few moments while the straps are being adjusted a vision comes to him. He dreams a dream. He sees a little country cottage, bright, sun-lit, nestling in a bower of flowers. A woman is there, and a little child. He speaks with them and finds that they are his wife, his child—and the cottage their home. So, after all, it is a mistake. Some one has frightfully, irretrievably blundered. The accusation, the trial, the conviction, the sentence to death in the electric chair—all a dream. He takes his wife in his arms and kisses the child. Yes, here is happiness. It was a dream. Then—at a sign from the prison warden the fatal current is turned on.</p>
|
||||
<p>Here, in the very middle of a sentence, the hand of Death interrupted the telling of O. Henry’s last story. He had planned to make this story different from his others, the beginning of a new series in a style he had not previously attempted. “I want to show the public,” he said, “that I can write something new—new for me, I mean—a story without slang, a straightforward dramatic plot treated in a way that will come nearer my idea of real story-writing.” Before starting to write the present story, he outlined briefly how he intended to develop it: Murray, the criminal accused and convicted of the brutal murder of his sweetheart—a murder prompted by jealous rage—at first faces the death penalty, calm, and, to all outward appearances, indifferent to his fate. As he nears the electric chair he is overcome by a revulsion of feeling. He is left dazed, stupefied, stunned. The entire scene in the death-chamber—the witnesses, the spectators, the preparations for execution—become unreal to him. The thought flashes through his brain that a terrible mistake is being made. Why is he being strapped to the chair? What has he done? What crime has he committed? In the few moments while the straps are being adjusted a vision comes to him. He dreams a dream. He sees a little country cottage, bright, sunlit, nestling in a bower of flowers. A woman is there, and a little child. He speaks with them and finds that they are his wife, his child—and the cottage their home. So, after all, it is a mistake. Some one has frightfully, irretrievably blundered. The accusation, the trial, the conviction, the sentence to death in the electric chair—all a dream. He takes his wife in his arms and kisses the child. Yes, here is happiness. It was a dream. Then—at a sign from the prison warden the fatal current is turned on.</p>
|
||||
<p>Murray had dreamed the wrong dream.</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -19,11 +19,11 @@
|
||||
<p>On arriving in Saltillo I went to Bell’s store. He nodded to me, smiled his broad, lingering smile, went on leisurely selling some candy to a little girl, then came around the counter and shook hands.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well,” he said (his invariably preliminary jocosity at every call I made), “I suppose you are out here making kodak pictures of the mountains. It’s the wrong time of the year to buy any hardware, of course.”</p>
|
||||
<p>I told Bell about the bargain in Mountain City. If he wanted to take advantage of it, I would rather have missed a sale than have him overstocked in Saltillo.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It sounds good,” he said, with enthusiasm. “I’d like to branch out and do a bigger business, and I’m obliged to you for mentioning it. But—well, you come and stay at my house to-night and I’ll think about it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It sounds good,” he said, with enthusiasm. “I’d like to branch out and do a bigger business, and I’m obliged to you for mentioning it. But—well, you come and stay at my house tonight and I’ll think about it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>It was then after sundown and time for the larger stores in Saltillo to close. The clerks in Bell’s put away their books, whirled the combination of the safe, put on their coats and hats and left for their homes. Bell padlocked the big, double wooden front doors, and we stood, for a moment, breathing the keen, fresh mountain air coming across the foothills.</p>
|
||||
<p>A big man walked down the street and stopped in front of the high porch of the store. His long, black moustache, black eyebrows, and curly black hair contrasted queerly with his light, pink complexion, which belonged, by rights, to a blonde. He was about forty, and wore a white vest, a white hat, a watch chain made of five-dollar gold pieces linked together, and a rather well-fitting two-piece gray suit of the cut that college boys of eighteen are wont to affect. He glanced at me distrustfully, and then at Bell with coldness and, I thought, something of enmity in his expression.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well,” asked Bell, as if he were addressing a stranger, “did you fix up that matter?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Did I!” the man answered, in a resentful tone. “What do you suppose I’ve been here two weeks for? The business is to be settled to-night. Does that suit you, or have you got something to kick about?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Did I!” the man answered, in a resentful tone. “What do you suppose I’ve been here two weeks for? The business is to be settled tonight. Does that suit you, or have you got something to kick about?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s all right,” said Bell. “I knew you’d do it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Of course, you did,” said the magnificent stranger. “Haven’t I done it before?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You have,” admitted Bell. “And so have I. How do you find it at the hotel?”</p>
|
||||
@ -67,10 +67,10 @@
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Don’t get excited,’ says George. ‘And for the Lord’s sake go and wash your hands and face and put on a clean shirt.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“And he lights his pipe, while I drive away at a gallop. The next morning he drops around to our cottage, where my aunt was fiddling with her flowers and truck in the front yard. He bends himself and bows and makes compliments as he could do, when so disposed, and begs a rose bush from her, saying he had turned up a little land back of his cabin, and wanted to plant something on it by way of usefulness and ornament. So my aunt, flattered, pulls up one of her biggest by the roots and gives it to him. Afterward I see it growing where he planted it, in a place where the grass had been cleared off and the dirt levelled. But neither George nor me ever spoke of it to each other again.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The moon rose higher, possibly drawing water from the sea, pixies from their dells and certainly more confidences from Simms Bell, the friend of a friend.</p>
|
||||
<p>“There come a time, not long afterward,” he went on, “when I was able to do a good turn for George Ringo. George had made a little pile of money in beeves and he was up in Denver, and he showed up when I saw him, wearing deer-skin vests, yellow shoes, clothes like the awnings in front of drug stores, and his hair dyed so blue that it looked black in the dark. He wrote me to come up there, quick—that he needed me, and to bring the best outfit of clothes I had. I had ’em on when I got the letter, so I left on the next train. George was—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“There come a time, not long afterward,” he went on, “when I was able to do a good turn for George Ringo. George had made a little pile of money in beeves and he was up in Denver, and he showed up when I saw him, wearing deerskin vests, yellow shoes, clothes like the awnings in front of drug stores, and his hair dyed so blue that it looked black in the dark. He wrote me to come up there, quick—that he needed me, and to bring the best outfit of clothes I had. I had ’em on when I got the letter, so I left on the next train. George was—”</p>
|
||||
<p>Bell stopped for half a minute, listening intently.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I thought I heard a team coming down the road,” he explained. “George was at a summer resort on a lake near Denver and was putting on as many airs as he knew how. He had rented a little two-room cottage, and had a Chihauhau dog and a hammock and eight different kinds of walking sticks.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Simms,’ he says to me, ‘there’s a widow woman here that’s pestering the soul out of me with her intentions. I can’t get out of her way. It ain’t that she ain’t handsome and agreeable, in a sort of style, but her attentions is serious, and I ain’t ready for to marry nobody and settle down. I can’t go to no festivity nor sit on the hotel piazza or mix in any of the society round-ups, but what she cuts me out of the herd and puts her daily brand on me. I like this here place,’ goes on George, ‘and I’m making a hit here in the most censorious circles, so I don’t want to have to run away from it. So I sent for you.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Simms,’ he says to me, ‘there’s a widow woman here that’s pestering the soul out of me with her intentions. I can’t get out of her way. It ain’t that she ain’t handsome and agreeable, in a sort of style, but her attentions is serious, and I ain’t ready for to marry nobody and settle down. I can’t go to no festivity nor sit on the hotel piazza or mix in any of the society roundups, but what she cuts me out of the herd and puts her daily brand on me. I like this here place,’ goes on George, ‘and I’m making a hit here in the most censorious circles, so I don’t want to have to run away from it. So I sent for you.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘What do you want me to do?’ I asks George.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Why,’ says he, ‘I want you to head her off. I want you to cut me out. I want you to come to the rescue. Suppose you seen a wildcat about for to eat me, what would you do?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Go for it,’ says I.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -16,7 +16,7 @@
|
||||
<p>The policeman was standing at the corner of Twenty-fourth Street and a prodigiously dark alley near where the elevated railroad crosses the street. The time was two o’clock in the morning; the outlook a stretch of cold, drizzling, unsociable blackness until the dawn.</p>
|
||||
<p>A man, wearing a long overcoat, with his hat tilted down in front, and carrying something in one hand, walked softly but rapidly out of the black alley. The policeman accosted him civilly, but with the assured air that is linked with conscious authority. The hour, the alley’s musty reputation, the pedestrian’s haste, the burden he carried—these easily combined into the “suspicious circumstances” that required illumination at the officer’s hands.</p>
|
||||
<p>The “suspect” halted readily and tilted back his hat, exposing, in the flicker of the electric lights, an emotionless, smooth countenance with a rather long nose and steady dark eyes. Thrusting his gloved hand into a side pocket of his overcoat, he drew out a card and handed it to the policeman. Holding it to catch the uncertain light, the officer read the name “Charles Spencer James, M. D.” The street and number of the address were of a neighborhood so solid and respectable as to subdue even curiosity. The policeman’s downward glance at the article carried in the doctor’s hand—a handsome medicine case of black leather, with small silver mountings—further endorsed the guarantee of the card.</p>
|
||||
<p>“All right, doctor,” said the officer, stepping aside, with an air of bulky affability. “Orders are to be extra careful. Good many burglars and hold-ups lately. Bad night to be out. Not so cold, but—clammy.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“All right, doctor,” said the officer, stepping aside, with an air of bulky affability. “Orders are to be extra careful. Good many burglars and holdups lately. Bad night to be out. Not so cold, but—clammy.”</p>
|
||||
<p>With a formal inclination of his head, and a word or two corroborative of the officer’s estimate of the weather, Doctor James continued his somewhat rapid progress. Three times that night had a patrolman accepted his professional card and the sight of his paragon of a medicine case as vouchers for his honesty of person and purpose. Had any one of those officers seen fit, on the morrow, to test the evidence of that card he would have found it borne out by the doctor’s name on a handsome doorplate, his presence, calm and well dressed, in his well-equipped office—provided it were not too early, Doctor James being a late riser—and the testimony of the neighborhood to his good citizenship, his devotion to his family, and his success as a practitioner the two years he had lived among them.</p>
|
||||
<p>Therefore, it would have much surprised any one of those zealous guardians of the peace could they have taken a peep into that immaculate medicine case. Upon opening it, the first article to be seen would have been an elegant set of the latest conceived tools used by the “box man,” as the ingenious safe burglar now denominates himself. Specially designed and constructed were the implements—the short but powerful “jimmy,” the collection of curiously fashioned keys, the blued drills and punches of the finest temper—capable of eating their way into chilled steel as a mouse eats into a cheese, and the clamps that fasten like a leech to the polished door of a safe and pull out the combination knob as a dentist extracts a tooth. In a little pouch in the inner side of the “medicine” case was a four-ounce vial of nitroglycerine, now half empty. Underneath the tools was a mass of crumpled banknotes and a few handfuls of gold coin, the money, altogether, amounting to eight hundred and thirty dollars.</p>
|
||||
<p>To a very limited circle of friends Doctor James was known as “The Swell ‘Greek.’ ” Half of the mysterious term was a tribute to his cool and gentlemanlike manners; the other half denoted, in the argot of the brotherhood, the leader, the planner, the one who, by the power and prestige of his address and position, secured the information upon which they based their plans and desperate enterprises.</p>
|
||||
@ -33,13 +33,13 @@
|
||||
<p>“I done brought de doctor, Miss Amy.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Doctor James entered the room, and bowed slightly to a young lady standing by the side of a bed. He set his medicine case upon a chair, removed his overcoat, throwing it over the case and the back of the chair, and advanced with quiet self-possession to the bedside.</p>
|
||||
<p>There lay a man, sprawling as he had fallen—a man dressed richly in the prevailing mode, with only his shoe removed; lying relaxed, and as still as the dead.</p>
|
||||
<p>There emanated from Doctor James an aura of calm force and reserve strength that was as manna in the desert to the weak and desolate among his patrons. Always had women, especially, been attracted by something in his sick-room manner. It was not the indulgent suavity of the fashionable healer, but a manner of poise, of sureness, of ability to overcome fate, of deference and protection and devotion. There was an exploring magnetism in his steadfast, luminous brown eves; a latent authority in the impassive, even priestly, tranquillity of his smooth countenance that outwardly fitted him for the part of confidant and consoler. Sometimes, at his first professional visit, women would tell him where they hid their diamonds at night from the burglars.</p>
|
||||
<p>There emanated from Doctor James an aura of calm force and reserve strength that was as manna in the desert to the weak and desolate among his patrons. Always had women, especially, been attracted by something in his sickroom manner. It was not the indulgent suavity of the fashionable healer, but a manner of poise, of sureness, of ability to overcome fate, of deference and protection and devotion. There was an exploring magnetism in his steadfast, luminous brown eves; a latent authority in the impassive, even priestly, tranquillity of his smooth countenance that outwardly fitted him for the part of confidant and consoler. Sometimes, at his first professional visit, women would tell him where they hid their diamonds at night from the burglars.</p>
|
||||
<p>With the ease of much practice, Doctor James’s unroving eyes estimated the order and quality of the room’s furnishings. The appointments were rich and costly. The same glance had secured cognizance of the lady’s appearance. She was small and scarcely past twenty. Her face possessed the title to a winsome prettiness, now obscured by (you would say) rather a fixed melancholy than the more violent imprint of a sudden sorrow. Upon her forehead, above one eyebrow, was a livid bruise, suffered, the physician’s eye told him, within the past six hours.</p>
|
||||
<p>Doctor James’s fingers went to the man’s wrist. His almost vocal eyes questioned the lady.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Chandler,” she responded, speaking with the plaintive Southern slur and intonation. “My husband was taken suddenly ill about ten minutes before you came. He has had attacks of heart trouble before—some of them were very bad.” His clothed state and the late hour seemed to prompt her to further explanation. “He had been out late; to—a supper, I believe.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Doctor James now turned his attention to his patient. In whichever of his “professions” he happened to be engaged he was wont to honor the “case” or the “job” with his whole interest.</p>
|
||||
<p>The sick man appeared to be about thirty. His countenance bore a look of boldness and dissipation, but was not without a symmetry of feature and the fine lines drawn by a taste and indulgence in humor that gave the redeeming touch. There was an odor of spilled wine about his clothes.</p>
|
||||
<p>The physician laid back his outer garments, and then, with a penknife, slit the shirt-front from collar to waist. The obstacles cleared, he laid his ear to the heart and listened intently.</p>
|
||||
<p>The physician laid back his outer garments, and then, with a penknife, slit the shirtfront from collar to waist. The obstacles cleared, he laid his ear to the heart and listened intently.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mitral regurgitation?” he said, softly, when he rose. The words ended with the rising inflection of uncertainty. Again he listened long; and this time he said, “Mitral insufficiency,” with the accent of an assured diagnosis.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Madam,” he began, in the reassuring tones that had so often allayed anxiety, “there is a probability—” As he slowly turned his head to face the lady, he saw her fall, white and swooning, into the arms of the old negress.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Po’ lamb! po’ lamb! Has dey done killed Aunt Cindy’s own blessed child? May de Lawd’ stroy wid his wrath dem what stole her away; what break dat angel heart; what left—”</p>
|
||||
@ -85,7 +85,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Rising, he took the sick man’s wrist. His pulse was beating in great throbs, with ominous intervals between.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Lift your arm,” said Doctor James.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You know—I can’t move, Doctor.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The physician stepped swiftly to the hall door, opened it, and listened. All was still. Without further circumvention he went to the safe, and examined it. Of a primitive make and simple design, it afforded little more security than protection against light-fingered servants. To his skill it was a mere toy, a thing of straw and paste-board. The money was as good as in his hands. With his clamps he could draw the knob, punch the tumblers and open the door in two minutes. Perhaps, in another way, he might open it in one.</p>
|
||||
<p>The physician stepped swiftly to the hall door, opened it, and listened. All was still. Without further circumvention he went to the safe, and examined it. Of a primitive make and simple design, it afforded little more security than protection against light-fingered servants. To his skill it was a mere toy, a thing of straw and pasteboard. The money was as good as in his hands. With his clamps he could draw the knob, punch the tumblers and open the door in two minutes. Perhaps, in another way, he might open it in one.</p>
|
||||
<p>Kneeling upon the floor, he laid his ear to the combination plate, and slowly turned the knob. As he had surmised, it was locked at only a “day com.”—upon one number. His keen ear caught the faint warning click as the tumbler was disturbed; he used the clue—the handle turned. He swung the door wide open.</p>
|
||||
<p>The interior of the safe was bare—not even a scrap of paper rested within the hollow iron cube.</p>
|
||||
<p>Doctor James rose to his feet and walked back to the bed.</p>
|
||||
@ -98,7 +98,7 @@
|
||||
<p>The physician indulged himself to but one reply to the other’s caustic taunts. Bending low to catch Chandler’s fast crystallizing gaze, he pointed to the sleeping lady’s door with a gesture so stern and significant that the prostrate man half-lifted his head, with his remaining strength, to see. He saw nothing; but he caught the cold words of the doctor—the last sounds hie was to hear:</p>
|
||||
<p>“I never yet—struck a woman.”</p>
|
||||
<p>It were vain to attempt to con such men. There is no curriculum that can reckon with them in its ken. They are offshoots from the types whereof men say, “He will do this,” or “He will do that.” We only know that they exist; and that we can observe them, and tell one another of their bare performances, as children watch and speak of the marionettes.</p>
|
||||
<p>Yet it were a droll study in egoism to consider these two—one an assassin and a robber, standing above his victim; the other baser in his offences, if a lesser law-breaker, lying, abhorred, in the house of the wife he had persecuted, spoiled, and smitten, one a tiger, the other a dog-wolf—to consider each of them sickening at the foulness of the other; and each flourishing out of the mire of his manifest guilt his own immaculate standard—of conduct, if not of honor.</p>
|
||||
<p>Yet it were a droll study in egoism to consider these two—one an assassin and a robber, standing above his victim; the other baser in his offences, if a lesser lawbreaker, lying, abhorred, in the house of the wife he had persecuted, spoiled, and smitten, one a tiger, the other a dog-wolf—to consider each of them sickening at the foulness of the other; and each flourishing out of the mire of his manifest guilt his own immaculate standard—of conduct, if not of honor.</p>
|
||||
<p>The one retort of Doctor James must have struck home to the other’s remaining shreds of shame and manhood, for it proved the coup de grâce. A deep blush suffused his face—an ignominious <i xml:lang="la">rosa mortis</i>; the respiration ceased, and, with scarcely a tremor, Chandler expired.</p>
|
||||
<p>Close following upon his last breath came the negress, bringing the medicine. With a hand gently pressing upon the closed eyelids, Doctor James told her of the end. Not grief, but a hereditary rapprochement with death in the abstract, moved her to a dismal, watery snuffling, accompanied by her usual jeremiad.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Dar now! It’s in de Lawd’s hands. He am de jedge ob de transgressor, and de suppo’t of dem in distress. He gwine hab suppo’t us now. Cindy done paid out de last quarter fer dis bottle of physic, and it nebber come to no use.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -22,9 +22,9 @@
|
||||
<p>“Can either of you cook?” asked the superintendent.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I can,” said the reddish-haired fellow, promptly. “I’ve cooked in camp quite a lot. I’m willing to take the job until you’ve got something else to offer.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Now, that’s the way I like to hear a man talk,” said the superintendent, approvingly. “I’ll give you a note to Saunders, and he’ll put you to work.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Thus the names of John Bascom and Charles Norwood were added to the pay-roll of the Diamond-Cross. The two left for the round-up camp immediately after dinner. Their directions were simple, but sufficient: “Keep down the arroyo for fifteen miles till you get there.” Both being strangers from afar, young, spirited, and thus thrown together by chance for a long ride, it is likely that the comradeship that afterward existed so strongly between them began that afternoon as they meandered along the little valley of the Canada Verda.</p>
|
||||
<p>They reached their destination just after sunset. The main camp of the round-up was comfortably located on the bank of a long water-hole, under a fine mott of timber. A number of small A tents pitched upon grassy spots and the big wall tent for provisions showed that the camp was intended to be occupied for a considerable length of time.</p>
|
||||
<p>The round-up had ridden in but a few moments before, hungry and tired, to a supperless camp. The boys were engaged in an emulous display of anathemas supposed to fit the case of the absconding cook. While they were unsaddling and hobbling their ponies, the newcomer rode in and inquired for Pink Saunders. The boss ol the round-up came forth and was given the superintendent’s note.</p>
|
||||
<p>Thus the names of John Bascom and Charles Norwood were added to the payroll of the Diamond-Cross. The two left for the roundup camp immediately after dinner. Their directions were simple, but sufficient: “Keep down the arroyo for fifteen miles till you get there.” Both being strangers from afar, young, spirited, and thus thrown together by chance for a long ride, it is likely that the comradeship that afterward existed so strongly between them began that afternoon as they meandered along the little valley of the Canada Verda.</p>
|
||||
<p>They reached their destination just after sunset. The main camp of the roundup was comfortably located on the bank of a long water-hole, under a fine mott of timber. A number of small A tents pitched upon grassy spots and the big wall tent for provisions showed that the camp was intended to be occupied for a considerable length of time.</p>
|
||||
<p>The roundup had ridden in but a few moments before, hungry and tired, to a supperless camp. The boys were engaged in an emulous display of anathemas supposed to fit the case of the absconding cook. While they were unsaddling and hobbling their ponies, the newcomer rode in and inquired for Pink Saunders. The boss ol the roundup came forth and was given the superintendent’s note.</p>
|
||||
<p>Pink Saunders, though a boss during working hours, was a humorist in camp, where everybody, from cook to superintendent, is equal. After reading the note he waved his hand toward the camp and shouted, ceremoniously, at the top of his voice, “Gentlemen, allow me to present to you the Marquis and Miss Sally.”</p>
|
||||
<p>At the words both the new arrivals betray confusion. The newly employed cook started, with a surprised look on his face, but, immediately recollecting that “Miss Sally” is the generic name for the male cook in every west Texas cow camp, he recovered his composure with a grin at his own expense.</p>
|
||||
<p>His companion showed little less discomposure, even turning angrily, with a bitten lip, and reaching for his saddle pommel, as if to remount his pony; but “Miss Sally” touched his arm and said, laughingly, “Come now. Marquis; that was quite a compliment from Saunders. It’s that distinguished air of yours and aristocratic nose that made him call you that.”</p>
|
||||
@ -37,8 +37,8 @@
|
||||
<p>“You married?” said the superintendent, frowning a little. “You didn’t mention it when we were talking.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Because I’m not,” said the cook. “But I’d like to be. Thought I’d wait till I got a job under roof. I couldn’t ask her to live in a cow camp.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Right,” agreed the superintendent. “A camp isn’t quite the place for a married man—but—well, there’s plenty of room at the house, and if you suit us as well as I think you will you can afford it. You write to her to come on.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“All right,” said Miss Sally again, “I’ll ride in as soon as I am relieved to-morrow.”</p>
|
||||
<p>It was a rather chilly night, and after supper the cow-punchers were lounging about a big fire of dried mesquite chunks.</p>
|
||||
<p>“All right,” said Miss Sally again, “I’ll ride in as soon as I am relieved tomorrow.”</p>
|
||||
<p>It was a rather chilly night, and after supper the cowpunchers were lounging about a big fire of dried mesquite chunks.</p>
|
||||
<p>Their usual exchange of jokes and repartee had dwindled almost to silence, but silence in a cow camp generally betokens the brewing of mischief.</p>
|
||||
<p>Miss Sally and the Marquis were seated upon a log, discussing the relative merits of the lengthened or shortened stirrup in long-distance riding. The Marquis arose presently and went to a tree near by to examine some strips of rawhide he was seasoning for making a lariat. Just as he left a little puff of wind blew some scraps of tobacco from a cigarette that Dry-Creek Smithers was rolling, into Miss Sally’s eyes. While the cook was rubbing at them, with tears flowing, “Phonograph” Davis—so called on account of his strident voice—arose and began a speech.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Fellers and citizens! I desire to perpound a interrogatory. What is the most grievous spectacle what the human mind can contemplate?”</p>
|
||||
@ -47,21 +47,21 @@
|
||||
<p>“A Maverick when you ain’t got your branding iron!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Yourself!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The hole in the end of some other feller’s gun!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Shet up, you ignoramuses,” said old Taller, the fat cow-puncher. “Phony knows what it is. He’s waitin’ for to tell us.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“No, fellers and citizens,” continued Phonograph. “Them spectacles you’ve e-numerated air shore grievious, and way up yonder close to the so-lution, but they ain’t it. The most grievious spectacle air that”—he pointed to Miss Sally, who was still rubbing his streaming eyes—“a trustin’ and a in-veegled female a-weepin’ tears on account of her heart bein’ busted by a false deceiver. Air we men or air we catamounts to gaze upon the blightin’ of our Miss Sally’s affections by a a-risto-crat, which has come among us with his superior beauty and his glitterin’ title to give the weeps to the lovely critter we air bound to pertect? Air we goin’ to act like men, or air we goin’ to keep on eaten’ soggy chuck from her cryin’ so plentiful over the bread-pan?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Shet up, you ignoramuses,” said old Taller, the fat cowpuncher. “Phony knows what it is. He’s waitin’ for to tell us.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“No, fellers and citizens,” continued Phonograph. “Them spectacles you’ve enumerated air shore grievious, and way up yonder close to the solution, but they ain’t it. The most grievious spectacle air that”—he pointed to Miss Sally, who was still rubbing his streaming eyes—“a trustin’ and a in-veegled female a-weepin’ tears on account of her heart bein’ busted by a false deceiver. Air we men or air we catamounts to gaze upon the blightin’ of our Miss Sally’s affections by a a-risto-crat, which has come among us with his superior beauty and his glitterin’ title to give the weeps to the lovely critter we air bound to pertect? Air we goin’ to act like men, or air we goin’ to keep on eaten’ soggy chuck from her cryin’ so plentiful over the bread-pan?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s a gallopin’ shame,” said Dry-Creek, with a sniffle. “It ain’t human. I’ve noticed the varmint a-palaverin’ round her frequent. And him a Marquis! Ain’t that a title, Phony?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s somethin’ like a king,” the Brushy Creek Kid hastened to explain, “only lower in the deck. Guess it comes in between the Jack and the ten-spot.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Don’t miscontruct me,” went on Phonograph, “as undervaluatin’ the a-ristocrats. Some of ’em air proper people and can travel right along with the Watson boys. I’ve herded some with ’em myself. I’ve viewed the elephant with the Mayor of Fort Worth, and I’ve listened to the owl with the gen’ral passenger agent of the Katy, and they can keep up with the percession from where you laid the chunk. But when a Marquis monkeys with the innocent affections of a cook-lady, may I inquire what the case seems to call for?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Don’t miscontruct me,” went on Phonograph, “as undervaluatin’ the aristocrats. Some of ’em air proper people and can travel right along with the Watson boys. I’ve herded some with ’em myself. I’ve viewed the elephant with the Mayor of Fort Worth, and I’ve listened to the owl with the gen’ral passenger agent of the Katy, and they can keep up with the percession from where you laid the chunk. But when a Marquis monkeys with the innocent affections of a cook-lady, may I inquire what the case seems to call for?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The leathers,” shouted Dry-Creek Smithers.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You hearn ‘er, Charity!” was the Kid’s form of corroboration.</p>
|
||||
<p>“We’ve got your company,” assented the cow-punchers, in chorus.</p>
|
||||
<p>“We’ve got your company,” assented the cowpunchers, in chorus.</p>
|
||||
<p>Before the Marquis realized their intention, two of them seized him by each arm and led him up to the log. Phonograph Davis, self-appointed to carry out the sentence, stood ready, with a pair of stout leather leggings in his hands.</p>
|
||||
<p>It was the first time they had ever laid hands on the Marquis during their somewhat rude sports.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What are you up to?” he asked, indignantly, with flashing eyes.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Go easy, Marquis,” whispered Rube Fellows, one of the boys that held him. “It’s all in fun. Take it good-natured and they’ll let you off light. They’re only goin’ to stretch you over the log and tan you eight or ten times with the leggin’s. ‘Twon’t hurt much.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The Marquis, with an exclamation of anger, his white teeth gleaming, suddenly exhibited a surprising strength. He wrenched with his arms so violently that the four men were swayed and dragged many yards from the log. A cry of anger escaped him, and then Miss Sally, his eyes cleared of the tobacco, saw, and he immediately mixed with the struggling group.</p>
|
||||
<p>But at that moment a loud “Hallo!” rang in their ears, and a buckboard drawn by a team of galloping mustangs spun into the campfire’s circle of light. Every man turned to look, and what they saw drove from their minds all thoughts of carrying out Phonograph Davis’s rather time-worn contribution to the evening’s amusement. Bigger game than the Marquis was at hand, and his captors released him and stood staring at the approaching victim.</p>
|
||||
<p>The buckboard and team belonged to Sam Holly, a cattleman from the Big Muddy. Sam was driving, and with him was a stout, smooth-faced man, wearing a frock coat and a high silk hat. That was the county judge, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Dave Hackett, candidate for reëlection. Sam was escorting him about the county, among the camps, to shake up the sovereign voters.</p>
|
||||
<p>But at that moment a loud “Hallo!” rang in their ears, and a buckboard drawn by a team of galloping mustangs spun into the campfire’s circle of light. Every man turned to look, and what they saw drove from their minds all thoughts of carrying out Phonograph Davis’s rather timeworn contribution to the evening’s amusement. Bigger game than the Marquis was at hand, and his captors released him and stood staring at the approaching victim.</p>
|
||||
<p>The buckboard and team belonged to Sam Holly, a cattleman from the Big Muddy. Sam was driving, and with him was a stout, smooth-faced man, wearing a frock coat and a high silk hat. That was the county judge, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Dave Hackett, candidate for reelection. Sam was escorting him about the county, among the camps, to shake up the sovereign voters.</p>
|
||||
<p>The men got out, hitched the team to a mesquite, and walked toward the fire.</p>
|
||||
<p>Instantly every man in camp, except the Marquis, Miss Sally, and Pink Saunders, who had to play host, uttered a frightful yell of assumed terror and fled on all sides into the darkness.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Heavens alive!” exclaimed Hackett, “are we as ugly as that? How do you do, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Saunders? Glad to see you again. What are you doing to my hat, Holly?”</p>
|
||||
@ -69,48 +69,48 @@
|
||||
<p>Pink grinned.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Better elevate it some,” he said, in the tone of one giving disinterested advice. “The light ain’t none too good. I wouldn’t want it on my head.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Holly stepped upon the hub of a hind wheel of the grub wagon and hung the hat upon a limb of a live-oak. Scarcely had his foot touched the ground when the crash of a dozen six-shooters split the air, and the hat fell to the ground riddled with bullets.</p>
|
||||
<p>A hissing noise was heard as if from a score of rattlesnakes, and now the cow-punchers emerged on all sides from the darkness, stepping high, with ludicrously exaggerated caution, and “hist”-ing to one another to observe the utmost prudence in approaching. They formed a solemn, wide circle about the hat, gazing at it in manifest alarm, and seized every few moments by little stampedes of panicky flight.</p>
|
||||
<p>A hissing noise was heard as if from a score of rattlesnakes, and now the cowpunchers emerged on all sides from the darkness, stepping high, with ludicrously exaggerated caution, and “hist”-ing to one another to observe the utmost prudence in approaching. They formed a solemn, wide circle about the hat, gazing at it in manifest alarm, and seized every few moments by little stampedes of panicky flight.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s the varmint,” said one in awed tones, “that flits up and down in the low grounds at night, saying, ‘Willie-wallo!’ ”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s the venomous Kypootum,” proclaimed another. “It stings after it’s dead, and hollers after it’s buried.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s the chief of the hairy tribe,” said Phonograph Davis. “But it’s stone dead, now, boys.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Don’t you believe it,” demurred Dry-Creek. “It’s only ‘possumin’.’ It’s the dreaded Highgollacum fantod from the forest. There’s only one way to destroy its life.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He led forward Old Taller, the 240-pound cow-puncher. Old Taller placed the hat upright on the ground and solemnly sat upon it, crushing it as flat as a pancake.</p>
|
||||
<p>He led forward Old Taller, the 240-pound cowpuncher. Old Taller placed the hat upright on the ground and solemnly sat upon it, crushing it as flat as a pancake.</p>
|
||||
<p>Hackett had viewed these proceedings with wide-open eyes. Sam Holly saw that his anger was rising and said to him:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Here’s where you win or lose, Judge. There are sixty votes on the Diamond Cross. The boys are trying your mettle. Take it as a joke, and I don’t think you’ll regret it.” And Hackett saw the point and rose to the occasion.</p>
|
||||
<p>Advancing to where the slayers of the wild beast were standing above its remains and declaring it to be at last defunct, he said, with deep earnestness:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Boys, I must thank you for this gallant rescue. While driving through the arroyo that cruel monster that you have so fearlessly and repeatedly slaughtered sprang upon us from the tree tops. To you I shall consider that I owe my life, and also, I hope, reëlection to the office for which I am again a candidate. Allow me to hand you my card.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The cow-punchers, always so sober-faced while engaged in their monkey-shines, relaxed into a grin of approval.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Boys, I must thank you for this gallant rescue. While driving through the arroyo that cruel monster that you have so fearlessly and repeatedly slaughtered sprang upon us from the tree tops. To you I shall consider that I owe my life, and also, I hope, reelection to the office for which I am again a candidate. Allow me to hand you my card.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The cowpunchers, always so sober-faced while engaged in their monkey-shines, relaxed into a grin of approval.</p>
|
||||
<p>But Phonograph Davis, his appetite for fun not yet appeased, had something more up his sleeve.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Pardner,” he said, addressing Hackett with grave severity, “many a camp would be down on you for turnin’ loose a pernicious varmint like that in it; but, bein’ as we all escaped without loss of life, we’ll overlook it. You can play square with us if you’ll do it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“How’s that?” asked Hackett suspiciously.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You’re authorized to perform the sacred rights and lefts of mattermony, air you not?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, yes,” replied Hackett. “A marriage ceremony conducted by me would be legal.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“A wrong air to be righted in this here camp,” said Phonography, virtuously. “A a-ristocrat have slighted a ‘umble but beautchoos female wat’s pinin’ for his affections. It’s the jooty of the camp to drag forth the haughty descendant of a hundred—or maybe a hundred and twenty-five—earls, even so at the p’int of a lariat, and jine him to the weepin’ lady. Fellows! roundup Miss Sally and the Marquis; there’s goin’ to be a weddin’.”</p>
|
||||
<p>This whim of Phonograph’s was received with whoops of appreciation. The cow-punchers started to apprehend the principals of the proposed ceremony.</p>
|
||||
<p>“A wrong air to be righted in this here camp,” said Phonography, virtuously. “A aristocrat have slighted a ‘umble but beautchoos female wat’s pinin’ for his affections. It’s the jooty of the camp to drag forth the haughty descendant of a hundred—or maybe a hundred and twenty-five—earls, even so at the p’int of a lariat, and jine him to the weepin’ lady. Fellows! roundup Miss Sally and the Marquis; there’s goin’ to be a weddin’.”</p>
|
||||
<p>This whim of Phonograph’s was received with whoops of appreciation. The cowpunchers started to apprehend the principals of the proposed ceremony.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Kindly prompt me,” said Hackett, wiping his forehead, though the night was cool, “how far this thing is to be carried. And might I expect any further portions of my raiment to be mistaken for wild animals and killed?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The boys are livelier than usual to-night,” said Saunders. “The ones they are talking about marrying are two of the boys—a herd rider and the cook. It’s another joke. You and Sam will have to sleep here to-night anyway; p’rhaps you’d better see ’em through with it. Maybe they’ll quiet down after that.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The boys are livelier than usual tonight,” said Saunders. “The ones they are talking about marrying are two of the boys—a herd rider and the cook. It’s another joke. You and Sam will have to sleep here tonight anyway; p’rhaps you’d better see ’em through with it. Maybe they’ll quiet down after that.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The matchmakers found Miss Sally seated on the tongue of the grub wagon, calmly smoking his pipe. The Marquis was leaning idly against one of the trees under which the supply tent was pitched.</p>
|
||||
<p>Into this tent they were both hustled, and Phonograph, as master of ceremonies, gave orders for the preparations.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You, Dry-Creek and Jimmy, and Ben and Taller—hump yourselves to the wildwood and rustle flowers for the blow-out—mesquite’ll do—and get that Spanish dagger blossom at the corner of the horse corral for the bride to pack. You, Limpy, get out that red and yaller blanket of your’n for Miss Sally’s skyirt. Marquis, you’ll do ‘thout fixin’; nobody don’t ever look at the groom.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You, Dry-Creek and Jimmy, and Ben and Taller—hump yourselves to the wildwood and rustle flowers for the blowout—mesquite’ll do—and get that Spanish dagger blossom at the corner of the horse corral for the bride to pack. You, Limpy, get out that red and yaller blanket of your’n for Miss Sally’s skyirt. Marquis, you’ll do ‘thout fixin’; nobody don’t ever look at the groom.”</p>
|
||||
<p>During their absurd preparation, the two principals were left alone for a few moments in the tent. The Marquis suddenly showed wild perturbation.</p>
|
||||
<p>“This foolishness must not go on,” he said, turning to Miss Sally a face white in the light of the lantern, hanging to the ridge-pole.</p>
|
||||
<p>“This foolishness must not go on,” he said, turning to Miss Sally a face white in the light of the lantern, hanging to the ridgepole.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why not?” said the cook, with an amused smile. “It’s fun for the boys; and they’ve always let you off pretty light in their frolics. I don’t mind it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“But you don’t understand,” persisted the Marquis, pleadingly. “That man is county judge, and his acts are binding. I can’t—oh, you don’t know—”</p>
|
||||
<p>The cook stepped forward and took the Marquis’s hands.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sally Bascom,” he said, “I KNOW!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You know!” faltered the Marquis, trembling. “And you—want to—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“More than I ever wanted anything. Will you—here come the boys!”</p>
|
||||
<p>The cow-punchers crowded in, laden with armfuls of decorations.</p>
|
||||
<p>The cowpunchers crowded in, laden with armfuls of decorations.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Perfifious coyote!” said Phonograph, sternly, addressing the Marquis. “Air you willing to patch up the damage you’ve did this ere slab-sided but trustin’ bunch o’ calico by single-footin’ easy to the altar, or will we have to rope ye, and drag you thar?”</p>
|
||||
<p>The Marquis pushed back his hat, and leaned jauntily against some high-piled sacks of beans. His cheeks were flushed, and his eyes were shining.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Go on with the rat killin’,” said he.</p>
|
||||
<p>A little while after a procession approached the tree under which Hackett, Holly, and Saunders were sitting smoking.</p>
|
||||
<p>Limpy Walker was in the lead, extracting a doleful tune from his concertina. Next came the bride and groom. The cook wore the gorgeous Navajo blanket tied around his waist and carried in one band the waxen-white Spanish dagger blossom as large as a peck-measure and weighing fifteen pounds. His hat was ornamented with mesquite branches and yellow ratama blooms. A resurrected mosquito bar served as a veil. After them stumbled Phonograph Davis, in the character of the bride’s father, weeping into a saddle blanket with sobs that could be heard a mile away. The cow-punchers followed by twos, loudly commenting upon the bride’s appearance, in a supposed imitation of the audiences at fashionable weddings.</p>
|
||||
<p>Limpy Walker was in the lead, extracting a doleful tune from his concertina. Next came the bride and groom. The cook wore the gorgeous Navajo blanket tied around his waist and carried in one band the waxen-white Spanish dagger blossom as large as a peck-measure and weighing fifteen pounds. His hat was ornamented with mesquite branches and yellow ratama blooms. A resurrected mosquito bar served as a veil. After them stumbled Phonograph Davis, in the character of the bride’s father, weeping into a saddle blanket with sobs that could be heard a mile away. The cowpunchers followed by twos, loudly commenting upon the bride’s appearance, in a supposed imitation of the audiences at fashionable weddings.</p>
|
||||
<p>Hackett rose as the procession halted before him, and after a little lecture upon matrimony, asked:</p>
|
||||
<p>“What are your names?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sally and Charles,” answered the cook.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Join hands, Charles and Sally.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Perhaps there never was a stranger wedding. For, wedding it was, though only two of those present knew it. When the ceremony was over, the cow-punchers gave one yell of congratulation and immediately abandoned their foolery for the night. Blankets were unrolled and sleep became the paramount question.</p>
|
||||
<p>Perhaps there never was a stranger wedding. For, wedding it was, though only two of those present knew it. When the ceremony was over, the cowpunchers gave one yell of congratulation and immediately abandoned their foolery for the night. Blankets were unrolled and sleep became the paramount question.</p>
|
||||
<p>The cook (divested of his decorations) and the Marquis lingered for a moment in the shadow of the grub wagon. The Marquis leaned her head against his shoulder.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I didn’t know what else to do,” she was saying. “Father was gone, and we kids had to rustle. I had helped him so much with the cattle that I thought I’d turn cowboy. There wasn’t anything else I could make a living at. I wasn’t much stuck on it though, after I got here, and I’d have left only—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Only what?”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -20,14 +20,14 @@
|
||||
<p>Number four of my history-makers will simply construe from the premises the story that while an audience of two thousand enthusiasts was listening to a Rubinstein concert on Sixth Street, a woman who said she was <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Andrew M. Carter threw a brick through a plate-glass window valued at five hundred dollars. The Carter woman claimed that some one in the building had stolen her dog.</p>
|
||||
<p>Now, the discrepancies in these registrations of the day’s doings need do no one hurt. Surely, one newspaper is enough for any man to prop against his morning water-bottle to fend off the smiling hatred of his wife’s glance. If he be foolish enough to read four he is no wiser than a Higher Critic.</p>
|
||||
<p>I remember (probably as well as you do) having read the parable of the talents. A prominent citizen, about to journey into a far country, first hands over to his servants his goods. To one he gives five talents; to another two; to another one—to every man according to his several ability, as the text has it. There are two versions of this parable, as you well know. There may be more—I do not know.</p>
|
||||
<p>When the <abbr>p.</abbr> c. returns he requires an accounting. Two servants have put their talents out at usury and gained one hundred per cent. Good. The unprofitable one simply digs up the talent deposited with him and hands it out on demand. A pattern of behavior for trust companies and banks, surely! In one version we read that he had wrapped it in a napkin and laid it away. But the commentator informs us that the talent mentioned was composed of 750 ounces of silver—about $900 worth. So the chronicler who mentioned the napkin, had either to reduce the amount of the deposit or do a lot of explaining about the size of the napery used in those davs. Therefore in his version we note that he uses the word “pound” instead of “talent.”</p>
|
||||
<p>When the <abbr>p.</abbr> c. returns he requires an accounting. Two servants have put their talents out at usury and gained one hundred percent. Good. The unprofitable one simply digs up the talent deposited with him and hands it out on demand. A pattern of behavior for trust companies and banks, surely! In one version we read that he had wrapped it in a napkin and laid it away. But the commentator informs us that the talent mentioned was composed of 750 ounces of silver—about $900 worth. So the chronicler who mentioned the napkin, had either to reduce the amount of the deposit or do a lot of explaining about the size of the napery used in those davs. Therefore in his version we note that he uses the word “pound” instead of “talent.”</p>
|
||||
<p>A pound of silver may very well be laid away—and carried away—in a napkin, as any hotel or restaurant man will tell you.</p>
|
||||
<p>But let us get away from our mutton.</p>
|
||||
<p>When the returned nobleman finds that the one-talented servant has nothing to hand over except the original fund entrusted to him, he is as angry as a multi-millionaire would be if some one should hide under his bed and make a noise like an assessment. He orders the unprofitable servant cast into outer darkness, after first taking away his talent and giving it to the one-hundred-per cent. financier, and breathing strange saws, saying: “From him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” Which is the same as to say: “Nothing from nothing leaves nothing.”</p>
|
||||
<p>When the returned nobleman finds that the one-talented servant has nothing to hand over except the original fund entrusted to him, he is as angry as a multi-millionaire would be if some one should hide under his bed and make a noise like an assessment. He orders the unprofitable servant cast into outer darkness, after first taking away his talent and giving it to the one-hundred-percent financier, and breathing strange saws, saying: “From him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” Which is the same as to say: “Nothing from nothing leaves nothing.”</p>
|
||||
<p>And now closer draw the threads of parable, precept allegory, and narrative, leading nowhere if you will, or else weaving themselves into the little fiction story about Cliff McGowan and his one talent. There is but a definition to follow; and then the homely actors trip on.</p>
|
||||
<p>Talent: A gift, endowment or faculty; some peculiar ability, power, or accomplishment, natural or acquired. (A metaphor borrowed from the parable in Matt. <span epub:type="z3998:roman">XXV</span>. 14–30.)</p>
|
||||
<p>In New York City to-day there are (estimated) 125,000 living creatures training for the stage. This does not include seals, pigs, dogs, elephants, prize-fighters, Carmens, mind-readers, or Japanese wrestlers. The bulk of them are in the ranks of the Four Million. Out of this number will survive a thousand.</p>
|
||||
<p>Nine hundred of these will have attained their fulness of fame when they shall dubiously indicate with the point of a hatpin a blurred figure in a flashlight photograph of a stage tout ensemble with the proud commentary: “That’s me.”</p>
|
||||
<p>In New York City today there are (estimated) 125,000 living creatures training for the stage. This does not include seals, pigs, dogs, elephants, prizefighters, Carmens, mind-readers, or Japanese wrestlers. The bulk of them are in the ranks of the Four Million. Out of this number will survive a thousand.</p>
|
||||
<p>Nine hundred of these will have attained their fullness of fame when they shall dubiously indicate with the point of a hatpin a blurred figure in a flashlight photograph of a stage tout ensemble with the proud commentary: “That’s me.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Eighty, in the pinkest of (male) Louis <span epub:type="z3998:roman">XIV</span> court costumes, shall welcome the Queen of the (mythical) Pawpaw Isles in a few well-memorized words, turning a tip-tilted nose upon the nine hundred.</p>
|
||||
<p>Ten, in tiny lace caps, shall dust Ibsen furniture for six minutes after the rising of the curtain.</p>
|
||||
<p>Nine shall attain the circuits, besieging with muscle, skill, eye, hand, voice, wit, brain, heel and toe the ultimate high walls of stardom.</p>
|
||||
@ -37,9 +37,9 @@
|
||||
<p>Of all kinships it is likely that the closest is that of cousin. Between cousins there exist the ties of race, name, and favor—ties thicker than water, and yet not coagulated with the jealous precipitations of brotherhood or the enjoining obligations of the matrimonial yoke. You can bestow upon a cousin almost the interest and affection that you would give to a stranger; you need not feel toward him the contempt and embarrassment that you have for one of your father’s sons—it is the closer clan-feeling that sometimes makes the branch of a tree stronger than its trunk.</p>
|
||||
<p>Thus were the two McGowans bonded. They enjoyed a quiet celebrity in their district, which was a strip west of Eighth Avenue with the Pump for its pivot. Their talents were praised in a hundred “joints”; their friendship was famed even in a neighborhood where men had been known to fight off the wives of their friends—when domestic onslaught was being made upon their friends by the wives of their friends. (Thus do the limitations of English force us to repetends.)</p>
|
||||
<p>So, side by side, grim, sallow, lowering, inseparable, undefeated, the cousins fought their way into the temple of Art—art with a big A, which causes to intervene a lesson in geometry.</p>
|
||||
<p>One night at about eleven o’clock Del Delano dropped into Mike’s place on Eighth Avenue. From that moment, instead of remaining a Place, the café became a Resort. It was as though King Edward had condescended to mingle with ten-spots of a different suit; or Joe Gans had casually strolled in to look over the Tuskegee School; or <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Shaw, of England, had accepted an invitation to read selections from “Rena, the Snow-bird” at an unveiling of the proposed monument to James Owen O’Connor at Chinquapin Falls, Mississippi. In spite of these comparisons, you will have to be told why the patronizing of a third-rate saloon on the West Side by the said Del Delano conferred such a specific honor upon the place.</p>
|
||||
<p>One night at about eleven o’clock Del Delano dropped into Mike’s place on Eighth Avenue. From that moment, instead of remaining a Place, the café became a Resort. It was as though King Edward had condescended to mingle with ten-spots of a different suit; or Joe Gans had casually strolled in to look over the Tuskegee School; or <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Shaw, of England, had accepted an invitation to read selections from “Rena, the Snowbird” at an unveiling of the proposed monument to James Owen O’Connor at Chinquapin Falls, Mississippi. In spite of these comparisons, you will have to be told why the patronizing of a third-rate saloon on the West Side by the said Del Delano conferred such a specific honor upon the place.</p>
|
||||
<p>Del Delano could not make his feet behave; and so the world paid him $300 a week to see them misconduct themselves on the vaudeville stage. To make the matter plain to you (and to swell the number of words), he was the best fancy dancer on any of the circuits between Ottawa and Corpus Christi. With his eyes fixed on vacancy and his feet apparently fixed on nothing, he “nightly charmed thousands,” as his press-agent incorrectly stated. Even taking night performance and matinée together, he scarcely could have charmed more than eighteen hundred, including those who left after Zora, the Nautch girl, had squeezed herself through a hoop twelve inches in diameter, and those who were waiting for the moving pictures.</p>
|
||||
<p>But Del Delano was the West Side’s favorite; and nowhere is there a more loyal Side. Five years before our story was submitted to the editors, Del had crawled from some Tenth Avenue basement like a lean rat and had bitten his way into the Big Cheese. Patched, half-starved, cuffless, and as scornful of the Hook as an interpreter of Ibsen, he had danced his way into health (as you and I view it) and fame in sixteen minutes on Amateur Night at Creary’s (Variety) Theatre in Eighth Avenue. A bookmaker (one of the kind that talent wins with instead of losing) sat in the audience, asleep, dreaming of an impossible pick-up among the amateurs. After a snore, a glass of beer from the handsome waiter, and a temporary blindness caused by the diamonds of a transmontane blonde in Box E, the bookmaker woke up long enough to engage Del Delano for a three-weeks’ trial engagement fused with a trained-dog short-circuit covering the three Washingtons—Heights, Statue, and Square.</p>
|
||||
<p>But Del Delano was the West Side’s favorite; and nowhere is there a more loyal Side. Five years before our story was submitted to the editors, Del had crawled from some Tenth Avenue basement like a lean rat and had bitten his way into the Big Cheese. Patched, half-starved, cuffless, and as scornful of the Hook as an interpreter of Ibsen, he had danced his way into health (as you and I view it) and fame in sixteen minutes on Amateur Night at Creary’s (Variety) Theatre in Eighth Avenue. A bookmaker (one of the kind that talent wins with instead of losing) sat in the audience, asleep, dreaming of an impossible pickup among the amateurs. After a snore, a glass of beer from the handsome waiter, and a temporary blindness caused by the diamonds of a transmontane blonde in Box E, the bookmaker woke up long enough to engage Del Delano for a three-weeks’ trial engagement fused with a trained-dog short-circuit covering the three Washingtons—Heights, Statue, and Square.</p>
|
||||
<p>By the time this story was read and accepted, Del Delano was drawing his three-hundred dollars a week, which, divided by seven (Sunday acts not in costume being permissible), dispels the delusion entertained by most of us that we have seen better days. You can easily imagine the worshipful agitation of Eighth Avenue whenever Del Delano honored it with a visit after his terpsichorean act in a historically great and vilely ventilated Broadway theatre. If the West Side could claim forty-two minutes out of his forty-two weeks’ bookings every year, it was an occasion for bonfires and repainting of the Pump. And now you know why Mike’s saloon is a Resort, and no longer a simple Place.</p>
|
||||
<p>Del Delano entered Mike’s alone. So nearly concealed in a fur-lined overcoat and a derby two sizes too large for him was Prince Lightfoot that you saw of his face only his pale, hatchet-edged features and a pair of unwinking, cold, light blue eyes. Nearly every man lounging at Mike’s bar recognized the renowned product of the West Side. To those who did not, wisdom was conveyed by prodding elbows and growls of one-sided introduction.</p>
|
||||
<p>Upon Charley, one of the bartenders, both fame and fortune descended simultaneously. He had once been honored by shaking hands with the great Delano at a Seventh Avenue boxing bout. So with lungs of brass he now cried: “Hallo, Del, old man; what’ll it be?”</p>
|
||||
@ -54,7 +54,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Mac turned a hopeless but nervy eye upon Del Delano’s face. In it he read disgust, admiration, envy, indifference, approval, disappointment, praise, and contempt.</p>
|
||||
<p>Thus, in the countenances of those we hate or love we find what we most desire or fear to see. Which is an assertion equalling in its wisdom and chiaroscuro the most famous sayings of the most foolish philosophers that the world has ever known.</p>
|
||||
<p>Del Delano retired within his overcoat and hat. In two minutes he emerged and turned his left side to Mac. Then he spoke.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You’ve got a foot movement, kid, like a baby hippopotamus trying to side-step a jab from a humming-bird. And you hold yourself like a truck driver having his picture taken in a Third Avenue photograph gallery. And you haven’t got any method or style. And your knees are about as limber as a couple of Yale pass-keys. And you strike the eye as weighing, let us say, 450 pounds while you work. But, say, would you mind giving me your name?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You’ve got a foot movement, kid, like a baby hippopotamus trying to sidestep a jab from a hummingbird. And you hold yourself like a truck driver having his picture taken in a Third Avenue photograph gallery. And you haven’t got any method or style. And your knees are about as limber as a couple of Yale passkeys. And you strike the eye as weighing, let us say, 450 pounds while you work. But, say, would you mind giving me your name?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“McGowan,” said the humbled amateur—“Mac McGowan.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Delano the Great slowly lighted a cigarette and continued, through its smoke:</p>
|
||||
<p>“In other words, you’re rotten. You can’t dance. But I’ll tell you one thing you’ve got.”</p>
|
||||
@ -70,8 +70,8 @@
|
||||
<p>Mac’s eye wandered.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Forget it,” said Del. “Drink and tobacco may be all right for a man who makes his living with his hands; but they won’t do if you’re depending on your head or your feet. If one end of you gets tangled, so does the other. That’s why beer and cigarettes don’t hurt piano players and picture painters. But you’ve got to cut ’em out if you want to do mental or pedal work. Now, have a cracker, and then we’ll talk some.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“All right,” said Mac. “I take it as an honor, of course, for you to notice my hopping around. Of course I’d like to do something in a professional line. Of course I can sing a little and do card tricks and Irish and German comedy stuff, and of course I’m not so bad on the trapeze and comic bicycle stunts and Hebrew monologues and—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“One moment,” interrupted Del Delano, “before we begin. I said you couldn’t dance. Well, that wasn’t quite right. You’ve only got two or three bad tricks in your method. You’re handy with your feet, and you belong at the top, where I am. I’ll put you there. I’ve got six weeks continuous in New York; and in four I can shape up your style till the booking agents will fight one another to get you. And I’ll do it, too. I’m of, from, and for the West Side. ‘Del Delano’ looks good on bill-boards, but the family name’s Crowley. Now, Mackintosh—McGowan, I mean—you’ve got your chance—fifty times a better one than I had.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’d be a shine to turn it down,” said Mac. “And I hope you understand I appreciate it. Me and my cousin Cliff McGowan was thinking of getting a try-out at Creary’s on amateur night a month from to-morrow.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“One moment,” interrupted Del Delano, “before we begin. I said you couldn’t dance. Well, that wasn’t quite right. You’ve only got two or three bad tricks in your method. You’re handy with your feet, and you belong at the top, where I am. I’ll put you there. I’ve got six weeks continuous in New York; and in four I can shape up your style till the booking agents will fight one another to get you. And I’ll do it, too. I’m of, from, and for the West Side. ‘Del Delano’ looks good on billboards, but the family name’s Crowley. Now, Mackintosh—McGowan, I mean—you’ve got your chance—fifty times a better one than I had.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’d be a shine to turn it down,” said Mac. “And I hope you understand I appreciate it. Me and my cousin Cliff McGowan was thinking of getting a tryout at Creary’s on amateur night a month from tomorrow.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Good stuff!” said Delano. “I got mine there. Junius T. Rollins, the booker for Kuhn & Dooley, jumped on the stage and engaged me after my dance. And the boards were an inch deep in nickels and dimes and quarters. There wasn’t but nine penny pieces found in the lot.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I ought to tell you,” said Mac, after two minutes of pensiveness, “that my cousin Cliff can beat me dancing. We’ve always been what you might call pals. If you’d take him up instead of me, now, it might be better. He’s invented a lot of steps that I can’t cut.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Forget it,” said Delano. “Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays of every week from now till amateur night, a month off, I’ll coach you. I’ll make you as good as I am; and nobody could do more for you. My act’s over every night at 10:15. Half an hour later I’ll take you up and drill you till twelve. I’ll put you at the top of the bunch, right where I am. You’ve got talent. Your style’s bum; but you’ve got the genius. You let me manage it. I’m from the West Side myself, and I’d rather see one of the same gang win out before I would an East-Sider, or any of the Flatbush or Hackensack Meadow kind of butt-iners. I’ll see that Junius Rollins is present on your Friday night; and if he don’t climb over the footlights and offer you fifty a week as a starter, I’ll let you draw it down from my own salary every Monday night. Now, am I talking on the level or am I not?”</p>
|
||||
@ -83,9 +83,9 @@
|
||||
<p>[Page of (O. Henry’s) manuscript missing here.]</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>… easily among the wings with his patron, the great Del Delano. For, whatever footlights shone in the City-That-Would-Be-Amused, the freedom of their unshaded side was Del’s. And if he should take up an amateur—see? and bring him around—see? and, winking one of his cold blue eyes, say to the manager: “Take it from me—he’s got the goods—see?” you wouldn’t expect that amateur to sit on an unpainted bench sudorifically awaiting his turn, would you? So Mac strolled around largely with the nonpareil; and the seven waited, clammily, on the bench.</p>
|
||||
<p>A giant in shirt-sleeves, with a grim, kind face in which many stitches had been taken by surgeons from time to time, <abbr>i.e.</abbr>, with a long stick, looped at the end. He was the man with the Hook. The manager, with his close-smoothed blond hair, his one-sided smile, and his abnormally easy manner, pored with patient condescension over the difficult program of the amateurs. The last of the professional turns—the Grand March of the Happy Huzzard—had been completed; the last wrinkle and darn of their blue silkolene cotton tights had vanished from the stage. The man in the orchestra who played the kettle-drum, cymbals, triangle, sandpaper, whang-doodle, hoof-beats, and catcalls, and fired the pistol shots, had wiped his brow. The illegal holiday of the Romans had arrived.</p>
|
||||
<p>A giant in shirtsleeves, with a grim, kind face in which many stitches had been taken by surgeons from time to time, <abbr>i.e.</abbr>, with a long stick, looped at the end. He was the man with the Hook. The manager, with his close-smoothed blond hair, his one-sided smile, and his abnormally easy manner, pored with patient condescension over the difficult program of the amateurs. The last of the professional turns—the Grand March of the Happy Huzzard—had been completed; the last wrinkle and darn of their blue silkolene cotton tights had vanished from the stage. The man in the orchestra who played the kettledrum, cymbals, triangle, sandpaper, whang-doodle, hoof-beats, and catcalls, and fired the pistol shots, had wiped his brow. The illegal holiday of the Romans had arrived.</p>
|
||||
<p>While the orchestra plays the famous waltz from “The Dismal Wife,” let us bestow two hundred words upon the psychology of the audience.</p>
|
||||
<p>The orchestra floor was filled by People. The boxes contained Persons. In the galleries was the Foreordained Verdict. The claque was there as it had originated in the Stone Age and was afterward adapted by the French. Every Micky and Maggie who sat upon Creary’s amateur bench, wise beyond their talents, knew that their success or doom lay already meted out to them by that crowded, whistling, roaring mass of Romans in the three galleries. They knew that the winning or the losing of the game for each one lay in the strength of the “gang” aloft that could turn the applause to its favorite. On a Broadway first night a wooer of fame may win it from the ticket buyers over the heads of the cognoscenti. But not so at Creary’s. The amateur’s fate is arithmetical. The number of his supporting admirers present at his try-out decides it in advance. But how these outlying Friday nights put to a certain shame the Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and matinées of the Broadway stage you should know …</p>
|
||||
<p>The orchestra floor was filled by People. The boxes contained Persons. In the galleries was the Foreordained Verdict. The claque was there as it had originated in the Stone Age and was afterward adapted by the French. Every Micky and Maggie who sat upon Creary’s amateur bench, wise beyond their talents, knew that their success or doom lay already meted out to them by that crowded, whistling, roaring mass of Romans in the three galleries. They knew that the winning or the losing of the game for each one lay in the strength of the “gang” aloft that could turn the applause to its favorite. On a Broadway first night a wooer of fame may win it from the ticket buyers over the heads of the cognoscenti. But not so at Creary’s. The amateur’s fate is arithmetical. The number of his supporting admirers present at his tryout decides it in advance. But how these outlying Friday nights put to a certain shame the Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and matinées of the Broadway stage you should know …</p>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p>[Here the manuscript ends.]</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -33,7 +33,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Am I to have carte blanche to question every person connected with the hotel?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The proprietor has already been spoken to. Everything and everybody is at your service.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Tictocq consulted his watch.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Come to this room to-morrow afternoon at 6 o’clock with the landlord, the Populist Candidate, and any other witnesses elected from both parties, and I will return the socks.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Come to this room tomorrow afternoon at 6 o’clock with the landlord, the Populist Candidate, and any other witnesses elected from both parties, and I will return the socks.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Bien, Monsieur; schlafen sie wohl.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Au revoir.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The Chairman of the Democratic Executive Committee, Platform No.2, bowed courteously and withdrew.</p>
|
||||
@ -62,7 +62,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Somewhere, concealed by shrubbery, a band is playing, and during the pauses in conversation, onions can be smelt frying in the kitchen.</p>
|
||||
<p>Happy laughter rings out from ruby lips, handsome faces grow tender as they bend over white necks and drooping beads; timid eyes convey things that lips dare not speak, and beneath silken bodice and broadcloth, hearts beat time to the sweet notes of “Love’s Young Dream.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“And where have you been for some time past, you recreant cavalier?” says Miss <abbr>St.</abbr> Vitus to Harold <abbr>St.</abbr> Clair. “Have you been worshipping at another shrine? Are you recreant to your whilom friends? Speak, Sir Knight, and defend yourself.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, come off,” says Harold, in his deep, musical baritone; “I’ve been having a devil of a time fitting pants on a lot of bow-legged jays from the cotton-patch. Got knobs on their legs, some of ’em big as gourds, and all expect a fit. Did you every try to measure a bow-legged—I mean—can’t you imagine what a jam-swizzled time I have getting pants to fit ’em? Business dull too, nobody wants ’em over three dollars.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, come off,” says Harold, in his deep, musical baritone; “I’ve been having a devil of a time fitting pants on a lot of bowlegged jays from the cotton-patch. Got knobs on their legs, some of ’em big as gourds, and all expect a fit. Did you every try to measure a bowlegged—I mean—can’t you imagine what a jam-swizzled time I have getting pants to fit ’em? Business dull too, nobody wants ’em over three dollars.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You witty boy,” says Miss <abbr>St.</abbr> Vitus. “Just as full of bon mots and clever sayings as ever. What do you take now?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, beer.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Give me your arm and let’s go into the drawing-room and draw a cork. I’m chewing a little cotton myself.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -14,7 +14,7 @@
|
||||
</h2>
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<p>’Tis midnight in Paris.</p>
|
||||
<p>A myriad of lamps that line the Champs Elysées and the Rouge et Noir, cast their reflection in the dark waters of the Seine as it flows gloomily past the Place Vendôme and the black walls of the Convent Notadam.</p>
|
||||
<p>A myriad of lamps that line the Champs Élysées and the Rouge et Noir, cast their reflection in the dark waters of the Seine as it flows gloomily past the Place Vendôme and the black walls of the Convent Notadam.</p>
|
||||
<p>The great French capital is astir.</p>
|
||||
<p>It is the hour when crime and vice and wickedness reign.</p>
|
||||
<p>Hundreds of fiacres drive madly through the streets conveying women, flashing with jewels and as beautiful as dreams, from opera and concert, and the little bijou supper rooms of the Café Tout le Temps are filled with laughing groups, while bon mots, persiflage and repartee fly upon the air—the jewels of thought and conversation.</p>
|
||||
@ -27,11 +27,11 @@
|
||||
<p>He is the worst man in Paris.</p>
|
||||
<p>He is more than four feet ten in height, and his sharp, ferocious looking face and the mass of long, tangled gray hair that covers his face and head, have earned for him the name he bears.</p>
|
||||
<p>His striped blouse is wide open at the neck and falls outside of his dingy leather trousers. The handle of a deadly looking knife protrudes from his belt. One stroke of its blade would open a box of the finest French sardines.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Voilà, Gray Wolf,” cries Couteau, the bartender. “How many victims to-day? There is no blood upon your hands. Has the Gray Wolf forgotten how to bite?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Voilà, Gray Wolf,” cries Couteau, the bartender. “How many victims today? There is no blood upon your hands. Has the Gray Wolf forgotten how to bite?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sacrè Bleu, Mille Tonnerre, by George,” hisses the Gray Wolf. “Monsieur Couteau, you are bold indeed to speak to me thus.</p>
|
||||
<p>“By Ventre <abbr>St.</abbr> Gris! I have not even dined to-day. Spoils indeed. There is no living in Paris now. But one rich American have I garroted in a fortnight.</p>
|
||||
<p>“By Ventre <abbr>St.</abbr> Gris! I have not even dined today. Spoils indeed. There is no living in Paris now. But one rich American have I garroted in a fortnight.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Bah! those Democrats. They have ruined the country. With their income tax and their free trade, they have destroyed the millionaire business. Carrambo! Diable! D–n it!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Hist!” suddenly says Chamounix the rag-picker, who is worth 20,000,000 francs, “some one comes!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Hist!” suddenly says Chamounix the ragpicker, who is worth 20,000,000 francs, “some one comes!”</p>
|
||||
<p>The cellar door opened and a man crept softly down the rickety steps. The crowd watches him with silent awe.</p>
|
||||
<p>He went to the bar, laid his card on the counter, bought a drink of absinthe, and then drawing from his pocket a little mirror, set it up on the counter and proceeded to don a false beard and hair and paint his face into wrinkles, until he closely resembled an old man seventy-one years of age.</p>
|
||||
<p>He then went into a dark corner and watched the crowd of people with sharp, ferret-like eyes.</p>
|
||||
@ -55,7 +55,7 @@
|
||||
<p>The company is the most aristocratic and wealthy in Paris.</p>
|
||||
<p>Three or four brass bands are playing behind a portière between the coal shed, and also behind time. Footmen in gay-laced livery bring in beer noiselessly and carry out apple-peelings dropped by the guests.</p>
|
||||
<p>Valerie, seventh Duchess du Bellairs, leans back on a solid gold ottoman on eiderdown cushions, surrounded by the wittiest, the bravest, and the handsomest courtiers in the capital.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ah, madame,” said the Prince Champvilliers, of Palais Royale, corner of Seventy-third Street, “as Montesquiaux says, ‘Rien de plus bon tutti frutti’—Youth seems your inheritance. You are to-night the most beautiful, the wittiest in your own salon. I can scarce believe my own senses, when I remember that thirty-one years ago you—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ah, madame,” said the Prince Champvilliers, of Palais Royale, corner of Seventy-third Street, “as Montesquiaux says, ‘Rien de plus bon tutti frutti’—Youth seems your inheritance. You are tonight the most beautiful, the wittiest in your own salon. I can scarce believe my own senses, when I remember that thirty-one years ago you—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Saw it off!” says the Duchess peremptorily.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Prince bows low, and drawing a jewelled dagger, stabs himself to the heart.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The displeasure of your grace is worse than death,” he says, as he takes his overcoat and hat from a corner of the mantelpiece and leaves the room.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
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