Title: The Third Circle
Author: Norris, Frank
Language: English
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                           *THE THIRD CIRCLE*


                                   BY

                              FRANK NORRIS

                AUTHOR OF "THE PIT," "THE OCTOPUS," ETC.


                            INTRODUCTION BY

                               WILL IRWIN



                   LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
                      NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY
                                  1909



                             CHEAP EDITION


                    _Printed from electrotype plates
                 by Butler & Tanner, Frome and London._



                         _*TABLE OF CONTENTS*_

The Third Circle
The House With the Blinds
Little Dramas of the Curbstone
Shorty Stack, Pugilist
The Strangest Thing
A Reversion to Type
"Boom"
The Dis-Associated Charities
Son of a Sheik
A Defense of the Flag
Toppan
A Caged Lion
"This Animal of a Buldy Jones"
Dying Fires
Grettir at Drangey
The Guest of Honour



                            _*Introduction*_


It used to be my duty, as sub editor of the old San Francisco _Wave_, to
"put the paper to bed."  We were printing a Seattle edition in those
days of the Alaskan gold rush; and the last form had to be locked up on
Tuesday night, that we might reach the news stands by Friday. Working
short-handed, as all small weeklies do, we were everlastingly late with
copy or illustrations or advertisements; and that Tuesday usually
stretched itself out into Wednesday.  Most often, indeed, the foreman
and I pounded the last quoin into place at four or five o’clock
Wednesday morning and went home with the milk-wagons—to rise at noon and
start next week’s paper going.

For Yelton, most patient and cheerful of foremen, those Tuesday night
sessions meant steady work.  I, for my part, had only to confer with him
now and then on a "Caption" or to run over a late proof.  In the heavy
intervals of waiting, I killed time and gained instruction by reading
the back files of the _Wave_, and especially that part of the files
which preserved the early, prentice work of Frank Norris.

He was a hero to us all in those days, as he will ever remain a heroic
memory—that unique product of our Western soil, killed, for some hidden
purpose of the gods, before the time of full blossom.  He had gone East
but a year since to publish the earliest in his succession of rugged,
virile novels—"Moran of the Lady Letty," "McTeague," "Blix," "A Man’s
Woman," "The Octopus," and "The Pit."  The East was just beginning to
learn that he was great; we had known it long before.  With a special
interest, then, did I, his humble cub successor as sub editor and sole
staff writer, follow that prentice work of his from the period of his
first brief sketches, through the period of rough, brilliant short
stories hewed out of our life in the Port of Adventures, to the period
of that first serial which brought him into his own.

It was a surpassing study of the novelist in the making.  J. O’Hara
Cosgrave, owner, editor and burden-bearer of the _Wave_, was in his
editing more an artist than a man of business.  He loved "good stuff";
he could not bear to delete a distinctive piece of work just because the
populace would not understand.  Norris, then, had a free hand.  Whatever
his thought of that day, whatever he had seen with the eye of his flash
or the eye of his imagination, he might write and print. You began to
feel him in the files of the year 1895, by certain distinctive sketches
and fragments. You traced his writing week by week until the sketches
became "Little Stories of the Pavements."  Then longer stories, one
every week, even such stories as "The Third Circle," "Miracle Joyeaux,"
and "The House with the Blinds"; then, finally, a novel, written
_feuilleton_ fashion week by week—"Moran of the Lady Letty."  A curious
circumstance attended the publication of "Moran" in the _Wave_.  I
discovered it myself during those Tuesday night sessions over the files;
and it illustrates how this work was done.  He began it in the last
weeks of 1897, turning it out and sending it straight to the printer as
part of his daily stint. The _Maine_ was blown up February 14, 1898.  In
the later chapters of "Moran," he introduced the destruction of the
_Maine_ as an incident! It was this serial, brought to the attention of
_McClure’s Magazine_, which finally drew Frank Norris East.

"The studio sketches of a great novelist," Gellett Burgess has called
these ventures and fragments.  Burgess and I, when the _Wave_ finally
died of too much merit, stole into the building by night and took away
one set of old files.  A harmless theft of sentiment, we told ourselves;
for by moral right they belonged to us, the sole survivors in San
Francisco of those who had helped make the _Wave_.  And, indeed, by this
theft we saved them from the great fire of 1906.  When we had them safe
at home, we spent a night running over them, marveling again at those
rough creations of blood and nerve which Norris had made out of that
city which was the first love of his wakened intelligence, and in which,
so wofully soon afterward, he died.

I think that I remember them all, even now; not one but a name or a
phrase would bring back to mind.  Most vividly, perhaps, remains a
little column of four sketches called "Fragments."  One was a scene
behind the barricades during the Commune—a gay _flaneur_ of a soldier
playing on a looted piano until a bullet caught him in the midst of a
note.  Another pictured an empty hotel room after the guest had left.
Only that; but I always remember it when I first enter my room in a
hotel.  A third was the nucleus for the description of the "Dental
Parlors" in McTeague.  A fourth, the most daring of all, showed a sodden
workman coming home from his place of great machines.  A fresh violet
lay on the pavement. He, the primal brute in harness, picked it up.
Dimly, the aesthetic sense woke in him.  It gave him pleasure, a
pleasure which called for some tribute.  He put it between his great
jaws and crushed it—the only way he knew.

Here collected are the longest and most important of his prentice
products.  Even without those shorter sketches whose interest is, after
all, mainly technical, they are an incomparable study in the way a
genius takes to find himself.  It is as though we saw a complete
collection of Rembrandt’s early sketches, say—full technique and
co-ordination not yet developed, but all the basic force and vision
there.  Admirable in themselves, these rough-hewn tales, they are most
interesting when compared with the later work which the world knows, and
when taken as a melancholy indication of that power of growth which was
in him and which must have led, if the masters of fate had only spared
him, to the highest achievement in letters.

WILL IRWIN.
March, 1909.



                          _*The Third Circle*_


There are more things in San Francisco’s Chinatown than are dreamed of
in Heaven and earth.  In reality there are three parts of Chinatown—the
part the guides show you, the part the guides don’t show you, and the
part that no one ever hears of.  It is with the latter part that this
story has to do.  There are a good many stories that might be written
about this third circle of Chinatown, but believe me, they never will be
written—at any rate not until the "town" has been, as it were, drained
off from the city, as one might drain a noisome swamp, and we shall be
able to see the strange, dreadful life that wallows down there in the
lowest ooze of the place—wallows and grovels there in the mud and in the
dark.  If you don’t think this is true, ask some of the Chinese
detectives (the regular squad are not to be relied on), ask them to tell
you the story of the Lee On Ting affair, or ask them what was done to
old Wong Sam, who thought he could break up the trade in slave girls, or
why Mr. Clarence Lowney (he was a clergyman from Minnesota who believed
in direct methods) is now a "dangerous" inmate of the State Asylum—ask
them to tell you why Matsokura, the Japanese dentist, went back to his
home lacking a face—ask them to tell you why the murderers of Little
Pete will never be found, and ask them to tell you about the little
slave girl, Sing Yee, or—no, on the second thought, don’t ask for that
story.

The tale I am to tell you now began some twenty years ago in a See Yup
restaurant on Waverly Place—long since torn down—where it will end I do
not know.  I think it is still going on.  It began when young Hillegas
and Miss Ten Eyck (they were from the East, and engaged to be married)
found their way into the restaurant of the Seventy Moons, late in the
evening of a day in March.  (It was the year after the downfall of
Kearney and the discomfiture of the sand-lotters.)

"What a dear, quaint, curious old place!" exclaimed Miss Ten Eyck.

She sat down on an ebony stool with its marble seat, and let her gloved
hands fall into her lap, looking about her at the huge hanging lanterns,
the gilded carven screens, the lacquer work, the inlay work, the
coloured glass, the dwarf oak trees growing in Satsuma pots, the
marquetry, the painted matting, the incense jars of brass, high as a
man’s head, and all the grotesque jim-crackery of the Orient.  The
restaurant was deserted at that hour.  Young Hillegas pulled up a stool
opposite her and leaned his elbows on the table, pushing back his hat
and fumbling for a cigarette.

"Might just as well be in China itself," he commented.

"Might?" she retorted; "we are in China, Tom—a little bit of China dug
out and transplanted here.  Fancy all America and the Nineteenth Century
just around the corner!  Look!  You can even see the Palace Hotel from
the window. See out yonder, over the roof of that temple—the Ming Yen,
isn’t it?—and I can actually make out Aunt Harriett’s rooms."

"I say, Harry (Miss Ten Eyck’s first name was Harriett) let’s have some
tea."

"Tom, you’re a genius!  Won’t it be fun!  Of course we must have some
tea.  What a lark! And you can smoke if you want to."

"This is the way one ought to see places," said Hillegas, as he lit a
cigarette; "just nose around by yourself and discover things.  Now, the
guides never brought us here."

"No, they never did.  I wonder why?  Why, we just found it out by
ourselves.  It’s ours, isn’t it, Tom, dear, by right of discovery?"

At that moment Hillegas was sure that Miss Ten Eyck was quite the most
beautiful girl he ever remembered to have seen.  There was a daintiness
about her—a certain chic trimness in her smart tailor-made gown, and the
least perceptible tilt of her crisp hat that gave her the last charm.
Pretty she certainly was—the fresh, vigorous, healthful prettiness only
seen in certain types of unmixed American stock.  All at once Hillegas
reached across the table, and, taking her hand, kissed the little
crumpled round of flesh that showed where her glove buttoned.

The China boy appeared to take their order, and while waiting for their
tea, dried almonds, candied fruit and watermelon rinds, the pair
wandered out upon the overhanging balcony and looked down into the
darkening streets.

"There’s that fortune-teller again," observed Hillegas, presently.
"See—down there on the steps of the joss house?"

"Where?  Oh, yes, I see."

"Let’s have him up.  Shall we?  We’ll have him tell our fortunes while
we’re waiting."

Hillegas called and beckoned, and at last got the fellow up into the
restaurant.

"Hoh!  You’re no Chinaman," said he, as the fortune-teller came into the
circle of the lantern-light.  The other showed his brown teeth.

"Part Chinaman, part Kanaka."

"Kanaka?"

"All same Honolulu.  Sabe?  Mother Kanaka lady—washum clothes for sailor
peoples down Kaui way," and he laughed as though it were a huge joke.

"Well, say, Jim," said Hillegas; "we want you to tell our fortunes.  You
sabe?  Tell the lady’s fortune.  Who she going to marry, for instance."

"No fortune—tattoo."

"Tattoo?"

"Um.  All same tattoo—three, four, seven, plenty lil birds on lady’s
arm.  Hey?  You want tattoo?"

He drew a tattooing needle from his sleeve and motioned towards Miss Ten
Eyck’s arm.

"Tattoo my arm?  What an idea!  But wouldn’t it be funny, Tom?  Aunt
Hattie’s sister came back from Honolulu with the prettiest little
butterfly tattooed on her finger.  I’ve half a mind to try.  And it
would be so awfully queer and original."

"Let him do it on your finger, then.  You never could wear evening dress
if it was on your arm."

"Of course.  He can tattoo something as though it was a ring, and my
marquise can hide it."

The Kanaka-Chinaman drew a tiny fantastic-looking butterfly on a bit of
paper with a blue pencil, licked the drawing a couple of times, and
wrapped it about Miss Ten Eyck’s little finger—the little finger of her
left hand.  The removal of the wet paper left an imprint of the drawing.
Then he mixed his ink in a small sea-shell, dipped his needle, and in
ten minutes had finished the tattooing of a grotesque little insect, as
much butterfly as anything else.

"There," said Hillegas, when the work was done and the fortune-teller
gone his way; "there you are, and it will never come out.  It won’t do
for you now to plan a little burglary, or forge a little check, or slay
a little baby for the coral round its neck, ’cause you can always be
identified by that butterfly upon the little finger of your left hand."

"I’m almost sorry now I had it done.  Won’t it ever come out?  Pshaw!
Anyhow I think it’s very chic," said Harriett Ten Eyck.

"I say, though!" exclaimed Hillegas, jumping up; "where’s our tea and
cakes and things?  It’s getting late.  We can’t wait here all evening.
I’ll go out and jolly that chap along."

The Chinaman to whom he had given the order was not to be found on that
floor of the restaurant. Hillegas descended the stairs to the kitchen.
The place seemed empty of life.  On the ground floor, however, where tea
and raw silk was sold, Hillegas found a Chinaman figuring up accounts by
means of little balls that slid to and fro upon rods. The Chinaman was a
very gorgeous-looking chap in round horn spectacles and a costume that
looked like a man’s nightgown, of quilted blue satin.

"I say, John," said Hillegas to this one, "I want some tea.  You
sabe?—up stairs—restaurant. Give China boy order—he no come.  Get plenty
much move on.  Hey?"

The merchant turned and looked at Hillegas over his spectacles.

"Ah," he said, calmly, "I regret that you have been detained.  You will,
no doubt, be attended to presently.  You are a stranger in Chinatown?"

"Ahem!—well, yes—I—we are."

"Without doubt—without doubt!" murmured the other.

"I suppose you are the proprietor?" ventured Hillegas.

"I?  Oh, no!  My agents have a silk house here.  I believe they sub-let
the upper floors to the See Yups.  By the way, we have just received a
consignment of India silk shawls you may be pleased to see."

He spread a pile upon the counter, and selected one that was
particularly beautiful.

"Permit me," he remarked gravely, "to offer you this as a present to
your good lady."

Hillegas’s interest in this extraordinary Oriental was aroused.  Here
was a side of the Chinese life he had not seen, nor even suspected.  He
stayed for some little while talking to this man, whose bearing might
have been that of Cicero before the Senate assembled, and left him with
the understanding to call upon him the next day at the Consulate.  He
returned to the restaurant to find Miss Ten Eyck gone.  He never saw her
again.  No white man ever did.

                     *      *      *      *      *

There is a certain friend of mine in San Francisco who calls himself
Manning.  He is a Plaza bum—that is, he sleeps all day in the old Plaza
(that shoal where so much human jetsom has been stranded), and during
the night follows his own devices in Chinatown, one block above. Manning
was at one time a deep-sea pearl diver in Oahu, and, having burst his
ear drums in the business, can now blow smoke out of either ear. This
accomplishment first endeared him to me, and latterly I found out that
he knew more of Chinatown than is meet and right for a man to know.  The
other day I found Manning in the shade of the Stevenson ship, just
rousing from the effects of a jag on undiluted gin, and told him, or
rather recalled to him the story of Harriett Ten Eyck.

"I remember," he said, resting on an elbow and chewing grass.  "It made
a big noise at the time, but nothing ever came of it—nothing except a
long row and the cutting down of one of Mr. Hillegas’s Chinese
detectives in Gambler’s Alley. The See Yups brought a chap over from
Peking just to do the business."

"Hatchet-man?" said I.

"No," answered Manning, spitting green; "he was a two-knife Kai-Gingh."

"As how?"

"Two knives—one in each hand—cross your arms and then draw ’em together,
right and left, scissor-fashion—damn near slashed his man in two. He got
five thousand for it.  After that the detectives said they couldn’t find
much of a clue."

"And Miss Ten Eyck was not so much as heard from again?"

"No," answered Manning, biting his fingernails. "They took her to China,
I guess, or may be up to Oregon.  That sort of thing was new twenty
years ago, and that’s why they raised such a row, I suppose.  But there
are plenty of women living with Chinamen now, and nobody thinks anything
about it, and they are Canton Chinamen, too—lowest kind of coolies.
There’s one of them up in St. Louis Place, just back of the Chinese
theatre, and she’s a Sheeny.  There’s a queer team for you—the Hebrew
and the Mongolian—and they’ve got a kid with red, crinkly hair, who’s a
rubber in a Hammam bath.  Yes, it’s a queer team, and there’s three more
white women in a slave girl joint under Ah Yee’s tan room.  There’s
where I get my opium.  They can talk a little English even yet.  Funny
thing—one of ’em’s dumb, but if you get her drunk enough she’ll talk a
little English to you.  It’s a fact! I’ve seen ’em do it with her
often—actually get her so drunk that she can talk.  Tell you what,"
added Manning, struggling to his feet, "I’m going up there now to get
some dope.  You can come along, and we’ll get Sadie (Sadie’s her name)
we’ll get Sadie full, and ask her if she ever heard about Miss Ten Eyck.
They do a big business," said Manning, as we went along.  "There’s Ah
Yeo and these three women and a policeman named Yank.  They get all the
yen shee—that’s the cleanings of the opium pipes, you know, and make it
into pills and smuggle it into the cons over at San Quentin prison by
means of the trusties. Why, they’ll make five dollars worth of dope sell
for thirty by the time it gets into the yard over at the Pen.  When I
was over there, I saw a chap knifed behind a jute mill for a pill as big
as a pea.  Ah Yee gets the stuff, the three women roll it into pills,
and the policeman, Yank, gets it over to the trusties somehow.  Ah Yee
is independent rich by now, and the policeman’s got a bank account."

"And the women?’

"Lord! they’re slaves—Ah Yee’s slaves!  They get the swift kick most
generally."

Manning and I found Sadie and her two companions four floors underneath
the tan room, sitting cross-legged in a room about as big as a big
trunk. I was sure they were Chinese women at first, until my eyes got
accustomed to the darkness of the place. They were dressed in Chinese
fashion, but I noted soon that their hair was brown and the bridges of
each one’s nose was high.  They were rolling pills from a jar of yen
shee that stood in the middle of the floor, their fingers twinkling with
a rapidity that was somehow horrible to see.

Manning spoke to them briefly in Chinese while he lit a pipe, and two of
them answered with the true Canton sing-song—all vowels and no
consonants.

"That one’s Sadie," said Manning, pointing to the third one, who
remained silent the while. I turned to her.  She was smoking a cigar,
and from time to time spat through her teeth man-fashion.  She was a
dreadful-looking beast of a woman, wrinkled like a shriveled apple, her
teeth quite black from nicotine, her hands bony and prehensile, like a
hawk’s claws—but a white woman beyond all doubt.  At first Sadie refused
to drink, but the smell of Manning’s can of gin removed her objections,
and in half an hour she was hopelessly loquacious.  What effect the
alcohol had upon the paralysed organs of her speech I cannot say.
Sober, she was tongue-tied—drunk, she could emit a series of faint
bird-like twitterings that sounded like a voice heard from the bottom of
a well.

"Sadie," said Manning, blowing smoke out of his ears, "what makes you
live with Chinamen? You’re a white girl.  You got people somewhere. Why
don’t you get back to them?"

Sadie shook her head.

"Like um China boy better," she said, in a voice so faint we had to
stoop to listen.  "Ah Yee’s pretty good to us—plenty to eat, plenty to
smoke, and as much yen shee as we can stand.  Oh, I don’t complain."

"You know you can get out of this whenever you want.  Why don’t you make
a run for it some day when you’re out?  Cut for the Mission House on
Sacramento street—they’ll be good to you there."

"Oh!" said Sadie, listlessly, rolling a pill between her stained palms,
"I been here so long I guess I’m kind of used to it.  I’ve about got out
of white people’s ways by now.  They wouldn’t let me have my yen shee
and my cigar, and that’s about all I want nowadays.  You can’t eat yen
shee long and care for much else, you know.  Pass that gin along, will
you?  I’m going to faint in a minute."

"Wait a minute," said I, my hand on Manning’s arm.  "How long have you
been living with Chinamen, Sadie?"

"Oh, I don’t know.  All my life, I guess.  I can’t remember back very
far—only spots here and there.  Where’s that gin you promised me?"

"Only in spots?" said I; "here a little and there a little—is that it?
Can you remember how you came to take up with this kind of life?"

"Sometimes I can and sometimes I can’t," answered Sadie.  Suddenly her
head rolled upon her shoulder, her eyes closing.  Manning shook her
roughly:

"Let be! let be!" she exclaimed, rousing up; "I’m dead sleepy.  Can’t
you see?"

"Wake up, and keep awake, if you can," said Manning; "this gentleman
wants to ask you something."

"Ah Yee bought her from a sailor on a junk in the Pei Ho river," put in
one of the other women.

"How about that, Sadie?" I asked.  "Were you ever on a junk in a China
river?  Hey?  Try and think?"

"I don’t know," she said.  "Sometimes I think I was.  There’s lots of
things I can’t explain, but it’s because I can’t remember far enough
back."

"Did you ever hear of a girl named Ten Eyck—Harriett Ten Eyck—who was
stolen by Chinamen here in San Francisco a long time ago?"

There was a long silence.  Sadie looked straight before her, wide-eyed,
the other women rolled pills industriously, Manning looked over my
shoulder at-the scene, still blowing smoke through his ears; then
Sadie’s eyes began to close and her head to loll sideways.

"My cigar’s gone out," she muttered.  "You said you’d have gin for me.
Ten Eyck!  Ten Eyck!  No, I don’t remember anybody named that."  Her
voice failed her suddenly, then she whispered:

"Say, how did I get that on me?"

She thrust out her left hand, and I saw a butterfly tattooed on the
little finger.



                     _*The House With the Blinds*_


It is a thing said and signed and implicitly believed in by the
discerning few that San Francisco is a place wherein Things can happen.
There are some cities like this—cities that have come to be
picturesque—that offer opportunities in the matter of background and
local colour, and are full of stories and dramas and novels, written and
unwritten.  There seems to be no adequate explanation for this state of
things, but you can’t go about the streets anywhere within a mile radius
of Lotta’s fountain without realising the peculiarity, just as you would
realise the hopelessness of making anything out of Chicago, fancy a
novel about Chicago or Buffalo, let us say, or Nashville, Tennessee.
There are just three big cities in the United States that are "story
cities"—New York, of course, New Orleans, and best of the lot, San
Francisco.

Here, if you put yourself in the way of it, you shall see life uncloaked
and bare of convention—the raw, naked thing, that perplexes and
fascinates—life that involves death of the sudden and swift variety, the
jar and shock of unleased passions, the friction of men foregathered
from every ocean, and you may touch upon the edge of mysteries for which
there is no explanation—little eddies on the surface of unsounded
depths, sudden outflashings of the inexplicable—troublesome,
disquieting, and a little fearful.

About this "House With the Blinds" now.

If you go far enough afield, with your face towards Telegraph Hill,
beyond Chinatown, beyond the Barbary Coast, beyond the Mexican quarter
and Luna’s restaurant, beyond even the tamale factory and the Red House,
you will come at length to a park in a strange, unfamiliar, unfrequented
quarter.  You will know the place by reason of a granite stone set up
there by the Geodetic surveyors, for some longitudinal purposes of their
own, and by an enormous flagstaff erected in the center.  Stockton
street flanks it on one side and Powell on the other.  It is an Italian
quarter as much as anything else, and the Societa Alleanza holds dances
in a big white hall hard by.  The Russian Church, with its minarets
(that look for all the world like inverted balloons) overlook it on one
side, and at the end of certain seaward streets you may see the masts
and spars of wheat ships and the Asiatic steamers.  The park lies in a
valley between Russian and Telegraph Hills, and in August and early
September the trades come flogging up from the bay, overwhelming one
with sudden, bulging gusts that strike downward, blanket-wise and
bewildering.  There are certain residences here where, I am sure,
sea-captains and sailing masters live, and on one corner is an ancient
house with windows opening door-fashion upon a deep veranda, that was
used as a custom office in Mexican times.

I have a very good friend who is a sailing-master aboard the "_Mary
Baker_," a full-rigged wheat ship, a Cape Horner, and the most beautiful
thing I ever remember to have seen.  Occasionally I am invited to make a
voyage with him as supercargo, an invitation which you may be sure I
accept.  Such an invitation came to me one day some four or five years
ago, and I made the trip with him to Calcutta and return.

The day before the "_Mary Baker_" cast off I had been aboard (she was
lying in the stream off Meigg’s wharf) attending to the stowing of my
baggage and the appointment of my stateroom. The yawl put me ashore at
three in the afternoon, and I started home via the park I have been
speaking about.  On my way across the park I stopped in front of that
fool Geodetic stone, wondering what it might be.  And while I stood
there puzzling about it, a nurse-maid came up and spoke to me.

The story of "The House With the Blinds" begins here.

The nurse-maid was most dreadfully drunk, her bonnet was awry, her face
red and swollen, and one eye was blackened.  She was not at all
pleasant. In the baby carriage, which she dragged behind her, an
overgrown infant yelled like a sabbath of witches.

"Look here," says she; "you’re a gemmleman, and I wantcher sh’d help me
outen a fix.  I’m in a fix, s’wat I am—a damn bad fix."

I got that fool stone between myself and this object, and listened to it
pouring out an incoherent tirade against some man who had done it dirt,
b’Gawd, and with whom it was incumbent I should fight, and she was in a
fix, s’what she was, and could I, who was evidently a perfick gemmleman,
oblige her with four bits?  All this while the baby yelled till my ears
sang again.  Well, I gave her four bits to get rid of her, but she stuck
to me yet the closer, and confided to me that she lived in that house
over yonder, she did—the house with the blinds, and was nurse-maid
there, so she was, b’Gawd.  But at last I got away and fled in the
direction of Stockton street.  As I was going along, however, I
reflected that the shrieking infant was somebody’s child, and no doubt
popular in the house with the blinds.  The parents ought to know that
its nurse got drunk and into fixes. It was a duty—a dirty duty—for me to
inform upon her.

Much as I loathed to do so I turned towards the house with the blinds.
It stood hard by the Russian Church, a huge white-painted affair, all
the windows closely shuttered and a bit of stained glass in the front
door—quite the most pretentious house in the row.  I had got directly
opposite, and was about to cross the street when, lo! around the corner,
marching rapidly, and with blue coats flapping, buttons and buckles
flashing, came a squad of three, seven, nine—ten policemen.  They
marched straight upon the house with the blinds.

I am not brilliant nor adventurous, but I have been told that I am good,
and I do strive to be respectable, and pay my taxes and pew rent.  As a
corollary to this, I loathed with, a loathing unutterable to be involved
in a mess of any kind. The squad of policemen were about to enter the
house with the blinds, and not for worlds would I have been found by
them upon its steps.  The nurse-girl might heave that shrieking infant
over the cliff of Telegraph Hill, it were all one with me. So I shrank
back upon the sidewalk and watched what followed.

Fifty yards from the house the squad broke into a run, swarmed upon the
front steps, and in a moment were thundering upon the front door till
the stained glass leaped in its leads and shivered down upon their
helmets.  And then, just at this point, occurred an incident which,
though it had no bearing upon or connection with this yarn, is quite
queer enough to be set down.  The shutters of one of the top-story
windows opened slowly, like the gills of a breathing fish, the sash
raised some six inches with a reluctant wail, and a hand groped forth
into the open air.  On the sill of the window was lying a gilded
Indian-club, and while I watched, wondering, the hand closed upon it,
drew it under the sash, the window dropped guillotine-fashion, and the
shutters clapped to like the shutters of a cuckoo clock.  Why was the
Indian-club lying on the sill?  Why, in Heaven’s name, was it gilded?
Why did the owner of that mysterious groping hand, seize upon it at the
first intimation of danger?  I don’t know—I never will know.  But I do
know that the thing was eldritch and uncanny, ghostly even, in the glare
of that cheerless afternoon’s sun, in that barren park, with the trade
winds thrashing up from the seaward streets.

Suddenly the door crashed in.  The policemen vanished inside the house.
Everything fell silent again.  I waited for perhaps fifty
seconds—waited, watching and listening, ready for anything that might
happen, expecting I knew not what—everything.

Not more than five minutes had elapsed when the policemen began to
reappear.  They came slowly, and well they might, for they carried with
them the inert bodies of six gentlemen.  When I say carried I mean it in
its most literal sense, for never in all my life have I seen six
gentlemen so completely, so thoroughly, so hopelessly and helplessly
intoxicated.  Well dressed they were, too, one of them even in full
dress.  Salvos of artillery could not have awakened that drunken half
dozen, and I doubt if any one of them could even have been racked into
consciousness.

Three hacks appeared (note that the patrol-wagon was conspicuously
absent), the six were loaded upon the cushions, the word was given and
one by one the hacks rattled down Stockton street and disappeared in the
direction of the city.  The captain of the squad remained behind for a
few moments, locked the outside doors in the deserted shuttered house,
descended the steps, and went his way across the park, softly whistling
a quickstep. In time he too vanished.  The park, the rows of houses, the
windflogged streets, resumed their normal quiet.  The incident was
closed.

Or was it closed?  Judge you now.  Next day I was down upon the wharves,
gripsack in hand, capped and clothed for a long sea voyage.  The "_Mary
Baker’s_" boat was not yet come ashore, but the beauty lay out there in
the stream, flirting with a bustling tug that circled about her,
coughing uneasily at intervals.  Idle sailormen, ’longshoremen and
stevedores sat upon the stringpiece of the wharf, chewing slivers and
spitting reflectively into the water.  Across the intervening stretch of
bay came the noises from the "_Mary Baker’s_" decks—noises that were
small and distinct, as if heard through a telephone, the rattle of
blocks, the straining of a windlass, the bos’n’s whistle, and once the
noise of sawing.  A white cruiser sat solidly in the waves over by
Alcatraz, and while I took note of her the flag was suddenly broken out
and I heard the strains of the ship’s band.  The morning was fine.
Tamalpais climbed out of the water like a rousing lion.  In a few hours
we would be off on a voyage to the underside of the earth.  There was a
note of gayety in the nimble air, and one felt that the world was young
after all, and that it was good to be young with her.

A bum-boat woman came down the wharf, corpulent and round, with a roll
in her walk that shook first one fat cheek and then the other.  She was
peddling trinkets amongst the wharf-loungers—pocket combs, little round
mirrors, shoestrings and collar-buttons.  She knew them all, or at least
was known to all of them, and in a few moments she was retailing to them
the latest news of the town.  Soon I caught a name or two, and on the
instant was at some pains to listen.  The bum-boat woman was telling the
story of the house with the blinds:

"Sax of um, an’ nobs ivry wan.  But that bad wid bug-juice!  Whoo!
Niver have Oi seen the bate!  An’ divil a wan as can remimber owt for
two days by.  Bory-eyed they were; struck dumb an’ deef an’ dead wid
whiskey and bubble-wather. Not a manjack av um can tell the tale, but
wan av um used his knife cruel bad.  Now which wan was it?  Howse the
coort to find out?"

It appeared that the house with the blinds was, or had been, a gambling
house, and what I had seen had been a raid.  Then the rest of the story
came out, and the mysteries began to thicken. That same evening, after
the arrest of the six inebriates, the house had been searched.  The
police had found evidences of a drunken debauch of a monumental
character.  But they had found more. In a closet under the stairs the
dead body of a man, a well dressed fellow—beyond a doubt one of the
party—knifed to death by dreadful slashes in his loins and at the base
of his spine in true evil hand-over-back fashion.

Now this is the mystery of the house with the blinds.

Beyond all doubt, one of the six drunken men had done the murder.  Which
one?  How to find out?  So completely were they drunk that not a single
one of them could recall anything of the previous twelve hours.  They
had come out there with their friend the day before.  They woke from
their orgie to learn that one of them had worried him to his death by
means of a short palm-broad dagger taken from a trophy of Persian arms
that hung over a divan.

Whose hand had done it?  Which one of them was the murdered?  I could
fancy them—I think I can see them now—sitting there in their cells, each
man apart, withdrawn from his fellow-reveler, and each looking furtively
into his fellow’s face, asking himself, "Was it you?  Was it you? or was
it I?  Which of us, in God’s name, has done this thing?"

Well, it was never known.  When I came back to San Francisco a year or
so later I asked about the affair of the house with the blinds, and
found that it had been shelved with the other mysterious crimes: The six
men had actually been "discharged for the want of evidence."

But for a long time the thing harassed me. More than once since I have
gone to that windy park, with its quivering flagstaff and Geodetic
monument, and, sitting on a bench opposite the house, asked myself again
and again the bootless questions.  Why had the drunken nurse-maid
mentioned the house to me in the first place?  And why at that
particular time?  Why had she lied to me in telling me that she lived
there?  Why was that gilded Indian-club on the sill of the upper window?
And whose—here’s a point—whose was the hand that drew it inside the
house?  And then, of course, last of all, the ever recurrent question,
which one of those six inebriates should have stood upon the drop and
worn the cap—which one of the company had knifed his friend and bundled
him into that closet under the stairs?  Had he done it during the night
of the orgie, or before it?  Was his friend drunk at the time, or sober?
I never could answer these questions, and I suppose I shall never know
the secret of "The House With the Blinds."

A Greek family lives there now, and rent the upper story to a man who
blows the organ in the Russian Church, and to two Japanese, who have a
photograph gallery on Stockton street.  I wonder to what use they have
put the little closet under the stairs?



                   _*Little Dramas of the Curbstone*_


The first Little Drama had for backing the red brick wall of the clinic
at the Medical Hospital, and the calcium light was the feeble glimmer of
a new-lighted street lamp, though it was yet early in the evening and
quite light.  There were occasional sudden explosions of a northeast
wind at the street corners, and at long intervals an empty cable-car
trundled heavily past with a strident whirring of jostled glass windows.
Nobody was in sight—the street was deserted. There was the pale red wall
of the clinic, severe as that of a prison, the livid grey of the cement
sidewalk, and above the faint greenish blue of a windy sky.  A door in
the wall of the hospital opened, and a woman and a young boy came out.
They were dressed darkly, and at once their two black figures detached
themselves violently against the pale blue of the background.  They made
the picture.  All the faint tones of the wall and the sky and the
grey-brown sidewalk focused immediately upon them. They came across the
street to the corner upon which I stood, and the woman asked a
direction. She was an old woman, and poorly dressed.  The boy, I could
see, was her son.  Him I took notice of, for she led him to the steps of
the nearest house and made him sit down upon the lowest one. She guided
all his movements, and he seemed to be a mere figure of wax in her
hands.  She stood over him, looking at him critically, and muttering to
herself.  Then she turned to me, and her muttering rose to a shrill,
articulate plaint:

"Ah, these fool doctors—these dirty beasts of medical students!  They
impose upon us because we’re poor and rob us and tell us lies."

Upon this I asked her what her grievance was, but she would not answer
definitely, putting her chin the air and nodding with half-shut eyes, as
if she could say a lot about that if she chose.

"Your son is sick?" said I.

"Yes—or no—not sick; but he’s blind, and—and—he’s blind and he’s an
idiot—born that way—blind and idiot."

Blind and an idiot!  Blind and an idiot!  Will you think of that for a
moment, you with your full stomachs, you with your brains, you with your
two sound eyes.  Born blind and idiotic!  Do you fancy the horror of
that thing?  Perhaps you cannot, nor perhaps could I myself have
conceived of what it meant to be blind and an idiot had I not seen that
woman’s son in front of the clinic, in the empty, windy street, where
nothing stirred, and where there was nothing green.  I looked at him as
he sat there, tall, narrow, misshapen.  His ready-made suit, seldom
worn, but put on that day because of the weekly visit to the clinic,
hung in stupid wrinkles and folds upon him.  His cheap felt hat, clapped
upon his head by his mother with as little unconcern as an extinguisher
upon a candle, was wrong end foremost, so that the bow of the band came
upon the right hand side.  His hands were huge and white, and lay open
and palm upward at his side, the fingers inertly lax, like those of a
discarded glove, and his face——

When I looked at the face of him I know not what insane desire, born of
an unconquerable disgust, came up in me to rush upon him and club him
down to the pavement with my stick and batter in that face—that face of
a blind idiot—and blot it out from the sight of the sun for good and
all.  It was impossible to feel pity for the wretch.  I hated him
because he was blind and an idiot.  His eyes were filmy, like those of a
fish, and he never blinked them.  His mouth hung open.

Blind and an idiot, absolute stagnation, life as unconscious as that of
the jelly-fish, an excrescence, a parasitic fungus in the form of a man,
a creature far below the brute.  The last horror of the business was
that he never moved; he sat there just as his mother had placed him, his
motionless, filmy eyes fixed, his jaw dropped, his hands open at his
sides, his hat on wrong side foremost. He would sit like that, I knew,
for hours—for days, perhaps—would, if left to himself, die of
starvation, without raising a finger.  What was going on inside of that
misshapen head—behind those fixed eyes?

I had remembered the case by now.  One of the students had told me of
it.  His mother brought him to the clinic occasionally, so that the
lecturer might experiment upon his brain, stimulating it with
electricity.  "Heredity," the student had commented, "father a
degenerate, exhausted race, drank himself into a sanitarium."

While I was thinking all this the mother of the boy had gone on talking,
her thin voice vibrant with complaining and vituperation.  But indeed I
could bear with it no longer, and went away.  I left them behind me in
the deserted, darkening street, the querulous, nagging woman and her
blind, idiotic boy, and the last impression I have of the scene was her
shrill voice ringing after me the oft-repeated words:

"Ah, the dirty beasts of doctors—they robs us and impose on us and tell
us lies because we’re poor!"

                     *      *      *      *      *

The second Little Drama was wrought out for me the next day.  I was
sitting in the bay window of the club watching the world go by, when my
eye was caught by a little group on the curbstone directly opposite.  An
old woman, meanly dressed, and two little children, both girls, the
eldest about ten, the youngest, say, six or seven.  They had been coming
slowly along, and the old woman had been leading the youngest child by
the hand.  Just as they came opposite to where I was sitting the younger
child lurched away from the woman once or twice, dragging limply at her
hand, then its knees wobbled and bent and the next moment it had
collapsed upon the pavement.  Some children will do this from sheer
perversity and with intent to be carried.  But it was not perversity on
this child’s part.  The poor old woman hauled the little girl up to her
feet, but she collapsed again at once after a couple of steps and sat
helplessly down upon the sidewalk, staring vaguely about, her thumb in
her mouth.  There was something wrong with the little child—one could
see that at half a glance. Some complaint, some disease of the muscles,
some weakness of the joints, that smote upon her like this at
inopportune moments.  Again and again her old mother, with very painful
exertion—she was old and weak herself—raised her to her feet, only that
she might sink in a heap before she had moved a yard.  The old woman’s
bonnet fell off—a wretched, battered black bonnet, and the other little
girl picked it up and held it while she looked on at her mother’s
efforts with an indifference that could only have been born of
familiarity.  Twice the old woman tried to carry the little girl, but
her strength was not equal to it; indeed, the effort of raising the
heavy child to its feet was exhausting her.  She looked helplessly at
the street cars as they passed, but you could see she had not enough
money to pay even three fares.  Once more she set her little girl upon
her feet, and helped her forward half a dozen steps.  And so, little by
little, with many pauses for rest and breath, the little group went down
the street and passed out of view, the little child staggering and
falling as if from drunkenness, her sister looking on gravely, holding
the mother’s battered bonnet, and the mother herself, patient,
half-exhausted, her grey hair blowing about her face, labouring on step
by step, trying to appear indifferent to the crowd that passed by on
either side, trying bravely to make light of the whole matter until she
should reach home.  As I watched them I thought of this woman’s husband,
the father of this paralytic little girl, and somehow it was brought to
me that none of them would ever see him again, but that he was alive for
all that.

                     *      *      *      *      *

The third Little Drama was lively, and there was action in it, and
speech, and a curious, baffling mystery.  On a corner near a certain
bank in this city there is affixed to the lamp post a call-box that the
police use to ring up for the patrol wagon. When an arrest is made in
the neighbourhood the offender is brought here, the wagon called for,
and he is conveyed to the City Prison.  On the afternoon of the day of
the second Little Drama, as I came near to this corner, I was aware of a
crowd gathered about the lamp post that held the call-box, and between
the people’s heads and over their shoulders I could see the blue helmets
of a couple of officers.  I stopped and pushed up into the inner circle
of the crowd.  The two officers had in custody a young fellow of some
eighteen or nineteen years.  And I was surprised to find that he was as
well dressed and as fine looking a lad as one would wish to see.  I did
not know what the charge was, I don’t know it now,—but the boy did not
seem capable of any great meanness.  As I got into the midst of the
crowd, and while I was noting what was going forward, it struck me that
the people about me were unusually silent—silent as people are who are
interested and unusually observant. Then I saw why.  The young fellow’s
mother was there, and the Little Drama was enacting itself between her,
her son, and the officers who had him in charge.  One of these latter
had the key to the call-box in his hand.  He had not yet rung for the
wagon.  An altercation was going on between the mother and the son—she
entreating him to come home, he steadily refusing.

"It’s up to you," said one of the officers, at length; "if you don’t go
home with your mother, I’ll call the wagon."

"No!"

"Jimmy!" said the woman, and then, coming close to him, she spoke to him
in a low voice and with an earnestness, an intensity, that it hurt one
to see.

"No!"

"For the last time, will you come?"

"No!  No!  No!"

The officer faced about and put the key into the box, but the woman
caught at his wrist and drew it away.  It was a veritable situation.  It
should have occurred behind footlights and in the midst of painted flats
and flies, but instead the city thundered about it, drays and cars went
up and down in the street, and the people on the opposite walk passed
with but an instant’s glance.  The crowd was as still as an audience,
watching what next would happen.  The crisis of the Little Drama had
arrived.

"For the last time, will you come with me?"

"No!"

She let fall her hand then and turned and went away, crying into her
handkerchief.  The officer unlocked and opened the box, set the
indicator and opened the switch.  A few moments later, as I went on up
the street, I met the patrol-wagon coming up on a gallop.

What was the trouble here?  Why had that young fellow preferred going to
prison rather than home with his mother?  What was behind it all I shall
never know.  It was a mystery—a little eddy in the tide of the city’s
life, come and gone in an instant, yet reaching down to the very depths
of those things that are not meant to be seen.

And as I went along I wondered where was the father of that young fellow
who was to spend his first night in jail, and the father of the little
paralytic girl, and the father of the blind idiot, and it seemed to me
that the chief actors in these three Little Dramas of the Curbstone had
been somehow left out of the programme.



                       _*Shorty Stack, Pugilist*_


Over at the "Big Dipper" mine a chuck-tender named Kelly had been in
error as regards a box of dynamite sticks, and Iowa Hill had elected to
give an "entertainment" for the benefit of his family.

The programme, as announced upon the posters that were stuck up in the
Post Office and on the door of the Odd Fellows’ Hall, was quite an
affair. The Iowa Hill orchestra would perform, the livery-stable keeper
would play the overture to "William Tell" upon his harmonica, and the
town doctor would read a paper on "Tuberculosis in Cattle."  The evening
was to close with a "grand ball."

Then it was discovered that a professional pugilist from the "Bay" was
over in Forest Hill, and someone suggested that a match could be made
between him and Shorty Stack "to enliven the entertainment."  Shorty
Stack was a bedrock cleaner at the "Big Dipper," and handy with his
fists.  It was his boast that no man of his weight (Shorty fought at a
hundred and forty) no man of his weight in Placer County could stand up
to him for ten rounds, and Shorty had always made good this boast.
Shorty knew two punches, and no more—a short-arm jab under the ribs with
his right, and a left upper-cut on the point of the chin.

The pugilist’s name was McCleaverty.  He was an out and out dub—one of
the kind who appear in four-round exhibition bouts to keep the audience
amused while the "event of the evening" is preparing—but he had had ring
experience, and his name had been in the sporting paragraphs of the San
Francisco papers.  The dub was a welter-weight and a professional, but
he accepted the challenge of Shorty Stack’s backers and covered their
bet of fifty dollars that he could not "stop" Shorty in four rounds.

And so it came about that extra posters were affixed to the door of the
Odd Fellows’ Hall and the walls of the Post Office to the effect that
Shorty Stack, the champion of Placer County, and Buck McCleaverty, the
Pride of Colusa, would appear in a genteel boxing exhibition at the
entertainment given for the benefit, etc., etc.

Shorty had two weeks in which to train.  The nature of his work in the
mine had kept his muscles hard enough, so his training was largely a
matter of dieting and boxing an imaginary foe with a rock in each fist.
He was so vigorous in his exercise and in the matter of what he ate and
drank that the day before the entertainment he had got himself down to a
razor-edge, and was in a fair way of going fine.  When a man gets into
too good condition, the least little slip will spoil him.  Shorty knew
this well enough, and told himself in consequence that he must be very
careful.

The night before the entertainment Shorty went to call on Miss Starbird.
Miss Starbird was one of the cooks at the mine.  She was a very pretty
girl, just turned twenty, and lived with her folks in a cabin near the
superintendent’s office, on the road from the mine to Iowa Hill.  Her
father was a shift boss in the mine, and her mother did the washing for
the "office."  Shorty was recognised by the mine as her "young man."
She was going to the entertainment with her people, and promised Shorty
the first "walk-around" in the "Grand Ball" that was to follow
immediately after the Genteel Glove Contest.

Shorty came into the Starbird cabin on that particular night, his hair
neatly plastered in a beautiful curve over his left temple, and his
pants outside of his boots as a mark of esteem.  He wore no collar, but
he had encased himself in a boiled shirt, which could mean nothing else
but mute and passionate love, and moreover, as a crowning tribute, he
refrained from spitting.

"How do you feel, Shorty?" asked Miss Starbird.

Shorty had always sedulously read the interviews with pugilists that
appeared in the San Francisco papers immediately before their fights and
knew how to answer.

"I feel fit to fight the fight of my life," he alliterated proudly.
"I’ve trained faithfully and I mean to win."

"It ain’t a regular prize fight, is it, Shorty?" she enquired.  "Pa said
he wouldn’t take ma an’ me if it was.  All the women folk in the camp
are going, an’ I never heard of women at a fight, it ain’t genteel."

"Well, I d’n know," answered Shorty, swallowing his saliva.  "The
committee that got the programme up called it a genteel boxing
exhibition so’s to get the women folks to stay.  I call it a four round
go with a decision."

"My, itull be exciting!" exclaimed Miss Starbird. "I ain’t never seen
anything like it.  Oh, Shorty, d’ye think you’ll win?"

"I don’t _think_ nothun about it.  I know I will," returned Shorty,
defiantly.  "If I once get in my left upper cut on him, _huh_!" and he
snorted magnificently.

Shorty stayed and talked to Miss Starbird until ten o’clock, then he
rose to go.

"I gotta get to bed," he said, "I’m in training you see."

"Oh, wait a minute," said Miss Starbird, "I been making some potato
salad for the private dining of the office, you better have some; it’s
the best I ever made."

"No, no," said Shorty, stoutly, "I don’t want any."

"Hoh," sniffed Miss Starbird airily, "you don’t need to have any."

"Well, don’t you see," said Shorty, "I’m in training.  I don’t dare eat
any of that kinda stuff."

"Stuff!" exclaimed Miss Starbird, her chin in the air.  "No one _else_
ever called my cooking stuff."

"Well, don’t you see, don’t you see."

"No, I don’t see.  I guess you must be ’fraid of getting whipped if
you’re so ’fraid of a little salad."

"What!" exclaimed Shorty, indignantly.  "Why I could come into the ring
from a jag and whip him; ’fraid! _who’s_ afraid.  I’ll show you if I’m
afraid.  Let’s have your potato salad, an’ some beer, too.  Huh!  _I’ll_
show you if I’m afraid."

But Miss Starbird would not immediately consent to be appeased.

"No, you called it stuff," she said, "an’ the superintendent said I was
the best cook in Placer County."

But at last, as a great favour to Shorty, she relented and brought the
potato salad from the kitchen and two bottles of beer.

When the town doctor had finished his paper on "Tuberculosis in Cattle,"
the chairman of the entertainment committee ducked under the ropes of
the ring and announced that: "The next would be the event of the evening
and would the gentlemen please stop smoking."  He went on to explain
that the ladies present might remain without fear and without reproach
as the participants in the contest would appear in gymnasium tights, and
would box with gloves and not with bare knuckles.

"Well, don’t they always fight with gloves?" called a voice from the
rear of the house.  But the chairman ignored the interruption.

The "entertainment" was held in the Odd Fellows’ Hall.  Shorty’s seconds
prepared him for the fight in a back room of the saloon, on the other
side of the street, and towards ten o’clock one of the committeemen came
running in to say:

"What’s the matter?  Hurry up, you fellows, McCleaverty’s in the ring
already, and the crowd’s beginning to stamp."

Shorty rose and slipped into an overcoat.

"All ready," he said.

"Now mind, Shorty," said Billy Hicks, as he gathered up the sponges,
fans and towels, "don’t mix things with him, you don’t have to knock him
out, all you want’s the decision."

Next, Shorty was aware that he was sitting in a corner of the ring with
his back against the ropes, and that diagonally opposite was a huge red
man with a shaven head.  There was a noisy, murmuring crowd somewhere
below him, and there was a glare of kerosene lights over his head.

"Buck McCleaverty, the Pride of Colusa," announced the master of
ceremonies, standing in the middle of the ring, one hand under the dub’s
elbow.  There was a ripple of applause.  Then the master of ceremonies
came over to Shorty’s corner, and, taking him by the arm, conducted him
into the middle of the ring.

"Shorty Stack, the Champion of Placer County."  The house roared; Shorty
ducked and grinned and returned to his corner.  He was nervous, excited.
He had not imagined it would be exactly like this.  There was a
strangeness about it all; an unfamiliarity that made him uneasy.

"Take it slow," said Billy Hicks, kneading the gloves, so as to work the
padding away from the knuckles.  The gloves were laced on Shorty’s
hands.

"Up you go," said Billy Hicks, again.  "No, not the fight yet, shake
hands first.  Don’t get rattled."

Then ensued a vague interval, that seemed to Shorty interminable.  He
had a notion that he shook hands with McCleaverty, and that some one
asked him if he would agree to hit with one arm free in the breakaway.
He remembered a glare of lights, a dim vision of rows of waiting faces,
a great murmuring noise, and he had a momentary glimpse of someone he
believed to be the referee, a young man in shirtsleeves and turned-up
trousers.  Then everybody seemed to be getting out of the ring and away
from him, even Billy Hicks left him after saying something he did not
understand.  Only the referee, McCleaverty and himself were left inside
the ropes.

"Time!"

Somebody, that seemed to Shorty strangely like himself, stepped briskly
out into the middle of the ring, his left arm before him, his right fist
clinched over his breast.  The crowd, the glaring lights, the murmuring
noise, all faded away.  There only remained the creaking of rubber soles
over the resin of the boards of the ring and the sight of McCleaverty’s
shifting, twinkling eyes and his round, close-cropped head.

"Break!"

The referee stepped between the two men and Shorty realised that the two
had clinched, and that his right forearm had been across McCleaverty’s
throat, his left clasping him about the shoulders.

What!  Were they fighting already?  This was the first round, of course,
somebody was shouting.

"That’s the stuff, Shorty."

All at once Shorty saw the flash of a red muscled arm, he threw forward
his shoulder ducking his head behind it, the arm slid over the raised
shoulder and a bare and unprotected flank turned towards him.

"Now," thought Shorty.  His arm shortened and leaped forward.  There was
a sudden impact. The shock of it jarred Shorty himself, and he heard
McCleaverty grunt.  There came a roar from the house.

"Give it to him, Shorty."

Shorty pushed his man from him, the heel of his glove upon his face.  He
was no longer nervous.  The lights didn’t bother him.

"I’ll knock him out yet," he muttered to himself.

They fiddled and feinted about the ring, watching each other’s eyes.
Shorty held his right ready. He told himself he would jab McCleaverty
again on the same spot when next he gave him an opening.

"_Break!_"

They must have clinched again, but Shorty was not conscious of it.  A
sharp pain in his upper lip made him angry.  His right shot forward
again, struck home, and while the crowd roared and the lights began to
swim again, he knew that he was rushing McCleaverty back, back, back,
his arms shooting out and in like piston rods, now for an upper cut with
his left on the—

"_Time!_"

Billy Hicks was talking excitedly.  The crowd still roared.  His lips
pained.  Someone was spurting water over him, one of his seconds worked
the fans like a windmill.  He wondered what Miss Starbird thought of him
now.

"_Time!_"

He barely had a chance to duck, almost double, while McCleaverty’s right
swished over his head. The dub was swinging for a knockout already. The
round would be hot and fast.

"Stay with um, Shorty."

"That’s the stuff, Shorty."

He must be setting the pace, the house plainly told him that.  He
stepped in again and cut loose with both fists.

"_Break!_"

Shorty had not clinched.  Was it possible that McCleaverty was clinching
"to avoid punishment."  Shorty tried again, stepping in close, his right
arm crooked and ready.

"_Break!_"

The dub was clinching.  There could be no doubt of that.  Shorty
gathered himself together and rushed in, upper-cutting viciously; he
felt McCleaverty giving way before him.

"He’s got um going."

There was exhilaration in the shout.  Shorty swung right and left, his
fist struck something that hurt him.  Sure, he thought, that must have
been a good one.  He recovered, throwing out his left before him.  Where
was the dub? not down there on one knee in a corner of the ring?  The
house was a pandemonium, near at hand some one was counting,
"one—two—three—four—"

Billy Hicks shouted, "Come back to your corner. When he’s up go right in
to finish him.  He ain’t knocked out yet.  He’s just taking his full
time.  Swing for his chin again, you got him going.  If you can put him
out, Shorty, we’ll take you to San Francisco."

"Seven—eight—nine—"

McCleaverty was up again.  Shorty rushed in. Something caught him a
fearful jar in the pit of the stomach.  He was sick in an instant,
racked with nausea.  The lights began to dance.

"_Time!_"

There was water on his face and body again, deliciously cool.  The fan
windmills swung round and round.  "What’s the matter, what’s the
matter," Billy Hicks was asking anxiously.

Something was wrong.  There was a lead-like weight in Shorty’s stomach,
a taste of potato salad came to his mouth, he was sick almost to
vomiting.

"He caught you a hard one in the wind just before the gong, did he?"
said Billy Hicks.  "There’s fight in him yet.  He’s got a straight arm
body blow you want to look out for.  Don’t let up on him.  Keep—"

"_Time!_"

Shorty came up bravely.  In his stomach there was a pain that made it
torture to stand erect. Nevertheless he rushed, lashing out right and
left. He was dizzy; before he knew it he was beating the air.  Suddenly
his chin jolted backward, and the lights began to spin; he was tiring
rapidly, too, and with every second his arms grew heavier and heavier
and his knees began to tremble more and more.  McCleaverty gave him no
rest.  Shorty tried to clinch, but the dub sidestepped, and came in
twice with a hard right and left over the heart. Shorty’s gloves seemed
made of iron; he found time to mutter, "If I only hadn’t eaten that
stuff last night."

What with the nausea and the pain, he was hard put to it to keep from
groaning.  It was the dub who was rushing now; Shorty felt he could not
support the weight of his own arms another instant.  What was that on
his face that was warm and tickled?  He knew that he had just strength
enough left for one more good blow; if he could only upper-cut squarely
on McCleaverty’s chin it might suffice.

"_Break!_"

The referee thrust himself between them, but instantly McCleaverty
closed again.  Would the round _never_ end?  The dub swung again,
missed, and Shorty saw his chance; he stepped in, upper-cutting with all
the strength he could summon up. The lights swam again, and the roar of
the crowd dwindled to a couple of voices.  He smelt whisky.

"Gimme that sponge."  It was Billy Hicks voice.  "He’ll do all right
now."

Shorty suddenly realised that he was lying on his back.  In another
second he would be counted out.  He raised himself, but his hands
touched a bed quilt and not the resined floor of the ring. He looked
around him and saw that he was in the back room of the saloon where he
had dressed. The fight was over.

"Did I win?" he asked, getting on his feet.

"Win!" exclaimed Billy Hicks.  "You were knocked out.  He put you out
after you had him beaten.  Oh, you’re a peach of a fighter, you are!"

                     *      *      *      *      *

Half an hour later when he had dressed, Shorty went over to the Hall.
His lip was badly swollen and his chin had a funny shape, but otherwise
he was fairly presentable.  The Iowa Hill orchestra had just struck into
the march for the walk around.  He pushed through the crowd of men
around the door looking for Miss Starbird. Just after he had passed he
heard a remark and the laugh that followed it:

"Quitter, oh, what a quitter!"

Shorty turned fiercely about and would have answered, but just at that
moment he caught sight of Miss Starbird.  She had just joined the
promenade or the walk around with some other man. He went up to her:

"Didn’t you promise to have this walk around with me?" he said
aggrievedly.

"Well, did you think I was going to wait all night for you?" returned
Miss Starbird.

As she turned from him and joined the march Shorty’s eye fell upon her
partner.

It was McCleaverty.



                        _*The Strangest Thing*_


The best days in the voyage from the Cape to Southampton are those that
come immediately before and immediately after that upon which you cross
the line, when the ship is as steady as a billiard table, and the ocean
is as smooth and shiny and coloured as the mosaic floor of a basilica
church, when the deck is covered with awning from stem to stern, and the
resin bubbles out of the masts, and the thermometer in the companion-way
at the entrance to the dining-saloon climbs higher and higher with every
turn of the screw.  Of course all the men people aboard must sleep on
deck these nights.  There is a pleasure in this that you will find
nowhere else.  At six your steward wakes you up with your morning cup of
coffee, and you sit cross-legged in your pajamas on the skylight and
drink your coffee and smoke your cigarettes and watch the sun shooting
up over the rim of that polished basilica floor, and take pleasure in
the mere fact of your existence, and talk and talk and tell stories
until it’s time for bath and breakfast.

We came back from the Cape in _The Moor_, with a very abbreviated cabin
list.  Only three of the smaller tables in the saloon were occupied, and
those mostly by men—diamond-brokers from Kimberly, gold-brokers from the
Rand, the manager of a war correspondent on a lecture tour, cut short by
the Ashanti war, an English captain of twenty-two, who had been with
Jameson at Krugersdorp and somehow managed to escape, an Australian
reporter named Miller, and two or three others of a less distinct
personality.

Miller told the story that follows early one morning, sitting on the
Bull board, tailor-fashion, and smoking pipefuls of straight perique,
black as a nigger’s wool.  We were grouped around him on the deck in
pajamas and bath robes.  It was half after six, the thermometer was at
70 degrees, _The Moor_ cut the still water with a soothing rumble of her
screw, and at intervals flushed whole schools of flying fish.  Somehow
the talk had drifted to the inexplicable things that we had seen, and we
had been piecing out our experiences with some really beautiful lies.
Captain Thatcher, the Krugersdorp chap, held that the failure of the
Jameson Raid was the most inexplicable thing he had ever experienced,
but none of the rest of us could think of anything we had seen or heard
of that did not have some stealthy, shadowy sort of explanation sneaking
after it and hunting it down.

"Well, I saw something a bit thick once," observed Miller, pushing down
the tobacco in his pipe bowl with the tip of a callous finger, and in
the abrupt silence that followed we heard the noise of dishes from the
direction of the galley.

"It was in Johannesburg three years back, when I was down on me luck.  I
had been rooked properly by a Welsh gaming chap who was no end of a
bounder, and three quid was all that stood between me and—well," he
broke in, suddenly, "I had three quid left.  I wore down me feet walking
the streets of that bally town looking for anything that would keep me
going for a while, and give me a chance to look around and fetch breath,
and there was nothing, but I tell ye nothing, and I was fair desperate.
One dye, and a filthy wet dye it was, too, I had gone out to the race
track, beyond Hospital Hill, where the pony races are run, thinking as
might be I’d find a berth, handling ponies there, but the season was too
far gone, and they turned me awye.  I came back to town by another
road—then by the waye that fetches around by the Mahomedan
burying-ground.  Well, the pauper burying-ground used to be alongside in
those dyes, and as I came up, jolly well blown, I tell ye, for I’d but
tightened me belt by wye of breakfast, I saw a chap diggin’ a gryve.  I
was in a mind for gryves meself just then, so I pulled up and leaned
over the fence and piped him off at his work.  Then, like the geeser I’d
come to be, I says:

"’What are ye doing there, friend?’  He looked me over between
shovelfuls a bit, and then says:

"’Oh, just setting out early violets;’ and that shut me up properly.

"Well, I piped him digging that gryve for perhaps five minutes, and
then, s’ help me, I asked him for a job.  I did—I asked that
gryve-digger for a job—I was that low.  He leans his back against the
side of the gryve and looks me over, then by and bye, says he:

"’All right, pardner!’

"’I’m thinking your from the Stytes,’ says I.

"’Guess yes,’ he says, and goes on digging.

"Well, we came to terms after a while.  He was to give me two bob a dye
for helping him at his work, and I was to have a bunk in his ’shack’, as
he called it—a box of a house built of four boards, as I might sye, that
stood just on the edge of the gryveyard.  He was a rum ’un, was that
Yankee chap.  Over pipes that night he told me something of himself, and
do y’ know, that gryve-digger in the pauper burying-ground in
Johannesburg, South Africa, was a Harvard graduate!  Strike me straight
if I don’t believe he really was.  The man was a wreck from strong
drink, but that was the one thing he was proud of.

"’Yes, sir,’ he’d say, over and over again, looking straight ahead of
him, ’Yes, sir, I was a Harvard man once, and pulled at number five in
the boat’—the ’varsity boat, mind ye; and then he’d go on talking half
to himself.  ’And now what am I?  I’m digging gryves for hire—burying
dead people for a living, when I ought to be dead meself.  I am dead and
buried long ago.  Its just the whiskey that keeps me alive, Miller,’ he
would say; ’when I stop that I’m done for.’

"The first morning I came round for work I met him dressed as if to go
to town, and carrying a wickered demijohn.  ’Miller’,’ he says, ’I’m
going into town to get this filled.  You must stop here and be ready to
answer any telephone call from the police station.’  S’ help me if there
wasn’t a telephone in that beastly shack.  ’If a pauper cops off they’ll
ring you up from town and notify you to have the gryve ready.  If I’m
awye, you’ll have to dig it.  Remember, if it’s a man, you must dig a
six foot six hole; if it’s a woman, five feet will do, and if it’s a
kid, three an’ half’ll be a plenty. S’long.’  And off he goes.

"Strike me blind but that was a long dye, that first one.  I’d the
pauper gryves for view and me own thoughts for company.  But along about
noon, the Harvard graduate not showing up, I found a diversion.  The
graduate had started to paint the shack at one time, but had given over
after finishing one side, but the paint pot and the brushes were there.
I got hold of ’em and mixed a bit o’ paint and went the rounds of the
gryves. Ye know how it is in a pauper burying-ground—no nymes at all on
the headboards—naught but numbers, and half o’ them washed awye by the
rynes; so I, for a diversion, as I sye, started in to paint all manner
o’ fancy nymes and epitaphs on the headboards—any nyme that struck me
fancy, and then underneath, an appropriate epitaph, and the dytes, of
course—I didn’t forget the dytes. Ye know, that was the rarest enjoyment
I ever had.  Ye don’t think so?  Try it once!  Why, Gawd blyme me,
there’s a chance for imagination in it, and genius and art—highest kind
of art.  For instance now, I’d squat down in front of a blank headboard
and think a bit, and the inspiration would come, and I’d write like
this, maybe: ’Jno. K. Boggart, of New Zealand.  Born Dec. 21, 1870; died
June 5, 1890,’ and then, underneath, ’He Rests in Peace’; or else,
’Elsie, Youngest Daughter of Mary B. and William H. Terhune; b. May 1st,
1880; d. Nov. 25, 1889—Not Lost, but Gone Before’; or agyne, ’Lucas,
Lieutenant T. V. Killed in Battle at Wady Halfa, Egypt, August 30, 1889;
born London, England, Jan. 3, 1850—He Lies Like a Warrior, Tyking His
Rest with His Martial Cloak Around Him’; or something humorous, as
’Bohunkus, J. J.; born Germany; Oct. 3d, 1880; died (by request) Cape
Town, Sept. 4, 1890’; or one that I remember as my very best effort,
that read, ’Willie, Beloved Son of Anna and Gustave Harris; b. April
1st, 1878; d. May 5th, 1888—He was a Man Before His Mother.’  Then I
wrote me own nyme, with the epitaph, ’More Sinned Against Than Sinning;’
and the Harvard chap’s too.  His motto, I remember, was ’He Pulled 5 in
His ’Varsity’s Boat.’

"Well, I had more sport that afternoon than I’ve ever had since.  Y’know
I felt as if I really were acquainted with all those people—with John
Boggart, and Lieutenant Lucas, and Bohunkus, and Willie and all.  Ah,
that was a proper experience.  But right in the middle of me work here
comes a telephone message from town: ’Body of dead baby found at mouth
of city sewer—prepare gryve at once.’  Well, I dug that gryve, the
first, last and only gryve I ever hope to dig.  It came on to ryne like
a water-spout, and oh, but it was jolly tough work.  Then about four
o’clock, just as I was finishing, the Harvard chap comes home, howling
drunk.  I see him go into the shack, and pretty soon out he comes, with
a hoe in one hand and a table leg in the other. Soon as ever he sees me
he makes a staggering run at me, swinging the hoe and the table leg and
yelling like a Zulu indaba.  Just to make everything agreeable and
appropriate, I was down in the gryve, and it occurred to me that the
situation was too uncommon convenient.  I scrambled out and made a run
for it, for there was murder in his eye, and for upwards of ten minutes
we two played blindman’s buff in that gryveyard, me dodging from one
headboard to another, and he at me heels, chivying me like a fox and
with intent to kill.  All at once he trips over a headboard, and goes
down and can’t get up, and at the same minute here comes the morgue
wagon over Hospital Hill.

"Now here comes the queer part of this lamentable history.  A trap was
following that morgue wagon, a no-end swell trap, with a cob in the
shafts that was worth an independent fortune. There was an old gent in
the trap and a smart Cape boy driving.  The old gent was the heaviest
kind of a swell, but I’d never seen him before.  The morgue wagon drives
into the yard, and I—the Harvard chap being too far gone—points out the
gryve.  The driver of the morgue wagon chucks out the coffin, a bit of a
three-foot box, and drives back to town.  Then up comes the trap, and
the old gent gets down—dressed up to the nines he was, in that
heartbreaking ryne—and says he, ’My man, I would like to have that
coffin opened.’  By this time the Harvard chap had pulled himself
together.  He staggered up to the old gent and says, ’No, can’t op’n no
coffin, ’tsgainst all relugations—all regalutions, can’t permit no
coffin tobeopp’n.’  I wish you would have seen the old gent.  Excited!
The man was shaking like a flagstaff in a gyle, talked thick and
stammered, he was so phased.  Gawd strike me, what a scene!  I can see
it now—that pauper burying ground wye down there in South Africa—no
trees, all open and bleak.  The pelting ryne, the open gryve and the
drunken Harvard chap, and the excited old swell arguing over a baby’s
coffin."

Pretty soon the old gent brings up a sovereign and gives it to the
Harvard chap.

"’Let her go,’ says he then, and with that he gives the top board of the
coffin such a kick as started it an inch or more.  With that—now listen
to what I’m telling—with that the old gent goes down on his knees in the
mud and muck, and kneels there waiting and fair gasping with excitement
while the Harvard chap wrenches off the topboard.  Before he had raised
it four inches me old gent plunges his hand in quick, gropes there a
second and takes out something—something shut in the palm of his hand.

"’That’s all,’ says he: ’Thank you, my man,’ and gives us a quid apiece.
We stood there like stuck swine, dotty with the queerness, the
horribleness of the thing.

"’That’s all,’ he says again, with a long breath of relief, as he climbs
into his trap with his clothes all foul with mud.  ’That’s all, thank
Gawd.’  Then to the Cape boy: ’Drive her home, Jim.’  Five minutes later
we lost him in the blur of the rain over Hospital Hill."

"But what was it he took out of the baby’s coffin?" said half a dozen
men in a breath at this point.  "What was it?  What could it have been?"

"Ah, what was it?" said Miller.  "I’ll be damned if I know what it was.
I never knew, I never will know."



                        _*A Reversion to Type*_


Schuster was too damned cheeky.  He was the floor-walker in a department
store on Kearny street, and I had opportunity to observe his cheek upon
each of the few occasions on which I went into that store with—let us
say my cousin.  A floor-walker should let his communications be "first
aisle left," or "elevator, second floor front," or "third counter
right," for whatsoever is more than this cometh of evil.  But Schuster
used to come up to—my cousin, and take her gently by the hand and ask
her how she did, and if she was to be out of town much that season, and
tell her, with mild reproach in his eye, that she had been quite a
stranger of late, while I stood in the background mumbling curses not
loud but deep.

However, my cousin does not figure in this yarn, nor myself.  Paul
Schuster is the hero—Paul Schuster, floor-walker in a department-store
that sold ribbons and lace and corsets and other things, fancy, now!  He
was hopelessly commonplace, lived with a maiden aunt and a parrot in two
rooms, way out in the bleak streets around Lone Mountain.  When on duty
he wore a long black cutaway coat, a white pique four-in-hand and
blue-grey "pants" that cost four dollars.  Besides this he parted his
hair on the side and entertained ideas on culture and refinement.  His
father had been a barber in the Palace Hotel barber shop.

Paul Schuster had never heard anything of a grandfather.

Schuster came to that department-store when he was about thirty.  Five
years passed; then ten—he was there yet—forty years old by now. Always
in a black cutaway and white tie, always with his hair parted on one
side, always with the same damned cheek.  A floor-walker, respectable as
an English barrister, steady as an eight-day clock, a figure known to
every woman in San Francisco. He had lived a floor-walker; as a
floor-walker he would die.  Such he was at forty.  At forty-one he fell.
Two days and all was over.

It sometimes happens that a man will live a sober, steady, respectable,
commonplace life for forty, fifty or even sixty years, and then, without
the least sign of warning, suddenly go counter to every habit, to every
trait of character and every rule of conduct he has been believed to
possess. The thing only happens to intensely respectable gentlemen, of
domestic tastes and narrow horizons, who are just preparing to become
old. Perhaps it is a last revolt of a restrained youth—the final protest
of vigorous, heady blood, too long dammed up.  This bolting season does
not last very long.  It comes upon a man between the ages of forty and
fifty-five, and while it lasts the man should be watched more closely
than a young fellow in his sophomore year at college.  The vagaries of a
sophomore need not be taken any more seriously than the skittishness of
a colt, but when a fifty-year-old bolts, stand clear!

On the second of May—two months and a day after his forty-first
birthday—Paul Schuster bolted.  It came upon him with the quickness of a
cataclysm, like the sudden, abrupt development of latent mania.  For a
week he had been feeling ill at ease—restless; a vague discomfort hedged
him in like an ill-fitting garment; he felt the moving of his blood in
his wrists and his temples.  A subtle desire to do something, he knew
not what, bit and nibbled at his brain like the tooth of a tiny
unfamiliar rodent.

On the second of May, at twenty minutes after six, Schuster came out of
the store at the tail end of the little army of home-bound clerks. He
locked the door behind him, according to custom, and stood for a moment
on the asphalt, his hands in his pockets, fumbling his month’s pay. Then
he said to himself, nodding his head resolutely:

"To-night I shall get drunk—as drunk as I possibly can.  I shall go to
the most disreputable resorts I can find—I shall know the meaning of
wine, of street fights, of women, of gaming, of jolly companions, of
noisy mid-night suppers.  I’ll do the town, or by God, the town will do
me.  Nothing shall stop me, and I will stop at nothing. Here goes!"

Now, if Paul Schuster had only been himself this bolt of his would have
brought him to nothing worse than the Police Court, and would have
lasted but twenty-four hours at the outside.  But Schuster, like all the
rest of us, was not merely himself.  He was his ancestors as well.  In
him as in you and me, were generations—countless generations—of
forefathers.  Schuster had in him the characteristics of his father, the
Palace Hotel barber, but also, he had the unknown characteristics of his
grandfather, of whom he had never heard, and his great-grandfather,
likewise ignored.  It is rather a serious matter to thrust yourself
under the dominion of unknown, unknowable impulses and passions.  This
is what Schuster did that night.  Getting drunk was an impulse belonging
to himself; but who knows what "inherited tendencies," until then
dormant, the alcohol unleashed within him?  Something like this must
have happened to have accounted for what follows.

Schuster went straight to the Palace Hotel bar, where he had cocktails,
thence to the Poodle Dog, where he had a French dinner and champagne,
thence to the Barbary Coast on upper Kearny street, and drank whiskey
that rasped his throat like gulps of carpet tacks.  Then, realising that
San Francisco was his own principality and its inhabitants his vassals,
he hired a carriage and drove to the Cliff House, and poured champagne
into the piano in the public parlor.  A waiter remonstrated, and Paul
Schuster, floor-walker and respectable citizen, bowled him down with a
catsup bottle and stamped upon his abdomen.  At the beginning of that
evening he belonged to that class whom policemen are paid to protect.
When he walked out of the Cliff House he was a free-booter seven feet
tall, with a chest expansion of fifty inches.  He paid the hack-driver a
double fare and strode away into the night and plunged into the waste of
sand dunes that stretch back from the beach on the other side of the
Park.

It never could be found out what happened to Schuster, or what he did,
during the next ten hours.  We pick him up again in a saloon on the
waterfront about noon the next day, with thirty dollars in his pocket
and God knows what disorderly notions in his crazed wits.  At this time
he was sober as far as the alcohol went.  It might be supposed that now
would have been the time for reflection and repentance and return to
home and respectability.  Return home!  Not much!  Schuster had began to
wonder what kind of an ass he had been to have walked the floor of a
department-store for the last score of years.  Something was boiling in
his veins.  B-r-r-r!  Let ’em all stand far from him now.

That day he left San Francisco and rode the blind baggage as far as
Colfax on the Overland. He chose Colfax because he saw the name chalked
on a freight car at the Oakland mole.  At Colfax, within three hours
after his arrival, he fought with a restaurant man over the question of
a broken saucer, and the same evening was told to leave the town by the
sheriff.

Out of Colfax, some twenty-eight miles into the mountains, are placer
gold mines, having for headquarters a one-street town called Iowa Hill.
Schuster went over to the Hill the same day on the stage.  The stage got
in at night and pulled up in front of the postoffice.  Schuster went
into the postoffice, which was also a Wells-Fargo office, a candy store,
a drug store, a cigar store, and a lounging-room, and asked about
hotels.

Only the postmaster was in at that time, but as Schuster leaned across
the counter, talking to him, a young man came in, with a huge spur on
his left boot-heel.  He and the postmaster nodded, and the young man
slid an oblong object about the size of a brick across the counter.  The
object was wrapped in newspaper and seemed altogether too heavy for
anything but metal—metal of the precious kind, for example.

"He?" answered the postmaster to Schuster, when the young man had gone.
"He’s the superintendent of the Little Bear mine on the other side of
the American River, about three miles by the trail."

For the next week Schuster set himself to work to solve the problem of
how a man might obtain a shotgun in the vicinity of Iowa Hill without
the fact being remembered afterward and the man identified.  It seemed
good to him after a while to steal the gun from a couple of Chinamen who
were washing gravel along the banks of the American River about two
miles below the Little Bear.  For two days he lay in the tarweed and
witch hazel, on the side of the canyon overlooking the cabin, noted the
time when both Chinamen were sufficiently far away, and stole the gun,
together with a saw and a handful of cartridges loaded with buckshot.
Within the next week he sawed off the gun-barrels sufficiently short,
experimented once or twice with the buckshot, and found occasion to
reconnoiter every step of the trail that led from the Little Bear to
Iowa Hill.  Also, he found out at the bar of the hotel at the Hill that
the superintendent of the Little Bear amalgamated and reported the
cleanup on Sundays.  When he had made sure of this Schuster was seen no
more about that little one-street mining town.

"He says it’s Sunday," said Paul Schuster to himself; "but that’s why
it’s probably Saturday or Monday.  He ain’t going to have the town know
when he brings the brick over.  It might even be Friday.  I’ll make it a
four-night watch."

There is a nasty bit on the trail from the Little Bear to the Hill,
steep as a staircase, narrow as a rabbit-run, and overhung with
manzanita.  The place is trumpet-mouthed in shape, and sound carries
far.  So, on the second night of his watch, Schuster could at last
plainly hear the certain sounds that he had been waiting for—sounds that
jarred sharply on the prolonged roll of the Morning Star stamps, a
quarter of a mile beyond the canyon.  The sounds were those of a horse
threshing through the gravel and shallow water of the ford in the river
just below.  He heard the horse grunt as he took the slope of the nearer
bank, and the voice of his rider speaking to him came distinctly to his
ears.  Then silence for one—two—three minutes, while the stamp mill at
the Morning Star purred and rumbled unceasingly and Schuster’s heart
pumped thickly in his throat. Then a blackness blacker than that of the
night heaved suddenly against the grey of "the sky, close in upon him,
and a pebble clicked beneath a shod hoof.

"Pull up!"  Schuster was in the midst of the trail, his cheek caressing
the varnished stock.

"Whoa!  Steady there!  What in hell——"

"Pull up.  You know what’s wanted.  Chuck us that brick."

The superintendent chirped sharply to the horse, spurring with his left
heel.

"Stand clear there, God damn you!  I’ll ride you down!"

The stock leaped fiercely in Schuster’s arm-pit, nearly knocking him
down, and, in the light of two parallel flashes, he saw an instantaneous
picture—rugged skyline, red-tinted manzanita bushes, the plunging mane
and head of a horse, and above it a Face with open mouth and staring
eyes, smoke-wreathed and hatless.  The empty stirrup thrashed across
Schuster’s body as the horse scraped by him. The trail was dark in front
of him.  He could see nothing.  But soon he heard a little bubbling
noise and a hiccough.  Then all fell quiet again.

"I got you, all right!"

Thus Schuster, the ex-floor-walker, whose part hitherto in his little
life-drama had been to say, "first aisle left," "elevator, second
floor," "first counter right."

Then he went down on his knees, groping at the warm bundle in front of
him.  But he found no brick.  It had never occurred to him that the
superintendent might ride over to town for other reasons than merely to
ship the week’s cleanup. He struck a light and looked more
closely—looked at the man he had shot.  He could not tell whether it was
the superintendent or not, for various reasons, but chiefly because the
barrels of the gun had been sawn off, the gun loaded with buckshot, and
both barrels fired simultaneously at close range.

Men coming over the trail from the Hill the next morning found the young
superintendent, and spread the report of what had befallen him.

                     *      *      *      *      *

When the Prodigal Son became hungry he came to himself.  So it was with
Schuster.  Living on two slices of bacon per day (eaten raw for fear of
kindling fires) is what might be called starving under difficulties, and
within a week Schuster was remembering and longing for floor-walking and
respectability.  Within a month of his strange disappearance he was back
in San Francisco again knocking at the door of his aunt’s house on Geary
street.  A week later he was taken on again at his old store, in his old
position, his unexcused absence being at length, and under protest,
condoned by a remembrance of "long and faithful service."

Schuster picked up his old life again precisely where he had left it on
the second of May, six weeks previously—picked it up and stayed by it,
calmly, steadily, uneventfully.  The day before he died he told this
story to his maiden aunt, who told it to me, with the remark that it
was, of course, an absurd lie.  Perhaps it was.

One thing, however, remains to tell.  I repeated the absurd lie to a
friend of mine who is in the warden’s office over at the prison of San
Quentin. I mentioned Schuster’s name.

"Schuster!  Schuster!" he repeated; "why we had a Schuster over here
once—a long time ago, though.  An old fellow he was, and a bad egg, too.
Commuted for life, though.  Son was a barber at the Palace Hotel."

"What was old Schuster up for?" I asked.

"Highway robbery," said my friend.



                             *"*_*Boom*_*"*


San Diego in Southern California, is the largest city in the world.  If
your geographies and guide-books and encyclopædias have told you
otherwise, they have lied, or their authors have never seen San Diego.
Why, San Diego is nearly twenty-five miles from end to end! Why, San
Diego has more miles of sidewalk, more leagues of street railways, more
measureless lengths of paved streets, more interminable systems of
sewer-piping, than has London or Paris or even—even—even Chicago (and I
who say so was born in Chicago, too)!  There are statelier houses in San
Diego than in any other "of the world’s great centres," more spacious
avenues, more imposing business blocks, more delicious parks, more
overpowering public buildings, the pavements are better laid, the
electric lighting is more systematic, the railroad and transportation
facilities more accommodating, the climate is better than the Riviera,
the days are longer, the nights shorter, the men finer, the women
prettier, the theatres more attractive, the restaurants cheaper, the
wines more sparkling, "business opportunities" lie in wait for the
unfortunate at dark street-corners and fly at his throat till he must
fain fight them off.  Life is one long, glad fermentation.  There is no
darkness in San Diego, nor any more night.

Incidentally corner lots are desirable.

All of this must be so, because you may read it in the green and gold
prospectus of the San Diego Land and Improvement Company (consolidated),
sent free on application—that is, at one time during the boom it was
sent free—but to-day the edition is out of print, and can only be seen
in the collection of bibliophiles and wealthy amateurs, and the boom is
only an echo now.  But when the guests of the big Coronado Hotel over on
the island come across to the main land and course jackrabbits with
greyhounds in the country to the north of the town, their horses’ hoofs,
as they plunge through the sagebrush and tar weed, will sometimes slide
and clatter upon a bit of concrete sidewalk, half sunk of its own weight
into the sand; or the jack will be started in a low square of bricks,
such as is built for frame house foundations, and which make excellent
jumping for the horses.  There is a colony of rattlers on the shores of
a marsh to the southwest (the maps call it Amethyst Lake) and the little
half-breed Indians catch the tarantulas and horned toads that you buy
alive in glass jars on the hotel veranda, near the postoffice site, and
everything is very gay and pleasant and picturesque.

Why I remember it all so well is because I found Steele in this place.
You see, Steele was a very good friend of mine though he was Oxon, and I
only a man from Chicago.  When his wife knew I was coming west she gave
me Steele’s address, and told me I was to look him up.  Since she told
me this with much insistence and reiteration and with tears in her
voice, I made it a point to be particular.  She had not heard from
Steele in two years.  The address she gave me was "Hon. Ralph
Truax-Steele, Elmwood avenue and One Hundred and Eighty-eighth street,
San Diego, California."

When I arrived at San Diego I found it would be advisable to hire a
horse, for 188th street, instead of waiting for the Elmwood Avenue
electric car, and when I asked for directions a red-headed man whose
father was Irish and whose mother was Chinese, offered to act as guide
for twenty dollars.  He said, though, he would furnish his own outfit.
I demurred and he went away. I was told that some eight miles out beyond
the range I would find a water-hole, and that if I held to the southwest
after leaving this hole, keeping my horse’s ears between the double peak
of a distant mountain called Little Two Top, I would come after a while
to a lamp-post with a tarantula’s nest where the lamp should have been.
It would be hard to miss this lamp-post, they told me, as the desert was
very flat thereabouts, and the lamp-posts could be seen for a radius of
ten miles.  Also, there might be water there—the horse would smell it
out if there was.  Also, it was a good place to camp, because of a tiny
ledge of shale outcropping there.  I was to be particular about this
lamp-post, because it stood at the corner of Elmwood avenue and 188th
street.

When I asked about the Hon. Truax-Steele, Oxon, information was less
explicit.  They shook their heads.  One of them seemed to recollect a
"shack" about a mile hitherward of Two Top, a statement that was at once
contradicted by someone else.  Might have been an old Digger "wicky-up."
Sometimes the Indians camped in the valley on their way to ghost dances
and tribal feasts.  It wasn’t a place for a white man to live, chiefly
because the climate offered so many advantages and attractions to horned
toads, tarantulas and rattlesnakes.  Then the red-headed
Chinese-Irishman came back and said, with an accent that was beyond all
words, that a sheepherder had once told him of a loco-man out beyond
McIntyre’s waterhole, and another man said that, "Yes, that was so; he’d
passed flasks with a loco-man out that way once last June, when he was
out looking for a strayed pony.  In fact, the loco-man lived out there,
had a son, too, leastways a kid lived with him."  This seemed
encouraging.  The Hon. Truax-Steele, Oxon, was accredited with a son—so
his wife had said, who should know.  So I started out, simultaneously
hoping and dreading that the loco-man and the honourable Truax might be
one flesh.

I left San Diego at four o’clock A.M. to avoid as much as possible the
heat of mid-day, and just at sunset saw what might have been a cactus
plant standing out stark and still on the white blur of sage and alkali
like an exclamation point on a blank page.  It was the lamp-post of the
spider’s nest that marked the intersection of Elmwood avenue and 188th
street.  And then my horse shied, with his hind legs only, in the way
good horses have, and Ralph Truax-Steele rose out of a dried muck-hole
under the bit.

I had expected a madman, but his surprise and pleasure at seeing me were
perfectly sane.  After awhile he said: "Sorry, old boy.  It’s the
hospitality of the Arab I can give you; nothing better. A handful of
dates (we call ’em caned prunes out here), the dried flesh of a kid
(Californian for jerked beef), and a mouthful of cold water, which the
same we will thicken with forty-rod rye; incidentally, coffee, black and
unsweet, and tobacco, which at one time I should have requested my
undergroom to discontinue."

We went to his "shack" (I observed it to be built of discarded bricks,
mortared with ’dobe mud) and I was made acquainted with his boy,
Carrington Truax-Steele, fitting for Oxford under tutelage of his
father.

We had supper, after which the Hon. Truax, Sr. stood forth under the
kindling glory of that desert twilight by that incongruous, reeling
lamp-post, booted, bare-headed and woolen-shirted, and to the low
swinging scimitar of the new welded moon declaimed Creon’s speech to
Oedipus in sonorous Greek.  When he was done he exclaimed, abruptly:
"Come along, I’ll show you ’round."

I looked about that stricken reach of alkali, and followed him
wondering.  That evening the Hon. Ralph Truax-Steele, Oxon, showed me
his real estate and also, unwittingly, the disordered workings of his
brain.  The rest I guessed and afterwards confirmed.

Steele had gone mad over the real estate "boom" that had struck the town
five years previously, when land was worth as many dollars as could
cover it, and men and women fought with each other to buy lots around
the water hole called Amethyst Lake.  The "boom" had collapsed, and with
it Steele’s reason, for to him the boom was on the point of
recommencing; sane enough on other points, in this direction the man’s
grip upon himself was gone for good.

"There," he said to me that evening as we crushed our way through the
sagebrush, indicating a low roll on the desert surface, "there are my
villa sites, here will run a driveway, and yonder where you see the
skeleton of that steer I’m thinking of putting up a little rustic stone
chapel."

"Ralph, Ralph," I said, "come out of this. Can’t you see that the whole
business is dead and done for long since?  You’re going back with me to
God’s country to-morrow—going back to your wife, you and the boy.  She
sent me to fetch you."

He stared at me wonderingly.

"Why, it’s bound to come within a few days," he said.  "Wait till next
Wednesday, say, and you won’t recognise this place.  There’ll be a rush
here such as there was when Oklahoma was opened. We have everything for
us—climate, temperature, water.  Harry," he added in my ear, "look
around you.  You are standing on the site of one of the grandest,
stateliest cities of civilisation."

That night the boy Carrington and I sat late in consultation while
Steele slept.  "Nothing but force will do it," said the lad.  "I know
him well, and I’ve tried it again and again.  It’s no use any other
way."  So force it was.

How we got Steele back to San Diego I may not tell.  Carrington is the
only other person who knows, and I’m sure he will say nothing.  When
Steele found himself in the heart of a real city and began to look about
him, and take stock of his surroundings, the real collapse came.  He is
in a sanitarium now somewhere in Illinois, and his wife and son see him
on Wednesday and Sunday afternoons from two till five.  Steele will
never come out of that sanitarium, though he now realises that his
desert city was a myth, a creation of his own distorted wits.  He’s
sound enough on that point, but a strange inversion has taken place. It
is now upon all other subjects that he is insane.



                    _*The Dis-Associated Charities*_


There used to be a place in feudal Paris called the Court of Miracles,
and Mister Victor Hugo has told us all about it.  This Court was a
quarter of the town where the beggars lived, and it was called "of the
miracles", because once across its boundaries the blind saw, the lame
walked and the poor cared not to have the gospel preached unto them.

San Francisco has its Court of Miracles too. It is a far cry thither,
for it lies on the other side of Chinatown and Dagotown, and blocks
beyond Luna’s restaurant.  It is in the valley between Telegraph Hill
and Russian Hill, and you must pass through it as you go down to Meigg’s
Wharf where the Government tugs tie up.

One has elected to call it the Court of Miracles, but it is not a court,
and the days of miracles are over.  It is a row of seven two-story
houses, one of them brick.  The brick house is over a saloon kept by a
Kanaka woman and called "The Eiffel Tower."  Here San Francisco’s
beggars live and have their being.  That is, a good many of them.

The doubled-up old man with the white beard and neck-handkerchief who
used to play upon a zither and the sympathies of the public on the
corner of Sutter street has moved out, and one can find no trace of him,
and Father Elphick, the white-headed vegetarian of Lotta’s Fountain, is
dead.  But plenty of the others are left.  The neatly dressed fellow
with dark blue spectacles, who sings the _Marseillaise_, accompanying
himself upon an infinitesimal hand organ, is here; Mrs. McCleaverty is
here, and the old bare-headed man who sits on the street corner by the
Bohemian Club, after six o’clock in the evening and turns the crank of a
soundless organ, has here set up his everlasting rest.

The beggars of the Seven Houses are genuine miserables.  Perhaps they
have an organisation and a president, I don’t know.  But I do know that
Leander and I came very near demoralising the whole lot of them.

More strictly speaking, it was Leander who did the deed, I merely looked
on and laughed, but Leander says that by laughing I lent him my immoral
support, and am therefore party to the act.

Leander and I had been dining at the "Red House," which is a wine-shop
that Gelett Burgess discovered in an alley not far from the county jail.
Leander and I had gone there because we like to sit at its whittled
tables and drink its _Vin Ordinaire_ (très ordinaire) out of tin gill
measures; also we like its salad and its thick slices of bread that you
eat after you have rubbed them with an onion or a bit of garlic.  We
always go there in evening dress in order to impress the Proletariat.

On this occasion after we had dined and had come out again into the gas
and gaiety of the Mexican quarter we caromed suddenly against Cluness.
Cluness is connected with some sort of a charitable institution that has
a house somewhere in the "Quarter."  He says that he likes to alleviate
distress wherever he sees it; and that after all, the best thing in life
is to make some poor fellow happy for a few moments.

Leander and I had nothing better to do that evening so we went around
with Cluness, and watched him as he gave a month’s rent to an infirm old
lady on Stockton street, a bundle of magazines to a whining old rascal
at the top of a nigger tenement, and some good advice to a Chinese girl
who didn’t want to go to the Presbyterian Mission House.

"That’s my motto," says he, as we came away from the Chinese girl,
"alleviate misery wherever you see it and try and make some poor fellow
happy for a few moments."

"Ah, yes," exclaimed this farceur Leander, sanctimoniously, while I
stared, "that’s the only thing worth while," and he sighed and wagged
his head.

Cluness went on to tell us about a deserving case he had—we were going
there next—in fact, innocently enough, he described the Seven Houses to
us, never suspecting they were the beggar’s headquarters.  He said there
was a poor old paralytic woman lived there, who had developed an
appetite for creamed oysters.

"It’s the only thing," said Cluness, "that she can keep on her stomach."

"She told you so?" asked Leander.

"Yes, yes."

"Well, she ought to know."

We arrived at the Seven Houses and Cluness paused before the tallest and
dirtiest.

"Here’s where she lives; I’m going up for a few moments."

"Have a drink first," suggested Leander, fixing his eyes upon the saloon
under the brick house.

We three went in and sat down at one of the little round zinc
tables—painted to imitate marble—and the Kanaka woman herself brought us
our drinks.  While we were drinking, one of the beggars came in.  He was
an Indian, totally blind, and in the day time played a mouth-organ on
Grant Avenue near a fashionable department store.

"Tut, tut," said Cluness, "poor fellow, blind, you see, what a pity,
I’ll give him a quarter."

"No, let me," exclaimed Leander.

As he spoke the door opened again and another blind man groped in.  This
fellow I had seen often. He sold lavender in little envelopes on one of
the corners of Kearny street.  He was a stout, smooth-faced chap and
always kept his chin in the air.

"What misery there is in this world," sighed Cluness as his eye fell
upon this latter, "one half the world don’t know how—"

"Look, they know each other," said Leander. The lavender man had groped
his way to the Indian’s table—evidently it was their especial table—and
the two had fallen a-talking.  They ordered a sandwich apiece and a
small mug of beer.

"Let’s do something for ’em," exclaimed Cluness, with a burst of
generosity.  "Let’s make ’em remember this night for years to come.
Look at ’em trying to be happy over a bit of dry bread and a pint of
flat beer.  I’m going to give ’em a dollar each."

"No, no," protested Leander.  "Let me fix it, I’ve more money than you.
Let me do a little good now and then.  You don’t want to hog all the
philanthropy, Cluness, _I’ll_ give ’em something.

"It would be very noble and generous of you, indeed," cried Cluness,
"and you’ll feel better for it, see if you don’t.  But I must go to my
paralytic. You fellows wait for me.  I’ll be down in twenty minutes."

I frowned at Leander when Cluness was gone. "Now what tom-foolery is it
this time?" said I.

"Tom-foolery," exclaimed Leander, blankly. "It’s philanthropy.  By Jove,
here’s another chap with his lamps blown out.  Look at him."

A third unfortunate, blind as the other two, had just approached the
Indian and the lavender man.  The three were pals, one could see that at
half a glance.  No doubt they met at this table every night for beer and
sandwiches.  The last blind man was a Dutchman.  I had seen him from
time to time on Market street, with a cigar-box tied to his waist and a
bunch of pencils in his fist.

"Eins!" called the Dutchman to the Kanaka, as he sat down with the
lavender man and the Indian. "Eins—mit a hem sendvidge."

"Excuse me," said Leander, coming up to their table.

What was it?  Did those three beggars, their instinct trained by long
practice, recognise the alms-giver in the sound of Leander’s voice, or
in the step.  It is hard to say, but instantly each one of them dropped
the mildly convivial and assumed the humbly solicitous air, turning his
blind head towards Leander, listening intently.  Leander took out his
purse and made a great jingling with his money.  Now, I knew that
Leander had exactly fifteen dollars—no more, no less—fifteen dollars, in
three five-dollar gold pieces—not a penny of change.  Could it be
possible that he was going to give a gold piece to the three beggars?
It was, evidently, for I heard him say:

"Excuse me.  I’ve often passed you fellows on the street, in town, and I
guess I’ve always been too short of change, or in too much of a hurry to
remember you.  But I’m going to make up for it now, if you’ll permit me.
Here—" and he jingled his money, "here is a five dollar gold piece that
I’d like to have you spend between the three of you to-night, and drink
my health, and—and—have a good time, you know.  Catch on?"

They caught on.

"May God bless you, young man!" exclaimed the old lavender man.

The Indian grunted expressively.

The Dutchman twisted about in his place and shouted in the direction of
the bar:

"Mek ut er bottle Billzner und er Gotha druffle, mit ein _im_-borted
Frankfooter bei der side on."

The Kanaka woman came up, and the Dutchman repeated his order.  The
lavender man paused reflectively tapping his brow, then he delivered
himself: "A half spring chicken," he said with profound gravity, "rather
under done, and some chicory salad and a bottle of white wine—put the
bottle in a little warm water for about two minutes—and some lyonnaise
potatoes with onions, and—

"Donner wetter," shouted the Dutchman, "genuch!" smiting the table with
his fist.

The other subsided.  The Kanaka woman turned to the Indian.

"Whiskey," he grunted, "plenty whiskey, big beefsteak, soh," and he
measured off a yard on the table.

"Leander," said I, when he rejoined me, "that was foolishness, you’ve
thrown away your five dollars and these fellows are going to waste it in
riotous living.  You see the results of indiscriminate charity."

"I’ve _not_ thrown it away.  Cluness would say that if it made them
happier according to their lights it was well invested.  I hate the
charity that means only medicines, clean sheets, new shoes and sewerage.
Let ’em be happy in their own way."  There could be no doubt that the
three blind men were happy.  They loaded their table with spring
chickens, Gotha truffles, beefsteaks, and all manner of "alcoholic
beverages," till the zinc disappeared beneath the accumulation of plates
and bottles. They drank each other’s health and they pledged that of
Leander, standing up.  The Dutchman ordered: "Zwei Billzner more
alreatty."  The lavender man drank his warmed white wine with gasps of
infinite delight, and after the second whiskey bottle had been opened,
the Indian began to say strange and terrible things in his own language.

Cluness came in and beamed on them.

"See how happy you’ve made them, Leander," he said gratefully.  "They’ll
always remember this night."

"They always will," said Leander solemnly.

"I’ve got to go though," said Cluness.  I made as if to go with him but
Leander plucked my coat under the table.  I caught his eye.

"I guess we two will stay," said I.  Cluness left, thanking us again and
again.

"I don’t know what it is," said I seriously to Leander, "but to-night
you seem to me to be too good to be wholesome."

"_I_," said Leander, blankly.  "But I suppose I should expect to be
misjudged."

Just then the Kanaka woman came over to give us our check.

"This is on me," said Leander, but he was so slow in fumbling for his
purse that I was obliged, in all decency, to pay.

After she left _us_, the Kanaka went over to the blind men’s table, and,
check-pad in hand, ran her eye over the truffles, beer, chicken,
beefsteak, wine and whiskey, and made out her check.

"Four dollars, six bits," she announced.

There was a silence, not one of the blind men moved.

"Watch now," said Leander.

"Four, six bits," repeated the Kanaka, her hand on her hip.

Still none of the blind men moved.

"Vail, den," cried the Dutchman, "vich von you two vellars has dose
money, pay oop.  Fier thalers und sax beets."

"I haven’t it," exclaimed the lavender man, "Jim has it," he added,
turning to the Indian.

"No have got, no have got," grunted the Indian. "_You_ have got, you or
Charley."

I looked at Leander.

"Now, what have you done?"

For answer Leander showed me three five dollar gold pieces in the palm
of his hand.

"Each one of those chaps thinks that one of the other two has the gold
piece.  I just pretended to give it to one of ’em, jingled my coin, and
then put it back, I didn’t give ’em a cent.  Each one thought I had
given it to the other two.  How could they tell, they were blind, don’t
you see."

I reached for my hat.

"I’m going to get out of here."

Leander pulled me back.

"Not just yet, wait a few moments.  Listen."

"Vail, vail," cried the Dutchman, beginning to get red.  "You doand
vants to cheats Missus Amaloa, den berhaps—yes, Zhim," he cried to the
Indian, "pay oop, or ees ut _you_ den, Meest’r Paites, dat hab dose finf
thalers?"

"No have got," gurgled the Indian, swaying in his place as he canted the
neck of the whiskey bottle towards his lips.

"I thought you had the money," protested Mr. Bates, the lavender man,
"you or Jim."

"No have got," whooped the Indian, beginning to get angry.  "Hug-gh!
_You_ got money.  He give you money," and he turned his face towards the
Dutchman.

"That’s what _I_ thought," asserted Mr. Bates.

"Tausend Teufels _no_," shouted the other.  "I tell you _no_."

"_You, you,_" growled the Indian, plucking at Mr. Bates’ coat sleeve,
"you have got."

"Yah, soh," cried the Dutchman, shaking his finger at the lavender man,
excitedly, "pay dose finf thalers, Meest’r Paites."

"Pay yourself," exclaimed the other, "I haven’t touched them.  I’ll be
_any_ name, I’ll be _any_ name if I’ve touched them."

"Well, I ain’t going to wait here all night," shrilled the Kanaka woman
impatiently.  The Dutchman shook his finger solemnly towards where he
thought the Indian was sitting.

"It’s der Indyun.  It’s Zhim.  Get ut vrom Zhim."

"Lie, lie," vociferated the Indian, "white man lie.  No have got.  _You_
hav got, or _you_."

"I’ll turn my pockets inside out," exclaimed Mr. Bates.

"Schmarty," cried the Dutchman.  "Can I _see_ dose pocket?"

"Thief, thief," exclaimed the Indian, shaking his long black hair.  "You
steal money."

The other two turned on him savagely.

"There aint no man going to call me that."

"Vat he say, vait, und I vill his het mit der boddle demolisch.  Who you
say dat to, _mee_, or Meest’r Bates?"

"Oh, you make me tired," cried the lavender man, "you two.  _One_ of you
two, pay Missus Amaloa and quit fooling."

"Come on," cried the Kanaka, "pay up or I’ll ring for the police."

"Vooling, vooling," shouted the Dutchman, dancing in his rage.  "You
sheats Missus Amaloa und you gall dot vooling."

"_Who_ cheats," cried the other two simultaneously.

"Vail, how do _I_ know," yelled the Dutchman, purple to the eyes.  "How
do _I_ know vich."

The Kanaka turned to Leander.

"Say, which of these fellows did you give that money to?"

Leander came up.

"Ah-h, _now_ we vill know," said the Dutchman.

Leander looked from one to the other.  Then an expression of perplexity
came into his face.  He scratched an ear.

"Well, I thought it was this German gentleman."

"_Vat!_"

"Only it seems to me I had the money in my left hand, and he, you see,
is on the right hand of the table.  It might have been him, and then
again it might have been one of the other two gentlemen.  It’s so
difficult to remember.  Wasn’t it you," turning to Mr. Bates, "or no,
wasn’t it _you_," to the Indian.  "But it _couldn’t_ have been the
Indian gentleman, and it couldn’t have been Mr. Bates here, and yet I’m
sure it wasn’t the German gentleman, and, however, I _must_ have given
it to one of the three.  Didn’t I lay the coin down on the table and go
away and leave it."  Leander struck his forehead.  "Yes, I think that’s
what I did.  I’m sorry," he said to the Kanaka, "that you are having any
trouble, it’s some misunderstanding."

"Oh, I’ll get it all right," returned the Kanaka, confidently.  "Come
on, one of you fellows dig up."

Then the quarrel broke out afresh.  The three blind men rose to their
feet, blackguarding and vilifying one another till the room echoed.  Now
it was Mr. Bates and the Dutchman versus the Indian, now the Indian and
Dutchman versus Mr. Bates, now the Indian and Mr. Bates versus the
Dutchman.  At every instant the combinations varied with kaleidoscopic
swiftness.  They shouted, they danced, and they shook their fists
towards where they guessed each other’s faces were.  The Indian, who had
been drinking whiskey between intervals of the quarrel, suddenly began
to rail and howl in his own language, and at times even the Dutchman
lapsed into the vernacular.  The Kanaka woman lost her wits altogether,
and declared that in three more minutes she would ring for the police.

Then all at once the Dutchman swung both fists around him and caught the
Indian a tremendous crack in the side of the head.  The Indian vented an
ear-splitting war-whoop and began pounding Mr. Bates who stood next to
him.  In the next instant the three were fighting all over the room.
They lost each other, they struck furious blows at the empty air, they
fell over tables and chairs, or suddenly came together with a dreadful
shock and terrible cries of rage.  The Dutchman bumped against Leander
and before he could get away had smashed his silk hat down over his
ears.  The noise of their shouting could have been heard a block.

"Thief, thief."

"Teef yourselluf, pay oop dose finf thalers."

"No have got, no have got."

And then the door swung in and four officers began rounding them up like
stampeded sheep. Not until he was in the wagon could the Dutchman
believe that it was not the Indian and Mr. Bates who had him by either
arm, and even in the wagon, as they were being driven to the precinct
station-house, the quarrel broke out from time to time.

As we heard the rattle of the patrol-wagon’s wheels growing fainter over
the cobbles, we rose to go.  The Kanaka stood with her hands on her hips
glaring at the zinc table with its remnants of truffle, chicken and
beefsteak and its empty bottles. Then she exclaimed, "And _I’m_ shy four
dollars and six bits."

On the following Saturday night Leander and I were coming from a Mexican
dinner at Luna’s. Suddenly some one caught our arms from behind. It was
Cluness.

"I want to thank you fellows again," he exclaimed, "for your kindness to
those three blind chaps the other night.  It was really good of you.  I
believe they had five dollars to spend between them.  It was really fine
of you, Leander."

"Oh, I don’t mind five dollars," said Leander, "if it can make a poor
fellow any happier for a few moments.  That’s the only thing that’s
worth while in this life."

"I’ll bet you felt better and happier for doing it."

"Well, it did make me happy."

"Of course, and those three fellows will never forget that night."

"No, I guess they won’t," said Leander.



                           _*Son of a Sheik*_


The smell of the warm slime on the Jeliffe River and the sweet, heavy
and sickening odour that exhaled into the unspeakable heat of the desert
air from the bunches of dead and scorched water-reeds are with me yet;
also the sight of the long stretch of dry mud bank, rising by shallow
and barely perceptible degrees to the edge of the desert sands, and thus
disclosed by the shrinkage of the Jeliffe during the hot months.  The
mud banks were very broad and very black except where they touched the
desert; here the sand had sifted over them in light transparent
sprinklings. In rapidly drying under the sun of the Sahara, they had
cracked and warped into thousands of tiny concave cakes that looked, for
all the world, like little saucers in which Indian ink has been mixed.
(If you are an artist, as was Thévenot, you will the better understand
this.)

Then there was the reach of the desert that drew off on either hand and
rolled away, ever so gently, toward the place where the hollow sky
dropped out of sight behind the shimmering horizon, swelling grandly and
gradually like some mighty breast which, panting for breath in the
horrible heat, had risen in a final gasp and had then, in the midst of
it, suddenly stiffened and become rigid.  On this colourless bosom of
the desert, where nothing stirred but the waxing light in the morning
and the waning light in the night, lay tumbled red and gray rocks, with
thin drifts of sand in their rifts and crevices and grey-green cacti
squatting or sprawling in their blue shadows. And there was nothing
more, nothing, nothing, except the appalling heat and the maddening
silence.

And in the midst of it all,—we.

Now "we" broadly and generally speaking, were the small right wing of
General Pawtrot’s division of the African service; speaking less broadly
and less generally, "we" were the advance-guard of said division; and,
speaking in the narrowest and most particular sense, "we" were the party
of war-correspondents, specials, extras, etc., who were accompanying
said advance-guard of said wing of said army of said service for reasons
herein to be set forth.

As the long, black scow of the commissariat went crawling up the torpid
river with the advance-guard straggling along upon the right, "we" lay
upon the deck under the shadow of the scow’s awning and talked and drank
seltzer.

I forget now what led up to it, but Ponscarme had said that the Arabs
were patriotic, when Bab Azzoun cut in and said something which I shall
repeat as soon as I have told you about Bab Azzoun himself.

Bab Azzoun had been born twenty-nine years before this time, at Tlemcen,
of Kabyle parents (his father was a sheik).  He had been transplanted to
France at the age of ten, and had flourished there in a truly remarkable
manner. He had graduated fifth from the Polytéchnique; he had written
books that had been "_couronné par l’Académie_"; he had become
naturalised; he had been prominent in politics (no one can cut a wide
swath in Paris in anything without hitting against _la politique_;) he
had occupied important positions in two embassies; he was a diplomat of
no mean qualities; he had influence; he dressed in faultless French
fashion; he had owned "Crusader"; he had lost money on him; he had
applied to the government for the office of "_Sous-chef-des
bureaux-Arabes dans l’Oran_," in order to recoup; he had obtained it; he
had come on with "us", and was now on this, his first visit to his
fatherland since his tenth year, on his way to his post.

And when Ponscarme had spoken thus about the patriotism of the Arabs,
Bab Azzoun made him answer: "The Arabs are not sufficiently educated to
be true patriots."

"Bah!" said Santander, "a man does not require to be educated in order
to be a patriot.  And, indeed, the rudest nations have ever been the
most devotedly patriotic."

"Yes," said Bab Azzoun, "but it is a narrow and a very selfish
patriotism."

"I can’t see that," put in Ponscarme; "a patriot is like an egg—he is
either good or bad.  There is no such thing as a ’good enough egg,’
there is no such thing as a ’good enough patriot’—if a man is one at
all, he is a perfect one."

"I agree," answered Bab Azzoun; "yet patriotism can be more or less
narrow.  Listen and I will explain"—he raised himself from the deck on
his elbow and gestured with the amber mouth-piece of his
chibouk—"Patriotism has passed through five distinct stages; first, it
was only love of family—of parents and kindred; then, as the family
grows and expands into the tribe, it, too, as merely a large family,
becomes the object of affection, of patriotic devotion.  This is the
second stage—the stage of the tribe, the dan.  In the third stage, the
tribe has sought protection behind the inclosure of walls.  It is the
age of cities; patriotism is the devotion to the city; men are Athenians
ere Grecians, Romans ere Italians.  In the next period, patriotism means
affection for the state, for the county, for the province; and
Burgundian, Norman and Fleming gave freely of their breast-blood for
Burgundy, Normandy and Flanders; while we of to-day form the latest, but
not the last, link of the lengthening chain by honouring, loving and
serving the _country_ above all considerations, be they of tribe, or
town, or tenure. Yet I do not believe this to be the last, the highest,
the noblest form of patriotism.

"No," continued Bab Azzoun, "this development shall go on, ever
expanding, ever mounting, until, carried upon its topmost crest, we
attain to that height from which we can look down upon the world as our
country, humanity as our countrymen, and he shall be the best patriot
who is the least patriotic."

"Ah-h, _fichtre_!" exclaimed Santander, listlessly, throwing a cushion
at Bab Azzoun’s head; "_va te coucher_.  It’s too hot to theorise;
you’re either a great philosopher, Bab, or a large sized"—he looked at
him over the rim of his tin cup before concluding—"idiot." ...

But Bab Azzoun had gone on talking in the meanwhile, and now finishing
with "and so you must not blame me, if, looking upon them" (he meant the
Arabs) "and theirs, in this light, I find this African campaign a sorry
business for France to be engaged in,—a vast and powerful government
terrorising into submission a horde of half-starved fanatics," he
yawned, "all of which is very bad—very bad.  Give me some more seltzer."

We were aroused by the sudden stoppage of the scow.  A detachment of
"Zephyrs," near us upon the right bank, scrambled together in a hollow
square.  A battalion of Coulouglis, with _haik_ and _bournous_ rippling,
scuttled by us at a gallop, and the Twenty-Third Chasseurs d’Afrique in
the front line halted at an "order" on the crest of a sand ridge, which
hid the horizon from sight.  The still, hot air of the Sahara was
suddenly pervaded with something that roused us to our feet in an
instant.  Thévenot whipped out his ever-ready sketch-book and began
blocking in the landscape and the position of the troops, while
Santander snatched his note-book and stylograph.

Of the scene which now gathered upon us, I can remember little, only out
of that dark chaos can I rescue a few detached and fragmentary
impressions—all the more vivid, nevertheless, from their isolation, all
the more distinct from the grey blur of the background against which
they trace themselves.

Instantly, somewhere disquietingly near, an event, or rather a whirl of
events that rushed and writhed themselves together into a maze of
dizzying complexity, suddenly evolved and widened like the fierce, quick
rending open of some vast scroll, and there were zigzag hurryings to and
fro and a surging heavenward of a torrent of noises, noises of men and
noises of feet, noises of horses and noises of arms, noises that hustled
fiercely upward above the brown mass and closed together in the desert
air, blending or jarring one with another, joining and separating,
reuniting and dividing; noises that rattled; noises that clanked; noises
that boomed, or shrilled, or thundered, or quavered. And then came sight
of blue-grey tumulous curtains—but whether of smoke or dust, I could not
say, rumbling and billowing, bellying out with the hot tempest-breath of
the battle-demon that raged within, and whose outermost fringes were
torn by serrated files of flashing steel and wavering ranks of red.

And this was all at first.  I knew we had been attacked and that behind
those boiling smoke-billows, somewhere and somehow, men, infuriated into
beasts, were grappling and struggling, each man, with every sinew on the
strain, striving to kill his fellow.

And now we were in the midst of a hollow square of our soldiery, yet how
we came there I cannot recall, though I remember that the water of the
Jeliffe made my clothes heavy and uncomfortable, although a mortal fear
sat upon me of being shot down by some of our own frenzied soldiers.
And then came that awful rib-cracking pressure, as, from some outward,
unseen cause, the square was thrown back upon itself.  And with it all
the smell of sweat of horses, and of men, the odour of the powder-smoke,
the blinding, suffocating, stupefying clouds of dust, the horrible fear,
greater than all others, of being pushed down beneath those thousands of
trampling feet, the pitch of excitement that sickens and weakens, the
momentary consciousness—vanishing as soon as felt—that this was what men
called "war," and that we were experiencing the reality of what we had
so often read.

It was not inspiring; there was no romance, no poetry about it; there
was nothing in it but the hideous jar, one against the other, of men
drunk with the blood-lust that eighteen hundred years had not quenched.

I looked at Bab Azzoun; he was standing at the gunwale of the scow
(somehow we were back on the scow again) with an unloaded pistol in his
hand.  He was watching the battle on the bank. His nostrils quivered,
and he shifted his feet exactly like an excited thorough-bred.  On a
sudden, a trooper of the Eleventh Cuirassiers came spinning round and
round out of the brown of the battle, gulping up blood, and pitched,
wheezing, face downwards, into the soft ooze where the river licked at
the bank, raising ruddy bubbles in the water as he blew his life-breath
in gasps into it, and raking it into gridiron patterns as his quivering,
blue fingers closed into fists.  Instantly afterward came a mighty rush
across the river beneath our very bows.  Forty-odd cuirassiers burst
into it, followed by eighty or a hundred Kabyles.

I can recall just how the horse-hoofs rattled on the saucer-like cakes
of dry mud and flung them up in countless fragments behind them.  They
were a fine sight, those Kabyles, with their fierce, red horses, their
dazzling white _bournouses_, their long, thin, murderous rifle-barrels,
thundering and splashing past, while from the whole mass of them, from
under the shadow of every white _haik_, from every black-bearded lip,
was rolling their war-cry: "Allah, Allah-il-Allah!"

Some long dormant recollections stirred in Bab Azzoun at this old
battle-shout.  As he faced them now, he was no longer the cold, cynical
_boulevardier_ of the morning.  He looked as he must have looked when he
played, a ten year-old boy, about the feet of the horses in his father’s
black tent. He saw the long lines of the _douars_ of his native home; he
saw the camels, and the caravan crawling toward the sunset; he saw the
women grinding meal; he saw his father, the bearded sheik; he saw the
Arab horsemen riding down to battle; he saw the palm-broad spear-points
and the blue yataghans. In an instant of time all the long years of
culture and education were stripped away as a garment. Once more he
stood and stepped the Kabyle.  And with these recollections, his
long-forgotten native speech came rushing to his tongue, and in a long,
shrill cry, he answered his countrymen in their own language:

"_Allah-il-Allah, Mohammed ressoul Allah._"

He passed me at a bound, leaped from the scow upon the back of a
riderless horse, and, mingling with the Kabyles, rode out of sight.

And that was the last I ever saw of Bab Azzoun.



                       _*A Defense of the Flag*_


It had been the celebration of the feast of the Holy St. Patrick, and
the various Irish societies of the city had turned out in great
force—Sons of Erin, Fenians, Cork Rebels, and all.  The procession had
formed on one of the main avenues and had marched and countermarched up
and down through the American city; had been reviewed by the mayor
standing on the steps of the City Hall and wearing a green sash; and had
finally disbanded in the afternoon in the business quarter of the city.
So that now the streets in that vicinity were full of the perspiring
members of the parade, the emerald colour flashing in and out of the
slow moving maze of the crowd, like strands of green in the warp and
woof of a loom.

There were marshals of the procession, with batons and big green
rosettes, breathing easily once more after the long agony of sitting
upon a nervous horse that walked sideways.  There were the occupants of
the endless line of carriages, with their green sashes, stretching their
cramped and stiffened legs.  There were the members of the various
political clubs and secret societies, in their one good suit of
ready-made clothes, cotton gloves, and silver-fringed scarfs.  There was
the little girl, with green tassels on her boots, who had walked by her
father’s side carrying a set bouquet of cut flowers in a lace
paper-holder.  There was the little boy who wore a green high hat, with
a pipe stuck in the brim, and who carried the water for the band; and
there were the members of the groups upon the floats, with overcoats and
sacques thrown over their costumes and spangles.

The men were in great evidence in and around the corner saloons talking
aloud, smoking, drinking, and spitting, and calling for "Jim," or
"Connors," or "Duffy," over the heads of the crowd, and what with the
speeches, and the beer, and the frequent fights, and the appropriate
damning of England and the Orangemen, the day promised to end in right
spirit and proper mood.

It so came about that young Shotover, on his way to his club, met with
one of these groups near the City Hall, and noticed that they
continually looked up towards its dome and seemed very well pleased with
what they saw there.  After he had passed them some little distance,
Shotover, as well, looked up in that direction and saw that the Irish
flag was flying from the staff above the cupola.

Shotover was American-bred and American-born, and his father and mother
before him and their father and mother before them, and so on and back
till one brought up in the hold of a ship called the _Mayflower_,
further back than which it is not necessary to go.

He never voted.  He did not know enough of the trend of national
politics even to bet on the presidential elections.  He did not know the
names of the aldermen of his city, nor how many votes were controlled by
the leaders of the Dirigo or Comanche Clubs; but when he was told that
the Russian _moujik_ or the Bulgarian serf, who had lived for six months
in America (long enough for their votes to be worth three dollars), was
as much of an American citizen as himself, he thought of the Shotovers
who had framed the constitution in ’75, had fought for it in ’13 and
’64, and wondered if this were so.  He had a strange and stubborn
conviction that whatever was American was right and whatever was right
was American, and that somehow his country had nothing to be ashamed of
in the past, nor afraid of in the future, for all the monstrous
corruptions and abuses that obtained at present.

But just now this belief had been rudely jarred, and he walked on slowly
to his club, the blood gradually flushing his face up to the roots of
his hair.  Once there, he sat for a long time in the big bay-window,
looking absently out into the street, with eyes that saw nothing, very
thoughtful.  All at once he took up his hat, clapped it upon his head
with the air of a man who has made up his mind, and went out, turning in
the direction of the City Hall.

Whence arrived there, no one noticed him, for he made it a point to walk
with a brisk, determined air, as though he were bent upon some
especially important business, "which I am," he said to himself as he
went on and up through tessellated corridors, between court-rooms and
offices of clerks, commissioners, and collectors.

It was a long time before he found the right stairway, which was a
circuitous, ladder-like flight that wormed its way upward between the
two walls of the dome.  The door leading to the stairway was in a kind
of garret above the top floor of the building proper, and was sandwiched
in between coal-bunkers, water-tanks, and gas-meters.  Shotover tried
it, and found it locked.  He swore softly to himself, and attempted to
break it open.  He soon concluded that this would make too much noise,
and so turned about and descended to the floor below.  A negro, with an
immense goitre and a black velvet skull-cap, was cleaning the woodwork
outside a county commissioner’s door.  He directed Shotover to the
porter in the office of the Weather Bureau, if he wished to go up in the
cupola for the view.  It was after four by this time, and Shotover found
the porter of the Weather Bureau piling the chairs on the tables and
sweeping out after office-hours.

"Well you see," said this one, "we don’t allow nobody to go up in the
cupola.  You can get a permit from the architect’s office, but I guess
they’ll be shut up there by now."

"Oh, I’m sorry," said Shotover; "I’m leaving town to-morrow, and I
particularly wanted to get the view from the cupola.  They say you can
see well out into the ocean."

The porter had ignored him by this time, and was sweeping up a great
dust.  Shotover waited a moment.  "You don’t think I could arrange to
get up there this afternoon?" he went on.  The porter did not turn
around.

"We don’t allow no one up there without a permit," he answered.

"I suppose," returned Shotover, "that you have the keys?"

No answer.

"You have the keys, haven’t you—the keys to the door there at the foot
of the stairs?"

"We don’t allow no one to go up there without a permit.  Didn’t you hear
me before?"

Shotover took a five-dollar gold piece from his pocket, laid it on the
corner of a desk, and contemplated it with reflective sadness.  "I’m
sorry," he said; "I particularly wanted to see that view before I left."

"Well, you see," said the porter, straightening up, "there was a young
feller jumped off there once, and a woman tried to do it a little while
after, and the officers in the police station downstairs made us shut it
up; but ’s long as you only want to see the view and don’t want to jump
off, I guess it’ll be all right," and he leaned one hand against the
edge of the desk and coughed slightly behind the other.

While he had been talking, Shotover had seen between the two windows on
the opposite side of the room a very large wooden rack full of
pigeon-holes and compartments: The weather and signal-flags were tucked
away in these, but on the top was a great folded pile of bunting.  It
was sooty and grimy, and the new patches in it showed violently white
and clean.  But Shotover saw, with a strange and new catch at the heart,
that it was tri-coloured.

"If you will come along with me now, sir," said the porter, "I’ll open
the door for you."

Shotover let him go out of the room first, then jumped to the other side
of the room, snatched the flag down, and, hiding it as best he could,
followed him out of the room.  They went up the stairs together.  If the
porter saw anything, he was wise enough to keep quiet about it.

"I won’t bother about waiting for you," said he, as he swung the door
open.  "Just lock the door when you come down, and leave the key with me
at the office.  If I ain’t there, just give it to the fellow at the
news-stand on the first floor, and I can get it in the morning."

"All right," answered Shotover, "I will," and he hugged the flag close
to him, going up the narrow stairs two at a time.

After a long while he came out on the narrow railed balcony that ran
around the lantern, and paused for breath as he looked around and below
him.  Then he turned quite giddy and sick for a moment and clutched
desperately at the hand-rail, resisting a strong impulse to sit down and
close his eyes.

Seemingly insecure as a bubble, the great dome rolled away from him on
all sides down to the buttresses around the drum, and below that the
gulf seemed endless, stretching down, down, down, to the thin yellow
ribbon of the street.  Underneath him, the City Hall itself dropped
away, a confused heap of tinned roofs, domes, chimneys, and cornices,
and beyond that lay the city itself spreading out like a great gray map.
Over it there hung a greasy, sooty fog of a dark-brown color.  In places
the higher buildings over-topped the fog.  Here, it was pierced by a
slender church-spire.  In another place, a dome bulged up over it, or,
again, some sky-scraping office-building shouldered itself above its
level to the purer, cleaner air.  Looking down at the men in the
streets, Shotover could see only their feet moving back and forth
underneath their hat-brims as they walked.  The noises of the city
reached him in a subdued and steady murmur, and the strong wind that was
blowing brought him the smell of the vegetable-gardens in the suburbs,
the odour of trees and hay from the more distant country, and
occasionally a faint whiff of salt from the ocean.

The sight was a sort of inspiration to Shotover. The great American
city, with its riches and resources, boiling with the life and energy of
a new people, young, enthusiastic, ambitious, and so full of hope and
promise for the future, all striving and struggling in the fore part of
the march of empire, building a new nation, a new civilisation, a new
world, while over it all floated the Irish flag.

Shotover turned back, seized the halyards, and brought the green banner
down with a single movement of his arm.  Then he knotted the other
bundle of bunting to the cords and ran it up.  As it reached the top,
the bundle twisted, turned on itself, unfolded, suddenly caught the
wind, and then, in a single, long billow, rolled out into the stars and
bars of Old Glory.

Shotover shut his teeth against a cheer, and the blood went tingling up
and down through his body to his very finger-tips.  He looked up,
leaning his hand against the mast, and felt it quiver and thrill as the
great flag tugged at it.  The sound of the halyards rattling and
snapping came to his ears like music.

He was not ashamed then to be enthusiastic, and did not feel in the
least melodramatic or absurd. He took off his hat, and, as the great
flag grew out stiffer and snapped and strained in the wind, looked up at
it and said over softly to himself: "Lexington, Valley Forge, Yorktown,
Mexico, the Alamo, 1812, Gettysburg, Shiloh, the Wilderness."

Meanwhile the knot of people on the sidewalk below, that had watched his
doings, had grown into a crowd.  The green badge was upon every breast,
and there came to his ears a sound that was out of chord with the minor
drone, the worst sound in the human gamut, the sound of an angry mob.

The high, windy air and the excitement of the occasion began to tell on
Shotover, so that when half an hour later there came a rush of many feet
up the stairway, and a crash upon the door that led up to the lantern,
he buttoned his coat tightly around him, and shut his teeth and fists.

When the door finally went down and the first man jumped in, Shotover
hit him.

Terence Shannon told about this afterward.  "It was a birdie.  Ah, but
say, y’ ought to of seen um. He let go with his left, like de piston-rod
of de engine wot broke loose dat time at de power-house, an’ Duffy’s had
an eye like a fried egg iver since."

The crowd paused, partly through surprise and partly because the body of
Mr. Duffy lay across their feet and barred their way.  There were about
a dozen of them, all more or less drunk.  The one exception was Terence
Shannon, who was the candidate of the boss of his ward for a number on
the force.  In view of this fact, Shannon was trying to preserve order.
He took advantage of the moment of hesitation to step in between
Shotover and the crowd.

"Aw, say, youse fellows rattle me slats, sure. Do yer think the City
Hall is the place to scrap, wid the jug only two floors below?  Ye’ll be
havin’ the whole shootin’-match of the force up here in a minute.  Maybe
yer would like to sober up in the ’hole in the wall.’  Now just pipe
down quiet-like, an’ swear um in reg’lar at the station-house
down-stairs.  Ye’ve got a straight disturbin’-the-peace case wid um.
Ah, sure, straight goods.  I ain’t givin’ yer no gee-hee."

But the crowd stood its ground and glared at Shotover over Shannon’s
head.  Then Connors yelled and drew out his revolver.  "B’yes, we’ve got
a right," he exclaimed.  "It’s the boord av alderman gave us the permit
to show the green flag of ould Ireland here to-day.  It’s him as is
breaking the law, not we, confound you."  ("Confound you" was not what
Mr. Connors said).

"He’s dead on," said Shannon, turning to Shotover. "It’s all ye kin do.
Yer’re actin’ agin the law."

Shotover did not answer, but breathed hard through his nose, wondering
at the state of things that made it an offense against the American law
to protect the American flag.  But all at once Shannon passed him and
drew his knife across the halyards, and the great flag collapsed and
sank slowly down like a wounded eagle.  The crowd cheered, and Shannon
said in Shotover’s ear: "’Twas to save yer life, me b’y.  They’re out
for blood, sure."

"Now," said Connors, using several altogether impossible nouns and
adjectives, "now run up the green flag of ould Ireland again, or ye’ll
be sorry," and he pointed his revolver at Shotover.

"Say," cried Shannon, in a low voice to Shotover—"say, he’s dead stuck
on doin’ you dirt.  I can’t hold um.  Aw, say, Connors, quit your
foolin’, will you; put up your flashbox—put it up, or—or—"  But just
here he broke off, and catching up the green flag, threw it out in front
of Shotover, and cried, laughing, "Ye’ll not have the heart to shoot
now."

Shotover struck the flag to the ground, set his foot on it, and catching
up Old Glory again, flung it round him and faced them, shouting:

"_Now shoot!_"

But at this, in genuine terror, Shannon flung his hat down and ran in
front of Connors himself, fearfully excited, and crying out: "F’r Gawd’s
sake, Connors, you don’t dast do it.  Wake up, will yer, it’s mornin’.
Do yer want to hiv’ us all jugged for twenty years?  It’s treason and
rebellion, and I don’t now _what_ all, for every mug in the gang, if yer
just so much as crook dat forefinger.  Put it up, ye damned fool.  This
is a cat w’at has changed colour."

Something of the gravity of the situation had forced its way through the
clogged minds of the others, and, as Shannon spoke the last words,
Connors’s fore-arm was knocked up and he himself was pulled back into
the crowd.

You can not always foretell how one man is going to act, but it is easy
to read the intentions of a crowd.  Shotover saw a rush in the eyes of
the circle that was contracting about him, and turned to face the danger
and to fight for the flag as the Shotovers of the old days had so often
done.

In the books, the young aristocrat invariably thrashes the clowns who
set upon him.  But somehow Shotover had no chance with his clowns at
all. He hit out wildly into the air as they ran in, and tried to guard
against the scores of fists.  But their way of fighting was not that
which he had learned at his athletic club.  They kicked him in the
stomach, and, when they had knocked him down, stamped upon his face.  It
is hard to feel like a martyr and a hero when you can’t draw your breath
and when your mouth is full of blood and dust and broken teeth.
Accordingly Shotover gave it up, and fainted away.

When the officers finally arrived, they made no distinction between the
combatants, but locked them all up under the charge of "Drunk and
Disorderly."



                               _*Toppan*_


When Frederick Woodhouse Toppan came out of Thibet and returned to the
world in general and to San Francisco in particular, he began to know
what it meant to be famous.  As he entered street cars and hotel
elevators he remarked a sudden observant silence on the part of the
other passengers.  The reporters became a real instead of a feigned
annoyance and the papers at large commenced speaking of him by his last
name only.  He ceased to cut out and paste in his scrap-book, everything
that was said of him in the journals and magazines. People composed
beforehand clever little things to say to him when they were introduced,
and he was asked to indorse new soaps and patented cereals.  The great
magazines of the country wrote to him for more articles, and his
"Through the Highlands of Thibet", already in its fiftieth thousand, was
in everybody’s hands.

And he was hardly thirty.

To people who had preconceived ideas as to what an Asiatic explorer
should be like, Toppan was disappointing.  Where they expected to see a
"magnificent physique" in top boots and pith helmet, flung at length
upon lion skins, smoking a nargile, they saw only a very much tanned
young gentleman, who wore a straw hat and russet leather shoes just like
any well dressed man of the period.  They felt vaguely defrauded because
he looked ordinary and stylish and knew what to do with his hands and
feet in a drawing-room.

He had come to San Francisco for three reasons. First because at that
place he was fitting out an expedition for Kamtchatka which was to be
the big thing of his life, and cause him to be spoken of together with
Speke, Nansen and Stanley; second because the manager of the lecture
bureau with whom he had signed, had scheduled him to deliver his two
lectures there, as he had already done in Boston, New York, and
elsewhere; and, third because Victoria Boyden lived there.

When Toppan got back, the rest of Victoria’s men friends shrank
considerably when she compared them with Toppan.  They were of the type
who are in the insurance offices of fathers and uncles during the
winter, and in the summer are to be found at the fashionable resorts,
where they idle languidly on the beaches in white flannels or play
"chopsticks" with the girls on the piano in the hotel parlors.  Here,
however, was the first white man who had ever crossed Thibet alive, who
knew what it meant to go four days without water and who could explain
to you the difference between the insanity caused by the lack of sleep
and that brought about by a cobra-bite. The men of Victoria’s
acquaintance never had known what it was to go without two consecutive
meals, whereas Toppan at one time in the Himalayas had lived for several
weeks upon ten ounces of camel meat per day, after the animals had died
under their burdens.  Victoria’s friends led germans, Toppan led
expeditions; their only fatigue came from dancing.  Upon one occasion on
Mount Everest, Toppan and his companions, caught in a snow-storm where
sleep meant death, had kept themselves awake by chewing pipe-tobacco,
and rubbing the smarting juice in their eyes.  He had had experiences,
the like of which none other of her gentlemen friends had ever known and
she had cared for him from the first.

When a man tells a girl that he loves her in a voice that can speak in
the dialects of the interior Thibetan states around the Tengrinor lake,
or holds her hand in one that has been sunken deep in the throat of a
hunger-mad tiger, she cannot well be otherwise than duly impressed.

To look at, Victoria was a queen.  Just the woman you would have chosen
to be mated with a man like Toppan, five feet, eleven in her tennis
shoes, with her head flung well back on her shoulders, and the gait of a
goddess; she could look down on most men and in general suggested
figures of Brunehilde, Boadicea, or Berenice.  But to know her was to
find her shallow as a sun-shrunken mill-race, to discover that her
brilliancy was the cheapest glitter, and to realise that in every way
she was lamentably unsuited for the role of Toppan’s wife.  And no one
saw this so well as Toppan himself.  He knew that she did not appreciate
him at one-tenth his real value, that she never could and never would
understand him, and that he was in every way too good for her.

As his wife he felt sure she would only be a hindrance and a
stumbling-block in the career that he had planned for himself, if,
indeed she did not ruin it entirely.

But first impressions were strong with him, and because when he had
first known her she had seemed to be fit consort for an emperor, he had
gone on loving her as such ever since, making excuses for her
trivialities, her petty affectations, her lack of interest in his life
work, and even at times her unconcealed ridicule of it.  For one thing,
Victoria wanted him to postpone his expedition for a year, in order that
he might marry her, and Toppan objected to this because he was so
circumstanced just then that to postpone meant to abandon it.

No man is stronger than his weakest point. Toppan’s weak point was
Victoria Boyden, and he acknowledged to himself with a good deal of
humiliation that he could not make up his mind to break with her.
Perhaps he is not to be too severely blamed for this.  Living so much
apart from women as he did and plunged for such long periods into an
atmosphere so entirely different from that of ordinary society, he had
come to feel intensely where he felt at all, and had lost the faculty
possessed by the more conventional, of easy and ephemeral change from
one interest to another.  Most of Victoria’s admirers in a like case,
would have lit a cigarette and walked off the passion between dawn and
dark in one night.  But Toppan could not do this.  It was the one weak
strain in his build, "the little rift within the lute."

One of the natural consequences of their intercourse was that they were
never happy together and hailed with hardly concealed relief the advent
of a third person.  They had absolutely no interests in common, and
their meetings were made up of trivial bickerings.  They generally
parted quarrelling, and then immediately sat down to count the days
until they should meet again.  I have no doubt they loved each other
well enough, but somehow they were not made to be mated—and that was all
there was about it.

During the month before the Kamtchatka expedition sailed Toppan worked
hard.  He commanded jointly with Bushby, a lieutenant in the Civil
Engineer Corps, and the two toiled from the dawn of one morning till the
dawn of the next, perfecting the last details of their undertaking;
correcting charts, lading rifles and ammunition, experimenting with beef
extracts and pemmican, and corresponding with geographical societies.

Through it all Toppan found time to revise his notes for his last
lecture, and to call upon Victoria twice a week.

On one of these occasions he said; "How do you get on with my book, Vic,
pretty stupid reading?"  He had sent her from Bombay the first copy that
his London publishers had forwarded to him.

"Not at all," she answered, "I like it very much, do you know it has all
the fascination of a novel for me.  Your style is just as clear and
strong as can be, and your descriptions of scenery and the strange and
novel bits of human nature in such an unfrequented corner of the globe
are much more interesting than the most imaginative and carefully
elaborated fiction; those botanical and zoological data must be
invaluable to scientific men, I should think; but of course I can’t
understand them very well.  How do you do it, Fred?  It is certainly
very wonderful.  One would think that you were a born writer as well as
explorer.  But now see here, Freddy; I want to talk to you again about
putting off your trip to—what do you call it—for just a year, for my
sake."

After they had wrangled over this oft-mooted question they parted
coldly, and Toppan went away feeling aroused and unhappy.

That night he and Bushby were making a chemical analysis of a new kind
of smokeless powder. Bushby poured out a handful of saltpeter and
charcoal upon a leaf torn from a back number of the _Scientific Weekly_
and slid it across the table towards him.  "Now when you burn this
stuff," remarked Toppan, spreading it out upon the table with his
finger, "you get a reaction of 2KNO3+3C=CO2+CO+, I forget the rest.  Get
out your formulae in the bookcase there behind you, will you, and look
it up for me?"

While Bushby was fingering the leaves of the volume, Toppan caught sight
of his name on the leaf of the _Scientific Weekly_ which held the
mixture.  Looking closely he saw that it occurred in a criticism of his
book which he had not yet seen. He brushed the charcoal and saltpeter to
one side and ran his eyes over the lines:

"Toppan’s great work," said the writer, "is a book not only for the
scientist but for all men. Though dealing to a great extent with the
technicalities of geography, geology, and the sister sciences, the
author has known how to throw his thoughts and observations into a form
of remarkable lightness and brilliancy.  In Toppan’s hands the book has
all the fascination of a novel.  His: style is clear and strong, and his
descriptions of scenery, and of the weird and unusual phases of human
nature to be met with in such an unfrequented corner of the globe are
much more interesting than most of the imaginative and carefully
elaborated romances of adventure in the present day.  His botanical and
zoological data will be invaluable to scientific men.  It is rare we
find the born explorer a born writer as well."

As he read, Toppan’s heart grew cold within his ribs.  "She must have
learnt it like a parrot," he mused.  "I wonder if she even"—

"Equals CO2+CO+N3+KCO3," said Bushby turning to the table again, "come
on, old man, hurry up and let’s get through with this.  It’s nearly
three o’clock."

The next evening Toppan was to deliver his lecture at the Grand Opera
House, but in the afternoon he called upon Victoria with a purpose.  She
was out at the time but he determined to wait for her, and sat down in
the drawing-room until she should come.  Presently he saw his book with
its marbled cover—familiar to him now as the face of a child to its
father,—lying conspicuously upon the center table.  It was the copy he
had mailed to her from Bombay.  He picked it up and ran over the leaves;
not one of them had been cut.  He replaced the book upon the table and
left the house.

That night the Grand Opera House was packed to the doors and the street
in front was full of hoarse, over-worked policemen and wailing coachmen.
The awning was out over the sidewalk and the steps of the church across
the street were banked with row upon row of watching faces.  It was
known that this was to be the last lecture of Toppan’s before he plunged
into the wilderness again, and that the world would not see him for five
years.  The mayor of the city introduced him in a speech that was too
long, and then Toppan stood up and faced the artillery of opera-glasses,
and tried not to look into the right-hand proscenium box that held
Victoria Boyden and her party.

He kept the audience spell-bound for an hour, while he forgot his
useless notes, forgot his hearers and the circumstances of time and
place, forgot about Victoria Boyden and their mean little squabbles and
remembered only that he was Toppan, the great explorer, who had led his
men through the interior of Thibet, and had lived to tell it to these
people now before him.  For an hour he made the people too, forget
themselves in him and his story, till they felt something of what he had
felt on those occasions when Hope was a phantom scattering chaff, when
Resolve wore thin under friction of disaster, when the wheels of Life
ran very low and men thanked God that they _could_ die.  For an hour he
led them steadily into the heart of the unknown: the twilight of the
unseen.  Then he had an inspiration.

He had worked himself up to a mood wherein he was himself at his very
best, when his chosen life-work made all else seem trivial and the
desire to do great things was big within him.  In this mood he somehow
happened to remember Victoria Boyden, which he should not have done
because she was not to be thought of in connection with great deeds and
high resolves.  But just at that moment Toppan felt his strength and
knew how great he really was, and how small and belittled she seemed in
comparison.  She had practiced a small deception upon him, had done him
harm and would do him more.  He suddenly resolved to break with her at
that very moment and place while he was strong and able to do it.

He did it by cleverly working into his talk a little story whose real
meaning no one but Victoria understood.  For the audience it was but a
bright little bit of folk-lore of upper India.  For Victoria, he might
as well have struck her across the face. It was cruel; it was even
vulgarly cruel, which is brutal, it was vindictive and perhaps cowardly,
but the man was smarting under a long continued bitterness and he had at
last turned and with closed eyes struck back savagely.

The exalted mood which had brought this about, was with him during the
rest of the evening, was with him when he drove back to his rooms in his
coupe with Bushby, and was with him as he flung himself to bed and went
to sleep with a deep sigh of relief for that it was now over and done
with forever.

But it left him during the night and he awoke the next morning to a
realisation of what he had done and of all he had lost.  He began by
remembering Victoria as he had first known her, by recalling only what
was good in her, and by palliating all that was bad.  From this starting
point he went on till he was in an agony of grief and remorse and ended
by lashing himself into the belief that Victoria had been his
inspiration and had given zest and interest to every thing he had done.
Now he bitterly regretted that he had thrown her over.  He had never in
his life before loved her so much.  He was unfitted for work during all
that day and passed the next night in unavailing lamentations.  His
morning’s mail brought him face to face with the crisis of his life. It
came in the shape of a letter from Victoria Boyden.

It was a very thick and a very heavy letter and she must have spent most
of the previous day in writing it.  He was surprised that she should
have written him at all after what had passed on that other evening, but
he was deeply happy as well because he knew precisely what the letter
would be, before he opened it.  It would be a petition for his
forgiveness and a last attempt to win him back to her again.

And Toppan knew that she would succeed.  He knew that in his present
mood he would make any sacrifice for her sake.  He foresaw that her
appeal would be too strong for him.  That was, if he opened and read her
letter.  Just now the question was, should he do it?  If he read that
letter he knew that he was lost, his career would stop where it was.  To
be great he had only to throw it unopened into the fire; yes, but to be
great without her, was it worth the while?  What would fame and honour
and greatness be, without her?  He realised that the time had come to
choose between her and his career and that it all depended upon the
opening of her letter.  Two hours later, he flung himself down before
his table and took her letter in his hand.  His fingers itched for the
touch of it.  Close to his elbow lay a little copper knife with poison
grooves, such as are used by the Hill-tribes in the Kuen-Lun mountains.
Toppan kept it for a paper cutter; just now he picked it up.  For a long
time he remained sitting, holding Victoria’s letter in one hand, the
little knife in the other. Then he put the point under the flap of the
envelope and slowly cut it open.

Two weeks later the Kamtchatka Expedition sailed with Bushby in command.
Toppan did not go; he was married to Victoria Boyden that Fall.

Last season I met Toppan at Coronado Beach. The world has about
forgotten him now, but he is quite content as he is.  He is head clerk
in old Mr. Boyden’s insurance office and he plays a capital game of
tennis.



                            _*A Caged Lion*_


In front of the entrance a "spieler" stood on a starch-box and beat upon
a piece of tin with a stick, and we weakly succumbed to his frenzied
appeals and went inside.  We did this, I am sure, partly to please the
"spieler," who would have been dreadfully disappointed if we had not
done so, but partly, too, to please Toppan, who was always interested in
the great beasts and liked to watch them.

It is possible that you may remember Toppan as the man who married
Victoria Boyden, and, in so doing, thrust his greatness from him and
became a bank clerk instead of an explorer.  After he married, he came
to be quite ashamed of what he had done in Thibet and Africa and other
unknown corners of the earth, and, after a while, very seldom spoke of
that part of his life at all; or, when he did, it was only to allude to
it as a passing boyish fancy, altogether foolish and silly, like
calf-love and early attempts at poetry.

"I used to think I was going to set the world on fire at one time," he
said once; "I suppose every young fellow has some such ideas.  I only
made an ass of myself, and I’m glad I’m well out of it.  Victoria saved
me from that."

But this was long afterward.  He died hard, and sometimes he would have
moments of strength in his weakness, just as before he had given up his
career during a moment of weakness in his strength.  During the first
years after he had given up his career, he thought he was content with
the way things had come to be; but it was not so, and now and then the
old feeling, the love of the old life, the old ambition, would be
stirred into activity again by some sight, or sound, or episode in the
conventional life around him.  A chance paragraph in a newspaper, a
sight of the Arizona deserts of sage and cactus, a momentary panic on a
ferry-boat, sometimes even fine music or a great poem would wake the
better part of him to the desire of doing great things.  At such times
the longing grew big and troublous within him to cut loose from it all
and get back to those places of the earth where there were neither
months nor years, and where the days of the week had no names; where he
could feel unknown winds blowing against his face and unnamed mountains
rising beneath his feet; where he could see great, sandy, stony
stretches of desert with hot, blue shadows, and plains of salt, and
thickets of jungle-grass, broken only by the lairs of beasts and the
paths the steinbok make when they go down to water.

The most trifling thing would recall all this to him, just as a couple
of notes have recalled to you whole arias and overtures.  But with
Toppan it was as though one had recalled the arias and the overtures and
then was not allowed to sing them.

We went into the arena and sat down.  The ring in the middle was fenced
in by a great, circular, iron cage.  The tiers of seats rose around
this, a band was playing in a box over the entrance, and the whole
interior was lighted by an electric globe slung over the middle of the
cage.

Inside the cage a brown bear—to me less suggestive of a wild animal than
of lap-robes and furriers’ signs—was dancing sleepily and allowing
himself to be prodded by a person whose celluloid standing-collar showed
white at the neck above the green of his Tyrolese costume.  The bear was
mangy, and his steel muzzle had chafed him, and Toppan said he was
corrupted of moth and rust alike, and the audience applauded but feebly
when he and his keeper withdrew.

After this we had a clown-elephant, dressed in a bib and tucker and vast
baggy breeches—like those of a particularly big French _Turco_—who had
lunch with his keeper, and rang the bell and drank his wine and wiped
his mouth with a handkerchief like a bed-quilt, and pulled the chair
from underneath his companion, seeming to be amused at it all with a
strange sort of suppressed elephantine mirth.

And then, after they had both made their bow and gone out, in bounded
and tumbled the dogs, barking and grinning all over, jumping up on their
stools and benches, wriggling and pushing one another about, giggling
and excited like so many kindergarten children on a show-day.  I am sure
they enjoyed their performance as much as the audience did, for they
never had to be told what to do, and seemed only too eager for their
turn to come.  The best of it all was that they were quite unconscious
of the audience and appeared to do their tricks for the sake of the
tricks themselves, and not for the applause which followed them. And
then, after the usual programme of wicker cylinders, hoops, and balls
was over, they all rushed off amid a furious scrattling of paws and
filliping of tails and heels.

While this was going on, we had been hearing from time to time a great
sound, half-whine, half-rumbling guttural cough, that came from
somewhere behind the exit from the cage.  It was repeated at rapidly
decreasing intervals, and grew lower in pitch until it ended in a short
bass grunt. It sounded cruel and menacing, and when at its full volume
the wood of the benches under us thrilled and vibrated.

There was a little pause in the programme while the arena was cleared
and new and much larger and heavier paraphernalia was set about, and a
gentleman in a frock coat and a very shiny hat entered and announced
"the world’s greatest lion-tamer."  Then he went away and the tamer came
in and stood expectantly by the side of the entrance, there was another
short wait and the band struck a long minor chord.

And then they came in, one after the other, with long, crouching,
lurching strides, not at all good-humouredly, like the dogs, or the
elephant, or even the bear, but with low-hanging heads, surly, watchful,
their eyes gleaming with the rage and hate that burned in their hearts
and that they dared not vent.  Their loose, yellow hides rolled and
rippled over the great muscles as they moved, and the breath coming from
their hot, half-open, mouths turned to steam as it struck the air.

A huge, blue-painted see-saw was dragged out to the centre, and the
tamer made a sharp sound of command.  Slowly, and with twitching tails,
two of them obeyed and clambering upon the balancing-board swung up and
down, while the music played a see-saw waltz.  And all the while their
great eyes flamed with the detestation of the thing and their black
upper lips curled away from their long fangs in protest of this hourly
renewed humiliation and degradation.

And one of the others, while waiting his turn to be whipped and bullied,
sat up on his haunches and faced us and looked far away beyond us over
the heads of the audience—over the continent and ocean, as it were—as
though he saw something in that quarter that made him forget his present
surroundings.

"You grand old brute," muttered Toppan; and then he said: "Do you know
what you would see if you were to look into his eyes now?  You would see
Africa, and unnamed mountains, and great stony stretches of desert, with
hot blue shadows, and plains of salt, and lairs in the jungle-grass, and
lurking places near the paths the steinbok make when they go down to
water.  But now he’s hampered and caged—is there anything worse than a
caged lion?—and kept from the life he loves and was made for"—just here
the tamer spoke sharply to him, and his eyes and crest drooped—"and
ruled over," concluded Toppan, "by some one who is not so great as he,
who has spoiled what was best in him and has turned his powers to
trivial, resultless uses—some one weaker than he, yet stronger.  Ah,
well, old brute, it was yours once, we will remember that."

They wheeled out a clumsy velocipede, built expressly for him, and,
while the lash whistled and snapped about him, the conquered king heaved
himself upon it and went around and around the ring, while the band
played a quick-step, the audience broke into applause, and the tamer
smirked and bobbed his well-oiled head.  I thought of Samson performing
for the Philistines and Thusnelda at the triumph of Germanicus.  The
great beasts, grand though conquered, seemed to be the only dignified
ones in the whole business.  I hated the audience who saw their shame
from behind iron bars; I hated myself for being one of them; and I hated
the smug, sniggering tamer.

This latter had been drawing out various stools and ladders, and now
arranged the lions upon them so they should form a pyramid, with himself
on top.

Then he swung himself up among them, with his heels upon their necks,
and, taking hold of the jaws of one, wrenched them apart with a great
show of strength, turning his head to the audience so that all should
see.

And just then the electric light above him cackled harshly, guttered,
dropped down to a pencil of dull red, then went out, and the place was
absolutely dark.

The band stopped abruptly with a discord, and there was an instant of
silence.  Then we heard the stools and ladders clattering as the lions
leaped down, and straightway four pairs of lambent green spots burned
out of the darkness and traveled swiftly about here and there, crossing
and recrossing one another like the lights of steamers in a storm.
Heretofore, the lions had been sluggish and inert; now they were aroused
and alert in an instant, and we could hear the swift pad-pad of their
heavy feet as they swung around the arena and the sound of their great
bodies rubbing against the bars of the cage as one and the other passed
nearer to us.

I don’t the think the audience at all appreciated the situation at
first, for no one moved or seemed excited, and one shrill voice
suggested that the band should play "When the electric lights go out."

"Keep perfectly quiet, please!" called the tamer out of the darkness,
and a certain peculiar ring in his voice was the first intimation of a
possible danger.

But Toppan knew; and as we heard the tamer fumbling for the catch of the
gate, which he somehow could not loose in the darkness, he said, with a
rising voice: "He wants to get that gate open pretty quick."

But for their restless movements the lions were quiet; they uttered no
sound, which was a bad sign.  Blinking and dazed by the garish blue
whiteness of a few moments before, they could see perfectly now where
the tamer was blind.

"Listen," said Toppan.  Near to us, and on the inside of the cage, we
could hear a sound as of some slender body being whisked back and forth
over the surface of the floor.  In an instant I guessed what it was; one
of the lions was crouched there, whipping his sides with his tail.

"When he stops that he’ll spring," said Toppan, excitedly.

"Bring a light, Jerry—quick!" came the tamer’s voice.

People were clambering to their feet by this time, talking loud, and we
heard a woman cry out.

"Please keep as quiet as possible, ladies and gentlemen!" cried the
tamer; "it won’t do to excite—"

From the direction of the voice came the sound of a heavy fall and a
crash that shook the iron gratings in their sockets.

"He’s got him!" shouted Toppan.

And then what a scene!  In that thick darkness every one sprang up,
stumbling over the seats and over each other, all shouting and crying
out, suddenly stricken with a panic fear of something they could not
see.  Inside the barred death-trap every lion suddenly gave tongue at
once, until the air shook and sang in our ears.  We could hear the great
cats hurling themselves against the bars, and could see their eyes
leaving brassy streaks against the darkness as they leaped.  Two more
sprang as the first had done toward that quarter of the cage from which
came sounds of stamping and struggling, and then the tamer began to
scream.

I think that so long as I shall live I shall not forget the sound of the
tamer’s scream.  He did not scream as a woman would have done, from the
head, but from the chest, which sounded so much worse that I was sick
from it in a second with that sickness that weakens one at the pit of
the stomach and along the muscles at the back of the legs.  He did not
pause for a second.  Every breath was a scream, and every scream was
alike, and one heard through it all the long snarls of satisfied hate
and revenge, muffled by the man’s clothes and the _rip, rip_ of the
cruel, blunt claws.

Hearing it all in the dark, as we did, made it all the more dreadful.  I
think for a time I must have taken leave of my senses.  I was ready to
vomit for the sickness that was upon me, and I beat my hands raw upon
the iron bars or clasped them over my ears, against the sounds of the
dreadful thing that was doing behind them.  I remember praying aloud
that it might soon be over, so only those screams might be stopped.

It seemed as though it had gone on for hours, when some men rushed in
with a lantern and long, sharp irons.  A hundred voices cried: "Here he
is, over here!" and they ran around outside the cage and threw the light
of the lantern on a place where a heap of grey, gold-laced clothes
writhed and twisted beneath three great bulks of fulvous hide and
bristling black mane.

The irons were useless.  The three furies dragged their prey out of
their reach and crouched over it again and recommenced.  No one dared to
go into the cage, and still the man lived and struggled and screamed.

I saw Toppan’s fingers go to his mouth, and through that medley of
dreadful noises there issued a sound that, sick as I was, made me shrink
anew and close my eyes and teeth and shudder as though some cold slime
had been poured through the hollow of my bones where the marrow should
be. It was as the noise of the whistling of a fine whiplash, mingled
with the whirr of a locust magnified a hundred times, and ended in an
abrupt clacking noise thrice repeated.

At once I remembered where I had heard it before, because, having once
heard the hiss of an aroused and angry serpent, no child of Eve can ever
forget it.

The sound that now came from between Toppan’s teeth and that filled the
arena from wall to wall, was the sound that I had heard once before in
the Paris Jardin des Plantes at feeding-time—the sound made by the great
constrictors, when their huge bodies are looped and coiled like a
_reata_ for the throw that never misses, that never relaxes, and that no
beast of the field is built strong enough to withstand.  All the filthy
wickedness and abominable malice of the centuries since the Enemy first
entered into that shape that crawls, was concentrated in that hoarse,
whistling hiss—a hiss that was cold and piercing like an icicle-made
sound.  It was not loud, but had in it some sort of penetrating quality
that cut through the waves of horrid sounds about us, as the
snake-carved prow of a Viking galley might have cut its way through the
tumbling eddies of a tide-rip.

At the second repetition the lions paused.  None better than they knew
what was the meaning of that hiss.  They had heard it before in their
native hunting-grounds in the earlier days of summer, when the first
heat lay close over all the jungle like the hollow of the palm of an
angry god.  Or if they themselves had not heard it, their sires before
them had, and the fear of the thing bred into their bones suddenly
leaped to life at the sound and gripped them and held them close.

When for a third time the sound sung and shrilled in their ears, their
heads drew between their shoulders, their great eyes grew small and
glittering, the hackles rose, and stiffened on their backs, their tails
drooped, and they backed slowly to the further side of the cage and
cowered there, whining and beaten.

Toppan wiped the sweat from the inside of his hands and went into the
cage with the keepers and gathered up the panting, broken body, with its
twitching fingers and dead, white face and ears, and carried it out.  As
they lifted it, the handful of pitiful medals dropped from the shredded
grey coat and rattled down upon the floor.  In the silence that had now
succeeded, it was about the only sound one heard.


As we sat that evening on the porch of Toppan’s house, in a fashionable
suburb of the city, he said, for the third time: "I had that trick from
a Mpongwee headman," and added: "It was while I was at Victoria Falls,
waiting to cross the Kalahari Desert."

Then he continued, his eyes growing keener and his manner changing:
"There is some interesting work to be done in that quarter by some one.
You see, the Kalahari runs like this"—he drew the lines on the ground
with his cane—"coming down in something like this shape from the Orange
River to about the twentieth parallel south.  The aneroid gives its
average elevation about six hundred feet. I didn’t cross it at the time,
because we had sickness and the porters cut.  But I made a lot of
geological observations, and from these I have built up a theory that
the Kalahari is no desert at all, but a big, well-watered plateau, with
higher ground on the east and west.  The tribes, too, thereabout call
the place _Linoka-Noka_, and that’s the Bantu for rivers upon rivers.
They’re nasty, though, these Bantu, and gave us a lot of trouble. They
have a way of spitting little poisoned thorns into you unawares, and
your tongue swells up and turns blue and your teeth fall out and—"

His wife Victoria came out to us in evening dress.

"Ah, Vic," said Toppan, jumping up, with a very sweet smile, "we were
just talking about your paper-german next Tuesday, and _I_ think we
might have some very pretty favours made out of white tissue-paper—roses
and butterflies, you know."



                 *"*_*This Animal of a Buldy Jones*_*"*


We could always look for fine fighting at Julien’s of a Monday morning,
because at that time the model was posed for the week and we picked out
the places from which to work.  Of course the first ten of the
_esquisse_ men had first choice.  So, no matter how early you got up and
how resolutely you held to your first row tabouret, chaps like Rounault,
or Marioton, or the little Russian, whom we nicknamed "Choubersky," or
Haushaulder, or the big American—"This Animal of a Buldy Jones"—all
strong _esquisse_ men, could always chuck you out when they came, which
they did about ten o’clock, when everything had quieted down.  When two
particularly big, quick-tempered, obstinate, and combative men try to
occupy, simultaneously, a space twelve inches square, it gives rise to
complications.  We used to watch and wait for these fights (after we had
been chucked out ourselves), and make things worse, and hasten the
crises by getting upon the outskirts of the crowd that thronged about
the disputants and shoving with all our mights.  Then one of the
disputants would be jostled rudely against the other, who would hit him
in the face, and then there would be a wild hooroosh and a clatter of
overturned easels and the flashing of whitened knuckles and glimpses of
two fierce red faces over the shoulders of the crowd, and everything
would be pleasant.  Then, perhaps, you would see an allusion in the
Paris edition of the next morning’s "_Herald_" to "the brutal and
lawless students."

I remember particularly one fight—quite the best I ever saw at Julien’s
or elsewhere, for the matter of that.  It was between Haushaulder and
Gilet. Haushaulder was a Dane, and six feet two.  Gilet was French, and
had a waist like Virginie’s.  But Gilet had just come back from his
three years’ army service, and knew all about the savate.  They squared
off at each other, Gilet spitting like a cat, and Haushaulder grommelant
under his mustache. "This Animal of a Buldy Jones," the big American,
bellowed to separate them, for it really looked like a massacre.  And
then, all at once, Gilet spun around, bent over till his finger-tips
touched the floor, and balancing on the toe, lashed out backwards with
his leg at Haushaulder, like any cayuse. The heel of his boot caught the
Dane on the point of the chin.  An hour and forty minutes later, when
Haushaulder recovered consciousness and tried to speak, we found that
the tip of his tongue had been sliced off between his teeth as if by a
pair of scissors.  It was a really unfortunate affair, and the
government very nearly closed the atelier because of it.  But "This
Animal of a Buldy Jones" gave us all his opinion of the savate, and
announced that the next man who savated from any cause whatever "_aurait
affaire avec lui, oui, avec lui, cre nom!_"

Heavens!  No one _aimerait avoir affaire avec cette animal de_ Buldy
Jones.  He was from Chicago (but, of course, he couldn’t help that!),
and was taller than even Haushaulder, and much broader.  The desire for
art had come upon him all of a sudden while he was studying law at
Columbia.  For "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" had gone into law after
leaving Yale.  Here we touch his great weakness.  He was a Yale man!
Why, he was prouder of that fact than he was of being an American, or
even a Chicagoan—and that is saying much.  Why, he couldn’t talk of Yale
without his face flushing.  Why, Yale was almost more to him than his
mother.  I remember, at the students’ ball at Bulliers, he got the
Americans together, and with infinite trouble taught us all the Yale
"yell", which he swore was a transcript from Aristophanes, and for three
hours he gravely headed a procession that went the rounds of a hall
howling "Brek!  Kek!  Kek!  Kek!  Co-ex!" and all the rest of it.

More than that, "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" had pitched on his
Varsity baseball nine.  In his studio—quite the swellest in the Quarter,
by the way—he had a collection of balls that he had pitched in match
games at different times, and he used to show them to us reverently, and
if we were his especial friends, would allow us to handle them. They
were all written over with names and dates. He would explain them to us
one by one.

"This one," he would say, "I pitched in the Princeton game, and here’s
two I pitched in the Harvard game—hard game that—our catcher gave
out—guess he couldn’t hold me" (with a grin of pride), "and Harvard made
it interesting for me until the fifth inning; then I made two men fan
out one after the other, and then, just to show ’em what I could do,
filled the bases, got three balls called on me, and then pitched two
inshoots and an outcurve, just as hard as I could deliver.  Printz of
Harvard was at the bat.  He struck at every one of them—and fanned out.
Here’s the ball I did it with.  Yes, sir.  Oh, I can pitch a ball all
right."

Now think of that!  Here was this man, "This Animal of a Buldy Jones," a
Beaux Arts man, one of the best colour and line men on our side, who had
three _esquisses_ and five figures "on the wall" at Julien’s (any Paris
art student will know what that means), and yet the one thing he was
proud of, the one thing he cared to be admired for, the one thing he
loved to talk about, was the fact that he had pitched for the Yale
’varsity baseball nine.

All this by way of introduction.

I wonder how many Julien men there are left who remember the _affaire_
Camme?  Plenty, I make no doubt, for the thing was a monumental
character. I heard Roubault tell it at the "Dead Rat" just the other
day.  "Choubersky" wrote to "The Young Pretender" that he heard it away
in the interior of Morocco, where he had gone to paint doorways, and
Adler, who is now on the "Century" staff, says it’s an old story among
the illustrators. It has been bandied about so much that there is danger
of its original form being lost.  Wherefore it is time that it should be
brought to print.

Now Camme, be it understood, was a filthy little beast—a thorough-paced,
blown-in-the-bottle blackguard with not enough self-respect to keep him
sweet through a summer’s day—a rogue, a bug—anything you like that is
sufficiently insulting; besides all this, and perhaps because of it, he
was a duelist.  He loved to have a man slap his face—some huge,
big-boned, big-hearted man, who knew no other weapons but his knuckles.
Camme would send him his card the next day, with a message to the effect
that it would give him great pleasure to try and kill the gentleman in
question at a certain time and place.  Then there would be a lot of
palaver, and somehow the duel would never come off, and Camme’s
reputation as a duelist would go up another peg, and the rest of
us—beastly little rapins that we were—would hold him in increased fear
and increased horror, just as if he were a rattler in coil.

Well, the row began one November morning—a Monday—and, of course, it was
over the allotment of seats.  Camme had calmly rubbed out the name of
"This Animal of a Buldy Jones" from the floor, and had chalked his own
in its place.

Now, Bouguereau had placed the _esquisse_ of "This Animal of a Buldy
Jones" fifth, the precedence over Camme.

But Camme invented reasons for a different opinion, and presented them
to the whole three ateliers at the top of his voice and with unclean
allusions.  We were all climbing up on the taller stools by this time,
and Virginie, who was the model of the week, was making furtive signs at
us to give the crowd a push, as was our custom.

Camme was going on at a great rate.

"_Ah, farceur!  Ah, espece de volveur, crapaud, va; c’est a moi cette
place la Saligaud va te prom’ner, va faire des copies au Louvre._"

To be told to go and make copies in the Louvre was in our time the last
insult.  "This Animal of a Buldy Jones," this sometime Yale pitcher,
towering above the little frog-like Frenchman, turned to the crowd, and
said, in grave concern, his forehead puckered in great deliberation:

"I do not know, precisely, that which it is necessary to do with this
kind of a little toad of two legs.  I do not know whether I should spank
him or administer the good kick of the boot.  I believe I shall give him
the good kick of the boot.  Hein!"

He turned Camme around, held him at arm’s length, and kicked him twice
severely.  Next day, of course, Camme sent his card, and four of us
Americans went around to the studio of "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" to
have a smoke-talk over it.  Robinson was of the opinion to ignore the
matter.

"Now, we can’t do that," said Adler; "these beastly continentals would
misunderstand.  Can you shoot, Buldy Jones?"

"Only deer."

"Fence?"

"Not a little bit.  Oh, let’s go and punch the wadding out of him, and
be done with it!"

"No!  No!  He should be humiliated."

"I tell you what—let’s guy the thing."

"Get up a fake duel and make him seem ridiculous."

"You’ve got the choice of weapons, Buldy Jones."

"Fight him with hat-pins."

"Oh, let’s go punch the wadding out of him—he makes me tired."

"Horse" Wilson, who hadn’t spoken, suddenly broke in with:

"Now, listen to me, you other fellows.  Let me fix this thing.  Buldy
Jones, I must be one of your seconds."

"Soit!"

"I’m going to Camme, and say like this: ’This Animal of a Buldy Jones’
has the naming of weapons.  He comes from a strange country, near the
Mississippi, from a place called Shee-ka-go, and there it is not
considered etiquette to fight either with a sword or pistol; it is too
common.  However, when it is necessary that balls should be exchanged in
order to satisfy honour, a curious custom is resorted to.  Balls are
exchanged, but not from pistols.  They are very terrible balls, large as
an apple, and of adamantine hardness.  ’This Animal of a Buldy Jones,’
even now has a collection. No American gentleman of honour travels
without them.  He would gladly have you come and make first choice of a
ball while he will select one from among those you leave.  _Sur le
terrain_, you will deliver these balls simultaneously toward each other,
repeating till one or the other adversary drops.  Then honour can be
declared satisfied."

"Yes, and do you suppose that Camme will listen to such tommy rot as
that?" remarked "This Animal of a Buldy Jones."  "I think I’d better
just punch his head."

"Listen to it?  Of course he’ll listen to it.  You’ve no idea what
curious ideas these continentals have of the American duel.  You can’t
propose anything so absurd in the dueling line that they won’t give it
serious thought.  And besides, if Camme won’t fight this way we’ll tell
him that you will have a Mexican duel."

"What’s that?"

"Tie your left wrists together, and fight with knives in your right
hand.  That’ll scare the tar out of him."

And it did.  The seconds had a meeting at the cafe of the _Moulin
Rouge_, and gave Camme’s seconds the choice of the duel Yale or the duel
Mexico.  Camme had no wish to tie himself to a man with a knife in his
hand, and his seconds came the next day and solemnly chose a league
ball—one that had been used against the Havard nine.

Will I—will any of us ever forget that duel? Camme and his people came
upon the ground almost at the same time as we.  It was behind the mill
of Longchamps, of course.  Roubault was one of Camme’s seconds, and he
carried the ball in a lacquered Japanese tobacco-jar—gingerly as if it
were a bomb.  We were quick getting to work. Camme and "This Animal of a
Buldy Jones" were each to take his baseball in his hand, stand back to
back, walk away from each other just the distance between the pitcher’s
box and the home plate (we had seen to that), turn on the word,
and—deliver their balls.

"How do you feel?" I whispered to our principal, as I passed the ball
into his hands.

"I feel just as if I was going into a match game, with the bleachers
full to the top and the boys hitting her up for Yale.  We ought to give
the yell, y’ know."

"How’s the ball?"

"A bit soft and not quite round.  Bernard of the Harvard nine hit the
shape out of it in a drive over our left field, but it’ll do all right."

"This Animal of a Buldy Jones" bent and gathered up a bit of dirt,
rubbed the ball in it, and ground it between his palms.  The man’s arms
were veritable connecting-rods, and were strung with tendons like
particularly well-seasoned rubber. I remembered what he said about few
catchers being able to hold him, and I recalled the pads and masks and
wadded gloves of a baseball game, and I began to feel nervous.  If Camme
was hit on the temple or over the heart—

"Now, say, old man, go slow, you know.  We don’t want to fetch up in
Mazas for this.  By the way, what kind of ball are you going to give
him? What’s the curve?"

"I don’t know yet.  Maybe I’ll let him have an up-shoot.  Never make up
my mind till the last moment."

"All ready, gentlemen!" said Roubault, coming up.

Camme had removed coat, vest, and cravat. "This Animal of a Buldy Jones"
stripped to a sleeveless undershirt.  He spat on his hands, and rubbed a
little more dirt on the ball.

"Play ball!" he muttered.

We set them back to back.  On the word they paced from each other and
paused.  "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" shifted his ball to his right
hand, and, holding it between his fingers, slowly raised both his arms
high above his head and a little over one shoulder.  With his toe he
made a little depression in the soil, while he slowly turned the ball
between his fingers.

"Fire!" cried "Horse" Wilson.

On the word "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" turned abruptly about on one
foot, one leg came high off the ground till the knee nearly touched the
chest—you know the movement and position well—the uncanny contortions of
a pitcher about to deliver.

Camme threw his ball overhand—bowled it as is done in cricket, and it
went wide over our man’s shoulder.  Down came Buldy Jones’ foot, and his
arm shot forward with a tremendous jerk.  Not till the very last moment
did he glance at his adversary or measure the distance.

"It is an in-curve!" exclaimed "Horse" Wilson in my ear.

We could hear the ball whir as it left a grey blurred streak in the air.
Camme made as if to dodge it with a short toss of head and neck—it was
all he had time for—and the ball, faithful to the last twist of the
pitcher’s fingers, swerved sharply inward at the same moment and in the
same direction.

When we got to Camme and gathered him up, I veritably believed that the
fellow had been done for.  For he lay as he had fallen, straight as a
ramrod and quite as stiff, and his eyes were winking like the shutter of
a kinetoscope.  But "This Animal of a Buldy Jones," who had seen
prize-fighters knocked out by a single blow, said it was all right. An
hour later Camme woke up and began to mumble in pain through his
clenched teeth, for the ball, hitting him on the point of the chin, had
dislocated his jaw.

The heart-breaking part of the affair came afterward, when "This Animal
of a Buldy Jones" kept us groping in the wet grass and underbrush until
after dark looking for his confounded baseball, which had caromed off
Camme’s chin, and gone—no one knows where.

We never found it.



                            _*Dying Fires*_


Young Overbeck’s father was editor and proprietor of the county paper in
Colfax, California, and the son, so soon as his high-school days were
over, made his appearance in the office as his father’s assistant.  So
abrupt was the transition that his diploma, which was to hang over the
editorial desk, had not yet returned from the framer’s, while the first
copy that he was called on to edit was his own commencement oration on
the philosophy of Dante.  He had worn a white pique cravat and a cutaway
coat on the occasion of its delivery, and the county commissioner, who
was the guest of honour on the platform, had congratulated him as he
handed him his sheepskin.  For Overbeck was the youngest and the
brightest member of his class.

Colfax was a lively town in those days.  The teaming from the valley
over into the mining country on the other side of the Indian River was
at its height then.  Colfax was the headquarters of the business, and
the teamsters—after the long pull up from the Indian River Cañon—showed
interest in an environment made up chiefly of saloons.

Then there were the mining camps over by Iowa Hill, the Morning Star,
the Big Dipper, and further on, up in the Gold Run country, the Little
Providence.  There was Dutch Flat, full of Mexican-Spanish girls and
"breed" girls, where the dance-halls were of equal number with the bars.
There was—a little way down the line—Clipper Gap, where the mountain
ranches began, and where the mountain cow-boy lived up to the traditions
of his kind.

And this life, tumultuous, headstrong, vivid in colour, vigorous in
action, was bound together by the railroad, which not only made a single
community out of all that part of the east slope of the Sierras’
foothills, but contributed its own life as well—the life of oilers,
engineers, switchmen, eating-house waitresses and cashiers, "lady"
operators, conductors, and the like.

Of such a little world news-items are evolved—sometimes even scare-head,
double-leaded descriptive articles—supplemented by interviews with
sheriffs and ante-mortem statements.  Good grist for a county paper;
good opportunities for an unspoiled, observant, imaginative young fellow
at the formative period of his life.  Such was the time, such the
environment, such the conditions that prevailed when young Overbeck, at
the age of twenty-one, sat down to the writing of his first novel.

He completed it in five months, and, though he did not know the fact
then, the novel was good. It was not great—far from it, but it was not
merely clever.  Somehow, by a miracle of good fortune, young Overbeck
had got started right at the very beginning.  He had not been influenced
by a fetich of his choice till his work was a mere replica of some other
writer’s.  He was not literary.  He had not much time for books.  He
lived in the midst of a strenuous, eager life, a little primal even yet;
a life of passions that were often elemental in their simplicity and
directness.  His schooling and his newspaper work—it was he who must
find or ferret out the news all along the line, from Penrhyn to Emigrant
Gap—had taught him observation without—here was the miracle—dulling the
edge of his sensitiveness.  He saw, as those few, few people see who
live close to life at the beginning of an epoch.  He saw into the life
and the heart beneath the life; the life and the heart of Bunt McBride,
as with eight horses and much abjuration he negotiated a load of steel
"stamps" up the sheer leap of the Indian Cañon; he saw into the life and
into the heart of Irma Tejada, who kept case for the faro players at
Dutch Flat; he saw into the life and heart of Lizzie Toby, the
biscuit-shooter in the railway eating-house, and into the life and heart
of "Doc" Twitchel, who had degrees from Edinburgh and Leipsic, and who,
for obscure reasons, chose to look after the measles, sprains and
rheumatisms of the countryside.

And, besides, there were others and still others, whom young Overbeck
learned to know to the very heart’s heart of them: blacksmiths,
traveling peddlers, section-bosses, miners, horse-wranglers,
cow-punchers, the stage-drivers, the storekeeper, the hotel-keeper, the
ditch-tender, the prospector, the seamstress of the town, the
postmistress, the schoolmistress, the poetess.  Into the lives of these
and the hearts of these young Overbeck saw, and the wonder of that sight
so overpowered him that he had no thought and no care for other people’s
books.  And he was only twenty-one!  Only twenty-one, and yet he saw
clearly into the great, complicated, confused human machine that clashed
and jarred around him.  Only twenty-one, and yet he read the enigma that
men of fifty may alone hope to solve!  Once in a great while this thing
may happen—in such out of the way places as that country around Colfax
in Placer County, California, where no outside influences have play,
where books are few and misprized and the reading circle a thing
unknown.  From time to time such men are born, especially along the line
of cleavage where the furthest skirmish line of civilisation thrusts and
girds at the wilderness.  A very few find their true profession before
the fire is stamped out of them; of these few, fewer still have the
force to make themselves heard.  Of these last the majority die before
they attain the faculty of making their message intelligible.  Those
that remain are the world’s great men.

At the time when his first little book was on its initial journey to the
Eastern publishing houses, Overbeck was by no means a great man.  The
immaturity that was yet his, the lack of knowledge of his tools, clogged
his work and befogged his vision. The smooth running of the cogs and the
far-darting range of vision would come in the course of the next fifteen
years of unrelenting persistence.  The ordering and organising and
controlling of his machine he could, with patience and by taking
thought, accomplish for himself.  The original impetus had come straight
from the almighty gods. That impetus was young yet, feeble, yet, coming
down from so far it was spent by the time it reached the earth—at
Colfax, California.  A touch now might divert it.  Judge with what care
such a thing should be nursed and watched; compared with the delicacy
with which it unfolds, the opening of a rosebud is an abrupt explosion.
Later on, such insight, such undeveloped genius may become a tremendous
world-power, a thing to split a nation in twain as the axe cleaves the
block.  But at twenty-one, a whisper—and it takes flight; a touch—it
withers; the lifting of a finger—it is gone.

The same destiny that had allowed Overbeck to be born, and that thus far
had watched over his course, must have inspired his choice, his very
first choice, of a publisher, for the manuscript of "The Vision of Bunt
McBride" went straight as a home-bound bird to the one man of all others
who could understand the beginnings of genius and recognise the golden
grain of truth in the chaff of unessentials. His name was Conant, and he
accepted the manuscript by telegram.

He did more than this, and one evening Overbeck stood on the steps of
the post-office and opened a letter in his hand, and, looking up and
off, saw the world transfigured.  His chance had come.  In half a year
of time he had accomplished what other men—other young writers—strive
for throughout the best years of their youth.  He had been called to New
York.  Conant had offered him a minor place on his editorial staff.

Overbeck reached the great city a fortnight later, and the cutaway coat
and pique cravat—unworn since Commencement—served to fortify his courage
at the first interview with the man who was to make him—so he
believed—famous.

Ah, the delights, the excitement, the inspiration of that day!  Let
those judge who have striven toward the Great City through years of
deferred hope and heart-sinkings and sacrifice daily renewed. Overbeck’s
feet were set in those streets whose names had become legendary to his
imagination. Public buildings and public squares familiar only through
the weekly prints defiled before him like a pageant, but friendly for
all that, inviting, even. But the vast conglomerate life that roared by
his ears, like the systole and diastole of an almighty heart, was for a
moment disquieting.  Soon the human resemblance faded.  It became as a
machine infinitely huge, infinitely formidable. It challenged him with
superb condescension.

"I must down you," he muttered, as he made his way toward Conant’s, "or
you will down me."  He saw it clearly.  There was no other alternative.
The young boy in his foolish finery of a Colfax tailor’s make, with no
weapons but such wits as the gods had given him, was pitted against the
leviathan.

There was no friend nearer than his native state on the other fringe of
the continent.  He was fearfully alone.

But he was twenty-one.  The wits that the gods had given him were good,
and the fine fire that was within him, the radiant freshness of his
nature, stirred and leaped to life at the challenge. Ah, he would win,
he would win!  And in his exuberance, the first dim consciousness of his
power came to him.  He could win, he had it in him; he began to see that
now.  That nameless power was his which would enable him to grip this
monstrous life by the very throat, and bring it down on its knee before
him to listen respectfully to what he had to say.

The interview with Conant was no less exhilarating.  It was in the
reception-room of the great house that it took place, and while waiting
for Conant to come in, Overbeck, his heart in his mouth, recognised, in
the original drawings on the walls, picture after picture, signed by
famous illustrators, that he had seen reproduced in Conant’s magazine.

Then Conant himself had appeared and shaken the young author’s hand a
long time, and had talked to him with the utmost kindness of his book,
of his plans for the immediate future, of the work he would do in the
editorial office and of the next novel he wished him to write.

"We’ll only need you here in the mornings," said the editor, "and you
can put in your afternoons on your novel.  Have you anything in mind as
good as ’Bunt McBride’?"

"I have a sort of notion for one," hazarded the young man; and Conant
had demanded to hear it.

Stammering, embarrassed, Overbeck outlined it.

"I see, I see!" Conant commented.  "Yes, there is a good story in that.
Maybe Hastings will want to use it in the monthly.  But we’ll make a
book of it, anyway, if you work it up as well as the McBride story."

And so the young fellow made his first step in New York.  The very next
day he began his second novel.

In the editorial office, where he spent his mornings reading proof and
making up "front matter," he made the acquaintance of a middle-aged
lady, named Miss Patten, who asked him to call on her, and later on
introduced him into the "set" wherein she herself moved.  The set called
itself the "New Bohemians," and once a week met at Miss Patten’s
apartment up-town.  In a month’s time Overbeck was a fixture in "New
Bohemia."

It was made up of minor poets whose opportunity in life was the blank
space on a magazine page below the end of an article; of men past their
prime, who, because of an occasional story in a second-rate monthly,
were considered to have "arrived"; of women who translated novels from
the Italian and Hungarian; of decayed dramatists who could advance
unimpeachable reasons for the non-production of their plays; of
novelists whose books were declined by publishers because of
professional jealousy on the part of the "readers," or whose ideas,
stolen by false friends, had appeared in books that sold by the hundreds
of thousands. In public the New Bohemians were fulsome in the praise of
one another’s productions.  Did a sonnet called, perhaps, "A Cryptogram
is Stella’s Soul" appear in a current issue, they fell on it with eager
eyes, learned it by heart and recited lines of it aloud; the conceit of
the lover translating the cipher by the key of love was welcomed with
transports of delight.

"Ah, one of the most exquisitely delicate allegories I’ve ever heard,
and so true—so ’in the tone’!"

Did a certain one of the third-rate novelists, reading aloud from his
unpublished manuscript, say of his heroine: "It was the native
catholicity of his temperament that lent strength and depth to her
innate womanliness," the phrase was snapped up on the instant.

"How he understands women!"

"Such _finesse_!  More subtle than Henry James."

"Paul Bourget has gone no further," said one of the critics of New
Bohemia; "our limitations are determined less by our renunciations than
by our sense of proportion in our conception of ethical standards."

The set abased itself.  "Wonderful, ah, how pitilessly you fathom our
poor human nature!"  New Bohemia saw colour in word effects.  A poet
read aloud:

    _The stalwart rain!_
    _Ah, the rush of down-toppling waters;_
    _The torrent!_
    _Merge of mist and musky air;_
    _The current_
    _Sweeps thwart my blinded sight again._


"Ah!" exclaimed one of the audience, "see, see that bright green flash!"

Thus in public.  In private all was different. Walking home with one or
another of the set, young Overbeck heard their confidences.

"Keppler is a good fellow right enough, but, my goodness, he can’t write
verse!"

"That thing of Miss Patten’s to-night!  Did you ever hear anything so
unconvincing, so obvious?  Poor old woman!"

"I’m really sorry for Martens; awfully decent sort, but he never should
try to write novels."

By rapid degrees young Overbeck caught the lingo of the third-raters.
He could talk about "tendencies" and the "influence of reactions."  Such
and such a writer had a "sense of form," another a "feeling for word
effects."  He knew all about "tones" and "notes" and "philistinisms."
He could tell the difference between an allegory and a simile as far as
he could see them.  An anticlimax was the one unforgivable sin under
heaven. A mixed metaphor made him wince, and a split infinitive hurt him
like a blow.

But the great word was "convincing."  To say a book was convincing was
to give positively the last verdict.  To be "unconvincing" was to be
shut out from the elect.  If the New Bohemian decided that the last
popular book was unconvincing, there was no appeal.  The book was not to
be mentioned in polite conversation.

And the author of "The Vision of Bunt McBride," as yet new to the world
as the day he was born, with all his eager ambition and quick
sensitiveness, thought that all this was the real thing. He had never so
much as seen literary people before.  How could he know the difference?
He honestly believed that New Bohemia was the true literary force of New
York.  He wrote home that the association with such people, thinkers,
poets, philosophers, was an inspiration; that he had learned more in one
week in their company than he had learned in Colfax in a whole year.

Perhaps, too, it was the flattery he received that helped to carry
Overbeck off his feet.  The New Bohemians made a little lion of him when
"Bunt McBride" reached its modest pinnacle of popularity. They kotowed
to him, and toadied to him, and fagged and tooted for him, and spoke of
his book as a masterpiece.  They said he had succeeded where Kipling had
ignominiously failed. They said there was more harmony of prose effects
in one chapter of "Bunt McBride" than in everything that Bret Harte ever
wrote.  They told him he was a second Stevenson—only with more
refinement.

Then the women of the set, who were of those who did not write, who
called themselves "mere dilettantes," but who "took an interest in young
writers" and liked to influence their lives and works, began to flutter
and buzz around him.  They told him that they understood him; that they
under stood his temperament; that they could see where his forte lay;
and they undertook his education.

There was in "The Vision of Bunt McBride" a certain sane and healthy
animalism that hurt nobody, and that, no doubt, Overbeck, in later
books, would modify.  He had taken life as he found it to make his book;
it was not his fault that the teamsters, biscuit-shooters and "breed"
girls of the foothills were coarse in fibre.  In his sincerity he could
not do otherwise in his novel than paint life as he saw it.  He had
dealt with it honestly; he did not dab at the edge of the business; he
had sent his fist straight through it.

But the New Bohemians could not abide this.

"Not so much _faroucherie_, you dear young Lochinvar!" they said.  "Art
must uplift.  ’Look thou not down, but up toward uses of a cup’;" and
they supplemented the quotation by lines from Walter Peter, and read to
him from Ruskin and Matthew Arnold.

Ah, the spiritual was the great thing.  We were here to make the world
brighter and better for having lived in it.  The passions of a waitress
in a railway eating-house—how sordid the subject! Dear boy, look for the
soul, strive to rise to higher planes!  Tread upward; every book should
leave a clean taste in the mouth, should tend to make one happier,
should elevate, not debase.

So by degrees Overbeck began to see his future in a different light.  He
began to think that he really had succeeded where Kipling had failed;
that he really was Stevenson with more refinement, and that the one and
only thing lacking in his work was soul.  He believed that he must
strive for the spiritual, and "let the ape and tiger die."  The
originality and unconventionally of his little book he came to regard as
crudities.

"Yes," he said one day to Miss Patten and a couple of his friends, "I
have been re-reading my book of late.  I can see its limitations—now.
It has a lack of form; the tonality is a little false.  It fails somehow
to convince."

Thus the first Winter passed.  In the mornings Overbeck assiduously
edited copy and made up front matter on the top floor of the Conant
building.  In the evenings he called on Miss Patten, or some other
member of the set.  Once a week, up-town, he fed fat on the literary
delicatessen that New Bohemia provided.  In the meantime, every
afternoon, from luncheon-time till dark, he toiled on his second novel,
"Renunciations."  The environment of "Renunciations" was a far cry from
Colfax, California.  It was a city-bred story, with no fresher
atmosphere than that of bought flowers. Its _dramatis personae_ were all
of the leisure class, opera-goers, intriguers, riders of blood horses,
certainly more refined than Lizzie Toby, biscuit-shooter, certainly more
_spirituelle_ than Irma Tejada, case-keeper in Dog Omahone’s faro joint,
certainly more elegant than Bunt McBride, teamster of the Colfax Iowa
Hill Freight Transportation Company.

From time to time, as the novel progressed, he read it to the dilettante
women whom he knew best among the New Bohemians.  They advised him as to
its development, and "influenced" its outcome and dénouement.

"I think you have found your _métier_, dear boy," said one of them, when
"Renunciations" was nearly completed.  "To portray the concrete—is it
not a small achievement, sublimated journalese, nothing more?  But to
grasp abstractions, to analyse a woman’s soul, to evoke the spiritual
essence in humanity, as you have done in your ninth chapter of
’Renunciations’—that is the true function of art.  _Je vous fais mes
compliments_.  ’Renunciations’ is a _chef-d’oeuvre_.  Can’t you see
yourself what a stride you have made, how much broader your outlook has
become, how much more catholic, since the days of ’Bunt McBride’?"

To be sure, Overbeck could see it.  Ah, he was growing, he was
expanding.  He was mounting higher planes.  He was more—catholic.  That,
of all words, was the one to express his mood. Catholic, ah, yes, he was
catholic!

When "Renunciations" was finished he took the manuscript to Conant and
waited a fortnight in an agony of suspense and repressed jubilation for
the great man’s verdict.  He was all the more anxious to hear it
because, every now and then, while writing the story,
doubts—distressing, perplexing—had intruded.  At times and all of a
sudden, after days of the steadiest footing, the surest progress, the
story—the whole set and trend of the affair—would seem, as it were, to
escape from his control. Where once, in "Bunt McBride," he had gripped,
he must now grope.  What was it?  He had been so sure of himself, with
all the stimulus of new surroundings, the work in this second novel
should have been all the easier.  But the doubt would fade, and for
weeks he would plough on, till again, and all unexpectedly, he would
find himself in an agony of indecision as to the outcome of some vital
pivotal episode of the story.  Of two methods of treatment, both equally
plausible, he could not say which was the true, which the false; and he
must needs take, as it were, a leap in the dark—it was either that or
abandoning the story, trusting to mere luck that he would, somehow, be
carried through.

A fortnight after he had delivered the manuscript to Conant he presented
himself in the publisher’s office.

"I was just about to send for you," said Conant. "I finished your story
last week."

There was a pause.  Overbeck settled himself comfortably in his chair,
but his nails were cutting his palms.

"Hastings has read it, too—and—well, frankly, Overbeck, we were
disappointed."

"Yes?" inquired Overbeck, calmly.  "H’m—that’s too b-bad."

He could not hear, or at least could not understand, just what the
publisher said next.  Then, after a time that seemed immeasurably long,
he caught the words:

"It would not do you a bit of good, my boy, to have us publish it—it
would harm you.  There are a good many things I would lie about, but
books are not included.  This ’Renunciations’ of yours is—is, why,
confound it, Overbeck, it’s foolishness."

Overbeck went out and sat on a bench in a square near by, looking
vacantly at a fountain as it rose and fell and rose again with an
incessant cadenced splashing.  Then he took himself home to his hall
bedroom.  He had brought the manuscript of his novel with him, and for a
long time he sat at his table listlessly turning the leaves, confused,
stupid, all but inert.  The end, however, did not come suddenly.  A few
weeks later "Renunciations" was published, but not by Conant.  It bore
the imprint of an obscure firm in Boston.  The covers were of limp
dressed leather, olive green, and could be tied together by thongs, like
a portfolio.  The sale stopped after five hundred copies had been
ordered, and the real critics, those who did not belong to New Bohemia,
hardly so much as noticed the book.

In the Autumn, when the third-raters had come back from their vacations,
the "evenings" at Miss Patten’s were resumed, and Overbeck hurried to
the very first meeting.  He wanted to talk it all over with them.  In
his chagrin and cruel disappointment he was hungry for some word of
praise, of condolement.  He wanted to be told again, even though he had
begun to suspect many things, that he had succeeded where Kipling had
failed, that he was Stevenson with more refinement.

But the New Bohemians, the same women and fakirs and half-baked minor
poets who had "influenced" him and had ruined him, could hardly find
time to notice him now.  The guest of the evening was a new little lion
who had joined the set.  A symbolist versifier who wrote over the
pseudonym of de la Houssaye, with black, oily hair and long white hands;
him the Bohemians thronged about in crowds as before they had thronged
about Overbeck.  Only once did any one of them pay attention to the
latter.  This was the woman who had nicknamed him "Young Lochinvar."
Yes, she had read "Renunciations," a capital little thing, a little thin
in parts, lacking in _finesse_.  He must strive for his true medium of
expression, his true note.  Ah, art was long!  Study of the new
symbolists would help him.  She would beg him to read Monsieur de la
Houssaye’s "The Monoliths."  Such subtlety, such delicious word-chords!
It could not fail to inspire him.

Shouldered off, forgotten, the young fellow crept back to his little
hall bedroom and sat down to think it over.  There in the dark of the
night his eyes were opened, and he saw, at last, what these people had
done to him; saw the Great Mistake, and that he had wasted his
substance.

The golden apples, that had been his for the stretching of the hand, he
had flung from him. Tricked, trapped, exploited, he had prostituted the
great good thing that had been his by right divine, for the privilege of
eating husks with swine.  Now was the day of the mighty famine, and the
starved and broken heart of him, crying out for help, found only a
farrago of empty phrases.

He tried to go back; he did in very fact go back to the mountains and
the cañons of the great Sierras.  "He arose and went to his father,"
and, with such sapped and broken strength as New Bohemia had left him,
strove to wrest some wreckage from the dying fire.

But the ashes were cold by now.  The fire that the gods had allowed him
to snatch, because he was humble and pure and clean and brave, had been
stamped out beneath the feet of minor and dilettante poets, and now the
gods guarded close the brands that yet remained on the altars.

They may not be violated twice, those sacred fires.  Once in a lifetime
the very young and the pure in heart may see the shine of them and pluck
a brand from the altar’s edge.  But, once possessed, it must be watched
with a greater vigilance than even that of the gods, for its light will
live only for him who snatched it first.  Only for him that shields it,
even with his life, from the contact of the world does it burst into a
burning and a shining light.  Let once the touch of alien fingers
disturb it, and there remains only a little heap of bitter ashes.



                         _*Grettir at Drangey*_


                                  *I*

                    *HOW GRETTIR CAME TO THE ISLAND*


A long slant of rain came from out the northwest, and much fog; and the
sea, still swollen by the last of the winter gales—now two days
gone—raced by the bows of their boat in great swells, quiet, huge.

It was cold, and the wind, like a hound at fault, hunted along through
the gorges between the wave heads, casting back and forth swiftly in
bulging, sounding blasts that made an echo between the walls of water.
At times the wind discovered the boat and leaped upon it suddenly with a
gush of fierce noise, clutching at the sail and bearing it down as the
dog bears down the young elk.

The sky, a vast reach of broken grey, slid along close overhead,
sometimes even dropping flat upon the sea, blotting the horizon and
whirling about like geyser mist or the reek and smoke from the mouth of
_jokuls_.  Then, perhaps, out of the fog and out of the rain, suddenly
great and fearful came towering and dipping a mighty berg, the waves
breaking like surf about its base, spires of grey ice lifting skywards,
all dripping and gashed and jagged; knobs and sharp ridges thrusting
from under beneath the water, full of danger to ships. At such moments
they must put the helm over quickly, sheering off from the colossus
before it caught and trampled them.

But no living thing did they see through all the day.  Sea birds there
were none; no porpoises played about the boat, no seals barked from
surge to surge.  There was nothing but the silent gallop of the waves,
the flitting of the leaden sky, the uneven panting of the wind, and the
rattle of the rain on the half-frozen sail.  The sea was very lonely,
barren, empty of all life.

Towards the middle of the day, when Iceland lay far behind them,—a bar
of black on the ocean’s edge,—they were little by little aware of the
roll and thunder of breakers, and the cries and calls of very many sea
birds and—very faint—the bleating of sheep.  The fog and the scud of
rain and the spindrift that the wind whipped from off the wavetops shut
out all sight beyond the cast of a spear. But they knew that they must
be driving hard upon the island, and Grettir, from his place at the
helm, bent himself to look under the curve of the sail. He called to
Illugi, his brother, and to Noise, the thrall, who stood peering at the
bows of the boat (their eyes made small to pierce the mist), to know if
they saw aught of the island.

"I see," answered Illugi, "only wrack and drift of wreck and streamers
of kelp, but we are close upon it."

Then all at once Grettir threw the boat up into the wind, and shouted
aloud:

"Look overhead!  Quick!  Above there!  We are indeed close."

And for all that the foot and mid-most part of the island were unseen
because of the mist, there, far above them, between sea and sky,
looming, as it were, out of heaven, rose suddenly the front of the
cliff, rearing the forehead of it, high from out all that din of surf
and swirl of mist and rain, bare to the buffet of storms, iron-strong,
everlasting, a mighty rock.

They lowered the sail and ran out the sweeps, and for an hour skirted
the edge of the island searching for the landing-place, where the
rope-ladder hung from the cliff’s edge.  When they had found it, they
turned the nose of the boat landward, and, caught by the set of the
surf, were drawn inwards, and at last flung up on the beaches.
Waist-deep in the icy undertow, they ran the boat up and made her fast,
rejoicing that they had won to land without ill-fortune.

The wind for an instant tore in twain the veils of fog, and they saw the
black cliff towering above them, as well as the ladder that hung from
its summit clattering against the rock as the wind dashed it to and fro,
and as they turned from the boat to look about them, lo, at their feet,
stranded at make of the ebb, a great walrus, crushed between two
ice-floes, lay dead, the rime of the frost encrusting its barbels.

So Grettir Asmundson, called The Strong, outlawed throughout Iceland,
came with his brother Illugi, and the thrall Noise, to live on the
Island of Drangey.


                                  *II*

          *HOW GRETTIR AND ILLUGI HIS BROTHER KEPT THE ISLAND*


On top of the cliff (to be reached only by climbing the rope-ladder)
were sheep-walks, where the shepherds from the mainland kept their
flocks. Grettir and Illugi took over these, for food and for the sake of
their pelts which were to make them coverings.  They built themselves a
house out of the driftwood that came ashore at the foot of the cliff
with every tide, and throughout the rest of the winter days lived in
peace.

But in the early spring a fisherman carried the news to the mainland
that he had seen men on the top of Drangey, and that the ladder was up.

Forthwith came the farmers and shepherds in their boats to know if such
were the truth.  They found, indeed, the ladder up, and after calling
and shouting a long time time, brought the hero and his brother to the
cliff’s edge.

"What now?" they cried.  "Give a reckoning of our sheep.  Is it peace or
war between you and us?  Why have you come to our island?  Answer,
Grettir—outlaw."

"What I have, I hold," called Grettir.  "Outlawed I am, indeed, and no
man is there in all Iceland that dare help me to home or hiding.  Mine
is the Island of Drangey, and mine are the sheep and the goats."

"Robber!" shouted the shepherds, "since when have you bought the island?
Show the title."

For answer Grettir drew his sword from its sheath, and held it high.

"That is my title," he cried.  "When that you shall take from me, the
Island of Drangey is yours again."

"At least render up our sheep," answered the shepherds.

"What I have said, I have said!" cried Grettir, and with that he and
Illugi drew back from the cliff’s edge and were no more seen.

The shepherds sailed back to the mainland, and could think of no way of
ridding the island of Grettir and his brother.

The summer waned, and finding themselves no further along than at the
beginning, they struck hands with a certain Thorbjorn, called The Hook,
and sold him their several claims.

So it came about that Thorbjorn the Hook was also an enemy of Grettir,
for he swore that foul or fair, ill or well, he would have the head of
the hero, and the price that was upon it, as well as the sheepwalks and
herds of Drangey.

This Thorbjorn had an old foster-mother named Thurid, who, although the
law of Christ had long since prevailed through all the country, still
made witchcraft, and by this means promised The Hook that he should have
the island, and with it the heads of Illugi and Grettir.  She herself
was a mumbling, fumbling carline of a sour spirit and fierce temper.
Once when The Hook and his brother were at tail-game, she, looking over
his shoulder, taunted him because he had made a bad move.  On his
answering in surly fashion, she caught up one of the pieces, and drove
the tail of it so fiercely against his eye that the ball had started
from the socket. He had sprung up with a mighty oath, and dealt her so
strong a blow that she had taken to her bed a month, and thereafterward
must walk with a stick.  There was no love lost between the two.

Meanwhile, Grettir and Illugi lived in peace upon the top of Drangey.
Illugi was younger than the hero; a fine lad with yellow hair and blue
eyes.  The brothers loved each other, and could not walk or sit
together, but that the arm of one was about the shoulder of the other.
The lad knew very well that neither he nor Grettir would ever leave
Drangey alive; but in spite of that he abode on the island, and was
happy in the love and comradeship of his older brother.  As for Grettir,
hunted and hustled from Norway to Skaptar Jokul, he could trust Illugi
only.  The thrall Noise was meet for little but to gather driftwood to
feed the fire.  But Illugi, of all men in the world, Grettir had chosen
to stay at his side in this, the last stand of his life, and to bear him
company in the night when he waked and was afraid.

For the weird that the Vampire had laid upon Grettir, when he had fought
with him through the night at Thorhall-stead, lay heavy upon him.  As
the Vampire had said, his strength was never greater than at the moment
when, spent and weary with the grapple, he had turned the monster under
him; and, moreover, as the dead man had foretold, the eyes of him—the
sightless, lightless dead eyes of him—grew out of the darkness in the
late watches of the night, and stared at Grettir whichever way he
turned.

For a long time all went well with the two. Bleak though it was, the
brothers grew to love the Island of Drangey.  Not all the days were so
bitter as the one that witnessed their arrival.  Throughout the
summer—when the daylight lengthened and lengthened, till at last the sun
never set at all—the weather held fair.  The crust of soil on the top of
the great rock grew green and brilliant with gorse and moss and
manzel-wursel.  Blackberries flourished on southern exposures and in
crevices between the bowlders, and wild thyme and heather bloomed and
billowed in the sea wind.

Day after day the brothers walked the edge of the cliff, making the
rounds of the snares they had set for sea fowl.  Day after day,
descending to the beaches, they fished in the offing or with ready
spears crept from rock to rock, stalking the great bull-walruses that
made the land to sun themselves. Day after day in a cloudless sky the
sun shone; day after day the sea, deep blue, coruscated and flashed in
his light; day after day the wind blew free, the flowers spread, and the
surf shouted hoarsely on the beaches, and the sea fowl clamoured, cried,
and rose and fell in glinting hordes. The air was full of the fine,
clean aroma of the ocean, even the perfume of the flowers was crossed
with a tang of salt, and the seaweed at low tide threw off, under the
heat of the sun, a warm, sweet redolence of its own.

It was a brave life.  They were no man’s men. The lonely, rock-ribbed
island, the grass, the growths of green, the blue sea, and the blessed
sunlight were their friends, their helpers; they held what of the world
they saw in fief.  They made songs to the morning, and sang them on the
cliff’s edge, looking off over the sea beneath, standing on a point of
rock, the wind in their faces, the taste of salt in their mouths, their
long braids of yellow hair streaming from their foreheads.

They made songs to their swords, and swung the ponderous blades in
cadence as they sang—wild, unrhymed, metrical chants, monotonous,
turning upon but few notes; savage songs, full of man-slayings and
death-fights against great odds, shouted out in deep-toned, male voices,
there, far above the world, on that airy, wind-swept, lonely rock.  A
brave life!

The end they knew must come betimes.  They were in nowise afraid.  They
made a song to their death—the song they would sing when they had turned
Berserk in the crash of swords, when the great grey blades were rising
and falling, death, like lightning, leaping from their edges; when
shield rasped shield, and the spears sank home and wrenched out the life
in a spurt of scarlet, and the massive axes rang upon helmet and
hauberk, and men, heroes all, met death with a cheer, and went out into
the Dark with a shout.  A brave life!


                                 *III*

       *OF THE WEIRD OF THURID, FOSTER-MOTHER TO THORBJORN HOOK*


Twice during that summer The Hook made attempts to secure the island.
Once he sailed over to Drangey, and standing up in the prow of his boat
near the beach, close by where the ladder hung, talked long with
Grettir, who came to the rim of the cliff in answer to his shouts. He
promised the Outlaw (so only that he would yield up the island) full
possession of half the sheep that yet remained and a free passage in one
of his ships to any port within fifty leagues.  But the hero had but one
answer to all persuadings.

"Drangey is mine," he said.  "There is no rede whereby you can get me
hence.  Here do I bide, whatso may come to hand, to the day of my death
and my undoing," and The Hook must sail home in evil mind, gnawing his
nails in his fury, and vowing that he would yet gain the island and lay
Grettir to earth, and get the best out of the bad bargain he had made.

Another time The Hook hired a man named Hœring, a great climber, to try,
by night, to scale the hinder side of Drangey where the cliff was not so
bold.  But halfway up the man lost either his wits or his footing, for
he fell dreadfully upon the rocks far below, and brake the neck of him,
so that the spine drave through the skin.

And after that, certainly Grettir and Illugi were let alone.  The fame
of them and of their seizure of Drangey and the blood feud between them
and Thorbjorn, called The Hook, went wide through all that part of
Iceland, and many the man that put off from the mainland and sailed to
the island, just to hail the Outlaw, at the head of the ladder, and wish
him well.  Thus the summer and the next winter passed.

At about the break-up of the winter night, The Hook began to importune
his foster-mother, Thurid, that she should make good her promise as to
the winning of Grettir.  At last she said: "If you are to have my rede,
I must have my will.  Strike hands with my hand then, and swear to me to
do those things that I shall say."  And The Hook struck hands and sware
the oath.

Then, though he was loath to visit the island again, she bade him man an
eight-oared boat and flit her out to Drangey.

When they had reached the island, and after much shouting had brought
Grettir and Illugi to the edge of the rock, Thorbjorn again renewed his
offer, saying further that if there were now but few sheep left upon the
island, he would add a bag of silver pennies to make the difference
good.

"Bootless be your quest," answered Grettir. "Wot this well.  What I have
said, I have said. My bones shall rot upon Drangey ere I set foot on
other soil."

But at his words the carline, who till now had sat huddled in rags and
warps in the bow of the boat, stirred herself and screamed out:

"An ill word for a fair offer.  The wits are out of these men that they
may not know the face of their good fortune, and upon an evil time have
they put their weal from them.  Now this I cast over thee, Grettir; that
thou be left of all health and good-hap, all good heed and wisdom, and
that the longer ye live the less shall be thy luck.  Good hope have I,
Grettir, that thy days of gladness shall be fewer in time to come than
in time gone by."

And at the words behold, Grettir the Strong, whose might no two men
could master, staggered as though struck, and then a rage came upon him,
and plucking up a stone from the earth, he flung it at the heap of rags
in the boat, so that it fell upon the hag’s leg and brake it.

"An evil deed, brother," said Illugi.  "Surely no good will come of
that."

"Nor none from the words of that hell-cat yonder," answered Grettir.
"Not over-much were-gild were paid for us, though the price should be
one carline’s life."

The Hook sailed back to the mainland after this, and sat at home while
the leg of his foster-mother mended.  But when she was able to walk
again, she bade him lead her forth upon the shore.  For a time she
hobbled up and down till she had found a piece of driftwood to her
liking.  She turned over, now upon this side, now upon that, mumbling to
herself the while, till The Hook, puzzled, said:

"What work ye there, foster-mother?"

"The bane of Grettir," answered the witch, and with that she crouched
herself down by the log and cut runes upon it.  Then she stood upright
and walked backwards about the log, and went widdershins around it, and
then, after carving more runes, bade Thorbjorn cast it into the sea.

The Hook scoffed and jeered, but, mindful of his oath, set the log
adrift.  Now the flood tide made strongly at the time, and the wind set
from off the ocean.

"It will come to shore," he said.

"Ay, that I hope," said the witch; "to the shore of Drangey."

On the beaches, where the torn scum and froth of the waves shuddered and
tumbled to and fro in the wind, The Hook and the old witch stood
watching. Thrice the surf flung the log landward, thrice the undertow
sucked it back.  It was carried under the curve of a great hissing
comber, disappeared, then rose dripping on the far side.  The hag, bent
upon her crutch, her toothless jaws fumbling and working, her gray hair
streaming in the wind, fixed a glittering eye, malevolent, iniquitous,
far out to sea where Drangey showed itself, a block of misty blue over
the horizon’s edge.

"A strong spell for a strong man," she muttered, "and an ill curse for
an evil deed.  Blighted be the breasts that sucked ye, and black and
bitter the bread ye cat.  Look thou now, foster-son," she cried, raising
her voice.

The Hook crossed himself, and his head crouched fearfully between his
shoulders.  Under his bent brows the glance of him shot uneasily from
side to side.

"A bad business," he whispered, and he trembled as he spoke.  For the
log was riding the waves like a skiff, headed seawards, making way
against tide and wind, veering now east, now west, but in the main
working steadily toward Drangey.  "A bad business, and peril of thy life
is toward if the deed thou hast done this day be told of at Thingvalla."


                                  *IV*

                 *THE NIGHT-FLITTING OF THORBJORN HOOK*


By candle-lighting time that day the storm had reached such a pitch and
so mighty was the fury and noise raging across the top of Drangey, that
Grettir and Illugi must needs put their lips to one another’s ears when
they spoke. There was no rain as yet, and the wind that held straight as
an arrow’s flight over the ocean, had blown away all mists and clouds,
so that the atmosphere was of an ominous clearness, and the coasts of
Iceland showed livid white against the purple black of the sky.

There were strange sounds about: the prolonged alarums of the gale;
blast trumpeting to blast all through the hollow upper spaces of the
air; the metallic slithering of the frozen grasses, writhing and
tormented; the minute whistle of driving sand; the majestic diapason of
the breakers, and the wild piping of bewildered sea-mews and black
swans, as, helpless in the sudden gusts, they drove past, close overhead
with slanted wings stretched tense and taut.

Towards evening Grettir and Illugi regained the hut, their bodies bent
and inclined against the wind. They bore between them the carcass of a
slaughtered sheep, the last on the island, for by now they had killed
and eaten all of the herd, with the exception of one old ram, whom they
had spared because of his tameness.  This one followed the brothers
about like a dog, and each night came to the door of the hut and butted
against it till he was allowed to come in.

Earlier in the day Grettir, foreseeing that the weather would be hard,
had sent Noise, the servant, to gather in a greater supply of drift.
The thrall now met the brothers at the door of the hut, staggering under
the weight of a great log.  He threw his burden down at Grettir’s feet
and spoke surlily, for he was but little pleased with his lot:

"There be that which I hold will warm you enough.  Hew it now yourself,
for I am spent with the toil of getting it in on such a night as this."

But as Grettir heaved up the axe, Illugi sprang forward with a hand
outstretched and a warning cry.  He had glanced at the balk of drift,
and had seen it to be one that Grettir had twice discarded, suspicious
of the runes that he saw were cut into it.  Even Noise had been warned
and forbidden to bring it to the hut.  Doubtless on this day the thrall
had found it close by the foot of the ladder, and being too slothful and
too ill-tempered to seek farther, had fetched it in despite of Grettir’s
commands.

"Brother," cried Illugi, "have a heed what ye do!"

But he spoke too late.  Grettir hewed strong upon the balk, and the axe
flipped from it and drave into his leg below the knee, so that the blade
hung in the bone.  Grettir flung down the axe, and staggered into the
hut and sank upon the bed.

"Ill-luck is to us-ward," he cried, "and now wot I well that my death is
upon me.  For no good thing was this drift-timber sent thrice to us.
Noise, evilly hast thou done, and ill hast thou served us. Go now and
draw the ladder, and let thy faithful service henceforth make good the
ill-turn thou hast done me to-day."  And with the words the brothers
drove him out into the night.

Grumbling, the thrall made his way to the ladder-head, and sat down
cursing.

"A fine life," he muttered, "hounded like a house-carle from dawn to
dark.  Because the son of Asmund swings awkwardly his axe and notches
the skin of him, I must be driven from house and hearthstone on so hard
a night as this.  Draw the ladder!  Ay, draw the ladder, says he.  By
God! it were no man’s deed to risk whether he could win to the island in
such a storm as this."

For all that, he made at least one attempt to draw the ladder up.  But
it was heavy, and the wind, thrashing it to and fro, made it hard to
manage.  Noise soon gave over, and, out of spite refusing to return to
the hut, drew his cloak over his head, and crawling in behind a bowlder
addressed himself to sleep.  He was awakened by a blow.

He sprang up.  The night was overcast; it had been raining; his cloak
was drenched.  Men were there; dark figures crowding together,
whispering. There was a click and clash of steel, and against the pale
blur of the sky, he saw, silhouetted, the moving head of a spear.  Again
some one struck him.  He wrenched about terrified, and a score of hands
gripped him close, while at his throat sprang the clutch of fingers
iron-strong.  Then a voice:

"Fool, and son of a fool, and worse than a fool! It is I, Thorbjorn,
called The Hook.  Speak as he should speak who is nigh to death, true
words and few words.  What of Grettir?"

"Sore bestead," Noise made shift to answer, through the grip upon his
throat.  "Crippled with his own axe as he hewed upon a log of firewood
but this very day.  Down upon his back he is, and none to stand at his
side, when the need is on him, but the boy Illugi."

"A log, say you?" whispered The Hook.  Then turning to a comrade: "Mark
you that, Hialfi Thinbeard."

"A log cut with runes," insisted Noise.

"Ay, with runes," repeated The Hook.  "With runes, I say, Hialfi
Thinbeard.  My mind misgave me when the carline urged this flitting
to-night, and only for my oath’s sake I would have foregone it. But an
old she-goat knows the shortest path to the byre.  As for you"—he turned
to Noise: "Grettir is mine enemy, and the feud of blood lies between us,
but he deserves a better thrall than so foul a bird as thou."

Thereat he gave the word, and his carles set upon Noise and beat him
till no breath was left in his body.  Then they bound him hand and foot,
and dragged him behind a rock, and left him.

Noise watched them as they drew to one side and whispered together.
There were at least twenty of them.  For a long moment they conferred
together in low voices, while the wind shrilled fiercely in the cluster
of their spear-blades.  Then there was a movement.  The group broke up.
Silently and with cautious steps the dark figures of the men moved off
in the direction of the hut.  Twice, as The Hook gave the word, they
halted to listen. Then they moved on again.  They disappeared.  A pebble
clicked under foot, a sword struck faintly against a rock.

There was no more sound.  The rain urged by the wind held steadily
across the top of the Island of Drangey.  It wanted about three hours
till dawn.


                                  *V*

                    *OF THE MAN-SLAYING ON DRANGEY*


In the hut, his head upon his brother’s lap, Grettir lay tossing with
pain.  From the thigh down the leg was useless, and from the thigh down
it throbbed with anguish, yet the Outlaw gave no sign of his sufferings,
and even to speed the slow passing of the night had sung aloud.

It was a song of the old days, when all men were friendly to him, when
he was known as Grettir Asmundson and not Grettir the Outlaw; and as he
sang, his mind went back through the years of all that wild, troubled
life of his, and he remembered many things.  Back again in the old home
at Biarg, free and happy once more he saw himself as he should have
been, head of his mother’s household, his foot upon his own hearthstone,
his head under his own rooftree.  And there should be no more foes to
fight, and no more hiding and night-riding; no noontime danger to be
faced down; no enemies that struck in the dark to be baffled.  And he
would be free again; he would be among his fellows; he would touch the
hand of friends, would know the companionship of brave and honest men
and the love of good and honest women.  Would it all be his again some
day?  Would the old, old times come back again?  Would there ever be a
home-coming for him?  Fighter though he was, a hero and a warrior, and
though battles and man-slayings more than he could count had been his
portion, even though the shock of swords was music to him, there were
other things that made life glad. The hand the sword-hilt had calloused
could yet remember the touch of a maiden’s fingers, and at times, such
as this, strange thoughts grew with a strange murmuring in his brain.
He was a young man yet; could he but make head against his enemies and
his untoward fortune till the sentence of outlawry was overpassed, he
might yet begin his life all new again.  A wife should be his, and a son
should be born to him—a little son to watch at play, to love, to
cherish, to boast of, to be proud of, to laugh over, to weep over, to be
held against that mighty breast of his, to be enfolded ever so gently in
those mighty sword-scarred arms of his.  Strange thoughts; strange,
indeed, for a wounded outlaw, on that storm-swept, barren rock in the
dark, dark hours before the dawn.

"I think," said Grettir after a while, "that now I may sleep a little."

Illugi made him comfortable upon the sheep-pelts, and put his rolled-up
cloak under his head; then, when Grettir had closed his eyes, put a new
log upon the fire and sat down nigh at hand.

Long time the lad sat thus watching his brother’s face as sleep smoothed
from it the lines of pain; as the lips under the long, blond mustaches
relaxed a little, and the frown went from the forehead.

It was a kindly face, after all; none of the harshness in it, none of
the fierceness in it that so bitter a life as his should have stamped it
with—a kindly face, serious, grave even, the face of a big-hearted,
generous fellow who bore no malice, who feared no evil, who uttered no
complaint, and who looked fate fearless between the eyes.

Something shocked heavily at the door of the hut, and the Outlaw stirred
uneasily, and his blue eyes opened a little.

"It is only the old ram, brother," said Illugi. "He butts hard to get
in."

"Hard and over hard," muttered Grettir, and as he spoke the door split
in twain, and the firelight flashed upon the face of Thorbjorn Hook.

Instantly Illugi was on his feet, his spear in hand.  It had come at
last, the end of everything. Fate at last was knocking at the door.
Grettir was to fight the Last Fight there in that narrow hut, there on
that night of storm, in the rain and under the scudding clouds.

Behind him, as he stood facing the riven door and the men that were
crowding into the doorway, he heard Grettir struggling to his feet.  The
fire flared and smoked in the wind, and the rain, as it swept in from
without, hissed as it fell among the hot embers.  From far down on the
beaches came the booming of the surf.

The onset hung poised.  After that first splintering of the door The
Hook and his men made no move.  No man spoke.  Illugi, his spear held
ready, was a statue in the midst of the hut; Grettir, upon one knee,
with his great sword in his fist, one hand holding by Illugi’s belt, did
not move.  His eyes, steady, earnest, were upon those of The Hook, and
the two men held each other’s glances for a moment that seemed
immeasurably long. Then at last:

"Who showed thee the way hither?" said Grettir quietly.

"God showed us the way," The Hook made answer.

"Nay, nay, it was the hag, thy foster-mother."

But the sound of voices broke the spell.  In an instant the great
fight—the fight that would be told of in Iceland for hundreds of years
to come—burst suddenly forth like the bursting of a dyke.  Illugi had
leaped forward, and through the smoke of the weltering fire his
spear-blade flashed, curving like the curving leap of a salmon in the
rapids of the Jokulsa.  There was a cry, a rush of many feet, a parting
of the group in the doorway, and Hialti Thinbeard’s hands shut their
death-grip upon the shaft of Illugi’s spear as the blade of it tore out
between his shoulders.

But now men were upon the roof—Karr, son of Karr, thrall of
Tongue-stone, Vikaar and Haldarr of the household of Eirik of Good-dale,
Hafr of Meadness in the Fleets and Thorwald of Hegra-ness—tearing away
the thatch and thrusting madly downward with sword and spear.  Illugi
dropped the haft of the weapon that had slain Hialfi, and catching up
another one, made as if to drive it through the hatch.  But even as he
did so the whole roof cracked and sagged; then it gave way at one
corner, and Karr, son of Karr, fell headlong from above.  Grettir caught
him on his sword-point as he fell, and at the same moment The Hook drave
a small boar-spear clean through Illugi’s head.

And from that moment all semblance of consecutive action was lost.
Yelling, shouting, groaning, cursing, the men rushed together in one
blurred and furious grapple.  The wrecked hut collapsed, crashing upon
their heads; the fire, kicked and trampled as the fight raged back and
forth, caught the thatch and sheep-pelts, and flamed up fiercely in and
around the combat.  They fought literally in fire—in fire and thick
smoke and driving rain.  The arms that thrust with spear or hewed with
sword rose and fell all ablaze.  Those who fell, fell among hot coals
and fought their fellows—their own friends—to make way that they might
escape the torment.

Twice Grettir, dying though he was, flung the fight from him and rose to
his full height, a dreadful figure, alone for an instant, bloody,
dripping, charred with ashes, half naked, his clothes all burning; and
twice again they flung themselves upon him, and bore him down, so that
he disappeared beneath their mass.  And ever and again from out the
swirl of the onset, from that unspeakable jam of men, mad with the
battle-madness that was upon them, crawled out some horrid figure,
staggering, gashed, and maimed, or even dying, done to death by the
great Outlaw in the last fight of his life.  Thorfin, Gamli’s man, had
both arms broken at the very shoulders; Krolf of Drontheim reeled back
from the battle with a sword-thrust through his hip that made him go on
crutches the rest of his life; Kolbein, churl of Svein, died two days
later of a spear-thrust through the bowels; Ognund, Hakon’s son, never
was able to use his right arm after that night.

Hardly a man of all the twenty that did not for all the rest of his life
bear upon his body the marks of Grettir’s death-fight.  Still Grettir
bore up.  He had with one arm caught Thorir, The Hook’s stoutest
house-carle, around the throat, while his other arm, that wielded his
sword, hewed and hewed and smote and thrust as though it would never
tire.  Even above the din of the others rose the clamour of Thorir’s
agony.  Once again Grettir cleared a space around him, and stood with
dripping sword, his left arm still crushing Thorir in that awful
embrace.  Thorir was weaponless, his face purple.  No thought of battle
was left in him, and frantic, he stretched out a hand to his fellows,
his voice a wail:

"Help me, Thorbjorn.  He is killing me.  For Christ’s sake——"

And Grettir’s blade nailed the words within his throat.  The wretch slid
to the ground doubled in a heap, the blood gushing from his mouth.

Then those that yet remained alive, drawn off a little, panting, spent,
saw a terrible sight—the death of Grettir.

For a moment in that flicker of fire he seemed to grow larger.  Alone,
unassailable, erect among those heaps of dead and dying enemies, his
stature seemed as it were suddenly to increase.  He towered above them,
his head in swirls of smoke, the great bare shoulders gleaming with his
blood, the long braids of yellow hair soaked with it.  Awful, gigantic,
suddenly a demi-god, he stood colossal, a man made more than human.  The
eyes of him fixed, wide open, looked out into the darkness above their
heads, unwinking, unafraid—looked into the darkness and into the eyes of
Death, unafraid, unshaken.

There he stood already dead, yet still upon his feet, rigid as iron, his
back unbent, his neck proud; while they cowered before him holding their
breaths waiting, watching.  Then, like a mighty pine tree, stiff,
unbending, he swayed slowly forward.  Stiff as a sword-blade the great
body leaned over farther and farther; slowly at first, then with
increased momentum inclined swiftly earthward. He fell, and they could
believe that the crash of that fall shook the earth beneath their feet.
He died as he would have wished to die, in battle, his harness on, his
sword in his grip.  He lay face downward amid the dead ashes of the
trampled fire and moved no more.



                        _*The Guest of Honour*_


                               *PART ONE*


The doctor shut and locked his desk drawer upon his memorandum book with
his right hand, and extended the left to his friend Manning Verrill,
with the remark:

"Well, Manning, how are you?"

"If I were well, Henry," answered Verrill gravely, "I would not be
here."

The doctor leaned back in his deep leather chair, and having carefully
adjusted his glasses, tilted back his head, and looked at Verrill from
beneath them.  He waited for him to continue.

"It’s my nerves—I _suppose_," began Verrill. "Henry," he declared
suddenly leaning forward, "Henry, I’m scared; that’s what’s the matter
with me—I’m scared."

"Scared," echoed the doctor, "What nonsense! What of?"

"Scared of death, Henry," broke out Verrill, "scared _blue_!"

"It is your nerves," murmured the doctor.  "You need travel and a
bromide, my boy.  There’s nothing the matter with you.  Why, you’re good
for another forty years,—yes, or even for another fifty years.  You’re
sound as a nut.  You, to talk about death!"

"I’ve seen thirty—twenty-nine I should say, twenty-nine of my best
friends go."

The doctor looked puzzled a moment; then—"Oh! you mean that club of
yours," said he.

"Yes," said Verrill, "Great heavens! to think that I should be the last
man after all—well, one of us had to be the last.  And that’s where the
trouble is, Henry.  It’s been growing on me for the last two years—ever
since Curtice died.  He was the twenty-sixth.  And he died only a month
before the Annual Dinner.  Arnold, Brill, Steve—Steve Sharrett, you
know, and I—just the four,—were left then; and we sat down to that big
table alone; and when we came to the toast of ’The Absent Ones’ ...
Well, Henry, we were pretty solemn before we got through.  And we knew
that the choice of the last man,—who would face those thirty-one empty
covers and open the bottle of wine that we all set aside at our first
dinner, and drink ’The Absent Ones,’—was narrowing down pretty fine.

"Next year there were only Arnold and Steve, and myself left.
Brill—well you know all about his death.  The three of us got through
dinner somehow. The year after that we were still three, and even the
year after that.  Then poor old Steve went down with the _Dreibund_ in
the bay of Biscay, and four months afterward Arnold and I sat down to
the table at the Annual, alone.  I’m not going to forget that evening in
a hurry.  Why, Henry—oh! never mind.  Then—"

"Well," prompted the doctor as his friend paused:

"Arnold died three months ago.  And the day of our Annual—I mean my—the
club’s," Verrill changed his position.  "The date of the dinner, the
Annual Dinner, is next month, and I’m the only one left."

"And, of course, you’ll not go," declared the doctor.

"Oh, yes," said Verrill.  "Yes, I will go, of course.  But—"  He shook
his head with a long sigh.  "When the Last Man Club was organised," he
went on, "in ’68, we were all more or less young.  It was a great idea,
at least I felt that way about it, but I didn’t believe that thirty
young men would persist in anything—of that sort very long. But no
member of the club died for the first five years, and the club met every
year and had its dinner without much thought of—of consequences, and of
the inevitable.  We met just to be sociable."

"Hold on," interrupted the doctor, "you are speaking now of thirty.  A
while ago you said thirty-one."

"Yes, I know," assented Verrill, "There were thirty in the club, but we
always placed an extra cover—for—for the Guest of Honour."

The doctor made a movement of impatience. Then in a moment, "Well," he
said, resignedly, "go on."

"That’s about the essentials," answered Verrill. "The first death was in
’73.  And from that year on the vacant places at the table have steadily
increased.  Little by little the original bravado of the thing dropped
out of it all for me; and of late years—well I have told you how it is.
I’ve seen so many of them die, and die so fast, so regularly—one a year
you might say,—that I’ve kept saying ’who next, who next, who’s to go
this year?’ ... And as they went, one by one, and still I was left ... I
tell you, Henry, the suspense was, ... the suspense is ... You see I’m
the last now, and ever since Curtice died, I’ve felt this thing weighing
on me.  _By God, Henry, I’m afraid; I’m afraid of Death!  It’s
horrible!_  It’s as though I were on the list of ’condemned’ and were
listening to hear my name called every minute."

"Well, so are all of us, if you come to that," observed the doctor.

"Oh, I know, I know," cried Verrill, "it is morbid and all that.  But
that don’t help me any. Can you imagine me one month from to-morrow
night.  Think now.  I’m alone, absolutely, and there is the long empty
table, with the thirty places set, and the extra place, and those places
are where all my old friends used to sit.  And at twelve I get up and
give first ’The Absent Ones,’ and then ’The Guest of the Evening.’  I
gave those toasts last year, but there were two of us, then, and the
year before there were three.  But ever since Curtice died and we were
narrowed down to four, this thing has been weighing on me—this idea of
death, and I’ve conceived a horror of it—a—a dread.  And now I am the
last.  I had no idea this would ever happen to me; or if it did, that it
would be like this.  I’m shaken, Henry, shaken. I’ve not slept for three
nights.  So I’ve come to you.  You must help me."

"So I will, by advising you.  You give up the idiocy.  Cut out the
dinner this year; yes, and for always."

"You don’t understand," replied Verrill, calmly. "It is impossible.  I
could not keep away.  I _must_ be there."

"But it’s simple lunacy," expostulated the doctor. "Man, you’ve worked
upon your nerves over this fool club and dinner, till I won’t be
responsible for you if you carry out this notion.  Come, promise me you
will take the train for, say Florida, tomorrow, and _I’ll_ give you
stuff that will make you sleep.  St. Augustine is heaven at this time of
year, and I hear the tarpon have come in.  Shall—"

Verrill shook his head.

"You don’t understand," he repeated.  "You simply don’t understand.  No,
I shall go to the dinner.  But of course I’m—I’m nervous—a little. Did I
say I was scared?  I didn’t mean that.  Oh, I’m all right; I just want
you to prescribe for me, something for the nerves.  Henry, death is a
terrible thing,—to see ’em all struck down, twenty-nine of ’em—splendid
boys.  Henry, I’m not a coward.  There’s a difference between cowardice
and fear.  For hours last night I was trying to work it out.
Cowardice—that’s just turning tail and running; but I shall go through
that Annual Dinner, and that’s ordeal enough, believe me.  But
fear,—it’s just death in the abstract that unmans me.  _That’s_ the
thing to fear.  To think that we all go along living and working and
fussing from day to day, when we _know_ that this great Monster, this
Horror, is walking up and down the streets, and that sooner or later
he’ll catch us,—that we can’t escape.  Isn’t it the greatest curse in
the world!  We’re so used to it we don’t realise the Thing.  But suppose
one could eliminate the Monster altogether.  _Then_ we’d realise how
sweet life was, and we’d look back at the old days with horror—just as I
do now."

"Oh, but this is rubbish," cried the doctor, "simple drivel.  Manning,
I’m ashamed of you.  I’ll prescribe for you, I suppose I’ve got to.  But
a good rough fishing-and-hunting-trip would do more for you than a
gallon of drugs.  If you won’t go to Florida, get out of town, if it’s
only over Sunday. Here’s your prescription, and _do_ take a
Friday-to-Monday trip.  Tramp in the woods, get tired, and _don’t go to
that dinner_!"

"You don’t understand," repeated Verrill, as the two stood up.  He put
the prescription into his pocket-book.  "You don’t understand.  I
couldn’t keep away.  It’s a duty, and besides—well I couldn’t make you
see.  Good-by.  This stuff will make me sleep, eh?  And do my nerves
good, too, you say?  I see.  I’ll come back to you if it don’t work.
Good-by again.  _This_ door, is it?  Not through the waiting-room, eh?
Yes, I remember.... Henry, did you ever—did you ever face death
yourself—I mean—"

"Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense," cried the doctor. But Verrill persisted.
His back to the closed door, he continued:

"_I_ did.  _I_ faced death once,—so you see I should know.  It was when
I was a lad of twenty.  My father had a line of New Orleans packets and
I often used to make the trip as super-cargo.  One October day we were
caught in the equinox off Hatteras, and before we knew it we were
wondering if she would last another half-hour.  Along in the afternoon
there came a sea aboard, and caught me unawares.  I lost my hold and
felt myself going, going....  I was sure for ten seconds that it was the
end,—_and I saw death then, face to face_!

"And I’ve never forgotten it.  I’ve only to shut my eyes to see it all,
hear it all—the naked spars rocking against the grey-blue of the sky,
the wrench and creak of the ship, the threshing of rope ends, the
wilderness of pale-green water, the sound of rain and scud....  No, no,
I’ll not forget it. And death was a horrid specter in that glimpse I got
of him.  I—I don’t care to see him again. Well, good-by once more."

"Good-by, Manning, and believe me, this is all hypochondria.  Go and
catch fish.  Go shoot something, and in twenty-four hours you’ll believe
there’s no such thing as death."

The door closed.  Verrill was gone.


                               *PART TWO*


The banquet hall was in the top story of one of the loftiest
sky-scrapers of the city.  Along the eastern wall was a row of windows
reaching from ceiling to floor, and as the extreme height of the
building made it unnecessary to draw the curtains whoever was at the
table could look out and over the entire city in that direction.  Thus
it was that Manning Verrill, on a certain night some four weeks after
his interview with the doctor, sat there at his walnuts and black coffee
and, absorbed, abstracted, looked out over the panorama beneath him,
where the Life of a great nation centered and throbbed.

To the unenlightened the hall would have presented a strange spectacle.
Down its center extended the long table.  The chairs were drawn up, the
covers laid.  But the chairs were empty, the covers untouched; and but
for the presence of the one man the hall was empty, deserted.

At the head of the table Verrill, in evening dress, a gardenia in his
lapel, his napkin across his lap, an unlighted cigar in his fingers, sat
motionless, looking out over the city with unseeing eyes.  Of thirty
places around the table, none was distinctive, none varied.  But at
Verrill’s right hand the thirty-first place, the place of honour,
differed from all the rest.  The chair was large, massive.  The oak of
which it was made was black, while instead of the usual array of silver
and porcelain, one saw but two vessels,—an unopened bottle of wine and a
large silver cup heavily chased.

From far below in the city’s streets eleven o’clock struck.  The sounds
broke in upon Verrill’s reverie and he stirred, glanced about the room
and then, rising, went to the window and stood there for some time
looking out.

At his feet, far beneath lay the city, twinkling with lights.  In the
business quarter all was dark, but from the district of theatres and
restaurants there arose a glare into the night, ruddy, vibrating, with
here and there a ganglion of electric bulbs upon a "fire sign"
emphasising itself in a whiter radiance.  Cable-cars and cabs threaded
the streets with little starring eyes of coloured lights, while
underneath all this blur of illumination, the people, debouching from
the theatres, filled the sidewalks with tiny ant-like swarms, minute,
bustling.

Farther on in the residence district, occasional lighted windows watched
with the street-lamps gazing blankly into the darkness.  In particular
one house was all ablaze.  Every window glowed.  No doubt a great
festivity was in progress and Verrill could almost fancy that he heard
the strains of the music, the rustle of the silks.

Then nearer at hand, but more to the eastward, where the office
buildings rose in tower-like clusters and somber groups, Verrill could
see a vista of open water—the harbour.  Lights were moving here, green
and red, as the great hoarse-voiced freighters stood out with the tide.

And beyond this was the sea itself, and more lights, very, very faint
where the ships rolled leisurely in the ground swells; ships bound to
and from all ports of the earth,—ships that united the nations, that
brought the whole world of living men under the view of the lonely
watcher in the empty Banquet Hall.

Verrill raised the window.  At once a subdued murmur, prolonged,
monotonous,—the same murmur as that which disengages itself from
forests, from the sea, and from sleeping armies,—rose to meet him.  It
was the mingling of all the night noises into one great note that came
simultaneously from all quarters of the horizon, infinitely vast,
infinitely deep,—a steady diapason strain like the undermost bourdon of
a great organ as the wind begins to thrill the pipes.

It was the stir of life, the breathing of the Colossus, the push of the
nethermost basic force, old as the world, wide as the world, the murmur
of the primeval energy, coeval with the centuries, blood-brother to that
spirit which in the brooding darkness before creation, moved upon the
face of the waters.

And besides this, as Verrill stood there looking out, the night wind
brought to him, along with the taint of the sea, the odour of the
heaped-up fruit in the city’s markets and even the suggestion of the
vegetable gardens in the suburbs.

Across his face, like the passing of a long breath, he felt the abrupt
sensation of life, indestructible, persistent.

But absorbed in other things, Verrill, unmoved, and only dimly
comprehending, closed the window and turned back into the room.  At his
place stood an unopened bottle and a glass as yet dry.  He removed the
foil from the neck of the bottle, but after looking at his watch, set it
down again without drawing the cork.  It lacked some fifteen minutes to
midnight.

Once again, as he had already done so many times that evening, Verrill
wiped the moisture from his forehead.  He shut his teeth against the
slow thick labouring of his heart.  He was alone.  The sense of
isolation, of abandonment, weighed down upon him intolerably as he
looked up and down the the empty table.  Alone, alone; all the rest were
gone, and he stood there, in the solitude of that midnight; he, last of
all that company whom he had known and loved.  Over and over again he
muttered:

"All, all are gone, the old familiar faces."  Then slowly Verrill began
to make the circuit of the table, reading, as if from a roll call, the
names written on the cards which lay upon the place-plates.  "Anderson,
... Evans, ... Copeland,—dear old ’crooked-face’ Copeland, his camp
companion in those Maine fishing-trips of the old days, dead now these
ten years....  Stryker,—’Buff’ Stryker they had called him, dead,—he had
forgotten how long,—drowned in his yacht off the Massachusetts coast;
Harris, died of typhoid somewhere in Italy; Dick Herndon, killed in a
mine accident in Mexico; Rice, old ’Whitey Rice’ a suicide in a
California cattle town; Curtice, carried off by fever in Durban, South
Africa."  Thus around the whole table he moved, telling the bead-roll of
death, following in the footsteps of the Monster who never relented, who
never tired, who never, never,—never forgot.

His own turn would come some day.  Verrill, sunken into his chair, put
his hands over his eyes. Yes his own turn would come.  There was no
escape.  That dreadful face would rise again before his eyes.  He would
bow his back to the scourge of nations, he would roll helpless beneath
the wheels of the great car.  How to face that prospect with fortitude!
How to look into those terrible grey eyes with calm!  Oh, the terror of
that gorgon face, oh, the horror of those sightless, lightless grey
eyes!

But suddenly midnight struck.  He heard the strokes come booming upward
from the city streets. His vigil was all but over.

Verrill opened the bottle of wine, breaking the seal that had been
affixed to the cork on the night of the first meeting of the club.
Filling his glass, he rose in his place.  His eyes swept the table, and
while for the last time the memories came thronging back, his lips
formed the words:

"To the Absent Ones: to you, Curtice, Anderson, Brill, to you, Copeland,
to you, Stryker, to you, Arnold, to you all, my old comrades, all you
old familiar faces who are absent to-night."

He emptied the glass, but immediately filled it again.  The last toast
was to be drunk, the last of all.  Verrill, the glass raised,
straightened himself.

But even as he stood there, glass in hand, he shivered slightly.  He
made note of it for the moment, yet his emotions had so shaken him
during all that evening that he could well understand the little shudder
that passed over him for a moment.

But he caught himself glancing at the windows. All were shut.  The doors
of the hall were closed, the flames of the chandeliers were steady.
Whence came then this certain sense of coolness that so suddenly had
invaded the air?  The coolness was not disagreeable, but none the less
the temperature of the room had been lowered, at least so he could
fancy.  Yet already he was dismissing the matter from his mind.  No
doubt the weather had changed suddenly.

In the next second, however, another peculiar circumstance forced itself
upon his attention.  The stillness of the Banquet Hall, placed as it
was, at the top of one of the highest buildings in the city was no
matter of comment to Verrill.  He was long since familiar with it.  But
for all that, even through the closed windows, and through the medium of
steel and brick and marble that composed the building the indefinite
murmur of the city’s streets had always made itself felt in the hall.
It was faint, yet it was distinct.  That bourdon of life to which he had
listened that very evening was not wholly to be shut out, yet now, even
in this supreme moment of the occasion it was impossible for Verrill to
ignore the fancy that an unusual stillness had all at once widened about
him, like the widening of unseen ripples.  There was not a sound, and he
told himself that stillness such as this was only the portion of the
deaf.  No faintest tremor of noise rose from the streets.  The vast
building itself had suddenly grown as soundless as the unplumbed depth
of the sea.  But Verrill shook himself; all evening fancies such as
these had besieged him, even now they were prolonging the ordeal.  Once
this last toast drunk and he was released from his duty: He raised his
glass again, and then in a loud clear voice he said:

"_Gentlemen, I give you the toast of the evening._"  And as he emptied
the glass, a quick, light footstep sounded in the corridor outside the
door.

Verrill looked up in great annoyance.  The corridor led to but one
place, the door of the Banquet Hall, and any one coming down the
corridor at so brisk a pace could have but one intention—that of
entering the hall.  Verrill frowned at the idea of an intruder.  His
orders had been of the strictest.  That a stranger should thrust himself
upon his company at this of all moments was exasperating.

But the footsteps drew nearer, and as Verrill stood frowning at the door
at the far end of the hall, it opened.

A gentleman came in, closed the door, behind him, and faced about.
Verrill scrutinised him with an intent eye.

He was faultlessly dressed, and just by his manner of carrying himself
in his evening clothes Verrill knew that here was breeding, distinction.
The newcomer was tall, slim.  Also he was young; Verrill, though he
could not have placed his age with any degree of accuracy, would none
the less have disposed of the question by setting him down as a young
man.  But Verrill further observed that the gentleman was very pale,
even his lips lacked colour.  However, as he looked closer, he
discovered that this pallor was hardly the result of any present
emotion, but was rather constitutional.

There was a moment’s silence as the two looked at each other the length
of the Hall; then with a peculiarly pleasant smile the stranger came
forward drawing off his white glove and extending his hand. He seemed so
at home, so perfectly at his ease, and at the same time so much of what
Verrill was wont to call a "thoroughbred fellow" that the latter found
it impossible to cherish any resentment.  He preferred to believe that
the stranger had made some readily explained mistake which would be
rectified in their first spoken words.  Thus it was that he was all the
more non-plussed when the stranger took him by the hand with words:
"This is Mr. Manning Verrill, of course.  I am very glad to meet you
again, sir.  Two such as you and I who have once been so intimate,
should never forget each other."

Verrill had it upon his lips to inform the other that he had something
the advantage of him; but at the last moment he was unable to utter the
words. The newcomer’s pleasure in the meeting was so hearty, so
spontaneous, that he could not quite bring himself to jeopardise it—at
the outset at least—by a confession of implied unfriendliness; so
instead he clumsily assumed the other’s manner, and, though deeply
perplexed, managed to attain a certain heartiness as he exclaimed: "But
you have come very late.  I have already dined, and by the way, let me
explain why you find me here alone, in a deserted Banquet Hall with
covers laid for so many."

"Indeed, you need not explain," replied the stranger.  "I am a member of
your club, you know."

A member of the club, this total stranger!  Verrill could not hide a
frown of renewed perplexity; surely this face was not one of any friend
he ever had.  "A charter member, you might say," the other continued;
"but singularly enough, I have never been able to attend one of the
meetings until now.  Of us all I think I have been the busiest—and the
one most widely traveled.  Such must be my excuses."

At the moment an explanation occurred to Verrill. It was within the
range of the possible that the newcomer was an old member of the club,
some sojourner in a foreign country, whose death had been falsely
reported.  Possibly Verrill had lost track of him.  It was not always
easy to "place" at once every one of the thirty.  The two sat down, but
almost immediately Verrill exclaimed:

"Pardon me, but—that chair.  The omen would be so portentous!  You have
taken the wrong place.  You who are a member of the club!  You must
remember that we reserved that chair—the one you are occupying."

But the stranger smiled calmly.

"I defy augury, and I snap my fingers at the portent.  Here is my place
and here I choose to remain."

"As you will," answered Verrill, "but it is a singular choice.  It is
not conducive to appetite."

"My dear Verrill," answered the other, "I shall not dine, if you will
permit me to say so.  It is very late and my time is limited.  I can
stay but a short while at best.  I have much to do to-night after I
leave you,—much good I hope, much good. For which," he added rather
sadly, "I shall receive no thanks, only abuse, only abuse, my dear
Verrill."  Verrill was only half listening.  He was looking at the
other’s face, and as he looked, he wondered; for the brow was of the
kind fitted for crowns, and from beneath glowed the glance of a King.
The mouth seemed to have been shaped by the utterance of the commands of
Empire. The whole face was astonishing, full of power tempered by a
great kindliness.  Verrill could not keep his gaze from those wonderful,
calm grey eyes.  Who was this extraordinary man met under such strange
circumstances, alone and in the night, in the midst of so many dead
memories, and surrounded by that inexplicable stillness, that sudden,
profound peace?  And what was the subtle magnetism that upon sight, drew
him so powerfully to the stranger?  Kingly he was, but Verrill seemed to
feel that he was more than that.  He was—could be—a friend, such a
friend as in all their circle of dead companions he had never known. In
his company he knew he need never be ashamed of weakness, human,
natural, ordained weakness, need not be ashamed because of the certainty
of being perfectly and thoroughly understood.  Thus it was that when the
stranger had spoken the words"—only abuse, only abuse, my dear Verrill."
Verrill, starting from his muse, answered quickly: "What, abuse, you! in
return for good! You astonish me."

"’Abuse’ is the mildest treatment I dare expect; it will no doubt be
curses.  Of all personages, I am the one most cruelly misunderstood.  My
friends are few, few,—oh, so pitiably few."  "Of whom may I be one?"
exclaimed Verrill.  "I hope," said the stranger gravely, "we shall be
the best of friends.  When we met before I am afraid, my appearance was
too abrupt and—what shall I say—unpleasant to win your good will."
Verrill in some embarrassment, framed a lame reply; but the other
continued:

"You do not remember, as I can easily understand. My manner at that time
was against me. It was a whim, but I chose to be most forbidding on that
occasion.  I am a very Harlequin in my moods; Harlequin did I say, my
dear fellow I am the Prince of Masqueraders."

"But a Prince in all events," murmured Verrill, half to himself.

"Prince and Slave," returned the other, "slave to circumstance."

"Are we not all—," began Verrill, but the stranger continued:

"Slave to circumstance, slave to time, slave to natural laws, none so
abject as I, in my servility. When the meanest, the lowest, the very
weakest calls, I must obey.  On the other hand, none so despotic as I,
none so absolute.  When I summon, the strongest must respond; when I
command, the most powerful must obey.  My profession, my dear Verrill,
is an arduous one."

"Your profession is, I take it," observed Verrill, "that of a
physician."

"You may say so," replied the other, "and you may also say an efficient
one.  But I am always the last to be summoned.  I am a last resource; my
remedy is a heroic one.  But it prevails—inevitably. No pain, my dear
Verrill, so sharp that I cannot allay, no anguish so great that I cannot
soothe."

"Then perhaps you may prescribe for me," said Verrill.  "Of late I have
been perturbed.  I have lived under a certain strain, certain
contingencies threaten, which, no doubt unreasonably, I have come to
dread.  I am shaken, nervous, fearful. My own doctor has been unable to
help me.  Perhaps you—"

The stranger had already opened the bottle of wine which stood by his
plate, and filled the silver cup.  He handed it to Verrill.

"Drink," he said.

Verrill hesitated:

"But this wine," he protested: "This cup—pardon me, it was reserved—"

"Drink," repeated the stranger.  "Trust me."

He took Verrill’s glass in which he had drunk the toasts and which yet
contained a little wine. He pressed the silver cup into Verrill’s hands.

"Drink," he urged for the third time.

Verrill took the cup, and the stranger raised his glass.

"To our better acquaintance," he said.

But Verrill, at length at the end of all conjecture, cried out, the cup
still in his hand:

"Your toast is most appropriate, sir.  A better acquaintance with you, I
assure you, would be most pleasing to me.  But I must ask your pardon
for my stupidity.  Where have we met before?  Who are you, and what is
your name?"

The stranger did not immediately reply, but fixed his grave grey eyes
upon Verrill’s.  For a moment he held his gaze in his own.  Then as the
seconds slipped by, the first indefinite sense of suspicion flashed
across Verrill’s mind, flashed and faded, returned once more, faded
again, and left him wondering.  Then as the stranger said:

"Do you remember,—it was long ago.  Do you remember the sight of naked
spars rocking against a grey torn sky, a ship wrenching and creaking,
wrestling with the wind, a world of pale green surges, the gale singing
through the cordage, and then as the sea swept the decks—ah, you do
remember."

For Verrill had started suddenly, and with the movement, full
recognition, complete, unequivocal, gleamed suddenly in his eyes.  There
was a long silence while he returned the gaze of the other, now no
longer a stranger.  At length Verrill spoke, drawing a long breath.

"Ah ... it is you ... at last."

"Well!"

Verrill smiled:

"It _is_ well, I had imagined it would be so different,—when you did
come.  But as it is—," he extended his hand, "I am very glad to meet
you."

"Did I not tell you," said the other, "that of all the world, I am the
most cruelly misunderstood?"

"But you confessed to the masquerade."

"Oh, blind, blind, not to see behind the foolish masque.  Come, we have
not yet drunk."

He placed the cup in Verrill’s hands, and once again raised the glass.

"To our better acquaintance," he said.

"To our better acquaintance," echoed Verrill. He drained the cup.

"The lees were bitter," he observed.

"But the effect?"

"Yes, it is calming—already, exquisitely so.  It is not—as I have
imagined for so long, deadening, on the contrary, it is invigorating,
revivifying.  I feel born again."

The other rose: "Then there is no need," he said, "to stay here any
longer.  Come, shall we be going?"

"Yes, yes, I am ready," answered Verrill. "Look," he exclaimed, pointing
to the windows. "Look—it is morning."

Low in the east, the dawn was rising over the city.  A new day was
coming; the stars were paling, the night was over.

"That is true," said Verrill’s new friend. "Another day is coming.  It
is time we went out to meet it."

They rose and passed down the length of the Banquet Hall.  He who had
called himself the great Physician, the Servant of the Humble, the
Master of Kings, the Prince of Masqueraders, held open the door for
Verrill to pass.  But when the man had gone out, the Prince paused a
moment, and looked back upon the deserted Banquet Hall, lit partly by
the steady electrics, partly by the pale light of morning, that now
began with ever-increasing radiance to stream through the eastern
windows.  Then he stretched forth his hand and laid his touch upon a
button in the wall. Instantly the lights sank, vanished; for a moment
the hall seemed dark.

He went out quietly, shutting the door behind him.

                     *      *      *      *      *

And the Banquet Hall remained deserted, lonely, empty, yet it was
neither dark nor lifeless. Stronger and stronger grew the flood of light
that burned roseate toward the zenith as the sun came up.  It penetrated
to every corner of the room, and the drops of wine left in the bottom of
the glasses flashed like jewels in the radiance.  From without, from the
city’s streets, came the murmur of increasing activity.  Through the
night it had droned on, like the low-pitched diapason of some vast
organ, but now as the sun rose, it swelled in volume.  Louder it grew
and ever louder.  Its sound-waves beat upon the windows of the hall.
They invaded the hall itself.

It was the symphony of energy, the vast orchestration of force, the pæan
of an indestructible life, coeval with the centuries, renascent,
ordained, eternal.





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Third Circle" ***

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