O'Henry / О’Генри
Short Stories / Рассказы

Ships

   Within a week a suitable building had been secured in the Calle Grande, and Mr Hemstetter’s stock of shoes arranged upon their shelves. The rent of the store was moderate; and the stock made a fine showing of neat white boxes, attractively displayed.
   Johnny’s friends stood by him loyally. On the first day Keogh strolled into the store in a casual kind of way about once every hour, and bought shoes. After he had purchased a pair each of extension soles, congress gaiters, button kids, low-quartered calfs, dancing pumps, rubber boots, tans of various hues, tennis shoes and flowered slippers, he sought out Johnny to be prompted as to the names of other kinds that he might inquire for. The other English-speaking residents also played their parts nobly by buying often and liberally. Keogh was grand marshal, and made them distribute their patronage, thus keeping up a fair run of custom for several days.
   Mr Hemstetter was gratified by the amount of business done thus far; but expressed surprise that the natives were so backward with their custom.
   “Oh, they’re awfully shy,” explained Johnny, as he wiped his forehead nervously. “They’ll get the habit pretty soon. They’ll come with a rush when they do come.”
   One afternoon Keogh dropped into the consul’s office, chewing an unlighted cigar thoughtfully.
   “Got anything up your sleeve?” he inquired of Johnny. “If you have it’s about time to show it. If you can borrow some gent’s hat in the audience, and make a lot of customers for an idle stock of shoes come out of it you’d better spiel. The boys have all laid in enough footwear to last ’em ten years; and there’s nothing doing in the shoe store but dolce far niente. [1 - dolce far niente – (шпал.) блаженное безделье] I just came by there. Your venerable victim was standing in the door, gazing through his specs at the bare toes passing by his emporium. The natives here have got the true artistic temperament. Me and Clancy took eighteen tintypes this morning in two hours. There’s been but one pair of shoes sold all day. Blanchard went in and bought a pair of furlined house-slippers because he thought he saw Miss Hemstetter go into the store. I saw him throw the slippers into the lagoon afterwards.”
   “There’s a Mobile fruit steamer coming in to-morrow or next day,” said Johnny. We can’t do anything until then.”
   “What are you going to do – try to create a demand?”
   “Political economy isn’t your strong point,” said the consul, impudently. “You can’t create a demand. But you can create a necessity for a demand. That’s what I am going to do.”
   Two weeks after the consul sent his cable, a fruit steamer brought him a huge, mysterious brown bale of some unknown commodity. Johnny’s influence with the custom-house people was sufficiently strong for him to get the goods turned over to him without the usual inspection. He had the bale taken to the consulate and snugly stowed in the back room. That night he ripped open a corner of it and took out a handful of the cockleburrs. He examined them with the care with which a warrior examines his arms before he goes forth to battle for his lady-love and life. The burrs were the ripe August product, as hard as filberts, and bristling with spines as tough and sharp as needles. Johnny whistled softly a little tune, and went out to find Billy Keogh.
   Later in the night, when Coralio was steeped in slumber, he and Billy went forth into the deserted streets with their coats bulging like balloons. All up and down the Calle Grande they went, sowing the sharp burrs carefully in the sand, along the narrow sidewalks, in every foot of grass between the silent houses. And then they took the side streets and byways, missing none. No place where the foot of man, woman or child might fall was slighted. Many trips they made to and from the prickly hoard. And then, nearly at the dawn, they laid themselves down to rest calmly, as great generals do after planning a victory according to the revised tactics, and slept, knowing that they had sowed with the accuracy of Satan sowing tares and the perseverance of Paul planting.
   With the rising sun came the purveyors of fruits and meats, and arranged their wares in and around the little market-house. At one end of the town near the seashore the market-house stood; and the sowing of the burrs had not been carried that far. The dealers waited long past the hour when their sales usually began. None came to buy. “iQue hay? [2 - Que hay? – (исп.) Что случилось?]” they began to exclaim, one to another. At their accustomed time, from every ’dobe and palm hut and grass-thatched shack and dim patio [3 - patio – (исп.) двор] glided women – black women, brown women, lemon-colored women, women dun and yellow and tawny. They were the marketers starting to purchase the family supply of cassava, plantains, meat, fowls, and tortillas. Decollete they were and bare-armed and bare-footed, with a single skirt reaching below the knee. Stolid and ox-eyed, they stepped from their doorways into the narrow paths or upon the soft grass of the streets.
   The first to emerge uttered ambiguous squeals, and raised one foot quickly. Another step and they sat down, with shrill cries of alarm, to pick at the new and painful insects that had stung them upon the feet. “iQue picadores diablos! [4 - Que picadores diablos! – (исп.) Чертовы колючки!]” they screeched to one another across the narrow ways. Some tried the grass instead of the paths, but there they were also stung and bitten by the strange little prickly balls. They plumped down in the grass, and added their lamentations to those of their sisters in the sandy paths. All through the town was heard the plaint of the feminine jabber. The venders in the market still wondered why no customers came.
   Then men, lords of the earth, came forth. They, too, began to hop, to dance, to limp, and to curse. They stood stranded and foolish, or stopped to pluck at the scourge that attacked their feet and ankles. Some loudly proclaimed the pest to be poisonous spiders of an unknown species.
   And then the children ran out for their morning romp. And now to the uproar was added the howls of limping infants and cockleburred childhood. Every minute the advancing day brought forth fresh victims.
   Dona Maria Castillas y Buenventura de las Casas stepped from her honored doorway, as was her daily custom, to procure fresh bread from the panaderia [5 - panaderia – (исп.) булочная] across the street. She was clad in a skirt of flowered, yellow satin, a chemise of ruffled linen, and wore a purple mantilla from the looms of Spain. Her lemon-tinted feet, alas! were bare. Her progress was majestic, for were not her ancestors hidalgos of Aragon? Three steps she made across the velvety grass, and set her aristocratic sole upon a bunch of Johnny’s burrs. Dona Maria Castillas y Buenventura de las Casas emitted a yowl even as a wild-cat. Turning about, she fell upon hands and knees, and crawled – ay, like a beast of the field she crawled back to her honorable door-sill.
   Don Senor Ildefonso Federico Valdazar, Juez de la Paz, [6 - Juez de la Paz – (исп.) мировой судья] weighing twenty stone, [7 - weighing twenty stone – то есть больше ста килограммов] attempted to convey his bulk to the pulperia [8 - pulperia – (исп.) бакалейный магазин с продажей алкогольных напитков] at the corner of the plaza in order to assuage his matutinal thirst. The first plunge of his unshod foot into the cool grass struck a concealed mine. Don Ildefonso fell like a crumpled cathedral, crying out that he had been fatally bitten by a deadly scorpion. Everywhere were the shoeless citizens hopping, stumbling, limping, and picking from their feet the venomous insects that had come in a single night to harass them.
   The first to perceive the remedy was Esteban Delgado, the barber, a man of travel and education. Sitting upon a stone, he plucked burrs from his toes, and made oration:
   “Behold, my friends, these bugs of the devil! I know them well. They soar through the skies in swarms like pigeons. These are dead ones that fell during the night. In Yucatan I have seen them as large as oranges. Yes! There they hiss like serpents, and have wings like bats. It is the shoes – the shoes that one needs! iZapatos – zapatos para mi! [9 - Zapatos – zapatos para mi! – (ucn.) Обувь – обувь для меня!]”
   Esteban hobbled to Mr Hemstetter’s store, and bought shoes. Coming out, he swaggered down the street with impunity, reviling loudly the bugs of the devil. The suffering ones sat up or stood upon one foot and beheld the immune barber. Men, women and children took up the cry: “ЎZapatos! zapatos!”
   The necessity for the demand had been created. The demand followed. That day Mr Hemstetter sold three hundred pairs of shoes.
   “It is really surprising,” he said to Johnny, who came up in the evening to help him straighten out the stock, “how trade is picking up. Yesterday I made but three sales.”
   “I told you they’d whoop things up when they got started,” said the consul.
   “I think I shall order a dozen more cases of goods, to keep the stock up,” said Mr Hemstetter, beaming through his spectacles.
   “I wouldn’t send in any orders yet,” advised Johnny. “Wait till you see how the trade holds up.”
   Each night Johnny and Keogh sowed the crop that grew dollars by day. At the end of ten days two-thirds of the stock of shoes had been sold; and the stock of cockleburrs was exhausted. Johnny cabled to Pink Dawson for another 500 pounds, paying twenty cents per pound as before. Mr Hemstetter carefully made up an order for $1500 worth of shoes from Northern firms. Johnny hung about the store until this order was ready for the mail, and succeeded in destroying it before it reached the postoffice.
   That night he took Rosine under the mango tree by Godwin’s porch, and confessed everything. She looked him in the eye, and said: “You are a very wicked man. Father and I will go back home. You say it was a joke? I think it is a very serious matter.”
   But at the end of half an hour’s argument the conversation had been turned upon a different subject. The two were considering the respective merits of pale blue and pink wall-paper with which the old colonial mansion of the Atwoods in Dalesburg was to be decorated after the wedding.
   On the next morning Johnny confessed to Mr Hemstetter. The shoe merchant put on his spectacles, and said through them: “You strike me as being a most extraordinary young scamp. If I had not managed this enterprise with good business judgment my entire stock of goods might have been a complete loss. Now, how do you propose to dispose of the rest of it?”
   When the second invoice of cockleburrs arrived Johnny loaded them and the remainder of the shoes into schooner, and sailed down the coast to Alazan. There, in the same dark and diabolical manner, he repeated his success: and came back with a bag of money and not so much as a shoestring.
   And then he besought his great Uncle of the waving goatee and starred vest to accept his resignation, [10 - Дядя Сэм – символ Соединенных Штатов. Его принято изображать в виде сухопарого верзилы с длинной бородкой, в жилете, усеянном звездами (национальный флаг).] for the lotus no longer lured him. He hankered for the spinach and cress of Dalesburg.
   The services of Mr William Terence Keogh as acting consul, pro term., were suggested and accepted, and Johnny sailed with the Hemstetters back to his native shores.
   Keogh slipped into the sinecure of the American consulship with the ease that never left him even in such high places. The tintype establishment was soon to become a thing of the past, although its deadly work along the peaceful and helpless Spanish Main was never effaced. The restless partners were about to be off again, scouting ahead of the slow ranks of Fortune. But now they would take different ways. There were rumors of a promising uprising in Peru; and thither the martial Clancy would turn his adventurous steps. As for Keogh, he was figuring in his mind and on quires of Government letter-heads a scheme that dwarfed the art of misrepresenting the human countenance upon tin.
   “What suits me,” Keogh used to say, “in the way of a business proposition is something diversified that looks like a longer shot than it is – something in the way of a genteel graft that isn’t worked enough for the correspondence schools to be teaching it by mail. I take the long end; but I like to have at least as good a chance to win as a man learning to play poker on an ocean steamer, or running for governor of Texas on the Republican ticket. And when I cash in my winnings I don’t want to find any widows’ and orphans’ chips in my stack.”
   The grass-grown globe was the green table on which Keogh gambled. The games he played were of his own invention. He was no grubber after the diffident dollar. Nor did he care to follow it with horn and hounds. Rather he loved to coax it with egregious and brilliant flies from its habitat in the waters of strange streams. Yet Keogh was a business man; and his schemes, in spite of their singularity, were as solidly set as the plans of a building contractor. In Arthur’s time Sir William Keogh would have been a Knight of the Round Table. In these modern days he rides abroad, seeking the Graft instead of the Grail.
   Three days after Johnny’s departure, two small schooners appeared off Coralio. After some delay a boat put off from one of them, and brought a sunburned young man ashore. This young man had a shrewd and calculating eye; and he gazed with amazement at the strange things that he saw. He found on the beach some one who directed him to the consul’s office; and thither he made his way at a nervous gait.
   Keogh was sprawled in the official chair, drawing caricatures of his Uncle’s head on an official pad of paper. He looked up at his visitor.
   “Where’s Johnny Atwood?” inquired the sunburned young man, in a business tone.
   “Gone,” said Keogh, working carefully at Uncle Sam’s necktie.
   “That’s just like him,” remarked the nut-brown one, leaning against the table. “He always was a fellow to gallivant around instead of ’tending to business. Will he be in soon?”
   “Don’t think so,” said Keogh, after a fair amount of deliberation.
   “I s’pose he’s out at some of his tomfoolery,” conjectured the visitor, in a tone of virtuous conviction. “Johnny never would stick to anything long enough to succeed. I wonder how he manages to run his business here, and never be ’round to look after it.”
   “I’m looking after the business just now,” admitted the pro term. consul.
   “Are you – then, say – where’s the factory?”
   “What factory?” asked Keogh, with a mildly polite interest.
   “Why, the factory where they use them cockleburrs. Lord knows what they use ’em for, anyway! I’ve got the basements of both them ships out there loaded with ’em. I’ll give you a bargain in this lot. I’ve had every man, woman and child around Dalesburg that wasn’t busy pickin’ ’em for a month. I hired these ships to bring ’em over. Everybody thought I was crazy. Now, you can have this lot for fifteen cents a pound, delivered on land. And if you want more I guess old Alabam’ can come up to the demand. Johnny told me when he left home that if he struck anything down here that there was any money in he’d let me in on it. Shall I drive the ships in and hitch?”
   A look of supreme, almost incredulous, delight dawned in Keogh’s ruddy countenance. He dropped his pencil. His eyes turned upon the sunburned young man with joy in them mingled with fear lest his ecstasy should prove a dream.
   “For God’s sake tell me,” said Keogh, earnestly, “are you Dink Pawson?”
   “My name is Pinkney Dawson,” said the cornerer of the cockleburr market.
   Billy Keogh slid rapturously and gently from his chair to his favorite strip of matting on the floor.
   There were not many sounds in Coralio on that sultry afternoon. Among those that were may be mentioned a noise of enraptured and unrighteous laughter from a prostrate Irish-American, while a sunburned young man, with a shrewd eye, looked on him with wonder and amazement. Also the “tramp, tramp, tramp” of many well-shod feet in the streets outside. Also the lonesome wash of the waves that beat along the historic shores of the Spanish Main.

The Lotus and the Bottle

   Willard Geddie, consul for the United States in Coralio, was working leisurely on his yearly report. Goodwin, who had strolled in as he did daily for a smoke on the much coveted porch, had found him so absorbed in his work that he departed after roundly abusing the consul for his lack of hospitality.
   “I shall complain to the civil service department,” said Goodwin; – “or is it a department? – perhaps it’s only a theory. One gets neither civility nor service from you. You won’t talk; and you won’t set out anything to drink. What kind of a way is that of representing your government?”
   Goodwin strolled out and across to the hotel to see if he could bully the quarantine doctor into a game on Coralio’s solitary billiard table. His plans were completed for the interception of the fugitives from the capital; and now it was but a waiting game that he had to play.
   The consul was interested in his report. He was only twenty-four; and he had not been in Coralio long enough for his enthusiasm to cool in the heat of the tropics – a paradox that may be allowed between Cancer and Capricorn.
   So many thousand bunches of bananas, so many thousand oranges and coconuts, so many ounces of gold dust, pounds of rubber, coffee, indigo and sarparilla – actually, exports were twenty per cent greater than for the previous year!
   A little thrill of satisfaction ran through the consul. Perhaps, he thought, the State Department, upon reading his introduction, would notice – and then he leaned back in his chair and laughed. He was getting as bad as the others. For the moment he had forgotten that Coralio was an insignificant republic lying along the by-ways of a second-rate sea. He thought of Gregg, the quarantine doctor, who subscribed for the London Lancet, expecting to find it quoting his reports to the home Board of Health concerning the yellow fever germ. The consul knew that not one in fifty of his acquaintances in the States had ever heard of Coralio. He knew that two men, at any rate, would have to read his report – some underling in the State Department and a compositor in the Public Printing Office. Perhaps the typesticker would note the increase of commerce in Coralio, and speak of it, over the cheese and beer, to a friend.
   He had just written: “Most unaccountable is the supineness of the large exporters in the United States in permitting the French and German houses to practically control the trade interests of this rich and productive country” – when he heard the hoarse notes of a steamer’s siren.
   Geddie laid down his pen and gathered his Panama hat and umbrella. By the sound he knew it to be the Valhalla, one of the line of fruit vessels plying for the Vesuvius Company. Down to ninos of five years, every one in Coralio could name you each incoming steamer by the note of her siren.
   The consul sauntered by a roundabout, shaded way to the beach. By reason of long practice he gauged his stroll so accurately that by the time he arrived on the sandy shore the boat of the customs officials was rowing back from the steamer, which had been boarded and inspected according to the laws of Anchuria.
   There is no harbor at Coralio. Vessels of the draught of the Valhalla must ride at anchor a mile from shore. When they take on fruit it is conveyed on lighters and freighter sloops. At Solitas, where there was a fine harbor, ships of many kinds were to be seen, but in the roadstead off Coralio scarcely any save the fruiters paused. Now and then a tramp coaster, or a mysterious brig from Spain, or a saucy French barque would hang innocently for a few days in the offing. Then the custom-house crew would become doubly vigilant and wary. At night a sloop or two would be making strange trips in and out along the shore; and in the morning the stock of Three-Star Hennessey, wines and drygoods in Coralio would be found vastly increased. It has also been said that the customs officials jingled more silver in the pockets of their red-striped trousers, and that the record books showed no increase in import duties received.
   The custom’s boat and the Valhalla gig reached the shore at the same time. When they grounded in the shallow water there was still five yards of rolling surf between them and dry sand. Then half-clothed Caribs dashed into the water, and brought in on their backs the Valhalla’s purser, and the little native officials in their cotton undershirts, blue trousers with red stripes, and flapping straw hats.
   At college Geddie had been a treasure as a first-baseman. He now closed his umbrella, stuck it upright in the sand, and stooped, with his hands resting upon his knees. The purser, burlesquing the pitcher’s contortions, hurled at the consul the heavy roll of newspapers, tied with a string, that the steamer always brought for him. Geddie leaped high and caught the roll with a sounding “thwack.” The loungers on the beach – about a third of the population of the town – laughed and applauded delightedly. Every week they expected to see that roll of papers delivered and received in that same manner, and they were never disappointed. Innovations did not flourish in Coralio.
   The consul re-hoisted his umbrella and walked back to the consulate.
   This home of a great nation’s representative was a wooden structure of two rooms, with a native-built gallery of poles, bamboo and nipa palm running on three sides of it. One room was the official apartment, furnished chastely with a flat-top desk, a hammock, and three uncomfortable cane-seated chairs. Engravings of the first and latest president of the country represented hung against the wall. The other room was the consul’s living apartment.
   It was eleven o’clock when he returned from the beach, and therefore breakfast time. Chanca, the Carib woman who cooked for him, was just serving the meal on the side of the gallery facing the sea – a spot famous as the coolest in Coralio. The breakfast consisted of shark’s fin soup, stew of land crabs, breadfruit, a boiled iguana steak, aquacates, a freshly cut pineapple, claret and coffee.
   Geddie took his seat, and unrolled with luxurious laziness his bundle of newspapers. Here in Coralio for two days or longer he would read the goings-on in the world very much as we of the world read those whimsical contributions to inexact science that assume to portray the doings of the Martians. After he had finished with the papers they would be sent on the rounds of the other English-speaking residents of the town.
   The paper that came first to his hand was one of those bulky mattresses of printed stuff upon which the readers of certain New York journals are supposed to take their Sabbath literary nap. Opening this the consul rested it upon the table, supporting its weight with the aid of the back of a chair. Then he partook of his meal deliberately, turning the leaves from time to time and glancing half idly at the contents.
   Presently he was struck by something familiar to him in a picture – a half-page, badly printed reproduction of a photograph of a vessel. Languidly interested, he leaned for a nearer scrutiny and a view of the florid headlines of the column next to the picture.
   Yes; he was not mistaken. The engraving was of the eight-hundred-ton yacht Idalia, belonging to “that prince of good fellows, Midas of the money market, and society’s pink of perfection, J. Ward Tolliver.”
   Slowly sipping his black coffee, Geddie read the column of print. Following a listed statement of Mr Tolliver’s real estate and bonds, came a description of the yacht’s furnishings, and then the grain of news no bigger than a mustard seed. Mr Tolliver, with a party of favored guests, would sail the next day on a six weeks’ cruise along the Central American and South American coasts and among the Bahama Islands. Among the guests were Mrs Cumberland Payne and Miss Ida Payne, of Norfolk.
   The writer, with the fatuous presumption that was demanded of him by his readers, had concocted a romance suited to their palates. He bracketed the names of Miss Payne and Mr Tolliver until he had well-nigh read the marriage ceremony over them. He played coyly and insinuatingly upon the strings of “on dit [11 - on dit – (фр.) говорят]” and “Madame Rumor” and “a little bird” and “no one would be surprised,” and ended with congratulations.
   Geddie, having finished his breakfast, took his papers to the edge of the gallery, and sat there in his favorite steamer chair with his feet on the bamboo railing. He lighted a cigar, and looked out upon the sea. He felt a glow of satisfaction at finding he was so little disturbed by what he had read. He told himself that he had conquered the distress that had sent him, a voluntary exile, to this far land of the lotus. He could never forget Ida, of course; but there was no longer any pain in thinking about her. When they had had that misunderstanding and quarrel he had impulsively sought this consulship, with the desire to retaliate upon her by detaching himself from her world and presence. He had succeeded thoroughly in that. During the twelve months of his life in Coralio no word had passed between them, though he had sometimes heard of her through the dilatory correspondence with the few friends to whom he still wrote. Still he could not repress a little thrill of satisfaction at knowing that she had not yet married Tolliver or any one else. But evidently Tolliver had not yet abandoned hope.
   Well, it made no difference to him now. He had eaten of the lotus. He was happy and content in this land of perpetual afternoon. Those old days of life in the States seemed like an irritating dream. He hoped Ida would be as happy as he was. The climate as balmy as that of distant Avalon; the fetterless, idyllic round of enchanted days; the life among this indolent, romantic people – a life full of music, flowers, and low laughter; the influence of the imminent sea and mountains, and the many shapes of love and magic and beauty that bloomed in the white tropic nights – with all he was more than content. Also, there was Paula Brannigan.
   Geddie intended to marry Paula – if, of course, she would consent; but he felt rather sure that she would do that. Somehow, he kept postponing his proposal. Several times he had been quite near to it; but a mysterious something always held him back. Perhaps it was only the unconscious, instinctive conviction that the act would sever the last tie that bound him to his old world.
   He could be very happy with Paula. Few of the native girls could be compared with her. She had attended a convent school in New Orleans for two years; and when she chose to display her accomplishments no one could detect any difference between her and the girls of Norfolk and Manhattan. But it was delicious to see her at home dressed, as she sometimes was, in the native costume, with bare shoulders and flowing sleeves.
   Bernard Brannigan was the great merchant of Coralio. Besides his store, he maintained a train of pack mules, and carried on a lively trade with the interior towns and villages. He had married a native lady of high Castilian descent, but with a tinge of Indian brown showing through her olive cheek. The union of the Irish and the Spanish had produced, as it so often has, an offshoot of rare beauty and variety. They were very excellent people indeed, and the upper story of the house was ready to be placed at the service of Geddie and Paula as soon as he should make up his mind to speak about it.
   By the time two hours were whiled away the consul tired of reading. The papers lay scattered about him on the gallery. Reclining there, he gazed dreamily out upon an Eden. A clump of banana plants interposed their broad shields between him and the sun. The gentle slope from the consulate to the sea was covered with the dark-green foliage of lemon-trees and orange-trees just bursting into bloom. A lagoon pierced the land like a dark, jagged crystal, and above it a pale ceiba-tree rose almost to the clouds. The waving coconut palms on the beach flared their decorative green leaves against the slate of an almost quiescent sea. His senses were cognizant of brilliant scarlet and ochres and the vert of the coppice, of odors of fruit and bloom and the smoke from Chanca’s clay oven under the calabash-tree; of the treble laughter of the native women in their huts, the song of the robin, the salt taste of the breeze, the diminuendo of the faint surf running along the shore – and, gradually, of a white speck, growing to a blur, that intruded itself upon the drab prospect of the sea.
   Lazily interested, he watched this blur increase until it became the Idalia steaming at full speed, coming down the coast. Without changing his position he kept his eyes upon the beautiful white yacht as she drew swiftly near, and came opposite to Coralio. Then, sitting upright, he saw her float steadily past and on. He had seen the frequent splash of her polished brass work and the stripes of her deck-awnings – so much, and no more. Like a ship on a magic lantern slide the Idalia had crossed the illuminated circle of the consul’s little world, and was gone. Save for the tiny cloud of smoke that was left hanging over the brim of the sea, she might have been an immaterial thing, a chimera of his idle brain.
   Geddie went into his office and sat down to dawdle over his report. If the reading of the article in the paper had left him unshaken, this silent passing of the Idalia had done for him still more. It had brought the calm and peace of a situation from which all uncertainty had been erased. He knew that men sometimes hope without being aware of it. Now, since she had come two thousand miles and had passed without a sign, not even his unconscious self need cling to the past any longer.
   After dinner, when the sun was low behind the mountains, Geddie walked on the little strip of beach under the coconuts. The wind was blowing mildly landward, and the surface of the sea was rippled by tiny wavelets.
   A miniature breaker, spreading with a soft “swish” upon the sand brought with its something round and shiny that rolled back again as the wave receded. The next influx beached it clear, and Geddie picked it up. The thing was a long-necked wine bottle of colorless glass. The cork had been driven in tightly to the level of the mouth, and the end covered with dark-red sealing-wax. The bottle contained only what seemed to be a sheet of paper, much curled from the manipulation it had undergone while being inserted. In the sealing-wax was the impression of a seal – probably of a signet-ring, bearing the initials of a monogram; but the impression had been hastily made, and the letters were past anything more certain than a shrewd conjecture. Ida Payne had always worn a signet-ring in preference to any other finger decoration. Geddie thought he could make out the familiar “I P”; and a queer sensation of disquietude went over him. More personal and intimate was this reminder of her than had been the sight of the vessel she was doubtless on. He walked back to his house, and set the bottle on his desk.
   Throwing off his hat and coat, and lighting a lamp – for the night had crowded precipitately upon the brief twilight – he began to examine his piece of sea salvage.
   By holding the bottle near the light and turning it judiciously, he made out that it contained a double sheet of note-paper filled with close writing; further, that the paper was of the same size and shade as that always used by Ida; and that, to the best of his belief, the handwriting was hers. The imperfect glass of the bottle so distorted the rays of light that he could read no word of the writing; but certain capital letters, of which he caught comprehensive glimpses, were Ida’s, he felt sure.
   There was a little smile both of perplexity and amusement in Geddie’s eyes as he set the bottle down, and laid three cigars side by side on his desk. He fetched his steamer chair from the gallery, and stretched himself comfortably. He would smoke those three cigars while considering the problem.
   For it amounted to a problem. He almost wished that he had not found the bottle; but the bottle was there. Why should it have drifted in from the sea, whence come so many disquieting things, to disturb his peace?
   In this dreamy land, where time seemed so redundant, he had fallen into the habit of bestowing much thought upon even trifling matters.
   He began to speculate upon many fanciful theories concerning the story of the bottle, rejecting each in turn.
   Ships in danger of wreck or disablement sometimes cast forth such precarious messengers calling for aid. But he had seen the Idalia not three hours before, safe and speeding. Suppose the crew had mutinied and imprisoned the passengers below, and the message was one begging for succour! But, premising such an improbable outrage, would the agitated captives have taken the pains to fill four pages of note-paper with carefully penned arguments to their rescue.
   Thus by elimination he soon rid the matter of the more unlikely theories, and was reduced – though aversely – to the less assailable ones that the bottle contained a message to himself. Ida knew he was in Coralio; she must have launched the bottle while the yacht was passing and the wind blowing fairly toward the shore.
   As soon as Geddie reached this conclusion a wrinkle came between his brows and a stubborn look settled around his mouth. He sat looking out through the doorway at the gigantic fire-flies traversing the quiet streets.
   If this was a message to him from Ida, what could it mean save an overture at reconciliation? And if that, why had she not used the same methods of the post instead of this uncertain and even flippant means of communication? A note in an empty bottle, cast into the sea! There was something light and frivolous about it, if not actually contemptuous.
   The thought stirred his pride, and subdued whatever emotions had been resurrected by the finding of the bottle.
   Geddie put on his coat and hat and walked out. He followed a street that led him along the border of the little plaza where a band was playing and people were rambling, care-free and indolent. Some timorous senoritas scurrying past with fire-flies tangled in the jetty braids of their hair glanced at him with shy, flattering eyes. The air was languorous with the scent of jasmin and orange-blossoms.
   The consul stayed his steps at the house of Bernard Brannigan. Paula was swinging in a hammock on the gallery. She rose from it like a bird from its nest. The color came to her cheek at the sound of Geddie’s voice.
   He was charmed at the sight of her costume – a flounced muslin dress, with a little jacket of white flannel, all made with neatness and style. He suggested a stroll, and they walked out to the old Indian well on the hill road. They sat on the curb, and there Geddie made the expected but long-deferred speech. Certain though he had been that she would not say him nay, he was still thrilled at the completeness and sweetness of her surrender. Here was surely a heart made for love and steadfastness. Here was no caprice or questionings or captious standards of convention.
   When Geddie kissed Paula at her door that night he was happier than he had ever been before. “Here in this hollow lotus land, ever to live and lie reclined” seemed to him, as it has seemed to many mariners, the best as well as the easiest. His future would be an ideal one. He had attained a Paradise without a serpent. His Eve would be indeed a part of him, unbeguiled, and therefore more beguiling. He had made his decision to-night, and his heart was full of serene, assured content.
   Geddie went back to his house whistling that finest and saddest love song, “La Golondrina. [12 - La Golondrina – (исп.) Ласточка]” At the door his tame monkey leaped down from his shelf, chattering briskly. The consul turned to his desk to get him some nuts he usually kept there. Reaching in the half-darkness, his hand struck against the bottle. He started as if he had touched the cold rotundity of a serpent.
   He had forgotten that the bottle was there.
   He lighted the lamp and fed the monkey. Then, very deliberately, he lighted a cigar, and took the bottle in his hand, and walked down the path to the beach.
   There was a moon, and the sea was glorious. The breeze had shifted, as it did each evening, and was now rushing steadily seaward.
   Stepping to the water’s edge, Geddie hurled the unopened bottle far out into the sea. It disappeared for a moment, and then shot upward twice its length. Geddie stood still, watching it. The moonlight was so bright that he could see it bobbing up and down with the little waves. Slowly it receded from the shore, flashing and turning as it went. The wind was carrying it out to sea. Soon it became a mere speck, doubtfully discerned at irregular intervals; and then the mystery of it was swallowed up by the greater mystery of the ocean. Geddie stood still upon the beach, smoking and looking out upon the water.
   “Simon! – Oh, Simon! – Wake up there, Simon!” bawled a sonorous voice at the edge of the water.
   Old Simon Cruz was a half-breed fisherman and smuggler who lived in a hut on the beach. Out of his earliest nap Simon was thus awakened.
   He slipped on his shoes and went outside. Just landing from one of the Valhalla’s boats was the third mate of that vessel, who was an acquaintance of Simon’s, and three sailors from the fruiter.
   “Go up, Simon,” called the mate, “and find Doctor Gregg or Mr Goodwin or anybody that’s a friend to Mr Geddie, and bring ’em here at once.”
   “Saints of the skies!” said Simon, sleepily, “nothing has happened to Mr Geddie?”
   “He’s under that tarpauling,” said the mate, pointing to the boat, “and he’s rather more than half drowned. We seen him from the steamer nearly a mile out from shore, swimmin’ like mad after a bottle that was floatin’ in the water, outward bound. We lowered the gig and started for him. He nearly had his hand on the bottle, when he gave out and went under. We pulled him out in time to save him, maybe; but the doctor is the one to decide that.”
   “A bottle?” said the old man, rubbing his eyes. He was not yet fully awake. “Where is the bottle?”
   “Driftin’ along out there some’eres,” said the mate, jerking his thumb toward the sea. “Get on with you, Simon.”

A Service of Love

   When one loves one’s Art no service seems too hard.
   That is our premise. This story shall draw a conclusion from it, and show at the same time that the premise is incorrect. That will be a new thing in logic, and a feat in story-telling somewhat older than the great wall of China.
   Joe Larrabee came out of the post-oak flats of the Middle West pulsing with a genius for pictorial art. At six he drew a picture of the town pump with a prominent citizen passing it hastily. This effort was framed and hung in the drug store window by the side of the ear of corn with an uneven number of rows. At twenty he left for New York with a flowing necktie and a capital tied up somewhat closer.
   Delia Caruthers did things in six octaves so promisingly in a pine-tree village in the South that her relatives chipped in enough in her chip hat for her to go “North” and “finish.” They could not see her f —, but that is our story.
   Joe and Delia met in an atelier where a number of art and music students had gathered to discuss chiaroscuro, Wagner, music, Rembrandt’s works, pictures, Waldteufel, wall paper, Chopin and oolong.
   Joe and Delia became enamoured one of the other, or each of the other, as you please, and in a short time were married – for (see above), when one loves one’s Art no service seems too hard.
   Mr and Mrs Larrabee began housekeeping in a flat. It was a lonesome flat – something like the A sharp way down at the left-hand end of the keyboard. And they were happy; for they had their Art, and they had each other. And my advice to the rich young man would be – sell all thou hast, and give it to the poor – janitor for the privilege of living in a flat with your Art and your Delia.
   Flat-dwellers shall indorse my dictum that theirs is the only true happiness. If a home is happy it cannot fit too close – let the dresser collapse and become a billiard table; let the mantel turn to a rowing machine, the escritoire to a spare bedchamber, the washstand to an upright piano; let the four walls come together, if they will, so you and your Delia are between. But if home be the other kind, let it be wide and long – enter you at the Golden Gate, hang your hat on Hatteras, your cape on Cape Horn and go out by the Labrador.
   Joe was painting in the class of the great Magister – you know his fame. His fees are high; his lessons are light – his high-lights have brought him renown. Delia was studying under Rosenstock – you know his repute as a disturber of the piano keys.
   They were mighty happy as long as their money lasted. So is every – but I will not be cynical. Their aims were very clear and defined. Joe was to become capable very soon of turning out pictures that old gentlemen with thin side-whiskers and thick pocketbooks would sandbag one another in his studio for the privilege of buying. Delia was to become familiar and then contemptuous with Music, so that when she saw the orchestra seats and boxes unsold she could have sore throat and lobster in a private dining-room and refuse to go on the stage.
   But the best, in my opinion, was the home life in the little flat – the ardent, voluble chats after the day’s study; the cozy dinners and fresh, light breakfasts; the interchange of ambitions – ambitions interwoven each with the other’s or else inconsiderable – the mutual help and inspiration; and – overlook my artlessness – stuffed olives and cheese sandwiches at 11 p.m.
   But after a while Art flagged. It sometimes does, even if some switchman doesn’t flag it. Everything going out and nothing coming in, as the vulgarians say. Money was lacking to pay Mr Magister and Herr Rosenstock their prices. When one loves one’s Art no service seems too hard. So, Delia said she must give music lessons to keep the chafing dish bubbling.
   For two or three days she went out canvassing for pupils. One evening she came home elated.
   “Joe, dear,” she said, gleefully, “I’ve a pupil. And, oh, the loveliest people! General – General A. B. Pinkney’s daughter – on Seventy-first street. Such a splendid house, Joe – you ought to see the front door! Byzantine I think you would call it. And inside! Oh, Joe, I never saw anything like it before.
   “My pupil is his daughter Clementina. I dearly love her already. She’s a delicate thing – dresses always in white; and the sweetest, simplest manners! Only eighteen years old. I’m to give three lessons a week; and, just think, Joe! $5 a lesson. I don’t mind it a bit; for when I get two or three more pupils I can resume my lessons with Herr Rosenstock. Now, smooth out that wrinkle between your brows, dear, and let’s have a nice supper.”
   “That’s all right for you, Dele,” said Joe, attacking a can of peas with a carving knife and a hatchet, “but how about me? Do you think I’m going to let you hustle for wages while I philander in the regions of high art? Not by the bones of Benvenuto Cellini! I guess I can sell papers or lay cobblestones, and bring in a dollar or two.”
   Delia came and hung about his neck.
   “Joe, dear, you are silly. You must keep on at your studies. It is not as if I had quit my music and gone to work at something else. While I teach I learn. I am always with my music. And we can live as happily as millionaires on $15 a week. You mustn’t think of leaving Mr Magister.”
   “All right,” said Joe, reaching for the blue scalloped vegetable dish. “But I hate for you to be giving lessons. It isn’t Art. But you’re a trump and a dear to do it.”
   “When one loves one’s Art no service seems too hard,” said Delia.
   “Magister praised the sky in that sketch I made in the park,” said Joe. “And Tinkle gave me permission to hang two of them in his window. I may sell one if the right kind of a moneyed idiot sees them.”
   “I’m sure you will,” said Delia, sweetly. “And now let’s be thankful for Gen. Pinkney and this veal roast.”
   During all of the next week the Larrabees had an early breakfast. Joe was enthusiastic about some morning-effect sketches he was doing in Central Park, and Delia packed him off breakfasted, coddled, praised and kissed at 7 o’clock. Art is an engaging mistress. It was most times 7 o’clock when he returned in the evening.
   At the end of the week Delia, sweetly proud but languid, triumphantly tossed three five-dollar bills on the 8x10 (inches) centre table of the 8x10 (feet) flat parlour.
   “Sometimes,” she said, a little wearily, “Clementina tries me. I’m afraid she doesn’t practise enough, and I have to tell her the same things so often. And then she always dresses entirely in white, and that does get monotonous. But Gen. Pinkney is the dearest old man! I wish you could know him, Joe. He comes in sometimes when I am with Clementina at the piano – he is a widower, you know – and stands there pulling his white goatee. “And how are the semiquavers and the demisemiquavers progressing?” he always asks.
   “I wish you could see the wainscoting in that drawing-room, Joe! And those Astrakhan rug portieres. And Clementina has such a funny little cough. I hope she is stronger than she looks. Oh, I really am getting attached to her, she is so gentle and high bred. Gen. Pinkney’s brother was once Minister to Bolivia.”
   And then Joe, with the air of a Monte Cristo, drew forth a ten, a five, a two and a one – all legal tender notes – and laid them beside Delia’s earnings.
   “Sold that watercolour of the obelisk to a man from Peoria,” he announced overwhelmingly.
   “Don’t joke with me,” said Delia, “not from Peoria!”
   “All the way. I wish you could see him, Dele. Fat man with a woollen muffler and a quill toothpick. He saw the sketch in Tinkle’s window and thought it was a windmill at first. He was game, though, and bought it anyhow. He ordered another – an oil sketch of the Lackawanna freight depot – to take back with him. Music lessons! Oh, I guess Art is still in it.”
   “I’m so glad you’ve kept on,” said Delia, heartily. “You’re bound to win, dear. Thirty-three dollars! We never had so much to spend before. We’ll have oysters to-night.”
   “And filet mignon with champignons,” said Joe. “Where is the olive fork?”
   On the next Saturday evening Joe reached home first. He spread his $18 on the parlour table and washed what seemed to be a great deal of dark paint from his hands.
   Half an hour later Delia arrived, her right hand tied up in a shapeless bundle of wraps and bandages.
   “How is this?” asked Joe after the usual greetings. Delia laughed, but not very joyously.
   “Clementina,” she explained, “insisted upon a Welsh rabbit after her lesson. She is such a queer girl. Welsh rabbits at 5 in the afternoon. The General was there. You should have seen him run for the chafing dish, Joe, just as if there wasn’t a servant in the house. I know Clementina isn’t in good health; she is so nervous. In serving the rabbit she spilled a great lot of it, boiling hot, over my hand and wrist. It hurt awfully, Joe. And the dear girl was so sorry! But Gen. Pinkney! – Joe, that old man nearly went distracted. He rushed downstairs and sent somebody – they said the furnace man or somebody in the basement – out to a drug store for some oil and things to bind it up with. It doesn’t hurt so much now.”
   “What’s this?” asked Joe, taking the hand tenderly and pulling at some white strands beneath the bandages.
   “It’s something soft,” said Delia, “that had oil on it. Oh, Joe, did you sell another sketch?” She had seen the money on the table.
   “Did I?” said Joe; “just ask the man from Peoria. He got his depot to-day, and he isn’t sure but he thinks he wants another parkscape and a view on the Hudson. What time this afternoon did you burn your hand, Dele?”
   “Five o’clock, I think,” said Dele, plaintively. “The iron – I mean the rabbit came off the fire about that time. You ought to have seen Gen. Pinkney, Joe, when – ”
   “Sit down here a moment, Dele,” said Joe. He drew her to the couch, sat beside her and put his arm across her shoulders.
   “What have you been doing for the last two weeks, Dele?” he asked.
   She braved it for a moment or two with an eye full of love and stubbornness, and murmured a phrase or two vaguely of Gen. Pinkney; but at length down went her head and out came the truth and tears.
   “I couldn’t get any pupils,” she confessed. “And I couldn’t bear to have you give up your lessons; and I got a place ironing shirts in that big Twenty-fourth street laundry. And I think I did very well to make up both General Pinkney and Clementina, don’t you, Joe? And when a girl in the laundry set down a hot iron on my hand this afternoon I was all the way home making up that story about the Welsh rabbit. You’re not angry, are you, Joe? And if I hadn’t got the work you mightn’t have sold your sketches to that man from Peoria.”
   “He wasn’t from Peoria,” said Joe, slowly.
   “Well, it doesn’t matter where he was from. How clever you are, Joe – and – kiss me, Joe – and what made you ever suspect that I wasn’t giving music lessons to Clementina?”
   “I didn’t,” said Joe, “until to-night. And I wouldn’t have then, only I sent up this cotton waste and oil from the engine-room this afternoon for a girl upstairs who had her hand burned with a smoothing-iron. I’ve been firing the engine in that laundry for the last two weeks.”
   “And then you didn’t – ”
   “My purchaser from Peoria,” said Joe, “and Gen. Pinkney are both creations of the same art – but you wouldn’t call it either painting or music.”
   And then they both laughed, and Joe began:
   “When one loves one’s Art no service seems – ”
   But Delia stopped him with her hand on his lips. “No,” she said – “just ‘When one loves.’ ”

The Furnished Room

   Restless, shifting, fugacious as time itself is a certain vast bulk of the population of the red brick district of the lower West Side. Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to furnished room, transients forever – transients in abode, transients in heart and mind. They sing “Home, Sweet Home” in ragtime; they carry their – lares et penates [13 - lares et penates – (лат.) лары и пенаты; домашний очаг] – in a bandbox; their vine is entwined about a picture hat; a rubber plant is their fig tree.
   Hence the houses of this district, having had a thousand dwellers, should have a thousand tales to tell, mostly dull ones, no doubt; but it would be strange if there could not be found a ghost or two in the wake of all these vagrant guests.
   One evening after dark a young man prowled among these crumbling red mansions, ringing their bells. At the twelfth he rested his lean hand-baggage upon the step and wiped the dust from his hatband and forehead. The bell sounded faint and far away in some remote, hollow depths.
   To the door of this, the twelfth house whose bell he had rung, came a housekeeper who made him think of an unwholesome, surfeited worm that had eaten its nut to a hollow shell and now sought to fill the vacancy with edible lodgers.
   He asked if there was a room to let.
   “Come in,” said the housekeeper. Her voice came from her throat; her throat seemed lined with fur. “I have the third floor back, vacant since a week back. Should you wish to look at it?”
   The young man followed her up the stairs. A faint light from no particular source mitigated the shadows of the halls. They trod noiselessly upon a stair carpet that its own loom would have forsworn. It seemed to have become vegetable; to have degenerated in that rank, sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew in patches to the staircase and was viscid under the foot like organic matter. At each turn of the stairs were vacant niches in the wall. Perhaps plants had once been set within them. If so they had died in that foul and tainted air. It may be that statues of the saints had stood there, but it was not difficult to conceive that imps and devils had dragged them forth in the darkness and down to the unholy depths of some furnished pit below.
   “This is the room,” said the housekeeper, from her furry throat. “It’s a nice room. It ain’t often vacant. I had some most elegant people in it last summer – no trouble at all, and paid in advance to the minute. The water’s at the end of the hall. Sprowls and Mooney kept it three months. They done a vaudeville sketch. Miss Bretta Sprowls – you may have heard of her – Oh, that was just the stage names – right there over the dresser is where the marriage certificate hung, framed. The gas is here, and you see there is plenty of closet room. It’s a room everybody likes. It never stays idle long.”
   “Do you have many theatrical people rooming here?” asked the young man.
   “They comes and goes. A good proportion of my lodgers is connected with the theatres. Yes, sir, this is the theatrical district. Actor people never stays long anywhere. I get my share. Yes, they comes and they goes.”
   He engaged the room, paying for a week in advance. He was tired, he said, and would take possession at once. He counted out the money. The room had been made ready, she said, even to towels and water. As the housekeeper moved away he put, for the thousandth time, the question that he carried at the end of his tongue.
   “A young girl – Miss Vashner – Miss Eloise Vashner – do you remember such a one among your lodgers? She would be singing on the stage, most likely. A fair girl, of medium height and slender, with reddish, gold hair and a dark mole near her left eyebrow.”
   “No, I don’t remember the name. Them stage people has names they change as often as their rooms. They comes and they goes. No, I don’t call that one to mind.”
   No. Always no. Five months of ceaseless interrogation and the inevitable negative. So much time spent by day in questioning managers, agents, schools and choruses; by night among the audiences of theatres from all-star casts down to music halls so low that he dreaded to find what he most hoped for. He who had loved her best had tried to find her. He was sure that since her disappearance from home this great, water-girt city held her somewhere, but it was like a monstrous quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no foundation, its upper granules of to-day buried to-morrow in ooze and slime.
   The furnished room received its latest guest with a first glow of pseudo-hospitality, a hectic, haggard, perfunctory welcome like the specious smile of a demirep. The sophistical comfort came in reflected gleams from the decayed furniture, the ragged brocade upholstery of a couch and two chairs, a foot-wide cheap pier glass between the two windows, from one or two gilt picture frames and a brass bedstead in a corner.
   The guest reclined, inert, upon a chair, while the room, confused in speech as though it were an apartment in Babel, tried to discourse to him of its divers tenantry.
   A polychromatic rug like some brilliant-flowered rectangular, tropical islet lay surrounded by a billowy sea of soiled matting. Upon the gay-papered wall were those pictures that pursue the homeless one from house to house – The Huguenot Lovers, The First Quarrel, The Wedding Breakfast, Psyche at the Fountain. The mantel’s chastely severe outline was ingloriously veiled behind some pert drapery drawn rakishly askew like the sashes of the Amazonian ballet. Upon it was some desolate flotsam cast aside by the room’s marooned when a lucky sail had borne them to a fresh port – a trifling vase or two, pictures of actresses, a medicine bottle, some stray cards out of a deck.
   One by one, as the characters of a cryptograph become explicit, the little signs left by the furnished room’s procession of guests developed a significance. The threadbare space in the rug in front of the dresser told that lovely woman had marched in the throng. Tiny finger prints on the wall spoke of little prisoners trying to feel their way to sun and air. A splattered stain, raying like the shadow of a bursting bomb, witnessed where a hurled glass or bottle had splintered with its contents against the wall. Across the pier glass had been scrawled with a diamond in staggering letters the name “Marie.” It seemed that the succession of dwellers in the furnished room had turned in fury – perhaps tempted beyond forbearance by its garish coldness – and wreaked upon it their passions. The furniture was chipped and bruised; the couch, distorted by bursting springs, seemed a horrible monster that had been slain during the stress of some grotesque convulsion. Some more potent upheaval had cloven a great slice from the marble mantel. Each plank in the floor owned its particular cant and shriek as from a separate and individual agony. It seemed incredible that all this malice and injury had been wrought upon the room by those who had called it for a time their home; and yet it may have been the cheated home instinct surviving blindly, the resentful rage at false household gods that had kindled their wrath. A hut that is our own we can sweep and adorn and cherish.
   The young tenant in the chair allowed these thoughts to file, soft-shod, through his mind, while there drifted into the room furnished sounds and furnished scents. He heard in one room a tittering and incontinent, slack laughter; in others the monologue of a scold, the rattling of dice, a lullaby, and one crying dully; above him a banjo tinkled with spirit. Doors banged somewhere; the elevated trains roared intermittently; a cat yowled miserably upon a back fence. And he breathed the breath of the house – a dank savour rather than a smell – a cold, musty effluvium as from underground vaults mingled with the reeking exhalations of linoleum and mildewed and rotten woodwork.
   Then, suddenly, as he rested there, the room was filled with the strong, sweet odour of mignonette. It came as upon a single buffet of wind with such sureness and fragrance and emphasis that it almost seemed a living visitant. And the man cried aloud: “What, dear?” as if he had been called, and sprang up and faced about. The rich odour clung to him and wrapped him around. He reached out his arms for it, all his senses for the time confused and commingled. How could one be peremptorily called by an odour? Surely it must have been a sound. But, was it not the sound that had touched, that had caressed him?
   “She has been in this room,” he cried, and he sprang to wrest from it a token, for he knew he would recognize the smallest thing that had belonged to her or that she had touched. This enveloping scent of mignonette, the odour that she had loved and made her own – whence came it?
   The room had been but carelessly set in order. Scattered upon the flimsy dresser scarf were half a dozen hairpins – those discreet, indistinguishable friends of womankind, feminine of gender, infinite of mood and uncommunicative of tense. These he ignored, conscious of their triumphant lack of identity. Ransacking the drawers of the dresser he came upon a discarded, tiny, ragged handkerchief. He pressed it to his face. It was racy and insolent with heliotrope; he hurled it to the floor. In another drawer he found odd buttons, a theatre programme, a pawnbroker’s card, two lost marshmallows, a book on the divination of dreams. In the last was a woman’s black satin hair bow, which halted him, poised between ice and fire. But the black satin hair-bow also is femininity’s demure, impersonal, common ornament, and tells no tales.
   And then he traversed the room like a hound on the scent, skimming the walls, considering the corners of the bulging matting on his hands and knees, rummaging mantel and tables, the curtains and hangings, the drunken cabinet in the corner, for a visible sign, unable to perceive that she was there beside, around, against, within, above him, clinging to him, wooing him, calling him so poignantly through the finer senses that even his grosser ones became cognisant of the call. Once again he answered loudly: “Yes, dear!” and turned, wild-eyed, to gaze on vacancy, for he could not yet discern form and colour and love and outstretched arms in the odour of mignonette. Oh, God! whence that odour, and since when have odours had a voice to call? Thus he groped.
   He burrowed in crevices and corners, and found corks and cigarettes. These he passed in passive contempt. But once he found in a fold of the matting a half-smoked cigar, and this he ground beneath his heel with a green and trenchant oath. He sifted the room from end to end. He found dreary and ignoble small records of many a peripatetic tenant; but of her whom he sought, and who may have lodged there, and whose spirit seemed to hover there, he found no trace.
   And then he thought of the housekeeper.
   He ran from the haunted room downstairs and to a door that showed a crack of light. She came out to his knock. He smothered his excitement as best he could.
   “Will you tell me, madam,” he besought her, “who occupied the room I have before I came?”
   “Yes, sir. I can tell you again. ’Twas Sprowls and Mooney, as I said. Miss Bretta Sprowls it was in the theatres, but Missis Mooney she was. My house is well known for respectability. The marriage certificate hung, framed, on a nail over – ”
   “What kind of a lady was Miss Sprowls – in looks, I mean?”
   “Why, black-haired, sir, short, and stout, with a comical face. They left a week ago Tuesday.”
   “And before they occupied it?”
   “Why, there was a single gentleman connected with the draying business. He left owing me a week. Before him was Missis Crowder and her two children, that stayed four months; and back of them was old Mr Doyle, whose sons paid for him. He kept the room six months. That goes back a year, sir, and further I do not remember.”
   He thanked her and crept back to his room. The room was dead. The essence that had vivified it was gone. The perfume of mignonette had departed. In its place was the old, stale odour of mouldy house furniture, of atmosphere in storage.
   The ebbing of his hope drained his faith. He sat staring at the yellow, singing gaslight. Soon he walked to the bed and began to tear the sheets into strips. With the blade of his knife he drove them tightly into every crevice around windows and door. When all was snug and taut he turned out the light, turned the gas full on again and laid himself gratefully upon the bed.
//-- * * * --//
   It was Mrs McCool’s night to go with the can for beer. So she fetched it and sat with Mrs Purdy in one of those subterranean retreats where house-keepers foregather and the worm diets seldom.
   “I rented out my third floor, back, this evening,” said Mrs Purdy, across a fine circle of foam. “A young man took it. He went up to bed two hours ago.”
   “Now, did ye, Mrs Purdy, ma’am?” said Mrs McCool, with intense admiration. “You do be a wonder for rentin’ rooms of that kind. And did ye tell him, then?” she concluded in a husky whisper, laden with mystery.
   “Rooms,” said Mrs Purdy, in her furriest tones, “are furnished for to rent. I did not tell him, Mrs McCool.”
   “’Tis right ye are, ma’am; ’tis by renting rooms we kape alive. Ye have the rale sense for business, ma’am. There be many people will rayjict the rentin’ of a room if they be tould a suicide has been after dyin’ in the bed of it.”
   “As you say, we has our living to be making,” remarked Mrs Purdy.
   “Yis, ma’am; ’tis true. ’Tis just one wake ago this day I helped ye lay out the third floor, back. A pretty slip of a colleen she was to be killin’ herself wid the gas – a swate little face she had, Mrs Purdy, ma’am.”
   “She’d a-been called handsome, as you say,” said Mrs Purdy, assenting but critical, “but for that mole she had a-growin’ by her left eyebrow. Do fill up your glass again, Mrs McCool.”

The Trimmed Lamp

   Of course there are two sides to the question. Let us look at the other. We often hear “shop-girls” spoken of. No such persons exist. There are girls who work in shops. They make their living that way. But why turn their occupation into an adjective? Let us be fair. We do not refer to the girls who live on Fifth Avenue as “marriage-girls.”
   Lou and Nancy were chums. They came to the big city to find work because there was not enough to eat at their homes to go around. Nancy was nineteen; Lou was twenty. Both were pretty, active, country girls who had no ambition to go on the stage.
   The little cherub that sits up aloft guided them to a cheap and respectable boarding-house. Both found positions and became wage-earners. They remained chums. It is at the end of six months that I would beg you to step forward and be introduced to them. Meddlesome Reader: My Lady friends, Miss Nancy and Miss Lou. While you are shaking hands please take notice – cautiously – of their attire. Yes, cautiously; for they are as quick to resent a stare as a lady in a box at the horse show is.
   Lou is a piece-work ironer in a hand laundry. She is clothed in a badly-fitting purple dress, and her hat plume is four inches too long; but her ermine muff and scarf cost $25, and its fellow beasts will be ticketed in the windows at $7.98 before the season is over. Her cheeks are pink, and her light blue eyes bright. Contentment radiates from her.
   Nancy you would call a shop-girl – because you have the habit. There is no type; but a perverse generation is always seeking a type; so this is what the type should be. She has the high-ratted pompadour, and the exaggerated straight-front. Her skirt is shoddy, but has the correct flare. No furs protect her against the bitter spring air, but she wears her short broadcloth jacket as jauntily as though it were Persian lamb! On her face and in her eyes, remorseless type-seeker, is the typical shop-girl expression. It is a look of silent but contemptuous revolt against cheated womanhood; of sad prophecy of the vengeance to come. When she laughs her loudest the look is still there. The same look can be seen in the eyes of Russian peasants; and those of us left will see it some day on Gabriel’s face when he comes to blow us up. It is a look that should wither and abash man; but he has been known to smirk at it and offer flowers – with a string tied to them.
   Now lift your hat and come away, while you receive Lou’s cheery “See you again,” and the sardonic, sweet smile of Nancy that seems, somehow, to miss you and go fluttering like a white moth up over the housetops to the stars.
   The two waited on the corner for Dan. Dan was Lou’s steady company. Faithful? Well, he was on hand when Mary would have had to hire a dozen subpoena servers to find her lamb.
   “Ain’t you cold, Nance?” said Lou. “Say, what a chump you are for working in that old store for $8. a week! I made $18.50 last week. Of course ironing ain’t as swell work as selling lace behind a counter, but it pays. None of us ironers make less than $10. And I don’t know that it’s any less respectful work, either.”
   “You can have it,” said Nancy, with uplifted nose. “I’ll take my eight a week and hall bedroom. I like to be among nice things and swell people. And look what a chance I’ve got! Why, one of our glove girls married a Pittsburg – steel maker, or blacksmith or something – the other day worth a million dollars. I’ll catch a swell myself some time. I ain’t bragging on my looks or anything; but I’ll take my chances where there’s big prizes offered. What show would a girl have in a laundry?”
   “Why, that’s where I met Dan,” said Lou, triumphantly. “He came in for his Sunday shirt and collars and saw me at the first board, ironing. We all try to get to work at the first board. Ella Maginnis was sick that day, and I had her place. He said he noticed my arms first, how round and white they was. I had my sleeves rolled up. Some nice fellows come into laundries. You can tell ’em by their bringing their clothes in suit cases; and turning in the door sharp and sudden.”
   “How can you wear a waist like that, Lou?” said Nancy, gazing down at the offending article with sweet scorn in her heavy-lidded eyes. “It shows fierce taste.”
   “This waist?” cried Lou, with wide-eyed indignation. “Why, I paid $16. for this waist. It’s worth twenty-five. A woman left it to be laundered, and never called for it. The boss sold it to me. It’s got yards and yards of hand embroidery on it. Better talk about that ugly, plain thing you’ve got on.”
   “This ugly, plain thing,” said Nancy, calmly, “was copied from one that Mrs Van Alstyne Fisher was wearing. The girls say her bill in the store last year was $12,000. I made mine, myself. It cost me $1.50. Ten feet away you couldn’t tell it from hers.”
   “Oh, well,” said Lou, good-naturedly, “if you want to starve and put on airs, go ahead. But I’ll take my job and good wages; and after hours give me something as fancy and attractive to wear as I am able to buy.”
   But just then Dan came – a serious young man with a ready-made necktie, who had escaped the city’s brand of frivolity – an electrician earning 30 dollars per week who looked upon Lou with the sad eyes of Romeo, and thought her embroidered waist a web in which any fly should delight to be caught.
   “My friend, Mr Owens – shake hands with Miss Danforth,” said Lou.
   “I’m mighty glad to know you, Miss Danforth,” said Dan, with outstretched hand. “I’ve heard Lou speak of you so often.”
   “Thanks,” said Nancy, touching his fingers with the tips of her cool ones, “I’ve heard her mention you – a few times.”
   Lou giggled.
   “Did you get that handshake from Mrs Van Alstyne Fisher, Nance?” she asked.
   “If I did, you can feel safe in copying it,” said Nancy.
   “Oh, I couldn’t use it, at all. It’s too stylish for me. It’s intended to set off diamond rings, that high shake is. Wait till I get a few and then I’ll try it.”
   “Learn it first,” said Nancy wisely, “and you’ll be more likely to get the rings.”
   “Now, to settle this argument,” said Dan, with his ready, cheerful smile, “let me make a proposition. As I can’t take both of you up to Tiffany’s and do the right thing, what do you say to a little vaudeville? I’ve got the rickets. How about looking at stage diamonds since we can’t shake hands with the real sparklers?”
   The faithful squire took his place close to the curb; Lou next, a little peacocky in her bright and pretty clothes; Nancy on the inside, slender, and soberly clothed as the sparrow, but with the true Van Alstyne Fisher walk – thus they set out for their evening’s moderate diversion.
   I do not suppose that many look upon a great department store as an educational institution. But the one in which Nancy worked was something like that to her. She was surrounded by beautiful things that breathed of taste and refinement. If you live in an atmosphere of luxury, luxury is yours whether your money pays for it, or another’s.
   The people she served were mostly women whose dress, manners, and position in the social world were quoted as criterions. From them Nancy began to take toll – the best from each according to her view.
   From one she would copy and practice a gesture, from another an eloquent lifting of an eyebrow, from others, a manner of walking, of carrying a purse, of smiling, of greeting a friend, of addressing “inferiors in station.” From her best beloved model, Mrs Van Alstyne Fisher, she made requisition for that excellent thing, a soft, low voice as clear as silver and as perfect in articulation as the notes of a thrush. Suffused in the aura of this high social refinement and good breeding, it was impossible for her to escape a deeper effect of it. As good habits are said to be better than good principles, so, perhaps, good manners are better than good habits. The teachings of your parents may not keep alive your New England conscience; but if you sit on a straight-back chair and repeat the words “prisms and pilgrims” forty times the devil will flee from you. And when Nancy spoke in the Van Alstyne Fisher tones she felt the thrill of noblesse oblige [14 - noblesse oblige – (фр.) положение обязывает] to her very bones.
   There was another source of learning in the great departmental school. Whenever you see three or four shop-girls gather in a bunch and jingle their wire bracelets as an accompaniment to apparently frivolous conversation, do not think that they are there for the purpose of criticizing the way Ethel does her back hair. The meeting may lack the dignity of the deliberative bodies of man; but it has all the importance of the occasion on which Eve and her first daughter first put their heads together to make Adam understand his proper place in the household. It is Woman’s Conference for Common Defense and Exchange of Strategical Theories of Attack and Repulse upon and against the World, which is a Stage, and Man, its Audience who Persists in Throwing Bouquets Thereupon. Woman, the most helpless of the young of any animal – with the fawn’s grace but without its fleetness; with the bird’s beauty but without its power of flight; with the honey-bee’s burden of sweetness but without its – Oh, let’s drop that simile – some of us may have been stung.
   During this council of war they pass weapons one to another, and exchange stratagems that each has devised and formulated out of the tactics of life.
   “I says to ’im,” says Sadie, “ain’t you the fresh thing! Who do you suppose I am, to be addressing such a remark to me? And what do you think he says back to me?”
   The heads, brown, black, flaxen, red, and yellow bob together; the answer is given; and the parry to the thrust is decided upon, to be used by each thereafter in passages-at-arms with the common enemy, man.
   Thus Nancy learned the art of defense; and to women successful defense means victory.
   The curriculum of a department store is a wide one. Perhaps no other college could have fitted her as well for her life’s ambition – the drawing of a matrimonial prize.
   Her station in the store was a favored one. The music room was near enough for her to hear and become familiar with the works of the best composers – at least to acquire the familiarity that passed for appreciation in the social world in which she was vaguely trying to set a tentative and aspiring foot. She absorbed the educating influence of art wares, of costly and dainty fabrics, of adornments that are almost culture to women.
   The other girls soon became aware of Nancy’s ambition. “Here comes your millionaire, Nancy,” they would call to her whenever any man who looked the role approached her counter. It got to be a habit of men, who were hanging about while their women folk were shopping, to stroll over to the handkerchief counter and dawdle over the cambric squares. Nancy’s imitation high-bred air and genuine dainty beauty was what attracted. Many men thus came to display their graces before her. Some of them may have been millionaires; others were certainly no more than their sedulous apes. Nancy learned to discriminate. There was a window at the end of the handkerchief counter; and she could see the rows of vehicles waiting for the shoppers in the street below. She looked and perceived that automobiles differ as well as do their owners.
   Once a fascinating gentleman bought four dozen handkerchiefs, and wooed her across the counter with a King Cophetua air. When he had gone one of the girls said:
   “What’s wrong, Nance, that you didn’t warm up to that fellow. He looks the swell article, all right, to me.”
   “Him?” said Nancy, with her coolest, sweetest, most impersonal, Van Alstyne Fisher smile; “not for mine. I saw him drive up outside. A 12 H. P. machine and an Irish chauffeur! And you saw what kind of handkerchiefs he bought – silk! And he’s got dactylis on him. Give me the real thing or nothing, if you please.”
   Two of the most “refined” women in the store – a forelady and a cashier – had a few “swell gentlemen friends” with whom they now and then dined. Once they included Nancy in an invitation. The dinner took place in a spectacular cafe whose tables are engaged for New Year’s eve a year in advance. There were two “gentlemen friends” – one without any hair on his head – high living ungrew it; and we can prove it – the other a young man whose worth and sophistication he impressed upon you in two convincing ways – he swore that all the wine was corked; and he wore diamond cuff buttons. This young man perceived irresistible excellencies in Nancy. His taste ran to shop-girls; and here was one that added the voice and manners of his high social world to the franker charms of her own caste. So, on the following day, he appeared in the store and made her a serious proposal of marriage over a box of hem-stitched, grass-bleached Irish linens. Nancy declined. A brown pompadour ten feet away had been using her eyes and ears. When the rejected suitor had gone she heaped carboys of upbraidings and horror upon Nancy’s head.
   “What a terrible little fool you are! That fellow’s a millionaire – he’s a nephew of old Van Skittles himself. And he was talking on the level, too. Have you gone crazy, Nance?”
   “Have I?” said Nancy. “I didn’t take him, did I? He isn’t a millionaire so hard that you could notice it, anyhow. His family only allows him $20,000 a year to spend. The bald-headed fellow was guying him about it the other night at supper.”
   The brown pompadour came nearer and narrowed her eyes.
   “Say, what do you want?” she inquired, in a voice hoarse for lack of chewing-gum. “Ain’t that enough for you? Do you want to be a Mormon, and marry Rockefeller and Gladstone Dowie and the King of Spain and the whole bunch? Ain’t $20,000 a year good enough for you?”
   Nancy flushed a little under the level gaze of the black, shallow eyes.
   “It wasn’t altogether the money, Carrie,” she explained. “His friend caught him in a rank lie the other night at dinner. It was about some girl he said he hadn’t been to the theater with. Well, I can’t stand a liar. Put everything together – I don’t like him; and that settles it. When I sell out it’s not going to be on any bargain day. I’ve got to have something that sits up in a chair like a man, anyhow. Yes, I’m looking out for a catch; but it’s got to be able to do something more than make a noise like a toy bank.”
   “The physiopathic ward for yours!” said the brown pompadour, walking away.
   These high ideas, if not ideals – Nancy continued to cultivate on $8 per week. She bivouacked on the trail of the great unknown “catch,” eating her dry bread and tightening her belt day by day. On her face was the faint, soldierly, sweet, grim smile of the preordained man-hunter. The store was her forest; and many times she raised her rifle at game that seemed broad-antlered and big; but always some deep unerring instinct – perhaps of the huntress, perhaps of the woman – made her hold her fire and take up the trail again.
   Lou flourished in the laundry. Out of her $18.50 per week she paid $6. for her room and board. The rest went mainly for clothes. Her opportunities for bettering her taste and manners were few compared with Nancy’s. In the steaming laundry there was nothing but work, work and her thoughts of the evening pleasures to come. Many costly and showy fabrics passed under her iron; and it may be that her growing fondness for dress was thus transmitted to her through the conducting metal.
   When the day’s work was over Dan awaited her outside, her faithful shadow in whatever light she stood.
   Sometimes he cast an honest and troubled glance at Lou’s clothes that increased in conspicuity rather than in style; but this was no disloyalty; he deprecated the attention they called to her in the streets.
   And Lou was no less faithful to her chum. There was a law that Nancy should go with them on whatsoever outings they might take. Dan bore the extra burden heartily and in good cheer. It might be said that Lou furnished the color, Nancy the tone, and Dan the weight of the distraction-seeking trio. The escort, in his neat but obviously ready-made suit, his ready-made tie and unfailing, genial, ready-made wit never startled or clashed. He was of that good kind that you are likely to forget while they are present, but remember distinctly after they are gone.
   To Nancy’s superior taste the flavor of these ready-made pleasures was sometimes a little bitter: but she was young; and youth is a gourmand, when it cannot be a gourmet.
   “Dan is always wanting me to marry him right away,” Lou told her once. “But why should I? I’m independent. I can do as I please with the money I earn; and he never would agree for me to keep on working afterward. And say, Nance, what do you want to stick to that old store for, and half starve and half dress yourself? I could get you a place in the laundry right now if you’d come. It seems to me that you could afford to be a little less stuck-up if you could make a good deal more money.”
   “I don’t think I’m stuck-up, Lou,” said Nancy, “but I’d rather live on half rations and stay where I am. I suppose I’ve got the habit. It’s the chance that I want. I don’t expect to be always behind a counter. I’m learning something new every day. I’m right up against refined and rich people all the time – even if I do only wait on them; and I’m not missing any pointers that I see passing around.”
   “Caught your millionaire yet?” asked Lou with her teasing laugh.
   “I haven’t selected one yet,” answered Nancy. “I’ve been looking them over.”
   “Goodness! the idea of picking over ’em! Don’t you ever let one get by you Nance – even if he’s a few dollars shy. But of course you’re joking – millionaires don’t think about working girls like us.”
   “It might be better for them if they did,” said Nancy, with cool wisdom. “Some of us could teach them how to take care of their money.”
   “If one was to speak to me,” laughed Lou, “I know I’d have a duck-fit.”
   “That’s because you don’t know any. The only difference between swells and other people is you have to watch ’em closer. Don’t you think that red silk lining is just a little bit too bright for that coat, Lou?”
   Lou looked at the plain, dull olive jacket of her friend.
   “Well, no I don’t – but it may seem so beside that faded-looking thing you’ve got on.”
   “This jacket,” said Nancy, complacently, “has exactly the cut and fit of one that Mrs Van Alstyne Fisher was wearing the other day. The material cost me $3.98. I suppose hers cost about $100 more.”
   “Oh, well,” said Lou lightly, “it don’t strike me as millionaire bait. Shouldn’t wonder if I catch one before you do, anyway.”
   Truly it would have taken a philosopher to decide upon the values of the theories held by the two friends. Lou, lacking that certain pride and fastidiousness that keeps stores and desks filled with girls working for the barest living, thumped away gaily with her iron in the noisy and stifling laundry. Her wages supported her even beyond the point of comfort; so that her dress profited until sometimes she cast a sidelong glance of impatience at the neat but inelegant apparel of Dan – Dan the constant, the immutable, the undeviating.
   As for Nancy, her case was one of tens of thousands. Silk and jewels and laces and ornaments and the perfume and music of the fine world of good-breeding and taste – these were made for woman; they are her equitable portion. Let her keep near them if they are a part of life to her, and if she will. She is no traitor to herself, as Esau was; for she keeps he birthright and the pottage she earns is often very scant.
   In this atmosphere Nancy belonged; and she throve in it and ate her frugal meals and schemed over her cheap dresses with a determined and contented mind. She already knew woman; and she was studying man, the animal, both as to his habits and eligibility. Some day she would bring down the game that she wanted; but she promised herself it would be what seemed to her the biggest and the best, and nothing smaller.
   Thus she kept her lamp trimmed and burning to receive the bridegroom when he should come.
   But, another lesson she learned, perhaps unconsciously. Her standard of values began to shift and change. Sometimes the dollar-mark grew blurred in her mind’s eye, and shaped itself into letters that spelled such words as “truth” and “honor” and now and then just “kindness.” Let us make a likeness of one who hunts the moose or elk in some mighty wood. He sees a little dell, mossy and embowered, where a rill trickles, babbling to him of rest and comfort. At these times the spear of Nimrod himself grows blunt.
   So, Nancy wondered sometimes if Persian lamb was always quoted at its market value by the hearts that it covered.
   One Thursday evening Nancy left the store and turned across Sixth Avenue westward to the laundry. She was expected to go with Lou and Dan to a musical comedy.
   Dan was just coming out of the laundry when she arrived. There was a queer, strained look on his face.
   “I thought I would drop around to see if they had heard from her,” he said.
   “Heard from who?” asked Nancy. “Isn’t Lou there?”
   “I thought you knew,” said Dan. “She hasn’t been here or at the house where she lived since Monday. She moved all her things from there. She told one of the girls in the laundry she might be going to Europe.”
   “Hasn’t anybody seen her anywhere?” asked Nancy.
   Dan looked at her with his jaws set grimly, and a steely gleam in his steady gray eyes.
   “They told me in the laundry,” he said, harshly, “that they saw her pass yesterday – in an automobile. With one of the millionaires, I suppose, that you and Lou were forever busying your brains about.”
   For the first time Nancy quailed before a man. She laid her hand that trembled slightly on Dan’s sleeve.
   “You’ve no right to say such a thing to me, Dan – as if I had anything to do with it!”
   “I didn’t mean it that way,” said Dan, softening. He fumbled in his vest pocket.
   “I’ve got the tickets for the show to-night,” he said, with a gallant show of lightness. “If you – ”
   Nancy admired pluck whenever she saw it.
   “I’ll go with you, Dan,” she said.
   Three months went by before Nancy saw Lou again.
   At twilight one evening the shop-girl was hurrying home along the border of a little quiet park. She heard her name called, and wheeled about in time to catch Lou rushing into her arms.
   After the first embrace they drew their heads back as serpents do, ready to attack or to charm, with a thousand questions trembling on their swift tongues. And then Nancy noticed that prosperity had descended upon Lou, manifesting itself in costly furs, flashing gems, and creations of the tailors’ art.
   “You little fool!” cried Lou, loudly and affectionately. “I see you are still working in that store, and as shabby as ever. And how about that big catch you were going to make – nothing doing yet, I suppose?”
   And then Lou looked, and saw that something better than prosperity had descended upon Nancy – something that shone brighter than gems in her eyes and redder than a rose in her cheeks, and that danced like electricity anxious to be loosed from the tip of her tongue.
   “Yes, I’m still in the store,” said Nancy, “but I’m going to leave it next week. I’ve made my catch – the biggest catch in the world. You won’t mind now Lou, will you? – I’m going to be married to Dan – to Dan! – he’s my Dan now – why, Lou!”
   Around the corner of the park strolled one of those new-crop, smooth-faced young policemen that are making the force more endurable – at least to the eye. He saw a woman with an expensive fur coat, and diamond-ringed hands crouching down against the iron fence of the park sobbing turbulently, while a slender, plainly-dressed working girl leaned close, trying to console her. But the Gibsonian cop, being of the new order, passed on, pretending not to notice, for he was wise enough to know that these matters are beyond help so far as the power he represents is concerned, though he rap the pavement with his nightstick till the sound goes up to the furthermost stars.

The Last Leaf

   In a little district west of Washington Square the streets have run crazy and broken themselves into small strips called “places.” These “places” make strange angles and curves. One street crosses itself a time or two. An artist once discovered a valuable possibility in this street. Suppose a collector with a bill for paints, paper and canvas should, in traversing this route, suddenly meet himself coming back, without a cent having been paid on account!
   So, to quaint old Greenwich Village the art people soon came prowling, hunting for north windows and eighteenth-century gables and Dutch attics and low rents. Then they imported some pewter mugs and a chafing dish or two from Sixth avenue, and became a “colony.”
   At the top of a squatty, three-story brick Sue and Johnsy had their studio. “Johnsy” was familiar for Joanna. One was from Maine; the other from California. They had met at the table d’hôte [15 - table d'hôte – (фр.) общий обеденный стол в пансионах] of an Eighth street “Delmonico’s,” and found their tastes in art, chicory salad and bishop sleeves so congenial that the joint studio resulted.
   That was in May. In November a cold, unseen stranger, whom the doctors called Pneumonia, stalked about the colony, touching one here and there with his icy fingers. Over on the east side this ravager strode boldly, smiting his victims by scores, but his feet trod slowly through the maze of the narrow and moss-grown “places.”
   Mr Pneumonia was not what you would call a chivalric old gentleman. A mite of a little woman with blood thinned by California zephyrs was hardly fair game for the red-fisted, short-breathed old duffer. But Johnsy he smote; and she lay, scarcely moving, on her painted iron bedstead, looking through the small Dutch window-panes at the blank side of the next brick house.
   One morning the busy doctor invited Sue into the hallway with a shaggy, gray eyebrow.
   “She has one chance in – let us say, ten,” he said, as he shook down the mercury in his clinical thermometer. “And that chance is for her to want to live. This way people have of lining-up on the side of the undertaker makes the entire pharmacopeia look silly. Your little lady has made up her mind that she’s not going to get well. Has she anything on her mind?”
   “She – she wanted to paint the Bay of Naples some day,” said Sue.
   “Paint? – bosh! Has she anything on her mind worth thinking about twice – a man, for instance?”
   “A man?” said Sue, with a jew’s-harp twang in her voice. “Is a man worth – but, no, doctor; there is nothing of the kind.”
   “Well, it is the weakness, then,” said the doctor. “I will do all that science, so far as it may filter through my efforts, can accomplish. But whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent from the curative power of medicines. If you will get her to ask one question about the new winter styles in cloak sleeves I will promise you a one-in-five chance for her, instead of one in ten.”
   After the doctor had gone Sue went into the workroom and cried a Japanese napkin to a pulp. Then she swaggered into Johnsy’s room with her drawing board, whistling ragtime.
   Johnsy lay, scarcely making a ripple under the bedclothes, with her face toward the window. Sue stopped whistling, thinking she was asleep.
   She arranged her board and began a pen-and-ink drawing to illustrate a magazine story. Young artists must pave their way to Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to pave their way to Literature.
   As Sue was sketching a pair of elegant horseshow riding trousers and a monocle on the figure of the hero, an Idaho cowboy, she heard a low sound, several times repeated. She went quickly to the bedside.
   Johnsy’s eyes were open wide. She was looking out the window and counting – counting backward.
   “Twelve,” she said, and a little later “eleven;” and then “ten,” and “nine;” and then “eight” and “seven,” almost together.
   Sue looked solicitously out the window. What was there to count? There was only a bare, dreary yard to be seen, and the blank side of the brick house twenty feet away. An old, old ivy vine, gnarled and decayed at the roots, climbed half way up the brick wall. The cold breath of autumn had stricken its leaves from the vine until its skeleton branches clung, almost bare, to the crumbling bricks.
   “What is it, dear?” asked Sue.
   “Six,” said Johnsy, in almost a whisper. “They’re falling faster now. Three days ago there were almost a hundred. It made my head ache to count them. But now it’s easy. There goes another one. There are only five left now.”
   “Five what, dear. Tell your Sudie.”
   “Leaves. On the ivy vine. When the last one falls I must go, too. I’ve known that for three days. Didn’t the doctor tell you?”
   “Oh, I never heard of such nonsense,” complained Sue, with magnificent scorn. “What have old ivy leaves to do with your getting well? And you used to love that vine so, you naughty girl. Don’t be a goosey. Why, the doctor told me this morning that your chances for getting well real soon were – let’s see exactly what he said – he said the chances were ten to one! Why, that’s almost as good a chance as we have in New York when we ride on the street cars or walk past a new building. Try to take some broth now, and let Sudie go back to her drawing, so she can sell the editor man with it, and buy port wine for her sick child, and pork chops for her greedy self.”
   “You needn’t get any more wine,” said Johnsy, keeping her eyes fixed out the window. “There goes another. No, I don’t want any broth. That leaves just four. I want to see the last one fall before it gets dark. Then I’ll go, too.”
   “Johnsy, dear,” said Sue, bending over her, “will you promise me to keep your eyes closed, and not look out the window until I am done working? I must hand those drawings in by to-morrow. I need the light, or I would draw the shade down.”
   “Couldn’t you draw in the other room?” asked Johnsy, coldly.
   “I’d rather be here by you,” said Sue. “Besides I don’t want you to keep looking at those silly ivy leaves.”
   “Tell me as soon as you have finished,” said Johnsy, closing her eyes, and lying white and still as a fallen statue, “because I want to see the last one fall. I’m tired of waiting. I’m tired of thinking. I went to turn loose my hold on everything, and go sailing down, down, just like one of those poor, tired leaves.”
   “Try to sleep,” said Sue. “I must call Behrman up to be my model for the old hermit miner. I’ll not be gone a minute. Don’t try to move “till I come back.”
   Old Behrman was a painter who lived on the ground floor beneath them. He was past sixty and had a Michael Angelo’s Moses beard curling down from the head of a satyr along the body of an imp. Behrman was a failure in art. Forty years he had wielded the brush without getting near enough to touch the hem of his Mistress’s robe. He had been always about to paint a masterpiece, but had never yet begun it. For several years he had painted nothing except now and then a daub in the line of commerce or advertising. He earned a little by serving as a model to those young artists in the colony who could not pay the price of a professional. He drank gin to excess, and still talked of his coming masterpiece. For the rest he was a fierce little old man, who scoffed terribly at softness in any one, and who regarded himself as especial mastiff-in-waiting to protect the two young artists in the studio above.
   Sue found Behrman smelling strongly of juniper berries in his dimly lighted den below. In one corner was a blank canvas on an easel that had been waiting there for twenty-five years to receive the first line of the masterpiece. She told him of Johnsy’s fancy, and how she feared she would, indeed, light and fragile as a leaf herself, float away when her slight hold upon the world grew weaker.
   Old Behrman, with his red eyes, plainly streaming, shouted his contempt and derision for such idiotic imaginings.
   “Vass!” he cried. “Is dere people in de world mit der foolishness to die because leafs dey drop off from a confounded vine? I haf not heard of such a thing. No, I will not bose as a model for your fool hermit-dunderhead. Vy do you allow dot silly pusiness to come in der prain of her? Ach, dot poor lettle Miss Johnsy.”
   “She is very ill and weak,” said Sue, “and the fever has left her mind morbid and full of strange fancies. Very well, Mr Behrman, if you do not care to pose for me, you needn’t. But I think you are a horrid old – old flibbertigibbet.”
   “You are just like a woman!” yelled Behrman. “Who said I will not bose? Go on. I come mit you. For half an hour I haf peen trying to say dot I am ready to bose. Gott! dis is not any blace in which one so goot as Miss Johnsy shall lie sick. Some day I vill baint a masterpiece, and ve shall all go away. Gott! yes.”
   Johnsy was sleeping when they went upstairs. Sue pulled the shade down to the window-sill, and motioned Behrman into the other room. In there they peered out the window fearfully at the ivy vine. Then they looked at each other for a moment without speaking. A persistent, cold rain was falling, mingled with snow. Behrman, in his old blue shirt, took his seat as the hermit-miner on an upturned kettle for a rock.
   When Sue awoke from an hour’s sleep the next morning she found Johnsy with dull, wide-open eyes staring at the drawn green shade.
   “Pull it up; I want to see,” she ordered, in a whisper.
   Wearily Sue obeyed.
   But, lo! after the beating rain and fierce gusts of wind that had endured through the livelong night, there yet stood out against the brick wall one ivy leaf. It was the last on the vine. Still dark green near its stem, but with its serrated edges tinted with the yellow of dissolution and decay, it hung bravely from a branch some twenty feet above the ground.
   “It is the last one,” said Johnsy. “I thought it would surely fall during the night. I heard the wind. It will fall to-day, and I shall die at the same time.”
   “Dear, dear!” said Sue, leaning her worn face down to the pillow, “think of me, if you won’t think of yourself. What would I do?”
   But Johnsy did not answer. The lonesomest thing in all the world is a soul when it is making ready to go on its mysterious, far journey. The fancy seemed to possess her more strongly as one by one the ties that bound her to friendship and to earth were loosed.
   The day wore away, and even through the twilight they could see the lone ivy leaf clinging to its stem against the wall. And then, with the coming of the night the north wind was again loosed, while the rain still beat against the windows and pattered down from the low Dutch eaves.
   When it was light enough Johnsy, the merciless, commanded that the shade be raised.
   The ivy leaf was still there.
   Johnsy lay for a long time looking at it. And then she called to Sue, who was stirring her chicken broth over the gas stove.
   “I’ve been a bad girl, Sudie,” said Johnsy. “Something has made that last leaf stay there to show me how wicked I was. It is a sin to want to die. You may bring me a little broth now, and some milk with a little port in it, and – no; bring me a hand-mirror first, and then pack some pillows about me, and I will sit up and watch you cook.”
   An hour later she said.
   “Sudie, some day I hope to paint the Bay of Naples.”
   The doctor came in the afternoon, and Sue had an excuse to go into the hallway as he left.
   “Even chances,” said the doctor, taking Sue’s thin, shaking hand in his. “With good nursing you’ll win. And now I must see another case I have downstairs. Behrman, his name is – some kind of an artist, I believe. Pneumonia, too. He is an old, weak man, and the attack is acute. There is no hope for him; but he goes to the hospital to-day to be made more comfortable.”
   The next day the doctor said to Sue: “She’s out of danger. You’ve won. Nutrition and care now – that’s all.”
   And that afternoon Sue came to the bed where Johnsy lay, contentedly knitting a very blue and very useless woolen shoulder scarf, and put one arm around her, pillows and all.
   “I have something to tell you, white mouse,” she said. “Mr Behrman died of pneumonia to-day in the hospital. He was ill only two days. The janitor found him on the morning of the first day in his room downstairs helpless with pain. His shoes and clothing were wet through and icy cold. They couldn’t imagine where he had been on such a dreadful night. And then they found a lantern, still lighted, and a ladder that had been dragged from its place, and some scattered brushes, and a palette with green and yellow colors mixed on it, and – look out the window, dear, at the last ivy leaf on the wall. Didn’t you wonder why it never fluttered or moved when the wind blew? Ah, darling, it’s Behrman’s masterpiece – he painted it there the night that the last leaf fell.”

The Handbook of Hymen

   ’Tis the opinion of myself, Sanderson Pratt, who sets this down, that the educational system of the United States should be in the hands of the weather bureau. I can give you good reasons for it; and you can’t tell me why our college professors shouldn’t be transferred to the meteorological department. They have been learned to read; and they could very easily glance at the morning papers and then wire in to the main office what kind of weather to expect. But there’s the other side of the proposition. I am going on to tell you how the weather furnished me and Idaho Green with an elegant education.
   We was up in the Bitter Root Mountains over the Montana line prospecting for gold. A chin-whiskered man in Walla-Walla, carrying a line of hope as excess baggage, had grubstaked us; and there we was in the foothills pecking away, with enough grub on hand to last an army through a peace conference.
   Along one day comes a mail-rider over the mountains from Carlos, and stops to eat three cans of green-gages, [16 - green-gages – зеленые сливы] and leave us a newspaper of modern date. This paper prints a system of premonitions of the weather, and the card it dealt Bitter Root Mountains from the bottom of the deck was “warmer and fair, with light westerly breezes.”
   That evening it began to snow, with the wind strong in the east. Me and Idaho moved camp into an old empty cabin higher up the mountain, thinking it was only a November flurry. But after falling three foot on a level it went to work in earnest; and we knew we was snowed in. We got in plenty of firewood before it got deep, and we had grub enough for two months, so we let the elements rage and cut up all they thought proper.
   If you want to instigate the art of manslaughter just shut two men tip in a eighteen-by-twenty-foot cabin for a month. Human nature won’t stand it.
   When the first snowflakes fell me and Idaho Green laughed at each other’s jokes and praised the stuff we turned out of a skillet and called bread. At the end of three weeks Idaho makes this kind of an edict to me. Says he:
   “I never exactly heard sour milk dropping out of a balloon on the bottom of a tin pan, but I have an idea it would be music of the spears compared to this attenuated stream of asphyxiated thought that emanates out of your organs of conversation. The kind of half-masticated noises that you emit every day puts me in mind of a cow’s cud, only she’s lady enough to keep hers to herself, and you ain’t.”
   “Mr Green,” says I, “you having been a friend of mine once, I have some hesitations in confessing to you that if I had my choice for society between you and a common yellow three-legged cur pup, one of the inmates of this here cabin would he wagging a tail just at present.”
   This way we goes on for two or three days, and then we quits speaking to one another. We divides up the cooking implements, and Idaho cooks his grub on one side of the fireplace, and me on the other. The snow is up to the windows, and we have to keep a fire all day.
   You see me and Idaho never had any education beyond reading and doing “if John had three apples and James five” on a slate. We never felt any special need for a university degree, though we had acquired a species of intrinsic intelligence in knocking around the world that we could use in emergencies. But snow-bound in that cabin in the Bitter Roots, we felt for the first time that if we had studied Homer or Greek and fractions and the higher branches of information, we’d have had some resources in the line of meditation and private thought. I’ve seen them eastern college fellows working in camps all through the West, and I never noticed but what education was less of a drawback to ’em than you would think. Why, once over on Snake River, when Andrew McWilliams’ saddle horse got the botts, he sent a buckboard ten miles for one of these strangers that claimed to be a botanist. But that horse died.
   One morning Idaho was poking around with a stick on top of a little shelf that was too high to reach. Two books fell down to the floor. I started toward ’em but caught Idaho’s eye. He speaks for the first time in a week.
   “Don’t burn your fingers,” says he. “In spite of the fact that you’re only fit to be the companion of a sleeping mud-turtle, I’ll give you a square deal. And that’s more than your parents did when they turned you loose in the world with the sociability of a rattlesnake and the bedside manner of a frozen turnip. I’ll play you a game of seven-up, the winner to pick up his choice of the book, the loser to take the other.”
   We played; and Idaho won. He picked up his book, and I took mine. Then each of us got on his side of the house and went to reading.
   I never was as glad to see a ten-ounce nugget as I was that book. And Idaho looked at his like a kid looks at a stick of candy.
   Mine was a little book about five by six inches called “Herkimer’s Handbook of Indispensable Information.” I may be wrong, but I think that was the greatest book that ever was written. I’ve got it to-day; and I can stump you or any man fifty times in five minutes with the information in it. Talk about Solomon or the New York Tribune! Herkimer had cases on both of ’em. That man must have put in fifty years and travelled a million miles to find out all that stuff. There was the population of all cities in it, and the way to tell a girl’s age, and the number of teeth a camel has. It told you the longest tunnel in the world, the number of the states, how long it takes for chicken pox to break out, what a lady’s neck ought to measure, the veto powers of Governors, the dates of the Roman aqueducts, how many pounds of rice going without three beers a day would buy, the average annual temperature of Augusta, Maine, the quantity of seed required to plant an acre of carrots in drills, antidotes for poisons, the number of hairs on a blond lady’s head, how to preserve eggs, the height of all the mountains in the world, and the dates of all wars and battles and how to restore drowned persons, and sunstroke, and the number of tacks in a pound, and how to make dynamite and flowers and beds, and what to do before the doctor comes – and a hundred times as many things besides. If there was anything Herkimer didn’t know I didn’t miss it out of the book.
   I sat and read that book for four hours. All the wonders of education was compressed in it. I forgot the snow, and I forgot that me and old Idaho was on the outs. He was sitting still on a stool reading away with a kind of partly soft and partly mysterious look shining through his tanbark whiskers.
   “Idaho,” says I, “what kind of a book is yours?”
   Idaho must have forgot, too, for he answered moderate, without any slander or malignity.
   “Why,” says he, “this here seems to be a volume by Homer K. M. [17 - Homer К. M. – (искаж.) Омар Хайям]”
   “Homer K. M. what?” I asked.
   “Why, just Homer K. M.,” says he.
   “You’re a liar,” says I, a little riled that Idaho should try to put me up a tree. “No man is going ’round signing books with his initials. If it’s Homer K. M. Spoopendyke, or Homer K. M. McSweeney, or Homer K. M. Jones, why don’t you say so like a man instead of biting off the end of it like a calf chewing off the tail of a shirt on a clothesline?”
   “I put it to you straight, Sandy,” says Idaho, quiet. “It’s a poem book,” says he, “by Homer K. M. I couldn’t get colour out of it at first, but there’s a vein if you follow it up. I wouldn’t have missed this book for a pair of red blankets.”
   “You’re welcome to it,” says I. “What I want is a disinterested statement of facts for the mind to work on, and that’s what I seem to find in the book I’ve drawn.”
   “What you’ve got,” says Idaho, “is statistics, the lowest grade of information that exists. They’ll poison your mind. Give me old K. M.’s system of surmises. He seems to be a kind of a wine agent. His regular toast is ‘nothing doing,’ and he seems to have a grouch, but he keeps it so well lubricated with booze that his worst kicks sound like an invitation to split a quart. But it’s poetry,” says Idaho, “and I have sensations of scorn for that truck of yours that tries to convey sense in feet and inches. When it comes to explaining the instinct of philosophy through the art of nature, old K. M. has got your man beat by drills, rows, paragraphs, chest measurement, and average annual rainfall.”
   So that’s the way me and Idaho had it. Day and night all the excitement we got was studying our books. That snowstorm sure fixed us with a fine lot of attainments apiece. By the time the snow melted, if you had stepped up to me suddenly and said:
   “Sanderson Pratt, what would it cost per square foot to lay a roof with twenty by twenty-eight tin at nine dollars and fifty cents per box?” I’d have told you as quick as light could travel the length of a spade handle at the rate of one hundred and ninety-two thousand miles per second. How many can do it? You wake up ’most any man you know in the middle of the night, and ask him quick to tell you the number of bones in the human skeleton exclusive of the teeth, or what percentage of the vote of the Nebraska Legislature overrules a veto. Will he tell you? Try him and see.
   About what benefit Idaho got out of his poetry book I didn’t exactly know. Idaho boosted the wine-agent every time he opened his mouth; but I wasn’t so sure.
   This Homer K. M., from what leaked out of his libretto through Idaho, seemed to me to be a kind of a dog who looked at life like it was a tin can tied to his tail. After running himself half to death, he sits down, hangs his tongue out, and looks at the can and says: “Oh, well, since we can’t shake the growler, let’s get it filled at the comer, and all have a drink on me.”
   Besides that, it seems he was a Persian; and I never hear of Persia producing anything worth mentioning unless it was Turkish rugs and Maltese cats.
   That spring me and Idaho struck pay ore. It was a habit of ours to sell out quick and keep moving. We unloaded on our grub-staker for eight thousand dollars apiece; and then we drifted down to this little town of Rosa, on the Salmon River, to rest up, and get some human grub, and have our whiskers harvested.
   Rosa was no mining camp. It laid in the valley, and was as free of uproar and pestilence as one of them rural towns in the country. There was a three-mile trolley line champing its bit in the environs; and me and Idaho spent a week riding on one of the cars, dropping off of nights at the Sunset View Hotel.
   Being now well read as well as travelled, we was soon pro re nata [18 - pro re nata – (лат.) сообразно возникающим обстоятельствам] with the best society in Rosa, and was invited out to the most dressed-up and high-toned entertainments. It was at a piano recital and quail-eating contest in the city hall, for the benefit of the fire company, that me and Idaho first met Mrs D. Ormond Sampson, the queen of Rosa society.
   Mrs Sampson was a widow, and owned the only two-story house in town. It was painted yellow, and whichever way you looked from you could see it as plain as egg on the chin of an O’Grady on a Friday. Twenty-two men in Rosa besides me and Idaho was trying to stake a claim on that yellow house.
   There was a dance after the song books and quail bones had been miced out of the Hall. Twenty-three of the bunch galloped over to Mrs Sampson and asked for a dance. I side-stepped the two-step, and asked permission to escort her home. That’s where I made a hit.
   On the way home says she:
   “Ain’t the stars lovely and bright to-night, Mr Pratt?”
   “For the chance they’ve got,” says I, “they’re humping themselves in a mighty creditable way. That big one you see is Sixty-Six billions of miles distant. It took thirty-six years for light to reach us. With an eighteen-foot telescope you can see forty-three millions of ’em, including them of the thirteenth magnitude, which, if one was to go out now, you would keep on seeing it for twenty-seven hundred years.”
   “My!” says Mrs Sampson. “I never knew that before. How warm it is! I’m as damp as I can be from dancing so much!”
   “That’s easy to account for,” says I, “when you happen to know that you’ve got two million sweat glands working all at once. If every one of your perspiratory ducts, which are a quarter of an inch long, was placed end to end, they would reach a distance of seven miles.”
   “Lawsy!” says Mrs Sampson. “It sounds like an irrigation ditch you was describing, Mr Pratt. How do you get all this knowledge of information?”
   “From observation, Mrs Sampson,” I tells her. “I keep my eyes open when I go about the world.”
   “Mr Pratt,” says she, “I always did admire a man of education. There are so few scholars among the sap-headed plug-uglies of this town that it is a real pleasure to converse with a gentleman of culture. I’d be gratified to have you call at my house whenever you feel go inclined.”
   And that was the way I got the goodwill of the lady in the yellow house. Every Tuesday and Friday evenings I used to go there and tell her about the wonders of the universe as discovered, tabulated, and compiled from nature by Herkimer. Idaho and the other gay Lutherans of the town got every minute of the rest of the week that they could.
   I never imagined that Idaho was trying to work on Mrs Sampson with old K. M.’s rules of courtship till one afternoon when I was on my way over to take her a basket of wild hog-plums I met the lady coming down the lane that led to her house. Her eyes were snapping, and her hat made a dangerous dip over one eye.
   “Mr Pratt,” she opens up, “this Mr Green is a friend of yours, I believe.”
   “For nine years,” says I.
   “Cut him out,” says she. “He’s no gentleman!”
   “Why, ma’am,” says I, “he’s a plain incumbent of the mountain, with asperities and the usual failings of a spendthrift and a liar, but I never on the most momentous occasion had the heart to deny that he was a gentleman. It may be that in haberdashery and the sense of arrogance and display Idaho offends the eye, but inside, ma’am, I’ve found him impervious to the lower grades of crime and obesity. After nine years of Idaho’s society, Mrs Sampson,” I winds up, “I should hate to impute him, and I should hate to see him imputed.”
   “It’s right plausible of you, Mr Pratt,” says Mrs Sampson, “to take up the curmudgeons in your friend’s behalf; but it don’t alter the fact that he has made proposals to me sufficiently obnoxious to ruffle the ignominy of any lady.”
   “Why, now, now, now!” says I. “Old Idaho do that! I could believe it of myself sooner. I never knew but one thing to deride in him; and a blizzard was responsible for that. Once while we was snowbound in the mountains he became a prey to a kind of spurious and uneven poetry, which may have corrupted his demeanor.
   “It has,” says Mrs Sampson. “Ever since I knew him he has been reciting to me a lot of irreligious rhymes by some person he calls Ruby Ott, and who is no better than she should be, if you judge by her poetry.”
   “Then Idaho has struck a new book,” says I, “for one he had was by a man who writes under the nom de plume [19 - nom de plume – (фр.) псевдоним] of K. M.”
   “He’d better have stuck to it,” says Mrs Sampson, “whatever it was. And to-day he caps the vortex. I get a bunch of flowers from him, and on ’em is pinned a note. Now, Mr Pratt, you know a lady when you see her; and you know how I stand in Rosa society. Do you think for a moment that I’d skip out to the woods with a man alone with a jug of wine and a loaf of bread, and go singing and cavorting up and down under the trees with him? I take a little claret with my meals, but I’m not in the habit of packing a jug of it into the brush and raising Cain in any such style as that. And of course he’d bring his book of verses along, too. He said so. Let him go on his scandalous picnics alone! Or let him take his Ruby Ott with him. I reckon she wouldn’t kick unless it was on account of there being too much bread along. And what do you think of your gentleman friend now, Mr Pratt?”
   “Well, ’m,” says I, “it may be that Idaho’s invitation was a kind of poetry, and meant no harm. Maybe it belonged to the class of rhymes they call figurative. They offend law and order, but they get sent through the mails on the grounds that they mean something that they don’t say. I’d be glad on Idaho’s account if you’d overlook it,” says I, “and let us extricate our minds from the low regions of poetry to the higher planes of fact and fancy. On a beautiful afternoon like this, Mrs Sampson,” I goes on, “we should let our thoughts dwell accordingly. Though it is warm here, we should remember that at the equator the line of perpetual frost is at an altitude of fifteen thousand feet. Between the latitudes of forty degrees and forty-nine degrees it is from four thousand to nine thousand feet.”
   “Oh, Mr Pratt,” says Mrs Sampson, “it’s such a comfort to hear you say them beautiful facts after getting such a jar from that minx of a Ruby’s poetry!”
   “Let us sit on this log at the roadside,” says I, “and forget the inhumanity and ribaldry of the poets. It is in the glorious columns of ascertained facts and legalized measures that beauty is to be found. In this very log we sit upon, Mrs Sampson,” says I, “is statistics more wonderful than any poem. The rings show it was sixty years old. At the depth of two thousand feet it would become coal in three thousand years. The deepest coal mine in the world is at Killingworth, near Newcastle. A box four feet long, three feet wide, and two feet eight inches deep will hold one ton of coal. If an artery is cut, compress it above the wound. A man’s leg contains thirty bones. The Tower of London was burned in 1841.”
   “Go on, Mr Pratt,” says Mrs Sampson. “Them ideas is so original and soothing. I think statistics are just as lovely as they can be.”
   But it wasn’t till two weeks later that I got all that was coming to me out of Herkimer.
   One night I was waked up by folks hollering “Fire!” all around. I jumped up and dressed and went out of the hotel to enjoy the scene. When I seen it was Mrs Sampson’s house, I gave forth a kind of yell, and I was there in two minutes.
   The whole lower story of the yellow house was in flames, and every masculine, feminine, and canine in Rosa was there, screeching and barking and getting in the way of the firemen. I saw Idaho trying to get away from six firemen who were holding him. They was telling him the whole place was on fire downstairs, and no man could go in it and come out alive.
   “Where’s Mrs Sampson?” I asks.
   “She hasn’t been seen,” says one of the firemen. “She sleeps upstairs. We’ve tried to get in, but we can’t, and our company hasn’t got any ladders yet.”
   I runs around to the light of the big blaze, and pulls the Handbook out of my inside pocket. I kind of laughed when I felt it in my hands – I reckon I was some daffy with the sensation of excitement.
   “Herky, old boy,” I says to it, as I flipped over the pages, “you ain’t ever lied to me yet, and you ain’t ever throwed me down at a scratch yet. Tell me what, old boy, tell me what!” says I.
   I turned to “What to do in Case of Accidents,” on page 17.
   I run my finger down the page, and struck it. Good old Herkimer, he never overlooked anything! It said:
   SUFFOCATION FROM INHALING SMOKE OR GAS – There is nothing better than flaxseed. Place a few seed in the corner of the eye.
   I shoved the Handbook back in my pocket, and grabbed a boy that was running by “Here,” says I, giving him some money, “run to the drug store and bring a dollar’s worth of flaxseed. Hurry, and you’ll get another one for yourself. Now,” I sings out to the crowd, “we’ll have Mrs Sampson!” And I throws away my coat and hat.
   Four of the firemen and citizens grabs hold of me. It’s sure death, they say, to go in the house, for the floors was beginning to fall through.
   “How in blazes;” I sings out, kind of laughing yet, but not feeling like it, “do you expect me to put flaxseed in a eye without the eye?”
   I jabbed each elbow in a fireman’s face, kicked the bark off of one citizen’s shin, and tripped the other one with a side hold.
   And then I busted into the house. If I die first I’ll write you a letter and tell you if it’s any worse down there than the inside of that yellow house was; but don’t believe it yet. I was a heap more cooked than the hurry-up orders of broiled chicken that you get in restaurants. The fire and smoke had me down on the floor twice, and was about to shame Herkimer, but the firemen helped me with their little stream of water, and I got to Mrs Sampson’s room. She’d lost conscientiousness from the smoke, so I wrapped her in the bed clothes and got her on my shoulder. Well, the floors wasn’t as bad as they said, or I never could have done it – not by no means.
   I carried her out fifty yards from the house and laid her on the grass. Then, of course, every one of them other twenty-two plaintiffs to the lady’s hand crowded around with tin dippers of water ready to save her. And up runs the boy with the flaxseed.
   I unwrapped the covers from Mrs Sampson’s head. She opened her eyes and says, “Is that you, Mr Pratt?”
   “S-s-sh,” says I. “Don’t talk till you’ve had the remedy.”
   I runs my arm around her neck and raises her head, gentle, and breaks the bag of flaxseed with the other hand; and as easy as I could I bends over and slips three or four of the seeds in the outer corner of her eye.
   Up gallops the village doc by this time, and snorts around, and grabs at Mrs Sampson’s pulse, and wants to know what I mean by any such sandblasted nonsense.
   “Well, old Jalap and Jerusalem oak seed,” says I, “I’m no regular practitioner, but I’ll show you my authority, anyway.”
   They fetched my coat, and I gets out the Handbook. “Look on page 117,” says I, “at the remedy for suffocation by smoke or gas. Flaxseed in the outer corner of the eye, it says. I don’t know whether it works as a smoke consumer or whether it hikes the compound gastro-hippopotamus nerve into action, but Herkimer says it, and he was called to the case first. If you want to make it a consultation, there’s no objection.”
   Old doc takes the book and looks at it by means of his specs and a fireman’s lantern.
   “Well, Mr Pratt,” says he, “you evidently got on the wrong line in reading your diagnosis. The recipe for suffocation says: ‘Get the patient into fresh air as quickly as possible, and place in a reclining position.’ The flaxseed remedy is for ‘Dust and Cinders in the Eye,’ on the line above. But, after all —
   “See here, ” interrupts Mrs Sampson, “I reckon I’ve got something to say in this consultation. That flaxseed done me more good than anything I ever tried.” And then she raises up her head and lays it back on my arm again, and says: “Put some in the other eye, Sandy dear.”
   And so if you was to stop off at Rosa to-morrow, or any other day, you’d see a fine new yellow house with Mrs Pratt, that was Mrs Sampson, embellishing and adorning it. And if you was to step inside you’d see on the marble-top centre table in the parlor, “Herkimer’s Handbook of Indispensable Information,” all rebound in red morocco, and ready to be consulted on any subject pertaining to human happiness and wisdom.

The Princess and the Puma

   There had to be a king and queen, of course. The king was a terrible old man who wore six-shooters and spurs, and shouted in such a tremendous voice that the rattlers on the prairie would run into their holes under the prickly pear. Before there was a royal family they called the man “Whispering Ben.” When he came to own 50,000 acres of land and more cattle than he could count, they called him O’Donnell “the Cattle King.”
   The queen had been a Mexican girl from Laredo. She made a good, mild, Coloradoclaro wife, and even succeeded in teaching Ben to modify his voice sufficiently while in the house to keep the dishes from being broken. When Ben got to be king she would sit on the gallery of Espinosa Ranch and weave rush mats. When wealth became so irresistible and oppressive that upholstered chairs and a centre table were brought down from San Antone in the wagons, she bowed her smooth, dark head, and shared the fate of the Danaé.
   To avoid lèse majesté [20 - lèse majesté – (фp.,) оскорбление монарха] you have been presented first to the king and queen. They do not enter the story, which might be called “The Chronicle of the Princess, the Happy Thought, and the Lion that Bungled his Job.”
   Josefa O’Donnell was the surviving daughter, the princess. From her mother she inherited warmth of nature and a dusky, semi-tropic beauty. From Ben O’Donnell the royal she acquired a store in intrepidity, common sense, and the faculty of ruling. The combination was worth going miles to see. Josefa while riding her pony at a gallop could put five out of six bullets through a tomato-can swinging at the end of a string. She could play for hours with a white kitten she owned, dressing it in all manner of absurd clothes. Scorning a pencil, she could tell you out of her head what 1545 two-year-olds would bring on the hoof, at $8.50 per head. Roughly speaking, the Espinosal Ranch is forty miles long and thirty broad – but mostly leased land. Josefa, on her pony, had prospected over every mile of it. Every cow-puncher on the range knew her by sight and was a loyal vassal. Ripley Givens, foreman of one of the Espinosal outfits, saw her one day, and made up his mind to form a royal matrimonial alliance. Presumptuous? No. In those days in the Nueces country a man was a man. And, after all, the title of cattle king does not presuppose blood royal. Often it only signifies that its owner wears the crown in token of his magnificent qualities in the art of cattle stealing.
   One day Ripley Givens rode over to the Double Elm Ranch to inquire about a bunch of strayed yearlings. He was late in setting out on his return trip, and it was sundown when he struck the White Horse Crossing of the Nueces. From there to his own camp it was sixteen miles. To the Espinosal ranchhouse it was twelve. Givens was tired. He decided to pass the night at the Crossing.
   There was a fine water hole in the river-bed. The banks were thickly covered with great trees, undergrown with brush. Back from the water hole fifty yards was a stretch of curly mesquite grass – supper for his horse and bed for himself. Givens staked his horse, and spread out his saddle blankets to dry. He sat down with his back against a tree and rolled a cigarette. From somewhere in the dense timber along the river came a sudden, rageful, shivering wail. The pony danced at the end of his rope and blew a whistling snort of comprehending fear. Givens puffed at his cigarette, but he reached leisurely for his pistol-belt, which lay on the grass, and twirled the cylinder of his weapon tentatively. A great gar plunged with a loud splash into the water hole. A little brown rabbit skipped around a bunch of catclaw and sat twitching his whiskers and looking humorously at Givens. The pony went on eating grass.
   It is well to be reasonably watchful when a Mexican lion sings soprano along the arroyos at sundown. The burden of his song may be that young calves and fat lambs are scarce, and that he has a carnivorous desire for your acquaintance.
   In the grass lay an empty fruit can, cast there by some former sojourner. Givens caught sight of it with a grunt of satisfaction. In his coat pocket tied behind his saddle was a handful or two of ground coffee. Black coffee and cigarettes! What ranchero could desire more?
   In two minutes he had a little fire going clearly. He started, with his can, for the water hole. When within fifteen yards of its edge he saw, between the bushes, a side-saddled pony with down-dropped reins cropping grass a little distance to his left. Just rising from her hands and knees on the brink of the water hole was Josefa O’Donnell. She had been drinking water, and she brushed the sand from the palms of her hands. Ten yards away, to her right, half concealed by a clump of sacuista, Givens saw the crouching form of the Mexican lion. His amber eyelids glared hungrily; six feet from them was the tip of the tail stretched straight, like a pointer’s. His hind-quarters rocked with the motion of the cat tribe preliminary to leaping.
   Givens did what he could. His six-shooter was thirty-five yards away lying on the grass. He gave a loud yell, and dashed between the lion and the princess.
   The “rucrus,” as Givens called it afterward, was brief and somewhat confused. When he arrived on the line of attack he saw a dim streak in the air, and heard a couple of faint cracks. Then a hundred pounds of Mexican lion plumped down upon his head and flattened him, with a heavy jar, to the ground. He remembered calling out: “Let up, now – no fair gouging!” and then he crawled from under the lion like a worm, with his mouth full of grass and dirt, and a big lump on the back of his head where it had struck the root of a water-elm. The lion lay motionless. Givens, feeling aggrieved, and suspicious of fouls, shook his fist at the lion, and shouted: “I’ll rastle you again for twenty – ” and then he got back to himself.
   Josefa was standing in her tracks, quietly reloading her silver-mounted 38. It had not been a difficult shot. The lion’s head made an easier mark than a tomato-can swinging at the end of a string. There was a provoking, teasing, maddening smile upon her mouth and in her dark eyes. The would-be-rescuing knight felt the fire of his fiasco burn down to his soul. Here had been his chance, the chance that he had dreamed of; and Momus, and not Cupid, had presided over it. The satyrs in the wood were, no doubt, holding their sides in hilarious, silent laughter. There had been something like vaudeville – say Signor Givens and his funny knockabout act with the stuffed lion.
   “Is that you, Mr Givens?” said Josefa, in her deliberate, saccharine contralto. “You nearly spoiled my shot when you yelled. Did you hurt your head when you fell?”
   “Oh, no,” said Givens, quietly; “that didn’t hurt.” He stooped ignominiously and dragged his best Stetson hat from under the beast. It was crushed and wrinkled to a fine comedy effect. Then he knelt down and softly stroked the fierce, open-jawed head of the dead lion.
   “Poor old Bill!” he exclaimed, mournfully.
   “What’s that?” asked Josefa, sharply.
   “Of course you didn’t know, Miss Josefa,” said Givens, with an air of one allowing magnanimity to triumph over grief. “Nobody can blame you. I tried to save him, but I couldn’t let you know in time.”
   “Save who?”
   “Why, Bill. I’ve been looking for him all day. You see, he’s been our camp pet for two years. Poor old fellow, he wouldn’t have hurt a cottontail rabbit. It’ll break the boys all up when they hear about it. But you couldn’t tell, of course, that Bill was just trying to play with you.”
   Josefa’s black eyes burned steadily upon him. Ripley Givens met the test successfully. He stood rumpling the yellow-brown curls on his head pensively. In his eyes was regret, not unmingled with a gentle reproach. His smooth features were set to a pattern of indisputable sorrow. Josefa wavered.
   “What was your pet doing here?” she asked, making a last stand. “There’s no camp near the White Horse Crossing.”
   “The old rascal ran away from camp yesterday,” answered Givens, readily. “It’s a wonder the coyotes didn’t scare him to death. You see, Jim Webster, our horse wrangler, brought a little terrier pup into camp last week. The pup made life miserable for Bill – he used to chase him around and chew his hind legs for hours at a time. Every night when bedtime came Bill would sneak under one of the boys’ blankets and sleep to keep the pup from finding him. I reckon he must have been worried pretty desperate or he wouldn’t have run away. He was always afraid to get out of sight of camp.”
   Josefa looked at the body of the fierce animal. Givens gently patted one of the formidable paws that could have killed a yearling calf with one blow. Slowly a red flush widened upon the dark olive face of the girl. Was it the signal of shame of the true sportsman who has brought down ignoble quarry? Her eyes grew softer, and the lowered lids drove away all their bright mockery.
   “I’m very sorry,” she said, humbly; “but he looked so big, and jumped so high that – ”
   “Poor old Bill was hungry,” interrupted Givens, in quick defence of the deceased. “We always made him jump for his supper in camp. He would lie down and roll over for a piece of meat. When he saw you he thought he was going to get something to eat from you.”
   Suddenly Josefa’s eyes opened wide.
   “I might have shot you!” she exclaimed. “You ran right in between. You risked your life to save your pet! That was fine, Mr Givens. I like a man who is kind to animals.”
   Yes; there was even admiration in her gaze now. After all, there was a hero rising out of the ruins of the anti-climax. The look on Givens’s face would have secured him a high position in the S.P.C.A. [21 - S.P.C.A. – Общество покровительства животным]
   “I always loved ’em,” said he; “horses, dogs, Mexican lions, cows, alligators – ”
   “I hate alligators,” instantly demurred Josefa; “crawly, muddy things!”
   “Did I say alligators?” said Givens. “I meant antelopes, of course.”
   Josefa’s conscience drove her to make further amends. She held out her hand penitently. There was a bright, unshed drop in each of her eyes.
   “Please forgive me, Mr Givens, won’t you? I’m only a girl, you know, and I was frightened at first. I’m very, very sorry I shot Bill. You don’t know how ashamed I feel. I wouldn’t have done it for anything.”
   Givens took the proffered hand. He held it for a time while he allowed the generosity of his nature to overcome his grief at the loss of Bill. At last it was clear that he had forgiven her.
   “Please don’t speak of it any more, Miss Josefa. ’Twas enough to frighten any young lady the way Bill looked. I’ll explain it all right to the boys.”
   “Are you really sure you don’t hate me?” Josefa came closer to him impulsively. Her eyes were sweet – oh, sweet and pleading with gracious penitence. “I would hate any one who would kill my kitten. And how daring and kind of you to risk being shot when you tried to save him! How very few men would have done that!” Victory wrested from defeat! Vaudeville turned into drama! Bravo, Ripley Givens!
   It was now twilight. Of course Miss Josefa could not be allowed to ride on to the ranch-house alone. Givens resaddled his pony in spite of that animal’s reproachful glances, and rode with her. Side by side they galloped across the smooth grass, the princess and the man who was kind to animals. The prairie odors of fruitful earth and delicate bloom were thick and sweet around them. Coyotes yelping over there on the hill! No fear. And yet – Josefa rode closer. A little hand seemed to grope. Givens found it with his own. The ponies kept an even gait. The hands lingered together, and the owner of one explained.
   “I never was frightened before, but just think! How terrible it would be to meet a really wild lion! Poor Bill! I’m so glad you came with me!”
   O’Donnell was sitting on the ranch gallery:
   “Hello, Rip!” he shouted – “that you?”
   “He rode in with me,” said Josefa. “I lost my way and was late.”
   “Much obliged,” called the cattle king. “Stop over, Rip, and ride to camp in the morning.”
   But Givens would not. He would push on to camp. There was a bunch of steers to start off on the trail at daybreak. He said good-night, and trotted away.
   An hour later, when the lights were out, Josefa, in her night-robe, came to her door and called to the king in his own room across the brick-paved hallway:
   “Say, Pop, you know that old Mexican lion they call the ‘Gotch-eared Devil’ – the one that killed Gonzales, Mr Martin’s sheep herder, and about fifty calves on the Salada range? Well, I settled his hash this afternoon over at the White Horse Crossing. Put two balls in his head with my.38 while he was on the jump. I knew him by the slice gone from his left ear that old Gonzales cut off with his machete. You couldn’t have made a better shot yourself, Daddy.”
   “Bully for you!” thundered Whispering Ben from the darkness of the royal chamber.

A Comedy in Rubber

   One may hope, in spite of the metaphorists, to avoid the breath of the deadly upas tree; one may, by great good fortune, succeed in blacking the eye of the basilisk; one might even dodge the attentions of Cerberus and Argus, but no man, alive or dead, can escape the gaze of the Rubberer.
   New York is the Caoutchouc City. There are many, of course, who go their ways, making money, without turning to the right or the left, but there is a tribe abroad wonderfully composed, like the Martians, solely of eyes and means of locomotion.
   These devotees of curiosity swarm, like flies, in a moment in a struggling, breathless circle about the scene of an unusual occurrence. If a workman opens a manhole, if a street car runs over a man from North Tarrytown, if a little boy drops an egg on his way home from the grocery, if a casual house or two drops into the subway, if a lady loses a nickel through a hole in the lisle thread, if the police drag a telephone and a racing chart forth from an Ibsen Society reading-room, if Senator Depew or Mr Chuck Connors walks out to take the air – if any of these incidents or accidents takes place, you will see the mad, irresistible rush of the “rubber” tribe to the spot.
   The importance of the event does not count. They gaze with equal interest and absorption at a chorus girl or at a man painting a liver pill sign. They will form as deep a cordon around a man with a club-foot as they will around a balked automobile. They have the furor rubberendi. They are optical gluttons, feasting and fattening on the misfortunes of their fellow beings. They gloat and pore and glare and squint and stare with their fishy eyes like goggle-eyed perch at the book baited with calamity.
   It would seem that Cupid would find these ocular vampires too cold game for his calorific shafts, but have we not yet to discover an immune even among the Protozoa? Yes, beautiful Romance descended upon two of this tribe, and love came into their hearts as they crowded about the prostrate form of a man who had been run over by a brewery wagon.
   William Pry was the first on the spot. He was an expert at such gatherings. With an expression of in-tense happiness on his features, he stood over the victim of the accident, listening to his groans as if to the sweetest music. When the crowd of spectators had swelled to a closely packed circle William saw a violent commotion in the crowd opposite him. Men were hurled aside like ninepins by the impact of some moving body that clove them like the rush of a tornado. With elbows, umbrella, hat-pin, tongue, and fingernails doing their duty, Violet Seymour forced her way through the mob of onlookers to the first row. Strong men who even had been able to secure a seat on the 5.30 Harlem express staggered back like children as she bucked centre. Two large lady spectators who had seen the Duke of Roxburgh married and had often blocked traffic on Twenty-third Street fell back into the second row with ripped shirtwaists when Violet had finished with them. William Pry loved her at first sight.
   The ambulance removed the unconscious agent of Cupid. William and Violet remained after the crowd had dispersed. They were true Rubberers. People who leave the scene of an accident with the ambulance have not genuine caoutchouc in the cosmogony of their necks. The delicate, fine flavor of the affair is to be had only in the after-taste – in gloating over the spot, in gazing fixedly at the houses opposite, in hovering there in a dream more exquisite than the opium-eater’s ecstasy. William Pry and Violet Seymour were connoisseurs in casualties. They knew how to extract full enjoyment from every incident.
   Presently they looked at each other. Violet had a brown birthmark on her neck as large as a silver half-dollar. William fixed his eyes upon it. William Pry had inordinately bowed legs. Violet allowed her gaze to linger unswervingly upon them. Face to face they stood thus for moments, each staring at the other. Etiquette would not allow them to speak; but in the Caoutchouc City it is permitted to gaze without stint at the trees in the parks and at the physical blemishes of a fellow creature. At length with a sigh they parted. But Cupid had been the driver of the brewery wagon, and the wheel that broke a leg united two fond hearts.
   The next meeting of the hero and heroine was in front of a board fence near Broadway. The day had been a disappointing one. There had been no fights on the street, children had kept from under the wheels of the street cars, cripples and fat men in negligee shirts were scarce; nobody seemed to be inclined to slip on banana peels or fall down with heart disease. Even the sport from Kokomo, Ind., who claims to be a cousin of ex-Mayor Low and scatters nickels from a cab window, had not put in his appearance. There was nothing to stare at, and William Pry had premonitions of ennui.
   But he saw a large crowd scrambling and pushing excitedly in front of a billboard. Sprinting for it, he knocked down an old woman and a child carrying a bottle of milk, and fought his way like a demon into the mass of spectators. Already in the inner line stood Violet Seymour with one sleeve and two gold fillings gone, a corset steel puncture and a sprained wrist, but happy. She was looking at what there was to see. A man was painting upon the fence:
   “Eat Bricklets – They Fill Your Face.”
   Violet blushed when she saw William Pry. William jabbed a lady in a black silk raglan in the ribs, kicked a boy in the shin, hit an old gentleman on the left ear and managed to crowd nearer to Violet. They stood for an hour looking at the man paint the letters. Then William’s love could be repressed no longer. He touched her on the arm.
   “Come with me,” he said. “I know where there is a bootblack without an Adam’s apple.”
   She looked up at him shyly, yet with unmistakable love transfiguring her countenance.
   “And you have saved it for me?” she asked, trembling with the first dim ecstasy of a woman beloved.
   Together they hurried to the bootblack’s stand. An hour they spent there gazing at the malformed youth.
   A window-cleaner fell from the fifth story to the sidewalk beside them. As the ambulance came clanging up William pressed her hand joyously. “Four ribs at least and a compound fracture,” he whispered, swiftly. “You are not sorry that you met me, are you, dearest?
   “Me?” said Violet, returning the pressure. “Sure not. I could stand all day rubbering with you.”
   The climax of the romance occurred a few days later. Perhaps the reader will remember the intense excitement into which the city was thrown when Eliza Jane, a colored woman, was served with a subpoena. The Rubber Tribe encamped on the spot. With his own hands William Pry placed a board upon two beer kegs in the street opposite Eliza Jane’s residence. He and Violet sat there for three days and nights. Then it occurred to a detective to open the door and serve the subpoena. He sent for a kinetoscope and did so.
   Two souls with such congenial tastes could not long remain apart. As a policeman drove them away with his night stick that evening they plighted their troth. The seeds of love had been well sown, and had grown up, hardy and vigorous, into a – let us call it a rubber plant.
   The wedding of William Pry and Violet Seymour was set for June 10. The Big Church in the Middle of the Block was banked high with flowers. The populous tribe of Rubberers the world over is ram-pant over weddings. They are the pessimists of the pews. They are the guyers of the groom and the banterers of the bride. They come to laugh at your marriage, and should you escape from Hymen’s tower on the back of death’s pale steed they will come to the funeral and sit in the same pew and cry over your luck. Rubber will stretch.
   The church was lighted. A grosgrain carpet lay over the asphalt to the edge of the sidewalk. Brides-maids were patting one another’s sashes awry and speaking of the Bride’s freckles. Coachmen tied white ribbons on their whips and bewailed the space of time between drinks. The minister was musing over his possible fee, essaying conjecture whether it would suffice to purchase a new broadcloth suit for himself and a photograph of Laura Jane Libbey for his wife. Yea, Cupid was in the air.
   And outside the church, oh, my brothers, surged and heaved the rank and file of the tribe of Rubberers. in two bodies they were, with the grosgrain carpet and cops with clubs between. They crowded like cattle, they fought, they pressed and surged and swayed and trampled one another to see a bit of a girl in a white veil acquire license to go through a man’s pockets while he sleeps. But the hour for the wedding came and went, and the bride and bridegroom came not. And impatience gave way to alarm and alarm brought about search, and they were not found. And then two big policemen took a band and dragged out of the furious mob of onlookers a crushed and trampled thing, with a wedding ring in its vest pocket and a shredded and hysterical woman beating her way to the carpet’s edge, ragged, bruised and obstreperous.
   William Pry and Violet Seymour, creatures of habit, had joined in the seething game of the specta-tors, unable to resist the overwhelming desire to gaze upon themselves entering, as bride and bridegroom, the rose-decked church.
   Rubber will out.

Squaring the Circle

   At the hazard of wearying you this tale of vehe-ment emotions must be prefaced by a discourse on geometry.
   Nature moves in circles; Art in straight lines. The natural is rounded; the artificial is made up of angles. A man lost in the snow wanders, in spite of himself, in perfect circles; the city man’s feet, denaturalized by rectangular streets and floors, carry him ever away from himself.
   The round eyes of childhood typify innocence; the narrowed line of the flirt’s optic proves the in-vasion of art. The horizontal mouth is the mark of determined cunning; who has not read Nature’s most spontaneous lyric in lips rounded for the candid kiss?
   Beauty is Nature in perfection; circularity is its chief attribute. Behold the full moon, the enchanting golf ball, the domes of splendid temples, the huckleberry pie, the wedding ring, the circus ring, the ring for the waiter, and the “round” of drinks.
   On the other hand, straight lines show that Na-ture has been deflected. Imagine Venus’s girdle transformed into a “straight front”!
   When we begin to move in straight lines and turn sharp corners our natures begin to change. The consequence is that Nature, being more adaptive than Art, tries to conform to its sterner regulations. The result is often a rather curious product – for instance: A prize chrysanthemum, wood alcohol whiskey, a Republican Missouri, cauliflower au gratin, and a New Yorker.
   Nature is lost quickest in a big city. The cause is geometrical, not moral. The straight lines of its streets and architecture, the rectangularity of its laws and social customs, the undeviating pavements, the hard, severe, depressing, uncompromising rules of all its ways – even of its recreation and sports – coldly exhibit a sneering defiance of the curved line of Nature.
   Wherefore, it may be said that the big city has demonstrated the problem of squaring the circle. And it may be added that this mathematical introduction precedes an account of the fate of a Kentucky feud that was imported to the city that has a habit of making its importations conform to its angles.
   The feud began in the Cumberland Mountains between the Folwell and the Harkness families. The first victim of the homespun vendetta was a ’possum dog belonging to Bill Harkness. The Harkness family evened up this dire loss by laying out the chief of the Folwell clan. The Folwells were prompt at repartee. They oiled up their squirrel rifles and made it feasible for Bill Harkness to follow his dog to a land where the ’possums come down when treed without the stroke of an ax.
   The feud flourished for forty years. Harknesses were shot at the plough, through their lamp-lit cabin windows, coming from camp-meeting, asleep, in duello, sober and otherwise, singly and in family groups, prepared and unprepared. Folwells had the branches of their family tree lopped off in similar ways, as the traditions of their country prescribed and authorized.
   By and by the pruning left but a single member of each family. And then Cal Harkness, probably reasoning that further pursuance of the controversy would give a too decided personal flavor to the feud, suddenly disappeared from the relieved Cumberlands, baulking the avenging hand of Sam, the ultimate opposing Folwell.
   A year afterward Sam Folwell learned that his hereditary, unsuppressed enemy was living in New York City. Sam turned over the big iron wash-pot in the yard, scraped off some of the soot, which he mixed with lard and shined his boots with the com-pound. He put on his store clothes of butternut dyed black, a white shirt and collar, and packed a carpet-sack with Spartan lingerie. He took his squirrel rifle from its hooks, but put it back again with a sigh. However ethical and plausible the habit might be in the Cumberlands, perhaps New York would not swallow his pose of hunting squirrels among the skyscrapers along Broadway. An ancient but reliable Colt’s revolver that he resurrected from a bureau drawer seemed to proclaim itself the pink of weapons for metropolitan adventure and vengeance. This and a hunting-knife in a leather sheath, Sam packed in the carpet-sack. As he started, Muleback, for the lowland railroad station the last Folwell turned in his saddle and looked grimly at the little cluster of white-pine slabs in the clump of cedars that marked the Folwell burying-ground.
   Sam Folwell arrived in New York in the night. Still moving and living in the free circles of nature, he did not perceive the formidable, pitiless, restless, fierce angles of the great city waiting in the dark to close about the rotundity of his heart and brain and mould him to the form of its millions of re-shaped victims. A cabby picked him out of the whirl, as Sam himself had often picked a nut from a bed of wind-tossed autumn leaves, and whisked him away to a hotel commensurate to his boots and carpet-sack.
   On the next morning the last of the Folwells made his sortie into the city that sheltered the last Harkness. The Colt was thrust beneath his coat and secured by a narrow leather belt; the hunting-knife hung between his shoulder-blades, with the haft an inch below his coat collar. He knew this much – that Cal Harkness drove an express wagon somewhere in that town, and that he, Sam Folwell, had come to kill him. And as he stepped upon the side-walk the red came into his eye and the feud-hate into his heart.
   The clamor of the central avenues drew him thitherward. He had half expected to see Cal coming down the street in his shirt-sleeves, with a jug and a whip in his hand, just as he would have seen him in Frankfort or Laurel City. But an hour went by and Cal did not appear. Perhaps he was waiting in ambush, to shoot him from a door or a window. Sam kept a sharp eye on doors and windows for a while.
   About noon the city tired of playing with its mouse and suddenly squeezed him with its straight lines.
   Sam Folwell stood where two great, rectangular arteries of the city cross. He looked four ways, and saw the world burled from its orbit and reduced by spirit level and tape to an edged and cornered plane. All life moved on tracks, in grooves, accord-ing to system, within boundaries, by rote. The root of life was the cube root; the measure of existence was square measure. People streamed by in straight rows; the horrible din and crash stupefied him.
   Sam leaned against the sharp corner of a stone building. Those faces passed him by thousands, and none of them were turned toward him. A sudden foolish fear that he had died and was a spirit, and that they could not see him, seized him. And then the city smote him with loneliness.
   A fat man dropped out of the stream and stood a few feet distant, waiting for his car. Sam crept to his side and shouted above the tumult into his ear:
   “The Rankinses’ hogs weighed more’n ourn a whole passel, but the mast in thar neighborhood was a fine chance better than what it was down – ”
   The fat man moved away unostentatiously, and bought roasted chestnuts to cover his alarm.
   Sam felt the need of a drop of mountain dew. Across the street men passed in and out through swinging doors. Brief glimpses could he had of a glistening bar and its bedeckings. The feudist crossed and essayed to enter. Again had Art eliminated the familiar circle. Sam’s hand found no door-knob – it slid, in vain, over a rectangular brass plate and polished oak with nothing even so large as a pin’s head upon which his fingers might close. Abashed, reddened, heartbroken, he walked away from the bootless door and sat upon a step. A locust club tickled him in the ribs.
   “Take a walk for yourself,” said the policeman. You’ve been loafing around here long enough.”
   At the next corner a shrill whistle sounded in Sam’s ear. He wheeled around and saw a black-browed villain scowling at him over peanuts heaped on a steaming machine. He started across the street. An im-mense engine, running without mules, with the voice of a bull and the smell of a smoky lamp, whizzed past, grazing his knee. A cab-driver bumped him with a hub and explained to him that kind words were invented to be used on other occasions. A motorman clanged his bell wildly and, for once in his life, corroborated a cab-driver. A large lady in a changeable silk waist dug an elbow into his back, and a newsy pensively pelted him with banana rinds, murmuring, “I hate to do it – but if anybody seen me let it pass!”
   Cal Harkness, his day’s work over and his express wagon stabled, turned the sharp edge of the build-ing that, by the cheek of architects, is modelled upon a safety razor. Out of the mass of hurrying people his eye picked up, three yards away, the surviving bloody and implacable foe of his kith and kin.
   He stopped short and wavered for a moment, being unarmed and sharply surprised. But the keen mountaineer’s eye of Sam Folwell had picked him out.
   There was a sudden spring, a ripple in the stream of passersby and the sound of Sam’s voice crying:
   “Howdy, Cal! I’m durned glad to see ye.”
   And in the angles of Broadway, Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third Street the Cumberland feudists shook hands.

The Octopus Marooned

   “A trust is its weakest point,” said Jeff Peters.
   “That,” said I, “sounds like one of those unintelligible remarks such as, “Why is a policeman?”
   “It is not,” said Jeff. “There are no relations between a trust and a policeman. My remark was an epitogram – an axis – a kind of mulct’em in parvo. What it means is that a trust is like an egg, and it is not like an egg. If you want to break an egg you have to do it from the outside. The only way to break up a trust is from the inside. Keep sitting on it until it hatches. Look at the brood of young colleges and libraries that’s chirping and peeping all over the country. Yes, sir, every trust bears in its own bosom the seeds of its destruction like a rooster that crows near a Georgia colored Methodist camp meeting, or a Republican announcing himself a candidate for governor of Texas.”
   I asked Jeff, jestingly, if he had ever, during his checkered, plaided, mottled, pied and dappled career, conducted an enterprise of the class to which the word “trust” had been applied. Somewhat to my surprise he acknowledged the corner.
   “Once,” said he. “And the state seal of New Jersey never bit into a charter that opened up a solider and safer piece of legitimate octopusing. We had everything in our favor – wind, water, police, nerve, and a clean monopoly of an article indispensable to the public. There wasn’t a trust buster on the globe that could have found a weak spot in our scheme. It made Rockefeller’s little kerosene speculation look like a bucket shop. But we lost out.”
   “Some unforeseen opposition came up, I suppose,” I said.
   “No, sir, it was just as I said. We were self-curbed. It was a case of auto-suppression. There was a rift within the loot, as Albert Tennyson says.”
   You remember I told you that me and Andy Tucker was partners for some years. That man was the most talented conniver at stratagems I ever saw. Whenever he saw a dollar in another man’s hands he took it as a personal grudge, if he couldn’t take it any other way. Andy was educated, too, besides having a lot of useful information. He had acquired a big amount of experience out of books, and could talk for hours on any subject connected with ideas and discourse. He had been in every line of graft from lecturing on Palestine with a lot of magic lantern pictures of the annual Custom-made Clothiers’ Association convention at Atlantic City to flooding Connecticut with bogus wood alcohol distilled from nutmegs.
   One Spring me and Andy had been over in Mexico on a flying trip during which a Philadelphia capitalist had paid us $2,500 for a half interest in a silver mine in Chihuahua. Oh, yes, the mine was all right. The other half interest must have been worth two or three thousand. I often wondered who owned that mine.
   In coming back to the United States me and Andy stubbed our toes against a little town in Texas on the bank of the Rio Grande. The name of it was Bird City; but it wasn’t. The town had about 2,000 inhabitants, mostly men. I figured out that their principal means of existence was in living close to tall chaparral. Some of ’em were stockmen and some gamblers and some horse peculators and plenty were in the smuggling line. Me and Andy put up at a hotel that was built like something between a roof-garden and a sectional bookcase. It began to rain the day we got there. As the saying is, Juniper Aquarius was sure turning on the water plugs on Mount Amphibious.
   Now, there were three saloons in Bird City, though neither Andy nor me drank. But we could see the townspeople making a triangular procession from one to another all day and half the night. Everybody seemed to know what to do with as much money as they had.
   The third day of the rain it slacked up awhile in the afternoon, so me and Andy walked out to the edge of town to view the mudscape. Bird City was built between the Rio Grande and a deep wide arroyo that used to be the old bed of the river. The bank between the stream and its old bed was cracking and giving away, when we saw it, on account of the high water caused by the rain. Andy looks at it a long time. That man’s intellects was never idle. And then he unfolds to me a instantaneous idea that has occurred to him. Right there was organized a trust; and we walked back into town and put it on the market.
   First we went to the main saloon in Bird City, called the Blue Snake, and bought it. It cost us $1,200. And then we dropped in, casual, at Mexican Joe’s place, referred to the rain, and bought him out for $500. The other one came easy at $400.
   The next morning Bird City woke up and found itself an island. The river had busted through its old channel, and the town was surrounded by roaring torrents. The rain was still raining, and there was heavy clouds in the northwest that presaged about six more mean annual rainfalls during the next two weeks. But the worst was yet to come.
   Bird City hopped out of its nest, waggled its pin feathers and strolled out for its matutinal toot. Lo! Mexican Joe’s place was closed and likewise the other little ’dobe life saving station. So, naturally the body politic emits thirsty ejaculations of surprise and ports hellum for the Blue Snake. And what does it find there?
   Behind one end of the bar sits Jefferson Peters, octopus, with a sixshooter on each side of him, ready to make change or corpses as the case may be. There are three bartenders; and on the wall is a ten foot sign reading: “All Drinks One Dollar.” Andy sits on the safe in his neat blue suit and gold-banded cigar, on the lookout for emergencies. The town marshal is there with two deputies to keep order, having been promised free drinks by the trust.
   Well, sir, it took Bird City just ten minutes to realize that it was in a cage. We expected trouble; but there wasn’t any. The citizens saw that we had ‘em. The nearest railroad was thirty miles away; and it would be two weeks at least before the river would be fordable. So they began to cuss, amiable, and throw down dollars on the bar till it sounded like a selection on the xylophone.
   There was about 1,500 grown-up adults in Bird City that had arrived at years of indiscretion; and the majority of ’em required from three to twenty drinks a day to make life endurable. The Blue Snake was the only place where they could get ’em till the flood subsided. It was beautiful and simple as all truly great swindles are.
   About ten o’clock the silver dollars dropping on the bar slowed down to playing two-steps and marches instead of jigs. But I looked out the window and saw a hundred or two of our customers standing in line at Bird City Savings and Loan Co., and I knew they were borrowing more money to be sucked in by the clammy tendrils of the octopus.
   At the fashionable hour of noon everybody went home to dinner. We told the bartenders to take advantage of the lull, and do the same. Then me and Andy counted the receipts. We had taken in $1,300. We calculated that if Bird City would only remain an island for two weeks the trust would be able to endow the Chicago University with a new dormitory of padded cells for the faculty, and present every worthy poor man in Texas with a farm, provided he furnished the site for it.
   Andy was especial inroaded by self-esteem at our success, the rudiments of the scheme having originated in his own surmises and premonitions. He got off the safe and lit the biggest cigar in the house.
   “Jeff,” says he, “I don’t suppose that anywhere in the world you could find three cormorants with brighter ideas about down-treading the proletariat than the firm of Peters, Satan and Tucker, incorporated. We have sure handed the small consumer a giant blow in the sole apoplectic region. No?”
   “Well,” says I, “it does look as if we would have to take up gastritis and golf or be measured for kilts in spite of ourselves. This little turn in bug juice is, verily, all to the Skibo. And I can stand it,” says I, “I’d rather batten than bant any day.”
   Andy pours himself out four fingers of our best rye and does with it as was so intended. It was the first drink I had ever known him to take.
   “By way of liberation,” says he, “to the gods.”
   And then after thus doing umbrage to the heathen diabetes he drinks another to our success. And then he begins to toast the trade, beginning with Raisuli and the Northern Pacific, and on down the line to the little ones like the school book combine and the oleomargarine outrages and the Lehigh Valley and Great Scott Coal Federation.
   “It’s all right, Andy,’ says I, “to drink the health of our brother monopolists, but don’t overdo the wassail. You know our most eminent and loathed multi-corruptionists live on weak tea and dog biscuits.”
   Andy went in the back room awhile and came out dressed in his best clothes. There was a kind of murderous and soulful look of gentle riotousness in his eye that I didn’t like. I watched him to see what turn the whiskey was going to take in him. There are two times when you never can tell what is going to happen. One is when a man takes his first drink; and the other is when a woman takes her latest.
   In less than an hour Andy’s skate had turned to an ice yacht. He was outwardly decent and managed to preserve his aquarium, but inside he was impromptu and full of unexpectedness.
   “Jeff,” says he, “do you know that I’m a crater – a living crater?”
   “That’s a self-evident hypothesis,” says I. “But you’re not Irish. Why don’t you say “creature,” according to the rules and syntax of America?”
   “I’m the crater of a volcano,” says he. “I’m all aflame and crammed inside with an assortment of words and phrases that have got to have an exodus. I can feel millions of synonyms and parts of speech rising in me,” says he, “and I’ve got to make a speech of some sort. Drink,” says Andy, “always drives me to oratory.”
   “It could do no worse,” says I.
   “From my earliest recollections,” says he, “alcohol seemed to stimulate my sense of recitation and rhetoric. Why, in Bryan’s second campaign,” says Andy, “they used to give me three gin rickeys and I’d speak two hours longer than Billy himself could on the silver question. Finally, they persuaded me to take the gold cure.”
   “If you’ve got to get rid of your excess verbiage,” says I, “why not go out on the river bank and speak a piece? It seems to me there was an old spell-binder named Cantharides that used to go and disincorporate himself of his windy numbers along the seashore.”
   “No,” says Andy, “I must have an audience. I feel like if I once turned loose people would begin to call Senator Beveridge the Grand Young Sphinx of the Wabash. I’ve got to get an audience together, Jeff, and get this oral distension assuaged or it may turn in on me and I’d go about feeling like a deckle-edge edition de luxe of Mrs E. D. E. N. Southworth.”
   “On what special subject of the theorems and topics does your desire for vocality seem to be connected with?” I asks.
   “I ain’t particular,” says Andy. “I am equally good and varicose on all subjects. I can take up the matter of Russian immigration, or the poetry of John W. Keats, or the tariff, or Kabyle literature, or drainage, and make my audience weep, cry, sob and shed tears by turns.”
   “Well, Andy,” says I, “if you are bound to get rid of this accumulation of vernacular suppose you go out in town and work it on some indulgent citizen. Me and the boys will take care of the business. Everybody will be through dinner pretty soon, and salt pork and beans makes a man pretty thirsty. We ought to take in $1,500 more by midnight.”
   “So Andy goes out of the Blue Snake, and I see him stopping men on the street and talking to ’em. By and by he has half a dozen in a bunch listening to him; and pretty soon I see him waving his arms and elocuting at a good-sized crowd on a corner. When he walks away they string out after him, talking all the time; and he leads ’em down the main street of Bird City with more men joining the procession as they go. It reminded me of the old legerdemain that I’d read in books about the Pied Piper of Heidsieck charming the children away from the town.
   “One o’clock came; and then two; and three got under the wire for place; and not a Bird citizen came in for a drink. The streets were deserted except for some ducks and ladies going to the stores. There was only a light drizzle falling then.
   “A lonesome man came along and stopped in front of the Blue Snake to scrape the mud off his boots.
   “Pardner,” says I, “what has happened? This morning there was hectic gaiety afoot; and now it seems more like one of them ruined cities of Tyre and Siphon where the lone lizard crawls on the walls of the main port-cullis.”
   “The whole town,” says the muddy man, “is up in Sperry’s wool warehouse listening to your side-kicker make a speech. He is some gravy on delivering himself of audible sounds relating to matters and conclusions,’ says the man.
   “Well, I hope he’ll adjourn, sine qua non, [22 - sine qua non – (лат.) обязательное, непременное условие; то, без чего нельзя обойтись] pretty soon,” says I, “for trade languishes.”
   “Not a customer did we have that afternoon. At six o’clock two Mexicans brought Andy to the saloon lying across the back of a burro. We put him in bed while he still muttered and gesticulated with his hands and feet.
   “Then I locked up the cash and went out to see what had happened. I met a man who told me all about it. Andy had made the finest two hour speech that had ever been heard in Texas, he said, or anywhere else in the world.
   “What was it about?” I asked.
   “Temperance,” says he. “And when he got through, every man in Bird City signed the pledge for a year.”

The Hand that Riles the World

   “Many of our great men,” said I (apropos of many things), “have declared that they owe their success to the aid and encouragement of some brilliant woman.”
   “I know;” said Jeff Peters. “I’ve read in history and mythology about Joan of Arc and Mme. Yale and Mrs Caudle and Eve and other noted females of the past. But, in my opinion, the woman of to-day is of little use in politics or business – what’s she best in, anyway? – men make the best cooks, milliners, nurses, housekeepers, stenographers, clerks, hairdressers and launderers. About the only job left that a woman can beat a man in is female impersonator in vaudeville!”
   “I would have thought,” said I, “that occasionally, anyhow, you would have found the wit and intuition of woman valuable to you in your lines of business?”
   “Now, wouldn’t you,” said Jeff, with an emphatic nod – “wouldn’t you have imagined that? But a woman is an absolutely unreliable partner in any straight swindle. She’s liable to turn honest on you when you are depending upon her most. I tried ’em once.
   “Bill Humble, an old friend of mine in the Territories, conceived the illusion that he wanted to be appointed United States Marshal. At that time me and Andy was doing a square, legitimate business of selling walking canes. If you unscrewed the head of one and turned it up to your mouth a half pint of good rye whiskey would go trickling down your throat to reward you for your act of intelligence. The deputies was annoying me and Andy some, and when Bill spoke to me about his officious aspirations, I saw how the appointment as Marshal might help along the firm of Peters & Tucker.
   “ ‘Jeff,’ says Bill to me, ‘you are a man of learning and education, besides having knowledge and information concerning not only rudiments but facts and attainments.’
   “ ‘I do,’ says I, ‘and I have never regretted it. I am not one,’ says I, ‘who would cheapen education by making it free. Tell me,’ says I, ‘which is of the most value to mankind, literature or horse racing?’
   “ ‘Why-er-, playing the po – I mean, of course, the poets and the great writers have got the call, of course,’ says Bill.
   “ ‘Exactly;’ says I. ‘Then why do the master minds of finance philanthropy,’ says I, ‘charge us $2 to get into a race-track and let us into a library free? Is that distilling into the masses,’ says I, ‘a correct estimate of the relative value of the two means of self-culture and disorder?’
   “ ‘You are arguing outside of my faculties of sense and rhetoric,’ says Bill, ‘what I wanted you to do is to go to Washington and dig out this appointment for me. I haven’t no ideas of cultivation and intrigue. I’m a plain citizen and I need the job.’
   “ ‘I’ve killed seven men,’ says Bill; ‘I’ve got nine children; I’ve been a good Republican ever since the first of May; I can’t read nor write, and I see no reason why I ain’t illegible for the office. And I think your partner, Mr Tucker,’ goes on Bill, ‘is also a man of sufficient ingratiation and connected system of mental delinquency to assist you in securing the appointment. I will give you preliminary,’ says Bill, ‘$1,000 for drinks, bribes and carfare in Washington. If you land the job I will pay you $1,000 more, cash down, and guarantee you impunity in boot-legging whiskey for twelve months. Are you patriotic to the West enough to help me put this thing through the White-washed Wigwam of the Great Father of the most eastern flag station of the Pennsylvania Railroad?’ says Bill.
   “Well, I talked to Andy about it, and he liked the idea immense. Andy was a man of an involved nature. He was never content to plod along, as I was, saying to the peasantry some little tool like a combination steak beater, shoe horn, marcel waver, monkey wrench, nail file, potato masher and multum in parvo [23 - multum in parvo – (лат.) большое в малом] tuning fork.
   Andy had the artistic temper, which is not to be judged as a preacher’s or a moral man’s by purely commercial deflections. So we accepted Bill’s offer, and strikes out for Washington.
   “Says I to Andy, when we get located at a hotel on South Dakota Avenue, 0.5. S. W. ‘Now Andy, for the first time in our lives, we’ve got to do a real dishonest act. Lobbying is something we’ve never been used to; but we’ve got to scandalize ourselves for Bill Humble’s sake. In a straight and legitimate business,’ says I, ‘we could afford to introduce a little foul play and chicanery, but in a disorderly and heinous piece of malpractice like this, it seems to me that the straightforward and aboveboard way is the best. I propose,’ says I, ‘that we hand over $500 of this money to the chairman of the national campaign committee, get a receipt, lay the receipt on the President’s desk and tell him about Bill. The President is a man who would appreciate a candidate who went about getting office that way instead of pulling wires.
   “Andy agreed with me, but after we talked the scheme over with the hotel clerk we give that plan up. He told us that there was only one way to get an appointment in Washington, and that was through a lady lobbyist. He gave us the address of one he recommended, a Mrs Avery, who he said was high up in sociable and diplomatic rings and circles.
   “The next morning at 10 o’clock me and Andy called at her hotel, and was shown up to her reception room. This Mrs Avery was a solace and a balm to the eyesight. She had hair the color of the back of a twenty-dollar gold certificate, blue eyes and a system of beauty that would make the girl on the cover of a July magazine look like a cook on a Monongahela coal barge.
   “She had on a low necked dress covered with silver spangles, and diamond rings and ear bobs. Her arms was bare; and she was using a desk telephone with one hand, and drinking tea with the other.
   “ ‘Well, boys,’ says she after a bit, ‘what is it?’
   “I told her in as few words as possible what we wanted for Bill, and the price we could pay.
   “ ‘Those western appointments,’ says she, ‘are easy. Le’me see, now,’ says she, ‘who could put that through for us. No use fooling with Territorial delegates. I guess,’ says she, ‘that Senator Sniper would be about the man. He’s from somewheres in the West. Let’s see how he stands on my private menu card.’ She takes some papers out of a pigeonhole with the letter ‘S’ over it.
   “ ‘Yes,’ says she, ‘he’s marked with a stat; that means ‘ready to serve.’ Now, let’s see. ‘Age 55; married twice; Presbyterian, likes blondes, Tolstoy, poker and stewed terrapin; sentimental at third bottle of wine.’
   ‘Yes,’ she goes on, ‘I am sure I can have your friend, Mr Bummer, appointed Minister to Brazile.’
   “ ‘Humble,’ says I: ‘And United States Marshal was the berth.’
   “ ‘Oh, yes,’ says Mrs Avery. ‘I have so many deals of this sort I sometimes get them confused. Give me all the memoranda you have of the case, Mr Peters, and come back in four days. I think it can be arranged by then.’
   “So me and Andy goes back to our hotel and waits. Andy walks up and down and chews the left end of his mustache.
   “ ‘A woman of high intellect and perfect beauty is the rare thing, Jeff,’ says he.
   “ ‘As rare,’ says I, ‘as an omelet made from the eggs of the fabulous bird known as the epidermis,’ says I.
   “ ‘A woman like that,’ says Andy, ‘ought to lead a man to the highest positions of opulence and fame.’
   “ ‘I misdoubt,’ says I, ‘if any woman ever helped a man to secure a job any more than to have his meals ready promptly and spread a report that the other candidate’s wife had once been a shoplifter. They are no more adapted for business and politics,’ says I, ‘than Algernon Charles Swinburne is to be floor manager at one of Chuck Connor’s annual balls. I know,’ says I to Andy, ‘that sometimes a woman seems to step out into the kalsomine light as the chargé d’affaires [24 - chargé d'affaires – (фр.) поверенный в делах] of her man’s political job, but how does it come out? Say, they have a neat little berth somewhere as foreign consul of record to Afghanistan or lock-keeper on the Delaware and Raritan Canal. One day this man finds his wife putting on her overshoes and three months’ supply of bird seed into the canary’s cage. ‘Sioux Falls?’ he asks with a kind of hopeful look in his eye.
   ‘No, Arthur,’ says she, ‘Washington. We’re wasted here,’ says she. ‘You ought to be Toady Extraordinary to the Court of St. Bridget or Head Porter of the Island of Porto Rico. I’m going to see about it.’
   “ ‘Then this lady,’ I says to Andy, ‘moves against the authorities at Washington with her baggage and munitions, consisting of five dozen indiscriminating letters written to her by a member of the Cabinet when she was 15; a letter of introduction from King Leopold to the Smithsonian Institution, and a pink silk costume with canary colored spats.
   “ ‘Well, and then what?’ I goes. ‘She has the let-ters printed in the evening papers that match her costume, she lectures at an informal tea given in the palm room of the B. & O. [25 - В. & О. – железная дорога Балтимор – Огайо] Depot and then calls on the President. The ninth Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Labor, the first aide-de-camp [26 - aide-de-camp – (фр.) адъютант] of the Blue Room and an unidentified colored man are waiting there to grasp her by the hands – and feet. They carry her out to S. W. B. street and leave her on a cellar door. That ends it. The next time we hear of her she is writing postal cards to the Chinese Minister asking him to get Arthur a job in a tea store.’
   “ ‘Then,’ says Andy, ‘You don’t think Mrs Avery will land the Marshalship for Bill?’
   ‘I do not,’ says I. ‘I do not wish to be a septic, but I doubt if she can do as well as you and me could have done.’
   ‘I don’t agree with you,’ says Andy. ‘I’ll bet you she does. I’m proud of having a higher opinion of the talent and the powers of negotiation of ladies.’
   “We was back at Mrs Avery’s hotel at the time she appointed. She was looking pretty and fine enough, as far as that went, to make any man let her name every officer in the country. But I hadn’t much faith in looks, so I was certainly surprised when she pulls out a document with the great seal of the United States on it, and ‘William Henry Humble’ in a fine, big hand on the back.
   ‘You might have had it the next day, boys,’ says Mrs Avery, smiling. ‘I hadn’t the slightest trouble in getting it,’ says she. ‘I just asked for it, that’s all. Now, I’d like to talk to you a while,’ she goes on, ‘but I’m awfully busy, and I know you’ll excuse me. I’ve got an Ambassadorship, two Consulates and a dozen other minor applications to look after. I can hardly find time to sleep at all. You’ll give my compliments to Mr Humble when you get home, of course.’
   “Well, I handed her the $1000 which she pitched into her desk drawer without counting. I put Bill’s appointment in my pocket and me and Andy made our adieus.
   “We started back for the Territory the same day. We wired Bill: ‘Job landed; get the tall glasses ready,’ and we felt pretty good.
   “Andy joshed me all the way about how little I knew about women.
   “ ‘All right,’ says I. ‘I’ll admit that she surprised me. But it’s the first time I ever knew one of’em to manipulate a piece of business on time without getting it bungled up in some way,’ says I.
   “Down about the edge of Arkansas I got out Bill’s appointment and looked it over, and then I handed it to Andy to read. Andy read it but didn’t add any remarks to my silence.
   “The paper was for Bill, all right, and a genuine document, but it appointed him post-master of Dade City, Fla. [27 - Florida]
   “Me and Andy got off the train at Little Rock and sent Bill’s appointment to him by mail. Then we struck northeast toward Lake Superior.
   “I never saw Bill Humble after that.”

Roads of Destiny

     I go to seek on many roads
     What is to be. True heart and strong, with love to light —
     Will they not bear me in the fight
     To order, shun or wield or mould
     My Destiny?

Unpublished Poems of David Mignot

   The song was over. The words were David’s; the air, one of the countryside. The company about the inn table applauded heartily, for the young poet paid for the wine. Only the notary, M. Papineau, shook his head a little at the lines, for he was a man of books, and he had not drunk with the rest.
   David went out into the village street, where the night air drove the wine vapour from his head. And then he remembered that he and Yvonne had quarrelled that day, and that he had resolved to leave his home that night to seek fame and honour in the great world outside.
   “When my poems are on every man’s tongue,” he told himself, in a fine exhilaration, “she will, perhaps, think of the hard words she spoke this day.”
   Except the roisterers in the tavern, the village folk were abed. David crept softly into his room in the shed of his father’s cottage and made a bundle of his small store of clothing. With this upon a staff, he set his face outward upon the road that ran from Vernoy.
   He passed his father’s herd of sheep, huddled in their nightly pen – the sheep he herded daily, leaving them to scatter while he wrote verses on scraps of paper. He saw a light yet shining in Yvonne’s window, and a weakness shook his purpose of a sudden. Perhaps that light meant that she rued, sleepless, her anger, and that morning might – But, no! His decision was made. Vernoy was no place for him. Not one soul there could share his thoughts. Out along that road lay his fate and his future.
   Three leagues across the dim, moonlit champaign ran the road, straight as a ploughman’s furrow. It was believed in the village that the road ran to Paris, at least; and this name the poet whispered often to himself as he walked. Never so far from Vernoy had David travelled before.
//-- The Left Branch --//
   Three leagues, then, the road ran, and turned into a puzzle. It joined with another and a larger road at right angles. David stood, uncertain, for a while, and then took the road to the left.
   Upon this more important highway were, imprinted in the dust, wheel tracks left by the recent passage of some vehicle. Some half an hour later these traces were verified by the sight of a ponderous carriage mired in a little brook at the bottom of a steep hill. The driver and postilions were shouting and tugging at the horses’ bridles. On the road at one side stood a huge, black-clothed man and a slender lady wrapped in a long, light cloak.
   David saw the lack of skill in the efforts of the servants. He quietly assumed control of the work. He directed the outriders to cease their clamour at the horses and to exercise their strength upon the wheels. The driver alone urged the animals with his familiar voice; David himself heaved a powerful shoulder at the rear of the carriage, and with one harmonious tug the great vehicle rolled up on solid ground. The outriders climbed to their places.
   David stood for a moment upon one foot. The huge gentleman waved a hand. “You will enter the carriage,” he said, in a voice large, like himself, but smoothed by art and habit. Obedience belonged in the path of such a voice. Brief as was the young poet’s hesitation, it was cut shorter still by a renewal of the command. David’s foot went to the step. In the darkness he perceived dimly the form of the lady upon the rear seat. He was about to seat himself opposite, when the voice again swayed him to its will. “You will sit at the lady’s side.”
   The gentleman swung his great weight to the forward seat. The carriage proceeded up the hill. The lady was shrunk, silent, into her corner. David could not estimate whether she was old or young, but a delicate, mild perfume from her clothes stirred his poet’s fancy to the belief that there was loveliness beneath the mystery. Here was an adventure such as he had often imagined. But as yet he held no key to it, for no word was spoken while he sat with his impenetrable companions.
   In an hour’s time David perceived through the window that the vehicle traversed the street of some town. Then it stopped in front of a closed and darkened house, and a postilion alighted to hammer impatiently upon the door. A latticed window above flew wide and a nightcapped head popped out.
   “Who are ye that disturb honest folk at this time of night? My house is closed. ’Tis too late for profitable travellers to be abroad. Cease knocking at my door, and be off.”
   “Open!” spluttered the postilion, loudly; “open for Monsiegneur the Marquis de Beaupertuys.”
   “Ah!” cried the voice above. “Ten thousand pardons, my lord. I did not know – the hour is so late – at once shall the door be opened, and the house placed at my lord’s disposal.”
   Inside was heard the clink of chain and bar, and the door was flung open. Shivering with chill and apprehension, the landlord of the Silver Flagon stood, half clad, candle in hand, upon the threshold.
   David followed the Marquis out of the carriage. “Assist the lady,” he was ordered. The poet obeyed. He felt her small hand tremble as he guided her descent. “Into the house,” was the next command.
   The room was the long dining-hall of the tavern. A great oak table ran down its length. The huge gentleman seated himself in a chair at the nearer end. The lady sank into another against the wall, with an air of great weariness. David stood, considering how best he might now take his leave and continue upon his way.
   “My lord,” said the landlord, bowing to the floor, “h-had I ex-expected this honour, entertainment would have been ready. T-t-there is wine and cold fowl and m-m-maybe – ”
   “Candles,” said the marquis, spreading the fingers of one plump white hand in a gesture he had.
   “Y-yes, my lord.” He fetched half a dozen candles, lighted them, and set them upon the table.
   “If monsieur would, perhaps, deign to taste a certain Burgundy – there is a cask – ”
   “Candles,” said monsieur, spreading his fingers.
   “Assuredly – quickly – I fly, my lord.”
   A dozen more lighted candles shone in the hall. The great bulk of the marquis overflowed his chair. He was dressed in fine black from head to foot save for the snowy ruffles at his wrist and throat. Even the hilt and scabbard of his sword were black. His expression was one of sneering pride. The ends of an upturned moustache reached nearly to his mocking eyes.
   The lady sat motionless, and now David perceived that she was young, and possessed of pathetic and appealing beauty. He was startled from the contemplation of her forlorn loveliness by the booming voice of the marquis.
   “What is your name and pursuit?”
   “David Mignot. I am a poet.”
   The moustache of the marquis curled nearer to his eyes.
   “How do you live?”
   “I am also a shepherd; I guarded my father’s flock,” David answered, with his head high, but a flush upon his cheek.
   “Then listen, master shepherd and poet, to the fortune you have blundered upon to-night. This lady is my niece, Mademoiselle Lucie de Varennes. She is of noble descent and is possessed of ten thousand francs a year in her own right. As to her charms, you have but to observe for yourself. If the inventory pleases your shepherd’s heart, she becomes your wife at a word. Do not interrupt me. To-night I conveyed her to the chateau of the Comte de Villemaur, to whom her hand had been promised. Guests were present; the priest was waiting; her marriage to one eligible in rank and fortune was ready to be accomplished. At the alter this demoiselle, so meek and dutiful, turned upon me like a leopardess, charged me with cruelty and crimes, and broke, before the gaping priest, the troth I had plighted for her. I swore there and then, by ten thousand devils, that she should marry the first man we met after leaving the chateau, be he prince, charcoal-burner, or thief. You, shepherd, are the first. Mademoiselle must be wed this night. If not you, then another. You have ten minutes in which to make your decision. Do not vex me with words or questions. Ten minutes, shepherd; and they are speeding.”
   The marquis drummed loudly with his white fingers upon the table. He sank into a veiled attitude of waiting. It was as if some great house had shut its doors and windows against approach. David would have spoken, but the huge man’s bearing stopped his tongue. Instead, he stood by the lady’s chair and bowed.
   “Mademoiselle,” he said, and he marvelled to find his words flowing easily before so much elegance and beauty. “You have heard me say I was a shepherd. I have also had the fancy, at times, that I am a poet. If it be the test of a poet to adore and cherish the beautiful, that fancy is now strengthened. Can I serve you in any way, mademoiselle?”
   The young woman looked up at him with eyes dry and mournful. His frank, glowing face, made serious by the gravity of the adventure, his strong, straight figure and the liquid sympathy in his blue eyes, perhaps, also, her imminent need of long-denied help and kindness, thawed her to sudden tears.
   “Monsieur,” she said, in low tones, “you look to be true and kind. He is my uncle, the brother of my father, and my only relative. He loved my mother, and he hates me because I am like her. He has made my life one long terror. I am afraid of his very looks, and never before dared to disobey him. But to-night he would have married me to a man three times my age. You will forgive me for bringing this vexation upon you, monsieur. You will, of course, decline this mad act he tries to force upon you. But let me thank you for your generous words, at least. I have had none spoken to me in so long.”
   There was now something more than generosity in the poet’s eyes. Poet he must have been, for Yvonne was forgotten; this fine, new loveliness held him with its freshness and grace. The subtle perfume from her filled him with strange emotions. His tender look fell warmly upon her. She leaned to it, thirstily.
   “Ten minutes,” said David, “is given me in which to do what I would devote years to achieve. I will not say I pity you, mademoiselle; it would not be true – I love you. I cannot ask love from you yet, but let me rescue you from this cruel man, and, in time, love may come. I think I have a future; I will not always be a shepherd. For the present I will cherish you with all my heart and make your life less sad. Will you trust your fate to me, mademoiselle?”
   “Ah, you would sacrifice yourself from pity!”
   “From love. The time is almost up, mademoiselle.”
   “You will regret it, and despise me.”
   “I will live only to make you happy, and myself worthy of you.”
   Her fine small hand crept into his from beneath her cloak.
   “I will trust you,” she breathed, “with my life. And – and love – may not be so far off as you think. Tell him. Once away from the power of his eyes I may forget.”
   David went and stood before the marquis. The black figure stirred, and the mocking eyes glanced at the great hall clock.
   “Two minutes to spare. A shepherd requires eight minutes to decide whether he will accept a bride of beauty and income! Speak up, shepherd, do you consent to become mademoiselle’s husband?”
   “Mademoiselle,” said David, standing proudly, “has done me the honour to yield to my request that she become my wife.”
   “Well said!” said the marquis. “You have yet the making of a courtier in you, master shepherd. Mademoiselle could have drawn a worse prize, after all. And now to be done with the affair as quick as the Church and the devil will allow!”
   He struck the table soundly with his sword hilt. The landlord came, knee-shaking, bringing more candles in the hope of anticipating the great lord’s whims. “Fetch a priest,” said the marquis, “a priest; do you understand? In ten minutes have a priest here, or – ”
   The landlord dropped his candles and flew.
   The priest came, heavy-eyed and ruffled. He made David Mignot and Lucie de Verennes man and wife, pocketed a gold piece that the marquis tossed him, and shuffled out again into the night.
   “Wine,” ordered the marquis, spreading his ominous fingers at the host.
   “Fill glasses,” he said, when it was brought. He stood up at the head of the table in the candlelight, a black mountain of venom and conceit, with something like the memory of an old love turned to poison in his eyes, as it fell upon his niece.
   “Monsieur Mignot,” he said, raising his wineglass, “drink after I say this to you: You have taken to be your wife one who will make your life a foul and wretched thing. The blood in her is an inheritance running black lies and red ruin. She will bring you shame and anxiety. The devil that descended to her is there in her eyes and skin and mouth that stoop even to beguile a peasant. There is your promise, monsieur poet, for a happy life. Drink your wine. At last, mademoiselle, I am rid of you.”
   The marquis drank. A little grievous cry, as if from a sudden wound, came from the girl’s lips. David, with his glass in his hand, stepped forward three paces and faced the marquis. There was little of a shepherd in his bearing.
   “Just now,” he said, calmly, “you did me the honor to call me monsieur. May I hope, therefore that my marriage to mademoiselle has placed me somewhat nearer to you in – let us say, reflected rank – has given me the right to stand more as an equal to monseigneur in a certain little piece of business I have in my mind?”
   “You may hope, shepherd,” sneered the marquis.
   “Then,” said David, dashing his glass of wine into the contemptuous eyes that mocked him, “perhaps you will condescend to fight me.”
   The fury of the great lord outbroke in one sudden curse like a blast from a horn. He tore his sword from its black sheath; he called to the hovering landlord: “A sword there, for this lout!” He turned to the lady, with a laugh that chilled her heart, and said: “You put much labour upon me, madame. It seems I must find you a husband and make you a widow in the same night.”
   “I know not sword-play,” said David. He flushed to make the confession before his lady.
   “I know not sword-play,” mimicked the marquis. “Shall we fight like peasants with oaken cudgels? Hola! Francois, my pistols!”
   A postilion brought two shining great pistols ornamented with carven silver, from the carriage holsters. The marquis tossed one upon the table near David’s hand. “To the other end of the table,” he cried; “even a shepherd may pull a trigger. Few of them attain the honour to die by the weapon of a De Beaupertuys.”
   The shepherd and the marquis faced each other from the ends of the long table. The landlord, in an ague of terror, clutched the air and stammered: “M-M-Monseigneur, for the love of Christ! not in my house! – do not spill blood – it will ruin my custom – ” The look of the marquis, threatening him, paralyzed his tongue.
   “Coward,” cried the lord of Beaupertuys, “cease chattering your teeth long enough to give the word for us, if you can.”
   Mine host’s knees smote the floor. He was without a vocabulary. Even sounds were beyond him. Still, by gestures he seemed to beseech peace in the name of his house and custom.
   “I will give the word,” said the lady, in a clear voice. She went up to David and kissed him sweetly. Her eyes were sparkling bright, and colour had come to her cheek. She stood against the wall, and the two men levelled their pistols for her count.
   “Un – deux – trois!”
   The two reports came so nearly together that the candles flickered but once. The marquis stood, smiling, the fingers of his left hand resting, outspread, upon the end of the table. David remained erect, and turned his head very slowly, searching for his wife with his eyes. Then, as a garment falls from where it is hung, he sank, crumpled, upon the floor.
   With a little cry of terror and despair, the widowed maid ran and stooped above him. She found his wound, and then looked up with her old look of pale melancholy. “Through his heart,” she whispered. “Oh, his heart!”
   “Come,” boomed the great voice of the marquis, “out with you to the carriage! Daybreak shall not find you on my hands. Wed you shall be again, and to a living husband, this night. The next we come upon, my lady, highwayman or peasant. If the road yields no other, then the churl that opens my gates. Out with you into the carriage!”
   The marquis, implacable and huge, the lady wrapped again in the mystery of her cloak, the postilion bearing the weapons – all moved out to the waiting carriage. The sound of its ponderous wheels rolling away echoed through the slumbering village. In the hall of the Silver Flagon the distracted landlord wrung his hands above the slain poet’s body, while the flames of the four and twenty candles danced and flickered on the table.
//-- The Right Branch --//
   Three leagues, then, the road ran, and turned into a puzzle. It joined with another and a larger road at right angles. David stood, uncertain, for a while, and then took the road to the right.
   Whither it led he knew not, but he was resolved to leave Vernoy far behind that night. He travelled a league and then passed a large chateau which showed testimony of recent entertainment. Lights shone from every window; from the great stone gateway ran a tracery of wheel tracks drawn in the dust by the vehicles of the guests.
   Three leagues farther and David was weary. He rested and slept for a while on a bed of pine boughs at the roadside. Then up and on again along the unknown way.
   Thus for five days he travelled the great road, sleeping upon Nature’s balsamic beds or in peasants’ ricks, eating of their black, hospitable bread, drinking from streams or the willing cup of the goatherd.
   At length he crossed a great bridge and set his foot within the smiling city that has crushed or crowned more poets than all the rest of the world. His breath came quickly as Paris sang to him in a little undertone her vital chant of greeting – the hum of voice and foot and wheel.
   High up under the eaves of an old house in the Rue Conti, David paid for lodging, and set himself, in a wooden chair, to his poems. The street, once sheltering citizens of import and consequence, was now given over to those who ever follow in the wake of decline.
   The houses were tall and still possessed of a ruined dignity, but many of them were empty save for dust and the spider. By night there was the clash of steel and the cries of brawlers straying restlessly from inn to inn. Where once gentility abode was now but a rancid and rude incontinence. But here David found housing commensurate to his scant purse. Daylight and candlelight found him at pen and paper.
   One afternoon he was returning from a foraging trip to the lower world, with bread and curds and a bottle of thin wine. Halfway up his dark stairway he met – or rather came upon, for she rested on the stair – a young woman of a beauty that should balk even the justice of a poet’s imagination. A loose, dark cloak, flung open, showed a rich gown beneath. Her eyes changed swiftly with every little shade of thought. Within one moment they would be round and artless like a child’s, and long and cozening like a gypsy’s. One hand raised her gown, undraping a little shoe, high-heeled, with its ribbons dangling, untied. So heavenly she was, so unfitted to stoop, so qualified to charm and command! Perhaps she had seen David coming, and had waited for his help there.
   Ah, would monsieur pardon that she occupied the stairway, but the shoe! – the naughty shoe! Alas! it would not remain tied. Ah! if monsieur would be so gracious!
   The poet’s fingers trembled as he tied the contrary ribbons. Then he would have fled from the danger of her presence, but the eyes grew long and cozening, like a gypsy’s, and held him. He leaned against the balustrade, clutching his bottle of sour wine.
   “You have been so good,” she said, smiling. “Does monsieur, perhaps, live in the house?”
   “Yes, madame. I–I think so, madame.”
   “Perhaps in the third story, then?”
   “No, madame; higher up.”
   The lady fluttered her fingers with the least possible gesture of impatience.
   “Pardon. Certainly I am not discreet in asking. Monsieur will forgive me? It is surely not becoming that I should inquire where he lodges.”
   “Madame, do not say so. I live in the – ”
   “No, no, no; do not tell me. Now I see that I erred. But I cannot lose the interest I feel in this house and all that is in it. Once it was my home. Often I come here but to dream of those happy days again. Will you let that be my excuse?”
   “Let me tell you, then, for you need no excuse,” stammered the poet. “I live in the top floor – the small room where the stairs turn.”
   “In the front room?” asked the lady, turning her head sidewise.
   “The rear, madame.”
   The lady sighed, as if with relief.
   “I will detain you no longer then, monsieur,” she said, employing the round and artless eye. “Take good care of my house. Alas! only the memories of it are mine now. Adieu, and accept my thanks for your courtesy.”
   She was gone, leaving but a smile and a trace of sweet perfume. David climbed the stairs as one in slumber. But he awoke from it, and the smile and the perfume lingered with him and never afterward did either seem quite to leave him. This lady of whom he knew nothing drove him to lyrics of eyes, chansons of swiftly conceived love, odes to curling hair, and sonnets to slippers on slender feet.
   Poet he must have been, for Yvonne was forgotten; this fine, new loveliness held him with its freshness and grace. The subtle perfume about her filled him with strange emotions.
//-- * * * --//
   On a certain night three persons were gathered about a table in a room on the third floor of the same house. Three chairs and the table and a lighted candle upon it was all the furniture. One of the persons was a huge man, dressed in black. His expression was one of sneering pride. The ends of his upturned moustache reached nearly to his mocking eyes. Another was a lady, young and beautiful, with eyes that could be round and artless, as a child’s, or long and cozening, like a gypsy’s, but were now keen and ambitious, like any other conspirator’s. The third was a man of action, a combatant, a bold and impatient executive, breathing fire and steel. He was addressed by the others as Captain Desrolles.
   This man struck the table with his fist, and said, with controlled violence:
   “To-night. To-night as he goes to midnight mass. I am tired of the plotting that gets nowhere. I am sick of signals and ciphers and secret meetings and such baragouin. Let us be honest traitors. If France is to be rid of him, let us kill in the open, and not hunt with snares and traps. To-night, I say. I back my words. My hand will do the deed. To-night, as he goes to mass.”
   The lady turned upon him a cordial look. Woman, however wedded to plots, must ever thus bow to rash courage. The big man stroked his upturned moustache.
   “Dear captain,” he said, in a great voice, softened by habit, “this time I agree with you. Nothing is to be gained by waiting. Enough of the palace guards belong to us to make the endeavour a safe one.”
   “To-night,” repeated Captain Desrolles, again striking the table. “You have heard me, marquis; my hand will do the deed.”
   “But now,” said the huge man, softly, “comes a question. Word must be sent to our partisans in the palace, and a signal agreed upon. Our stanchest men must accompany the royal carriage. At this hour what messenger can penetrate so far as the south doorway? Ribouet is stationed there; once a message is placed in his hands, all will go well.”
   “I will send the message,” said the lady.
   “You, countess?” said the marquis, raising his eyebrows. “Your devotion is great, we know, but – ”
   “Listen!” exclaimed the lady, rising and resting her hands upon the table; “in a garret of this house lives a youth from the provinces as guileless and tender as the lambs he tended there. I have met him twice or thrice upon the stairs. I questioned him, fearing that he might dwell too near the room in which we are accustomed to meet. He is mine, if I will. He writes poems in his garret, and I think he dreams of me. He will do what I say. He shall take the message to the palace.”
   The marquis rose from his chair and bowed. “You did not permit me to finish my sentence, countess,” he said. “I would have said: Your devotion is great, but your wit and charm are infinitely greater.”
   While the conspirators were thus engaged, David was polishing some lines addressed to his amorette d’escalier. He heard a timorous knock at his door, and opened it, with a great throb, to behold her there, panting as one in straits, with eyes wide open and artless, like a child’s.
   “Monsieur,” she breathed, “I come to you in distress. I believe you to be good and true, and I know of no other help. How I flew through the streets among the swaggering men! Monsieur, my mother is dying. My uncle is a captain of guards in the palace of the king. Some one must fly to bring him. May I hope – ”
   “Mademoiselle,” interrupted Davis, his eyes shining with the desire to do her service, “your hopes shall be my wings. Tell me how I may reach him.”
   The lady thrust a sealed paper into his hand.
   “Go to the south gate – the south gate, mind – and say to the guards there, The falcon has left his nest. They will pass you, and you will go to the south entrance to the palace. Repeat the words, and give this letter to the man who will reply “Let him strike when he will.” This is the password, monsieur, entrusted to me by my uncle, for now when the country is disturbed and men plot against the king’s life, no one without it can gain entrance to the palace grounds after nightfall. If you will, monsieur, take him this letter so that my mother may see him before she closes her eyes.”
   “Give it me,” said David, eagerly. “But shall I let you return home through the streets alone so late? I – ”
   “No, no – fly. Each moment is like a precious jewel. Some time,” said the lady, with eyes long and cozening, like a gypsy’s, “I will try to thank you for your goodness.”
   The poet thrust the letter into his breast, and bounded down the stairway. The lady, when he was gone, returned to the room below.
   The eloquent eyebrows of the marquis interrogated her.
   “He is gone,” she said, “as fleet and stupid as one of his own sheep, to deliver it.”
   The table shook again from the batter of Captain Desrolles’s fist.
   “Sacred name!” he cried; “I have left my pistols behind! I can trust no others.”
   “Take this,” said the marquis, drawing from beneath his cloak a shining, great weapon, ornamented with carven silver. “There are none truer. But guard it closely, for it bears my arms and crest, and already I am suspected. Me, I must put many leagues between myself and Paris this night. To-morrow must find me in my chateau. After you, dear countess.”
   The marquis puffed out the candle. The lady, well cloaked, and the two gentlemen softly descended the stairway and flowed into the crowd that roamed along the narrow pavements of the Rue Conti.
   David sped. At the south gate of the king’s residence a halberd was laid to his breast, but he turned its point with the words; “The falcon has left his nest.”
   “Pass, brother,” said the guard, “and go quickly.”
   On the south steps of the palace they moved to seize him, but again the mot de passe charmed the watchers. One among them stepped forward and began: “Let him strike – ” but a flurry among the guards told of a surprise. A man of keen look and soldierly stride suddenly pressed through them and seized the letter which David held in his hand. “Come with me,” he said, and led him inside the great hall. Then he tore open the letter and read it. He beckoned to a man uniformed as an officer of musketeers, who was passing. “Captain Tetreau, you will have the guards at the south entrance and the south gate arrested and confined. Place men known to be loyal in their places.” To David he said: “Come with me.”
   He conducted him through a corridor and an anteroom into a spacious chamber, where a melancholy man, sombrely dressed, sat brooding in a great, leather-covered chair. To that man he said:
   “Sire, I have told you that the palace is as full of traitors and spies as a sewer is of rats. You have thought, sire, that it was my fancy. This man penetrated to your very door by their connivance. He bore a letter which I have intercepted. I have brought him here that your majesty may no longer think my zeal excessive.”
   “I will question him,” said the king, stirring in his chair. He looked at David with heavy eyes dulled by an opaque film. The poet bent his knee.
   “From where do you come?” asked the king.
   “From the village of Vernoy, in the province of Eure-et-Loir, sire.”
   “What do you follow in Paris?”
   “I–I would be a poet, sire.”
   “What did you in Vernoy?”
   “I minded my father’s flock of sheep.”
   The king stirred again, and the film lifted from his eyes.
   “Ah! in the fields!”
   “Yes, sire.”
   “You lived in the fields; you went out in the cool of the morning and lay among the hedges in the grass. The flock distributed itself upon the hillside; you drank of the living stream; you ate your sweet, brown bread in the shade, and you listened, doubtless, to blackbirds piping in the grove. Is not that so, shepherd?”
   “It is, sire,” answered David, with a sigh; “and to the bees at the flowers, and, maybe, to the grape gatherers singing on the hill.”
   “Yes, yes,” said the king, impatiently; “maybe to them; but surely to the blackbirds. They whistled often, in the grove, did they not?”
   “Nowhere, sire, so sweetly as in Eure-et-Loir. I have endeavored to express their song in some verses that I have written.”
   “Can you repeat those verses?” asked the king, eagerly. “A long time ago I listened to the blackbirds. It would be something better than a kingdom if one could rightly construe their song. And at night you drove the sheep to the fold and then sat, in peace and tranquillity, to your pleasant bread. Can you repeat those verses, shepherd?”
   “They run this way, sire,” said David, with respectful ardour:
   “ ‘Lazy shepherd, see your lambkins / Skip, ecstatic, on the mead; See the firs dance in the breezes, / Hear Pan blowing at his reed.
   “Hear us calling from the tree-tops, / See us swoop upon your flock; / Yield us wool to make our nests warm / In the branches of the – ’ ”
   “If it please your majesty,” interrupted a harsh voice, “I will ask a question or two of this rhymester. There is little time to spare. I crave pardon, sire, if my anxiety for your safety offends.”
   “The loyalty,” said the king, “of the Duke d’Aumale is too well proven to give offence.” He sank into his chair, and the film came again over his eyes.
   “First,” said the duke, “I will read you the letter he brought:
   ‘To-night is the anniversary of the dauphin’s death. If he goes, as is his custom, to midnight mass to pray for the soul of his son, the falcon will strike, at the corner of the Rue Esplanade. If this be his intention, set a red light in the upper room at the southwest corner of the palace, that the falcon may take heed.’
   “Peasant,” said the duke, sternly, “you have heard these words. Who gave you this message to bring?”
   “My lord duke,” said David, sincerely, “I will tell you. A lady gave it me. She said her mother was ill, and that this writing would fetch her uncle to her bedside. I do not know the meaning of the letter, but I will swear that she is beautiful and good.”
   “Describe the woman,” commanded the duke, “and how you came to be her dupe.”
   “Describe her!” said David with a tender smile. “You would command words to perform miracles. Well, she is made of sunshine and deep shade. She is slender, like the alders, and moves with their grace. Her eyes change while you gaze into them; now round, and then half shut as the sun peeps between two clouds. When she comes, heaven is all about her; when she leaves, there is chaos and a scent of hawthorn blossoms. She came to see me in the Rue Conti, number twenty-nine.”
   “It is the house,” said the duke, turning to the king, “that we have been watching. Thanks to the poet’s tongue, we have a picture of the infamous Countess Quebedaux.”
   “Sire and my lord duke,” said David, earnestly, “I hope my poor words have done no injustice. I have looked into that lady’s eyes. I will stake my life that she is an angel, letter or no letter.”
   The duke looked at him steadily. “I will put you to the proof,” he said, slowly. “Dressed as the king, you shall, yourself, attend mass in his carriage at midnight. Do you accept the test?”
   David smiled. “I have looked into her eyes,” he said. “I had my proof there. Take yours how you will.”
   Half an hour before twelve the Duke d’Aumale, with his own hands, set a red lamp in a southwest window of the palace. At ten minutes to the hour, David, leaning on his arm, dressed as the king, from top to toe, with his head bowed in his cloak, walked slowly from the royal apartments to the waiting carriage. The duke assisted him inside and closed the door. The carriage whirled away along its route to the cathedral.
   On the qui vive [28 - on the qui vive – настороже] in a house at the corner of the Rue Esplanade was Captain Tetreau with twenty men, ready to pounce upon the conspirators when they should appear.
   But it seemed that, for some reason, the plotters had slightly altered their plans. When the royal carriage had reached the Rue Christopher, one square nearer than the Rue Esplanade, forth from it burst Captain Desrolles, with his band of would-be regicides, and assailed the equipage. The guards upon the carriage, though surprised at the premature attack, descended and fought valiantly. The noise of conflict attracted the force of Captain Tetreau, and they came pelting down the street to the rescue. But, in the meantime, the desperate Desrolles had torn open the door of the king’s carriage, thrust his weapon against the body of the dark figure inside, and fired.
   Now, with loyal reinforcements at hand, the street rang with cries and the rasp of steel, but the frightened horses had dashed away. Upon the cushions lay the dead body of the poor mock king and poet, slain by a ball from the pistol of Monseigneur, the Marquis de Beaupertuys.
//-- The Main Road --//
   Three leagues, then, the road ran, and turned into a puzzle. It joined with another and a larger road at right angles. David stood, uncertain, for a while, and then sat himself to rest upon its side.
   Whither these roads led he knew not. Either way there seemed to lie a great world full of chance and peril. And then, sitting there, his eye fell upon a bright star, one that he and Yvonne had named for theirs. That set him thinking of Yvonne, and he wondered if he had not been too hasty. Why should he leave her and his home because a few hot words had come between them? Was love so brittle a thing that jealousy, the very proof of it, could break it? Mornings always brought a cure for the little heartaches of evening. There was yet time for him to return home without any one in the sweetly sleeping village of Vernoy being the wiser. His heart was Yvonne’s; there where he had lived always he could write his poems and find his happiness.
   David rose, and shook off his unrest and the wild mood that had tempted him. He set his face steadfastly back along the road he had come. By the time he had retravelled the road to Vernoy, his desire to rove was gone. He passed the sheepfold, and the sheep scurried, with a drumming flutter, at his late footsteps, warming his heart by the homely sound. He crept without noise into his little room and lay there, thankful that his feet had escaped the distress of new roads that night.
   How well he knew woman’s heart! The next evening Yvonne was at the well in the road where the young congregated in order that the cure might have business. The corner of her eye was engaged in a search for David, albeit her set mouth seemed unrelenting. He saw the look; braved the mouth, drew from it a recantation and, later, a kiss as they walked homeward together.
   Three months afterwards they were married. David’s father was shrewd and prosperous. He gave them a wedding that was heard of three leagues away. Both the young people were favourites in the village. There was a procession in the streets, a dance on the green; they had the marionettes and a tumbler out from Dreux to delight the guests.
   Then a year, and David’s father died. The sheep and the cottage descended to him. He already had the seemliest wife in the village. Yvonne’s milk pails and her brass kettles were bright – ouf! they blinded you in the sun when you passed that way. But you must keep your eyes upon her yard, for her flower beds were so neat and gay they restored to you your sight. And you might hear her sing, aye, as far as the double chestnut tree above Pere Gruneau’s blacksmith forge.
   But a day came when David drew out paper from a long-shut drawer, and began to bite the end of a pencil. Spring had come again and touched his heart. Poet he must have been, for now Yvonne was well-nigh forgotten. This fine new loveliness of earth held him with its witchery and grace. The perfume from her woods and meadows stirred him strangely. Daily had he gone forth with his flock, and brought it safe at night. But now he stretched himself under the hedge and pieced words together on his bits of paper. The sheep strayed, and the wolves, perceiving that difficult poems make easy mutton, ventured from the woods and stole his lambs.
   David’s stock of poems grew longer and his flock smaller. Yvonne’s nose and temper waxed sharp and her talk blunt. Her pans and kettles grew dull, but her eyes had caught their flash. She pointed out to the poet that his neglect was reducing the flock and bringing woe upon the household. David hired a boy to guard the sheep, locked himself in the little room at the top of the cottage, and wrote more poems. The boy, being a poet by nature, but not furnished with an outlet in the way of writing, spent his time in slumber. The wolves lost no time in discovering that poetry and sleep are practically the same; so the flock steadily grew smaller. Yvonne’s ill temper increased at an equal rate. Sometimes she would stand in the yard and rail at David through his high window. Then you could hear her as far as the double chestnut tree above Pere Gruneau’s blacksmith forge.
   M. Papineau, the kind, wise, meddling old notary, saw this, as he saw everything at which his nose pointed. He went to David, fortified himself with a great pinch of snuff, and said:
   “Friend Mignot, I affixed the seal upon the marriage certificate of your father. It would distress me to be obliged to attest a paper signifying the bankruptcy of his son. But that is what you are coming to. I speak as an old friend. Now, listen to what I have to say. You have your heart set, I perceive, upon poetry. At Dreux, I have a friend, one Monsieur Bril – Georges Bril. He lives in a little cleared space in a houseful of books. He is a learned man; he visits Paris each year; he himself has written books. He will tell you when the catacombs were made, how they found out the names of the stars, and why the plover has a long bill. The meaning and the form of poetry is to him as intelligent as the baa of a sheep is to you. I will give you a letter to him, and you shall take him your poems and let him read them. Then you will know if you shall write more, or give your attention to your wife and business.”
   “Write the letter,” said David, “I am sorry you did not speak of this sooner.”
   At sunrise the next morning he was on the road to Dreux with the precious roll of poems under his arm. At noon he wiped the dust from his feet at the door of Monsieur Bril. That learned man broke the seal of M. Papineau’s letter, and sucked up its contents through his gleaming spectacles as the sun draws water. He took David inside to his study and sat him down upon a little island beat upon by a sea of books.
   Monsieur Bril had a conscience. He flinched not even at a mass of manuscript the thickness of a finger-length and rolled to an incorrigible curve. He broke the back of the roll against his knee and began to read. He slighted nothing; he bored into the lump as a worm into a nut, seeking for a kernel.
   Meanwhile, David sat, marooned, trembling in the spray of so much literature. It roared in his ears. He held no chart or compass for voyaging in that sea. Half the world, he thought, must be writing books.
   Monsieur Bril bored to the last page of the poems. Then he took off his spectacles, and wiped them with his handkerchief.
   “My old friend, Papineau, is well?” he asked.
   “In the best of health,” said David.
   “How many sheep have you, Monsieur Mignot?”
   “Three hundred and nine, when I counted them yesterday. The flock has had ill fortune. To that number it has decreased from eight hundred and fifty.”
   “You have a wife and home, and lived in comfort. The sheep brought you plenty. You went into the fields with them and lived in the keen air and ate the sweet bread of contentment. You had but to be vigilant and recline there upon nature’s breast, listening to the whistle of the blackbirds in the grove. Am I right thus far?”
   “It was so,” said David.
   “I have read all your verses,” continued Monsieur Bril, his eyes wandering about his sea of books as if he conned the horizon for a sail. “Look yonder, through that window, Monsieur Mignot; tell me what you see in that tree.”
   “I see a crow,” said David, looking.
   “There is a bird,” said Monsieur Bril, “that shall assist me where I am disposed to shirk a duty. You know that bird, Monsieur Mignot; he is the philosopher of the air. He is happy through submission to his lot. None so merry or full-crawed as he with his whimsical eye and rollicking step. The fields yield him what he desires. He never grieves that his plumage is not gay, like the oriole’s. And you have heard, Monsieur Mignot, the notes that nature has given him? Is the nightingale any happier, do you think?”
   David rose to his feet. The crow cawed harshly from his tree.
   “I thank you, Monsieur Bril,” he said, slowly. “There was not, then, one nightingale among all those croaks?”
   “I could not have missed it,” said Monsieur Bril, with a sigh. “I read every word. Live your poetry, man; do not try to write it any more.”
   “I thank you,” said David, again. “And now I will be going back to my sheep.”
   “If you would dine with me,” said the man of books, “and overlook the smart of it, I will give you reasons at length.”
   “No,” said the poet, “I must be back in the fields cawing at my sheep.”
   Back along the road to Vernoy he trudged with his poems under his arm. When he reached his village he turned into the shop of one Zeigler, a Jew out of Armenia, who sold anything that came to his hand.
   “Friend,” said David, “wolves from the forest harass my sheep on the hills. I must purchase firearms to protect them. What have you?”
   “A bad day, this, for me, friend Mignot,” said Zeigler, spreading his hands, “for I perceive that I must sell you a weapon that will not fetch a tenth of its value. Only last I week I bought from a peddlar a wagon full of goods that he procured at a sale by a commissionaire of the crown. The sale was of the chateau and belongings of a great lord – I know not his title – who has been banished for conspiracy against the king. There are some choice firearms in the lot. This pistol – oh, a weapon fit for a prince! – it shall be only forty francs to you, friend Mignot – if I lose ten by the sale. But perhaps an arquebuse – ”
   “This will do,” said David, throwing the money on the counter. “Is it charged?”
   “I will charge it,” said Zeigler. “And, for ten francs more, add a store of powder and ball.”
   David laid his pistol under his coat and walked to his cottage. Yvonne was not there. Of late she had taken to gadding much among the neighbours. But a fire was glowing in the kitchen stove. David opened the door of it and thrust his poems in upon the coals. As they blazed up they made a singing, harsh sound in the flue.
   “The song of the crow!” said the poet.
   He went up to his attic room and closed the door. So quiet was the village that a score of people heard the roar of the great pistol. They flocked thither, and up the stairs where the smoke, issuing, drew their notice.
   The men laid the body of the poet upon his bed, awkwardly arranging it to conceal the torn plumage of the poor black crow. The women chattered in a luxury of zealous pity. Some of them ran to tell Yvonne.
   M. Papineau, whose nose had brought him there among the first, picked up the weapon and ran his eye over its silver mountings with a mingled air of connoisseurship and grief.
   “The arms,” he explained, aside, to the cure, “and crest of Monseigneur, the Marquis de Beaupertuys.”

“Next to Reading Matter”

   He compelled my interest as he stepped from the ferry at Desbrosses Street. He had the air of being familiar with hemispheres and worlds, and of entering New York as the lord of a demesne who revisited it in after years of absence. But I thought that, with all his air, he had never before set foot on the slippery cobblestones of the City of Too Many Caliphs.
   He wore loose clothes of a strange bluish drab colour, and a conservative, round Panama hat without the cock-a-loop indentations and cants with which Northern fanciers disfigure the tropic head-gear. Moreover, he was the homeliest man I have ever seen. His ugliness was less repellent than startling – arising from a sort of Lincolnian ruggedness and irregularity of feature that spellbound you with wonder and dismay. So may have looked afrites or the shapes metamorphosed from the vapour of the fisherman’s vase. As he afterward told me, his name was Judson Tate; and he may as well be called so at once. He wore his green silk tie through a topaz ring; and he carried a cane made of the vertebrae of a shark.
   Judson Tate accosted me with some large and casual inquiries about the city’s streets and hotels, in the manner of one who had but for the moment forgotten the trifling details. I could think of no reason for disparaging my own quiet hotel in the downtown district; so the mid-morning of the night found us already victualed and drinked (at my expense), and ready to be chaired and tobaccoed in a quiet corner of the lobby.
   There was something on Judson Tate’s mind, and, such as it was, he tried to convey it to me. Already he had accepted me as his friend; and when I looked at his great, snuff-brown first-mate’s hand, with which he brought emphasis to his periods, within six inches of my nose, I wondered if, by any chance, he was as sudden in conceiving enmity against strangers.
   When this man began to talk I perceived in him a certain power. His voice was a persuasive instrument, upon which he played with a somewhat specious but effective art. He did not try to make you forget his ugliness; he flaunted it in your face and made it part of the charm of his speech. Shutting your eyes, you would have trailed after this rat-catcher’s pipes at least to the walls of Hamelin. Beyond that you would have had to be more childish to follow. But let him play his own tune to the words set down, so that if all is too dull, the art of music may bear the blame.
   “Women,” said Judson Tate, “are mysterious creatures.”
   My spirits sank. I was not there to listen to such a world-old hypothesis – to such a time-worn, long-ago-refuted, bald, feeble, illogical, vicious, patent sophistry – to an ancient, baseless, wearisome, ragged, unfounded, insidious, falsehood originated by women themselves, and by them insinuated, foisted, thrust, spread, and ingeniously promulgated into the ears of mankind by underhanded, secret and deceptive methods, for the purpose of augmenting, furthering, and reinforcing their own charms and designs.
   “Oh, I don’t know!” said I, vernacularly.
   “Have you ever heard of Oratama?” he asked.
   “Possibly,” I answered. “I seem to recall a toe dancer – or a suburban addition – or was it a perfume? – of some such name.”
   “It is a town,” said Judson Tate, “on the coast of a foreign country of which you know nothing and could understand less. It is a country governed by a dictator and controlled by revolutions and insubordination. It was there that a great life-drama was played, with Judson Tate, the homeliest man in America, and Fergus McMahan, the handsomest adventurer in history or fiction, and Senorita Anabela Zamora, the beautiful daughter of the alcalde of Oratama, as chief actors. And, another thing – nowhere else on the globe except in the department of Treinta y tres in Uruguay does the chuchula plant grow. The products of the country I speak of are valuable woods, dyestuffs, gold, rubber, ivory, and cocoa.”
   “I was not aware,” said I, “that South America produced any ivory.”
   “There you are twice mistaken,” said Judson Tate, distributing the words over at least an octave of his wonderful voice. “I did not say that the country I spoke of was in South America – I must be careful, my dear man; I have been in politics there, you know. But, even so – I have played chess against its president with a set carved from the nasal bones of the tapir – one of our native specimens of the order of perissodactyle ungulates inhabiting the Cordilleras – which was as pretty ivory as you would care to see.
   “But is was of romance and adventure and the ways of women that was I going to tell you, and not of zoological animals.
   “For fifteen years I was the ruling power behind old Sancho Benavides, the Royal High Thumbscrew of the republic. You’ve seen his picture in the papers – a mushy black man with whiskers like the notes on a Swiss music-box cylinder, and a scroll in his right hand like the ones they write births on in the family Bible. Well, that chocolate potentate used to be the biggest item of interest anywhere between the colour line and the parallels of latitude. It was three throws, horses, whether he was to wind up in the Hall of Fame or the Bureau of Combustibles. He’d have been sure called the Roosevelt of the Southern Continent if it hadn’t been that Grover Cleveland was President at the time. He’d hold office a couple of terms, then he’d sit out for a hand – always after appointing his own successor for the interims.
   “But it was not Benavides, the Liberator, who was making all this fame for himself. Not him. It was Judson Tate. Benavides was only the chip over the bug. I gave him the tip when to declare war and increase import duties and wear his state trousers. But that wasn’t what I wanted to tell you. How did I get to be It? I’ll tell you. Because I’m the most gifted talker that ever made vocal sounds since Adam first opened his eyes, pushed aside the smelling-salts, and asked: Where am I?
   “As you observe, I am about the ugliest man you ever saw outside the gallery of photographs of the New England early Christian Scientists. So, at an early age, I perceived that what I lacked in looks I must make up in eloquence. That I’ve done. I get what I go after. As the back-stop and still small voice of old Benavides I made all the great historical powers-behind-the-throne, such as Talleyrand, Mrs de Pompadour, and Loeb, look as small as the minority report of a Duma. I could talk nations into or out of debt, harangue armies to sleep on the battlefield, reduce insurrections, inflammations, taxes, appropriations or surpluses with a few words, and call up the dogs of war or the dove of peace with the same bird-like whistle. Beauty and epaulettes and curly moustaches and Grecian profiles in other men were never in my way. When people first look at me they shudder. Unless they are in the last stages of angina pectoris they are mine in ten minutes after I begin to talk. Women and men – I win ’em as they come. Now, you wouldn’t think women would fancy a man with a face like mine, would you?
   “Oh, yes, Mr Tate,” said I. “History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women. There seems –
   “Pardon me,” interrupted Judson Tate, “but you don’t quite understand. You have yet to hear my story.
   “Fergus McMahan was a friend of mine in the capital. For a handsome man I’ll admit he was the duty-free merchandise. He had blond curls and laughing blue eyes and was featured regular. They said he was a ringer for the statue they call Herr Mees, the god of speech and eloquence resting in some museum at Rome. Some German anarchist, I suppose. They are always resting and talking.
   “But Fergus was no talker. He was brought up with the idea that to be beautiful was to make good. His conversation was about as edifying as listening to a leak dropping in a tin dish-pan at the head of the bed when you want to go to sleep. But he and me got to be friends – maybe because we was so opposite, don’t you think? Looking at the Hallowe’en mask that I call my face when I’m shaving seemed to give Fergus pleasure; and I’m sure that whenever I heard the feeble output of throat noises that he called conversation I felt contented to be a gargoyle with a silver tongue.
   “One time I found it necessary to go down to this coast town of Oratama to straighten out a lot of political unrest and chop off a few heads in the customs and military departments. Fergus, who owned the ice and sulphur-match concessions of the republic, says he’ll keep me company.
   “So, in a jangle of mule-train bells, we gallops into Oratama, and the town belonged to us as much as Long Island Sound doesn’t belong to Japan when T. R. is at Oyster Bay. I say us; but I mean me. Everybody for four nations, two oceans, one bay and isthmus, and five archipelagoes around had heard of Judson Tate. Gentleman adventurer, they called me. I had been written up in five columns of the yellow journals, 40,000 words (with marginal decorations) in a monthly magazine, and a stickful on the twelfth page of the New York Times. If the beauty of Fergus McMahan gained any part of our reception in Oratama, I’ll eat the price-tag in my Panama. It was me that they hung out paper flowers and palm branches for. I am not a jealous man; I am stating facts. The people were Nebuchadnezzars; they bit the grass before me; there was no dust in the town for them to bite. They bowed down to Judson Tate. They knew that I was the power behind Sancho Benavides. A word from me was more to them than a whole deckle-edged library from East Aurora in sectional bookcases was from anybody else. And yet there are people who spend hours fixing their faces – rubbing in cold cream and massaging the muscles (always toward the eyes) and taking in the slack with tincture of benzoin and electrolyzing moles – to what end? Looking handsome. Oh, what a mistake! It’s the larynx that the beauty doctors ought to work on. It’s words more than warts, talk more than talcum, palaver more than powder, blarney more than bloom that counts – the phonograph instead of the photograph. But I was going to tell you.
   “The local Astors put me and Fergus up at the Centipede Club, a frame building built on posts sunk in the surf. The tide’s only nine inches. The Little Big High Low Jack-in-the-game of the town came around and kowtowed. Oh, it wasn’t to Herr Mees. They had heard about Judson Tate.
   “One afternoon me and Fergus McMahan was sitting on the seaward gallery of the Centipede, drinking iced rum and talking.
   “ ‘Judson,” says Fergus, “there’s an angel in Oratama.’
   “ ‘So long,” says I, “as it ain’t Gabriel, why talk as if you had heard a trump blow?’
   “ ‘It’s the Senorita Anabela Zamora,’ says Fergus. ‘She’s – she’s – she’s as lovely as – as hell!’
   “ ‘Bravo!’ says I, laughing heartily. ‘You have a true lover’s eloquence to paint the beauties of your inamorata. You remind me,’ says I, ‘of Faust’s wooing of Marguerite – that is, if he wooed her after he went down the trap-door of the stage.’
   “ ‘Judson,” says Fergus, ‘you know you are as beautiless as a rhinoceros. You can’t have any interest in women. I’m awfully gone in Miss Anabela. And that’s why I’m telling you.’
   “ ‘Oh, seguramente,’ says I. ‘I know I have a front elevation like an Aztec god that guards a buried treasure that never did exist in Jefferson County, Yucatan. But there are compensations. For instance, I am It in this country as far as the eye can reach, and then a few perches and poles. And again,’ says I, ‘when I engage people in a set-to of oral, vocal, and laryngeal utterances, I do not usually confine my side of the argument to what may be likened to a cheap phonographic reproduction of the ravings of a jellyfish.’
   “ ‘Oh, I know,’ says Fergus, amiable, ‘that I’m not handy at small talk. Or large, either. That’s why I’m telling you. I want you to help me.’
   “ ‘How can I do it?’ I asked.
   “ ‘I have subsidized,’ says Fergus, ‘the services of Senorita Anabela’s duenna, whose name is Francesca. You have a reputation in this country, Judson,’ says Fergus, ‘of being a great man and a hero.’
   “ ‘I have,’ says I. ‘And I deserve it.’
   “ ‘And I,’ says Fergus, ‘am the best-looking man between the arctic circle and antarctic ice pack.’
   “ ‘With limitations,’ says I, ‘as to physiognomy and geography, I freely concede you to be.’
   “ ‘Between the two of us,’ says Fergus, ‘we ought to land the Senorita Anabela Zamora. The lady, as you know, is of an old Spanish family, and further than looking at her driving in the family carruaje [29 - carruaje – (исп.) экипаж] of afternoons around the plaza, or catching a glimpse of her through a barred window of evenings, she is as unapproachable as a star.’
   “ ‘Land her for which one of us?’ says I.
   “ ‘For me of course,’ says Fergus. ‘You’ve never seen her. Now, I’ve had Francesca point me out to her as being you on several occasions. When she sees me on the plaza, she thinks she’s looking at Don Judson Tate, the greatest hero, statesman, and romantic figure in the country. With your reputation and my looks combined in one man, how can she resist him? She’s heard all about your thrilling history, of course. And she’s seen me. Can any woman want more?’ asks Fergus McMahan.
   “ ‘Can she do with less?’ I ask. “How can we separate our mutual attractions, and how shall we apportion the proceeds?”
   “Then Fergus tells me his scheme.
   “The house of the alcalde, Don Luis Zamora, he says, has a patio, of course – a kind of inner courtyard opening from the street. In an angle of it is his daughter’s window – as dark a place as you could find. And what do you think he wants me to do? Why, knowing my freedom, charm, and skilfulness of tongue, he proposes that I go into the patio at midnight, when the hobgoblin face of me cannot be seen, and make love to her for him – for the pretty man that she has seen on the plaza, thinking him to be Don Judson Tate.
   “Why shouldn’t I do it for him – for my friend, Fergus McMahan? For him to ask me was a compliment – an acknowledgment of his own shortcomings.
   “ ‘You little, lily white, fine-haired, highly polished piece of dumb sculpture,’ says I, ‘I’ll help you. Make your arrangements and get me in the dark outside her window and my stream of conversation opened up with the moonlight tremolo stop turned on, and she’s yours.’
   “ ‘Keep your face hid, Jud,” says Fergus. “For heaven’s sake, keep your face hid. I’m a friend of yours in all kinds of sentiment, but this is a business deal. If I could talk I wouldn’t ask you. But seeing me and listening to you I don’t see why she can’t be landed.’
   “ ‘By you?’ says I.
   “ ‘By me,’ says Fergus.
   “Well, Fergus and the duenna, Francesca, attended to the details. And one night they fetched me a long black cloak with a high collar, and led me to the house at midnight. I stood by the window in the patio until I heard a voice as soft and sweet as an angel’s whisper on the other side of the bars. I could see only a faint, white clad shape inside; and, true to Fergus, I pulled the collar of my cloak high up, for it was July in the wet seasons, and the nights were chilly. And, smothering a laugh as I thought of the tongue-tied Fergus, I began to talk.
   “Well, sir, I talked an hour at the Senorita Anabela. I say ‘at’ because it was not ‘with.’ Now and then she would say: ‘Oh, Senor,’ or ‘Now, ain’t you foolin’?’ or ‘I know you don’t mean that,’ and such things as women will when they are being rightly courted. Both of us knew English and Spanish; so in two languages I tried to win the heart of the lady for my friend Fergus. But for the bars to the window I could have done it in one. At the end of the hour she dismissed me and gave me a big, red rose. I handed it over to Fergus when I got home.
   “For three weeks every third or fourth night I impersonated my friend in the patio at the window of Senorita Anabela. At last she admitted that her heart was mine, and spoke of having seen me every afternoon when she drove in the plaza. It was Fergus she had seen, of course. But it was my talk that won her. Suppose Fergus had gone there, and tried to make a hit in the dark with his beauty all invisible, and not a word to say for himself!
   “On the last night she promised to be mine – that is, Fergus’s. And she put her hand between the bars for me to kiss. I bestowed the kiss and took the news to Fergus.
   “ ‘You might have left that for me to do,’ says he.
   “ ‘That’ll be your job hereafter,’ says I. ‘Keep on doing that and don’t try to talk. Maybe after she thinks she’s in love she won’t notice the difference between real conversation and the inarticulate sort of droning that you give forth.’
   “Now, I had never seen Senorita Anabela. So, the next day Fergus asks me to walk with him through the plaza and view the daily promenade and exhibition of Oratama society, a sight that had no interest for me. But I went; and children and dogs took to the banana groves and mangrove swamps as soon as they had a look at my face.
   “ ‘Here she comes,’ said Fergus, twirling his moustache – ‘the one in white, in the open carriage with the black horse.’
   “I looked and felt the ground rock under my feet. For Senorita Anabela Zamora was the most beautiful woman in the world, and the only one from that moment on, so far as Judson Tate was concerned. I saw at a glance that I must be hers and she mine forever. I thought of my face and nearly fainted; and then I thought of my other talents and stood upright again. And I had been wooing her for three weeks for another man!
   “As Senorita Anabela’s carriage rolled slowly past, she gave Fergus a long, soft glance from the corners of her night-black eyes, a glance that would have sent Judson Tate up into heaven in a rubber-tired chariot. But she never looked at me. And that handsome man only ruffles his curls and smirks and prances like a lady-killer at my side.
   “ ‘What do you think of her, Judson?’ asks Fergus, with an air.
   “ ‘This much,” says I. ‘She is to me Mrs Judson Tate. I am no man to play tricks on a friend. So take your warning.”
   “I thought Fergus would die laughing.
   “ ‘Well, well, well,’ said he, ‘you old doughface! Struck too, are you? That’s great! But you’re too late. Francesca tells me that Anabela talks of nothing but me, day and night. Of course, I’m awfully obliged to you for making that chin-music to her of evenings. But, do you know, I’ve an idea that I could have done it as well myself.’
   “ ‘Mrs Judson Tate,’ says I. ‘Don’t forget the name. You’ve had the use of my tongue to go with your good looks, my boy. You can’t lend me your looks; but hereafter my tongue is my own. Keep your mind on the name that’s to be on the visiting cards two inches by three and a half – Mrs Judson Tate. That’s all.’
   “ ‘All right,” says Fergus, laughing again. “I’ve talked with her father, the alcalde, and he’s willing. He’s to give a baile [30 - baile – (исп.) танец, бал] to-morrow evening in his new warehouse. If you were a dancing man, Jud, I’d expect you around to meet the future Mrs McMahan.’
   “But on the next evening, when the music was playing loudest at the Alcade Zamora’s baile, into the room steps Judson Tate in a new white linen clothes as if he were the biggest man in the whole nation, which he was.
   “Some of the musicians jumped off the key when they saw my face, and one or two of the timidest senoritas let out a screech or two. But up prances the alcalde and almost wipes the dust off my shoes with his forehead. No mere good looks could have won me that sensational entrance.
   “ ‘I hear much, Senor Zamora,’ says I, ‘of the charm of your daughter. It would give me great pleasure to be presented to her.’
   “There were about six dozen willow rocking-chairs, with pink tidies tied on to them, arranged against the walls. In one of them sat Senorita Anabela in white Swiss and red slippers, with pearls and fireflies in her hair. Fergus was at the other end of the room trying to break away from two maroons and a claybank girl.
   “The alcalde leads me up to Anabela and presents me. When she took the first look at my face she dropped her fan and nearly turned her chair over from the shock. But I’m used to that.
   “I sat down by her, and began to talk. When she heard me speak she jumped, and her eyes got as big as alligator pears. She couldn’t strike a balance between the tones of my voice and face I carried. But I kept on talking in the key of C, which is the ladies’ key; and presently she sat still in her chair and a dreamy look came into her eyes. She was coming my way. She knew of Judson Tate, and what a big man he was, and the big things he had done; and that was in my favour. But, of course, it was some shock to her to find out that I was not the pretty man that had been pointed out to her as the great Judson. And then I took the Spanish language, which is better than English for certain purposes, and played on it like a harp of a thousand strings. I ranged from the second G below the staff up to F-sharp above it. I set my voice to poetry, art, romance, flowers, and moonlight. I repeated some of the verses that I had murmured to her in the dark at her window; and I knew from a sudden soft sparkle in her eye that she recognized in my voice the tones of her midnight mysterious wooer.
   “Anyhow, I had Fergus McMahan going. Oh, the vocal is the true art – no doubt about that. Handsome is as handsome palavers. That’s the renovated proverb.
   “I took Senorita Anabela for a walk in the lemon grove while Fergus, disfiguring himself with an ugly frown, was waltzing with the claybank girl. Before we returned I had permission to come to her window in the patio the next evening at midnight and talk some more.
   “Oh, it was easy enough. In two weeks Anabela was engaged to me, and Fergus was out. He took it calm, for a handsome man, and told me he wasn’t going to give in.
   “ ‘Talk may be all right in its place, Judson,’ he says to me, ‘although I’ve never thought it worth cultivating. But,’ says he, ‘to expect mere words to back up successfully a face like yours in a lady’s good graces is like expecting a man to make a square meal on the ringing of a dinner-bell.’
   “But I haven’t begun on the story I was going to tell you yet.
   “One day I took a long ride in the hot sunshine, and then took a bath in the cold waters of a lagoon on the edge of the town before I’d cooled off.
   “That evening after dark I called at the alcalde’s to see Anabela. I was calling regular every evening then, and we were to be married in a month. She was looking like a bulbul, a gazelle, and a tea-rose, and her eyes were as soft and bright as two quarts of cream skimmed off from the Milky Way. She looked at my rugged features without any expression of fear or repugnance. Indeed, I fancied that I saw a look of deep admiration and affection, such as she had cast at Fergus on the plaza.
   “I sat down, and opened my mouth to tell Anabela what she loved to hear – that she was a trust, monopolizing all the loveliness of earth. I opened my mouth, and instead of the usual vibrating words of love and compliment, there came forth a faint wheeze such as a baby with croup might emit. Not a word – not a syllable – not an intelligible sound. I had caught cold in my laryngeal regions when I took my injudicious bath.
   “For two hours I sat trying to entertain Anabela. She talked a certain amount, but it was perfunctory and diluted. The nearest approach I made to speech was to formulate a sound like a clam trying to sing A Life on the Ocean Wave at low tide. It seemed that Anabela’s eyes did not rest upon me as often as usual. I had nothing with which to charm her ears. We looked at pictures and she played the guitar occasionally, very badly. When I left, her parting manner seemed cool – or at least thoughtful.
   “This happened for five evenings consecutively.
   “On the sixth day she ran away with Fergus McMahan.
   “It was known that they fled in a sailing yacht bound for Belize. I was only eight hours behind them in a small steam launch belonging to the Revenue Department.
   “Before I sailed, I rushed into the botica of old Manuel Iquito, a half-breed Indian druggist. I could not speak, but I pointed to my throat and made a sound like escaping steam. He began to yawn. In an hour, according to the customs of the country, I would have been waited on. I reached across the counter, seized him by the throat, and pointed again to my own. He yawned once more, and thrust into my hand a small bottle containing a black liquid.
   “ ‘Take one small spoonful every two hours,’ says he.
   “I threw him a dollar and skinned for the steamer.
   “I steamed into the harbour at Belize thirteen seconds behind the yacht that Anabela and Fergus were on. They started for the shore in a dory just as my skiff was lowered over the side. I tried to order my sailormen to row faster, but the sounds died in my larynx before they came to the light. Then I thought of old Iquito’s medicine, and I got out his bottle and took a swallow of it.
   “The two boats landed at the same moment. I walked straight up to Anabela and Fergus. Her eyes rested upon me for an instant; then she turned them, full of feeling and confidence, upon Fergus. I knew I could not speak, but I was desperate. In speech lay my only hope. I could not stand beside Fergus and challenge comparison in the way of beauty. Purely involuntarily, my larynx and epiglottis attempted to reproduce the sounds that my mind was calling upon my vocal organs to send forth.
   “To my intense surprise and delight the words rolled forth beautifully clear, resonant, exquisitely modulated, full of power, expression, and long-repressed emotion.
   “ ‘Senorita Anabela,’ says I, ‘may I speak with you aside for a moment?’
   “You don’t want details about that, do you? Thanks. The old eloquence had come back all right. I led her under a cocoanut palm and put my old verbal spell on her again.
   “ ‘Judson,” says she, “when you are talking to me I can hear nothing else – I can see nothing else – there is nothing and nobody else in the world for me.’
   “Well, that’s about all of the story. Anabela went back to Oratama in the steamer with me. I never heard what became of Fergus. I never saw him any more. Anabela is now Mrs Judson Tate. Has my story bored you much?”
   “No,” said I. “I am always interested in psychological studies. A human heart – and especially a woman’s – is a wonderful thing to contemplate.”
   “It is,” said Judson Tate. “And so are the trachea and bronchial tubes of man. And the larynx too. Did you ever make a study of the windpipe?”
   “Never,” said I. “But I have taken much pleasure in your story. May I ask after Mrs Tate, and inquire of her present health and whereabouts?”
   “Oh, sure,” said Judson Tate. “We are living in Bergen Avenue, Jersey City. The climate down in Oratama didn’t suit Mrs T. I don’t suppose you ever dissected the arytenoid cartilages of the epiglottis, did you?”
   “Why, no,” said I, “I am no surgeon.”
   “Pardon me,” said Judson Tate, “but every man should know enough of anatomy and therapeutics to safeguard his own health. A sudden cold may set up capillary bronchitis or inflammation of the pulmonary vesicles, which may result in a serious affection of the vocal organs.”
   “Perhaps so,” said I, with some impatience; “but that is neither here nor there. Speaking of the strange manifestations of the affection of women, I – ”
   “Yes, yes,” interrupted Judson Tate; “they have peculiar ways. But, as I was going to tell you: when I went back to Oratama I found out from Manuel Iquito what was in that mixture he gave me for my lost voice. I told you how quick it cured me. He made that stuff from the chuchula plant. Now, look here.”
   Judson Tate drew an oblong, white pasteboard box from his pocket.
   “For any cough,” he said, “or cold, or hoarseness, or bronchial affection whatsoever, I have here the greatest remedy in the world. You see the formula, printed on the box. Each tablet contains licorice, 2 grains; balsam tolu, 110 grain; oil of anise, 120 minim; oil of tar, 160 minim; oleo-resin of cubebs, 1100 minim; fluid extract of chuchula, 110 minim.
   “I am in New York,” went on Judson Tate, “for the purpose of organizing a company to market the greatest remedy for throat affections ever discovered. At present I am introducing the lozenges in a small way. I have here a box containing four dozen, which I am selling for the small sum of fifty cents. If you are suffering – ”
//-- * * * --//
   I got up and went away without a word. I walked slowly up to the little park near my hotel, leaving Judson Tate alone with his conscience. My feelings were lacerated. He had poured gently upon me a story that I might have used. There was a little of the breath of life in it, and some of the synthetic atmosphere that passes, when cunningly tinkered, in the marts. And, at the last it had proven to be a commercial pill, deftly coated with the sugar of fiction. The worst of it was that I could not offer it for sale. Advertising departments and counting-rooms look down upon me. And it would never do for the literary. Therefore I sat upon a bench with other disappointed ones until my eyelids drooped.
   I went to my room, and, as my custom is, read for an hour stories in my favourite magazines. This was to get my mind back to art again.
   And as I read each story, I threw the magazines sadly and hopelessly, one by one, upon the floor. Each author, without one exception to bring balm to my heart, wrote liltingly and sprightly a story of some particular make of motor-car that seemed to control the sparking plug of his genius.
   And when the last one was hurled from me I took heart.
   “If readers can swallow so many proprietary automobiles,” I said to myself, “they ought not to strain at one of Tate’s Compound Magic Chuchula Bronchial Lozenges.”
   And so if you see this story in print you will understand that business is business, and that if Art gets very far ahead of Commerce, she will have to get up and hustle.
   I may as well add, to make a clean job of it, that you can’t buy the chuchula plant in the drug stores.

The Hiding of Black Bill

   A lank, strong, red-faced man with a Wellington beak and small, fiery eyes tempered by flaxen lashes, sat on the station platform at Los Pinos swinging his legs to and fro. At his side sat another man, fat, melancholy, and seedy, who seemed to be his friend. They had the appearance of men to whom life had appeared as a reversible coat – seamy on both sides.
   “Ain’t seen you in about four years, Ham,” said the seedy man. “Which way you been travelling?”
   “Texas,” said the red-faced man. “It was too cold in Alaska for me. And I found it warm in Texas. I’ll tell you about one hot spell I went through there.
   “One morning I steps off the International at a water-tank and lets it go on without me. ’Twas a ranch country, and fuller of spite-houses than New York City. Only out there they build’em twenty miles away so you can’t smell what they’ve got for dinner, instead of running’em up two inches from their neighbors’ windows.
   “There wasn’t any roads in sight, so I footed it ’cross country. The grass was shoe-top deep, and the mesquite timber looked just like a peach orchard. It was so much like a gentleman’s private estate that every minute you expected a kennelful of bulldogs to run out and bite you. But I must have walked twenty miles before I came in sight of a ranch-house. It was a little one, about as big as an elevated-railroad station.
   “There was a little man in a white shirt and brown overalls and a pink handkerchief around his neck rolling cigarettes under a tree in front of the door.
   “ ‘Greetings,’ says I. ‘Any refreshment, welcome, emoluments, or even work for a comparative stranger?’
   “ ‘Oh, come in,’ says he, in a refined tone. ‘Sit down on that stool, please. I didn’t hear your horse coming.’
   “ ‘He isn’t near enough yet,’ says I. ‘I walked. I don’t want to be a burden, but I wonder if you have three or four gallons of water handy.’
   “ ‘You do look pretty dusty,’ says he; ‘but our bathing arrangements – ’
   “ ‘It’s a drink I want,’ says I. ‘Never mind the dust that’s on the outside.’
   “He gets me a dipper of water out of a red jar hanging up, and then goes on:
   “ ‘Do you want work?’
   “ ‘For a time,’ says I. ‘This is a rather quiet section of the country, isn’t it?’
   “ ‘It is,’ says he. ‘Sometimes – so I have been told – one sees no human being pass for weeks at a time. I’ve been here only a month. I bought the ranch from an old settler who wanted to move farther west.’
   “ ‘It suits me,’ says I. ‘Quiet and retirement are good for a man sometimes. And I need a job. I can tend bar, salt mines, lecture, float stock, do a little middle-weight slugging, and play the piano.’
   “ ‘Can you herd sheep?’ asks the little ranch-man.
   “ ‘Do you mean have I heard sheep?’ says I.
   “ ‘Can you herd’em – take charge of a flock of ’em?’ says he.
   “ ‘Oh,’ says I, ‘now I understand. You mean chase ’em around and bark at’em like collie dogs. Well, I might,’ says I. ‘I’ve never exactly done any sheep-herding, but I’ve often seen’em from car windows masticating daisies, and they don’t look dangerous.’
   “ ‘I’m short a herder,’ says the ranchman. ‘You never can depend on the Mexicans. I’ve only got two flocks. You may take out my bunch of muttons – there are only eight hundred of ’em – in the morning, if you like. The pay is twelve dollars a month and your rations furnished. You camp in a tent on the prairie with your sheep. You do your own cooking, but wood and water are brought to your camp. It’s an easy job.’
   “ ‘I’m on,’ says I. ‘I’ll take the job even if I have to garland my brow and hold on to a crook and wear a loose-effect and play on a pipe like the shepherds do in pictures.’
   “So the next morning the little ranchman helps me drive the flock of muttons from the corral to about two miles out and let’em graze on a little hillside on the prairie. He gives me a lot of instructions about not letting bunches of them stray off from the herd, and driving’em down to a water-hole to drink at noon.
   “ ‘I’ll bring out your tent and camping outfit and rations in the buckboard before night,’ says he.
   “ ‘Fine,’ says I. ‘And don’t forget the rations. Nor the camping outfit. And be sure to bring the tent. Your name’s Zollicoffer, ain’t it?’
   “ ‘My name,’ says he, ‘is Henry Ogden.’
   “ ‘All right, Mr Ogden,’ says I. ‘Mine is Mr Percival Saint Clair.’
   “I herded sheep for five days on the Rancho Chiquito; and then the wool entered my soul. That getting next to Nature certainly got next to me. I was lonesomer than Crusoe’s goat. I’ve seen a lot of persons more entertaining as companions than those sheep were. I’d drive ’em to the corral and pen ’em every evening, and then cook my corn-bread and mutton and coffee, and lie down in a tent the size of a table-cloth, and listen to the coyotes and whippoorwills singing around the camp.
   “The fifth evening, after I had corralled my costly but uncongenial muttons, I walked over to the ranch-house and stepped in the door.
   “ ‘Mr Ogden,’ says I, ‘you and me have got to get sociable. Sheep are all very well to dot the landscape and furnish eight-dollar cotton suitings for man, but for table-talk and fireside companions they rank along with five-o’clock teazers. If you’ve got a deck of cards, or a parcheesi outfit, or a game of authors, get’em out, and let’s get on a mental basis. I’ve got to do something in an intellectual line, if it’s only to knock somebody’s brains out.’
   “This Henry Ogden was a peculiar kind of ranchman. He wore finger-rings and a big gold watch and careful neckties. And his face was calm, and his nose-spectacles was kept very shiny. I saw once, in Muscogee, an outlaw hung for murdering six men, who was a dead ringer for him. But I knew a preacher in Arkansas that you would have taken to be his brother. I didn’t care much for him either way; what I wanted was some fellowship and communion with holy saints or lost sinners – anything sheepless would do.
   “ ‘Well, Saint Clair,’ says he, laying down the book he was reading, ‘I guess it must be pretty lonesome for you at first. And I don’t deny that it’s monotonous for me. Are you sure you corralled your sheep so they won’t stray out?’
   “ ‘They’re shut up as tight as the jury of a millionaire murderer,’ says I. ‘And I’ll be back with them long before they’ll need their trained nurse.’
   “So Ogden digs up a deck of cards, and we play casino. After five days and nights of my sheep-camp it was like a toot on Broadway. When I caught big casino I felt as excited as if I had made a million in Trinity. And when H. O. loosened up a little and told the story about the lady in the Pullman car I laughed for five minutes.
   “That showed what a comparative thing life is. A man may see so much that he’d be bored to turn his head to look at a $3,000,000 fire or Joe Weber or the Adriatic Sea. But let him herd sheep for a spell, and you’ll see him splitting his ribs laughing at Curfew Shall Not Ring To-night, or really enjoying himself playing cards with ladies.
   “By-and-by Ogden gets out a decanter of Bourbon, and then there is a total eclipse of sheep.
   “ ‘Do you remember reading in the papers, about a month ago,’ says he, ‘about a train hold-up on the M. K. & T.? The express agent was shot through the shoulder, and about $15,000 in currency taken. And it’s said that only one man did the job.’
   “ ‘Seems to me I do,’ says I. ‘But such things happen so often they don’t linger long in the human Texas mind. Did they overtake, overhaul, seize, or lay hands upon the despoiler?’
   “ ‘He escaped,’ says Ogden. ‘And I was just reading in a paper to-day that the officers have tracked him down into this part of the country. It seems the bills the robber got were all the first issue of currency to the Second National Bank of Espinosa City. And so they’ve followed the trail where they’ve been spent, and it leads this way.’
   “Ogden pours out some more Bourbon, and shoves me the bottle.
   “ ‘I imagine,’ says I, after ingurgitating another modicum of the royal boose, ‘that it wouldn’t be at all a disingenuous idea for a train robber to run down into this part of the country to hide for a spell. A sheep-ranch, now,’ says I, ‘would be the finest kind of a place. Who’d ever expect to find such a desperate character among these song-birds and muttons and wild flowers? And, by the way,’ says I, kind of looking H. Ogden over, ‘was there any description mentioned of this single-handed terror? Was his lineaments or height and thickness or teeth fillings or style of habiliments set forth in print?’
   “ ‘Why, no,’ says Ogden; ‘they say nobody got a good sight of him because he wore a mask. But they know it was a train-robber called Black Bill, because he always works alone and because he dropped a handkerchief in the express-car that had his name on it.’
   “ ‘All right,’ says I. ‘I approve of Black Bill’s retreat to the sheep-ranges. I guess they won’t find him.’
   “ ‘There’s one thousand dollars reward for his capture,’ says Ogden.
   “ ‘I don’t need that kind of money,’ says I, looking Mr Sheepman straight in the eye. ‘The twelve dollars a month you pay me is enough. I need a rest, and I can save up until I get enough to pay my fare to Texarkana, where my widowed mother lives. If Black Bill,’ I goes on, looking significantly at Ogden, ‘was to have come down this way – say, a month ago – and bought a little sheep-ranch and – ’
   “ ‘Nothing,’ says I; ‘no insinuations. I’m stating a hypodermical case. I say, if Black Bill had come down here and bought a sheep-ranch and hired me to Little-Boy-Blue ’em and treated me square and friendly, as you’ve done, he’d never have anything to fear from me. A man is a man, regardless of any complications he may have with sheep or railroad trains. Now you know where I stand.’
   “Ogden looks black as camp-coffee for nine seconds, and then he laughs, amused.
   “ ‘You’ll do, Saint Clair,’ says he. ‘If I was Black Bill I wouldn’t be afraid to trust you. Let’s have a game or two of seven-up to-night. That is, if you don’t mind playing with a train-robber.’
   “ ‘I’ve told you,’ says I, ‘my oral sentiments, and there’s no strings to ’em.’
   “While I was shuffling after the first hand, I asks Ogden, as if the idea was a kind of a casualty, where he was from.
   “ ‘Oh,’ says he, ‘from the Mississippi Valley.’
   “ ‘That’s a nice little place,’ says I. ‘I’ve often stopped over there. But didn’t you find the sheets a little damp and the food poor? Now, I hail,’ says I, ‘from the Pacific Slope. Ever put up there?’
   “ ‘Too draughty,’ says Ogden. ‘But if you’ve ever in the Middle West just mention my name, and you’ll get foot-warmers and dripped coffee.’
   “ ‘Well,’ says I, ‘I wasn’t exactly fishing for your private telephone number and the middle name of your aunt that carried off the Cumberland Presbyterian minister. It don’t matter. I just want you to know you are safe in the hands of your shepherd. Now, don’t play hearts on spades, and don’t get nervous.’
   “ ‘Still harping,’ says Ogden, laughing again. ‘Don’t you suppose that if I was Black Bill and thought you suspected me, I’d put a Winchester bullet into you and stop my nervousness, if I had any?’
   “ ‘Not any,’ says I. ‘A man who’s got the nerve to hold up a train single-handed wouldn’t do a trick like that. I’ve knocked about enough to know that them are the kind of men who put a value on a friend. Not that I can claim being a friend of yours, Mr Ogden,’ says I, ‘being only your sheep-herder; but under more expeditious circumstances we might have been.’
   “ ‘Forget the sheep temporarily, I beg,’ says Ogden, ‘and cut for deal.’
   “About four days afterward, while my muttons was nooning on the water-hole and I deep in the interstices of making a pot of coffee, up rides softly on the grass a mysterious person in the garb of the being he wished to represent. He was dressed somewhere between a Kansas City detective, Buffalo Bill, and the town dog-catcher of Baton Rouge. His chin and eye wasn’t molded on fighting lines, so I knew he was only a scout.
   “ ‘Herdin’ sheep?’ he asks me.
   “ ‘Well,’ says I, ‘to a man of your evident gumptional endowments, I wouldn’t have the nerve to state that I am engaged in decorating old bronzes or oiling bicycle sprockets.’
   “ ‘You don’t talk or look like a sheep-herder to me,’ says he.
   “ ‘But you talk like what you look like to me,’ says I.
   “And then he asks me who I was working for, and I shows him Rancho Chiquito, two miles away, in the shadow of a low hill, and he tells me he’s a deputy sheriff.
   “ ‘There’s a train-robber called Black Bill supposed to be somewhere in these parts,’ says the scout. ‘He’s been traced as far as San Antonio, and maybe farther. Have you seen or heard of any strangers around here during the past month?’
   “ ‘I have not,’ says I, ‘except a report of one over at the Mexican quarters of Loomis’ ranch, on the Frio.’
   “ ‘What do you know about him?’ asks the deputy.
   “ ‘He’s three days old,’ says I.
   “ ‘What kind of a looking man is the man you work for?’ he asks. ‘Does old George Ramey own this place yet? He’s run sheep here for the last ten years, but never had no success.’
   “ ‘The old man has sold out and gone West,’ I tells him. ‘Another sheep-fancier bought him out about a month ago.’
   “ ‘What kind of a looking man is he?’ asks the deputy again.
   “ ‘Oh,’ says I, ‘a big, fat kind of a Dutchman with long whiskers and blue specs. I don’t think he knows a sheep from a ground-squirrel. I guess old George soaked him pretty well on the deal,’ says I.
   “After indulging himself in a lot more non-communicative information and two-thirds of my dinner, the deputy rides away.
   “That night I mention the matter to Ogden.’ ‘They’re drawing the tendrils of the octopus around Black Bill,’ says I. And then I told him about the deputy sheriff, and how I’d described him to the deputy, and what the deputy said about the matter.
   “ ‘Oh, well,’ says Ogden, ‘let’s don’t borrow any of Black Bill’s troubles. We’ve a few of our own. Get the Bourbon out of the cupboard and we’ll drink to his health – unless,’ says he, with his little cackling laugh, ‘you’re prejudiced against train-robbers.’
   “ ‘I’ll drink,’ says I, ‘to any man who’s a friend to a friend. And I believe that Black Bill,’ I goes on, ‘would be that. So here’s to Black Bill, and may he have good luck.’
   “And both of us drank.
   “About two weeks later comes shearing-time. The sheep had to be driven up to the ranch, and a lot of frowzy-headed Mexicans would snip the fur off of them with back-action scissors. So the afternoon before the barbers were to come I hustled my underdone muttons over the hill, across the dell, down by the winding brook, and up to the ranch-house, where I penned’em in a corral and bade’em my nightly adieus.
   “I went from there to the ranch-house. I find H. Ogden, Esquire, lying asleep on his little cot bed. I guess he had been overcome by anti-insomnia or diswakefulness or some of the diseases peculiar to the sheep business. His mouth and vest were open, and he breathed like a second-hand bicycle pump. I looked at him and gave vent to just a few musings. ‘Imperial Caesar,’ says I, ‘asleep in such a way, might shut his mouth and keep the wind away.’
   A man asleep is certainly a sight to make angels weep. What good is all his brain, muscle, backing, nerve, influence, and family connections? He’s at the mercy of his enemies, and more so of his friends. And he’s about as beautiful as a cab-horse leaning against the Metropolitan Opera House at 12.30 a.m. dreaming of the plains of Arabia. Now, a woman asleep you regard as different. No matter how she looks, you know it’s better for all hands for her to be that way.
   “Well, I took a drink of Bourbon and one for Ogden, and started in to be comfortable while he was taking his nap. He had some books on his table on indigenous subjects, such as Japan and drainage and physical culture – and some tobacco, which seemed more to the point.
   “After I’d smoked a few, and listened to the sartorial breathing of H. O., I happened to look out the window toward the shearing-pens, where there was a kind of a road coming up from a kind of a road across a kind of a creek farther away.
   “I saw five men riding up to the house. All of’em carried guns across their saddles, and among’em was the deputy that had talked to me at my camp.
   “They rode up careful, in open formation, with their guns ready. I set apart with my eye the one I opinionated to be the boss muck-raker of this law-and-order cavalry.
   “ ‘Good-evening, gents,’ says I. ‘Won’t you ’light, and tie your horses?’
   “The boss rides up close, and swings his gun over till the opening in it seems to cover my whole front elevation.
   “ ‘Don’t you move your hands none,’ says he, ‘till you and me indulge in a adequate amount of necessary conversation.’
   “ ‘I will not,’ says I. ‘I am no deaf-mute, and therefore will not have to disobey your injunctions in replying.’
   “ ‘We are on the lookout,’ says he, ‘for Black Bill, the man that held up the Katy for $15,000 in May. We are searching the ranches and everybody on’em. What is your name, and what do you do on this ranch?’
   “Captain,’ says I, ‘Percival Saint Clair is my occupation, and my name is sheep-herder. I’ve got my flock of veals – no, muttons – penned here to-night. The shearers are coming to-morrow to give them a haircut – with baa-a-rum, I suppose.’
   “ ‘Where’s the boss of this ranch?’ the captain of the gang asks me.
   “ ‘Wait just a minute, cap’n,’ says I. ‘Wasn’t there a kind of a reward offered for the capture of this desperate character you have referred to in your preamble?’
   “ ‘There’s a thousand dollars reward offered,’ says the captain, ‘but it’s for his capture and conviction. There don’t seem to be no provision made for an informer.’
   “ ‘It looks like it might rain in a day or so,’ says I, in a tired way, looking up at the cerulean blue sky.
   “ ‘If you know anything about the locality, disposition, or secretiveness of this here Black Bill,’ says he, in a severe dialect, ‘you are amiable to the law in not reporting it.’
   “ ‘I heard a fence-rider say,’ says I, in a desultory kind of voice, ‘that a Mexican told a cowboy named Jake over at Pidgin’s store on the Nueces that he heard that Black Bill had been seen in Matamoras by a sheepman’s cousin two weeks ago.’
   “ ‘Tell you what I’ll do, Tight Mouth,’ says the captain, after looking me over for bargains. ‘If you put us on so we can scoop Black Bill, I’ll pay you a hundred dollars out of my own – out of our own – pockets. That’s liberal,’ says he. ‘You ain’t entitled to anything. Now, what do you say?’
   “ ‘Cash down now?’ I asks.
   “The captain has a sort of discussion with his helpmates, and they all produce the contents of their pockets for analysis. Out of the general results they figured up $102.30 in cash and $31 worth of plug tobacco.
   “ ‘Come nearer, capitan meeo,’ says I, ‘and listen.’ He so did.
   “ ‘I am mighty poor and low down in the world,’ says I. ‘I am working for twelve dollars a month trying to keep a lot of animals together whose only thought seems to be to get asunder. Although,’ says I, ‘I regard myself as some better than the State of South Dakota, it’s a come-down to a man who has heretofore regarded sheep only in the form of chops. I’m pretty far reduced in the world on account of foiled ambitions and rum and a kind of cocktail they make along the P. R. R. all the way from Scranton to Cincinnati – dry gin, French vermouth, one squeeze of a lime, and a good dash of orange bitters. If you’re ever up that way, don’t fail to let one try you. And, again,’ says I, ‘I have never yet went back on a friend. I’ve stayed by’em when they had plenty, and when adversity’s overtaken me I’ve never forsook’em.
   “ ‘But,’ I goes on, ‘this is not exactly the case of a friend. Twelve dollars a month is only bowing-acquaintance money. And I do not consider brown beans and corn-bread the food of friendship. I am a poor man,’ says I, ‘and I have a widowed mother in Texarkana. You will find Black Bill,’ says I, ‘lying asleep in this house on a cot in the room to your right. He’s the man you want, as I know from his words and conversation. He was in a way a friend,’ I explains, ‘and if I was the man I once was the entire product of the mines of Gondola would not have tempted me to betray him. But,’ says I, ‘every week half of the beans was wormy, and not nigh enough wood in camp.
   “ ‘Better go in careful, gentlemen,’ says I. ‘He seems impatient at times, and when you think of his late professional pursuits one would look for abrupt actions if he was come upon sudden.’
   “So the whole posse unmounts and ties their horses, and unlimbers their ammunition and equipments, and tiptoes into the house. And I follows, like Delilah when she set the Philip Stein on to Samson.
   “The leader of the posse shakes Ogden and wakes him up. And then he jumps up, and two more of the reward-hunters grab him. Ogden was mighty tough with all his slimness, and he gives’em as neat a single-footed tussle against odds as I ever see.
   “ ‘What does this mean?’ he says, after they had him down.
   “ ‘You’re scooped in, Mr Black Bill,’ says the captain. ‘That’s all.’
   “ ‘It’s an outrage,’ says H. Ogden, madder yet.
   “ ‘It was,’ says the peace-and-good-will man. ‘The Katy wasn’t bothering you, and there’s a law against monkeying with express packages.’
   “And he sits on H. Ogden’s stomach and goes through his pockets symptomatically and careful.
   “ ‘I’ll make you perspire for this,’ says Ogden, perspiring some himself. ‘I can prove who I am.’
   “ ‘So can I,’ says the captain, as he draws from H. Ogden’s inside coat-pocket a handful of new bills of the Second National Bank of Espinosa City. ‘Your regular engraved Tuesdays-and-Fridays visiting-card wouldn’t have a louder voice in proclaiming your indemnity than this here currency. You can get up now and prepare to go with us and expatriate your sins.
   “H. Ogden gets up and fixes his necktie. He says no more after they have taken the money off of him.
   “ ‘A well-greased idea,’ says the sheriff captain, admiring, ‘to slip off down here and buy a little sheep-ranch where the hand of man is seldom heard. It was the slickest hide-out I ever see,’ says the captain.
   “So one of the men goes to the shearing-pen and hunts up the other herder, a Mexican they call John Sallies, and he saddles Ogden’s horse, and the sheriffs all ride tip close around him with their guns in hand, ready to take their prisoner to town.
   “Before starting, Ogden puts the ranch in John Sallies’ hands and gives him orders about the shearing and where to graze the sheep, just as if he intended to be back in a few days. And a couple of hours afterward one Percival Saint Clair, an ex-sheep-herder of the Rancho Chiquito, might have been seen, with a hundred and nine dollars – wages and blood-money – in his pocket, riding south on another horse belonging to said ranch.’
   The red-faced man paused and listened. The whistle of a coming freight-train sounded far away among the low hills.
   The fat, seedy man at his side sniffed, and shook his frowzy head slowly and disparagingly.
   “What is it, Snipy?’ asked the other. ‘Got the blues again?’
   “No, I ain’t,’ said the seedy one, sniffing again. ‘But I don’t like your talk. You and me have been friends, off and on, for fifteen years; and I never yet knew or heard of you giving anybody up to the law – not no one. And here was a man whose saleratus you had eat and at whose table you had played games of cards – if casino can be so called. And yet you inform him to the law and take money for it. It never was like you, I say.’
   “This H. Ogden,’ resumed the red-faced man, ‘through a lawyer, proved himself free by alibis and other legal terminalities, as I so heard afterward. He never suffered no harm. He did me favors, and I hated to hand him over.’
   “How about the bills they found in his pocket?’ asked the seedy man.
   “I put ’em there,’ said the red-faced man, ‘while he was asleep, when I saw the posse riding up. I was Black Bill. Look out, Snipy, here she comes! We’ll board her on the bumpers when she takes water at the tank.’

A Poor Rule

   I have always maintained, and asserted time to time, that woman is no mystery; that man can foretell, construe, subdue, comprehend, and interpret her. That she is a mystery has been foisted by herself upon credulous mankind. Whether I am right or wrong we shall see. As “Harper’s Drawer” used to say in bygone years: “The following good story is told of Miss —, Mr —, Mr – and Mr —.”
   We shall have to omit “Bishop X” and “the Rev. – ,” for they do not belong.
   In those days Paloma was a new town on the line of the Southern Pacific. A reporter would have called it a “mushroom” town; but it was not. Paloma was, first and last, of the toadstool variety.
   The train stopped there at noon for the engine to drink and for the passengers both to drink and to dine. There was a new yellow-pine hotel, also a wool warehouse, and perhaps three dozen box residences. The rest was composed of tents, cow ponies, “black-waxy” mud, and mesquite-trees, all bound round by a horizon. Paloma was an about-to-be city. The houses represented faith; the tents hope; the twice-a-day train by which you might leave, creditably sustained the role of charity.
   The Parisian Restaurant occupied the muddiest spot in the town while it rained, and the warmest when it shone. It was operated, owned, and perpetrated by a citizen known as Old Man Hinkle, who had come out of Indiana to make his fortune in this land of condensed milk and sorghum.
   There was a four-room, unpainted, weather-boarded box house in which the family lived. From the kitchen extended a “shelter” made of poles covered with chaparral brush. Under this was a table and two benches, each twenty feet long, the product of Paloma home carpentry. Here was set forth the roast mutton, the stewed apples, boiled beans, soda-biscuits, puddinorpie, and hot coffee of the Parisian menu.
   Ma Hinkle and a subordinate known to the ears as “Betty,” but denied to the eyesight, presided at the range. Pa Hinkle himself, with salamandrous thumbs, served the scalding viands. During rush hours a Mexican youth, who rolled and smoked cigarettes between courses, aided him in waiting on the guests. As is customary at Parisian banquets, I place the sweets at the end of my wordy menu.
   Ileen Hinkle!
   The spelling is correct, for I have seen her write it. No doubt she had been named by ear; but she so splendidly bore the orthography that Tom Moore himself (had he seen her) would have indorsed the phonography.
   Ileen was the daughter of the house, and the first Lady Cashier to invade the territory south of an east-and-west line drawn through Galveston and Del Rio. She sat on a high stool in a rough pine grand-stand – or was it a temple? – under the shelter at the door of the kitchen. There was a barbed-wire protection in front of her, with a little arch under which you passed your money. Heaven knows why the barbed wire; for every man who dined parisianly there would have died in her service. Her duties were light; each meal was a dollar; you put it under the arch, and she took it.
   I set out with the intent to describe Ileen Hinkle to you. Instead, I must refer you to the volume by Edmund Burke entitled: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. It is an exhaustive treatise, dealing first with the primitive conceptions of beauty – roundness and smoothness, I think they are, according to Burke. It is well said. Rotundity is a patent charm; as for smoothness – the more new wrinkles a woman acquires, the smoother she becomes.
   Ileen was a strictly vegetable compound, guaranteed under the Pure Ambrosia and Balm-of-Gilead Act of the year of the fall of Adam. She was a fruit-stand blonde-strawberries, peaches, cherries, etc. Her eyes were wide apart, and she possessed the calm that precedes a storm that never comes. But it seems to me that words (at any rate per) are wasted in an effort to describe the beautiful. Like fancy, “It is engendered in the eyes.” There are three kinds of beauties – I was foreordained to be homiletic; I can never stick to a story.
   The first is the freckle-faced, snub-nosed girl whom you like. The second is Maud Adams. The third is, or are, the ladies in Bouguereau’s paintings. Ileen Hinkle was the fourth. She was the mayoress of Spotless Town. There were a thousand golden apples coming to her as Helen of the Troy laundries.
   The Parisian Restaurant was within a radius. Even from beyond its circumference men rode in to Paloma to win her smiles. They got them. One meal – one smile – one dollar. But, with all her impartiality, Ileen seemed to favor three of her admirers above the rest. According to the rules of politeness, I will mention myself last.
   The first was an artificial product known as Bryan Jacks – a name that had obviously met with reverses. Jacks was the outcome of paved cities. He was a small man made of some material resembling flexible sandstone. His hair was the color of a brick Quaker meeting-house; his eyes were twin cranberries; his mouth was like the aperture under a drop-letters-here sign.
   He knew every city from Bangor to San Francisco, thence north to Portland, thence S. 45 E. to a given point in Florida. He had mastered every art, trade, game, business, profession, and sport in the world, had been present at, or hurrying on his way to, every head-line event that had ever occurred between oceans since he was five years old. You might open the atlas, place your finger at random upon the name of a town, and Jacks would tell you the front names of three prominent citizens before you could close it again. He spoke patronizingly and even disrespectfully of Broadway, Beacon Hill, Michigan, Euclid, and Fifth avenue, and the St. Louis Four Courts. Compared with him as a cosmopolite, the Wandering Jew would have seemed a mere hermit. He had learned everything the world could teach him, and he would tell you about it.
   I hate to be reminded of Pollock’s Course of Time, and so do you; but every time I saw Jacks I would think of the poet’s description of another poet by the name of G. G. Byron who “Drank early; deeply drank – drank draughts that common millions might have quenched; then died of thirst because there was no more to drink.”
   That fitted Jacks, except that, instead of dying, he came to Paloma, which was about the same thing. He was a telegrapher and station– and express-agent at seventy-five dollars a month. Why a young man who knew everything and could do everything was content to serve in such an obscure capacity I never could understand, although he let out a hint once that it was as a personal favor to the president and stockholders of the S. P. Ry. Co.
   One more line of description, and I turn Jacks over to you. He wore bright blue clothes, yellow shoes, and a bow tie made of the same cloth as his shirt.
   My rival No.2 was Bud Cunningham, whose services had been engaged by a ranch near Paloma to assist in compelling refractory cattle to keep within the bounds of decorum and order. Bud was the only cowboy off the stage that I ever saw who looked like one on it. He wore the sombrero, the chaps, and the handkerchief tied at the back of his neck.
   Twice a week Bud rode in from the Val Verde Ranch to sup at the Parisian Restaurant. He rode a many-high-handed Kentucky horse at a tremendously fast lope, which animal he would rein up so suddenly under the big mesquite at the corner of the brush shelter that his hoofs would plough canals yards long in the loam.
   Jacks and I were regular boarders at the restaurant, of course.
   The front room of the Hinkle House was as neat a little parlor as there was in the black-waxy country. It was all willow rocking-chairs, and home-knit tidies, and albums, and conch shells in a row. And a little upright piano in one corner.
   Here Jacks and Bud and I – or sometimes one or two of us, according to our good-luck – used to sit of evenings when the tide of trade was over, and “visit” Miss Hinkle.
   Ileen was a girl of ideas. She was destined for higher things (if there can be anything higher) than taking in dollars all day through a barbed-wire wicket. She had read and listened and thought. Her looks would have formed a career for a less ambitious girl; but, rising superior to mere beauty, she must establish something in the nature of a salon – the only one in Paloma.
   “Don’t you think that Shakespeare was a great writer?” she would ask, with such a pretty little knit of her arched brows that the late Ignatius Donnelly, himself, had he seen it, could scarcely have saved his Bacon.
   Ileen was of the opinion, also, that Boston is more cultured than Chicago; that Rosa Bonheur was one of the greatest of women painters; that Westerners are more spontaneous and open-hearted than Easterners; that London must be a very foggy city, and that California must be quite lovely in the springtime. And of many other opinions indicating a keeping up with the world’s best thought.
   These, however, were but gleaned from hearsay and evidence: Ileen had theories of her own. One, in particular, she disseminated to us untiringly. Flattery she detested. Frankness and honesty of speech and action, she declared, were the chief mental ornaments of man and woman. If ever she could like any one, it would be for those qualities.
   “I’m awfully weary,” she said, one evening, when we three musketeers of the mesquite were in the little parlor, “of having compliments on my looks paid to me. I know I’m not beautiful.”
   (Bud Cunningham told me afterward that it was all he could do to keep from calling her a liar when she said that.)
   “I’m only a little Middle-Western girl,” went on Ileen, “who just wants to be simple and neat, and tries to help her father make a humble living.”
   (Old Man Hinkle was shipping a thousand silver dollars a month, clear profit, to a bank in San Antonio.)
   Bud twisted around in his chair and bent the rim of his hat, from which he could never be persuaded to separate. He did not know whether she wanted what she said she wanted or what she knew she deserved. Many a wiser man has hesitated at deciding. Bud decided.
   “Why – ah, Miss Ileen, beauty, as you might say, ain’t everything. Not sayin’ that you haven’t your share of good looks, I always admired more than anything else about you the nice, kind way you treat your ma and pa. Any one what’s good to their parents and is a kind of home-body don’t specially need to be too pretty.”
   Ileen gave him one of her sweetest smiles. “Thank you, Mr Cunningham,” she said. “I consider that one of the finest compliments I’ve had in a long time. I’d so much rather hear you say that than to hear you talk about my eyes and hair. I’m glad you believe me when I say I don’t like flattery.”
   Our cue was there for us. Bud had made a good guess. You couldn’t lose Jacks. He chimed in next.
   “Sure thing, Miss Ileen,” he said; “the good-lookers don’t always win out. Now, you ain’t bad looking, of course, but that’s nix-cum-rous. I knew a girl once in Dubuque with a face like a cocoanut, who could skin the cat twice on a horizontal bar without changing hands. Now, a girl might have the California peach crop mashed to a marmalade and not be able to do that. I’ve seen – er – worse lookers than you, Miss Ileen; but what I like about you is the business way you’ve got of doing things. Cool and wise – that’s the winning way for a girl. Mr Hinkle told me the other day you’d never taken in a lead silver dollar or a plugged one since you’ve been on the job. Now, that’s the stuff for a girl – that’s what catches me.”
   Jacks got his smile, too.
   “Thank you, Mr Jacks,” said Ileen. “If you only knew how I appreciate any one’s being candid and not a flatterer! I get so tired of people telling me I’m pretty. I think it is the loveliest thing to have friends who tell you the truth.”
   Then I thought I saw an expectant look on Ileen’s face as she glanced toward me. I had a wild, sudden impulse to dare fate, and tell her of all the beautiful handiwork of the Great Artificer she was the most exquisite – that she was a flawless pearl gleaming pure and serene in a setting of black mud and emerald prairies – that she was – a – a corker; and as for mine, I cared not if she were as crtiel as a serpent’s tooth to her fond parents, or if she couldn’t tell a plugged dollar from a bridle buckle, if I might sing, chant, praise, glorify, and worship her peerless and wonderful beauty.
   But I refrained. I feared the fate of a flatterer. I had witnessed her delight at the crafty and discreet words of Bud and Jacks. No! Miss Hinkle was not one to be beguiled by the plated-silver tongue of a flatterer. So I joined the ranks of the candid and honest. At once I became mendacious and didactic.
   “In all ages, Miss Hinkle,” said I, “in spite of the poetry and romance of each, intellect in woman has been admired more than beauty. Even in Cleopatra, herself, men found more charm in her queenly mind than in her looks.”
   “Well, I should think so!” said Ileen. “I’ve seen pictures of her that weren’t so much, she had an awfully long nose.”
   “If I may say so,” I went on, “you remind me of Cleopatra, Miss Ileen.”
   “Why, my nose isn’t so long!” said she, opening her eyes wide and touching that comely feature with a dimpled forefinger.
   “Why – er – I mean,” said I – “I mean as to mental endowments.”
   “Oh!” said she; and then I got my smile just as Bud and Jacks had got theirs.
   “Thank every one of you,” she said, very, very sweetly, “for being so frank and honest with me. That’s the way I want you to be always. Just tell me plainly and truthfully what you think, and we’ll all be the best friends in the world. And now, because you’ve been so good to me, and understand so well how I dislike people who do nothing but pay me exaggerated compliments, I’ll sing and play a little for you.”
   Of course, we expressed our thanks and joy; but we would have been better pleased if Ileen had remained in her low rocking-chair face to face with us and let us gaze upon her. For she was no Adelina Patti – not even on the fare-wellest of the diva’s farewell tours. She had a cooing little voice like that of a turtle-dove that could almost fill the parlor when the windows and doors were closed, and Betty was not rattling the lids of the stove in the kitchen. She had a gamut that I estimate at about eight inches on the piano; and her runs and trills sounded like the clothes bubbling in your grandmother’s iron wash-pot. Believe that she must have been beautiful when I tell you that it sounded like music to us.
   “She Must Have Been Beautiful When I Tell You That It Sounded Like Music To Us”
   Ileen’s musical taste was catholic. She would sing through a pile of sheet music on the left-hand top of the piano, laying each slaughtered composition on the right-hand top. The next evening she would sing from right to left. Her favorites were Mendelssohn, and Moody and Sankey. By request she always wound up with Sweet Violets and When the Leaves Begin to Turn.
   When we left at ten o’clock the three of us would go down to Jacks’ little wooden station and sit on the platform, swinging our feet and trying to pump one another for dews as to which way Miss Ileen’s inclinations seemed to lean. That is the way of rivals – they do not avoid and glower at one another; they convene and converse and construe – striving by the art politic to estimate the strength of the enemy.
   One day there came a dark horse to Paloma, a young lawyer who at once flaunted his shingle and himself spectacularly upon the town. His name was C. Vincent Vesey. You could see at a glance that he was a recent graduate of a southwestern law school. His Prince Albert coat, light striped trousers, broad-brimmed soft black hat, and narrow white muslin bow tie proclaimed that more loudly than any diploma could. Vesey was a compound of Daniel Webster, Lord Chesterfield, Beau Brummell, and Little Jack Horner. His coming boomed Paloma. The next day after he arrived an addition to the town was surveyed and laid off in lots.
   Of course, Vesey, to further his professional fortunes, must mingle with the citizenry and outliers of Paloma. And, as well as with the soldier men, he was bound to seek popularity with the gay dogs of the place. So Jacks and Bud Cunningham and I came to be honored by his acquaintance.
   The doctrine of predestination would have been discredited had not Vesey seen Ileen Hinkle and become fourth in the tourney. Magnificently, he boarded at the yellow pine hotel instead of at the Parisian Restaurant; but he came to be a formidable visitor in the Hinkle parlor. His competition reduced Bud to an inspired increase of profanity, drove Jacks to an outburst of slang so weird that it sounded more horrible than the most trenchant of Bud’s imprecations, and made me dumb with gloom.
   For Vesey had the rhetoric. Words flowed from him like oil from a gusher. Hyperbole, compliment, praise, appreciation, honeyed gallantry, golden opinions, eulogy, and unveiled panegyric vied with one another for pre-eminence in his speech. We had small hopes that Ileen could resist his oratory and Prince Albert.
   But a day came that gave us courage.
   About dusk one evening I was sitting on the little gallery in front of the Hinkle parlor, waiting for Ileen to come, when I heard voices inside. She had come into the room with her father, and Old Man Hinkle began to talk to her. I had observed before that he was a shrewd man, and not unphilosophic.
   “Ily,” said he, “I notice there’s three or four young fellers that have been callin’ to see you regular for quite a while. Is there any one of ’em you like better than another?”
   “Why, pa,” she answered, “I like all of ’em very well. I think Mr Cuninngham and Mr Jacks and Mr Harris are very nice young men. They are so frank and honest in everything they say to me. I haven’t known Mr Vesey very long, but I think he’s a very nice young man, he’s so frank and honest in everything he says to me.”
   “Now, that’s what I’m gittin’ at,” says old Hinkle. “You’ve always been sayin’ you like people what tell the truth and don’t go humbuggin’ you with compliments and bogus talk. Now, suppose you make a test of these fellers, and see which one of ’em will talk the straightest to you.”
   “But how’ll I do it, pa?”
   “I’ll tell you how. You know you sing a little bit, Ily; you took music-lessons nearly two years in Logansport. It wasn’t long, but it was all we could afford then. And your teacher said you didn’t have any voice, and it was a waste of money to keep on. Now, suppose you ask the fellers what they think of your singin’, and see what each one of ’em tells you. The man that ’ll tell you the truth about it ’ll have a mighty lot of nerve, and ’ll do to tie to. What do you think of the plan?”
   “All right, pa,” said Ileen. “I think it’s a good idea. I’ll try it.”
   Ileen and Mr Hinkle went out of the room through the inside doors. Unobserved, I hurried down to the station. Jacks was at his telegraph table waiting for eight o’clock to come. It was Bud’s night in town, and when he rode in I repeated the conversation to them both. I was loyal to my rivals, as all true admirers of all Ileens should be.
   Simultaneously the three of us were smitten by an uplifting thought. Surely this test would eliminate Vesey from the contest. He, with his unctuous flattery, would be driven from the lists. Well we remembered Ileen’s love of frankness and honesty – how she treasured truth and candor above vain compliment and blandishment.
   Linking arms, we did a grotesque dance of joy up and down the platform, singing Muldoon Was a Solid Man at the top of our voices.
   That evening four of the willow rocking-chairs were filled besides the lucky one that sustained the trim figure of Miss Hinkle. Three of us awaited with suppressed excitement the application of the test. It was tried on Bud first.
   “Mr Cunningham,” said Ileen, with her dazzling smile, after she had sung When the Leaves Begin to Turn, “what do you really think of my voice? Frankly and honestly, now, as you know I want you to always be toward me.”
   Bud squirmed in his chair at his chance to show the sincerity that he knew was required of him.
   “Tell you the truth, Miss Ileen,” he said, earnestly, “you ain’t got much more voice than a weasel – just a little squeak, you know. Of course, we all like to hear you sing, for it’s kind of sweet and soothin’ after all, and you look most as mighty well sittin’ on the piano-stool as you do faced around. But as for real singin’ – I reckon you couldn’t call it that.”
   I looked closely at Ileen to see if Bud had overdone his frankness, but her pleased smile and sweetly spoken thanks assured me that we were on the right track.
   “And what do you think, Mr Jacks?” she asked next. “Take it from me,” said Jacks, “you ain’t in the prima donna class. I’ve heard ’em warble in every city in the United States; and I tell you your vocal output don’t go. Otherwise, you’ve got the grand opera bunch sent to the soap factory – in looks, I mean; for the high screechers generally look like Mary Ann on her Thursday out. But nix for the gargle work. Your epiglottis ain’t a real side-stepper – its footwork ain’t good.”
   With a merry laugh at Jacks’ criticism, Ileen looked inquiringly at me.
   I admit that I faltered a little. Was there not such a thing as being too frank? Perhaps I even hedged a little in my verdict; but I stayed with the critics.
   “I am not skilled in scientific music, Miss Ileen,” I said, “but, frankly, I cannot praise very highly the singing-voice that Nature has given you. It has long been a favorite comparison that a great singer sings like a bird. Well, there are birds and birds. I would say that your voice reminds me of the thrush’s – throaty and not strong, nor of much compass or variety – but still – er – sweet – in – er – its – way, and – er – ”
   “Thank you, Mr Harris,” interrupted Miss Hinkle. “I knew I could depend upon your frankness and honesty.”
   And then C. Vincent Vesey drew back one sleeve from his snowy cuff, and the water came down at Lodore.
   My memory cannot do justice to his masterly tribute to that priceless, God-given treasure – Miss Hinkle’s voice. He raved over it in terms that, if they had been addressed to the morning stars when they sang together, would have made that stellar choir explode in a meteoric shower of flaming self-satisfaction.
   He marshalled on his white finger-tips the grand opera stars of all the continents, from Jenny Lind to Emma Abbott, only to depreciate their endowments. He spoke of larynxes, of chest notes, of phrasing, arpeggios, and other strange paraphernalia of the throaty art. He admitted, as though driven to a corner, that Jenny Lind had a note or two in the high register that Miss Hinkle had not yet acquired – but – “!!!” – that was a mere matter of practice and training.
   And, as a peroration, he predicted – solemnly predicted – a career in vocal art for the “coming star of the Southwest – and one of which grand old Texas may well be proud,” hitherto unsurpassed in the annals of musical history.
   When we left at ten, Ileen gave each of us her usual warm, cordial handshake, entrancing smile, and invitation to call again. I could not see that one was favored above or below another – but three of us knew – we knew.
   We knew that frankness and honesty had won, and that the rivals now numbered three instead of four.
   Down at the station Jacks brought out a pint bottle of the proper stuff, and we celebrated the downfall of a blatant interloper.
   Four days went by without anything happening worthy of recount.
   On the fifth, Jacks and I, entering the brush arbor for our supper, saw the Mexican youth, instead of a divinity in a spotless waist and a navy-blue skirt, taking in the dollars through the barbed-wire wicket.
   We rushed into the kitchen, meeting Pa Hinkle coming out with two cups of hot coffee in his hands.
   “Where’s Ileen?” we asked, in recitative.
   Pa Hinkle was a kindly man. “Well, gents,” said he, “it was a sudden notion she took; but I’ve got the money, and I let her have her way. She’s gone to a corn – a conservatory in Boston for four years for to have her voice cultivated. Now, excuse me to pass, gents, for this coffee’s hot, and my thumbs is tender.”
   That night there were four instead of three of us sitting on the station platform and swinging our feet. C. Vincent Vesey was one of us. We discussed things while dogs barked at the moon that rose, as big as a five-cent piece or a flour barrel, over the chaparral.
   And what we discussed was whether it is better to lie to a woman or to tell her the truth.
   And as all of us were young then, we did not come to a decision.

The Girl and the Graft

   The other day I ran across my old friend Ferguson Pogue. Pogue is a conscientious grafter of the highest type. His headquarters is the Western Hemisphere, and his line of business is anything from speculating in town lots on the Great Staked Plains to selling wooden toys in Connecticut, made by hydraulic pressure from nutmegs ground to a pulp.
   Now and then when Pogue has made a good haul he comes to New York for a rest. He says the jug of wine and loaf of bread and Thou in the wilderness business is about as much rest and pleasure to him as sliding down the bumps at Coney would be to President Taft. “Give me,” says Pogue, “a big city for my vacation. Especially New York. I’m not much fond of New Yorkers, and Manhattan is about the only place on the globe where I don’t find any.”
   While in the metropolis Pogue can always be found at one of two places. One is a little second-hand bookshop on Fourth Avenue, where he reads books about his hobbies, Mahometanism and taxidermy. I found him at the other – his hall bedroom in Eighteenth Street – where he sat in his stocking feet trying to pluck The Banks of the Wabash out of a small zither. Four years he has practised this tune without arriving near enough to cast the longest trout line to the water’s edge. On the dresser lay a blued-steel Colt’s forty-five and a tight roll of tens and twenties large enough around to belong to the spring rattlesnake-story class. A chambermaid with a room-cleaning air fluttered nearby in the hall, unable to enter or to flee, scandalized by the stocking feet, aghast at the Colt’s, yet powerless, with her metropolitan instincts, to remove herself beyond the magic influence of the yellow-hued roll.
   I sat on his trunk while Ferguson Pogue talked. No one could be franker or more candid in his conversation. Beside his expression the cry of Henry James for lacteal nourishment at the age of one month would have seemed like a Chaldean cryptogram. He told me stories of his profession with pride, for he considered it an art. And I was curious enough to ask him whether he had known any women who followed it.
   “Ladies?” said Pogue, with Western chivalry. “Well, not to any great extent. They don’t amount to much in special lines of graft, because they’re all so busy in general lines. What? Why, they have to. Who’s got the money in the world? The men. Did you ever know a man to give a woman a dollar without any consideration? A man will shell out his dust to another man free and easy and gratis. But if he drops a penny in one of the machines run by the Madam Eve’s Daughters’ Amalgamated Association and the pineapple chewing gum don’t fall out when he pulls the lever you can hear him kick to the superintendent four blocks away. Man is the hardest proposition a woman has to go up against. He’s the low-grade one, and she has to work overtime to make him pay. Two times out of five she’s salted. She can’t put in crushers and costly machinery. He’d notice ’em and be onto the game. They have to pan out what they get, and it hurts their tender hands. Some of ’em are natural sluice troughs and can carry out $1,000 to the ton. The dry-eyed ones have to depend on signed letters, false hair, sympathy, the kangaroo walk, cowhide whips, ability to cook, sentimental juries, conversational powers, silk underskirts, ancestry, rouge, anonymous letters, violet sachet powders, witnesses, revolvers, pneumatic forms, carbolic acid, moonlight, cold cream and the evening newspapers.”
   “You are outrageous, Ferg,” I said. “Surely there is none of this graft as you call it, in a perfect and harmonious matrimonial union!”
   “Well,” said Pogue, “nothing that would justify you every time in calling Police Headquarters and ordering out the reserves and a vaudeville manager on a dead run. But it’s this way: Suppose you’re a Fifth Avenue millionaire, soaring high, on the right side of copper and cappers.
   “You come home at night and bring a $9,000,000 diamond brooch to the lady who’s staked your for a claim. You hand it over. She says, Oh, George! and looks to see if it’s backed. She comes up and kisses you. You’ve waited for it. You get it. All right. It’s graft.
   “But I’m telling you about Artemisia Blye. She was from Kansas and she suggested corn in all of its phases. Her hair was as yellow as the silk; her form was as tall and graceful as a stalk in the low grounds during a wet summer; her eyes were as big and startling as bunions, and green was her favorite color.
   “On my last trip into the cool recesses of your sequestered city I met a human named Vaucross. He was worth – that is, he had a million. He told me he was in business on the street. ‘A sidewalk merchant?’ says I, sarcastic. ‘Exactly,’ says he, ‘Senior partner of a paving concern.’
   “I kind of took to him. For this reason, I met him on Broadway one night when I was out of heart, luck, tobacco and place. He was all silk hat, diamonds and front. He was all front. If you had gone behind him you would have only looked yourself in the face. I looked like a cross between Count Tolstoy and a June lobster. I was out of luck. I had – but let me lay my eyes on that dealer again.
   “Vaucross stopped and talked to me a few minutes and then he took me to a high-toned restaurant to eat dinner. There was music, and then some Beethoven, and Bordelaise sauce, and cussing in French, and frangipangi, and some hauteur and cigarettes. When I am flush I know them places.
   “I declare, I must have looked as bad as a magazine artist sitting there without any money and my hair all rumpled like I was booked to read a chapter from Elsie’s School Days at a Brooklyn Bohemian smoker. But Vaucross treated me like a bear hunter’s guide. He wasn’t afraid of hurting the waiter’s feelings.
   “ ‘Mr Pogue,’ he explains to me, ‘I am using you.’
   “ ‘Go on,’ says I; ‘I hope you don’t wake up.’
   “And then he tells me, you know, the kind of man he was. He was a New Yorker. His whole ambition was to be noticed. He wanted to be conspicuous. He wanted people to point him out and bow to him, and tell others who he was. He said it had been the desire of his life always. He didn’t have but a million, so he couldn’t attract attention by spending money. He said he tried to get into public notice one time by planting a little public square on the east side with garlic for free use of the poor; but Carnegie heard of it, and covered it over at once with a library in the Gaelic language. Three times he had jumped in the way of automibiles; but the only result was five broken ribs and a notice in the papers that an unknown man, five feet ten, with four amalgam-filled teeth, supposed to be the last of the famous Red Leary gang had been run over.
   “ ‘Ever try the reporters,’ I asked him.
   “ ‘Last month,’ says Mr Vaucross, ‘my expenditure for lunches to reporters was $124.80.’
   “ ‘Get anything out of that?’ I asks.
   “ ‘That reminds me,’ says he; ‘add $8.50 for perpsin. Yes, I got indigestion.’
   “ ‘How am I supposed to push along your scramble for prominence?’ I inquires. ‘Contrast?’
   “ ‘Something of that sort to-night,’ says Vaucross. ‘It grieves me; but I am forced to resort to eccentricity.” And here he drops his napkin in his soup and rises up and bows to a gent who is devastating a potato under a palm across the room.
   “ ‘The Police Commissioner,’ says my climber, gratified. ‘Friend,’ says I, in a hurry, ‘have ambitions but don’t kick a rung out of your ladder. When you use me as a stepping stone to salute the police you spoil my appetite on the grounds that I may be degraded and incriminated. Be thoughtful.’
   “ ‘At the Quaker City squab en casserole the idea about Artemisia Blye comes to me.
   “ ‘Suppose I can manage to get you in the papers,’ says I – ‘a column or two every day in all of’em and your picture in most of’em for a week. How much would it be worth to you?’
   “ ‘Ten thousand dollars,’ says Vaucross, warm in a minute. ‘But no murder,’ says he; ‘and I won’t wear pink pants at a cotillon.’
   “ ‘I wouldn’t ask you to,’ says I. ‘This is honorable, stylish and uneffiminate. Tell the waiter to bring a demi tasse and some other beans, and I will disclose to you the opus moderandi. [31 - opus moderandi (искаж. лат.) – modus operandi – способ действия, план]’
   “We closed the deal an hour later in the rococo rouge et noire [32 - rouge et noire – (фр.) красное и черное (карточная игра)] room. I telegraphed that night to Miss Artemisia in Salina. She took a couple of photographs and an autograph letter to an elder in the Fourth Presbyterian Church in the morning, and got some transportation and $80. She stopped in Topeka long enough to trade a flashlight interior and a valentine to the vice-president of a trust company for a mileage book and a package of five-dollar notes with $250 scrawled on the band.
   “The fifth evening after she got my wire she was waiting, all decolletee and dressed up, for me and Vaucross to take her to dinner in one of these New York feminine apartment houses where a man can’t get in unless he plays bezique and smokes depilatory powder cigarettes.
   “ ‘She’s a stunner,’ says Vaucross when he saw her. ‘They’ll give her a two-column cut sure.’
   “This was the scheme the three of us concocted. It was business straight through. Vaucross was to rush Miss Blye with all the style and display and emotion he could for a month. Of course, that amounted to nothing as far as his ambitions were concerned. The sight of a man in a white tie and patent leather pumps pouring greenbacks through the large end of a cornucopia to purchase nutriment and heartsease for tall, willowy blondes in New York is as common a sight as blue turtles in delirium tremens. But he was to write her love letters – the worst kind of love letters, such as your wife publishes after you are dead – every day. At the end of the month he was to drop her, and she would bring suit for $100,000 for breach of promise.
   “Miss Artemisia was to get $10,000. If she won the suit that was all; and if she lost she was to get it anyhow. There was a signed contract to that effect.
   “Sometimes they had me out with’em, but not often. I couldn’t keep up to their style. She used to pull out his notes and criticize them like bills of lading.
   “ ‘Say, you!’ she’d say. ‘What do you call this – letter to a Hardware Merchant from His Nephew on Learning that His Aunt Has Nettlerash? You Eastern duffers know as much about writing love letters as a Kansas grasshopper does about tugboats. ‘My dear Miss Blye!’ – wouldn’t that put pink icing and a little red sugar bird on your bridal cake? How long do you expect to hold an audience in a court-room with that kind of stuff? You want to get down to business, and call me ‘Tweedlums Babe’ and ‘Honeysuckle,’ and sing yourself Mama’s Own Big Bad Puggy Wuggy Boy if you want any limelight to concentrate upon your sparse gray hairs. Get sappy.’
   “After that Vaucross dipped his pen in the indelible tabasco. His notes read like something or other in the original. I could see a jury sitting up, and women tearing one another’s hats to hear ’em read. And I could see piling up for Mr Vaucross as much notoriousness as Archbishop Crammer or the Brooklyn Bridge or cheese-on-salad ever enjoyed. He seemed mighty pleased at the prospects.
   “They agreed on a night; and I stood on Fifth Avenue outside a solemn restaurant and watched ’em. A process-server walked in and handed Vaucross the papers at this table. Everybody looked at ’em; and he looked as proud as Cicero. I went back to my room and lit a five-cent cigar, for I knew the $10,000 was as good as ours.
   “About two hours later somebody knocked at my door. There stood Vaucross and Miss Artemisia, and she was clinging – yes, sir, clinging – to his arm. And they tells me they’d been out and got married. And they articulated some trivial cadences about love and such. And they laid down a bundle on the table and said ‘Good night’ and left.
   “ ‘And that’s why I say,’ concluded Ferguson Pogue, ‘that a woman is too busy occupied with her natural vocation and instinct of graft such as is given her for self-preservation and amusement to make any great success in special lines.’
   “What was in the bundle they left?” I asked, with my usual curiosity.
   “ ‘Why,’ said Ferguson, ‘there was a scalper’s railroad ticket as far as Kansas City and two pairs of Mr Vaucross’s old pants.’

Babes in the Jungle

   Montague Silver, the finest street man and art grafter in the West, says to me once in Little Rock: “If you ever lose your mind, Billy, and get too old to do honest swindling among grown men, go to New York. In the West a sucker is born every minute; but in New York they appear in chunks of roe – you can’t count ’em!”
   Two years afterward I found that I couldn’t remember the names of the Russian admirals, and I noticed some gray hairs over my left ear; so I knew the time had arrived for me to take Silver’s advice. I struck New York about noon one day, and took a walk up Broadway. And I run against Silver himself, all encompassed up in a spacious kind of haberdashery, leaning against a hotel and rubbing the half-moons on his nails with a silk handkerchief.
   “Paresis or superannuated?” I asks him.
   “Hello, Billy,” says Silver; “I’m glad to see you. Yes, it seemed to me that the West was accumulating a little too much wiseness. I’ve been saving New York for dessert. I know it’s a low-down trick to take things from these people. They only know this and that and pass to and fro and think ever and anon. I’d hate for my mother to know I was skinning these weak-minded ones. She raised me better.”
   “Is there a crush already in the waiting rooms of the old doctor that does skin grafting?” I asks. “Well, no,” says Silver; “you needn’t back Epidermis to win to-day. I’ve only been here a month. But I’m ready to begin; and the members of Willie Manhattan’s Sunday School class, each of whom has volunteered to contribute a portion of cuticle toward this rehabilitation, may as well send their photos to the Evening Daily.
   “I’ve been studying the town,” says Silver, “and reading the papers every day, and I know it as well as the cat in the City Hall knows an O’Sullivan. People here lie down on the floor and scream and kick when you are the least bit slow about taking money from them. Come up in my room and I’ll tell you. We’ll work the town together, Billy, for the sake of old times.“
   Silver takes me up in a hotel. He has a quantity of irrelevant objects lying about.
   “There’s more ways of getting money from these metropolitan hayseeds,” says Silver, “than there is of cooking rice in Charleston, S. C. [33 - South Carolina] They’ll bite at anything. The brains of most of ’em commute. The wiser they are in intelligence the less perception of cognizance they have. Why, didin’t a man the other day sell J. P. Morgan an oil portrait of Rockefeller, Jr., for Andrea del Sarto’s celebrated painting of the young Saint John!
   “You see that bundle of printed stuff in the corner, Billy? That’s gold mining stock. I started out one day to sell that, but I quit it in two hours. Why? Got arrested for blocking the street. People fought to buy it. I sold the policeman a block of it on the way to the station-house, and then I took it off the market. I don’t want people to give me their money. I want some little consideration connected with the transaction to keep my pride from being hurt. I want ’em to guess the missing letter in Chic-go, or draw to a pair of nines before they pay me a cent of money.
   “Now there’s another little scheme that worked so easy I had to quit it. You see that bottle of blue ink on the table? I tattooed an anchor on the back of my hand and went to a bank and told ’em I was Admiral Dewey’s nephew. They offered to cash my draft on him for a thousand, but I didn’t know my uncle’s first name. It shows, though, what an easy town it is. As for burglars, they won’t go in a house now unless there’s a hot supper ready and a few college students to wait on ’em. They’re slugging citizens all over the upper part of the city and I guess, taking the town from end to end, it’s a plain case of assault and battery.”
   “Monty,” says I, when Silver had slacked up, “you may have Manhattan correctly discriminated in your perorative, but I doubt it. I’ve only been in town two hours, but it don’t dawn upon me that it’s ours with a cherry in it. There ain’t enough rus in urbe [34 - rus in urbe – (лат.) сельский элемент в городе, деревенщина] about it to suit me. I’d be a good deal much better satisfied if the citizens had a straw or more in their hair, and run more to velveteen vests and buckeye watch charms. They don’t look easy to me.”
   “You’ve got it, Billy,” says Silver. “All emigrants have it. New York’s bigger than Little Rock or Europe, and it frightens a foreigner. You’ll be all right. I tell you I feel like slapping the people here because they don’t send me all their money in laundry baskets, with germicide sprinkled over it. I hate to go down on the street to get it. Who wears the diamonds in this town? Why, Winnie, the Wiretapper’s wife, and Bella, the Buncosteerer’s bride. New Yorkers can be worked easier than a blue rose on a tidy. The only thing that bothers me is I know I’ll break the cigars in my vest pocket when I get my clothes all full of twenties.”
   “I hope you are right, Monty,” says I; “but I wish all the same I had been satisfied with a small business in Little Rock. The crop of farmers is never so short out there but what you can get a few of ’em to sign a petition for a new post office that you can discount for $200 at the county bank. The people here appear to possess instincts of self-preservation and illiberality. I fear me that we are not cultured enough to tackle this game.”
   “Don’t worry,” says Silver. “I’ve got this Jayville-near-Tarrytown correctly estimated as sure as North River is the Hudson and East River ain’t a river. Why, there are people living in four blocks of Broadway who never saw any kind of a building except a skyscraper in their lives! A good, live hustling Western man ought to get conspicuous enough here inside of three months to incur either Jerome’s clemency or Lawson’s displeasure.”
   “Hyperbole aside,” says I, “do you know of any immediate system of buncoing the community out of a dollar or two except by applying to the Salvation Army or having a fit on Miss Helen Gould’s doorsteps?”
   “Dozens of ’em,” says Silver. “How much capital have you got, Billy?”
   “A thousand,” I told him.
   “I’ve got $1,200,” says he. “We’ll pool and do a big piece of business. There’s so many ways we can make a million that I don’t know how to begin.”
   The next morning Silver meets me at the hotel and he is all sonorous and stirred with a kind of silent joy.
   “We’re to meet J. P. Morgan this afternoon,” says he. “A man I know in the hotel wants to introduce us. He’s a friend of his. He says he likes to meet people from the West.”
   “That sounds nice and plausible,” says I. “I’d like to know Mr Morgan.”
   “It won’t hurt us a bit,” says Silver, “to get acquainted with a few finance kings. I kind of like the social way New York has with strangers.” The man Silver knew was named Klein. At three o’clock Klein brought his Wall Street friend to see us in Silver’s room. “Mr Morgan” looked some like his pictures, and he had a Turkish towel wrapped around his left foot, and he walked with a cane. “Mr Silver and Mr Pescud,” says Klein. “It sounds superfluous,” says he, “to mention the name of the greatest financial – ”
   “Cut it out, Klein,” says Mr Morgan. “I’m glad to know you gents; I take great interest in the West. Klein tells me you’re from Little Rock. I think I’ve a railroad or two out there somewhere. If either of you guys would like to deal a hand or two of stud poker I – ”
   “Now, Pierpont,” cuts in Klein, “you forget!”
   “Excuse me, gents!” says Morgan; “since I’ve had the gout so bad I sometimes play a social game of cards at my house. Neither of you never knew One-eyed Peters, did you, while you was around Little Rock? He lived in Seattle, New Mexico.”
   Before we could answer, Mr Morgan hammers on the floor with his can and begins to walk up and down, swearing in a loud tone of voice. “They have been pounding your stocks to-day on the Street, Pierpont?” asks Klein, smiling.
   “Stocks! No!” roars Mr Morgan. “It’s that picture I sent an agent to Europe to buy. I just thought about it. He cabled me to-day that it ain’t to be found in all Italy. I’d pay $50,000 to-morrow for that picture – yes, $75,000. I give the agent à la carte [35 - à la carte – (фp.) порционно, на заказ. Видимо, имеется в виду другое французское выражение carte blanche. То give carte blanche. – Предоставить полную свободу действий.] in purchasing it. I cannot understand why the art galleries will allow a da Vincy to – ”
   “Why, Mr Morgan,” says Klein; “I thought you owned all of the da Vincy paintings.”
   “What is the picture like, Mr Morgan?” asks Silver. “It must be as big as the side of the Flatiron Building.”
   “I’m afraid your art education is on the bum, Mr Silver,” says Morgan. “The picture is 27 inches by 42; and it is called Love’s Idle Hour. It represents a number of cloak models doing the two-step on the bank of a purple river. The cablegram said it might have been brought to this country. My collection will never be complete without that picture. Well, so long, gents; us financiers must keep early hours.”
   Mr Morgan and Klein went away together in a cab. Me and Silver talked about how simple and unsuspecting great people was; and Silver said what a shame it would be to try to rob a man like Mr Morgan; and I said I thought it would be rather imprudent, myself. Klein proposes a stroll after dinner; and me and him and Silver walks down toward Seventh Avenue to see the sights. Klein sees a pair of cuff links that instigate his admiration in a pawnshop window, and we all go in while he buys’em. After we got back to the hotel and Klein had gone, Silver jumps at me and waves his hands.
   “Did you see it?” says he. “Did you see it, Billy?”
   “What?” I asks.
   “Why, that picture that Morgan wants. It’s hanging in that pawnshop, behind the desk. I didn’t say anything because Klein was there. It’s the article sure as you live. The girls are as natural as paint can make them, all measuring 36 and 25 and 42 skirts, if they had any skirts, and they’re doing a buck-and-wing on the bank of a river with the blues. What did Mr Morgan say he’d give for it? Oh, don’t make me tell you. They can’t know what it is in that pawnshop.”
   When the pawnshop opened the next morning me and Silver was standing there as anxious as if we wanted to soak our Sunday suit to buy a drink. We sauntered inside, and began to look at watch-chains.
   “That’s a violent specimen of a chromo you’ve got up there,” remarked Silver, casual, to the pawnbroker. “But I kind of enthuse over the girl with the shoulderblades and red bunting. Would an offer of $2.25 for it cause you to knock over any fragile articles of your stock in hurrying it off the nail?”
   The pawnbroker smiles and goes on showing us plate watch-chains.
   “That picture,” says he, “was pledged a year ago by an Italian gentleman. I loaned him $500 on it. It is called Love’s Idle Hour, and it is by Leonardo da Vincy. Two days ago the legal time expired, and it became an unredeemed pledge. Here is a style of chain that is worn a great deal now.”
   At the end of half an hour me and Silver paid the pawnbroker $2,000 and walked out with the picture. Silver got into a cab with it and started for Morgan’s office. I goes to the hotel and waits for him. In two hours Silver comes back.
   “Did you see Mr Morgan?” I asks. “How much did he pay you for it?”
   Silver sits down and fools with a tassel on the table cover.
   “I never exactly saw Mr Morgan,” he says, “because Mr Morgan’s been in Europe for a month. But what’s worrying me, Billy, is this: The department stores have all got that same picture on sale, framed, for $3.48. And they charge $3.50 for the frame alone – that’s what I can’t understand.”

The Whirligig of Life

   Justice-of-the-peace Benaja Widdup sat in the door of his office smoking his elder-stem pipe. Half-way to the zenith the Cumberland range rose blue-gray in the afternoon haze. A speckled hen swaggered down the main street of the “settlement,” cackling foolishly.
   Up the road came a sound of creaking axles, and then a slow cloud of dust, and then a bull-cart bearing Ransie Bilbro and his wife. The cart stopped at the Justice’s door, and the two climbed down. Ransie was a narrow six feet of sallow brown skin and yellow hair. The imperturbability of the mountains hung upon him like a suit of armour. The woman was calicoed, angled, snuff-brushed, and weary with unknown desires. Through it all gleamed a faint protest of cheated youth unconscious of its loss.
   The Justice of the Peace slipped his feet into his shoes, for the sake of dignity, and moved to let them enter.
   “We-all,” said the woman, in a voice like the wind blowing through pine boughs, “wants a divo’ce.” She looked at Ransie to see if he noted any flaw or ambiguity or evasion or partiality or self-partisanship in her statement of their business.
   “A divo’ce,” repeated Ransie, with a solemn nod. “We – all can’t git along together nohow. It’s lonesome enough fur to live in the mount’ins when a man and a woman keers fur one another. But when she’s a-spittin’ like a wildcat or a-sullenin’ like a hoot-owl in the cabin, a man ain’t got no call to live with her.”
   “When he’s a no-’count varmint,” said the woman, “without any especial warmth, a-traipsin’ along of scalawags and moonshiners and a-layin’ on his back pizen ’ith co’n whiskey, and a-pesterin’ folks with a pack o’ hungry, triflin’ houn’s to feed!”
   “When she keeps a-throwin’ skillet lids,” came Ransie’s antiphony, “and slings b’ilin’ water on the best coon-dog in the Cumberlands, and sets herself agin’ cookin’ a man’s victuals, and keeps him awake o’ nights accusin’ him of a sight of doin’s!”
   “When he’s al’ays a-fightin’ the revenues, and gits a hard name in the mount’ins fur a mean man, who’s gwine to be able fur to sleep o’ nights?”
   The Justice of the Peace stirred deliberately to his duties. He placed his one chair and a wooden stool for his petitioners. He opened his book of statutes on the table and scanned the index. Presently he wiped his spectacles and shifted his inkstand.
   “The law and the statutes,” said he, “air silent on the subjeck of divo’ce as fur as the jurisdiction of this co’t air concerned. But, accordin’ to equity and the Constitution and the golden rule, it’s a bad barg’in that can’t run both ways. If a justice of the peace can marry a couple, it’s plain that he is bound to be able to divo’ce ’em. This here office will issue a decree of divo’ce and abide by the decision of the Supreme Co’t to hold it good.”
   Ransie Bilbro drew a small tobacco-bag from his trousers pocket. Out of this he shook upon the table a five-dollar note. “Sold a b’arskin and two foxes fur that,” he remarked. “It’s all the money we got.”
   “The regular price of a divo’ce in this co’t,” said the Justice, “air five dollars.” He stuffed the bill into the pocket of his homespun vest with a deceptive air of indifference. With much bodily toil and mental travail he wrote the decree upon half a sheet of foolscap, and then copied it upon the other. Ransie Bilbro and his wife listened to his reading of the document that was to give them freedom:
   “Know all men by these presents that Ransie Bilbro and his wife, Ariela Bilbro, this day personally appeared before me and promises that hereinafter they will neither love, honour, nor obey each other, neither for better nor worse, being of sound mind and body, and accept summons for divorce according to the peace and dignity of the State. Herein fail not, so help you God. Benaja Widdup, justice of the peace in and for the county of Piedmont, State of Tennessee.” The Justice was about to hand one of the documents to Ransie. The voice of Ariela delayed the transfer. Both men looked at her. Their dull masculinity was confronted by something sudden and unexpected in the woman.
   “Judge, don’t you give him that air paper yit. “Tain’t all settled, nohow. I got to have my rights first. I got to have my alimoney. “Tain’t no kind of a way to do fur a man to divo’ce his wife “thout her havin” a cent fur to do with. I’m a-layin’ off to be a-goin’ up to brother Ed’s up on Hogback Mount’in. I’m bound fur to hev a pa’r of shoes and some snuff and things besides. Ef Rance kin affo’d a divo’ce, let him pay me alimoney.”
   Ransie Bilbro was stricken to dumb perplexity. There had been no previous hint of alimony. Women were always bringing up startling and unlooked-for issues.
   Justice Benaja Widdup felt that the point demanded judicial decision. The authorities were also silent on the subject of alimony. But the woman’s feet were bare. The trail to Hogback Mountain was steep and flinty.
   “Ariela Bilbro,” he asked, in official tones, “how much did you ’low would be good and sufficient ali-money in the case befo the co’t.”
   “I ’lowed,” she answered, “fur the shoes and all, to say five dollars. That ain’t much fur ali-money, but I reckon that’ll git me to up brother Ed’s.”
   “The amount,” said the Justice, “air not onreasonable. Ransie Bilbro, you air ordered by the co’t to pay the plaintiff the sum of five dollars befo’ the decree of divo’ce air issued.”
   “I hain’t no mo’ money,” breathed Ransie, heavily. “I done paid you all I had.”
   “Otherwise,” said the Justice, looking severely over his spectacles, “you air in contempt of co’t.”
   “I reckon if you gimme till to-morrow,” pleaded the husband, “I mout be able to rake or scrape it up somewhars. I never looked for to be a-payin’ no ali-money.”
   “The case air adjourned,” said Benaja Widdup, “till to-morrow, when you all will present yo’selves and obey the order of the co’t. Followin’ of which the decrees of divo’ce will be delivered.” He sat down in the door and began to loosen a shoestring.
   “We mout as well go down to Uncle Ziah’s,” decided Ransie, “and spend the night.” He climbed into the cart on one side, and Ariela climbed in on the other. Obeying the flap of his rope, the little red bull slowly came around on a tack, and the cart crawled away in the nimbus arising from its wheels.
   Justice-of-the-peace Benaja Widdup smoked his elder-stem pipe. Late in the afternoon he got his weekly paper, and read it until the twilight dimmed its lines. Then he lit the tallow candle on his table, and read until the moon rose, marking the time for supper. He lived in the double log cabin on the slope near the girdled poplar. Going home to supper he crossed a little branch darkened by a laurel thicket. The dark figure of a man stepped from the laurels and pointed a rifle at his breast. His hat was pulled down low, and something covered most of his face.
   “I want yo’ money,” said the figure, “ ‘thout any talk. I’m gettin’ nervous, and my finger’s a-wabblin’ on this here trigger.”
   “I’ve only got f-f-five dollars,” said the Justice, producing it from his vest pocket.
   “Roll it up,” came the order, “and stick it in the end of this here gun-bar’l.”
   The bill was crisp and new. Even fingers that were clumsy and trembling found little difficulty in making a spill of it and inserting it (this with less ease) into the muzzle of the rifle.
   “Now I reckon you kin be goin’ along,” said the robber.
   The Justice lingered not on his way.
   The next day came the little red bull, drawing the cart to the office door. Justice Benaja Widdup had his shoes on, for he was expecting the visit. In his presence Ransie Bilbro handed to his wife a five-dollar bill. The official’s eye sharply viewed it. It seemed to curl up as though it had been rolled and inserted into the end of a gun-barrel. But the Justice refrained from comment. It is true that other bills might be inclined to curl. He handed each one a decree of divorce. Each stood awkwardly silent, slowly folding the guarantee of freedom. The woman cast a shy glance full of constraint at Ransie.
   “I reckon you’ll be goin’ back up to the cabin,” she said, along ’ith the bull-cart. There’s bread in the tin box settin’ on the shelf. I put the bacon in the b’ilin’-pot to keep the hounds from gittin’ it. Don’t forget to wind the clock to-night.”
   “You air a-goin’ to your brother Ed’s?” asked Ransie, with fine unconcern.
   “I was ’lowin to get along up thar afore night. I ain’t sayin’ as they’ll pester theyselves any to make me welcome, but I hain’t nowhar else fur to go. It’s a right smart ways, and I reckon I better be goin’. I’ll be a-sayin’ good-bye, Ranse – that is, if you keer fur to say so.”
   “I don’t know as anybody’s a hound dog,” said Ransie, in a martyr’s voice, “fur to not want to say good-bye – ’less you air so anxious to git away that you don’t want me to say it.”
   Ariela was silent. She folded the five-dollar bill and her decree carefully, and placed them in the bosom of her dress. Benaja Widdup watched the money disappear with mournful eyes behind his spectacles.
   And then with his next words he achieved rank (as his thoughts ran) with either the great crowd of the world’s sympathizers or the little crowd of its great financiers.
   “Be kind o’ lonesome in the old cabin to-night, Ranse,” he said.
   Ransie Bilbro stared out at the Cumberlands, clear blue now in the sunlight. He did not look at Ariela.
   “I ’low it might be lonesome,” he said; “but when folks gits mad and wants a divo’ce, you can’t make folks stay.”
   “There’s others wanted a divo’ce,” said Ariela, speaking to the wooden stool. “Besides, nobody don’t want nobody to stay.”
   “Nobody never said they didn’t.”
   “Nobody never said they did. I reckon I better start on now to brother Ed’s.”
   “Nobody can’t wind that old clock.”
   “Want me to go back along ’ith you in the cart and wind it fur you, Ranse?”
   The mountaineer’s countenance was proof against emotion. But he reached out a big hand and enclosed Ariela’s thin brown one. Her soul peeped out once through her impassive face, hallowing it.
   “Them hounds shan’t pester you no more,” said Ransie. “I reckon I been mean and low down. You wind that clock, Ariela.”
   “My heart hit’s in that cabin, Ranse,” she whispered, “along ’ith you. I ai’nt a-goin’ to git mad no more. Le’s be startin’, Ranse, so’s we kin git home by sundown.” Justice-of-the-peace Benaja Widdup interposed as they started for the door, forgetting his presence.
   “In the name of the State of Tennessee,” he said, “I forbid you all to be a-defyin’ of its laws and statutes. This co’t is mo’ than willin’ and full of joy to see the clouds of discord and misunderstandin’ rollin’ away from two lovin’ hearts, but it air the duty of the co’t to p’eserve the morals and integrity of the State. The co’t reminds you that you air no longer man and wife, but air divo’ced by regular decree, and as such air not entitled to the benefits and ’purtenances of the mattermonal estate.”
   Ariela caught Ransie’s arm. Did those words mean that she must lose him now when they had just learned the lesson of life?
   “But the co’t air prepared,” went on the Justice, “fur to remove the disabilities set up by the decree of divo’ce. The co’t air on hand to perform the solemn ceremony of marri’ge, thus fixin’ things up and enablin’ the parties in the case to resume the honour’ble and elevatin’ state of mattermony which they desires. The fee fur per-formin’ said ceremony will be, in this case, to wit, five dollars.”
   Ariela caught the gleam of promise in his words. Swiftly her hand went to her bosom. Freely as an alighting dove the bill fluttered to the Justice’s table. Her sallow cheek coloured as she stood hand in hand with Ransie and listened to the reuniting words.
   Ransie helped her into the cart, and climbed in beside her. The little red bull turned once more, and they set out, hand-clasped, for the mountains.
   Justice-of-the-peace Benaja Widdup sat in his door and took off his shoes. Once again he fingered the bill tucked down in his vest pocket. Once again he smoked his elder-stem pipe. Once again the speckled hen swaggered down the main street of the “settlement,” cackling foolishly.

The Roads We Take

   Twenty miles West of Tucson, the “Sunset Express” stopped at a tank to take on water. Besides the aqueous, addition the engine of that famous flyer acquired some other things that were not good for it.
   While the fireman was lowering the feeding hose, Bob Tidball, “Shark” Dodson and a quarter-bred Creek Indian called John Big Dog climbed on the engine and showed the engineer three round orifices in pieces of ordnance that he carried. These orifices so impressed the engineer with their possibilities that he raised both hands in a gesture such as accompanies the ejaculation “Do tell!”
   At the crisp command of Shark Dodson, who was leader of the attacking force the engineer descended to the ground and uncoupled the engine and tender. Then John Big Dog, perched upon the coal, sportively held two guns upon the engine driver and the fireman, and suggested that they run the engine fifty yards away and there await further orders.
   Shark Dodson and Bob Tidball, scorning to put such low-grade ore as the passengers through the mill, struck out for the rich pocket of the express car. They found the messenger serene in the belief that the “Sunset Express” was taking on nothing more stimulating and dangerous than aqua pura. While Bob was knocking this idea out of his head with the butt-end of his six-shooter Shark Dodson was already dosing the express-car safe with dynamite.
   The safe exploded to the tune of $30,000, all gold and currency. The passengers thrust their heads casually out of the windows to look for the thunder-cloud. The conductor jerked at the bell-rope, which sagged down loose and unresisting, at his tug. Shark Dodson and Bob Tidball, with their booty in a stout canvas bag, tumbled out of the express car and ran awkwardly in their high-heeled boots to the engine.
   The engineer, sullenly angry but wise, ran the engine, according to orders, rapidly away from the inert train. But before this was accomplished the express messenger, recovered from Bob Tidball’s persuader to neutrality, jumped out of his car with a Winchester rifle and took a trick in the game. Mr John Big Dog, sitting on the coal tender, unwittingly made a wrong lead by giving an imitation of a target, and the messenger trumped him. With a ball exactly between his shoulder blades the Creek chevalier of industry rolled off to the ground, thus increasing the share of his comrades in the loot by one-sixth each.
   Two miles from the tank the engineer was ordered to stop.
   The robbers waved a defiant adieu and plunged down the steep slope into the thick woods that lined the track. Five minutes of crashing through a thicket of chapparal brought them to open woods, where three horses were tied to low-hanging branches. One was waiting for John Big Dog, who would never ride by night or day again. This animal the robbers divested of saddle and bridle and set free. They mounted the other two with the bag across one pommel, and rode fast and with discretion through the forest and up a primeval, lonely gorge. Here the animal that bore Bob Tidball slipped on a mossy boulder and broke a foreleg. They shot him through the head at once and sat down to hold a council of flight. Made secure for the present by the tortuous trail they had travelled, the question of time was no longer so big. Many miles and hours lay between them and the spryest posse that could follow. Shark Dodson’s horse, with trailing rope and dropped bridle, panted and cropped thankfully of the grass along the stream in the gorge. Bob Tidball opened the sack, drew out double handfuls of the neat packages of currency and the one sack of gold and chuckled with the glee of a child.
   “Say, you old double-decked pirate,” he called joyfully to Dodson, “you said we could do it – you got a head for financing that knocks the horns off of anything in Arizona.”
   “What are we going to do about a hoss for you, Bob? We ain’t got long to wait here. They’ll be on our trail before daylight in the mornin’.”
   “Oh, I guess that cayuse of yourn’ll carry double for a while,” answered the sanguine Bob. “We’ll annex the first animal we come across. By jingoes, we made a haul, didn’t we? Accordin’ to the marks on this money there’s $30,000 – $15,000 apiece!”
   “It’s short of what I expected,” said Shark Dodson, kicking softly at the packages with the toe of his boot and then he looked pensively at the wet sides of his tired horse.
   “Old Bolivar’s mighty nigh played out,” he said, slowly. “I wish that sorrel of yours hadn’t got hurt.”
   “So do I,” said Bob, heartily, “but it can’t be helped. Bolivar’s got plenty of bottom – he’ll get us both far enough to get fresh mounts. Dang it, Shark, I can’t belp thinkin’ how funny it is that an Easterner like you can come out here and give us Western fellows cards and spades in the desperado business. What part of the East was you from, anyway?”
   “New York State,” said Shark Dodson, sitting down on a boulder and chewing a twig. “I was born on a farm in Ulster County. I ran away from home when I was seventeen. It was an accident my coming West. I was walkin’ along the road with my clothes in a bundle, makin’ for New York City. I had an idea of goin’ there and makin’ lots of money. I always felt like I could do it. I came to a place one evenin’ where the road forked and I didn’t know which fork to take. I studied about it for half an hour, and then I took the left-hand. That night I run into the camp of a Wild West show that was travellin’ among the little towns, and I went West with it. I’ve often wondered if I wouldn’t have turned out different if I’d took the other road.”
   “Oh, I reckon you’d have ended up about the same,” said Bob Tidball, cheerfully philosophical. “It ain’t the roads we take; it’s what’s inside of us that makes us turn out the way we do.”
   Shark Dodson got up and leaned against a tree.
   “I’d a good deal rather that sorrel of yourn hadn’t hurt himself, Bob,” he said again, almost pathetically.
   “Same here,” agreed Bob; “he was sure a first-rate kind of a crowbait. But Bolivar, he’ll pull us through all right. Reckon we’d better be movin’ on, hadn’t we, Shark? I’ll bag this boodle ag’in and we’ll hit the trail for higher timber.”
   Bob Tidball replaced the spoil in the bag and tied the mouth of it tightly with a cord. When he looked up the most prominent object that he saw was the muzzle of Shark Dodson’s.45 held upon him without a waver.
   “Stop your funnin’,” said Bob, with a grin. “We got to be hittin’ the breeze.”
   “Set still,” said Shark. “You ain’t goin’ to hit no breeze, Bob. I hate to tell you, but there ain’t any chance for but one of us. Bolivar, he’s plenty tired, and he can’t carry double.”
   “We been pards, me and you, Shark Dodson, for three years,” Bob said quietly. “We’ve risked our lives together time and again. I’ve always give you a square deal, and I thought you was a man. I’ve heard some queer stories about you shootin’ one or two men in a peculiar way, but I never believed ’em. Now if you’re just havin’ a little fun with me, Shark, put your gun up, and we’ll get on Bolivar and vamose. If you mean to shoot – shoot, you blackhearted son of a tarantula!”
   Shark Dodson’s face bore a deeply sorrowful look. “You don’t know how bad I feel,” he sighed, “about that sorrel of yourn breakin’ his leg, Bob.”
   The expression on Dodson’s face changed in an instant to one of cold ferocity mingled with inexorable cupidity. The soul of the man showed itself for a moment like an evil face in the window of a reputable house.
   Truly Bob Tidball was never to “hit the breeze” again. The deadly.45 of the false friend cracked and filled the gorge with a roar that the walls hurled back with indignant echoes. And Bolivar, unconscious accomplice, swiftly bore away the last of the holders-up of the “Sunset Express,” not put to the stress of “carrying double.”
   But as “Shark” Dodson galloped away the woods seemed to fade from his view; the revolver in his right hand turned to the curved arm of a mahogany chair; his saddle was strangely upholstered, and he opened his eyes and saw his feet, not in stirrups, but resting quietly on the edge of a quartered-oak desk.
   I am telling you that Dodson, of the firm of Dodson & Decker, Wall Street brokers, opened his eyes. Peabody, the confidential clerk, was standing by his chair, hesitating to speak. There was a confused hum of wheels below, and the sedative buzz of an electric fan.
   “Ahem! Peabody,” said Dodson, blinking. “I must have fallen asleep. I had a most remarkable dream. What is it, Peabody?”
   “Mr Williams, sir, of Tracy & Williams, is outside. He has come to settle his deal in X. Y. Z. The market caught him short, sir, if you remember.”
   “Yes, I remember. What is X. Y. Z. quoted at to-day, Peabody?”
   “One eighty-five, sir.”
   “Then that’s his price.”
   “Excuse me,” said Peabody, rather nervously “for speaking of it, but I’ve been talking to Williams. He’s an old friend of yours, Mr Dodson, and you practically have a corner in X. Y. Z. I thought you might – that is, I thought you might not remember that he sold you the stock at 98. If he settles at the market price it will take every cent he has in the world and his home too to deliver the shares.”
   The expression on Dodson’s face changed in an instant to one of cold ferocity mingled with inexorable cupidity. The soul of the man showed itself for a moment like an evil face in the window of a reputable house.
   “He will settle at one eighty-five,” said Dodson. “Bolivar cannot carry double.”

A Ruler of Men

   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.
   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.
   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.
   Without his looking at me or slowing his pace, I found a five-dollar bill crumpled neatly into my hand.
   “I wouldn’t have thought, Kansas Bill,” I said, “that you’d hold an old friend that cheap.”
   Then he turned his head, and the hickory-nut cracked into a wide smile.
   “Give back the money,” said he, “or I’ll have the cop after you for false pretenses. I thought you was the cop.”
   “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?”
   “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.”
   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.
   “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.”
   “The tropics,” said I, “are a broad territory. What part of Cancer of Capricorn have you been honoring with a visit?”
   “Down along China or Peru – or maybe the Argentine Confederacy,” said Kansas Bill. “Anyway ’twas among a great race of people, off-colored but progressive. I was there three months.”
   “No doubt you are glad to be back among the truly great race,” I surmised. “Especially among New Yorkers, the most progressive and independent citizens of any country in the world,” I continued, with the fatuity of the provincial who has eaten the Broadway lotus.
   “Do you want to start an argument?” asked Bill.
   “Can there be one?” I answered.
   “Has an Irishman humor, do you think?” asked he.
   “I have an hour or two to spare,” said I, looking at the cafe clock.
   “Not that the Americans aren’t a great commercial nation,” conceded Bill. “But the fault laid with the people who wrote lies for fiction.”
   “What was this Irishman’s name?” I asked.
   “Was that last beer cold enough?” said he.
   “I see there is talk of further outbreaks among the Russian peasants,” I remarked.
   “His name was Barney O’Connor,” said Bill.
   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:
   “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.
   “ ‘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 cafe; thence – ’
   “ ‘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.’
   “ ‘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! [36 - Cospetto! – (итал.) Черт возьми!]” and other Italian maledictions. I misdoubt if it’s ever been done. You’re not thinking of trying that, are you, Barney?’ I asks.
   “ ‘Bowers,’ says he, ‘you’re a man of education and courage.’
   “ ‘How can I deny it?’ says I. ‘Education runs in my family; and I have acquired courage by a hard struggle with life.’
   “ ‘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.’
   “ ‘Barney,’ I says to him, ‘why don’t you get on the force and settle down to a quiet life of carnage and corruption instead of roaming off to foreign parts? In what better way can you indulge your desire to subdue and maltreat the oppressed?’
   “ ‘Look again at the map,’ says he, ‘at the country I have the point of me knife on. ’Tis that one I have selected to aid and overthrow with me father’s sword.’
   “ ‘I see,’ says I. ‘It’s the green one; and that does credit to your patriotism, and it’s the smallest one; and that does credit to your judgment.’
   “ ‘Do ye accuse me of cowardice?’ says Barney, turning pink.
   “ ‘No man,’ says I, ‘who attacks and confiscates a country single-handed could be called a coward. The worst you can be charged with is plagiarism or imitation. If Anthony Hope and Roosevelt let you get away with it, nobody else will have any right to kick.’
   “ ‘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?’
   “ ‘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?’
   “ ‘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.’
   “ ‘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.’
   “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.
   “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.’
   “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 [37 - dolce far ultra – смешение двух устойчивых оборотов: dolce far niente (итал.) сладкое ничегонеделание и ne plus ultra (лат.) далее ничего; видимо речь идет о «высшей степени безделия»] as the pictures of Lake Ronkonkoma in the brochure of the passenger department of the Long Island Railroad.
   “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.
   “ ‘Hooligan Alley,’ says I, rechristening it.
   “ ‘’Twill be our headquarters,’ says O’Connor. ‘My agent here, Don Fernando Pacheco, secured it for us.’
   “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 a la Kansas City lunch counter.
   “It seems that O’Connor really did have some sort of system planned out beforehand. He wrote plenty of letters; and every day or two some native gent would stroll round to headquarters and be shut up in the back room for half an hour with O’Connor and the interpreter. I noticed that when they went in they were always smoking eight-inch cigars and at peace with the world; but when they came out they would be folding up a ten– or twenty-dollar bill and cursing the government horribly.
   “One evening after we had been in Guaya – in this town of Smellville-by-the-Sea – about a month, and me and O’Connor were sitting outside the door helping along old tempus fugit with rum and ice and limes, I says to him:
   “ ‘If you’ll excuse a patriot that don’t exactly know what he’s patronizing, for the question – what is your scheme for subjugating this country? Do you intend to plunge it into bloodshed, or do you mean to buy its votes peacefully and honorably at the polls?’
   “ ‘Bowers,’ says he, ‘ye’re a fine little man and I intend to make great use of ye after the conflict. But ye do not understand statecraft. Already by now we have a network of strategy clutching with invisible fingers at the throat of the tyrant Calderas. We have agents at work in every town in the republic. The Liberal party is bound to win. On our secret lists we have the names of enough sympathizers to crush the administration forces at a single blow.’
   “ ‘A straw vote,’ says I, ‘only shows which way the hot air blows.’
   “ ‘Who has accomplished this?’ goes on O’Connor. ‘I have. I have directed everything. The time was ripe when we came, so my agents inform me. The people are groaning under burdens of taxes and levies. Who will be their natural leader when they rise? Could it be any one but meself? ’Twas only yesterday that Zaldas, our representative in the province of Durasnas, tells me that the people, in secret, already call me El Library Door, which is the Spanish manner of saying The Liberator. [38 - Libertador – (исп.) Освободитель]’
   “ ‘Was Zaldas that maroon-colored old Aztec with a paper collar on and unbleached domestic shoes?’ I asked.
   “ ‘He was,’ says O’Connor.
   “ ‘I saw him tucking a yellow-back into his vest pocket as he came out,’ says I. ‘It may be,’ says I, ‘that they call you a library door, but they treat you more like the side door of a bank. But let us hope for the worst.’
   “ ‘It has cost money, of course,’ says O’Connor; ‘but we’ll have the country in our hands inside of a month.’
   “In the evenings we walked about in the plaza and listened to the band playing and mingled with the populace at its distressing and obnoxious pleasures. There were thirteen vehicles belonging to the upper classes, mostly rockaways and old-style barouches, such as the mayor rides in at the unveiling of the new poorhouse at Milledgeville, Alabama. Round and round the desiccated fountain in the middle of the plaza they drove, and lifted their high silk hats to their friends. The common people walked around in barefooted bunches, puffing stogies that a Pittsburg millionaire wouldn’t have chewed for a dry smoke on Ladies’ Day at his club. And the grandest figure in the whole turnout was Barney O’Connor. Six foot two he stood in his Fifth Avenue clothes, with his eagle eye and his black moustache that tickled his ears. He was a born dictator and czar and hero and harrier of the human race. It looked to me that all eyes were turned upon O’Connor, and that every woman there loved him, and every man feared him. Once or twice I looked at him and thought of funnier things that had happened than his winning out in his game; and I began to feel like a Hidalgo de Officio de Grafto de South America myself. And then I would come down again to solid bottom and let my imagination gloat, as usual, upon the twenty-one American dollars due me on Saturday night.
   “ ‘Take note,’ says O’Connor to me as thus we walked, ‘of the mass of the people. Observe their oppressed and melancholy air. Can ye not see that they are ripe for revolt? Do ye not perceive that they are disaffected?’
   “ ‘I do not,’ says I. ‘Nor disinfected either. I’m beginning to understand these people. When they look unhappy they’re enjoying themselves. When they feel unhappy they go to sleep. They’re not the kind of people to take an interest in revolutions.’
   “ ‘They’ll flock to our standard,’ says O’Connor. ‘Three thousand men in this town alone will spring to arms when the signal is given. I am assured of that. But everything is in secret. There is no chance for us to fail.’
   “On Hooligan Alley, as I prefer to call the street our headquarters was on, there was a row of flat ‘dobe houses with red tile roofs, some straw shacks full of Indians and dogs, and one two-story wooden house with balconies a little farther down. That was where General Tumbalo, the comandante and commander of the military forces, lived. Right across the street was a private residence built like a combination bake-oven and folding-bed. One day, O’Connor and me were passing it, single file, on the flange they called a sidewalk, when out of the window flies a big red rose. O’Connor, who is ahead, picks it up, presses it to his fifth rib, and bows to the ground. By Carrambos! [39 - Carramba – (исп.) Черт подери!] that man certainly had the Irish drama chaunceyized. I looked around expecting to see the little boy and girl in white sateen ready to jump on his shoulder while he jolted their spinal columns and ribs together through a breakdown, and sang: ‘Sleep, Little One, Sleep.’
   “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.
   “When we got back to our house O’Connor began to walk up and down the floor and twist his moustaches.
   “ ‘Did ye see her eyes, Bowers?’ he asks me.
   “ ‘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 VII 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 senorita – then the outburst – the fighting on the plaza – the – ’
   “ ‘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.’
   “ ‘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 Espanola and lay in a bottle of walnut stain before war is declared.’
   “ ‘How will I find out her name?’ says O’Connor, layin’ his chin in his hand.
   “ ‘Why don’t you go across the street and ask her?’ says I.
   “ ‘Will ye never regard anything in life seriously?’ says O’Connor, looking down at me like a schoolmaster.
   “ ‘Maybe she meant the rose for me,’ I said, whistling the Spanish Fandango.
   “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.
   “The next afternoon he comes in with a triumphant smile and begins to pull something like ticker tape out of his pocket.
   “ ‘Great!’ says I. ‘This is something like home. How is Amalgamated Copper to-day?’
   “ ‘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.’
   “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.
   “ ‘Do ye see?’ says O’Connor. ‘She intends to encourage me sword to save her country.’
   “ ‘It looks to me like an invitation to supper,’ says I.
   “So every day this senorita 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 glory field of battle.
   “By and by the revolution began to get ripe. One day O’Connor takes me into the back room and tells me all.
   “ ‘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.’
   “ ‘No doubt,’ says I. ‘But could you lick six? And suppose they hurled an army of seventeen against you?’
   “ ‘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 Senor Espadas, now Minister of Finance in the present cabinet.’
   “ ‘What do you get?’ I asked.
   “ ‘’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.’
   “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.
   “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.
   “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.
   “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.
   “ ‘Did you hear anything?’ he asks.
   “ ‘I did,’ says I. ‘At first I thought it was drums. But it wasn’t; it was snoring. Everybody in town’s asleep.’
   “O’Connor tears out his watch.
   “ ‘Fools!’ says he. ‘They’ve set the time right at the siesta hour when everybody takes a nap. But the cannon will wake ’em up. Everything will be all right, depend upon it.’
   “Just at twelve o’clock we heard the sound of a cannon – BOOM! – shaking the whole town.
   “O’Connor loosens his sword in its scabbard and jumps for the door. I went as far as the door and stood in it.
   “People were sticking their heads out of doors and windows. But there was one grand sight that made the landscape look tame.
   “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.
   “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.
   “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.
   “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.
   “Then the general’s sabre broke in two; and he took to his ginger-colored heels crying out, Policia, 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 hats climbed over O’Connor and subjugated him according to the municipal statutes.
   “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.
   “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.
   “ ‘The ice-man didn’t call to-day,’ says I. ‘What’s the matter with everything, Sancho?’
   “ ‘Ah, yes,’ says the liver-colored linguist. ‘They just tell me in the town. Verree bad act that Senor O’Connor make fight with General Tumbalo. Yes, general Tumbalo great soldier and big mans.’
   “ ‘What’ll they do to Mr O’Connor?’ I asks.
   “ ‘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 Senor Americano try kill General Tumbalo. He say they keep Senor O’Connor in jail six months; then have trial and shoot him with guns. Verree sorree.’
   “ ‘How about this revolution that was to be pulled off?’ I asks.
   “ ‘Oh,’ says this Sancho, ‘I think too hot weather for revolution. Revolution better in winter-time. Maybe so next winter. Quien sabe?’
   “ ‘But the cannon went off,’ says I. ‘The signal was given.’
   “ ‘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.”
   “About sunset I went over to the jail, and they let me talk to O’Connor through the bars.
   “ ‘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?’
   “ ‘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?’
   “ ‘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.’
   “ ‘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.’
   “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.
   “ ‘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.’
   “ ‘Has it come to this?’ says O’Connor, raging up and down his cell. ‘Am I to be starved to death and then shot? I’ll make those traitors feel the weight of an O’Connor’s hand when I get out of this.’ And then he comes to the bars and speaks softer. ‘Has nothing been heard from Dona Isabel?’ he asks. ‘Though every one else in the world fail,’ says he, ‘I trust those eyes of hers. She will find a way to effect my release. Do ye think ye could communicate with her? One word from her – even a rose would make me sorrow light. But don’t let her know except with the utmost delicacy, Bowers. These high-bred Castilians are sensitive and proud.’
   “ ‘Well said, Barney,’ says I. ‘You’ve given me an idea. I’ll report later. Something’s got to be pulled off quick, or we’ll both starve.’
   “I walked out and down to Hooligan Alley, and then on the other side of the street. As I went past the window of Dona Isabel Antonia Concha Regalia, out flies the rose as usual and hits me on the ear.
   “The door was open, and I took off my hat and walked in. It wasn’t very light; inside, but there she sat in a rocking-chair by the window smoking a black cheroot. And when I got closer I saw that she was about thirty-nine, and had never seen a straight front in her life. I sat down on the arm of her chair, and took the cheroot out of her mouth and stole a kiss.
   “ ‘Hullo, Izzy,’ I says. ‘Excuse my unconventionality, but I feel like I have known you for a month. Whose Izzy is oo?’
   “The lady ducked her head under her mantilla, and drew in a long breath. I thought she was going to scream, but with all that intake of air she only came out with: ‘Me likee Americanos.’
   “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.
   “ ‘You come back?’ says Izzy, in alarm.
   “ ‘Me go bring preacher,’ says I. ‘Come back twenty minutes. We marry now. How you likee?’
   “ ‘Marry to-day?’ says Izzy. ‘Good!’
   “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.
   “ ‘Excuse me for interrupting,’ says I, ‘but can you tell me how a man could get married quick?’
   “The consul gets up and fingers in a pigeonhole.
   “ ‘I believe I had a license to perform the ceremony myself, a year or two ago,’ he said. ‘I’ll look, and – ’
   “I caught hold of his arm.
   “ ‘Don’t look it up,’ says I. ‘Marriage is a lottery anyway. I’m willing to take the risk about the license if you are.’
   “The consul went back to Hooligan Alley with me. Izzy called her ma to come in, but the old lady was picking a chicken in the patio and begged to be excused. So we stood up and the consul performed the ceremony.
   “That evening Mrs Bowers cooked a great supper of stewed goat, tamales, baked bananas, fricasseed red peppers and coffee. Afterward I sat in the rocking-chair by the front window, and she sat on the floor plunking at a guitar and happy, as she should be, as Mrs William T. B.
   “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.
   “ ‘That big, oogly man,’ said Izzy. ‘But all right – he your friend.’
   “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?’
   “ ‘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?’
   “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?’
   “ ‘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.’
   “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.
   “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 Mrs 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:
   “ ‘Buenas dias, senor. Yo tengo – yo tengo – ’
   “ ‘Oh, sit down, Mr 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?’
   “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:
   “ ‘I sent for you, Mr Bowers, to let you know that you can have your friend Mr 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.’
   “ ‘One moment, judge,’ says I; ‘that revolution – ’
   “The judge lays back in his chair and howls.
   “ ‘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 Senor O’Connor for his money. It is very funny.’
   “ ‘It was,’ says I. ‘I saw the joke all along. I’ll take another highball, if your Honor don’t mind.’
   “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.
   “ ‘Hist!’ says I in his ear: ‘Dona Isabel has arranged our escape. Not a word!’
   “They rowed us in a boat out to a little steamer that smelled of table d’hote salad oil and bone phosphate.
   “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.
   “He had the red rose in his hand.
   “ ‘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.’
   “ ‘You talk like a sequel,’ says I. ‘But in Volume II please omit the light-haired friend who totes the grub to the hero in his dungeon cell.’
   “And thus reminiscing, we came back to New York.”
   There was a little silence broken only by the familiar roar of the streets after Kansas Bill Bowers ceased talking.
   “Did O’Connor ever go back?” I asked.
   “He attained his heart’s desire,” said Bill. “Can you walk two blocks? I’ll show you.”
   He led me eastward and down a flight of stairs that was covered by a curious-shaped glowing, pagoda-like structure. Signs and figures on the tiled walls and supporting columns attested that we were in the Grand Central station of the subway. Hundreds of people were on the midway platform.
   An uptown express dashed up and halted. It was crowded. There was a rush for it by a still larger crowd.
   Towering above every one there a magnificent, broad-shouldered, athletic man leaped into the centre of the struggle. Men and women he seized in either hand and hurled them like manikins toward the open gates of the train.
   Now and then some passenger with a shred of soul and self-respect left to him turned to offer remonstrance; but the blue uniform on the towering figure, the fierce and conquering glare of his eye and the ready impact of his hamlike hands glued together the lips that would have spoken complaint.
   When the train was full, then he exhibited to all who might observe and admire his irresistible genius as a ruler of men. With his knees, with his elbows, with his shoulders, with his resistless feet he shoved, crushed, slammed, heaved, kicked, flung, pounded the overplus of passengers aboard. Then with the sounds of its wheels drowned by the moans, shrieks, prayers, and curses of its unfortunate crew, the express dashed away.
   “That’s him. Ain’t he a wonder?” said Kansas Bill admiringly. “That tropical country wasn’t the place for him. I wish the distinguished traveller, writer, war correspondent, and playright, Richmond Hobson Davis, could see him now. O’Connor ought to be dramatized.”

The Last of the Troubadours

   Inexorably Sam Galloway saddled his pony. He was going away from the Rancho Altito at the end of a three-months’ visit. It is not to be expected that a guest should put up with wheat coffee and biscuits yellow-streaked with saleratus for longer than that. Nick Napoleon, the big negro man cook, had never been able to make good biscuits. Once before, when Nick was cooking at the Willow Ranch, Sam had been forced to fly from his cuisine, after only a six-weeks’ sojourn.
   On Sam’s face was an expression of sorrow, deepened with regret and slightly tempered by the patient forgiveness of a connoisseur who cannot be understood. But very firmly and inexorably he buckled his saddle-cinches, looped his stake-rope and hung it to his saddle-horn, tied his slicker and coat on the cantle, and looped his quirt on his right wrist. The Merrydews (householders of the Rancho Altito), men, women, children, and servants, vassals, visitors, employee, dogs, and casual callers were grouped in the “gallery” of the ranch house, all with faces set to the tune of melancholy and grief. For, as the coming of Sam Galloway to any ranch, camp, or cabin between the rivers Frio or Bravo del Norte aroused joy, so his departure caused mourning and distress.
   And then, during absolute silence, except for the bumping of a hind elbow of a hound dog as he pursued a wicked flea, Sam tenderly and carefully tied his guitar across his saddle on top of his slicker and coat. The guitar was in a green duck bag; and if you catch the significance of it, it explains Sam.
   Sam Galloway was the Last of the Troubadours. Of course you know about the troubadours. The encyclopaedia says they flourished between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries. What they flourished doesn’t seem clear – you may be pretty sure it wasn’t a sword: maybe it was a fiddle-bow, or a forkful of spaghetti, or a lady’s scarf. Anyhow, Sam Galloway was one of ’em.
   Sam put on a martyred expression as he mounted his pony. But the expression on his face was hilarious compared with the one on his pony’s. You see, a pony gets to know his rider mighty well, and it is not unlikely that cow ponies in pastures and at hitching racks had often guyed Sam’s pony for being ridden by a guitar player instead of by a rollicking, cussing, all-wool cowboy. No man is a hero to his saddle-horse. And even an escalator in a department store might be excused for tripping up a troubadour.
   Oh, I know I’m one; and so are you. You remember the stories you memorize and the card tricks you study and that little piece on the piano – how does it go? – ti-tum-te-tum-titum – those little Arabia Ten Minute Entertainments that you furnish when you go up to call on your rich Aunt Jane. You should know that omniæ personæ in tres partes divisæ sunt. [40 - omniæ personæ in tres partes divisæ sunt – (лат.) люди делятся на три группы] Namely: Barons, Troubadours, and Workers. Barons have no inclination to read such folderol as this; and workers have no time: so I know you must be a troubadour and that you will understand Sam Galloway. Whether we sing, act, dance, write, lecture, or paint we are only troubadours; so let us make the worst of it.
   The pony with the Dante Alighieri face, guided by the pressure of Sam’s knees, bore that wandering minstrel sixteen miles southeastward. Nature was in her most benignant mood. League after league of delicate, sweet flowerets made fragrant the gently undulating prairie. The east wind tempered the spring warmth; wool-white clouds flying in from the Mexican Gulf hindered the direct rays of the April sun. Sam sang songs as he rode. Under his pony’s bridle he had tucked some sprigs of chaparral to keep away the deer flies. Thus crowned, the long-face quadruped looked more Dantesque than before, and, judging by his countenance, seemed to think of Beatrice.
   Straight as topography permitted, Sam rode to the sheep ranch of old man Ellison. A visit to a sheep ranch seemed to him desirable just then. There had been too many people, too much noise, argument, competition, confusion at Rancho Altito. He had never conferred upon old man Ellison the favor of sojourning at his ranch; but he knew he would be welcome. The troubadour is his own passport everywhere. The Workers in the castle let down the drawbridge to him, and the Baron sets him at his left hand at table in the banquet hall. There ladies smile upon him and applaud his songs and stories, while the Workers bring boars’ heads and flagons. If the Baron nods once or twice in his carved oaken chair he does not do it maliciously.
   Old man Ellison welcomed the troubadour flatteringly. He had often heard praises of Sam Galloway from other ranchmen who had been complimented by his visits, but had never aspired to such an honor for his own humble barony. I say barony because old man Ellison was the Last of the Barons. Of course, Mr Bulwer-Lytton lived too early to know him or he wouldn’t have conferred that sobriquet upon Warwick. In life it is the duty and the function of the Baron to provide work for the Workers and lodging and shelter for the Troubadours.
   Old man Ellison was a shrunken old man, with a short, yellow-white beard and a face lined and seamed by past-and-gone smiles. His ranch was a little two-room box house in a grove of hackberry trees in the lonesomest part of the sheep country. His household consisted of a Kiowa Indian man cook, four hounds, a pet sheep, and a half-tamed coyote chained to a fence-post. He owned 3,000 sheep, which he ran on two sections of leased land and many thousands of acres neither leased nor owned. Three or four times a year some one who spoke his language would ride up to his gate and exchange a few bald ideas with him. Those were red-letter days to old man Ellison. Then in what illuminated, embossed, and gorgeously decorated capitals must have been written the day on which a troubadour – a troubadour who, according to the encyclopaedia, should have flourished between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries – drew rein at the gates of his baronial castle!
   Old man Ellison’s smiles came back and filled his wrinkles when he saw Sam. He hurried out of the house in his shuffling, limping way to greet him.
   “Hello, Mr Ellison,” called Sam cheerfully. “Thought I’d drop over and see you a while. Notice you’ve had fine rains on your range. They ought to make good grazing for your spring lambs.”
   “Well, well, well,” said old man Ellison. “I’m mighty glad to see you, Sam. I never thought you’d take the trouble to ride over to as out-of-the-way an old ranch as this. But you’re mighty welcome. “I’ve got a sack of new oats in the kitchen – shall I bring out a feed for your hoss?”
   “Oats for him?” said Sam, derisively. “No, sir-ee. He’s as fat as a pig now on grass. He don’t get rode enough to keep him in condition. I’ll just turn him in the horse pasture with a drag rope on if you don’t mind.”
   I am positive that never during the eleventh and thirteenth centuries did Baron, Troubadour, and Worker amalgamate as harmoniously as their parallels did that evening at old man Ellison’s sheep ranch. The Kiowa’s biscuits were light and tasty and his coffee strong. Ineradicable hospitality and appreciation glowed on old man Ellison’s weather-tanned face. As for the troubadour, he said to himself that he had stumbled upon pleasant places indeed. A well-cooked, abundant meal, a host whom his lightest attempt to entertain seemed to delight far beyond the merits of the exertion, and the reposeful atmosphere that his sensitive soul at that time craved united to confer upon him a satisfaction and luxurious ease that he had seldom found on his tours of the ranches.
   After the delectable supper, Sam untied the green duck bag and took out his guitar. Not by way of payment, mind you – neither Sam Galloway nor any other of the true troubadours are lineal descendants of the late Tommy Tucker. You have read of Tommy Tucker in the works of the esteemed but often obscure Mother Goose. Tommy Tucker sang for his supper. No true troubadour would do that. He would have his supper, and then sing for Art’s sake.
   Sam Galloway’s repertoire comprised about fifty funny stories and between thirty and forty songs. He by no means stopped there. He could talk through twenty cigarettes on any topic that you brought up. And he never sat up when he could lie down; and never stood when he could sit. I am strongly disposed to linger with him, for I am drawing a portrait as well as a blunt pencil and a tattered thesaurus will allow.
   I wish you could have seen him: he was small and tough and inactive beyond the power of imagination to conceive. He wore an ultramarine-blue woolen shirt laced down the front with a pearl-gray exaggerated sort of shoestring, indestructible brown duck clothes, inevitable high-heeled boots with Mexican spurs, and a Mexican straw sombrero.
   That evening Sam and old man Ellison dragged their chairs out under the hackberry trees. They lighted cigarettes; and the troubadour gaily touched his guitar. Many of the songs he sang were the weird, melancholy, minor-keyed canciones that he had learned from the Mexican sheep-herders and vaqueros. One, in particular, charmed and soothed the soul of the lonely baron. It was a favorite song of the sheep-herders, beginning: Huile, huile, palomita, which being translated means, “Fly, fly, little dove.” Sam sang it for old man Ellison many times that evening.
   The troubadour stayed on at the old man’s ranch. There was peace and quiet and appreciation there such as he had not found in the noisy camps of the cattle kings. No audience in the world could have crowned the work of poet, musician, or artist with more worshipful and unflagging approval than that bestowed upon his efforts by old man Ellison. No visit by a royal personage to a humble woodchopper or peasant could have been received with more flattering thankfulness and joy.
   On a cool, canvas-covered cot in the shade of the hackberry trees Sam Galloway passed the greater part of his time. There he rolled his brown paper cigarettes, read such tedious literature as the ranch afforded, and added to his repertoire of improvisations that he played so expertly on his guitar. To him, as a slave ministering to a great lord, the Kiowa brought cool water from the red jar hanging under the brush shelter, and food when he called for it. The prairie zephyrs fanned him mildly; mocking-birds at morn and eve competed with but scarce equaled the sweet melodies of his Lyre; a perfumed stillness seemed to fill all his world. While old man Ellison was pottering among his flocks of sheep on his mile-an-hour pony, and while the Kiowa took his siesta in the burning sunshine at the end of the kitchen, Sam would lie on his cot thinking what a happy world he lived in, and how kind it is to the ones whose mission in life it is to give entertainment and pleasure. Here he had food and lodging as good as he had ever longed for; absolute immunity from care or exertion or strife; an endless welcome, and a host whose delight at the sixteenth repetition of a song or a story was as keen as at its initial giving. Was there ever a troubadour of old who struck upon as royal a castle in his wanderings? While he lay thus meditating upon his blessings little brown cottontails would shyly frolic through the yard; a covey of white-topknotted blue quail would run past, in single file, twenty yards away; a paisano bird, out hunting for tarantulas, would hop upon the fence and salute him with sweeping flourishes of its long tail. In the eighty-acre horse pasture the pony with the Dantesque face grew fat and almost smiling. The troubadour was at the end of his wanderings.
   Old man Ellison was his own vaquero. That means that he supplied his sheep camps with wood, water, and rations by his own labors instead of hiring a vaquero. On small ranches it is often done.
   One morning he started for the camp of Incarnacion Felipe de la Cruz y Monte Piedras (one of his sheep herders) with the week’s usual rations of brown beans, coffee, meal, and sugar. Two miles away on the trail from old Fort Ewing he met, face to face, a terrible being called King James, mounted on a fiery, prancing, Kentucky-bred horse.
   King James’s real name was James King; but people reversed it because it seemed to fit him better, and also because it seemed to please his majesty. King James was the biggest cattleman between the Alamo plaza in San Antone and Bill Hopper’s saloon in Brownsville. Also he was the loudest and most offensive bully and braggart and bad man in Southwest Texas. And he always made good whenever he bragged; and the more noise he made the more dangerous he was. In the story papers it is always the quiet, mild-mannered man with light-blue eyes and a low voice who turns out to be really dangerous; but in real life and in this story such is not the case. Give me my choice between assaulting a large, loud-mouthed rough-trouser and an inoffensive stranger with blue eyes sitting quietly in a corner, and you will see something doing in the corner every time.
   King James, as I intended to say earlier, was a fierce two-hundred-pound sunburned blond man, as pink as an October strawberry, and with two horizontal slits under shaggy red eyebrows for eyes. On that day he wore a flannel shirt that was tan-colored with the exception of certain large areas which were darkened by transudations due to the summer sun. There seemed to be other clothing and garnishings about him, such as brown duck trousers stuffed into immense boots, and red handkerchiefs and revolvers; and a shotgun laid across his saddle and a leather belt with millions of cartridges shining in it – but your mind skidded off such accessories; what held your gaze was just the two little horizontal slits that he used for eyes.
   This was the man that old man Ellison met on the trail; and when you count up in the baron’s favor that he was sixty-five and weighed ninety-eight pounds and had heard of King James’s record and that he (the baron) had a hankering for the vita simplex [41 - vita simplex – (лат.) простая жизнь] and had no gun with him and wouldn’t have used it if he had, you can’t censure him if I tell you that the smiles with which the troubadour had filled his wrinkles went out of them and left then plain wrinkles again. But he was not the kind of baron that flies from danger. He reined in the mile-an-hour pony (no difficult feat), and saluted the formidable monarch.
   King James expressed himself with royal directness.
   “You’re that old snoozer that’s running sheep on this range, ain’t you?” said he. “What right have you got to do it? Do you own any land, or lease any?”
   “I have two sections leased from the state,” said old man Ellison, mildly.
   “Not by no means you haven’t,” said King James. “Your lease expired yesterday; and had a man at the land office on the minute to take it up. You don’t control a foot of grass in Texas. You sheep men have got to git. Your time’s up. It’s a cattle country; and there ain’t any room in it for snoozers. This range you’ve got your sheep on is mine. I’m putting up a wire fence, forty by sixty miles; and if there’s a sheep inside of it when it’s done it’ll be a dead one. I’ll give you a week to move yours away. If they ain’t gone by then, I’ll send six men over here with Winchesters to make mutton out of the whole lot. And if I find you here at the same time this is what you’ll get.”
   King James patted the breech of his shotgun warningly.
   Old man Ellison rode on to the camp of Incarnacion. He sighed many times; and the wrinkles in his face grew deeper. Rumors that the old order was about to change had reached him before. The end of Free Grass was in sight. Other troubles, too, had been accumulating upon his shoulders. His flocks were decreasing instead of growing; the price of wool was declining at every clip; even Bradshaw, the storekeeper at Frio City, at whose store he bought his ranch supplies, was dunning him for his last six months’ bill and threatening to cut him off. And so this last greatest calamity suddenly dealt out to him by the terrible King James was a crusher.
   When the old man got back to the ranch at sunset he found Sam Galloway lying on his cot, propped against a roll of blankets and wool sacks, fingering his guitar.
   “Hello, Uncle Ben,” the troubadour called, cheerfully. “You rolled in early this evening. I been trying a new twist on the Spanish Fandango to-day. I just about got it. Here’s how she goes – listen.”
   “That’s fine, that’s mighty fine,’’ said old man Ellison, sitting on the kitchen step and rubbing his white, Scotch-terrier whiskers. “I reckon you’ve got all the musicians beat east and west, Sam, as far as the roads are cut out.”
   “Oh, I don’t know,” said Sam, reflectively. “But I certainly do get there on variations. I guess I can handle anything in five flats about as well as any of ’em. But you look kind of fagged out, Uncle Ben – ain’t you feeling right well this evening?”
   “Little tired; that’s all, Sam. If you ain’t played yourself out, let’s have that Mexican piece that starts off with: Huile, huile, palomita. It seems that that song always kind of soothes and comforts me after I’ve been riding far or anything bothers me.”
   “Why, seguramente, senor,” said Sam. “I’ll hit her up for you as often as you like. And before I forget about it, Uncle Ben, you want to jerk Bradshaw up about them last hams he sent us. They’re just a little bit strong.”
   A man sixty-five years old, living on a sheep ranch and beset by a complication of disasters, cannot successfully and continuously dissemble. Moreover, a troubadour has eyes quick to see unhappiness in others around him – because it disturbs his own ease. So on the next day Sam again questioned the old man about his air of sadness and abstraction. Then old man Ellison told him the story of King James’s threats and orders and that pale melancholy and red ruin appeared to have marked him for their own. The troubadour took the news thoughtfully. He had heard much about King James.
   On the third day of the seven days of grace allowed him by the autocrat of the range, old man Ellison drove his buckboard to Frio City to fetch some necessary supplies for the ranch. Bradshaw was hard but not implacable. He divided the old man’s order by two, and let him have a little more time. One article secured was a new, fine ham for the pleasure of the troubadour.
   Five miles out of Frio City on his way home the old man met King James riding into town. His majesty could never look anything but fierce and menacing, but to-day his slits of eyes appeared to be a little wider than they usually were.
   “Good day,” said the king gruffly. “I’ve been wanting to see you. I hear it said by a cowman from Sandy yesterday that you was from Jackson County, Mississippi, originally. I want to know if that’s a fact.”
   “Born there,” said old man Ellison, “and raised there till I was twenty-one.”
   “This man says,” went on King James, “that he thinks you was related to the Jackson County Reeveses. Was he right?”
   “Aunt Caroline Reeves,” said the old man, “was my half-sister.”
   “She was my aunt,” said King James. “I run away from home when I was sixteen. How let’s re-talk over some things that we discussed a few days ago. They call me a bad man; and they’re only half right. There’s plenty of room in my pasture for your bunch of sheep and their increase for a long time to come. Aunt Caroline used to cut out sheep in cake dough and bake ’em for me. You keep your sheep where they are, and use all the range you want. How’s your finances?”
   The old man related his woes in detail, dignifiedly, with restraint and candor.
   “She used to smuggle extra grub into my school basket – I’m speaking of Aunt Caroline,” said King James. “I’m going over to Frio City to-day, and I’ll ride back by your ranch to-morrow. I’ll draw $2,000 out of the bank there and bring it over to you; and I’ll tell Bradshaw to let you have everything you want on credit. You are bound to have heard the old saying at home, that the Jackson County Reeveses and Kings would stick closer by each other than chestnut burrs. Well, I’m a King yet whenever I run across a Reeves. So you look out for me along about sundown to-morrow, and don’t worry about nothing. Shouldn’t wonder if the dry spell don’t kill out the young grass.”
   Old man Ellison drove happily ranchward. Once more the smiles filled out his wrinkles. Very suddenly, by the magic of kinship and the good that lies somewhere in all hearts, his troubles had been removed.
   On reaching the ranch he found that Sam Galloway was not there. His guitar hung by its buckskin string to the hackberry limb, moaning as the gulf breeze blew across its masterless strings.
   The Kiowa endeavored to explain.
   “Sam, he catch pony,” said he, “and say he ride to Frio City. What for no can damn sabe. [42 - sabe – (итал.) знает] Say he come back to-night. Maybe so. That all.”
   As the first stars came out the troubadour rode back to his haven. He pastured his pony and went into the house, his spurs jingling martially.
   Old man Ellison sat at the kitchen table, having a tin cup of before-supper coffee. He looked contented and pleased.
   “Hello, Sam,” said he, “I’m darned glad to see ye back. I don’t know how I managed to get along on this ranch, anyhow, before ye dropped in to cheer things up. I’ll bet ye’ve been skylarking around with some of them Frio City gals, now, that’s kept ye so late.”
   And then old man Ellison took another look at Sam’s face and saw that the minstrel had changed to the man of action.
   And while Sam is unbuckling from his waist old man Ellison’s six-shooter, that the latter had left behind when he drove to town, we may well pause to remark that anywhere and whenever a troubadour lays down the guitar and takes up the sword trouble is sure to follow. It is not the expert thrust of Athos not the cold skill of Aramis not the iron wrist of Porthos that we have to fear – it is the Gascon’s fury – the wild and unacademic attack of the troubadour – the sword of D’Artagnan.
   “I done it,” said Sam. “I went over to Frio City to do it. I couldn’t let him put the skibunk on you, Uncle Ben. I met him in Summers’s saloon. I knowed what to do. I said a few things to him that nobody else heard. He reached for his gun first – half a dozen fellows saw him do it – but I got mine unlimbered first. Three doses I have fired – right around the lungs, and a saucer could have covered up all of’em. He won’t bother you no more.”
   “This – is – King – James – you speak – of?” asked old man Ellison, while he sipped his coffee.
   “You bet it was. And they took me before the county judge; and the witnesses what saw him draw his gun first was all there. Well, of course they put me under $300 bond to appear before the court, but there was four or five boys on the spot ready to sign the bail. He won’t bother you no more, Uncle Ben. You ought to have seen how close them bullet holes was together. I reckon playing a guitar as much as I do must kind of limber a fellow’s trigger finger up a little, don’t you think, Uncle Ben?”
   Then there was a little silence in the castle except for the spluttering of a venison steak that the Kiowa was cooking.
   “Sam,” said old man Ellison, stroking his white whiskers with a tremulous hand, “would you mind getting the guitar and playing that Huile, huile, palomita piece once or twice? It always seems to be kind of soothing and comforting when a man’s tired and fagged out.”
   There is no more to be said, except that the title of the story is wrong. It should have been called “The Last of the Barons.” There never will be an end to the troubadours; and now and then it does seem that the jingle of their guitars will drown the sound of the muffled blows of the pickaxes and trip-hammers of all the Workers in the world.

O'Henry / О’Генри Short Stories / Рассказы