Title: Those Times and These
Author: Cobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
Language: English
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THOSE TIMES AND THESE

By Irvin S. Cobb

George H. Doran Company New York

New York George H. Doran Company

Copyright, 1917



TO THE MEMORY OF

MANDY MARTIN, whose soul was as white as her skin was black, and who for
forty-two years, until her death, was a loyal friend and servant of my
people.



THOSE TIMES AND THESE



CHAPTER I. EX-FIGHTIN’ BILLY

TO me and to those of my generation, Judge Priest was always Judge
Priest. So he was also to most of the people of our town and our county
and our judicial district. A few men of his own age--mainly men who had
served with him in the Big War--called him Billy, right to his face, and
yet a few others, men of greater age than these, spoke of him and to
him as William, giving to the name that benignant and most paternal
air which an octogenarian may employ in referring to one who is ten or
fifteen years his junior.

I was a fairly sizable young person before ever I found out that once
upon a time among his intimates the Judge had worn yet another title.
Information upon this subject was imparted to me one summery afternoon
by Sergeant Jimmy Bagby as we two perched in company upon the porch of
the old boat-store.

I don’t know what mission brought Sergeant Bagby three blocks down
Franklin Street from his retail grocery establishment, unless it was
that sometimes the boat-store porch was cool while the rest of the town
baked. That is to say, it was cool by comparison. Little wanton breezes
that strayed across the river paid fluttering visits there before they
struck inland to perish miserably of heat prostration.

For the moment the Sergeant and I had the little wooden balcony to
ourselves, nearly everybody else within sight and hearing having gone
down the levee personally to enjoy the small excitement of seeing the
stem-wheel packet _Emily Foster_ land after successfully completing one
of her regular triweekly round trips to Clarksburg and way landings.

At the blast of the _Emily Foster’s_ whistles as she rounded to and put
her nose upstream preparatory to sliding in alongside the wharf, divers
coloured persons of the leisure class had roused from where they napped
in the shady lee of freight piles and lined up on the outer gunwales of
the wharf-boat ready to catch and make fast the head-line when it should
be tossed across the intervening patch of water into their volunteer
hands.

Two town hacks and two town drays had coursed down the steep gravelled
incline, with the draymen standing erect upon the jouncing springless
beds of their drays as was their way. In the matter of maintaining a
balance over rough going and around abrupt turns, no chariot racers of
old could have taught them anything. Only Sergeant Bagby and I, of all
in the immediate vicinity, had remained where we were. The Sergeant was
not of what you could exactly call a restless nature, and I, for the
moment, must have been overcome by one of those fits of languor which
occasionally descend upon the adolescent manling. We two bided where we
sat.

With a tinkle of her engine bells, a calling out of orders and
objurgations in the professionally hoarse, professionally profane voice
of her head mate and a racking, asthmatic coughing and sighing and
pounding from her exhaust pipes, the _Emily Foster_ had found her berth;
and now her late passengers came streaming up the slant of the hill--a
lanky timberman or two, a commercial traveller--most patently a
commercial traveller--a dressy person who looked as though he might be
an advance agent for some amusement enterprise, and a family of movers,
burdened with babies and bundles and accompanied by the inevitable hound
dog. The commercial traveller and the suspected advance agent patronised
the hacks--fare twenty-five cents anywhere inside the corporate
limits--but the rest entered into the city afoot and sweating. At the
very tail of the procession appeared our circuit judge, he being
closely convoyed by his black house-boy, Jeff Poindexter, who packed
the master’s bulging and ancient valise with one hand and bore a small
collection of law books under his other arm.

Looking much like a high-land terrapin beneath the shelter of his
venerable cotton umbrella, Judge Priest toiled up the hot slant.
Observed from above, only his legs were visible for the moment. We knew
him, though, by his legs--and also by Jeff and the umbrella. Alongside
the eastern wall of the boat-store, nearmost of all buildings to the
water-front, he halted in its welcome shadows to blow and to mop
his streaming face with a vast square of handkerchief, and, while so
engaged, glanced upward and beheld his friend, the Sergeant, beaming
down upon him across the whittled banister rail.

“Hello, Jimmy!” he called in his high whine.

“Hello, yourself!” answered the Sergeant. “Been somewheres or jest
traveling round?”

“Been somewheres,” vouchsafed the newly returned; “been up at
Livingstonport all week, settin’ as special judge in place of Judge
Given. He’s laid up in bed with a tech of summer complaint and I went up
to git his docket cleaned up fur him. He’s better now, but still puny.”

“You got back ag’in in time to light right spang in the middle of a warm
spell,” said Sergeant Bagby.

“Well,” stated Judge Priest, “it ain’t been exactly whut you’d call
chilly up the river, neither. The present thaw appears to be gineral
throughout this section of the country.” He waved a plump arm in
farewell and slowly departed from view beyond the side wail of the
boat-store.

“Looks like Judge Priest manages to take on a little more flesh every
year he lives,” said the Sergeant, who was himself no lightweight,
addressing the remark in my direction. “You wouldn’t scursely think it
to see him waddlin’ ‘long, a to tin’ all that meat on his bones; but
once’t upon a time he was mighty near ez slim ez his own ramrod and was
commonly known ez little Fightin’ Billy. You wouldn’t, now, would you?”

The question I disregarded. It was the disclosure he had bared which
appealed to my imagination and fired my curiosity. I said: “Mr. Bagby, I
never knew anybody ever called Judge Priest that?”

“No, you natchelly wouldn’t,” said the Sergeant--“not onless you’d mebbe
overheared some of us old fellers talkin’ amongst ourselves sometimes,
with no outsiders present. It wouldn’t hardly be proper, ever’thing
considered, to be referrin’ in public to the presidin’ judge of the
first judicial district of the State of Kintucky by sech a name ez that.
Besides which, he ain’t little any more. And then, there’s still another
reason.”

“How did they ever come to call him that in the first place?” I asked.

“Well, young man, it makes quite a tale,” said the Sergeant. With an
effort he hauled out his big silver watch, looked at its face, and then
wedged it back into a hidden recess under one of the overlapping creases
of his waistband.

“He acquired that there title at Shiloh, in the State of Tennessee, and
by his own request he parted from it some three years and four months
later on the banks of the Rio Grande River, in the Republic of Mexico,
I bein’ present in pusson on both occasions. But ef you’ve got time to
listen I reckin I’ve got jest about the time to tell it to you.”

“Yes, sir--if you please.” With eagerness, I hitched my cane-bottomed
chair along the porch floor to be nearer him. And then as he seemed not
to have heard my assent, I undertook to prompt him. “Er--what were you
and Judge Priest doing down in Mexico, Mr. Bagby?”

“Tryin’ to git out of the United States of America fur one thing.” A
little grin, almost a shamefaced grin, I thought, broke his round moist
face up into fat wrinkles. He puckered his eyes in thought, looking out
across the languid tawny river toward the green towhead in midstream
and the cottonwoods on the far bank, a mile and more away. “But I don’t
marvel much that you never heared the full circumstances before. Our
bein’ down in Mexico together that time is a fact we never advertised
‘round for common consumption--neither one of us.”

He withdrew his squinted gaze from the hot vista of shores and water and
swung his body about to face me, thereafter punctuating his narrative
with a blunted forefinger.

“My command was King’s Hell Hounds. There ought to be a book written
some of these days about whut all King’s Hell Hounds done en-durin’ of
the unpleasantness--it’d make mighty excitin’ readin’. But Billy and
a right smart chance of the other boys frum this place, they served
throughout with Company B of the Old Regiment of mounted infantry. Most
of the time frum sixty-one to sixty-five I wasn’t throwed with ‘em,
but jest before the end came we were all consolidated--whut there
was remainin’ of us--under General Nathan Bedford Forrest down in
Mississippi. Fur weeks and months before that, we knowed it was a
hopeless fight we were wagin’, but somehow we jest kept on. I reckin
we’d sort of got into the fightin’ habit. Fellers do, you know,
sometimes, when the circumstances are favourable, ez in this case.

“Well, here one mornin’ in April, came the word frum Virginia that
Richmond had fallen, and right on top of that, that Marse Robert had
had to surrender. They said, too, that Sherman had Johnston penned off
somewheres down in the Carolinas, we didn’t know exactly where, and that
Johnston would have to give up before many days passed. In fact, he
had already give up a week before we finally heared about it. So then
accordin’ to our best information and belief, that made us the last body
of organised Confederates on the east bank of the Mississippi River.
That’s a thing I was always mighty proud of. I’m proud of it yit.

“All through them last few weeks the army was dwindlin’ away and
dwindlin’ away. Every momin’ at roll-call there’d be a few more
absentees. Don’t git me _wrong_--I wouldn’t call them boys deserters.
They’d stuck that long, doin’ their duty like men, but they knowed good
and well--in fact we all knowed--‘twas only a question of time till even
Forrest would have to quit before overpowerin’ odds and we’d be called
on to lay down the arms we’d toted fur so long. Their families needed
‘em, so they jest quit without sayin’ anything about it to anybody and
went on back to their homes. This was specially true of some that lived
in that district.

“But with the boys frum up this way it was different. In a way of
speakin’, we didn’t have no homes to go back to. Our State had been in
Northern hands almost frum the beginnin’ and some of us had prices
on our heads right that very minute on account of bein’ branded ez
guerrillas. Which was a lie. But folks didn’t always stop to sift out
the truth then. They were prone to shoot you first and go into the
merits of the case afterward. Anyway, betwixt us and home there was a
toler’ble thick hedge of Yankee soldiers--in fact several thick hedges.
You know they called one of our brigades the Orphan Brigade. And there
were good reasons fur callin’ it so--more ways than one.

“I ain’t never goin’ to furgit the night of the fifth of May. Somehow
the tidin’s got round amongst the boys that the next mornin’ the
order to surrender was goin’ to be issued. The Yankee cavalry general,
Wilson--and he was a good peart fighter, too--had us completely blocked
off to the North and the East, but the road to the Southwest was still
open ef anybody cared to foller it. So that night some of us held a
little kind of a meetin’--about sixty of us--mainly Kintuckians, but
with a sprinklin’ frum other States, too.

“Ez I remember, there wasn’t a contrary voice raised when ‘twas
suggested we should try to make it acrost the big river and j’ine
in under Kirby Smith, who still had whut was left of the Army of the
Trans-Mississippi.

“Billy Priest made the principal speech. ‘Boys,’ he says, ‘South
Carolina may a-started this here war, but Kintucky has undertook the
contract to close it out. Somewheres out yonder in Texas they tell me
there’s yit a consid’ble stretch of unconquered Confederate territory.
Speakin’ fur myself I don’t believe I’m ever goin’ to be able to live
comfortable an’ reconciled under any other flag than the flag we’ve fit
to uphold. Let’s us-all go see ef we can’t find the place where our flag
still floats.’

“So we all said we’d go. Then the question ariz of namin’ a leader.
There was one man that had been a captain and a couple more that had
been lieutenants, but, practically unanimously, we elected little Billy
Priest. Even ef he was only jest a private in the ranks we all knowed
it wasn’t fur lack of chances to go higher. After Shiloh, he’d refused
a commission and ag’in after Hartsville. So, in lessen no time a-tall,
that was settled, too.

“Bright and early next day we started, takin’ our guns and our hosses
with us. They were our hosses anyway; mainly we’d borrowed ‘em off
Yankees, or anyways, off Yankee sympathisers on our last raid Northward
and so that made ‘em our pussonal property, the way we figgered it out.
‘Tennyrate we didn’t stop to argue the matter with nobody whutsoever.
We jest packed up and we put out--and we had almighty little to pack up,
lemme tell you.

“Ez we rid off we sung a song that was be-ginnin’ to be right
fashionable that spring purty near every place below Mason and Dixon’s
line; and all over the camp the rest of the boys took it up and made
them old woodlands jest ring with it. It was a kind of a farewell to us.
The fust verse was likewise the chorus and it run something like this:

     Oh, I’m a good old rebel, that’s jest whut I am;
     And fur this land of freedom I do not give a dam’,
     I’m glad I fit ag’in her, I only wish’t we’d won,
     And I don’t ax your pardon fur anything I’ve done.

“And so on and so forth. There were several more verses all expressin’
much the same trend of thought, and all entirely in accordance with our
own feelin’s fur the time bein’.

“Well, boy, I reckin there ain’t no use wastin’ time describin’ the
early stages of that there pilgrimage. We went ridin’ along livin’ on
the land and doin’ the best we could. We were young fellers, all of us,
and it was springtime in Dixie--you know whut that means--and in spite
of everything, some of the springtime got into our hearts, too, and
drove part of the bitterness out. The country was all scarified with
the tracks of war, but nature was doin’ her level best to cover up the
traces of whut man had done. People along our route had mighty slim
pickin’s fur themselves, but the sight of an old grey jacket was still
mighty dear to most of ‘em and they divided whut little they had with us
and wish’t they had more to give us. We didn’t need much at that--a few
meals of vittles fur the men and a little fodder fur our hosses and we’d
be satisfied. We’d reduced slow starvation to an exact ‘science long
before that. Every man in the outfit was hard ez nails and slim ez a
blue racer.

“Whut Northern forces there was East of the river we dodged. In fact we
didn’t have occasion to pull our shootin’-irons but once’t, and that
was after we’d cros’t over into Louisiana. There wasn’t any organised
military force to regulate things and in the back districts civil
government had mighty near vanished altogether. People had went back to
fust principles--wild, reckless fust principles they were, too. One day
an old woman warned us there was a gang of bushwhackers operatin’ down
the road a piece in the direction we were headin’--a mixed crowd of
deserters frum both sides, she said, who’d jined in with some of the
local bad characters and were preyin’ on the country, hariyin’
the defenceless, and terrorism’ women and children and raisin’ hob
ginerally. She advised us that we’d better give ‘em a wide berth.

“But Billy Priest he throwed out scouts and located the gang, and jest
before sunrise next mornin’ we dropped in on ‘em, takin’ ‘em by surprise
in the camp they’d rigged up in a live-oak thicket in the midst of a
stretch of cypress slashes.

“And when the excitement died down ag’in, quite a number of them
bushwhackers had quit whackin’ permanently and the rest of ‘em were
tearin’ off through the wet woods wonderin’, between jumps, whut had hit
‘em. Ez fur our command, we accumulated a considerable passel of plunder
and supplies and a number of purty fair hosses, and went on our way
rejoicin’. We hadn’t lost a man, and only one man wounded.

“When we hit the Texas border, news was waitin’ fur us. They told us ef
we aimed to ketch up with the last remainders of the army we’d have
to hurry, because Smith and Shelby, with whut was left of his Missoury
outfit, and Sterlin’ Price and Hindman with some of his Arkansaw boys
and a right smart sprinklin’ of Texans had already pulled up stakes
and were headed fur old Mexico, where the natives were in the enjoyable
midst of one of their regular revolutions.

“With the French crowd and part of the Mexicans to help him, the Emperor
Maximilian was tryin’ to hang onto his onsteady and topplin’ throne,
whilst the Republikins or Liberals, as they called themselves, were
tryin’ with might and main to shove him off of it. Ef a feller jest
natchelly honed fur an opportunity to indulge a fancy fur active
hostilities, Mexico seemed to offer a very promisin’ field of endeavour.

“It didn’t take us long to make up our minds whut course we’d follow.
Billy Priest put the motion. ‘Gentlemen,’ he says, ‘it would seem the
Southern Confederacy is bent and determined on gittin’ clear out frum
under the shad-der of the Yankee government. It has been moved and
seconded that we foller after her no matter where she goes. All in
favour of that motion will respond by sayin’ Aye--contrary-wise, No.
The Ayes seem to have it and the Ayes do have it and it is so ordered,
unanimously. By fours! Forward, march!’

“That happened in the town of Corsicana in the early summer-time of the
year. So we went along acrost the old Lone Star State, headin’ mighty
nigh due West, passin’ through Waco and Austin and San Antonio, and
bein’ treated mighty kindly by the people wheresoever we passed. And
ez we went, one of the boys that had poetic leanin’s, he made up a new
verse to our song. Let’s see, son, ef I kin remember it now after all
these years.”

The Sergeant thought a bit and then lifting his voice in a quavery
cadence favoured me with the following gem:

     I won’t be reconstructed; I’m better now than them;
     And fur a carpet-bagger I don’t give a dam;
     So I’m off fur the frontier, fast ez I kin go,
     I’ll purpare me a weepon and head fur Mexico.

“It was the middle of July and warm enough to satisfy the demands of the
most exactin’ when we reached the Rio Grande, to find out Shelby’s force
had done crossed over after buryin’ their battle-flag in the middle of
the river, wrapped up in a rock to hold it down. On one side was cactus
and greasewood and a waste of sandy land, that was already back in the
Union or mighty soon would be. On the other side was more cactus and
more grease-wood and more sandy loam, but in a different country. So,
after spendin’ a few pleasant hours at the town of Eagle Pass, we turn’t
our backs to one country and cros’t over to the other, alookin’ fur the
Confederacy wherever she might be. I figgered it out I was tellin’ the
United States of America good-by furever. I seem to remember that quite
a number of us kept peerin’ back over our shoulders toward the Texas
shore. They tell me the feller that wrote ‘Home Sweet Home’ didn’t have
any home to go to but he writ the song jest the same. Nobody didn’t say
nothin’, though, about weakenin’ or turnin’ back.

“Very soon after we hit Mexican soil we run into one of the armies--a
Liberal army, this one was, of about twelve hundred men, and its name
suited it to a T. The officers were liberal about givin’ orders and
the men were equally liberal about makin’ up their minds whether or not
they’d obey. Also, ez we very quickly discovered, the entire kit and
caboodle of ‘em were very liberal with reguards to other folks’ property
and other folks’ lives. We’d acquired a few careless ideas of our
own concernin’ the acquirin’ of contraband plunder durin’ the years
immediately precedin’, but some of the things we seen almost ez soon ez
we’d been welcomed into the hospitable but smelly midst of that there
Liberal army, proved to us that alongside these fellers we were merely
whut you might call amatoors in the confiscatin’ line.

“I wish’t I had the words to describe the outfit so ez you could see it
the way I kin see it this minute. This purticular army was made up
of about twelve hundred head, includin’ common soldiers. I never saw
generals runnin’ so many to the acre before in my life. The Confederacy
hadn’t been exactly destitute in that respect but--shuckins!--down here
you bumped into a brigadier every ten feet. There was a considerable
sprinklin’ of colonels and majors and sech, too; and here and there
a lonesome private. Ef you seen a dark brown scarycrow wearin’ fur a
uniform about enough rags to pad a crutch with, with a big sorry straw
hat on his head and his feet tied up in bull hides with his bare toes
peepin’ coyly out, and ef he was totin’ a flint lock rifle, the chances
were he’d be a common soldier. But ef in addition to the rest of his
regalia he had a pair of epaulettes sewed onto his shoulders you mout
safely assume you were in the presence of a general or something of that
nature. I ain’t exaggeratin’--much. I’m only tryin’ to make you git the
picture of it in your mind.

“Well, they received us very kindly and furnished us with rations, sech
ez they were--mostly peppers and beans and a kind of batter-cake that’s
much in favour in them parts, made out of corn pounded up fine and mixed
with water and baked ag’inst a hot rock. Ef a man didn’t keer fur the
peppers, he could fall back on the beans, thus insurin’ him a change of
diet, and the corn batter-cakes were certainly right good-tastin’.

“Some few of our dark-complected friends kin make a stagger at speakin’
English, so frum one of ‘em Billy inquires where is the Confederacy?
They explains that it has moved on further South but tells us that first
General Shelby sold ‘em the artillery he’d fetched with him that fur to
keep it frum failin’ into the Yankees’ hands. Sure enough there’re the
guns--four brass field-pieces. Two of ‘em are twelve-pounders and the
other two are four-teen-pounders. The Mexicans are very proud of their
artillery and appear to set much store by it.

“Well, that evenin’ their commandin’ general comes over to where we’ve
made camp, accompanied by his coffee-coloured staff, and through an
interpreter he suggests the advisability of our j’inin’ in with them,
he promisin’ good pay and offerin’ to make us all high-up officers. He
seems right anxious to have us enlist with his glorious forces right
away. In a little while it leaks out why he’s so generous with his
promises and so wishful to see us enrolled beneath his noble banner.
He’s expectin’ a call inside of the next forty-eight hours frum the
Imperials that’re reported to be movin’ up frum the South, nearly two
thousand strong, with the intention of givin’ him battle.

“Billy Priest, speakin’ fur all of us, says he’ll give him an answer
later. So the commandin’ general conceals his disappointment the best he
kin and retires on back to his own headquarters, leavin’ us to discuss
the proposition amongst ourselves. Some of the boys favour thro win’
in with the Liberals right away, bein’ hongry fur a fight, I reckin,
or else sort of dazzled by the idea of becomin’ colonels and majors
overnight. But Billy suggests that mebbe we’d better jest sort of hang
‘round and observe the conduct and deportment of these here possible
feller warriors of our’n whilst they’re under hostile fire. ‘Speakin’
pusson-ally,’ he says, ‘I must admit I ain’t greatly attracted to them
ez they present themselves to the purview of my gaze in their ca’mmer
hours. Before committin’ ourselves, s’posen we stand by and take a few
notes on how they behave themselves in the presence of an enemy. Then,
there’ll be abundant time to decide whether we want to stay a while with
these fellers or go long about our business of lookin’ fur the Southern
Confederacy.’

“That sounded like good argument, so we let Billy have his way about it,
and we settled down to wait. We didn’t have long to wait. The next day
about dinner-time, here come the Imperial army, advancin’ in line of
battle. The Liberals moved out acrost the desert to meet ‘em and we-all
mounted and taken up a position on a little rise close at hand, to
observe the pur-ceedin’s.

“Havin’ had consider’ble experience in sech affairs, I must say I don’t
believe I ever witnessed such a dissa’pintin’ battle ez that one turn’t
out to be. The prevailin’ notion on both sides seemed to be that the
opposin’ forces should march bravely toward one another ontil they got
almost within long range and then fur both gangs to halt ez though by
simultaneous impulse, and fire at will, with nearly everybody shootin’
high and wide and furious. When this had continued till it become
mutually bore-some, one side would charge with loud cheers, ashootin’
ez it advanced, but prudently slowin’ down and finally haltin’ before it
got close enough to inflict much damage upon the foe or to suffer much
damage either. Havin’ accomplished this, the advancin’ forces would fall
back in good order and then it was time fur the other side to charge.
I must say this in justice to all concerned--there was a general
inclination to obey the rules ez laid down fur the prosecution of tie
kind of warfare they waged. Ez a usual thing, I s’pose it would be
customary fur the battle to continue ez described until the shades
of night descended and then each army would return to its own base,
claimin’ the victory. But on this occasion something in the nature of a
surprise occurred that wasn’t down on the books a-tall.

“Right down under the little rise where us fellers sat waitin’, stood
them four guns that the Liberals bought off of Shelby. Ef brass cannons
have feelin’s--and I don’t know no reason why they shouldn’t have--them
cannons must have felt like something was radically wrong. The crews
were loadin’ and firin’ and swabbin’ and loadin’ and firin’ ag’in--all
jest ez busy ez beavers. But they plum overlooked one triflin’ detail
which the military experts have always reguarded ez bein’ more or less
essential to successful artillery operations. They forgot to aim in the
general direction at the enemy. They done a plentiful lot of cheerin’,
them gun crews did, and they burnt up a heap of powder and they raised a
powerful racket and hullabaloo, but so fur ez visible results went they
mout jest ez well have been bombardin’ the clear blue sky of heaven.

“Well, fur quite a spell we stayed up there on the brow of the hill,
watchin’ that there engagement. Only you couldn’t properly call it an
engagement--by rights it wasn’t nothin’ but a long distance flirtation.
Now several of our boys had served one time or another with the guns.
There was one little feller named Vince Hawley, out of Lyon’s Battery,
that had been one of the crack gunners of the Western Army. He held in
ez long ez he could and then he sings out:

“‘Boys, do you know whut’s ailin’ them pore mistreated little
field-pieces down yonder? Well, I’ll tell you. They’re Confederate guns,
born, bred, and baptised; and they’re cravin’ fur Confederate hands to
pet ‘em. It mout be this’ll be the last chance a Southern soldier
will ever git to fire a Southern gun. Who’ll go ‘long with me fur one
farewell sashay with our own cannons?’

“In another minute eight or ten of our command were pilin’ off their
horses and tearin’ down that little hill behind Vince Hawley and bustin’
in amongst the Mexies and laying violent but affectionate hands on
one of the twelve-pounders. Right off, the natives perceived whut our
fellers wanted to do and they fell back and gave ‘em elbow-room. Honest,
son, it seemed like that field-piece recognised her own kind of folks,
even ‘way off there on the aidge of a Mexican desert, and strove to
respond to their wishes. The boys throwed a charge into her and Hawley
sighted her and then--kerboom--off she went!

“Off the Imperial forces went, too. The charge landed right in amongst
their front ranks ez they were advancin’--it happened to be their turn
to charge--takin’ ‘em absolutely by surprise. There was a profound
scatteration and then spontaneous-like the enemy seemed to come to a
realisation of the fact that the other side had broke all the rules and
was actually tryin’ to do ‘em a real damage. With one accord they turned
tail and started in the general direction of the Isthmus of Panama.
Ef they kept up the rate of travel at which they started, they arrived
there inside of a week, too--or mebbe even sooner. I s’pose it depended
largely on whether their feet held out.

“Hawley and his gang run the gun forward to the crest of a little swale
ready to give the retreatin’ forces another treatment in case they
should rally and re-form, but a second dose wasn’t needed. Howsomever,
before the squad came back, they scouted acrost the field to see whut
execution their lone charge had done. Near to where the shell had busted
they gathered up six skeered soldiers--fellers that had dropped down,
skeered but unhurt, when the smash come and had been layin’ there in a
hollow in the ground, fearin’ the worst and hopin’ fur the best. So
they brung ‘em back in with ‘em and turned ‘em over to the Liberals ez
prisoners of war.

“The rest of us were canterin’ down on the flat by now. We arrived in
time to observe that some of the victorious Liberals were engaged in
lashin’ the prisoners’ elbows together with ropes, behind their backs,
and that whut looked like a firin’ squad was linin’ up conveniently
clos’t by. Billy Priest went and located a feller that could interpret
after a fashion and inquired whut was the idea. The interpreter feller
explained that the idea was to line them six prisoners up and shoot ‘em
to death.

“‘Boys,’ says Billy, turnin’ to us, ‘I’m afeared we’ll have to interfere
with the contemplated festivalities. Our friends are too gently-inclined
durin’ the hostilities and too blame’ bloodthirsty afterward to suit
me. Let us bid an adieu to ‘em and purceed upon our way. But first,’ he
says, ‘let us break into the picture long enough to save those six poor
devils standin’ over there in a row, all tied up like beef-critters fur
the butcher.’

“So we rid in betwixt the condemned and the firin’ squad and by various
devices such ez drawin’ our carbines and our six-shooters, we made plain
our purpose. At that a wave of disappointment run right through the
whole army. You could see it travellin’ frum face to face under the dirt
that was on said faces. Even the prisoners seemed a trifle put-out and
downcasted. Later we found out why. But nobody offered to raise a hand
ag’inst us.

“‘All right then,’ says Billy Priest, ‘so fur so good. And now I think
we’d better be resumin’ our journey, takin’ our captives with us. I’ve
got a presentiment,’ he says, ‘that they’d probably enjoy better health
travellin’ along with us than they would stayin’ on with these here
Liberals.’

“‘How about them four field-pieces?’ says one of the boys, speakin’ up.
‘There’s plenty of hosses to haul ‘em. Hadn’t we better take them along
with us, too? They’ll git awful lonesome bein’ left in such scurvy
company--poor little things!’

“‘No,’ says Billy, ‘I reckin that wouldn’t be right. The prisoners are
our’n by right of capture, but the guns ain’t. These fellers bought ‘em
off Shelby’s brigade and they’re entitled to keep ‘em. But before we
depart,’ he says, ‘it mout not be a bad idea to tinker with ‘em a little
with a view to sort of puttin’ ‘em out of commission fur the time bein’.
Our late hosts mout take a notion to turn ‘em on us, ez we are goin’
away frum ‘em and there’s a bare chance,’ he says, ‘that they might hit
some of us--by accident.’

“So we tinkered with the guns and then we moved out in hollow formation
with the six prisoners marchin’ along in the middle and not a soul
undertakin’ to halt us ez we went. On the whole them Liberals seemed
right pleased to get shet of us. But when we’d gone along fur a mile or
so, one of the Mexicans flopped down on his knees and begin to jabber.
And then the other five follered suit and jabbered with him. After
‘while it dawned on us that they were beggin’ us to kill ‘em quick and
not torture ‘em, they thinkin’ we’d only saved ‘em frum bein’ shot in
order to do something much more painful to ‘em at our leisure. So then
four or five of the boys dropped down off their mounts and untied ‘em
and faced ‘em about so the open country was in front of ‘em and give
‘em a friendly kick or two frum behind ez a notice to ‘em to be on their
way. They lit out into the scrub and were gone the same ez ef they’d
been so many Molly Cottontails.

“Fur upward of a week then, we moved along, headin’ mighty nigh due
South. Considerin’ that the country was supposed to be in the midst of
civil war we saw powerful few evidences of it ez we rode through. Life
fur the humble Mexican appeared to be waggin’ along about ez usual, but
was nothin’ to brag about, at that. We seen him ploughin’ amongst the
prevalent desolation with a forked piece of wood, one fork bein’ hitched
to a yoke of oxen and the other fork bein’ shod with a little strip of
rusty iron. We seen him languidly gatherin’ his wheat, him goin’ ahead
and pullin’ it up out of the ground, roots and all and pilin’ it in
puny heaps, and then the women cornin’ along behind him and tyin’ it
in little bunches with strings. Another place we seen him and his women
folks threshin’ grain by beatin’ it with sticks and dependin’ on the
wind to help ‘em winnow the wheat from the chaff jest ez it is written
‘twas done in the Bible days. We seen him in his hours of ease, fightin’
his chicken-cock against some other feller’s game-bird, and gamblin’ and
scratchin’ his flea-bites and the more we seen of him the less we seemed
to keer fur him. He mout of been all right in his way, but he wasn’t our
kind of folks; I reckin that was it.

“And he repaid the compliment by not appearin’ to keer very deeply fur
us strangers neither, but the women seemed to take to us, mightily.
They’d come out to us frum their little dried mud cabins bringin’ us
beans and them flat batter-cakes of their’n and even sometimes milk and
butter. Also they gave us roughage fur our hosses and wouldn’t take pay
fur none of it, indicatin’ by signs that it was all a free gift. Whut
between the grazin’ they got and the dried fodder the women gave us,
our hosses took on flesh and weren’t sech ga’nted crowbaits ez they had
been.

“Seven days of traversin’ that miser’ble land and then, son, we ran
smack into the Imperial scouts and found we’d arrived within less ‘en a
day’s march of the city of Monterey. Purty soon out come a detachment of
cavalry to meet us and inquire into our business and a most
Godforsaken lookin’ bunch they were, but with ‘em they had half a dozen
Confederates--Missoury boys, all of ‘em exceptin’ one, him bein’ frum
Louisiana; and these here Missoury fellers told us some news. It seemed
that after Shelby and Price and Hindman got to Monterey their little
army had split in two, most of its members headin’ off toward the City
of Mexico with no purticular object in view so fur ez anybody knowed
but jest filled with a restless cravin’ to stay in the saddle and keep
movin’, and the rest strikin’ Westward toward the Pacific Coast.

“But about two hundred of ‘em had stayed behind and enlisted at
Monterey, havin’ been given a bounty of six hundred dollars apiece and
a promise of one hundred dollars a month in pay ef they’d fight fur
Maximilian. The delegation that had rode out to meet us now were part
and parcel of that two hundred. They seemed tickled to death to see us
and they bragged about the money they were gittin’, but ef you watched
‘em kind of clos’t you could tell, mighty easy, they weren’t exactly
overjoyed and carried away with enthusiasm over their present jobs. They
told us in confidence that the French officers in their army were fine
soldiers and done the best they could with the material they had, but
that the rank and file were small potatoes and few in the hill. In fact,
we gathered frum remarks let fall here and there that after servin’ ez
a Confederate fur a period of years and fightin’ ag’inst husky fellers
frum Indiana or Kansas or Michigan or somewheres up that way, bein’ a
soldier of fortune with the Imperials and fightin’ ag’inst the Liberals
was, comparatively speakin’, a mighty tame pursuit--that you’d
probably live longer so doin’, but you wouldn’t have anywheres near
the excitement. On top of all that, though, they extended a cordial
invitation to us to go on back to Monterey with ‘em and enlist under the
Maximilian government.

“Some of our outfit seemed to sort of lean toward the proposition and
some to sort of lean ag’inst it, without exactly statin’ their reasons
why and wherefore. But amongst us all there wasn’t a man but whut relied
mighty implicit on Billy Priest’s judgment, and besides which, you’ve
got to remember, son, that discipline had come to be a sort of an
ingrained habit with us. We’d got used to lookin’ to our leaders to show
us the way and give us our orders and then we’d try to obey ‘em, spite
of hell and high water. That’s the way it had been with us for four
long years and that’s the way it still was with us. So under the
circumstances, with sentiment divided ez it was, we-all waited to see
how Billy Priest felt, because ez I jest told you, we imposed a heap of
confidence in his views on purty near any subject you mout mention. The
final say-so bein’ put up to him, he studied a little and then he said
to the Missoury boys that hearin’ frum them about the Confederacy havin’
split up into pieces had injected a new and a different aspect into
the case and in his belief it was a thing that needed thinkin’ over and
mebbe sleepin’ on. Accordin’ly, ef it was all the same to them, he’d
like to wait till next mornin’ before comin’ to a definite decision and
he believed that in this his associates would concur with him. That
was agreeable to the fellers that had brung us the invitation, or ef
it wasn’t they let on like it was anyhow, and so we left the matter
standin’ where it was without further argument on their part.

“They told us good-by and expressed the hope that they’d see us next day
in Monterey and then they rid on back to headquarters to report progress
on the part of the committee on new members and to ask further time, I
s’pose. Ez fur us, we went into camp right where we was.

“Most of us suspicioned that after we’d fed the hosses and et our supper
Billy would call a sort of caucus and git the sense of the meetin’, but
he didn’t take no steps in that direction and of course nobody else
felt qualified to do so. After a while the fires we’d lit to cook our
victuals on begin to die down low and the boys started to turn in. There
wasn’t much talkin’ or singin’, or skylarkin’ round, but a whole heap of
thinkin’ was goin’ on--you could feel it in the air. I was layin’ there
on the ground under my old ragged blankets with my saddle fur a pillow
and the sky fur my bed canopy, but I didn’t drop right off like I
usually done. I was busy ponderin’ over in my mind quite a number of
things. I remember how gash’ly and on-earthly them old cactus plants
looked, loomin’ up all ‘round me there in the darkness and how strange
the stars looked, a-shinin’ overhead. They didn’t seem like the same
stars we’d been used to sleepin’ under before we come on down here
into Mexico. Even the new moon had a different look, ez though it
was another moon frum the one that had furnished light fur us to go
possum-huntin’ by when we were striplin’ boys growin’ up. This here one
was a lonesome, strange, furreign-lookin’ moon, ef you git my meanin’?
Anyhow it seemed so to me.

“Somebody spoke my name right alongside of me, and I tum’t over and
raised up my head and there was Billy Priest hunkered down. He had a
little scrap of dried greasewood in his hand and he was scratchin’ with
it in the dirt in a kind of an absent-minded way.

“‘You ain’t asleep yet, Jimmy?’ he says to me.

“‘No,’ I says, ‘I’ve been layin’here, study-in’.’

“‘That so?’ he says. ‘Whut about in particular?’

“‘Oh nothin’ in particular,’ I says, ‘jest studyin’.’

“He don’t say anything more fur a minute; jest keepin’ on makin’
little marks in the dirt with the end of his stick. Then he says to me:
“‘Jimmy,’ he says, ‘I’ve been doin’ right smart thinkin’ myself.’

“‘Have you?’ I says.

“‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I have. I’ve been thinkin’ that whilst peppers make
quite spicy eatin’ and beans are claimed to be very nourishin’ articles
of food, still when taken to excess they’re liable to pall on the
palate, sooner or later.’

“‘They certainly are,’ I says.

“‘Let’s see,’ he says. ‘This is the last week in July, ain’t it? Back in
God’s country, the first of the home-grown watermelons oughter be comin’
in about now, oughten they? And in about another week from now they’ll
be pickin’ those great big stripedy rattlesnake melons that grow in the
river bottoms down below town, won’t they?’

“‘Yes,’ I says, ‘they will, ef the season ain’t been rainy and set ‘em
back.’

“‘Let us hope it ain’t,’ he says, and I could hear his stick scratchin’
in the grit of that desert land, makin’ a scrabblin’ itchy kind of
sound.

“‘Jimmy Bagby,’ he says, ‘any man’s liable to make a mistake sometimes,
but that don’t necessarily stamp him ez a fool onlessen he sticks to it
too long after he’s found out it is a mistake.’

“‘Billy,’ I says, ‘I can’t take issue with you there.’”

“‘F’r instance now,’ he says, ‘you take a remark which I let fall some
weeks back touch-in’ on flags. Well I’ve been thinkin’ that remark over,
Jimmy, and I’ve about come to the conclusion that ef a man has to give
up the flag he fout under and can’t have it no longer, he mout in time
come to be equally comfortable in the shadder of the flag he was born
under. He might even come to love ‘em both, mighty sincerely--lovin’ one
fur whut it meant to him once’t and fur all the traditions and all the
memories it stands fur, and lovin’ the other fur whut it may mean to him
now and whut it’s liable to mean to his children and their children.’

“‘But Billy,’ I says, ‘when all is said and done, we fit in defence of a
constitutional principle.’

“‘You bet we did,’ he says; ‘but it’s mostly all been said and it’s
practically all been done. I figger it out this way, Jimmy. Reguardless
of the merits of a given case, ef a man fights fur whut he thinks is
right, so fur ez he pussonally is concerned, he fights fur whut is
right. I ain’t expectin’ it to happen yit awhile, but I’m willin’ to bet
you something that in the days ahead both sides will come to feel jest
that way about it too.’

“‘Do you think so, Billy?’ I says.

“‘Jimmy,’ he say, ‘I don’t only think so--I jest natchelly knows so. I
feel it in my bones.’

“‘Then I persume you must be correct,’ I says.

“He waits a minute and then he says: ‘Jimmy,’ he says, ‘I don’t believe
I’d ever make a success ez one of these here passenger-pigeons. Now, a
passenger-pigeon ain’t got no regular native land of his own. He loves
one country part of the time and another country part of the time,
dividin’ his seasons betwixt ‘em. Now with me I’m afraid it’s different.’

“‘Billy,’ I says, ‘I’ve about re’ch the conclusion that I wasn’t cut out
to be a passenger-pigeon, neither.’

“He waits a minute, me holdin’ back fur him to speak and wonderin’ whut
his next subject is goin’ to be. Bill Priest always was a master one to
ramble in his conversations. After a while he speaks, very pensive:

“‘Jimmy,’ he says, ‘ef a man was to git up on a hoss, say to-morrow
momin’ and ride along right stiddy he’d jest about git home by
hog-killin’ time, wouldn’t he?’

“‘Jest about,’ I says, ‘ef nothin’ serious happened to delay him on the
way.’

“‘That’s right,’ he says, ‘the spare ribs and the chitterlin’s would
jest about be ripe when he arrove back.’

“I didn’t make no answer to that--my mouth was waterin’ so I couldn’t
speak. Besides there didn’t seem to be nothin’ to say.

“‘The fall revivals ought to be startin’ up about then, too,’ he says,
‘old folks gittin’ religion all over ag’in and the mourners’ bench
overflowin’, and off in the back pews and in the dark comers young folks
flirtin’ with one another and holdin’ hands under cover of the
hymn-books. But all the girls we left behind us have probably got new
beaux by now, don’t you reckin?’

“‘Yes, Billy,’ I says, ‘I reckin they have and I don’t know ez I could
blame ‘em much neither, whut with us streakin’ ‘way off down here like a
passel of idiots.’

“He gits up and throws away his stick.

“‘Well, Jimmy,’ he says, ‘I’m powerful glad to find out we agree on so
many topics. Well, good night,’ he says.

“‘Good night,’ I says, and then I rolled over and went right off to
sleep. But before I dropped off I ketched a peep of Billy Priest,
squattin’ down alongside one of the other boys, and doubtless fixin’ to
read that other feller’s thoughts like a book the same ez he’d jest been
readin’ mine.

“Well, son, the next mornin’ at sun-up we were all up, too. We had our
breakfast, sech ez it was, and broke camp and mounted and started off
with Billy Priest ridin’ at the head of the column and me stickin’
clos’t beside him. I didn’t know fur sure whut was on the mind of
anybody else in that there cavalcade of gentlemen rangers, but I was
mighty certain about whut I aimed to do. I aimed to stick with Billy
Priest; that’s whut. Strange to say, nobody ast any questions about whut
we were goin’ to do with reguards to them Imperalists waitin’ there
fur us in Monterey. You never saw such a silent lot of troopers in your
life. There wasn’t no singin’ nor laughin’ and mighty little talkin’.
But fur half an hour or so there was some good, stiddy lopin’.

“Presently one of the boys pulled out of line and spurred up alongside
of our chief.

“‘S’cuse me, commander,’ he says, ‘but it begins to look to me like we
were back trackin’ on our own trail.’

“Billy looks at him, grinnin’ a little through his whiskers. We all had
whiskers on our faces, or the startin’s of ‘em.

“‘Bless my soul, I believe you’re right!’ says Billy. ‘Why, you’ve got
the makin’s of a scout in you.’

“‘But look here,’ says the other feller, still sort of puzzled-like,
‘that means we’re headin’ due North, don’t it?’

“‘It means I’m headin’ North,’ says Billy, and at that he quit grinnin’.
‘But you, nor no one else in this troop don’t have to fol-ler along
onlessen you’re minded so to do. Every man here is a free agent and his
own boss. And ef anybody is dissatisfied with the route I’m takin’ and
favours some other, I’d like fur him to come out now and say so. It
won’t take me more’n thirty seconds to resign my leadership.’

“‘Oh, that’s all right,’ says the other feller, ‘I was merely astin’ the
question, that’s all. I ain’t dissatisfied. I voted fur you ez commander
fur the entire campaign--not fur jest part of it. I was fur you when we
elected you, and I’m fur you yit.’

“And with that he wheeled and racked along back to his place. Purty soon
Billy looked over his shoulder along the column and an idea struck him.
Not fur behind him Tom Moss was joggin’ along with his old battered
banjo swung acrost his back. Havin’ toted that there banjo of his’n all
through the war he’d likewise brought it along with him into Mexico.
He had a mighty pleasin’ voice, too, and the way he could sing and play
that song about him bein’ a good old rebel and not carin’ a dam’ made
you feel that he didn’t care a dam’, neither. Billy beckoned to him and
Tom rid up alongside and Billy whispered something in his ear. Tom’s
face all lit up then and he on-slung his banjo frum over his shoulder
and throwed one laig over his saddle-bow and hit the strings a couple of
licks and reared his head back and in another second he was singin’ at
the top of his voice. But this time he wasn’t singin’ the song about
bein’ a good old rebel. He was singin’ the one that begins:

     The sun shines bright on my Old Kintucky Home;
     ‘Tis Summer, the darkies are gay,
     The corn tops are ripe and the medders are in bloom,
     And the birds make music all the day.’

“In another minute everybody else was singin’, too--singin’ and
gallopin’. Son, you never in your whole life seen so many hairy, ragged,
rusty fellers on hoss-back a-tear in’ along through the dust of a
strange land, actin’ like they were all in a powerful hurry to git
somewheres and skeered the gates would be shut before they arrived.
Boy, listen: the homesickness jest popped out through my pores like
perspiration.

“It taken us all of seven days to git frum the border acros’t that long
stretch of waste to within a day’s ride of the city of Monterey. It only
taken us four and a half to git back ag’in to the border, the natives
standin’ by to watch us as we tore on past ‘em. The sun was still
several hours high on the evenin’ of the fifth day when we come in sight
of the Rio Grande River; and I don’t ever seem to recall a stretch
of muddy yaller water that looked so grateful to my eyes ez that one
looked.

“We come canterin’ down to the water’s edge, all of us bein’ plum’ jaded
and mighty travel-worn. And there, right over yond’ on the fur bank
we could see the peaky tops of some army tents standin’ in rows and we
heared the notes of a bugle, soundin’ mighty sweet and clear in that
still air. And it dawned on us that by a strange coincidence whut
wouldn’t be liable to happen once’t in a dozen years had happened in our
purticular case--that the United States Government, ez represented by a
detachment of its military forces, had moved down to the line at a point
almost opposite to the place where we aimed to cross back over.

“I ain’t sure yit whut it was--it mout a-been the first sight of the
foeman he’d fit ag’inst so long that riled him or it mout a-been merely
a sort of sneakin’ desire to make out like he purposed to hold off to
the very last and then be won over by sweet blandishments--but jest ez
we reached the river, a big feller hailin’ frum down in Bland County rid
up in front of Billy Priest and he says he wants to ast him a question.

“‘Fire away,’ says Billy.

“‘Bill Priest,’ says the Bland County feller, ‘I take it to be your
intention to go back into the once’t free but now conquered state of
Texas?’

“‘Well, pardner,’ says Billy in that whiny way of his’n, ‘you certainly
are a slow one when it comes to pickin’ up current gossip ez it flits to
and fro about the neighbourhood. Why do you s’pose we’ve all been
ridin’ hell-fur-leather in this direction endurin’ of the past few days
onlessen it was with that identical notion in mind?’

“‘Never mind that now,’ says the other feller. ‘Circumstances alter
cases. Don’t you see that there camp over yonder is a camp of Yankee
soldiers?’

“‘Ef my suspicions are correct that’s jest whut it is,’ says Billy very
politely. ‘Whut of it?’

“‘Well,’ says the other feller, ‘did it ever occur to you that ef we
cross here them Yankees will call on us to lay down the arms which we’ve
toted so long? Did it ever occur to you that mebbe they’d even expect us
to take their dam’ oath of allegiance?’

“‘Yes,’ says Billy Priest, ‘sence you bring up the subject, it had
occurred to me that they mout do jest that. And likewise it has also
occurred to me that when them formalities are concluded they mout extend
the hospitalities of the occasion by invitin’ us to set down with them
to a meal of real human vittles. Why,’ he says, ‘I ain’t tasted a cup of
genuwyne coffee in so long that----!’

“The other feller breaks in on him before Billy can git done with whut
he’s sayin’.

“‘And you,’ he says, sort of sneerful and insinuatin’, ‘you, here only
some three or four months back was a ring-leader and a head-devil in
formin’ this here expedition. You was goin’ round makin’ your brags
that you’d be the last one to surrender--you! And we’ve been callin’ you
Fightin’ Billy! Fightin’ Billy? Hell’s fire!’

“Billy rammed his heels in his hoss’s flanks and shoved over, only
reinin’ up when he was touchin’ laigs with the Bland County feller. A
shiny little blue light come into his eyes and the veins in his neck all
swelled out.

“‘My esteemed friend and feller-country-man,’ says Billy, speakin’
plenty slow and plenty polite, ‘ef any gentleman present is inclined to
make a pussonal matter of it, I’ll undertake to endeavour to prove up
my right to that there title right here and now. But ef not, I wish to
state fur the benefit of all concerned that frum this minute I ain’t
figgerin’ on wearin’ the nickname any longer. Frum where I set it looks
to me like this is a mighty fitten and appropriate time to go out of the
fightin’ business and resume the placid and pleasant ways of peace. Frum
now on, to friends ez well ez to strangers, I’m goin’ to be jest plain
William Pitman Priest, Esquire, attorney and counsellor-at-law. I ast
you all to kindly bear it in mind. And furthermore speakin’ solely and
exclusively fur the said William Pitman Priest, I will state it is my
intention of gittin’ acrost this here river in time to eat my supper on
the soil of my own country. Ef anybody here feels like goin’ along with
me I’ll be glad of his company. Ef not, I’ll bid all you good comrades
an affectionate farewell and jest jog along over all by my lonesome
self.’

“But, of course, when he said that last he was jest funnin’--talkin’ to
hear hisself talk. He knowed good and well we would all go with him. And
we did. And ez fur ez I know none of us ever had cause to regret takin’
the step.

“By hurryin’, we did git back home before hog-killin’ time. And then
after a spell, when we’d had our disabilities removed, some of us
like Billy Priest started runnin’ fur office and bein’ elected with
reasonable regularity and some of us, like me, went into business. We
lived through bayonet rule and reconstruction and carpet-baggery, and
we lived to see all them evils die out and a better feelin’ and a better
understandin’ come in. We’ve been livin’ ever since, sech of us ez are
still survivin’. I’ve done consider’ble livin’ myself. I’ve lived to see
North and South united. I’ve even lived to see my own daughter married
to the son of a Northern soldier, with the full consent of the families
on both sides. And so that’s how it happens I’ve got a grandson that’s
part Yankee and part Confederate in his breedin’. I reckin there
ain’t nobody that’s ez plum’ foolish ez I am about that there little,
curly-headed sassy tike, without it’s his grandfather on the other side,
old Major Ashcroft. We differ radically on politics, the Major bein’ a
besotted and hopeless black Republikin; and try ez I will I ain’t never
been able to cure him of a delusion of his’n that the Ninth Michigan
could a-helt its own ag’inst King’s Hell Hounds ef ever they’d met up
on the field of battle; but in other respects he’s a fairly intelligent
man; and he certainly does coincide with me that betwixt us we’ve got
the smartest four-year-old youngster fur a grandchild that ever was
born. There’s hope fur a nation that kin produce sech children ez that
one, ef I do say it myself.”

He stood up and shook himself.

“In fact, son,” concluded Sergeant Bagby, “you mout safely say that,
takin’ one thing with another, this country is turnin’ out to be quite a
success.”



CHAPTER II. AND THERE WAS LIGHT

SO many things that at first seem amazingly complex turn out amazingly
simple. The purely elemental has a trick of ambushing itself behind a
screen of mystery; but when by deduction and elimination--in short, by
the simple processes of subtraction and division--we have stripped away
the mask, the fact stands so plainly revealed we marvel that we did
not behold it from the beginning. Elemental, you will remember, was a
favourite word with Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and one much employed by him in
the elucidation of problems in criminology for the better enlightenment
of his sincere but somewhat obvious-minded friend, the worthy Doctor
Watson.

On the other hand, traits and tricks that appear to betray the
characters, the inclinations and, most of all, the vocations of their
owners may prove misleading clues, and very often do. You see a black
man with a rolling gait, who spraddles his legs when he stands and sways
his body on his hips when he walks; and, following the formula of the
deductionist cult of amateur detectives, you say to yourself that here,
beyond peradventure, is a deep-water sailor, used to decks that heave
and scuppers that flood. Inquiry but serves to prove to you how wrong
you are. The person in question is a veteran dining-car waiter.

Then along comes another--one with a hearty red face, who rears well
back and steps out with martial precision. Evidently a retired officer
of the regular army, you say to yourself. Not at all; merely the former
bass drummer of a military brass band. The bass drummer, as will readily
be recalled, leans away from his instrument instead of toward it.

For a typical example of this sort of thing, let us take the man I have
in mind for the central figure of this tale. He was a square-built man,
round-faced, with a rather small, deep-set grey eye, and a pair of big
hands, clumsy-looking but deft. He wore his hair short and his upper
lip long. Appraising him upon the occasion of a chance meeting in the
street, you would say offhand that this, very probably, was a man who
had been reasonably successful in some trade calling for initiative
and expertness rather than for technic. He wouldn’t be a theatrical
manager--his attire was too formal; or a stockbroker--his attire was not
formal enough.

I imagine you in the act of telling yourself that he might be a clever
life-insurance solicitor, or a purchasing agent for a trunk line, or a
canny judge of real-estate values--a man whose taste in dress would run
rather to golf stockings than to spats, rather to soft hats than to
hard ones, and whose pet hobby would likely be trout flies and not first
editions. In a part of your hypothesis you would have been absolutely
correct. This man could do things with a casting rod and with a mid-iron
too.

Seeing him now, as we do see him, wearing a loose tweed suit and sitting
bareheaded behind a desk in the innermost room of a smart suite of
offices on a fashionable side street, surrounded by shelves full of
medical books and by wall cases containing medical appliances, you,
knowing nothing of him except what your eye told you, would probably
hazard a guess that this individual was a friend of the doctor, who,
having dropped in for social purposes and having found the doctor out,
had removed his hat and taken a seat in the doctor’s chair to await the
doctor’s return.

Therein you would have been altogether in error. This man was not the
doctor’s friend, but the doctor himself--a practitioner of high repute
in his own particular line. He was known as a specialist in neurotic
disorders; privately he called himself a specialist in human nature. He
was of an orthodox school of medicine, but he had cast overboard most
of the ethics of the school and he gave as little as possible of the
medicine. Drugs he used sparingly, preferring to prescribe other things
for most of his patients--such things, for instance, as fresh air,
fresh, vegetables and fresh thoughts. His cures were numerous and his
fees were large.

On the other side of a cross wall a woman sat waiting to see him. She
was alone, being the first of his callers to arrive this day. A heavy,
deep-cushioned town car, with a crest on its doors and a man in fine
livery to drive it, had brought her to the doctor’s address five minutes
earlier; car and driver were at the curb outside.

The woman was exquisitely groomed and exquisitely overdressed. She
radiated luxury, wealth and the possession of an assured and enviable
position. She radiated something else, too--unhappiness.

Here assuredly the lay mind might make no mistake in its summarising.
There are too many like her for any one of us to err in our diagnosis
when a typical example is presented. The city is especially prolific of
such women. It breeds them. It coddles them and it pampers them, but
in payment therefore it besets them with many devils. It gives them
everything in reason and out of reason, and then it makes them long for
something else--anything else, so long as it be unattainable. Possessed
of the nagging demons of unrest and discontent and satiation, they feed
on their nerves until their nerves in retaliation begin to feed on them.
The result generally is smash. Sanitariums get them, and divorce courts
and asylums--and frequently cemeteries.

The woman who waited in the reception room did not have to wait very
long, yet she was hard put to it to control herself while she sat there.
She bit her under lip until the red marks of her teeth showed in the
flesh, and she gripped the arms of her chair so tightly and with
such useless expenditure of nervous force that through her gloves the
knuckles of her hands exposed themselves in sharp high ridges.

Presently a manservant entered and, bowing, indicated mutely that
his master would see her now. She fairly ran past him through the
communicating door which he held open for her passage. As she entered
the inner room it was as though her coming into it set all its
orderliness awry. Only the ruddy-faced specialist, intrenched behind the
big table in the middle of the floor, seemed unchanged. She halted on
the other side of the table and bent across it toward him, her finger
tips drumming a little tattoo upon its smooth surface. He did not speak
even the briefest of greetings; perhaps he was minded not to speak. He
waited for her to begin.

“Doctor,” she burst out, “you must do something for me; you must give
me medicine--drugs--narcotics--anything that will soothe me. I did not
sleep at all last night and hardly any the night before that. All
night I sat up in bed or walked the floor trying to keep from screaming
out--trying to keep from going mad. I have been dressed for hours--I
made my maid stay up with me--waiting for your office to open so that I
might come to you. Here I am--see me! See the state I am in! Doctor, you
must do something for me--and do it now, quickly, before I do something
desperate!”

She panted out the last words. She put her clenched hands to her bosom.
Her haggard eyes glared into his; their glare made the carefully applied
cosmetics upon her face seem a ghastly mask.

“I have already prescribed for you, madam,” the doctor said. “I told you
that what you mainly needed was rest--complete and absolute rest.”

“Rest? Rest! How can I rest? What chance is there for me to rest? I
can’t rest! If I try to rest I begin to think--and then it is worse than
ever. I must keep on the go. Something drives me on--something inside
me, here--to go and go, and to keep on going until I drop. Oh, doctor,
you don’t know what I suffer--what I have to endure. No one knows what I
have to endure. No one understands. My husband doesn’t understand me--my
children do not, nor my friends.

“Friends? I have no friends. I can’t get on with any one--I quarrel
with every one. I know I am sick, that I am irritable and out-of-sorts
sometimes. And I know that I am self-willed and want my own way. But
I’ve always been self-willed; it’s a part of my nature. And I’ve always
had my own way. They should appreciate that. But they don’t. They
cross me. At every turn somebody crosses me. The whole world seems in a
conspiracy to deny me what I want.

“It can’t be my fault always that I am forever quarrelling with
people--with my own family; with my husband’s family; with every one who
crosses my path. I tell you they don’t understand me, doctor. They don’t
make allowances for my condition. If they would only make allowances!
And they don’t give me any consideration. I can’t stand it, doctor! I
can’t go on like this any longer. Please--please, doctor, do something
for me!”

Mounting hysteria edged her voice with a sharpened, almost a vulgar
shrillness. The austere and studied reserve of her class--a reserve that
is part of it poise and the rest of it pose--dropped away from her
like a discarded garment, and before her physician she revealed herself
nakedly for what she was--a creature with the passions, the forwardness
and the selfishness of a spoiled and sickly child; and, on top of
these, superimposed and piled up, adult impulses, adult appetites, adult
petulance, adult capacity for misery.

“I told you,” he said, “to go away. I thought, until my man brought me
your name a bit ago, that you had gone. Weeks ago I told you that travel
might help you--not the sort of travel to which you have been used, but
a different sort--travel in the quiet places, out of the beaten path,
and rest. I told you the same thing again less than a week ago.”

“But where?” she demanded. “Where am I to go? Tell me that! I have been
everywhere--I have seen everything. What is there left for me to see in
the world? What is there in the world that is worth seeing? You told
me before there was nothing organically wrong with me, nothing
fundamentally wrong with my body. Then it must be my mind, and travel
couldn’t cure a mind in the state that mine is in. How can I rest when I
am so distracted, when small things upset me so, when----”

In the midst of this new outburst she broke off. Her eyes, wandering
from his as she pumped herself up toward a frenzy, were focused now upon
some object behind him. She pointed toward it.

“I never saw that before,” she said. “It wasn’t there when I was here
last.”

He swung about in his chair, its spiral creaking under his weight.

“No,” he said; “you never saw that before. It came into my possession
only a day or two ago. It is a----”

She broke in on him.

“What a wonderful face!” she said. “What beauty there is in it--what
peace! I think that is what made me notice it--the peace that is in it.
Oh, if I could only be like that! Doctor, the being to whom that face
belonged must have had everything worth having. And to think there can
be such beings in this world--beings so blessed, so happy--while
I--I----”

Tears of self-pity came into her eyes. She was slipping back again into
her former mood. With his gaze he caught and held hers, exerting all his
will to hold it. A brother psychologist seeing him in that moment
would have said that to this man a possible way out of a dilemma had
come--would have said that an inspiration suddenly had visited him.

“Perhaps you would like to see it at closer range,” he said, still
steadfastly regarding her. “There is a story regarding it--a story that
might interest you, madam.”

He rose from his place, crossed the room and, reaching up, took down
a plaster cast of a face that rested upright against the broad low
moulding that ran along his walls on two sides.

As he brought it to her he saw that she had taken a chair. Her figure
was relaxed from its recent rigidness. Her elbows were upon the
tabletop. He put the cast into her gloved hands and reseated himself.
She held it before her at arm’s length, and one gloved hand went over
its surface almost caressingly.

“It is wonderful!” she said. “I never saw such an expression on any
human face--why, it is soothing to me just to look at it. Doctor, where
did you get it? Who was the original of it--or don’t you know? What
living creature sat for the artist who made it?”

“No living creature sat for it,” he said slowly.

“Oh!” she said disappointedly. “Well, then, what artist had the
imagination to conjure up such a conception?”

“No artist conjured it up,” he told her.

“Then how-”

“That, madam,” he said, “is a death mask.”

“A death mask!” Her tone was incredulous. “A death mask, doctor?”

“Yes, madam--a death mask. See, the eyes are closed--are half closed,
anyway.”

“Do you mean to tell me that death can leave such an expression on any
face? How could--”

She broke off, staring incredulously at the thing.

“That is what makes the story I mean to tell you,” he said--“if you care
to hear it?”

“Of course I want to hear it.” Her manner was insistent, impatient,
demanding almost. “Please go on.”

He kept her in suspense a moment or two; and so they both sat, he
squinting up at the ceiling as though marshalling a narrative in its
proper sequence in his mind, she holding fast to the disked shape of
white plaster. At length he began, speaking slowly.

“Here is the story,” he said: “A few weeks ago an acquaintance of
mine--a fellow physician--told me of a case he thought might interest
me. Primarily it was a surgical case, and I, as perhaps you know, do not
practise surgery; but there was another aspect of it that did have a
direct and personal appeal for me.

“It seems that some weeks before there had been put into his hands for
treatment a man--a young man--who was stone-deaf and stone-blind, and
whose senses of taste and of smell were greatly affected--perhaps I
should say impaired. He could speak, more or less imperfectly, and his
sense of touch was good; in fact, better than with ordinary mortals.
These two faculties alone remained to him. He had been afflicted so from
childhood; the attack, or the disease, which left him in this state
had come upon him very early, before his mind had registered very many
sensible impressions.

“Speech and feeling--these really were what remained intact. Yet his
intelligence, considering these handicaps, was above the average, and
his body was healthy, and his temperament, in the main, sanguine.
Practically all his life he had been in an asylum--a charity
institution. Until chance brought him to the attention of this
acquaintance of mine it had seemed highly probable that he would spend
the rest of his life in this institution.

“The physicians there regarded his case as hopeless. They were
conscientious men--these physicians--and they were not lacking in
sympathy, I think; but their hands and their thoughts were concerned
with their duties, and perhaps--mind you, I say perhaps--perhaps an
individual case more or less did not mean to them what it means to the
physician in private practice. You understand? So this young man, who
was well formed physically, who was normal in his mental aspects, seemed
to be doomed to serve a life sentence inside walls of utter darkness and
utter silence.

“Well, this man came under the attention of the surgeon I have
mentioned. Possibly because it seemed so hopeless, the case interested
the surgeon. He made up his mind that the affliction--afflictions
rather--were not congenital, not incurable. He made up his mind that a
tumorous growth on the brain was responsible for the present state of
the victim. And he made up his mind that an operation--a delicate and
a risky and a difficult operation--might bring about a cure. If the
operation failed the subject would pass from the silence and the
blackness he now endured into a silence and a blackness which many of
us, similarly placed, would find preferable. He would die--quickly and
painlessly. If the operation succeeded he probably would have back all
his faculties--he would begin really to live. The surgeon was willing to
take the chance, to assume the responsibility.

“The other man was willing to take his chance too. Both of them took it.
The operation was performed--and it was a success. The man lived through
it, and when he was lifted off the table my friend had every reason to
believe--in fact, to know as surely as a man whose business is tampering
with the human organism can know anything--that before very long this
man, who had walked all his days in darkness, lacking taste and smell,
and hearing no sound, would have back all that his afflictions had
denied him.

“To my friend, the surgeon, it seemed likely that I, as a person
concerned to a degree in psychologic manifestations and psychologic
phenomena, would be glad of the opportunity to be present at the hour
when this man, through his eyes, his ears, his tongue and his palate,
first registered intelligible and actual impressions. And I was glad
of the opportunity. Almost it would be like witnessing the rebirth of
a human being; certainly it would be witnessing the mental awakening,
through physical mediums, of a human soul.

“At first hand I would see what this world, to which you and I are
accustomed and of which some of us have grown weary, meant to one who
had been so completely, so utterly shut out from that world through all
the more impressionable years of his life. Naturally I was enormously
interested to hear what he might say, to see what he might do in the
hour of his reawakening and re-creation.

“So I went with the surgeon on the day appointed by him for testing the
success of his operation. Only five of us were present--the man himself,
the surgeon who had cured him, two others and myself. Until that hour
and for every hour since he had come out from under the ether, the
patient’s eyes had been bandaged to shut out light, and his ears had
been muffled to shut out sounds, and he had been fed on liquid mixtures
administered artificially.”

“Why?” asked the woman, interrupting for the first time.

For a moment the doctor hesitated. Then he went on smoothly to explain:

“You see, they feared the sudden shock to senses and to organs made
sensitive by long disuse until he had completely rallied from the
operation. So they had hooded his eyes and his ears.”

“But food--why couldn’t he have eaten solid food before this?” she
insisted. “That is what I mean.”

“Oh, that?” he said, and again he halted for an instant. “That was
done largely on my account. I think the surgeon wanted the test to be
complete at one time and not developed in parts. You understand, don’t
you?”

She nodded. And he continued, watching her face intently as he
proceeded:

“So, first of all, we led him into a partly darkened room and sat him
down at a table; and we gave him food--very simple food--a glass of cold
water; a piece of bread, buttered; a baked Irish potato, with butter and
salt upon it--that was all. We stood about him watching him as he tasted
of the things we put before him--for it was really the first time he had
ever properly tasted anything.

“Madam, if I live to be a hundred years old, I shall never forget the
look that came into his face then. Even though he lacked the words
to express himself, as you and I with our greater vocabularies might
conceivably have expressed ourselves had such an experience come to us,
I knew that to him the bread was ambrosia and the water was nectar.

“He didn’t wolf the food down as I had rather expected he might. He ate
it slowly, extracting the flavour from every crumb of it. And the water
he took in sips, allowing it to trickle down his throat, drop by drop
almost. And then he spoke to us, touching the bread and the potato and
the water glass. Mind you, I am reproducing the sense of what he said
rather than his exact words. He said:

“‘What is this--and this--and this? What are these delicious things
you have given me to eat? And what is this exquisite drink I have
swallowed?’

“We told him and he seemed not to believe it at first. He said:

“‘Why, I have handled such things as these often. I have taken them up
in my hands a thousand times and I have swallowed them. I should have
known what they were by the touch of my fingers--but the taste of
them deceived me. Can it be possible that these things are common
things--that even poor people can feast upon such meals as this which I
am eating? Can it even be possible that there is food within the reach
of ordinary mortals which has a finer zest than this?’

“And when his friend, the surgeon, told him ‘Yes’--told him ‘Yes’ many
times and in many ways--still he seemed loath to believe it. When he had
finished, to the last scrap of the potato skin and the last morsel of
the bread crust and the last drop in the glass, he bowed his head and
outspread his hands before him as though returning thanks for a glorious
benefaction.

“Perhaps I should have told you that this took place late in the
afternoon. We waited a little while after that, and then just before
sunset we took him outdoors into a little shabby garden on the asylum
grounds; and we freed his eyes and we unmuffled his ears. And then we
drew back from him a distance and watched him to see what he would do.

“For a little while he did nothing except stand in his tracks,
transfixed and transfigured. He saw the sky and the sunlight and the
earth and the grass and the shadows upon the earth and the trees and the
flowers that were about him--saw them literally in a celestial vision;
and he smelled the good wholesome smells of the earth, and the scents of
the struggling, straggling flowers in the ill-kept flower beds, and the
scents of the green things growing there too.

“And just then, as though it had known and had been inspired to choose
this instant for bringing to him yet another sensation, a thrush--a
common brown thrush--began singing in an elm tree almost directly above
him. Of course it was merely a coincidence that a thrush should begin
singing then and there. Thrushes are plentiful enough about the country
in this climate at this season of the year. Central Park is full of
them, sometimes. Most of us scarcely notice them, or their singing
either. But, you see, with this man it was different. He literally was
undergoing re-creation, re-incarnation, resurrection. Call it what you
please. It was one of those three things. In a way of speaking it was
all three of them.

“At the first note of music from the bird he gave a quick start, and
then he threw back his head and uplifted his face; and quite near at
hand he saw the little rusty-coloured chap, singing away there, with
its speckled throat feathers rising and falling, and he heard the sounds
that poured from the thrush’s open beak. And as he looked and listened
he put his hands to his breast as though something were hurting him
there. He didn’t move until the bird had fluttered away. Nor did we move
either.

“Then he turned and came stumbling and reeling toward us, literally
drunk with joy. His intoxication of ecstasy thickened his tongue and
choked him until he, at first, could not speak to us. After a bit,
though, the words came outpouring from his lips.

“‘Did you hear that?’ he cried out. ‘Did you hear it? Do you smell the
earth and the flowers? And the sky--I have seen it! I can see it now.
Oh, hasn’t God been good to us to give us all this? Oh, hasn’t He been
good to me?’

“In an outburst of gratitude he seized the hand of my friend and kissed
it again and again. I had meant to take notes of his behaviour as we
went along, but I took none. I knew that afterward I could reproduce
from memory all that transpired.

“Presently he was calmer, and the surgeon said to him:

“‘My son, there is something yet to be seen--something that you, having
so many other things to see, have overlooked. Look yonder!’ And he
pointed to the West, where the sun was just going down.

“And, at that, the other man faced about and looked full into his
first sunset. Instantly his whole mood changed. It became rapt,
reverential--you might say worshipful. His lips moved, but no words came
from them at first, and he made as though to shut out the sight with
his hands, as though the beauty of the vision was too great for him to
endure. I went to him and put my hand on his shoulder. He was quivering
from head to foot in an ague of sheer happiness. He seemed hardly to
know I was there. He did not look toward me. He kept his eyes fixed upon
the West as if he were greedy to miss nothing of the spectacle.

“Until now the sunset had seemed to me less beautiful by far than many
another summer sunset I had seen, for the sky was rather overcast and
the colours not particularly vivid; but, standing there beside him, in
physical contact with him, I caught from him something of what he felt,
and I saw that glow in the west as some-thing of indescribable grandeur
and unutterable splendour, a miracle too glorious for words to describe
or painters to reproduce upon squares of canvas.

“Presently he spoke to me, still without turning his head in my
direction.

“‘How often does this--this--come to pass?’ he asked, panting the words
out.

“‘Many times a year,’ I told him. ‘At this season nearly every evening.’

“‘And is it ever so beautiful as this?’ he said.

“‘Often more beautiful,’ I said. ‘Often the colours are richer and
deeper.’

“‘Why are there not more of us here to look upon it?’ he asked. ‘Surely
at this hour all mankind must cease from its tasks--from whatever it is
doing--to see this miracle--this free gift of the Creator!’

“I tried to tell him that mankind had grown accustomed to the daily
repetition of the sunset, but he seemed unable to comprehend. As the
last flattened ray of sunshine faded upon the grass, and the afterglow
began to spread across the heavens, I thought he was about to faint; and
I put both my arms round him to steady him. But he did not faint, though
he trembled all over and took his breath into his lungs in great sobbing
gulps. I showed him the evening star where it shone in the sky, and he
watched it brighten, saying nothing at all.

“Suddenly he turned to me and said:

“‘At last I have lived, and I have found that life is sweet. Life is
sweeter than I ever dared to hope it might be.’

“Then he said:

“‘I have a home. Will you show me where it is? While I was blind I could
feel my way to it; but, now that I can see, I feel lost--all things are
so changed to me. Please lead me there--I want to see with my own eyes
what a home is like.’

“So I took his hand in mine and we went toward it, and the three others
who were there followed after us.

“Madam, his home--the only home he had, for so far as we knew, he had no
living kinspeople--was a room in that big barn of an asylum. I led
him to the door of it. It was a barren enough room--you know how these
institutions are apt to be furnished, and this room was no exception to
the rule. Bare walls, a bare floor, bare uncurtained windows, a bed, a
chair or two, a bare table--a sort of hygienic and sanitary brutality
governed all its appointments.

“I imagine the lowest servant in your employ has a more attractively
furnished room than this was. Now, though, it was flooded with the
afterglow, which poured in at the windows; that soft light alone
redeemed its hideousness of outline and its poverty of furnishings.

“He halted at the threshold. We know what home means to most of us. How
much must it have meant, then, to him! He could see the walls closing
round to encompass him in their friendly companionship; he could see the
roof coming down to protect him.

“‘Home!’ he said to himself in a half whisper, under his breath. ‘What a
beautiful word home is! And what a beautiful place my home is!’

“Nobody gave the signal, none of us made the suggestion by word or
gesture; but with one accord we four, governed by the same impulse, left
him and went away. We felt in an inarticulate way that he was entitled
to be alone; that no curious eye had any right to study his emotions in
this supreme moment.

“In an hour we went back. He was lying where he had fallen--across
the threshold of his room. On his face was a beatific peace, a content
unutterable--and he was dead. Joy I think had burst his heart. That bit
of plaster you hold in your hand is his death mask.”

The doctor finished his tale. He bent forward in his chair to see
the look upon his caller’s face. She stood up; and she was a creature
transformed and radiant!

“Doctor,” she said--and even her voice was altered--“I am going
home--home to my husband and my children and my friends. I believe I
have found a cure for my--my trouble. Rather, you have found it for me
here to-day. You have taught me a lesson. You have made me see things
I could not see before--hear things I could not hear before. For I have
been blind and deaf, as blind and as deaf as this man was--yes, blinder
than he ever was. But now”--she cried out the words in a burst
of revelation--“but now--why, doctor, I have everything to live
for--haven’t I?”

“Yes, madam,” he said gravely; “you have everything to live for. If only
we knew it, if only we could realise it, all of us in this world have
everything to live for.”

She nodded, smiling across the table at him. “Doctor,” she said, “I
do not believe I shall ever come back here to see you--as a patient of
yours.”

“No,” he affirmed; “I do not believe you will ever come back--as a
patient of mine.”

“But, if I may, I should like to come sometimes, just to look at that
face--that dead face with its living message for me.”

“Madam,” he told her, “you may have it on two conditions--namely, that
you keep it in your own room, and that you do not tell its story--the
story I have just told you--to any other person. I have reasons of my
own for making those conditions.”

“In my own room is exactly where I would keep it,” she said. “I promise
to do as you ask. I shall never part with it. But how can you part with
it?”

“Oh, I think I know where I can get another copy,” he said, “The
original mould has not been destroyed. I am sure my--my friend--has it.
This one will be delivered at your home before night. My servant shall
take it to you.”

“No,” she said. “If you do not mind, I shall take it with me now--in my
own hands.”

She clasped the gift to her breast, holding it there as though it were
a priceless thing--too priceless to be intrusted to the keeping of any
other than its possessor.

For perhaps five minutes after the departure of his recent patient the
great specialist sat at his desk smiling gently to himself. Then he
touched with his forefinger a button under the desk. His manservant
entered.

“You have heard of troubles being started by a lie, haven’t you?” asked
the doctor abruptly.

“Yes, sir--I think so, sir.”

The man was not an Englishman, but he had been trained in the school of
English servants. His voice betrayed no surprise.

“Well, did you ever hear of troubles being ended by a lie?”

“Really, sir, I can’t say, sir--offhand.”

“Well, it can be done,” said the doctor; “in fact, it has been done.”

The man stood a moment.

“Was that all, sir?”

“No; not quite,” said the master. “Do you remember an Italian pedlar who
was here the other day?”

“An Italian pedlar, sir?”

“Yes; don’t you remember? A street vender who passed the door. I called
him in and bought a plaster cast from him--for seventy-five cents, as I
recall.”

“Oh, yes, sir; I do remember now.”

The man’s eyes flitted to an empty space on the wall moulding above the
bookcase behind his employer’s chair, and back again to his employer’s
face.

“Well,” said the doctor, “you keep a lookout for him, in case he passes
again. I want to buy another of those casts from him. I think it may be
worth the money--the last one was, anyhow.”



CHAPTER III. CHAPTER III. MR. FELSBURG GETS EVEN

OF all the human legs ever seen in our town I am constrained to admit
that Mr. Herman Felsburg’s pair were the most humorous legs. When it
came to legs--funny legs--the palm was his without a struggle. Casting
up in my mind a wide assortment and a great range of legs, I recall no
set in the whole of Red Gravel County that, for pure comedy of contour
or rare eccentricity of gait, could compare with the two he owned. In
his case his legs achieved the impossible by being at one and the same
time bent outward and warped inward, so that he was knock-kneed at a
stated point and elsewhere bow-legged. And yet, as legs go, they were
short ones. For a finishing touch he was, to a noticeably extent,
pigeon-toed.

I remember mighty well the first time Mr. Felsburg’s legs first acquired
for me an interest unrelated to their picturesqueness of aspect. As
I think backward along the grooves of my memory to that occasion, it
defies all the rules of perspective by looming on a larger scale and in
brighter and more vivid colours than many a more important thing which
occurred in a much more recent period. I reckon, though, that is because
our Creator has been good enough to us sometimes to let us view our
childhood with the big, round, magnifying eyes of a child.

I feel it to be so in my case. By virtue of a certain magic I see a
small, inquisitive boy sitting on the top step of the wide front porch
of an old white house; and as he sits he hugs his bare knees within the
circle of his arms and listens with two wide-open ears to the talk that
shuttles back and forth among three or four old men who are taking their
comfort in easy-chairs behind a thick screen of dishrag and morning
glory and balsam-apple vines.

I am that small boy who listens; and, as the picture forms and frames
itself in my mind, one of the men is apt to be my uncle. He was not my
uncle by blood ties or marriage, but through adoption only, as was the
custom down our way in those days and, to a certain degree, is still the
custom; and, besides, I was his namesake.

I know now, when by comparison I subject the scene to analysis, that
they were not such very old men--then. They are old enough now--such of
them as survive to this day. None of that group who yet lives will ever
see seventy-five again. In those times grown people would have called
them middle-aged men, or, at the most, elderly men; but when I re-create
the vision out of the back of my head I invest them with an incredible
antiquity and a vasty wisdom, because, as I said just now, I am looking
at them with the eyes of a small boy again. Also, it seems to me, the
season always is summer--late afternoon or early evening of a hot, lazy
summer day.

It was right there, perched upon the top step of Judge Priest’s front
porch, that I heard, piece by piece, the unwritten history of our
town--its tragedies and its farces, its homely romances and its homely
epics. There I heard the story of Singin’ Sandy Riggs, who, like
Coligny, finally won by being repeatedly whipped; and his fist feud with
Harve Allen, the bully; and the story of old Marm Perry, the Witch. I
don’t suppose she was a witch really; but she owned a black cat and
she had a droopy lid, which hung down over one red eye, and she lived a
friendless life.

And so when the babies in the settlement began to sicken and die of the
spotted fever somebody advanced the very plausible suggestion that Marm
Perry had laid a spell upon the children, and nearly everybody else
believed it. A man whose child fell ill of the plague in the very hour
when Marm Perry had spoken to the little thing took a silver dollar
and melted it down and made a silver bullet of it--because, of course,
witches were immune to slugs of lead--and on the night after the day
when they buried his baby he slipped up to Marm Perry’s cabin and fired
through the window at her as she sat, with her black cat in her lap,
mouthing her empty gums over her supper. The bullet missed her--and he
was a good shot, too, that man was. Practically all the men who lived in
those days on the spot where our town was to stand were good shots. They
had to be--or else go hungry frequently.

When the news of this spread they knew for certain that only by fire
could the evil charm be broken and the conjure-woman be destroyed. So
one night soon after that a party of men broke into Marm Perry’s cabin
and made prisoners of her and her cat. They muffled her head in a
bedquilt and they thrust the cat into a bag, both of them yowling and
kicking; and they carried them to a place on the bluff above Island
Creek, a mile or so from the young settlement, and there they kindled a
great fire of brush; and when the flames had taken good hold of the wood
they threw Marm Perry and her cat into the blaze and stood back to see
them burn. Mind you, this didn’t happen at Salem, Massachusetts, in or
about the year 1692. It happened less than a century ago near a small
river landing on what was then the southwestern frontier of these United
States.

There were certain men, though--leaders of opinion and action in the
rough young community--who did not altogether hold with the theory that
the evil eye was killing off the babies. Somehow they learned what
was afoot and they followed, hotspeed, on the trail of the volunteer
executioners. As the tale has stood through nearly a hundred years of
telling, they arrived barely in time. When they broke through the ring
of witch burners and snatched Marm Perry off the pyre, her apron strings
had burned in two. As for the cat, it burst through the bag and ran off
through the woods, with its fur all ablaze, and was never seen again. I
remember how I used to dream that story over and over again. Always in
my dreams it reached its climax when that living firebrand went tearing
off into the thickets. Somehow, to me, the unsalvaged cat took on more
importance than its rescued owner.

There were times, too, when I chanced to be the only caller upon Judge
Priest’s front porch, and these are the times which in retrospect seem
to me to have been the finest of all. I used to slip away from home
alone, along toward suppertime, and pay the Judge a visit. Many and many
a day, sitting there on that porch step, I watched the birds going to
bed. His big front yard was a great place for the birds. In the deep
grass, all summer long and all day long, the cock partridge would be
directing the attention of a mythical Bob White to the fact that his
peaches were ripe and overripe. If spared by boys and house cats until
the hunting season began he would captain a covey. Now he was chiefly
concerned with a family. Years later I found that his dictionary name
was American quail; but to us then he was a partridge, and in our town
we still know him by no other title.

Forgetting all about the dogs and the guns of the autumn before he would
even invade Judge Priest’s chicken lot to pick up titbits overlooked by
the dull-eyed resident flock; and toward twilight, growing bolder still,
he would whistle and whistle from the tall white gate post of the front
fence, while his trim brown helpmate clucked lullabies to her speckled
brood in the rank tangle back of the quince bushes.

When the redbirds called it a day and knocked off, the mocking birds
took up the job and on clear moonlight nights sang all night in the
honey locusts. Just before sunset yellow-hammers would be flickering
about, tremendously occupied with things forgotten until then; and the
chimney swifts that nested in Judge Priest’s chimney would go whooshing
up and down the sooty flue, making haunted-house noises in the old
sitting room below.

Sprawled in his favourite porch chair, the Judge would talk and I would
listen. Sometimes, the situation being reversed, I would talk and he
listen. Under the spell of his sympathetic understanding I would be
moved to do what that most sensitive and secretive of creatures--a small
boy--rarely does do: I would bestow my confidences upon him. And if he
felt like laughing--at least, he never laughed. And if he felt that the
disclosures called for a lecture he rarely did that, either; but if he
did the admonition was so cleverly sugar-coated by his way of framing it
that I took it down without tasting it.

As I see the vision now, it was at the close of a mighty warm day, when
the sun went down as a red-hot ball and all the west was copper-plated
with promise of more heat to-morrow, when Mr. Herman Felsburg passed.
I don’t know what errand was taking him up Clay Street that evening--he
lived clear over on the other side of town. But, anyway, he passed; and
as he headed into the sunset glow I was inspired by a boy’s instinctive
appreciation of the ludicrous to speak of the peculiar conformation of
Mr. Felsburg’s legs. I don’t recall now just what it was I said, but
I do recall, as clearly as though it happened yesterday, the look that
came into Judge Priest’s chubby round face.

“Aha!” he said; and from the way he said it I knew he was displeased
with me. He didn’t scold me, though--only he peered at me over his
glasses until I felt my repentant soul shrivelling smaller and smaller
inside of me; and then after a bit he said: “Aha! Well, son, I reckin
mebbe you’re right. Old Man Herman has got a funny-lookin’ pair of
laigs, ain’t he? They do look kinder like a set of hames that ain’t been
treated kindly, don’t they? Whut was it you said they favoured--horse
collars, wasn’t it?” I tucked a regretful head down between my hunched
shoulders, making no reply. After another little pause he went on:

“Well, sonny, ef you should be spared to grow up to be a man, and there
should be a war comin’ along, and you should git drawed into it someway,
jest you remember this: Ef your laigs take you into ez many tight places
and into ez many hard-fit fights as I’ve saw them little crookedy
laigs takin’ that little man, you won’t have no call to feel ashamed of
‘em--not even ef yours should be so twisted you’d have to walk backward
in order to go furward.”

At hearing this my astonishment was so great I forgot my remorse of a
minute before. I took it for granted that off yonder, in those far-away
days, most of the older men in our town had seen service on one side or
the other in the Big War--mainly on the Southern side. But somehow it
never occurred to me that Mr. Herman Felsburg might also have been a
soldier. As far back as I recalled he had been in the clothing business.
Boylike, I assumed he had always been in the clothing business. So----

“Was Mr. Felsburg in the war?” I asked.

“He most suttinly was,” answered Judge Priest.

“As a regular sure-nuff soldier!” I asked, still in doubt.

“Ez a reg’lar sure-nuff soldier.”

I considered for a moment.

“Why, he’s Jewish, ain’t he, Judge?” I asked next.

“So fur as my best information and belief go, he’s practically
exclusively all Jewish,” said Judge Priest with a little chuckle.

“But I didn’t think Jewish gentlemen ever did any fighting, Judge?”

I imagine that bewilderment was in my tone, for my juvenile education
was undergoing enlargement by leaps and bounds.

“Didn’t you?” he said. “Well, boy, you go to Sunday school, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes, sir--every Sunday--nearly.”

“Well, didn’t you ever hear tell at Sunday school of a little feller
named David that taken a rock-sling and killed a big giant named
Goliath?”

“Yes, sir; but----”

“Well, that there little feller David was a Jew.”

“I know, sir; but--but that was so long ago!”

“It was quite a spell back, and that’s a fact,” agreed Judge Priest.
“Even so, I reckin human nature continues to keep right on bein’ human
nature. You’ll be findin’ that out, son, when you git a little further
along in years. They learnt you about Samson, too, didn’t they--at that
there Sunday school?”

I am quite sure I must have shown enthusiasm along here. At that period
Samson was, with me, a favourite character in history. By reason of his
recorded performances he held rank in my estimation with Israel Putnam
and General N. B. Forrest.

“Aha!” continued the Judge. “Old Man Samson was right smart of a
fighter, takin’ one thing with another, wasn’t he? Remember hearin’
about that time when he taken the jawbone of an ass and killed up I
don’t know how many of them old Philistines?”

“Oh, yes, sir. And then that other time when they cut off his hair short
and put him in jail, and after it grew out again he pulled the temple
right smack down and killed everybody!”

“It strikes me I did hear somebody speakin’ of that circumstance too. I
expect it must have created a right smart talk round the neighbourhood.”

I can hear the old Judge saying this, and I can see--across the
years--the quizzical little wrinkles bunching at the corners of his
eyes.

He sat a minute looking down at me and smiling.

“Samson was much of a man--and he was a Jew.”

“Was he?” I was shocked in a new place.

“That’s jest exactly what he was. And there was a man oncet named
Judas--not the Judas you’ve heared about, but a feller with the full
name of Judas Maccabæus; and he was such a pert hand at fightin’ they
called him the Hammer of the Jews. Judgin’ by whut I’ve been able to
glean about him, his enemies felt jest as well satisfied ef they could
hear, before the hostilities started, that Judas was laid up sick in
bed somewheres. It taken considerable of a load off their minds, ez you
might say.

“But--jest as you was sayin’, son, about David--it’s been a good while
since them parties flourished. When we look back on it, it stretches all
the way frum here to B. C.; and that’s a good long stretch, and a lot
of things have been happenin’ meantime. But I sometimes git to thinkin’
that mebbe little Herman Felsburg has got some of that old-time Jew
fightin’ blood in his veins. Anyhow, he belongs to the same breed. No,
sirree, sonny; it don’t always pay to judge a man by his laigs. You kin
do that with reguards to a frog or a grasshopper, or even sometimes
with a chicken; but not with a man. It ain’t the shape of ‘em that
counts--it’s where they’ll take you in time of trouble.”

He cocked his head down at me--I saying nothing at all. There didn’t
seem to be anything for me to say; so I maintained silence and he spoke
on:

“You jest bear that in mind next time you feel moved to talk about
laigs. And ef it should happen to be Mister Felsburg’s laigs that you’re
takin’ fur your text, remember this whut I’m tellin’ you now: They may
be crooked; but, son, there ain’t no gamer pair of laigs nowheres in
this world. I’ve seen ‘em carry in’ him into battle when, all the time,
my knees was knockin’ together, the same ez one of these here end men in
a minstrel show knocks his bones together. His laigs may ‘a’ trembled
a little bit too--I ain’t sayin’ they didn’t--but they kept right on
promenadin’ him up to where the trouble was; and that’s the main p’int
with a set of shanks. You jest remember that.”

Being sufficiently humbled I said I would remember it.

“There’s still another thing about Herman Felsburg’s laigs that most
people round here don’t know, neither,” added Judge Priest when I had
made my pledge: “All up and down the back sides of his calves, and clear
down on his shins, there’s a whole passel of little red marks. There’s
so many of them little scars that they look jest like lacework on his
skin.”

“Did he get them in the war?” I inquired eagerly, scenting a story.

“No; he got them before the war came along,” said Judge Priest. “Some of
these times, sonny, when you’re a little bit older, I’ll tell you a tale
about them scars on Mr. Felsburg’s laigs. There ain’t many besides me
that knows it.”

“Couldn’t I hear it now?” I asked.

“I reckin you ain’t a suitable age to understand--y it,” said
Judge Priest. “I reckin we’d better wait a few years. But I won’t
for-git--I’ll tell you when the time’s ripe. Anyhow, there’s somethin’
else afoot now--somethin’ that ought to interest a hongry boy.”

I became aware of his house servant--Jeff Poindexter--standing in the
hall doorway, waiting until his master concluded whatever he might be
saying in order to make an important announcement.

“All right, Jeff!” said Judge Priest. “I’ll be there in a minute.” Then,
turning to me: “Son-boy, hadn’t you better stay here fur supper with
me? I expect there’s vittles enough fur two. Come on--I’ll make Jeff run
over to your house and tell your mother I kept you to supper with me.”

After that memorable supper with Judge Priest--all the meals I ever took
as his guest were memorable events and still are--ensues a lapse, to be
measured by years, before I heard the second chapter of what might be
called the tale of Mr. Felsburg’s legs. I heard it one evening in the
Judge’s sitting room.

A squeak had come into my voice, and there was a suspicion of down--a
mere trace, as the chemists say--on my upper lip. I was in the second
week of proud incumbency of my first regular job. I had gone to work
on the _Daily Evening News_--the cubbiest of cub reporters, green as
a young gourd, but proud as Potiphar over my new job and my new
responsibilities. This time it was professional duty rather than the
social instinct that took me to the old Judge’s house.

I had been charged by my editor to get from him divers litigatious facts
relating to a decision he had that day rendered in the circuit court
where he presided. The information having been vouchsafed, the talk took
a various trend. Somewhere in the course of it Mr. Felsburg’s name came
up and my memory ran back like a spark along a tarred string to that
other day when he had promised to relate to me an episode connected
with certain small scars on those two bandy legs of our leading clothing
merchant.

The present occasion seemed fitting for hearing this long-delayed
narrative. I reminded my host of his olden promise; and between puffs
at his corncob pipe he told me the thing which I retell here and now,
except that, for purposes of convenience, I have translated the actual
wording of it out of Judge Priest’s vernacular into my own.

So doing, it devolves upon me, first off, to introduce into the
main theme a character not heretofore mentioned--a man named Thomas
Albritton, a farmer in our country, and at one period a prosperous one.
He lived, while he lived--for he has been dead a good while now--six
miles from town, on the Massac Creek Road. He lived there all his days.
His father before him had cleared the timber off the land and built the
two-room log house of squared logs, with the open “gallery” between.
With additions, the house grew in time to be a rambling, roomy
structure, but from first to last it kept its identity; and even after
the last of the old tenants died off or moved off, and new tenants moved
in, it was still known as the Albritton place. For all I know to the
contrary, it yet goes by that name.

From pioneer days on until this Thomas Albritton became heir to the
farm and head of the family, the Albrittons had been a forehanded
breed--people with a name for thrift. In fact, I had it that night from
the old Judge that, for a good many years after he grew up, this Thomas
Albritton enjoyed his due share of affluence. He raised as good a grade
of tobacco and as many bushels of corn to the acre as anybody in the
Massac Bottoms raised; and, so far as ready money went, he was better
off than most of his neighbours.

Perhaps, though, he was not so provident as his sire had been; or
perhaps, in a financial way, he had in his latter years more than
his share of bad luck. Anyhow, after a while he began to go downhill
financially, which is another way of saying he got into debt. Piece
by piece he sold off strips of the fertile creek lands his father had
cleared. There came a day when he owned only the house, standing in its
grove of honey locusts, and the twenty acres surrounding it; and the
title to those remaining possessions was lapped and overlapped by
mortgages.

It is the rule of this merry little planet of ours that some must go up
while others go down. Otherwise there would be no room at the top for
those who climb. Mr. Herman Felsburg was one who steadily went up. When
first I knew him he was rated among the wealthy men of our town. By
local standards of those days he was rich--very rich. To me, then,
it seemed that always he must have been rich. But here Judge Priest
undeceived me.

When Mr. Felsburg, after four years of honourable service as a private
soldier in the army of the late Southern Confederacy, came back with the
straggling handful that was left of Company B to the place where he had
enlisted, he owned of this world’s goods just the rags he stood in, plus
a canny brain, a provident and saving instinct, and a natural aptitude
for barter and trade.

Somewhere, somehow, he scraped together a meagre capital of a few
dollars, and with this he opened a tiny cheap-John shop down on
Market Square, where he sold gimcracks to darkies and poor whites.
He prospered--it was inevitable that he should prosper. He took unto
himself a wife of his own people; and between periods of bearing him
children she helped him to save. He brought his younger brother, Ike,
over from the old country and made Ike a full partner with him in his
growing business.

Long before those of my own generation were born the little store down
on Market Square was a reminiscence. Two blocks uptown, on the busiest
corner in town, stood Felsburg Brothers’ Oak Hall Clothing Emporium,
then, as now, the largest and the most enterprising merchandising
establishment in our end of the state. If you could not find it at
Felsburg Brothers’ you simply could not find it anywhere--that was all.
It was more than a store; it was an institution, like the courthouse and
the county-fair grounds.

The multitudinous affairs of the industry he had founded did not engage
the energies of the busy little man with the funny legs to the exclusion
of other things. As the saying goes, he branched out. He didn’t
speculate--he was too conservative for that; but where there seemed a
chance to invest an honest dollar with a reasonable degree of certainty
of getting back, say, a dollar-ten in due time, he invested. Some people
called it luck, which is what some people always call it when it turns
out so; but, whether it was luck or just foresight, whatsoever he
touched seemed bound to flourish and beget dividends.

Eventually, as befitting one who had risen to be a commanding figure in
the commercial affairs of the community, Mr. Felsburg became an active
factor in its financial affairs. As a stockholder, the Commonwealth
Bank welcomed him to its hospitable midst. Soon it saw its way clear to
making him a director and vice president. There was promise of profit in
the use of his name. Printed on the letterheads, it gave added solidity
and added substantiality to the bank’s roster. People liked him too.
Behind his short round back they might gibe at the shape of his legs,
and laugh at his ways of butchering up the English language and twisting
up the metaphors with which he besprinkled his everyday walk and
conversation; but, all the same, they liked him.

So, in his orbit Mr. Herman Felsburg went up and up to the very peaks
of prominence; and while he did this, that other man I have
mentioned--Thomas Albritton--went down and down until he descended to
the very bottom of things.

In the fullness of time the lines of these two crossed, for it was at
the Commonwealth Bank that Albritton negotiated the first and, later,
the second of his loans upon his homestead. Indeed, it was Mr. Felsburg
who both times insisted that Albritton be permitted to borrow, even
though, when the matter of making the second mortgage came up, another
director, who specialised in county property, pointed out that, to begin
with, Albritton wasn’t doing very well; and that, in the second place,
the amount of his indebtedness already was as much and very possibly
more than as much as the farm would bring at forced sale.

Even though the bank bought it in to protect itself--and in his gloomy
mind’s eye this director foresaw such a contingency--it might mean a
cash loss; but Mr. Felsburg stood pat; and, against the judgment of his
associates, he had his way about it. Subsequently, when Mr. Felsburg
himself offered to relieve the bank of all possibility of an ultimate
deficit by buying Albritton’s paper, the rest of the board felt
relieved. Practically by acclamation he was permitted to do so.

Of this, however, the borrower knew nothing at all, Mr. Felsburg having
made it a condition that his purchase should be a private transaction.
So far as the borrower’s knowledge went, he owed principal and interest
to the bank. There was no reason why Albritton should suspect that Mr.
Herman Felsburg took any interest, selfish or otherwise, in his affairs,
or that Mr. Felsburg entertained covetous designs upon his possessions.
Mr. Felsburg wasn’t a money lender. He was a clothing merchant. And
Albritton wasn’t a business man--his present condition, stripped as he
was of most of his inheritance, and with the remaining portion heavily
encumbered, gave ample proof of that.

Besides, the two men scarcely knew each other. Albritton was an
occasional customer at the Oak Hall. But, for the matter of that, so was
nearly everybody else in Red Gravel County; and when he came in to make
a purchase it was never the senior member of the firm but always one
of the clerks who served him. At such times Mr. Felsburg, from the
back part of the store, would watch Mr. Albritton steadily. He never
approached him, never offered to speak to him; but he watched him.

One day, not so very long after the date when Mr. Felsburg privately
took over the mortgages on the Albritton place, Albritton drove in with
a load of tobacco for the Buckner & Keys Warehouse; and, leaving
his team and loaded wagon outside, he went into the Oak Hall to buy
something. Adolph Dreifus, one of the salesmen, waited on him as he
often had before.

The owners of the establishment were at the moment engaged in conference
in the rear of the store. Mr. Ike Felsburg was urging, with all the
eloquence at his command, the advisability of adding a line of trunks
and suit cases to the stock--a venture which he personally strongly
favoured--when he became aware that his brother was not heeding what he
had to say. Instead of heeding, Mr. Herman was peering along a vista of
counters and garment racks to where Adolph Dreifus stood on one side
of a show case and Tom Albritton stood on the other. There was a queer
expression on Mr. Felsburg’s face. His eyes were squinted and his tongue
licked at his lower lip.

“Hermy,” said the younger man, irritated that his brother’s attention
should go wandering afar while a subject of such importance was under
discussion, “Hermy, would you please be so good as to listen to me what
I am saying to you?”

There was no answer. Mr. Herman continued to stare straight ahead. Mr.
Ike raised his voice impatiently:

“Hermy!”

The older man turned on him with such suddenness that Mr. Ike almost
slipped off the stool upon which he was perched.

“What’s the idea--yelling in my ear like a graven image?” demanded Mr.
Herman angrily. “Do you think maybe I am deef or something?”

“But, Hermy,” complained Mr. Ike, “you ain’t listening at all. Twice now
I have to call you; in fact, three times.”

“Is that so?” said Mr. Herman with elaborate sarcasm. “I suppose you
think I got nothing whatever at all to do except I should listen to you?
If I should spend all my time listening to you where would this here
Oak Hall Clothing Emporium be? I should like to ask you that. Gabble,
gabble, gabble all day long--that is you! Me, I don’t talk so much; but
I do some thinking.”

“But this is important, what I am trying to tell you, Hermy. Why should
you be watching yonder, with a look on your face like as if you would
like to bite somebody? Adolph Dreifus ain’t so dumb in the head but what
he could sell a pair of suspenders or something without your glaring at
him every move what he makes.”

“Did I say I was looking at Adolph Dreifus?” asked Mr. Herman
truculently.

“Well, then, if you ain’t looking at Adolph, why should you look so hard
at that Albritton fellow? He don’t owe us any money, so far as I know.
For what he gets he pays cash, else we positively wouldn’t let him have
the goods. I’ve seen you acting like this before, Hermy. Every time that
Albritton comes in this place you drop whatever you are doing and hang
round and hang round, watching him. I noticed it before; and I should
like to ask----”

“Mister Ikey Felsburg,” said Mr. Herman slowly, “if you could mind your
own business I should possibly be able to mind mine. Remember this, if
you please--I look at who I please. You are too nosey and you talk too
damn much with your mouth! I am older than what you are; and I tell you
this--a talking jaw gathers no moss. Also, I would like to know, do
my eyes belong to me or do they maybe belong to you, and you have just
loaned ‘em to me for a temporary accommodation?”

“But, Hermy----”

“Ike, shut up!”

And Mr. Ike, warned by the tone in his brother’s voice, shut up.

One afternoon, perhaps six months after this passage between the
two partners, Mr. Herman crossed the street from the Oak Hall to the
Commonwealth Bank to make a deposit.

Through his wicket window Herb Kivil, the cashier, spoke to him,
lowering his voice: “Oh, Mr. Felsburg; you remember that Albritton
matter you were speaking to me about week before last?”

Mr. Felsburg nodded.

“Well, the last interest payment is more than a month overdue now; and,
on top of that, Albritton still owes the payment that was due three
months before that. There’s not a chance in the world of his being able
to pay up. He practically admitted as much when he was in here last,
asking for more time. So I’ve followed your instructions in the matter.”

“That’s a good boy, Herby--a very good boy,” said Mr. Felsburg,
seemingly much gratified. “You wrote him, then, like I told you?”

“Yes, sir; I wrote him. Yesterday I served notice on him by mail that
we would have to go ahead and foreclose right away. So this morning he
called me up by telephone from out in the country and asked us to hold
off, please, until he could come in here and talk the thing over again.”

“Does he think maybe he can pay his just debts with talk?” inquired Mr.
Felsburg.

“Well, if he does I’ll mighty soon undeceive him,” said Kivil. “And yet
I can’t help but feel sorry for the poor devil--he’s had an awful run of
luck, by all accounts. But here’s the thing I mainly wanted to speak to
you about: You see, he still thinks the bank holds these mortgages. He
doesn’t know you bought ‘em from the bank; and what I wanted to ask
you was this: Do you want me to tell him the truth when he comes in, or
would you rather I waited and let him find it out for himself when the
foreclosure goes through and the sheriff takes possession?”

“Don’t do neither one,” ordered Mr. Felsburg. “You should call him up
right away and tell him to come in to see about it to-morrow at ten
o’clock. And then, Herby, when he does come in, you should tell him he
should step over to the Oak Hall and see me in my office. That’s all
what you should tell him. I got reasons of my own why I should prefer to
break the news to him myself. Understand, Herby?”

“I understand, Mr. Felsburg,” said Mr. Kivil. “The minute he steps in
here--before he’s had time to open up the subject--I’m to send him over
to see you. Is that right?”

“That’s exactly right, Herby.” And, with pleased puckers at the corners
of his eyes, Mr. Felsburg turned away and went stumping out.

Physically Mr. Felsburg didn’t in the least suggest a cat, and yet,
after he was gone, Cashier Kivil found himself likening Mr. Felsburg to
a cat with long claws--a cat that would play a long time with a captive
mouse before killing it. He turned to his assistant, Emanuel Moon.

“What’s bred in the bone is bound to show sooner or later,” said Herb
Kivil sagely. “I never thought of it before--but I guess there must be
a mighty mean streak in Mr. Felsburg somewheres. I know this much: I’d
hate mightily to owe him any money. Did you see that look on his face?
He looked like a regular little old Shylock. I’ll bet you he takes his
pound of flesh every pop--with an extra half pound or so thrown in
for good measure.” Long before ten o’clock the following morning Mr.
Felsburg sat waiting in his little cubicle of a private office on the
mezzanine floor at the back of the Oak Hall. He kept taking out his
watch and looking at it. About ten minutes past the hour one of the
clerks climbed the stairs to tell him that Mr. Thomas Albritton, from
out in the Massac Creek neighbourhood, was below, asking to see him.

“All right,” said Mr. Felsburg; “you should send him up here to me right
away. Tell him I said, please, he should step this way.”

Presently, the clunk of heavy feet sounding on the steps, Mr. Felsburg
reared himself back in his chair at his desk with an expectant, eager
look on his face. In the doorway at the top of the stairs appeared the
man for whom he waited--a middle-aged man with slumped shoulders, in
worn, soiled garments, and in every line of his harassed face expressing
the fact that here stood a failure, mutely craving the pardon of the
world for being a failure. The yellow dust of country roads was thick,
like powdered sulphur, in the wrinkles of his shoes and the creases of
his shabby old coat. He had his hat in his hand.

“Good mornin’, Mr. Felsburg,” he said.

“Morning!”

Mr. Felsburg returned the greeting with a sharp and businesslike
brevity. He did not invite the caller to seat himself. In the small room
there was but one chair--the one that held Mr. Felsburg’s short
form. So, during the early part of the scene that followed, Albritton
continued to stand, while Mr. Felsburg enjoyed the advantage of being
seated and at his ease where, without stirring, he might, from beneath
his lowered brows, look the other up and down.

“I’ve just come from over at the Commonwealth Bank,” said Albritton,
fumbling his hat. “I came in to see about getting an extension on my
loans, and Mr. Kivil, over there, said I was to come on over here and
talk to you first. He said you wanted to see me ‘bout something--if I
understood him right.”

Mr. Felsburg nodded in affirmation of this, but made no other reply.
Albritton, having halted for a moment, went on again:

“I suppose you want to talk to me about my affairs, you being a director
of the bank?”

“And also, furthermore, vice president,” supplemented Mr. Felsburg.

“Yes, suh. Just so. And that’s what made me suppose--”

Mr. Felsburg raised a fat, short hand upon which the biggest, whitest
diamond in Red Gravel County glittered.

“You should not talk with me as an officer of that bank--if you will
be so good, please,” he stated. “You should talk with me now as an
individual.”

“An individual? I’m afraid I don’t understand you, suh.”

“Pretty soon you will, Mr. Albritton. This is an individual matter--just
between you and me; because I, and not the bank, am the party what holds
these here mortgages on your place.”

“You hold ‘em?”

“Sure! I bought both those mortgages off the bank quite some time ago. I
own those mortgages--and not anybody else whatsoever.”

“But I thought--”

“You don’t need to think. You need only that you should listen at what I
am telling you now. It is me--Herman Felsburg, Esquire, of the Oak Hall
Clothing Emporium--to which you owe this money, principal and likewise
interest. So we will talk together, man to man, if you please, Mr.
Albritton. Do I make myself plain? I do.”

The debtor dropped to his side the hand with which he had been rubbing
a perplexed forehead. A little gleam, as of hope reawakening, came into
his eyes.

“Well, suh,” he said, “you sort of take me by surprise--I didn’t have
any idea that was the state of the case at all. Then, all along, the
bank has just been representing you in the matter?”

“As my agent--yes,” said the little merchant. “Well, to tell you the
truth, I’m not sorry to hear it,” said Albritton. “A bank has got its
rules, I reckin, and has to live up to ‘em. But, dealing with you, suh,
as an individual, is another thing altogether. Anyhow, I’m hoping so,
Mr. Felsburg.”

“How you make that out?”

Mr. Felsburg’s tone was so sharply staccato that Albritton’s face fell a
little.

“Well, suh, I’m hoping that maybe you can see your way clear not to
foreclose on me just yet a while. I’d hate mightily to lose my home--I
would so! I was born there, Mr. Felsburg. And I’ve got a sickly wife and
a whole houseful of children. I don’t know where I’d turn to get another
roof over their heads if I was driven off my place. I know I owe you the
money and by law you’re entitled to it; but I certainly would appreciate
the favour if you’d give me a little more time.”

“So? And was there any other little favour you’d like to ask from me,
Mr. Albritton?” inquired Mr. Felsburg with impressive politeness.

Perhaps the other missed the note in the speaker’s voice; or perhaps he
was merely desperate. A drowning man does not pick and choose the straws
at which he grasps.

“Yes, suh; since you bring up the subject yourself, there is something
else, Mr. Felsburg. If you can see your way clear to giving me a little
time, and, on top of that, if you could loan me, say, four hundred
dollars more to help carry me over until fall, I believe I can pay you
back everything and start clean and clear again.”

“So-o-o!”

Mr. Felsburg turned himself in his chair, showing his back to his
visitor, and, taking up a pen, bent over his desk and for a minute wrote
briskly, as though to record notes of the proposition. Then he swung
back again, facing Albritton.

“Let me see if I get you right, Mr. Albritton,” he said, speaking slowly
and prolonging the suspense. “Already you owe me money; and now, instead
of paying up what you owe, you should like to borrow yet some more
money, eh? What security should you expect to give, Mr. Albritton?”

“Only my word and my promise, Mr. Felsburg,” pleaded Albritton. “You
don’t know me very well; but if you’ll inquire round you’ll find out
I’ve got the name for being an honest man, even if I have had a power
of hard luck these last few years. I ain’t a drinking man, Mr. Felsburg,
and I’m a hard worker. If there was somebody I knew better than I know
you I’d go to him; but there ain’t anybody. I’m right at the end of my
rope--I ain’t got anywhere to turn.

“I’m confident, if you’ll give me a little help, Mr. Felsburg, I can
make out to get a new start. But if I’m put off my place now I’ll lose
the crop I’ve put in--lose all my time and my labour too. It looks like
tobacco is going to fetch a better price this fall than it’s fetched for
three or four years back, and the young plants I’ve put in are coming up
mighty promising. But I need money to carry me over until I can get
my tobacco cured and marketed. Don’t you see how it is with me, Mr.
Felsburg? Just a little temporary accommodation from you and I’m
certain--”

“Business is business, Mr. Albritton,” said Mr. Felsburg, cutting in on
him. “And all my life I have been a business man. Is it good business,
I should like to ask you, that I should loan you yet more money when
already you owe me money which you cannot pay? Huh, Mr. Albritton?”

“Maybe it ain’t good business; but, just as one human being to
another--”

“Oh! So now you put it that way? Well, suit yourself. We talk, then,
as two human beings, eh? We make this a personal matter, eh? Good! That
also is how I should prefer it should be. Listen to me for one little
minute, Mr. Albritton. I am going to speak with you about a small
matter which happened quite a long while ago. Do you perhaps re-member
something which happened in the spring of the year eighteen hundred and
sixty--the year before the war broke out?”

“Why, yes,” said Albritton after a moment of puzzled thought. “That was
the year my father died and left me the place; the same year that I got
married too. I wasn’t but just twenty-two years old then. But I don’t
get your drift, Mr. Felsburg. What’s the year eighteen-sixty got to do
with you and me?”

“I’m coming to that pretty soon,” said Mr. Felsburg. He sat up straight
now, his eyes ashine and his hands clenched on the arms of his chair.
“Do you perhaps remember something else which also happened in that
year, Mr. Albritton?”

“I can’t say as I do,” confessed the puzzled countryman.

“Then, if you’ll be so good as to listen, Mr. Albritton, I should be
pleased to tell you. Maybe I have got a better memory than what your
memory is. Also, maybe I have got something on me to remember it by. Now
you listen to me!

“There was a hot day in the springtime of that year, when you sat on the
porch of your house out there in the country, and a little young Jew-boy
pedlar came up your lane from the road, with a pack on his back; and he
opened the gate of your horse lot, in the front of your house, and he
came through that gate.

“And you was sitting there on your porch, just like I am telling you;
and you yelled to him that he should get out--that you did not want to
buy nothing from him. Well, maybe he was new in this country and could
not understand all what you meant. Or maybe it was that he was very
tired and hot, and that he only wanted to ask you to let him sit down
and take his heavy pack off his back, and drink some cool water out of
your well, and maybe rest a little while there. And maybe, too, he had
not sold anything at all that day and hoped that if he showed you
what he had you would perhaps change your mind and buy something from
him--just a little something, so that his whole day would not be wasted.

“So he came through that gate of your horse lot and he kept on coming.
And then you cursed at him, and you told him again he should get
out. But he kept coming. And then you called your dogs. And two dogs
came--big, mean dogs--out from under your house.

“And when he saw the dogs come from under the house, that young Jew boy
he turned round and he tried to run away and save himself. But the
pack on his back was heavy, and he was already so very tired, like I am
telling you, from walking in the sun all day. And so he could not run
fast. And the dogs they soon caught him, and they bit him many times in
the legs; and then he was more worse scared than before and the biting
hurt him very much, and he cried out.

“But you stood there on your porch; and you clapped your two hands
together and you laughed to hear that poor little pedlar boy cry out.
And your dogs chased him away down the lane, and they bit him still
more in his legs. Maybe perhaps you thought a poor Jew would not have
feelings the same as you? Maybe perhaps you thought he would not bleed
when those sharp teeth bit him in his legs? So you clapped your hands
and you laughed to see him run and to hear him yell out that way. Do you
remember all that, Mr. Albritton?”

He stood up now, shaking all over; and his eyes glittered to match
the diamond on his quivering hand. They glittered like two little hard
bright stones.

Under the tan the face of the man at whom he glared turned a dull
brick-dust red. Albritton put up a hand to one burning cheek; and as he
made answer the words came from him haltingly, self-accusingly:

“I don’t remember it, Mr. Felsburg; but if you say it’s true--why, I
reckin it must ‘a’ happened just the way you tell it. It was a low-down,
cruel, mean thing to do; and if it was me I’m sorry for it--even now,
after all these years. I wasn’t much more than a boy, though; and--”

“You were a grown man, Mr. Albritton; anyhow, you were older than the
little pedlar boy that your dogs bit. You say you are sorry now; but you
forgot about it, didn’t you?

“I didn’t forget about it, Mr. Albritton! All these years I have not
forgotten it. All these years I have been waiting for this day to make
you sorry. All these years I have been waiting for this day to get even
with you. I was that little Jew boy, Mr. Albritton. In my legs I have
now the red marks from your dogs’ teeth. And so now you come here and
you stand here before me”--he raised his chubby clenched fists and shook
them--“and you--you--you--ask me that I should do you favours!”

“Mr. Felsburg,” said Albritton--and his figure drooped as though he
would prostrate himself before the triumphant little man--“I ain’t
saying this because I hope to get any help from you in a money way--I
know there’s no chance of that now--I’m saying it because I mean it from
the bottom of my soul. I’m sorry. If I thought you’d believe me I’d be
willing to go down on my knees and take my Bible oath that I’m sorry.”

“You should save yourself the trouble, Mr. Albritton,” said Mr.
Felsburg, calmer now. “In the part of your Bible which I believe in it
says ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,’ Mr. Albritton.”

“All right!” said Albritton. “You’ve had your say--you’re even with me.”

He turned from the gloating figure of the other and started to go. From
the chair in which he had reseated himself, Felsburg, a pic-ture of
vengeance gratified and sated, watched him, saying nothing until the
bankrupt had descended the first step of the stairs and the second. Then
he spoke.

“You wait!” he ordered in the tone of a master. “I am not yet done.”

“What’s the use?” said Albritton; but he faced about, humbled and
crushed. “There ain’t anything you could say or do that would make me
feel any worse.”

“Come back!” bade Felsburg; and, like a man whipped, the other came back
to the doorway.

“You’re even with me, I tell you,” he said from the threshold. “What’s
the use of piling it on?”

Mr. Felsburg did not answer in words. He reached behind him to his desk,
wadded up something in his fingers, and, once more rising, he advanced,
with his figure distended, on Albritton. Albritton flinched, then
straightened himself.

“Hit me if you want to,” he said brokenly. “I won’t hit back if you do.
I deserve it.”

“Yes, I will hit you,” said Felsburg. “With this I will hit you.”

Into Albritton’s right hand he thrust a crumpled slip of paper. At the
wadded paper Albritton stared numbly.

“I don’t know what you are driving at,” he said; “but, if this is a
notice of foreclosure, I don’t need any notice.”

“Look at it--close,” bade Felsburg.

And Albritton, obeying, looked; and his face turned from red to white
and then to red again.

“Now you see what it is,” said Felsburg. “It is my check for four
hundred dollars. I loan it to you--without security; and to-day I fix up
those mortgages for you. Mr. Albritton, I am even with you. All the days
from now on that you live in your house I am getting even with you--more
and more every day what passes. And now, please, go away.”

He turned from the other, ignoring the fumbling hand that would have
taken his own in its grasp; and, resting his elbows on his desk, he put
his face in his cupped palms and spoke from between his fingers:

“I ask you again--please go away!”

When Judge Priest had finished telling me the story, in form much as I
have retold it here, he sat back, drawing hard on his pipe, which had
gone out. Bewildered, I pondered the climax of the tale.

“But if Mr. Felsburg really wanted to get even,” I said at length, “what
made him give that man the money?”

The Judge scratched a match on a linen-clad flank and applied the flame
to the pipe-bowl; and then, between puffs, made answer slowly.

“Son,” he said, “you jest think it over in your spare time. I reckin
mebbe when you’re a little older the answer’ll come to you.”

And sure enough, when I was a little older it did.



CHAPTER IV. THE GARB OF MEN

THEY used to say--and how long ago it seems since they used to say
it!--that the world would never see another world war. They said that
the planet, being more or less highly civilised with regard to its
principal geographical divisions, and in the main peaceably inclined,
would never again send forth armed millions to slit the throats of yet
other armed millions. That was what they said back yonder in 1912 and
1913, and in the early part of 1914 even.

But something happened--something unforeseen and unexpected and
unplausible happened. And, at that, the structure of amity between the
nations which so carefully had been built up on treaty and pledge, so
shrewdly tongued-and-grooved by the promises of Christian statesmen, so
beautifully puttied up by the prayers of Christian men, so excellently
dovetailed and mortised and rabbeted together, all at once broke down,
span by span; just as it is claimed that a fiddler who stations himself
in the middle of a bridge and plays upon his fiddle a certain note
may, if only he keeps up his playing long enough, play down that bridge,
however strong and well-piered it is.

We still regard the fiddle theory as a fable concocted upon a hypothesis
of physics; but when that other thing happened--a thing utterly
inconceivable--we so quickly adjusted ourselves to it that at once
yesterday’s impossibility became to-day’s actuality and to-mor-row’s
certain prospect.

This war having begun, they said it could not at the very most last more
than a few months; that the countries immediately concerned could not,
any of them, for very long withstand the drains upon them in men and
money and munitions and misery; that the people at home would rise in
revolt against the stupid malignity of it, if the men at the front did
not.

Only a few war-seasoned elderly men, including one in a War Office at
London and one in a General Staff at Berlin and one in a Cabinet Chamber
at Paris, warned their respective people to prepare themselves for a
struggle bloodier, and more violent and costlier, and possibly more
prolonged, than any war within the memories of living men.

At first we couldn’t believe that either; none of us could believe it.
But those old men were right and the rest of us were wrong. The words of
the war wiseacres came true.

Presently we beheld enacted the intolerable situation they had
predicted; and in our own country at least the tallies of dead, as
enumerated in the foreign dispatches, began to mean to us only headlines
on the second page of the morning paper.

Then they said that when, by slaughter and maiming and incredible
exertion, the manhood of Europe had been decimated to a given point the
actual physical exhaustion of the combatants would force all the armies
to a standstill. But the thing went on.

It went on through its first year and through its second year. We saw it
going on into its third year, with no sign of abatement, no evidence
of a weakening anywhere among the states and the peoples immediately
affected. We saw our own country drawn into it. And so, figuring what
might lie in front of us and them by what laid behind, we might, without
violence to credibility, figure it as going on until all of Britain’s
able-bodied adult male population wore khaki or had been buried in it;
until sundry millions of the men of France were corpses or on crutches;
until Germania had scraped and harrowed and combed her domains for
cannon fodder; until Russia’s countless supply of prime human grist for
the red hopper of this red mill no longer was countless but countable.

There is a town in the northern part of the Republic of France called
Courney. Rather, I should say that once upon a time there was such a
town. Considered as a town, bearing the outward manifestations of a town
and nourishing within it the communal spirit of a town, it ceased to
exist quite a time back. Nevertheless, it is with that town, or with the
recent site of it, that this story purports to deal.

There is no particular need of our trying to recreate the picture of
it as it was before the war began. Before the war it was one of a vast
number of suchlike drowsy, cosy little towns lying, each one of them, in
the midst of tilled fat acres on the breasts of a pleasant land; a town
with the grey highroad running through it to form its main street, and
with farms and orchards and vineyards and garden patches round about
it; so that in the springtime, when the orchard trees bloomed and the
grapevines put forth their young leaves and the wind blew, it became a
little island, set in the centre of a little, billowy green-and-white
sea; a town of snug small houses of red brick and grey brick, with a
priest and a mayor, a schoolhouse and a beet-sugar factory, a town well
for the gossips and a town shrine for the devout.

Nor is there any especial necessity for us to try to describe it as it
was after the war had rolled forward and back and forward again over it;
for then it was transformed as most of those small towns that lay in the
tracks of the hostile armies were transformed. It became a ruin, a
most utter and complete and squalid ruin, filled with sights that were
affronts to the eye and smells that were abominations to the nose.

In this place there abode, at the time of which I aim to write, a few
living creatures. They were human beings, but they had ceased to exist
after the ordinary fashion of human beings in this twentieth century of
ours. So often, in the first months and the first years of the war, had
their simple but ample standards been forcibly upset that by now almost
they had forgotten such standards had ever been.

To them yesterday was a dimming memory, and to-morrow a dismal prospect
without hope in it of anything better. To-day was all and everything to
them; each day was destiny itself. Just to get through it with breath
of life in one’s body and rags over one’s hide and a shelter above
one’s head--that was the first and the last of their aim. They lived not
because life was worth while any more, but because to keep on living is
an instinct, and because most human beings are so blessed--or, maybe, so
cursed--with a certain adaptability of temperament, a certain inherent
knack of adjustability that they may endure anything--even the
unendurable--if only they have ceased to think about the past and to
fret about the future.

And these people in this town had ceased to think. They were out of
habit with thinking. A long time before, their sensibilities had
been rocked to sleep by the everlasting lullaby of the cannon; their
imaginations were wrapped in a smoky coma. They lived on without
conscious effort, without conscious ambition, almost without conscious
desire: just as blind worms live under a bank, or slugs in a marsh, or
protoplasms in a pond.

Once, twice, three times Courney had been a stepping-stone in the swept
and garnished pathways of battle. Back in September of 1914 the Germans,
sweeping southward as an irresistible force, took possession of this
town, after shelling it quite flat with their big guns to drive out the
defending garrison of French and British. Then, a little later, in front
of Paris the irresistible force met the immovable body and answered the
old, old question of the scientists; and, as the Germans fell back
to dig themselves in along the Somme and the Aisne, there was again
desperate hard fighting here, and many, very many, lives were spent in
the effort of one side to take and retain, and of the other to gain
and hold fast, the little peaky heaps of wreckage protruding above the
stumps of the wasted orchard trees.

Now, though, for a long time things had been quiet in Courney. Though
placed in debatable territory, as the campaign experts regard debatable
territory, it had lapsed into an eddy and a backwater of war, becoming,
so to speak, a void and a vacuum amid the twisting currents of the war.
In the core of a tornado there may be calm while about it the vortex
swirls and twists. If this frequently is true of windstorms it
occasionally is true of wars.

Often to the right of them and to the left of them, sometimes far in
front of them, and once in a while far back in the rear of them, those
who still abode at Courney heard the distant voices of the big guns; but
their place of habitation, by reasons of shifts in the war game, was no
longer on a route of communication between separate groups of the same
fighting force. It was not even on a line of travel. No news of the
world beyond their limited horizon seeped in to them. They did not know
how went the war--who won or who lost--and almost they had quit desiring
to know. What does one colony of blind worms in a bank care how fares it
with colonies of blind worms in other banks?

You think this state of apathy could not come to pass? Well, I know that
it can, because with my own eyes I saw it coming to pass in the times
while yet the war was new; while it yet was a shock and an affront to
our beliefs; and you must remember that now I write of a much later
time, when the world war had become the world’s custom.

Also, could you have looked in upon the surviving remnant of the
inhabitants of Courney, you would have had a clearer and fuller
corroboration of the fact I state, because then you would have seen that
here in this place lived only those who were too old or too feeble to
care, or else were too young to understand.

All tallied, there were not more then than twenty remaining of two
or three hundred who once had been counted as the people of this
inconsequential village; and of these but two were individuals in what
ordinarily would be called the prime of life.

One of these two was a French petty officer, whose eyes had been shot
out, and who, having been left behind in the first retreat toward Paris,
had been forgotten, and had stayed behind ever since. The other had
likewise been a soldier. He was a Breton peasant. His disability seemed
slight enough when he sustained it. A bullet bored across the small
of his back, missing the spine. But the bullet bore with it minute
fragments of his uniform coat; and so laden with filth had his outer
garments become, after weeks and months of service in the field, that,
with the fragments of cloth, germs of tetanus had been carried into his
flesh also, and lockjaw had followed.

Being as strong as a bullock, he had weathered the hideous agonies of
his disease; but it left him beset with an affliction like a queer
sort of palsy, which affected his limbs, his tongue, and the nerves and
muscles of his face.

Continually he twitched all over. He moved by a series of spasmodic
jerks, and when he sought to speak the sounds he uttered came out from
his contorted throat in slobbery, unintelligible gasps and grunts. He
was sane enough, but he had the look about him of being an idiot.

Besides these two there were three or four very aged, very infirm men on
the edge of their dotage; likewise some women, including one masterful,
high-tempered old woman and a younger woman who wept continuously, with
a monotonous mewing sound, for a husband who was dead in battle and for
a fourteen-year-old son who had vanished altogether out of her life,
and who, for all she knew, was dead too. The rest were children--young
children, and a baby or so. There were no sizable youths whatsoever, and
no girls verging on maidenhood, remaining in this place.

So this small group was what was left of Courney. Their houses being
gone and family ties for the most part wiped out, they consorted
together in a rude communal system which a common misery had forced upon
them. Theirs was the primitive socialism that the cave dweller may have
known in his tribe. As I say, their houses were gone; so they denned in
holes where the cellars under the houses had been. Time had been when
they fled to the shelter of these holes as the fighting, swinging
northward or southward, included Courney in its orbit.

Afterward they had contrived patchwork roofage to keep out the worst of
the weather; and now they called these underground shelters home, which
was an insult to the word home. Once they had had horse meat to eat--the
flesh of killed cavalry mounts and wagon teams. Now perforce they were
vegetarians, living upon cabbages and beets and potatoes which grew half
wild in the old garden patches, and on a coarse bran bread made of a
flour ground by hand out of the grain that sprouted in fields where real
harvests formerly had grown.

The more robust and capable among the adults cultivated these poor crops
in a pecking and puny sort of way. The children went clothed in ancient
rags, which partly covered their undeveloped and stunted bodies, and
played in the rubbish; and sometimes in their play they delved too
deep and uncovered grisly and horrible objects. On sunny days the blind
soldier and the palsied one sat in the sunshine, and when it rained
they took refuge with the others in whichever of the leaky burrows was
handiest for them to reach. If they walked the Breton towed his mate in
a crippling, zigzag course, for one lacked the eyes to see where he went
and the other lacked the ability to steer his afflicted legs on a direct
line.

The wreckage of rafters and beams and house furnishings provided
abundant supplies of wood and for fires. By a kind of general assent,
headship and authority were vested jointly in the old tempestuous woman
and the blind man, for the reasons that she had the strongest body and
the most resolute will, and he the keenest mind of them all.

So these people lived along, without a priest to give them comfort by
his preaching; without a physician to mend their ailments; with no set
code of laws to be administered and none to administer them. Existence
for them was reduced to its raw elementals. Since frequently they heard
the big guns sounding distantly and faintly, they knew that the war
still went on. And, if they gave the matter a thought, to them it seemed
that the war always would go on. Time and the passage of time meant
little. A day was merely a period of lightness marked at one end by
a sunrise and at the other by a sunset; and when that was over and
darkness had come, they bedded themselves down under fouled and ragged
coverlids and slept the dumb, dreamless sleep of the lower animals.
Except for the weeping woman who went about with her red eyes
continually streaming and her whining wail forever sounding, no one
among them seemingly gave thought to those of their own kinspeople and
friends who were dead or scattered or missing.

Well, late one afternoon in the early fall of the year, the workers had
quit their tasks and were gathering in toward a common centre, before
the oncoming of dusk, when they heard cries and beheld the crotchety old
woman who shared leadership with the blinded man, running toward them.
She had been gathering beets in one of the patches to the southward
of their ruins; and now, as she came at top speed along the path that
marked where their main street had once been, threading her way swiftly
in and out among the grey mounds of rubbish, she held a burden of the
red roots in her long bony arms.

She lumbered up, out of breath, to tell them she had seen soldiers
approaching from the south. Since it was from that direction they came,
these soldiers doubtlessly would be French soldiers; and, that being
so, the dwellers in Courney need feel no fear of mistreatment at their
hands. Nevertheless, always before, the coming of soldiers had meant
fighting; so, without waiting to spy out their number or to gauge from
their movements a hint of their possible intentions, she had hastened to
spread the alarm.

“I saw them quite plainly!” she cried out between pants for breath.
“They have marched out of the woods yonder--the woods that bound the
fields below where the highroad to Laon ran in the old days. And now
they are spreading out across the field, to the right and the left.
Infantry they are, I think--and they have a machine gun with them.”

“How many, grandmother? How many of them are there?”

It was the eyeless man who asked the question. He had straightened up
from where he sat, and stood erect, with his arms groping before him and
his nostrils dilated.

“No great number,” answered the old woman; “perhaps two
companies--perhaps a battalion. And as they came nearer to me they
looked--they looked so queer!”

“How? How? What do you mean by queer?” It was the blind man seeking to
know.

She dropped her burden of beetroots and threw out her hands in a gesture
of helplessness.

“Queer!” she repeated stupidly. “Their clothes now--their clothes seemed
not to fit them. They are such queer-looking soldiers--for Frenchmen.”

“Oh, if only the good God would give me back my eyes for one little
hour!” cried the blind man impotently. Then, in a different voice, “What
is that?” he said, and swung about, facing north. His ears, keener
than theirs, as a blind man’s ears are apt to be, had caught, above the
babble of their excited voices, another sound.

Scuttling, shuffling, half falling, the palsied man, moving at the best
speed of which he was capable, rounded a heap of shattered grey masonry
that had once been the village church, and made toward the clustered
group of them. His jaws worked spasmodically. With one fluttering hand
he pointed, over his left shoulder, behind him. He strove to speak
words, but from his throat issued only clicking, slobbery grunts and
gasps.

“What is it now?” demanded the old woman.

She clutched him, forcing him to a quaking standstill. He kept on
gurgling and kept on pointing.

“Soldiers? Are there more soldiers coming?”

He nodded eagerly.

“From the north?”

He made signs of assent.

“Frenchmen?”

He shook his head until it seemed he would shake it off his shoulders.

“Germans, then? From that way the Germans are coming, eh?”

Again he nodded, making queer movements with his hands, the meaning of
which they could not interpret. Indeed, none there waited to try.
With one accord they started for the deepest and securest of their
burrows--the one beneath the battered-down sugar-beet factory. Its
fallen walls and its shattered roof made a lid, tons heavy and yards
thick, above the cellar of it. In times of fighting it had been their
safest refuge. So once more they ran to hide themselves there. The
ragged children scurried on ahead like a flight of autumn leaves. The
very old men and the women followed after the children; and behind all
the rest, like a rearguard, went the cripple and the old woman, steering
the blind man between them.

At the gullet of a little tunnel-like opening leading down to the deep
basement below, these three halted a brief moment; and the palsied man
and the woman, looking backward, were in time to see a skirmisher in
the uniform of a French foot soldier cross a narrow vista in the
ruins, perhaps a hundred yards away, and vanish behind a culm of
broken masonry. Seen at that distance, he seemed short, squatty--almost
gnomish. Back in the rear of him somewhere a bugle sounded a halting,
uncertain blast, which trailed off suddenly to nothing, as though the
bugler might be out of breath; and then--pow, pow, pow!--the first shots
sounded. High overhead a misdirected bullet whistled with a droning,
querulous note. The three tarried no longer, but slid down into the
mouth of the tunnel.

Inside the cellar the women and children already were stretched close up
to the thick stone sides, looking like flattened piles of rags against
the flagged floor. They had taken due care, all of them, to drop down
out of line with two small openings which once had been windows in the
south wall of the factory cellar, and which now, with their sashes gone,
were like square portholes, set at the level of the earth. Through these
openings came most of the air and all of the daylight which reached
their subterranean retreat.


The old woman cowered down in an angle of the wall, rocking back and
forth and hugging her two bony knees with her two bony arms; but the
maimed soldiers, as befitting men who had once been soldiers, took
stations just beneath the window holes, the one to listen and the other
to watch for what might befall in the narrow compass of space lying
immediately in front of them. For a moment after they found their places
there was silence there in the cellar, save for the rustling of bodies
and the wheeze of forced breathing. Then a woman’s voice was uplifted
wailingly: “Oh, this war! Why should it come back here again? Why
couldn’t it leave us poor ones alone?”

“Hush, you!” snapped the blinded man in a voice of authority. “There are
men out there fighting for France. Hush and listen!”

A ragged volley, sounding as though it had been fired almost over their
heads, cut off her lamentation, and she hid her face in her hands,
bending her body forward to cover and shield a baby that was between her
knees upon the floor.

From a distance, toward the north, the firing was answered. Somewhere
close at hand a rapid-fire gun began a staccato outburst as the gun
crew pumped its belts of cartridges into its barrel; but at once this
chattering note became interrupted, and then it slackened, and then it
stopped altogether.

“Idiots! Fools! Imbeciles!” snarled the blind man. “They have jammed
the magazine! And listen, comrade, listen to the rifle fire from over
here--half a company firing, then the other half. Veterans would never
fire so. Raw recruits with green officers--that’s what they must be....
And listen! The Germans are no better.”

Outside, nearby, a high-pitched strained voice gave an order, and past
the window openings soldiers began to pass, some shrilly cheering, some
singing the song of France, the Marseillaise Hymn. Their trunks were not
visible. From the cellar could be seen only their legs from the knees
down, with stained leather leggings on each pair of shanks, and their
feet, in heavy military boots, sliding and slithering over the cinders
and the shards of broken tiling alongside the wrecked factory wall.

Peering upward, trying vainly at his angled range of vision to see the
bodies of those who passed, the palsied man reached out and grasped the
arm of his mate in a hard grip, uttering meaningless sounds. It was as
though he sought to tell of some astounding discovery he had just made.

“Yes, yes, brother; I understand,” said the blind man. “I cannot see,
but I can hear. There is no swing to their step, eh? Their feet scuffle
inside their boots, eh? Yes, yes, I know--they are very weary. They have
come far to-day to fight these Huns. And how feebly they sing the song
as they go past us here! They must be very tired--that is it, eh? But,
tired or not, they are Frenchmen, and they can fight. Oh, if only the
good God for one little hour, for one little minute, would give me back
my eyes, to see the men of France fighting for France!”

The last straggling pair of legs went shambling awkwardly past the
portholes. To the Breton, watching, it appeared that the owner of those
legs scarcely could lift the weight of the thick-soled boots.

Beyond the cellar, to the left, whither the marchers had defiled,
the firing became general. It rose in volume, sank to a broken and
individual sequence of crashes, rose again in a chorus, grew thin and
thready again. There was nothing workmanlike, nothing soldierlike about
it; nothing steadfastly sustained. It was intermittent, irregular,
uncertain. Listening, the blind man waggled his head in a puzzled,
irritated fashion, and shook off the grasp of his comrade, who still
appeared bent on trying to make something clear to him.

With a movement like that of a startled horse the old leader-woman threw
up her head. With her fingers she clawed the matted grey hair out of her
ears.

“Hark! Hark!” she cried, imposing silence upon all of them by her hoarse
intensity. “Hark, all of you! What is that?”

The others heard it too, then. It was a whining, gagging, thin cry
from outside, dose up against the southerly wall of their underground
refuge--the distressful cry of an un-happy child, very frightened and
very sick. There was no mistaking it--the sobbing intake of the breath;
the choked note of nausea which followed.

“It is a little one!” bleated one woman.

“What child is missing?” screeched another in a panic. “What babe has
been overlooked?”

Each mother took quick and frenzied inventory of her own young, groping
out with her hands to make sure by the touch of their flesh to her
flesh that her offspring were safely bestowed. But when, this done,
they turned to tell their leader that apparently all of Courney had been
accounted for, she was gone. She had darted into the dark passage that
led up and outward into the open. They sat up on their haunches, gaping.

A minute passed and she was back, half bearing, half pulling in her arms
not a forgotten baby, but a soldier; a dwarfish and misshapen soldier,
it seemed to them, squatting there in the fading light; a soldier whose
uniform was far too large for him; a soldier whose head was buried under
his cap, and whose face was hidden within the gaping collar of his coat,
and whose booted toes scraped along the rough flagging as his rescuer
backed in among them, dragging him along with her.

In the middle of the floor she released him, and he fell upon his side
in a clump of soiled cloth and loose accoutrement; and for just an
instant they thought both his hands had been shot away, for nothing
showed below the ends of the flapping sleeves as he pressed his midriff
in his folded arms, uttering weak, tearful cries. Then, though, they saw
that his hands were merely lost within the length of his sleeves, and
they plunged at the conclusion that his hurt was in his middle.

“Ah, the poor one!” exclaimed one or two. “Wounded in the belly.”

“Wounded?” howled the old woman. “Wounded? You fools! Don’t you see he
has no wound? Don’t you see what it is? Then, look, you fools--look!”

She dropped down alongside him and wrestled him, he struggling feebly,
over on his back. With a ferocious violence she snatched the cap off his
head, tore his gripped arms apart, ripped open the coat he wore and the
coarse shirt that was beneath it.

“Look, fools, and see for yourselves!” Forgetting the danger to
themselves of stray bullets, they scrambled to their feet and crowded up
close behind her, peering over her shoulders as she reared back upon her
bent knees in order that they might the better see.

They did see. They saw, looking up at them from beneath the mop of
tousled black hair, the scared white face and the terror-widened eyes of
a boy--a little, sickly, undernourished boy. He could not have been more
than fourteen--perhaps not more than thirteen. They saw in the gap of
his parted garments the narrow structure of his shape, with the ribs
pressing tight against the tender, hairless skin, and below the arch of
the ribs the sunken curve of his abdomen, heaving convulsively to the
constant retching as he twisted and wriggled his meagre body back and
forth.

“Oh, Mother above!” one yowled. “They have sent a child to fight!”

As though these words had been to him a command, the writhing heap half
rose from the flags.

“I am no child!” he cried, between choking attacks of nausea. “I am
as old as the rest--older than some. Let me go! Let me go back! I am a
soldier of France!”

For all his brave words, his trembling legs gave way under him, and he
fell again and rolled over on his stomach, hiding his face in his hands,
a whimpering, vomiting child, helpless with pain and with fear.

“He speaks true! He speaks true!” yelled the old woman. Now she was on
her feet, her lean face red and swollen with a vast rage. “I saw them--I
saw them--I saw those others as I was dragging this one in. He speaks
true, I tell you. There was a captain--he could not have been more than
fifteen. And his sword--it was as long as he was, nearly. There are
soldiers out there like this one, whose arms are not strong enough
to lift the guns to their shoulders. They are children who fight
outside--children in the garb of men!”

The widow, who continually wept, sprang forward. She had quit weeping
and a great and terrible fury looked out of her red-lidded eyes. She
screeched in a voice that rose above the wails of the rest:

“And it was for this, months ago, that they took away from me my little
Pierre! Mother of God, they fight this war with babies!”

She threw herself down on all fours and, wriggling across the floor upon
her hands and knees, gathered up the muddied, booted feet of the boy
soldier and hugged them to her bosom.

In the middle of the circle the old woman stood, gouging at her hair
with her hands.

“It is true!” she proclaimed. “They are sending forth our babies to
fight against strong men.”

The palsied man twisted himself up to her. He shook his head to and fro,
as if in dissent of what she declared. He pointed toward the north; then
at the sobbing boy at his feet; then north again; then at the boy;
and, so doing, he many times and very swiftly nodded his head. Then he
repeated the same gesticulations with his arms that he had made at the
time of giving the first alarm of the approach of the enemy. Finally he
stooped his back and shrank up his body and hunched in his shoulders
in an effort to counterfeit smallness and slightness, all the while
gurgling in a desperate attempt to make himself understood. All at once,
simultaneously his audience grasped the purport of his pantomime.

“The Germans that you saw, they were children too--children like this
one?” demanded the old woman, her voice all thickened and raspy with her
passion. “Is that what you mean?”

He jerked his head up and down in violent assent, his jaws clicking and
his face muscles jumping. The old woman shoved him away from in front of
her.

“Come on with me!” she bade the other women, in a tone that clarioned
out high and shrill above the sobbing of the boy on the floor, above the
gurgling of the cripple and the sound of the firing without. “Come on!”

They knew what she meant; and behind her they massed themselves, their
bodies bent forward from their waists, their heads lowered and their
hands clenched like swimmers about to breast a swift torrent.

“Bide where you are--you women!” the blinded man commanded. He felt his
way out to the middle of the room, barring their path with his body and
his outspread arms. “You can do nothing. The war goes on--this fight
here goes on--until we win!”

“No, no, no, no!” shouted back the old beldam, and at each word beat her
two fists against her flaccid breasts. “When babies fight this war this
war ends! And we--the women here--the women everywhere--we will stop it!
Do you hear me? We will stop it! Come on!”

She pushed him aside; and, led by her, the tatterdemalion crew of them
ran swiftly from the cellar and into the looming darkness of the tunnel,
crying out as they ran.

Strictly speaking, the beginning of this story comes at the end of it.
One morning in the paper, I read, under small headlines on an inner
page, sandwiched in between the account of a football game at Nashville
and the story of a dog show at Newport, a short dispatch that had been
sent by cable to this country, to be printed in our papers and to be
read by our people, and then to be forgotten by them. And that dispatch
ran like this:


BOYS TO FIGHT WAR SOON

Germany Using Some Seventeen Years Old.

Haig Wants Young Men

London--The war threatens soon to become a struggle between mere boys.
The pace is said to be entirely too fast for the older men long to
endure. It is declared here that by the middle of 1917, the Entente
Allies will be facing boys of seventeen in the German Army.

General Sir Douglas Haig, commanding the British Expeditionary Forces,
is said to have objected to the sending out of men of middle age. He
wants young men of from eighteen to twenty-five. After the latter year,
it is said, the fighting value of the human unit shows a rapid and
steady decline.... The older men have their place; but, generally
speaking, it is said now to be in “the army behind the army”--the men
back of the line, in the supply and transport divisions, where the
strain is not so great. These older men are too susceptible to trench
diseases to be of great use on the firing line. England already is
registering boys born in 1899, preparatory to calling them up when they
attain their eighteenth year.

So I sat down and I wrote this story.



CHAPTER V. THE CURE FOR LONESOMENESS


THEY were on their way back from Father Minor’s funeral. Going to the
graveyard the horses had ambled slowly; coming home they trotted along
briskly so that from under their feet the gravel grit sprang up, to
blow out behind in little squills and pennons of yellow dust. The black
plumes in the headstalls of the white span that drew the empty hearse
nodded briskly. It was only their colour which kept those plumes
from being downright cheerful. Also, en route to the cemetery, the
pallbearers, both honorary and active, had marched in double file at
the head of the procession. Now, returning, they rode in carriages
especially provided for them.

The first carriage--that is to say, the first one following the
hearse--held four passengers: firstly, the widowed sister of the dead
man, from up state somewhere; secondly and thirdly, two strange priests
who had come over from Hopkinsburg to conduct the services; finally
and fourthly, the late Father Minor’s housekeeper, a lean and elderly
spinster whose devoutness made her dour; indeed, a person whom piety
beset almost as a physical affliction. Seeing her any time at all, the
observer went away filled with the belief that in her particular case
the more certain this woman might be of blessedness hereafter, the more
miserable she would feel in the meantime. Now, as her grief-drawn
face and reddened eyes looked forth from the carriage window upon the
familiar panorama of Buckner Street, all about her bespoke the profound
conviction that this world, already lost in sin, was doubly lost since
Father Minor had gone to take his reward.

In the second carriage rode four of the honorary pallbearers, and
each of them was a veteran, as the dead priest had been: Circuit Judge
Priest, Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, Doctor Lake, and Mr. Peter J. Galloway,
our leading blacksmith and horseshoer. Of these four Mr. Galloway was
the only one who worshipped according to the faith the dead man had
preached. But all of them were members in good standing of the Gideon K.
Irons Camp.

As though to match the changed gait of the undertaker’s horses,
the spirits of these old men were uplifted into a sort of tempered
cheerfulness. So often it is that way after the mourners come away from
the grave. All that kindly hands might do for him who was departed out
of this life had been done. The spade had shaped up and smoothed
down the clods which covered him; the flowers had been piled upon the
sexton’s mounded handiwork until the raw brown earth was almost hidden.
Probably already the hot morning sun was wilting the blossoms. By
to-morrow morning the petals would be falling--a drifting testimony to
the mortality of all living things.

On the way out these four had said mighty little to one another, but
in their present mood they spoke freely of their departed comrade--his
sayings, his looks, little ways that he had, stories of his early life
before he took holy orders, when he rode hard and fought hard, and very
possibly swore hard, as a trooper in Morgan’s cavalry.

“It was a fine grand big turnout they gave him this day,” said Mr.
Galloway with a tincture of melancholy pride in his voice. “Almost as
many Protestants as Catholics there.”

“Herman Felsburg sent the biggest floral design there was,” said Doctor
Lake. “I saw his name on the card.”

“That’s the way Father Tom would have liked it to be, I reckin,” said
Judge Priest from his corner of the carriage. “After all, boys, the best
test of a man ain’t so much the amount of cash he’s left in the bank,
but how many’ll turn out to pay him their respects when they put him
away.”

“Still, at that,” said the sergeant, “I taken notice of several
absentees--from the Camp, I mean. I didn’t see Jake Smedley nowheres
around at the church, or at the graveyard neither.”

“Jake’s got right porely,” explained Judge Priest. “He’s been lookin’
kind of ga’nted anyhow, lately. I’m feared Jake is beginnin’ to break.”

“Oh, I reckin tain’t ez bad ez all that,” said the sergeant. “You’ll see
Jake comin’ round all right ez soon ez the weather turns off cool ag’in.
Us old boys may be gittin’ along in years, but we’re a purty husky crew
yit. It’s a powerful hard job to kill one of us off. I’m sixty-seven
myself, but most of the time I feel ez peart and skittish ez a colt.”
 He spoke for the moment vaingloriously; then his tone altered: “I’m
luckier, though, than some--in the matter of general health. Take Abner
Tilghman now, for instance. Sence he had that second stroke Abner jest
kin make out to crawl about. He wasn’t there to-day with us neither.”

“Boys,” said Doctor Lake, “I hope it’s no reflection on my professional
abilities, but it seems to me I’ve been losing a lot of my patients here
recently. I’m afraid Ab Tilghman is going to be the next one to make a
gap in the ranks. Just between us, he’s in mighty bad shape. Did it ever
occur to any of you to count up and see how many members of the Camp
we’ve buried this past year, starting in last January with old Professor
Reese and winding up to-day with Father Minor?”

None of them answered him in words. Only Judge Priest gave a little
stubborn shake of his head, as though to ward away an unpleasant
thought. Tact inspired Sergeant Bagby to direct the conversation into a
different channel.

“I reckin Mrs. Herman Felsburg won’t know whut to do now with that extry
fish she always fries of a Friday,” said the sergeant.

“That’s right too, Jimmy,” said Mr. Galloway. “Well, God bless her
anyway for a fine lady!”

Had you, reader, enjoyed the advantage of living in our town and of
knowing its customs, you would have understood at once what this last
reference meant. You see, the Felsburgs, in their fine home, lived
diagonally across the street from the little priest house behind the
Catholic church. Mrs. Felsburg was distinguished for being a rigid
adherent to the ritualistic laws of her people. Away from home her
husband and her sons might choose whatever fare suited their several
palates, but beneath her roof and at the table where she presided they
found none of the forbidden foods.

On Fridays she cooked with her own hands the fish for the cold
_Shabbath_ supper and, having cooked them, she set them aside to cool.
But always the finest, crispest fish of all, while still hot, was spread
upon one of Mrs. Felsburg’s best company plates and covered over with
one of Mrs. Felsburg’s fine white napkins, and then a servant would run
across the street with it, from Mrs. Felsburg’s side gate to the front
door of the priest house, and hand it in to the dour-faced housekeeper
with Mrs. Felsburg’s compliments. And so that night, at his main meal
of the day, Father Minor would dine on prime river perch or fresh lake
crappie, fried in olive oil by an orthodox Jewess. Year in and year out
this thing had happened once a week regularly. Probably it would not
happen again. Father Minor’s successor, whoever he might be, might
not understand. Mr. Galloway nodded abstractedly, and for a little bit
nothing was said.

The carriage bearing them twisted out of the procession, leaving a gap
in it, and stopped in front of Doctor Lake’s red-brick residence. The
old doctor climbed down stiffly and, leaning heavily on his cane, went
up the walk to his house. Next Mr. Galloway was dropped at his shabby
little house, snug in its ambuscade behind a bushwhacker’s paradise of
lilac bushes; and pretty soon after that it was Sergeant Bagby’s turn to
get out. As the carriage slowed up for the third stop Judge Priest laid
a demurring hand upon his companion’s arm.

“Come on out to my place, this evenin’, Jimmy,” he said, “and have a
bite of supper with me. There won’t be nobody there but jest you and me,
and after supper we kin set a spell and talk over old times.”

The sergeant shook his whity-grey head in regretful dissent.

“I wish’t I could, Judge,” he said, “but it can’t be done--not
to-night.”

“Better come on!” The judge’s tone was pleading. “I sort of figger that
there old nigger cook of mine has killed a young chicken. And she kin
mix up a batch of waffle batter in less’n no time a-tall.”

“Not to-night, Billy; some night soon I’ll come, shore. But to-night my
wife is figurin’ on company, and ef I don’t show up there’ll be hell to
pay and no pitch hot.”

“Listen, Jimmy; listen to me.” The judge spoke fast, for the sergeant
was out of the carriage by now. “I’ve got a quart of special licker that
Lieutenant Governor Bosworth sent me frum Lexington. Thirty-two years
old, Jimmy--handmade and run through a gum log. Copper nor iron ain’t
never teched it. And when you pour a dram of it out into a glass it
beads up same ez ef it had soapsuds down in the bottom of it--it does
fur a fact. There ain’t been but two drinks drunk out of that quart.”

“Judge, please quit teasin’ me!” Like unto a peppercorn, ground between
the millstones of duty and desire, the sergeant backed reluctantly away
from between the carriage wheels.

“You know yourse’f how wimmin folks are. It’s the new Campbellite
preacher that’s comin’ to-night, and there won’t be a drop to drink on
the table exceptin’ maybe lemonade or ice tea. But I’ve jest natchelly
got to be on hand and, whut’s more, I’ve got to be on my best behaviour
too. Dem that new preacher! Why couldn’t he a-picked out some other
night than this one?”

“Jimmy, listen----”

But the sergeant had turned and was fleeing to sanctuary, beyond reach
of the tempter’s tongue.

So for the last eighth-mile of the ride, until the black driver halted
his team at the Priest place out on Clay Street, the judge rode alone.
Laboriously he crawled out from beneath the overhang of the carriage
top, handed up two bits as a parting gift to the darky on the seat, and
waddled across the sidewalk.

The latch on the gate was broken. It had been broken for weeks. The old
man slammed the gate to with a passionate jerk. The infirm latch clicked
weakly, then slipped out of the iron nick and the gate sagged open--an
invitation to anybody’s wandering livestock to come right on in and
feast upon the shrubs, which from lack of pruning had become thick,
irregular little jungles. Clumps of rank grass, like green scalp locks,
were sprouting in the walk, and when the master had mounted the creaking
steps he saw where two porch planks had warped apart, leaving a gap
between them. In and out of the space ran big black ants. The house
needed painting, too, he noticed; in places where the rain water had
dribbled out of a rust-hole in the tin gutter overhead, the grain of
the clapboarding showed through its white coating. Mentally the judge
promised himself that he would take a couple of days off sometime soon
and call in workmen and have the whole shebang tidied and fixed up. Once
a place began to run down it seemed to break out with neglect all over,
as with a rash.

Halfway through his supper that evening the judge, who had been
strangely silent in the early part of the meal, addressed his house boy,
Jeff Poindexter, in the accents of a marked disapproval.

“Look here, Jeff,” he demanded, “have I got to tell you ag’in about
mendin’ the ketch on that front gate?”

“Yas, suh--I means no, suh,” Jeff corrected himself quickly. “Ise aimin’
to do it fust thing in de mawnin’, suh,” added Jeff glibly, repeating a
false pledge for perhaps the dozenth time within a month. “I got so
many things to do round yere, Jedge, dat sometimes hit seems lak I can’t
think whut nary one of ‘em is.”

“Huh!” snorted his employer crossly. Then he went on warningly: “Some of
these days there’s goin’ to be a sudden change in this house ef things
ain’t attended to better--whole place goin’ to rack and ruin like it
is.”

Wriggling uneasily Jeff found a pretext for withdrawing himself, the
situation having become embarrassing. It wasn’t often that the judge
gave way to temper. Not that Jeff feared the covert threat of discharge.
If anybody quit it wouldn’t be Jeff, as Jeff well knew. Usually Jeff had
an excuse ready for any accusation of shortcomings on his part; thinking
them up was his regular specialty. But this particular moment did not
seem a propitious one for offering excuses. Jeff noiselessly evaporated
out of sight and hearing.

In silence the master hurried through the meal, eating it with what for
him was unusual speed. He was beset with an urge to be out of the big
high-ceiled dining room. Looking about it he told himself it wasn’t a
dining room at all--just a bare barracks, full of emptiness and mighty
little else.

After supper he sat on the porch, while the long twilight gloomed into
dusk and the dusk into night. He was half-minded to walk downtown in the
hope of finding congenial company at Soule’s drug store, the favoured
loafing place of his dwindling set of cronies. But he changed his mind.
Since Mr. Soule, growing infirm, had taken a younger man for a partner,
the drug store was changed. Its old-time air of hospitality and comfort
had somehow altered.

The judge smoked on, rocking back and forth in his chair. The bull bats,
which had been dodging about in the air as long as the daylight lasted,
were gone now, and their shy cousin, the whippoorwill, began calling
from down in the old Enders orchard at the far end of the street. Two
or three times there came to Judge Priest’s ears the sound of footsteps
clunking along the plank sidewalk on his side of the road, and at that
he sat erect, hoping each time the gate hinges would whine a warning
of callers dropping in to bear him company. But the unseen pedestrians
passed on without turning in. The whippoorwill moved up close to Judge
Priest’s side fence. A little night wind that had something on its mind
began with a mournful whispering sound to swish through the top of the
big cedar alongside the porch.

The judge stood it until nearly half-past nine o’clock. Even under the
most favourable circumstances a whippoorwill and a remorseful night
wind, telling its troubles to an evergreen tree, do not make what one
would call exhilarating company. He closed and locked the front door,
turned out the single gas light which burned in the hall and went up the
stairs. In its main design the house was Colonial--Southern Colonial.
But his bedroom was in an ell, above a side porch overlooking the
croquet ground, and this ell was adorned with plank curlicues under its
gables, and a square, ugly, useless little balcony, like a misplaced
wooden moustache, adhered to its most prominent elevation on the side
facing the front. The judge frequently said that, as nearly as he could
figure it out, the extension belonged to the Rutherford B. Hayes period
of American architecture.

Except for him the house was empty. Aunt Dilsey didn’t stay on the place
at night and Jeff’s sleeping quarters were over the stable at the back.
As Judge Priest felt his way through the upper hall and made a light
in his bedchamber, the house was giving off those little creaking,
complaining sounds from its joints that an old tired house always gives
off when it is lonely for a fuller measure of human occupancy.

His own room, revealed now in its homely contour and its still homelier
furnishings, was neat enough, with Jeff’s ideas of neatness, but all
about it indubitably betrayed the fact that only male hands cared for
it. The tall black-walnut bureau lacked a cover for its top; the mantel
was littered with cigar boxes and old law reports; the dead asparagus
ferns, banked in the grate, were faded to a musty yellow; and some
of the fronds had fallen out across the hearth so that remotely the
fireplace suggested the mouth of a big cow choking on an overly large
bite of dried hay. In places the matting on the floor was frayed almost
through.

Just from the careless skew of the coverlid and the set of the pillows
against the white bolster, you would have known at a glance that a man
had made up the bed that morning.

Barring one picture the walls were bare. This lone picture hung in a
space between the two front windows, right where the occupant of the
room, if so minded, might look at it the last thing at night and the
first thing in the morning. Beyond any doubt a lover of the truly
refined in art would have looked at it with a shudder, for it was one
of those crayon portraits--a crayon portrait done in the most crayonsome
and grewsome style of a self-taught artist working by the day rather
than by the piece. Plainly it had been enlarged, as the trade term goes,
from a photograph; the enlarger thereof had been lavish with his black
leads; that, too, was self-evident. The original photographer had done
his worst with the subject; the retoucher had gone him one better.

It was a likeness--you might call it a likeness--of a woman dressed in
the abominable style of the late seventies--with heavy bangs down in her
eyes, and a tight-fitting basque with enormous sleeves, and long
pendent eardrops in her ears. The artist, whoever he was, had striven
masterfully to rob the likeness of all expression. There alone his
craftsmanship had failed him. For even he had not altogether taken away
from the face a certain suggestion of old-fashioned wistfulness and
sweetness. In all other regards, though, he had had his reckless way
with it. The eyes were black and staring, the lines of the figure stiff
and artificial, and the background for the head was a pastel nightmare.

For so long had Judge Priest been wifeless and childless that many of
the younger generation in our town knew nothing of the tragedy in this
old man’s life--which was that the same diphtheria epidemic that took
both his babies in one week’s time had widowed him too. We knew he loved
other people’s children; some of us never suspected that once upon a
time he had had children of his own to love. Except in his memory no
images of the dead babies endured, and this crayon portrait was the sole
sentimental reminder left to him of his married life. And so, to him, it
was a perfect and a matchless thing. He wouldn’t have traded it for all
the canvases of all the old masters in all the art galleries in this
round big world.

This night, before he undressed, he went over and stood in front of it
and looked at it for a while. There was dust in the grooves of the heavy
tarnished gilt frame. From the top bureau drawer he took a big silk
handkerchief and carefully he wiped the dust away. Then, before he put
the handkerchief back in its place, he straightened the thing upon the
nail which held it, and gave the glass front an awkward little caress
with his pudgy old hand.

“It’s been a long, long time, honey, since you went away and left me,”
 he said slowly, in the voice of one addressing a hearer very near at
hand; “but I still miss you and the babies powerfully. And sometimes
it’s sorter lonesome here without you.”

A little later, when the light had been turned out, a noise like a long,
deep sigh sounded out in the darkness. That, though, might have been the
wheeze of the afflicted bedsprings as the old judge let his weight down
in the bed.

An hour passed and there was another small sound there--a muffled
nibbling sound. Behind the wainscoting, between bedroom and bathroom, a
young, adventuresome rat gnawed at a box of matches which he had found
on the floor in the hall and had dragged to his nest in the wall. From
within the box a strangely tantalising aroma escaped; the rat, being
deluded thereby into the belief that phosphorus might be an edible
dainty, was minded to sample the contents. Presently his teeth met
through the cover of the box. There was a sharp flaring pop, followed by
a swift succession of other pops, and the rat gave a jump and departed
elsewhere in great haste, with a hot bad smell in his snout and his
adolescent whiskers quite entirely singed away.

The Confederates, in ragged uniforms of butternut jeans, were squatted
in a clump of pawpaw bushes on the edge of a stretch of ploughed ground.
From the woods on the far side of the field Yankee skirmishers were
shooting toward them. A shell from the batteries must have fallen nearby
and set fire to the dried leaves and the fallen brush, for the smoke
kept blowing in a fellow’s face, choking him and making him cough.
Captain Tip Meldrum, the commander of Company B, was just behind the
men, giving the order to fire back. High Private Billy Priest aimed
his musket at the thickets where the Yankees were hidden and pulled
the trigger, but the cap on the nipple of his piece was defective or
something, and the charge wouldn’t explode. “Fire! Fire! Fire!” yelled
Captain Tip Meldrum over and over again, and then he yanked out his
own horse-pistol and emptied it into the hostile timber. But Private
Priest’s gun still balked. He flung it down--and found himself sitting
up in bed, gasping.

The dream hadn’t been altogether a dream at that. For there was indeed
smoke in the judge’s eyes and his nostrils--plenty of it. A revolver
was cracking out its shots somewhere near at hand; somebody outside his
window was shrieking “Fire!” at the top of a good strong voice. In the
distance other voices were taking up the cry.

In an earlier day, when a fire started in town, the man who discovered
it drew his pistol if he were on the highway, or snatched it up if he
chanced to be at home, and pointing its barrel at the sky emptied it
into the air as fast as the cylinder would turn. The man next door
followed suit and so on until volleys were rattling all over the
neighbourhood. Thus were the townspeople aroused and, along with the
townspeople, the members of the volunteer fire department. Now we had a
paid department and a regular electric-alarm system, predicated on
boxes and gongs and wires and things; but in outlying districts the
pistol-shooting fashion of spreading the word still prevailed to a
considerable extent, and more especially did it prevail at nighttime. So
it didn’t take the late dreamer longer than the shake of a sheep’s tail
to separate what was fancy from what was reality.

As Judge Priest, yet half asleep but waking up mighty fast, shoved his
stout legs into his trousers and tucked the tails of his nightshirt down
inside the waistband, he decided it must be his barn and not his house
that was afire. The smoke which filled the room seemed to be eddying in
through the side window, from across the end of the ell structure. He
thought of his old white mare, Mittie May, fast in her stall under
the hay loft, and of Jeff, who was one of the soundest sleepers in the
world, in his room right alongside the mow. There was need for him to
move, and move fast. He must awaken Jeff first, and then get Mittie May
out of danger. Barefooted, he felt his way across the room and along the
hall and down the stairs, mending his gait as he went. And then, as he
jerked the front door open and stumbled out upon the porch, he came into
violent collision with Ed Tilghman, Junior, who lived across the street,
and who had just bounded up the porch steps with the idea of hammering
on the front-door panels. Tilghman was a young man and the judge an
old one; it was inevitable the judge should suffer the more painful
consequences of the sudden impact of their two bodies together. He went
down sideways with a great hard thump, his forehead striking against a
sharp corner of the door jamb. He was senseless, and a little stream
of blood was beginning to trickle down his face as Tilghman dragged him
down off the porch into the yard and stretched him on his back in the
grass, and then ran to fetch water.

In that same minute the big bell in the tower of fire headquarters,
half a mile away, began sounding in measured beats, and a small
hungry-looking tongue of flame licked up across the sill and flickered
for a moment through the smoke which was pouring forth out of the
bathroom window and rolling across the flat top of the extension. The
smoke gushed out still thicker, smothering down the red pennon, but in a
second or two it showed again, and this time it brought with it two more
like it. The bathroom window became a frame for a cloudy pink glare, and
the purring note of the fire became a brisk and healthy crackle as it
ate through the seasoned clapboards of the outer wall.

All of a sudden, so it seemed, the yard and the street were full of
people. Promptly there began to happen most of the things that do happen
at a fire. As for instance: Mr. Milus Miles, who arrived among the very
first and who had a commandingly loud voice, mounted a rustic bench
alongside the croquet ground and called for volunteers to form a bucket
brigade. That his recruits would have no buckets to pass after they
had enrolled themselves for service was with Mr. Miles a minor
consideration. It was the spirit of the thing, the forethought, the
responsibility, the aptitude for leadership in a work of succour--all
these inspired him.

Mr. Ulysses Rice, who lived in the next street, climbed the side
fence--under the circumstances it somehow to him seemed a more resolute
thing to scale the fence than to enter by the gate in the regular
way--and ran across the yard, inspired with a neighbourly and
commendable desire to save something right away. He put his toe in a
croquet wicket and fell headlong. This was to be expected of Mr. Rice.
He had a perfect genius for getting into accidents. All Nature was ever
in a conspiracy with all the inanimate objects in the world to do
him bodily hurt. If he went skiff riding and fell overboard, as he
customarily did, it was not because he had rocked the boat. The boat
rocked itself. He was the only man in town who had ever succeeded in
gashing his throat with a safety razor.

He now disentangled his foot from the wicket and scrambled up and, still
actuated by the best motives imaginable, he dashed toward the back of
the Priest homestead, being minded to seek entrance by a rear door. But
a wire clothesline, swinging at exactly the right height to catch him
just under the nose, did catch him just under the nose and almost
sawed the tip of that useful organ off Mr. Rice’s agonised face.
Coincidentally, citizens of various ages and assorted sizes ran into
the house and dragged out the furnishings of the lower floor, bestowing
their salvage right where other citizens might fall over it. Through all
the joints between the shingles the roof of the ell leaked smoke, until
it resembled a sloped bed of slaking lime. This fire was rapidly getting
to be a regular fire.

With a great clattering the department came tearing up the street.
Dropping down from their perches on the running boards of the wagons,
certain of its members began unreeling the hose, then ran back with it
to couple it to the nearest fire hydrant, nearly two blocks away down
Clay Street. Others brought a ladder and reared it against the side of
the house, with its uppermost rounds projecting above the low eaves.
While many hands steadied the ladder in place, Captain Bud Gorman of
Station No. 1--there was also a Station No. 2, but Bud skippered Station
No. 1--mounted it and, with an axe, started chopping a hole in the roof
at a point where there seemed as yet to be no immediate peril. Under his
strokes the shingles flew in showers. It was evident that if the flames
should spread to this immediate area Captain Bud Gorman would have a
rough but practicable flue ready for their egress into the open air,
against the moment when they had burst through the ceiling and the
rafters below.

More people and yet more kept coming. The rubber piping, which
perversely had kinked and twisted as it came off the spinning drum of
hose reel No. 1, was fairly straight now, and from his station just
inside the gate the fire chief bellowed the command down the line to
turn ‘er on! They turned her on, but somewhere in the coupled sections
of hose a stricture had developed. All that happened was that from the
brass snout of the nozzle a languid gush of yellow water arose in a fan
shape to an elevation of perhaps fifteen feet, thence descending in a
cascade, not upon the particular spot at which the nozzle was aimed,
but full upon the ill-starred Mr. Rice as he tugged to uproot a wooden
support of the little grape arbor which flanked the house on the
endangered side. Somewhat disfigured by the clothesline but still
resolute to lend a helping hand somewhere, Mr. Rice had but a moment
before become possessed of an ambition to remove the grape vines,
trellis and all, to a place of safety. His reward for this kindly
attempt was a sudden soaking.

As though the hiss of the water had aroused him, Judge Priest sat up in
the grass, where he had been lying during these tumultuous and crowded
five minutes. He was still half dazed. As his eyesight cleared, he saw
that the bathroom was as good as gone and that his bedroom was about to
go. Some one helped him to his unsteady feet and kept him upright. He
shook himself free from the supporting grasp of the person who held him,
and advanced toward the porch steps, wavering a little on his legs as he
went.

Then, before anybody sensed what he meant to do, before anybody could
make a move to stop him, he had mounted the steps and was at the front
door.

Out of the door, bumping into him, backed a coughing, gasping squad,
their noses smarting and their eyes streaming from the acrid reek,
towing after them the big horsehair sofa which was the principal piece
of furniture in the judge’s sitting room. The sofa had lost two of its
casters in transit, and it took all their strength to drag it over the
lintel.

“It’s no use, Judge Priest,” panted one of these workers, recognising
him; “we’ve got pretty nearly everything out that was downstairs and you
couldn’t get upstairs now if you tried.”

Then seeing that the owner meant to disregard the warning, this man
threw out an arm forcibly to detain the other. But for all his age and
size, the judge was wieldy enough when he chose to be. With an agile
twist of his body he dodged past, and as the man, astounded and
horrified, glared across the threshold he saw Judge Priest running down
the murky hall and, with head bent and his mouth and nose buried in
the crook of one elbow, starting up the stairs into the thickest and
blackest of the smoke. To this man’s credit, be it said, he made a
valiant effort to overtake the old man. The pursuer darted in behind
him, but at the foot of the steps fell back, daunted and unable to
breathe. He staggered out again into the open, gagging with the smoke
that was in his throat and down in his lungs.

“He’s gone in there!” he shouted, pointing behind him. “He’s gone right
in there! He’s gone upstairs!”

“Who is it? Who’s gone in there?” twenty voices demanded together.

“The judge--just a second ago! I tried to stop him--he got by me! He
ain’t got a chance!” Even as he spoke the words, a draught of fire came
roaring through the crater in the roof which Captain Bud Gorman’s axe
had dug for its free passage. An outcry--half gasp, half groan--went up
from those who knew what had happened. They ran round in rings wasting
precious time.

Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, half dressed, trotted across the lawn. He had just
arrived. He grabbed young Ed Tilghman by the arm.

“How’d she start, boy?” demanded the sergeant. “Where’s the judge? Did
they git everything out?”

“Everything out--hell!” answered Tilghman, sobbing in his distress.
“The old judge is in there. He got a lick on the head and it must have
made him crazy. He just ran back in there and went upstairs. He’ll never
make it--and nobody can get him out. He’ll smother to death sure!”

Down on his knees dropped Sergeant Bagby and shut his eyes, and for the
first, last and only time in his life he prayed aloud in public.

“Oh, Lord,” he prayed, “fur God’s sake git Billy Priest out of there!
Oh, Lord, that’s all I’ll ever ask You--fur God’s sake git Billy Priest
out of there! Ez a favour to me, Lord, please, Suh, git Billy Priest out
of there!” From many throats at once a yell arose--a yell so shrill
and loud that it overtopped all lesser sounds; a yell so loud that the
sergeant ceased from his praying to look. Through the smoke, and over
the sloping peak of the roof from the rear, came a slim, dark shape
on its all-fours. Treading the pitch of the gable as swiftly and
surefootedly as a cat, it scuttled forward to the front edge of the
housetop, swung downward at arms’ length from the eaves, and dropped
on a narrow ledge of tin-covered surface where the small ornamental
balcony, which was like a misplaced wooden moustache, projected from the
face of the building at the level of the second floor, then instantly
dived headfirst in at that window of the judge’s bedchamber which was
farthest from the corner next the bathroom.

For a silent minute--a minute which seemed a year--those below stared
upward, with starting eyes and lumps in their throats. Then, all
together, they swallowed their several throat lumps and united in an
exultant joyous yell, which made that other yell they had uttered a
little before seem by comparison puny and cheap. Through the smoke which
bulged from the balcony window and out upon the balcony itself popped
the agile black figure. Bracing itself, it hauled across the window
ledge a bulky inert form. It wrestled its helpless burden over and eased
it down the flat, tiny railed-in perch just as a fire ladder, manned
by many eager hands, came straightening up from below, with Captain Bud
Gorman of Station No. 1 climbing it, two rounds at a jump, before it had
ceased to waver in the air.

Volunteers swarmed up the ladder behind Bud Gorman, forming a living
chain from the earth to the balcony. First they passed down the judge,
breathing and whole but unconscious, with his nightshirt torn off his
back and his bare right arm still clenched round a picture of some
sort in a heavy gilt frame. His grip on it did not relax until they had
carried him well back from the burning house, and for the second time
that night had stretched him out upon the grass.

The judge being safe, the men on the ladder made room for Jeff
Poindexter to descend under his own motive power, all of them cheering
mightily. Just as Jeff reached solid ground the stoppage in the hose
unstopped itself of its own accord and from the brazen gullet of the
nozzle there sprang up, like a silver sword, a straight, hard stream of
water which lanced into the heart of the fire, turning its exultant song
from a crackle to a croon and then to a resentful hiss.

In that same instant Sergeant Bagby found himself, for the first time
since he escaped from the kindly tyranny of a black mammy--nearly sixty
years before--in close and ardent embrace with a member of the African
race.

“Jeff,” clarioned the sergeant, hugging the blistered rescuer yet closer
to him and beating him on the back with hearty thumps--“Jeff, God bless
your black hide, how did you come to think of it?”

“Well, suh, Mr. Bagby,” wheezed Jeff, “hit wuz lak dis: I didn’t wake
up w’en she fust started. I got so much on my mind to do daytimes ‘at I
sleeps mighty sound w’en I does sleep. Presen’ly, tho’, I did wake up,
an’ I got my pants on, an’ I come runnin’ acrost de lot frum de stable,
an’ I got heah jes’ in time to hear ‘em all yellin’ out dat de jedge is
done went back into de house. I sees there ain’t no chanc’t of goin’ in
after him de way he’s done went, but jes’ about that time I remembers
dat air little po’ch up yonder on de front of de house w’ich it seem lak
ever’body else had done furgot all ‘bout hit bein’ there a-tall. So I
runs round to de back right quick, an’ I dim’ up de lattice-work by
de kitchen, an’ I comes out along over de roof, an’ I drap down on
de little po’ch, an’ after that, I reckin, you seen de rest of it fur
you’self, suh--all but whut happen after I gits inside dat window.”

“What did happen?” From the ring of men who hedged in the sergeant and
Jeff five or six asked the same question at once. Before an all-white
audience Jeff visibly expanded himself.

“W’y, nothin’ a-tall happen,” he said, “‘ceptin’ that I found de ole
boss-man right where I figgered I’d find him--in his own room at de foot
of his baid. He’d done fell down dere on de flo’, right after he grabbed
dat air picture offen de wall. Yas, suh, that’s perzack-ly where I finds
him!”

“But, Jeff, how could you breathe up there?” Still in the sergeant’s
cordial grasp, Jeff made direct answer:

“Gen’l’mens, I didn’t! Fur de time bein’ I jes’ natchelly abandoned
breathin’!”

Again that night Judge Priest had a dream--only this time the dream
lacked continuity and sequence and was but a jumble of things--and he
emerged from it with his thoughts all in confusion. In his first drowsy
moment of consciousness he had a sensation of having taken a long
journey along a dark rough road. For a little he lay wondering where
he was, piecing together his impressions and trying to bridge the
intervening gaps.

Then the light got better and he made out the anxious face of Doctor
Lake looking down at him and, just over Doctor Lake’s shoulder, the face
of Sergeant Bagby. He opened his mouth then and spoke.

“Well, there’s one thing certain shore,” said the judge: “this ain’t
heaven! Because ef ‘twas, there wouldn’t be a chance of you and Jimmy
Bagby bein’ here with me.”

Whereupon, for no apparent reason on earth that Judge Priest could
fathom, Doctor Lake, with a huskily affectionate intonation, called him
by many profane and improper names; and Sergeant Bagby, wiping his eyes
with one hand, made his other hand up into a fist and shook it in Judge
Priest’s face, meanwhile emotionally denouncing him as several qualified
varieties of an old idiot.

Under this treatment the fogginess quit Judge Priest’s brain, and he
became aware of the presence of a considerable number of persons about
him, including the two Edward Tilghmans--Senior and Junior--and the two
Tilghman girls; and Jeff Poindexter, wearing about half as many garments
as Jeff customarily wore, and with a slightly blistered appearance as
to his face and shoulders; and Mr. Ulysses Rice, with a badly
skinned nose and badly drenched shoulders; and divers others of his
acquaintances. Indeed, he was quite surrounded by neighbours and
friends. Also by degrees it became apparent to him that he was stretched
upon a strange bed in a strange room--at least he did not recall ever
having been in this room before--and that he had a bandage across the
baldest part of his head, and that he felt tired all over his body.

“Well, I got out, didn’t I?” he inquired after a minute or two.

“Got out--thunder!” vociferated the sergeant with what the judge
regarded as a most unnecessary violence of voice and manner. “Ef this
here black boy of yourn hadn’t a-risked his own life, climbin’ down over
the roof and goin’ in through a front window and draggin’ you out of
that fire--the same ez ef you was a sack of shorts--you’d a-been a
goner, shore. Ain’t you ‘shamed of yourself, scarin’ everybody half to
death that-a-way?”

“Oh, it was Jeff, was it?” said the old judge, disregarding Sergeant
Bagby’s indignant interrogation. He looked steadfastly at his grinning
servitor and, when he spoke again, there was a different intonation in
his voice.

“Much obliged to you, Jeff.” That was all he said. It was the way he
said it.

“You is more’n welcome, thanky, suh,” answered Jeff; “it warn’t scursely
no trouble a-tall, suh--‘cep’in’ dem ole shingles on dat roof suttin’y
wuz warm to de te’ch.”

“Did--did Jeff succeed in savin’ anything else besides me?” The judge
put the question as though half fearing what the answer might be.

“Ef you mean this--why, here ‘tis, safe and sound,” said Sergeant Bagby,
and he moved aside so that Judge Priest might see, leaning against
the footboard of the bed, a certain crayon portrait. “The glass ain’t
cracked even and the frame ain’t dented. You three come out of there
practically together--Jeff a-hang-in’ onto you and you a-hangin’ onto
your picture. So if that’s whut you went chargin’ back in there fur, I
hope you’re satisfied!”

“I’m satisfied,” said the judge softly. Then after a bit he cleared his
throat and ventured another query:

“That old house of mine--I s’pose she’s all burnt up by now?”

“Don’t you ever believe it,” said the sergeant. “That there house of
yourn ‘pears to be purty nigh ez contrary and set in its ways ez whut
you are. It won’t burn up, no matter how good a chance you give it. Jest
about the time Jeff here drug you out on that little balcony outside
your window, the water works begun to work, and after that they had her
under control in less’n no time. She must be about out by now.”

“Your bathroom’s a total loss and the extension on that side is pretty
badly scorched up, but the rest of the place, excusing damage by the
water and the smoke, is hardly damaged,” added the younger Tilghman.
“You’ll be able to move back in, inside of a month, judge.”

“And in the meantime you’re going to stay right here, Judge Priest, and
make my house your home,” announced Mr. Tilghman, Senior. “It’s mighty
plain, but such as it is you’re welcome to it, judge. We’ll do our level
best to make you comfortable. Only I’m afraid you’ll miss the things
you’ve been used to having round you.”

“Oh, I reckin not,” said Judge Priest. His glance travelled slowly
from the crayon portrait at the foot of the bed to Jeff Poindexter’s
chocolate-coloured face and back again to the portrait. “I’ve got mighty
near everything I need to make me happy.”

“What I meant was that maybe you’d be kind of lonesome away from your
own house,” Mr. Tilghman said.

“No, I don’t believe so,” answered the old man, smiling a little. “You
see, I taken the cure for lonesomeness to-night. You mout call it the
smoke cure.”



CHAPTER VI. THE FAMILY TREE

THE family tree of the Van Nicht family was not the sort of family tree
you think I mean, although they had one of that variety too. This was a
real tree. It was an elm--the biggest elm and the broadest and the most
majestic elm in the entire state, and in the times of its leafage cast
the densest shade of any elm to be found anywhere, probably. For more
than one hundred years the Van Nicht family had lived in its shadow.
That was the principal trouble with them--they did live in the shadow.
I’ll come to that later.

Every consequential visitor to Schuylerville was taken to see the Van
Nicht elm. It was a necessary detail of his tour about town. Either
before or after he had viewed the new ten-story skyscraper of the
Seaboard National Bank, and the site for the projected Civic Centre, and
the monument to Schuyler County’s defenders of the Union--1861-’65--with
a dropsical bronze figure of a booted and whiskered infantryman on top
of the tall column, and the Henrietta Wing Memorial Library, and the
rest of it, they took him and they showed him the Van Nicht elm. So
doing, it was incumbent upon them to escort him through a street which
was beginning to wear that vacillating, uncertain look any street
wears while trying to make up its mind whether to keep on being a quiet
residential byway in an old-fashioned town or to turn itself into an
important thoroughfare of a thriving industrial centre. You know the
kind of street I aim to picture--with here an impudent young garage
showing its shining morning face of red brick in a side yard where there
used to be an orchard, and there a new apartment building which has
shouldered its way into a line of ancient dwellings and is driving its
cast-iron cornices, like rude elbows, into the clapboarded short ribs of
its neighbours upon either side.

At the far, upper end of that street, upon the poll of a gentle
eminence, uplifted the Van Nicht elm. It was for sundry months of the
year a splendid vast umbrella, green in the spring and summer and yellow
in the fall; and in the winter presented itself against the sky line as
a great skeleton shape, without a blemish upon it, except for a scar
in the bark close down to the earth to show where once there might have
been a fissure in its mighty bole. No grass, or at least mighty little
grass, grew within the circle of its brandishing limbs. It was as though
the roots of the tree sucked up all the nourishment that the soil might
hold, leaving none for the humble grass to thrive upon.

It was in the winter that the house, which stood almost directly under
the tree, was most clearly revealed as a square, ugly domicile of
grey stone, a story and a half in height, lidded over by a hip roof of
weathered shingles; with a deeply recessed front door, like a pursed and
proper mouth, and, above it, a row of queer little longitudinal windows,
half hidden below the overhang of the gables and suggesting so many
slitted eyes peering out from beneath a lowering brow. You saw, too,
the mould that had formed in streaky splotches upon the stonework of
the walls and the green rime of age and dampness that had overspread the
curled shingles and the peeling paint, turning to minute scales upon
the woodwork of the window casings and the door frames. Also you saw
one great crooked bough which stretched across the roof like a menacing
black arm, forever threatening to descend and crush its rafters in. This
was in winter; in summertime the leaves almost completely hid the house,
so that one who halted outside the decrepit fence, with its snaggled and
broken panels, must needs stoop low to perceive its outlines at all.

The carriage or the automobile bearing the prominent guest and the
chairman of the local reception committee would halt at the end of the
street.

“That,” the chairman would say, pointing up grade, “is the Van Nicht
elm. Possibly you’ve heard about it? Round here we call it the Van
Nicht family tree. It is said to be the largest elm in this part of the
country. In fact, I doubt whether there are any larger than this one,
even up in New England. And that’s the famous old Van Nicht homestead
there, just back of it.

“Its got a history. When Colonel Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht came here
right after the Revolutionary War--he was a colonel in the Revolution,
you know--he built the house, placing it just behind the tree. The
tree must’ve grown considerably since then, but the house yonder hasn’t
changed but mighty little all these years. It’s the oldest building in
Schuyler County. As a matter of fact, the town, with this house for
a starter, sort of grew up down here on the flat lands below. The old
colonel raised a family here and died here. So did his son and his
grandson. They were rich people once--the richest people in the county
at one time.

“Why all the land from here clear down to Ossibaw Street--that’s six
blocks south--used to be included in the Van Nicht estate. It was a farm
then, of course, and by all accounts a fine one. But each generation
sold off some of the original grant, until all that’s left now is that
house, with the tree and about an acre of ground more or less. And I
guess it’s pretty well covered with mortgages.”

This, in substance, was what the guide would tell the distinguished
stranger. This, in substance, was what was told to young Olcott on
the day after he arrived in Schuylerville to take over the editorial
management of the Schuylerville News-Ledger. Mayor T. J. McGlynn was
showing him the principal points of interest--so the mayor had put it,
when he called that morning with his own car at the Hotel Brain-ard,
where Olcott was stopping, and invited the young man to go for a tour of
inspection of the city, as a sort of introductory and preparatory course
in local education prior to his assuming his new duties.

While the worthy mayor was uttering his descriptive remarks Olcott bent
his head and squinted past the thick shield of limbs and leaves. He saw
that the door of the house, which was closed, somehow had the look of
about always being closed, and that most of the windows were barred with
thick shutters.

“Appears rather deserted, doesn’t it?” said the newcomer, striving to
show a proper appreciation of the courtesy that was being visited upon
him. “There isn’t any one living there at present, is there?”

“Sure there is,” said Mayor McGlynn. “Old Mr. Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht,
4th, who’s the present head of the family, and his two old-maid sisters,
Miss Rachael and Miss Harriet--they all live there together. Miss
Rachael is considerably older than Miss Harriet, but they’re both
regular old maids--guess they always will be. The brother never married,
either--couldn’t find anybody good enough to share the name, I suppose.
Anyhow he’s never married. And besides I guess it keeps him pretty busy
living up to the job of being the head of the oldest family in this end
of the state. That’s about all he ever has done.”

“Then he isn’t in any regular business or any profession?”

“Business!” Mayor McGlynn snorted. “I should say not! All any one of the
Van Nichts has ever done since anybody can remember was just to keep on
being a Van Nicht and upholding the traditions and the honours of the
Van Nichts--and this one is like all his breed. The poorer he gets the
more pompous and the more important acting he gets--that’s the funny
part of it.”

“Apparently not a very lucrative calling, judging by the general aspect
of the ancestral manor,” said Olcott, who was beginning now to be
interested. “How do they manage to live?”

“Lord knows,” said the mayor. “How do the sparrows manage to live? I
guess there’re times when they need a load of coal and a market basket
full of victuals to help tide ‘em over a hard spell, but naturally
nobody would dare to offer to help them. They’re proud as Lucifer
themselves, and the town is kind of proud of ‘em. They’re institutions
with us, as you might say.”

McGlynn, who, as Olcott was to learn later, was a product of new
industrial and new political conditions in the community, spoke with
the half-begrudged admiration which the self-made so often have for the
ancestor-made.

“We ain’t got so very many of the real aristocrats in this section any
more, what with all this new blood pouring in since our boom started
up; and even if they are as poor as Job’s turkey, these Van Nichts still
count for a good deal round here. Money ain’t everything anyway, is
it?... Well, Mr. Olcott, if you’ve seen enough here, we’ll turn round
and go see something else.” He addressed his chauffeur: “Jim, suppose
you take us by the new hosiery mills next. I want Mr. Olcott to see one
of the most prosperous manufacturing plants in the state. Employs nine
hundred hands, Mr. Olcott, and hasn’t been in operation but a little
more than three years. That’s the way this town is humping itself. You
didn’t make any mistake, coming here.”

As the car swung about, Olcott gave the Van Nicht place a backward
scrutiny over his shoulder and was impressed by its appearance into
saying this:

“It strikes me as having a mighty unhealthy air about it. I’d say
offhand it was a first-rate breeding spot for malaria and rheumatism.
I wonder why they don’t trim up that big old tree and give the sunshine
and the light a chance to get in under it.”

“For heaven’s sake and your own, don’t you suggest that to the old boy
when you meet him,” said McGlynn with a grin. “He’d as soon think of
cutting off his own leg as to touch a leaf on the family tree. It’s
sacred to him. It represents all the glory of his breed and he venerates
it, the same as some people venerate an altar in a church.”

“Then you think I will be likely to meet him? I’d like to--from what you
tell me, he must be rather a unique personality.”

“Yes, he’s all of that--unique, I mean. And you’re pretty sure to meet
him before you’ve been in town many months. He seems to regard it as his
duty to call on certain people, after they’ve been here a given length
of time, and extend to them the freedom of the town that his illustrious
great-granddaddy founded. If you’re specially lucky--or specially
unlucky--he may even invite you to call on him, although that’s an
honour that doesn’t come to very many, even among the older residents.
The Van Nichts are mighty exclusive and it isn’t often that anybody sees
what the inside of their house looks like--let alone a stranger.... Say,
Jim, after we’ve seen the hosiery mills, run us on out past the County
Feeble-Minded and Insane Asylum. Mr. Olcott will enjoy that!”

Within a month’s time from this time, Mayor McGlynn’s prophecy was to
come true. On a morning in the early part of the summer 01 Olcott sat
behind his desk in his office adjoining the city room on the second
floor of the _News-Ledger_ building, when his office boy announced a
gentleman calling to see Mr. Olcott personally.

“See who it is, will you, please, Morgan?” said Olcott to his assistant.
Morgan had arrived less than a week before, having been sent on by the
syndicate which owned a chain of papers, the _News-Ledger included_, to
serve under the new managing editor. The syndicate had a cheery little
way of shuffling the cards at frequent intervals and dealing out fresh
executives for the six or eight dailies under its control and ownership.

“I’m busy as the dickens,” added Olcott as Morgan got up to obey; “so if
it’s a pest that’s outside, give him the soft answer and steer him off!”

In a minute Morgan was back with a cryptic grin on his face.

“You’d better see him--he’s worth seeing, all right,” said Morgan.

“Who is it?” asked Olcott.

“It’s somebody right out of a book,” answered Morgan; “somebody giving
the name of Something Something Van Nicht. I didn’t catch all the first
name--I was too busy sizing up its proprietor. Says he must see you
privately and in person. I gather from his manner that if you don’t see
him this paper will never be quite the same again. And honestly, Olcott,
he’s worth seeing.”

“I think I know who it is,” said Olcott, “and I’ll see him. Boy, show
the gentleman in!”

“I’ll go myself,” said Morgan. “This is a thing that ought to be done in
style.”

Olcott reared back in his chair, waiting. The door opened and Morgan’s
voice was heard making formal and sonorous announcement: “Mr. Van
Nicht.” And Olcott, looking over his desk top, saw, framed in the
doorway, a figure at once picturesque and pitiable.

The first thing, almost, to catch his eye was a broad black stock
collar--the first stock collar Olcott had ever seen worn by a man in
daytime. Above it was a long, close-shaven, old face, with a bloodless
and unwholesome pallor to it, framed in long, white hair, and surmounted
by a broad-brimmed, tall-crowned soft hat which had once been black
and now was gangrenous with age. Below it a pair of sloping shoulders
merging into a thin, meagre body tightly cased in a rusty frock coat,
and below the coat skirts in turn a pair of amazingly thin and rickety
legs, ending in slender, well-polish-ed boots with high heels. In an
instantaneous appraisal of the queer figure Olcott comprehended these
details and, in that same flicker of time, noted that the triangle of
limp linen showing in the V of the close-buttoned lapels had a fragile,
yellowish look like old ivory, that all the outer garments were
threadbare and shiny in the seams, and that the stock collar was decayed
to a greenish tinge along its edges. Although the weather was warm, the
stranger wore a pair of grey cotton gloves.

“Good morning,” said Olcott, mechanically putting a ceremonious and
formal emphasis into the words and getting on his feet.

“Good morning, sir, to you,” returned the visitor in a voice of
surprising volume, considering that it issued from so slight a frame.
“You are Mr. Olcott?”

“Yes, that’s my name.” And Olcott took a step forward, extending his
hand.

“Mine, sir, is Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht, 4th.” The speaker paused midway
of the floor to remove one glove and to shift it and his cane to the
left hand. Advancing, with a slight limp, he gave to Olcott a set of
fingers that were dry and chilly and fleshless. Almost it was like
clasping the articulated bones of a skeleton’s hand.

“I have come personally, sir, to pay my respects and, as one
representing the--ah--the old régime of our people, to bid you welcome
to our midst.”

“Thank you very much,” said Olcott, a bit amused inwardly, and a bit
impressed also by the air of mouldy grandeur which the other diffused.
“Won’t you sit down, Mr. Van Nicht?”

“I shall be able to tarry but a short while.” The big voice boomed out
of the little dried-up body as the old man took the chair which Olcott
had indicated. He took only part of it. He poised himself on the forward
edge of its seat, holding his spine very erect and dramatising his
posture with a stiff and stately investure.

Olcott caught himself telling himself Morgan had been right: This
personage was not really flesh and blood, but something out of a
book--an embodied bit of fiction. Why even his language had the stilted
shaping of the characters in most of these old-timey classical novels.

“He wasn’t really born at all,” Olcott thought. “Dickens wrote him and
then Cruikshank drew him and now here he is, miraculously preserved to
posterity. But Charlotte Brontë endowed him with his conversation.” What
Olcott said--aloud--was something fatuous and commonplace touching on
the state of the weather.

“I have yet other motives in presenting myself to-day, in this, your
sanctum,” stated Mr. Van Nicht. “First of all, I wish to congratulate
you upon what to me appears to be a very gratifying stroke of
journalistic enterprise which has come to light in the columns of
your valued organ since your advent into the community and for which,
therefore, I assume you are responsible.”

“Well,” said Olcott, “we try to get out a reasonably live sheet.”

“Pardon me,” said Mr. Van Nicht, “but I do not refer to the aspect of
your news columns. I am speaking with reference to a feature lately
appearing in your Sunday edition, in what I believe is known as your
magazine section. I have observed that, beginning two weeks ago, you
inaugurated a department devoted to the genealogies of divers of our
older and more distinguished American families. As I recall, the
subjects of your first two articles were the Adams family, of
Massachusetts, and the Lee family, of Virginia. It may interest you to
know, sir--I trust indeed that it may please you to know--that I,
personally, am most highly pleased that you should seek to inculcate in
the minds of our people, through the medium of your columns, a knowledge
of those strains of blood to which our nation is particularly indebted
for much of its culture, much of its social development, many of its
gentler and more graceful influences. It is a most worthy movement
indeed, a most commendable undertaking. I repeat, sir, that I
congratulate you upon it.”

“Thank you,” said Olcott. “This coming Sunday we are going to run a yarn
about the Gordon family, of Georgia, and after that I believe come the
Clays, of Kentucky.”

“Quite so, quite so,” said Mr. Van Nicht. “The names you have mentioned
are names that are permanently embalmed in the written annals of our
national life. But may I ask, sir, whether you have taken any steps as
yet to in-corporate into your series an epitome of the achievements
of the family of which I have the honour to be the head--the Van Nicht
family?”

“Well, you see,” explained Olcott apologetically, “these articles are
not written here in the office. They are sent to us in proof sheets as a
part of our regular feature service, and we run ‘em just as they come to
us. Probably--probably”--he hesitated a moment over the job of phrasing
tactfully his white lie--“probably a story on your family genealogy will
be coming along pretty soon.”

“Doubtlessly so, doubtlessly so.” The assent was guilelessly emphatic.
“In any such symposium, in any such compendium, my family, beyond
peradventure, will have its proper place in due season. Nevertheless,
foreseeing that in the hands of a stranger the facts and the dates
might unintentionally be confused or wrongly set down, I have taken upon
myself the obligation of preparing an accurate account of the life and
work of my illustrious, heroic and noble ancestor, Colonel Cecilius
Jacob Van Nicht, together with a more or less elaborate _résumé_ of the
lives of his descendants up to and including the present generation.
This article is now completed. In fact I have it upon my person.”
 Carefully he undid the top button of his coat and reached for an inner
breast pocket. “I shall be most pleased to accord you my full permission
for its insertion in an early issue of your publication.” He spoke with
the air of one bestowing a gift of great value.

Olcott’s practised eye appraised the probable length of the manuscript
which this volunteer contributor was hauling forth from his bosom and,
inside himself, Olcott groaned. There appeared to be a considerable
number of sheets of foolscap, all closely written over in a fine, close
hand.

“Thank you, Mr. Van Nicht, thank you very much,” said Olcott, searching
his soul for excuses. “But I’m afraid we aren’t able to pay much for
this sort of matter. What I mean to say is we are not in a position
to invest very heavily in outside offerings. Er--you see most of our
specials--in fact practically all of them except those written here
in the office by the staff--come to us as part of a regular syndicate
arrangement.”

Here Mr. Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht, 4th, attained the physically
impossible. He erected his spine straighter than before and stiffened
his body a mite stiffer than it had been.

“Pray do not misunderstand me, sir,” he stated solemnly. “I crave no
honorarium for this work. I expect none. I have considered it a duty
incumbent upon me to prepare it, and I regard it as a pleasure to tender
it to you, gratis.”

“But--I’d like to be able to offer a little something anyway--”

“One moment, if you please! Kindly hear me out! With me, sir, this has
been a labour of love. Moreover, I should look upon it as an impropriety
to accept remuneration for such work. To me it would savour of the
mercenary--would be as though I sought to capitalise into dollars and
cents the reputation of my own people and my own stock. I trust you get
my viewpoint?”

“Oh, yes, indeed”--Olcott was slightly flustered--“very creditable of
you, I’m sure. Er--is it very long?”

“No longer than a proper appreciation of the topic demands.” The old
gentleman spoke with firmness. “Also you may rely absolutely upon the
trustworthiness and the accuracy of all the facts, as herein recited.
I had access to the papers left by my own revered grandfather, Judge
Cecilius Van Nicht, 2d, son and namesake of the founder of our line,
locally. I may tell you, too, that in preparing this compilation I was
assisted by my sister, Miss Rachael Van Nicht, a lady of wide reading
and no small degree of intellectual attainment, although leading a life
much aloof from the world--in fact, almost a cloistered life.”

He arose, opened out the sheaf of folded sheets, pressed them flat with
a caressing hand and laid them down in front of Olcott. He spoke now
with authority, almost in the tone of a superior giving instructions
regarding a delicate matter to an underling:

“I feel warranted in the assumption that you will not find it necessary
to alter or curtail my statements in any particular. I have had some
previous experience in literary endeavours. In all modesty I may
say that I am no novice. A signed article from my pen, entitled The
Influence of the Holland--Dutch Strain Upon American Public Life, From
Peter Stuyvesant to Theodore Roosevelt, was published some years since
in the New York _Evening Post_, afterward becoming the subject of
editorial comment in the Springfield _Republican_, the Hartford
_Courant_ and the Boston _Transcript_. At present I am engaged in a
brief history of one of our earlier presidents, the Honourable Martin
Van Buren. I have the honour to bid you a very good day, sir.”

Olcott ran the story in his next Sunday issue but one. It stretched
the full length of two columns and invaded a third. It was tiresome and
long-winded. It was as prosy as prosy could be. To make room for it a
smartly done special on the commercial awakening of Schuyler County was
crowded out. Olcott’s judgment told him he did a sinful thing, but he
ran it. He went further than that. Into the editorial page he slipped a
paragraph directing attention to “Mr. Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht’s timely
and interesting article, appearing elsewhere in this number.”

He had his reward, though, in the comments of sundry ones of his local
subscribers. From these comments, made to him by letter and by word of
mouth, he sensed something of the attitude of the community toward
the Van Nicht family. As he figured, this sentiment was a compound of
several things. It appeared to embody a gentle intolerance for the shell
of social exclusiveness in which the present bearers of the name had
walled themselves up, together with a sympathy for their poverty and
their self-imposed state of lonely and neglected aloofness, and
still further down, underlying these emotions and tincturing them, an
understanding and an admiration for the importance of this old family as
an old family--an admiration which was genuine and avowed on the part of
some, and just as genuine but more or less reluctantly bestowed on the
part of others. It was as Mayor McGlynn had informed Olcott on their
first meeting. The Van Nichts were not so much individuals, having a
share in the life of this thriving, striving, overgrown town, as they
were historical fixtures and traditional assets. Collectively, they
constituted something to be proud of and sorry for.

Soon, too, he had further reward. One afternoon a small and grimy boy
invaded his room, without knocking, and laid a note upon his desk.

“Old guy downstairs, with long hair and a gimpy leg, handed me this yere
and gimme fi’ cents to fetch it up here to you,” stated the messenger.

The note was from Mr. Van Nicht, as a glance at the superscription told
Olcott before he opened the envelope. In formal terms Olcott was thanked
for giving the writer’s offering such prominence in the pages of his
valuable paper and was invited, formally, to call upon the undersigned
at his place of residence, in order that undersigned might more fully
express to Mr. Olcott his sincere appreciation.

On the whole, Olcott was glad of the opportunity to view the inside
of that gloomy old house under the big tree out at the end of Putnam
Street. He wanted to see more of Mr. Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht, and
to see something of the other two dwellers beneath that ancient roof.
Olcott had dreams of some day writing a novel; some day when he had the
time. Most newspaper men do have such dreams; or else it is a play they
are going to write. Meanwhile, pending the coming of that day, he was
storing up material for it in his mind. Assuredly the bleached-out,
pale, old recluse in the black stock would make copy. Probably his
sisters would be types also, and they might make copy too. Olcott
answered the note, accepting the invitation for that same evening.

It was a night of crystal-clear moonlight, and Olcott walked up Putnam
Street through an alchemistic radiance which was like a path for a Puck
to dance along. But the shimmering aisle broke off short, when he had
turned in at the broken gate and had come to the edge of the shade of
the Van Nicht elm. Under there the shadow lay so thick and dense that,
as he groped through it to the small entry porch, finding the way by the
feel of his feet upon the irregular, flagged walk, he had the conviction
that he might reach out with his hands and gather up folds of the
darkness in his arms, like ells of black velvet. The faint glow which
came through a curtained front window of the unseen house was like a
phosphorescent smear, plastered against a formless background, and only
served to make the adjacent darkness darker still. If the moonlight
yonder was a fit place for the fairies to trip it, this particular spot,
he thought, must be reserved for ghosts to stalk in.

Fumbling with his hands, he searched out the heavy door knocker. Its
resounding thump against its heel plate, as he dropped it back in place,
made him jump. At once the door opened. Centred in the oblong of dulled
light which came from an oil lamp burning upon a table, behind and
within, appeared the slender, warped figure of Mr. Cecilius Jacob Van
Nicht, 4th. With much ceremony the head of the house bowed the guest in
past the portals.

Almost the first object to catch Olcott’s eye, as he stepped in, was a
portrait which, with its heavy frame, filled up a considerable portion
of the wall space across the back breadth of the square hallway into
which he had entered. Excepting for this picture and the table with the
oil lamp upon it and a tall hat-tree, the hall was quite bare.

Plainly pleased that the younger man’s attention had been caught by the
painted square of canvas, Mr. Van Nicht promptly turned up the wick of
the light, and then Olcott, looking closer, saw staring down at him the
close-set black eyes and the heavy-jowled, foreign-look-ing face of an
old man, dressed in such garb as we associate with our conceptions of
Thomas Jefferson and the elder Adams.

“My famous forbear, sir,” stated Olcott’s host, with a great weight of
vanity in his words, “the original bearer of the name which I, as his
great-grandson, have the honour, likewise, of bearing. To me, sir, it
has ever been a source of deep regret that there is no likeness
extant depicting him in his uniform as a regimental commander in the
Continental armies. If any such likeness existed, it was destroyed
prior to the colonel’s removal to this place, following the close of the
struggle for Independence. This portrait was executed in the later years
of the original’s life--presumably about the year 1798, by order of his
son, who was my grandfather. It was the son who enlarged this house, by
the addition of a wing at the rear, and to him also we are indebted for
the written records of his father’s gallant performances on the field of
honour, as well as for the accounts of his many worthy achievements in
the lines of civic endeavour. Naturally this portrait and those records
are our most precious possessions and our greatest heritages.

“The first Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht was by all accounts a great scholar
but not a practised scribe. The second of the name was both. Hence our
great debt to him--a debt which I may say is one in which this community
itself shares.”

“I’m sure of it,” said Olcott.

“And now, sir, if you will be so good, kindly step this way,” said Mr.
Van Nicht. “The light, I fear, is rather indifferent. This house has
never been wired for electricity, nor was it ever equipped with gas
pipes. I prefer to use lights more in keeping with its antiquity and its
general character.”

His tone indicated that he did not in the least hold with the vulgarised
and common utilities of the present. He led the way diagonally across
the hall to a side door and ushered Olcott into what evidently was the
chief living room of the house. It was a large, square room, very badly
lighted with candles. It was cluttered, as Olcott instantly perceived,
with a jumble of dingy-appearing antique furnishings, and it contained
two women who, at his appearance, rose from their seats upon either side
of the wide and empty fireplace. Simultaneously his nose informed him’
that this room was heavy with a pent, dampish taint.

He decided that what it mainly needed was air and sunshine, and plenty
of both.

“My two sisters,” introduced Mr. Van Nicht. “Miss Rachael Van Nicht, Mr.
Olcott. Miss Harriet Van Nicht, Mr. Olcott.”

Neither of the two ladies offered her hand to him. They bowed primly,
and Olcott bowed back and, already feeling almost as uncomfortable as
though he had invaded the privacy of a family group of resident shades
in their resident vault, he sat down in a musty-smell-ing armchair near
the elder sister.

Considered as such, the conversation which followed was not
unqualifiedly a success. The brother bore the burden of it, which meant
that at once it took on a stiff and an unnatural and an artificial
colouring. It was dead talk, stuffed with big words, and strung with
wires. There were semioccasional interpolations by Olcott, who continued
to feel most decidedly out of place. Once in a while Miss Rachael Van
Nicht slid a brief remark into the grooves which her brother channelled
out. Since he was called upon to say so little, Olcott was the better
off for an opportunity to study this lady as he sat there.

His first look at her had told him she was of the same warp and texture
as her brother; somewhat skimpier in the pattern, but identical in the
fabric. Olcott decided though that there was this difference: If the
brother had stepped out of Dickens, the sister had escaped from between
the hasped lids of an old daguerreotype frame. Her plain frock of some
harsh, dead-coloured stuff--her best frock, his intuition told him--the
big cameo pin at her throat, the homely arrangement of her grey hair,
her hands, wasted and withered-looking as they lay on her lap, even her
voice, which was lugubriously subdued and flat--all these things helped
out the illusion. Of the other sister, sitting two-thirds of the way
across the wide room from him, he saw but little and he heard less. The
poor light, and the distance and the deep chair in which she had sunk
herself, combined to blot her out as a personality and to efface her
from the picture. She scarcely uttered a word.

As Olcott had expected beforehand, the talk dealt, in the main, with the
Van Nicht family, which is another way of saying that it went back of
and behind, and far beyond, all that might be current and timely and
pertinent to the hour. There was no substance to it, for it dealt with
what had no substance. As he stayed on, making brave pretense of being
interested, he was aware of an interrupting, vaguely irritating sound
at his rear and partly to one side of him. Patently the sound was coming
from without. It was like a sustained and steady scratching, and it had
to do, he figured, with one of the window openings. He took a glance
over his shoulder, but he couldn’t make out the cause; the window was
too heavily shrouded in faded, thick curtains of a sad, dark-green
aspect. The thing got on his nerves, it persisted so. Finally he was
moved to mention it.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, taking advantage of a pause, “but isn’t
somebody or something fumbling at the window outside?”

“It is a bough of the family elm,” explained Mr. Van Nicht. “One of the
lower boughs has grown forward and downward, until it touches the side
of the house. When stirred by the breeze it creates the sound which you
hear.” Internally Olcott shivered. Now that the explanation had been
vouchsafed the noise made him think of ghostly fingers tapping at the
glass panes--as though the spirit of the tree craved admittance to the
dismal circle of these human creatures who shared with it the tribal
glory.

“Don’t you find it very annoying?” he asked innocently. “I should think
you would prune the limb back.” He halted then, realising that his
tongue had slipped. There was a little silence, which became edged and
iced with a sudden hostility.

“No human hand has ever touched the tree to denude it of any part of its
majestic beauty,” stated Mr. Van Nicht with a frigid intonation. “Whilst
any of this household survives to protect it, no human hand ever shall.”

From the elder sister came a murmur of assent.

The conversation had sagged and languished before; after this it sank
to a still lower level and gradually froze to death. After possibly ten
minutes more of the longest and bleakest minutes he ever recalled having
weathered, Olcott, being mentally chilled through, got up and, making a
show of expressing a counterfeit pleasure of having been accorded this
opportunity of meeting those present, said really he must be going now.

In their places Miss Rachael Van Nicht and her brother rose, standing
stiff as stalagmites, and he knew he was not forgiven. It was the
younger sister who showed him out, preceding him silently, as he betook
himself from the presence of the remaining two.

Close up, in the better light of the hall, Olcott for the first time
perceived that Miss Harriet Van Nicht was not so very old. In fact, she
was not old at all. He had assumed somehow that she must be sered and
soured and elderly, or at least that she must be middle-aged. With this
establishment he could not associate any guise of youth as belonging.
But he perceived how wrong he had been. Miss Harriet Van Nicht most
assuredly was not old. She could not be past thirty, perhaps she was not
more than twenty-five or six. It was the plain and ugly gown she wore, a
dun-coloured, sleazy, shabby gown, which had given her, when viewed from
a distance, the aspect of age--that and the unbecoming way in which she
wore her hair slicked back from her forehead and drawn up from round her
ears. She had fine eyes, as now he saw, with a plaintive light in them,
and finely arched brows and a delicate oval of a face; and she was small
and dainty of figure. He could tell that, too, despite the fit of the
ungraceful frock.

At the outer door, which she held ajar for his passage, she spoke, and
instantly he was moved by a certain wistfulness in her tones.

“It was a pleasure to have you come to see us, Mr. Olcott,” she said,
and he thought she meant it too. “We see so few visitors, living here
as we do. Sometimes I think it might be better for us if we kept more
in touch with people who live in the outside world and know something of
it.”

“Thank you, Miss Van Nicht,” said Olcott, warming. “I’m afraid, though,
I made a rather unfortunate suggestion about the tree. Really, I’m very
sorry.”

Her face took on a gravity; almost a condemning expression came into it.
And when she answered him it was in a different voice.

“A stranger could not understand how we regard the Van Nicht elm,” she
said. “No stranger could understand! Good night, Mr. Olcott.”

At the last she had made him feel that he was a stranger. And she had
not shaken hands with him either, nor had she asked him to call again.

He made his way out, through the black magic of the tree’s midnight
gloom, into the pure white chemistry of the moonlight; and having
reached the open, he looked back. Except for that faint luminous
blotch, like smeared phosphorus, showing through the blackness from
beyond the giant tree, nothing testified that a habitation of living
beings might be tucked away in that drear hiding place. He shrugged his
shoulders as though to shake a load off them and, as he swung down
the silvered street in the flawless night, his thoughts thawed out. He
decided that assuredly two of the Van Nichts must go into the book which
some day, when time served, he meant to write.

They belonged in a book--those two poor, pale, sapless creatures,
enduring a grinding poverty for the sake of a vain idolatry; those joint
inheritors of a worthless and burdensome fetish, deliberately preferring
the shadow of a mouldy past for the substance of the present day. Why,
the thing smacked of the Oriental. It wasn’t fit and sane for white
people--this Mongolian ancestor-worship which shut the door and drew
the blind to every healthy and vigorous impulse and every beneficent
impulse. Going along alone, Olcott worked himself into quite a brisk
little fury of impatience and disgust.

He had it right--they belonged in a book, those two older Van Nichts,
not in real life. And into a book they should go--into his book. But the
younger girl, now. It was a pitiable life she must lead, hived up there
in that musty old house under that terrific big tree with those two grim
and touchy hermits. On her account he resented it. He tried to picture
her in some more favourable setting. He succeeded fairly well too.
Possibly, though, that was because Olcott had the gift of a brisk
imagination. At times, during the days which followed, the vision of
Harriet Van Nicht, translated out of her present decayed environment,
persisted in his thoughts. He wondered why it did persist.

Nearly a month went by, during which he saw no member of that weird
household. One day he encountered upon the street the brother and went
up to him and, rather against the latter’s inclination, engaged him in
small talk. It didn’t take long to prove that Mr. Van Nicht had very
little small talk in stock; also that his one-time air of distant and
punctilious regard for the newspaper man had entirely vanished. Mr. Van
Nicht was courteous enough, with an aloof and stand-away courteousness,
but he was not cordial. Presently Olcott found himself speaking, from
a rather defensive attitude, of his own ancestry. He came of good New
England stock--a circumstance which he rarely mentioned in company, but
which now, rather to his own surprise, he found himself expounding at
some length. Afterward he told himself that he had been merely casting
about for a subject which might prove congenial to Mr. Van Nicht and
had, by chance, hit on that one.

If such were the care, the expedient failed. It did not in the least
serve to establish them upon a common footing. The old gentleman
listened, but he refused to warm up; and when he bade Olcott good day
and limped off, he left Olcott profoundly impressed with the conviction
that Mr. Van Nicht did not propose to suffer any element of familiarity
to enter into their acquaintanceship. Feeling abashed, as though he had
been rebuked after some subtle fashion for presumption and forwardness,
Olcott dropped into the handiest bar and had a drink all by
himself--something he rarely did. But this time he felt that the social
instinct of his system required a tonic and a bracer.

Within the next day or two chance gave him opportunity for still further
insight into the estimation in which he was held by other members of the
Van Nicht family. This happened shortly before the close of a cool and
showery July afternoon. Leaving his desk, he took advantage of a lull
in the rain to go for a solitary stroll before dinner. He was briskly
traversing a side street, well out of the business district, when
suddenly the downpour started afresh. He pulled up the collar of his
light raincoat and turned back to hurry to the Hotel Brain-ard, where
he lived. Going in the opposite direction a woman pedestrian, under an
umbrella, met him; she was heading right into the slanting sheets of
rain. In a sidelong glance he recognised the profile of the passer,
and instantly he had faced about and was alongside of her, lifting his
soaked hat.

“How d’you do, Miss Van Nicht?” he was saying. “I’m afraid you’ll make
poor headway against this rainstorm. Won’t you let me see you safely
home?”

It was the younger Miss Van Nicht. Her greeting of him and her smile
made him feel that for the moment at least he would not be altogether
an unwelcome companion. As he fell in beside her, catching step with her
and taking the umbrella out of her hands, he noted with a small throb of
pity that her cheap dark skirt was dripping and that the shoes she wore
must be insufficient protection, with their thin soles and their worn
uppers, against wet weather. He noted sundry other things about her:
Seen by daylight she was pretty--undeniably pretty. The dampness had
twisted little curls in her primly bestowed hair, and the exertion of
her struggle against the storm had put a becoming flush in her cheeks.

“I was out on an errand for my sister,” she said. “I thought I could
get home between showers, but this one caught me. And my umbrella--I’m
afraid it is leaky.”

Undeniably it was. Already the palm of Olcott’s hand was sopping where
water, seeping through open seams along the rusted ribs, had run down
the handle. Each new gust, drumming upon the decrepit cloth, threatened
to make a total wreck of what was already but little better than the
venerable ruin of an umbrella.

“You must permit me to see you home then,” he said. He glanced up and
down, hoping to see a cab or a taxi. But there was no hireable vehicle
in sight and the street cars did not run through this street. “I’m
afraid, though, that we’ll have to go afoot.”

“And I’m afraid that I am taking you out of your way,” she said. “You
were going in the opposite direction, weren’t you, when you met me?”

“I wasn’t going anywhere in particular,” he lied gallantly; “personally
I rather like to take a walk when it’s raining.”

For a bit after this neither of them spoke, for the wind all at once
blew with nearly the intensity of a small hurricane, buffeting thick
rain spray into their faces and spattering it up about their feet. She
seemed so small--so defenceless almost, bending forward to brace herself
against its rude impetuosity. He was mighty glad it was his hand which
clasped her arm, guiding and helping her along; mighty glad it was he
who held the leaky old umbrella in front of her and with it fended off
some part of the rain from her. They had travelled a block or two so, in
company, when the summer storm broke off even more abruptly than it had
started. There was an especially violent spatter of especially large
drops, and then the wind gave one farewell wrench at the umbrella and
was gone, tearing on its way.

In another half minute the setting sun was doing its best to shine out
through a welter of shredding black clouds. There were wide patches
of blue in the sky when they turned into Putnam Street and came within
sight of the Van Nicht elm, rising as a great, green balloon at the head
of it. By now they were chatting upon the basis--almost--of a seasoned
acquaintanceship. Olcott found himself talking about his work. When a
young man tells a young woman about his work, and is himself interested
as he tells it, it is quite frequently a sign that he is beginning to be
interested in something besides his work, whether he realises it yet or
not. And in Miss Van Nicht he was pleased to discern what he took to be
a sympathetic understanding, as well as a happy aptness and alertness in
the framing of her replies. It hardly seemed possible that this was the
second time they had exchanged words. Rather it was as though they had
known each other for a considerable period; so he told himself.

But as, side by side, they turned in at the rickety gate of the
ancestral dooryard and came under the shadow of the ancestral tree,
her manner, her attitude, her voice, all about her seemed to undergo
a change. Her pace quickened for these last few steps, and she cast a
furtive, almost an apprehensive glance toward the hooded windows of the
house.

“I’m afraid I am late--my sister and my brother will be worrying about
me,” she said a little nervously. “And I am sorry to have put you to all
this trouble on my account.”

“Trouble, Miss Van Nicht? Why, it was--”

“I shan’t ask you in,” she said, breaking in on him. “I know you
will want to be getting back to the hotel and putting on dry clothes.
Good-by, Mr. Olcott, and thank you very much.”

And with that she had left him, and she was hurrying up the porch steps,
and she was gone, without a backward look to where he stood, puzzled and
decidedly taken aback, in the middle of the seamed flags of the walk.

He was nearly at the gate when he discovered that he had failed to
return her umbrella to her; so he went back and knocked at the door. It
was the elder sister who answered. She opened the door a scant foot.

“How do you do, sir?” she said austerely.

“I forgot to give your sister her umbrella,” explained Olcott.

“So I perceive,” she replied, speaking through the slit with a kind of
sharp impatience, and she took it from him. “‘Thank you! We are most
grateful to you for your thoughtfulness.”

She waited then, as if for him to speak, providing he had anything to
say--her posture and her expression meanwhile most forcibly interpreting
the attitude in which he must understand that he stood here. It
was plain enough to be sensed. She resented--they all resented--his
reappearance in any rôle at the threshold of their home. She was
profoundly out of temper with him and all that might pertain and
appertain to him. So naturally there was nothing for him to say except
“Good evening,” and he said it.

“Good evening,” she said, and as he bowed and backed away she closed the
door.

Outside the fence he halted and looked about him, then he looked back
over the gapped and broken palings. Everywhere else the little world of
Putnam Street had a washed, cleansed aspect; everywhere else nearly the
sun slid its flattened rays along the refreshed and moistened sod and
touched the wayside weeds with pure gold; but none of its beams slanted
over the side hill and found a way beneath the interlaced, widespread
bulk of the family tree. He saw how forlornly the lower boughs, under
their load of rain water, drooped almost to the earth, and how the naked
soil round about the vast trunk of it was guttered with muddy, yellow
furrows where little torrents had coursed down the slope, and how
poisonously vivid was the mould upon the trunk. The triangular scar in
its lower bark showed as a livid greenish patch. Still farther back in
the shadow the outlines of the old grey house half emerged, revealing
dimly a space of streaked walls and the sodden, warped shingles upon one
outjut-ting gable of the peaked roof.

“It’s not an honest elm,” thought Olcott to himself in a little
impotent rage. “It’s a cursed devil tree, a upas tree, overshadowing
and blighting everything pleasant and wholesome that might grow near
it. Bats and owls and snails belong back there--not human beings. There
ought to be a vigilance committee formed to chop it down and blast its
roots out of the ground with dynamite. Oh, damn!”

In his pocket he had a letter from the presiding deity of the
organisation that owned the string of papers of which the paper he
edited was a part. In that letter he was invited to consider the
proposition of surrendering his present berth with the Schuylerville
_News-Ledger_ and going off to Europe, as special war correspondent for
the syndicate. He had been considering the project for two days now.
All of a sudden he made up his mind to accept. While the heat of his
petulance and disappointment was still upon him, he went that same
evening and wired his acceptance to headquarters. Two days later, with
his credentials in his pocket and a weight of sullen resentment against
certain animate and inanimate objects in his heart, he was aboard a
train out of Schuylerville, bound for New York, and thereafter, by
steamer, for foreign parts.

He was away, concerned with trenches, gas bombs, field hospitals and
the quotable opinions of sundry high and mighty men of war-craft and
statecraft, for upwards of a year. It was a most remarkably busy year,
and the job in hand claimed jealous sovereignty of his eyes, his legs
and his brain, while it lasted.

He came back, having delivered the goods to the satisfaction of his
employers, to find himself promoted to a general supervision of the
editorial direction of the papers in his syndicate, with a thumping good
salary and a roving commission. He willed it that the first week of his
incumbency in his new duties should carry him to Schuylerville. In his
old office, which looked much the same as it had looked when he occupied
it, he found young Morgan, his former assistant, also looking much
the same, barring that now Morgan was in full charge and giving orders
instead of taking them. Authority nearly always works a change in a man;
it had in this case.

“Say, Olcott,” said Morgan after the talk between them had ebbed and
flowed along a little while, “you remember that old geezer, Van Nicht,
don’t you? You know, the old boy who wrote the long piece about his
family, and you ran it?”

“Certainly I do,” said Olcott. “Why--what of him?”

Instead of answering him directly, Morgan put another question:

“And of course you remember the old Van Nicht house, under that big,
whopping elm tree, out at the end of Putnam Street, where he used to
live with those two freakish sisters of his?”

“Where he used to live? Doesn’t he--don’t they--live there now?”

“Nope--tree’s gone and so is the house.”

“Gone? Gone where?”

“Gone out of existence--vamoosed. Here’s what happened, and it’s a
peach of a tale too: One night about six months ago there came up a hard
thunderstorm--lots of lightning and gobs of thunder, not to mention
rain and wind a plenty. In the midst of it a bolt hit the Van Nicht
elm--ker-flewie--and just naturally tore it into flinders. When I saw
it myself the next day it was converted from a landmark into the biggest
whisk broom in the world. The neighbours were saying that it rained
splinters round there for ten minutes after the bolt struck. I guess
they didn’t exaggerate much at that, because--”

“Was the house struck too? Was anybody hurt?” Olcott cut in on him.

“No, the house escaped somehow--had a few shingles ripped off the roof,
and some of its windows smashed in by flying scraps; that was all. And
nobody about the place suffered anything worse than a stunning. But the
fright killed the older sister--Miss Rachael. Anyhow, that’s what the
doctors think. She didn’t have a mark on her, but she died in about an
hour, without ever speaking. I guess it was just as well, too, that she
did. If she had survived the first shock I judge the second one would
just about have finished her.”

“The second shock? You don’t mean the lightning?”

“No, no!” Morgan hastened to explain.

“Lightning never plays a return date--never has need to, I take it. I
mean the shock of what happened after daylight next morning.

“That was the queerest part of the whole thing--that was what made a
really big story out of it. We ran two columns about it ourselves, and
the A. P. carried it for more than a column.

“After the storm had died down and it got light enough to see, some of
the neighbours were prowling round the place sizing up the damage. Right
in the heart of the stump of the elm, which was split wide open--the
stump, I mean--they found a funny-looking old copper box buried in
what must have been a rot-ted-out place at one time, maybe ninety or
a hundred years ago. But the hollow had grown up, and nobody ever had
suspected that the tree wasn’t solid as iron all the way through, until
the lightning came along and just naturally reached a fiery finger down
through all that hardwood and probed the old box out of its cache and,
without so much as melting a hinge on it, heaved it up into sight, where
the first fellow that happened along afterward would be sure to see it.
Well, right off they thought of buried treasure, but being honest they
called old Van Nicht out of the house, and in his presence they opened
her up--the box I mean--and then, lo and behold, they found out that all
these years this town had been worshipping a false god!

“Yes, sir, the great and only original Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht was a
rank fake. He was as bogus as a lead nickel. There were papers in the
box to prove what nobody, and least of all his own flesh and blood,
ever suspected before. He wasn’t a hero of the Revolution. He wasn’t a
colonel under George Washington. He wasn’t of Holland-Dutch stock. His
name wasn’t even Van Nicht. His real name was Jake Nix--that’s what it
was, Nix--and he was just a plain, everyday Hessian soldier--a mercenary
bought up, along with the other Hessians, and sent over here by King
George to fight against the cause of liberty, instead of for it.

“As near as we can figure it out, he changed his name after the war
ended, before he moved here to live, and then after he died--or anyhow
when he was an old man--his son, the second Cecilius Jacob, concocted
the fairy tale about his father’s distinguished services and all the
rest of it. The son was the one, it seems, who capitalised the false
reputation of the old man. He lived on it, and all the Van Nichts who
came after him lived on it too--only they were innocent of practising
any deception on the community at large, and the second Van Nicht
wasn’t. It certainly put the laugh on this town, not to mention the
local aristocracy, and the D. A. R.’s and the Colonial Dames and the
rest of the blue bloods generally, when the news spread that morning.

“Oh, there couldn’t be any doubt about it! The proofs were all right
there and dozens of reliable witnesses saw them--letters and papers and
the record of old Nix’s services in the British army. In fact there
was only one phase of the affair that has remained unexplained and
a mystery. I mean the presence of the papers in the tree. Nobody can
figure out why the son didn’t destroy them, when he was creating such a
swell fiction character out of his revered parent. One theory is that
he didn’t know of their existence at all--that the old man, for reasons
best known to himself, hid them there in that copper box and that then
the tree healed up over the hole and sealed the box in, with nobody but
him any the wiser, and nobody ever suspecting anything out of the way,
but just taking everything for granted. Why, it was exactly as if the
old Nix had come out of the grave after lying there for a century or
more, to produce the truth and shame his own offspring, and incidentally
scare one of his descendants plumb to death.”

“What a tragedy!” said Olcott. But his main thought when he said it was
not for the dead sister but for the living.

“You said it,” affirmed Morgan. “That’s exactly what it was--a tragedy,
with a good deal of serio-comedy relief to it. Only there wasn’t
anything very comical about the figure the old man Van Nicht cut when he
came walking into this office here about half past ten o’clock that day,
with a ragged piece of crêpe tied round his old high hat. Olcott, you
never in your life saw a man as badly broken up as he was. All his
vanity, all his bumptiousness was gone--he was just a poor, old, shabby,
broken-spirited man. I’d already gotten a tip on the story and I’d sent
one of my boys out to find him and get his tale, but it seemed he’d told
the reporter he preferred to make a personal statement for publication.
And so here he was with his statement all carefully written out and
he asked me to print it, insisting that it ought to be given as wide
circulation as possible. I’ll dig it up for you out of the files in a
minute and let you see it.

“Yes, sir, he’d sat down alongside his sister’s dead body and written
it. He called it A Confession and an Apology, and I ran it that way,
just as he’d written it. It wasn’t very long, but it was mighty pitiful,
when you took everything into consideration. He begged the pardon of
the public for unwittingly practicing a deceit upon it all through his
life--for living a lie, was the way he phrased it--and he signed it
‘Jacob Nix, heretofore erroneously known as Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht,
4th.’ That signature was what especially got me when I read it--it made
me feel that the old boy was literally stripping his soul naked before
the ridicule of this town and the ridicule of the whole country. A
pretty manly, straightforward thing, I called it, and I liked him better
for having done it than I ever had liked him before.

“Well, I told him I would run the card for him and I did run it, and
likewise I toned down the story we carried about the exposure too. I’m
fairly well calloused, I guess, but I didn’t want to bruise the old
man and his sister any more than I could help doing. But, of course, I
didn’t speak to him about that part of it. I did try, in a clumsy sort
of way, to express my sympathy for him. I guess I made a fairly sad hash
of it, though. There didn’t seem to be any words to fit the situation.
Or, if there were, I couldn’t think of them for the moment. I remember I
mumbled something about letting bygones be bygones and not taking it too
much to heart and all that sort of thing.

“He thanked me, and then, as he started to go, he stopped and asked
me whether by any chance I knew of any opening--any possible job for
a person of his age and limitations. I remember his words: ‘It is high
time that I was casting about to find honourable employment, no matter
how humble. I have been trading with a spurious currency for too long.
I have spent my life in the imposition of a monumental deceit upon this
long-suffering community. I intend now, sir, to go to work to earn a
living with my own hands and upon my own merits. I wish to atone for the
rôle I have played.’

“It may have been imagination, but I thought there was a kind of faint
hopeful gleam in his eye as he looked at me and said this; and he seemed
to flinch a little bit when I broke the news to him that we didn’t have
any vacancies on the staff at present. I sort of gathered that he rather
fancied he had literary gifts. Literary gifts? Can’t you just see that
poor, forlorn old scout piking round soliciting want ads at twenty cents
a line or trying to cover petty assignments on the news end? I told him,
though, I’d be on the lookout for something for him, and he thanked me
mighty ceremoniously and limped out, leaving me all choked up. Two days
later, after the funeral, he telephoned in to ask me not to trouble
myself on his account, because he had already established a connection
with another concern which he hoped would turn out to be mutually
advantageous and personally lucrative; or words to that effect.

“So I did a little private investigating that evening and I found out
where the old chap had connected. You see I was interested. A live wire
named Garrison, who owned the state rights for selling the World’s Great
Classics of Prose and Poetry on subscriptions, had landed here about
a week before. You know the kind of truck this fellow Garrison was
peddling? Forty large, hard, heavy volumes, five dollars down and a
dollar a month as long as you live; no blacksmith’s fireside complete
without the full set; should be in every library; so much for the full
calf bindings; so much for the half leather; give your little ones a
chance to acquire an education at a trifling cost; come early and
avoid the rush of those seeking to take advantage of this unparalleled
opportunity; price positively due to advance at the end of a limited
period; see also our great clubbing offer in conjunction with Bunkem’s
Illustrated Magazine--all that sort of guff.

“Well, Garrison had opened up headquarters here. He’d brought some of
his agents with him--experts at conning the simple peasantry and the
sturdy yeomanry into signing on the dotted line A and paying down the
first installment as a binder; but he needed some home talent to
fill out his crew, and he advertised with us for volunteers. Old Van
Nicht--Nix, I mean--had heard about it, and he had applied for a job as
canvasser, and Garrison had taken him on, not on salary, of course, but
agreeing to pay him a commission on all his sales. That was what I found
out that night.”

Before Olcott’s eyes rose a vision of a dried-up, bleak-eyed old man
limping from doorstep to doorstep, enduring the rebuffs of fretful
housewives and the insolence of annoyed householders--a failure, and a
hopeless, predestined failure at that.

“Too bad, wasn’t it?” he said.

“What’s too bad?” asked Morgan.

“About that poor old man turning book agent at his age, with his lack of
experience with the ways of the world.”

“Save your pity for somebody that needs it,” said Morgan, grinning.
“That old boy doesn’t. Why, Olcott, he was a hit from the first minute.
This fellow Garrison was telling me about him only last week. All that
stately dignity, all that Sir Walter Raleigh courtesy stuff, all that
faculty for using the biggest possible words in stock, was worth money
to the old chap when he put it to use. It impressed the simple-minded
rustic and the merry villager. It got him a hearing where one of
these gabby young canvassers with a striped vest and a line of patter
memorised out of a book would be apt to fail. Why, he’s the sensation
of the book-agent game in these parts. They sick him on to all the
difficult prospects out in the country, and he makes good nine times out
of ten. He’s got four counties in his territory, with all expenses
paid, and last month his commissions--so Garrison told me--amounted to a
hundred and forty dollars, and this month he’s liable to do even better.
What’s more, according to Garrison, the old scout likes the work and
isn’t ashamed of it. So what do you know about that?”

As Morgan paused, Olcott asked the question which from the first of this
recital had been shaping itself in the back part of his head: “The other
sister--what became of her?” He tried to put a casual tone into his
inquiry.

“You mean Miss Harriet? Well, say, in her case the transformation was
almost as great as it was in her brother’s. She came right out of her
shell, too--in fact, she seemed downright glad of a chance to come out
of it and quit being a recluse. She let it be noised about that she was
in the market for any work that she could do, and a lot of people who
felt sorry for her, including Mayor McGlynn, who’s a pretty good
chap, interested themselves in her behalf. Right off, the school board
appointed her a substitute teacher in one of the lower grammar grades at
the Hawthorne School, out here on West Frobisher Street. She didn’t
lose any time in delivering the goods either. Say, there must have
been mighty good blood in that family, once it got a real chance to
circulate. The kiddies in her classes all liked her from the start, and
the other teachers and the principal liked her, too, and when the fall
term begins in October she goes on as a regular.

“On top of that, when she’d got a little colour in her cheeks and had
frizzed her hair out round her face, and when she’d used up her first
month’s pay in buying herself some good black clothes, it dawned on the
town all of a sudden that she was a mighty good-looking, bright, sweet
little woman instead of a dowdy, sour old maid. They say she never had
a sweetheart before in her life--that no man ever had looked at her the
second time; at least that’s the current gossip. Be that as it may, she
can’t complain on that score any more, even if she is still in mourning
for her sister.”

“How do you know all this?” demanded Olcott suspiciously. “Are you
paying her attentions yourself?”

“Who, me? Lord, man, no! I’m merely an innocent bystander. You see, we
live at the same boarding house, take our meals at the same table in
fact, and I get a chance to see what’s going on. She came there to
board--it’s Mrs. Gale’s house--as soon as she moved out of the historic
but mildewed homestead, which was about a month after the night of the
storm. The New Diamond Auto Company--that’s a concern formed since you
left--bought the property and tore down the old house, after blasting
the stump of the family tree out of the ground with giant powder;
they’re putting up their assembling plant on the site. After the
mortgage was satisfied and the back taxes had been paid up, there was
mighty little left for the two heirs; but about that time Miss Harriet
got her job of teaching and she came to Mrs. Gale’s to live, and that’s
where I first met her. Two or three spry young fellows round town are
calling on her in the evenings--nearly every night there’s some fellow
in the parlour, all spruced up and highly perfumed, waiting to see
her--not to mention one or two of the unmarried men boarders.”

“Morgan,” said Olcott briskly, “do me a favour! Take me along with you
to dinner tonight at your boarding place, will you?”

“Tired of hotels, eh?” asked Morgan. “Well, Mrs. Gale has good home
cooking and I’d be glad to have you come.”

“That’s it,” said Olcott; “I’m tired of hotel life.”

“You’re on,” said Morgan.

“Yes,” said Olcott, “I am--but you’re not on--at least not yet.” But
Morgan didn’t hear that, because Olcott said it to himself.



CHAPTER VII. HARK! FROM THE TOMBS

FROM all the windows of Coloured Odd Fellows’ Hall, on the upper floor
of the two-story building at the corner of Oak and Tennessee Streets,
streamed Jacob’s ladders of radiance, which slanted outward and downward
into the wet night. Along with these crossbarred shafts of lights,
sounds as of singing and jubilation percolated through the blurry panes.
It was not yet eleven o’clock, the date being December thirty-first; but
the New Year’s watch service, held under the auspices of Castle Camp,
Number 1008, Afro-American Order of Supreme Kings of the Universe, had
been going on quite some time and was going stronger every minute.

Odd Fellows’ Hall had been especially engaged and partially decorated
for this occasion. Already it was nearly filled; but between now and
midnight it would be fuller, and at a still later time would doubtlessly
attain the superlatively impossible by being fuller than fullest.

From all directions, out of the darkness, came belated members of the
officiating fraternity, protecting their regalias under umbrellas,
and accompanied by wives and families if married, or by lady and other
friends if otherwise. With his sword clanking impressively at his flank
and his beplumed helmet nodding grandly as he walked, each Supreme
King of the Universe bore himself with an austere and solemn mien, as
befitting the rôle he played--of host to the multitude--and the uniform
that adorned his form.

Later, after the young year had appropriately been ushered in, when the
refreshments were being served, he might unbend somewhat. But not
now. Now every Supreme King was what he was, wearing his dignity as a
becoming and suitable garment. This attitude of the affiliated brethren
affected by contagion those who came with them as their guests. There
was a stateliness and a formality in the greetings which passed between
this one and that one as the groups converged into the doorway, set in
the middle front of the building, and by pairs and by squads ascended
the stairs.

“Good evenin’, Sist’ Fontleroy. I trusts things is goin’ toler’ble well
wid you, ma’am?”

“Satisfactory, Br’er Grider--thank de good Lawd! How’s all at yore own
place of residence?”

“Git th’ough de C’ris’mus all right, Mizz Hillman?”

“Yas, suh; ‘bout de same ez whut I always does, Mist’ Duiguid.”

“Well, ole yeah’s purty nigh gone frum us, Elder; ain’t it de truth?”

“Most doubtless is. An’ now yere come ‘nother! We don’t git no younger,
sister, does we?”

“Dat we don’t, sholy!”

The ceremonial reserve of the moment would make the jollifying all the
sweeter after the clocks struck and the whistles began to blow.

There was one late arrival, though, who came along alone, wearing a
downcast countenance and an air of abstraction, and speaking to none
who encountered him on the way or at the portal. This one was Jeff
Poindexter; but a vastly different Jeff from the customary Jeff. Usually
he moved with a jaunty gait, his elbows out and his head canted
back; and on the slightest provocation his feet cut scallops and
double-shuffles and pigeonwings against the earth. Now his heels scraped
and his toes dragged; and the gladsome raiment that covered his person
gave him no joy, but only an added sense of resentment against the
prevalent scheme of mundane existence.

An unseen weight bowed his shoulders down, and beneath the wide
lapels of an almost white waistcoat his heart was like unto a chunk of
tombstone in his bosom. For the current light of his eyes, Miss Ophelia
Stubblefield, had accepted the company of a new and most formidable
rival for this festive occasion. Wherefore an embodiment of sorrow
walked hand in hand with Jeff.

After this blow descended all the taste of delectable anticipation
in his mouth had turned to gall and to wormwood. Of what use now the
costume he had been at such pains to accumulate from kindly white
gentlemen, for whom Jeff in spare moments did odd jobs of valeting--the
long, shiny frock coat here; the only slightly spotted grey-blue
trousers there; the almost clean brown derby hat in another quarter; the
winged collar and the puff necktie in yet a fourth? Of what value to him
would be the looks of envy and admiration sure to be bestowed upon
the pair of new, shiny and excessively painful patent-leather shoes,
specially acquired and specially treasured for this event?

He had bought those shoes, with an utter disregard for expense, before
he dreamed that another would bring Ophelia to the watch party. With her
at his side, his soul would have risen exultant and triumphant above
the discomfort of cramped-up toes and pinched-in heels. Now, at each
dragging step, he was aware that his feet hurt him. Indeed, for Jeff
there was at that moment no balm to be found throughout all Gilead, and
in his ointment dead flies abounded thickly.

It added to his unhappiness that the lady might and doubtlessly would
rest under a misapprehension regarding his failure to invite her to
share with him the pleasures of the night. He had not asked her to be
his company; had not even broached the subject to her. For this seeming
neglect there had been a good and sufficient reason--one hundred and
ninety pounds of a chocolate-coloured reason. Seven days before, on
Christmas Eve, Jeff had been currying Mittie May, the white mare of
Judge Priest, in the stable back of the Priest place, when he heard
somebody whistle in the alley behind the stable and then heard his name
called. He had stepped outside to find one Smooth Crumbaugh leaning upon
the alley gate.

“Hello, Smoothy!” Jeff had hailed with a smart and prompt cordiality.

It was not that he felt any deep warmth of feeling for Smooth, but that
it was prudent to counterfeit the same. All in Smooth’s circle deported
themselves toward Smooth with a profound regard and, if Smooth seemed
out of sorts, displayed almost an affection for him, whether they felt
it or not. ‘Twere safer thus.

With characteristic brusqueness, Smooth entirely disregarded the
greeting.

“Come yere to me, little nigger!” he said out of one corner of his lips,
at the same time fixing a lowering stare upon Jeff. Then, as Jeff still
stood, filled with sudden misgivings: “Come yere quick w’en I speaks!
Want me to come on in dat yard after you?”

Jeff was conscious of no act of wrongdoing toward Smooth Crumbaugh. With
Jeff, discretion was not only the greater part of fighting valour but
practically was all of it. Nevertheless, he was glad, as he obeyed the
summons and, with a placating smile fixed upon his face, drew nearer
the paling, that he stood on the sanctuary ground of a circuit judge’s
premises, and that a fence intervened between him and his truculent
caller.

“Comm’ right along,” he said with an affected gaiety.

Just the same, he didn’t go quite up to the gate. He made his stand
three or four feet inside of it, ready to jump backward or sidewise
should the necessity arise.

“I’se feared I didn’t heah you call de fus time,” stated Jeff
ingratiatingly. “I wuzn’t studyin’ about nobody wantin’ me--been wipin’
off our ole mare. ‘Sides, I thought you wuz down in Alabam’, workin’ on
de ole P. and A. Road.”

“Num’mine dat!” said Smooth. “Jes’ lis’en to whut I got to say.”

The hostile glare of his eye bored straight into Jeff, making him chilly
in his most important organs. Smooth was part basilisk, but mainly
hyena, with a touch of the man-eating tiger in his composition. “Little
nigger,” he continued grimly, “I come th’ough dis lane on puppus’ to
tell you somethin’ fur de good of yore health.”

“I’s lis’enin’,” said Jeff, most politely.

“Heed me clost,” bade Smooth; “heed me dost, an’ mebbe you mout live
longer. Who wuz you at de Fust Ward Cullid Baptis’ Church wid last
Sunday night? Dat’s de fust question.”

“Who--me?”

“Yas; you!”

“Why, lemme see, now,” said Jeff, dissembling. “Seem lak, ez well ez I
reckerleck, I set in de same pew wid quite a number of folkses durin’ de
service.”

“I ain’t axin’ you who you set wid. I’s axin’ you who you went wid?”

“Oh!” said Jeff, as though enlightened as to the real object of the
inquiry, and still sparring for time. “You means who did I go dere wid,
Smoothy? Well----”

“Wuz it dat Stubblefield gal, or wuzn’t it? Answer me, yas or no!”

The tone of the questioner became more ominous, more threatening, with
each passing moment.

“Yas--yas, Smoothy.” He giggled uneasily. “Uh-huh! Dat’s who ‘twuz.”

“Well, see dat it don’t happen ag’in.”

“Huh?”

“You heared whut I said!”

“But I---- But she----”

“See dat it don’t happen nary time ag’in.”

“But--but----”

“Say, whut you mean, interrup’in’ me whilst I’s speakin’ wid you fur
yore own good? Shut up dat trap-face of your’n an’ lis’en to me,
whut I’m say in’: Frum dis hour on, you stay plum’ away frum dat gal.
Understan’?”

“Honest, Smoothy, I didn’t know you wuz cravin’ to be prankin’ round wid
Ophelia!”

Jeff spoke with sincerity, from the heart out. In truth, he hadn’t
known, else his sleep of nights might have been less sound.

“Dat bein’ de case, you better keep yore yeahs open to heah de news,
else you won’t have no yeahs. Git me mad an’ I’s liable to snatch
‘em right offen de sides of your haid an’ feed ‘em to you. I’s tuck a
lay-off fur de C’ris’mus. An’ endurin’ de week I spects to spend de
mos’ part of my time enjoyin’ dat gal’s society. I aims to be wid her
to-night an’ to-morrow night an’ de nex’ night, an’ ever’ other night
twell I goes back down de road. I aims to tek her to de C’ris’mus tree
doin’s at de church on Friday night, an’ to de festibul at de church on
Sad’day night, an’ to de watch party up at de Odd Fellers’ Hall on New
Yeah’s Eve. Is dat clear to you?”

“Suttinly is, seein’ ez it’s you,” assented Jeff, trying to hide his
disappointment under a smile. “Course, Smoothy, ef you craves a young
lady’s company fur a week or so, I don’t know nobody dat’s mo’ entitled
to it’n whut you is. Jes’ a word frum you is plenty fur me. You done
told me how you feels; dat’s ample.”

“No, ‘tain’t!” growled Smooth. “I got somethin’ mo’ to tell you. Frum
now on, all de time I’s in dis town I don’t want to heah of you speakin’
wid dat gal, or telephonin’ to her, or writin’ her ary note, or sendin’
ary message to her house. Ef you do I’s gwine find out ‘bout it; an’ den
I’s gwine lay fur you an’ strip a whole lot of dark meat offen you wid
a razor or somethin’. I won’t leave nothin’ of you but jes’ a framework.
Now den, it’s up to you! Does you want to go round fur de rest of yore
days lookin’ lak a scaffoldin’, or doesn’t you?”

“Smoothy,” protested Jeff, “I ain’t got no quarrel wid you. I ain’t
aimin’ to git in no rookus wid nobody a-tall--let alone ‘tis you. But
s’posen’”--he added this desperately--“s’posen’ now I should happen
to meet up wid her on de street. Fur politeness’ sake I’s natchelly
‘bleeged to speak wid her, ain’t I--even ef ‘tain’t nothin’ more’n jes’
passin’ de time of day?”

“Is dat so?” said Smooth in mock surprise. “Well, suit yo’se’f; suit
yo’se’f. Only, de words you speaks wid her better be yore farewell
message to de world. Ef anythin’ happen to you now, sech ez a fun’el,
hit’s yore own fault--you done had yore warnin’ frum headquarters. I
ain’t got no mo’ time to be wastin’ on a puny little scrap of nigger
sech ez you is. I’s on my way now. But jes’ remember whut I been tellin’
you an’ govern yo’se’f ‘cordin’ly.” And with that the bully turned away,
leaving poor Jeff to most discomforting reflections amid the ruins of
his suddenly blasted romance.

The full scope of his rival’s design stood so clearly revealed that it
left to its victim no loophole of escape whatsoever. Not only was he
to be debarred, by the instinct of self-preservation, from seeking the
presence of Ophelia during the most joyous and the most socially crowded
week of the entire year; not only were all his pleasant dreams dashed
and smashed, but, furthermore, he might not even make excuses to her for
what would appear in her eyes as an abrupt and unreasonable cessation
of sentimental interest on his part, save and except it be done at dire
peril to his corporeal well-being and his physical intactness.

Above all things, Jeff Poindexter coveted to stay in one piece. And
Smooth Crumbaugh was one who nearly always kept his word--especially
when that word involved threats against any who stood between him and
his personal ambitions.

Jeff, watching the broad retreating back of Smooth, as Smooth swaggered
out of the alley, fetched little moans of acute despair. To him remained
but one poor morsel of consolation--no outsider had been a witness to
his interview with the bad man. Unless the bad man bragged round, none
need know how abject had been Jeff’s capitulation.

Solitary, melancholy, a prey to conflicting emotions, Jeff Poindexter
climbed the stairs leading up to Odd Fellows’ Hall, at the heels of a
family group of celebrants. Until the last minute he hadn’t meant to
come; but something drew him hither, even as the moth to the flame is
drawn. He paid his fifty cents to the Most High Grand Outer Guardian,
who was stationed at the door in the capacity of ticket taker and cash
collector, and entered in, to find sitting-down space pretty much all
occupied and standing room rapidly being preempted--especially round the
walls and at the back of the long assembly room.

Outside, the air was muggy with the clinging dampness of a rainy, mild
winter’s night; a weak foretaste of the heightened mugginess’ within.
Nearly always, in our part of the South, the first real cold snap came
with the New Year; but, as yet, there were no signs of its approach.
Inside, thanks to a big potbellied stove, choked with hot coals, and to
the added circumstance of all the windows being closed, the temperature
was somewhere up round eighty; which was as it should be. When the
coloured race sets itself to enjoy itself, it desires warmth, and plenty
of it.

This crowd was hot and therefore happy. Trickles of perspiration,
coursing downward, streaked the rice powder upon the cheeks of many
mezzotint damosels, and made to glisten the faces of the chrome-shaded
gallants who squired them.

On the platform at the far end of the hall, beneath crossed flags,
sat the principal officiating dignitaries, three in number--first, the
Imperial Grand Potentate of the lodge, holder of an office corresponding
to president elsewhere, but invested with rather more grandeur than
commonly appertains to a presidency; then the second in command, known
formally as First Vice Imperial Grand Potentate; and thirdly, the
Reverend Potiphar Grasty, pastor of First Ward Church.

Facing these three and, in turn, faced by them, sat on the front seats
the Supreme Kings, temporarily detached from their kinspeople and
well-wishers, who, with the populace generally, filled the serried rows
of chairs and benches behind the uniformed ranks.

At the rear, near the main entrance, in a cleared space, stood two long
trestles bearing the refreshments, of which, at a suitable moment, all
and sundry would be invited to partake. The feast plainly would be a
rich and abundant one, including, as it did, such items as cream puffs,
ham sandwiches, Frankfurters, bananas, and soda pop of the three more
popular varieties--lemon, sarsaparilla and strawberry--in seemingly
unlimited quantities.

Sister Eldora Menifee, by title Queen Bee of the Ladies’ Royal Auxiliary
of the Supreme Kings, had charge of the collation, its arrangement
and its decorations. She hovered about her handiwork, a mighty, black
mountain, vigilant to frown away any who might undertake any clandestine
poaching. The display of napery and table linen was most ample; and why
not? Didn’t Sister Menifee do the washing for the biggest white folks’
boarding house in town?

With an eye filmed and morose, Jeff Poindexter, pausing at the rear,
comprehended this festive scene. Then, as his gaze ran to and fro, he
saw that which he dreaded to see and yet sought to behold. He saw Smooth
Crum-baugh sitting with Ophelia on the right side of the hall, well up
toward the front. Their backs were to him; their heads inclined sidewise
toward a common centre.

The loose fold of flesh in Smooth’s bull neck pouched down over his
glistening collar as he slanted one shoulder to whisper sweet somethings
in Ophelia’s ear. They must have been sweet somethings, and witty
withal; for at once the lady gave vent to a clear soprano giggle.
Her mirthful outburst rose above the babble of voices and, floating
backward, pierced Jeff Poindexter’s bosom as with darts and javelins;
and jealousy, meantime, like the Spartan boy’s fox, gnawed at his
inwards.

The sight and the sound, taken together, made Jeff Poindexter desperate
almost to the point of outright recklessness--almost, but not quite. He
noted the fortuitous circumstance of a vacant chair directly behind the
pair he watched. Surely now Smooth Crumbaugh would start no disturbance
here. Surely--so Jeff reasoned it--time, place, occasion and the present
company, all would operate and cooperate to curb Smooth’s chronic
belligerency.

If only for a fleeting period, Jeff longed to venture within
conversational distance of Ophelia; to bask for a spell in one of her
brilliant smiles; to prove to her by covert looks, if not by whispered
words, that there were no ill feelings; to give her an opportunity for
visual appreciation of his housings; and, most of all, subtly to convey
the suggestion that it was bodily indisposition which had caused him to
absent himself from her presence throughout the Christmas. Under cover
of his hand he rehearsed a deep cough, and simultaneously began to inch
his way along an aisle toward the coveted seat in the adjacent rear of
the couple.

The programme proper was well under way; it had begun auspiciously and
it promised much. There had been a prayer and a welcoming address by the
Imperial Grand Potentate, and now there was singing. Starting shortly,
the annual memorial service for any member or members who had departed
this life during the preceding twelve months would follow; this lasting
until five minutes before midnight. Then all the lights would be turned
out, and the gathering would sit in darkness, singing some lugubriously
appropriate song as a vocal valedictory for the passing year until
the first stroke of midnight, when the lights would flash on again.
Thereafter would follow the strictly social phases of the watch party.

Almost until the last it had seemed that the memorial exercises would
have to be foregone for lack of material to work on. But at the eleventh
hour, as it were, Red Hoss Shackleford, who always heretofore had been a
disappointment to everybody, had greatly obliged, and, at the same time,
disproved the oft-repeated assertion that one born for hanging can never
be drowned, by falling overboard off the tugboat _Giles C. Jordan_.

This tragedy had occurred at a late hour of the evening of December
twenty-sixth, when the _Giles C. Jordan_ was forty miles up Tennessee
River on a crosstie-towing venture, and while Red Hoss Shackleford, who
had shipped aboard her as cook and general roustabout, was yet overcome
by the potent elements of his Christmas celebration, self-administered
internally in liquid form.

At least such were the tidings borne by the captain and surviving crew
upon their return to port on the twenty-ninth instant. Whereupon the
Supreme Kings had seized upon the opportunity thus vouchsafed as a free
gift of a frequently inscrutable Providence.

To be sure, the late Shackleford was not exactly a member in good
standing. Two years before, in a fine fervour of enthusiasm induced by
the splendour of the uniforms worn at the funeral turnout of a departed
brother, Red Hoss had joined the lodge. He had fallen behind in his
dues, and, to all intents and purposes, had been expunged from the
rolls. Red Hoss generally was in arrears, anyhow, except for those
obligations he owed the county chain gang. Those were debts he always
paid--if they could catch him.

None the less, certain points were waived by acclamation, following the
receipt of the news of his taking-off. It was agreed that one Red
Hoss Shackleford dead at such time was worth ten Red Hoss Shacklefords
living. His memory was to be perpetuated, thereby lending to the
programme precisely that touch of seriousness which was needed to round
it out and make of it a thing complete and adequate.

To add to the effect, his sole surviving relative, a half sister, by
name Sister Rosalie Shackleford, had a prominent place at the front,
flanking the low platform. It was conceivable, everything considered,
that her loss had been no great one; nevertheless, with a fine theatric
instinct for the unities and the verities, she now deported herself as
one utterly devastated by a grief almost too great to be borne. There
was no mistake about it--when this sister mourned, she mourned!

With her prevalent dark complexion enhanced by enshrouding ells of black
crape, she half lay, half sat in a slumped attitude betokening utter
and complete despondency, and at timely intervals uttered low moans and
sobs. Two friends attended her in a ministering capacity. One fanned her
assiduously. The other, who was of ample girth, provided commodious and
billowy accommodations for her supine form when she slipped back after
swooning dead away. It was expected of Sister Rosalie that she should
faint occasionally and be revived; and so she did.

The ritualistic features of the night had been disposed of and the
singing was in full swing as Jeff Poindexter edged along, pussyfooting
like a house cat, toward the point he sought. Eventually he arrived
there unobserved by the quarry he stalked.

Up to this point fortune had favoured him; none had pre-empted the one
vacant chair, half concealed from general view as it had been by the
adjacent bulk of a very fleshy black woman. With a whispered apology
to her for intruding, Jeff wormed his way in alongside. He let himself
softly down into the seat and began to cough the gentle cough of a quasi
invalid now on the road to recovery.

Together, it would seem, the pair in front of him sensed his presence so
near them. With one accord they swung their heads.

“Evenin’, Miss Stubblefield. Evenin’, Smoothy,” said Jeff, smiling
wanly, as a convalescent naturally would. “Seein’ ez how dis yere cheer
wuz onuccupied, I jes’ taken it so’s to be out of de draf’. I ain’t been
so well dis week--had a little tech of pneumonia, I think ‘twuz; an’
so--”

Ophelia’s surprised murmur of sympathy was cut short. Smooth Crumbaugh
distorted his gingerbread-coloured countenance into a hideous war mask.
He turned in his place, thrusting his face forward. “Git up outen dat
seat!” he ordered in a low, forceful grumble.

“But de seat ain’t taken, Smoothy,” protested Jeff weakly. “I ‘lowed I’d
set yere jes’ fur a minute or two, account of de draf’.”

“Git up outen dat cheer!” repeated Smooth Crumbaugh in a louder tone.

His shoulders began to hunch and his hands to curl up into fists.
Ophelia’s rising agitation was tempered perhaps by the realisation of
the fact that for her favour two persons, both well known and
prominent in their respective spheres of activity, were about to have
words--possibly to exchange threats, or even blows. To be the storm
centre of such a sensation is not always entirely unpleasant, especially
if one be young and personable. She spoke now in a voice clearly audible
to several about her.

“Please, suzz, gen’lemen, both of you be nice an’ quiet!” she implored.
“I trusts there ain’t goin’ be no trouble ‘cause of me.”

“‘Tain’t goin’ be no trouble, gal,” stated Smooth, as Jeff sat dumb with
apprehension. “‘Tain’t goin’ be nothin’ but a pleasure to me to haul off
an’ knock dis little nigger naiked.” He addressed Jeff: “Git up outen
dat cheer, lak I tells you! Start travellin’, an’ keep on travellin’.
Git plum’ out of dis yere buildin’!” Daunted to the very taproots of his
being, Jeff nevertheless strove to save his face. He made pretense that
his cough prevented the utterance of a defiant rejoinder as he rose
and backed out into the aisle and worked his way toward the rear, with
Smooth Crumbaugh’s glower following after him. Perhaps the excellence
of his acting may have deceived some, but in his own soul Jeff suffered
amain.

Far back, hard by the refreshment stand, he wriggled himself in behind
an intervening frieze of standees. His judgment warned him that he
should heed Smooth Crumbaugh’s wishes and entirely betake himself hence;
but his crushed and bruised spirit revolted against a surrender so
abject and so utter. He told himself he had given up his chair because
he did not care to be sitting down, anyway. Even so, this was a free
country and he would stay a while longer if he wanted to stay. Only, he
meant to keep yards of space and plenty of bystanders between him and
Smooth Crumbaugh. He would be self-effacive, but not absolutely absent.

With an ear dulled by chagrin, he hearkened as the Reverend Grasty rose
and opened his discourse touching on the life and works of the late Red
Hoss Shackleford. The speaker’s very first words made it clear to all
that he had come to bury Cæsar--not to praise him. Really, the only
complimentary thing which might truthfully be said of Red Hoss was that
always he had a good appetite. At once the Reverend Grasty manifested
that he meant to adopt no weak and temporising course in his discussion
of the subject in hand. Forthrightly he launched into a stirring recital
of the shortcomings of the deceased; and out of his topic’s sins, cut
off in the midst of his impenitence, he builded a vivid lesson to warn
the living.

If one might judge by her behaviour, the lorn half sister resented not
the attitude and the language of the orator. She forgot to faint and she
sat erect. Presently she was chanting an accompaniment to his shouted
illustrations.

“Oh, my pore lost brother, sunken in de cold waters.” She quavered in a
fine camp-meeting tremolo. “Oh, my pore onworthy brother, whut we gwine
do ‘bout you now?”

Fervently deep amens began to arise from other quarters, punctuating
the laments of Sister Rosalie and the louder outpourings of the Reverend
Grasty. The memorial service was turning out to be the high point of the
watch party.

In spite of personal distractions, Jeff was carried away by the dramatic
intensity of the scene. Forgetting momentarily his own trouble, he
shoved forward, the better to see and hear. A menacing growl in his off
ear brought him back to earth with a jolt. It was the dread voice of
Smooth Crumbaugh, speaking from a distance not of yards but of inches.
And now, as Jeff turned his head, Smooth’s outjutted underlip was almost
brushing the tip of his nose.

“Thought I tole you to git plum’ outen dis hall!” quoth Smooth; and
his voice, more than before, was freighted with the menace of dire
catastrophe, imminent and impending.

Jeff didn’t dare reply in regular words. He muttered unintelligible
sounds beneath his breath, seeking the while to draw away.

“Quit mumblin’!” ordered Smooth. “You’s liable to mumble up somethin’
I don’t keer to heah, an’ den I’ll tek an’ jes’ natchelly mek a set of
nigger shoestrings outen you. B’lieve I’ll do hit anyway--right now!”

One of his hands--the left one--closed en-twiningly in Jeff’s coat
collar. His right stole back toward his hip pocket--the pocket wherein
Smooth was reputed to carry his razor. Jeff felt dark wings fanning his
clammy brow.

“Speak up an’ say whut you got to say whilst you is got de breath to say
hit,” said the bad man.

“I--I wus jes’ fixin’ to go, Smoothy,” his voice squeaked.

“Naw, you wuzn’t. Ain’t I been watchin’ you, hangin’ round back yere
whar you thought I couldn’t see you. Now den----”

A uniformed and helmeted form bulged in between them, breaking Smooth’s
hold on Jeff. The disturbance had drawn the Most High Grand Outer
Guardian away from his post at the door.

“Yere! Dat’ll be ‘bout all!” stated this functionary in a voice of
authority. “Go on outside, you two, ef you wants to argify wid one nurr.
Dis ain’t no place to be ‘sputin’.” He gave a violent start of
surprise and his voice trailed off to nothingness. Until now he had not
recognised Jeff’s adversary.

“Who you talkin’ to, Mistah Monkey Clothes?”

Smooth swung on the officer, ready in his present state of feeling
to carve up one or a dozen. An ingratiating smile split the nervous
countenance of the Most High Grand Outer Guardian. Than to be flirting
with disaster nothing was farther from his desires.

“Scuse me, Mistah Crumbaugh. I didn’t know ‘twuz you. I begs yore
pardon!” he stated hastily. “Please, ef you don’t mind, I’ll settle dis
matter fur you.”

He swung round on Jeff, who was making himself smaller by the second.

“Whut you mean,” he demanded, “per-vokin’ Mistah Crumbaugh twell he’s
jes’ about to lose his temper? Ef yore presence yere irritates him, w’y
don’t you go on ‘way, lak a gen’leman?... Lis’en to dat! Don’t you see
you’s ‘bout to break up de programme?” From the rows of seats nearest
them came indignant Sh-h-hs! Jeff’s popped eyes, glaring about him, read
in all visible looks only intense disapproval of him. It was not healthy
to hold Smooth Crumbaugh responsible for the interruption; but poor Jeff
stood in quite a different attitude with the assemblage.

He shrank away, pawing out behind him with both hands for the door.
Partly mollified, but still growling, Smooth started to return to his
seat, all in his way making a clear path for him. Jeff vanished through
the opening like a scared chipmunk.

The Reverend Grasty had not been discommoded by the disturbance in the
rear. He was getting louder every minute. So was Sister Shackleford.

Outside on the landing, Jeff breathed again and paused to master a
trembling tendency as regards his legs, at the same time telling himself
he had not wanted to stay through their old watch party anyhow. It was
a lie; but he kept on telling it to himself over and over again until
he almost believed it. With a bitter smile, reflective of the intense
bitterness in his heart, he looked backward at the blank panels of the
door and reflected that, barring one fascinating exception, he didn’t
have a real friend in all that multitude.

Why, if they really wanted to put somebody out, hadn’t they clubbed
in and put that tough Smooth Crumbaugh out? Why hadn’t twenty-five or
thirty of them formed a volunteer committee on good order and removed
Smooth by force? He would have been glad to enroll as a member of that
committee--as the thirtieth member and in an advisory capacity purely.

Oh, well, what was the use of hanging round a place where true gentility
was neither recognised nor appreciated? These here Supreme Kings
couldn’t possibly last much longer, anyway--running things the way they
did. He might as well go on about his business. Reluctantly, making
compromise with his outraged dignity at every step, and rent between
a hankering to linger on and a conviction that if he did linger a most
evil thing surely would befall him, Jeff limped in his creaking new
shoes down the empty stairs, descending yard by yard into a Slough of
Despond.

At the foot of the steps he stopped again, fumbling in his pockets. The
jangled state of his nerves demanded the sooth of nicotine. From one
pocket he exhumed nearly half of a cigar and from the other a box of
matches. He inserted the cigar between his lips and undertook to strike
a light. These were a new kind of matches--long, thick ones, with big
white-and-black heads. Judge Priest had brought home a supply of
them the day before, and Jeff, attracted vaguely by their novelty of
appearance and their augmented size, had been moved to borrow a box of
them off the dining-room sideboard without mentioning the matter to any
one.

The misanthrope drew one of the big matches down the plastered side of
the entryway. It sputtered and snapped under the friction of the stroke,
but declined to burst into flame. Jeff cast it away and tried another,
with no different result, except that the stick part snapped off short.
Either the prevalent dampness had adversely affected them or they were
defective and untrustworthy by reason of some flaw in their manufacture.
But he noted that both matches had left queer luminous streaks upon the
dingy wall.

Morbidly reflecting that in this night of his bad luck he was to be
denied even the small solace of a smoke, Jeff absently fingered a third
match between his fingers, plucking at its bulbous tip with a thumb
nail. Instantly the effect of this was such as mildly to startle him;
for at once on his finger ends appeared a strange spectral glow, as
though he had been fondling some new and especially well-illuminated
breed of lightning bug in his naked hand.

At any other time, almost, this phenomenon, so simply accomplished,
would have set Jeff’s nimble fancy at work devising experimental means
of entertainment to be derived therefrom; but now and here, in
his existent frame of thought, the discovery gave him no pleasure
whatsoever.

He pouched cigar butt and matches, and stepped forth from the
stair passage into the drizzle. Out of the darkness a figure reeled
unsteadily. It bumped into him with such violence as to drive him back
into the doorway, and then caromed off, rocking on its heels to regain
its balance. Jeff made out that the awk-ward one was a person of his own
colour and sex.

“Whut’s ailin’ you, man?” he demanded irritably. “Ain’t a whole sidewalk
wide ‘nuff fur you, widout you tryin’ to knock folkses down?”

“Huh?”

The wavering pedestrian exhaled a thick grunt, which brought with it
an aroma of stick gin. He tottered forward again, throwing out his
clutching hands for some support.

“Go on ‘way frum me!”

Jeff flung out an arm to fend the other off; but the gesture froze solid
while yet his elbow was crooked, and Jeff cowered back, transfixed and
limber with terror, too scared to run, too weak to cry out.

For there, centred in the dim half-light that streamed down from above,
swaying on his legs and dripping moisture, as befitting one who had
but lately met a watery end, stood the mortal remains of the late
unlamented--whom even now they were most unkindly commemorating
upstairs--Red Hoss Shackleford, deceased. There was no doubt about
it. Red Hoss’ embodied spirit, with the restless malignity of a soul
accursed, had come back to attend its own memorial service!

Jeff’s jaws opened and refused to close. His throat locked on a howl,
and that howl emerged as a thin, faint wheeze. The filling inside his
knee joints turned to a marrowy jelly. His scalp crawled on his skull.

The ghost grabbed him in a fumbling embrace; and even as Jeff, in an
intensified spasm of terror, wrestled to be free of that awful clutch,
he realised that this ghost was entirely too solid for a regular ghost.
Besides, there was that smell of gin. Ghosts did not drink--or did they?
He found his voice--part of it.

“Shacky, ain’t you daid?” he pleaded in croaking accents. “Fur Gawd’s
sake, tell me de truth--ain’t you sho-’nuff daid?”

“Who say I’m daid?” demanded Red Hoss with maudlin truculence. Then
instantly his tone became plaintive: “How come ever’whars I goes
to-night dey axes me is I daid? Does I look daid? Does I act daid?”

“Wait a minute, Shacky--lemme think.” And now Jeff, well recovered, was
holding the ex-apparition upright. “You sorter taken me by s’prise; but
lemme think.”

Already, as his self-possession came back to him, the germ of a
splendid, dazzling idea took root and sprouted in his brain.

Still supporting the burden of the miraculously restored Red Hoss, he
glanced over his shoulder up the hallway. There was no one visible; none
other shared this marvellous secret with him. As quickly as might be,
he guided the uncertain form of Red Hoss away from the doorway and round
the corner into the black shadows at the side of the building, where
rain dripped on them from the eaves above.

That made no difference. Red Hoss was wet through, and in this moment
any slight dam-age from dampness to his own vanities of wardrobe meant
nothing at all to Jeff. He propped Red Hoss against the brick wall and
steadied him there. And when he spoke, he spoke low; but, also, he spoke
fast. Time was a precious commodity right now.

“Red Hoss,” he said, “I’s yore friend, ez you knows full well. Now tell
me: How come you didn’t git drownded in de river?”

“Me? Huh! Dey ain’t nary river ever been dug deep ‘nuff to drownd me
in,” Red Hoss was replying with drunken boastfulness. “Here’s de way
‘twuz: Come de night after C’ris’mus, I finds myse’f a little bit
overtuck wid licker. So I lays down on de b’iler deck of dat dere
tugboat, takin’ a little nap. I reckin I must ‘a’ roll over in my
sleep, ‘ca’se all of a sudden I ‘scovers myse’f in de middle of dat ole
Tennessee River; an’ dat tugboat, she’s agoin’ ‘long upstream same ez
ef de w’ite folks is sayin’ to deyse’ves: ‘Well, one nigger mo’ or less
don’t make no diff’ence in good times lak dese.’

“I treads water an’ I yells; but she keep right on movin’. So den I jes’
swims an’ swims, an’ swims some mo’; an’ dat river sut-tinly is cold
to my skin. After a spell I lands ashore whar dey’s some thick-kinder
woods; an’ I walks back an’ fo’th th’ough dem woods, tryin’ to keep frum
freezin’ to death.

“Long ‘bout daylight I comes to a tie camp whar two w’ite men is got a
gang of niggers git-tin’ out crossties, an’ I yells an’ knocks on de
do’ of de shack twell I rousts ‘em all up. Dey lemme in; an’ dey ax me a
whole passel of fool questions ‘bout whar’bouts is I come frum, an’ whut
is I doin’ dar, an’ dey kindle up a big fire an’ I dries myse’f out; an’
den bimeby dey feeds me a meal of vittles. W’en I gits ready to start
frum dar, ‘long about de middle of de day, one of de w’ite men gives me
six bits to pay my way back yere on de railroad.

“But jes’ after I leaves de camp to walk to de railroad, w’ich is eight
miles ‘way, I runs into a bunch of de hands, hid out in de woods a
little piece, shootin’ craps; an’ I stops. So presently my six bits is
gone. So den I goes on to de railroad afoot; an’, not havin’ no money
nor nothin’, I has to beat my way home. I rides on de brake beams a
spell, an’ den de brakeman he spies me; an’ he th’ows me off; and de
las’ eighteen miles I has to walk all de way--an’ hit a-rainin’!”

“W’en did you git yere? I means w’en did you hit town?”

“‘Bout a hour ago--or mebbe ‘twuz a hour an’ a half.”

With usage, Red Hoss’ powers for coherent speech were improving.

“So, fust off, I goes down to de river whar dat tugboat is tied up to
see whut chance dey is, dat time of night, of my drawin’ whut money is
coinin’ to me. But de cabin is all dark an’ t’ain’t nobody aboard her
‘cep’in’ de nigger night watchman; an’ he’s settin’ down back in de
ingine room, sound asleep. I walks back to whar he is an’ I says to him,
I says: ‘Hello, nigger!’--jes’ lak dat. An’ he open his eyes an’ gimme
jes’ one look; an’ den he give out one yell, an’ den he ain’t dere no
mo’. I kin heah his footsteps goin’ up de levee, scatterin’ gravels lak
a ole hen scratching but dat nigger is plum’ gone. He act lak he seen a
ha’nt, or somethin’.

“So den, de nex’ thing I does, I goes up de wharf to de house whar my
ha’f sister, Rosalie--you knows dat ‘ooman?--does cookin’ fur a w’ite
fambly; an’ I goes round de house an’ knocks at de kitchen do’, but
t’ain’t nobody answers. I keeps on knockin’, an’ after a spell de boss
of de house, a w’ite man, name of Futrell, he come out on de back po’ch
in his night-clo’es, wid a lamp in his hand, an’ he suttinly do act
‘stonished to see me standin’ dar; an’ he ax me p’intedly ain’t I
drownded; an’ I tells him No, suh; suttinly I ain’t drownded! An’ I ax
him whar is Rosalie. An’ he say, ef she ain’t in her cabin in de yard,
he reckon she must ‘a’ come on up yere to dis yere hall fur some kind
of nigger doin’s. Dat’s de fust I knows ‘bout her livin’ on de Futrell
place.

“So I goes out to de cabin in de yard; but she done gone, leavin’ de do’
unlocked an’ on de jar. So I goes in an’ meks a light an’ looks ‘bout
me; an’ I finds sixty cents under a mat on de washstand, w’ich on my
way yere I spends dat sixty cents fur gin at de Bleedin’ Heart Saloon,
‘ca’se I’s wet to de skin, ez you kin see fur yo’se’f. An’ so den I meks
my way to dis hall, ‘ca’se I p’intedly does aim to drag dat dere ‘ooman
out an’ ax her whut put it into her fool haid to go all round town
tellin’ folkses I’s drownded w’en she know, her ownse’f, dey ain’t nary
river ever been dug deep ‘nuff to drownd me in.”

His voice became complaining now, rather than indignant:

“Fur de las’ ha’f hour, mo’ or less, I been tryin’ to git up dem
stepses. But seem lak dem stepses is a heap mo’ steeper’n whut dey used
to be. Whut mek ‘em steepen dem stepses fur, Jeff?”

A sudden drowsiness overcame the narrator and he sought to slump down
against the wall. But Jeff upheld him, against his will; and a minute
later Jeff’s words had roused him out of his gin-born daze:

“Lis’en to me, Red Hoss; lis’en! I jes’ come down frum up dere. I come
away; ‘ca’se I’s yore friend, an’ I jes’ natchelly couldn’t bear to set
dere no longer an’ heah ‘em scandalise you de way dey’s doin’.”

“Scandalise me! Who’s scandalisin’ me?”

“Ever’body is; but specially de pastor of de Fust Ward Church--yas, suh;
he’s de main scandaliser. An’ dat sister of your’n, she’s settin’ there
harkin’ to him, same ez ef he wuz tellin’ her some good news.”

“Lemme go! Lemme go! I lay I’ll learn dem niggers to be ‘stroyin’ my
good name behine my back!”

The victim of calumny, all wide-awake now, wrestled to be free of the
detaining hands. After a little, though, he suffered his form to relax
and his struggles to abate as Jeff poured agreeable advice upon him.

“Wait a minute, Shacky--jes’ wait a minute! I got a better scheme ‘n
whut dat one is. ‘Sides, you couldn’t git past de do’--whole place up
dere is jest jammed an’ blocked off wid people. Come on now wid me.
We’ll go in by de back way, whar de stepses ain’t so steep ez dey is
round yere in front. You an’ me’ll go up dat way, tippytoe, so ez not to
mek no noise; and we’ll wait in dat little hall behine de flatform--you
knows de hall I means--de one whar dey perpares de candidates fur
‘nitiation?”

Red Hoss nodded.

“I knows it full well. Been dere oncet. And den whut?” he inquired.

“Den we’ll wait twell dey turns de lights out; dey’s aimin’ to turn ‘em
out in a mighty few minutes to welcome in de New Yeah in de darkness.
An’ jes’ w’en dey does dat I’ll open de do’, an’ you step out on de
flatform an’ say: ‘Heah I is!’ At dat I’ll switch on de lights right
quick; an’ den--don’t you see?--you’ll be standin’ right dere in full
view, up on de flatform, whar you kin tell dat preacher whut you thinks
of him.”

“I ain’t ‘lowin’ to tell him nothin’--I ‘low to jes’ haul off an’ bust
him one, an’ peel his nappy haid fur him!” avowed Red Hoss.

“Suit yo’se’f about dat,” conceded Jeff; “but how do de res’ of de plan
seem to strike you?”

“You’s my friend--seem lak you’s de onlies’ friend whut I got lef in
de world,” stated Red Hoss. “An’ so I does lak you says--up to a suttin
point; but frum den on I’s gwine cut loose an’ be rough. Come on, Jeff!
Show me de way! Dat’s all I axes you--jes’ show me de way!”

“Hole still a minute--we got time yit to spare,” counselled Jeff; on top
of his first inspiration a second one had burgeoned forth. “Fust off,
lemme wipe de rain an’ de cinders offen you--yore face is powerful
dirty.”

Obediently Red Hoss offered his features for renovation. From his pocket
Jeff hauled out a handkerchief; hauled something else out, too--only Red
Hoss didn’t see that. He made pretense of wrapping a forefinger in the
handkerchief; but it was not a finger tip that carefully encircled both
of Red Hoss’ blinking eyes, pressing firmly against the moist black
flesh, and then outlined his nose and passed in rings round his mouth,
above the upper lip and below the lower one.

“Hole up!” protested Red Hoss. “You’s rubbin’ too hard. Yore finger nail
hurts me.”

“Stay still!” urged Jeff. “I’s ‘most th’ough.” Craftily, with a fresh
match, he touched the outer and the inner corners of Red Hoss’ eyes and
the lobes of his ears; and then he drew off, almost appalled himself by
the ghastliness of his own handicraft, as revealed in the dark.

“Come along, Red Hoss. An’ don’t furgit whut you’s goin’ to say w’en I
opens de hall do’ fur you.”

“Ain’t furgittin’ nothin’,” promised Red Hoss.

Their two figures, closely interwoven--one steering and supporting; the
other being steered and being supported--passed in the murk round the
back corner of Odd Fellows’ Hall, to bring up at the foot of a flight of
rough wooden stairs, built on against the wall for added protection and
as an added means of exit from the upper floor in case of fire, fight or
flight. Here the hardest part of Jeff’s job began. He had to boost Red
Hoss up, step by step.

Above, the most successful watch party ever conducted under the auspices
of the Supreme Kings of the Universe had progressed almost to its
apogee. It was now six minutes before the hour when, according to no
less an authority than the late Bard of Avon, churchyards yawn and
graves give up their sheeted dead. The principal orator, with his high
collar quite wilted down and his face, behind his spectacles, slick and
shiny with sweat, reached his conclusion, following a burst of eloquence
so powerful that his hearers almost could hear the Tophet fires
crackling beneath their tingling feet.

“An’ now, my dearly beloved sistern an’ brethem,” he proclaimed, in a
short peroration to his longer one--“an’ now I commands you to think on
the fix this pore transgressor must be in at this very minute, cut off
ez he wuz in the midst of his sins an’ his shortcomin’ses. Think on
yore own sins an’ yore own shortcomin’ses. Think, an’ think hard! Think,
an’ think copious!”

His voice swung downward to the more subdued cadence of the
semiconversational tone: “The hour of midnight is ‘most at hand. In
acco’dance wid the programme I shell now turn off the lights, an’ this
gatherin’ will set in the solemn communion of darkness fur five minutes,
till the New Yeah comes.”

He stepped three paces backward and turned a plug set in the wall close
to the door jam. All over the hall the bulbs winked out. Nothing was to
be seen, and for a few seconds nothing was heard except the sound of the
minister’s shuffling movements as he felt his way back to his place at
the front of the platform, and, below him, in the body of the hall, the
nervous rustle of many swaying bodies and of twice as many scuffling
feet.

On the far side of the closed rear door crouched Jeff, breathless from
his recent exertions, panting whispered admonitions in the ear of his
co-conspirator. Red Hoss was impatient to lunge forward. He wanted
to surge in right now. But Jeff held fast to him. Jeff could sense a
psychological moment, even if he could not pronounce one.

“Wait jes’ one secont mo’--please, Red Hoss!” he entreated. “Wait twell
I opens dis yere do’ fur you. Den you bulge right in an’ speak up de
words ‘Here I is!’ loud an’ clear. You won’t furgit’dat part, will you?”

“‘On’t furgit nothin’!” muttered Red Hoss. “Jes’ watch my smoke--dat’s
all!”

With his ear against a thin panel, Jeff listened; listened--and smiled.
Through the barrier he heard the preacher’s voice saying:

“All present will now unite in singin’ the hymn w’ich begins: Hark! From
the Tombs a Doleful Soun’!”

Softly, oh, so softly, Jeff’s fingers turned the doorknob; gently, very
gently, he drew the door itself half open; with the whispered admonition
“Now, boy, now!” he swiftly but silently propelled Red Hoss, face
forward, through the opening.

The Reverend Grasty stood waiting for the first words of the hymn to
uprise from below him in a mighty swing. But from that unseen gathering
down in front a very different sound came--a sound that was part a gasp
of stupefaction, part a groan of abject distress. For the rest saw what
the minister, as yet, did not see, by reason of his back being to the
wall, where-as they faced it. They saw, floating against a background
of black nothingness, a face limned in wavering pulsing lines of a most
ghastly witch fire--nose and brow and chin and ears, wide mouth and
glaring eyes, all wreathed about by that unearthly graveyard glow.

In that same flash of space Jeff Poindexter’s hand had found the switch,
set in the wall hard by the door casing, and had flipped the lights
on. And now before them they beheld the form of the late Red Hoss
Shackleford, his face seamed with livid greyish streaks, his garments
all adrip, his arms outspread, his eyes like balls of flame, and his
lips agleam with a palish blush, as though he had hither come direct
from feasting on the hot coals of Perdition, without stopping to wipe
his mouth. And then he opened that fearsome scupper of a mouth, and in
a voice thickened and muddy--the proper voice for one who had lain for
days in river ooze--he spoke the words:

“Here I is!” That was all he said. But that was enough.

It is believed that the Reverend Grasty was the first to move. Naturally
he would be among the first, anyhow, he being the nearest of all to the
risen form of the dead. He spread himself like an eagle and soared away
from there; and when he lit, he lit a-running. Indeed, so high did he
jump and so far outward that, though he started with a handicap, few
there were who beat him in the race to the door.

Smooth Crumbaugh was one who beat him. Smooth feared neither man nor
beast nor devil; but ha’nts were something else! He took a flying start,
spuming the floor as he rose up over chairs and their recent occupants.
Without checking speed, he clove a path straight through the centre of
Sister Eldora Menifee’s refreshment department; and on the stairway,
going down, he passed the Most High Grand Outer Guardian as though the
Most High Grand Outer Guardian had been standing still.

It was after he struck the sidewalk, though, and felt the solid bricks
beneath his winged feet, that Smooth really started to move along.
For some ten furlongs he had strong competition, but he was leading by
several lengths when he crossed Yazoo Street, eight blocks away, with
the field tailing out behind him for a matter of half a mile or so.

I might add that Sister Rosalie Shackleford, hampered though she was by
skirts and the trappings of woe, nevertheless finished inside the money
herself.

Jefferson Poindexter, calm, smiling and debonair, picked his way
daintily among overthrown chairs and through a litter of hats, helmets,
umbrellas and swords across the hall to Ophelia, who, helpless with
shock, was plastered, prone and flat on the floor, close up against the
side wall, where Smooth had flung her as he launched himself in flight.

Right gallantly Jeff raised her to her feet and supported her; and
right mainfully she clung to him, inclosing herself, all distracted and
aquiver, within the circle of his comforting arms. Already they were
almost alone and within a space of moments would be entirely so, except
for one fat auntie, lying in a dead faint under the wrecked snack stand.

Also there still remained Red Hoss Shackleford, who wavered to and fro
upon the platform, with a hand to his bewildered brow, trying foggily
to figure out just how he had been thwarted of his just retribution upon
the persons of those vanished arch-detractors of him. He had had his
revenge--had it sugar-sweet and brimming over--only he didn’t know it
yet.

“Oh, Jeffy,” gasped Ophelia, “wuzn’t you skeered too?”

“Who--me?” proclaimed Jeff. “Me skeered of a wet nigger, full of stick
gin? Fair lady, mebbe I don’t keer so much fur gittin’ my clothes all
mussed up fightin’ wid bully niggers, but I ain’t never run frum no
ghostes yit; an’ I don’t never aim to, neither--not ‘thout waitin’ round
long ‘nuff to find out fust w’ether hit’s a real ghost or not. Dat’s
me!”

“Oh, Jeffy, you suttinly is de bravest man I knows!” she answered back
in muffled tones, with her head on his white waistcoat.

At this moment precisely the town clock sounded the first stroke of
twelve, and all the steam whistles in town let go, blasting out shrilly;
and all the giant firecrackers in town began bursting in loud acclaim of
the New Year. But what the triumphant, proud, conquering Jeff heard was
his Ophelia, speaking to him soul to soul.



CHAPTER VIII. CINNAMON SEED AND SANDY BOTTOM

Major putnam stone is dead, but his soul goes marching on. Mainly it
does its marching on at Midsylvania University. Every fall, down yonder,
on the night of the day of the last game of the season, when the squad
has broken training and many of the statutes touching on the peace and
quiet of the community, there is a dinner. At the end of this dinner the
captain of the team stands up at one end of the table and chants out:
“Cinnamon Seed and Sandy Bottom!”--just like that. Whereupon there
are loud cheers. And then, at the far end of the table from him, the
chairman of the athletic community stands up in his place and lifts his
mug and says, in the midst of a little silence: “To the memory of
Major Putnam Stone!” Then everybody rises and drinks; and there are no
heel-taps.

This ceremony is never omitted. It is a tradition; and they go in
rather strongly for traditions at Midsylvania, and always have since the
days when there was not much else to Midsylvania except its traditions.
The team may have won that afternoon, or it may have lost. The boys may
be jubilating for the biggest victory of the whole year, or, over the
trenches and the tankards, consoling themselves and one another for an
honourable defeat at the hands of their classic rival, Vanderbeck. It
makes no difference. Win or lose, they toast the shade and the name of
Major Stone.

So there is no danger that the Major will be forgotten at the
University, any more than there is danger of such a thing coming to pass
in the _Evening Press_ shop where the Major used to work. Most of the
old hands who worked there with him once upon a time are gone elsewhere
now. One or two or three are dead and the rest of us, with few
exceptions, have scattered over the country. But among the men who are
our successors on the staff the spirit of the old man walks, and there
is a tale of him to be told to each beginner who comes on the paper. It
is as much a part of the history of the city room as the great stories
that Ike Webb, who was our star man, wrote back in those latter
nineties; as much a part as the sayings and the doings of little Pinky
Gilfoil, who passed out last year, serving with the American ambulance
corps over in France.

The last time I was down that way I stopped over between trains and went
around on Jefferson Street to look the old place over. It was late in
the afternoon, after press time for the final edition, and the day force
had all departed; but out of the press-room to greet me came limping old
Henry, the black night watchman, who, according to belief, had been a
fixture of the _Evening Press_ since the corner stone of the building was
laid.

“Yassuh,” said Henry to me after this and that and the other thing had
been discussed back and forth between us; “we still talks a mighty much
about ole Majah. Dis yere new issue crop of young w’ite genelmens we
got workin’ ‘round yere now’days gits a chanc’t to hear tell about him
frequent an’ of’en. They’s a picture of him hangin’ upstairs in de big
boss’ room on de thud flo’. Big boss, he sets a heap of store by ‘at air
picture. An’ they tells me ‘at de mate to it is hangin’ up in ‘at
air new structure w’ich they calls de Forbes Memorial, out at de
Univussity.”

If my recollection serves me aright I have once or twice before touched
on sundry chapters in the life and works of the old Major, telling how,
for him, nothing of real consequence happened in this world between the
surrender of Lee at Appomattox and the day, nearly forty years later,
when all his tidy property was wiped out in an unfortunate investment,
and he moved out of his suite at the old Gault House and abandoned
his armchair in a front window at the Shawnee Club, and, at the age
of sixty-four and a salary of twelve dollars a week, took a job as cub
reporter on the _Evening Press_; how because he would persist in gnawing
at the rinds of old yesterdays instead of nosing into the things of the
current day he was a most utter and complete failure at the job; how
once through chance, purely, he uncovered the whoppingest scoop that a
real reporter could crave for and then chucked it away again to save a
woman who by the standards of all proper people wasn’t worth saving in
the first place; how by compassion of the owner of the paper and against
the judgment of everybody else, he hung on all through the summer,
a drag upon the organization and a clog on the ankle of City Editor
Wilford Devore; how on the opening day of the famous Lyric Hall
convention he finally rose to an emergency that was of his liking and
with the persuasive aid of a brace of long-barrelled, ivory-handled
cavalry revolvers stampeded the Stickney gang, when they tried by force
to seize the party machinery, having first put that official bad man and
deputy subheader of the opposition, Mink Satterlee, out of business, by
love-tapping Mink upon his low and retreating forehead with the butt end
of one of his shooting irons; and how then as a reward therefor, he was
made war-editor of the sheet, thereafter fitting comfortably and snugly
into a congenial berth especially devised and created for his occupancy.
All this has elsewhere been told.

This present tale, which has to do in part with the Major and in part
with the student body of Midsylvania, dates from sometime after the day
when he became our war editor, and was writing those long and tiresome
special articles of his, dealing favourably with Jackson’s Campaign in
the Valley, and unfavourably with Sherman’s March to the Sea.

Midsylvania, those days, was a university with a long vista of historic
associations behind it and a puny line of endowments to go forward
on; so it went forward very slowly indeed. To get the most favourable
perspective on Midsylvania you must needs look backward into a
distinguished but mouldy past, and consider the list of dead-and-gone
warriors and statesmen and educators and clergymen who had been
graduated in the class of ‘49 or the class of ‘54, or some other class.
Chief among its physical glories were a beech tree, under which Daniel
Boone was said to have camped overnight once; an ancient chapel building
of red brick, with a row of fat composition pillars, like broken legs
in plaster casts, stretching across its front to uphold its squatty
portico; and in the centre of the campus, a noseless statue of Henry
Clay.

Sons of Old Families in the state attended it, principally, I suppose,
because their fathers before them had attended it; sons of new families
mostly went elsewhere for their education. With justice, you might speak
of Midsylvania as being conservative, which was true; but when you said
that, you said it all, and it let you out. There was nothing more to be
said.

If poor shabby old Midsylvania lagged behind sundry of her sister
schools in the matter of equipment, most certainly and most woefully
did she lag behind them in the matter of athletics. In that regard, and
perhaps other regards, she was an Old Ladies’ Home. Eight governors of
American commonwealths, six of them dead and two yet living, might be
listed on the roster of her alumni--and were; but you sought in vain
there for the name of a great pitcher or of a consistent winner of track
events, or of a champion pole vaulter. If anybody mentioned Midsylvania
in connection with college sports, it was to laugh. So there was a good
deal of laughing one fall when, for the first time, she went in for
football. The laughter continued, practically without abatement, through
that season; but early the following season it died away altogether,
to be succeeded by a wave of astonishment and of reluctantly conceded
admiration, which ran from the Ohio River to the Gulf of Mexico, and
from the Atlantic Seaboard to the Mississippi River. Other football
teams began to respect Midsylvania’s football team. They had to; she
mauled it into their respective consciousness.

The worm had turned--and turned something besides the other cheek, at
that; for in that second year she won her first game, which was her game
with Exstein Normal. Now Exstein Normal came up proudly, like an army
glorious with banners, and went down abruptly, like a scuttled ship:
Score, thirty-one to nothing. Following on this, she beat Holy Mount’s
team of fiery Louisiana Creoles, with a red-headed demon of a New
Orleans Irish boy for their captain; and, in succession, she took on and
overcame Cherokee Tech., and Alabama State, and Bayless.

She held to a tie what was conceded to be the best team that
Old Dominion had ever mustered; and Vanderbeck, the largest and,
athletically considered, the strongest of them all, bested her only by
the narrowest and closest of margins on Vanderbeck’s own gridiron. It
was one of the upsetting things that never can happen, but occasionally
do, that Midsylvania should go straight through to Thanksgiving Day with
a miraculous record of five victories, one tie and one defeat out of
seven games played, and with not a man in the regular lineup seriously
damaged. And yet not so miraculous either when you came to cast
up causes to find results. Her men had steam and had speed and had
strategy, which meant team-work; in fact, they had everything. Heaven
alone knew where, within the space of one year they had got it, but they
had it: that was the main point, the incontrovertible detail.

You know the old saying: Home folks are always the last ones to
appreciate us. More or less I think this must have been true of us as
regards our own University’s football outfit. Undoubtedly a lot had been
written and said in cities farther south about it, before the _Evening
Press_ and the other papers in town began fully to realise that
Midsylvania was putting the town on the football map. But when we did
realise it we gave her and her team front page space and sporting page
space, and plenty of both. Before we had been content to bestow upon
her a weekly column which one of the undergraduates turned in at space
rates, and pretty poor space rates at that--departmental stuff, mostly
dealing with faculty changes, and Greek letter society doings and campus
gossip and such-like. Now though almost anything that anybody on the
staff or off of it chose to grind out about the boys who wore the M on
their sweater breasts found a warm welcome after it landed on the City
Editor’s desk. Local pride in local achievement had been roused and
if anybody knows of anything stronger than local pride in a city of
approximately a hundred and fifty thousand population, please tell me
what it is. We covered the games that were played at home that year as
fully as the limitations of a somewhat scanty staff permitted, and Ike
Webb was detailed to travel with the squad when it played away from
home. He sent back by telegraph, regardless of expense, stories on the
games abroad, which were smeared all over the sheet under spread heads
and signed as being “By Our Special Staff Correspondent.” They were good
stories--Ike was not addicted to writing bad ones, ever--and they made
circulation.

There is no telling how many letters from subscribers came to the chief
commending him for his journalistic enterprise. He ran a good many of
them. The paper rode with the team on the crest of the popularity wave.
Trust Devore for that. He had a sense for news-values which compensated
and more than compensated for certain temperamental shortcomings as
exhibited inside the plant.

One day in the tail end of November the old Major came stumping down the
stairs from his sanctum--anyhow, he always called it his sanctum--upon
the top floor in a little partitioned-off space adjoining the chief’s
office, where he had a desk of his own and where he did his work. He had
a wad of copy paper in his hand. In dress and in manner he was the same
old Major that he had been in the flush times two years back, when he
used to come in daily, ostensibly to get some exchanges but really to
sit and sit, and bore everybody who would listen with tiresome long
accounts of things that happened between 1861 and 1865--not the
shabby forlorn figure he became that first summer after he got his
twelve-dollar-a-week job--but his former self, recreated all over again.
His fullbreasted shirt of fine linen jutted out above the unbuttoned
top of his low waistcoat in pleaty, white billows and his loose black
sailor’s tie made a big clump at his throat where the ends of his Lord
Byron collar came together. His cuffs almost covered his hands and his
longish white hair was like silk floss lying on his coat collar behind.
That little white goatee of his jutted out under his lower lip like
a tab of carded wool. Altogether he was the Major of yore, rejoicing
sartorially in his present state of comparative prosperity. The boys
around the shop always said that if the Major had only ten dollars and
fifty cents in the world he would spend five dollars of it for his club
dues and five of it on his wardrobe and give the remaining fifty cents
to some beggar. I guess he would have, too.

He came downstairs this day and walked up to Devore, and laid down his
sheaf of pages at Devore’s elbow. “A special contribution, sir,” he said
very ceremoniously.

Devore ran through the first page, which was covered with pencil
marks--the Major always wrote his stuff out in long hand--and glanced
up, a little bit astonished.

“Kind of out of your usual line, isn’t it, Major Stone?” he asked.

“In a measure, sir--yes,” stated the old man; and he rocked on his
high heels as though he might be nervous regarding the reception his
contribution would have in this quarter. “Under the circumstances I feel
justified in a departure from the material I customarily indite. But if
you feel--”

“Oh, that’s all right!” said Devore, divining what the Major meant to
say before the Major finished saying it. “There’s always room for good
stuff.”

He laid the first sheet aside and shuffled through the sheets under it,
picking out lines and appraising the full purport of the manuscript, as
any skilled craftsman of a newspaper copy desk can do in half the length
of time an outsider would be needing to make out the sense of it.

“About young Morehead, eh? I didn’t know you knew him, Major?”

“Personally I do not. But, in his lifetime, I knew his gallant father
well; in fact, intimately. For some months we served together on the
staff of General Leonidas Polk. Accordingly I felt qualified by my
personal acquaintance with his family to treat of the subject as I have
treated it.”

“Oh, I see!” Devore gave an involuntary smile quick burial in the palm
of his cupped hand. “And so you’ve caught the fever too?”

“Fever, sir? What fever?”

“I mean you’ve got yourself all worked up about football, the same as
everybody else in town?”

“Not at all, sir. Of the game of football I know little or nothing. In
my college days we concerned ourselves in our sportive hours with very
different pursuits and recreations.”

The Major, as we knew from hearing him tell about it a hundred times,
had left the University of Virginia in his second year to enlist in the
army. And we knew his views on the subject of sports. If a young person
of the masculine gender could waltz with the ladies, and ride a horse
well enough to follow the hounds without falling off at the jumps, and
with a shotgun could kill half the birds he fired at--these, from
the Major’s standpoint, were accomplishments enough for any Southern
gentleman, now that the use of duelling pistols had died out. We had
heard him say so, often.

“Football, considered as a game, does not interest me,” he went on
now. “I have never seen it played. But on account of Mr. James Payne
Morehead, Junior, I am interested. Being of the strain of blood that
he is, I am constrained to believe he will acquit himself in a manner
worthy of his ancestry, wheresoever he may be placed. In the article you
have there before you I have said as much.”

“So I notice,” said Devore, keeping most of the irony out of his tone.
“Thank you, Major--we’ll stick the yarn in to-morrow.” And then, as the
old man started out: “By the way, Major Stone, if you’ve never seen a
game you might enjoy seeing the one next Saturday--against Sangamon.
It’ll be your last chance this season. I’ll save you out a press
ticket--if you don’t mind sitting in the newspaper box with the boys
that I’ll have out there covering the story?”

“I am obliged to you, sir,” said Major Stone. “I shall be pleased to
avail myself of the courtesy, and nothing could afford me more pleasure
than to have the company of my youthful compatriots in the field of
journalistic endeavour on that occasion.”

He talked like that. Talking, he made you think of the way some people
write in their letters, not of the way anybody else on earth spoke in
ordinary conversation.

Out he went then, all reared back and Devore read the copy through,
chuckling to himself. It wasn’t a malicious chuckle, though. Devore was
not likely to forget what the Major did for him that day eighteen months
before at the Lyric Hall convention when Bad Mink Satterlee tried to
cave in Devore’s skull with a set of brass knuckles and doubtlessly
would have carried the undertaking through successfully if Major Stone
hadn’t been so swiftly deft with the ivory butt of one of his pair of
cavalry pistols, nor to forget how nasty he, as City Editor, had been
before that, during all the months of the Major’s apprenticeship as a
sixty-four-year-old cub reporter.

“Just like the old codger!” he said, tapping the manuscript with his
hand affectionately. “Starts out to write about the kid; gives the kid
a couple of paragraphs; and then uses up twenty pages more telling what
great men the kid’s father and grandfather were. Here, you fellows, just
listen a minute to this.”

He read a few sentences aloud.

“Get the angle, don’t you? Major figures that any spunk and any sense
the Morehead boy’s got is a heritage from his revered ancestors, and
that he’ll just naturally have to make good because he had ‘em for his
ancestors. Well, at that, the Maje is probably right, without realising
it. I’m thinking Captain James Payne Morehead, Junior, and his bunch
of little fair-haired playmates are going to need something more than
they’ve got now when they go up against that bunch of huskies from
Sangamon next Saturday. How about it, eh?” We knew about it, or at least
we thought we knew about it, as surely as anyone may know in advance of
the accomplished event. There was a note of foreboding in the answers we
made to our immediate superior there in the city room. One of the boys
summed it up: “‘Pride goeth before a fall,’” he said; “and biting
off more than you can chaw is bad on the front teeth--provided the
Midsylvania eleven have any front teeth left after the Sangamon eleven
get through toying with their bright young faces on Saturday afternoon.”
 Which, differently expressed, perhaps, was the common sentiment. A chill
of dread was descending upon the community at large; in fact, had been
descending like a dark, dank blanket for upward of a week now. During
the first few hours after the announcement came out that the team of
Sangamon College, making their post-season tour, would swing downward
across Messrs. Mason and Dixon’s justly celebrated survey marks for
the express purpose of playing against Midsylvania, there had been a
flare-up of jubilation that was statewide.

It was no small honour for victorious Midsylvania that her football
eleven should be the chosen eleven below the Line to meet these
all-conquering gladiators from above it. So everybody agreed, at the
outset. But on second thought, which so often is the better thought of
the two, the opportunity seemed, after all, not so glorious. A hero
may go down leading a forlorn hope--may die holding a last ditch--and
posterity possibly will applaud him; but we may safely figure that he
does not greatly enjoy himself while thus engaged; nor can his friends
and well-wishers, looking on, be so very happy, either, over the dire
and distressful outcome of the sacrificial deed. The nearer came the day
of the game and the more people read about the strength of the invaders,
the more dismal loomed the prospect for the defenders.

To begin with, Sangamon was one of the biggest fresh-water colleges on
the continent, and one of the richest. Sangamon had six times as many
students enrolled as Midsylvania, which meant, of course, six times
the bulk of raw material from which to pick and choose for her team.
Sangamon had a professional coach, paid trainers and paid rubbers; and
Sangamon had a fat fund to support her in her athletic endeavours.

Midsylvania, it is almost needless to state, had none of these. Sangamon
had gone through the fall, mopping up ambitious contenders, east and
west, due north, north by east, and north by west. Sangamon had two
players--not one, but actually two--that the experts of the New York
dailies had nominated for the All-American--her fullback, Vretson, known
affectionately and familiarly as the Terrible Swede; and her star end,
Fay, who, in full football panoply of spiked shoes and padded knickers,
had, on test, done a hundred yards in twelve seconds flat. It isn’t
so very often that the astigmatic Eastern sharps can see across the
Appalachians when they come to make up the roster of nominees for the
seasonal hall of football fame. This year, though, they had looked as
far inland as Sangamon. At the peril of a severe eyestrain they had to,
because Sangamon simply would not be denied.

This was what Midsylvania must go up against this coming Saturday
afternoon. Wherefore the apprehension of disaster was that thick you
could slice it with a knife.

They played the game out at Morehead Downs, where every year the Derby
was run. Neither the baseball park nor the rutty common at the back of
the University campus, where the Varsity scrubs and regulars did their
stint at practise, could begin to hold the number that was due to attend
this game, decent weather being vouchsafed. So Morehead Downs it was,
with the lines blocked out in the turf on the inner side of the white
fence that bounded the track, a little way up the home stretch, so that
the judges’ stand should not cut off the view of any considerable number
of the spectators sitting across in the grand stand.

For the newspaper fellows they rigged up elbowroom accommodations of
bench and table against the base of the judges’ kiosk. There we sat--Ike
Webb and the Major and Gil Boyd, who was our sporting editor, and
myself, all in a row--and there we had been sitting for nearly an hour
before the time for starting. Ike Webb was to do the introduction and
Gil Boyd the running account of the game, play by play. My job was to
keep tab of incidents and local-colour stuff generally. But the old
Major was there as a spectator merely.

He certainly saw a sight. In that town we always measured multitudes
by our Derby Day figures; yet even Derby Days did not often turn out a
bigger crowd than the crowd that swarmed to the Downs that bright gusty
December afternoon. The governor came down from the capital and most
of the statehouse force came with him. There were excursions by rail in
from out in the state, all of them mighty well patronised.

As for the local attendance--well, so far as compiling a directory of
the able-bodied adult white population and a fair sprinkling of the
black was concerned, the enumerators could have simplified and expedited
their task considerably by going up and down the aisles and jotting down
the names as they went. They could have made a fairly complete census
of our prominent families without straying beyond the confines of the
reserved-seat section at the front, or fashionable, side of the grand
stand. And if a single society girl in town was absent it was because
her parents or her guardian kept her at home under lock and key.

Before two o’clock, the slanting floor beneath the high-peaked red roof
of the structure made you think of a big hanging garden, what with the
faces and the figures of all those thousands packed in together, row
after row of them, with the finery of the women standing out from the
massed background in brighter patches of colour, and the little red
pennons that the venders had peddled in the audience all dancing and
swaying, like the petals of wind-blown flowers. That spectacle alone,
viewed from our vantage place over across the race course, was worth the
price of admission to anybody.

Carrying the simile a bit farther, you might have likened two sections
of space in the stand to hothouses where noise was being brought into
bloom, by both artificial and natural means. One of these forcing beds
of sound was where Midsylvania grouped herself--faculty and students
and old graduates. The other, a smaller area, held the visitors from
Sangamon, two hundred strong and more, who had come down three hundred
miles by special train, to root for the challengers, bringing with them
a brass band and their own glee club--or a good part of it, anyhow--and
their own cheer leader.

This cheer leader, being the first of a now common species ever seen
in our parts, succeeded in holding the public eye mighty closely, as
he stood, bareheaded and long-haired, down below on the track, with
his gaudy blue-and-gold sweater on, and his big megaphone in his hand,
jerking his arms and his body back and forth as he directed his chorus
above in its organised cheering and its well-drilled singing of college
songs.

Compared with this output, Midsylvania’s cheering arose in larger
volume, which was to be expected, seeing that Midsylvania so greatly
excelled in numbers present, and had behind its delegations the favour
of the onlookers almost to a unit’; but, even so, it seemed to lack the
force and fervour of those vocal volleys arising from the ranks of the
enemy. Each time Sangamon let off a yell it was platoon firing, steady
and rapid and brisk; and literally it crackled on the air. When this had
died away, and Midsylvania had answered back, the result somehow put
you in mind of a boy whistling to keep up his courage while passing a
cemetery after dark.

It is hard to express the difference in words, but, had you been there
that day, you would have caught it in a jiffy. One group was certain of
victory impending and expressed its certainty; the other was doubtful
and betrayed it. In the intervals between the whooping and the singing
Sangamon’s imported band would play snatches of some rousing air, or
else Midsyl-vania’s band would play; between the two of them pumping up
the pulsebeats of all and sundry.

I was struck by one thing--the Major maintained calm and dignity through
all the preliminary excitement. In the moment of the first really big
outburst, which was when the Varsity’s students and former students
marched in behind their band, out of the tail of my eye I caught the
Major with a pencil, checking off the names of the home squad on his
copy of the official programme. Knowing the old fellow as I did, I
guessed he was figuring up to see how many of the players were members
of Old Families. Nearly all of them were, for that matter. He even held
himself in when, at two-fifteen or thereabouts, first one of the teams
and then the other trotted out from under opposite ends of the grand
stand and crossed the track to the field to warm up.

He asked me to point out young Morehead to him; and when I did he
nodded as if in affirmation of a previous decision of his own. On my own
initiative I pointed out some of the other stars to him too.

In advance we knew Sangamon was going to have the advantage of beef
on her side; but I do not think anybody realised just how great the
advantage was until we saw the two teams on the same ground and had
opportunity to compare and appraise them, man for man. Then we saw, with
an added sinking of the spirit--at least I knew my spirit sank at the
inequality of the comparison--that her front line outweighed ours by
pounds upon pounds of brawn.

In another regard as well, and a more essential regard, too, she showed
superiority. For these champions from the upper Corn Belt had what
plainly their opponents always before during the season had likewise
had, but now lacked: they had an enormous conceit of themselves, a
mountainous and a monumental belief in their ability to take this game
away from the rival team.

They had brought it with them--this assurance--and they had fed it
stall-fat beforehand; and now, with the easy and splendid insolence of
lusty, pampered youth, they exhibited it openly before all these hostile
eyes upon the enemy’s soil. It showed in them individually and as a
unit. Almost as visibly as though words of defiance had been stencilled
upon their tight-laced jerkins fore and aft, they flaunted forth their
confidence in themselves, somehow expressing it in their rippling leg
muscles and in their broad backs and in their hunched shoulders as they
bunched up into formidable close formation, and in everything they did
and said in the few minutes of practice intervening before they should
be at grips with their opponents.

They accepted the handclaps from the onlookers--a tribute of hospitality
this was, extended by people to whom hospitality for the stranger was as
sacred as their religion and as sincere as their politics--with an air
which betokened, most evidently, that presently they meant to repay
those who greeted them for the greeting, by achieving one of Sangamon’s
customary victories in Sangamon’s customary workmanlike fashion. Among
them Vretson, the much-advertised, loomed a greater giant above lesser
giants, justifying by bulk alone his title of the Terrible Swede.

As for Midsylvania’s players, upon the other hand, it seemed to me, as I
watched them, that they, in turn, watched the young Gogs and Magogs who
were to grapple with them in a half-fearsome, half-furtive fashion. I
marked that they flinched nervously, like débutantes, before the volleys
of friendly applause from the crowd. It occurred to me that their
thoughts must be studded with big black question marks; whereas we
all could understand that no suggestion of doubtfulness punctuated the
anticipations of the opposing eleven touching on the possibilities of
the next two hours.

The feeling of foreboding spread like a cold contagion from the field
to the press stand, affecting the newspaper men; and, becoming generally
epidemic, it reached the spectators. That earlier lustiness was almost
altogether lacking from the outbreak signalling the beginning of play.
In the salvo there was nothing heartening. It appeared rather to be
pitched in the tone of sympathetic consolation for a predestined and an
impending catastrophe; and even the bark and roar of Midsylvania’s yell,
as all Midsylvania gave it,’ seemed to have almost a hollow daunted
sound to it. Where we sat we could sense this abatement of spirit with
particular plainness; in fact, I rather think Major Stone was the
only person there who did not sense it in its full effect and its full
import.

I am not going to spend overmuch space in describing the first half of
that game; this was in the days when games were divided into halves, and
not quartered up into periods. Anyhow, I have forgotten a good many of
the details. The principal points are what stick out in my memory. I
remember that on the toss of the coin Sangamon won and kicked off.
It was Vretson--no less--who drove his talented punting toe into the
pigskin.

There was a sound as though some one had smote a taut bladder with a
slapstick, and the ball soared upward and away, shrinking from the size
of a watermelon to the size of a gourd, and from a gourd to a goose egg;
and then it came whirling downward again, growing bigger as it dropped.
Woolwine, our quarter, caught it and took a flying start off his shoe
hobs. Fay and the other Sangamon end, whose name I have forgotten, were
after him like a pair of coursing beagles after a doubling hare; and
together they nailed him before he had gone twenty yards, and down he
went, with Fay on top of him and What’shisname on top of Fay. When they
dug the three of them out of their heap little Woolwine still had the
ball under him.

As the teams lined up, boring their heads forward to a common centre,
billy-goat fashion, and Morehead, who was playing end, called out
the signals, “Six--eight--twenty-eight--thirty-one”--or some such
combination of figures--we caught the quaver in his voice. Ike Webb,
sitting next to me, gave a little groan and laid down his pencil, and
put his pessimistic face in his sheltering hands.

“Listen to that tremolo note, will you?” he lamented from between his
fingers. “Licked, by golly, before they start! They won’t play to win,
because they’re scared to death already. They’ll play to keep from being
licked by too big a score, and that means they won’t have a chance. Just
you fellows watch and see if I’m not right. Ah-h! There she goes!”

We watched all right; and we saw that our boys meant to try to carry
the ball through for gains. There was not a chance of that, though. They
butted their heads against a stone wall until they fairly addled the
football instincts in their brains. In two attempts they did not advance
the ball six feet; so they tried kicking it. Young Railey punted well
into Sangamon territory and now Sangamon had the ball. She lost it on
a fumble, but got it back a minute or two later on a fumble slip by the
other side. In their respective shortcomings as regards fumbling it was
even-Stephen between the teams; but Ike Webb couldn’t view the thing in
any such optimistic light. He had turned into a merciless critic of the
Varsity outfit.

“Aha!” he muttered dolorously as a scrimmaging tangle of forms
disentangled and showed that Sangamon, by a smart bit of strategy, had
gained three yards. “What did I tell you not five minutes back? Those
boys lost their hearts before they even began, and now they’re due to
lose their heads too.”

It really looked as though Ike Webb was qualifying for clairvoyant
honours, for promptly Midsylvania’s defence became more and more
inefficient, more and more uncertain. Sangamon had a smart field
commander, and he took leeway of the advantage. He set his men to the
job of jamming through; and jam through they did. It took time, though,
because Midsylvania, of course, offered a measure of resistance. To me,
however, it appeared to be the mechanical resistance of bodies in action
rather than anything guided by a spiritual determination--if you get
what I mean. It took a good deal of time; but after a while, by dint of
shoving ahead with all her tonnage against Midsyl-vania’s slighter
and lighter displacement, the visitors forced the ball along to
Midsylvania’s thirty-yard line.

At this point, Sangamon suddenly changed her tactics. Collop, her
captain, made a gesture with his arms and the Blue tackles dropped back
a little. From the centre of the massed wedge of shapes a signal was
barked out. So swiftly that the spectacle made you think of a pyramid of
pool balls scattering over a pool table when the cue ball hits it hard
on the nose, the visiting players shifted positions.

For ten seconds we lost sight of the ball altogether. When we saw it
again it was cuddling in Vretson’s vast, outspread paws. Who had passed
it, or how it got there after being passed, I never knew. Magically it
had materialised in his grasp in the same way that a prestidigitator’s
china egg is produced from a countryjake’s whiskers. He tucked it into
the bight of his left arm and, with his mighty right arm swinging behind
him as a rudder and before him as a flail, he tore down the field, going
away out to the right.

He was fast for his size--wonderfully fast, and besides, he had perfect
interference to help him along. His mates, skirmishing out on his flank,
threw back and bowled over the men who bored in to tackle him. In his
flight he himself accounted for at least two Varsity players who sprang
round the wings of his protecting line, hoping to intercept the big
sprinter. One he dodged, the other he flung aside; and then he kept on
and on until after a run of thirty-five yards, he flung himself through
the air; and, with Cabell, of Midsylvania, clutching at the wideness
between his shoulder blades, he dropped flat across Midsylvania’s goal
line. A groan went up from the grand stand.

There wasn’t a sound from any quarter, though, as Vretson squared off to
kick for a goal; but whoops of relief arose when the ball, after soaring
high and straight, veered off under pressure of a puff of air and,
instead of passing over the bar, struck one of the goal posts with
a mellow smack and dropped back. So the score, by the rules of those
times, stood four to naught.

Nearly everybody there, I guess, figured that Sangamon would promptly
buttress her lead by at least four additional points, and very possibly
more; but she didn’t. True, she played all round and all over and all
through Midsylvania during the remaining portion of the first half, but
she did not score again. This was due not so much to the rebuttal fight
the defenders offered, for now their playing sagged more woefully weak
than ever, but to small misplays and slip-ups and seeming overconfidence
on the part of Sangamon.

It may have been they were cocksure of their power to score again when
they chose. Maybe they were a trifle tired. Maybe they were satisfied to
postpone the slaughter-house work until toward the end of the game and
make a spectacular, overwhelming finish of it. Anyhow, it struck us,
in the press stand, that the reason behind their failure to push their
advantage still farther, during the next ten minutes or so, was rather
because of their own disinclination than because of any strategy or
strength Midsylvania’s plainly despondent eleven presented against them.

Along here I became aware, subconsciously at first, and then in a minute
or so with a fuller sense of realisation, that Major Stone had waked
up. I felt him wriggling on the bench, joggling me in the side with his
elbow; and when I looked at him his face was an indignant pink and his
little white goatee was bristling like a thistle pod.

He was saying something to himself, and by listening, I caught from
his muttered words the purport of the change that had come into the old
man’s emotions, which change, as I speedily divined, was exactly what
might have been expected of him. He did not have the attitude of the
average spectator over in the grand stand, for his bump of local pride
was not being bruised, as theirs was, by this exhibition. Nor had he
grasped and assimilated the feelings of those two groups of youngsters
whose cleated feet ripped up the turf in front of him.

It did not lie within his capabilities to share their youthful and,
therefore, profound conviction that all which was desirable in life,
here or hereafter, centred on the results of this struggle; and that
the youth who failed now to acquit himself to the greater glory of his
comrades and his class and his college--and, most of all, himself--would
droop an abased and shameful head through all the years to come. For,
as I may have remarked before, Major Stone was not a bright person, but
rather a stupid one; and his viewpoint on most subjects had not altered
materially since Appomattox.

That was it--it had not altered since Appomattox; and because it had
not he was viewing the present event as a struggle between North and
South--as a conflict into which Civil War causes and Civil War effects
directly entered. Possibly you cannot understand that. But you could if
you had known Major Stone and men like him, most of whom are now dead
and gone. His face turned from a hot pink to a dull brick-dust red, and
he gnawed at his moustache.

“It is monstrous!” I heard him say. “It is incredible! Southern sons
of Southern sires, every damned one of them! And because the odds
are against them they have weakened! I myself can see that they are
weakening every minute. Why, the thing’s incredible--that’s what it is!
Incredible!”

Just then the whistle blew, and the teams, which had been in a mix-up,
unsnarled themselves. The Sangamon eleven came off the field; some
of them were briskly trotting to prove their fitness, and some were
swaggering a little as their band hit up the tune of Marching Through
Georgia to play them into their quarters under the stand. But the
Varsity eleven passed out of sight with shoulders that drooped and with
no spring in their gaits.

Back at the tail end of their line went little Morehead, wiping his damp
eyes with the dirty sleeve of his jersey. Morehead was no young Saint
Laurence, to expire smilingly on a gridiron. He was not of the stuff
that martyrs are made of; he was a creature, part man and part boy, and
the man part of him made him furious with self-reproach, but the boy
in him made him cry. I take it, some of the spectators felt almost like
crying too; certainly their cheering sounded so.

One of the Red tackles--Rodney--had been disabled just before the
breakaway, and I ran over to Midsylvania’s quarters to find out for
the paper whether he was injured to the degree of being definitely
incapacitated for further participation in the game. In what, during
race meets, was a refreshment establishment, under the grand stand, I
obtruded upon a veritable grand lodge of sorrow.

Gadsden, the coach, who had played with the team the year before, which
was his graduating year, was out in the centre of the floor making a
brave pretense at being hopeful; but I do not think anybody present
suffered himself to be deceived thereby. His pleas to the team to buck
up and to brace up, and to go back in and fight for every point, lacked
sincerity. He appeared to be haranguing them because that was the
ordained thing for him to do, and not because he expected to infuse into
them any part of his make-believe optimism. Lying on their backs upon
blankets, with limbs relaxed, some of his hearers turned dejected faces
upward. Others, sitting upright or squatted on their knees, kept their
abashed heads on their breasts, staring down steadfastly at nothing at
all.

Morehead was sulking by himself in a corner, winking his eyelids and
wrinkling his face up to hold back the tears of his mortification. He
blamed himself, I take it, for what was the fault of all. Cabell was a
tousled heap, against a wall. He was flexing a bruised wrist, as though
that small hurt was just now the most important thing in the world to
him. Even the darky rubbers and the darky water carrier showed their
sensations by their dejected faces. There was enough of downcastness in
that room to supply half a dozen funerals with all the gloom they might
require; the whole place exhaled the essence of a resentful depression
that was as plainly to be sniffed up into the nostrils as the smells
of alcohol and arnica and liniment which burdened the air and gave the
accompaniment of a drug-store smell to the picture.

As I halted at the door on my way out of this melancholy spot to the
scarcely less melancholy atmosphere of the open, having learned that
Rodney was not really injured, somebody bumped into me, jostling me to
one side; and, to my astonishment, I saw that the impetuous intruder was
Major Stone. I had not known until then that he had followed me here,
and I did not know now what errand could have brought him along. But he
did not keep me wondering long; in fact, he did not keep me wondering at
all. He burst in on them with a great “Woof!” of indignation.

Before scarcely any one there had realised that a newcomer, arriving
unheralded and all unexpected, was in their midst, he stood in the
middle of the littered floor, glaring about him and snorting loudly. His
first words, too, were calculated not only to startle them but deeply to
profane the semi-privacy of their grief and their humiliation.

“Young gentlemen,” he fairly shouted, “I am ashamed of you! And I have
come here to tell you so, and to tell you why I am ashamed.”

By sight, even, he was probably a stranger to most of those who, with
one accord, now stared at the little, old-fashioned figure of this
invader. They straightened up. There was a rustle and a creaking of
their harnessed and padded bodies. Perhaps surprise held them dumb; or
perhaps they were in a humour to take a scolding, even from an outsider,
feeling that they deserved it. At any rate, only one of them spoke. I
think it was the voice of Gadsden, the coach, that answered back.

“Who the devil are you?” he asked. “And who the devil let you in here,
anyhow?”

“You may not know me,” snapped the Major; “but I know you.” He wheeled
on his heels, aiming a jabbing forefinger at this man and that. “And I
know you--and I know you--and I know you--and you, and you, too, young
sir, over there in the corner. What is more, I knew your fathers before
you.”

“Well, what of it?”

“What of it? This much of it: Your fathers before you were gallant
Southern gentlemen--the bearers of honoured names; names revered in this
state and in the Southern armies. That is what your fathers were.
And what have you, their sons, proved yourselves to be this day?
Cravens--that is the word. Cravens! Out of all the South you were chosen
to represent your native land against these Northerners; and how have
you repaid the trust imposed in you? By quitting--by showing the white
feather, like a flock of dunghill cockerels--by raising the white flag
at the first attack!” A babble of resentful voices arose:

“Say, look here; now--”

“What do you know about football?”

“Who gave you any license to butt in here?”

“Say, that’s pretty rough!”

He broke into the confused chorus of their protests, silencing the
interrupters by the stormy blare of his rejoinder. He was so terribly in
earnest that they just had to hearken.

“I know nothing of this game you have essayed to play. Before to-day I
never saw it played; and if this miserable exhibition by you is a sample
of the game I hope never to see it played again. But I know courage when
I see it and I know cowardice when I see it.”

He levelled his condemning finger at little Morehead and focused his
glare upon that un-happy youth.

“Your name is Morehead! Your grandfather was a great governor of this
great state. Your father was my companion in arms upon the field of
battle--and no braver man ever breathed, sir. This historic inclosure
bears the honoured name of your honoured line--Morehead Downs. You are
the chosen leader of these companions of yours. And how have you led
them to-day? How have you acquitted yourself of your trust? I ask you
that--how?” He halted, out of breath.

“The other team is stronger. They’ve got us outclassed. Look--why, look
at the reputation they’ve got all over this country! What--what chance
have we against them?”

The confession came from little Morehead haltingly, as though he spoke
against his own will in his own defence.

“Damn their reputation!” shouted Major Stone. “Your very words are an
admission of the things I allege against you, and against all of you
here. Concede that your antagonists are stronger than you, man for man.
Concede that they outclass you in experience. Is that any reason why
they should outclass you in courage and in determination? Your father
and the fathers of more than half of the rest of you served in an army
that for four years defended our beloved country against a foe immensely
stronger than they were--stronger in men, in money, in munitions, in
food, in supplies, in guns--stronger in everything except valour.

“Suppose, because of the odds against them, your people had lost heart
from the very outset, as you yourselves have lost heart here today.
Would that great war have lasted for four years? Or would it have lasted
for four months? Would the Southern Confederacy have endured until it no
longer had the soldiers to fill the gaps and hold the lines; or food
for the bellies of those soldiers who were left; or powder and lead for
their guns? Or would it have surrendered after the first repulse, as you
have surrendered? Answer me that, some of you!

“These Northerners are game clear through; I can tell that. Their
ancestors before them were brave men--the Southern Confederacy could
never have been starved out and bled white by a breed of cowards. And
these young men here--these splendid young Americans from up yonder in
that Northern country--have the same gallant spirit their people showed
forty years ago against your people. But you--you have lost the spirit
of your race, that surely must have been born in you. You are going to
let these Yankees run right over you--your behaviour proves it--and not
fight back. That is what I charge against you. That is what I am here to
tell you.”

“How about me?” put in one of the blanketed contingent of his audience.
“My people were all Unionists.”

“Your name?” demanded the Major of him. “Speedman.”

“A son of the late Colonel Henry T. Speedman?”

“His nephew.”

“I knew your uncle and your uncle’s brothers and your grandfather. They
were Union-men from principle; and I admired them for it, even though
we differed, and even though they took up arms against their own kinsmen
and fought on the opposite side. They wore the blue from conviction; but
when the war was over your uncle, being a Southerner, helped to save his
native state from carpetbaggery and bayonet rule. That was the type
of man your uncle was. I regret to note that you did not inherit his
qualities. I particularly observed your behaviour out there on that
field yonder a while ago. You quit, young man--you quit like a dog!”

“Say, look here; you’re an old man, and that’s enough to save you!”
 Speedman suddenly was sobbing in his mortification. “But--but you’ve got
no right to say things like that to me. You’ve--you’ve-” A gulp cut the
miserable youngster’s utterance short. He choked and plaintively tried
again: “If we can’t win we can’t win--and that’s all there is to it!
Isn’t it, fellows?”

He looked to his companions in distress for comfort; but all of them,
as though mesmerised, were looking at Major Stone. It dawned on me,
watching and listening across the threshold, that some influence--some
electric appeal to an inner consciousness of theirs--was beginning to
galvanise them, taking the droop out of their spines, and making their
frames tense where there had been a sag of nonresistance, and putting
sparks of resentment into their eyes. The transformation had been almost
instantaneously accomplished, but it was plainly visible.

“I am not expecting that you should win,” snapped the Major, turning
Speedman’s words into an admonition for all of them. “I do not believe
it is humanly possible for you to win. There is nothing disgraceful
in being fairly defeated; the disgrace is in accepting defeat without
fighting back with all your strength and all your will and all your
skill and all your strategy and all your tactics. And that is
exactly what I have just seen you doing. And that, judging by all the
indications, is exactly what you will go on doing during the remaining
portion of this affair.”

There were no more interruptions. For perhaps two or three minutes more,
then, the old Major went steadily on, saying his say to the end. Saying
it, he wasn’t the Old Major I had known before; he was not pottering and
ponderous; he did not clothe his thoughts in cumbersome, heavy phrases.
He fairly bit the words off--short, bitter, scorching words--and spat
them out in their faces. He did not plead with them; nor--except by
indirection--did he invoke a sentiment that was bound to be as much a
part of them as the nails on their fingers or the teeth in their mouths.

And, somehow, I felt--and I knew they felt--that here, in this short,
stumpy white-haired form, stood the Old South, embodied and typified,
with all its sectional pride and all its sectional devotion--yes, and
all its sectional prejudices. All at once, in the midst of a sentence,
he checked up; and then, staring hard at them through a pause, he spoke
his final message: “You are of the seed of heroes. Try to remember that
when you go back out yonder before that great crowd. You are the sons of
men who had sand, who had bottom, who had all the things a fighting man
should have. Try--if you can--to remember it!”

Out from behind the group that had clustered before the speaker, darted
a diminutive darky--Midsylvania’s self-appointed water carrier:

“He done jest said it!” whooped the little negro, dancing up and down in
frenzy. “He done jest said it! ‘Cinnamon Seed an’ Sandy Bottom! ‘Dat’s
it! Cinnamon Seed an’ Sandy Bottom!’--same ez you sez it w’en you sings
Dixie Land. Dem’s de words to win by! W’ite folks, youse done heared
de lesson preached frum de true tex’. Come on! Le’s us go an’ tear dem
Sangamonders down! ‘Cinnamon Seed an’ Sandy Bottom!’ Oh, gloree, gloree,
hallelujah!”

He rocked back on his splay feet, his knees sprung forward, his mouth
wide open, and his eyes popping out of his black face.

The Major did not look the little darky’s way. Settling his slouch hat
on his head, he faced about and out he stalked; and I, following along
after him, was filled with conflicting emotions, for, as it happened, my
father was a Confederate soldier, too, and I had been bred up on a mixed
diet of Robert E. Lee, N. B. Forrest and Albert Sidney Johnston.

I followed him back to our post, he saying nothing at all on the way and
I likewise silent. I scrouged past him to my place alongside Ike Webb
and sat down, and tried in a few words to give Ike and Gil Boyd a
summary of the sight I had just witnessed. And when I was done I
illustrated my brief and eager narrative by pointing with a flirt of
my thumb to Major Stone, stiffly erect on my left hand, with his chest
protruded and his head held high in a posture faintly suggestive of
certain popular likenesses of the late Napoleon Bonaparte; and on
his elderly face was the look of one who, having sowed good seed
in receptive loam, confidently expects an abundant and a gratifying
harvest.

It was a different team which came out for the second half of that game;
not exactly a jaunty team, nor yet a boisterous one, but rather a
team that were grimly silent, indicating by their silence a certain
preparedness and a certain resolution for the performance of that which
is claimed to speak louder than words--action.

The onlookers, I judged, saw the difference almost instantly and
realised that from some source, somehow, Morehead’s men had gathered
unto themselves a new power of will, which presently they meant to
express physically. And three minutes later Sangamon found herself
breasted by a mechanism that had in its composition the springiness
of an earnest desire and a sincere determination, whereas before,
in emergencies, it had expressed no more than sullen and downhearted
desperation.

Now from the very outset there was resilience behind its formations and
active intelligence behind its movements, guiding and shaping them. The
confronting line might give under the pressure of superior weight, but
it bounced right back. At once it was made manifest that the Red eleven
would not thenceforward be content merely to defend, but would have
the effrontery actually to attack, and attack again, and to keep on
attacking. No longer was it a case of hammer falling on anvil; two
hammers were battering against one another, nose to nose now, and in one
stroke there was as much buoyancy as in the other.

In my eagerness to reach my climax I am getting ahead of my story. Let’s
go back a bit: The whistle blew. The antagonists having swapped goals,
Midsylvania now had what benefit was to be derived from the wind, which
blew out of the West at a quartering angle across the field. Following
the kick-off an interchange of punts ensued. Midsylvania apparently
elected to continue these kicking operations indefinitely; whereupon
it is probable the Sangamon strategists jumped at the conclusion that,
realising the hopelessness of overcoming the weight presented against
them, the locals meant to make a kicking match of it. Be that as it may,
they accepted the challenge, if challenge it was, and a punting duel
ensued, with no noteworthy fortunes falling to either eleven.

I think it was early in this stage of the proceedings, after some mighty
brisk scrimmaging, when the strangers, by coming into violent physical
contact with their opponents, discovered that a new spirit inspired and
governed the others, and began to apprehend that, after all, this would
not be a walkover for them; but that they must fight, and fight hard, to
hold their present lead, and fight even harder if they expected to swell
that lead.

When, at the first opportunity for a forward push, the Red line came
at the Blue with an impetuosity theretofore lacking from its frontal
assaults, you could almost see the ripple of astonishment running down
the spines of the Northerners as they braced themselves to meet and stay
the onslaught. Anyhow, you could imagine you saw it; certainly there
were puzzled looks on the faces of some of them as they emerged from the
mêlée.

With appreciative roars, the crowd greeted these evidences of a newer
and more comforting aspect to the situation. Each time some Midsylvania
player caught the booted ball as it came tumbling out of the skies the
grand stand rocked to the noise; each time Midsylvania sent it flying
back to foreign ground it rocked some more; each time the teams clashed,
then locked together, it was to be seen that the Midsylvanians held
their ground despite the efforts of their bulkier rivals to uproot and
overthrow them.

And, at that, the air space beneath the peaked roof was ripped all to
flinders by exultant blares from sundry thousands of lungs. Under the
steady pounding feet the floor of the grand stand became a great bass
drum, which was never silent; and all the myriad red flags danced
together. Into the struggle an element of real dash had entered and
mightily it uplifted the spectators. They knew now that, though the
Varsity team might be beaten, and probably would be, they would not be
disgraced. It would be an honourable defeat before overpowering odds,
and one stoutly resisted to the end by all that intelligence, plus
pluck, could do.

There was no fault now to be found with Midsylvania’s captain. Little
Morehead, with his face a red smear, was playing all over the lot. The
impact of a collision with a bigger frame than his, had slammed him face
down against the ground, skinning one cheek and bloodying his nose. He
looked like a mad Indian in streaky war paint, and he played like one.
He seemed to be everywhere at once, exhorting, commanding, leading; by
shouted precept and by reckless example giving the cue to his teammates.

I suppose the latter half was about half over when the Sangamon team
changed their tactics and, no longer content to play safe and exchange
punts, sought to charge through and gain ground by sheer force.
Doubtlessly their decision was based on sound principles of reason; but
by reason of certain insurmountable obstacles, personified in eleven
gouging, wrestling, panting, sweating youths, they were effectually
deterred, during a breathless period of minutes, from so doing.

It was inevitable that a break must come sooner or later. It was
not humanly possible for any team or any two teams to maintain that
punishing pace very long without giving way somewhere.

The ball, after various vicissitudes, was in the middle of the field,
and the Northerners had it. As the Blue tackles slipped back of their
comrades stealthily, and Vretson, stealing forward, poised himself to
take the catch, we on the press benches realised that Sangamon meant to
undertake a repetition of the device that had won her lone goal for her.
Thirty minutes earlier it would have seemed the logical move to try.
Now, in view of everything, it was audacious.

At that, though, I guess it was Sangamon’s best card, even though
Midsylvania would be forewarned and forearmed by their earlier
disastrous experience to take measures for combating the play.
Everything depended on getting Vretson away to a flying start and then
keeping his interference intact.

The captain chanted the code numbers. The Blue press shifted in quick
shuttlelike motions, and the ball, beautifully and faultlessly handled,
was flipped back, aiming straight for Vretson’s welcoming grasp.
Simultaneously something else happened. That something else was
Morehead.

As the ball was passed he moved. There was a hole in Sangamon’s
breastworks, made by the spreading out of her men. It was a little hole
and a hole which instantaneously closed up again, being stoppered by an
interposing torso; but in that flash of space Morehead saw the opening
and, without being touched, came whizzing straight through it like a
small, compact torpedo. Head in and head down, he crashed into Vretson
in the same tenth-second when the ball reached Vretson’s fingers. With
his skull, his shoulders, his arms, and his trunk he smashed against the
giant.

Vretson staggered sideways. The ball escaped from his grip; and,
striking the earth, it took one lazy bound, and then another; but no
more. As it bounced the second time, Morehead, bending double from his
hips, slid under it with outspread arms, scooped it up to his breast,
and was off, travelling faster, I am sure, than Morehead in all his life
had ever travelled. He was clear and away, going at supertopspeed, while
Vretson still spun and rocked on his heels.

Obeying the signal for the play the majority of the Sangamon team
already had darted off to their right to make a living barrier upon the
threatened side of the imaginary lane their star was due to follow.
It behooved them to reverse the manouvre. Digging their heels into the
earth for brakes they wheeled round, scuttling back and spreading out to
intercept the fugitive; but he was already past and beyond Vretson, and
nearing the line of cross-angle along which the nearest of his pursuers
must go to encounter him. Before him, along the eastern boundary of
Sangamon’s territory, was a clear stretch of cross-marked turf.

Vretson recovered himself and made a stem chase of it, and Vretson could
run, as I said before; but it would have been as reasonable to expect
a Jersey bull to overtake a swamp rabbit when the swamp rabbit had the
start of the bull, and was scared to death besides, as to expect Vretson
to catch Morehead. The Red captain travelled three feet for every two
the bigger man travelled. Twenty yards--thirty, forty--he sped, and
not a tackler’s hand was laid on him. With the pack of his adversaries
tagging out behind him like hounds behind a hare, he pitched over the
goal line and lay there, his streaming nose in the grass roots, with the
precious ball under him, and the Sangamon players tumbling over him as
they came tailing up. Single-handed, on a fluky chance, Morehead had
duplicated and bettered what Vretson, with assistance, had done.

The crowd simply went stark, raving crazy and behaved accordingly. But
the Varsity section in the grand stand and the clump of blanketted
Varsity substitutes and scrubs on the side lines were the craziest spots
of all.

After this there isn’t so very much to be told. Midsylvania kicked for
a goal, but failed, as Sangamon had done. The ball struck the crossbar
between the white goal posts and flopped back; and during the few
remaining minutes of play neither side tallied a point, though
both tried hard enough and Sangamon came very near it once, but
failed--thanks to the same inspired counterforces that had balked her in
similar ambitions all through this half.

So, at the end, with the winter sun going down red in the west, and
the grand stand all red with dancing flags to match it, the score stood
even--four to four.

Officially a tie, yes; but not otherwise--not by the reckoning of the
populace. That Midsylvania, outmanned and outweighted as she was, should
have played those Middle West champions to a standstill was, in effect,
a victory--so the crowd figured--and fitting to be celebrated on that
basis, which promptly it was.

Out from the upstanding ranks of the multitude, down from the stand,
across the track and into the field came the Varsity students,
clamouring their joy, and their band came with them, and others,
unattached, came trailing after them. Some were dancing dervishes
and some were human steam whistles, and all the rest were just plain
lunatics. They fell into an irregular weaving formation, four or six
abreast, behind the team, with Morehead up ahead, riding upon the
shoulders of two of his fellows; and round the gridiron they started,
going first between one pair of goal posts and then between the
other pair. Doubtlessly the band played; but what tune they elected to
play nobody knew, because nobody could hear it--not even the musicians
themselves.

As the top of the column, completing its first circuit, swung down the
gridiron toward the judges’ stand, Morehead pointed toward where we sat
and, from his perch on their shoulders, called down something to those
who bore him. At that, a deputation of about half a dozen broke out of
the mass and charged straight for us. For a moment it must have seemed
to the crowd that this detachment contemplated a physical assault upon
some obnoxious newspaper man behind our bench, for they dived right
in among us, laying hands upon one of our number, heaving him bodily
upward, and bearing him away a prisoner.

Half a minute later Major Putnam Stone, somewhat dishevelled as to his
attire, was also mounted on a double pair of shoulders and was bobbing
along at the front of the procession, side by side with young Morehead.
Judging by his expression, I should say the Major was enjoying the
ride. Without knowing the whys and the wherefores of it, the spectators
derived that in some fashion this little, old, white-haired man was
esteemed by Midsylvania’s representatives to have had a share in the
achieved result.

As this conviction sank home, the exultant yelling mounted higher and
higher still. I think it was along here the members of the band quit
trying to be heard and stopped their playing, and took their horns down
from their faces.

Immediately after this still another strange figure attained a
conspicuous place in the parade: A little darky, mad with joy, and
wearing a red-and-gray sweater much too roomy for him, came bounding
across the field, with an empty water bucket in one hand. He caught
up with the front row of the marchers; and, scuttling along backward,
directly in front of them, he began calling out certain words in a sort
of slogan, repeating them over and over again, until those nearest him
detected the purport of his utterances and started chanting them in time
with him.

Presently, as the chorus of definite sounds and the meaning of the
sounds spread along down the column, the Varsity boys took up the
refrain, and it rose and fell in a great, thundering cadence. And then
everybody made out its substance, the words being these:

“Cinnamon Seed and Sandy Bottom! Cinnamon Seed and Sandy Bottom!
CINNAMON SEED AND SANDY BOTTOM!”

The sun, following its usual custom, continued to go down, growing
redder and redder as it went; and Midsylvania, over and above the
triumph it had to celebrate and was celebrating, had also these three
things now added unto her: A new college yell, in this perfectly
meaningless line from an old song; a new cheer leader--her first, by the
way--in the person of a ragged black water boy; and a new football
idol to take to her heart, the same being an elderly gentleman who
knew nothing at all of the science of football, and doubtlessly cared
less--an idol who in the fullness of time would become a tradition, to
be treasured along with the noseless statue of Henry Clay and the beech
tree under which Daniel Boone slept one night.

So that explains why, each year after the main game, when the team of
a bigger and stronger Midsylvania have broken training, they drink a
rising toast to the memory of Major Putnam Stone, deceased; whereat, as
afore-stated, there are no heel-taps whatsoever.



CHAPTER IX. A KISS FOR KINDNESS

AS WILL be recalled, it was from the lips of His Honour, Judge Priest,
that I heard the story relating to those little scars upon the legs of
Mr. Herman Felsburg. It was from the same source that I gleaned certain
details concerning the manner of Mr. Felsburg’s enlistment and services
as a private soldier in the Army of the Confederate States of America;
and it is these facts that make up the narrative I would now relate.
As Judge Priest gave them to me, with occasional interruptions by old
Doctor Lake, so now do I propose giving them to you.

This tale I heard at a rally in the midst of one of the Bryan campaigns,
back in those good days before the automobile and the attached cuff came
in, while Bryan campaigns were still fashionable in the nation. It could
not have been the third Bryan campaign, and I am pretty sure it was not
the first one; so it must have been the second one. On second thought,
I am certain it was the second one--when the candidate’s hair was still
almost as long in front as behind.

By reason of the free-silver split four years earlier, and bitter
dissensions within the party organization subsequently, our state had
fallen into the doubtful column; wherefore, campaigns took on even a
more hectic and feverish aspect than before. Of course there was no
doubt about our own district. Whatever might betide, she was safe
and sound--a Democratic Rock of Ages. “Solid as Gibraltar!” John C.
Breckinridge called her once; and, taking the name, a Gibraltar she
remained forever after, piling up a plurality on which the faithful
might mount and stand, even as on a watch-tower of the outer
battlements, to observe the struggle for those debatable counties to
the eastward and the northward of us. It was not a question whether
she would give a majority for the ticket, but a question of how big a
majority she would give. Come to think about it, that was not much of
a question, either. We had sincere voters and competent compilers of
election returns down our way then; and still have, for that matter.

Nevertheless and notwithstanding, it was to be remembered that, four
years before, the bulk of the state’s votes in the Electoral College,
for the first time in history, had been recorded for a Republican
nominee; and so, with a possibility of a recurrence of this catastrophe
staring us in the face, the rally that was held on that fine Indian
summery day at Cold Springs, five miles out from town on the road to
Maxon’s Mills, assumed a scope and an importance beyond the rallies of
earlier and less uncertain times. It was felt that by precept and deed
the Stalwarts should set an example for all wavering brethren above the
river. So there was a parade through town in the morning and burgoo
and a barbecue in the woods at noon, and in the afternoon a feast of
oratory, with Congressman Dabney Prentiss to preside and a United States
Senator from down across the line in Tennessee to deliver the principal
address. There was forethought in the shaping of the programme thus:
those who came to feast would remain to hear.

Time waits on no man, but has an accommodating way of checking up
occasionally, while the seed pod of reminiscence sprouts beneath the
warm, rich humus of a fellow’s memory; and, because time does do just
this, I yet can visualise, with sufficient clarity for my present
purposes, some of the things which happened that day. Again is my blood
quickened by sweet strains of music as Dean’s Brass Band swings up
Franklin Street, leading the procession of the forenoon.

Without serious mental strain I re-create the picture of the prominent
guests riding in open carriages with members of the reception committee
and, behind them, the Young Men’s Democratic Marching Club going afoot,
four hundred strong.

I see a big four-horse wagon, used ordinarily for such prosaic purpose
as moving household goods, but now with bunting and flags converted into
a tableau car, and bearing pretty girls, badged and labelled with the
names of the several states of the Union. And the prettiest, stateliest
girl of all stands for Kentucky. At her side is a little dark girl who
represents the Philippines, and accordingly she wears upon her wrists a
dangling doubled loop of ironmongery. This hardware is very new and very
shiny, and its links jangle effectively as the pageant moves onward,
thereby causing the captive sister to smile a gratified smile not
altogether in keeping with the lorn state of servitude here typified by
these trace-chain manacles of hers.

It seems a long time--doesn’t it?--since Expansion was a cardinal issue
and Imperialism a war cry, and we were deeply concerning ourselves with
the fate and future of the little brown brother, and warmly debating
among ourselves whether we should continue to hold him as a more or less
unwilling ward of the nation or turn him and his islands loose to fend
for themselves. But really, when we cast up the tally of the intervening
years, it isn’t so very long ago after all. It is as though this might
have happened yesterday, isn’t it?

So it is with me--abiding as one of those yesterdays that stand out from
the ruck and run of yesterdays. Perhaps that is why I can almost taste
the dust which is winnowed up from beneath the hoofs of the teams and
the turning wheels as the crowds stream off out the gravel turnpike,
bound for Cold Springs. Nearly everybody of consequence, politically or
socially, joins in that hurrying pilgrimage. Like palmers of old, Judge
Priest and Commonwealth’s Attorney Flournoy and Sheriff Giles Birdsong
and all our district and county and city officials attend, to attest
by their presence the faith that is in them. I attend, too; but in the
capacity of scribe. I go to report the doings for the _Daily Evening
News_. I am the principal reporter and, by the same token, one-half of
the local staff of that dependable journal, the remaining half being its
editor in chief.

Time in its flight continuing to turn backward, we are now at Cold
Springs. Mint-master Jack Frost has been busy there these last few
nights, so that the leaves of the hickories are changing from summer’s
long green to swatches of the crisp yellow-backed currency of October.
On the snake fence, which separates the flanks of the woodland from the
cleared lands beyond, the trumpet vine and the creeper blaze in clumps
so red that one almost wonders the dried rails do not catch fire too.

The smells of fall are in the air--of com in the shock; of bruised
winesaps dropping, dead ripe, from the orchard trees; of fox grapes
turning purple in the vine canopies away up in the tops of the trees.
From the fringes of the grove come the sounds of the stamping of horses’
feet and the restless swishing of horses’ tails. Off in quiet places
a hundred flat flasks have been uncorked; in each thicket rendezvous
fore-thoughted citizens are extending the hospitalities of the occasion
to such as forgot to freight their hip pockets before journeying hither.
There have been two fights and one runaway.

And now it is noon time; and now it is half an hour past it, and
the county committee, with the aid of the only known Republicans
present--all these latter being of African descent and all, or nearly
all, camp cooks of high repute in Red Gravel County--is about to play
host to the multitude.

In retrospect I smell the burgoo a-cooking, and sympathetically my
mouth waters. Do you know burgoo? If not your education has been sadly
neglected--most woefully neglected. It is a glorified gumbo, made in
copper caldrons over open fires; and it contains red meats and white
meats, and ducks and chickens, and young squirrels, and squabs, and all
the fresh green vegetables in season. And into it with prodigal black
hands the cooks put plenty of tomatoes for color and potatoes for body
and red peppers for seasoning and onions for flavour. And all these
having stewed together for hours and hours, they merge anon into a
harmonious and fragrant whole. So now the product is dipped up in
ladles and bestowed upon the assemblage in tin cups, to be drunk after a
fashion said to have been approved of by Old Hickory Jackson himself.
A Jeffersonian simplicity likewise governs the serving out of the
barbecued meats, following afterward. You eat with the tools Nature has
given you, and the back of your hand is your napkin. And when everybody
is as full of victuals as a good Democrat should be--which is another
way of saying so full he cannot hold another bite or another sup--the
band plays and the speaking starts on a plank platform under a brush
arbour, with the audience sitting or standing--but mostly sitting--on a
fragrant thick matting of faded wild grasses and fallen red and yellow
leaves.

The programme of events having progressed to this point, I found my
professional duties over for the day. The two principal speeches were
already in type at the _Daily Evening News_ office, advance copies
having been furnished by Congressman Prentiss and the visiting Senator
from Tennessee, the authors of the same. By special messenger I had
transmitted brief dispatches touching on the complete and unqualified
success of the burgoo, the barbecue, the two fist fights and the
runaway.

Returning from the fringes of the woodland, after confiding my scribbled
advices to our courier, my way led me under the shoulder of the bluff
above Cold Springs. There, right where the water came seeping out
through the bank of tawny gravel, I came upon a picture which is one
of the pictures that have endured in reasonably vivid colours on the
background of my mind.

The bole of an uptorn gum tree spanned a half-moon depression at the
verge of the spring. Upon the butt end of the log, where an upended
snag of root made a natural rest for his broad back, was perched Judge
Priest. His plump legs hugged the rounded trunk. In one hand he held a
pint flask and in the other a tin cup, which lately must have contained
burgoo. A short distance down the tree from him sat old Doctor Lake,
without any bottle, but with the twin to Judge Priest’s tin cup poised
accurately upon one of his bony knees.

Behind these two, snugly screening them in, was a wall of green and
yellow grape leaves. Through the vines the sunlight filtered in, to make
a mellow flood about them. Through the leaves, also, came distantly
the sound of the present speaker’s voice and, at frequent intervals,
cheering. There was to be heard a gentle tinkling of cracked ice. A
persuasive odour of corn distillations perfumed the languid air. All
through the glade nuts were dropping from the hickories, with sharp
little reports. It was a picture, all right enough!

My feet made rustlings in the leaves. Judge Priest squinted over his
glasses to see who the intruder upon their woodland privacy might be.

“Why, howdy, son!” he hailed. “How’s everything with you?”

He didn’t offer to share his store of refreshment with me. I never knew
him to give a very young man a drink or to accept a drink from such a
one. Doctor Lake raised his cup to stir its contents and nodded in my
direction over it.

“The big speech of the day has just got started good, gentlemen,” I
said. “Didn’t you-all know it?”

“Yes; we knowed it,” answered the old Judge; “in fact, we heared the
beginnin’ of it. That’s one reason why me and Lew Lake come on away. The
other reason was that Lew run acrost a little patch of late mint down
here by the spring. So we slipped off frum the crowd and come on down
here to sort of take things nice and easy till it gits time to be
startin’ back toward the city.”

“Why, I thought he was a mighty fine speaker, from what I heard right
after Mr. Prentiss introduced him,” I said.

“He’s all of that,” assented the old Judge; “he’s a regular
Cicero--seems to know this here oratory business frum who laid the rail.
He don’t never jest plain ast somebody to do somethin’. He adjures ‘em
by the altars of their Sunny Southland, and he beseeches ‘em by the
memories of their sires; but he don’t ast ‘em. And I took notice, durin’
the few minutes I lingered on--spellbound, ez you mout say, by the
witchery of his voice--that when he gits holt of a good long word it
ain’t a word no more. He runs her as a serial and every syllable is a
separate chapter.

“Oh, no; I ain’t got a word to say ag’inst the distinguished gentleman’s
style of delivery. I only wisht I had his gift of melodious expression.
I reckin ef I did, I’d talk in public part of the day and sing the rest
of the time. But the p’int is, son, that me and Lew Lake have heared
consid’able of that particular brand of oratory in our day, and after a
little spell of listenin’ we decided betwixt ourselves that we favoured
the quiet of the sylvan dell to the heat and dust of the forum. So here
we are, ez you behold us.

“One speech mere or less won’t make much difference in the gineral
results, noways, I reckin. Down here in the pennyrile country we’ll all
vote the regular ticket the same ez we always do; and the Republikans
will vote their ticket, bein’ the stubborn unreasonable creatures that
they are; and then our boys’ll hold back the returns to see how many
Democrat votes are needed, and up in the mountains the Republikans
will hold them back to see how many Republikan votes are needed--and
that’ll be the whole upshot of it, onless the corrupt scoundrels should
succeed in outcounting the party of the people.

“Of course there’s a great crisis hoverin’ over our country at present.
There’s a crisis hoverin’ every four years, regular--to hear the orators
tell it. But I’ve took notice that, after the votin’ is over, the
crisis always goes back in its hole to stay till the next presidential
election, and the country remains reasonably safe, no matter which side
gits in; though I admit it’s purty hard to convince the feller who’s
already got a government job, or hopes to git one, that the whole nation
won’t plumb go to thunder onless his crowd wins.”

“Still, Billy,” put in Doctor Lake, “there was a time when all these
high-sounding phrases about duty and patriotism meant more to us than
they do now--back in the spring and summer of Sixty-one--eh?”

Behind the Judge’s spectacle lenses sparks of reminiscence burned in his
faded blue eyes. He lifted his cup ceremoniously and Doctor Lake lifted
his, and I knew they were drinking to the memory of olden days.

“Now you’re shoutin’!” Judge Priest assented. “Say, Lew, do you call to
mind them speeches Hector Dallas used to utter ‘way back yonder, when
Sumter was bein’ fired on and the Yankee Government was callin’ fur
troops to put down the Rebellion, ez they seen fit to term it? Heck
Dallas was our champion homegrown orator in those times,” he vouchsafed
in an aside for my better enlightenment. “Somethin’ about that young
feller yonder, that’s speakin’ so brilliantly and so fluently now, puts
me right smartly in mind of him. Heck was plenty copious with language
himself. When it come to burnin’ words he was jest the same ez one of
these here volcanoes. Remember, don’t you, Lew, how willin’ Heck was to
bleed and die fur his native land?”

“But he didn’t,” stated Doctor Lake grimly.

“Well--since you mention it--not to any noticeable extent,” said Judge
Priest. “Leastwise, any bleedin’ that he done was done internally, frum
the strain of utterin’ all them fiery remarks.” Again he included me
with a gesture. “You see, son, Heck didn’t go off to the war with the
rest of us. Nearly everybody else did--this town was purty near emptied
of young fellers of a suitable courtin’ age after we’d gone down to Camp
Boone to begin drillin’. But Hecky didn’t go.

“Ez I recollect, he felt called upon to put out first fur Richmond
to give President Davis and the Cabinet the benefit of his advice or
somethin’; and aimed to join us later. But he didn’t--somehow, somethin’
always kept inter-ferin’ with his ambition to bleed and die, until after
a while it seemed like he jest got discouraged and quit tryin’. When we
got back home, four years later--sech ez was left of us--Heck had done
been entirely reconstructed and was fixin’ to run fur office on the
Black Radical ticket.”

“The cat had to jump mighty brisk to beat Hector,” said Doctor Lake; “or
else, when she landed on the other side, she’d find him already there,
wanning a place for her. I’ve known a good many like Hector--and some of
them prospered fairly well--while they lasted.”

“Well, the spring of Sixty-one was a stirrin’ period, and I reckin
oratory helped along right smartly at the start,” said Judge Priest;
“though, to be sure, later on it came to pass that the boys who could go
hongry and ragged, and still keep on fightin’ the Yankees, were the ones
that really counted.

“Take Meriwether Grider now: He went in as our company commander and he
come out with the marks of a brigadier on his coat collar; but I’ll bet
you a ginger cookie Meriwether Grider never said a hundred words on a
stretch in his life without he was cussin’ out some feller fur not doin’
his duty. Meriwether certainly learned to cuss mighty well fur a man
whose early trainin’ had been so turribly neglected in that respect.”

“Recall how Meriwether Grider behaved the night we organised Company B?”
 inquired Doctor Lake.

“Jest the same ez ef it was yistiddy!” assented Judge Priest.

He half turned his chubby body so as to face me. By now I was sitting
on the log between them. I had scented a story and I craved mightily
to hear it, though I never dreamed that some day I should be writing it
out.

“You see, boy, it was like this: Upstate the sentiment was purty evenly
divided betwixt stayin’ in the Union and goin’ out of it; but down here,
in Red Gravel County, practically everybody was set one way--so much one
way that they took to callin’ our town Little Charleston, and spoke of
this here Congressional District as the South Carolina of the West. Ez
state after state went out, the feelin’ got warmer and warmer; but the
leaders of public opinion, all except Heck Dallas, counselled holdin’
off till the legislature could act. Heck, he was for crossin’ over
into Illinois some nice pleasant dark night and killin’ off the
Abolitionists, though at that time of speakin’ there weren’t many more
Abolitionists livin’ on that side of the river than there were on this.
That was merely Heck’s way of expressin’ his convictions.

“In spite of his desires, we kept on waitin’. But when word come from
Frankfort that the legislature, by a mighty clost vote, had voted down
the Secession Ordinance and had declared fur armed neutrality--which was
in the nature of a joke, seein’ ez everybody in the state who was old
enough to tote a fusee was already armed and couldn’t be a neutral--why,
down in this neck of the woods we didn’t wait no longer.

“Out of the front window of his printin’ office old Colonel Noble
h’isted the first Confederate flag seen in these parts; and that night,
at the old market house, there was the biggest mass meetin’ that ever
had been held in this here town up to then. A few young fellers had
already slid down acrost the border into Tennessee to enlist, and a few
more were already oyer in Virginia, wearin’ the grey; but everybody else
that was anybody was there.

“Right away Heck took the platform. They’d a had to lock it up
somewheres to keep him frum takin’ it. He was up on one of them market
benches, wavin’ his arms and spoutin’ about the mudsills and the nigger
lovers, and jest darin’ the accursed invader to put one heel upon the
sacred soil of the grand old Commonwealth--not both his heels, but
ary one of ‘em--when all of a sudden Meriwether Grider leaned over and
kissed his wife--he hadn’t been married but a little more’n a year
and they had a baby about three weeks old at home. And then he stepped
forward and climbed up on the bench and sort of shoved Heck to one side,
and called out that there’d been enough talk, and that it was about time
for action; and said, ef somebody had a piece of paper handy, he’d like
mightily to put his name down as a volunteer fur the Southern Army. And
in another second every woman there was cheerin’ with one side of her
mouth and cryin’ with the other.

“And Colonel Noble had fetched his flag up and was wavin’ it with both
hands; and old Doctor Hendrickson, the Presbyterian preacher, had made a
prayer--a heap shorter one than whut he ginerally made--and had yanked
a little pocket Testament out frum under his coattails fur the boys to
take the oath on. And in less’n no time Heck Dallas was back down in the
crowd, in considerable danger of being trampled to death in the rush of
young fellers to git up there and sign their names to the roll.”

Doctor Lake slid off the log and stood up, with his black hat crumpled
in one gnarled old hand. In the emotion of the moment he forgot his
grammar: “You remember, Billy--don’t you?--how you and me and Peter J.
Galloway and little Gil Nicholas went up together to sign?”

“I ain’t exactly liable to furgit it, ever,” said Judge Priest. “That
was the night I jest natchelly walked off and left my little law office
flat on its back. I’d been advertisin’ myself to practise law fur about
a year, but whut I’d mainly practised up to that time was economy--that
and checkers and old sledge, to help pass away the time. No, suh;
I didn’t leave no clients behind me, clamourin’ fur my professional
services. Clients were something I’d heared a lot of talk about, but
hadn’t met face to face. All I had to do when I quit was jest to put out
the fire and shut the door, and come on away.”

“And the last one of all to sign that night was Herman Felsburg,” stated
Doctor Lake, as though desirous of rounding out a recital.

“Yes--that’s right too, Lew,” agreed the old Judge. “Herman was the very
last one. I remember how some of the crowd begun snickerin’ when
he come stumpin’ up on them crooketty little laigs of hisn; but the
snickerin’ died out when Meriwether Grider grabbed Herman’s hand and
shook it, and Doctor Hendrickson held out the Book fur him to swear on
it to be true and faithful to the cause of the Southern Confederacy. A
person don’t snicker so very well that’s got a lump in his throat at the
moment.

“You see, son, Herman was a kind of town joke them days,” stated
Judge Priest, again digressing for my benefit. “There weren’t many
furreign-born people in this section back yonder in Sixty-one. Ef a
feller come along that was frum Greece or Italy or Spain, or somewheres
else down that way, we jest called him a Dago, dry-so--and let it go at
that. But ef he hailed from Germany or Holland or Russia, or anywhere in
Northern Europe, he was a Dutchman to us.

“There were just two exceptions to the rule: An Irishman was an
Irishman, of course; and a Jew was a Jew. We had a few Irish families
in town, like the Galloways and the Hallorans; and there was one Jewish
family livin’ here--the Liebers; but they’d all been born in this
country and didn’t speak nothin’ but English, and, exceptin’ that old
man Lieber used to close up his hide-and-pelt store of a Sad’day, instid
of Sunday, it never occurred to anybody that the Liebers practised a
different religion frum the run of folks.

“Herman had been here about a year, off and on. He didn’t seem to know
nobody, and he didn’t have any friends. He wasn’t more’n nineteen years
old--or maybe twenty; and he was shy and awkward and homely. He used to
go out through the county with a pack on his back, sellin’ gimcracks
to country people. He could make change all right--I reckin he jest
natchelly inherited that ez a gift--and he was smart enough at drivin’
a bargain; but somehow it seemed like he jest couldn’t learn to talk
English, or to understand it, neither, exceptin’ when the subject was
business. Understand, that was thirty-odd years back; but sometimes,
even now, when old Herman gits excited, you’d think, to hear him, that
he didn’t know much English yit. His language matches the shape of his
laigs then.”

I nodded understanding, Mr. Felsburg’s conversational eccentricities
being a constant fount of material for the town humourists of my own
generation. The Judge went on: “Well, anyway, he signed up that night,
along with all the rest of us. And after that, fur a few days, so many
things was happenin’ that I sort of forgot about him; and I reckin
nearly everybody else did too. It seemed like the whole town sort of
went crazy fur a spell, whut with the first company, which was our
company, electin’ its officers, and the County Battery formin’, and
a troop of cavalry organisin’, and the older men enrollin’ fur home
defence, and a lot of big-moth fellers standin’ round on street comers
lowin as how it was goin’ to be only a ninety-day picnic, anyway, and
that any Southern man could whip five Yankees--and so forth and so on.

“And then we’d go home at night and find our mothers and sisters settin’
round a coal-oil lamp, makin’ our new grey uniforms, and sewin’ a tear
in with every stitch. And every feller’s sweetheart was makin’ him a
silk sash to wear round his waist. I could git a sash round my waist
then, but I s’pose if I felt called on to wear one now I’d have to hire
old man Dillon, the mattress maker, to make one fur me out of a roll of
bedtickin.” And the speaker glanced downward toward the bulge of his
girth.

“My mother kept telling me that it would kill her for me to go--and that
she’d kill me if I didn’t go,” interpolated Doctor Lake.

“I reckin no set of men on this earth ever went out to fight with the
right sort of spirit in ‘em onless their womenfolk stood behind ‘em,
biddin’ ‘em to go,” said the old Judge. “That’s the way it was with us,
anyway--I know that much. Well then, right on top of everything else,
along come the big ball they gave us at the Richland House the night
before we left fur Camp Boone to be mustered in, regular fashion. There
wasn’t any absentees there that night--not a single solitary one. They’d
‘a’ had to tie me hand and foot to keep me frum comin’ there to show off
my new grey suit and my red-striped sash and all my brass buttons.

“Fur oncet, social lines didn’t count. That night the best families
mixed with all the other families that was mebbe jest as good, but
didn’t know it. Peter Galloway’s old daddy drove a dray down on the
levee and his mother took in washin’, but before the ball broke up I
seen old Mrs. Galloway with both her arms round Mrs. Governor Trimble,
and Mrs. Governor Trimble had her arms round Mrs. Galloway, and both of
‘em cryin’ together, the way women like to do. The Trimbles were sending
three sons; but old Mrs. Galloway was givin’ up Peter, and he was all
the boy she had.

“We danced till purty near sunup, stoppin’ only oncet, and then jest
long enough fur ‘em to present Captain Meriwether Grider with his new
gold-mounted sword. You remember, Lew, we buried that sword in the same
coffin with him fifteen years later?

“About four o’clock in the mornin’, when the first of the daylight was
beginnin’ to leak in at the winders, the nigger string band in the corner
struck up Home, Sweet Home! We took partners, but that was one dance
which never was finished.

“All of a sudden that sassy little red-headed Janie Thornbury stopped
dead-still out in the middle of the floor, and she flung both arms
round the neck of Garrett Hinton, that she was engaged to marry, but
didn’t--on account of her marryin’ somebody else while Garry was off
soldierin’--and, before everybody, she kissed him right smack on the
mouth!

“And then, in less’n no time at all, every feller in the company had his
arms round his sweetheart or his sister, or mebbe his mother, and kisses
were goin’ off all over that old ball room like paper bags a-bustin’.
I fergit now-who ‘twas I kissed; but, to the best of my recollection, I
jest browsed round and done quite a passel of promiscuous kissin’.”

“I’ll never forget the one I kissed!” broke in Doctor Lake. “With the
exception of the ensuing four years, I’ve been kissing the same girl
ever since. She hefts a little more than she did then--those times you
could mighty near lock a gold bracelet round her waist, and many’s the
time I spanned it with my two hands--and she’s considerably older; but
her kisses still taste mighty sweet to me!”

“Go ‘way, Lew Lake!” protested Judge Priest gallantly. “Miss Mamie
Ellen is jest ez young ez ever she was; and she’s sweeter, too, because
there’s more of her to be sweet. I drink to her!”

Two tin cups rose in swinging circles; and I knew these old men were
toasting a certain matron of my acquaintance who weighed two hundred
and fifty if she weighed a pound, and had white hair and sizable
grandchildren.

“And so then”--Judge Priest was resuming his narration--“and so then,
after a spell, the epidemic of kissin’ began to sorter die down, though
I reckin some of the boys would ‘a’ been willin’ to keep it up plumb
till breakfast time. I mind how I was standin’ off to one side, fixin’
to make my farewells to Miss Sally Machen, when out of the tail of my
off eye I seen little Herman Felsburg, over on the other side of the
ballroom, lookin’ powerful forlorn and lonesome and neglected.

“Doubtless he’d been there all night, without a soul to dance with him,
even ef he’d knowed how, or a soul to speak with him, even ef he could
have understood whut they said to’ him. Doubtless he wasn’t exactly whut
you’d call happy. Jest about then Miss Sally Machen must ‘a’ seen him
too; and the same thought that had jest come to me must ‘a’ come to her
too. “‘It’s a shame!’ she said--jest like that--under her voice. And in
another minute she was walkin’ acrost the floor toward Herman.

“I remember jest how she looked. Why, ef I was an artist I could draw a
picture of her right now! She was the handsomest girl in town, and the
proudest and the stateliest--tall and slender and dark, with great big
black eyes, and a skin like one of these here magnolia buds--and she was
well off in her own name; and she belonged to a leadin’ family. Four or
five boys were beauin’ her, and it was a question which one of ‘em she’d
marry. Sometimes, Lew, I think they don’t raise very many girls like
Miss Sally Machen any more.

“Well, she kept right on goin’ till she came to where Herman was
scrouged up ag’inst the wall. She didn’t say a word to him, but she
took him by the hand and led him right out into the middle of the floor,
where everybody could see; and then she put those white arms of hers
round his neck, with the gold bracelets on her wrists jinglin’, and she
bent down to him--she had to bend down, bein’ a whole head taller than
whut he was--and she kissed him on the lips; not a sweetheartin’ kiss,
but the way his own mother might ‘a’ kissed him good-bye, ef he’d had a
mother and she’d been there.

“Some few started in to laugh, but stopped off short; and some started
to cheer, but didn’t do that, neither. We-all jest stood and watched
them two. Herman’s face tum’t ez red ez blood; and he looked up at her
sideways and started to smile that funny little smile of hisn--he had
one front tooth missin’, and that made it funnier still. But then his
face got serious, and frum clear halfway acrost the hall I could see his
eyes were wet. He backed off frum her and bowed purty near to the ground
before her. And frum the way he done it I knowed he was somethin’ more
than jest a little, strange Jew pedlar in a strange land. You have to
have the makin’s of a gentleman in you to bow like that. You mout learn
it in time, with diligent practice, but it comes a sight easier ef
you’re born with it in you.”

From his flat flask the old Judge toned up the contents of their julep
cups. Then, with pauses, during which he took delicate but prolonged
sips, he spoke on in the rambling, contemplative fashion that was as
much a part of him as his trick of ungrammatical speech or his high bald
forehead was, or his wagging white chin-beard:

“Well, purty soon after that we were all down yonder at old Camp Boone,
and chiefly engaged, in our leisure hours--which we had blamed few
leisure hours, at that--in figurin’ out the difference between talkin’
about soldierin’ and braggin’ about it, and actually doin’ of it. There
wasn’t no more dancin’ of quadrilles with purty girls then. We done our
grand right-and-left with knapsacks on our backs and blisters on our
feet. Many and many a feller that had signed up to be a hero made the
distressin’ discovery what he’d really j’ined on to.

“All this time little old Herman was doin’ his share like a major. Long
before he could make out the words of command, he’d picked up the manual
of arms, jest frum watchin’ the others in the same awkward squad with
him. He was peart enough that-a-way. Where he was slow was learnin’ how
to talk’ so ez you could make out whut he was aimin’ to say. It seemed
like that was the only slow thing about him.

“Natchelly the boys poked a heap of fun at him. They kept prankin’ with
him constantly. But he taken it all in good part and grinned back at
‘em, and never seemed to lose his holt on his temper. You jest couldn’t
help likin’ him--only he did cut such funny mon-keyshines with the
Queen’s English when he tried to talk!

“Because he was so good-natured, some of the boys took it into their
heads, I reckin, that he didn’t have no real grit; or mebbe they thought
he wasn’t spunky because he was a Jew. That’s a delusion which a good
many suffer frum that don’t know his race.

“I remember one night, about three weeks or a month after we went into
camp, Herman was put on post. The sergeant mighty near lost his mind,
and did lose his disposition, drillin’ the countersign and the password
into Herman’s skull. So a couple of boys out of the Calloway County
company--they called themselves the Blood River Tigers, and were a purty
wild and devilish lot of young colts ginerally--they took it into their
heads that after it got good and dark they’d slip down to the lines and
sneak up on Herman, unbeknownst to him, and give him a good skeer,
and mebbe take his piece away from him--sort of play hoss with him,
ginerally. So, ‘long about ‘leven o’clock they set out to do so.”

He paused and looked at Doctor Lake, grinning. I couldn’t hold in.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Oh, nothin’ much,” said Judge Priest--“exceptin’ that presently
there was a loud report and consider’ble many loud cries; and when
the corporal of the guard got there with a squad, one of them Calloway
County boys was layin’ on the ground with a hole through his right
shoulder, and the other was layin’ alongside of him right smartly
clubbed up with the butt end of a rifle. And Herman was standin’ over
‘em, jabberin’ in German--he’d forgot whut little English he knowed. But
you could tell frum the way he carried on that he was jest double-dog
darin’ ‘em to move an inch. I don’t believe in my whole life I ever seen
two fellers that looked so out of the notion of playin’ practical jokes
as them two Blood River Tigers did. They were plumb sick of Herman,
too--you could tell that frum a mere glance at ‘em ez we toted ‘em in
and sent for the surgeon to patch ‘em up.

“So, after that, the desire to prank with Private Felsburg when he was
on duty sort of languished away. Then, when Herman took down sick with
camp measles, and laid there day after day in the hospital tent under
an old ragged bedquilt, mighty sick, but never complainin’--only jest
grinnin’ his gratitude when anybody done a kind turn fur him--we knowed
he was gritty in more ways than one. And there wasn’t a man in Company
B but whut would have fit any feller that ever tried ag’in to impose on
him.

“He was sick a good while. He was up and round ag’in, though, in time to
do his sheer in the first fight we were in--which was at Belmont, over
acrost the Mississippi River frum Columbus--in the fall o’ that year. I
seem to recall that, ez we went into action and got into fire, a strange
pair of laigs took to tremblin’ mightily inside the pair of pants I was
wearin’ at the time; and most of my vital organs moved up into my throat
and interfered some with my breathin’.

“In fact I made a number of very interestin’ discoveries in the openin’
stages of that there fight. One was that I wasn’t never goin’ to be
entirely reconciled to the idea of bein’ killed on the field of battle;
and another was that, though I loved my native land and would die fur
her if necessary--only hopin’ it wouldn’t be necessary to go so fur ez
all that--still, ef I lived to git out of this particular war I wasn’t
goin’ to love another native land ez long ez I lived.”

“Shucks, William!” snorted Doctor Lake. “Try that on somebody else, but
don’t try to come such stuff on me. Why, I was right alongside of you
when we went into that charge, and you never faltered!”

“Lew,” stated Judge Priest, “you might ez well know the truth. I’ve been
waitin’ fur nearly forty years to make this confession. The fact of the
matter was, I was so skeered I didn’t dare to stop goin’ ahead. I knowed
ef ever I did slow up, and give myself a chance to think, I’d never quit
runnin’ the other way until I was out in the Gulf of Mexico, swimmin’.

“And yit another thing I found out that day was that the feller back
home who told me one Southerner could whip five Yankees, single-handed,
made a triflin’ error in his calculations; or else the Yankees he had
in mind when he uttered the said remark was a different breed frum
the bunch we tackled that day in the backskirts of the thrivin’ little
community of Belmont, Missoury. But the most important thing of all the
things I discovered was about Herman Felsburg--only that come later.

“In the early stages of that little battle the Federals sort of shoved
us back a few pegs; but about three o’clock in the evenin’ the tide
swung the other way, and shortly thereafter their commandin’ general
remembered some pressin’ business back in Cairo, Illinois, that needed
attendin’ to right away, and he started back there to do so, takin’ whut
was left of his army along with him. So we claimed it ez a victory for
us, which it was.

“Along toward dusk, when the fightin’ had died down, our company was
layin’ alongside a country road jest outside the town, purty well
tuckered out, and cut up some. We were all tellin’ each other how brave
we’d been, when along down the road toward us come a file of prisoners,
under guard, lookin’ mighty forlorn and low-sperrited. They was the
first prisoners any of us had ever seen; so we jumped up from where
we was stretched out and crowded up round ‘em, pokin’ fun at ‘em. The
guards halted ‘em to let ‘em rest and we had a good chance to exchange
the compliments of the season with ‘em. Eight in the front rank of the
blue-bellies was one big furreign-lookin’ feller, with no hat on, and
a head of light yaller hair. He ripped out somethin’ in German--a cuss
word, I take it. Doubtless he was tellin’ us to go plum’ to hell. Well,
suh, at that, Herman jumped like he’d been stung by one of these here
yaller jackets. I reckin he was homesick, anyway, fur the sound of his
own language.

“He walked over and begun jabberin’ in Dutch with the big sandy-haired
Yank, and the Yank jabbered back; and they talked together mighty
industrious until the prisoners moved on--about fifteen minutes, I
should say, offhanded. And ez we went back to lay down ag’in I took
notice that Herman had the funniest look on his face that ever I seen on
almost any human face. And he kept scratchin’ his head, like there was
somethin’ on his mind, troublin’ him, that he jest simply couldn’t
make out noway. But he didn’t say nothin’ to nobody then--jest kept on
scratchin’ and studyin’.

“In fact, he held in till nearly ten o’clock that night. We made camp
right there on the edge of the battleground. I was fixin’ to turn in
when Herman got up frum where he’d been squattin’, over by a log fire,
lookin’ in the flames; and he come over to me and teched me on the
shoulder. “‘Pilly Briest,’ he says in that curious way of hisn, ‘I should
like to speak mit you. Please, you gecomin’ mit me.’

“So I got up and follered him. He led me off into a little thicket-like
and we set down side by side on a log, same ez we three are set-tin’
here now. There was a full moon that night, ridin’ high, and no clouds
in the sky; and even there in the shadders everythin’ was purty nigh ez
bright ez day.

“‘Well, old hoss,’ I says, ‘whut seems to be on your mind?’

“I ain’t goin’ to try very hard to imitate his accent--you-all kin
imagine it fur yourselves. ‘And he says to me he’s feared he’s made a
big mistake.’

“‘Whut kind of a mistake?’ I says.

“‘Ven I j’ined dis army,’ he says--or words to that effect.

“‘How so?’ I says.

“And then he starts in to tell me, talkin’ ez fast ez his tongue kin
wag, and makin’ gestures with both his hands, like a boy tryin’ to learn
to swim dog-fashion. And after a little, by piecin’ together ez much of
his talk ez I kin ketch, I begin to make out whut he’s drivin’ at; and
the shock is so great I come mighty near failin’ right smack off that
log backward.

“Here’s the way the thing stands with him: That night at the old market
house, when the company is bein’ formed, he happens along and sees a
crowd, and drops in to find out, ef he kin, whut’s afoot. Presently he
makes out that there’s a war startin’ up ag’inst somebody or other, and,
sence he’s made up his mind he’s goin’ to live in America always and
make it his country, he decides it’s his bounden duty to fight fur his
country. So he jest up and signs, along with the rest of us.

“Of course from that time on he hears a lot of talk about the Yankee
invader and the Northern vandal; but he figgers it that the enemy
comes frum somewhere ‘way up North--Canada or Greenland, or the Arctic
regions, or the North Pole, or some of them other furreign districts up
in that gineral vicinity. And not fur a minute--not till he talked with
the big Dutch prisoner that day--had it ever dawned on him fur a single
minute that a Yankee mout possibly be an American, too.

“When he stops I sets and looks at him a minute, takin’ it all in; and
he looks back. Finally I says:

“‘And so you went and enlisted, thinkin’ you was goin’ to fight fur the
United States of America, and you’re jest findin’ out now that all these
weeks you’ve been organism’ yourself to fight ag’inst her? Is that it?’

“And he says, ‘Yes, that’s it.’ And I says: ‘Well, I wisht I might
be dam’!’ And he says, well, he wishes he might be dam’ too, or in
substance expresses sech a sentiment. And fur another spell we two
merely continues to set there lookin’ one another in the face.

“After a little I asts him whut he’s aimin’ to do about it; and he says
he ain’t decided yit in his own mind. And then I says:

“‘Well, Herman, it’s purty tough on you, anyway you take it. I don’t
rightly know all the rules o’ this here war business yit, myself; but I
reckin ef it was made clear to the higher authorities that you was sort
of drug into this affair under false pretenses, ez it were, why,
mebbe they mout muster you out and give you an honourable
discharge--providin’, of course, you pledged yourself not to take up
arms fur the other side, which, in a way of speakin’, would make you a
deserter. We-all know you ain’t no coward, and we’ll all testify to it
ef our testimony is needed. I reckon the rest of the boys’ll understand
your position in the matter; in fact, I’ll undertake to make ‘em
understand.’

“He asts me then: ‘Whut iss false pretenses?’”

And I explains to him the best I kin; and he thinks that p’int over fur
a minute or two. Then he looks up at me sideways frum under the brim of
his cap, and I kin see by the moonlight he’s blushin’ ez red ez a beet,
and grinnin’ that shy little snaggle-teethed grin of hisn.

“‘Pilly,’ he says, ‘mebbe so you remember dot young lady vot put her
arms round me dot night--de von vot gif to me a kiss fur kindness? She
iss on de Deexie side--yes?--no?’

“And I says to him: ‘You kin bet your sweet life she is!’”

“‘All right!’ he says. ‘I am much lonesome dot night--and she kiss me!
All right, den. I fights fur her! I sticks mit Deexie!’ And when he says
that he makes a salute, and I notice he’s quit grinnin’.”

“And did he stick?” I asked.

Before he answered, the old Judge drained his tin cup to the bottom.

“Did he stick? Huh! Four long hard bitter years he stuck--that’s all!
Boy, you mout not think it, to see old Herman waddlin’ acrost that Oak
Hall Clothin’ Store to sell some young buck from the country a pair of
twenty-five-cent galluses or a celluloid collar; but I’m here to tell
you he’s one of the stickin’est white men that ever drawed the breath of
life. Lew Lake, here, will tell you the same thing. Mebbe it’s because
he is sech a good sticker that he’s one of the wealthiest men in this
county to-day. I only wisht I had to spend on sweetenin’ drams whut he
lays-’by every year. But I don’t begrudge it to him.”

Through the grove ran an especially loud outburst of cheering, and on
top of it we heard the scuffling of many yeomen feet. Judge Priest slid
off the log and stood up and stretched his pudgy legs.

“That must mean the speakin’s over and the rally’s breakin’ up,” he
said. “Come along, son, and ride on back to town with us in my old
buggy. I reckin there’s room fur you to scrouge in between me and Doctor
Lake, ef you’ll make yourself small.”

The October sun, slanting low, made long stippled lanes between the tree
trunks, so that we waded waist-deep in a golden haze as we made for the
place where Judge Priest’s Mittie May was tethered to a sapling. The old
white mare recognised her master from afar, and whinnied a greeting
to him, and I was moved to ask another question. To me that tale stood
uncompleted:

“Judge, what ever became of that young lady who kissed him that night at
the Richland House?”

“Oh, her? She died a long, long time ago--before you was born. Her folks
lost their money on account of the war, and she married a feller that
wasn’t much account; they moved out to Arkansaw and the marriage turned
out bad, and she died when her first baby was born. There ain’t none
of her family livin’ here now--they’ve purty much all died out too. But
they shipped her body back here, and she’s buried out in Ellum Grove
Cemetery, in the old Machen lot.

“Some of these days, when you are out there in the cemetery foolin’
round, with nothin’ much else to do, you look for her grave--you kin
find it. Bein’ a Christian woman, she had a Christian burial and she’s
restin’ in a Christian buryin’ ground; but, in strict confidence,
I’ll tell you this much more while we’re on the subject: It wasn’t no
Christian that privately paid the bill fur the tombstone that marks the
place where she’s sleepin’. I wonder ef you could figger out who it was
that did pay fur it? I’ll give you two guesses.

“And say, listen, sonny: your first guess will be the right one.”



CHAPTER X. THE START OF A DREAM

For years it was the dream of our life--I should say our lives, since
my wife shared this vision with me--to own an abandoned farm. The idea
first came to us through reading articles that appeared in the various
magazines and newspapers telling of the sudden growth of what I may call
the aban-doned-farm industry.

It seemed that New England in general--and the state of Connecticut
in particular--was thickly speckled with delightful old places which,
through overcultivation or ill-treatment, had become for the time being
sterile and non-productive; so that the original owners had moved away
to the nearby manufacturing towns, leaving their ancestral homesteads
empty and their ancestral acres idle. As a result there were great
numbers of desirable places, any one of which might be had for a
song. That was the term most commonly used by the writers of these
articles--abandoned farms going for a song. Now, singing is not my
forte; still, I made up my mind that if such indeed was the case I would
sing a little, accompanying myself on my bank balance, and win me an
abandoned farm.

The formula as laid down by the authorities was simple in the extreme:
Taking almost any Connecticut town for a starting point, you merely
meandered along an elm-lined road until you came to a desirable
location, which you purchased for the price of the aforesaid song. This
formality being completed, you spent a trivial sum in restoring the
fences, and so on, and modernizing the interior of the house;
after which it was a comparatively easy task to restore the land to
productiveness by processes of intensive agriculture--details procurable
from any standard book on the subject or through easy lessons by mail.
And so presently, with scarcely any trouble or expense at all, you were
the possessor of a delightful country estate upon which to spend your
declining years. It made no difference whether you were one of those
persons who had never to date declined anything of value; there was no
telling when you might start in.

I could shut my eyes and see the whole delectable prospect: Upon a
gentle eminence crowned with ancient trees stood the rambling old manse,
filled with marvelous antique furniture, grandfather’s clocks dating
back to the whaling days, spinning wheels, pottery that came over on
the _Mayflower_, and all those sorts of things. Round about were the
meadows, some under cultivation and some lying fallow, the latter being
dotted at appropriate intervals with fallow deer.

At one side of the house was the orchard, the old gnarly trees crooking
their bent limbs as though inviting one to come and pluck the sun-kissed
fruit from the burdened bough; at the other side a purling brook
wandering its way into a greenwood copse, where through all the golden
day sang the feathered warblers indigenous to the climate, including the
soft-billed Greenwich thrush, the Peabody bird the Pettingill bird,
the red worsted pulse-warmer, and others of the commoner varieties too
numerous to mention.

At the back were the abandoned cotes and byres, with an abandoned
rooster crowing lustily upon a henhouse, and an abandoned bull calf
disporting himself in the clover of the pasture. At the front was a
rolling vista undulating gently away to where above the tree-tops
there rose the spires of a typical New England village full of old line
Republicans and characters suitable for putting into short stories. On
beyond, past where a silver lake glinted in the sunshine, was a view
either of the distant Sound or the distant mountains. Personally I
intended that my establishment should be so placed as to command a view
of the Sound from the east windows and of the mountains from the west
windows. And all to be had for a song! Why, the mere thought of it was
enough to make a man start taking vocal culture right away.

Besides, I had been waiting impatiently for a long time for an
opportunity to work out several agricultural projects of my own. For
example, there was my notion in regard to the mulberry. The mulberry,
as all know, is one of our most abundant small fruits; but many
have objected to it on account of its woolly appearance and slightly
caterpillary taste. My idea was to cross the mulberry on the slippery
elm--pronounced, where I came from, ellum--producing a fruit which I
shall call the mulellum. This fruit would combine the health-giving
qualities of the mulberry with the agreeable smoothness of the slippery
elm; in fact, if my plans worked out I should have a berry that would
go down so slick the consumer could not taste it at all unless he should
eat too many of them and suffer from indigestion afterward.

Then there was my scheme for inducing the common chinch bug to make
chintz curtains. If the silk worms can make silk why should not the
chinch bug do something useful instead of wasting his energies in idle
pursuits? This is what I wished to know. And why should this man Luther
Burbank enjoy a practical monopoly of all these propositions? That was
the way I looked at it; and I figured that an abandoned farm would make
an ideal place for working out such experiments as might come to me from
time to time.

The trouble was that, though everybody wrote of the abandoned farms in a
broad, general, alluring way, nobody gave the exact location of any
of them. I subscribed for one of the monthly publications devoted to
country life along the Eastern seaboard and searched assiduously through
its columns for mention of abandoned farms. The owners of most of the
country places that were advertised for sale made mention of such
things as fourteen master’s bedrooms and nine master’s baths--showing
undoubtedly that the master would be expected to sleep oftener than he
bathed--sunken gardens and private hunting preserves, private golf links
and private yacht landings.

In nearly every instance, also, the advertisement was accompanied by a
halftone picture of a structure greatly resembling the new county court
house they are going to have down at Paducah if the bond issue ever
passes. This seemed a suitable place for holding circuit court in, or
even fiscal court, but it was not exactly the kind of country home
that we had pictured for ourselves. As my wife said, just the detail of
washing all those windows would keep the girl busy fully half the
time. Nor did I care to invest in any sunken gardens. I had sufficient
experience in that direction when we lived in the suburbs and
permanently invested about half of what I made in our eight-by-ten
flower bed in an effort to make it produce the kind of flowers that the
florists’ catalogues described. You could not tell us anything about
that subject--we knew where a sunken garden derives its name. We paid
good money to know.

None of the places advertised in the monthly seemed sufficiently
abandoned for our purposes, so for a little while we were in a quandary.
Then I had a bright thought. I said to myself that undoubtedly abandoned
farms were so cheap the owners did not expect to get any real money for
them; they would probably be willing to take something in exchange. So I
began buying the evening papers and looking through them in the hope of
running across some such item as this:

To Exchange--Abandoned farm, centrally located, with large farmhouse,
containing all antique furniture, barns, outbuildings, family
graveyard--planted--orchard, woodland, fields--unplanted--for a
collection of postage stamps in album, an amateur magician’s outfit, a
guitar with book of instructions, a safety bicycle, or what have you?
Address Abandoned, South Squantum Center, Connecticut.

I found no such offers, however; and in view of what we had read this
seemed stranger still. Finally I decided that the only safe method would
be by first-hand investigation upon the spot. I would go by rail to
some small but accessible hamlet in the lower part of New England.
On arriving there I personally would examine a number of the more
attractive abandoned farms in the immediate vicinity and make a
discriminating selection. Having reached this conclusion I went to bed
and slept peacefully--or at least I went to bed and did so as soon as
my wife and I had settled one point that came up unexpectedly at this
juncture. It related to the smokehouse. I was in favor of turning the
smokehouse into a study or workroom for myself. She thought, though,
that by knocking the walls out and altering the roof and building a
pergola on to it, it would make an ideal summer house in which to serve
tea and from which to view the peaceful landscape of afternoons.

We argued this back and forth at some length, each conceding something
to the other’s views; and finally we decided to knock out the walls and
alter the roof and have a summer house with a pergola in connection. It
was after we reached this compromise that I slept so peacefully, for now
the whole thing was as good as settled. I marveled at not having thought
of it sooner.

It was on a bright and peaceful morning that I alighted from the train
at North Newburybunkport.

Considering that it was supposed to be a typical New England village,
North Newbury-bunkport did not appear at first glance to answer to
the customary specifications, such as I had gleaned from my reading of
novels of New England life. I had expected that the platform would be
populated by picturesque natives in quaint clothes, with straws in their
mouths and all whittling; and that the depot agent would wear long chin
whiskers and say “I vum!” with much heartiness at frequent intervals.
Right here I wish to state that so far as my observations go the native
who speaks these words about every other line is no longer on the job.
Either I Vum the Terrible has died or else he has gone to England to
play the part of the typical American millionaire in American plays
written by Englishmen.

Instead of the loafers, several chauffeurs were idling about the station
and a string of automobiles was drawn up across the road. Just as I
disembarked there drove up a large red bus labeled: Sylvan Dale Summer
Hotel, European and American Plans. The station agent also proved in
the nature of a disappointment. He did not even say “I swan” or “I
cal’late!” or anything of that nature. He wore a pink in his buttonhole
and his hair was scalloped up off his forehead in what is known as the
lion tamer’s roach. Approaching, I said to him:

“In what direction should I go to find some of the abandoned farms of
this vicinity? I would prefer to go where there is a good assortment to
pick from.”

He did not appear to understand, so I repeated the question, at the same
time offering him a cigar.

“Bo,” he said, “you’ve sure got me winging now. You’d better ask Tony
Magnito--he runs the garage three doors up the street from here on the
other side. Tony does a lot of driving round the country for suckers
that come up here, and he might help you.”

To reach the garage I had to cross the road, dodging several automobiles
in transit, and then pass two old-fashioned New England houses fronting
close up to the sidewalk. One had the sign of a teahouse over the door,
and in the window of the other, picture postcards, birch-bark souvenirs
and standard varieties of candy were displayed for sale.

Despite his foreign-sounding name, Mr. Magnito spoke fair English--that
is, as fair English as any one speaks who employs the Manhattan accent
in so doing.

Even after he found out that I did not care to rent a touring car for
sightseeing purposes at five dollars an hour he was quite affable and
accommodating; but my opening question appeared to puzzle him just as in
the case of the depot agent.

“Mister,” he said frankly, “I’m sorry, but I don’t seem to make you.
What’s this thing you is looking for? Tell me over again slow.”

Really the ignorance of these villagers regarding one of their principal
products--a product lying, so to speak, at their very doors and written
about constantly in the public prints--was ludicrous. It would have been
laughable if it had not been deplorable. I saw that I could not indulge
in general trade terms. I must be painfully explicit and simple.

“What I am seeking”--I said it very slowly and very distinctly--“is
a farm that has been deserted, so to speak--one that has outlived its
usefulness as a farm proper, and everything like that!”

“Oh,” he says, “now I get you! Why didn’t you say that in the first
place? The place you’re looking for is the old Parham place, out here on
the post road about a mile. August’ll take good care of you--that’s his
specialty.”

“August?” I inquired. “August who?”

“August Weinstopper--the guy who runs it,” he explained. “You must have
known August if you lived long in New York. He used to be the steward at
that big hotel at Broadway and Forty-second; that was before he came up
here and opened up the old Parham place as an automobile roadhouse.
He’s cleaning up about a thousand a month. Some class to that mantrap!
They’ve got an orchestra, and nothing but vintage goods on the wine
card, and dancing at all hours. Any night you’ll see forty or fifty big
cars rolling up there, bringing swell dames and--”

I judge he saw by my expression that he was on a totally wrong tack,
because he stopped short.

“Say, mister,” he said, “I guess you’d better step into the post-office
here--next door--and tell your troubles to Miss Plummer. She knows
everything that’s going on round here--and she ought to, too, seeing as
she gets first chance at all the circulars and postal cards that come
in. Besides, I gotter be changing that gasoline sign--gas has went up
two cents a gallon more.”

Miss Plummer was sorting mail when I appeared at her wicket. She was one
of those elderly, spinsterish-looking, kittenish females who seem in an
intense state of surprise all the time. Her eyebrows arched like croquet
wickets and her mouth made O’s before she uttered them.

“Name, please?” she said twitteringly.

I told her.

“Ah,” she said in the thrilled tone of one who is watching a Fourth of
July skyrocket explode in midair. The news seemed to please her.

“And the initials, please?”

“The initials are of no consequence. I do not expect any mail,” I said.
“I want merely to ask you a question.”

“Indeed!” she said coyly. She said it as though I had just given her
a handsome remembrance, and she cocked her head on one side like a
bird--like a hen-bird.

“I hate to trouble you,” I went on, “but I have experienced some
difficulty in making your townspeople understand me. I am looking for a
certain kind of farm--a farm of an abandoned character.” At once I saw I
had made a mistake.

“You do not get my meaning,” I said hastily. “I refer to a farm that has
been deserted, closed up, shut down--in short, abandoned. I trust I make
myself plain.”

She was still suffering from shock, however. She gave me a wounded-fawn
glance and averted her burning face.

“The Prewitt property might suit your purposes--whatever they may be,”
 she said coldly over her shoulder. “Mr. Jabez Pickerel, of Pickerel &
Pike, real-estate dealers, on the first corner above, will doubtless
give you the desired information. He has charge of the Prewitt
property.”

At last, I said to myself as I turned away, I was on the right track.
Mr. Pickerel rose as I entered his place of business. He was a short,
square man, with a brisk manner and a roving eye.

“I have been directed to you,” I began. He seized my hand and began
shaking it warmly. “I have been told,” I continued, “that you have
charge of the old Prewitt farm somewhere near here; and as I am in the
market for an aban-” I got no farther than that.

“In one minute,” he shouted explosively--“in just one minute!”

Still clutching me by the hand, he rushed me pell-mell out of the place.
At the curbing stood a long, low, rakish racing-model roadster, looking
something like a high-powered projectile and something like an enlarged
tailor’s goose. Leaping into this machine at one bound, he dragged me
up into the seat beside him and threw on the power. Instantly we were
streaking away at a perfectly appalling rate of speed--fully forty-five
to fifty-five miles an hour I should say. You never saw anything so
sudden in your life. It was exactly like a kidnaping. It was only by the
exercise of great self-control that I restrained myself from screaming
for help. I had the feeling that I was being abducted--for what purpose
I knew not.

As we spun round a corner on two wheels, spraying up a long furrow of
dust, the same as shown in pictures of the chariot race in Ben-Hur,
a man with a watch in his hand and wearing a badge--a constable, I
think--ran out of a house that had a magistrate’s sign over it and threw
up his hand authoritatively, as though to stop us; but my companion
yelled something the purport of which I could not distinguish and
the constable fell back. Glancing rearward over my shoulder I saw him
halting another car bearing a New York license that did not appear to be
going half so fast as we were.

In another second we were out of town, tearing along a country highway.
Evidently sensing the alarm expressed by my tense face and strained
posture, this man Pickerel began saying something in what was evidently
intended to be a reassuring tone; but such was the roaring of the car
that I could distinguish only broken fragments of his speech. I caught
the words “unparalleled opportunity,” repeated several times--the term
appeared to be a favorite of his--and “marvelous proposition.” Possibly
I was not listening very closely anyhow, my mind being otherwise
engaged. For one thing I was surmising in a general sort of way upon
the old theory of the result when the irresistible force encounters the
immovable object. I was wondering how long it would be before we hit
something solid and whether it would be possible afterward to tell us
apart. His straw hat also made me wonder. I had mine clutched in both
hands and even then it fluttered against my bosom like a captive bird,
but his stayed put. I think yet he must have had threads cut in his head
to match the convolutions of the straw and screwed his hat on, like a
nut on an axle.

I have a confused recollection of rushing with the speed of the tornado
through rows of trees; of leaping from the crest of one small hill to
the crest of the next small hill; of passing a truck patch with such
velocity that the lettuce and tomatoes and other things all seemed to
merge together in a manner suggestive of a well-mixed vegetable salad.

Then we swung off the main road in between the huge brick columns of an
ornate gateway that stood alone, with no fence in connection. We bumpily
traversed a rutted stretch of cleared land; and then with a jar and
a jolt we came to a pause in what appeared to be a wide and barren
expanse.

As my heart began to throb with slightly less violence I looked about me
for the abandoned farmhouse. I had conceived that it would be white with
green blinds and that it would stand among trees. It was not in sight;
neither were the trees. The entire landscape presented an aspect that
was indeed remarkable. Small numbered stakes, planted in double lines at
regular intervals, so as to form aisles, stretched away from us in every
direction. Also there were twin rows of slender sticks planted in the
earth in a sort of geometric pattern. Some were the size of switches.
Others were almost as large as umbrella handles and had sprouted
slightly. A short distance away an Italian was steering a dirtscraper
attached to a languid mule along a sort of dim roadway. There were no
other living creatures in sight. Right at my feet were two painted and
lettered boards affixed at cross angles to a wooden upright. The legend
on one of these boards was: Grand Concourse. The inscription on the
other read: Nineteenth Avenue West. Repressing a gasp, I opened my mouth
to speak.

“Ahem!” I said. “There has been some mistake--”

“There can be no mistake!” he shouted enthusiastically. “The only
mistake possible is not to take advantage of this magnificent
opportunity while it is yet possible to do so. Just observe that view!”
 He waved his arm in the general direction of the horizon from northwest
to southeast. “Breathe this air! As a personal favor to me just breathe
a little of this air!” He inhaled deeply himself as though to show me
how, and I followed suit, because after that ride I needed to catch up
with my regular breathing.

“Thank you!” I said gratefully when I had finished breathing. “But how
about----”

“Quite right!” he cried, beaming upon me admiringly. “Quite right! I
don’t blame you. You have a right to know all the details. As a business
man you should ask that question. You were about to say: But how about
the train service? Ah, there spoke the true business man, the careful
investor! Twenty fast trains a day each way--twenty, sir! Remember! And
as for accessibility--well, accessibility is simply no name for it! Only
two or three minutes from the station. You saw how long it took us to
get here to-day? Well, then, what more could you ask? Right here,” he
went on, pointing, “is the country club--a magnificent thing!”

I looked, but I didn’t see anything except a hole in the ground about
fifty feet from us.

“Where?” I asked. “I don’t see it.”

“Well,” he said, “this is where it is going to be. You automatically
become a member of the country club; in fact, you are as good as a
member now! And right up there at the corner of Lincoln Boulevard and
Washington Parkway, where that scraper is, is the public library--the
site for it! You’ll be crazy about the public library! When we get back
I’ll let you run over the plans for the public library while I’m fixing
up the papers. Oh, ‘my friend, how glad I am you came while there was
yet time!”

I breasted the roaring torrent of his pouring language.

“One minute,” I begged of him--“One minute, if you please! I am obliged
to you for the interest you take in me, a mere stranger to you; but
there has been a misunderstanding. I wanted to see the Prewitt place.”

“This is the Prewitt place,” he said.

“Yes,” I said; “but where is the house? And why all this--why all
these-” I indicated by a wave of my hand what I meant.

“Naturally,” he explained, “the house is no longer here. We tore it
away--it was old; whereas everything here will be new, modern and
up-to-date. This is--or was--the Prewitt place, now better known as
Homecrest Heights, the Development Ideal!” Having begun to capitalize
his words, he continued to do so. “The Perfect Addition! The Suburb
Superb! Away From the City’s Dust and Heat! Away From Its Glamor and
Clamor! Into the Open! Into the Great Out-of-Doors! Back to the Soil!
Villa Plots on Easy Terms! You Furnish the Birds, We Furnish the Nest!
The Place For a Business Man to Rear His Family! You Are Married? You
Have a Wife? You Have Little Ones?”

“Yes,” I said, “one of each--one wife and one little one.”

“Ah!” he cried gladly. “One Little One--How Sweet! You Love Your Little
One--Ah, Yes! Yes! You Desire to Give Your Little One a Chance? You
Would Give Her Congenial Surroundings--Refined Surroundings? You Would
Inculcate in Her While Young the Love of Nature?” He put an entire
sentence into capitals now: “Give Your Little One a Chance! That is All
I Ask of You!”

He had me by both lapels. I thought he was going to kneel to me in
pleading. I feared he might kiss me. I raised him to his feet. Then his
manner changed--it became domineering, hectoring, almost threatening.

I will pass briefly over the events of the succeeding hour, including
our return to his lair or office. Accounts of battles where all the
losses fall upon one side are rarely interesting to read about anyway.
Suffice it to say that at the last minute I was saved. It was a
desperate struggle though. I had offered the utmost resistance at first,
but he would surely have had his way with me--only that a train pulled
in bound for the city just as he was showing me, as party of the first
part, where I was to sign my name on the dotted line A. Even then,
weakened and worn as I was, I should probably not have succeeded in
beating him off if he had not been hampered by having a fountain pen in
one hand and the documents in the other. At the door he intercepted me;
but I tackled him low about the body and broke through and fled like a
hunted roebuck, catching the last car just as the relief train pulled
out of the station. It was a close squeeze, but I made it. The thwarted
Mr. Pickerel wrote me regularly for some months thereafter, making
mention of My Little One in every letter; but after a while I took to
sending the letters back to him unopened, and eventually he quit.

I reached home along toward evening. I was tired, but I was not
discouraged. I reported progress on the part of the committee on a
permanent site, but told my wife that in order to find exactly what we
wanted it would be necessary for us to leave the main-traveled paths.
It was now quite apparent to me that the abandoned farm-seeker who stuck
too closely to the railroad lines was bound to be thrown constantly in
contact with those false and feverish metropolitan influences which,
radiating from the city, have spread over the country like the spokes of
a wheel or an upas tree, or a jauga-naut, or something of that nature.
The thing to do was to get into an automobile and go away from the
principal routes of travel, into districts where the abandoned farms
would naturally be more numerous.

This solved one phase of the situation--we now knew definitely where
to go. The next problem was to decide upon some friend owning an
automobile. We fixed upon the Winsells. They are charming people! We are
devoted to the Winsells. They were very good friends of ours when they
had their small four-passenger car; but since they sold the old one and
bought a new forty-horse, seven-passenger car, they are so popular that
it is hard to get hold of them for holidays and week-ends.

Every Saturday--nearly--some one of their list of acquaintances is
calling them up to tell of a lovely spot he has just heard about, with
good roads all the way, both coming and going; but after a couple of
disappointments we caught them when they had an open date. Over the
telephone Winsell objected that he did not know anything about the
roads up in Connecticut, but I was able to reassure him promptly on that
score. I told him he need not worry about that--that I would buy the
road map myself. So on a fair Saturday morning we started.

The trip up through the extreme lower end of the state of New York was
delightful, being marred by only one or two small mishaps. There was
the trifling incident of a puncture, which delayed us slightly; but
fortunately the accident occurred at a point where there was a wonderful
view of the Croton Lakes, and while Winsell was taking off the old tire
and adjusting a new one we sat very comfortably in the car, enjoying
Nature’s panorama.

It was a little later on when we hit a dog. It seemed to me that this
dog merely sailed, yowling, up into the air in a sort of long curve, but
Winsell insisted that the dog described a parabola. I am very glad that
in accidents of this character it is always the victims that describe
the parabola. I know I should be at a complete loss to describe one
myself. Unless it is something like the boomerang of the Australian
aborigines I do not even know what a parabola is. Nor did I dream until
then that Winsell understood the dog language. However, those are but
technical details.

After we crossed the state line we got lost several times; this was
because the country seemed to have a number of roads the road map
omitted, and the road map had many roads the country had left out.
Eventually, though, we came to a district of gently rolling hills,
dotted at intervals with those neat white-painted villages in which
New England excels; and between the villages at frequent intervals were
farmhouses. Abandoned ones, however, were rarer than we had been led
to expect. Not only were these farms visibly populated by persons who
appeared to be permanently attached to their respective localities, but
at many of them things were offered for sale--such as home-made pastry,
souvenirs, fresh poultry, antique furniture, brass door-knockers, milk
and eggs, hand-painted crockery, table board, garden truck, molasses
taffy, laundry soap and livestock.

At length, though, when our necks were quite sore from craning this way
and that on the watch for an abandoned farm that would suit us, we
came to a very attractive-looking place facing a lawn and flanked by an
orchard. There was a sign fastened to an elm tree alongside the fence.
The sign read: For Information Concerning This Property Inquire Within.

To Winsell I said:

“Stop here--this is without doubt the place we have been looking for!”

Filled--my wife and I--with little thrills of anticipation, we all got
out. I opened the gate and entered the yard, followed by Winsell, my
wife and his wife. I was about halfway up the walk when a large dog
sprang into view, at the same time showing his teeth in rather an
intimidating way. To prevent an encounter with an animal that might be
hostile, I stepped nimbly behind the nearest tree. As I came round on
the other side of the tree there, to my surprise, was this dog face to
face with me. Still desiring to avoid a collision with him, I stepped
back the other way. Again I met the dog, which was now growling. The
situation was rapidly becoming embarrassing when a gentleman came out
upon the porch and called sharply to the dog. The dog, with apparent
reluctance, retired under the house and the gentleman invited us inside
and asked us to be seated. Glancing about his living room I noted that
the furniture appeared to be a trifle modern for our purposes; but, as
I whispered to my wife, you cannot expect to have everything to suit you
at first. With the sweet you must ever take the bitter--that I believe
is true, though not an original saying.

In opening the conversation with the strange gentleman I went in a
businesslike way direct to the point.

“You are the owner of these premises?” I asked. He bowed. “I take it,” I
then said, “that you are about to abandon this farm?”

“I beg your pardon?” he said, as though confused.

“I presume,” I explained, “that this is practically an abandoned farm.”

“Not exactly,” he said. “I’m here.”

“Yes, yes; quite so,” I said, speaking perhaps a trifle impatiently.
“But you are thinking of going away from it, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” he admitted; “I am.”

“Now,” I said, “we are getting round to the real situation. What are you
asking for this place?”

“Eighteen hundred,” he stated. “There are ninety acres of land that go
with the house and the house itself is in very good order.”

I considered for a moment. None of the abandoned farms I had ever read
about sold for so much as eighteen hundred dollars. Still, I reflected,
there might have been a recent bull movement; there had certainly been
much publicity upon the subject. Before committing myself, I glanced at
my wife. Her expression betokened acquiescence.

“That figure,” I said diplomatically, “was somewhat in excess of what I
was originally prepared to pay; still, the house seems roomy and, as you
were saying, there are ninety acres. The furniture and equipment go with
the place, I presume?”

“Naturally,” he answered. “That is the customary arrangement.”

“And would you be prepared to give possession immediately?”

“Immediately,” he responded.

I began to feel enthusiasm. By the look on my wife’s face I could tell
that she was enthused, too.

“If we come to terms,” I said, “and everything proves satisfactory, I
suppose you could arrange to have the deed made out at once?”

“The deed?” he said blankly. “You mean the lease?”

“The lease?” I said blankly. “You mean the deed?”

“The deed?” he said blankly. “You mean the lease?”

“The lease, indeed,” said my wife. “You mean----”

I broke in here. Apparently we were all getting the habit.

“Let us be perfectly frank in this matter,” I said. “Let us dispense
with these evasive and dilatory tactics. You want eighteen hundred
dollars for this place, furnished?”

“Exactly,” he responded. “Eighteen hundred dollars for it from June
to October.” Then, noting the expressions of our faces, he continued
hurriedly: “A remarkably small figure considering what summer rentals
are in this section. Besides, this house is new. It costs a lot to
reproduce these old Colonial designs!”

I saw at once that we were but wasting our time in this person’s
company. He had not the faintest conception of what we wanted. We came
away. Besides, as I remarked to the others after we were back in the car
and on our way again, this house-farm would never have suited us; the
view from it was nothing extra. I told Winsell to go deeper into the
country until we really struck the abandoned farm belt.

So we went farther and farther. After a while it was late afternoon and
we seemed to be lost again. My wife and Winsell’s wife were tired; so
we dropped them at the next teahouse we passed. I believe it was the
eighteenth teahouse for the day. Winsell and I then continued on the
quest alone. Women know so little about business anyway that it is
better, I think, whenever possible, to conduct important matters without
their presence. It takes a masculine intellect to wrestle with these
intricate problems; and for some reason or other this problem was
becoming more and more complicated and intricate all the time.

On a long, deserted stretch of road, as the shadows were lengthening,
we overtook a native of a rural aspect plodding along alone. Just as we
passed him I was taken with an idea and I told Winsell to stop. I was
tired of trafficking with stupid villagers and avaricious land-grabbers.
I would deal with the peasantry direct. I would sound the yeoman
heart--which is honest and true and ever beats in accord with the best
dictates of human nature.

“My friend,” I said to him, “I am seeking an abandoned farm. Do you know
of many such in this vicinity?”

“How?” he asked.

I never got so tired of repeating a question in my life; nevertheless,
for this yokel’s limited understanding, I repeated it again.

“Well,” he said at length, “whut with all these city fellers moving in
here to do gentleman-farming--whatsoever that may mean--farm property
has gone up until now it’s wuth considerable more’n town property, as
a rule. I could scursely say I know of any of the kind of farms you
mention as laying round loose--no, wait a minute; I do recollect
a place. It’s that shack up back of the country poor farm that the
supervisors used for a pest house the time the smallpox broke out. That
there place is consider’bly abandoned. You might try--”

In a stern tone of voice I bade Winsell to drive on and turn in at the
next farmhouse he came to. The time for trifling had passed. My mind was
fixed. My jaw was also set. I know, because I set it myself. And I have
no doubt there was a determined glint in my eye; in fact, I could feel
the glint reflected upon my cheek.

At the next farm Winsell turned in. We passed through a stone gateway
and rolled up a well-kept road toward a house we could see in glimpses
through the intervening trees. We skirted several rather neat flower
beds, curved round a greenhouse and came out on a stretch of lawn. I
at once decided that this place would do undoubtedly. There might
be alterations to make, but in the main the establishment would be
satisfactory even though the house, on closer inspection, proved to be
larger than it had seemed when seen from a distance.

On a signal from me Winsell halted at the front porch. Without a word
I stepped out. He followed. I mounted the steps, treading with great
firmness and decision, and rang the doorbell hard. A middle-aged person
dressed in black, with a high collar, opened the door.

“Are you the proprietor of this place?” I demanded without any preamble.
My patience was exhausted; I may have spoken sharply.

“Oh, no, sir,” he said, and I could tell by his accent he was English;
“the marster is out, sir.”

“I wish to see him,” I said, “on particular business--at once! At once,
you understand--it is important!”

“Perhaps you’d better come in, sir,” he said humbly. It was evident my
manner, which was, I may say, almost haughty, had impressed him deeply.
“If you will wait, sir, I’ll have the marster called, sir. He’s not far
away, sir.”

“Very good,” I replied. “Do so!”

He showed us into a large library and fussed about, offering drinks
and cigars and what-not. Winsell seemed somewhat perturbed by these
attentions, but I bade him remain perfectly calm and collected, adding
that I would do all the talking.

We took cigars--very good cigars they were. As they were not banded
I assumed they were home grown. I had always heard that Connecticut
tobacco was strong, but these specimens were very mild and pleasant. I
had about decided I should put in tobacco for private consumption and
grow my own cigars and cigarettes when the door opened, and a stout
elderly man with side whiskers entered the room. He was in golfing
costume and was breathing hard.

“As soon as I got your message I hurried over as fast as I could,” he
said.

“You need not apologize,” I replied; “we have not been kept waiting very
long.”

“I presume you come in regard to the traction matter?” he ventured.

“No,” I said, “not exactly. You own this place, I believe?”

“I do,” he said, staring at me.

“So far, so good,” I said. “Now, then, kindly tell me when you expect to
abandon it.”

He backed away from me a few feet, gaping. He opened his mouth and for a
few moments absent-mindedly left it in that condition.

“When do I expect to do what?” he inquired. “When,” I said, “do you
expect to abandon it?” He shook his head as though he had some marbles
inside of it and liked the rattling sound.

“I don’t understand yet,” he said, puzzled.

“I will explain,” I said very patiently. “I wish to acquire by purchase
or otherwise one of the abandoned farms of this state. Not having been
able to find one that was already abandoned, though I believe them to
be very numerous, I am looking for one that is about to be abandoned. I
wish, you understand, to have the first call on it. Winsell”--I said
in an aside--“quit pulling at my coat-tail! Therefore,” I resumed,
readdressing the man with the side whiskers, “I ask you a plain
question, to wit: When do you expect to abandon this one? I expect a
plain answer.”

He edged a few feet nearer an electric push button which was set in the
wall. He seemed flustered and distraught; in fact, almost apprehensive.

“May I inquire,” he said nervously, “how you got in here?”

“Your servant admitted us,” I said, with dignity. “Yes,” he said in a
soothing tone; “but did you come afoot--or how?”

“I drove here in a car,” I told him, though I couldn’t see what
difference that made.

“Merciful Heavens!” he muttered. “They do not trust you--I mean you do
not drive the car yourself, do you?”

Here Winsell cut in.

“I drove the car,” he said. “I--I did not want to come, but
he”--pointing to me--“he insisted.” Winsell is by nature a groveling
soul. His tone was almost cringing.

“I see,” said the gentleman, wagging his head, “I see. Sad case--very
sad case! Young, too!” Then he faced me. “You will excuse me now,” he
said. “I wish to speak to my butler. I have just thought of several
things I wish to say to him. Now in regard to abandoning this place:
I do not expect to abandon this place just yet--probably not for some
weeks or possibly months. In case I should decide to abandon it sooner,
if you will leave your address with me I will communicate with you by
letter at the institution where you may chance to be stopping at the
time. I trust this will be satisfactory.”

He turned again to Winsell.

“Does your--ahem--friend care for flowers?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Winsell. “I think so.”

“Perhaps you might show him my flower gardens as you go away,” said the
side-whiskered man. “I have heard somewhere that flowers have a very
soothing effect sometimes in such cases--or it may have been music. I
have spent thirty thousand dollars beautifying these grounds and I am
really very proud of them. Show him the flowers by all means--you might
even let him pick a few if it will humor him.”

I started to speak, but he was gone. In the distance somewhere I heard a
door slam.

Under the circumstances there was nothing for us to do except to
come away. Originally I did not intend to make public mention of this
incident, preferring to dismiss the entire thing from my mind; but,
inasmuch as Winsell has seen fit to circulate a perverted and needlessly
exaggerated version of it among our circle of friends, I feel that the
exact circumstances should be properly set forth.

It was a late hour when we rejoined our wives. This was due to Winsel’s
stupidity in forgetting the route we had traversed after parting from
them; in fact, it was nearly midnight before he found his way back to
the teahouse where we left them. The teahouse had been closed for some
hours then and our wives were sitting in the dark on the teahouse porch
waiting for us. Really, I could not blame them for scolding Winsell; but
they displayed an unwarranted peevishness toward me. My wife’s display
of temper was really the last straw. It was that, taken in connection
with certain other circumstances, which clinched my growing resolution
to let the whole project slide into oblivion. I woke her up and in so
many words told her so on the way home. We arrived there shortly after
daylight of the following morning.

So, as I said at the outset, we gave up our purpose of buying an
abandoned farm and moved into a flat on the upper west side.





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