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Title: The Picaroons
Author: Burgess, Gelett, Irwin, Will
Language: English
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THE PICAROONS
By the Same Author
❦
_The Reign of Queen Isyl_
THE
PICAROONS
BY GELETT BURGESS
AND WILL IRWIN
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & COMPANY
MCMIV
_Copyright, 1904, by_
MCCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.
Published, April, 1904
_Copyright, 1903, 1904, by Pearson Publishing Co._
To THE RED CYCLONE
G. B—— W. I.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE PICAROONS
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
Page
A MIRACLE AT COFFEE JOHN’S 3
The Story of the Great Bauer Syndicate 15
CHAPTER II
JAMES WISWELL COFFIN 3d. 26
The Story of the Harvard Freshman 27
CHAPTER III
PROFESSOR VANGO 45
The Story of the Ex-Medium 46
CHAPTER IV
ADMEH DRAKE 60
The Story of the Hero of Pago Bridge 61
CHAPTER V
THE DIMES OF COFFEE JOHN 81
The Story of Big Becky 83
CHAPTER VI
THE HARVARD FRESHMAN’S ADVENTURE: THE FORTY PANATELAS 102
The Story of the Returned Klondyker 108
The Story of the Retired Car-Conductor 143
CHAPTER VII
THE EX-MEDIUM’S ADVENTURE: THE INVOLUNTARY SUICIDE 156
The Story of the Quadroon Woman 175
CHAPTER VIII
THE HERO’S ADVENTURE: THE MYSTERY OF THE HAMMAM 192
The Story of the Minor Celebrity 199
The Mystery of the Hammam 209
The Story of the Dermograph Artist 217
The Story of the Deserter of the Philippines 236
CHAPTER IX
THE WARDS OF FORTUNE 258
NOTE
_Picaroon—a petty rascal; one who lives by his wits; an adventurer. The
Picaresque Tales, in Spanish literature of the beginning of the
Seventeenth Century, dealt with the fortunes of beggars, impostors,
thieves, etc., and chronicled the Romance of Roguery. Such stories were
the precursors of the modern novel. The San Francisco Night’s
Entertainment is an attempt to render similar subjects with an
essentially modern setting._
CHAPTER I
A MIRACLE AT COFFEE JOHN’S
The lad in the sweater yawned with abandon and glanced up at the clock
which hung on the whitewashed wall between a lithograph of Admiral Dewey
and a sign bearing the legend: “Doughnuts and Coffee, 5 cents.”
“I move we proceed,” he said, impatiently. “There’ll be nobody else here
to-night; all the stew-bums have lined up at the bakeries for free
bread. I say, old man, you pull the trigger and we’re off! I’ve got a
two-days’ handicap on my appetite and I won’t do a thing but make an
Asiatic ostrich of myself!”
“I’ll back my stomach against yours,” said the man with spectacles who
sat opposite him. “I’ll bet I could eat a ton of sinkers and a barrel of
this brown paint. I’m for rounding up the grub myself. I’ll be eating
the oil-cloth off this table, pretty soon!”
The proprietor of the dingy little restaurant turned to them from the
counter in front, where he had been arranging a pile of wet plates and
an exhibit of pastry in preparation for the next morning’s breakfasts.
Wiping his hands on his apron, he said with a Cockney accent which
proclaimed his birth, hinted at by his florid countenance and
mutton-chop whiskers, “I sye, gents, if yer don’t want to wyte, yer know
bloomin’ well wot yer _kin_ do, an’ that’s git art! Strike me pink if
yer ain’t gort a gall! Yer a bit comin’ on, gents, if yer don’t mind me
syin’ it. I told yer I’d give yer an A1 feed if yer’d on’y wyte for
another bloke to show up, an’ he ain’t ’ere yet, is ’e? Leastwise, if ’e
is, I don’t see ’im.”
He took off his apron, nevertheless, as if he, too, were anxiously
expectant, and he cast repeated glances at the door, where, painted on
the window in white letters, were the words, “Coffee John’s.” Then he
left the range behind the counter and came across the sanded floor to
the single oil-lamp that lighted the two men who were his last patrons
for the day.
The younger, he with the red sweater, had a round, jocund face and a
merry, rolling eye that misfortune was powerless to tame, though the lad
had evidently discovered Vagabondia.
“Who’s your interesting but mysterious friend?” he asked. “You’re not
expecting a lady, I hope!” and he glanced at his coat which, though it
had the cut of a fashionable tailor, was an atrocious harlequin of spots
and holes.
“I don’t know who’s a comin’ no more’n you do,” Coffee John replied.
“But see ’ere!” and he pointed with a blunt red finger at an insurance
calendar upon the wall. “D’yer cop that there numero? It’s the
Thirteenth of October to-dye, an’ they’ll be comp’ny all right. They
allus is, the Thirteenth of October!”
“Well, you rope him and we’ll brand him,” remarked the other at the
table, a man of some twenty-two years, with a typically Western cast of
countenance, high cheek-bones and an aquiline nose. His eyes were
gray-blue behind rusty steel spectacles. “I hope that stranger will come
pretty durn pronto,” he added.
“There’ll be somethink a-doin’ before nine, I give yer _my_ word. I’ll
eat this ’ere bloomin’ pile o’ plytes if they ain’t!” Coffee John
asserted.
Scarcely had he made the remark when the clock rang out, ending his
sentence like a string of exclamation points, and immediately the door
burst open and a man sprang into the room as though he were a runaway
from Hell.
In his long, thin, white face two black eyes, set near together, burned
with terror. His mouth was open and quivering, his hands were fiercely
clinched. Under a battered Derby hat his stringy black hair and ragged
beard played over his paper collar in a fringe. He wore a cutaway suit,
green and shiny with age, which, divorced at the waist, showed a ring of
red flannel undershirt. He crept up to the counter like a kicked
spaniel.
“For God’s sake, gimme a drink o’ coffee, will you?” he whined.
“Wot’s bitin’ yer?” Coffee John inquired without sentiment. “Don’t yer
ask me to chynge a ’undred-dollar bill, fur I reelly can’t do it!”
“I lost my nerves, that’s all,” he said, looking over his shoulder
apprehensively. Then, turning to the two at the table, he gazed at them
over the top of a thick mug of coffee. “Lord! That’s good! I’m better
now,” he went on, and wiped off his mustache with a curling tongue,
finishing with his sleeve. “If I should narrate to you the experience
which has just transpired, gents, you wouldn’t believe it. You’d regard
myself as a imposition. But facts is authentic, nevertheless, and cannot
be dissented from, however sceptical.”
“See here!” cried the lad in the sweater, not too unkindly, “suppose you
tell us about it some other time! We’ve been waiting for you many
mad-some moons, and the time is ripe for the harvest. If you are as
hungry as we are, and want to be among those present at this function,
sit down and you’ll get whatever is coming to you. You can ascend the
rostrum afterward. We were just looking for one more, and you’re it.”
The vagabond looked inquiringly at Coffee John, who, in response,
pointed to a chair. “Why cert’nly,” the new-comer said, removing his
hat, “I must confess I ain’t yet engaged at dinner this evening, and if
you gents are so obliged as to——”
“Rope it!” roared the man in spectacles, out of all patience. The
voluble stranger seated himself hurriedly.
Coffee John now drew two tables together. “Jest excuse me for half a
mo’, gents, w’ile I unfurl this ’ere rag,” he said, spreading the cloth.
The three strangers looked on in surprise, for the Cockney’s tone had
changed. He wore an expectant smile as he seated himself in the fourth
place and rapped loudly on the table, distributing, as he did so, a
damask napkin to each of his guests.
“Gloriana peacock!” cried the man in spectacles, “I’m sorry I forgot to
wear my dress-suit. I had no idea you put on so much dog for coffee and
sinkers.”
“Get wise, old chap,” the man in the sweater said, warningly, “I have a
hunch that this is to be no mere charity poke-out. This is the true
chloroform. We’re up against a genuine square this trip, or I’m a
Patagonian. How about that, Coffee John?”
The host tucked his napkin into his neck and replied, benignly, “Oh, I
dunno, we’ll do wot we kin, an’ them as ain’t satisfied can order their
kerridges.”
As he spoke, two Chinamen emerged from the back room and filed up the
dusky rows of tables, bearing loaded trays. Swiftly and deftly they
spread the board with cut glass, china, and silverware, aligning a
delectable array of bottles in front of the proprietor. In a trice the
table began to twinkle with the appointments of a veritable banquet,
complete even to a huge centre-piece of California violets. In that
shabby hole an entertainment began to blossom like a flower blooming in
a dunghill, and the spectators were awed and spellbound at the sudden
miracle of the transformation. The man in the red sweater loosened his
belt three holes under the table, the black-eyed man pulled a pair of
frayed cuffs from his sleeves, and the other wiped his glasses and
smiled for the first time. When all was ready, Coffee John arose, and,
filling the glasses, cried jubilantly:
“Gents, I give yer the good ’elth of Solomon Bauer, Esquire, an’ the
Thirteenth of October, an’ drink ’earty!”
The toast was drunk with wonder, for the men were visibly impressed,
but, at the entry of oysters, each began to eat as if he were afraid it
were all a dream and he might awake before it was over. The lad with the
merry eye alone showed any restraint; his manners were those of a
gentleman. The one with the spectacles drank like a thirsty horse, and
the thin, black-haired individual watched the kitchen-door to see what
was coming next. Following the oysters came soup, savoury with cheese.
“Potage _au fromage_, _a la_ Cafe Martin, or I’ve never been in New
York!” cried the youngster.
“Correck. I perceive yer by wye of bein’ an epicoor,” Coffee John
remarked, highly pleased at the appreciation.
“I didn’t think they could do it in San Francisco,” the youth went on.
The Cockney turned his pop-eyes at the lad, and, with the bigotry of a
proselyte, broached his favourite topic. “Young man, we kin do anythink
they kin do in New York, not to speak of a trick or two blokes go to
Paris to see done; an’ occysionally we kin go ’em one better. Yer don’t
know this tarn yet. It’s a bloomin’ prize puzzle, that’s wot it is;
they’s a bit o’ everythink ’ere!”
The fish followed, barracuda as none but Tortoni can broil; then
terrapin, teal, venison, and so, with Western prodigality, to the
dessert. The guests, having met and subdued the vanguard of hunger, did
hilarious battle with the dinner, stabbing and slashing gallantly. No
one dared to put his good fortune to the hazard of the inquiry, though
each was curious, until at last the lad in the sweater could resist
wonder no longer. The demands of nature satisfied, his mind sought for
diversion. He laid his fork down, and pushed back his plate.
“It’s too good to be true,” he said. “I want to know what we’re in for,
anyway! What’s your little game? It may be bad manners to be
inquisitive, but I’ve slept in a wagon, washed in a horse-trough and
combed my hair with tenpenny nails for so long that I’m not responsible.
The time has come, the walrus said, to speak of many things! and I balk
right here until I know what’s up your sleeve. No bum gets a Delmonico
dinner at a coffee-joint on the Barbary Coast for nothing, I don’t
think; and by John Harvard, I want to be put next to whether this is
charity, insanity, a bet, or are you trying to fix us for something
shady?”
“What d’you want to stampede the show for?” interrupted the man in
spectacles. “We haven’t been asked to pay in advance, have we? We’ve
signed no contract! You were keen to begin as a heifer is for salt, and
when we draw a prize you want to look a gift-horse in the jaw! Get onto
yourself!”
“Gents,” the unctuous voice of the third man broke in, “they’s champagne
a-comin’!”
Coffee John had been looking from one to the other in some amusement.
“Easy, gents,” he remarked. “I ain’t offended at this ’ere youngster’s
expreshings, though I don’t sye as wot I mightn’t be, if ’e wa’n’t a
gentleman, as I can see by the wye ’e ’andles ’is knife, an’ the
suspicious fack of ’is neck bein’ clean, if he _do_ wear a Jarsey. Nar,
all I gort to sye is, thet this ’ere feast is on the squyre an’ no
questions arsked. As soon as we gits to the corffee, I’ll explyne.”
“I accept your apology,” the lad cried, gayly, and he rose, bubbling
with impudence. “Gentlemen-adventurers, knights of the empty pocket,
comrades of the order of the flying brake-beam and what-not, I drink
your very good health. Here’s to the jade whose game we played, not once
afraid of losing, ah! It is passing many wintry days since I fed on
funny-water and burned cologne in my _petit noir_, but there _was_ a
time—! My name, brothers of the pave, is James Wiswell Coffin 3d. Eight
Mayflower ancestors, double-barrelled in-and-in stock, Puritans of
Plymouth. Wrestling Coffin landed at Salem in the _Blessing of the Bay_,
1630, and——”
“Whoa, there!” the man in spectacles cried. “You ain’t so all-fired
numerous! I left a happy mountain-home myself, but the biographical
contest don’t come till the show is over in the big tent!”
“Cert’nly not, after you vetoed at my remarks,” said the third. “Let’s
testify after the dishes is emptier and we begin to feel more like a
repletion!”
In such wise the guests proceeded with badinage till the fruit appeared.
Then, as a plate containing oranges and bananas was placed on the table,
the young man of the party suddenly arose with a look of disgust, and
turned from the sight.
“See here, Coffee John,” he said, pacifically, “would you mind, as a
grand transcontinental favour, removing those bananas? I’m very much
afraid I’ll have to part with my dinner if you don’t.”
“Wot’s up?” was the reply.
“Nothing, yet,” said the youth. “But I’ll explain later. We’ll have to
work out all these puzzles and word-squares together.”
The bananas were taken away, while the others looked on curiously. Then
the man with glasses grew serious, and said, “As long as objections have
been raised, and the whole bunch is a bit loco, I don’t mind saying I’ve
a request to make, myself.”
“Speak up, an’ if they’s anythink wrong, I’ll try to myke it correck,”
said Coffee John. “’Evving knows it ain’t ’ardly usual for the likes o’
me to tyke orders from the likes o’ you, but this dinner is gave to
please, _if_ possible, an’ I don’t want no complyntes to be neglected.
Wot’s the matter nar?”
“I’ve been sitting with my back to the wall, as you may have noticed,
but there’s that over my head that makes me feel pretty sick when I
catch myself thinking,” said the objector. “It’s that picture of Dewey.
He’s all right, and a hero for sure; but if you don’t mind, would you
turn him face to the wall, so I can look up?”
“Don’t menshing it,” said Coffee John, rising to gratify this eccentric
request. “Nar wot’s your private an’ partickler farncy?” he asked,
turning to the thin, dark man.
“Nothin’ at all, only proceed with the exercises, and if you’d be
magnanimous enough to allow me to smoke, they being no females
present——”
A box of Carolina perfectos was brought in, with a coffee-urn, cognac,
and liqueurs, and the three men, now calm, genial, and satisfied, gave
themselves up to the comforts of tobacco. Even the youngest allowed
himself to draw up a chair for his feet, and sighed in content. Coffee
John finished the last drop in his glass, drew out his brier pipe, and
lighted it. Then, producing a folded paper from his pocket, he raised
his finger for silence and said:
“If yer wants to know the w’y and the w’erfore of this ’ere reparst,
gents, I am nar ready to give yer satisfaction o’ sorts. It ain’t me yer
obligyted to, at all; it’s a newspyper Johnnie nymed Sol Bauer who’s put
up for it, him as I arsked yer for to drink a ’elth to. It’s a proper
queer story ’ow ’e come to myke and bryke in this ’ere very shop o’
mine, an’ if yer stogies is all drawin’ easy, I’ll read the tyle as ’e
wrote it art for me, skippin’ the interduction, w’ich is personal, ’e
bein’ of the belief that it wos me wot brought ’im luck.
“So ’ere goes, from w’ere ’e come darn to this plyce of a Hoctober night
five years ago.” And so saying, he opened the paper. The narrative,
deleted of Coffee John’s dialect, was as follows:
THE STORY OF THE GREAT BAUER SYNDICATE
Ten years I had been a newspaper man, and had filled almost every
position from club reporter to managing editor, when just a year ago I
found myself outside Coffee John’s restaurant, friendless, hungry, and
without a cent to my name. Although I had a reputation for knowing
journalism from A to Z, I had been discharged from every paper in the
city. The reason was good enough; I was habitually intemperate, and
therefore habitually unreliable. I did not drink, as many journalists
do, to stimulate my forces, but for love of the game. It was physically
impossible for me to remain sober for more than two weeks at a time.
I had, that day, been discharged from the _Tribune_ for cause. The new
president of the Southern Pacific Company was on his way to San
Francisco, and it was necessary for our paper to get ahead of its
contemporaries and obtain the first interview. I was told to meet the
magnate at Los Angeles. I loitered at a saloon till I was too late for
the train, and then decided I would meet my man down the line at Fresno.
The next train south left while I was still drinking. I had time,
however, to catch the victim on the other side of the bay, and interview
him on the ferry, but he got in before I roused myself from my dalliance
with the grape. Then, trusting to sheer bluff, I hurried into the
office, called up two stenographers, dictated a fake interview
containing important news, and rushed the thing on the press.
The next day the president of the railway repudiated the whole thing,
and I was summarily given the sack. Nevertheless, it so happened that
almost the whole of what I had predicted came true within the year.
I celebrated the bad luck in my characteristic manner, and finished with
just sense enough to wish to clear my head with black coffee. So,
trusting to my slight acquaintance with Coffee John, and more to his
well-known generosity, I entered his place, and for the first time in my
life requested what I could not pay for. I was not disappointed. A cup
of coffee and a plate of doughnuts were handed me without comment or
advice.
As I was making my meal in the back part of the little restaurant, three
men, one after the other, came and sat down at my table. In the general
conversation that ensued I found that one was a tramp printer, whose
boast it was to have worked and jumped his board-bill in nearly every
State in the Union; one was a book-agent, who had been attempting to
dispose of “The Life of U. S. Grant,” and the third was an insurance
solicitor, who had failed to make good the trade’s reputation for
acumen.
A little talk developed the fact that all four of us were out of funds,
and ready for anything that promised to keep the wolf from the door.
Then, with a journalist’s instinct for putting three and one together,
an idea came to me by which we could all find a way out of the dilemma.
For it so happened that one of the _Herald’s_ periodical upheavals had
occurred that very day, and a general clean-up was being effected in the
office. The city editor, after a stormy interview with his chief, had
resigned, and had carried with him four of the best men on the staff.
Other reporters who had taken his part had also been let go, and the
city room of the _Herald_ was badly in need of assistance. It was very
likely that any man who could put up any kind of a pretence to knowing
the ropes would stand a fair chance of obtaining a situation without any
trouble.
My plan was this: Each of the three men was to apply for a situation as
reporter on the _Herald_, and, if accepted, was to report the next day
for his assignment, and then come immediately to me for instructions. I
was to give them all the necessary information as to obtaining the
material, and, when they had brought me the facts, write out the story
for them to hand in.
The three men agreed enthusiastically to the venture, and I spent the
evening in coaching them in the shop-talk and professional terms they
would need. You cannot teach a man what “news” is in one sitting—a man
has to have a nose trained to smell it, and a special gift for
determining its value, but I described the technical meaning of “a
story” and “covering” a detail. I told them to keep their eyes open, and
gave many examples of how it often happened that a reporter, when sent
out on a little “single-head” story, would, if he were sharp, get a hint
that could be worked up into a front page “seven-column scare-head.”
There is, of course, no royal road to journalism, but there are
short-cuts that can be learned. I gave them points on the idiosyncrasies
of the new man at the city desk, for I knew him well, and I provided
each of them with a yarn about his supposed previous place. One, I
believe, was to have worked on the St. Louis _Globe-Herald_, under
George Comstock; one had done special writing on the Minneapolis
_Argus_, and so on; for I knew a lot about all the papers in the East,
and I fixed my men so they couldn’t easily be tripped up on their
autobiographies.
They went down to the _Herald_ office that night, and after I had waited
an hour or so, I had the satisfaction of hearing that all three of my
pupils had been accepted. It was agreed that each of them was to give me
half his salary, and so I had a fair show of earning a man and a half’s
wages as President of the Great Bauer Syndicate.
At one o’clock the next afternoon I sat down in Coffee John’s and waited
for my subordinates to report. As each man came in I gave him minute
instructions as to the best possible way of obtaining his information.
There was not a trick in the trade I didn’t know, and I had never been
beaten by any paper in town. I had succeeded in obtaining interviews at
two in the morning from persons avowedly hostile to my sheet, I had got
photographs nobody else could get, and I had made railroad officials
talk after an accident. Without conceit, I may claim to be a practical
psychologist, and where most men know only one way of getting what they
want, I know four. My men had little excuse for failing to obtain their
stories, and they walked out of Coffee John’s like automata that I had
wound up for three hours.
They returned between four and five o’clock, gave me the information
they had secured, and, while they reported to the city editor, received
instructions as to writing the story, and got their evening’s
assignment, I wrote the articles at railroad speed. I could tell as well
as any city editor how much space the stories were worth, and wrote the
head-lines accordingly—for in the _Herald_ office every reporter was his
own head-line writer.
If by any chance the editor’s judgment were not the same as mine, it
took but a few minutes to cut the thing down or pad it to any length,
and my men took the copy back before they went out on the next detail.
Meanwhile, I had given them their new directions, and, when they turned
up, toward ten and eleven at night, I had the whole batch of writing to
do again. It was a terrific pace for any one man to keep up, and I doubt
if anyone else in San Francisco could have kept three busy and turned
out first-class work.
This went on for fifteen days, during which time I made Coffee John’s
joint my headquarters. That was the only place where I could hope to
keep sober, working at such high pressure, for I didn’t dare trust
myself in a saloon, and I couldn’t afford to hire an office. The amount
of black coffee I consumed made me yellow for a year. Whether Coffee
John wondered what I was up to or not I never knew; at any rate he asked
no questions and made no objections.
The Great Bauer Syndicate went merrily, and the members, with the
exception of the president, earned their salaries easily enough. If the
job was especially difficult or delicate, I went out and got the story
myself. At the end of the first week we drew our pay and divided it
according to the agreement, but there were indications that my men
thought they were getting clever enough to handle the work alone. If it
hadn’t been that while I was waiting for them to come in I managed to
write several columns of “space,” faked and otherwise, that they could
turn in and get paid for without any work at all, I would have had
trouble in holding them down to their contracts. Except for this, the
prospects were bright for the prettiest little news syndicate that ever
fooled a city editor. We made a record for two weeks, and then came the
crash.
I had been as sober as a parson for fifteen long, weary days, beating my
record by twenty-four hours. I had drenched myself in black coffee, and
turned out copy like a linotype machine, keyed up to a tension so tight
that something had to give way. You can easily imagine what happened.
One Monday night, after the last batch of copy had been delivered, and I
had drawn down my second week’s pay, I relapsed into barbarism and cast
care to the winds for the nonce.
I started down the line, headed for Pete Dunn’s saloon at 1 A.M., with
thirty dollars in my pocket, and I found myself on Wednesday morning at
the Cliff House, with an unresponsive female, whom I was imploring to
call me “Sollie.” What had happened to me in the interim I never cared
to investigate. But the Great Bauer Syndicate was out of business.
It seems that my three subordinates showed up as usual on Tuesday
afternoon, and after waiting for me a while they attempted to cover
their assignments without my help. The insurance solicitor got all
twisted up, and never came back; the printer threw up his job when he
failed to find me on his return. But the book-agent had grown a bit
conceited by this time, and he thought he was as good as anybody in the
business. So he sat down and wrote out his story, and by what they say
about it, it must have been something rich enough to frame.
He had picked up a good many stock newspaper phrases, like “repaired to
the scene of the disaster,” and “a catastrophe was imminent,” and “the
last sad offices were rendered,” and “a life hung in the balance,” and
such rot, and he had a literary ambition that would have put the
valedictorian of a female seminary to the blush. He had an idea that my
work was crude and jerky, so he melted down a lot of ineffable poetical
bosh into paragraphs hot enough to set the columns afire. As for the
story, you couldn’t find it for the adjectives. He may have been a
wonder at selling “The Life of U. S. Grant,” but he couldn’t write
English for publication in a daily paper.
When he turned the stuff in, the city editor gave a look at it, put
about three swift questions to him, and the cat was out of the bag. It
took no time at all to sweat the story out of him, and they sent that
book-agent downstairs so quickly that he never came back.
The whole office went roaring over the way I’d done the paper, and the
first thing I knew I was sent for, and the managing editor told me that
if I’d take the Keeley cure for four months he’d give me the Sunday
editor’s place and forget the episode.
The time I put in at Los Gatos taking chloride of gold was the darkness
that preceded my financial dawn. When I graduated I hated the smell of
whiskey so much that I couldn’t eat an ordinary baker’s mince-pie. Six
months after that I was sent for by the New York _Gazette_, where I am
now drawing a salary that makes my life in San Francisco seem insipid.
* * * * *
Coffee John folded the document carefully and restored it to his pocket
with consideration. “Thet’s the wye ’e wrote it darn for me, an’ I’ve
read it every year since. Yer see, gents, Sol. Bauer ’avin’ gort the
idea I was, in a wye, the means of his restorashing to respeckability,
an’ by wye of memorisink them three bums, ’as myde a practice o’ sendin’
me a cheque an a small gift every year, with instrucshings to celebryte
the ’appy event by givin’ the best dinner money can buy to the fust
three blokes as turns up here after 8.30 on the thirteenth dye of
October, an’ I sye it’s ’andsome of ’im. Nar, I propose thet we all
drink ’is very good ’ealth again, after w’ich, them as is agreeable will
tell ’is own story for the mutual pleasure of the assembled company ’ere
present.”
The three men agreed, and filled their glasses to the grateful memory of
Solomon Bauer of the Great Bauer Syndicate.
CHAPTER II
JAMES WISWELL COFFIN 3D
“Nar, young man,” said Coffee John, pointing the stem of his pipe at the
lad in the red sweater, “seein’ we’ve all agreed to testify, s’pose yer
perceed to open the ball. You come in fust, an’ you talk fust. I ain’t
no fly cop, but it strikes me you’re a bit different from the rest of
us, though we’re all different enough, the Lord knows. Yer jacket fits
yer, an’ thet alone is enough to myke yer conspicus in this ’ere shop. I
see a good many men parss in an’ art from be’ind the carnter, but I
don’t see none too many o’ the likes o’ you. If I ain’t mistook, you’ll
be by wye o’ bein’ wot I might call a amatoor at this ’ere sort o’
livin’, an’ one as would find a joke w’erever ’e went. You’d larff at a
bloomin’ corpse, you would, and flirt with Queen Victoria. You’ll never
grow up, young fellar; I give yer thet stryte, before yer even open yer
marth.”
“But wot I cawn’t figger art,” he continued, “is w’y yer jumped at the
sight of a bunch o’ ord’n’ry yeller bananas. I’ve seen ’em eat with
their bloomin’ knives, an’ comb their w’iskers with their bloomin’
forks, but this ’ere is a new one on me, an’ it gets my gyme. I’m nar
ready to listen.”
“Even so!” said the youth. “Then I shall now proceed to let the
procession of thought wriggle, the band play, and the bug hop. The
suspense, I know, is something terrible, so I spare your anxiety.” And
with this fanfare he began to relate
THE STORY OF THE HARVARD FRESHMAN
When I received a cordial invitation from the Dean to leave Harvard the
second time—on that occasion it was for setting off ten alarm-clocks at
two-minute intervals in chapel—the governor flew off the handle. My fool
kid brother, that was to side-track the letter from the faculty, got
mixed on his signals, and the telegram that the old man sent back nearly
put the Cambridge office out of business. He said that I had foozled my
last drive, and, although a good cane is sometimes made out of a crooked
stick, he washed his hands of me, and would I please take notice that
the remittances were herewith discontinued.
I noticed. After I’d settled up and given my farewell dinner to the
Institute, where they were sorry to lose me because I was playing a
cyclone game on the Freshman Eleven, I had ninety-eight dollars, and
twelve hours to leave the college yard. Thinking it over, it struck me
that the keenest way for me to get my money’s worth was to go out and
take a sub-graduate course as a hobo—do the Wyckoff act, minus the
worker and the prayer-meetings. I wasn’t going to beg my meals—there was
where the pride of the Coffins stuck out—but I was willing to stand for
the rest—dust, rust, and cinders. As a dead-head tourist, ninety-eight
bones would feed me and sleep me for quite a space. I swung on at South
Boston for my first lesson in brake-beams, and, tumbled off mighty sick
at Worcester.
It’s a long tale, with hungry intervals, until I found myself in the
pound, at Peru, Illinois, for smashing a fresh brakeman and running up
against the constabulary. The police judge of that hustling little
Western centre is paid out of the fines that he collects. It is a
strange coincidence that when I was searched I had forty-seven, twenty,
on my person, and my fine for vagrancy and assault came to forty
dollars, with seven-twenty costs. The judge was a hard-shell deacon.
Next week, after I crawled out of the underground Pullman, at
Louisville, I was watching Senator Burke’s racing stables come in, and I
was hungry enough to digest a sand-car. It being work or beg, I says,
“Here’s where I break the ethics of my chosen profession and strike for
a job.” There was nothing doing until one of the hands mentioned, for a
joke, that a waiter was wanted for the dining-room where the nigger
jockeys ate. “It is only a matter of sentiment,” said I to myself, “and
my Massachusetts ancestors fit and bled and died to make freedmen out of
the sons of Ham. Here goes for a feed.” I took the place, collecting a
breakfast in advance, and threw chow for three meals at coloured
gentlemen who buried it with their knives. “If I am the prodigal son,”
says I to myself, “these are the swine, all right.”
There was a black exercise-boy in the bunch who played the prize
Berkshire hog. He was rather big for a man about the stables.
Superstition held that he could lick everything of his weight on earth,
and he acted as though he was a front-page feature in the _Police
Gazette_. During the fourth meal he got gay over my frank, untrammelled
way of passing soup. By way of repartee, I dropped the tray, tucked up
my apron, and cleared for action.
First, I wiped off one end of the table with him, the way the hired girl
handles crumbs. Then I hauled him out into the light of day, so as not
to muss the dining-room, and stood him up against the pump, and gave him
the Countercheck Quarrelsome. He was long on life and muscle, but short
on science, and he swung miles wide. After I’d ducked and countered two
attempts, he dropped his head all of a sudden. I saw what was coming. I
got out of range and let him butt, and when he came into my zone of fire
I gave him the knee good and proper. His face faded into a gaudy ruin.
The superintendent came down to restore order, and saw how merrily I
jousted. He was a bit strict, but he was a true Peruvian in some ways,
and he loved a scrapper. That night I got a hurry call to the office,
and walked away James Wiswell Coffin 3d, anointed assistant rubber.
After the season was over at Louisville, we pulled up stakes and hiked
on to Chicago, following the circuit. When we moved I was raised to
night-watchman—forty and found. Nothing happened until close to the end
of the season at Chicago, except that I ate regularly. Money was easy in
that part. Whenever I picked up any of it I looked around for good
things in the betting. Without springing myself any, I cleaned up a
little now and then, and when the big chance came I was $200 to the
good.
This is the way that Fate laid herself open, so that I could get in one
short-armed jab ere she countered hard. It was the night before a big
race, really more important to us than the Derby. Everyone around the
stables was bughouse with it. Before I went out on watch, the
superintendent—his name was Tatum, please remember that—lined me up and
told me that he’d have me garrotted, electrocuted, and crucified if
there was a hair so much as crossed on either of our entries. We had two
of them, Maduro and Maltese. The pair sold at six to five. Outside and
in, it looked as though the old man hadn’t had a cup nailed so hard for
years. The trainers were sleeping beside the ponies, but I was supposed
to look in every half hour to see how things were coming on. At midnight
Tatum came round and repeated his remarks, which riled me a bit, and
Maduro’s trainer said he would turn in for a little sleep.
The next call, for Heaven knows what nutty reason, I got back to
Maduro’s stall a quarter ahead of the hour. There was about a
teaspoonful of light coming through the cracks. I got an eye to a
knot-hole, and saw things happening. There was Maduro trussed like a
rib-roast, and trying to jump, and there was the trainer—“Honest Bob”
they used to call him—poking a lead-pencil up her nose. He said a swear
word and began to feel around in the mare’s nostril, and pulled out a
sponge. He squeezed it up tight and stuffed it back, and began to poke
again. That was the cue for my grand entry.
“Good-morning,” I said through the hole; “you’re sleeping bully.” I was
cutting and sarcastic, because I knew what was up. The sponge-game—stuff
it up a horse’s nose, and he can walk and get around the same as ever,
but when he tries to run, he’s a grampus.
He was too paralysed even to chuck the pencil. He stood there with his
hands down and his mouth open.
“Oh, hello,” he said, when his wind blew back. “I was just doctoring the
mare to make her sleep.” All this time I’d been opening the latch of the
door, and I slid into the corner.
“Oh, sure,” said I, displaying my gun so that it would be conspicuous,
but not obtrusive. “I suppose you’d like to have me send for Mr. Tatum.
He’d like to hold her little hoof and bend above her dreams,” says I.
“Oh, there’s no necessity for bothering him,” said “Honest Bob,” in a
kind of conciliatory way, and edging nearer to me all the time. I might
have been caught if I hadn’t noticed that his right hand was lifted just
a bit with the two first fingers spread. I learned that game with the
alphabet. You slide in on your man, telling him all the time that he is
your lootsy-toots, until you get your right in close, and then you shoot
that fork into both his lamps. He can neither see nor shoot nor hit
until his eyes clear out, which gives you time to do him properly.
“Honest Bob” was taking a long chance.
I guarded my eyes and shoved the gun in his face. I felt like Old Nick
Carter.
“How much do you want?” said he, all of a sudden.
“The honour of the Coffins never stoops to bribery,” said I; “but if
you’ll tell me what’s going to win to-morrow, I’ll talk business. If the
tip’s straight, I forget all about this job.”
“Early Rose,” he said.
“The devil you say!” said I. Early Rose was selling at twenty-five to
one. I gave it to him oblique and perpendicular that if his tip was
crooked I would peach and put him out of business for life. He swore
that he was in the know. For the rest of that night I omitted Maduro’s
stall and did some long-distance thinking.
I could see only one way out of it. Maduro loses sure, thinks I, and
whether it’s to be Early Rose or not, there’s an investigation coming
that involves little Jimmy 3d. What’s the matter with winning a pot of
money and then disappearing in a self-sacrificing spirit, so that
“Honest Bob” can lay it all to me? I was sick of the job, anyway.
What happened next day has passed into the history of the turf, but the
thing that wasn’t put into the papers was the fact that I was in on
Early Rose with one hundred and ninety plunks at twenty-five to one. He
staggered home at the head of a groggy bunch that wilted at the
three-quarters. I sloped for the ring and drew down $4,940. Just what
happened, and whether the nags were all doped or not, I don’t know to
this day, but there must be more in this horse-racing business than doth
appear to the casual débutante.
Two minutes after I left the bookies I was headed for the overland
train. Just as we pulled out, I looked back, proud like a lion, for a
last gloat at Chicago. There, on the platform, was that man Tatum, with
a gang from the stables, acting as though he were looking for someone.
In the front of the mob, shaking his fist and doing the virtuous in a
manner that shocked and wounded, was “Honest Bob.” I took the tip,
dropped off two stations down the line, doubled back on a local to a
child’s size Illinois town, and rusticated there three days.
I’d had time to think, and this was the way it looked: Where the broad
Pacific blends with the land of freedom and railway prospecti, the
Mistress of the Pacific dreams among her hills. Beneath her shades lie
two universities with building plans and endowments. It occurred to me
that I’d better make two packages of my money. One of nine hundred was
to get me out to San Francisco and show me the town in a manner
befitting my birth and station. The other was to transport me like a
dream through one of the aforesaid universities on a thousand a year,
showing the co-eds what football was like. With my diplomas and press
notices tucked under my arm, I would then report at the residence of
James Wiswell Coffin 2d, at South Framingham, and receive a father’s
blessing.
By the time I’d landed at this Midway Plaisance and bought a few rags,
the small package looked something like four hundred dollars. It was at
this stage of the game that I met the woman starring as the villainess
in this weird tale. We went out to the Emeryville track together. All of
my four hundred that I didn’t pay for incidentals I lost the first day
out.
But that makes no never mind, says I to myself; it’s easy to go through
a California university on seven-fifty per, and besides, a college
course ought to be three years instead of four. So I dipped into the big
pile. Let us drop the quick curtain. When it rises I am centre stage in
the Palace Hotel, ninety-dollar overcoats and pin-checked cutaways to
right and left, katzenjammer R. U. E., a week’s board-bill hovering in
the flies above me—and strapped. I gets up, puts my dress-suit into its
case, tucks in a sweater and a bunch of ties, tells the clerk that I am
going away for a day or so, and will leave my baggage until I can come
back and settle, and walks into the cold, wet world.
The dress-suit brought eight dollars. That fed me and slept me in a
little room on Third Street for a week. After dragging the ties through
every pawn-shop from Tar Flat to the Iron Works, I got a dollar for
them. They cost twenty. Next was the suit-case—two and a half. The third
day after that I had dropped the last cent, and was leaving my lodgings
two jumps ahead of the landlord, a great coarse Swede.
I hadn’t a thing but the clothes on my back. In a vacant basement of a
house on Folsom Street I found a front step invisible to the naked eye
of the cop on the beat. There I took lodgings. I got two meals by
trading my trousers for a cheaper pair and twenty cents to boot from the
Yiddish man in the shop above. When that was gone I roamed this grand
old city for four days and three nights, and never did such a vulgar
thing as eat. That’s no Child’s Dream of a Star.
The fourth day was a study in starvation. Dead serious, joshing aside,
that was about as happy a time as I ever put in. I forgot that I was
hungry, and up against the real thing. I saw myself like some other guy
that I had a line on, chasing about ’Frisco in that fix. I myself was
warm and comfortable, and having a dreamy sort of a time wandering
about.
I was strolling down Kearney Street, listening to the birds singing
through the haze, when something that wore scrambled whiskers and an
ash-barrel hat advised me to go down to Broadway wharf and take a chance
with the fruit bums. He steered me the proper course, and I smoked the
pipe along Broadway. There was the wharf all right, and there was a
whole cargo of bananas being lifted on a derrick and let down. Once in a
while one would drop. The crowd underneath would make a jump and fight
for it. I stood there wondering if I really wanted any bananas, or if it
was worth while to eat, seeing that I’d have to do it again, and was now
pretty well broken of the habit, when a big, scaly bunch got loose from
the stem and began to shake and shiver. I got under it and made a fair
catch, and went through the centre with it the way I used to go through
the Yale Freshmen line. There were seventeen bananas, and I ate them
all.
Next thing, I began to feel thirsty. So I marched up to that Coggswell
joke on Ben Franklin, somewhere in the dance-hall district, and
foundered myself with water. After that I crawled into a packing-box
back of a wood-yard, and for two days I was as sick as Ham, Shem, and
Japhet the second day out on the Ark.
When I got better I was hungry again. It was bananas or nothing. I found
them carting off the cargo, and managed to pick up quite a load in one
way or another. After dark I took up two piles and salted them down back
of my packing-box. Next day, pretty weak yet, I stayed at home and ate
bananas. When the new moon shone like a ripe banana-peel in the heavens
of the next night, I never wanted to see a banana as long as I lived.
Nathless, me lieges, they were all that I had. After breakfast next
morning, I shook my clothes out, hid the sweater, and put on my collar
to go downtown. On the way I couldn’t look at the bananas on the
fruit-stands. At the end of the line I bumped into a big yellow building
with arches on its front and a sign out:
“Football players please see Secretary.” I looked and saw that it was
the Y. M. C. A. “Aha,” says I, “maybe I dine.”
I sang a good spiel to the Secretary. They were getting up a
light-weight team and wanted talent. Thanking the gods that I was an end
instead of a centre, I spun him some dream about the Harlem Y. M. C. A.
He said report that afternoon. I went back, choked down ten bananas for
strength, and got out on the field in a borrowed suit. They lined up for
only five minutes, but that was time enough for me to show what I could
do.
I waited after the game to hear someone say training-table, and no one
peeped. I stood around, making myself agreeable, and they said come
around to the Wednesday socials, but no one asked me to say grace at his
humble board. By the time I had washed up and got back home to the
packing-box, I was the owner of such a fifty-horse-power hunger that I
simply _had_ to eat more bananas. I swore then and there that it was my
finish. Why, the taste of them was so strong that my tongue felt like a
banana-peel!
After dinner I piked back to the Y. M. C. A., seeing that it was my only
opening, and began to study the _Christian Advocate_ in the
reading-room. And the first thing that I saw was a tailor-made that
looked as though it had been ironed on her, and a pair of
coffee-coloured eyes as big as doughnuts.
As I rubbered at her over the paper I saw her try to open one of the
cases where they kept the silver cups. That was my cue. It wasn’t two
minutes before I was showing her around like a director. I taught her
some new facts about the Y. M. C. A., all right, all right. She was a
_Tribune_ woman doing a write-up, and she caught my game proper. We’d
got to the gym, and I was giving the place all the world’s indoor
athletic records, when she turned those lamps on me and said:
“You don’t belong here.”
“I don’t?” says I. “Don’t I strike you for as good a little Y. M. C.
A.’ser as there is in the business?”
She looked me over as though she were wondering if I was somebody’s
darling, and said in a serious way:
“My mother and I have supper at home. My brother’s just come on from the
East, and I’d like to have you meet him. Could you join us this
evening?”
Realising the transparency of that excuse for a lady-like poke-out, I
tried to get haughty and plead a previous engagement, but the taste of
bananas rose up in my mouth and made me half-witted. When we parted she
had me dated and doddering over the prospects. Then I raised my hand to
my chin and felt the stubble. “A shave is next in order,” says I. So I
stood at the door and scanned the horizon. Along comes the football
captain. If he was in the habit of shaving himself, I gambled that I
would dine with a clean face. I made myself as pleasant as possible.
Pretty soon he began to shift feet.
“Going down the street?” said I. “Well, I’ll walk along.” We got to his
lodgings. “Going in?” said I. “Well, I’d like to see your quarters,” and
I walked in. “Pretty rooms. That’s a nice safety razor you have there.
How do you strop it?” He showed me, kind of wondering, and I said,
“How’s your shaving-soap?” He brought it. “Looks good,” said I, heading
for the washstand. I jerked in a jet of cold water, mixed it up,
lathered my face, and began to shave, handing out chin-music all the
time about Social Settlement work. He said never a word. It was a case
of complete paralysis. When I had finished I begged to be excused. He
hadn’t even the strength to see me to the door.
Oh, the joy of walking to Jones Street, realising with every step that I
was going to have something to take the taste of bananas out of my
mouth! I got to playing wish with myself. I had just decided on a
tenderloin rare-to-medium, and Bass ale, when I bumped on her house and
the cordial welcome. It was one of those little box flats where the
dining-room opens by a folding-door off the living-room.
“Can you wait here just a minute?” said the girl with the doughnut orbs,
“I want you to meet my brother.”
She was gone longer than I expected. She was a thoroughbred to leave
such a hobo as me alone with the silver. It got so that I just had to
look at the scene of the festivities. It was here, all right, a genuine
Flemish quarter-sawed oak dining-table, all set, and me going to have my
first square meal for ten days. About that time I heard two voices in
the back of the house. One was the girl’s; the other was a baritone that
sounded mighty familiar. I explored farther, and the next clew was a
photograph on the mantel that lifted my hair out of its socket.
It was signed “Your loving brother, John,” and it was the picture of
John Tatum, the manager of Burke’s stables!
I saw my dinner dwindling in the distance. I saw myself breakfasting on
bananas, and says I, “Not on your hard luck.” I wouldn’t swipe the
silver, but, by all the gods of hunger, if there was a scrap to eat in
that dining-room I was going to have it. I ran through the sideboard;
nothing but salt, pepper, vinegar, and mustard. China closet; nothing
but dishes. There was only one more place in the whole room where grub
could be kept. That was a sort of ticket-window arrangement in the far
corner. Footsteps coming; “Last chance,” says I, and breaks for it like
a shot. I grabbed the handle and tore it open.
And there was a large, fine plate of rich, golden, mealy bananas!
CHAPTER III
PROFESSOR VANGO
“Yer was mixed up in a narsty piece o’ business,” said Coffee John,
after the Freshman had concluded his tale, “an’ it strikes me as yer
gort wot yer bloomin’ well desarved. I don’t rightly know w’ether yer
expect us to larff or to cry, but I’m inclined to fyver a grin w’erever
possible, as ’elpin’ the appetite an’ thereby bringin’ in tryde. So I
move we accept the kid’s apology for bein’ farnd in me shop, an’ perceed
with the festivities o’ the evenink. I see our friend ’ere with the long
finger-nails is itchin’ to enliven the debyte, an’ I’m afryde if we
don’t let ’im ’ave ’is sye art, ’e’ll bloomin’ well bust with it.”
He looked the thin, black-eyed stranger over calmly and judicially.
“You’ll be one as lives by ’is wits, an’ yet more from the lack of ’em
in other people, especially femyles,” the proprietor declared. “Yer one
o’ ten tharsand in this tarn as picks up easy money, if so be they’s no
questions arsked. But if I ain’t mistook, yer’ve come a cropper, an’ yer
ain’t much used to sweatin’ for yer salary. But that don’t explyne w’y
yer ’ad to tumble into this plyce like the devil was drivin’ yer, an’
put darn a swig o’ ’ot coffee to drarn yer conscience, like. Clay Street
wa’n’t afire, nor yet in no dynger o’ bein’ flooded, so I’m switched if
I twig yer gyme!”
“Well, I _have_ got a conscience,” began the stranger, “though I’m no
worse than many what make simulations to be better, and I never give
nobody nothin’ they didn’t want, and wasn’t willin’ to pay for, and why
shouldn’t I get it as well as any other party? Seein’ you don’t know any
of the parties, and with the understandin’ that all I say is in
confidence between friends, professional like, I’ll tell you the
misfortunes that have overcame me.” So he began
THE STORY OF THE EX-MEDIUM
I am Professor Vango, trance, test, business, materialisin’,
sympathetic, harmonic, inspirational, and developin’ medium, and
independent slate-writer. Before I withdrew from the profession, them as
I had comforted and reunited said that I was by far the best in
existence. My tests was of the sort that gives satisfaction and
convinces even the most sceptical. My front parlor was thronged every
Sunday and Tuesday evenin’ with ladies, the most genteel and elegant,
and gentlemen.
When I really learned my powers, I was a palm and card reader. Madame
August, the psychic card-reader and Reno Seeress, give me the advice
that put me in communication. She done it after a joint readin’ we give
for the benefit of the Astral Seers’ Protective Union.
“Vango,” she says—I was usin’ the name “Vango” already; it struck me as
real tasty—“Vango,” she says, “you’re wastin’ your talents. These is the
days when men speak by inspiration. You got genius; but you ain’t no
palmist.”
“Why ain’t I?” I says, knowin’ all the time that they was somethin’
wrong; “don’t I talk as good as any?”
“You’re a genius,” says she, “and you lead where others follow; your
idea of tellin’ every woman that she can write stories if she tries is
one of the best ever conceived, but if you don’t mind me sayin’ it, as
one professional to another, it’s your face that’s wrong.”
“My face?” says I.
“Your face and your hands and your shape and the balance of your
physicality,” says she. “They want big eyes—brown is best, but blue will
do—and lots of looks and easy love-makin’ ways that you can hang a past
to, and I’m frank to say that you ain’t got ’em. You _have_ got platform
talents, and you’ll be a phenomena where you can’t get near enough to
’em to hold hands. Test seances is the future of this business. Take a
few developin’ sittin’s and you’ll see.”
For the time, disappointment and chagrin overcome me. Often and often
since, I have said that sorrow is a means of development for a party.
That’s where I learnt it. Next year I was holdin’ test seances in my own
room and makin’ spirit photographs with my pardner for ample
renumeration. Of course, I made my mistakes, but I can assert without
fear of successful contradiction that I brought true communication as
often as any of ’em.
Once I sized up a woman that wore black before I had asked the usual
questions—which is a risky thing to do, and no medium that values a
reputation will attempt it—and told her about her husband that had
passed out and give a message, and she led me on and wrote me up for
them very papers that I was advertisin’ in and almost ruined my
prospecks. You get such scoffers all the time, only later on you learn
to look out and give ’em rebukes from the spirits. It ain’t no use
tryin’ to get ahead of us, as I used to tell the people at my seances
that thought I was a collusion, because they’ve only got theirselves;
but we’ve got ourselves and the spirits besides.
It wasn’t long in the course of eventualities before I was ordained by
the Spirit Psychic Truth Society, and elected secretary of the union,
and gettin’ my percentages from test and trance meetin’s at Pythian
Hall. I was popular with the professionals, which pays, because mediums
as a class is a little nervous, and—not to speak slanderous of a
profession that contains some of the most gifted scientists—a set of
knockers.
Only I wasn’t satisfied. I was ambitious in them days, and I wanted to
make my debut in materialisin’, which takes a hall of your own and a
apparatus and a special circle for the front row, but pays heavy on the
investment. Try every way I could, with developin’ circles and private
readin’s and palms extra, I could never amass the funds for one
first-class spirit and a cabinet, which ought to be enough to start on.
Then one night—it was a grand psychic reunion and reception to our
visitin’ brothers from Portland—_She_ come to the circle.
Our publication—I united with my other functionaries that of assistant
editor of _Unseen Hands_—stigmatised it afterward as the grandest
demonstration of hidden forces ever seen on this hemisphere. It was the
climax to my career. I was communicatin’ beautiful, and fortune favoured
my endeavours. When I pumped ’em, they let me see that which they had
concealed, and when I guessed I guessed with amazin’ accuracy. I told a
Swede all about his sweetheart on the other plane, and the colour of her
hair, and how happy she was, and how it was comin’ out all right, and
hazarded that her name was Tina, and guessed right the first trial. I
recollect I was tellin’ him he was a physie, and didn’t he sometimes
feel a influence he couldn’t account for, and hadn’t he ever tried to
establish communication with them on the spirit plane, and all he needed
was a few developin’ sittin’s—doin’ it neat an’ professional, you know,
and all of the other mediums on the platform acquiescin’—when a woman
spoke up from the back of the room. That was the first time that ever I
seen her.
She was a middle-sized, fairish sort of a woman, in mournin’, which I
hadn’t comprehended, or I’d ’a’ found the article that she sent up for
me to test her influence, long before. As soon as she spoke, I knew
she’d come to be comforted. She was a tidy sort of a woman, and her eyes
was dark, sort of between a brown and a black. Her shape was nice and
neat, and she had a straightish sort of a nose, with a curve into it.
She was dead easy. I seen that she had rings on her fingers and was
dressed real tasty, and right there it come to me, just like my control
sent it, that a way was openin’ for me to get my cabinet and a stock of
spirits.
“Will you please read my article?” she says. Bein’ against the æsthetics
of the profession to let a party guide you like that, Mrs. Schreiber,
the Egyptian astral medium, was for rebukin’ her. I superposed, because
I seen my cabinet growin’.
“I was strongly drawed to the token in question,” I says, and then Mrs.
Schreiber, who was there to watch who sent up what, motioned me to a
locket on the table.
“When I come into the room, I seen this party with a sweet influence
hoverin’ over her. Ain’t it a little child?” Because by that time I had
her sized up.
I seen her eyes jump the way they always do when you’re guided right,
and I knowed I’d touched the achin’ spot. While I was tellin’ her about
my control and the beautiful light that was hoverin’ over her, I palmed
and opened the locket. I got the picture out—they’re all alike, them
lockets—and behind it was a curl of gold hair and the name “Lillian.” I
got the locket back on the table, and the spirits guided me to it for
her test. When I told her that the spirit callin’ for her was happy in
that brighter sphere and sent her a kiss, and had golden hair, and was
called “Lillian” in the flesh plane, she was more overcame than I ever
seen a party at a seance. I told her she was a medium. I could tell it
by the beautiful dreams she had sometimes.
Right here, Mrs. Schreiber shook her head, indicatin’ that I was
travellin’ in a dangerous direction. Developin’ sittin’s is saved for
parties when you can’t approach ’em on the departed dear ones. In cases
like the one under consideration, the most logical course, you
comprehend, is to give private test sittin’s. But I knowed what I was
doin’. I told her I could feel a marvellous power radiate from her, and
her beautiful dreams was convincin’ proof. She expressed a partiality to
be developed.
When I got her alone in the sittin’, holdin’ her hand and gettin’ her to
concentrate on my eyes, she made manifest her inmost thoughts. She was a
widow runnin’ a lodgin’-house. Makin’ a inference from her remarks, I
seen that she hadn’t no money laid by, but only what she earned from her
boarders. The instalment plan was better than nothin’. She seized on the
idea that I could bring Lillian back if I had proper conditions to work
with. In four busy weeks, I was enabled by her magnanimity to open a
materialisin’ circle of my own, with a cabinet and a self-playin’ guitar
and four good spirit forms. I procured the cabinet second-hand, which
was better, because the joints worked easier, and I sent for the spirits
all the way to a Chicago dealer to get the best. They had luminous forms
and non-duplicated faces, that convinced even the most sceptical. The
firm very liberally throwed in a slate trick for dark cabinets and the
Fox Sisters’ rappin’ table.
I took one of them luminous forms, the littlest one, and fixed it with
golden curls painted phosphorescent. Mrs. Schreiber and the rest, all
glad to be partakers in my good fortune, was hired to come on the front
seats and join hands with each other across the aisle whenever one of
the spirits materialised too far forward toward the audience. We
advertised heavy, and the followin’ Sunday evenin’ had the gratification
to greet a numerous and cultured assemblage. I was proud and happy,
because steppin’ from plain test control to materialisin’ is a great
rise for any medium.
Mrs. Higgins—that was her name, Mrs. Clarissa Higgins—come early all
alone. I might ’a’ brought Lillian right away, only that would be
inelegant. First we sang, “Show Your Faces,” to get the proper psychie
current of mutuality. Etherealisin’ and a few tunes on a floatin’ guitar
was next. When my control reassured itself, I knowed that the time had
came, and let out the first spirit. A member of the Spirit Truth Society
on the front seat recognised it for a dear one, and carried on real
realistic and natural. I let it vanish. The next one was Little Hookah,
the spirit of the Egyptian dancer, that used to regale the Pharaohs in
the depths of the Ghizeh pyramid. I touched off a music-box to accompany
her for a skirt-dance with her robes. I done that all myself; it was a
little invention of my own, and was recognised with universal
approbation.
That was the time for Lillian to manifest herself, and I done it
artistic. First she rapped and conversed with me in the spirit whisper
back of the curtains. You could hear Mrs. Higgins in the audience
drawin’ in her breath sort of awesome.
I says for the spirit, in a little pipin’ voice, “Tell mamma not to
mourn, because her lamentations hinders my materialisation. The birds is
singin’, and it is, oh, so beautiful on this shore.”
Then commandin’ the believers on the front seats to join hands in a
circle of mutuality, in order to assist the sister on the other shore to
put on the astral symbols of the flesh, I materialised her nice and easy
and gradual.
We was prepared for demonstrations on the part of Mrs. Higgins, so when
she advanced I began to let it vanish, and the psychie circle of clasped
hands stopped her while I done the job up good and complete. She lost
conscientiousness on the shoulder of Mrs. Schreiber.
Not borin’ you, gentlemen, with the details of my career, my business
and religious relations with Mrs. Higgins was the beginnin’ of my
success. Myself and the little circle of believers—that guarded the
front seats from the protrusions of sceptical parties that come to
scoff, and not infrequent come up as earnest inquirers after my control
had passed—we lived easy on the proceeds.
Mrs. Higgins would bring tears to your eyes, she was that grateful. She
repaired the place for me so it was the envy of the unsuccessful in the
profession. She had it fixed with stucco like a grotto, and wax calla
lilies and mottoes and beautiful spirit paintin’s (Mrs. Schreiber done
them out of the air while she was under control—a hundred dollars apiece
she charged), and nice curtains over the cabinet, embroidered in snakes’
eyes inside of triangles and discobuluses. Mrs. Higgins capitalised the
expense. Whenever we done poor business, we originated some new
manifestations for Mrs. Higgins. She received ample renumeration. She
seen Lillian every Tuesday and Sunday. Very semi-occasionally, when the
planetary conditions favoured complete manifestation, I used to let her
hug Lillian and talk to her. That was a tremendous strain, involvin’ the
use of ice to produce the proper degree of grave cold, and my blood
nearly conglomerated whenever circumstances rendered it advisable.
All human relationships draws to a close in time. After seven years of
the most ideal communications between myself and Mrs. Higgins and the
rest of the Psychic Truth Society, they came a time one evenin’ when I
seen she was missin’. Next day, we received a message that she was
undisposed. We sent Madam La Farge, the medical clairvoyant, to give her
treatment, and word come back that them designin’ relatives, that always
haunt the last hours of the passin’ spirit with mercenary entreaties,
had complete domination over her person. I visited to console her
myself, and was rebuked with insinuations that was a insult to my
callin’. The next day we learned that she had passed out. We was not
even admitted to participate in the funeral obsequies.
The first Sunday that she was in the spirit Mrs. Schreiber was all for
materialisin’ her. I favoured omittin’ her, thinkin’ it would be more
fittin’, you understand, and more genteel. But we had some very wealthy
sceptics in the circle we was tryin’ to convince, and Mrs. Schreiber
said they’d expect it. Against my better counsels, seein’ that Mrs.
Higgins was a mighty fine woman and give me my start, and I got a
partiality for her, I took down my best spirit form and broadened it
some, because Mrs. Higgins had got fleshy before she passed out.
After Little Hookah done her regular dance that Sunday night, I got the
hymn started, and announcin’ that the spirit that rapped was a dear one
known to ’em all, I pulled out the new form that I had just fixed, and
waited for the tap on the cabinet to show that all was ready. I didn’t
like to do it. I felt funny, like something would go wrong. But I pulled
the string, and then—O God!—there—in the other corner of the cabinet—was
Mrs. Higgins—Mrs. Higgins holdin’ her arm across the curtains and just
lookin’ at me like her eyes was tearin’ through me!
They seen somethin’ was wrong, and Mrs. Schreiber got the robe away
before they found me—they said my control was too strong—and some said I
was drunk. I did get drunk, too, crazy drunk, next day—and when I come
round Mrs. Schreiber tried to do cabinet work with me on the front
seat—and there I seen _her_—in her corner—just like she used to sit—and
I never went back.
But a man has got to eat, and when my money was gone, and I wasn’t so
scared as I was at first, I tried to do test seances, sayin’ to myself
maybe she wouldn’t mind that—and the first article I took up, there she
was in the second row, holdin’—oh, I couldn’t get away of it—holdin’ a
locket just like she done the first night I seen her.
Then I knew I’d have to quit, and I hid from the circle—they wanted me
because Mrs. Schreiber couldn’t make it go. I slept in the Salvation
Army shelter, so as not to be alone, and she let me be for a while.
But to-day I seen a party in the street that I used to give tests to,
and he said he’d give me two bits to tell him about his mine—and I was
so broke and hungry, I give it a trial and—there _She_ was—in the shadow
by the bootblack awnin’—just lookin’ and lookin’!
* * * * *
The little medium broke off with a tremor that made the glasses shake.
CHAPTER IV
ADMEH DRAKE
“I expeck yer cut off yer own nose, all right,” said Coffee John. “If
the sperits of the dead do return, an’ I was to come along with ’em, it
seems to me I’d plye Mrs. ’Iggin’s gyme, an’ run abart a million o’
shyster ghost-raisers art o’ business in this city. I see their notices
in the dyly pypers, an’ it feerly mykes a man sick. The more you show
’em up, the more the people come to be gulled. ’Uman nychur is certingly
rum. Lord love yer, I’ve been to ’em, an’ I’ve been told my nyme was
Peter, wa’nt it? an’ if not Peter, Hennery; an’ didn’t I ’ave a
gryte-gran’father wot died? So I did, an’ I’m jolly glad ’e ain’t lived
to be a hundred an’ forty neither! W’y is it thet the sperit of a decent
Gawd-fearink woman wants to get familiar with a bloke wot wipes ’is nose
on ’is arm-sleeve an’ chews terbacker? It’s agin reason an’ nature, an’
I don’t go a cent on it. It’s enough to myke a man commit murder coupled
with improper lengwidge!”
He turned to the third man, who had made no comments on the stories.
“You’re one as ’as loved an’ lost,” he said. “Yer look like one as is a
lion with men an’ a bloomin’ mouse with women. You don’t cyre w’ether
school keeps or not, you don’t, an’ I’m wonderin’ why. I don’t just like
yer turnin’ yer back on Dewey, though plenty o’ Spanishers ’ave felt the
syme wye. Yer gort a fist as could grip a gun-stock, an’ an eye wot
ain’t afryde to look a man in the fyce, if yer do keep ’em behind specs.
If yer can give a good reason for turnin’ Dewey to the wall, nar’s the
charnce!”
The man with glasses had not winced at the plain language, nor
apologised as the medium had done. He looked up and said:
“All right, pardner, if you’ll stand for it, I’ll tell you the truth,
right out.” And with this he began
THE STORY OF THE HERO OF PAGO BRIDGE
My name is Admeh Drake. Mine ain’t a story-book yarn like yours,
pardner, or a tale of spooks and phantoms, like yours. You can get away
from ghosts when there’s other people around or it’s daylight, but
there’s some things that you can’t get away from in a thousand years,
daylight or dark.
A fellow that I knew from the PL outfit loaned me a story-book once by
“The Duchess,” that said something like this, only in story-book
language:
“A woman is the start and finish of all our troubles.”
I always remembered that. It was a right nice idea. Many and many’s the
time that, thinking over my troubles and what brought me to this elegant
feed—say, I could drink a washtub full of that new-fangled coffee—I’ve
remembered those sentiments. Susie Latham, that is the finest lady in
the White River country, she was the start and finish of my troubles.
Ever since we were both old enough to chew hay, Susie and I travelled as
a team. The first time that ever I shone in society, I did it with Susie
by my side. It was right good of her to go with me, seeing that I was
only bound-boy to old man Mullins, who brought me up and educated me,
and Susie’s father kept a store. But then we were too little to care
about such things, me being eleven and Susie nine. It was the mum social
of the First Baptist Church that I took her to. You know the sort? When
the boss Sunday-school man gives the signal, you clap the stopper on
your jaw-tackle and get fined a cent a word if you peep. Susie knew well
enough that I had only five cents left after I got in, so what does she
do but go out and sit on the porch while the talk is turned off, so that
she wouldn’t put me in the hole. When they passed the grab-bag, I blew
in the nickel. I got a kid brass ring with a red glass front and gave it
to her. I said that it was for us to get married when we grew up.
“Why, Admeh Drake, I like your gall,” she said, but she took it just the
same. After that, Susie was my best girl, and I was her beau. I licked
every fellow that said she wasn’t pretty, and she stuck out her tongue
to every girl that tried to joke me because I was old Mullins’s
bound-boy. We graduated from Striped Rock Union High-school together.
That was where I spent the happy hours running wild among the flowers in
my boyhood’s happy home down on the farm. After that, she went to
teaching school, and I struck first principles and punched cattle down
on old Mullins’s XQX ranch. Says I to myself, I’ll have an interest here
myself some time, and then married I’ll be to Susie if she’ll but name
the day. I had only six months before I was to be out of bound to old
Mullins.
Being a darn-fool kid, I let it go at that, and wrote to her once in a
while and got busy learning to punch cattle. Lord love you, I didn’t
have much to learn, because I was raised in the saddle. There were none
of them better than me if I did have a High-School education. My eyes
had gone bad along back while I was in the High-school, calling for
spectacles. When I first rode in gig-lamps, they used to josh me, but
when I got good with the rope and shot off-hand with the best and took
first prize for busting broncos Fourth of July at Range City, they
called me the “Four-eyed Cow-puncher,” and I was real proud of it. I
wish it was all the nickname I ever had. “The Hero of Pago Bridge”—I
wish to God——
The XQX is seventy miles down the river from Striped Rock. Seventy miles
ain’t such a distance in Colorado, only I never went back for pretty
near two years and a half. Then, one Christmas when we were riding
fences—keeping the line up against the snow, and running the cattle back
if they broke the wires and got across—I got to thinking of the holiday
dances at Striped Rock, and says I: “Here’s for a Christmas as near home
as I can get, and a sight of Susie.”
The boss let me off, and I made it in on Christmas Eve. The dance was
going on down at Foresters’ Hall. I fixed up and took it in.
And there she was—I didn’t know her for the start she’d got. Her
hair—that she used to wear in two molassesy-coloured braids hanging down
her back, and shining in the sun the way candy shines when you pull
it—was done up all over her head. She was all pinky and whitey in the
face the way she used to be when she was a little girl. She had on a
sort of pink dress, mighty pretty, with green wassets down the front and
a green dingbat around the bottom, and long—not the way it was when I
saw her before. She was rushed to the corner with every geezer in the
place piled in front of her. I broke into the bunch. Everybody seemed to
see me except Susie. She treated me like any other maverick in the herd.
She hadn’t even a dance left for me. Once, in “Old Dan Tucker,” she
called me out, but she’d called out every other tarantula in the White
River country, so there was no hope in that. If ever a man didn’t know
where he was at, I was the candidate.
All that winter, riding the fence, I thought and thought. I’d been so
dead sure of her that I was letting her go. Here was the principal of
the High-school, and young Mullins that worked in the Rancher’s Bank,
and Biles that owned stock in the P L, all after her, like broncos after
a marked steer, and I was only the “Four-eyed Cow-puncher,” thirty
dollars and found. And I got bluer than the light on the snow. And then
says I to myself, if she ain’t married when spring melts, by the Lord,
I’ll have her.
I’m one of those that ain’t forgetting the sixteenth of February, 1898.
Storm over, and me mighty glad of it. Snow all around, except where the
line of fence-rails peeked through, and the sun just blinding. I on the
bronco breaking through the crust, feeling mighty good both of us. Down
in a little _arroyo_, where a creek ran in summer, was the end of my
run. Away off in the snow, I saw Billy Taylor, my side-partner, waving
his hand like he was excited. I pounded my mule on the back.
“The Maine’s blown up,” he yells. “The Maine’s blown up!”
“The what?” says I, not understanding.
“The Maine—Havana Harbour—war sure!” he says. I tumbled off in the snow
while he chucked me down a bunch of Denver papers. There it was. I went
as _loco_ as Billy. Before I got back to camp, I had it all figured
out—what I ought to do. I got to the foreman before noon and drew my
pay, and left him cussing. Lickety-split, the cayuse—he was mine—got me
to the station. I figured that the National Guard would be the first to
go, and I figured right. So I telegraphed to old Captain Fletcher of
Company N at Range City: “Have you got room for me?” And he answered me,
knowing just how I stood on the ranches, “Yes. Can you raise me twenty
men to fill my company?” He didn’t need to ask for men; there were
plenty of them anxious enough to go, but he did need the sort of men I’d
get him. Snow be darned, I rode for four days signing up twenty
hellaroos that would leave the Rough Riders standing. Into Range City I
hustled them. There we waited on the town, doing nothing but live on our
back pay and drill while we waited, nineteen for glory and Spanish
blood, and me for glory and the girl.
Congress got a move on at last, though we thought it never would, and
the Colorado National Guard was accepted, enlisting as a body. When we
were in camp together and the medical inspector went around thumping
chests, the captain gave him a little song about my eyes. “He can’t see
without his glasses,” says Captain Fletcher, “but he can shoot all right
with them on. And he raised my extra men, and he’s a soldier.”
The doctor says, “Well, I’m getting forgetful in my age, and maybe I’ll
forget the eye-test.” Which he did as he said.
After that was Dewey and Manila Bay, and the news that the Colorado
Volunteers were going to be sent to the Philippines, which everybody had
studied about in the geography but nobody remembered, except that they
were full of Spaniards just dying to be lambasted.
We got going at last, muster at Denver, and they gave us a Sunday off to
see our folks. You better believe I took an early train for Striped
Rock—and Susie. A hundred and five miles it was, and the trains running
so that I had just two hours and twenty-five minutes in the place.
Susie wasn’t at home, nor any of the Lathams. They were all in church at
the Baptist meetinghouse where I gave her the grab-bag ring for kid fun.
I went over there and peeked in the door. A new sky-pilot was in the
pulpit, just turned loose on his remarks. Sizing him up, I saw that he
was a stem-winding, quarter-hour striking, eight-day talker that would
swell up and bust if he wasn’t allowed to run down. In the third row, I
saw Susie’s hair. There I’d come a hundred miles and more to say good-by
to her, and only two hours to spare; and there that preacher was taking
my time, the time that I’d enlisted to fight three years for. It was
against nature, so I signalled to the usher and told him that Miss Susie
Latham was wanted at home on important business.
The usher was one of the people that are born clumsy. The darn fool,
instead of going up and prodding her shoulder and getting her out sort
of quiet, went up and told the regular exhorter who was sitting up on
the platform; and the regular, instead of putting him on, told the
visiting preacher. The old geezer was deaf.
“How thankful we should be, my brethren, that this hopeless eternity—”
he was saying, when the regular parson broke out of his high-back chair
and tapped him on the broadcloth and began to whisper.
“Hey?” says the stranger.
“Miss Susie Latham,” says the regular preacher, between a whisper and a
holler.
“What about her?”
“Wanted at home,” so that you could hear him all through the church.
“Oh!” says the parson. “Brothers and sisters, I am requested to announce
that Miss Susie Latham is wanted at home on important business—that this
hopeless eternity is set as a guide to our feet—” and all the rest of
the spiel. And me feeling as comfortable as a lost heifer in a
blizzard—forty kinds of a fool.
She came down the aisle, looking red and white by turns, with all the
people necking her way. Before I’d got time to explain why I did it, her
mother got nervous, thinking there must be some trouble, and came
trailing out after her. Then her kid sister couldn’t stand the strain,
and followed suit.
That family reunion on the porch spoiled all the chance that I had to
see Susie alone, because when they heard why I came, and how I was going
to be Striped Rock’s hero, they were for giving me a Red Cross reception
then and there. Only two hours more until train time, and the old lady
had to rush me down to the house for lunch—and me with the rest of my
life to eat in!
But I shook her and the kid sister at last, and got Susie alone. I tried
to tell her—and I couldn’t. I could say that I was going to do my best
and maybe die for my country, and there I stalled and balked, her
looking the other way all pretty and pink, and giving me not a word
either way to bless myself with. Says I finally:
“And if I come back, I suppose that you’ll be married, Susie?” and she
says:
“No, I don’t think that I’ll be married when you come back; I don’t
think that I’ll ever marry unless he’s a man that I can be proud of.”
Then she looked at me, her big eyes filling—her big eyes, coloured like
the edge of the mountains after sunset. I’ve figured it out since that
she was more than half proud of me already—me, in a clean, blue suit,
and the buttons shiny; me, a ten-cent, camp volunteer. And then the old
woman broke in with a bottle of Eilman’s Embrocation for use in camp.
Never another chance had I that side of the station. Of course, she
kissed good-by, but that’s only politeness for soldiers. They all did
that. So, although it was just like heaven, I knew that it didn’t mean
anything particular from her, because her mother did it and her sister,
and pretty darned near every other girl in Striped Rock, seeing that the
news about having a real hero in town had spread.
Only, when we pulled away and I was leaning out of the window blowing
kisses, being afraid to blow at Susie in special because I didn’t like
to give myself away, she ran out of the crowd a ways and held up her
little finger to show me something over the knuckle, and pulled her hand
in quick as if nothing had happened. It was the play kid-ring that I
gave her out of the grab-bag, to show that I was going to marry her when
I grew up.
That was the last sight of Striped Rock that I got—Susie waving at the
station as far as I could see her. It made you feel queer to ride past
the fences and the bunch-grass and the foot-hills getting grayey-green
with sage-brush, and the mountains away off, all snowy on top, and know
that chances were you’d never see them again grayey. And I won’t, I
won’t—never again.
Muster at Denver, and the train, and away we went, packed like a herd
around salt, and the towns just black, like a steer in fly-time, with
people coming out to see us pass, and Red Cross lunches every time the
train had to stop for water; next ’Frisco and Camp Merritt. The first
time that I saw this town, gray all over like a sage-hill, made out of
crazy bay-window houses with fancy-work down the front, I knew that
something was going skewgee.
The night before we went up for our final medical examination by the
regular army surgeon, Captain Fletcher called me into his tent.
“Drake, how about your eyes?” says he.
I hadn’t thought of that, supposing that it could be fixed the same as
it was at Range City. I told him so, and he said it couldn’t, not with
the regular army surgeons. But says he:
“You’re a good soldier, and I got you to raise my reserves. They won’t
let you in if you can’t pass the eye-test, glasses or no glasses. If it
should happen that you learned a little formula that tallies with the
eye-card, you wouldn’t let on that I gave it to you, I suppose?”
“I’m good at forgetting,” I says.
“Burn it when you’ve learned it,” he says, and he gave me a paper with
long strings of letter on it. I learned it backward and forward, and so
on that I could begin in the middle and go both ways. I lay awake half
the night saying it over.
Naked as I was born, I floated in on the examiners for my physicals.
Lungs, as they make them in the cow-country; weight, first-class;
hearing, O. K. They whirled me and began to point. Taking a tight
squint—you see better that way—I ripped through the formula:
P V X C L M N H—I can see it yet. I could just see what line on the card
he was pointing at, and never a darned bit more.
They make that sort of a doctor in hell. He saw me squint—and he began
skipping from letter to letter all over the card. No use—I guessed and
guessed dead wrong. “Rejected!” just businesslike, as if it was a little
matter like a job on a hay-press. I went out and sat all naked on my
soldier-clothes—my soldier-clothes that I was never going to wear any
more—and covered up my head. It was the hardest jolt that I ever
got—except one.
Captain Fletcher hadn’t any pull; he couldn’t do anything. Some of the
twenty that I rounded into Range City talked about striking, they were
so mad, but that wouldn’t do any good. I watched them sworn in next day,
shuffling into the armory in new overall clothes. I stood around camp
and saw them drill. I saw them go down the streets to the
transport—flowers in their gun-barrels, wreaths on their hats, and the
people just whooping. I sneaked after them onto the transport, and there
I broke out and cussed the regular army and everything else. Old
Fletcher saw it. He wasn’t sore; he understood. But I wish I had killed
him before I let him do what he did next. He said:
“He can’t be with us, boys, and it ain’t his fault. But Striped Rock is
going to have its hero. I am going to be correspondent for the Striped
Rock _Leader_. If we have the luck to get into a fight, he’ll be the
hero in my piece in the paper, and the man that gives away the snap
ain’t square with Company N. Here’s three cheers for Admeh Drake, the
hero of Company N!” he said. When they pulled out, people were cheering
them and they cheering me. It heartened me up considerably, or else I
couldn’t have stood to see them sliding past Telegraph Hill into the
stream and me not there with them.
First, I was for writing to Susie and telling her all about it, but I
just couldn’t. I put it off, saying that I’d go back and tell her all
about it myself, and I went to mooning around camp like a ghost. And
then along came a copy of the _Leader_ that settled it. All about the
big feed that they gave the regiment at Honolulu, and how Admeh Drake
had responded for the men of Company N. Captain Fletcher was getting in
his deadly work. It said that I was justly popular, and my engagement to
one of Striped Rock’s fairest daughters was whispered. It treated me
like I was running for Congress on the _Leader_ ticket. I began to
wonder if I saw a way to Susie.
After they got to the Islands, I dragged the cascos through the surf and
rescued a squad of Company N from drowning. All that was in the
_Leader_. The night they scrapped in front of the town, I stood and
cheered on a detachment when they faltered before the foe. After they
got to Manila and did nothing but lay around, Captain Fletcher had me
rescue a man from a fire.
After that, I began to get next to myself, knowing that I’d have done
best to stop it at the start and go straight back to Striped Rock. I’d
been a darned fool to put it off so long. Now I could never go back and
face the joshing. I wrote the captain a letter about it, and he never
paid any attention. Instead of that, he sent me back a bunch of her
letters. Knowing how things stood, what I was doing and what she thought
that I was doing, I could hardly open them. They made me feel as small
as buckshot in a barrel. They hinted about being proud of me—and prayed
that I’d come home alive—and I knew, in spite of being ashamed, that I
had her.
Next thing, the natives got off the reservation. There’s where Captain
Fletcher went clean, plumb _loco_. One day the _Leader_ came out with
circus scare-heads about the “Hero of Pago Bridge.” They printed my
biography and a picture of me. It didn’t look like me, but it was a nice
picture. I’d broke through a withering fire and carried a Kansas
lieutenant across to safety after he had been helplessly wounded—and
never turned a hair.
What was I doing all that time? Laying pretty low. I was afraid to leave
town because I wanted to keep an eye on the _Leader_, which was coming
regularly to the Public Library, and afraid to get a regular daylight
job for fear that somebody from Striped Rock would come along and see
me. I was nearly busted when I ran onto old Doctor Morgan, the Indian
Root Specialist. He gave me a job as his outside man. All I had to do
was to hang around watching for sick-looking strays from the country.
You know the lay. I told them how Doctor Morgan had cured me of the same
lingering disease and how I was a well man, thanks to his secrets,
babying them along kind of easy until they went to the doctor. He did
the rest, and I collected twenty-five per cent.
Striped Rock acted as though I was the mayor. They named their new
boulevard Drake Way. Come Fourth of July, they set me up alongside of
Lincoln. They talked about running me for the Assembly. There came
another bunch of her letters—I had answered the last lot that Cap sent,
mailed them all the way to the Philippines, to be forwarded just to gain
time—they were heaven mixed with hell.
The regiment was coming back in a week, and then I began to think it
over and cuss myself harder than ever for a natural-born fool that
didn’t have enough sand to throw up the game at first and go home and
face the music. It was too late then, and I couldn’t go back to Striped
Rock and take all the glory that was coming to me and face Susie knowing
that I was a fake. Besides, I knew the boys from Range City were liable
to go up to Striped Rock any time and tell the whole story, and it froze
me, inside. I didn’t know what to do, but the first thing that I had on
hand was to catch them at the dock and tell them all that it meant to me
and get them to promise that they wouldn’t tell. Whether I’d dare to go
back and try to get Susie, I couldn’t even think.
I threw up my job with the doctor and went down to the transport office
to see just when they expected the boys. Little house on the dock;
little hole rooms that you could scarcely turn around in. They said that
the boss transport man was in the next room. I walked in.
There—face to face—was Susie—Susie, pinky and whitey, her eyes just
growing and growing. I couldn’t turn, I couldn’t run, I could just hang
tight onto the door-knob and study the floor. The transport man went out
and left us alone.
And she said:
“Admeh Drake, _what_ are you?”
My inwards, me saying nothing all the time, said that I was a fool and a
thief and a liar. I could have lied, told her that I came home ahead of
the regiment, if it had been anyone but Susie. But I told her the truth,
bellowed it out,—because my soul was burned paper.
“I came out to see you come back,” she said, and then:
“I thought that I could be proud of you.” Never another word she said,
and she never looked at me again, but she threw out her hand all of a
sudden and something dropped. It was the play kid-ring I gave her the
night that I wish I had died.
I tried to talk; I tried to hold the door; I might as well have tried to
talk to the wall. The last I saw of her, the last that ever I will see,
was her molassesy-gold hair going out of the big gate.
I spilled out over the transport man and—O God—how I cried! I ain’t
ashamed of it. You’d have cried, too. After that—I don’t know what I
did. I walked over a bigger patch of hell than any man ever did alone.
But the regiment’s come and gone and never found me, and I don’t know
why I ain’t dead along with my insides.
And they mustered out at Denver, and the boys split up and went home.
Company N went back to Range City—cottonwoods shedding along the creeks,
ranges all white on top, sagey smell off the foot-hills, people riding
and driving in from the ranches by hundreds to see them and cheer them
and feed them and hug them—but there wasn’t any hero for Striped Rock,
because he had bad eyes and was a darn fool—a darn fool!
CHAPTER V
THE DIMES OF COFFEE JOHN
“Well,” said the Harvard Freshman, after the last tale was told, “I’m
dead broke, and my brain seems to have gone out of business.”
“I’m broke, and my heart’s broke, too,” said the Hero of Pago Bridge.
“I’m broke, similar,” said the ex-medium, “and my nerves is a-sufferin’
from a severe disruption.”
Coffee John thumped his red fist upon the table.
“Bryce up, gents!” he exclaimed. “Remember there’s nothink in the ryce
but the finish, as the dark ’orse says, w’en ’e led ’em up to the wire!
They’s many a man ’as went broke in this ’ere tarn, an’ ’as lived to
build a four-story ’ouse in the Western Addition; an’ they’s plenty more
as will go broke afore the trams stop runnin’ on Market Street! This
’ere is a city o’ hextremes, you tyke me word for thet! It ain’t on’y
that Chinatarn is a stone’s throw from the haristocracy o’ Nob Hill, an’
they’s a corner grocery with a side entrance alongside of every Methody
chapel. It ain’t on’y that the gals here is prettier an’ homblier, an’
stryter an’ wickeder than anyw’eres else in Christendom, but things go
up an’ darn every other wye a man can nyme. It’s corffee an’ sinkers
to-dye an’ champyne an’ terrapin to-morrer for ’arf the people what hits
the village. They’s washwomen’s darters wot’s wearin’ of their dimonds
art on Pacific Avenoo, an’ they’s larst year’s millionaires wot’s livin’
in two rooms darn on Minnie Street. It’s the wye o’ life in a new
country, gents, but they’s plums a-gettin’ ripe yet, just the syme,
every bleedin’ dye, I give yer _my_ word! Good Lawd! Look at me, myself!
Lemme tell yer wot’s happened to me in my time!”
And with this philosophic introduction, Coffee John began
THE STORY OF BIG BECKY
When I fust struck this ’ere port, I was an yble seaman on the British
bark _Four Winds_ art o’ Iquique, with nitrytes, an’ I was abart as
green a lad as ever was plucked. When I drored the nine dollars that was
a-comin’ to me, I went ashore an’ took a look at the tarn, an’ I decided
right then that this was the plyce for me. So I calmly deserts the bark,
an’ I ain’t set me foot to a bloomin’ gang-plank from that dye to this,
syvin’ to tyke the ferry to Oakland.
Me money larsted abart four dyes. The bleedin’ sharks at the sylor
boardin’-’ouse charged five, a femile in a box at the “Golden West”
darnce-hall got awye with three more, an’ the rest was throwed into
drinks promiscus. The fourth dye in I ’adn’t a bloomin’ penny to me
nyme, an’ I was as wretched as a cow in a cherry-tree. After abart
twelve hours in “’Ell’s Arf-Acre” I drifted into a dive, darn on Pacific
Street, below Kearney, on the Barbary Coast, as _was_ the Barbary Coast
in them dyes! It was a well-known plyce then, an’ not like anythink else
wot ever done business that I ever seen, “Bottle Myer’s” it was; per’aps
yer may have heard of it? No?
Yer went in through a swing door with a brarss sign on, darn a ’allwye
as turned into a corner into a wider plyce w’ere the bar was, an’ beyond
that to a ’all that might ’ave ’eld, I should sye, some sixty men or
thereabart. The walls was pynted in a blue distemper, but for a matter
of a foot or so above the floor there was wot yer might call a dydo o’
terbacker juice, like a bloomin’ coat o’ brarn pynte. The ’all smelled
full strong o’ fresh spruce sawdust on the floor, an’ the rest was
whiffs o’ kerosene ile, an’ sylor’s shag terbacker an’ style beer, an’
the combination was jolly narsty! Every man ’ad ’is mug o’ beer on a
shelf in front of ’is bench, an’ the parndink of ’em after a song was
somethink awful. On a bit of a styge was a row of performers in farncy
dress like a nigger minstrel show, an’ a beery little bloke sat darn in
front, bangin’ a tin-pan pianner, reachin’ for ’is drink with one ’and
occysional, withart leavin’ off plyin’ with the other.
Well, after a guy ’ad sung “All through a lydy wot was false an’ fyre,”
an’ one o’ the ’ens ’ad cracked art “Darn the lyne to Myry,” or
somethink like that, Old Bottle Myer, ’e got up, with a ’ed like a
cannon-ball an’ cock eyes an’ eyebrars like bits o’ thatch, an’ a farncy
flannel shirt, an’ ’e says:
“If any gent present wants to sing a song, he can; an’ if ’e don’t want
to, ’e don’t ’ave to!”
Nar, I wa’n’t no singer myself, though I ’ad piped occysional, to me
mytes on shipboard, but I thought if I couldn’t do as well as them as
’ad myde us suffer, I ought to be jolly well ashymed o’ meself. Wot was
more to the point, I didn’t ’ave the price of a pot o’ beer to bless
myself with, an’ thinks I, this might be a charnst to pinch a bit of a
’aul. So I ups an’ walks darn to the styge, gives the bloke at the
pianner a tip on the chune, an’ starts off on old “Ben Bobstye.” They
was shellbacks in the audience quite numerous as I seen, an’ it done me
good to ’ear ’em parnd their mugs after I’d gort through. W’en I picked
up the abalone shell like the rest of ’em done, an’ parssed through the
’all, wot with dimes an’ two-bit pieces I ’ad considerable, an’ I was
natchurly prard o’ me luck.
Old Bottle Myer come up an’ says, “’Ow much did you myke, me friend?
Five fifteen, eh? Well, me charge will be on’y a dollar this time, but
if yer want to come rarnd to-morrow night, yer can. If yer do all right,
I’ll tyke yer on reg’lar.”
Well, I joined the comp’ny sure enough, an’ sung every night, pickin’ up
a feerly decent livin’ at the gyme, for it was boom times then, an’
money was easier to come by. I had me grub with all the other hartists
in a room they called the “Cabin,” darn below the styge, connected to a
side dressin’-room by a narrer styre. Nar, one o’ the lydies in the
comp’ny was the feature o’ the show, an’ she _were_ a bit out o’ the
ord’n’ry, I give you _my_ word!
She was a reg’lar whyle of a great big trouncin’ Jew woman as ever I
see. Twenty stone if she were an arnce, an’ all o’ six foot two, with
legs like a bloomin’ grand pianner w’en she put on a short petticoat to
do a comic song. She was billed as “Big Becky,” an’ by thet time she was
pretty well known abart tarn.
She ’ad started in business in San Francisco at the hextreme top o’ the
’Ebrew haristocracy of the Western Addition, ’avin ’parssed ’erself off
for a member o’ one o’ the swellest families o’ St. Louis, an’ she did
cut a jolly wide swath here, an’ no dart abart thet! She was myde
puffickly at ’ome everyw’eres, an’ flashed ’er sparklers an’ ’er silk
garns with the best o’ ’em. Lord, it must ’ave took yards o’ cloth to
cover ’er body! Well, she gort all the nobs into line, an’ ’ad
everythink ’er own wye for abart two months, as a reg’lar full-blowed
society favoryte. Day an’ night she ’ad a string o’ men after ’er, or
’er money, w’ich was quite two things, seein’ she ’ad to graft for every
penny she bloomin’ well ’ad.
W’ile she were at the top notch of the social w’irl, as you might sye,
along come another Jewess from the East, reckernized ’er, an’ spoils Big
Becky’s gyme, like a kiddie pricks a ’ole in a pink balloon. She was
showed up for a hadventuress, story-book style, wot ’ad ’oodwinked all
St. Louis a year back, an’ then ’er swell pals dropped awye from ’er
like she was a pest-’ouse. Them wot ’ad accepted ’er invites, an’ ’ad
’er to dinner an’ the theatre an’ wot-not, didn’t myke no bones abart
it—they just natchully broke an’ run. Then all sorts o’ stories come
art, ’ow she borrowed money ’ere, there an’ everyw’ere, put ’er nyme to
bad checks, an’ fleeced abart every bloomin’ ’Ebrew in tarn. She’d a bin
plyin’ it on the grand, an’ on the little bit too grand.
She was on trial for abart two dyes, an’ the city pypers was so full o’
the scandal that the swells she ’oodwinked ’ad to leave tarn till it
blew over, an’ San Francisco quit larfin at ’em. I give yer me word the
reporters did give art some precious rycy tyles, an’ every ’Ebrew wot
’ad ’ad Big Becky at a five o’clock tea didn’t dyre go art o’ doors
dye-times.
Well, for the syke o’ ’ushin’ matters up, her cyse were compromised an’
the prosecution withdrawed, she bein’ arsked in return to git art o’
tarn. Instead o’ thet, not ’avin’ any money, she went an’ accepted an
offer from a dime museum here, an’ begun fer to exhibit of ’erself in
short skirts every afternoon an’ evenink reg’lar, to the gryte an’ grand
delight of every chappie who ’adn’t been fooled ’imself. After that she
done “Mazeppa” at the Bella Union Theatre in a costume wot was
positively ’orrid. It was so rude that the police interfered, an’ thet
was back ten year ago, w’en they wa’n’t so partickler on the Barbary
Coast as they be naradyes. Then she dropped darn to Bottle Myer’s an’
did serios in tights. She was as funny as a bloomin’ helephant on
stilts, if so yer didn’t see the plyntive side of it, an’ we turned men
awye from the door every night.
I don’t expect Becky ever ’ad more’n a spoonful o’ conscience. But with
all ’er roguery, she was as big a baby inside as she were a giant
outside, w’en yer onct knew ’ow to tyke ’er, was Big Becky. ’Ard as
brarss she was w’en yer guyed ’er, but soft as butter w’en yer took ’er
part, w’ich were somethink as she weren’t much used to, for most treated
’er brutle. Some’ow I couldn’t help likin’ ’er a bit, in spite o’
meself. I put in a good deal o’ talk with ’er, one wye an’ another, till
I ’ad ’er confidence, an’ could get most anythink art of ’er I wanted.
She told me ’er whole story, bit by bit, an’ it were a reg’lar shillin’
shocker, I give yer _my_ word!
Amongst other things, she told me that a Johnnie in tarn nymed Ikey Behn
’ad gort precious balmy over ’er, before she was showed up, an’ ’ad went
so far as to tyke art a marriage license in ’opes, when she seen ’e
meant biz, she’d marry ’im. ’E’d even been bloomin’ arss enough to give
it to ’er, and she ’ad it yet, an’ was ’oldin’ it over ’is ’ed for
blackmyle, if wust come to wust. She proposed for to ’ave a parson’s
nyme forged into the marriage certificate that comes printed on the
other side from the license.
Nar, things bein’ like this, one night I come up the styre from the
“Cabin” w’ere I’d been lyte to dinner, an’ went into the room w’ere
Becky was a-gettin’ ready to dress for ’er turn. There was a toff there,
in a topper, an’ a long black coat, an’ ’e was havin’ it art, ’ot an’
’eavy, with Becky. Just as I come up, ’e broke it off, cursink ’er
something awful, an’ she was as red as a bleedin’ ’am, an’ shykin’ a
herthquyke with ’er ’air darn, an’ ’er breath comin’ like a smith’s
bellus. The gentleman slum the door, an’ she says to me, “’Ere, Jock,
old man, will yer do me a fyvor? Just ’old this purse o’ mine an’ keep
it good an’ syfe till I get through my song, for that’s Ikey Behn wot
just went art, an’ ’e’ll get my license sure, if I leave it abart. I
carn’t trust nobody in this ’ole but you. It’s in there,” an’ she showed
me the pyper, shovin’ the purse into me ’and. I left an’ went darn front
w’ile she put on ’er rig an’ done ’er turn.
Art in the bar, there was the toff, talkin’ to one o’ the wyters, an’ I
knew ’e was tryin’ to tip somebody to frisk Big Becky’s pockets. W’en I
come up, ’e says, “’Ow de do, me man? I sye, ’ave a glarss with me,
won’t yer? Wot’ll yer ’ave?”
I marked ’is gyme then an’ there, an’ I sat darn to see ’ow ’e’d act. ’E
done it ’andsome, ’e did; ’e was a thoroughbred, an’ no mistake abart
_thet_! ’E wan’t the bloke to drive a bargain like most would ’ave done
under the syme irritytin’ circumstances.
“See ’ere,” ’e says, affable, an’ ’e opens ’is wallet an’ tykes art a
pack o’ bills. “’Ere’s a tharsand in ’undred-dollar greenbacks. You get
me that pyper Big Becky’s got in ’er purse!”
There I was, sittin’ right in front of ’im, with the license in me
pocket, an’ there was a fortune in front o’ me as would ’ave set me up
in biz for the rest o’ me life. Wot’s more, if they’s anythink I do
admire, it’s a thoroughbred toff, for I was brought up to reckernize
clarss, an’ I seen at a wink that this ’ere Johnnie was a dead sport. I
knew wot it meant to ’im to get possession o’ thet pyper, for Becky
could myke it jolly ’ot for ’im with it. I confess, gents, thet for
abart ’alf a mo I hesityted. But I couldn’t go back on the woman, seem’
she ’ad trusted me partickler, an’ so I shook me ’ed mournful, an’
refused the wad.
’E was a bit darn in the mouth at thet, not lookin’ to run up agin such,
in a plyce like Bottle Myer’s, I expeck. “See ’ere, me man,” ’e says, “I
just _gort_ to ’ave thet pyper. I’ll tell yer wot, w’en I gort art thet
license, I swyre I thought the woman was stryte an’ all she pretended to
be. We was all of us took in. I wa’n’t after ’er money, I was plum balmy
on ’er, sure, an’ nar I’m engyged to the nicest little gal as ever
lived, an’ it’ll queer the whole thing if this ’ere foolishness gets
art!”
With my respeck for the haristocracy, I was jolly sorry for the chap,
but I wa’n’t a-goin’ to sell Becky art, not _thet_ wye. I wa’n’t no holy
Willie, but I stuck at that. So I arsked, “Wot’s the gal’s nyme?”
“That’s none of your biz,” says Behn, gettin’ ’ot in the scuppers, “an’
that little gyme won’t do yer no good, nohow, for the gal knows all
abart this matter, ’an yer can’t trip me up there. Not much. I’ll pye
yer all the docyment’s worth, if yer’ll get it for me.”
“Yer won’t get it art o’ Becky not at no price,” I says, “an’ yer won’t
get it art o’ me, unless yer answer my questing. If yer want me to
conduck this ’ere affyre, I got to know all abart it, an’ yer gal won’t
be put to no bother, neither.”
’E looked me over a bit, an’ then ’e says, low, so that nobody couldn’t
’ear, “It’s Miss Bertha Wolfstein.” Then ’e give me ’is address, ’an
left the matter for me to do wot I could.
I thought if anybody could work Becky, it would be me, an’ I expected
the gal’s nyme might come in ’andy, though I ’ad no idea then how strong
it would pull. So I goes up to the big woman after she was dressed, and
tykes ’er up to the “Poodle Dog” for supper. She ’ad gort over the worry
by this time, an’ was feelink as chipper as a brig in a west wind.
“Did ever yer ’ear tell of a Bertha Wolfstein?” I says, off-hand.
Then wot does she do but begins to bryke darn an’ blubber. “She was the
on’y one in tarn as come to see me after I was pulled,” she says. “I
done all kinds o’ fyvors for lots of ’em, but Miss Wolfstein was the
on’y one who ’ad called me friend, as ever remembered it. She was a
lydy, was Miss Wolfstein; she treated me angel w’ite, she did, Gawd
bless ’er pretty fyce!”
Then I knowed I ’ad ’er w’ere I wanted ’er, ’an I give it to ’er tender
an’ soft, with all the sugar an’ cream she could stand. I let art Ikey
Behn’s story, hinch by hinch, an’ I pynted the feelinks o’ thet Bertha
Wolfstein with all the tack I knew how, till I gort Becky on the run an’
she boohooed again, right art loud, an’ I see I ’ad win ’er over. My
word! she _did_ look a sight for spectytors after she’d wiped a ’arf
parnd o’ pynte off’n ’er fyce with ’er napkin, sobbink awye, like ’er
’eart was as soft as a slug in a mud-puddle. She parssed over the pyper
art of ’er purse an’ she says, “Yer can give it to Ikey an’ get the
money. I don’t want to ’urt a ’air o’ thet gal’s ’ead.”
Seein’ she was so easy worked, I thought it was on’y right I should be
pyde for me trouble, for it ’ad stood me somethink for a private room
an’ drinks an’ such to get her into proper condition.
So I says, “Thet’s all right, Becky, an’ it’s jolly ’andsome o’ yer to
be willin’ to let go of the docky-ment, but I’ll be blowed if I see ’ow
yer can tyke ’is money, w’en yer feel that wye. If yer sell art the
pyper, w’ere does the bloomin’ gratitude to the gal come in, anywye?”
At this, Becky looked all wyes for a Sunday, an’ I perceeded to rub it
in. “Nar, see here, Becky, w’ich would yer rather do—get five ’undred
dollars for the license from Ikey, or let Miss Wolfstein know yer’d made
a present of it to ’er, for wot she done to yer?”
That was a ’ard conundrum for a woman like that, who ’ad fleeced abart
every pal she ever ’ad, an’ the money was a snug bit for anybody who was
as ’ard up as she was then. I thought I’d mark the price darn a bit so’s
to myke the sacrifice easier for ’er. I didn’t dyre to trust her with a
offer of the tharsand Ikey ’ad flashed at me. Besides, I thought I see a
charnst to myke a bit meself withart lyin’. Sure enough, I ’ad read the
weather in ’er fyce all right, an’ she was gyme to lose five ’underd
just to sye “thank you,” as yer might sye. I farncy I’d found abart the
only spot in ’er ’eart as wa’n’t rotten.
“I guess I’d rather ’ave ’er know I ain’t quite so bad as they think,”
she says, an’ she gulluped an’ rubbed ’er eyes. “You go to Ikey, an’ you
tell ’im ’e’s a—” Well, I won’t sye wot she called ’im. “But Bertha
Wolfstein is the on’y lydy in tarn, an’ it’s on’y for ’er syke I’m
givin’ up the license.”
Then she kerflummuxed again, an’ if yer think I left her time to think
it over, yer don’t know old John. I took the pyper before the words was
feerly art of ’er marth, an’ in ’arf an’ ’our I was pullin’ Ikey Behn’s
door-bell. When ’e seen me, ’e grinned like a cat in a cream-jug, an’ ’e
arsked me into the li’bry like I was a rich uncle just ’ome from the
di’mond fields.
Nar, yer might think as I was a-goin’ to try to sell ’im the pyper on me
own account, leavin’ ’im to think that Becky was gettin’ the price of
it, an’ me a percentage. Not much I wa’n’t; not on yer blessed life! I
was too clever for thet! I’ve seen reel toffs before, an’ I knew Ikey
for best clarss when I piped ’im off. ’Ave yer ever watched the
bootblacks in Piccadilly Circus? D’yer think they has a trades-union
price for a shine? Nar! W’en a bleedin’ swell comes along an’ gits a
polish an’ arsks ’ow much, it’s “Wot yer please, sir,” an’ “I leave it
to you, sir,” an’ the blackie gits abart four times wot ’e’d a-dared to
arsk, specially if the toff’s a bit squeegee. That’s the on’y wye to
treat a gentleman born, an’ I knew it. So I tipped ’im off the stryte
story, leavin’ nothing art to speak of, an’ ’e listens affable. I ’ands
’im over the license at the end.
W’en ’e’d stuck the pyper in a candle ’andy, an’ ’ad lighted a big cigar
with it, offerink the syme an’ a drink to me, ’e says, as cool as a pig
before Christmas, says ’e, “Nar, me man, wot d’yer want for yer trouble?
Yer done me a fyvor, an’ no dart abart _thet_!”
“No trouble at all,” I says. “I’m proud to oblige such a perfeck
gentleman as you be,” an’ with that I picks up me ’at an’ walks toward
the door.
“Wyte a bit,” ’e says, “I’ll see if I ain’t gort a dollar on me,” an’ ’e
smiles cordial. But ’e watches me fyce sharp, too, as I seen in the
lookin-glarss. Then ’e goes to a writin’-desk an’ looks in a dror. “If
happen yer don’t want any o’ this yerself, yer can give it to Becky,” he
says, an’ ’e seals up a packet an’ gives it to me like ’e was the
bloomin’ Prince o’ Wyles. Sure, ’e _was_ toff, clean darn to ’is
boot-pegs, I give yer _my_ word!
When I gort out o’ doors an’ opened the packet, I near fynted awye. They
was a wad o’ hundreds as come to a cool four tharsand dollars. I walked
back on the bloomin’ hatmosphere!
I come into Bottle Myer’s, just as Big Becky was a-singin’ “Sweet
Vylets,” in a long w’ite baby rig an’ a bunnit as big as a ’ogshead.
Lord, old Myer _did_ myke a guy o’ thet woman somethink awful! W’en she
come off, I was wytin’ in the dressin’-room for ’er.
“My Lawd, Jock!” she says, w’en she seen me, “yer didn’t give up the
pyper, did yer? Yer knew I was on’y foolin’, didn’t yer? Don’t sye yer
let Ikey get a-hold of it! It was good for a hunderd to me any dye I
needed the money, if I wanted to give it to the pypers.”
Well, that myde me sick, though I’d expecked as much. I was thet
disgusted thet she couldn’t stand by ’er word for a hour, thet I
couldn’t ’elp syin’, “An’ ’ow abart Miss Wolfstein, as was a friend to
yer, w’en all the other women in tarn went back on yer, Becky? Yer know
wot _she’ll_ think of yer, don’t yer?”
Right then I seen abart as plucky a fight between good an’ bad worked
art on ’er fyce, as I ever seen in the ring, London Prize rules to a
finish. An’ if you’ll believe it, gents, the big woman’s gratitude to
the Wolfstein gal come art on top, an’ the stingy part of ’er was
knocked art flat.
It were a tough battle, though, I give yer _my_ word, before I got the
decision. She bit ’er lip till the blood come through the rouge,
standin’ there, a great whoopin’ big mounting o’ flesh with baby clothes
an’ a pink sash on, an’ a wig an’ bunnit like a bloomin’ Drury Lyne
Christmas Pantymime. I just stood an’ looked at ’er! I’m blowed if she
didn’t git almost pretty for ’alf a mo, w’en she says:
“I’m glad yer did give it up, Jock; I’m glad, nar it’s all over. But
thet five hundred would ’ave syved me life, for old Myer ’as give me the
sack to-dye, an’ I don’t know wot’ll become o’ me.”
Wot did I do? I done wot the dirtiest sneak in the Pen would a did, an’
’anded art the envelope an’ split the pile with ’er.
* * * * *
Coffee John fetched a deep sigh. “Well, gents, thet’s w’ere I got me
start. The wad didn’t larst long, for I was green an’ unused to money,
but I syved art enough to set me up here, an’ ’ere I am yet. I never
seen Big Becky sinct.
“Nar you see wot a man might ’appen to strike in a tarn like this. Every
bloomin’ dye they’s somebody up an’ somebody darn. I started withart a
penny, an’ I pulled art a small but helegant fortune in a week’s time.
So can any man.
“Gents, I give you this stryte: Life in San Francisco is a bloomin’
fayry tyle if a man knows ’is wye abart, an’ a bloke can bloomin’ well
blyme ’is own liver if ’e carn’t find a bit of everythink ’ere ’e wants,
from the Californy gal, w’ich is the noblest work o’ Gawd, to the
’Frisco flea, w’ich is a bleedin’ cousin to the Old Nick ’isself! They
ain’t no tarn like it, they ain’t never been none, an’ they ain’t never
goin’ to be. It ain’t got neither turf nor trees nor kebs, but it’s
bloody well gort a climate as mykes a man’s ’eart darnce in ’is bussum,
an’ cable-cars wot’ll tyke a guy uphill to ’eaven or rarnd the bloomin’
next corner to ’ell’s cellar! They’s every sin ’ere except ’ypocrisy,
for that ain’t needed, an’ they’s people wot would ’ave been synted if
they’d lived in ancient times.
“An’ nar, I want to egspress somethink of wot I thinks o’ you bums. As
fur as I can see every one o’ yer is a ’ard cyse, ’avin’ indulged in wot
yer might call questingable practices, withart yet bein’, so to speak,
of the criminal clarss. It don’t go to myke a man particklerly prard o’
’umanity to keep a dime restaurant; ’arrivver, ’Evving knows wot I’d do
if I couldn’t sometimes indulge in the bloomin’ glow of ’ope. Vango, I
allar you’ll be a bad ’un, and I don’t expeck to make a Sunday-school
superintendent o’ yer. Coffin uses such lengwidge as mykes a man wonder
if ’e ain’t a bleedin’ street fakir on a ’arf-’oliday, so I gives ’im up
frankly an’ freely an’ simply ’opes for the best. But you, Dryke, is
just a plyne ornery lad as ’as ’ad ’is eart broke, an’ you ’as me
sympathy, as a man with feelinks an’ a conscience.
“Nar, I’ll tell yer wot I’ll do. I’ll styke the three of yer a dime
apiece, an’ yer git art o’ ’ere with the firm intentions o’ gettin’ rich
honest. Mybe yer won’t myke it, an’ then again mybe yer will, but it’s a
good gamble an’ I’d like to have it tried art. Anywye, come back ’ere
to-morrow at nine, an’ ’ave dinner on me, ’an tell me all abart it. Wot
d’yer sye?”
It was a psychological moment. The proposition, fantastic as it was,
seemed, under the spell of Coffee John’s enthusiasm, to promise
something mysteriously new, something grotesquely romantic. It was a
chance to turn a new leaf. The three vagabonds were each stranded at a
turn of the tide. The medium, with his nerves unstrung, was only too
willing to cast on Fate the responsibility of the next move. The Harvard
Freshman, with no nerves at all, one might say, hailed the adventure as
a Quixotic quest that would be amusing to put to the hazard of chance.
The hero of Pago Bridge had little spirit left, but, like Vango, he
welcomed any fortuitous hint that would tell him which way to turn in
his misery. All three were well worked upon by the solace of the moment,
and a full stomach makes every man brave. Coffee John’s appeal went
home, and from the sordid little shop three beggars went forth as men.
One after the other accepted the lucky dime and fared into the night, to
pursue the firefly of Fortune.
In ten minutes the restaurant was dark and empty, and Coffee John was
snoring in a back room. Three Picaroons were busy at the Romance of
Roguery.
CHAPTER VI
THE HARVARD FRESHMAN’S ADVENTURE: THE FORTY PANATELAS
James Wiswell Coffin, 3d, was the first of the three adventurers to
leave the restaurant, and as he turned up Kearney Street he had a new
but fully fledged philosophy buzzing in his brain. Enlightenment had
come in a hint dropped by Coffee John himself. It took a Harvard man and
a Bostonian of Puritan stock to hatch that chick of thought, but, by the
time the coffee was finished, the mental egg broke and an idea burst
upon him. It was this:
“Facts show that good luck is stable for a while and is then followed by
a run of misfortune. The mathematical ideal of alternate favorable and
unfavorable combinations does not often occur. There is where the great
Law of Probabilities falls down hard. The curve of fortune is like a
wave. It should then be played heavily while it ascends, and lightly on
the decline. Mine is undoubtedly rising. Go to! I shall proceed to
gamble!”
But how gamble at midnight with a capital of but one dime? In no other
city in the world is it so easy as in San Francisco, that quaint
rendezvous of saloons and cigar stands. There the goddess Fortuna has a
shrine on every street corner and the offerings of her devotees produce
a rattle as characteristic of the town as the slap of the cable pulley
in the conduit of the car lines. The cigar slot-machine or
“hard-luck-box” is a nickel lottery played by good and bad alike; for it
has a reputation no shadier than the church-raffle or the juvenile
grab-bag, and is tolerated as a harmless safety-valve for the lust of
gaming. All the same, it is the perpetual ubiquitous delusion of the
amateur sportsman.
Gunschke’s cigar shop was still open as Coffin reached the corner of
Brush Street. He walked briskly inside the open sales-room (for a cigar
shop has but three walls in San Francisco’s gentle clime) and, with the
assurance of one who has just touched a humpback and the carelessness of
a millionaire, he exchanged Coffee John’s dime for two nickels, dropped
one down the slot of the machine on the counter and sprang the handle.
The five wheels of playing-cards whirled madly, then stopped, leaving a
poker-hand exposed behind the wire. He had caught a pair of kings, good
for a “bit” cigar.
Coffin was disappointed, and yet, after all, there was a slight gain in
the transaction. Investing five cents, he had won twelve and a half
cents’ worth of merchandise. It was not sufficiently marvellous to turn
his head, but his luck was evidently on the up-curve, though it was
rising slowly enough. He took the other nickel—his last—and jerked the
handle again, awaiting with calmness for the cards to come to a
standstill.
As the wheels settled into place a man with green eyes and a bediamonded
shirt front came up and leaned over Coffin’s shoulder. “Good work! A
straight flush, by crickety!—forty cigars! Get in and break the bank,
young fellow!”
Coffin turned to him with nonchalance, while the clerk marked the
winning in a book. “Nn—nn! I know when I’ve got enough.”
“Play for me then, will you?” the other rejoined. “You’ve got luck, you
have!”
“I don’t propose to make a present of it to you, if I have; I need every
stitch of it myself.” And then Coffin, touched with a happy thought,
began to swagger. “Besides, if I’m going to smoke this forty up to-night
I’ve got to get busy with myself.” He looked knowingly at the goods
displayed for his choice, pinching the wrappers. “I’ve never had all the
cigars I could smoke yet, and I’m going to try my limit. Got any
Africana Panatelas, Colorado Maduro?” he asked the clerk. A small box
was taken down from the shelf. Coffin accepted it and walked leisurely
toward the door.
“Good Lord!” cried the stranger, following him. “You don’t think you can
tackle forty cigars on a stretch, do you? Kid, it’ll kill you!”
“It’s a beautiful death,” Coffin replied, jauntily, “you can tell mamma
I died happy.” The cigar clerk grinned.
“Strikes me you’re troubled with youngness,” said the stranger, looking
him over.
Coffin ruffled at his patronizing tone. “See here! D’you think I can’t
get away with these forty cigars, smoking ’em in an end-to-end chain
down to one-inch butts?”
“I bet you a hundred dollars you get sick as a pig first!” was the
reply.
“Taken!” Coffin cried, and went at him with fire in his eye. “See here,
I left all my money on my grand piano, but if you’ll trust me I’ll trust
you without stakes held. We’ll get the clerk here to see fair play, and
if I don’t see this box to a finish or pay up, you two can push the face
off me. What d’you say?”
The green-eyed stranger, who had evidently money to spend foolishly, and
a night to waste in doing it, assented jovially. It is not hard to
organize an impromptu trio for any hair-brained purpose whatever in that
land of careless comradeship. The two waited till the clerk had put up
the screen at the front of the shop, and then walked with him round to
California Street. Half way up the first block stood an old-fashioned
wooden house painted drab, with green blinds, in striking contrast to
the high brick buildings that surrounded it. The frame had been brought
round Cape Horn in ’49, and, in pioneer days, the place had been one of
the most fashionable boarding-houses in town. Chinatown now crowded it
in; it had fallen into disrepute, and was visited only by the poorer
class of foreigners. Over the entrance was a sign bearing the
inscription, “Hotel de France.” Here the salesman had a room.
The lower part of the house was dark, but in answer to a prolonged
ringing of the bell, a small boy appeared and, with many comments in a
_patois_ of the Bas Pyrenees, lighted two lamps in the barroom. The
three men sat down and took off their coats and collars for comfort.
James Wiswell Coffin, 3d, opened the box of Panatelas and regarded them
with a sentimental eye.
He bit the end off the first cigar and struck a match. Then he bowed to
the company with the theatrical air of a man about to touch off a loaded
bomb. “Gentlemen, I proceed to take my degree of Bachelor of Nicotine,
if I don’t flunk.” He lighted the tobacco, quoting, “_Ave, Caesar!
Morituri te salutant!_” and blew forth a ring of smoke. It floated
upward, smooth and even, hovered over his head a moment like a halo,
then, writhing, scattered and drifted away. Coffin removed the cigar
from his mouth and looked thoughtfully at the ash.
“It burns all right,” he said, “I won’t have to put kerosene on ’em to
make ’em go. D’you know a Panatela always reminds me of a smart,
tailor-made girl. It’s the most slenderly beautiful shape for a cigar;
it’s gracile, by Jove, gracile and jimpriculate—I got that word in
Kentucky. But I chatter, friends, I am garrulous. Besides I think I have
now said all I know, and it’s your edge, stranger. How would it do for
you to enliven the pink and frisky watches of the night by narrating a
few of the more inflammable chapters of your autobiography?”
Thus conjured by the imp, the stranger consented to relate, after a few
preliminaries, the following tale:
THE STORY OF THE RETURNED KLONDYKER
This is pretty near the finish, young fellow, of the biggest spending
jag this town ever saw. The money cost me sixteen years of tramping and
trading and frozen toes, and then it came slap, all in a bunch. So easy
come, easy go, says I.
I was breaking north, the year of the big find, when I struck hard luck.
That’s too long a yarn to tell. But the end was that I landed two
hundred miles from Nowhere, cracked in the head from behind and left for
dead in the snow. The Malemute that did it had his finish in Dawson that
winter by the rope route, spoiling the shot I was saving for him.
I was stooping over, fixing a sled-runner, when—biff!... I woke up in an
Indian hut filled with smoke. The whole works were buzzing round, and a
lot of big husky bucks and squaws grunting over me. I was for getting up
and cleaning them out, but I hadn’t the strength. For a month I was plum
nutty. But every little while, when my head cleared, I’d look up to see
a good-natured looking brown girl with black eyes taking care of me as
carefully as if she was a trained nurse.
As I got over the fever slowly, I made out, she telling me in Chinook,
that she had found me half frozen to death, and had carried me fifty
miles by sled. How she did it the Lord only knows. Maybe it was because
she was gone on me, which I oughtn’t to say, neither, but she sure was.
I did a heap of thinking. She had grit and gentleness, and the feelings
of a lady, which is what every woman that calls herself such hasn’t got,
and the more I saw of her the better I liked her. So when I got well I
had a pow-wow with her father, who was chief of the tribe, and I bought
her for ten dogs on tick and my gun, which the durned thief had forgot
in the mix-up, and sixty tin tags I’d been saving from plucks of tobacco
to get a free meerschaum pipe with. We were married Indian fashion,
which is pretty easy, and she came and lived with me in my hut.
Since then I’ve had plenty of the stuff that’s supposed to make a man
happy, but I’m blowed if I was ever happier than I was that winter,
living with the tribe and married to Kate.
Well, that winter was over with at last. It came spring, or what you
might call such, with the ice beginning to melt and the sun getting up
for a little while every day, lighter and lighter. One day Kate and I
went fishing. She pulled in her line and I saw something that made me
forget I was an Indian, adopted into the tribe, all regular. Her sinker
was a gold nugget as big as the fist on a papoose!
I knew it the minute I laid my eyes on it, though it was all black with
water and weather. I grabbed it and cut it. It was as soft as lead,
reddish yellow.
“Where did you ever get that?” I said.
“Up by the Katakoolanat Pass,” she said, unconcerned-like, as if it was
pig-iron. “I picked it up because it was heavy.”
“Can you find the place again?” I asked her.
She studied a while. But the Indians never forget anything. It’s
book-learning that makes you forget. I knew she’d remember before she
got through, and she did. She took her fish-line and laid it out in
funny curves and loops on the top of the snow like a map, knotting it
here and there to show places she knew, mountain-peaks, lakes and
such-like. Then she pointed out the way with her finger. She had it down
fine. When she got done she looked up to me with a grin and said: “Why?”
Then it came to me all of a sudden that she had no idea of the worth of
her find. This was before the big rush, and her tribe didn’t see white
men more than twice a year. Their regular hunting grounds were far to
the north. They traded skins and dogs and fish once in a while with
traders, and got beads and truck in return. With the other Indians they
made change by strings of wampum they call alligacheeks. She had no idea
of the value of gold, and she’d never seen a piece of money in her life.
But I didn’t stop to explain then.
“Come on,” I said, “we’re going to borrow dogs, and sled north to the
Katakoolanat country for sure!” She never said a word, but packed up and
followed, the way she was trained to do.
We found the place the third day, just like she said we would. Lord,
that was a bonanza all right! You could dig out nuggets with a stick. It
was the Katakoolanat diggings you may have heard about.
When I had staked out my claims, two prospectors got wind of it and
started the rush. I got our band to move up and help me hold my rights,
and when some Seattle agents offered me four hundred thousand dollars
for my claims, I took it, you bet.
The first thing I did after that was to pay back a hundred dogs for the
ten I had promised for Kate; then I bought up all the provisions I could
get hold of—eggs a dollar apiece, bacon five dollars a pound—and I fed
our band of Indians till they couldn’t hold any more. It was Kate
brought me the luck, and I felt the winnings were more hers than mine.
There wasn’t anything too good for her. When a Scandihoovian missionary
came up to the place we went and got married white fashion, for I wanted
my wife to be respected, and after that I always insisted that everybody
should call her Mrs. Saul Timney, which made her feel about six foot
high every time she heard it.
Well, sir, Kate was a study in those times. She couldn’t quite get it
through her head for a good while why we could put it over the rest of
’em the way we did. The more I got for her, the more puzzled she was. I
recall the first time she ever saw money passed. It was when I bought
the dogs. I was paying twenty-dollar gold pieces out of a sack, and she
asked me what they were. She thought they were stones, because they
looked more than anything else like the flat, round pebbles she had seen
on the beach, the kind you throw to skip on the water.
“They’re just all alligacheek,” I said; then, partly for the joke on
her, I said, “Good medicine (meaning magic); you can get anything you
want with ’em!”
“Give me some,” said Kate, not quite believing me, for it was a pretty
big story to swallow, according to her ideas, so I handed her over a
stack of twenties.
She took them and went out to try the magic. Going up to the first man
she met, she held out the whole lot to him, asking him for his slicker.
When I came up and said it was all right, he peeled it right off and
handed it over to her, grabbing the money quick. That was a new one on
her, and she couldn’t quite believe it even then. Well, it was funny to
see the way she acted. She pretty near bought up everything in camp she
took a fancy to, just for the fun of seeing the magic work, and she was
as excited as a kid with a brand new watch.
We came out of the country finally, and took a steamer for San
Francisco, for I wanted to see the old town again and show Kate what big
cities were like, besides giving her the chance to spend all the money
she wanted on togs and jewelry. We drove up from the wharf in the best
turn-out I could find, and put up at the Palace Hotel in the bridal
suite. The best was none too good for Kate and me while I was flush.
I rather guess we broke the record for spending, the two weeks we stayed
there. I had three or four cases of champagne open in my room all the
time, and the bell-boys got so they knew they didn’t have to be asked,
but would just pop the cork and let her fizz. I got a great big
music-box that cost more than a piano, with drums and bells inside, and
we kept it a-going while we were eating, which was most of the time we
weren’t out doing the town. I blowed myself for an outfit of sparklers,
which this stone here in my shirt-front is the last, sole survivor. I
bought more clothes than I could wear out in ten years.
Kate went me one better. Gee! She _did_ have a time! Of course,
woman-like, though she was a squaw, the first thing she thought about,
after she saw white ladies on the wharves, at Skagway, was clothes. Mrs.
Saul Timney had to dress the part, and she was bound to do it if it
half-killed her, which it did. She bought a whole civilised outfit of
duds at the White House in ’Frisco, and got the chambermaid to help her
into ’em; that’s where she got the first jolt. It wasn’t so easy as it
looked. She couldn’t walk in the high-heeled shoes they wear here, and
so she kept on moccasins. Corsets she gave up early in the game. They
didn’t show, anyway, being inside. Finally she got a dressmaker to rig
her up a sort of a loose red dress that they call a Mother Hubbard. Her
favourite cover was an ermine cape. She bought it because it cost more
than anything else in the fur store. She just splurged on hats and
bonnets. I reckon she had a new one every day. The thing that tickled
her most was gloves, for her hands were good and little. She wore white
ones all the time. I s’pose it was because she felt she looked more like
an American woman that way.
The swell togs she couldn’t wear she bought just the same. We skated
through town like a forest-fire, me doing the talking and her the
picking out. She got darned near everything that I ever knew women wore,
and a big lot of others I never had heard of.
Every time she picked a thing, and pulled out the yellow boys to pay for
it her eyes stuck out. Of course, not being used to doing business that
way, it looked to her like every clerk behind the counter was her slave,
all ready to give her anything she said. She never got over her wonder
at the “medicine stones.”
She had to stop in front of every jewelry store she saw, too, but I
couldn’t get her to buy anything worth wearing. She just turned up her
nose at diamonds and rubies, but at the sight of a cheap string of beads
she went out of her head. She generally wore five or six necklaces of
’em over her cape. Lord, I didn’t care, and what she wanted, she got.
Well, after she’d let the money run away from her for a couple of weeks,
she got tired of the game and kind of homesick. She begun to pine for
cold weather and ice and all, while I was just beginning to enjoy the
place. I tried to brace her up, and thinking it might please her to hear
the seals bark at the Cliff House, we drove out there in a hack.
We were down to the “White House” store one day, when I run slap into
Flora Donovan, that used to live next door to us in Virginia City. She
was only a kid when I went north. She’d grown up into considerable of a
woman now, but I knew her. So I went up to her, and offered to shake
hands. She glared pretty hard till I told her who I was and how money
had come my way. It seems her folks had struck it rich, too, and she had
more money than she knew what to do with.
When Flora caught sight of Kate, staring at her, behind me, she flopped
up one of those spectacles with handles, and her eyebrows went up at the
same time. She froze like an ice-pack. I allow the two women didn’t look
much alike, but I wouldn’t let anybody snub my wife if I could help it,
so I introduced them, calling Kate Mrs. Saul Timney, the way she liked
to have me. Flora sprang something about being “charmed,” and then said
she had to be going. Said she hoped I’d call, but nothing about Kate, I
noticed.
I followed her off with my eyes, she was so pretty and high-toned now,
the first decent white woman I’d talked to in years, and, honest—oh,
well, hang it, a man’s got no license to be ashamed of his wife, but I
don’t know—Kate did look kind of funny in that red Mother Hubbard and
the ermine cape and straw hat, with moccasins and five strings of glass
beads—doggone it, I hated myself for being ashamed of her, which I
wasn’t, really, only somehow she looked different than she did before.
I tried to get her away, but she stood stock-still watching Flora, who
had walked off down to the cloak department at the end of the aisle. But
if Kate don’t want to move, all hell and an iceberg can’t budge her, and
I stood waiting to think how I’d square myself with her, feeling guilty
enough, though I was just as fond of my wife as ever. All of a sudden
Kate made a break for the counter where Flora Donovan was buying a
cloak. The clerks all knew Kate by this time, and the floorwalker chap
would come on the hop-skip-and-a-jump and turn the shop upside down for
her. So when she came up behind Miss Donovan, and pointed to three or
four expensive heavy cloaks and threw out a sack of double eagles to pay
for ’em, letting the clerk take out what he wanted, she had everybody
around staring at her, Flora included.
I could see well enough what was in Kate’s mind. She had seen that I was
just a little ashamed of her, for some reason, and that Flora didn’t
think she was in her class. Kate wanted to show that she was the real
thing, and a sure lady, and the only way she knew how to prove it was to
beat Flora at buying. Kate didn’t exactly want to put it over her, she
only wanted to make good as the wife of Saul Timney.
Flora only said: “Your wife has very good taste, Mr. Timney,” and sailed
into the ladies’ underwear corner. Kate stuck to her like a burr. She
was right at home there, and for about fifteen minutes it seemed like
all the cash-boys in the world were running in and out packing away
white things, just like Kate was a fairy queen giving orders. She laid
down “medicine stones” on the counter till the flim-flams and
thingumbobs almost dropped down off the shelves of themselves. I s’pose
a man really has no business to be in a place like that, but I watched
the two of ’em buy. Kate had actually got Flora going, and both of ’em
emptied their sacks. Then Flora swept out, looking a hole through me,
but never saying a word. I’ve heard afterward that Miss Donovan was
pretty well known to be close-fisted, and it must have hurt her some to
let go of all that money, just on account of an Indian squaw. But the
clerks behind the counter nearly went into fits.
Kate came up to me and said, “I can buy more things than she can, can’t
I?” And I said, “Sure, you can, Kate; you could buy her right out of
house and home!”
She looked a little relieved then, but I saw she was jealous, and the
worst of it was, I’d given her license to be. I tried to be as nice as I
could, and bought her another necklace, and took her to see the
kinetoscopes and let her look through the telescope at the moon, but I
saw she was still fretting about Flora. That night I met a fellow from
the Yukon, and I left Kate at the hotel and made a night of it. I went
to bed with considerable of a head, and when I woke up, toward noon,
Kate was gone. She didn’t show up till the next day after that. I
learned afterward what happened.
Kate started out bright and early to find Flora. She had got into a
black dress with spangles, patent-leather shoes, and a hat as big as a
penguin. She carried with her all the cash we had at the hotel, running
into four figures easy. The shopping district of San Francisco ain’t
such a big place, after all, and Kate and Flora only went to the best
and highest-priced stores, so it wasn’t long before they met.
As far as I could find out, Kate didn’t have her hatchet out at all,
this trip, but she was just trying to make up to Flora, and be nice to
her and show she was ready to get acquainted. You can guess what
happened. Flora tried to pass Kate, but Kate just stood in the aisle
like a house. It was no use for Flora to try and snub her, for Kate
couldn’t understand the kind of polite slaps in the face that ladies
know how to give. The only thing was to get rid of her, so Flora up and
went out the front door to her carriage.
Kate followed her out to the sidewalk. When Flora got in, Kate got in
right alongside, grinning all over, showing her sack of gold, and trying
her best to be as nice as she could. Flora was clean flabbergasted. She
didn’t want to make a holy show of herself on the street by calling the
police, and so she told her driver to go home, as the best way out of
it. So they drove to Van Ness Avenue, Flora throwing conniption fits,
she was so mad, and Kate smiling and talking Chinook, with her big hat
on one ear.
When they got to the house, Flora jumped out and loped up the steps,
blazing, and slammed the door. Kate tried to follow, but her tight dress
and tight shoes were too much for her, and she fell down. That got
Kate’s mad up, and when Kate’s good and mad she’s a mule. She banged at
the door, but no one opened. So she sat down on the front doorstep to
wait till Flora came out. You know what Indians are. She was ready to
wait all night. She was used to nights six months long, and a few hours
in a San Francisco fog didn’t worry her a bit. She took off her shoes,
and loosened her dress, and stuck to the mat.
Finally Flora sent out one of the hired help to drive Kate away. Kate
pulled out one of her “medicine stones” that she had always found would
work, and it worked all right. He went in with a twenty-dollar gold
piece and told all the rest of the help, and they came out one by one
and got twenties, while Kate froze to the doorstep. Then Flora
telephoned for the police, and a copper came up from the station to put
Kate off the steps. He stopped when she handed him the first twenty. He
put up his club when she brought out two more, and went back, after
telling the Donovans he couldn’t exceed the law.
There she stayed till eight o’clock next morning, but it finally got
through her head that Flora would never leave while she was there, so
Kate decided to hide out and lay for her. She went across the street and
sat down on the steps of the Presbyterian church, a couple of blocks
away, where she drew a crowd of kids and nurse-girls, till the cop on
the beat came up and drove ’em away and collected another pair of
twenties.
About ten o’clock, Flora, thinking the coast was clear, came out and got
into her carriage. Kate was ready for her, holding up her skirt in one
hand and her shoes in the other. The carriage drove off and Kate fell in
behind on a little trot. You know how Indians run; they can keep it up
all day, and you can’t get away from ’em. Flora saw her, and made the
driver whip up.
There they went, lickety-split, a swell turn-out, with Flora yelling at
the driver to go faster, and about half a block behind poor old Kate,
right in the middle of the street, on the car-track, in dinkey open-work
silk stockings, with her shoes in one hand, going like a steam-engine.
Her hat fell off as she crossed Polk Street, but Lord, she didn’t care,
she had barrels of ’em at the hotel. I guess they had a clear street all
the way. It must have taken the crowd like a circus parade.
The police never caught on till they got to Kearney Street, and there I
was standing, looking for my wife. A copper came out to nail her for a
crazy woman, but I got there first, and bundled her into a hack.
When we got up to our rooms she was so queer and strange that for a
little while I didn’t know but she had gone nutty, after all. She never
said a word till she had straightened up her dress and put on her shoes
and got out a new hat. Then she stood in front of a big looking-glass.
Finally she turned loose on me.
“I want to be white and have a thin nose and a little waist like an
American woman. Where can I get that? How many medicine stones will it
take to make me white?”
“Oh, Kate,” I said, “don’t talk like that, old girl. You are good enough
for me. You can’t buy all that, anyway.”
Then she said, “You don’t like me the way you like that other woman. How
many medicine stones will it take to make me just as if I was white?”
Of course I told her I was just as fond of her as ever, but she wouldn’t
have it that way. She asked me again how much money it would take, and I
had to tell her that the magic was no good for things like that.
That seemed to kind of stun her, and she began to mope and pine. She
went back into her room and puttered around some. I didn’t have the
heart to follow her and see what she was up to. When she came out she
had on her old loose dress and her moccasins. Over her head was the same
shawl she wore when she came out of the Klondyke.
“Give me my medicine stones,” she said to me. “I want all of them!”
She seemed to feel so sore, I went out and drew two thousand dollars in
twenties and brought ’em to her in two sacks. She didn’t need to tell me
what was up. She was going back to her own country and her own people.
She was singing the song of the tribe—“Death on the White Trail”—when I
came in. I was going to stay in ’Frisco. That was what Kate wanted, and
what Kate wants she gets, every time, if I have the say-so.
It happened there was a steamer going next morning, and Kate didn’t
leave her room nor speak to me till it was time to go down to the dock.
I got her ticket and paid the purser to take good care of her. Even at
the last we didn’t do much talking—what was the use? We both understood,
and her people don’t waste words.
When the boat started she stood on the upper deck looking at me. Then,
all of a sudden, she opened her two sacks of coin and began to throw the
money by handfuls into the Bay, scattering it in shower after shower of
gold till it was all gone.
* * * * *
Well, sir, the Yukon’s the place after all. I’ve blown in most all of my
four hundred thousand, and what have I got for it? Kate will wait for
me, the same way she waited for Flora Donovan. I’ve got one little claim
I hung on to when I sold out the rest, and I’ve got the fever again. As
soon as I’ve had my fun out, and that won’t be long, I’ll make for the
snow country.
* * * * *
And some day, when Kate comes in from the fishing, she’ll crawl into her
hut and find me there, smoking by the fire.
So, with jest and story, the night wore on, and James Wiswell Coffin 3d
pulled steadily at his cigars. He smoked nervously now, with a ruthless
determination to finish at any hazard. More than once, in the early
morning, he had to snatch hastily at a biscuit and swallow it to keep
his gorge from rising at his foolhardy intemperance; but he manfully
proceeded with a courage induced by the firm belief that if he failed,
and attempted to evade payment of his bet, this gentle, green-eyed
Klondyker would make him pay through the nose. It is not safe, in the
West, for a man to wager high stakes with no assets. The youngster was
by no means sure of his endurance. Already the weeds tasted vilely
bitter and the fumes choked him pitifully, but still his sallies and
repartees covered his fears as a shop-girl’s Raglan hides a shabby
skirt.
By the watch, he had succeeded in smoking his first cigar in eleven
minutes. Keeping fairly well to this pace, eight o’clock found him with
but four left in the box. Rather sallow, with a faded, set grin, still
puffing, still chaffing, the Harvard Freshman was as cool as Athos under
fire. The Klondyker was as excited as a heavy backer at a
six-days’-go-as-you-please. The cigar-clerk had run out of racy tales
and conundrums.
At last but three Panatelas remained.
“See here,” said the scion of the Puritans, “I promised to smoke the
whole box, didn’t I, and to keep one lighted all the time? Well, I
didn’t say only one, and so I’m going to make a spurt and smoke the last
three at once.”
The Klondyker demurred, and it was left for the cigar-salesman to
decide. Coffin won. Making a grimace, the young fool, with a dying gasp
of bravado, lighted the three, and while the others looked on with
admiration, puffed strenuously to the horrid end. When the stumps were
so short that he could hardly hold them between his lips the salesman
pulled out a watch.
“Seven hours, twenty-three minutes and six seconds—Coffin wins!” he
cried.
At this the Harvard Freshman toppled and, dropping prone upon the floor,
felt so desperately, so horribly, ill that for a while his nausea held
him captive. The room went round. After a while he reeled to his feet
and felt the cool touch of gold that the Klondyker was forcing into his
palm. The ragged clouds of rotting smoke, the lines of bottles behind
the bar, and the sanded floor swam in a troubled vision, and then his
mind righted.
“You were dead game all right, youngster,” the Klondyker was saying. “I
never thought you’d see it through, but you earned your money. I’ll bet
you never worked harder for a salary, though!”
Coffin tried to smile, and drank a half pitcher of water. “Gentlemen,”
he said, solemnly, leaning against the wall-paper, “one of life’s
sweetest blessings has faded. I have lost one of Youth’s illusions. I
shall never smoke again. There is nothing left for me to do but join the
Salvation Army and knock the Demon Rum. My heart feels like a
punching-bag after Fitz has finished practising with it, and my head is
as light as a new-laid balloon. As for the dark-brown hole where my
mouth used to be—brrrrrh! I move we pass out for fresh air. Funny, it
seems a trifle smoky here! Wonder why. Come along and see me skate on
the sidewalk. I’m as dizzy as Two-step Willie at the eleventh extra.”
Then he patted the double eagles in his hand. “Every one of you little
yellow boys has got to go out and get married, I must have a big family
by to-night!”
The Klondyker gasped. “For Heaven’s sake you don’t mean to say you’re
going to begin again? You ought to be in the Receiving Hospital right
now. Can you think of anything crazier to do after this? I’ll back you!
I haven’t had so much fun since I left the Yukon. You’re likely to tip
over the City Hall before night, if I don’t watch you.”
“Well, well, I can’t quite keep up this pace, gentlemen,” said the
cigar-clerk, “and I have to open up the shop. I’ll look you up to-night
at the morgue!”
He left hurriedly.
Once outside, Coffin’s spirits rose. “I never really expected to greet
yon glorious orb again,” he said. “Let’s climb up to Chinatown and get
rich.”
“Spending money is my mark; I’m a James P. Dandy when it comes to
letting go of coin. I’m with you,” said the Klondyker. “Besides, I want
to see how long before our luck changes.”
The Freshman led the way up past St. Mary’s Church, without heeding the
sacred admonition graved below the dial: “_Son, observe the time and
flee from evil!_” a warning singularly apposite in that scarlet quarter
of the town. They passed up the narrow Oriental lane of Dupont Street,
the Chinatown highway, and, as he pointed out the sights, Coffin
discoursed.
“In the back of half these shops the gentle game of fan-tan is now
progressing. Moreover, there are at least five lotteries running in the
quarter that I know of. To wit: the ’American,’ the ’Lum Ki,’ the ’New
York,’ the ’Ye Wah’ and the ’Mee Lee Sing.’ I propose to buck the
Mongolian tiger in his Oriental lair and watch the yellow fur fly, by
investing a small wad in a ticket for the half-past-nine drawing. I
worked out a system last night, while dallying with the tresses of My
Lady Nicotine, and I simply can’t lose unless my luck has turned sour. I
shall mark said ticket per said inspiration, and drag down the spoils of
war. Kaloo, kalay, I chortle in my joy!”
“See here, then, you let me in on that,” insisted the Klondyker; “you
keep your hundred and salt it down. You play my money this shot, and
I’ll give you half of what’s made on it. You’re a mascot to-day, and
I’ve earned the right to use you!”
“All right; then I agree to be fairy godmother until the sun sets. But I
muchly fear you’ll let the little tra-la-loo bird out of the cage, with
your great, big, coarse fingers. Never mind, we’ll try it. Here we are,
now!”
He paused in front of a smallish Chinese restaurant on a side street. In
the lower windows were displayed groceries and provisions, raw and
cooked, and from the upper story a painted wooden fretwork balcony
projected, adorned with potted shrubs and paper lanterns.
“Behind this exhibition of split ducks, semi-pigs, mud-packed eggs from
the Flowery Realm, dried abalones, sugar-cane from far Cathay, preserved
watermelon-rind, candied limes, li-chi nuts, chop suey, sharks’ fins,
birds’ nests, rats, cats, and rice-brandy, punks, peanut-oil, and
passionate pastry, lurks the peaceful group that makes money for you
while you wait. Above, in red hieroglyphs, you observe the legend, ’Chin
Fook Yen Company.’ This does not indicate the names of the several
members of the firm, as is ordinarily supposed, but it is the touching
and tempting motto, ’Here Prosperity awaits Everybody, all same
Sunlight!’ In the days of evil tidings I once made a bluff at being a
Chinatown guide. It is easy enough; but I am naturally virtuous, and I
was not a success with the voracious drummer and the incredulous English
globe-trotter. But I picked up a few friends amongst the Chinks, as
you’ll see.”
They entered, to find a small room, from the centre of which a
brass-stepped staircase rose to the floor above. On one side of this
office was a counter, behind which sat a fat, sleek Chinaman,
industriously writing with a vertical brush in an account-book, pausing
occasionally to compute a sum upon the ebony beads of an abacus. He
looked up and nodded at Coffin, and, without stopping his work, called
out several words in Chinese to those upstairs. The two went past the
kitchens on the second floor to the top story, where several large
dining-rooms, elaborately decorated in carved wood and colored glass
windows, stretched from front to rear. In one room a group of men,
seemingly Eastern tourists, were seated on teakwood stools at a round
table, drinking tea and nibbling at sugared confections distributed in
numerous bowls. Expatiating upon the wonders of the place was what
seemed to be one of the orthodox Chinatown guides, pointing with his
slim rattan cane, and smoking a huge cigar.
Coffin led the way to a back room, and, looking carefully to see if he
were observed, knocked three times at an unobtrusive door. Immediately a
silken curtain at the side was raised, disclosing a window guarded by a
wire screen. In an instant it was dropped again and the door was opened
narrowly. Coffin pushed his friend through, and they found themselves in
a square, box-like closet or hallway. Here, another door was opened
after a similar signal and inspection by the look-out, and they passed
through.
Inside this last barrier was a large room painted a garish blue. About a
table in the centre several Chinamen were assembled, and doors were
opening and shutting to receive or let out visitors. At a desk in the
corner was sitting a thin-faced merchant with horn spectacles and long
drooping white mustaches. To him Coffin went immediately and shook
hands. Then he explained something of the workings of the lottery to the
Klondyker. It was decided to buy a fifteen-dollar ticket, and they
received a square of yellow paper where, within a border, were printed
eighty characters in green ink. Above was stamped in red letters the
words “New York Day Time.” The price was written plainly across the
face.
“Now, I’ll mark it,” said Coffin. “You can mark a ’high-low’ system that
is pretty sure to win, but it’s too difficult for me—I was never much of
a Dazmaraz at the higher mathematics. So I’ll play a ’straight’ ticket.
That is: I mark out ten spots anywhere I please. There are twenty
winning numbers, and on a fifteen-dollar ticket if I catch five of them
I get thirty dollars; six pays two hundred and seventy dollars, seven
pays twenty-four hundred dollars, and eight spots pull down the capital
prize. If more than one ticket wins a prize the money is divided _pro
rata_, so we don’t know what we win till the tickets are cashed in,
downstairs in the office.”
He took a brush and marked his ten spots, five above and five below the
centre panel, and handed it to the manager, who wrote his name in
Chinese characters down the margin. There was just time for this when
the ceremony of drawing the winning numbers began. The manager brought
out a cylindrical bamboo vessel and placed in it the eighty characters
found on the tickets, each written on a small piece of paper and rolled
into a little pill or ball. Then he looked up at the Klondyker.
“You likee mix ’em up?” he asked. The stranger assented, and, having
stirred up the pellets, was gravely handed a dime by the treasurer of
the company.
The pellets were then drawn forth, one by one, and placed in four bowls
in rotation till all were disposed of. The manager now nodded to Coffin,
who came up to the table. “You shake ’em dice?” said the Chinaman.
Coffin nodded.
“You see this die?” he explained to the Klondyker. “It’s numbered up to
four, and the number decides which bowl contains the lucky numbers on
the ticket. Here goes! _Three!_”
The third bowl was accordingly emptied, and the numbers on the pellets
of rolled paper were read off and entered in a book. The Chinese now
began to show signs of excitement. Tickets were produced from the
pockets of their dark blouses and were scanned with interest as the
winning numbers were called out one by one. They crowded to the shoulder
of the manager as he unfolded the pellets, and jabbered unintelligible
oaths and blessings as the characters were revealed. Coffin beckoned to
one who appeared to have no investment, and showed him the joint ticket,
asking him to point out the spots as they were read. The first five were
unmarked, but then to their delight the long nail of the Chinaman’s
finger pointed to three spots in succession. In another minute two more
marked characters won, and then, after a series of failures, the last
two numbers read proved to be Coffin’s selection. The Chinaman’s eyes
snapped, and he cried out a few words, spreading the news over the room.
In an instant the two white men were surrounded, and a babel of
ejaculations began.
“What the devil does it mean? Do we win?” asked the Klondyker.
“Do we win! Can a duck swim? We’ve got seven lucky spots! Twenty-four
hundred dollars, if we don’t have to divide with some son of a
she-monkey!” and Coffin, grabbing his hat in his right hand, pranced
about the room and began on the Harvard yell.
The Chinamen, shocked at the noise, and in imminent fear of attracting
attention to the illegal enterprise, had grabbed him and stifled his
fifth “Rah!” when, suddenly, with a hoarse yelp, the watchman at the
look-out burst into the room, giving the alarm for a raid of the police,
and threw two massive oaken bars across the iron door. In an instant the
tickets, pellets, and books were swept into a sack, and the men
scattered in all directions, sweeping down tables and over chairs to
escape arrest.
“Run for your life, or we’ll get pulled!” Coffin called out to the
Klondyker, who still held the ticket in his hand, and he made a break
for one of the blue doors. It was slammed in his face by a retreating
scout. “Over here!” the Klondyker cried, setting his foot to another
door and forcing it open. By this time the outer barrier at the entrance
from the restaurant had been forced, and the police began with crowbars
and sledge-hammers at the inner door. Coffin ran for the exit, but
stumbled and fell across a chair, striking his diaphragm with a shock
that knocked the wind from his lungs. For fully a minute he lay there
writhing, without the power to move, gasping vainly for breath. The
blows on the door were redoubled in energy, and of a sudden the wooden
bars split and gave way, the lock shot off into the room, the hinges
broke through the woodwork jambs, and the door toppled and fell. It was
now too late for the Freshman to escape; a dozen men jumped into the
room and seized him with the few Chinamen left. To his dazed surprise
the attacking party was the very same group of men he had taken for
Eastern tourists as he entered, now evidently plain-clothes detectives
who had been cunningly disguised to escape suspicion.
These, after their prisoners had been handcuffed, ran here and there,
dragging more refugees by their queues in bunches from adjoining rooms
and halls, but most had made good their escape through the many secret
exits, hurrying, at the first warning, to the roof, to underground
passages in the cellar, through the party walls to other buildings.
When the last man had been secured, the crestfallen captives were taken
downstairs, loaded into two patrol-wagons, and driven to the California
Street Station. The Klondyker was not among their number.
As the Freshman was searched and his hundred dollars taken and sealed in
an envelope with his name, the booking-sergeant told him that if he
wished to deposit cash bail with the bond-clerk at the City Hall he
would be released. He might send the money by a messenger, who would
return with his certificate of bail.
“How much will it be?” Coffin asked.
“One hundred, probably.”
“Then I can’t pay a messenger, for that’s exactly all I have with me.”
“Oh, well,” said the sergeant, looking at him indulgently, “there’s an
officer going up to the Hall on an errand, and coming back pretty soon.
I’ll get him to take up your money, if you want.”
The Chinamen were put into a cell together, and Coffin was locked in a
separate compartment containing a single occupant, a weazened little man
with a chin beard, wearing a pepper-and-salt suit. At the irruption of
visitors, there arose from the women’s cell an inhuman clamor, raised by
two wretched creatures. They shrieked like fiends of the pit wailing in
mockery at the spirits of the damned. Coffin put his hands to his ears.
His new companion regarded him with a watery blue eye. “All-fired
nuisance, ain’t it? Gosh, they yelp like seals at the Cliff House! I
wish the sergeant would turn the hose on ’em. I would. They go off every
twenty minutes, like a Connecticut alarm-clock. Never mind, we’ll get
out of this soon. What were you pulled for?”
Coffin narrated his adventures in Chinatown.
“Oh, you’re all right, then, it’s just a periodical spasm of virtue by
the police. But I’m in for it. They’re goin’ to sock it to me, by
Jiminy!”
“What’s the matter?” Coffin asked.
The little Yankee crept over to the Freshman’s ear and whispered
mysteriously, “Grand larceny! They ain’t charged me with it yet, but
they’re holdin’ me till they can collect evidence. And me a reformed
man. I’m a miserable sinner, but I’ve repented, and I’ve paid back
everything to the last cent!”
His confession, which was becoming per-fervent, was here interrupted by
a policeman who was looking through the cells. “Hello, Eli,” he said,
with a sarcastic grin, “back again? I thought it was about time!”
“Say, what’s our little blue-eyed friend been up to, officer?” the
Freshman inquired.
The man laughed. “Vagrancy, of course. Just look at him. Ain’t he got
the eye of a grafter? We find him begging on the street every little
while, but he’ll get off with a reprimand. He always has plenty of money
on him. He’s nutty. Crazy as a hatter, ain’t you, Eli?” He laughed again
and passed on.
“Did you hear that?” cried the little man, angrily. “He pretends I ain’t
up for felony, but I am, though they can’t prove it. It’s persecution,
that’s what it is. I don’t mind the fine for vagrancy, but I’m afraid if
I have to go to jail I’ll lose my car.”
“Lose your car!” said Coffin, amused at the little old man’s vagaries.
“You don’t think a street-car will wait for you while you’re bailed out,
do you?”
“Mine will,” Eli replied. “That is, if it ain’t stolen.”
“Stolen! Gee Whizz, you’re an Alice in Wonderland, all right! Perhaps
you will inform me how they steal street-cars in San Francisco, and how
you happen to have one to be stolen.”
“I see you don’t believe it,” said the Yankee. “But it’s as true as
Gospel. I’ll tell you the whole story and then you’ll think better of
me.”
So saying, he fastened his watery blue eyes upon the Freshman and gave
him the history of his life.
THE STORY OF THE RETIRED CAR-CONDUCTOR
I was born and brought up in Duxbury, Massachusetts, and I had a close
call to escape bein’ named Wrestling Brewster, one of my mother’s family
names. My father voted for just plain Eli Cook, howsomever, and dad most
always generally won. It might have made considerable difference to me,
maybe, for as it was, whether from my name or nature, I rather took
after my father, who was no mortal good. Father was what Old Colony
folks call “clever,” just a shif’less ne’er-do-well, handy enough when
he got to work, but a sort of a Jack-of-all-trades and master of none.
Never went to church, fished on Sundays, smoked like a chimney and
chewed like a cow, easy to get on with and hard to drive—no more
backbone than a clam, my mother used to say. And what he was, I am, with
just enough Brewster in me to make me repent, but not enough to hinder
me from going astray.
I come out here to Californy in ’49, and hoofed it most all the way. I
calculated to get rich without workin’, but I reckoned without my host.
I looked for somethin’ easy till I got as thin as a yaller dog, and for
twenty year I held on that way by my eyelids, pickin’ up odd jobs and
loafin’ and whittlin’ sticks in between times. Then I got a place as
driver on the Folsom Street hoss-car line, and that’s where I made my
fortune by hook or crook, till I retired.
If I’d had a drop more Brewster blood I wouldn’t have did what I did,
but I kind of fell into the way of piecin’ out my salary the way every
one else did who worked for the company, and my conscience didn’t give
me no trouble for a considerable spell. It was only stealin’ from a
corporation, anyway, and I reckoned they could afford it, with the
scrimpin’ pay they give us.
In them days the company ran them little double-ender cars with ten-foot
bodies. When I got to the end of the route and drove my team round and
hitched up at t’other end, I had to take out the old Slawson fare-box
and set it up in front, for they didn’t have no conductors in early
days. I s’pose I kind of hated to carry such a load of money, bein’ more
or less of a shirk, and I got into the way of turning her upside down
and shakin’ out a few nickels every time. They come out easy, I’ll say
that for ’em, and it wa’n’t no trick at all to clean up a dollar or so
every day, and twice as much on Sundays.
Well, so long as all the boys was a-doin’ the same thing, the loss
wa’n’t noticed, but somehow or other the company got a few honest men on
the line, and they turned in so much more money than we did every night
that the old man smelled a mouse. He put in the new Willis patent
fare-box that was durned hard to beat. It had a little three-cornered
wheel inside that acted like a valve, and nothin’ that went in would
come out, either by turnin’ the box upside down, or by usin’ the wire
pokers we experimented with. They wa’n’t nothin’ for it but to git keys,
and so keys we got. It looked a heap more like stealin’ than it did
before, but it was rather easier. Some of the boys was caught at it, but
as luck would have it, nobody never suspected me, and I took out my
little old percentage regular as a faro dealer.
I salted down my money in the Hibernia Bank, and I called it my sinkin’
fund, which it was for sure sinkin’ my soul down deeper and deeper into
the bottomless pit. I’m a-goin’ to make a clean breast of it,
howsomever, and I own up I was about as bad as the rest of ’em, and four
times as sharp at the game.
After a while the system was improved, and the company got new rollin’
stock with all two-horse cars. I was a conductor then, and I ran on No.
27 till I was off the road. The Gardner punch was my first experience in
knockin’ down fares right in the face and eyes of everybody, and I had
figgered a way to “hold out” long before I had the nerve to try it. But
Lord! it was as easy as fallin’ off a log, when you knew how. You see,
we sold a five-coupon ticket for a quarter, and we had to slice off a
section for every fare, with a candle-snuffer arrangement, the check
droppin’ into a little box on the under jaw of the nippers. All we had
to do was to “build up” on ’em. You held back a lot of clipped tickets,
with two or three or four coupons left, as the case might be, and you
kept ’em underneath the bunch of regular tickets for sale. Say a man
handed you a whole ticket for two fares. You made a bluff at cuttin’ it,
and handed him back a three-coupon ticket from underneath your rubber
band. You kept his whole one for yourself, and sold it to the next
passenger for two bits.
Well, Jim Williams was caught red-handed, and Gardner’s system went to
Jericho. Next they sprung the regular bell-punch on us, the kind you
“punch in the presence of the passenjaire.” We had no trouble with that.
They was a dummy palm-bell manufactured almost simultaneous, and we’d
ring up fares without punchin’ at all. The breastplate registers was
worked similar, with a bell inside your vest connected with a button. It
was as easy as pie, providin’ nobody watched the numbers on the
indicator while you was ringin’ up.
I left the road before they adopted the stationary registers or clock
machines. I admit they’re ingenious, but still I ain’t got no doubt
that, given a good big crowd and no spotters, I could manage to make my
expenses with the rest of the boys.
But I won’t go round Robin Hood’s barn to spin out the story. The result
was that after about fifteen years of patient, unremittin’ industry, I
had somethin’ like $12,000 in the bank, and what was left of my New
England conscience shootin’ through me like rheumatism. It didn’t bother
me so much at first, but when once Brewster blood begins to boil it
don’t slow up in a hurry. Eli Cook didn’t seem to care a continental,
but they was a whole lot of Pilgrim Fathers behind me that was bound to
testify sooner or later.
I tried to settle down and get into some quiet business, where I
wouldn’t have no more trickery to do than maybe put a little terra alba
in the sugar and peanuts in the coffee. But after lookin’ round I
hankered after makin’ money easier, and so I bought minin’ stocks and
hung on, assessment after assessment, like grim Death, till, by Jimminy!
one day I’ll be durned if I didn’t calculate I had $30,000 to the good,
if I sold. I pulled out the day before the slump. I don’t know why
Providence favored my fortune, which was so wickedly come by, and I
don’t know why, after doin’ so well, I didn’t have spunk enough to pay
back the company, but, anyhow, I wa’n’t yet waked up to feel full
consciousness of sin, and I shut my ears to the callin’ to repentance.
Now, all this time, bein’ of a South Shore family of seafaring men
mostly, I had a hankerin’ after the water. So, when the first lots was
cut up, out to the Beach, I bought a parcel of land on the shore. I used
to go out there all the time to sit on my own sand, and recollect how it
used to feel to get a good dry heat on my bare legs when I was a boy
down to Duxbury. If they had only been clams there, I’d have been as
happy as a pollywog in a hogshead of rain water.
One day I was walkin’ out there, and as I passed the company’s stables I
see a sign out, “Cars for Sale, Cheap,” and I went in to see ’em. I
speered round the yard till what did I see but old 27, my car, settin’
there without wheels, lookin’ as shabby as Job’s cat! I asked the
foreman how much they wanted for it, and I got it for ten dollars. I
hired a dray and moved the thing out to the Beach that very afternoon. I
set it up on two sills on my lot, calculatin’ I could use it for a cabin
to hang out in, over Sunday, and it was as steady as Plymouth Rock, and
made as cute a little room as you’d want to see. Every time I went I
tinkered round and fixed her up more, till I had a good bunk at one end,
lockers under the seats, and a trig little cellar beneath, where I kept
canned stuff.
’Twa’n’t long before I regularly moved out there and stayed for good.
Just from force of habit, I expect, at first, I rung two bells every
time I got on, and one bell before I got off, and I always keep it up,
just as if the old car was really on the rails. I never went in and set
down but I felt as if No. 27 was poundin’ along toward Woodward’s
Gardens, with the hosses on a jog trot. Sometimes when the rain was
drivin’ down and the wind blowin’ like all possessed, and it was pitch
dark outside, with the surf rollin’, I’d put down my pipe and go out on
the platform, and set the brake up just as tight as I could. I don’t
know why, but it kind of give me a sense of security.
It wa’n’t long before I begun to feel a positive affection for that old
car, what with the years I’d spent on it, and livin’ ’way out there to
the Beach alone with nothin’ to think about but the way I’d robbed the
company. No. 27 was more like a pet dog than a house. You can talk about
ships bein’ like women, and havin’ queer ways and moods, but you go to
work and take an old car, and it’s more like folks than a second cousin;
and it’s got sense and temper, I’m persuaded of that.
But it wa’n’t long before No. 27 begun to act queer. I noticed it a
considerable spell before I realized just what was wrong. It wouldn’t
stay still a minute. It groaned and sighed like a sinner on the anxious
seat. I couldn’t ease it any way I tried. It worked off the sills, and
just wallowed in the sand. The sand drifts like snow at the Beach, and
often I used to have to dig myself out the door after a sou’wester. I
didn’t mind bein’ alone so much, for I had a book of my Uncle Joshua
Cook’s sermons to read, but the way that old car talked to itself got on
my nerves. The windows rattled, and sometimes a shutter would fall with
a bang, sudden, and I’d jump half out of my skin. Then, too, that
stealin’ was preyin’ on my mind, and I couldn’t help harpin’ on it. They
was a Slawson fare-box still on the front of the car, and finally I got
to goin’ in t’other way to avoid it. Then the green light got to
watchin’ me, and I begun to drink, for I felt the full qualms of the
unrighteous, and the car itself seemed to know it was defiled by my sin.
Finally, one night, I come home from the Cliff House, where I’d been
warmin’ up my courage, and when I got back to No. 27 I see the green
lantern I’d left lit was a burnin’ low, almost out. I got up on the
platform and tried to ring two bells as usual, but the cord broke in my
hands. I tried the door, but it wouldn’t budge. That blamed car just
naturally refused to recognize me, and wouldn’t let me in. Then I sat
down in the sand and cried like a fool, and wondered what was wrong.
It bust on me like a light from the sky, and the callin’ of a sinner to
repentance, sayin’, “Come now, this is the appointed time.” All I’d done
in the old days rose up in front of me, and right there I experienced a
change of heart and was convicted of sin. It come sudden, and I acted
sudden. I didn’t stop to think nor reason, nor to set my mortal mind
against the judgment of Heaven and that car, but I rose up confident of
grace, and went round to the front platform where the fare-box was, and
dropped in a nickel and tried the bell. The cord wa’n’t broke on this
side, and she rung all right. The light flared up again, and the door
opened as easy as a snuff-box. I was saved.
From that time on I never got aboard without payin’ my fare, and when
the box was full I’d turn it over to the treasurer of the company. Of
course I might have drawn out my money in the bank and paid it all up at
once, but it seemed to me that this means was shown me, so that I would
be reminded of my wickedness every day and keep in the road of
repentance. But even then, sometimes I backslid and fell from grace when
I emptied out the box. Some of the money would stick to my fingers, and
it seemed as if I couldn’t stop stealin’ from the company. But afterward
I’d repent and put in a quarter or even a half dollar for my fare to
make up, and in that way I went on tryin’ to lead a better life, and
keep in the straight and narrer road of salvation.
Well, I thought then that No. 27 would settle down and give me some
peace of mind, but it wa’n’t long before that car begun to get uneasy
again. I didn’t know what in creation to make of it, and it beat all the
way it took on. I drew out $5,000 of good securities that was payin’
nine per cent. and sent it all in gold coin packed in a barrel of barley
to the company, but that didn’t do no good at all. The car was plum
crazy, and nothin’ seemed to satisfy the critter.
No. 27 settled and sobbed and sighed like a fellow that’s been jilted by
a flirt. They wa’n’t no doin’ nothin’ with it. I puttered over it and
tightened all the nuts, but it snivelled and whined like a sick pup
every time the wind blew. When the fog come in, the drops of water stood
on the window panes like tears, and every gale made the body tremble
like a girl bein’ vaccinated. The old car must be sick, I thought, and I
greased all the slides and hinges with cod-liver oil. The thing only
wheezed worse than ever. I thought likely it might be just fleas, for
the sand is full of ’em, and I sponged the cushions with benzine. It
wa’n’t no more use than nothin’ at all!
Perhaps I ain’t got no call to boast, but I flatter myself I found out
what was lackin’ as soon as most would have done. Howsomever, I spent a
good deal of time walkin’ round the Beach thinkin’ it over. They’s quite
a colony of us out there now; seemed like my car drew out a lot of
others, until they’s more than a baker’s dozen of ’em scattered around,
built up and managed in different ways, accordin’ to the ideas of their
owners. Some h’ist ’em up and build a house underneath, some put two
alongside and rip out the walls, some put ’em end to end, some make
chambers of ’em and some settin’-rooms. They call the colony
Carville-by-the-Sea, and it looks for all the world like some
new-fangled sort of Chinatown.
I was walkin’ round one day, inspectin’ the new additions to the place,
when I see a car I thought I recognised. I went up, and if it wa’n’t a
Fifth Street body, and as far as I could see, it must have been the very
one old 27 used to transfer with in the old days! It was numbered 18,
and I remembered how she used to wait for us on the corner when we was
late. Then I understood what was the matter with my car. It was just
naturally pinin’ away for its old mate.
Well, sir, I went to the owner and bought No. 18 at his own price. I’d
have paid twenty-five dollars if he’d asked it. I moved her onto my lot,
put a foundation under her, sideways to 27, like an ell to a farm-house.
And it seemed to me I noticed old 27 give a grunt and settle down in
peace and contentment. I was a good guesser. I hitched ’em together with
a little stoop, covered over so as to make the two practically one, and
then I give the whole thing a fresh coat of white paint, and cleaned up
the windows and swept out till it was all spick and span. And I never
had no trouble with No. 27 after that, nor with my own conscience
neither, for now the money’s all paid back with interest.
Well, sir, maybe you won’t believe it, and maybe you will, but about a
year after the two was hitched together a funny thing happened. One day
morning I went outdoors, and see something on the sand beside No. 18. My
eyes stuck out like a fifer’s thumb when I recognised what it was. It
was a plum new red wheelbarrow!
CHAPTER VII
THE EX-MEDIUM’S ADVENTURE: THE INVOLUNTARY SUICIDE
Warmed by his copious draughts of wine, stimulated by the comradeship of
his fellow-adventurers, and his stomach packed to the top corner with
rich foods, Professor Vango left Coffee John’s, rejoicing in a brave
disregard for the troubles that had been for so long pursuing him. His
superstitious terrors had subsided, and for a while he was a man again.
Clay Street was empty, and stretched black and narrow to the
water-front. Below him lay the wholesale commercial quarter of the town
with its blocks of deserted warehouses, silent and dark. It was a part
of San Francisco almost unknown to the ex-medium, and now, at midnight,
obscure and bewildering, a place of possibilities. He was for
adventures, and he decided to seek them in the inscrutable region of the
docks.
He stepped boldly down the street, but it was not long before the echoes
of his footsteps struck him chill with dread. The packing-cases upon the
curb cast shadows where fearsome things might lurk. He began to watch
with a roving eye the crossings and alleys, from which some form might
come upon him unawares, and he cast sharp glances over his shoulder for
the appearance of the spirit that had cowed him. The thought of Mrs.
Higgins brought him back to his old torture. He felt as though she were
always round the next corner.
He had almost reached East Street, when he yielded to his qualms and
bolted into the warmth and light of the Bowsprit Saloon to drown his
forebodings in two schooners of steam beer. So disappeared Coffee John’s
luck-dime, and with it the stimulating effects of his exordium. Vango’s
short glow of comfort was, however, but a respite, for shortly after
midnight the bar closed, and he was sent forth again into the perilous
night.
He was pacing up and down the stone arcade of the Ferry Building,
dismally anticipating the prospect of walking the city streets alone
with his curse, when it occurred to him that he might possibly make his
way to Oakland. Oakland was less strenuous; it was calm, sober,
respectable, free from the distressing torments of San Francisco. Many a
time he had met Mrs. Higgins upon the dock behind the waiting-room, and
he knew the way well. He dodged slyly up the wagon-track, round the
corner of the baggage-room, to the slip where the steamer Piedmont was
waiting to set out on her last trip. As he came to the apron a few
belated commuters were running for the boat. He joined them without
being observed, and was hurried aboard by a warning from the deck-hands.
Just as he reached the bib the bridge was drawn up, the hawsers cast
off, and with a deep roaring whistle the vessel started, gathered way,
and, urged by the jingle-bell, shot out of the slip into the waters of
the Bay.
The crowds went forward, upstairs, to the protection of the cabin, but
Professor Vango stayed by the after-rail alone, where a chain was
stretched across the open stern. A ragged mist lay upon the harbour,
hanging to the surface of the water like a blanket, torn open sometimes
by a passing gust of wind and closing up to a thicker fog beyond. High
in the air, it was clearer, and the stars shone bright.
The thumping paddle-wheels, the phosphorescent waves, and the fey
obscurity of the night wrought heavily upon Vango’s emotion, and the
fumes of alcohol mingled in his brain. He was not happy; things went
round a bit, and he had hard work controlling his thoughts. He longed
for the gay cheerfulness of the saloon above, but he felt a need of the
sharp night air to revive him, first. He watched the stairway
suspiciously, feeling sure that the ghost of Mrs. Higgins, if she were
to appear, would come that way.
In point of fact, a woman did soon descend from the upper deck, and
stood at the bottom of the stairs in some uncertainty, gazing about her.
She was a heavy, middle-aged blonde, in a long black cape and veil, the
type of a thousand weak, impressionable widows, and, in the dusk,
through the glaze of Vango’s eyes, a passable counterfeit of the late
lamented Mrs. Higgins. She soon perceived him, and came forward a few
steps, while he retreated as far away, putting her off with futile
gestures. Curious at this exhibition, the woman walked up to him with a
question on her lips.
She was, in all probability, in search of nothing more than a glass of
water, but the medium had no more than time to hear, “Tell me where—”
before he had mentally completed the inquiry for her. “Where—where is
Lilian?” she meant, of course. Appalled, he had jumped over the chain in
the stern, and as she approached with that demand piercing his
conscience-stricken soul, he shrank back unconsciously. The first step
carried him to the extreme end of the boat, the second led him, with a
splashing fall, into the Bay. The waters closed over him, and the
steamer swept on.
When he came to the surface, spluttering but sober at last in the face
of a new and more tangible danger, he heard the rising staccato of a
woman’s shriek, and saw a pyramid of lights fading into the fog. Then he
sank again, and all was cold, black, and wet.
* * * * *
He rose to the surface in a space clear of mist, dimly lighted by a wisp
of moon. A few feet away a fruit-crate bobbed upon the waves in the
steamer’s wake, and for this he swam. By placing it under his body, he
found he could float well enough to keep his nose out of water,
tolerably secure from drowning, for a time at least.
The mist closed in upon him, was swept asunder, and shut down again. The
current was bearing him toward the harbour entrance he decided, and, as
he had fallen overboard about opposite Goat Island, he must by this time
be in the fairway, drifting for the Golden Gate and the Pacific. He
might, if his endurance held out, catch sight of some ship anchored in
the stream, and hail her crew. But no lights appeared, and he grew
deathly cold and stiff.
In Professor Vango’s ears the sobbing of the siren on Lime Point was
lulling him to a sleep that promised eternal forgetfulness, and the
Alcatraz Island bell was tolling grewsomely of his passing, when his
senses were aroused by a brisker note that came in quick, padded beats
through the fog. He summoned his drowsy wits for a last effort, and
gazed into the gloom. Suddenly, piercing the cloudy curtain drawn about
him, came a small launch, stern on, churning its way at full speed
straight at him.
In another moment it would have sped past him, to be swallowed up in the
darkness again, but, with a mighty struggle, he threw himself at the
boat, and, dodging the whirling propeller, clutched the rail with a
violence that made the craft careen. It dipped as if to throw him off,
but Vango held on and screamed hoarsely for help. No reply came from the
boat, nor was anybody to be seen in it, so at last he made shift to
climb aboard and reach the cock-pit.
The vapour and darkness lay about him like a pall, muffling even the
outlines of the boat itself; no lights were burning aboard. Shivering,
perplexed, terrified, but grateful for his preservation, and wondering
where his fate had led him, the Professor started on a further
examination of the launch.
He had taken but a few steps, when his foot struck a soft something
extended upon the floor. His teeth chattered with fear as he groped down
and made it out to be a human form. That it was a woman, he discovered
by the long hair that had overflowed her shoulders in crisp waves, and a
touch of her body showed that she was alive. He lifted her to a sitting
posture on the seat, then loosened her dress at the neck, and chafed her
wrists and temples. Her breath soon came in gasps; she sighed heavily
and sat erect, with a shudder. She gazed into his face in the dimness,
then cast her eyes over the boat and fell to weeping.
So, for some time, the launch, carrying its two wretched passengers, and
what more Vango dared not guess, plunged on insanely through the fog.
The medium knew nothing of practical affairs; psychology was his art,
and chicanery his science; but even had he been mechanic enough to stop
and reverse the engine in the dark, it would have taken a considerable
acquaintance with the Bay of San Francisco to have set and kept any
logical course in such a night. Wrapped in a tarpaulin which he found by
him, under which his dripping form shivered in misery, the unhappy man
sat, baffled, mystified, hopeless, too beat about in his mind even to
wonder. The woman cried on and the propeller kept up its rhythmic thud,
thud, thud, dragging the little vessel where it would.
Suddenly the swing of the choppy sea flung the woman at full length
across the seat and brought her to her senses. She arose, now, and
scanned the fog, then peered curiously at the medium, who was silent
from very terror.
“Where are we? Where, in Heaven’s name, did you come from?” she cried,
sharply, and she approached him with a searching gaze.
Trickster that he was, he sought some wile to outwit her. He mumbled
something about having fallen off Fishermen’s Wharf.
She stumbled to the cuddy under the seat and brought out a lantern and a
box of matches. With these she obtained a light and held it flaring in
Vango’s face. “I don’t know who you are,” she said, “but you’ve got to
help me get this boat back. Are you armed?”
The medium made an emphatic denial, for the woman’s face was sternly
set. She was indubitably a quadroon, by evidence of her creamy, swarthy
skin and the tight curls of her hair. Her dark eyes burned in the
lamplight under heavy, knotted brows, her full lips drawing apart like a
dog’s to show a line of white, straight teeth. She was the picture of
Judith ready to strike, and Vango trembled under her gaze till she
turned from him with an expression of contempt.
“Come aft and help me with the machinery,” she commanded. “We can’t keep
on, Heaven knows where, at full speed backward through weather like
this. Fi-fi, now, and mind your feet!”
They went to the tiny engine where, fumbling with the levers and
stop-cocks, she brought the machinery to a stop. The silence crowded
down upon them, as if someone had just died. Vango noticed that the
woman kept between him and the starboard rail with some secret intent,
and, as the two eyed each other, he caught sight of a revolver swinging
from her belt. He saw something else, also, that made his heart stop
beating for an instant; and then the quadroon held up her hand and
listened attentively.
“Do you hear a bell?” she asked.
Scarcely had she spoken when in the distance a fog-whistle sang out
across the water, and through the flying scud a yellow light winked and
went out.
“We’re right off Alcatraz,” she said. “Here, you stand by this lever and
mind my orders. Watch now, how I do it. Way forward for full speed
ahead, way back to reverse, and midway to stop; and turn off the naphtha
at this throttle. I’ll take the wheel, and we’ll make across for the
Lombard Street Wharf. Keep a look-out ahead, and let me know the instant
you see a light, or anything!”
She went forward to the wheel, and the launch forged ahead at half-speed
with Vango shuddering at the engine. But it was not only the piercing
wind that froze him stiff as he stood, for there was a ghastly horror
aboard that was almost unbearable. As the woman had stood by the engine,
swinging her lantern to show the working of the machinery, the light had
sought out one corner after another, and, though she had stood between,
the rays fell once upon an object protruding from beneath the seat. It
was a foot; there was no mistaking the outline, though the light had
touched it but for an instant. With all his resolution he put the sight
out of his mind and said no word to her, for her eyes terrified him, and
he dared not question.
She had, however, left the lantern behind to illuminate the machine, and
it now slanted past and flickered on the toe of that foot. He tried to
remove his eyes from it, but the thing held him with a morbid
fascination. Look where he would, it stuck in the end of his eye and
held him in an anguish. He kept his hand ready to the lever, and
succeeded in obeying the woman’s orders to stop, go ahead, or back, but
he acted as one hypnotised.
In about half an hour a dim light off the bow warned them off Lombard
Street pier, and from here they crawled slowly past the water-front,
guided by the lights on the sea-wall and the lanterns of ships in the
stream. Below the Pacific Mail dock their run was straight for Mission
Rock, and from there to the Potrero flats, but they were continually
getting off their course and regaining it, beating about this way and
that, confused in direction by the lights in the fog.
During this time the two exchanged hardly a word that did not have to do
with the navigation of the boat. Vango watched her, silhouetted against
the mist as she bent to one side and the other, and the distressing
tensity of the situation did not prevent him now from racking his wits
to find some possible explanation of her identity and purpose. He was a
keen observer and used to making shrewd guesses, but this was too much
for him.
At last, in the gray of the dawn, the launch arrived off Hunter’s Point,
and the medium’s eyes were straining through the murk to see some
landing pier, when he received a sudden summons to stop the boat. He
obeyed and looked up at the woman, who came aft. He flattened himself
against the rail in terror of her, for, sure now that one murder had
been done aboard the launch, he feared another.
“Now,” said the quadroon woman, “I want to know who you are and all
about you.”
In a few stuttering syllables he told her his story, persisting with a
childish fatuity in the deceit he had already begun, and welding to it
bits of truth from the strange procession of events that had carried him
through the past few months. When he mentioned the fact that he was a
medium, he noticed a change in the woman’s attitude immediately. His
cunning awoke, and the sharper began to assert himself, following this
clew, telling of how many persons he had aided with his wonderful
clairvoyant powers, and the success of his trances. It is needless to
say that he did not mention Mrs. Higgins, nor his reason for having
given up his practice. As he rolled off the glib catch-words and phrases
of his trade, he watched the woman sharply through his drooping eyelids
with the agile scrutiny of a professional trickster, and sought in her
appearance some clew to her secret.
With all her determination, the woman was undoubtedly sadly distraught.
The pistol by her side hinted at violence. Her dishevelled hair, the
distraction of her garments, her clinched fists and tightened brows told
clearly of some moving experience. Above all, the corpse beside the
engine, and her attempts to hide it, proclaimed some secret tragedy. Yet
while her mouth trembled her eyes were steady; if he made a wrong guess
it might not be well for him.
At the end of his explanations she had melted in a burst of feminine
credulity and hunger for the marvellous. “Then you can help me,” she
exclaimed, throwing herself upon his leadership in a swift submission to
the dominant sex. “You _must_ help me! I am in great trouble, and what
is to be done must be done quickly. Can you hold a sitting now? I want
to find something as soon as I can—it is of the greatest importance—I
would give any price to know where to find it. You must get your spirit
friends to help me!”
The medium shuffled. “You’re rather nervous, and the conditions ain’t
favourable when a party is excited or sufferin’ from excitin’ emotions.
The proper degree of mutuality ain’t to be obtained unless a sitter is
what you might call undisturbed.” Then he put all his shrewdness into a
piercing gaze. “Besides, you got murder on you! I see a red aura
hoverin’ over you like you had bloody hands!”
At this the quadroon burst out, “I haven’t, but I wish I had, and it
isn’t my fault!”
“Confession is good for the soul of a party,” Vango said, with unction.
“I’ll tell you everything, if you’ll only promise to help me. I am
innocent of any real crime, I swear before God! But I tried to kill a
man to-night. It was in self-defence, though.”
She took the lantern, and, setting the light on the seat, pointed
silently to the body. “Look at him!” she said.
After a heroic conflict with his repugnance the medium rolled the corpse
over till it lay face up. The dead man was a Chinaman. He could see that
by his clothes and hair, although his face was half masked with clotted
blood. Two shocking gashes in the forehead turned Vango sick with
horror. He looked up at the woman with fear in his eyes, and asked:
“Who was the deceased?”
“It was my husband,” she said, and her sobs choked her. “We must get him
ashore and put him in the house, and then we can decide what next, and
perhaps you can help me. There’s our pier, over there,” and she pointed
out the light on a little wharf running out from the gloom. She took the
wheel again, and the launch was docked at the pier.
As Vango disembarked and prepared to help her with the corpse, the
quadroon woman quickly stopped him. “Here,” she said, pointing to a
large wooden case in the bow, “this must go ashore first. Take it into
the shed there and watch out that you’re not seen. It won’t do for the
police to see it, or any of the neighbours. I’d rather they saw the
body!”
She stooped and untied a coil of rope from the case, and then the two
lifted it to the floating stage. It weighed something over a hundred
pounds, and it was all they could do to carry it together up the steep
incline and along the pier to the shed. The woman took a key from her
pocket, and unlocked the door. When the case was inside the room, which
was scantily furnished with a few chairs and tables, they returned to
the launch.
As they approached the stage, Vango thought of the woman’s request for a
seance, and her words struck him as curious. He asked her carelessly
what it was she wished to find.
“A scrap of red paper, with Chinese writing on it,” was the reply. She
had no more than uttered the words, when, glancing over at the launch,
Vango saw on the floor in the rays of the lantern a red spot. Looking
more closely, he saw that it was undoubtedly the very paper the woman
wanted. He turned suddenly and faced her to prevent her seeing it, and
seized her hand. Then he sighed heavily, passing his free hand over his
eyes.
“I feel a vibration of a self-independent message from my control,” he
said, and fetched a dramatic shudder. “They is a kind of a pain in my
head, as though a party had passed out of a stab like.”
This revelation was made in a die-away voice, as if from many miles off,
and he glanced through a slit in his lids at the quadroon to see how she
was taking it. Then he shuddered again more violently, but this time
without dissimulation. His hand gripped hers like a wrestler’s, his eyes
leaped past her, over her shoulder, staring; for there, dimly shadowed
in the obscurity, holding up a spectral arm in warning, was Mrs.
Higgins!
Vango’s soul was torn between greed and fear. Here was another dupe who
could restore his fortune, the way to cajole her plain before him—there
was the threatening form of his Nemesis protesting against his roguery,
and he faltered in dread.
“Oh, what is it, what is it?” the quadroon woman cried, piteously.
The medium’s cupidity won, and the credulous woman in the flesh was more
potent than her sister in the spirit. He shut his eyes and went
desperately on:
“She gives me this message: What you’re a-lookin’ for will be found
sooner than what you expect, and you’ll come by it on the water. You’ll
be guided to it by a party who is a good friend to you and you can
trust, and she gives me the letter ’V.’ He’s a dark-complected man with
a beard, and there’ll be money a-comin’ to him through your help.”
Having trembled again, and sighed himself back to life, the medium
turned to her drowsily, as if he had just been called from bed. “Where
am I?” he said, in mock surprise, and then with a groan of relief, as he
saw that Mrs. Higgins had disappeared, he added, “Oh, what was I sayin’?
I must have went into a trance.”
The quadroon was in a high tremor of suspense. “What is your name? You
never told me,” she demanded.
“My name?” he repeated, with a baby stare. “Vango, Professor Vango.
Why?”
“Then you’re the man,” she cried. “Come! Help me take the body ashore,
for we must get him to Chinatown as quickly as the Lord will let us.”
He waited till she had jumped into the boat and had laid her hand to the
corpse, and then he snatched for the paper and waved it in the air. “Did
you say it was a scrap of red paper you lost?”
She sprang at him and looked closely. “This is the very piece I wanted!
Wong Yet is one of them!” she cried. “Now my poor husband can be
avenged! God bless you, Professor; you have proved your part of the
message is true, and I reckon I’ll prove mine. Find the other half of
this piece of paper for me, you can do it easy with your spirit guides,
and I’ll give you a thousand dollars for it!”
They stooped over the dead Chinaman, and, with Professor Vango at the
shoulders and the quadroon at the knees, the corpse was carried up the
landing stage and along the pier to the shed. Here was hitched a
pitifully dirty white horse harnessed to a disreputable covered
laundry-wagon, spattered with adobe mud. Into this equipage they loaded
the remains, piled the case in the rear, and buttoned down the curtains.
Then the woman mounted with Vango to the seat and drove for the Potrero.
As they turned into the San Bruno Road, the quadroon began her promised
confession. She could not proceed calmly, but was swept with alternate
passions of sorrow and rage. The medium, however, unmoved by her
suffering, eyed her craftily, watching his chance to feed upon her
superstitious hopes.
THE STORY OF THE QUADROON WOMAN
I reckon you don’t guess a coloured person can hate white folks as much
as white folks hate niggers, but they do, sometimes, and I despise a
white man more than if I were a sure-enough black woman.
My Daddy was born fairer than a good many white trash. Some folks never
knew he was a mulatto. My ma died when I was born. Daddy wanted me to be
educated, so I was sent to the Tuskegee Institute, where I learned
nursing. After that we lived a little way out of Mobile, and we were
right happy for a good while.
Well, about two years back, there was an awful crime committed near our
place, and all the whites went pretty near crazy. You don’t have to be
told what it was, and you know what law amounts to at such times. Any
coloured man that is once suspected has no show at all. Daddy was
innocent, of course, but if he’d been guilty, I’d have stood up for him
just the same. He was put in jail, and they got up a mob to lynch him. I
got wind of it just in time. There was a sheriff’s deputy who was fond
of me, and he and I managed to get Daddy out and started West.
I had no idea just where Daddy had gone, till one day I was looking over
the Mobile _Register_, and I come on a “Personal” that made me prick up
my ears. It looked like it might have been written by my Daddy for me to
see. It was addressed “Aber,” and when I turned the word backward, the
way you do sometimes with funny-sounding words, I saw it made my own
name, “Reba.” It read like this:
Aber: Shall answer no further requests, as nobody can identify.
Sheriff called off.
Odod.
Now Odod was just Dodo backward; that was my pet name for Daddy when I
was little. The word “sheriff” seemed likely, but I couldn’t understand
that about “requests.” Then I thought to read the first letters of each
word, like the acrostics Daddy and I used to work out together in the
_Youth’s Companion_, and there it was, easy. Just “San Francisco.” Then
I knew Daddy was safe in California and wanted me to come on.
I packed right up and bought a ticket, hoping to find him somehow when I
got there. I didn’t think anybody would suspicion my leaving, but I had
no idea how cruel white folks can be, till I had gone too far to come
back. Just after we left New Orleans I thought I saw a man following me.
I wasn’t quite certain till we changed cars at El Paso, but then I knew
he was a sure-enough detective.
Talk about bloodhounds! That man never left me out of his sight for a
minute. He sat in the corner with his hat pulled over his face, and I
could just feel his eyes boring a hole in my back.
First thing I did after I got to the Golden West Hotel was to mail a
personal to the _Herald_. It read like this:
Odod: Any money will assist the cause. Help earnestly desired. We
are in trouble.
Aber.
I knew if he saw this message he’d see it meant “Am watched. Wait.”
Well, I can’t tell you half what I went through that first week, with
the detective turning up everywhere I went, till I was afeared I’d die
of the strain. Sometimes I just felt like murdering him to get him out
of the way. I didn’t care so much for myself, but I was in mortal terror
lest he’d catch sight of Daddy and arrest him. I watched my chance, and
one night I went to bed early, leaving word at the office to be called
at five next morning. Then, at two o’clock I got up and went out,
leaving all my things in the hotel.
I took a room down on Third Street, near Minna, and for three weeks I
was mighty careful where I went, waiting for the deputy to leave town. I
got a few jobs of nursing, so I paid my way for a spell; then I just
couldn’t stand it a day more, and I risked getting word to Daddy. So I
put another personal in the paper, telling him, the same way as before,
to meet me at the old Globe Hotel in Chinatown next night. You know the
old Globe used to be right smart of a hotel in early days, but now there
are hundreds of Chinamen living in it. It’s like an ant-hill, full of
all sorts of ways and corners to get out.
I waited on the steps, keeping a sharp eye out for Daddy. But I hadn’t
been there more than ten minutes before I saw—not my dear old Dodo—but
the detective who had followed me all the way West. I ran down the steps
and walked up Dupont Street as fast as I dared, never looking round once
nor letting on I had seen him.
When I got to the corner of Washington Street, only a matter of a block
away, I ran smack into a man. He grabbed me in his arms, and was crying
over me before I recognised him by his voice as Daddy, for he had a
light wig and a dyed mustache, and wore blue spectacles. I had no time
to kiss him even. I just whispered to him, “The detective—run for your
life!”
Daddy gave one glance over his shoulder, and ran up Washington Street.
The detective saw him go, and dashed after him, and I followed them
both. They turned up a flight of steps into a big doorway, a little
piece up the block.
I saw by the sign over the door that it was a Chinese theatre they had
gone into.
But I just had to find out what was going on inside, so I paid the man
at the door fifty cents and went up the stairs. I had never been in such
a place before, of course, and at first I had no idea what to do or
where to go. There was no sign of Daddy or the detective anywhere, and
the place was filled with a great crowd of Chinamen on the seats. The
only white people I saw were a lady and two men sitting up on one side
of the open stage. I was bewildered and frightened to death, for there
was a horrible noise of big gongs and squeaking fiddles, and actors in
queer costumes singing and talking in shrill voices.
A Chinaman came down the crowded aisle and took me up to a seat beside
the tourists on the stage, and there I had to sit in front of that crowd
of coolies while the play went on and on and on. I have seen Chinese
plays enough since, but then it was all new and terrible, for the
orchestra was right near me, making such a noise that I thought I’d go
mad, and the actors kept coming in and going out past me reciting in a
sing-song. I wanted to scream.
Away up over the stage was a break in the wall where the ceiling went up
higher, and there was a little window almost above my head. There, once
I saw a head stuck out and a Chinaman looked at me, long and hard. This
made me more frightened than ever.
Just when I thought I couldn’t stand it a minute longer, I heard the
voice of a white man swearing in the dressing-room behind the stage, and
then the detective came through the curtain looking like he was mad
enough to kill somebody. Frightened as I was at him, my heart was nigh
ready to break with joy, for I knew that Daddy must have escaped from
him somehow. He looked over the audience from the floor to the galleries
where the women were, and finally went out.
As soon as he was out of sight a Chinaman came up to me and grinned.
“You likee see actor dlessing-loom?” he said. Something told me that he
was a friend and I got right up and followed him. We went into the
dressing-room, where all the costumes were hung on the wall and the
actors were putting on queer dresses and painting their faces, then up a
flight of stairs. I kept my eyes open sharp, looking everywhere for
Daddy. Above the stage was the joss-house room of the theatre with punks
burning, but the place was empty. Above that was the kitchen.
Then we turned a corner, went down some steps and came to a padlocked
door. My guide unlocked it, put me outside on a platform, whistled and
left me, after saying, “You keep still; bimeby you catch him!” Then I
heard his footsteps going back into the building.
I was alone on an outside balcony, looking down into a dark alley, three
floors below.
After awhile a door opened, and a man beckoned to me. We went through a
little hall with doors on each side and dark passages leading off every
which way, and down these, in and out till I was more confused than
ever, and then finally he knocked at a little door. It was opened, and I
was pushed inside.
It was a tiny box of a room, low and narrow. On a broad bunk at one
side, two Chinese actors in costumes were lying, smoking opium pipes.
Leastways, I thought they were Chinamen, but as soon as the door was
shut, one jumped up and took me in his arms. I screamed and fought to
get away, but he called me Reba, and I knew it was Daddy. No wonder I
didn’t recognise him before. He had on a wig with a long queue, and a
gold embroidered costume, and his face was painted in a hideous fashion,
with his nose all white and streaks under his eyes.
After I had kissed half the paint off his face he told me what had
happened.
Daddy had been in San Francisco long enough to get pretty well
acquainted with Chinatown. He had kept around there from the first, to
escape notice, and he had got to be mighty good friends with one of the
actors who spoke English fairly well. When he was chased by the
detective he had made straight for Moy Kip’s room, and asked to hide
out. The Chinese are used to fooling the police, and Kip just threw a
gown over Daddy’s shoulders, painted his face, and put him on the opium
bunk. When the officer went through the actors’ rooms, he looked in, but
didn’t see any more than I saw at first. Then Moy Kip watched me through
the little window over the stage, and as soon as the detective left the
place they sent for me.
Daddy and I were taken to a room three stories under the sidewalk, where
we hid for a week, going upstairs at meal-times. It was just like one
big family of about eighty men, but only one or two women. The little
rooms we had were dark and dirty and close, and the smell was something
awful. I couldn’t have stood it alone, but Daddy was safe. That was
enough for a while.
But living Chinese fashion, without sunlight or decent food, didn’t
agree with Daddy at all, and he fell sick. It wasn’t only the air that
was ailing him, it was the fear of capture, too, and with all the
hardship and worry his fever got steadily worse. A Chinese doctor in big
spectacles and a long white mustache came in to see him, and mixed him
up some black, horrid, smelly stuff, made of sea-horses and lizards, and
Moy Kip burned punks in the joss-house upstairs, but he didn’t get any
better. He was always worrying about something when he was delirious,
and I couldn’t make out quite what it was about till one day, just
before the end, when his mind cleared and he told me. Moy Kip wanted to
marry me! Daddy didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t bear to ask me to
marry a Chinaman, and he didn’t like to refuse the man who had been
right kind to him.
You can imagine how I felt about it. It would have been bad enough if
Moy Kip had been an ordinary Chinaman, but, being an actor, he belonged
to almost the lowest caste. Undertakers and barbers and boatmen are the
only ones below. Actors can’t even mix equally with ordinary coolies.
Besides, Kip being the principal “white-face” actor or comedian, the
manager didn’t let him leave the theatre much, for fear he’d be
kidnapped by highbinders and held for ransom. If I married him, the life
would be something awful.
And now, to make it all worse, my poor old Dodo was taken away. He died
in my arms after being sick a week.
I was alone in the city, without money or friends, except the Chinese
actors. I was almost crazy for sunlight and fresh air, and the sight of
decent people.
Moy Kip was the only one of the crowd of Chinamen in the building who
could speak English very well, and he had also been my father’s friend.
He was educated after a fashion, and, for a Chinaman, kind and
gentlemanly.
One day, soon after Daddy was buried, Kip came to my room. I was crying
on the bunk, and he stood there watching me; then he placed a roll of
gold on the table. “I give you two hundled dollar,” he said. “You likee
go away home? No good stay here. Chiny actor heap bad.”
I sat up in surprise. I wondered where I would ever find another man
who, loving me and having me in his power, would give me the means to
escape. Right away I began to like him.
“Oh, Moy Kip,” I said, “you have been so good to poor Daddy!”
He looked at me hard, and said, “You likee Moy Kip? You mally me,
please?”
So, after a while, I ended by accepting him, and I have never been sorry
since. We were married in the Chinese way. I wore a stiff dress of red
silk my husband bought for me, and my hair was braided tight and
greased, fastened with gold fila-gree and jade ornaments. I had my
cheeks rouged and eyebrows painted, and all.
But it was not till the carriage took me from my old rooms and the slave
woman had carried me on her back up the stairs and into Moy Kip’s home
(so that I should not stumble on the threshold and bring bad luck), that
I found out how much difference the marriage was going to make to my
husband. For I wasn’t taken to the theatre at all, but to a little set
of rooms in Spofford Alley. When he came in to meet me, dressed like a
prince in his lilac blouse and green trousers, I asked him how it
happened he hadn’t fitted up a room for me in the theatre.
Seems like he reckoned I had brought him luck, for he had paid the
manager for the right to quit acting, and he was going to try and get
into more respectable business. In China, of course, he would have had
to go on being an actor, and his sons after him, but Chinatown here is
different, and it’s getting to lose some of the old strictness.
What Moy Kip was going to do, was to smuggle opium. He’d been wanting to
go into it for a long time, but he had nobody to help him at it, nobody
he could trust, that is. With me to take hold, he reckoned he could make
right smart of money.
We bought a naphtha launch and filled it with nets and truck, like we
were fishing, if anybody wanted to inspect us; and Kip had fixed the
stewards on about every China steamer coming into port. They bought the
stuff in five-tael tins, and packed it in bales with lines and floats,
dropping it overboard as the ship crossed the bar. Then all we had to do
was to cruise around in the launch and pick up the floats and haul in
the bale. It was my part of the business to dispose of the opium after
we had got it into town. I sold it to a German who distributed it
through Chinatown.
The first year I was perfectly happy with Moy Kip, and no white man
could have treated me better than he did. He named me “Hak Chu”—the
black pearl—and nothing was too good for me. But still we didn’t count
for much in Chinatown, for Moy Kip was still considered an actor, and
below the notice of merchants. It seemed to be as much a question of
money as anywhere else in the world, and until we could save enough up
to buy a share in some store, we were less than nobody, except at the
theatre, where they were always glad to see us both. We often went to
see the plays, until, with my husband’s explanations, I got so I could
follow the acting pretty well.
It’s right interesting when you begin to understand, for everything in
the theatre means something. Moy Kip explained to me how the carved and
gilded dragon over the doors leading to the dressing-rooms meant a
water-spout, and the sign beside it read, “Go out and change costume.”
They have lots of different kinds of plays, and some of them take weeks
to go through, running night after night until all the doings of the
hero are finished.
One night while we were sitting on the stage in the theatre watching a
new Wae, or painted-face comedian, who had come from China to take Moy
Kip’s place, a man came to my husband with a letter. You know, in
Chinese theatres they have a special column where letters for anybody in
the audience can be pinned up, and this one had been seen by some one
who knew Kip was there. When he read it I could see that it had bad
news. He got up right off, and told me we must go home.
When we were safe in our house, he told me what was the matter. The
letter was from the president of a highbinder tong. They had discovered
that we were making money some way, and now that if Moy Kip didn’t pay
five thousand dollars right off, he would be murdered by their
hatchet-men. Oh, I was scared! I tried to make my husband promise to pay
the hush-money, but he just wouldn’t do it. He said he might as well die
as be robbed of all he had earned at so much risk. He said he wasn’t
afraid, but if he wasn’t, I was.
From this time on, I had the horrors every time he left me. While we
were together on our trips on the launch, I didn’t care so much, for the
excitement kept up my spirits, but as soon as I was left alone I burned
punks in front of his little joss, just like I was a heathen myself.
All went on so quiet that I had begun to feel easier, when yesterday the
City of Pekin was reported. It was after dark before we got out to our
wharf and put off, and we passed the steamer at the Quarantine Station.
It was cold and foggy, and we spent hours cruising out at the mouth of
the harbor, in a rough swell, before we picked up the opium and steamed
back to Hunter’s Point.
As we stopped the engines and shot up to the pier, I was steering in the
bow, and Moy Kip was at the engine. Just then I saw two men rise up from
behind a pile on the dock. I screamed to my husband to reverse the
engine and back off at full speed, and he had just done it when the
highbinders jumped into the boat. The shock nearly rolled her over, and
I fell down on my face. Before I could get up, I saw the hatchet-men
strike at Moy Kip two or three times. I drew my pistol and fired, but
the launch was rolling, so I reckon I missed them. They jumped into the
water and swam off. Then I called out to Moy Kip and ran aft to help
him.
My husband didn’t answer. I stooped down to him and turned him over—oh,
it was horrible!—and then I must have swooned away, for it’s the last
thing I remember.
I know the ways of these hired hatchet-men. They’ve been sold out time
after time by their own members, and so now when they go out for a
murder they write down a confession with both names signed on the same
paper. Then they tear it up and divide the pieces, each one having the
other’s name to hold him by, if his partner tries to sell him out.
Wong Yet’s confession is on this paper you found. He’ll die
to-night—murderers can be bought cheap in Chinatown. Now, if I only
had the other half of the paper I’d know who the second man was, and
settle him, too.
By this time the dilapidated laundry wagon had threaded the Mission,
crossed Market Street, and was rolling along the asphalt of Golden Gate
Avenue on its way to the Chinese Quarter. The quadroon woman’s eyes were
afire with hate, and Vango watched her in apprehension, mingled with a
shrewd desire to work further upon her excitement.
“You see I was able to be of assistance, even when conditions was
unfavorable,” he ventured. “The spirits is unfallible to instruct when a
party approaches ’em right. If I could give you a regular sittin’ and
get into perfect harmony with the vibrations of my control’s magnetism,
I ain’t no doubt I could lead you to find the balance of that there
paper.”
The wheel of the wagon caught in the street-car rail and the medium was
jerked almost off his seat. Or, so an observer might have explained the
sudden lurch and the way Vango’s face went white. But his imagination or
mania, kindled again by the craft of his trickery, had conjured up the
vision of his previous dupe, and Mrs. Higgins’s spirit arose before him
in threatening attitude. He cowered and stared, exorcising the phantom,
rubbing his hands in terror.
But the quadroon woman did not notice. Her mind, too, was full of
horrors, and the desire for vengeance was an obsession. She only
replied, “One thousand dollars if you find that piece of paper before
night!”
CHAPTER VIII
THE HERO’S ADVENTURE: THE MYSTERY OF THE HAMMAM
“Ten cents!” Admeh Drake muttered to himself, as he felt the first shock
of the cool breeze on Kearney Street, “what in Jericho can a man do with
a dime, anyway? It won’t even buy a decent bed; it won’t pay the price
of a drink at the Hoffman Bar. Coffee John is full of prunes!”
He walked up the cheap side of the street, looking aimlessly at the shop
windows. “I figure it out about this way,” he thought, “I ain’t going to
earn a million with two nickels; if I make a raise, it’ll be just by
durn luck. So it don’t matter how I begin, nor what I do at all. I just
got to go it blind, and trust to striking a trail that’ll lead to water.
I’ll take up with the first idea I get, and ride for it as far as it
goes.”
With this decision, he gave up the unnecessary strain of thought and
floated with the human current, letting it carry him where it would. Now
the main Gulf Stream of San Francisco life sets down Kearney and up
Market Street; this is the Rialto, the promenade of cheap actors,
rounders and men about town. It is the route of the amatory ogler and
the grand tour of the demi-monde. Of a Saturday afternoon the course is
given over to human peacocks and popinjays, fresh from the matinees,
airing “the latest” in garb and finery; but there is a late guard abroad
after the theatres close in the evening, when the relieving prospect of
an idle morrow gives a merry license for late hours and convivial
comradeship. Among these raglans and opera-cloaks, Admeh’s rusty brown
jacket was carried along like an empty bottle floating down stream.
He turned into Market Street at Lotta’s Fountain, and had drifted a
block northerly, when the brilliant letters of an electric sign across
the way caught his eye: “Biograph Theatre. Admittance, ten cents.” The
hint was patent and alluring; there seemed to be no gainsaying such a
tip from Fate. Over he went with never a thought as to where he would
spend the night without money, and in two minutes Coffee John’s dime
slid under the window of the little ticket office in front. “Hurry up!”
said the man in the box, “the performance is just about to begin.”
Admeh made his way upstairs, passed through a corridor lined with a
cheap and unnecessary display of dried fishes in a long glass case, and
came to the entrance of a dingy hall, dimly illuminated. At the far end
of the sloping floor was a Lilliputian stage. A scant score of
spectators were huddled together on the front seats and here Admeh took
his place, between two soldiers in khaki uniform and a fat negress.
As he sat down, the curtain rose and two comedians entered, to go
through a dreary specialty turn of the coarsest “knockabout”
description. Admeh yawned. Even the negress was bored, and the two
infantry corporals sneered openly. Next came a plump lady of uncertain
age who carolled a popular song and did a frisky side-step to the
chorus.
Admeh was gloomily disappointed. He turned his head to inspect the
audience more closely, hoping for some livelier prompting of his
destiny, when with a trill and a one—two—three accompaniment upon the
wheezy piano at the side of the stage, a little soubrette ran down to
the footlights, and with a mighty fetching seriousness, rolling her eyes
to the ceiling, proclaimed: “Ladies and gentlemen, with your kind
permission, I will now endeavor to entertain you with a few tricks of
sleight-of-hand.”
She was a wee thing with wistful brown eyes under a curly blond wig, and
seemingly a mere child. Her costume was a painful combination of blue
and violet, home-made beyond a doubt. No one could help looking a guy in
such a dress, but Maxie Morrow, as the placard on the proscenium
announced her, had a childish ingenuousness that forfended criticism.
As she went through her foolish little performance, audibly coached by
some one in the wings, Admeh’s eyes followed her with eager interest. He
wondered how much older she was than she looked, and what she would be
like off the stage. She had a piquant rather than a pretty face, in form
that feline triangle depicted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. In her movements
she was as graceful and as swiftly accurate as a kitten, and she had all
a kitten’s endearing and alluring charm.
Admeh made a sudden resolve. If he were to meet with an adventure that
night, what could possibly be more entertaining than to have for his
heroine this little puss of a magician? He made a rapid study of the
situation to discover its possibilities. It took but a few minutes for
his wishes to work out a plan of action, and he was soon at the door
urbanely addressing the ticket-taker.
“See here,” said Admeh, “I’m a reporter on the _Wave_—you know the
paper, weekly illustrated—and I want an interview with Miss Morrow. I’ll
give her a good write-up if you’ll let me go behind and talk to her.”
The Biograph Theatre did not often figure in the dramatic columns of the
city papers, and such a free advertisement was not to be refused. The
doorkeeper became on the instant effusively polite and, bustling with
importance, took the young man down a side aisle to a door and up three
stairs through a passage leading behind the wings. Admeh was shown into
a tiny dressing-room whose scrawled plaster walls were half covered with
skirts, waists, and properties of all kinds. The little magician was in
front of her make-up table, dabbing at the rouge pot. The doorkeeper
introduced the visitor, then discreetly withdrew, closing the door after
him.
At her discovery by this audacious representative of the press, Maxie
was all smiles and blushes. She was still but little more than a girl,
although not quite so young as she had appeared in front of the
footlights, and more naïve and embarrassed than one would have expected
of such a determined little actress. She offered Admeh her own chair,
the only one in the room, but he seated himself upon a trunk and began
the conversation.
All his tact was necessary to put her at her ease and induce her to
talk. The Hero of Pago Bridge was by no means too ready with his tongue,
usually, in the presence of women, but there was something in the
touching admiration she betrayed for him as a newspaper man that
prevented him from being bashful. He thought the brotherly attitude to
be the proper pose, under the circumstances, and he led her on, talking
of the theatre, the weather, her costume and himself, while she sat
awkwardly conscious of her violet tights, which she slapped nervously
with a little whip. His careless, friendly way at last gave her
confidence, for he asked her few questions and did not seem to expect
clever replies. Before long she had thrown off all reserve and chatted
freely to him.
The Biograph Theatre kept open, as a rule, as long as it could secure
patronage. This night stragglers kept coming in, so that the four
“artists” and the picture machine in the room below still went through
their weary routine. As the conversation proceeded, Maxie left at times,
went through her act and returned, finding Admeh always ready to put her
upon the thread of her story.
So, by bits and snatches, by repetitions and parentheses, in an incident
here and a confession there, this is about the way Admeh Drake heard,
that night, in Maxie Morrow’s dressing-room
THE STORY OF THE MINOR CELEBRITY
I can’t really remember when I wasn’t acting, and I have no idea who my
parents were, or where I was born, or when, or anything. I think,
though, I must be about nineteen years old, though I don’t look it, and
I have decided on the first of July for my birthday, because that’s just
the middle of the year and it can’t possibly be more than six months
wrong. I used to go on in child’s parts in London when I couldn’t have
been more than four.
Then, the next thing I remember, I was with a company of Swiss
bell-ringers, and we travelled all through the English provinces. I used
to sing and dance in between their turns, and I tell you it was hard
work, practising all day and dancing all night, almost. We were all
fearfully poor, for we weren’t very much of an attraction. I had only
one frock beside my stage costume, and that one was so patched I was
ashamed to go to the pork shop, even, with it on. I was a regular little
slave to old Max, who ran the company, and had to help cook and wash the
dishes in the lodgings we took in the little towns. Bah! I hate the
smell of brown Windsor soap to this day. I was just a little wild
animal, for I never went to school a day in my life, and I was never
allowed to go out on errands alone, unless they kept account of the
exact time it would take to go and come, and they held me to account for
every minute. I hardly think I ever talked to a child till I was grown
up.
Well, the business fell off in England, so we took passage in a sailing
ship for California, around the Horn. That voyage was the happiest time
of my life, for I had nothing to do but practise my steps one or two
hours a day, when the sea was calm enough. There was a very nice old
lady aboard who taught me how to sew, and gave me some flannel to make
myself some underwear, for I had never worn anything but what showed
before, and I didn’t even know that anyone else ever did. She taught me
to read, too, and tried to help me with arithmetic, but mercy! I never
could get figures into my head.
Well, we got to San Francisco finally—that was about ten years ago.
Bell-ringing didn’t seem to take very well; it was out of date, or other
people did it better, because you know specialty people have to keep
improving their act, and play on their heads, or while they’re tumbling
through the air, or some novelty, nowadays, or it doesn’t go and it’s
hard to get booked. But my act drew well, and it always saved our turn.
I made up new steps all the time and invented pretty costumes, and so,
of course, old Max watched me like grim death to see that I didn’t get
away from him. We travelled all over the West, and all the time I was a
drudge, did most of the work and got none of the money. They used to
lock me into the house when they went out, and old Max’s wife would give
me so much work to do that she’d know whether I’d been idle a moment.
You wouldn’t think a girl in a fix like that had much chance to get
married, would you?
Well, I am married, or rather I was. I don’t know just how I stand now.
Let me tell you about it.
There was a man used to hang about the Star Variety Theatre in Los
Angeles, who did small parts sometimes, when they wanted a policeman in
a sketch, or things like that, but he mostly helped with the
scene-shifters. I never had more than a few words with him, but he kind
of took a fancy to me, and he used to bring me candy and leave it behind
the flats where the others wouldn’t see it. I don’t believe, now, he
ever cared so very much for me, but I was silly and had never had any
attention, and I thought he was in love with me, and I imagined I was
with him. He tried to make up to Max, but the old man wouldn’t have
anything to do with him.
One day, when all my people were out and had locked me in the house,
with a lot of dishes to wash, Harry—his name was Harry Maidslow—came
down the street and saw me at the kitchen window. I raised the sash when
he came into the yard, and without waiting for much talk first, for we
were both afraid the old man would be coming back and would catch us,
Harry asked me if I didn’t want to leave the show, and if I wouldn’t run
away with him.
I believe I told him I’d run away with an orangoutang if I got the
chance. Remember, I was only seventeen, and I had never been alone with
a man in my life before. In my life—if you call such slavery as that,
living! So he told me not to appear to notice him, but to be all ready
for him and to watch out, and when I heard a certain whistle he taught
me, wherever I was, to jump and run for him, and he’d do the rest.
You can imagine if I wasn’t excited for the next few days! I would have
jumped off the roof to get to him, if necessary, and I just waited from
hour to hour, expecting to hear his call every minute. I didn’t hardly
dare to go to sleep at night for fear I’d miss him, and I was listening
everywhere I went, meals and all. I think I trembled for three days. It
seemed impossible that he’d be able to get me away; it was too good to
come true. But I had nothing else in the world to look forward to, and I
hoped and prayed for that whistle with all my might.
One night at the theatre, after my company had done the first part of
their bell-ringing, I went on for my song. I remember it was that purple
silk frock I wore, the one with the gold fringe, and red stockings with
bows at the knees. Well, the orchestra had just struck up my air—
“Ain’t I the cheese? Ain’t I the cheese?
Dancing the serpentine under the trees!”
and I was just ready to catch the first note when I heard that whistle
so loud and clear I couldn’t mistake it. Heavens! I can almost hear it
now. I was half frightened to death, but I just shut my eyes and jumped
clean over the footlights and landed in the flageolet’s lap and then
pelted right up the middle aisle. Harry had a lot of his friends ready
by the main entrance, and they rushed down to meet me and while half of
them held the ushers and the crowd back, for everyone was getting up to
see what was the matter, like a panic, the rest of the boys took me by
the elbows and ran me out the front door. The house was simply packed
that night, and when they all saw me jump they set up a yell like the
place was afire. But I didn’t hear it at all till I got out in the
corridor with my skirt half torn off and my dancing clogs gone—and then
the noise sounded like a lion roaring in a menagerie.
Harry was all ready waiting for me, and he took me right up in his arms,
as if I was a doll, ran down the stairs, put me in a carriage waiting at
the door, and we drove off, lickety-split.
I’ve often thought since then that I took a big risk in trusting a man I
didn’t really know at all, but Harry was square, and took me right down
to a justice of the peace. We were married just as I stood, with no
slippers and the holes in the heels of my stockings showing. What old
Max did, I don’t know, but he must have been a picture for the audience
when he saw me fly away like a bird out of a cage. By the time he found
out what had happened it was too late to do anything about it, for I was
Mrs. Maidslow.
Well, I lived with Harry for a few months, and then he began to drink
and wanted me to go on the stage again to support him. The first time he
struck me I ran away and came up to San Francisco, and went into
specialty work for myself. Harry was kind enough when he was sober; in
fact, he was too good-natured to refuse even a drink; that was just what
was the matter. He had no backbone, and although he had a sort of
romantic way with him that women like he didn’t have the nerve to stay
with anything very long.
Now the funny part of the whole thing is this. You’d think that old Max
would have been furious, and so he was at first, but afterward he had a
terrible falling out with the others in his company—his wife had
died—and I guess he wanted to spite them more than he did me. At any
rate, just before he died, a year ago, he inherited some money from an
uncle in Germany, and what did he do but leave a kind of a legacy to
Harry. That is, the old man had a funny idea that wills didn’t hold very
well in this country, and he had a great respect for the honor of the
army officers. So he left $15,000 in cash with a Colonel Knowlton in
trust for Harry Maidslow when he could be found. Harry had a way of
changing his name when he felt like it, and old Max didn’t know him very
well, anyway, so the only way he could be sure of Colonel Knowlton
identifying him was by—well, by a certain mark he had on his body that
Max happened to know about. The colonel has been invalided home from the
Philippines, and every time he sees me he asks me if I’ve found Harry.
So, that’s all. I don’t really know whether I’m a wife or a widow, but I
do know that I ought to have a share of that money coming to me, and
perhaps if you put the story into the paper, some of his friends will
see it and give me news of him.
* * * * *
Admeh Drake put his pencil into his pocket feeling a sense of shame at
his duplicity with this little waif. He would have been glad to help
her, but it seemed useless to disappoint her credulity by confessing
that his relations with the press were entirely fictitious. “Well, I
hope you get the money,” he said, “and if there’s anything I can do to
help you, I will. But don’t you want me to see you home, Maxie?”
“Sure!” said the girl, frankly, and after pulling on a rather soiled
automobile coat and adjusting a top-heavy plumed black hat, she
descended the stairs of the theatre with Admeh and they found themselves
on Market Street.
“It’s a little late to get anything to eat,” Admeh suggested,
tentatively, trusting to his luck. He was not disappointed.
“Oh, yes, indeed,” replied the girl. “I always have supper after I get
home, anyway.”
Half the worry was off his mind, but without a cent in his pocket, the
question of transportation troubled him. If worst came to worst, Admeh
decided that he would take Maxie home in a carriage, see her safely
indoors, and then return and have it out with the driver. But first he
ventured another insinuation. “It’s a beautiful night!” he remarked. At
that moment the fog enveloped the upper half of the Spreckels Building,
and the tall and narrow column was visible only as an irregular pattern
of soft, blurred yellow lights.
“Fine!” said Maxie. “Let’s walk.”
She took his arm blithely, happy at her release from work, and they
crossed over, went up Grant Avenue to Post Street and there turned
toward Union Square. A short distance ahead of them a tall man in a gray
mackintosh was walking with somewhat painful carefulness up the street.
His deviations seemed to testify to a rather jovial evening’s
indulgence. The two rapidly approached him, and Admeh had scarcely time
to notice his yellow beard and hair when the stranger turned into a
doorway. The house he entered was gaudily painted in red and yellow with
stars and crescents, and so fiercely lighted with electric lamps that no
wayfarer, however dazed, could fail to notice the sign: “Hammam
Baths—Gentlemen’s Entrance.” When Admeh turned to Maxie she was as pale
as if she had seen a ghost. She looked up at him with a glitter in her
eyes.
“Here!” she exclaimed, opening her purse and thrusting a dollar into his
hand. “Go in there and see if that man who just went in has the word
’Dotty’ tattooed on his right arm! Find out who he is, and come to the
theatre and tell me.”
With that she pushed him into the doorway and was gone.
THE MYSTERY OF THE HAMMAM
With the enthusiasm of an amateur detective, Admeh Drake paid his dollar
for admission, and passed through two anterooms into an artificially
tropical atmosphere. Turkish baths were a luxury outside the scheme of
things; he knew nothing of the arrangements. He paused, uncertain how to
proceed; uncertain, too, as to the best plan for catching the
yellow-bearded man stripped. While he hesitated, an attendant showed him
into a dressing-room. He saw naked men passing with towels twisted about
their loins.
For the first time in many days, he took off his wrinkled, creased
clothes. Pausing on the balcony without the door, he surveyed the
carpeted, gaudily decorated apartment below. It was midnight, the
busiest hour of the twenty-four in the baths. Heavier than the
atmosphere of steam and steamed humanity rose the fumes of liquor. Few
there are sober in a Hammam at that elbow of the night. Not knowing that
the sweating heat takes the edge and fervor from the wildest
intoxication, Admeh wondered, as he watched, at the subdued murmur of
their babblings. His eye ranged over a group sitting up in towel robes,
chatting drowsily, over a drunken satyr thrusting his heavy limbs from
under the covers and singing a sleepy tune, over two others sunk in
stupor. Beyond them was a group of jockeys, who had come to reduce
weight; all were young, small, keen-eyed, each was puffing a huge cigar.
In that bower of transformation, where all men stood equal as at the
judgment, their worldly goods shrunk to a single bath towel, he found it
hard to pick his man, yet no one could he see with the clay-yellow hair
and beard that marked the mysterious person for whom he was searching.
Following others who slipped down the stairs in the single, levelling
garment, Admeh went across the main salon, through a double glass door,
and into an ante-chamber considerably hotter, where men were lolling
back, wet and shiny, in canvas chairs. He saw the rubbers working in the
room beyond, saw that the men under their hands were black and brown of
hair and beard.
To the right, another glass door caught his eye. He passed in and gasped
at the heavy, overpowering temperature. His glasses, to which he had
clung with the instinct of a near-sighted man, burned on his nose. Men,
glistening and dripping, sat all along the wall, their feet in little
tubs of water.
In the corner sat the mysterious stranger of the yellow hair and beard.
He was singing sentimentally. Admeh, practised in the lore of
intoxication, watched him. “The jag’s growing,” he said to himself. In
fact, the fumes of liquor, heat driven, were mounting steadily. Crossing
the room, so as to command the stranger’s right side, he saw round his
upper arm a black rubber bandage, like those used to confine varicose
veins. The problem resolved itself into a question of tearing off that
bandage.
“Hotter’n the hazes of the Philippines!” babbled the man with the yellow
beard. Piecing together the description of her husband given by Maxie in
the story of her adventures, Admeh was more than ever persuaded that
this was the object of his search, that under the elastic bandage was
the mark of identification by which he was to know the legatee of the
fortune left by the old bell-ringer.
The man of the yellow beard sang maudlin Orpheum songs and prattled of
many things. He cursed San Francisco. He told of his amours. He offered
to fight or wrestle with anyone in the room. “A chance,” thought Admeh,
as he took the challenge. But in a moment more, the drunken man was
running again on a love-tack, with the winds of imagination blowing
free. Nevertheless, this challenge gave Admeh an idea. What he could not
encompass by diplomacy he might seize by force. In that method, all must
depend upon the issue of a moment. If he could tear away the bandage in
the first dash he would win. But let the struggle last more than a
moment and others would intervene; then he would be thrown out and the
chance would be gone. Mentally he measured bodies against the stranger;
man for man he saw that, both being sober, he himself was badly
over-matched. Broader and taller by many inches, the stranger was of
thick, knotty limbs, and deep chest; Admeh himself was all cowboy nerve
and wire, but slight and out of condition. It was bull against coyote.
“The question is,” thought Admeh, “can I and his jag lick him and his
muscle?”
The stranger, singing again, lurched along the hot tiling to another
room. Admeh gasped like a hooked trout as he followed through the door.
It was the extra-hot room, where the mercury registered one hundred and
sixty degrees. The stranger’s bristles began to subside and his lips
crept together. The amateur detective drew nearer and, languid as he was
with the terrific heat, gathered his force for the attempt. At that
moment an attendant with trays of ice water slouched in on his felt
shoes. Admeh slipped back into his chair.
This entrance had a most surprising effect on him of the yellow beard.
Some emotion, which Admeh took to be either fear or anxiety, struggled
to break through the veil of his debauch; he stared with bleary but
intent eyes. In a moment he was lurching for the door. Glad of the
relief from that overwhelming heat, Admeh followed. The trail led
through the anteroom, past the rubbers and their benches, through
another double glass door. A rush of steam fogged his spectacles; when
it cleared a little, he saw dimly, through the hot vapor, that he was in
a long, narrow closet, banked on one side by benches and by pipes which
were vomiting clouds of steam. Groping from one side to the other, he
found that they were quite alone.
With no further hesitation, Admeh rushed on his man and grasped for the
right arm.
By the fraction of an inch he missed his hold. The stranger, with a
quickness amazing for one in his condition—and what was more surprising,
without a word—lashed out and caught Admeh a blow under the chest which
whirled him back on the hot benches and fairly jerked his spectacles
from his nose. The issue was on, and it was first honors for the
stranger. Unsteady on his legs, but still determined, Admeh closed
again, ducked under a ponderous blow and grappled round the waist. He
managed to get one hand on the bandage, but in no wise could he tear it
away, for the stranger held him in a bear-grip, tight about the neck. So
they struggled and grunted and swayed through the misty clouds from the
hot benches to the slippery floor and back to the benches again. Their
bodies, what with the exertion and the steam, ran rivulets; their
throats were gasping. Once, twice, they staggered the room’s length.
Admeh was beginning to feel his breath and his senses going together,
when the grasp about his neck slackened in tension.
“I and the jag win,” he thought, with what sense was left in him. He
gathered his strength into its last cartridge, and gave a heave and a
fling; they went down to the floor with a wet slap, Admeh above. He felt
his opponent collapse under him. For a moment he, too, saw the universe
swing round him, but with a great effort he tore away the bandage and
pressed his near-sighted eyes close to the right arm.
There, in faded colours, was a tattooed design on the white skin. Admeh
made out the word “Dotty,” framed in a border of twisted snakes. His
quest was done. Faint, weary, languid, he prepared to get away before
his assault was discovered. The door opened; some one caught Admeh by
the arm. With no more fight in him, he raised himself to one knee and
recognised the attendant, the sight of whom had before so nearly sobered
his drunken opponent.
“What the devil——” said the new-comer, and stopped as his eye caught
that mark on the arm. Then he bent down, passed his finger over the
design, studied it, and peered into the white, senseless face behind the
yellow beard.
“My work—it is the very man!” he exclaimed, in tones of the greatest
interest. Turning to Admeh he asked:
“Now why did _you_ want to know about that mark, and what were you
scrapping for?”
“What do you know about him?” retorted Admeh.
“Story for story,” said the attendant.
“Story for story, swapped sight unseen,” agreed Admeh. “But let’s get
him out of here first, because he’s in a pretty bad fix between his
fight and his jag.” Together they carried him to a dressing-room, laid
him on a bench, and closed the curtain. Here Admeh’s last spark of
strength left him; he collapsed in a heap on the floor. With practised
hands the attendant set about reviving them both. In ten minutes the man
of mystery slept heavily, stupidly, on the bench, and Admeh was sitting
against the wall breathing cool relief from the outer air. Briefly, he
told of his singular errand, omitting, from some hazy idea of policy,
the item about the legacy.
“Well,” said the rubber, after Admeh Drake had finished his tale, “your
yarn certainly is curious, but I can beat it. What d’you think of
this?—I tattooed that name and mark on this fellow’s arm, and I know the
history of it, but he has no idea to this day how it ever come there,
nor who ’Dotty’ is, nor why I did it, nor anything at all about it. He
was the hero of as queer a yarn as I ever heard, and he knew no more
about it all the time than a babe unborn!”
He rang an electric bell; a boy answered.
“Tell the boss to send for the extra man,” he said. “I’m done up for
to-night, and I’m going to lay off for a while.”
So saying, he took Drake into an adjoining room, shared by the employees
of the baths, and, after making himself comfortable on a lounge with a
blanket wrapper, he told the following joyous romance:
THE STORY OF THE DERMOGRAPH ARTIST
You see, this ain’t my regular job. I’m working here because my
profession is played out in San Francisco. I’m a dermograph artist.
What’s that? Oh, it’s what most people call a tattooer. But don’t you
think we’ve got as much right to be called artists as the fellows that
slap paint on cloth with a brush? I think so. Is anything nicer than the
human skin? Don’t you fix up your walls and your ceilings, and your
floors that you wipe your feet on? Then what’s the matter with
decorating yourself? That’s the line of talk I always gave people when
they asked me why I called myself a dermograph artist.
It was the electric needle and the Jap tattooer that ran me out of
business. With the electric needle, a man could put on a design in about
a quarter of the time that it takes to do a real artistic job by hand.
The blamed little Jap would pretty near pay to get a customer, he worked
that cheap. I quit, and I never get out my needles now except for a
design on some one in the baths.
My parlours were on the water-front, because most of my customers were
sailors. Of course, once in a while some swells from Nob Hill would come
in for a design or two. I used to do my best work for them, because, I
thought, you never can tell when these society people will get next to
the fact that a picture on the skin has it a mile on a painting. Why,
the other day I read in the papers that a Frenchman got a hundred
thousand dollars for a little, dinky canvas painting. The highest pay I
ever knew a dermograph artist to get was five hundred for doing the
Wells Brothers’ tattooed woman. Do you call that square?
After the Jap and the electric needle chump came to town, business fell
off, as I was telling you. They’d have made me close up my shop and get
out if it hadn’t been for Spotty Crigg. Ever hear of him? Well, you sure
haven’t been in San Francisco long. In those days he kept a sailor
boarding-house and saloon round the corner from my parlours, and he was
sort of boss of the water-front—good any time to deliver five hundred
votes. I ain’t saying that Spotty was a Sunday-school kind of man, but
he stuck to his friends. I was one of the gang, so he sent me enough
jobs to keep me going. Besides, I helped him once or twice on a
shanghaing deal. You see, like most sailor boarding-house keepers in
those days, he was a crimp—used to deliver a sailor or two when foremast
hands were scarce and the pay was good. Spotty Crigg is dead now, or I
wouldn’t be telling you about his last and biggest shanghaing scrape. I
didn’t understand it at the time, but I learned about it afterward, part
from Crigg and part from people on the other side of the little deal.
One of my society customers was young Tom Letterblair. Maybe you don’t
know about him, either. He belonged to about the richest tribe of swells
on Nob Hill. That fellow was as wild as a fish-hawk, a thoroughbred dead
game sport. His being wild didn’t bother his people so much as the way
he went about it—always doing something crazy. His people were strong on
getting into the society columns of the papers, but he was eternally
getting the family name on the news pages of the yellow journals, if not
in the police reports. He wasn’t really what you would call bad, either;
only wild and careless and brought up wrong, and stubborn about it when
anyone tried to call him down. He’d never seem sorry if he got the
family into trouble, but just laugh at his sisters when they roasted
him. And instead of treating him quiet and easy, and gentling him into
being good, they’d jaw him. That’s a bad scheme with a gilded youth like
Tom Letterblair.
They were a bunch of orphans. That was half the trouble.
Finally, Tom Letterblair took up with a chorus girl and refused to drop
her. The family tried to buy her off. Now she wasn’t a nice sort of
girl, but she was true to Tom. She told him about it. For once, although
he was such a careless fellow, he got mad and what does he do but come
to me to have her name, “Dotty,” tattooed on his arm with the double
snake border. Says he to me confidentially, “That’s the girl I’m going
to marry when I come of age, which is only two months, and don’t you
forget it.” Seems that he told other people the same thing, so that it
came back to his family.
Now his sisters and the Eastern society swells that they were married to
didn’t hanker any to have Dotty for a sister-in-law. But they knew by
experience that if Tom Letterblair said he’d do it, all blazes wouldn’t
hold him. J. Thrasher Sunderland, one of Tom’s brothers-in-law, had what
he thought was a bright idea. It was to get the kid shanghaied on a
sailing vessel off for a six months’ voyage.
That wasn’t such a bad scheme either. They could keep him away from
Dotty and drink for six months, have him work hard, and make a man out
of him. It’s been done before right in this port. That wild streak is a
kind of disease that strikes young fellows with too much blood in their
necks and money in their pockets. I know. I’ve had it myself, bar the
money. By six months, what doctors call the crisis would have been over.
The risky thing was the chance of raising a howl when he got back, but
they were willing to take chances that the sense knocked into him with a
belaying pin would make him see it their way. They were going to give it
out to the papers and their friends that he was off for his health.
J. Thrasher Sunderland made his first break when he went to Captain
Wynch of the bark _Treasure Trove_, instead of going straight to a
crimp, as he ought to have done. Wynch promised to treat the kid well
and try to brace him up. Never having seen Tom Letterblair he got a
description of him, including the tattoo mark. Then the skipper went to
Spotty Crigg and promised him a hundred dollars for doing the rough work
of getting Tom on board the vessel.
Letterblair was such a big, careless fellow, he never suspected
anything, and a lure note fetched him to Crigg’s saloon the night before
the bark cleared. Tom had been drinking hard that day—showed up badly
slewed. ’Twas a jolly drunk, and he was ready for a glass with anyone.
Now, Crigg hadn’t given much thought to this little transaction, for he
was doing that sort of work almost every day in the week. But when that
young swell, all dressed up to the nines, came into the “Bowsprit”
saloon, the looks of him put a brand-new idea into Spotty’s noddle. It
struck him that a hundred dollars was pretty small pay for catching a
fish of that size and colour; there was evidently a big deal on
somewhere. Like everyone else that read the papers, he knew considerable
about Tom Letterblair, knew him for a young sport, free as water with
his money. Putting two and two together, he saw that if he could save
the kid instead of stealing him, there might be a good many times a
hundred in the affair. Besides, there was a chance of finding out who
was trying to get the shanghaing done, and then collecting blackmail. So
he decided to play both ends. He would steal the wrong man, and hold on
to the right one.
He ran his eye around the place and saw Harry Maidslow, a scene-shifter
in the old Baldwin Theatre, who used to drop in, now and then, on his
nights off. Man for man, Maidslow and Letterblair were modelled on the
same lines—Maidslow wore a moustache, but that would come off easy
enough—yellow hair, blue eyes, big and strong build. Maidslow hadn’t a
relative this side of the Rockies; no one would miss him. Crigg knew
that.
Spotty Crigg went so far in his mind before he thought of the tattoo
mark. Captain Wynch had mentioned it as the proof that there was no
mistake. And then, Crigg thought of me. I suppose lots of people would
have stopped there, but Spotty Crigg had nerve, I’ll say that for
him—nerve of a thousand.
He worked Letterblair to drink himself to sleep, and then had him packed
upstairs and put to bed, dead to the world. The next move was easy.
Crigg took Harry Maidslow into his office, fed him knockout drops, and
carried him up into the same room with Letterblair. Side by side he laid
them both, and stripped them to undershirts.
That was the way I found them when a hurry call brought me to the
boarding-house. I thought at first they were both dead. It gave me the
horrors to hear Crigg tell me that I was to copy that tattoo mark. ’Twas
like working on a dead man. One drunk, the other drugged, lying on a
little, cheap old bed and Spotty, who wasn’t a nice, clean-looking sort
of person anyway, leaning over them with a candle.
When he told what he wanted, I kicked until he put on the screws. He
could drive me off the water-front if he cared. I knew that, and he
reminded me of it, besides offering me fifty dollars. So at last I went
at it, he telling me all the time to hurry. I never worked so fast in my
life. By two hours you couldn’t tell one mark from the other, except
that Maidslow’s was new and Letterblair’s old. Next we shaved Maidslow’s
mustache off, for Tom always wore a smooth face. Then we changed their
clothes, putting the swell rig on Maidslow and the old clothes on
Letterblair.
Next, Spotty Crigg took Maidslow, got him into a hack, drove him to a
dory he had waiting, and rowed out to the _Treasure Trove_, which was in
the stream waiting to sail next morning. Captain Wynch was cussing
purple because Spotty had been so long. He went over the description,
though, and looked at the right arm to make sure, just as Crigg expected
him to do. It looked all right, because a tattoo mark don’t begin to
swell until the day after; besides, Wynch was seeing it under a
fo’castle lamp.
It was all right so far. But Crigg, who wasn’t so keen by a jugful as he
thought he was, hadn’t figured on one thing. The Letterblairs had an
aunt, Mrs. Burden, a widow without chick or child of her own. She was an
old, religious lady, with oodles of money and a whopping temper—a
regular holy terror. She didn’t cotton to the sisters at all; in fact,
hated them, but she was soft over Tom Letterblair. Whenever she wasn’t
turning loose her money, stringing hospitals and churches all the way to
Sacramento, she was handing it over to the kid, who had only an
allowance until he got to be twenty-one. He and the parsons were the
only ones who got her to loosen up. She had no son and I rather guess
that on the quiet she had a sneaking liking for the way he was carrying
on. Sort of thrilled her. You know how some of those pious old girls
like a man that’s real bad. She coddled him to death and fought the
sisters for being hard on the boy.
Spotty’s luck turned so that she picked the very next morning for a
show-down with the sisters over the way they were treating the kid.
There must have been a regular hair-pulling. Anyway, before they got
through, Mrs. Sunderland was so mad that she poured out the whole scheme
in one mouthful. She said:
“You won’t have a chance to coddle _him_ any more! He’s on the _Treasure
Trove_, bound for China to get the foolishness taken out of him. He’s
passed the Farralones by this time.”
The old lady was foxy. She would have made a pretty good sport herself.
She shut up like a clam, went home, rushed for the telephone and called
up the wharfinger. She found that the _Treasure Trove_ was in the stream
being towed for the heads, and belonged to Burke & Coleman, this port.
She knew Burke. She got her carriage, made his office in two jumps, and
wouldn’t leave until she had an order on Captain Wynch to deliver a
sailor answering Letterblair’s description, tattooing and all. In a
half-hour more she had a tug started, chasing the _Treasure Trove_ with
that order. She offered the crew two hundred dollars over regular pay if
they got their man back safe and sound. She herself was afraid of the
water, and stayed in the tug office to wait.
While this was going on, Tom Letterblair woke up. The man watching him
tried to get him drunk again, and the jag turned out loud and nasty.
Crigg saw he’d have to be doing something right off the bat.
He knew a little how the land lay between Tom and his people, but not
enough. He was sure that some one of Tom’s relatives had done it. As far
as that he was right. He struck the wrong lead when he picked Mrs.
Burden as the one—she being a church member—that was most likely to be
ashamed of the kid. He looked up her number in the directory, and made
for the house hot-foot. She wasn’t in, so he held up a lamp-post,
waiting.
The tug got back. They packed Harry Maidslow into the dock-house. He was
still sound asleep from the knockout drops.
“My precious boy!” said the old lady, and fell on his neck. Then she
screamed so you could hear her all over the water-front and began to
jump on the captain. She said:
“You’re a pack of thieves! You’ve murdered my Tom and dressed another
man in his clothes. Where is my boy? Give me back my boy!” she said, and
a lot of other things.
Said the tug-boat captain: “You’re trying to get out of paying the two
hundred. He’s on specifications, and a nice time we had making them pass
him over. Look here.” He got the coat off Harry Maidslow. There was the
tattoo mark, just beginning to swell up.
“It’s a new mark. You and those hussies have fooled me,” said the old
lady. “I’ll have you all in jail for this,” she said. “I wish I could
find him, I’d show them up. I’d take him right up to the big dance
they’re going to have to-night. I’d shame them!” she said. And she drove
home, laughing and crying out loud. At the doorstep Spotty Crigg braced
her.
He began quiet and easy, working up her curiosity so that she would let
him know how the land lay. That’s just where he went wrong again. In
about a minute she put two and two together and saw pretty clearly
through the whole scheme. She was just one point smarter than Spotty,
and she wormed it out of him finally. He thought she wanted Tom put out
of the way, sure. She played her hand by letting him think so. It was
move and your turn, like a game of checkers, with the old lady one jump
ahead. Said Spotty:
“Two thousand dollars, or I bring him back and give the story to the
_Observer_.”
Which of course was exactly what she wanted. She pretended to be scared
but mad.
“Not a cent. Do your worst,” she said.
“Then I’ll go that one better,” said Spotty. “I see by the papers
there’s a dance at the Sunderland house to-night. Three thousand down or
I dump him in the front door, drunk as a lord and dressed like a
stevedore. I’ve got him where you can’t find him——” which was a bluff.
“If you tell the police he’ll get worse than a drunk——” which was
another.
“Not a red cent,” she said.
“Settles it!” said Crigg. He went away red-hot, mad enough to back up
his bluff, just as the old lady thought he would.
When he got home he found that Tom couldn’t be kept much longer. There
had been a deuce of a rough house. That clinched the matter with Spotty
Crigg. About half-past eight he woke Tom, gave him some dinner with a
cold bottle to get him started again, and spun him a yarn about finding
him drunk and robbed. The deal went through on schedule. At half-past
nine, Spotty drove up to the Letterblair house with the kid, rang the
door-bell and pushed Tom right into the hall, nursing a loud, talkative
drunk. They say it put that function on the bum. I heard afterward from
Tom Letterblair that it was about the only time he ever really enjoyed
himself at one of his sister’s parties.
Nobody ever told the police or the papers. Every man-jack in the deal
was afraid to peach on the others, because he couldn’t afford to tell on
himself. All except the old lady and Tom, of course, and they were too
tickled with the way the things turned out to care about giving it away.
Another funny thing: everybody quit a winner. You can see how Captain
Wynch won. Tom paid Spotty Crigg a thousand for keeping him off the
_Treasure Trove_, and I got fifty dollars for my job. And even the snob
sisters won out. How? Well, sir, Tom Letterblair braced up from that
time on. I suppose he took it that if he was far enough gone to the
devil for his family to have to shanghai him, he must be a pretty bad
egg. So he swore off, got on the water-wagon, and turned out pretty
well, alongside of what they’d expected of him. His chorus girl, Dotty,
ran away with another man, and that helped him some, too.
Finally, Tom got a case on a swell New York heiress, a dizzy blonde, who
was just simply It in the Four Hundred. He married her, to the great and
grand delight of Mr. and Mrs. J. Thrasher Sunderland.
And right there was where Tom had too much luck for any one man. I’ll be
darned if that girl’s name wasn’t Dotty, and she always believed Tom had
it pricked on his arm just on her account! What d’you think of that?
But perhaps you’re wondering how Maidslow got square. I’ll tell you.
He came to in the tug office, where the crew had passed him a few swift
kicks and left him. Pretty stupid and dopy yet, he crawled home to his
own room and slept some more of it off.
Then, when his head did finally clear out, he began to look himself
over; to discover and explore, as you might say. When he looked in the
glass he must have nearly fell dead. His yellow moustache was gone.
Then, he’d gone to sleep in old clothes and he woke up in a swell
high-class rig, silk-lined, and without a spot, patch, or sign of wear.
He had on silk gauze underwear, patent leather shoes, diamonds in his
shirt-front, cuff-links, and a pair of pretty hot socks. Feeling in his
pockets, as a man will, he found a gold watch and chain, a gold
cigarette case, a corkscrew mounted in rubies and three hundred and
forty-two dollars in bills and coin. Every one in the deal had been too
busy to touch him while he was drugged.
Long before he got his senses his arm began to feel funny. After he’d
investigated the costume, he took off the Willy-boy coat and stripped up
his shirt sleeve. There was a tattoo mark, smarting like sin, with the
name “DOTTY” in beautiful capital letters! Well, when he saw that he
went right up into the air. He was just like that old woman in the
nursery rhyme—“Lawk-a-massy on us, this is none of I!”
The tattoo mark was his only clue. I was the only one he knew in the
business, so he came down to me and wanted to know how, and when, and
where, and why, and what-the-devil.
“Look here, my son,” says I, “what are you kicking about, anyway? You go
to sleep with eight dollars on your back and two bits in your jeans. You
wake up with about a seven hundred and fifty dollar rig on, and a wad in
your pocket, more than you ever had in your life. The thing for you to
do,” I says, “is to lose yourself before you’re called for, and to stay
lost, good and hard! Next time you fade away on the water-front, you may
wake up in a jumper and overalls, shovelling garbage! You can’t expect
to draw a straight flush in diamonds every deal: next shuffle you may
catch deuces. You take my advice and drop a part of that roll of yours
for a ticket in the ’Owl’ train to-night, before you’re enchanted back
again.”
“All right,” he says, “I’ll do it. But for heaven’s sake, tell me just
one thing, and I’ll ask no more questions. _Who in blazes is Dotty?_”
“Aw,” I says, “she’s the fairy godmother of this pipe dream. She’s
changed into a sea-gull by this time!”
* * * * *
“Well,” concluded the rubber, “he skipped, and I have never seen him
since, from that day till to-night, when I found you scrapping with him,
for this man is Harry Maidslow for sure. If you want to talk to him now,
he’ll probably be all right. He’s had time to have a plunge, and you’ll
find him sleeping upstairs. I’ve got to go home, so good-by. Come round
again some time and tell me about him!”
Admeh Drake, after a swim in the tank himself, passed through the main
salon and upstairs, acting upon the hint of the Dermograph Artist. The
place was lined with cots, now filled with snoring occupants, and it was
not until he had explored a second story that Admeh found him of the
clay-yellow beard. He was alone in a secluded ward, sleeping peacefully.
Admeh touched him, and Maidslow sat up suddenly with a terrified stare.
“What d’you want? What d’you want of me?” he cried.
Admeh was astonished at his fright, but hastened to relieve the man’s
suspense. “Oh, nothing bad, I hope. Is your name—” here he hesitated,
and the man’s face showed abject fear—“Maidslow?”—and the mouth relaxed
its tensity.
“Yes,” said the man. “What d’you want?”
“I want to tell you that there’s fifteen thousand dollars coming to
you!” said Drake.
The man stared now in bewilderment.
“Ever know old Max Miller, Swiss bell-ringer?” “A little,” said
Maidslow. “Why?”
“He’s your rich uncle. He’s left you his fortune. You caught him when
you stole Maxie from him!”
“See here,” said Maidslow, “what kind of a jolly are you giving me
anyway? I haven’t seen Maxie—I suppose you mean my wife—for two years.
If you know anything about her, tell me the whole thing, and tell it
slow.”
For the second time that night Admeh Drake narrated his adventures,
beginning at Coffee John’s, and ending with the news of Maxie and the
legacy left to Harry Maidslow. But, when he mentioned Colonel Knowlton’s
name as the trustee, Maidslow, who had listened so far in delight, gave
an exclamation of despair.
“Oh, heavens!” he cried, “I can never get that money! Why couldn’t it
have been given in charge of some one else? Colonel Knowlton, of all men
in the world!”
“Why can’t you get it from him?” Drake asked.
“You listen to my story, and you’ll know,” replied Maidslow.
THE STORY OF THE DESERTER OF THE PHILIPPINES
I don’t exactly know why I married Maxie Morrow, except that I’ve always
been a fool about women. The thing came so sudden, I just jumped and
caught her on the fly. When she left me, I went pretty much to the bad.
Then Harry Maidslow disappeared, because of debts and one thing or
another, and I turned up as Harry Roberts in St. Louis. That was just
about when the Spanish war broke out. It was too good a chance to lose,
and I decided to begin all over again. So I enlisted in the regulars,
joining the One Hundred and Fourteenth Infantry. I was hardly more than
through the goose step when we were sent to the Philippines.
I was no slouch nor shirk, either, but I knew more about eating than
anything else, and I naturally gravitated to the cook’s tent and put him
on to a lot of things the boys liked. I got to be rather popular with
the company in this way, and when the Commissary Sergeant was appointed
in Manila, I managed to get the place, though I was only a rookie.
Perhaps the Captain’s wife helped me out some. She, being an officer’s
lady, wasn’t supposed to know I was on earth, but somehow she noticed me
and fixed it up easy.
Commissary work was a snap—little drill, no guard mount, leave of
absence occasionally, and the run of the town in a little pony cart. You
see each company had its quota of rations. We could draw them, or leave
them and get credit. There was maple syrup and candy, canned fruit, and
chocolate, and all sorts of good stuff in the storehouse that we could
get at wholesale rates. By cutting down on fresh meat and pinching on
bacon, I managed the company’s accounts so that we could have hot
griddle-cakes and maple syrup every day. That’s the way I held my job.
If I ever become famous it will be for having introduced Pie in the
Philippines.
Every morning I drove around Manila, visiting the markets with a man to
help me, exchanging sacks of flour for fresh baker’s bread and cakes,
getting chickens, and so on, besides making friends right and left.
About two nights every week I was dancing or flirting with the
half-breed women; Mestizas they called them. That’s how I got into
trouble.
Her name was Senorita Maria del Pilar Assompcion Aguilar, and nothing
that ever I saw could touch her for looks. She was the kind of woman
that makes you forget everything else that ever happened before. She and
her brother owned about the whole of a province in the middle of the
island of Luzon. When she came into the room it was all over with me.
There was more of the Spanish than the Filipino in her, enough to give
her the style and air of a lady, but she got her beauty from the
tropics. Her hair was like one of those hot black nights they have down
there—silky and soft, drifting around her face—but it was her eyes that
made you lose sleep. They were blue-black, not melting, but wide-awake
and piercing. They were just a bit crossed, hardly a hairbreadth out,
but that little cast seemed to make her even prettier than if they were
straight. A Kansas sergeant told me that the family was in from their
country place, and that the Secret Service people were watching her. She
and her brother were suspected of knowing a good deal about Aguinaldo’s
plans.
You remember that after the battle of Manila the American troops lay in
town for months, just drilling and waiting to see what the insurgents
were going to do. There were all sorts of rumours afloat, and nobody
knew which way the cat would jump. The Filipinos were camped in a
semi-circle outside the city and growing uglier every day. Our sentries
were watching them close enough to see every nigger that stuck his
finger to his nose at us.
I saw more and more of Maria, danced with her, or went to her house
every night I could get off. It wasn’t long before I saw that I had her
going. Her brother looked as if he’d like to bolo me in the back, and
never left us alone for a moment. I didn’t care. I was too far gone
myself to be afraid of him. I’ve seen one or two women in my time, but
she could put it over them all.
Love goes pretty fast in hot countries. One night I happened to find her
alone. Her brother was away on some Katipunan conspiracy business, most
likely, or perhaps dodging our spies. She was dressed like a queen, all
ready for me. I had no more than come in when she threw herself into my
arms and lay there crying. I had gone too far, and I was in for it.
I let her stay there a little while, kissing her and trying to get her
quiet, and then I looked away, and told her what I should have told her
long before—that I had a wife and couldn’t marry. She took it pretty
hard at first.
After she had cried she laughed, and there was a load off my mind. I
said to myself that women must be different down here, and thought I was
lucky to get out of it so easy. I thought perhaps she hadn’t been so
badly hurt, after all. She said we’d forget it, and be friends, just the
same. I was a fool and believed her. She asked me to come back
to-morrow, and I said I would.
The next day I met Señor Aguilar, her brother, and he seemed to be as
friendly as if we were bunkies. He insisted upon my having a drink with
him. He seemed to be glad to know that Maria and I weren’t so much
lovers as he had thought. We sat most of the afternoon drinking cognac,
and I got more and more pleased at having squared myself with them both.
Then some one must have hit me over the head.
When I came to, my head was bursting. My hands were bound and I was
covered with a sheet of canvas, being jolted in a little bobbing cart. I
yelled for help, and my only answer was the barrel of a Mauser rifle
stuck in my face. Then I went off into a stupor, and for the rest of
that trip I only remember heat, thirst, hunger, stiff joints and a
murderous headache. The journey seemed to go on for years and years, but
I didn’t have energy enough even to wonder what had happened or where I
was going.
Finally I found myself stretched upon a cot in a white-walled room,
looking through a great arched window into a green _patio_ waving with
palms. Señor Aguilar was standing beside me, smiling wickedly.
Bromo-seltzer wouldn’t have cleared my head the way the sight of him
did.
“Señor Roberts,” he said, as soon as he saw that I was fully conscious,
“possibly you may have suspected that I have not always been charmed at
the attentions you have paid Señorita Maria. However, you will be glad
to learn that I have at last decided to accept you as my brother-in-law.
I have given directions that the marriage ceremony shall take place
to-morrow evening. I shall be honoured by the alliance, I am sure, for
within a week you will be the only Americano alive on the Island of
Luzon. I have just come from a conference with General Aguinaldo, and
the council of war has set upon February 4th as the date when we shall
have the pleasure of capturing Manila and exterminating your army. You
are at Carrino, a hundred miles from the city, helpless and unarmed. I
think you will see the advisability of accepting gracefully the
privilege of becoming a member of our distinguished family.
“It is barely possible,” he went on, “that you may feel like declining
to become the husband of Señorita Maria. Americanos are not renowned for
their courtesy. So I give you a day to think it over. We Aguilars do not
often force ourselves upon strangers, but under the circumstances I
consent to forget our family pride. You may give me your answer
to-morrow.”
I knew what he meant. This was a sample of Spanish revenge with a
Filipino barb to it. If I stayed, I was a branded deserter. I knew that,
and Aguilar knew it too. And he was sure enough that I’d never marry his
sister under those circumstances, or he’d never have made the offer. The
only possible way out of it—although that seemed hopeless—was to escape,
carry the news to General Otis, and save the army. It would mean a
pardon, and maybe shoulder-straps for me.
Could I get away? That was the question. I had no time to lose. To
travel a hundred miles through an unknown hostile country in a week,
without arms, food or money, was no child’s play. But I watched my
chance.
About sundown a Tagalo woman, homely as a hedge-fence, came in with my
dinner. She hung round as though she were willing to talk, and I set to
work to see how I could use her. I’d had some experience with women, and
had found them mostly alike, black and white, and I used every trick I
knew on her. Of all the cyclone love-making I ever did, that got over
the ground the quickest. I worked so hard I almost meant it, and she
rose to the hook.
That night she got the guard off, filled him up with _bino_, and showed
me the way out of the plantation through the banana grove. Outside, she
had a little scrub pony waiting. She pointed to it, and gave me a
general idea of the direction, then put her arms on my shoulders and
held up her great thick lips to be kissed. That was about the hardest
work I had on the whole trip. Then I jumped into the saddle and pelted
down the road like Sheridan thirty miles away. I thought I was a hero,
all right, and I saw my picture in the papers with shoulder-straps and
the girls kissing me, like Hobson. It was a grand-stand play to save the
army. As near as I could calculate, that was the night of January 31st,
and I had six days to get to Manila. It looked easy.
I kept as nearly south as I could guess, and rode that pony almost to
death. At daylight I hid and hobbled him and crawled into the brush to
sleep. When I woke up the nag was lying in a puddle of blood, hamstrung.
That was the first blow.
There was not a soul in sight, but I imagined there was a boloman behind
every tree. I listened, and every waving bush scared me worse. I was
actually afraid of the light. If this were the beginning of the trip,
what would the end be? But I had to go on, and do my best.
I got under cover and crawled like a snake till I came to a patch of
banana trees, where I stopped long enough to eat and to fill my pockets.
For two days I kept it up, making about thirty miles south, I suppose,
dodging villages, skirting the roads and sleeping most of the daytime.
It was hot and dusty; food was scarce and water scarcer.
So I fought my way through the tropical night, tortured by mosquitos,
insects, and ants. Luckily it was near the full of the moon, and I was
able to drag myself along all night. The way gradually became more moist
and swampy. I toiled through slippery mud, and had often to make detours
to avoid sinking in great morasses. Then, just at dawn of the third
morning I came upon the banks of the Pasig. Now I had four days more in
which to save the army, and a quiet river to drift down at night, hiding
by daylight, if I could only find something to float on.
Towards noon, as I lay in the bushes, I saw an empty boat bobbing down
stream. I swam out to it, hauled it ashore, and hid it in the bushes.
That night I began to paddle down the river, calling myself “Lieutenant”
Roberts.
Twice, before morning, I thought I heard the sound of oars or paddles
behind me, and got inshore to listen, but nothing appeared. At dawn I
drew in to the bank, hid the boat, and crawled to a safe place and slept
like a horse. After I had foraged for bananas and got back to the river,
the boat was gone! I began to lose hope.
I was certain that I had tied the boat securely, so I knew now that
someone was on my trail. I had not only to make my way on foot through
the wilderness, but I was to be dogged at every step. What with the
heat, starvation, and growing fear, I was pretty nearly out of my head,
but the knowledge that upon me alone depended the safety of the army
kept me on, straining every nerve. If it hadn’t been for that, I would
have given it up right there.
After I had followed the bank of the river for some distance, some logs
came drifting down the current. I took the chances of being seen, and
swam out and captured two of them. Tied together with long, tough
creepers, they made a passable raft, and all that night I floated down
stream, paddling as well as I could with my hands. I passed a lot of
houses and villages on the banks, and so I knew that I was approaching
the city. Sometimes I heard the sound of drums and bugles, for the
insurgents were all over the country raising recruits. I must have been
wandering in my mind by that time, for I wasn’t a bit scared any
more—only watching for wild bananas and bread-fruit, and wondering how
long I’d last. I succeeded in killing some of the many tame ducks I saw,
and ate them raw, not daring to build a fire.
Next night the river broadened out into a good-sized lake. By the look
of it, I took it to be Laguna de Bay, about twenty-five miles from
Manila. I had only that night and the next day to reach our troops. If
the first shot were fired before I got to the outposts, I might just as
well drop into the Pasig and go to the bottom.
When the sun rose I slid into the water and struck out for the shore,
intending to take my chances along the bank by daylight. This was the
morning of the 4th of February. Somehow, some way, I had to get through
the circle of the Filipino lines drawn about the city. I hoped that I
was too close to the town for them to dare to interfere with an American
soldier in the daytime. So I climbed up a slippery bank and broke into
the brush, about as tired and discouraged as a man could be and still
live.
Then—all of a sudden—I was nailed from behind! The game was up. Somebody
gripped me by the throat. I was so weak, there was no fight left in me.
In half a minute I was bound by a dozen niggers, who came jumping out of
the bushes and fell on top of me from all sides at once. I didn’t much
care what they were going to do with me: I had quit. Five days of fear
and suspense and suffering had taken every bit of nerve out of me.
As soon as I was tied up they began to rush me along the road, kicking
me up every time I faltered, and jabbing me with bolos when I fell. I
don’t know why I didn’t die right then. I don’t know why my hair isn’t
white.
At last we came to a little nipa hut, guarded by Filipino soldiers in
dirty white uniforms and bare feet. I was thrown inside, unbound, and
given a gourd of rice. I ate it, hoping it was poisoned. From all I saw,
I was sure the tip about the outbreak was straight, for the place was
bustling with soldiers coming and going, and I noticed they all had
ammunition.
At about four o’clock I was bound again and gagged. I thought it was the
end, sure, this time, and I was ready to die game. But it was only a new
kind of torture. They prodded me with their bayonets, marching me to a
place where I could look through the bushes right across a little river.
There, on the other side, was one of our sentries pacing up and down,
and way off I saw the Stars and Stripes floating in the sun. I could
hear a band playing “There’ll be a hot time,” too. If I could have
yelled across just once and given our boys warning, I wouldn’t have
minded anything they did to me. But I was gagged. I believe I cried.
Then they took me back to the hut, and night came on. Every minute that
passed made the torture worse and worse. I didn’t care for myself any
more; I was only thinking about the boys across the river, all
unconscious of what was going to happen. I knew so well how careless
they had got to be, and what fun they made of the idea that the niggers
could possibly have the nerve to attack us. They would all be fooling
around the streets of Manila, probably half of them at the theatre or
dancing or in the cafés, leaving only the guard to take the first rush.
It didn’t seem possible that we could be saved. Our entrenchments would
be carried at the first charge, I was sure. The Tagalos in town would
rise, and it would mean a wholesale massacre.
Of course you know now all about the battle, for the night of February
4, 1899, is school-book history by this time. I doubt if there was any
actual date set by Aguinaldo for rushing Manila, though he had
considerable trouble keeping his cocky little niggers in order. If there
was a time set, it wasn’t that night, anyway. The Filipinos were getting
more insulting every day, and I suppose it was only a question of a week
or so at latest. But I didn’t know it then. Everybody has heard by this
time how the row opened, with a Nebraska private shooting at four
Tagalos who tried to pass Block House No. 6. But all I knew was what
Aguilar had told me, and from what I saw, it looked nasty enough to be
true. I could see that the niggers were prepared to go into action at a
minute’s notice.
So I waited and waited in the hut, dying by inches. I hoped I had been
fooled, and feared that I wasn’t. I imagined by what I had seen that I
was at San Felipe, on the bank of the San Juan River, where it joins the
Pasig. If so, the Nebraska boys ought to be nearest me. My regiment was
with Ovenshine, to the south of the city, camped near Malate.
I felt about the way you feel when a tempest is coming up, and I was
just waiting for the first clap of thunder. Along about half-past eight,
I should say, I heard a single shot ring out, and right off, as if it
had been a signal, the Mausers began to crack over by the river. The
fire increased steadily till they were shooting all over to the north in
the Tondo District. Company after company of Filipinos ran past the hut,
the officers yelling like mad. Still, there was nothing but Mausers
going, popping like fire-crackers, and it seemed hours before the fire
was returned. I was sure they had carried the town. At last I heard a
volley of Springfields—I knew them by the heavy boom, and I knew then
that the Nebraska boys had formed and had gone into action. I had been
with the regulars long enough to look down on the volunteers; but when I
heard that firing, I just stood up and yelled! It didn’t die down, but
kept up steadily, and I was sure the boys were holding the Filipinos
back, when the Utah light artillery got into action. Then, just like a
thunderstorm, the noise slowly swept round to the south, and the
Springfields took up the chorus down through Anderson’s Division; first
the California boys and the Idahos of the 1st Brigade, till about three
in the morning the regulars were engaged. Of course I had to guess it
out from what I knew of the way our troops were camped, but I imagined I
could tell the minute my regiment began to fight. The Astor Mountain
Battery and the 6th Artillery began to answer the Filipino’s Krupp guns,
and then till daybreak the battle was going on all round the town.
I waited for the Springfield fire to weaken, dreading that we would be
driven in, but when it kept up as if it never would stop, I was sure
that we had whipped them. The Filipinos began to retreat past the hut in
disorder, the officers as badly scared as the privates. I was watching
them, laughing, when four niggers broke into the hut, tied my arms,
packed me on a mule, and rushed me off.
For four or five days I was carried back and forth behind the Filipino
army, dodging out of every skirmish, as the Americans pushed Aguinaldo
back all along the circle. One night we spent in Mariquina, and left
early in the morning, while white flags were flying to lure our troops
into the town. Then we travelled southwest towards Pasai. I wondered
what they were keeping me for, and why they didn’t either kill me or let
me go. Then I remembered what I’d heard of Spanish prisons, and I
stopped wondering and began to pray.
We ended, finally, in a church the insurgents were trying to hold while
our boys were getting ready to charge. I was driven up into a bell-tower
half battered to pieces from our shells and filled with smoke. A squad
of natives were firing from the windows.
There in a corner was Señor Aguilar, in the uniform of a Filipino
colonel, and I knew that my case was to be settled at last. He looked
black. I didn’t have long to wait this time. The niggers threw me down,
and put a Filipino uniform blouse on me, taking it from a dead soldier
on the floor. I didn’t try to resist. What was the use?
Then Aguilar said to me: “I hope you have enjoyed your journey, Señor
Roberts. My men took care to make it as interesting as possible. A man
who has the courage to refuse the hand of an Aguilar deserves
distinguished treatment.” He got as far as that with his Spanish
sarcasm, and then his native Filipino savagery got the better of him.
“You d—— fool, did you think for a moment that I’d let an American hound
like you marry my sister? Do you think I would let a man live who had
played with her? No, by heaven, nor die, either, except like a dog. I
have let you live long enough to be hanged by your own countrymen.
You’re a deserter, and I’ve given some interesting information to your
spies. And you’ll be caught fighting in our ranks!” Then he drew his
revolver and pointed to the dead Filipino on the floor. “Take that gun,
and go to the window, and shoot down your brother dogs!” he cried.
I don’t know why I didn’t shoot him, instead, right there, but I had
lost my nerve. I went to the window and fired at a bare space. And then,
if you’ll believe it, I saw my own regimental flag coming up with Old
Glory, as my own bunkies formed for the rush. It was Colonel Knowlton’s
command that was to take the church. I don’t know what ever became of
Aguilar, for I just stood up in the window and cheered as the boys came
on. They charged with a yell that did my heart good to hear, for I lost
myself and my danger watching the way they did the work.
But I remembered soon enough. The Filipino fire died away, and the
insurgents scurried out of the building like rats. I was pulled back
with them as they retreated, but as we crossed a dry creek bed I
stumbled and fell. Just then a detachment of my own company came up,
skirmishing, and saw me. I threw up my hands, and a corporal covered me.
I knew him well; he used to drive in the little donkey-cart with me in
Manila when I marketed.
He dropped his rifle and said, “Good God! It’s Roberts.”
I tried to explain how I’d been knocked out and captured, but they
wouldn’t believe me. I had been posted for a deserter, and Aguilar had
fixed me. All I could do was to ask them to shoot me right there, as if
I had been killed in the battle. But they had cooled down some while I
talked, and they couldn’t do it in cold blood. Finally, the corporal
said:
“See here, boys, I enlisted to fight, and not to be a hangman. Roberts
has messed with me, and I can’t do it. Perhaps what he says is true; I
don’t know. If you want to arrest him, go ahead. But I’ll be darned if I
want it said that the old 114th had to shoot a deserter. Come on, and
let him take his chances!”
He turned his back on me, and they followed him. I ripped off my canvas
coat and ran down the creek and hid till night.
There wasn’t a man on the whole island, nigger or white, who wasn’t my
enemy, and I didn’t expect I’d ever escape. But there was a woman. She
wasn’t exactly the kind you’d ever suspect of having a heart, but she
saved my life. She hid me in a shed outside of the town, and fed me and
nursed me till I was able to get away on a blockade runner and come to
San Francisco. I owe that woman something, and if I’m ever flush again,
she’ll get it back.
So it was a woman who sent me to the Philippines, it was a woman who got
my promotion, a woman who tortured me like a fiend, and a woman who
saved me. And the queer part of it is that the last one was what most
people would call the worst of the lot!
* * * * *
Admeh Drake was seeing his own phantoms of the Philippines on his cot;
the man with the yellow beard, Maidslow, _alias_ Roberts, was looking
with eyes that saw beyond the walls of the Hammam, when the Hero of Pago
Bridge brought himself back with a jerk.
“You’ve told me all except how you got here,” he said.
“Plain drunk,” said Maidslow, “the first I dared get after I left the
Islands. But it isn’t safe for me to stay in San Francisco, now Colonel
Knowlton is back here. If Maxie saw through the beard, he will, and the
place is full of Secret Service men.”
Admeh Drake suddenly jumped from the couch.
“What will you give me if I get that legacy for you?”
“A thousand dollars.”
“Done!” cried the Hero. “See here, it’s too easy! Colonel Knowlton don’t
know your real name’s Maidslow, does he?”
“No, I enlisted as Roberts.”
“Dead to rights. He’ll take Maxie’s word when she identifies her husband
to him. All right again. Well, let me play Harry Maidslow, and go with
Maxie to the Colonel. I take my thousand, and you take the rest
and—Maxie. How’s that?”
“If Maxie will stand for it, I’m ready,” said the deserter.
During the rest of the night, the man who went for a soldier and wished
he hadn’t, and the man who didn’t go and wished that he had, lay in an
upper corridor of the Hammam discussing the details of their conspiracy.
CHAPTER IX
THE WARDS OF FORTUNE
Soothed by the drone of the Retired Car Conductor’s narrative, and
wearied out with the continuous performance of the night’s adventures,
the Harvard Freshman fell asleep on the wooden bench in his cell at the
Tanks; and it was not until a heavy hand was laid on his shoulder that
he awoke. A bluff policeman was standing over him.
“Your order for release has come, and you can go now! You and your
pardner was asleep, and I clean forgot you.”
The officer had a similar word with the Conductor, and led the two
prisoners out into the corridor. While they were waiting for their
property to be taken from the boxes in which it had been stored, Eli
Cook felt idly in his pocket and drew out a torn scrap of red paper
marked with Chinese writing.
“That’s all they left on me when I was searched,” he said, with a feeble
grin. “Want it for a souvenir of a happy evenin’? It dropped out of a
Chinaman’s pocket yesterday up to Dupont Street, and I picked it up.”
The Freshman took it, in the same spirit of mockery, and stuffed it into
his own pocket to keep company with several pawn tickets. As they went
together into the street the city bells were striking two o’clock.
“Gosh!” Coffin cried, with a burst of his old fervor, “I feel like the
chairman of a woman’s club after an annual election. Where you going to
feed your visage, old man?” he added tentatively. He was out of funds,
hungry and weary. The hundred dollars won from the Klondyker in the
smoking wager, deposited for bail, had, in fact, completely exhausted
his resources. The Conductor, however, refused to take the hint, and
manifested a desire to get away.
“Oh, I got to snoop back to the Beach,” he said. “This has been a hard
day for me, and I dunno how I’m a-goin’ to get even on my hundred if I
have to stand trial. I ain’t exactly hungry, anyway, but perhaps I’ll
stew up some canned stuff out to the cars. Want to come along? You’ll
have to walk, though, and it’s full seven miles through the Park.”
“No, thanks,” said Coffin, dryly. “I’ve got a poke-out coming to me at
nine, and I guess I can wait. I’ll walk up and down, and let the girls
admire me for a season.”
“Well, good-by, then!” said Eli Cook of Carville-by-the-Sea, and he
hurriedly made off down Kearney Street.
The youngster mused. “I shall now endeavor to give the correct imitation
of a thousand-dollar sport in the act of starving to death. I am
wondering, in my simple Japanese way, whether that gentle Klondyker with
my prize money in tow, will ever swim into my ken again. It’s a good
deal like trying to find a pet oyster in a mud flat, but I’ll try my
best. Angels, they say, can do no more. Selah!” With that he walked up
to Gunschke’s cigar store and found the young man who had assisted at
the smoking orgy of the night before. The clerk, however, knew nothing
of the Klondyker’s whereabouts, having never seen the Father of the
Katakoolanat previous to the debauch. The Freshman was in a quandary.
“Say, has your luck changed yet?” the salesman asked. “Last time I
heard, the curve was still rising.”
“By Jove, I had forgotten all about that,” cried Coffin. “Let’s see, I
won my hundred at the wager, then I won my thousand, more or less, in
the Chinese lottery, but then I was pulled, and dropped the hundred at
the Tanks. The grand psychological query is, Do I get that thou’? If I
had a nickel to my name I’d put the delicate question to the Oracle of
the Slot and find out how I stand on Fortune’s Golden Rolls.”
“Oh, I’ll stake you; here you are,” the salesman answered, tossing out a
nickel. “I’d like to know myself. If you’re still winning I’ll take you
out to the race-track and let you do my betting.”
The Freshman pushed the coin down the slot of the poker machine and
jerked the handle. Three treys appeared behind the wire. “Bully!” cried
the salesman. “Here, you draw four cigars!”
“Nay, nay, Pauline!” Coffin exclaimed in disgust. “I wouldn’t eat
another cigar to be crowned King of the Barbary Coast! I can never
endure the smell of tobacco again without being as sea-sick as a cat in
a swing. Much obliged for your charity, but I’ll call it square for the
good omen.”
Irrationally cheered by the portent, James Wiswell Coffin, 3d, wandered
out aimlessly and floated with the throng down towards the cheaper end
of Kearney Street. The cool, green, grassy square at the Old Plaza
attracted him, and he entered the little park.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, the plot hatched by the Hero of Pago Bridge and the deserter
of the Philippines had gone forward without a hitch. Drake and Maidslow
had met Maxie at the Biograph Theatre, and she had consented to visit
Colonel Knowlton and represent Drake as her missing husband, that
Maidslow might be safe from being recognised and apprehended by the
Secret Service men as a deserter. Both husband and wife were affected at
this meeting, after so many years, and it was evident to the Hero that a
reconciliation would be easily arranged. Both were lonely. Maxie had
worked so hard and Maidslow had lived so adventurously that the prospect
of settling down to a peaceful married life attracted them equally. This
was now possible if the legacy of old Max could be collected safely from
the Colonel. Their scheme was nothing less them conspiracy; but, after
all, Maidslow, her real husband, would be the one profited, for he would
receive the money. Maxie’s conscience was assuaged by this
consideration.
At 10.30 that morning Maxie and Drake called upon the Colonel at the
army headquarters and passed the ordeal successfully. The officer was
too busy to spend much time in investigation, and, knowing Maxie as well
as he did, it did not occur to him to suspect fraud. At any rate, the
check for $15,000, which he passed over to Admeh (made payable to Harry
Maidslow) would not be cashed without proper identification, and the
bank would relieve the Colonel of this necessity. He congratulated them
on their reunion, and dismissed them in relief that the responsibility
of his trust was over.
How Maidslow was to cash the check was now the question. It was easily
solved, at a meeting of the three principals in the plot, by the
decision that old Dietrich, the proprietor of the Biograph Theatre,
could identify the payee. He would undoubtedly believe Maxie’s
introduction of Maidslow as her husband, as this time, at least, she
would be speaking the truth. They left Admeh Drake on the sidewalk while
they proceeded to this next step.
The old Dutchman was canny, however. “How do I know dat dis man is your
huspant?” he said. “You say so, Maxie, put I neffer seen him pefore! See
here, didn’t you say Harry Maidslow hat a tattoo mark on his arm
alretty? He hat a girl’s name ’Dotty,’ you tole me once. Lemme see dat
mark, and I vill itentify him, sure! Den I know it’s all right!”
This was easily proved. Maidslow stripped up his sleeve and exhibited
the tattoo mark, and old Dietrich was convinced. He put on his hat to
accompany them to the bank. Excusing himself for a moment, Maidslow
slipped out and spoke to Admeh Drake.
“It’s all right, Drake, we’re going right down to cash the check. You
get away before Dietrich sees you and gets suspicious, and I’ll meet you
with the thousand dollars at Lotta’s Fountain in half an hour!”
Drake walked down Market Street. In a few minutes he saw Maxie,
Maidslow, and the old Dutchman approaching. He kept out of sight while
they passed him, on their way to Montgomery Street, where the bank was
located. Then he commenced his vigil at Lotta’s Fountain.
This is the very hub and centre of San Francisco, in the heart of the
shopping district, and the strategic point for confidence men, tourists,
loiterers, and sports. The three great newspaper buildings form here a
towering group against the sky, and the Palace Hotel, a massive block
honeycombed with windows, is within a stone’s throw. About him eddied
the principal currents of the town, carrying their heterogeneous
collection of humanity. The fountain is an island in the triangular
opening formed by the union of Geary, Kearney, and Market streets, and
each of these important thoroughfares contributed to the liveliness of
the place. Groups of brightly gowned women were awaiting the cable cars
to take them to the Oakland Ferry, cheap actors promenaded up the Rialto
of Market Street, the Geary Street cars swung on the turn-table,
impeding the traffic, and along the sidewalk on Kearney Street the
flower-venders made a vivid splotch of color. The whole place was alive
and bustling, and time went fast with the watcher at the gilded fountain
where no one drank.
When Admeh Drake looked up to the clock tower above his head, he was
surprised to see that it was already a quarter to twelve. He had waited
nearly an hour. He began to be impatient, nervous, suspicious. Maidslow
should have returned with Maxie long before this. Something must have
happened, or else—he grew frightened at the thought—they had given him
the slip, and would avoid paying him the thousand dollars as his share
of the plot. He waited now with less hope. Surely, if they were coming
at all, they would have returned before this. He lost interest in the
passers-by, and watched only for the two who were to bring him his
reward.
The clock struck noon, and the throng was swelled by clerks and business
men released for their lunch hour. One o’clock, and the tide poured back
again. Two, and he grew weary with standing, and sat upon the pedestal
of the Fountain. Three, and he gave up all hope. The excitement which
had kept him up all night relaxed. He was faint and limp from lack of
food and sleep.
So he, too, joined the human current and drifted along Kearney Street
with no set plan of action.
He turned into the Old Plaza, at Portsmouth Square, his eyes caught by a
sparkle of light from the gilded sails of the little bronze ship on the
Stevenson Memorial. He walked nearer to see what it was, and as he
approached he perceived a young man in a red sweater reading the
inscription on the marble shaft. It was the Harvard Freshman.
“_To be honest, to be kind_,” Coffin was reading, “_to earn a little and
to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his
presence_”—and then he turned away with a bitter protest in his throat,
to see the Hero of Pago Bridge looking over his shoulder.
“Pretty, ain’t it!” said Admeh Drake, and he, too, looked at the
immortal quotation from the “Christmas sermon.” Had it been written for
him alone, it could not have stung him more fiercely.
“—_To renounce, when that shall be necessary, and not be embittered, to
keep a few friends, but these without capitulation—above all, on the
same grim condition, to keep friends with himself—here is a task for all
that a man has of fortitude and delicacy_.”
He turned to Coffin with despair in his eye, all that was best in him
writhing at these graven words. “Say, what the hell did they stick that
up here for, right where every man that has failed can read it and eat
out his heart?”
Coffin slapped him on the back in sympathy, for even the irrepressible
Freshman seemed for the moment to be touched by the admonitory legend.
But he was not one to be serious for long, and after that one swift
glance into his soul, his customary spirit asserted itself.
“See here,” he said, “this is the way I look at it. You can’t have good
luck with your conscience all the time, any more’n you can with your
purse. Moral: cultivate your forgettery! We meet under the shadow of the
good ship _Bonaventure_, aforesaid ship being full of buccaneers and
sailing over a Sublime Moral Precept, by R. L. S. I doubt if he would
claim he was always such an angel himself if anybody should drive up in
a chariot and ask him. Lastly, my brethren, why be phazed at a dozen
lines of type? Discard your doubts and draw to the glorious flush of
hope. Amen. Let’s have a drink.”
They pledged each other somewhat forlornly in Spring Valley water, and
then Coffin remarked, “By the way, what did you do with the dime Coffee
John gave you? Made a fortune yet?”
“I made a thousand dollars, but I’ve got it to get. I’ve roped her, but
I can’t throw her yet.”
“A thou’?” Coffin exclaimed, “the devil you have! Jupiter, but that’s
queer! Why, that’s my fix, precisely. I got it on the hook all right,
but I couldn’t haul it into the boat.”
Exchanging confidences over the night’s adventures, the two wandered up
to the top of the sloping Plaza, where the back of the Woey Sen Low
restaurant arose, three stories high, an iron balcony projecting from
each tier of windows.
“Let’s come up to the chink’s Delmonico,” suggested the Freshman. “You
can get a great view of the city from up there, and you don’t have to
spend money if you don’t want to.”
They went round to the front entrance, ascended the stairs, and filed
past empty tables, gaining the balcony. As they stood gazing over San
Francisco they heard steps approaching from behind, and two persons came
into the nearest room. Coffin, who was standing with Drake, out of sight
of the new arrivals, peeped round the corner of a porcelain lantern.
“It’s a woman,” he whispered. “And a peach-erlooloo of the first degree,
too, by Jove! Nigger or Kanacker blood, though. Let’s go through and
have a look at her.”
Drake assented. They entered the open doorway and passed carelessly
through the room. A man at the table looked up and nodded.
“Whittaker!” said the Freshman, when they were out of sight, “the
medium, as I exist! I wonder how he ever got into a friendly mix-up with
that chocolate-colored fairy. There was no heroine with raven locks in
mine.”
At this moment Vango appeared and stuck a dirty finger in Coffin’s
buttonhole. The medium’s hair was matted and stringy, his clothes
wrinkled and spotted in a shocking disorder. “Come in here,” he said. “I
want to make you acquainted with a lady friend,” and he escorted the
adventurers where the Quadroon sat, already clad in widow’s weeds.
“Mrs. Moy Kip, let me introduce—Mr.”—here he hesitated, and was
prompted—“Mr. Coffin and Mr. Drake. Set down, gents. This here lady has
suffered recent a sad and tragical bereavement. I was just about to
console her when you passed by, and I hoped you might help distrack her
mind from gloomious thoughts and reflections. The party what has just
passed out, you understand, was a Chinee, but he is now on the happy
side of Jordan, in the spirit spere, and we are some in hopes of having
the pleasure of his society to-night in astral form, if the conditions
is favorable.”
Here he nudged the Freshman under the table, and Coffin passed the hint
to Drake, neither of them knowing exactly what was expected of them.
“Do you speak Chinese, madam?” inquired the Freshman, at a loss how to
begin the conversation. “I’ve often wondered about these signs in here.
I suppose they’re mottoes from Confucius. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind
translating some.” He pointed to several long, narrow strips of colored
paper which hung from the walls.
“Oh, I only know a little Chinese, just about enough to read a common
business letter in the Cantonese dialect,” said the Quadroon.
Coffin recalled the scrap of paper given him by the retired conductor in
the Tanks, and he drew it from his pocket to show to her. The sharp
black eyes of the ex-medium, sharpened by long practice, fastened upon
it, and he darted a skinny hand.
“Here you are!” he cried excitedly to the Quadroon. “I told you I’d find
it, and I done it! Look at that, Mrs. Moy Kip, and see if it ain’t the
very same identical piece of paper you was a-searchin’ for. Oh, I felt
it a-comin’ just now when this gentleman entered into the room. I felt a
wave of self-independent spirit message, and I seen a red aura round his
head, thereby denotin’ he was a Psychie.” Exultant as he was, however,
he looked over his shoulder fearfully as if he dreaded interruption.
The Quadroon had taken another scrap of red paper from her bosom and
tremblingly placed the torn edges of the two together. They fitted
exactly. She suddenly rose with set eyes and mouth, and ran towards the
stairs without a word.
Vango followed her, leaving Drake and Coffin to wonder at the cause of
the excitement. After a few moments the Professor returned trembling,
pale, and crestfallen. He sank into a seat and covered his face with his
hands.
“Mrs. Higgins! Mrs. Higgins!” he moaned. “I just see her out by the
stairs! She wouldn’t let me by! Oh, God, she’s after me again! And that
nigger woman’s gone and I’ve lost her. Think of it, after all I’ve went
through, to lose her just as I was winnin’!”
He looked up haggardly and pounded his fist on the table. “By Jimminy
Christmas! That there piece of paper was worth a thousand dollars,
gents, to me, and I’ve lost it!”
Drake and Coffin exchanged glances of amused surprise, and Vango added
weakly, looking at the Freshman, “Much obliged, I’m sure, Mr. Coffin.”
He was wondering if he would be asked to divide the prize, in case he
got it.
“Oh, don’t mention it, old chap,” Coffin answered, “you’re welcome to
all you can make out of that paper with your flim-flam. That sort of
humbuggery isn’t exactly in my line. But suppose you put us wise as to
the facts in the case.”
The ex-medium, still trembling with the memory of his supernatural fears
and discomfited by the escape of the woman, pulled himself together, and
told of the remarkable series of events which had brought him, that
morning, to Hunter’s Point in a launch containing a Quadroon woman, a
dead Chinaman, a scrap of paper, and $2,000 worth of smuggled opium.
“I’ve been working the widow soft and easy ever since,” he said.
“Gettin’ that first piece of paper was what I incline to denominate a
masterpiece, but this findin’ of the missin’ half right in your pocket
is nothin’ less than inspirational second-sight. She ought to think
herself lucky to have fell in with me at no cost to herself for a
sittin’ whatever. But will she pay up? That’s the question. Niggers is
creditable, but they is also tricky. But anyways, I bet them two Chinese
highbinders is apt to meet Moy Kip on the opposite shore to-night.”
It grew dark as they sat there, and when they had finished their stories
they went out upon the balcony again. The light on the Ferry tower
burned like a star against the waters of the Bay. The street lamps
followed suit, and the night closed in. The three Picaroons were in the
first quiet exhilaration that follows hunger and fatigue. Except for the
Freshman’s broken rest at the Tanks, not one of them had slept since
their meeting the previous evening; not one of them had eaten. Their
eyes were glassy, but not yet sleepy; they were like dead men who could
still walk and speak. A dull fever burned in their veins. Talk, then,
grew faint, and even thought flickered but dimly. There was nothing
positive to look forward to but Coffee John’s invitation to supper at
nine o’clock, so they waited listlessly for the hour. Finally, a
proposal from the indefatigable Coffin to wander through the Chinese
quarter lured them out.
They turned into Ross Alley. This narrow lane of shops and gambling
houses was swarming with passers-by. As the three men entered the
passage, the sound of banging doors preceded them; the outer guards of
the fan-tan resorts, catching sight of white faces and fearing
detectives, were slamming and bolting the entrances.
Before they had gone half the length of the alley, Coffin noticed a
Chinaman in felt hat and blue blouse standing idly by a lamp-post, and
behind him a second man, leaning against a brick wall. The Freshman’s
alert eye awoke and took the two in at a glance, for he noted something
vaguely furtive in their apparently careless attitudes.
Now another Chinese approached the two figures at a rapid pace, holding
one hand hidden in his blouse. A few feet behind him a coolie followed,
looking sharply to the right and left. Coffin was just about to call
Drake’s attention to them, when, without warning, the man by the lamp
whipped out a revolver and fired point blank at the one approaching. The
pistol barked three times in rapid succession, then the weapon was
swiftly handed to the loafer by the wall. It was like the passing of the
ball to the quarter-back in a football game, for, on the instant, these
two and another broke through the crowd and ran in different directions.
As they started, the bodyguard of the wounded man drew his own pistol
and sent a stream of bullets after the fugitives.
The fusillade scattered the crowd in the alley. The Chinese dodged this
way and that, escaping into doors and down cross lanes to avoid the
officers who would soon appear to question them. The Freshman pulled his
companions hurriedly into a little shop, and, whirling them back to the
door, drew their surprised attention to a case of jade ornaments.
“Lay low,” he exclaimed, “the police will be here in a moment, and we
don’t want to be run in and held for witnesses. We couldn’t identify the
chink, anyway. I say let ’em have it out their own way.”
He looked out and saw a plain-clothes detective running down the alley
to where the dead man lay. From the other end of the passage two
officers in uniform came up, sweeping a dozen Chinese in front of them.
One policeman lined the fugitives in front of him, while the other
examined them for weapons. As none were found, the crowd was rapidly
dispersed. The detective looked in at the shop door.
“Did you see the shooting?” he asked.
“We got to the door here just in time to see three men running, but I
didn’t catch their faces,” said Coffin coolly. “What’s the row?”
“Oh, another Tong war,” said the detective. “Moy Kip was shot last
night, and this one is the first one to pay up the score. Of course we
can’t do nothing without no witnesses except this monkey!” and he went
about his business.
“Well,” said Professor Vango, as they passed from the scene, “that’s the
finishin’ conclusion to my picnic. I hope yourn won’t end so tragic.”
“I don’t know,” the Freshman replied, “you may find your dusky beauty
yet. Then Drake has to catch his soubrette, and I would fain discover
the gentle Klondyker. I consider it about horse and horse. Funny! Here
each of us has made a thousand dollars, and not one is any better off
than he was last night, plum broke! That’s what we used to call a
paradox at Harvard, in ’English 13.’ And I’m carnivorously hungry to
boot. I haven’t bitten anything except a cigar since the feed last
night.”
“Nor me, neither,” asserted the Professor.
“Here too!” said Admeh Drake.
“Then it would seem to be up to Coffee John again. He seems to be the
god in this machine. Come on, and we’ll give an imitation of a
three-stamp mill crushing ore!” So saying, still jubilant, still
heartening them with frivolous prattle, the Harvard Freshman piloted his
comrades down Clay Street.
As they passed the old Plaza, Drake looked over his shoulder once or
twice and said, “I reckon we’re being followed, pardners. There’s a
chink been on our trail ever since we turned out of the lane, up yonder.
I hope they ain’t got it in for us because we saw the scrap!”
The soft-footed coolie was half a block behind them, when, without a
word of explanation, Coffin suddenly bolted and ran up Kearney Street.
Vango gave a gasp and clutched the cowboy’s arm.
“What’s the matter?” he whimpered. “Where’s Coffin went? Is he scared?”
“You can search me!” Drake said, philosophically. “I give it up, unless
he’s running to get an appetite for dinner. Don’t you fret, I’ll stand
by you if there’s any trouble.”
Taking the medium’s arm, he walked down Clay Street until they came to
Coffee John’s window. Then, looking round, they saw the Chinaman coming
up to them boldly, with a grin on his face.
“You name Vango?” the coolie said.
“That’s right! What d’you want with him?” the cowboy replied, for the
Professor was too frightened to answer.
The Chinaman felt inside his blouse, while Drake watched for the first
sight of a weapon. Nothing more formidable was brought forth, however,
than a smallish paper-wrapped parcel. Vango took it cautiously. It was
suspiciously heavy.
“Moy Kip wife send,” explained the Chinaman, and retreated up the
street.
The medium, in an agony of excitement, opened the parcel by the light of
the window. It contained fifty golden double eagles. His little beady
black eyes sparkling, he jubilantly entered the restaurant with Drake.
Close on their heels came James Wiswell Coffin, 3d, waving a bunch of
greenbacks above his head. “I got him! Oh, I got the green-eyed
Klondyker all right!” he cried. “He had cashed my lottery ticket, and he
handed me over ten hundred pea-green dollars! Oh, frabjous day, we dine,
we dine to-night!”
Coffee John, who had been conversing with some unseen patron in a tiny,
curtained-off room in the rear of the shop, now came forward and greeted
the Picaroons.
“My word,” he remarked, “yer do look bloomin’ ’appy, reg’lar grinnin’
like a Chinee at a Mission Sabbath School! All but Dryke,” he added,
noticing his favorite’s gloomy looks, in sharp contrast to the delight
of the others. “Wot’s wrong? Ain’t your aig ’atched, too? Well, per’aps
it will, yet. They’s a lydy a-wytin’ darn in thet there room for you.
Been there a ’arf hour an’ is nar nacherly a bit impytient. Looks like a
narce gal, too, if she didn’t put so much flar on her fyce. She may ’ave
good news for yer.”
Drake started before Coffee John finished, and, entering the little
compartment, found Maxie Morrow awaiting him. He held out his hand in
pleased surprise. She offered him a thick envelope in return.
“Oh, I’m in an awful hurry,” she began, “and I haven’t a minute to
spare. I’m afraid you thought we weren’t going to keep our word, but
really, Mr. Drake, we couldn’t help it! I was so sorry to keep you
waiting so long, but, just as we left the Bank, I saw Colonel Knowlton
come in. I was so afraid he’d suspect something, seeing me there with
Harry, instead of with you, and Harry was so afraid the Colonel would
put the Secret Service men on his track, that we jumped on a car and
went right to my house on Bush Street, and Harry has been afraid to show
himself outdoors since. We’re going to try to get away to-morrow to
Southern California, but I was just bound that you should have your
thousand dollars, so I brought it down here. Lucky you told Harry you
were coming to Coffee John’s, wasn’t it? Now, good-by, and good luck to
you!”
With that she rustled out of the restaurant, and Drake joined the group
at the counter.
“Nort by no means!” Coffee John was saying. “Tortoni’s be blowed! If
Coffee John’s peach pie an’ corfee ain’t good enough fer yer to-night,
yer can go and eat withart me. Fust thing, I want to hear the tyles
told. Afore I begin to ’elp yer eat your money, I want to know ’ow it’s
come by! After thet, I don’t sye as I won’t accep’ a invitytion to dine
proper.”
The proprietor was insistent, and though a thousand dollars burned in
each pocket, the Picaroons, so gloriously come into port, sat down to a
more modest repast than had been set in that room the night before.
Between mouthfuls, one after the other told to his benefactor the story
of his lucky dime—the Freshman with a tropic wealth of flowery trope and
imagery, the ex-Medium with unction and self-satisfied glibness, the
Hero of Pago Bridge with his customary simplicity. Not one of them
expected the flagon of morality that was to be broached by their host,
forbye.
For, as the tales developed, Coffee John’s face grew set in sterner
disapproval. Coffin’s story moulded disdain upon the Cockney’s lip—the
recital of Professor Vango altered this expression to scorn—but at the
confession of Admeh Drake the proprietor’s face froze in absolute
contempt, and he arose in a towering wrath.
“See ’ere, gents,” he began, folding his red bare arms, “though w’y I
should call yer thet, w’ich yer by no means ain’t, I don’t know—nar I
see wot good it is to plyce a mistaken charity in kindness! I’ve went
an’ throwed awye me thirty cents on yer, blow me if I ain’t! I said yer
was ’ard cyses, an’ yer _be_ ’ard cyses, an’ so yer’ll nacherly continue
till yer all bloomin’ well jugged for it!
“You, Coffin,” he pointed with severity, “you ’ave conspired against the
laws of this ’ere Styte w’ich forbids a gyme o’ charnce, besides ’avin’
patronized a Chinee lottery, w’ich same is also illegal. You, Vango,
’ave comparnded a felony, by bein’ a receiver o’ stolen goods subjick to
dooty in Federal customs. And you, Dryke, who, bite me if I didn’t ’ave
a soft spot in me ’art for, yer’ve gone an’ went an’ obtayned money
under false pretences, an’ ’arbored an’ abetted a desarter from the
harmy o’ your country, for if you believe that there cock-an’-a-bull
story, I don’t!”
He raised his arms threateningly, like an outraged Jove. “Git art from
under me roof, all o’ yer! Yer no better than lags in the Pen!”
The three Picaroons passed through the door and faded into the darkness.
The Cockney watched them separate, and then reëntering his shop, turned
out the lamp and locked the door.
“I feed no more bums!” said Coffee John.
The End
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Added “The Mystery of the Hammam” to the Contents on p. viii.
2. Silently corrected typographical errors.
3. Retained anachronistic and non-standard spellings as printed.
4. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
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