OPTIONS
BY
O HENRY




CONTENTS

"The Rose of Dixie"
The Third Ingredient
The Hiding of Black Bill
Schools and Schools
Thimble, Thimble
Supply and Demand
Buried Treasure
To Him Who Waits
He Also Serves
The Moment of Victory
The Head-Hunter
No Story
The Higher Pragmatism
Best-Seller
Rus in Urbe
A Poor Rule




OPTIONS




"THE ROSE OF DIXIE"



When The Rose of Dixie magazine was started by a stock company in 
Toombs City, Georgia, there was never but one candidate for its chief 
editorial position in the minds of its owners.  Col.  Aquila Telfair 
was the man for the place.  By all the rights of learning, family, 
reputation, and Southern traditions, he was its foreordained, fit, and 
logical editor.  So, a committee of the patriotic Georgia citizens who 
had subscribed the founding fund of $100,000 called upon Colonel 
Telfair at his residence, Cedar Heights, fearful lest the enterprise 
and the South should suffer by his possible refusal.

The colonel received them in his great library, where he spent most of 
his days.  The library had descended to him from his father.  It 
contained ten thousand volumes, some of which had been published as 
late as the year 1861.  When the deputation arrived, Colonel Telfair 
was seated at his massive white-pine centre-table, reading Burton's 
Anatomy of Melancholy.  He arose and shook hands punctiliously with 
each member of the committee.  If you were familiar with The Rose of 
Dixie you will remember the colonel's portrait, which appeared in it 
from time to time.  You could not forget the long, carefully brushed 
white hair; the hooked, high-bridged nose, slightly twisted to the 
left; the keen eyes under the still black eyebrows; the classic mouth 
beneath the drooping white mustache, slightly frazzled at the ends.

The committee solicitously offered him the position of managing 
editor, humbly presenting an outline of the field that the publication 
was designed to cover and mentioning a comfortable salary.  The 
colonel's lands were growing poorer each year and were much cut up by 
red gullies.  Besides, the honor was not one to be refused.

In a forty-minute speech of acceptance, Colonel Telfair gave an 
outline of English literature from Chaucer to Macaulay, re-fought the 
battle of Chancellorsville, and said that, God helping him, he would 
so conduct The Rose of Dixie that its fragrance and beauty would 
permeate the entire world, hurling back into the teeth of the Northern 
minions their belief that no genius or good could exist in the brains 
and hearts of the people whose property they had destroyed and whose 
rights they had curtailed.

Offices for the magazine were partitioned off and furnished in the 
second floor of the First National Bank building; and it was for the 
colonel to cause The Rose of Dixie to blossom and flourish or to wilt 
in the balmy air of the land of flowers.

The staff of assistants and contributors that Editor-Colonel Telfair 
drew about him was a peach.  It was a whole crate of Georgia peaches.  
The first assistant editor, Tolliver Lee Fairfax, had had a father 
killed during Pickett's charge.  The second assistant, Keats Unthank, 
was the nephew of one of Morgan's Raiders.  The book reviewer, Jackson 
Rockingham, had been the youngest soldier in the Confederate army, 
having appeared on the field of battle with a sword in one hand and a 
milk-bottle in the other.  The art editor, Roncesvalles Sykes, was a 
third cousin to a nephew of Jefferson Davis.  Miss Lavinia Terhune, 
the colonel's stenographer and typewriter, had an aunt who had once 
been kissed by Stonewall Jackson.  Tommy Webster, the head office-boy, 
got his job by having recited Father Ryan's poems, complete, at the 
commencement exercises of the Toombs City High School.  The girls who 
wrapped and addressed the magazines were members of old Southern 
families in Reduced Circumstances.  The cashier was a scrub named 
Hawkins, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who had recommendations and a bond 
from a guarantee company filed with the owners.  Even Georgia stock 
companies sometimes realize that it takes live ones to bury the dead.

Well, sir, if you believe me, The Rose of Dixie blossomed five times 
before anybody heard of it except the people who buy their hooks and 
eyes in Toombs City.  Then Hawkins climbed off his stool and told on 
'em to the stock company.  Even in Ann Arbor he had been used to 
having his business propositions heard of at least as far away as 
Detroit.  So an advertising manager was engaged -- Beauregard Fitzhugh 
Banks, a young man in a lavender necktie, whose grandfather had been 
the Exalted High Pillow-slip of the Kuklux Klan.  

In spite of which The Rose of Dixie kept coming out every month.  
Although in every issue it ran photos of either the Taj Mahal or the 
Luxembourg Gardens, or Carmencita or La Follette, a certain number of 
people bought it and subscribed for it.  As a boom for it, Editor-
Colonel Telfair ran three different views of Andrew Jackson's old 
home, "The Hermitage," a full-page engraving of the second battle of 
Manassas, entitled "Lee to the Rear!" and a five-thousand-word 
biography of Belle Boyd in the same number.  The subscription list 
that month advanced 118.  Also there were poems in the same issue by 
Leonina Vashti Haricot (pen-name), related to the Haricots of 
Charleston, South Carolina, and Bill Thompson, nephew of one of the 
stockholders.  And an article from a special society correspondent 
describing a tea-party given by the swell Boston and English set, 
where a lot of tea was spilled overboard by some of the guests 
masquerading as Indians.

One day a person whose breath would easily cloud a mirror, he was so 
much alive, entered the office of The Rose of Dixie.  He was a man 
about the size of a real-estate agent, with a self-tied tie and a 
manner that he must have borrowed conjointly from W J.  Bryan, 
Hackenschmidt, and Hetty Green.  He was shown into the editor-
colonel's pons asinorum.  Colonel Telfair rose and began a Prince 
Albert bow.

"I'm Thacker," said the intruder, taking the editor's chair--"T. T. 
Thacker, of New York."

He dribbled hastily upon the colonel's desk some cards, a bulky manila 
envelope, and a letter from the owners of The Rose of Dixie.  This 
letter introduced Mr. Thacker, and politely requested Colonel Telfair 
to give him a conference and whatever information about the magazine 
he might desire.

"I've been corresponding with the secretary of the magazine owners for 
some time," said Thacker, briskly.  "I'm a practical magazine man 
myself, and a circulation booster as good as any, if I do say it.  
I'll guarantee an increase of anywhere from ten thousand to a hundred 
thousand a year for any publication that isn't printed in a dead 
language.  I've had my eye on The Rose of Dixie ever since it started.  
I know every end of the business from editing to setting up the 
classified ads.  Now, I've come down here to put a good bunch of money 
in the magazine, if I can see my way clear.  It ought to be made to 
pay.  The secretary tells me it's losing money.  I don't see why a 
magazine in the South, if it's properly handled, shouldn't get a 
good circulation in the North, too.

"Colonel Telfair leaned back in his chair and polished his gold-rimmed 
glasses.

"Mr. Thacker," said he, courteously but firmly, "The Rose of Dixie is 
a publication devoted to the fostering and the voicing of Southern 
genius.  Its watchword, which you may have seen on the cover, is 'Of, 
For, and By the South.'"

"But you wouldn't object to a Northern circulation, would you?" asked 
Thacker.

"I suppose," said the editor-colonel, "that it is customary to open 
the circulation lists to all.  I do not know.  I have nothing to do 
with the business affairs of the magazine.  I was called upon to 
assume editorial control of it, and I have devoted to its conduct such 
poor literary talents as I may possess and whatever store of erudition 
I may have acquired."

"Sure," said Thacker.  "But a dollar is a dollar anywhere, North, 
South, or West--whether you're buying codfish, goober peas, or Rocky 
Ford cantaloupes.  Now, I've been looking over your November number.  
I see one here on your desk.  You don't mind running over it with me?

"Well, your leading article is all right.  A good write-up of the 
cotton-belt with plenty of photographs is a winner any time.  New York 
is always interested in the cotton crop.  And this sensational account 
of Hatfield-McCoy feud, by a schoolmate of a niece of the Governor of 
Kentucky, isn't such a bad idea.  It happened so long ago that most 
people have forgotten it.  Now, here's a poem three pages long called 
'The Tyrant's Foot,' by Lorella Lascelles.  I've pawed around a good 
deal over manuscripts, but I never saw her name on a rejection slip."

"Miss Lascelles," said the editor, "is one of our most widely 
recognized Southern poetesses.  She is closely related to the Alabama 
Lascelles family, and made with her own hands the silken Confederate 
banner that was presented to the governor of that state at his 
inauguration."

"But why," persisted Thacker, "is the poem illustrated with a view of 
the M.  & 0.  Railroad freight depot at Tuscaloosa?"

"The illustration," said the colonel, with dignity, "shows a corner of 
the fence surrounding the old homestead where Miss Lascelles was 
born."

"All right," said Thacker.  "I read the poem, but I couldn't tell  
whether it was about the depot of the battle of Bull Run.  Now, here's 
a short story called 'Rosies' Temptation,' by Fosdyke Piggott.  It's 
rotten.  What is a Piggott, anyway?"

"Mr.  Piggott," said the editor, "is a brother of the principal 
stockholder of the magazine."

"All's right with the world--Piggott passes," said Thacker.  "Well  
this article on Arctic exploration and the one on tarpon fishing might 
go.  But how about this write-up of the Atlanta, New Orleans, 
Nashville, and Savannah breweries?  It seems to consist mainly of 
statistics about their output and the quality of their beer.  What's 
the chip over the bug?"

"If I understand your figurative language," answered Colonel Telfair, 
"it is this: the article you refer to was handed to me by the owners 
of the magazine with instructions to publish it.  The literary quality 
of it did not appeal to me.  But, in a measure, I feel impelled to 
conform, in certain matters, to the wishes of the gentlemen who are 
interested in the financial side of The Rose."

"I see," said Thacker.  "Next we have two pages of selections from 
'Lalla Rookh,' by Thomas Moore.  Now, what Federal prison did Moore 
escape from, or what's the name of the F.  F.  V.  family that he 
carries as a handicap?"

"Moore was an Irish poet who died in 1852," said Colonel Telfair, 
pityingly.  "He is a classic.  I have been thinking of reprinting his 
translation of Anacreon serially in the magazine."

"Look out for the copyright laws,"  said Thacker, flippantly.   Who's 
Bessie Belleclair, who contributes the essay on the newly completed 
water-works plant in Milledgeville?"

"The name, sir," said Colonel Telfair, "is the nom de guerre of Miss 
Elvira Simpkins.  I have not the honor of knowing the lady; but her 
contribution was sent to us by Congressman Brower, of her native 
state.  Congressman Brower's mother was related to the Polks of 
Tennessee.

"Now, see here, Colonel," said Thacker, throwing down the magazine, 
"this won't do.  You can't successfully run a magazine for one 
particular section of the country.  You've got to make a universal 
appeal.  Look how the Northern publications have catered to the South 
and encouraged the Southern writers.  And you've got to go far and 
wide for your contributors.  You've got to buy stuff according to its 
quality without any regard to the pedigree of the author.  Now, I'll 
bet a quart of ink that this Southern parlor organ you've been running 
has never played a note that originated about Mason & Hamlin's line.  
Am I right?"

"I have carefully and conscientiously rejected all contributions from 
that section of the country--if I understand your figurative language 
aright," replied the colonel.

"All right.  Now I'll show you something."

Thacker reached for his thick manila envelope and dumped a mass of 
typewritten manuscript on the editors desk.

"Here's some truck," said he, "that I paid cash for, and brought along 
with me."

One by one he folded back the manuscripts and showed their first pages 
to the colonel.

Here are four short stories four of the highest priced authors in the 
United States--three of 'em living in New York, and one commuting.  
There's a special article on Vienna-bred society by Tom Vampson.  
Here's an Italian serial by Captain Jack--no--it's the other Crawford.  
Here are three separate exposes of city governments by Sniffings, and 
here's a dandy entitled 'What Women Carry in Dress-Suit Cases'--a 
Chicago newspaper woman hired herself out for five years as a lady's 
maid to get that information.  And here's a Synopsis of Preceding 
Chapters of Hall Caine's new serial to appear next June.  And here's a 
couple of pounds of vers de societe that I got at a rate from the 
clever magazines.  That's the stuff that people everywhere want.  And 
now here's a writeup with photographs at the ages of four, twelve, 
twenty-two, and thirty of George B.  McClellan.  It's a 
prognostication.  He's bound to be elected Mayor of New York.  It '11 
make a big hit all over the country.  He--"

"I beg your pardon," said Colonel Telfair, stiffening in his chair.  
"What was the name?"

"Oh, I see," said Thacker, with half a grin.  Yes, he's a son of the 
General.  We'll pass that manuscript up.  But, if you'll excuse me, 
Colonel, it's a magazine we're trying to make go off--not the first 
gun at Fort Sumter.  Now, here's a thing that's bound to get next to 
you.  It's an original poem by James Whitcomb Riley.  J.W.  himself.  
You know what that means to a magazine.  I won't tell you what I had 
to pay for that poem; but I'll tell you this--Riley can make more 
money writing with a fountain-pen than you or I can with one that lets 
the ink run.  I'll read you the last two stanzas:

"'Pa lays around 'n' loafs all day,
   'N' reads and makes us leave him be.
He lets me do just like I please,
   'N' when I'm in bad he laughs at me,
'N' when I holler loud 'n' say
   Bad words 'n' then begin to tease
The cat, 'n' pa just smiles, ma's mad
   'N' gives me Jesse crost her knees.
      I always wondered why that wuz-
      I guess it's cause
           Pa never does.

"''N' after all the lights are out
   I'm sorry 'bout it; so I creep
Out of my trundle bed to ma's
   'N' say I love her a whole heap,
'N' kiss her, 'n' I hug her tight.
   'N' it's too dark to see her eyes,
But every time I do I know
   She cries 'n' cries 'n' cries 'n' cries.
      I always wondered why that wuz-
      I guess it's 'cause
         Pa never does.'

"That's the stuff," continued Thacker.  "What do you think of that?"

"I am not unfamiliar with the works of Mr.  Riley," said the colonel, 
deliberately.  "I believe he lives in Indiana.  For the last ten years 
I have been somewhat of a literary recluse, and am familiar with 
nearly all the books in the Cedar Heights library.  I am also of the 
opinion that a magazine should contain a certain amount of poetry.  
Many of the sweetest singers of the South have already contributed to 
the pages of The Rose of Dixie.  I, myself, have thought of 
translating from the original for publication in its pages the works 
of the great Italian poet Tasso.  Have you ever drunk from the 
fountain of this immortal poet's lines, Mr.  Thacker?"

"Not even a demi-Tasso," said Thacker.

Now, let's come to the point, Colonel Telfair.  I've already invested 
some money in this as a flyer.  That bunch of manuscripts cost me 
$4,000.  My object was to try a number of them in the next issue-I 
believe you make up less than a month ahead--and see what effect it 
has on the circulation.  I believe that by printing the best stuff we 
can get in the North, South, East, or West we can make the magazine 
go.  You have there the letter from the owning company asking you to 
co-operate with me in the plan.  Let's chuck out some of this slush 
that you've been publishing just because the writers are related to 
the Skoopdoodles of Skoopdoodle County.  Are you with me?"

"As long as I continue to be the editor of The Rose," said Colonel 
Telfair, with dignity, "I shall be its editor.  But I desire also to 
conform to the wishes of its owners if I can do so conscientiously."

"That's the talk," said Thacker, briskly.  "Now, how much of this 
stuff I've brought can we get into the January number?  We want to 
begin right away."

"There is yet space in the January number," said the editor, "for 
about eight thousand words, roughly estimated."

"Great!" said Thacker.  "It isn't much, but it'll give the readers 
some change from goobers, governors, and Gettysburg.  I'll leave the 
selection of the stuff I brought to fill the space to you, as it's all 
good.  I've got to run back to New York, and I'll be down again in a 
couple of weeks."

Colonel Telfair slowly swung his eye-glasses by their broad, black 
ribbon.

"The space in the January number that I referred to," said he, 
measuredly, "has been held open purposely, pending a decision that I 
have not yet made.  A short time ago a contribution was submitted to 
The Rose of Dixie that is one of the most remarkable literary efforts 
that has ever come under my observation.  None but a master mind and 
talent could have produced it.  It would just fill the space that I 
have reserved for its possible use."

Thacker looked anxious.

"What kind of stuff is it?" he asked.  "Eight thousand words sounds 
suspicious.  The oldest families must have been collaborating.  Is 
there going to be another secession ?"

"The author of the article," continued the colonel, ignoring Thacker's 
allusions, "is a writer of some reputation.  He has also distinguished 
himself in other ways.  I do not feel at liberty to reveal to you his 
name--at least not until I have decided whether or not to accept his 
contribution."

"Well," said Thacker, nervously, "is it a continued story, or an 
account of the unveiling of the new town pump in Whitmire, South 
Carolina, or a revised list of General Lee's body-servants, or what?"

"You are disposed to be facetious," said Colonel Telfair, calmly.  
"The article is from the pen of a thinker, a philosopher, a lover of 
mankind, a student, and a rhetorician of high degree."

"It must have been written by a syndicate," said Thacker.  "But, 
honestly, Colonel, you want to go slow.  I don't know of any eight-
thousand-word single doses of written matter that are read by anybody 
these days, except Supreme Court briefs and reports of murder trials.  
You haven't by any accident gotten hold of a copy of one of Daniel 
Webster's speeches, have you?"

Colonel Telfair swung a little in his chair and looked steadily from 
under his bushy eyebrows at the magazine promoter.

"Mr.  Thacker," he said, gravely, "I am willing to segregate the 
somewhat crude expression of your sense of humor from the solicitude 
that your business investments undoubtedly have conferred upon you.  
But I must ask you to cease your jibes and derogatory comments upon 
the South and the Southern people.  They, sir, will not be tolerated 
in the office of The Rose of Dixie for one moment.  And before you 
proceed with more of your covert insinuations that I, the editor of 
this magazine, am not a competent judge of the merits of the matter 
submitted to its consideration, I beg that you will first present some 
evidence or proof that you are my superior in any way, shape, or form 
relative to the question in hand."

"Oh, come, Colonel," said Thacker, good-naturedly.  "I didn't do 
anything like that to you.  It sounds like an indictment by the fourth 
assistant attorney-general.  Let's get back to business.  What's this 
8,000 to 1 shot about?"

"The article," said Colonel Telfair, acknowledging the apology by a 
slight bow, "covers a wide area of knowledge.  It takes up theories 
and questions that have puzzled the world for centuries, and disposes 
of them logically and concisely.  One by one it holds up to view the 
evils of the world, points out the way of eradicating them; and then 
conscientiously and in detail comments the good.  There is hardly a 
phase of human life that it does not discuss wisely, calmly, and 
equitably.  The great policies of governments, the duties of private 
citizens, the obligations of home life, law, ethics, morality--all 
these important subjects are handled with a calm wisdom and confidence 
that I must confess has captured my admiration."

"It must be a crackerjack," said Thacker, impressed.

"It is a great contribution to the world's wisdom," said the colonel.  
"The only doubt remaining in my mind as to the tremendous advantage it 
would be to us to give it publication in The Rose of Dixie is that I 
have not yet sufficient information about the author to give his work 
publicity in our magazine.

"I thought you said he is a distinguished man," said Thacker.

"He is," replied the colonel, "both in literary and in other more 
diversified and extraneous fields.  But I am extremely careful about 
the matter that I accept for publication.  My contributors are people 
of unquestionable repute and connections, which fact can be verified 
at any time.  As I said, I am holding this article until I can acquire 
more information about its author.  I do not know whether I will 
publish it or not.  If I decide against it, I shall be much pleased, 
Mr.  Thacker, to substitute the matter that you are leaving with me in 
its place."

Thacker was somewhat at sea.

"I don't seem to gather," said he, "much about the gist of this 
inspired piece of literature.  It sounds more like a dark horse than 
Pegasus to me."

"It is a human document," said the colonel-editor, confidently, "from 
a man of great accomplishments who, in my opinion, has obtained a 
stronger grasp on the world and its outcomes than that of any man 
living to-day."

Thacker rose to his feet excitedly.

"Say!" he said.  "It isn't possible that you've cornered John D.  
Rockefeller's memoirs, is it?  Don't tell me that all at once."

No, sir," said Colonel Telfair.  "I am speaking of mentality and 
literature not of the less worthy intricacies of trade."

Well, what's the trouble about running the article," asked Thacker, a 
little impatiently, "if the man's well known and has got the stuff ?"
Colonel Telfair sighed.

"Mr.  Thacker," said he, "for once I have been tempted.  Nothing has 
yet appeared in The Rose of Dixie that has not been from the pen of 
one of its sons or daughters.  I know little about the author of this 
article except that he has acquired prominence in a section of the 
country that has always been inimical to my heart and mind.  But I 
recognize his genius; and, as I have told you, I have instituted an 
investigation of his personality.  Perhaps it will be futile.  But I 
shall pursue the inquiry.  Until that is finished, I must leave open 
the question of filling the vacant space in our January number."

Thacker arose to leave.

"All right, Colonel," he said, as cordially as he could.  "You use 
your own judgment.  If you've really got a scoop or something that 
will make 'em sit up, run it instead of my stuff.  I'll drop in again 
in about two weeks.  Good luck!"

Colonel Telfair and the magazine promoter shook hands.

Returning a fortnight later, Thacker dropped off a very rocky Pullman 
at Toombs City.  He found the January number of the magazine made up 
and the forms closed.

The vacant space that had been yawning for type was filled by an 
article that was headed thus:

                    SECOND MESSAGE TO CONGRESS

                           Written for

                         THE ROSE OF DIXIE

                                 BY

                    A Member of the Well-known

                    BULLOCH FAMILY, OF GEORGIA

                            T.  Roosevelt




THE THIRD INGREDIENT



The (so-called) Vallambrosa Apartment-House is not an apartment-house.  
It is composed of two old-fashioned, brownstone-front residences 
welded into one.  The parlor floor of one side is gay with the wraps 
and head-gear of a modiste; the other is lugubrious with the 
sophistical promises and grisly display of a painless dentist.  You 
may have a room there for two dollars a week or you may have one for 
twenty dollars.  Among the Vallambrosa's roomers are stenographers, 
musicians, brokers, shop-girls, space-rate writers, art students, 
wire-tappers, and other people who lean far over the banister-rail 
when the door-bell rings.

This treatise shall have to do with but two of the Vallambrosians--
though meaning no disrespect to the others.

At six o'clock one afternoon Hetty Pepper came back to her third-floor 
rear $3.50 room in the Vallambrosa with her nose and chin more sharply 
pointed than usual.  To be discharged from the department store where 
you have been working four years, and with only fifteen cents in your 
purse, does have a tendency to make your features appear more finely 
chiseled.

And now for Hetty's thumb-nail biography while she climbs the two 
flights of stairs.

She walked into the Biggest Store one morning four years before with 
seventy-five other girls, applying for a job behind the waist 
department counter.  The phalanx of wage-earners formed a bewildering 
scene of beauty, carrying a total mass of blond hair sufficient to 
have justified the horseback gallops of a hundred Lady Godivas.

The capable, cool-eyed, impersonal, young, bald-headed man whose task 
it was to engage six of the contestants, was aware of a feeling of 
suffocation as if he were drowning in a sea of frangipanni, while 
white clouds, hand-embroidered, floated about him.  And then a sail 
hove in sight.  Hetty Pepper, homely of countenance, with small, 
contemptuous, green eyes and chocolate-colored hair, dressed in a suit 
of plain burlap and a common-sense hat, stood before him with every 
one of her twenty-nine years of life unmistakably in sight.

"You're on!." shouted the bald-headed young man, and was saved.  And 
that is how Hetty came to be employed in the Biggest Store.  The story 
of her rise to an eight-dollar-a-week salary is the combined stories 
of Hercules, Joan of Arc, Una, Job, and Little-Red-Riding-Hood.  You 
shall not learn from me the salary that was paid her as a beginner.  
There is a sentiment growing about such things, and I want no 
millionaire store-proprietors climbing the fire-escape of my tenement-
house to throw dynamite bombs into my skylight boudoir.

The story of Hetty's discharge from the Biggest Store is so nearly a 
repetition of her engagement as to be monotonous.

In each department of the store there is an omniscient, omnipresent, 
and omnivorous person carrying always a mileage book and a red 
necktie, and referred to as a "buyer."  The destinies of the girls in 
his department who live on (see Bureau of Victual Statistics)--so much 
per week are in his hands.

This particular buyer was a capable, cool-eyed, impersonal, young, 
bald-headed man.  As he walked along the aisles of his department lie 
seemed to be sailing on a sea of frangipanni, while white clouds, 
machine-embroidered, floated around him.  Too many sweets bring 
surfeit.  He looked upon Hetty Pepper's homely countenance, emerald 
eyes, and chocolate-colored hair as a welcome oasis of green in a 
desert of cloying beauty.  In a quiet angle of a counter he pinched 
her arm kindly, three inches above the elbow.  She slapped him three 
feet away with one good blow of her muscular and not especially lily-
white right.  So, now you know why Hetty Pepper came to leave the 
Biggest Store at thirty minutes' notice, with one dime and a nickel in 
her purse.

This morning's quotations list the price of rib beef at six cents per 
(butcher's) pound.  But on the day that Hetty was "released" by the B.  
S.  the price was seven and one-half cents.  That fact is what makes 
this story possible.  Otherwise, the extra  four cents would have--

But the plot of nearly all the good stories in the world is concerned 
with shorts who were unable to cover; so you can find no fault with 
this one.

Hetty mounted with her rib beef to her $3.50 third-floor back.  One 
hot, savory beef-stew for supper, a night's good sleep, and she would 
be fit in the morning to apply again for the tasks of Hercules, Joan 
of Arc, Una, Job, and Little-Red-Riding-Hood.

In her room she got the granite-ware stew-pan out of the 2x4-foot 
china--er--I mean earthenware closet, and began to dig down in a 
rats'-nest of paper bags for the potatoes and onions.  She came out 
with her nose and chin just a little sharper pointed.

There was neither a potato nor an onion.  Now, what kind of a beef-
Stew can you make out of simply beef?  You can make oyster-soup 
without oysters, turtle-soup without turtles, coffee-cake without 
coffee, but you can't make beef-stew without potatoes and onions.

But rib beef alone, in an emergency, can make an ordinary pine door 
look like a wrought-iron gambling-house portal to the wolf.  With salt 
and pepper and a tablespoonful of flour (first well stirred in a 
little cold water) 'twill serve--'tis not so deep as a lobster a la 
Newburg nor so wide as a church festival doughnut; but 'twill serve.

Hetty took her stew-pan to the rear of the third-floor hall.  
According to the advertisements of the Vallambrosa there was running 
water to be found there.  Between you and me and the water-meter, it 
only ambled or walked through the faucets; but technicalities have no 
place here.  There was also a sink where housekeeping roomers often 
met to dump their coffee grounds and glare at one another's kimonos.

At this sink Hetty found a girl with heavy, gold-brown, artistic hair 
and plaintive eyes, washing two large "Irish" potatoes.  Hetty knew 
the Vallambrosa as well as any one not owning "double hextra-
magnifying eyes" could compass its mysteries.  The kimonos were her 
encyclopedia, her "Who's What?" her clearinghouse of news, of goers 
and comers.  From a rose-pink kimono edged with Nile green she had 
learned that the girl with the potatoes was a miniature-painter living 
in a kind of attic--or "studio," as they prefer to call it--on the top 
floor.  Hetty was not certain in her mind what a miniature was; but it 
certainly wasn't a house; because house-painters, although they wear 
splashy overalls and poke ladders in your face on the street, are 
known to indulge in a riotous profusion of food at home.

The potato girl was quite slim and small, and handled her potatoes as 
an old bachelor uncle handles a baby who is cutting teeth.  She had a 
dull shoemaker's knife in her right hand, and she had begun to peel 
one of the potatoes with it.

Hetty addressed her in the punctiliously formal tone of one who 
intends to be cheerfully familiar with you in the second round.

"Beg pardon," she said, "for butting into what's not my business, but 
if you peel them potatoes you lose out.  They're new Bermudas.  You 
want to scrape 'em.  Lemme show you."

She took a potato and the knife, and began to demonstrate.

"Oh, thank you," breathed the artist.  "I didn't know.  And I did hate 
to see the thick peeling go; it seemed such a waste.  But I thought 
they always had to be peeled.  When you've got only potatoes to eat, 
the peelings count, you know."

"Say, kid," said Hetty, staying her knife, "you ain't up against it, 
too, are you?"

The miniature artist smiled starvedly.

"I suppose I am.  Art--or, at least, the way I interpret it--doesn't 
seem to be much in demand.  I have only these potatoes for my dinner.  
But they aren't so bad boiled and hot, with a little butter and salt."

"Child," said Hetty, letting a brief smile soften her rigid features, 
"Fate has sent me and you together.  I've had it handed to me in the 
neck, too; but I've got a chunk of meat in my, room as big as a lap-dog.
And I've done everything to get potatoes  except pray for 'em.  
Let's me and you bunch our commissary  departments and make a stew of 'em.
We'll cook it in my room.  If we  only had an onion to go in it!  
Say, kid, you haven't got a couple of pennies that've slipped down 
into the lining of your last winter's sealskin, have you?  
I could step down to the corner and get one at old Giuseppe's stand.
A stew without an onion is worse'n a matinee without candy."

"You may call me Cecilia," said the artist.  "No; I spent my last 
penny three days ago."

"Then we'll have to cut the onion out instead of slicing it in," said 
Hetty.  "I'd ask the janitress for one, but I don't want 'em hep just 
yet to the fact that I'm pounding the asphalt for another job.  But I 
wish we did have an onion."

In the shop-girl's room the two began to prepare their supper.  
Cecilia's part was to sit on the couch helplessly and beg to be 
allowed to do something, in the voice of a cooing ring-dove.  Hetty 
prepared the rib beef, putting it in cold salted water in the stew-pan 
and setting it on the one-burner gas-stove.

"I wish we had an onion," said Hetty, as she scraped the two potatoes.

On the wall opposite the couch was pinned a flaming, gorgeous 
advertising picture of one of the new ferry-boats of the P.  U.  F.  
F.  Railroad that had been built to cut down the time between Los 
Angeles and New York City one-eighth of a minute.

Hetty, turning her head during her continuous monologue, saw tears 
running from her guest's eyes as she gazed on the idealized 
presentment of the speeding, foam-girdled transport.

"Why, say, Cecilia, kid," said Hetty, poising her knife, "is it as bad 
art as that?  I ain't a critic; but I thought it kind of brightened up 
the room.  Of course, a manicure-painter could tell it was a bum 
picture in a minute.  I'll take it down if you say so.  I wish to the 
holy Saint Potluck we had an onion."

But the miniature miniature-painter had tumbled down, sobbing, with 
her nose indenting the hard-woven drapery of the couch.  Something was 
here deeper than the artistic temperament offended at crude 
lithography.

Hetty knew.  She had accepted her role long ago.  How scant the words 
with which we try to describe a single quality of a human being! When 
we reach the abstract we are lost.  The nearer to Nature that the 
babbling of our lips comes, the better do we understand.  Figuratively 
(let us say), some people are Bosoms, some are Hands, some are Heads, 
some are Muscles, some are Feet, some are Backs for burdens.

Hetty was a Shoulder.  Hers was a sharp, sinewy shoulder; but all her 
life people had laid their heads upon it, metaphorically or actually, 
and had left there all or half their troubles.  Looking at Life 
anatomically, which is as good a way as any, she was preordained to be 
a Shoulder.  There were few truer collar-bones anywhere than hers.

Hetty was only thirty-three, and she had not yet outlived the little 
pang that visited her whenever the head of youth and beauty leaned 
upon her for consolation.  But one glance in her mirror always served 
as an instantaneous pain-killer.  So she gave one pale look into the 
crinkly old looking-glass on the wall above the gas-stove, turned down 
the flame a little lower from the bubbling beef and potatoes, went 
over to the couch, and lifted Cecilia's head to its confessional.

"Go on and tell me, honey," she said.  "I know now that it ain't art 
that's worrying you.  You met him on a ferry-boat, didn't you? Go on, 
Cecilia, kid, and tell your--your Aunt Hetty about it."

But youth and melancholy must first spend the surplus of sighs and 
tears that waft and float the barque of romance to its harbor in the 
delectable isles.  Presently, through the stringy tendons that formed 
the bars of the confessional, the penitent--or was it the glorified 
communicant of the sacred flame--told her story without art or 
illumination.

"It was only three days ago.  I was coming back on the ferry from 
Jersey City.  Old Mr.  Schrum, an art dealer, told me of a rich man in 
Newark who wanted a miniature of his daughter painted.  I went to see 
him and showed him some of my work.  When I told him the price would 
be fifty dollars he laughed at me like a hyena.  He said an enlarged 
crayon twenty times the size would cost him only eight dollars.

"I had just enough money to buy my ferry ticket back to New York.  I 
felt as if I didn't want to live another day.  I must have looked as I 
felt, for I saw him on the row of seats opposite me, looking at me as 
if he understood.  He was nice-looking, but oh, above everything else, 
he looked kind.  When one is tired or unhappy or hopeless, kindness 
counts more than anything else.

"When I got so miserable that I couldn't fight against it any longer, 
I got up and walked slowly out the rear door of the ferry-boat cabin.  
No one was there, and I slipped quickly over the rail and dropped into 
the water.  Oh, friend Hetty, it was cold, cold!

"For just one moment I wished I was back in the old Vallambrosa, 
starving and hoping.  And then I got numb, and didn't care.  And then 
I felt that somebody else was in the water close by me, holding me up.  
He had followed me, and jumped in to save me.

"Somebody threw a thing like a big, white doughnut at us, and he made 
me put my arms through the hole.  Then the ferry-boat backed, and they 
pulled us on board.  Oh, Hetty, I was so ashamed of my wickedness in 
trying to drown myself; and, besides, my hair had all tumbled down and 
was sopping wet, and I was such a sight.

"And then some men in blue clothes came around; and he gave them his 
card, and I heard him tell them he had seen me drop my purse on the 
edge of the boat outside the rail, and in leaning over to get it I had 
fallen overboard.

And then I remembered having read in the papers that people who try to 
kill themselves are locked up in cells with people who try to kill 
other people, and I was afraid.

"But some ladies on the boat took me downstairs to the furnace-room 
and got me nearly dry and did up my hair.  When the boat landed, he 
came and put me in a cab.  He was all dripping himself, but laughed as 
if he thought it was all a joke.  He begged me, but I wouldn't tell 
him my name nor where I lived, I was so ashamed."

"You were a fool, child," said Hetty, kindly.  "Wait till I turn the 
light up a bit.  I wish to Heaven we had an onion."

"Then he raised his hat," went on Cecilia, "and said: 'Very well.  But 
I'll find you, anyhow.  I'm going to claim my rights of salvage.'  
Then he gave money to the cab-driver and told him to take me where I 
wanted to go, and walked away.  What is 'salvage,' Hetty?"

"The edge of a piece of goods that ain't hemmed," said the shop-girl.  
"You must have looked pretty well frazzled out to the little hero 
boy."

"It's been three days," moaned the miniature-painter, "and he hasn't 
found me yet."

"Extend the time," said Hetty.  "This is a big town.  Think of how 
many girls he might have to see soaked in water with their hair down 
before he would recognize you.  The stew's getting on fine--but oh, 
for an onion!  I'd even use a piece'of garlic if I had it."

The beef and potatoes bubbled merrily, exhaling a mouth-watering savor 
that yet lacked something, leaving a hunger on the palate, a haunting, 
wistful desire for some lost and needful ingredient.

"I came near drowning in that awful river," said Cecilia, shuddering.

"It ought to have more water in it," said Hetty; "the stew, I mean.  
I'll go get some at the sink."

"It smells good," said the artist.

"That nasty old North River?"  objected Hetty.  "It smells to me like 
soap factories and wet setter-dogs--oh, you mean the stew.  Well, I 
wish we had an onion for it.  Did he look like he had money?"

"First, he looked kind,'' said Cecilia.  "I'm sure he was rich; but 
that matters so little.  When he drew out his bill-folder to pay the 
cab-man you couldn't help seeing hundreds and thousands of dollars in 
it.  And I looked over the cab doors and saw him leave the ferry 
station in a motor-car; and the chauffeur gave him his bearskin to put 
on, for he was sopping wet.  And it was only three days ago."

"What a fool!" said Hetty, shortly.

"Oh, the chauffeur wasn't wet," breathed Cecilia.  "And he drove the 
car away very nicely."

"I mean you," said Hetty.  "For not giving him your address."

"I never give my address to chauffeurs," said Cecilia, haughtily.

"I wish we had one," said Hetty, disconsolately.

"What for?"

"For the stew, of course--oh, I mean an onion."

Hetty took a pitcher and started to the sink at the end of the hall.

A young man came down the stairs from above just as she was opposite 
the lower step.  He was decently dressed, but pale and haggard.  His 
eyes were dull with the stress of some burden of physical or mental 
woe.  In his hand he bore an onion--a pink, smooth, solid, shining 
onion as large around as a ninety-eight-cent alarm-clock.

Hetty stopped.  So did the young man.  There was something Joan of 
Arc-ish, Herculean, and Una-ish in the look and pose of the shoplady--
she had cast off the roles of Job and Little-Red-Riding-Hood.  The 
young man stopped at the foot of the stairs and coughed distractedly.  
He felt marooned, held up, attacked, assailed, levied upon, sacked, 
assessed, panhandled, browbeaten, though he knew not why.  It was the 
look in Hetty's eyes that did it.  In them he saw the Jolly Roger fly 
to the masthead and an able seaman with a dirk between his teeth 
scurry up the ratlines and nail it there.  But as yet he did not know 
that the cargo he carried was the thing that had caused him to be so 
nearly blown out of the water without even a parley.

"Beg your pardon," said Hetty, as sweetly as her dilute acetic acid 
tones permitted, "but did you find that onion on the stairs?  There 
was a hole in the paper bag; and I've just come out to look for it."

The young man coughed for half a minute.  The interval may have given 
him the courage to defend his own property.  Also, he clutched his 
pungent prize greedily, and, with a show of spirit, faced his grim 
waylayer.

"No," he said huskily, "I didn't find it on the stairs.  It was given 
to me by Jack Bevens, on the top floor.  If you don't believe it, ask 
him.  I'll wait until you do."

"I know about Bevens," said Hetty, sourly.  "He writes books and 
things up there for the paper-and-rags man.  We can hear the postman 
guy him all over the house when he brings them thick envelopes back.  
Say--do you live in the Vallambrosa?"

"I do not," said the young man.  "I come to see Bevens sometimes.  
He's my friend.  I live two blocks west."

"What are you going to do with the onion?

--begging your pardon," said Hetty.

"I'm going to eat it."

"Raw?"

"Yes: as soon as I get home."

"Haven't you got anything else to eat with it?"

The young man considered briefly.

"No," he confessed; "there's not another scrap of anything in my 
diggings to eat.  I think old Jack is pretty hard up for grub in his 
shack, too.  He hated to give up the onion, but I worried him into 
parting with it."

"Man," said Hetty, fixing him with her world-sapient eyes, and laying 
a bony but impressive finger on his sleeve, "you've known trouble, 
too, haven't you?"

"Lots," said the onion owner, promptly.  "But this onion is my own 
property, honestly come by.  If you will excuse me, I must be going."

"Listen," said Hetty, paling a little with anxiety.  "Raw onion is a 
mighty poor diet.  And so is a beef-stew without one.  Now, if you're 
Jack Bevens' friend, I guess you're nearly right.  There's a little 
lady--a friend of mine--in my room there at the end of the hall.  Both 
of us are out of luck; and we had just potatoes and meat between us.  
They're stewing now.  But it ain't got any soul.  There's something 
lacking to it.  There's certain things in life that are naturally 
intended to fit and belong together.  One is pink cheese-cloth and 
green roses, and one is ham and eggs, and one is Irish and trouble.  
And the other one is beef and potatoes with onions.  And still another 
one is people who are up against it and other people in the same fix."

The young man went into a protracted paroxysm of coughing.  With one 
hand he hugged his onion to his bosom.

"No doubt; no doubt," said he, at length.  "But, as I said, I must be 
going, because--"

Hetty clutched his sleeve firmly.

"Don't be a Dago, Little Brother.  Don't cat raw onions.  Chip it in 
toward the dinner and line yourself inside with the best stew you ever 
licked a spoon over.  Must two ladies knock a young gentleman down and 
drag him inside for the honor of dining with 'em?  No harm shall 
befall you, Little Brother.  Loosen up and fall into line."

The young man's pale face relaxed into a grin.

"Believe I'll go you," he said, brightening.  "If my onion is good as 
a credential, I'll accept the invitation gladly."

"It's good as that, but better as seasoning," said Hetty.  "You come 
and stand outside the door till I ask my lady friend if she has any 
objections.  And don't run away with that letter of recommendation 
before I come out."

Hetty went into her room and closed the door.  The young man waited 
outside.

"Cecilia, kid," said the shop-girl, oiling the sharp saw of her voice 
as well as she could, "there's an onion outside.  With a young man 
attached.  I've asked him in to dinner.  You ain't going to kick, are 
you?"

"Oh, dear!" said Cecilia, sitting up and patting her artistic hair.  
She cast a mournful glance at the ferry-boat poster on the wall.

"Nit," said Hetty.  "It ain't him.  You're up against real life now.  
I believe you said your hero friend had money and automobiles.  This 
is a poor skeezicks that's got nothing to eat but an onion.  But he's 
easy-spoken and not a freshy.  I imagine he's been a gentleman, he's 
so low down now.  And we need the onion.  Shall I bring him in?  I'll 
guarantee his behavior."

"Hetty, dear," sighed Cecilia, "I'm so hungry.  What difference does 
it make whether he's a prince or a burglar?  I don't care.  Bring him 
in if he's got anything to eat with him."

Hetty went back into the hall.  The onion man was gone.  Her heart 
missed a beat, and a gray look settled over her face except on her 
nose and cheek-bones.  And then the tides of life flowed in again, for 
she saw him leaning out of the front window at the other end of the 
hall.  She hurried there.  He was shouting to some one below.  The 
noise of the street overpowered the sound of her footsteps.  She 
looked down over his shoulder, saw whom he was speaking to, and heard 
his words.  He pulled himself in from the window-sill and saw her 
standing over him.

Hetty's eyes bored into him like two steel gimlets.

"Don't lie to me," she said, calmly.  "What were you going to do with 
that onion?"

The young man suppressed a cough and faced her resolutely.  His manner 
was that of one who had been bearded sufficiently.

"I was going to eat it," said he, with emphatic slowness; "just as I 
told you before."

"And you have nothing else to eat at home?"

"Not a thing."

"What kind of work do you do?"

"I am not working at anything just now."

"Then why," said Hetty, with her voice set on its sharpest edge, "do 
you lean out of windows and give orders to chauffeurs in green 
automobiles in the street below?"

The young man flushed, and his dull eyes began to sparkle.

"Because, madam," said he, in accelerando tones, "I pay the 
chauffeur's wages and I own the automobile--and also this onion--this 
onion, madam."

He flourished the onion within an inch of Hetty's nose.  The shop-lady 
did not retreat a hair's-breadth.

"Then why do you eat onions," she said, with biting contempt, "and 
nothing else?"

"I never said I did," retorted the young man, heatedly.  "I said I had 
nothing else to eat where I live.  I am not a delicatessen store-
keeper."

"Then why," pursued Hetty, inflexibly, "were you going to eat a raw 
onion?"

"My mother," said the young man, "always made me eat one for a cold.  
Pardon my referring to a physical infirmity; but you may have noticed 
that I have a very, very severe cold.  I was going to eat the onion 
and go to bed.  I wonder why I am standing here and apologizing to you 
for it."

"How did you catch this cold?" went on Hetty, suspiciously.

The young man seemed to have arrived at some extreme height of 
feeling.  There were two modes of descent open to him--a burst of rage 
or a surrender to the ridiculous.  He chose wisely; and the empty hall 
echoed his hoarse laughter.

"You're a dandy," said he.  "And I don't blame you for being careful.  
I don't mind telling you.  I got wet.  I was on a North River ferry a 
few days ago when a girl jumped overboard.  Of course, I--"

Hetty extended her hand, interrupting his story.

"Give me the onion," she said.

The young man set his jaw a trifle harder.

"Give me the onion," she repeated.

He grinned, and laid it in her hand.

Then Hetty's infrequent, grim, melancholy smile showed itself.  She 
took the young man's arm and pointed with her other hand to the door 
of her room.

"Little Brother," she said, "go in there.  The little fool you fished 
out of the river is there waiting for you.  Go on in.  I'll give you 
three minutes before I come.  Potatoes is in there, waiting.  Go on 
in, Onions."

After he had tapped at the door and entered, Hetty began to peel and 
wash the onion at the sink.  She gave a gray look at the gray roofs 
outside, and the smile on her face vanished by little jerks and 
twitches.

"But it's us," she said, grimly, to herself, "it's us that furnishes 
the beef."




THE HIDING OF BLACK BILL



A lank, strong, red-faced man with a Wellington beak and small, fiery 
eyes tempered by flaxen lashes, sat on the station platform at Los 
Pinos swinging his legs to and fro.  At his side sat another man, fat, 
melancholy, and seedy, who seemed to be his friend.  They had the 
appearance of men to whom life had appeared as a reversible coat--
seamy on both sides.

"Ain't seen you in about four years, Ham," said the seedy man.  "Which 
way you been travelling?"

"Texas," said the red-faced man.  "It was too cold in Alaska for me.  
And I found it warm in Texas.  I'll tell you about one hot spell I 
went through there.

"One morning I steps off the International at a water-tank and lets it 
go on without me.  'Twas a ranch country, and fuller of spite-houses 
than New York City.  Only out there they build 'em twenty miles away 
so you can't smell what they've got for dinner, instead of running 'em 
up two inches from their neighbors' windows.

"There wasn't any roads in sight, so I footed it 'cross country.  The 
grass was shoe-top deep, and the mesquite timber looked just like a 
peach orchard.  It was so much like a gentleman's private estate that 
every minute you expected a kennelful of bulldogs to run out and bite 
you.  But I must have walked twenty miles before I came in sight of a 
ranch-house.  It was a little one, about as big as an elevated-
railroad station.

"There was a little man in a white shirt and brown overalls and a pink 
handkerchief around his neck rolling cigarettes under a tree in front 
of the door.

"'Greetings,' says I.  'Any refreshment, welcome, emoluments, or even 
work for a comparative stranger?'

"'Oh, come in,' says he, in a refined tone.  'Sit down on that stool, 
please.  I didn't hear your horse coming.'

"'He isn't near enough yet,' says I.  'I walked.  I don't want to be a 
burden, but I wonder if you have three or four gallons of water 
handy.'

"'You do look pretty dusty,' says he; 'but our bathing arrangements--'

"'It's a drink I want,' says I.  'Never mind the dust that's on the 
outside.'

"He gets me a dipper of water out of a red jar hanging up, and then 
goes on:

"'Do you want work?'

"'For a time,' says I.  'This is a rather quiet section of the 
country, isn't it?'

"'It is,' says he.  'Sometimes--so I have been told--one sees no human 
being pass for weeks at a time.  I've been here only a month.  I 
bought the ranch from an old settler who wanted to move farther west.'

"'It suits me,' says I.  'Quiet and retirement are good for a man 
sometimes.  And I need a job.  I can tend bar, salt mines, lecture, 
float stock, do a little middle-weight slugging, and play the piano.'

"'Can you herd sheep ?' asks the little ranch-man.

"'Do you mean have I heard sheep?' says I.  

"'Can you herd 'em--take charge of a flock of 'em ?' says he.

"'Oh,' says I, 'now I understand.  You mean chase 'em around and bark 
at 'em like collie dogs.  Well, I might,' says I.  'I've never exactly 
done any sheep-herding, but I've often seen 'em from car windows 
masticating daisies, and they don't look dangerous.'

"'I'm short a herder,' says the ranchman.  'You never can depend on 
the Mexicans.  I've only got two flocks.  You may take out my bunch of 
muttons--there are only eight hundred of 'em--in the morning, if you 
like.  The pay is twelve dollars a month and your rations furnished.  
You camp in a tent on the prairie with your sheep.  You do your own 
cooking, but wood and water are brought to your camp.  It's an easy 
job.'

"'I'm on,' says I.  'I'll take the job even if I have to garland my 
brow and hold on to a crook and wear a loose-effect and play on a pipe 
like the shepherds do in pictures.'

"So the next morning the little ranchman helps me drive the flock of 
muttons from the corral to about two miles out and let 'em graze on a 
little hillside on the prairie.  He gives me a lot of instructions 
about not letting bunches of them stray off from the herd, and driving 
'em down to a water-hole to drink at noon.

"'I'll bring out your tent and camping outfit and rations in the 
buckboard before night,' says he.

"'Fine,' says I.  'And don't forget the rations.  Nor the camping 
outfit.  And be sure to bring the tent.  Your name's Zollicoffer, 
ain't it?"

"'My name,' says he, 'is Henry Ogden.'

"'All right, Mr.  Ogden,' says I.  'Mine is Mr.  Percival Saint 
Clair.'

"I herded sheep for five days on the Rancho Chiquito; and then the 
wool entered my soul.  That getting next to Nature certainly got next 
to me.  I was lonesomer than Crusoe's goat.  I've seen a lot of 
persons more entertaining as companions than those sheep were.  I'd 
drive 'em to the corral and pen 'em every evening, and then cook my 
corn-bread and mutton and coffee, and lie down in a tent the size of a 
table-cloth, and listen to the coyotes and whippoorwills singing 
around the camp.

"The fifth evening, after I had corralled my costly but uncongenial 
muttons, I walked over to the ranch-house and stepped in the door.

"'Mr.  Ogden,' says I, 'you and me have got to get sociable.  Sheep 
are all very well to dot the landscape and furnish eight-dollar cotton 
suitings for man, but for table-talk and fireside companions they rank 
along with five-o'clock teazers.  If you've got a deck of cards, or a 
parcheesi outfit, or a game of authors, get 'em out, and let's get on 
a mental basis.  I've got to do something in an intellectual line, if 
it's only to knock somebody's brains out.'

"This Henry Ogden was a peculiar kind of ranchman.  He wore finger-
rings and a big gold watch and careful neckties.  And his face was 
calm, and his nose-spectacles was kept very shiny.  I saw once, in 
Muscogee, an outlaw hung for murdering six men, who was a dead ringer 
for him.  But I knew a preacher in Arkansas that you would have taken 
to be his brother.  I didn't care much for him  either way; what I 
wanted was some fellowship and communion with holy saints or lost 
sinners--anything sheepless would do.

"'Well, Saint Clair,' says he, laying down the book he was reading, 'I 
guess it must be pretty lonesome for you at first.  And I don't deny 
that it's monotonous for me.  Are you sure you corralled your sheep so 
they won't stray out ?

"'They're shut up as tight as the jury of a millionaire murderer,' 
says I.  'And I'll be back with them long before they'll need their 
trained nurse.'

"So Ogden digs up a deck of cards, and we play casino.  After five 
days and nights of my sheep-camp it was like a toot on Broadway.  When 
I caught big casino I felt as excited as if I had made a million in 
Trinity.  And when H.  O.  loosened up a little and told the story 
about the lady in the Pullman car I laughed for five minutes.

"That showed what a comparative thing life is.  A man may see so much 
that he'd be bored to turn his head to look at a $3,000,000 fire or 
Joe Weber or the Adriatic Sea.  But let him herd sheep for a spell, 
and you'll see him splitting his ribs laughing at 'Curfew Shall Not 
Ring To-night,' or really enjoying himself playing cards with ladies.

"By-and-by Ogden gets out a decanter of Bourbon, and then there is a 
total eclipse of sheep.

"'Do you remember reading in the papers, about a month ago,' says he, 
'about a train hold-up on the M.  K.  & T.?  The express agent was 
shot through the shoulder, and about $15,000 in currency taken.  And 
it's said that only one man did the job.'

"'Seems to me I do,' says I.  'But such things happen so often they 
don't linger long in the human Texas mind.  Did they overtake, 
overhaul, seize, or lay hands upon the despoiler?'

"'He escaped,' says Ogden.  'And I was just reading in a paper to-day 
that the officers have tracked him down into this part of the country.  
It seems the bills the robber got were all the first issue of currency 
to the Second National Bank of Espinosa City.  And so they've followed 
the trail where they've been spent, and it leads this way.'

"Ogden pours out some more Bourbon, and shoves me the bottle.

"'I imagine,' says I, after ingurgitating another modicum of the royal 
boose, 'that it wouldn't be at all a disingenuous idea for a train 
robber to run down into this part of the country to hide for a spell.  
A sheep-ranch, now,' says I, would be the finest kind of a place.  
Who'd ever expect to find such a desperate character among these song-
birds and muttons and wild flowers?  And, by the way,' says I, kind of 
looking H.  Ogden over, 'was there any description mentioned of this 
single-handed terror?  Was his lineaments or height and thickness or 
teeth fillings or style of habiliments set forth in print ?'

"'Why, no,' says Ogden; 'they say nobody got a good sight of him 
because he wore a mask.  But they know it was a train-robber called 
Black Bill, because he always works alone and because he dropped a 
handkerchief in the express-car that had his name on it.'

"'All right,' says I.  'I approve of Black Bill's retreat to the 
sheep-ranges.  I guess they won't find him.'

"'There's one thousand dollars reward for his capture,' says Ogden.

"'I don't need that kind of money,' says I, looking Mr.  Sheepman 
straight in the eye.  'The twelve dollars a month you pay me is 
enough.  I need a rest, and I can save up until I get enough to pay my 
fare to Texarkana, where my widowed mother lives.  If Black Bill,' I 
goes on, looking significantly at Ogden, was to have come down this 
way--say, a month ago--and bought a little sheep-ranch and--'

"'Stop,' says Ogden, getting out of his chair and looking pretty 
vicious.  'Do you mean to insinuate--'

"'Nothing,' says I; 'no insinuations.  I'm stating a hypodermical 
case.  I say, if Black Bill had come down here and bought a sheep-
ranch and hired me to Little-Boy-Blue 'em and treated me square and 
friendly, as you've done, he'd never have anything to fear from me.  A 
man is a man, regardless of any complications he may have with sheep 
or railroad trains.  Now you know where I stand.'

"Ogden looks black as camp-coffee for nine seconds, and then he 
laughs, amused.

"'You'll do, Saint Clair,' says he.  'If I was Black Bill I wouldn't 
be afraid to trust you.  Let's have a game or two of seven-up to-
night.  That is, if you don't mind playing with a train-robber.'

"'I've told you,' says I, 'my oral sentiments, and there's no strings 
to 'em.'

"While I was shuffling after the first hand, I asks Ogden, as if the 
idea was a kind of a casualty, where he was from.

"'Oh,' says he, 'from the Mississippi Valley.'

"'That's a nice little place,' says I.  'I've often stopped over 
there.  But didn't you find the sheets a little damp and the food 
poor? Now, I hail,' says I, 'from the Pacific Slope.  Ever put up 
there?'

"'Too draughty,' says Ogden.  'But if you've ever in the Middle West 
just mention my name, and you'll get foot-warmers and dripped coffee.'

"'Well,' says I, 'I wasn't exactly fishing for your private telephone 
number and the middle name of your aunt that carried off the 
Cumberland Presbyterian minister.  It don't matter.  I just want you 
to know you are safe in the hands of your shepherd.  Now, don't play 
hearts on spades, and don't get nervous.'

"'Still harping,' says Ogden, laughing again.  'Don't you suppose that 
if I was Black Bill and thought you suspected me, I'd put a Winchester 
bullet into you and stop my nervousness, if I had any?'

"'Not any,' says I.  'A man who's got the nerve to hold up a train 
single-handed wouldn't do a trick like that.  I've knocked about 
enough to know that them are the kind of men who put a value on a 
friend.  Not that I can claim being a friend of yours, Mr.  Ogden,' 
says I, 'being only your sheep-herder; but under more expeditious 
circumstances we might have been.'

"'Forget the sheep temporarily, I beg,' says Ogden, 'and cut for 
deal.'

"About four days afterward, while my muttons was nooning on the water-
hole and I deep in the interstices of making a pot of coffee, up rides 
softly on the grass a mysterious person in the garb of the being he 
wished to represent.  He was dressed somewhere between a Kansas City 
detective, Buffalo Bill, and the town dog-catcher of Baton Rouge.  His 
chin and eye wasn't molded on fighting lines, so I knew he was only a 
scout.

"'Herdin' sheep?' he asks me.

"'Well,' says I, 'to a man of your evident gumptional endowments, I 
wouldn't have the nerve to state that I am engaged in decorating old 
bronzes or oiling bicycle sprockets.'

"'You don't talk or look like a sheep-herder to me,' says he.

"'But you talk like what you look like to me,' says I.

"And then he asks me who I was working for, and I shows him Rancho 
Chiquito, two miles away, in the shadow of a low hill, and he tells me 
he's a deputy sheriff.

"'There's a train-robber called Black Bill supposed to be somewhere in 
these parts,' says the scout.  'He's been traced as far as San 
Antonio, and maybe farther.  Have you seen or heard of any strangers 
around here during the past month?'

"'I have not,' says I, 'except a report of one over at the Mexican 
quarters of Loomis' ranch, on the Frio.'

"'What do you know about him?' asks the deputy.

"'He's three days old,' says I.

"'What kind of a looking man is the man you work for ?' he asks.  
'Does old George Ramey own this place yet?  He's run sheep here for 
the last ten years, but never had no success.'

"'The old man has sold out and gone West,' I tells him.  'Another 
sheep-fancier bought him out about a month ago.'

"'What kind of a looking man is he ?' asks the deputy again.

"'Oh,' says I, ' a big, fat kind of a Dutchman with long whiskers and 
blue specs.  I don't think he knows a sheep from a ground-squirrel.  I 
guess old George soaked him pretty well on the deal,' says I.

"After indulging himself in a lot more non-communicative information 
and two-thirds of my dinner, the deputy rides away.

"That night I mentions the matter to Ogden.  "'They're drawing the 
tendrils of the octopus around Black Bill,' says I.  And then I told 
him about the deputy sheriff, and how I'd described him to the deputy, 
and what the deputy said about the matter.

"'Oh, well,' says Ogden, 'let's don't borrow any of Black Bill's 
troubles.  We've a few of our own.  Get the Bourbon out of the 
cupboard and we'll drink to his health--unless,' says he, with his 
little cackling laugh, 'you're prejudiced against train-robbers.'

"'I'll drink,' says I, 'to any man who's a friend to a friend.  And I 
believe that Black Bill,' I goes on, 'would be that.  So here's to 
Black Bill, and may he have good luck.'

"And both of us drank.

"About two weeks later comes shearing-time.  The sheep had to be 
driven up to the ranch, and a lot of frowzy-headed Mexicans would snip 
the fur off of them with back-action scissors.  So the afternoon 
before the barbers were to come I hustled my underdone muttons over 
the hill, across the dell, down by the winding brook, and up to the 
ranch-house, where I penned 'em in a corral and bade 'em my nightly 
adieus.

"I went from there to the ranch-house.  I find H.  Ogden, Esquire, 
lying asleep on his little cot bed.  I guess he had been overcome by 
anti-insomnia or diswakefulness or some of the diseases peculiar to 
the sheep business.  His mouth and vest were open, and he breathed 
like a second-hand bicycle pump.  I looked at him and gave vent to 
just a few musings.  'Imperial Caesar,' says I, 'asleep in such a way, 
might shut his mouth and keep the wind away.'

A man asleep is certainly a sight to make angels weep.  What good is 
all his brain, muscle, backing, nerve, influence, and family 
connections?  He's at the mercy of his enemies, and more so of his 
friends.  And he's about as beautiful as a cab-horse leaning against 
the Metropolitan Opera House at 12.30 A.M.  dreaming of the plains of 
Arabia.  Now, a woman asleep you regard as different.  No matter how 
she looks, you know it's better for all hands for her to be that way.

"Well, I took a drink of Bourbon and one for Ogden, and started in to 
be comfortable while he was taking his nap.  He had some books on his 
table on indigenous subjects, such as Japan and drainage and physical 
culture--and some tobacco, which seemed more to the point.

"After I'd smoked a few, and listened to the sartorial breathing of H.  
O., I happened to look out the window toward the shearing-pens, where 
there was a kind of a road coming up from a kind of a road across a 
kind of a creek farther away.

"I saw five men riding up to the house.  All of 'em carried guns 
across their saddles, and among 'em was the deputy that had talked to 
me at my camp.

"They rode up careful, in open formation, with their guns ready.  I 
set apart with my eye the one I opinionated to be the boss muck-raker 
of this law-and-order cavalry.

"'Good-evening, gents,' says I.  'Won't you 'light, and tie your 
horses?'

"The boss rides up close, and swings his gun over till the opening in 
it seems to cover my whole front elevation.

"'Don't you move your hands none,' says he, 'till you and me indulge 
in a adequate amount of necessary conversation.'

"'I will not,' says I.  'I am no deaf-mute, and therefore will not 
have to disobey your injunctions in replying.'

"'We are on the lookout,' says he, 'for Black Bill, the man that held 
up the Katy for $15,000 in May.  We are searching the ranches and 
everybody on 'em.  What is your name, and what do you do on this 
ranch?'

"'Captain,' says I, 'Percival Saint Clair is my occupation, and my 
name is sheep-herder.  I've got my flock of veals--no, muttons--penned 
here to-night.  The shearers are coming to-morrow to give them a hair-
cut--with baa-a-rum, I suppose.'

"'Where's the boss of this ranch?' the captain of the gang asks me.

"'Wait just a minute, cap'n,' says I.  'Wasn't there a kind of a 
reward offered for the capture of this desperate character you have 
referred to in your preamble?'

"'There's a thousand dollars reward offered,' says the captain, 'but 
it's for his capture and conviction.  There don't seem to be no 
provision made for an informer.'

"'It looks like it might rain in a day or so,' says I, in a tired way, 
looking up at the cerulean blue sky.

"'If you know anything about the locality, disposition, or 
secretiveness of this here Black Bill,' says he, in a severe dialect, 
'you are amiable to the law in not reporting it.'

"'I heard a fence-rider say,' says I, in a desultory kind of voice, 
'that a Mexican told a cowboy named Jake over at Pidgin's store on the 
Nueces that he heard that Black Bill had been seen in Matamoras by a 
sheepman's cousin two weeks ago.'

"'Tell you what I'll do, Tight Mouth,' says the captain, after looking 
me over for bargains.  'If you put us on so we can scoop Black Bill, 
I'll pay you a hundred dollars out of my own--out of our own--pockets.  
That's liberal,' says he.  'You ain't entitled to anything.  Now, what 
do you say?'

"'Cash down now?' I asks.

"The captain has a sort of discussion with his helpmates, and they all 
produce the contents of their pockets for analysis.  Out of the 
general results they figured up $102.30 in cash and $31 worth of plug 
tobacco.

"'Come nearer, capitan meeo,' says I, 'and listen.'  He so did.

"'I am mighty poor and low down in the world,' says I.  'I am working 
for twelve dollars a month trying to keep a lot of animals together 
whose only thought seems to be to get asunder.  Although,' says I, 'I 
regard myself as some better than the State of South Dakota, it's a 
come-down to a man who has heretofore regarded sheep only in the form 
of chops.  I'm pretty far reduced in the world on account of foiled 
ambitions and rum and a kind of cocktail they make along the P.  R.  
R.  all the way from Scranton to Cincinnati--dry gin, French vermouth, 
one squeeze of a lime, and a good dash of orange bitters.  If you're 
ever up that way, don't fail to let one try you.  And, again,' says I, 
'I have never yet went back on a friend.  I've stayed by 'em when
they had plenty, and when adversity's overtaken me I've never forsook 'em.

"'But,' I goes on, 'this is not exactly the case of a friend.  Twelve 
dollars a month is only bowing-acquaintance money.  And I do not 
consider brown beans and corn-bread the food of friendship.  I am a 
poor man,' says I, 'and I have a widowed mother in Texarkana.  You 
will find Black Bill,' says I, 'lying asleep in this house on a cot in 
the room to your right.  He's the man you want, as I know from his 
words and conversation.  He was in a way a friend,' I explains, 'and 
if I was the man I once was the entire product of the mines of Gondola 
would not have tempted me to betray him.  But,' says I, 'every week 
half of the beans was wormy, and not nigh enough wood in camp.

"'Better go in careful, gentlemen,' says I.  'He seems impatient at 
times, and when you think of his late professional pursuits one would 
look for abrupt actions if he was come upon sudden.'

"So the whole posse unmounts and ties their horses, and unlimbers 
their ammunition and equipments, and tiptoes into the house.  And I 
follows, like Delilah when she set the Philip Stein on to Samson.

"The leader of the posse shakes Ogden and wakes him up.  And then he 
jumps up, and two more of the reward-hunters grab him.  Ogden was 
mighty tough with all his slimness, and he gives 'em as neat a single-
footed tussle against odds as I ever see.

"'What does this mean?' he says, after they had him down.

"'You're scooped in, Mr.  Black Bill,' says the captain.  'That's 
all.'

"'It's an outrage,' says H.  Ogden, madder yet.

"'It was,' says the peace-and-good-will man.  'The Katy wasn't 
bothering you, and there's a law against monkeying with express 
packages.'

"And he sits on H.  Ogden's stomach and goes through his pockets 
symptomatically and careful.

"'I'll make you perspire for this,' says Ogden, perspiring some 
himself.  'I can prove who I am.'

"'So can I,' says the captain, as he draws from H.  Ogden's inside 
coat-pocket a handful of new bills of the Second National Bank of 
Espinosa City.  'Your regular engraved Tuesdays-and-Fridays visiting-
card wouldn't have a louder voice in proclaiming your indemnity than 
this here currency.  You can get up now and prepare to go with us and 
expatriate your sins.

"H.  Ogden gets up and fixes his necktie.  He says no more after they 
have taken the money off of him.

"'A well-greased idea,' says the sheriff captain, admiring, 'to slip 
off down here and buy a little sheep-ranch where the hand of man is 
seldom heard.  It was the slickest hide-out I ever see,' says the 
captain.

"So one of the men goes to the shearing-pen and hunts up the other 
herder, a Mexican they call John Sallies, and he saddles Ogden's 
horse, and the sheriffs all ride tip close around him with their guns 
in hand, ready to take their prisoner to town.

"Before starting, Ogden puts the ranch in John Sallies' hands and 
gives him orders about the shearing and where to graze the sheep, just 
as if he intended to be back in a few days.  And a couple of hours 
afterward one Percival Saint Clair, an ex-sheep-herder of the Rancho 
Chiquito, might have been seen, with a hundred and nine dollars--wages 
and blood-money--in his pocket, riding south on another horse 
belonging to said ranch."

The red-faced man paused and listened.  The whistle of a coming 
freight-train sounded far away among the low hills.

The fat, seedy man at his side sniffed, and shook his frowzy head 
slowly and disparagingly.

"What is it, Snipy?" asked the other.  "Got the blues again?"

"No, I ain't" said the seedy one, sniffing again.  "But I don't like 
your talk.  You and me have been friends, off and on, for fifteen 
year; and I never yet knew or heard of you giving anybody up to the 
law--not no one.  And here was a man whose saleratus you had et and at 
whose table you had played games of cards--if casino can be so called.  
And yet you inform him to the law and take money for it.  It never was 
like you, I say."

"This H.  Ogden," resumed the red-faced man, "through a lawyer, proved 
himself free by alibis and other legal terminalities, as I so heard 
afterward.  He never suffered no harm.  He did me favors, and I hated 
to hand him over."

"How about the bills they found in his pocket?" asked the seedy man.

"I put 'em there," said the red-faced man, "while he was asleep, when 
I saw the posse riding up.  I was Black Bill.  Look out, Snipy, here 
she comes!  We'll board her on the bumpers when she takes water at the 
tank."




SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLS



I


Old Jerome Warren lived in a hundred-thousand-dollar house at 35 East 
Fifty-Soforth Street.  He was a down-town broker, so rich that he 
could afford to walk--for his health--a few blocks in the direction of 
his office every morning, and then call a cab.

He had an adopted son, the son of an old friend named Gilbert--Cyril 
Scott could play him nicely--who was becoming a successful painter as 
fast as he could squeeze the paint out of his tubes.  Another member 
of the household was Barbara Ross, a stepniece.  Man is born to 
trouble; so, as old Jerome had no family of his own, he took up the 
burdens of others.

Gilbert and Barbara got along swimmingly.  There was a tacit and 
tactical understanding all round that the two would stand up under a 
floral bell some high noon, and promise the minister to keep old 
Jerome's money in a state of high commotion.  But at this point 
complications must be introduced.

Thirty years before, when old Jerome was young Jerome, there was a 
brother of his named Dick.  Dick went West to seek his or somebody 
else's fortune.  Nothing was heard of him until one day old Jerome had 
a letter from his brother.  It was badly written on ruled paper that 
smelled of salt bacon and coffee-grounds.  The writing was asthmatic 
and the spelling St.  Vitusy.

It appeared that instead of Dick having forced Fortune to stand and 
deliver, he had been held up himself, and made to give hostages to the 
enemy.  That is, as his letter disclosed, he was on the point of 
pegging out with a complication of disorders that even whiskey had 
failed to check.  All that his thirty years of prospecting had netted 
him was one daughter, nineteen years old, as per invoice, whom he was 
shipping East, charges prepaid, for Jerome to clothe, feed, educate, 
comfort, and cherish for the rest of her natural life or until 
matrimony should them part.

Old Jerome was a board-walk.  Everybody knows that the world is 
supported by the shoulders of Atlas; and that Atlas stands on a rail-
fence; and that the rail-fence is built on a turtle's back.  Now, the 
turtle has to stand on something; and that is a board-walk made of men 
like old Jerome.

I do not know whether immortality shall accrue to man; but if not so, 
I would like to know when men like old Jerome get what is due them?

They met Nevada Warren at the station.  She was a little girl, deeply 
sunburned and wholesomely good-looking, with a manner that was frankly 
unsophisticated, yet one that not even a cigar-drummer would intrude 
upon without thinking twice.  Looking at her, somehow you would expect 
to see her in a short skirt and leather leggings, shooting glass balls 
or taming mustangs.  But in her plain white waist and black skirt she 
sent you guessing again.  With an easy exhibition of strength she 
swung along a heavy valise, which the uniformed porters tried in vain 
to wrest from her.

"I am sure we shall be the best of friends," said Barbara, pecking at 
the firm, sunburned cheek.

"I hope so," said Nevada.

"Dear little niece," said old Jerome, "you are as welcome to my home 
as if it were your father's own."

"Thanks," said Nevada.

"And I am going to call you 'cousin,'" said Gilbert, with his charming 
smile.

"Take the valise, please," said Nevada.  "It weighs a million pounds.  
It's got samples from six of dad's old mines in it," she explained to 
Barbara.  "I calculate they'd assay about nine cents to the thousand 
tons, but I promised him to bring them along."


II


It is a common custom to refer to the usual complication between one 
man and two ladies, or one lady and two men, or a lady and a man and a 
nobleman, or--well, any of those problems--as the triangle.  But they 
are never unqualified triangles.  They are always isosceles--never 
equilateral.  So, upon the coming of Nevada Warren, she and Gilbert 
and Barbara Ross lined up into such a figurative triangle; and of that 
triangle Barbara formed the hypotenuse.

One morning old Jerome was lingering long after breakfast over the 
dullest morning paper in the city before setting forth to his down-
town fly-trap.  He had become quite fond of Nevada, finding in her 
much of his dead brother's quiet independence and unsuspicious 
frankness.

A maid brought in a note for Miss Nevada Warren.

"A messenger-boy delivered it at the door, please," she said.  "He's 
waiting for an answer."

Nevada, who was whistling a Spanish waltz between her teeth, and 
watching  the carriages and autos roll by in the street, took the 
envelope.  She knew it was from Gilbert, before she opened it, by the 
little gold palette in the upper left-hand corner.

After tearing it open she pored over the contents for a while, 
absorbedly.  Then, with a serious face, she went and stood at her 
uncle's elbow.

"Uncle Jerome, Gilbert is a nice boy, isn't he?"

"Why, bless the child!" said old Jerome, crackling his paper loudly; 
"of course he is.  I raised him myself."

"He wouldn't write anything to anybody that wasn't exactly--I mean 
that everybody couldn't know and read, would he?"

"I'd just like to see him try it," said uncle, tearing a handful from 
his newspaper.  "Why, what--"

"Read this note he just sent me, uncle, and see if you think it's all 
right and proper.  You see, I don't know much about city people and 
their ways."

Old Jerome threw his paper down and set both his feet upon it.  He 
took Gilbert's note and fiercely perused it twice, and then a third 
time.

"Why, child," said he, "you had me almost excited, although I was sure 
of that boy.  He's a duplicate of his father, and he was a gilt-edged 
diamond.  He only asks if you and Barbara will be ready at four 
o'clock this afternoon for an automobile drive over to Long Island.  I 
don't see anything to criticise in it except the stationery.  I always 
did hate that shade of blue."

"Would it be all right to go?" asked Nevada, eagerly.

"Yes, yes, yes, child; of course.  Why not?  Still, it pleases me to 
see you so careful and candid.  Go, by all means."

"I didn't know," said Nevada, demurely.  "I thought I'd ask you.  
Couldn't you go with us, uncle?"

"I?  No, no, no, no!  I've ridden once in a car that boy was driving.  
Never again! But it's entirely proper for you and Barbara to go.  Yes, 
yes.  But I will not.  No, no, no, no!"

Nevada flew to the door, and said to the maid:

"You bet we'll go.  I'll answer for Miss Barbara.  Tell the boy to say 
to Mr.  Warren, 'You bet we'll go.'"

"Nevada," called old Jerome, "pardon me, my dear, but wouldn't it be 
as well to send him a note in reply?  Just a line would do."

"No, I won't bother about that," said Nevada, gayly.  "Gilbert will 
understand--he always does.  I never rode in an automobile in my life; 
but I've paddled a canoe down Little Devil River through the Lost 
Horse Canon, and if it's any livelier than that I'd like to know!"


III


Two months are supposed to have elapsed.

Barbara sat in the study of the hundred-thousand-dollar house.  It was 
a good place for her.  Many places are provided in the world where men 
and women may repair for the purpose of extricating themselves from 
divers difficulties.  There are cloisters,  wailing-places, watering-
places, confessionals, hermitages, lawyer's offices, beauty parlors, 
air-ships, and studies; and the greatest of these are studies.

It usually takes a hypotenuse a long time to discover that it is the 
longest side of a triangle.  But it's a long 
line that has no turning.

Barbara was alone.  Uncle Jerome and Nevada had gone to the theatre.  
Barbara had not cared to go.  She wanted to stay at home and study in 
the study.  If you, miss, were a stunning New York girl, and saw every 
day that a brown, ingenuous Western witch was getting hobbles and a 
lasso on the young man you wanted for yourself, you, too, would lose 
taste for the oxidized-silver setting of a musical comedy.

Barbara sat by the quartered-oak library table.  Her right arm rested 
upon the table, and her dextral fingers nervously manipulated a sealed 
letter.  The letter was addressed to Nevada Warren; and in the upper 
left-hand corner of the envelope was Gilbert's little gold palette.  
It had been delivered at nine o'clock, after Nevada had left.

Barbara would have given her pearl necklace to know what the letter 
contained; but she could not open and read it by the aid of steam, or 
a pen-handle, or a hair-pin, or any of the generally approved methods, 
because her position in society forbade such an act.  She had tried to 
read some of the lines of the letter by holding the envelope up to a 
strong light and pressing it hard against the paper, but Gilbert had 
too good a taste in stationery to make that possible.

At eleven-thirty the theatre-goers returned.  it was a delicious 
winter night.  Even so far as from the cab to the door they were 
powdered thickly with the big flakes downpouring diagonally from the 
cast.  Old Jerome growled good-naturedly about villanous cab service 
and blockaded streets.  Nevada, colored like a rose, with sapphire 
eyes, babbled of the stormy nights in the mountains around dad's 
cabin.  During all these wintry apostrophes, Barbara, cold at heart, 
sawed wood--the only appropriate thing she could think of to do.

Old Jerome went immediately up-stairs to hot-water-bottles and 
quinine.  Nevada fluttered into the study, the only cheerfully lighted 
room, subsided into an arm-chair, and, while at the interminable task 
of unbuttoning her elbow gloves, gave oral testimony as to the 
demerits of the "show."

"Yes, I think Mr.  Fields is really amusing--sometimes," said Barbara.  
"Here is a letter for you, dear, that came by special delivery just 
after you had gone."

"Who is it from?" asked Nevada, tugging at a button.

"Well, really," said Barbara, with a smile, "I can only guess.  The 
envelope has that queer little thing in one corner that Gilbert calls 
a palette, but which looks to me rather like a gilt heart on a school-
girl's valentine."

"I wonder what he's writing to me about" remarked Nevada, listlessly.

"We're all alike," said Barbara; "all women.  We try to find out what 
is in a letter by studying the postmark.  As a last resort we use 
scissors, and read it from the bottom upward.  Here it is."

She made a motion as if to toss the letter across the table to Nevada.

"Great catamounts!" exclaimed Nevada.  "These centre-fire buttons are 
a nuisance.  I'd rather wear buckskins.  Oh, Barbara, please shuck the 
hide off that letter and read it.  It'll be midnight before I get 
these gloves off!"

"Why, dear, you don't want me to open Gilbert's letter to you?  It's 
for you, and you wouldn't wish any one else to read it, of course!"

Nevada raised her steady, calm, sapphire eyes from her gloves.

"Nobody writes me anything that everybody mightn't read," she said.  
"Go on, Barbara.  Maybe Gilbert wants us to go out in his car again 
to-morrow."

Curiosity can do more things than kill a cat; and if emotions, well 
recognized as feminine, are inimical to feline life, then jealousy 
would soon leave the whole world catless.  Barbara opened the letter, 
with an indulgent, slightly bored air.

"Well, dear," said she, "I'll read it if you want me to."

She slit the envelope, and read the missive with swift-travelling 
eyes; read it again, and cast a quick, shrewd glance at Nevada, who, 
for the time, seemed to consider gloves as the world of her interest, 
and letters from rising artists as no more than messages from Mars.

For a quarter of a minute Barbara looked at Nevada with a strange 
steadfastness; and then a smile so small that it widened her mouth 
only the sixteenth part of an inch, and narrowed her eyes no more than 
a twentieth, flashed like an inspired thought across her face.

Since the beginning no woman has been a mystery to another woman  
Swift as light travels, each penetrates the heart and mind of another, 
sifts her sister's words of their cunningest disguises, reads her most 
hidden desires, and plucks the sophistry from her wiliest talk like 
hairs from a comb, twiddling them sardonically between her thumb and 
fingers before letting them float away on the breezes of fundamental 
doubt.  Long ago Eve's son rang the door-bell of the family residence 
in Paradise Park, bearing a strange lady on his arm, whom he 
introduced.  Eve took her daughter-in-law aside and lifted a classic 
eyebrow.

"The Land of Nod," said the bride, languidly flirting the leaf of a 
palm.  ''I suppose you've been there, of course?"

"Not lately," said Eve, absolutely unstaggered.  "Don't you think the 
apple-sauce they serve over there is execrable?  I rather like that 
mulberry-leaf tunic effect, dear; but, of course, the real fig goods 
are not to be had over there.  Come over behind this lilac-bush while 
the gentlemen split a celery tonic.  I think the caterpillar-holes 
have made your dress open a little in the back."

So, then and there--according to the records--was the alliance formed 
by the only two who's-who ladies in the world.  Then it was agreed 
that woman should forever remain as clear as a pane of glass-though 
glass was yet to be discovered-to other women, and that she should 
palm herself off on man as a mystery.

Barbara seemed to hesitate.

"Really, Nevada," she said, with a little show of embarrassment, "you 
shouldn't have insisted on my opening this.  I-I'm sure it wasn't 
meant for any one else to know."

Nevada forgot her gloves for a moment.

"Then read it aloud," she said.  "Since you've already read it, what's 
the difference?  If Mr.  Warren has written to me something that any 
one else oughtn't to know, that is all the more reason why everybody 
should know it."

"Well," said Barbara, "this is what it says:

'Dearest Nevada--Come to my studio at twelve o'clock to-night.  Do not 
fail.'"  Barbara rose and dropped the note in Nevada's lap.  "I'm 
awfully sorry," she said, "that I knew.  It isn't like Gilbert.  There 
must be some mistake.  Just consider that I am ignorant of it, will 
you, dear? I must go up-stairs now, I have such a headache.  I'm sure 
I don't understand the note.  Perhaps Gilbert has been dining too 
well, and will explain.  Good night!"


IV


Nevada tiptoed to the hall, and heard Barbara's door close upstairs.  
The bronze clock in the study told the hour of twelve was fifteen 
minutes away.  She ran swiftly to the front door, and let herself out 
into the snow-storm.  Gilbert Warren's studio was six squares away.

By aerial ferry the white, silent forces of the storm attacked the 
city from beyond the sullen East River.  Already the snow lay a foot 
deep on the pavements, the drifts heaping themselves like scaling-
ladders against the walls of the besieged town.  The Avenue was as 
quiet as a street in Pompeii.  Cabs now and then skimmed past like 
white-winged gulls over a moonlit ocean; and less frequent motor-cars-
-sustaining the comparison--hissed through the foaming waves like 
submarine boats on their jocund, perilous journeys.

Nevada plunged like a wind-driven storm-petrel on her way.  She looked 
up at the ragged sierras of cloud-capped buildings that rose above the 
streets, shaded by the night lights and the congealed vapors to gray, 
drab, ashen, lavender, dun, and cerulean tints.  They were so like the 
wintry mountains of her Western home that she felt a satisfaction such 
as the hundred-thousand-dollar house had seldom brought her.

A policeman caused her to waver on a corner, just by his eye and 
weight.

"Hello, Mabel!" said he.  "Kind of late for you to be out, ain't it?"

"I--I am just going to the drug store," said Nevada, hurrying past 
him.

The excuse serves as a passport for the most sophisticated.  Does it 
prove that woman never progresses, or that she sprang from Adam's rib, 
full-fledged in intellect and wiles?

Turning eastward, the direct blast cut down Nevada's speed one-half.  
She made zigzag tracks in the snow; but she was as tough as a pinon 
sapling, and bowed to it as gracefully.  Suddenly the studio-building 
loomed before her, a familiar landmark, like a cliff above some well-
remembered canon.  The haunt of business and its hostile neighbor, 
art, was darkened and silent.  The elevator stopped at ten.

Up eight flights of Stygian stairs Nevada climbed, and rapped firmly 
at the door numbered "89."  She had been there many times before, with 
Barbara and Uncle Jerome.

Gilbert opened the door.  He had a crayon pencil in one hand, a green 
shade over his eyes, and a pipe in his mouth.  The pipe dropped to the 
floor.

"Am I late?" asked Nevada.  "I came as quick as I could.  Uncle and me 
were at the theatre this evening.  Here I am, Gilbert!"

Gilbert did a Pygmalion-and-Galatea act.  He changed from a statue of 
stupefaction to a young man with a problem to tackle.  He admitted 
Nevada, got a whiskbroom, and began to brush the snow from her 
clothes.  A great lamp, with a green shade, hung over an easel, where 
the artist had been sketching in crayon.

"You wanted me," said Nevada simply, " and I came.  You said so in 
your letter.  What did you send for me for?"

"You read my letter?" inquired Gilbert, sparring for wind.

"Barbara read it to me.  I saw it afterward.  It said: 'Come to my 
studio at twelve to-night, and do not fail.'  I thought you were sick, 
of course, but you don't seem to be."

"Aha!" said Gilbert irrelevantly.  "I'll tell you why I asked you to 
come, Nevada.  I want you to marry me immediately -- to-night.  What's 
a little snow-storm?  Will you do it?"

"You might have noticed that I would, long ago," said Nevada.  "And 
I'm rather stuck on the snow-storm idea, myself.  I surely would hate 
one of these flowery church noon-weddings.  Gilbert, I didn't know you 
had grit enough to propose it this way.  Let's shock 'em--it's our 
funeral, ain't it?"

"You bet!" said Gilbert.  "Where did I hear that expression?" he added 
to himself.  "Wait a minute, Nevada; I want to do a little 'phoning."

He shut himself in a little dressing-room, and called upon the 
lightnings of tile heavens--condensed into unromantic numbers and 
districts.

"That you, Jack?  You confounded sleepyhead!  Yes, wake up; this is 
me--or I--oh, bother the difference in grammar!  I'm going to be 
married right away.  Yes!  Wake up your sister--don't answer me back; 
bring her along, too--you must!.  Remind Agnes of the time I saved her 
from drowning in Lake Ronkonkoma--I know it's caddish to refer to it, 
but she must come with you.  Yes.  Nevada is here, waiting.  We've 
been engaged quite a while.  Some opposition among the relatives, you 
know, and we have to pull it off this way.  We're waiting here for 
you.  Don't let Agnes out-talk you--bring her!  You will?  Good old 
boy!  I'll order a carriage to call for you, double-quick time.  
Confound you, Jack, you're all right!"

Gilbert returned to the room where Nevada waited.

"My old friend, Jack Peyton, and his sister were to have been here at 
a quarter to twelve," he explained; "but Jack is so confoundedly slow.  
I've just 'phoned them to hurry.  They'll be here in a few minutes.  
I'm the happiest man in the world, Nevada!  What did you do with the 
letter I sent you to-day ?"

"I've got it cinched here," said Nevada, pulling it out from beneath 
her opera-cloak.

Gilbert drew the letter from the envelope and looked it over 
carefully.  Then he looked at Nevada thoughtfully.

"Didn't you think it rather queer that I should ask you to come to my 
studio at midnight?" he asked.
"Why, no," said Nevada, rounding her eyes.  "Not if you needed me.  
Out West, when a pal sends you a hurry call--ain't that what you say 
here ?--we get there first and talk about it after the row is over.  
And it's usually snowing there, too, when things happen.  So I didn't 
mind."

Gilbert rushed into another room, and came back burdened with 
overcoats warranted to turn wind, rain, or snow.

"Put this raincoat on," he said, holding it for her.  "We have a 
quarter of a mile to go.  Old Jack and his sister will be here in a 
few minutes."  He began to struggle into a heavy coat.  "Oh, Nevada," 
he said, "just look at the head-lines on the front page of that 
evening paper on the table, will you?  It's about your section of the 
West, and I know it will interest you."

He waited a full minute, pretending to find trouble in the getting on 
of his overcoat, and then turned.  Nevada had not moved.  She was 
looking at him with strange and pensive directness.  Her cheeks had a 
flush on them beyond the color that had been contributed by the wind 
and snow; but her eyes were steady.

"I was going to tell you," she said, "anyhow, before you--before we--
before-well, before anything.  Dad never gave me a day of schooling.  
I never learned to read or write a darned word.  Now if--"
Pounding their uncertain way up-stairs, the feet of Jack, the 
somnolent, and Agnes, the grateful, were heard.


V


When Mr.  and Mrs.  Gilbert Warren were spinning softly homeward in a 
closed carriage, after the ceremony, Gilbert s said:

"Nevada, would you really like to know what I wrote you in the letter 
that you received to-night?"

"Fire away!" said his bride.

"Word for word," said Gilbert, "it was this: 'My dear Miss Warren-You 
were right about the flower.  It was a hydrangea, and not a lilac.'

"All right," said Nevada.  "But let's forget it.  The joke's on 
Barbara, anyway!"




THIMBLE, THIMBLE



These are the directions for finding the I office of Carteret & 
Carteret, Mill Supplies and Leather Belting:
You follow the Broadway trail down until you pass the Crosstown Line, 
the Bread Line, and the Dead Line, and come to the Big Canons of the 
Moneygrubber Tribe.  Then you turn to the left, to the right, dodge a 
push-cart and the tongue of a two-ton, four-horse dray and hop, skip, 
and jump to a granite ledge on the side of a twenty-one-story 
synthetic mountain of stone and iron.  In the twelfth story is the 
office of Carteret & Carteret.  The factory where they make the mill 
supplies and leather belting is in Brooklyn.  Those commodities--to 
say nothing of Brooklyn--not being of interest to you, let us hold the 
incidents within the confines of a one-act, one-scene play, thereby 
lessening the toil of the reader and the expenditure of the publisher.  
So, if you have the courage to face four pages of type and Carteret & 
Carteret's office boy, Percival, you shall sit on a varnished chair in 
the inner office and peep at the little comedy of the Old Nigger Man, 
the Hunting-Case Watch, and the Open-Faced Question--mostly borrowed 
from the late Mr.  Frank Stockton, as you will conclude.

First, biography (but pared to the quick) must intervene.  I am for 
the inverted sugar-coated quinine pill--the bitter on the outside.

The Carterets were, or was (Columbia College professors please rule), 
an old Virginia family.  Long time ago the gentlemen of the family had 
worn lace ruffles and carried tinless foils and owned plantations and 
had slaves to burn.  But the war had greatly reduced their holdings.  
(Of course you can perceive at once that this flavor has been 
shoplifted from Mr.  F.  Hopkinson Smith, in spite of the "et" after 
"Carter.")  Well, anyhow:

In digging up the Carteret history I shall not take you farther back 
than the year 1620.  The two original American Carterets came over in 
that year, but by different means of transportation.  One brother, 
named John, came in the Mayflower and became a Pilgrim Father.  You've 
seen his picture on the covers of the Thanksgiving magazines, hunting 
turkeys in the deep snow with a blunderbuss.  Blandford Carteret, the 
other brother, crossed the pond in his own brigantine, landed on the 
Virginia coast, and became an F.F.V.  John became distinguished for 
piety and shrewdness in business; Blandford for his pride, juleps; 
marksmanship, and vast slave-cultivated plantations.

Then came the Civil War.  (I must condense this historical 
interpolation.)  Stonewall Jackson was shot; Lee surrendered; Grant 

toured the world; cotton went to nine cents; Old Crow whiskey and Jim 
Crow cars were invented; the Seventy-ninth Massachusetts Volunteers 
returned to the Ninety-seventh Alabama Zouaves the battle flag of 
Lundy's Lane which they bought at a second-hand store in Chelsea kept 
by a man named Skzchnzski; Georgia sent the President a sixty-pound 
watermelon--and that brings us up to the time when the story begins.  
My! but that was sparring for an opening!  I really must brush op on 
my Aristotle.

The Yankee Carterets went into business in New York long before the 
war.  Their house, as far as Leather Belting and Mill Supplies was 
concerned, was as musty and arrogant and solid as one of those old 
East India tea-importing concerns that you read about in Dickens.  
There were some rumors of a war behind its counters, but not enough to 
affect the business.

During and after the war, Blandford Carteret, F.F.V., lost his 
plantations, juleps, marksmanship, and life.  He bequeathed little 
more than his pride to his surviving family.  So it came to pass that 
Blandford Carteret, the Fifth, aged fifteen, was invited by the 
leather-and-millsupplies branch of that name to come North and learn 
business instead of hunting foxes and boasting of the glory of his 
fathers on the reduced acres of his impoverished family.  The boy 
jumped at the chance; and, at the age of twenty-five, sat in the 
office of the firm equal partner with John, the Fifth, of the 
blunderbuss-and-turkey branch.  Here the story begins again.

The young men were about the same age, smooth of face, alert, easy of 
manner, and with an air that promised mental and physical quickness.  
They were razored, blue-serged, straw-hatted, and pearl stick-pinned 
like other young New Yorkers who might be millionaires or bill clerks.

One afternoon at four o'clock, in the private office of the firm, 
Blandford Carteret opened a letter that a clerk had just brought to 
his desk.  After reading it, he chuckled audibly for nearly a minute.  
John looked around from his desk inquiringly.

"It's from mother," said Blandford.  "I'll read you the funny part of 
it.  She tells me all the neighborhood news first, of course, and then 
cautions me against getting my feet wet and musical comedies.  After 
that come some vital statistics about calves and pigs and an estimate 
of the wheat crop.  And now I'll quote some:

"'And what do you think! Old Uncle Jake, who was seventy-six last 
Wednesday, must go travelling.  Nothing would do but he must go to New 
York and see his "young Marster Blandford."  Old as he is, he has a 
deal of common sense, so I've let him go.  I couldn't refuse him--he 
seemed to have concentrated all his hopes and desires into this one 
adventure into the wide world.  You know he was born on the 
plantation, and has never been ten miles away from it in his life.  
And he was your father's body servant during the war, and has been 
always a faithful vassal and servant of the family.  He has often seen 
the gold watch--the watch that was your father's and your father's 
father's.  I told him it was to be yours, And he begged me to allow 
him to take it to you and to put it into your hands himself.

"'So he has it, carefully inclosed in a buck-skin case, and is 
bringing it to you with all the pride and importance of a king's 
messenger.  I gave him money for the round trip and for a two weeks' 
stay in the city.  I wish you would see to it that he gets comfortable 
quarters--Jake won't need much looking after--he's able to take care 
of himself.  But I have read in the papers that African bishops and 
colored potentates generally have much trouble in obtaining food and 
lodging in the Yankee metropolis.  That may be all right; but I don't 
see why the best hotel there shouldn't take Jake in.  Still, I suppose 
it's a rule.

"'I gave him full directions about finding you, and packed his valise 
myself.  You won't have to bother with him; but I do hope you'll see 
that he is made comfortable.  Take the watch that he brings you--it's 
almost a decoration.  It has been worn by true Carterets, and there 
isn't a stain upon it nor a false movement of the wheels.  Bringing it 
to you is the crowning joy of old Jake's life.  I wanted him to have 
that little outing and that happiness before it is too late.  You have 
often heard us talk about how Jake, pretty badly wounded himself, 
crawled through the reddened grass at Chancellorsville to where your 
father lay with the bullet in his dear heart, and took the watch from 
his pocket to keep it from the "Yanks."

"'So, my son, when the old man comes consider him as a frail but 
worthy messenger from the old-time life and home.

"'You have been so long away from home and so long among the people 
that we have always regarded as aliens that I'm not sure that Jake 
will know you when he sees you.  But Jake has a keen perception, and I 
rather believe that he will know a Virginia Carteret at sight.  I 
can't conceive that even ten years in Yankee-land could change a boy 
of mine.  Anyhow, I'm sure you will know Jake.  I put eighteen collars 
in his valise.  If he should have to buy others, he wears a number 15 
1/2.  Please see that he gets the right ones.  He will be no trouble 
to you at all.

"'If you are not too busy, I'd like for you to find him a place to 
board where they have white-meal corn-bread, and try to keep him from 
taking his shoes off in your office or on the street.  His right foot 
swells a little, and he likes to be comfortable.

"'If you can spare the time, count his handkerchiefs when they come 
back from the wash.  I bought him a dozen new ones before he left.  He 
should be there about the time this letter reaches you.  I told him to 
go straight to your office when he arrives.'"

As soon as Blandford had finished the reading of this, something 
happened (as there should happen in stories and must happen on the 
stage).

Percival, the office boy, with his air of despising the world's output 
of mill supplies and leather belting, came in to announce that a 
colored gentleman was outside to see Mr.  Blandford Carteret.

"Bring him in," said Blandford, rising.

John Carteret swung around in his chair and said to Percival:  "Ask 
him to wait a few minutes outside.  We'll let you know when to bring 
him in."

Then he turned to his cousin with one of those broad, slow smiles that 
was an inheritance of all the Carterets, and said:

"Bland,  I've  always had a consuming curiosity to understand the 
differences that you haughty Southerners believe to exist between 'you 
all ' and the people of the North.  Of course, I know that you 
consider yourselves made out of finer clay and look upon Adam as only 
a collateral branch of your ancestry; but I don't know why.  I never 
could understand the differences between us."

"Well, John," said Blandford, laughing, "what you don't understand 
about it is just the difference, of course.  I suppose it was the 
feudal way in which we lived that gave us our lordly baronial airs and 
feeling of superiority."

"But you are not feudal, now," went on John.  "Since we licked you and 
stole your cotton and mules you've had to go to work just as we 
'damyankees,' as you call us, have always been doing.  And you're just 
as proud and exclusive and upper-classy as you were before the war.  
So it wasn't your money that caused it."

"Maybe it was the climate," said Blandford, lightly, "or maybe our 
negroes spoiled us.  I'll call old Jake in, now.  I'll be glad to see 
the old villain again."

"Wait just a moment," said John.  "I've got a little theory I want to 
test.  You and I are pretty much alike in our general appearance.  Old 
Jake hasn't seen you since you were fifteen.  Let's have him in and 
play fair and see which of us gets the watch.  The old darky surrey 
ought to be able to pick out his 'young marster' without any trouble.  
The alleged aristocratic superiority of a 'reb' ought to be visible to 
him at once.  He couldn't make the mistake of handing over the 
timepiece to a Yankee, of course.  The loser buys the dinner this 
evening and two dozen 15 1/2 collars for Jake.  Is it a go?"

Blandford agreed heartily.  Percival was summoned, and told to usher 
the "colored gentleman" in.

Uncle Jake stepped inside the private office cautiously.  He was a 
little old man, as black as soot, wrinkled and bald except for a 
fringe of white wool, cut decorously short, that ran over his ears and 
around his head.  There was nothing of the stage "uncle" about him: 
his black suit nearly fitted him; his shoes shone, and his straw hat 
was banded with a gaudy ribbon.  In his right hand he carried 
something carefully concealed by his closed fingers.

Uncle Jake stopped a few steps from the door.  Two young men sat in 
their revolving desk-chairs ten feet apart and looked at him in 
friendly silence.  His gaze slowly shifted many times from one to the 
other.  He felt sure that he was in the presence of one, at least, of 
the revered family among whose fortunes his life had begun and was to 
end.

One had the pleasing but haughty Carteret air; the other had the 
unmistakable straight, long family nose.  Both had the keen black 
eyes, horizontal brows, and thin, smiling lips that had distinguished 
both the Carteret of the Mayflower and him of the brigantine.  Old 
Jake had thought that he could have picked out his young master 
instantly from a thousand Northerners; but he found himself in 
difficulties.  The best he could do was to use strategy.

"Howdy, Marse Blandford--howdy, suh ?" he said, looking midway between 
the two young men.

"Howdy, Uncle Jake?" they both answered pleasantly and in unison.  
"Sit down.  Have you brought the watch ?"

Uncle Jake chose a hard-bottom chair at a respectful distance, sat on 
the edge of it, and laid his hat carefully on the floor.  The watch in 
its buckskin case he gripped tightly.  He had not risked his life on 
the battle-field to rescue that watch from his "old marster's" foes to 
hand it over again to the enemy without a struggle.

"Yes, suh; I got it in my hand, suh.  I'm gwine give it to you right 
away in jus' a minute.  Old Missus told me to put it in young Marse 
Blandford's hand and tell him to wear it for the family pride and 
honor.  It was a mighty longsome trip for an old nigger man to make--
ten thousand miles, it must be, back to old Vi'ginia, suh.  You've 
growed mightily, young marster.  I wouldn't have reconnized you but 
for yo' powerful resemblance to old marster."

With admirable diplomacy the old man kept his eyes roaming in the 
space between the two men.  His words might have been addressed to 
either.  Though neither wicked nor perverse, he was seeking for a 
sign.

Blandford and John exchanged winks.

"I reckon you done got you ma's letter," went on Uncle Jake.  "She 
said she was gwine to write to you 'bout my comin' along up this er-
way.

"Yes, yes, Uncle Jake," said John briskly.  "My cousin and I have just 
been notified to expect you.  We are both Carterets, you know."

"Although one of us," said Blandford, "was born and raised in the 
North."

"So if you will hand over the watch--" said John.

"My cousin and I-" said Blandford.

'Will then see to it--" said John.

"That comfortable quarters are found for you," said Blandford.

With creditable ingenuity, old Jake set up a cackling, high-pitched, 
protracted laugh.  He beat his knee, picked up his hat and bent the 
brim in an apparent paroxysm of humorous appreciation.  The seizure 
afforded him a mask behind which he could roll his eyes impartially 
between, above, and beyond his two tormentors.

"I sees what!" he chuckled, after a while.  "You gen'lemen is tryin' 
to have fun with the po' old nigger.  But you can't fool old Jake.  I 
knowed you, Marse Blandford, the minute I sot eyes on you.  You was a 
po' skimpy little boy no mo' than about fo'teen when you lef' home to 
come No'th; but I knowed you the minute I sot eyes on you.  You is the 
mawtal image of old marster.  The other gen'leman resembles you 
mightily, suh; but you can't fool old Jake on a member of the old 
Vi'ginia family.  No suh."

At exactly the same time both Carterets smiled and extended a hand for 
the watch.

Uncle Jake's wrinkled, black face lost the expression of amusement to 
which he had vainly twisted it.  He knew that he was being teased, and 
that it made little real difference, as far as its safety went, into 
which of those outstretched hands he placed the family treasure.  But 
it seemed to him that not only his own pride and loyalty but much of 
the Virginia Carterets' was at stake.  He had heard down South during 
the war about that other branch of the family that lived in the North 
and fought on "the yuther side," and it had always grieved him.  He 
had followed his "old marster's" fortunes from stately luxury through 
war to almost poverty.  And now, with the last relic and reminder of 
him, blessed by "old missus," and intrusted implicitly to his care, he 
had come ten thousand miles (as it seemed) to deliver it into the 
hands of the one who was to wear it and wind it and cherish it and 
listen to it tick off the unsullied hours that marked the lives of the 
Carterets--of Virginia.

His experience and conception of the Yankees had been an impression of 
tyrants--"low-down, common trash"--in blue, laying waste with fire and 
sword.  He had seen the smoke of many burning homesteads almost as 
grand as Carteret Hall ascending to the drowsy Southern skies.  And 
now he was face to face with one of them--and he could not distinguish 
him from his "young marster" whom he had come to find and bestow upon 
him the emblem of his kingship--even as the arm "clothed in white 
samite, mystic, wonderful" laid Excalibur in the right hand of Arthur.  
He saw before him two young men, easy, kind, courteous, welcoming, 
either of whom might have been the one he sought.  Troubled, 
bewildered, sorely grieved at his weakness of judgment, old Jake 
abandoned his loyal subterfuges.  His right hand sweated against the 
buckskin cover of the watch.  He was deeply humiliated and chastened.  
Seriously, now, his prominent, yellow-white eyes closely scanned the 
two young men.  At the end of his scrutiny he was conscious of but one 
difference between them.  One wore a narrow black tie with a white 
pearl stickpin.  The other's "four-in-hand " was a narrow blue one 
pinned with a black pearl.

And then, to old Jake's relief, there came a sudden distraction.  
Drama knocked at the door with imperious knuckles, and forced Comedy 
to the wings, and Drama peeped with a smiling but set face over the 
footlights.

Percival, the hater of mill supplies, brought in a card, which he 
handed, with the manner of one bearing a cartel, to Blue-Tie.

"'Olivia De Ormond,'" read Blue-Tie from the card.  He looked 
inquiringly at his cousin.

"Why not have her in," said Black-Tie, "and bring matters to a 
conclusion?"

"Uncle Jake," said one of the young men, "would you mind taking that 
chair over there in the corner for a while?  A lady is coming in--on 
some business.  We'll take up your case afterward."

The lady whom Percival ushered in was young and petulantly, decidedly, 
freshly, consciously, and intentionally pretty.  She was dressed with 
such expensive plainness that she made you consider lace and ruffles 
as mere tatters and rags.  But one great ostrich plume that she wore 
would have marked her anywhere in the army of beauty as the wearer of 
the merry helmet of Navarre.

Miss De Ormond accepted the swivel chair at Blue-Tie's desk.  Then the 
gentlemen drew leather-upholstered seats conveniently near, and spoke 
of the weather.

"Yes," said she, "I noticed it was warmer.  But I mustn't take up too 
much of your time during business hours.  That is," she continued, 
"unless we talk business."

She addressed her words to Blue-Tie, with a charming smile.

"Very well," said he.  "You don't mind my cousin being present, do 
you?  We are generally rather confidential with each other-especially 
in business matters."

"Oh no," caroled Miss De Ormond.  "I'd rather he did hear.  He knows 
all about it, anyhow.  In fact, he's quite a material witness because 
he was present when you--when it happened.  I thought you might want 
to talk things over before--well, before any action is taken, as I 
believe the lawyers say."

"Have you anything in the way of a proposition to make?" asked Black-
Tie.

Miss De Ormond looked reflectively at the neat toe of one of her dull 
kid-pumps.

"I had a proposal made to me," she said.  "If the proposal sticks it 
cuts out the proposition.  Let's have that settled first."

"Well, as far as--" began Blue-Tie.

"Excuse me, cousin," interrupted Black-Tie, "if you don't mind my 
cutting in."  And then he turned, with a good-natured air, toward the 
lady.

"Now, let's recapitulate a bit," he said cheerfully.  "All three of 
us, besides other mutual acquaintances, have been out on a good many 
larks together."

"I'm afraid I'll have to call the birds by another name," said Miss De 
Ormond.

"All right," responded Black-Tie, with unimpaired cheerfulness; 
"suppose we say 'squabs' when we talk about the 'proposal' and 'larks' 
when we discuss the 'proposition.'  You have a quick mind, Miss De 
Ormond.  Two months ago some half-dozen of us went in a motor-car for 
day's run into the country.  We stopped at a road-house for dinner.  
My cousin proposed marriage to you then and there.  He was influenced 
to do so, of course, by the beauty and charm which no one can deny 
that you possess."

"I wish I had you for a press agent, Mr.  Carteret," said the beauty, 
with a dazzling smile.

"You are on the stage, Miss De Ormond," went on Black-Tie.  "You have 
had, doubtless, many admirers, and perhaps other proposals.  You must 
remember, too, that we were a party of merrymakers on that occasion.  
There were a good many corks pulled.  That the proposal of marriage 
was made to you by my cousin we cannot deny.  But hasn't it been your 
experience that, by common consent, such things lose their seriousness 
when viewed in the next day's sunlight?  Isn't there something of a 
'code' among good 'sports'--I use the word in its best sense--that 
wipes out each day the follies of the evening previous?"

"Oh yes," said Miss De Ormond.  "I know that very well.  And I've 
always played up to it.  But as you seem to be conducting the case--
with the silent consent of the defendant--I'll tell you something 
more.  I've got letters from him repeating the proposal.  And they're 
signed, too."

"I understand," said Black-Tie gravely.  "What's your price for the 
letters?"

"I'm not a cheap one," said Miss De Ormond.  "But I had decided to 
make you a rate.  You both belong to a swell family.  Well, if I am on 
the stage nobody can say a word against me truthfully.  And the money 
is only a secondary consideration.  It isn't the money I was after.  
I--I believed him--and--and I liked him."

She cast a soft, entrancing glance at Blue-Tie from under her long 
eyelashes.

"And the price?" went on Black-Tie, inexorably.

"Ten thousand dollars," said the lady, sweetly.

"Or--"

"Or the fulfillment of the engagement to marry."

"I think it is time," interrupted Blue-Tie, "for me to be allowed to 
say a word or two.  You and I, cousin, belong to a family that has 
held its head pretty high.  You have been brought up in a section of 
the country very different from the one where our branch of the family 
lived.  Yet both of us are Carterets, even if some of our ways and 
theories differ.  You remember, it is a tradition of the family, that 
no Carteret ever failed in chivalry to a lady or failed to keep his 
word when it was given."

Then Blue-Tie, with frank decision showing on his countenance, turned 
to Miss De Ormond.

"Olivia," said he, "on what date will you marry me?"

Before she could answer, Black-Tie again interposed.

"It is a long journey," said he, "from Plymouth rock to Norfolk Bay.  
Between the two points we find the changes that nearly three centuries 
have brought.  In that time the old order has changed.  We no longer 
burn witches or torture slaves.  And to-day we neither spread our 
cloaks on the mud for ladies to walk over nor treat them to the 
ducking-stool.  It is the age of common sense, adjustment, and 
proportion.  All of us--ladies, gentlemen, women, men, Northerners, 
Southerners, lords, caitiffs, actors, hardware-drummers, senators, 
hodcarriers, and politicians--are coming to a better understanding.  
Chivalry is one of our words that changes its meaning every day.  
Family pride is a thing of many constructions--it may show itself by 
maintaining a moth-eaten arrogance in cobwebbed Colonial mansion or by 
the prompt paying of one's debts.

"Now, I suppose you've had enough of my monologue.  I've learned 
something of business and a little of life; and I somehow believe, 
cousin, that our great-great-grandfathers, the original Carterets, 
would indorse my view of this matter."

Black-Tie wheeled around to his desk, wrote in a check-book and tore 
out the check, the sharp rasp of the perforated leaf making the only 
sound in the room.  He laid the check within easy reach of Miss De 
Ormond's hand.

"Business is business," said he.  "We live in a business age.  There 
is my personal check for $10,000.  What do you say, Miss De Ormond--
will it he orange blossoms or cash ?"

Miss De Ormond picked up the cheek carelessly, folded it 
indifferently, and stuffed it into her glove.

"Oh, this '11 do," she said, calmly.  "I just thought I'd call and put 
it up to you.  I guess you people are all right.  But a girl has 
feelings, you know.  I've heard one of you was a Southerner--I wonder 
which one of you it is?"

She arose, smiled sweetly, and walked to the door.  There, with a 
flash of white teeth and a dip of the heavy plume, she disappeared.

Both of the cousins had forgotten Uncle Jake for the time.  But now 
they heard the shuffling of his shoes as he came across the rug toward 
them from his seat in the corner.

"Young marster," he said, "take yo' watch."  And without hesitation he 
laid the ancient timepiece in the hand of its rightful owner.

Finch keeps a hats-cleaned-by-electricity-while-you-wait 
establishment, nine feet by twelve, in Third Avenue.  Once a customer, 
you are always his.  I do not know his secret process, but every four 
days your hat needs to be cleaned again.

Finch is a leathern, sallow, slowfooted man, between twenty and forty.  
You would say he had been brought up a bushelman in Essex Street.  
When business is slack he likes to talk, so I had my hat cleaned even 
oftener than it deserved, hoping Finch might let me into some of the 
secrets of the sweatshops.

One afternoon I dropped in and found Finch alone.  He began to anoint 
my headpiece de Panama with his mysterious fluid that attracted dust 
and dirt like a magnet.

"They say the Indians weave 'em under water," said I, for a leader.

"Don't you believe it," said Finch.  "No Indian or white man could 
stay under water that long.  Say, do you pay much attention to 
politics?  I see in the paper something about a law they've passed 
called 'the law of supply and demand.'"

I explained to him as well as I could that the reference was to a 
politico-economical law, and not to a legal statute.

"I didn't know," said Finch.  "I heard a good deal about it a year or 
so ago, but in a one-sided way."

"Yes," said I, "political orators use it a great deal.  In fact, they 
never give it a rest.  I suppose you heard some of those cart-tail 
fellows spouting on the subject over here on the east side."

"I heard it from a king," said Finch--"the white king of a tribe of 
Indians in South America."

I was interested but not surprised.  The big city is like a mother's 
knee to many who have strayed far and found the roads rough beneath 
their uncertain feet.  At dusk they come home and sit upon the door-
step.  I know a piano player in a cheap cafe who has shot lions in 
Africa, a bell-boy who fought in the British army against the Zulus, 
an express-driver whose left arm had been cracked like a lobster's 
claw for a stew-pot of Patagonian cannibals when the boat of his 
rescuers hove in sight.  So a hat-cleaner who had been a friend of a 
king did not oppress me.

"A new band ?" asked Finch, with his dry, barren smile.

"Yes," said I, "and half an inch wider."  I had had a new band five 
days before.

"I meets a man one night," said Finch, beginning his story--"a man 
brown as snuff, with money in every pocket, eating schweinerknuckel in 
Schlagel's.  That was two years ago, when I was a hose-cart driver for 
No.  98.  His discourse runs to the subject of gold.  He says that 
certain mountains in a country down South that he calls Gaudymala is 
full of it.  He says the Indians wash it out of the streams in plural 
quantities.

"'Oh, Geronimo!' says I.  'Indians! There's no Indians in the South,' 
I tell him, 'except Elks, Maccabees, and the buyers for the fall dry-
goods trade.  The Indians are all on the reservations,' says I.

"'I'm telling you this with reservations,' says he.  'They ain't 
Buffalo Bill Indians; they're squattier and more pedigreed.  They call 
'em Inkers and Aspics, and they was old inhabitants when Mazuma was 
King of Mexico.  They wash the gold out of the mountain streams,' says 
the brown man, 'and fill quills with it; and then they empty 'em into 
red jars till they are full; and then they pack it in buckskin sacks 
of one arroba each--an arroba is twenty-five pounds--and store it in a 
stone house, with an engraving of a idol with marcelled hair, playing 
a flute, over the door.'

"'how do they work off this unearth increment?' I asks.

"'They don't,' says the man.  'It's a case of "Ill fares the land with 
the great deal of velocity where wealth accumulates and there ain't 
any reciprocity."'

"After this man and me got through our conversation, which left him 
dry of information, I shook hands with him and told him I was sorry I 
couldn't believe him.  And a month afterward I landed on the coast of 
this Gaudymala with $1,300 that I had been saving up for five years.  
I thought I knew what Indians liked, and I fixed myself accordingly.  
I loaded down four pack-mules with red woollen blankets, wrought-iron 
pails, jewelled side-combs for the ladies, glass necklaces, and 
safety-razors.  I hired a black mozo, who was supposed to be a mule-
driver and an interpreter too.  It turned out that he could interpret 
mules all right, but he drove the English language much too hard.  His 
name sounded like a Yale key when you push it in wrong side up, but I 
called him McClintock, which was close to the noise.

"Well, this gold village was forty miles up in the mountains, and it 
took us nine days to find it.  But one afternoon McClintock led the 
other mules and myself over a rawhide bridge stretched across a 
precipice five thousand feet deep, it seemed to me.  The hoofs of the 
beasts drummed on it just like before George M.  Cohan makes his first 
entrance on the stage.

"This village was built of mud and stone, and had no streets.  Some 
few yellow-and-brown persons popped their heads out-of-doors, looking 
about like Welsh rabbits with Worcester sauce on em.  Out of the 
biggest house, that had a kind of a porch around it, steps a big white 
man, red as a beet in color, dressed in fine tanned deerskin clothes, 
with a gold chain around his neck, smoking a cigar.  I've seen United 
States Senators of his style of features and build, also head-waiters 
and cops.

"He walks up and takes a look at us, while McClintock disembarks and 
begins to interpret to the lead mule while he smokes a cigarette.

"'Hello, Buttinsky,' says the fine man to me.  'How did you get in the 
game?  I didn't see you buy any chips.  Who gave you the keys of the 
city?'

"'I'm a poor traveller,' says I.  'Especially mule-back.  You'll 
excuse me.  Do you run a hack line or only a bluff?'

"'Segregate yourself from your pseudo-equine quadruped,' says he, 'and 
come inside.'

"He raises a finger, and a villager runs up.

"'This man will take care of your outfit,' says he, 'and I'll take 
care of you.'

"He leads me into the biggest house, and sets out the chairs and a 
kind of a drink the color of milk.  It was the finest room I ever saw.  
The stone walls was hung all over with silk shawls, and there was red 
and yellow rugs on the floor, and jars of red pottery and Angora goat 
skins, and enough bamboo furniture to misfurnish half a dozen seaside 
cottages.

"'In the first place,' says the man, 'you want to know who I am.  I'm 
sole lessee and proprietor of this tribe of Indians.  They call me the 
Grand Yacuma, which is to say King or Main Finger of the bunch.  I've 
got more power here than a charge d'affaires, a charge of dynamite, 
and a charge account at Tiffany's combined.  In fact, I'm the Big 
Stick, with as many extra knots on it as there is on the record run of 
the Lusitania.  Oh, I read the papers now and then,' says he.  'Now, 
let's hear your entitlements,' he goes on, 'and the meeting will be 
open.'

"'Well,' says I, 'I am known as one W.  D.  Finch.  Occupation, 
capitalist.  Address, 54' East Thirty-second--'

"'New York,' chips in the Noble Grand.  'I know,' says he, grinning.  
'It ain't the first time you've seen it go down on the blotter.  I can 
tell by the way you hand it out.  Well, explain "capitalist."'

"I tells this boss plain what I come for and how I come to came.

"'Gold-dust ?' says he, looking as puzzled as a baby that's got a 
feather stuck on its molasses finger.  'That's funny.  This ain't a 
gold-mining country.  And you invested all your capital on a 
stranger's story?  Well, well!  These Indians of mine--they are the 
last of the tribe of Peehes--are simple as children.  They know 
nothing of the purchasing power of gold.  I'm afraid you've been 
imposed on,' says he.

"'Maybe so,' says I, 'but it sounded pretty straight to me.'

"'W.  D.,' says the King, all of a sudden, 'I'll give you a square 
deal.  It ain't often I get to talk to a white man, and I'll give you 
a show for your money.  It may be these constituents of mine have a 
few grains of gold-dust hid away in their clothes.  To-morrow you may 
get out these goods you've brought up and see if you can make any 
sales.  Now, I'm going to introduce myself unofficially.  My name is 
Shane--Patrick Shane.  I own this tribe of Peche Indians by right of 
conquest--single handed and unafraid.  I drifted up here four years 
ago, and won 'em by my size and complexion and nerve.  I learned their 
language in six weeks-it's easy: you simply emit a string of 
consonants as long as your breath holds out and then point at what 
you're asking for.

"'I conquered 'em, spectacularly,' goes on King Shane, 'and then I 
went at 'em with economical politics, law, sleight-of-hand, and a kind 
of New England ethics and parsimony.  Every Sunday, or as near as I 
can guess at it, I preach to 'em in the council-house (I'm the 
council) on the law of supply and demand.  I praise supply and knock 
demand.  I use the same text every time.  You wouldn't think, W.  D.,' 
says Shane, 'that I had poetry in me, would you?'

"'Well,' says I, 'I wouldn't know whether to call it poetry or not.'

"'Tennyson,' says Shane,  'furnishes the poetic gospel I preach.  I 
always considered him the boss poet.  Here's the way the text goes:


"For, not to admire, if a man could learn it, were more
Than to walk all day like a Sultan of old in a garden of spice."


"'You see, I teach 'em to cut out demand--that supply is the main 
thing.  I teach 'em not to desire anything beyond their simplest 
needs.  A little mutton, a little cocoa, and a little fruit brought up 
from the coast--that's all they want to make 'cm happy.  I've got 'em 
well trained.  They make their own clothes and hats out of a vegetable 
fibre and straw, and they're a contented lot.  It's a great thing,' 
winds up Shane, 'to have made a people happy by the incultivation of 
such simple institutions.'

"Well, the next day, with the King's permission, I has the McClintock 
open up a couple of sacks of my goods in the little plaza of the 
village.  The Indians swarmed around by the hundred and looked the 
bargain-counter over.  I shook red blankets at 'em, flashed finger-
rings and ear-bobs, tried pearl necklaces and sidecombs on the women, 
and a line of red hosiery on the men.  'Twas no use.  They looked on 
like hungry graven images, but I never made a sale.  I asked 
McClintock what was the trouble.  Mac yawned three or four times, 
rolled a cigarette, made one or two confidential side remarks to a 
mule, and then condescended to inform me that the people had no money.

"Just then up strolls King Patrick, big and red 'and royal as usual, 
with the gold chain over his chest and his cigar in front of him.

"'How's business, W.  D.?' he asks.

"'Fine,' says I.  'It's a bargain-day rush.  I've got one more line of 
goods to offer before I shut up shop.  I'll try 'em with safety-
razors.  I've' got two gross that I bought at 'a fire sale.'

"Shane laughs till some kind of mameluke or private secretary he 
carries with him has to hold him up.

"'0 my sainted Aunt Jerusha!' says he, 'ain't you one of the Babes in 
the Goods, W.  D.?  Don't you know that no Indians ever shave? They 
pull out their whiskers instead.'

"'Well,' says I, 'that's just what these razors would do for 'em--they 
wouldn't have any kick coming if they used 'em once.'

"Shane went away, and I could hear him laughing a block, if there had 
been any block.

"'Tell 'em,' says I to McClintock, 'it ain't money I want--tell 'em 
I'll take gold-dust.  Tell 'em I'll allow 'em sixteen dollars an ounce 
for it in trade.  That's what I'm out for--the dust.'

"Mac interprets, and you'd have thought a squadron of cops had charged 
the crowd to disperse it.  Every uncle's nephew and aunt's niece of 
'em faded away inside of two minutes.

"At the royal palace that night me and the King talked it over.

"'They've got the dust hid out somewhere,' says I, 'or they wouldn't 
have been so sensitive about it.'

"'They haven't,' says Shane.  'What's this gag you've got about gold?  
You been reading Edward Allen Poe?  They ain't got any gold.'

"'They put it in quills,' says I, 'and then they empty it in jars, and 
then into sacks of twenty-five pounds each.  I got it straight.'

"'W.  D.,' says Shane, laughing and chewing his cigar, 'I don't often 
see a white man, and I feel like putting you on.  I don't think you'll 
get away from here alive, anyhow, so I'm going to tell you.  Come over 
here.'

''He draws aside a silk fibre curtain in a corner of the room and 
shows me a pile of buckskin sacks.

"'Forty of 'em,' says Shane.  'One arroba in each one.  In round 
numbers, $220,000 worth of gold-dust you see there.  It's all mine.  
It belongs to the Grand Yacuma.  They bring it all to me.  Two hundred 
and twenty thousand dollars--think of that, you glass-bead peddler,' 
says Shane--' and all mine.'

"'Little good it does you,' says I, contemptuously and hatefully.  
'And so you are the government depository of this gang of money-less 
money-makers?  Don't you pay enough interest on it to enable one of 
your depositors to buy an Augusta (Maine) Pullman carbon diamond worth 
$200 for $4.85 ?'

"'Listen,' says Patrick Shane, with the sweat coming out on his brow.  
' I'm confidant with you, as you have, somehow, enlisted my regards.  
Did you ever,' he says, 'feel the avoirdupois power of gold--not the 
troy weight of it, but the sixteen-ounces-to-the-pound force of it?'

"'Never,' says I.  'I never take in any bad money.'

"Shane drops down on the floor and throws his arms over the sacks of 
gold-dust.

"'I love it,, says he.  'I want to feel the touch of it day and night.  
It's my pleasure in life.  I come in this room, and I'm a king and a 
rich man.  I'll be a millionaire in another year.  The pile's getting 
bigger every month.  I've got the whole tribe washing out the sands in 
the creeks.  I'm the happiest man in the world, W.  D.  I just want to 
be near this gold, and know it's mine and it's increasing every day.  
Now, you know,' says he, 'why my Indians wouldn't buy your goods.  
They can't.  They bring all the dust to me.  I'm their king.  I've 
taught 'em not to desire or admire.  You might as well shut up shop.'

"'I'll tell you what you are,' says I.  'You're a plain, contemptible 
miser.  You preach supply and you forget demand.  Now, supply,' I goes 
on, 'is never anything but supply.  On the contrary,' says I, 'demand 
is a much broader syllogism and assertion.  Demand includes the rights 
of our women and children, and charity and friendship, and even a 
little begging on the street corners.  They've both got to harmonize 
equally.  And I've got a few things up my commercial sleeve yet,' says 
I, 'that may jostle your preconceived ideas of politics and economy.

"The next morning I had McClintock bring tip another mule-load of 
goods to the plaza and open it up.  The people gathered around the 
same as before.

"I got out the finest line of necklaces, bracelets, hair-combs, and 
earrings that I carried, and had the women put 'em on.  And then I 
played trumps.

"Out of my last pack I opened up a half gross of hand-mirrors, with 
solid tinfoil backs, and passed 'em around among the ladies.  That was 
the first introduction of looking-glasses among the Peche Indians.

"Shane walks by with his big laugh.

"'Business looking up any?' he asks.

"'It's looking at itself right now,' says I.

"By-and-by a kind of a murmur goes through the crowd.  The women had 
looked into the magic crystal and seen that they were beautiful, and 
was confiding the secret to the men.  The men seemed to be urging the 
lack of money and the hard times just before the election, but their 
excuses didn't go.

"Then was my time.

"I called McClintock away from an animated conversation with his mules 
and told him to do some interpreting.

"'Tell 'em,' says I, 'that gold-dust will buy for them these befitting 
ornaments for kings and queens of the earth.  Tell 'em the yellow sand 
they wash out of the waters for the High Sanctified Yacomay and Chop 
Suey of the tribe will buy the precious jewels and charms that will 
make them beautiful and preserve and pickle them from evil spirits.  
Tell 'em the Pittsburg banks are paying four per cent.  interest on 
deposits by mail, while this get-rich-frequently custodian of the 
public funds ain't even paying attention.  Keep telling 'em, Mac,' 
says I, 'to let the gold-dust family do their work.  Talk to 'em like 
a born anti-Bryanite,' says I.  'Remind 'em that Tom Watson's gone 
back to Georgia,' says I.

"McClintock waves his hand affectionately at one of his mules, and 
then hurls a few stickfuls of minion type at the mob of shoppers.

"A gutta-percha Indian man, with a lady hanging on his arm, with three 
strings of my fish-scale jewelry and imitation marble beads around her 
neck, stands up on a block of stone and makes a talk that sounds like 
a man shaking dice in a box to fill aces and sixes.

"'He says,' says McClintock, 'that the people not know that gold-dust 
will buy their things.  The women very mad.  The Grand Yacuma tell 
them it no good but for keep to make bad spirits keep away.'

"'You can't keep bad spirits away from money,' says I.

"'They say,' goes on McClintock, 'the Yacuma fool them.  They raise 
plenty row.'

"'Going! Going!' says I.  'Gold-dust or cash takes the entire stock.  
The dust weighed before you, and taken at sixteen dollars the ounce--
the highest price on the Gaudymala coast.'

"Then the crowd disperses all of a sudden, and I don't know what's up.  
Mac and me packs away the hand-mirrors and jewelry they had handed 
back to us, and we had the mules back to the corral they had set apart 
for our garage.

"While we was there we hear great noises of shouting, and down across 
the plaza runs Patrick Shane, hotfoot, with his clothes ripped half 
off, and scratches on his face like a cat had fought him hard for 
every one of its lives.

"'They're looting the treasury, W.  D.,' he sings out.  'They're going 
to kill me and you, too.  Unlimber a couple of mules at once.  We'll 
have to make a get-away in a couple of minutes.'

"'They've found out,' says I,' the truth about the law of supply and 
demand.'

"'It's the women, mostly,' says the King.  'And they used to admire me 
so!'

"'They hadn't seen looking-glasses then,' says I.

"'They've got knives and hatchets,' says Shane; 'hurry !'

"'Take that roan mule,' says I.  'You and your law of supply!  I'll 
ride the dun, for he's two knots per hour the faster.  The roan has a 
stiff knee, but he may make it,' says I.  'If you'd included 
reciprocity in your political platform I might have given you the 
dun,' says I.

"Shane and McClintock and me mounted our mules and rode across the 
rawhide bridge just as the Peches reached the other side and began 
firing stones and long knives at us.  We cut the thongs that held up 
our end of the bridge and headed for the coast."

A tall, bulky policeman came into Finch's
shop at that moment and leaned an elbow on the showcase.  Finch nodded 
at him friendly.

"I heard down at Casey's," said the cop, in rumbling, husky tones, 
"that there was going to be a picnic of the Hat-Cleaners' Union over 
at Bergen Beach, Sunday.  Is that right?"

"Sure," said Finch.  "There'll be a dandy time."

"Gimme five tickets," said the cop, throwing a five-dollar bill on the 
showcase.

"Why,'' said Finch, "ain't you going it a little too--"

"Go to h--!" said the cop.  "You got 'em to sell, ain't you?  
Somebody's got to buy 'em.  Wish I could go along."

I was glad to See Finch so well thought of in his neighborhood.

And then in came a wee girl of seven, with dirty face and pure blue 
eyes and a smutched and insufficient dress.

"Mamma says," she recited shrilly, "that you must give me eighty cents 
for the grocer and nineteen for the milkman and five cents for me to 
buy hokey-pokey with--but she didn't say that," the elf concluded, 
with a hopeful but honest grin.

Finch shelled out the money, counting it twice, but I noticed that the 
total sum that the small girl received was one dollar and four cents.

"That's the right kind of a law," remarked Finch, as he carefully 
broke some of the stitches of my hatband so that it would assuredly 
come off within a few days--"the law of supply and demand.  But 
they've both got to work together.  I'll bet," he went on, with his 
dry smile, "she'll get jelly beans with that nickel--she likes 'em.  
What's supply if there's no demand for it?"

"What ever became of the King?" I asked, curiously.
''Oh, I might have told you," said Finch.  "That was Shane came in and 
bought the tickets.  He came back with me, and he's on the force now."




BURIED TREASURE



There are many kinds of fools.  Now, will everybody please sit still 
until they are called upon specifically to rise?

I had been every kind of fool except one.  I had expended my 
patrimony, pretended my matrimony, played poker, lawn-tennis, and 
bucket-shops--parted soon with my money in many ways.  But there 
remained one rule of the wearer of cap and bells that I had not 
played.  That was the Seeker after Buried Treasure.  To few does the 
delectable furor come.  But of all the would-be followers in the hoof-
prints of King Midas none has found a pursuit so rich in pleasurable 
promise.

But, going back from my theme a while--as lame pens must do--I was a 
fool of the sentimental soft.  I saw May Martha Mangum, and was hers.  
She was eighteen, the color of the white ivory keys of a new piano, 
beautiful, and possessed by the exquisite solemnity and pathetic 
witchery of an unsophisticated angel doomed to live in a small, dull, 
Texas prairie-town.  She had a spirit and charm that could have 
enabled her to pluck rubies like raspberries from the crown of Belgium 
or any other sporty kingdom, but she did not know it, and I did not 
paint the picture for her.

You see, I wanted May Martha Mangum for to have and to hold.  I wanted 
her to abide with me, and put my slippers and pipe away every day in 
places where they cannot be found of evenings.

May Martha's father was a man hidden behind whiskers and spectacles.  
He lived for bugs and butterflies and all insects that fly or crawl or 
buzz or get down your back or in the butter.  He was an etymologist, 
or words to that effect.  He spent his life seining the air for flying 
fish of the June-bug order, and then sticking pins through 'em and 
calling 'em names.

He and May Martha were the whole family.  He prized her highly as a 
fine specimen of the racibus humanus because she saw that he had food 
at times, and put his clothes on right side before, and kept his 
alcohol-bottles filled.  Scientists, they say, are apt to be absent-
minded.

There was another besides myself who thought May Martha Mangum one to 
be desired.  That was Goodloe Banks, a young man just home from 
college.  He had all the attainments to be found in books--Latin, 
Greek, philosophy, and especially the higher branches of mathematics 
and logic.

If it hadn't been for his habit of pouring out this information and 
learning on every one that he addressed, I'd have liked him pretty 
well.  But, even as it was, he and I were, you would have thought, 
great pals.

We got together every time we could because each of us wanted to pump 
the other for whatever straws we could to find which way the wind blew 
from the heart of May Martha Mangum--rather a mixed metaphor; Goodloe 
Banks would never have been guilty of that.  That is the way of 
rivals.

You might say that Goodloe ran to books, manners, culture, rowing, 
intellect, and clothes.  I would have put you in mind more of baseball 
and Friday-night debating societies--by way of culture--and maybe of a 
good horseback rider.

But in our talks together, and in our visits and conversation with May 
Martha, neither Goodloe Banks nor I could find out which one of us she 
preferred.  May Martha was a natural-born non-committal, and knew in 
her cradle how to keep people guessing.

As I said, old man Mangum was absentminded.  After a long time he 
found out one day--a little butterfly must have told him-that two 
young men were trying to throw a net over the head of the young 
person, a daughter, or some such technical appendage, who looked after 
his comforts.

I never knew scientists could rise to such occasions.  Old Mangum 
orally labelled and classified Goodloe and myself easily among the 
lowest orders of the vertebrates; and in English, too, without going 
any further into Latin than the simple references to Orgetorix, Rex 
Helvetii--which is as far as I ever went, myself.  And he told us that 
if he ever caught us around his house again he would add us to his 
collection.

Goodloe Banks and I remained away five days, expecting the storm to 
subside.  When we dared to call at the house again May Martha Mangum 
and her father were gone.  Gone!  The house they had rented was 
closed.  Their little store of goods and chattels was gone also.

And not a word of farewell to either of us from May Martha--not a 
white, fluttering note pinned to the hawthorn-bush; not a chalk-mark 
on the gate-post nor a post-card in the post-office to give us a clew.

For two months Goodloe Banks and I--separately--tried every scheme we 
could think of to track the runaways.  We used our friendship and 
influence with the ticket-agent, with livery-stable men, railroad 
conductors, and our one lone, lorn constable, but without results.

Then we became better friends and worse enemies than ever.  We 
forgathered in the back room of Snyder's saloon every afternoon after 
work, and played dominoes, and laid conversational traps to find out 
from each other if anything had been discovered.  That is the way of 
rivals.

Now, Goodloe Banks had a sarcastic way of displaying his own learning 
and putting me in the class that was reading "Poor Jane Ray, her bird 
is dead, she cannot play."  Well, I rather liked Goodloe, and I had a 
contempt for his college learning, and I was always regarded as good-
natured, so I kept my temper.  And I was trying to find out if he knew 
anything about May Martha, so I endured his society.

In talking things over one afternoon he said to me:

"Suppose you do find her, Ed, whereby would you profit?  Miss Mangum 
has a mind.  Perhaps it is yet uncultured, but she is destined for 
higher things than you could give her.  I have talked with no one who 
seemed to appreciate more the enchantment of the ancient poets and 
writers and the modern cults that have assimilated and expended their 
philosophy of life.  Don't you think you are wasting your time looking 
for her?"

"My idea," said I, "of a happy home is an eight-room house in a grove 
of live-oaks by the side of a charco on a Texas prairie.  A piano," I 
went on, "with an automatic player in the sitting-room, three thousand 
head of cattle under fence for a starter, a buckboard and ponies 
always hitched at a post for 'the missus '--and May Martha Mangum to 
spend the profits of the ranch as she pleases, and to abide with me, 
and put my slippers and pipe away every day in places where they 
cannot be found of evenings.  That," said I, "is what is to be; and a 
fig--a dried, Smyrna, dago-stand fig--for your curriculums, cults, and 
philosophy."

"She is meant for higher things," repeated Goodloe Banks.

"Whatever she is meant for," I answered, just now she is out of 
pocket.  And I shall find her as soon as I can without aid of the 
colleges."

"The game is blocked," said Goodloe, putting down a domino and we had 
the beer.

Shortly after that a young farmer whom I knew came into town and 
brought me a folded blue paper.  He said his grandfather had just 
died.  I concealed a tear, and he went on to say that the old man had 
jealously guarded this paper for twenty years.  He left it to his 
family as part of his estate, the rest of which consisted of two mules 
and a hypotenuse of non-arable land.

The sheet of paper was of the old, blue kind used during the rebellion 
of the abolitionists against the secessionists.  It was dated June 14, 
1863, and it described the hiding-place of ten burro-loads of gold and 
silver coin valued at three hundred thousand dollars.  Old Rundle--
grandfather of his grandson, Sam--was given the information by a 
Spanish priest who was in on the treasure-burying, and who died many 
years before--no, afterward--in old Rundle's house.  Old Rundle wrote 
it down from dictation.

"Why didn't your father look this up?" I asked young Rundle.

"He went blind before he could do so," he replied.

"Why didn't you hunt for it yourself?" I asked.

"Well," said he, "I've only known about the paper for ten years.  
First there was the spring ploughin' to do, and then choppin' the 
weeds out of the corn; and then come takin' fodder; and mighty soon 
winter was on us.  It seemed to run along that way year after year."

That sounded perfectly reasonable to me, so I took it up with young 
Lee Rundle at once.

The directions on the paper were simple.  The whole burro cavalcade 
laden with the treasure started from an old Spanish mission in Dolores 
County.  They travelled due south by the compass until they reached 
the Alamito River.  They forded this, and buried the treasure on the 
top of a little mountain shaped like a pack-saddle standing in a row 
between two higher ones.  A heap of stones marked the place of the 
buried treasure.  All the party except the Spanish priest were killed 
by Indians a few days later.  The secret was a monopoly.  It looked 
good to me.

Lee Rundle suggested that we rig out a camping outfit, hire a surveyor 
to run out the line from the Spanish mission, and then spend the three 
hundred thousand dollars seeing the sights in Fort Worth.  But, 
without being highly educated, I knew a way to save time and expense.

We went to the State land-office and had a practical, what they call a 
"working," sketch made of all the surveys of land from the old mission 
to the Alamito River.  On this map I drew a line due southward to the 
river.  The length of lines of each survey and section of land was 
accurately given on the sketch.  By these we found the point on the 
river and had a "connection" made with it and an important, well-
identified corner of the Los Animos five-league survey--a grant made 
by King Philip of Spain.

By doing this we did not need to have the line run out by a surveyor.  
It was a great saving of expense and time.

So, Lee Rundle and I fitted out a two-horse wagon team with all the 
accessories, and drove a hundred and forty-nine miles to Chico, the 
nearest town to the point we wished to reach.  There we picked up a 
deputy county surveyor.  He found the corner of the Los Animos survey 
for us, ran out the five thousand seven hundred and twenty varas west 
that our sketch called for, laid a stone on the spot, had coffee and 
bacon, and caught the mail-stage back to Chico.

I was pretty sure we would get that three hundred thousand dollars.  
Lee Rundle's was to be only one-third, because I was paying all the 
expenses.  With that two hundred thousand dollars I knew I could find 
May Martha Mangum if she was on earth.  And with it I could flutter 
the butterflies in old man Mangum's dove-cot, too.  If I could find 
that treasure!

But Lee and I established camp.  Across the river were a dozen little 
mountains densely covered by cedar-brakes, but not one shaped like a 
pack-saddle.  That did not deter us.  Appearances are deceptive.  A 
pack-saddle, like beauty, may exist only in the eye of the beholder.

I and the grandson of the treasure examined those cedar-covered hills 
with the care of a lady hunting for the wicked flea.  We explored 
every side, top, circumference, mean elevation, angle, slope, and 
concavity of every one for two miles up and down the river.  We spent 
four days doing so.  Then we hitched up the roan and the dun, and 
hauled the remains of the coffee and bacon the one hundred and forty-
nine miles back to Concho City.

Lee Rundle chewed much tobacco on the return trip.  I was busy 
driving, because I was in a hurry.

As shortly as could be after our empty return Goodloe Banks and I 
forgathered in the back room of Snyder's saloon to play dominoes and 
fish for information.  I told Goodloe about my expedition after the 
buried treasure.

"If I could have found that three hundred thousand dollars," I said to 
him, "I could have scoured and sifted the surface of the earth to find 
May Martha Mangum."

"She is meant for higher things," said Goodloe.  "I shall find her 
myself.  But, tell me how you went about discovering the spot where 
this unearthed increment was imprudently buried."

I told him in the smallest detail.  I showed him the draughtsman's 
sketch with the distances marked plainly upon it.

After glancing over it in a masterly way, he leaned back in his chair 
and bestowed upon me an explosion of sardonic, superior, collegiate 
laughter.

"Well, you are a fool, Jim," he said, when he could speak.

"It's your play," said I, patiently, fingering my double-six.

"Twenty," said Goodloe, making two crosses on the table with his 
chalk.

"Why am I a fool?" I asked.  "Buried treasure has been found before in 
many places."

"Because," said he, "in calculating the point on the river where your 
line would strike you neglected to allow for the variation.  The 
variation there would be nine degrees west.  Let me have your pencil."

Goodloe Banks figured rapidly on the back of an envelope.

"The distance, from north to south, of the line run from the Spanish 
mission," said he, "is exactly twenty-two miles.  It was run by a 
pocket-compass, according to your story.  Allowing for the variation, 
the point on the Alamito River where you should have searched for your 
treasure is exactly six miles and nine hundred and forty-five varas 
farther west than the place you hit upon.  Oh, what a fool you are, 
Jim!"

"What is this variation that you speak of?" I asked.  "I thought 
figures never lied."

"The variation of the magnetic compass," said Goodloe, "from the true 
meridian."

He smiled in his superior way; and then I saw come out in his face the 
singular, eager, consuming cupidity of the seeker after buried 
treasure.

"Sometimes," he said with the air of the oracle, "these old traditions 
of hidden money are not without foundation.  Suppose you let me look 
over that paper describing the location.  Perhaps together we might--"

The result was that Goodloe Banks and I, rivals in love, became 
companions in adventure.  We went to Chico by stage from Huntersburg, 
the nearest railroad town.  In Chico we hired a team drawing a covered 
spring-wagon and camping paraphernalia.  We had the same surveyor run 
out our distance, as revised by Goodloe and his variations, and then 
dismissed him and sent him on his homeward road.

It was night when we arrived.  I fed the horses and made a fire near 
the bank of the river and cooked supper.  Goodloe would have helped, 
but his education had not fitted him for practical things.

But while I worked he cheered me with the expression of great thoughts 
handed down from the dead ones of old.  He quoted some translations 
from the Greek at much length.

"Anacreon," he explained.  "That was a favorite passage with Miss 
Mangum--as I recited it."

"She is meant for higher things," said I, repeating his phrase.

"Can there be anything higher," asked Goodloe, "than to dwell in the 
society of the classics, to live in the atmosphere of learning and 
culture?  You have often decried education.  What of your wasted 
efforts through your ignorance of simple mathematics?  How soon would 
you have found your treasure if my knowledge had not shown you your 
error?"

"We'll take a look at those hills across the river first," said I, 
"and see what we find.  I am still doubtful about variations.  I have 
been brought up to believe that the needle is true to the pole."

The next morning was a bright June one.  We were up early and had 
breakfast.  Goodloe was charmed.  He recited--Keats, I think it was, 
and Kelly or Shelley--while I broiled the bacon.  We were getting 
ready to cross the river, which was little more than a shallow creek 
there, and explore the many sharp-peaked cedar-covered hills on the 
other side.

"My good Ulysses," said Goodloe, slapping me on the shoulder while I 
was washing the tin breakfast-plates, "let me see the enchanted 
document once more.  I believe it gives directions for climbing the 
hill shaped like a pack-saddle.  I never saw a pack-saddle.  What is 
it like, Jim?"

"Score one against culture," said I.  "I'll know it when I see it."

Goodloe was looking at old Rundle's document when he ripped out a most 
uncollegiate swear-word.

"Come here," he said, holding the paper up against the sunlight.  
"Look at that," he said, laying his finger against it.

On the blue paper--a thing I had never noticed before--I saw stand out 
in white letters the word and figures : "Malvern, 1898."

"What about it?" I asked.

"It's the water-mark," said Goodloe.  "The paper was manufactured in 
1898.  The writing on the paper is dated 1863.  This is a palpable 
fraud."

"Oh, I don't know," said I.  "The Rundles are pretty reliable, plain, 
uneducated country people.  Maybe the paper manufacturers tried to 
perpetrate a swindle."

And then Goodloe Banks went as wild as his education permitted.  He 
dropped the glasses off his nose and glared at me.

"I've often told you you were a fool," he said.  "You have let 
yourself be imposed upon by a clodhopper.  And you have imposed upon 
me."

"How," I asked, "have I imposed upon you ?"

"By your ignorance," said he.  "Twice I have discovered serious flaws 
in your plans that a common-school education should have enabled you 
to avoid.  And," he continued, "I have been put to expense that I 
could ill afford in pursuing this swindling quest.  I am done with 
it."

I rose and pointed a large pewter spoon at him, fresh from the dish-
water.

"Goodloe Banks," I said, "I care not one parboiled navy bean for your 
education.  I always barely tolerated it in any one, and I despised it 
in you.  What has your learning done for you?  It is a curse to 
yourself and a bore to your friends.  Away," I said--"away with your 
water-marks and variations!  They are nothing to me.  They shall not 
deflect me from the quest."

I pointed with my spoon across the river to a small mountain shaped 
like a pack-saddle.

"I am going to search that mountain," I went on, "for the treasure.  
Decide now whether you are in it or not.  If you wish to let a water-
mark or a variation shake your soul, you are no true adventurer.  
Decide."

A white cloud of dust began to rise far down the river road.  It was 
the mail-wagon from Hesperus to Chico.  Goodloe flagged it.

"I am done with the swindle," said he, sourly.  "No one but a fool 
would pay any attention to that paper now.  Well, you always were a 
fool, Jim.  I leave you to your fate."

He gathered his personal traps, climbed into the mail-wagon, adjusted 
his glasses nervously, and flew away in a cloud of dust.

After I had washed the dishes and staked the horses on new grass, I 
crossed the shallow river and made my way slowly through the cedar-
brakes up to the top of the hill shaped like a pack-saddle.

It was a wonderful June day.  Never in my life had I seen so many 
birds, so many butter-flies, dragon-flies, grasshoppers, and such 
winged and stinged beasts of the air and fields.

I investigated the hill shaped like a pack-saddle from base to summit.  
I found an absolute absence of signs relating to buried treasure.  
There was no pile of stones, no ancient blazes on the trees, none of 
the evidences of the three hundred thousand dollars, as set forth in 
the document of old man Rundle.

I came down the hill in the cool of the afternoon.  Suddenly, out of 
the cedar-brake I stepped into a beautiful green valley where a 
tributary small stream ran into the Alamito River.

And there I was started to see what I took to be a wild man, with 
unkempt beard and ragged hair, pursuing a giant butterfly with 
brilliant wings.

"Perhaps he is an escaped madman," I thought; and wondered how he had 
strayed so far from seats of education and learning.

And then I took a few more steps and saw a vine-covered cottage near 
the small stream.  And in a little grassy glade I saw May Martha 
Mangum plucking wild flowers.

She straightened up and looked at me.  For the first time since I knew 
her I saw her face--which was the color of the white keys of a new 
piano--turn pink.  I walked toward her without a word.  She let the 
gathered flowers trickle slowly from her hand to the grass.

"I knew you would come, Jim," she said clearly.  "Father wouldn't let 
me write, but I knew you would come.

What followed you may guess--there was my wagon and team just across 
the river.


I've often wondered what good too much education is to a man if he 
can't use it for himself.  If all the benefits of it are to go to 
others, where does it come in?

For May Martha Mangum abides with me.  There is an eight-room house in 
a live-oak grove, and a piano with an automatic player, and a good 
start toward the three thousand head of cattle is under fence.

And when I ride home at night my pipe and slippers are put away in 
places where they cannot be found.

But who cares for that? Who cares--who cares?




TO HIM WHO WAITS



The Hermit of the Hudson was hustling about his cave with unusual 
animation.

The cave was on or in the top of a little spur of the Catskills that 
had strayed down to the river's edge, and, not having a ferry ticket, 
had to stop there.  The bijou mountains were densely wooded and were 
infested by ferocious squirrels and woodpeckers that forever menaced 
the summer transients.  Like a badly sewn strip of white braid, a 
macadamized road ran between the green skirt of the hills and the 
foamy lace of the river's edge.  A dim path wound from the comfortable 
road up a rocky height to the hermit's cave.  One mile upstream was 
the Viewpoint Inn, to which summer folk from the city came; leaving 
cool, electric-fanned apartments that they might be driven about in 
burning sunshine, shrieking, in gasoline launches, by spindle-legged 
Modreds bearing the blankest of shields.

Train your lorgnette upon the hermit and let your eye receive the 
personal touch that shall endear you to the hero.

A man of forty, judging him fairly, with long hair curling at the 
ends, dramatic eyes, and a forked brown beard like those that were 
imposed upon the West some years ago by self-appointed "divine 
healers" who succeeded the grasshopper crop.  His outward vesture 
appeared to be kind of gunny-sacking cut and made into a garment that 
would have made the fortune of a London tailor.  His long, well-shaped 
fingers, delicate nose, and poise of manner raised him high above the 
class of hermits who fear water and bury money in oyster-cans in their 
caves in spots indicated by rude crosses chipped in the stone wall 
above.

The hermit's home was not altogether a cave.  The cave was an addition 
to the hermitage, which was a rude hut made of poles daubed with clay 
and covered with the best quality of rust-proof zinc roofing.

In the house proper there were stone slabs for seats, a rustic 
bookcase made of unplaned poplar planks, and a table formed of a 
wooden slab laid across two upright pieces of granite--something 
between the furniture of a Druid temple and that of a Broadway 
beefsteak dungeon.  Hung against the walls were skins of wild animals 
purchased in the vicinity of Eighth Street and University Place, New 
York.

The rear of the cabin merged into the cave.  There the hermit cooked 
his meals on a rude stone hearth.  With infinite patience and an old 
axe he had chopped natural shelves in the rocky walls.  On them stood 
his stores of flour, bacon, lard, talcum-powder, kerosene, baking-
powder, soda-mint tablets, pepper, salt, and Olivo-Cremo Emulsion for 
chaps and roughness of the hands and face.

The hermit had hermited there for ten years.  He was an asset of the 
Viewpoint Inn.  To its guests he was second in interest only to the 
Mysterious Echo in the Haunted Glen.  And the Lover's Leap beat him 
only a few inches, flat-footed.  He was known far (but not very wide, 
on account of the topography) as a.  scholar of brilliant intellect 
who had forsworn the world because he had been jilted in a love 
affair.  Every Saturday night the Viewpoint Inn sent to him 
surreptitiously a basket of provisions.  He never left the immediate 
outskirts of his hermitage.  Guests of the inn who visited him said 
his store of knowledge, wit, and scintillating philosophy were simply 
wonderful, you know.

That summer the Viewpoint Inn was crowded with guests.  So, on 
Saturday nights, there were extra cans of tomatoes, and sirloin steak, 
instead of "rounds," in the hermit's basket.

Now you have the material allegations in the case.  So, make way for 
Romance.

Evidently the hermit expected a visitor.  He carefully combed his long 
hair and parted his apostolic beard.  When the ninety-eight-cent 
alarm-clock on a stone shelf announced the hour of five he picked up 
his gunny-sacking skirts, brushed them carefully, gathered an oaken 
staff, and strolled slowly into the thick woods that surrounded the 
hermitage.

He had not long to wait.  Up the faint pathway, slippery with its 
carpet of pine-needles, toiled Beatrix, youngest and fairest of the 
famous Trenholme sisters.  She was all in blue from hat to canvas 
pumps, varying in tint from the shade of the tinkle of a bluebell at 
daybreak on a spring Saturday to the deep hue of a Monday morning at 
nine when the washer-woman has failed to show up.

Beatrix dug her cerulean parasol deep into the pine-needles and 
sighed.  The hermit, on the q.  t., removed a grass burr from the 
ankle of one sandalled foot with the big toe of his other one.

She blued--and almost starched and ironed him--with her cobalt eyes.

"It must be so nice," she said in little, tremulous gasps, "to be a 
hermit, and have ladies climb mountains to talk to you."

The hermit folded his arms and leaned against a tree.  Beatrix, with a 
sigh, settled down upon the mat of pine-needles like a bluebird upon 
her nest.  The hermit followed suit; drawing his feet rather awkwardly 
under his gunny-sacking.

"It must be nice to be a mountain," said he, with ponderous lightness, 
"and have angels in blue climb up you instead of flying over you."

"Mamma had neuralgia," said Beatrix, "and went to bed, or I couldn't 
have come.  It's dreadfully hot at that horrid old inn.  But we hadn't 
the money to go anywhere else this summer."

"Last night," said the hermit, "I climbed to the top of that big rock 
above us.  I could see the lights of the inn and hear a strain or two 
of the music when the wind was right.  I imagined you moving 
gracefully in the arms of others to the dreamy music of the waltz amid 
the fragrance of flowers.  Think how lonely I must have been!"

The youngest, handsomest, and poorest of the famous Trenholme sisters 
sighed.

"You haven't quite hit it," she said, plaintively.  "I was moving 
gracefully at the arms of another.  Mamma had one of her periodical 
attacks of rheumatism in both elbows and shoulders, and I had to rub 
them for an hour with that horrid old liniment.  I hope you didn't 
think that smelled like flowers.  You know, there were some West Point 
boys and a yachtload of young men from the city at last evening's 
weekly dance.  I've known mamma to sit by an open window for three 
hours with one-half of her registering 85 degrees and the other half 
frostbitten, and never sneeze once.  But just let a bunch of 
ineligibles come around where I am, and she'll begin to swell at the 
knuckles and shriek with pain.  And I have to take her to her room and 
rub her arms.  To see mamma dressed you'd be surprised to know the 
number of square inches of surface there are to her arms.  I think it 
must be delightful to be a hermit.  That--cassock-- gabardine, isn't 
it?--that you wear is so becoming.  Do you make it--or them--of course 
you must have changes- yourself?  And what a blessed relief it must be 
to wear sandals instead of shoes!  Think how we must suffer--no matter 
how small I buy my shoes they always pinch my toes.  Oh, why can't 
there be lady hermits, too!"

The beautifulest and most adolescent Trenholme sister extended two 
slender blue ankles that ended in two enormous blue-silk bows that 
almost concealed two fairy Oxfords, also of one of the forty-seven 
shades of blue.  The hermit, as if impelled by a kind of reflex-
telepathic action, drew his bare toes farther beneath his gunny-
sacking.

"I have heard about the romance of your life," said Miss Trenholme, 
softly.  "They have it printed on the back of the menu card at the 
inn.  Was she very beautiful and charming?"

"On the bills of fare!" muttered the hermit; "but what do I care for 
the world's babble?  Yes, she was of the highest and grandest type.  
Then," he continued, "then I thought the world could never contain 
another equal to her.  So I forsook it and repaired to this mountain 
fastness to spend the remainder of my life alone--to devote and 
dedicate my remaining years to her memory."

"It's grand," said Miss Trenholme, "absolutely grand.  I think a 
hermit's life is the ideal one.  No bill-collectors calling, no 
dressing for dinner--how I'd like to be one!  But there's no such luck 
for me.  If I don't marry this season I honestly believe mamma will 
force me into settlement work or trimming hats.  It isn't because I'm 
getting old or ugly; but we haven't enough money left to butt in at 
any of the swell places any more.  And I don't want to marry--unless 
it's somebody I like.  That's why I'd like to be a hermit.  Hermits 
don't ever marry, do they ?"

"Hundreds of 'em," said the hermit, "when they've found the right 
one."

"But they're hermits," said the youngest and beautifulest, "because 
they've lost the right one, aren't they?"

"Because they think they have," answered the recluse, fatuously.  
"Wisdom comes to one in a mountain cave as well as to one in the world 
of 'swells,' as I believe they are called in the argot."

"When one of the 'swells' brings it to them," said Miss Trenholme.  
"And my folks are swells.  That's the trouble.  But there are so many 
swells at the seashore in the summer-time that we hardly amount to 
more than ripples.  So we've had to put all our money into river and 
harbor appropriations.  We were all girls, you know.  There were four 
of us.  I'm the only surviving one.  The others have been married off.  
All to money.  Mamma is so proud of my sisters.  They send her the 
loveliest pen-wipers and art calendars every Christmas.  I'm the only 
one on the market now.  I'm forbidden to look at any one who hasn't 
money."

"But--" began the hermit.

"But, oh," said the beautifulest "of course hermits have great pots of 
gold and doubloons buried somewhere near three great oak-trees.  They 
all have."

"I have not," said the hermit, regretfully.

"I'm so sorry," said Miss Trenholme.  "I always thought they had.  I 
think I must go now."

Oh, beyond question, she was the beautifulest.

"Fair lady--" began the hermit.

"I am Beatrix Trenholme--some call me Trix," she said.  "You must come 
to the inn to see me."

"I haven't been a stone's--throw from my cave in ten years," said the 
hermit.

"You must come to see me there," she repeated.  "Any evening except 
Thursday."

The hermit smiled weakly.

"Good-bye," she said, gathering the folds of her pale-blue skirt.  "I 
shall expect you.  But not on Thursday evening, remember."

What an interest it would give to the future menu cards of the 
Viewpoint Inn to have these printed lines added to them: "Only once 
during the more than ten years of his lonely existence did the 
mountain hermit leave his famous cave.  That was when he was 
irresistibly drawn to the inn by the fascinations of Miss Beatrix 
Trenholme, youngest and most beautiful of the celebrated Trenholme 
sisters, whose brilliant marriage to--"

Aye, to whom?

The hermit walked back to the hermitage.  At the door stood Bob 
Binkley, his old friend and companion of the days before he had 
renounced the world--Bob, himself, arrayed like the orchids of the 
greenhouse in the summer man's polychromatic garb--Bob, the 
millionaire, with his fat, firm, smooth, shrewd face, his diamond 
rings, sparkling fob-chain, and pleated bosom.  He was two years older 
than the hermit, and looked five years younger.

"You're Hamp Ellison, in spite of those whiskers and that going-away 
bathrobe," he shouted.  "I read about you on the bill of fare at the 
inn.  They've run your biography in between the cheese and 'Not 
Responsible for Coats and Umbrellas.'  What 'd you do it for, Hamp?  
And ten years, too--geewhilikins!"

"You're just the same," said the hermit.  "Come in and sit down.  Sit 
on that limestone rock over there; it's softer than the granite."

"I can't understand it, old man," said Binkley.  "I can see how you 
could give up a woman for ten years, but not ten years for a woman.  
Of course I know why you did it.  Everybody does.  Edith Carr.  She 
jilted four or five besides you.  But you were the only one who took 
to a hole in the ground.  The others had recourse to whiskey, the 
Klondike, politics, and that similia similibus cure.  But, say--Hamp, 
Edith Carr was just about the finest woman in the world--high-toned 
and proud and noble, and playing her ideals to win at all kinds of 
odds.  She certainly was a crackerjack."

"After I renounced the world," said the hermit, "I never heard of her 
again."

"She married me," said Binkley.

The hermit leaned against the wooden walls of his ante-cave and 
wriggled his toes.

"I know how you feel about it," said Binkley.  "What else could she 
do?  There were her four sisters and her mother and old man Carr--you 
remember how he put all the money he had into dirigible balloons? 
Well,  everything was coming down and nothing going up with 'em, as 
you might say.  Well, I know Edith as well as you do--although I 
married her.  I was worth a million then, but I've run it up since to 
between five and six.  It wasn't me she wanted as much as--well, it 
was about like this.  She had that bunch on her hands, and they had to 
be taken care of.  Edith married me two months after you did the 
ground-squirrel act.  I thought she liked me, too, at the time."

"And now?" inquired the recluse.

"We're better friends than ever now.  She got a divorce from me two 
years ago.  Just incompatibility.  I didn't put in any defence.  Well, 
well, well, Hamp, this is certainly a funny dugout you've built here.  
But you always were a hero of fiction.  Seems like you'd have been the 
very one to strike Edith's fancy.  Maybe you did--but it's the bank - 
roll that catches 'em, my boy--your caves and whiskers won't do it.  
Honestly, Hamp, don't you think you've been a darned fool?"

The hermit smiled behind his tangled beard.  He was and always had 
been so superior to the crude and mercenary Binkley that even his 
vulgarities could not anger him.  Moreover, his studies and 
meditations in his retreat had raised him far above the little 
vanities of the world.  His little mountain-side had been almost an 
Olympus, over the edge of which he saw, smiling, the bolts hurled in 
the valleys of man below.  Had his ten years of renunciation, of 
thought, of devotion to an ideal, of living scorn of a sordid world, 
been in vain?  Up from the world had come to him the youngest and 
beautifulest--fairer than Edith--one and three-seventh times lovelier 
than the seven-years-served Rachel.  So the hermit smiled in his 
beard.

When Binkley had relieved the hermitage from the blot of his presence 
and the first faint star showed above the pines, the hermit got the 
can of baking-powder from his cupboard.  He still smiled behind his 
beard.

There was a slight rustle in the doorway.  There stood Edith Carr, 
with all the added beauty and stateliness and noble bearing that ten 
years had brought her.

She was never one to chatter.  She looked at the hermit with her 
large, thinking, dark eyes.  The hermit stood still, surprised into a 
pose as motionless as her own.  Only his subconscious sense of the 
fitness of things caused him to turn the baking-powder can slowly in 
his hands until its red label was hidden against his bosom.

"I am stopping at the inn," said Edith, in low but clear tones.  "I 
heard of you there.  I told myself that I must see you.  I want to ask 
your forgiveness.  I sold my happiness for money.  There were others 
to be provided for--but that does not excuse me.  I just wanted to see 
you and ask your forgiveness.  You have lived here ten years, they 
tell me, cherishing my memory!  I was blind, Hampton.  I could not see 
then that all the money in the world cannot weigh in the scales 
against a faithful heart.  If--but it is too late now, of course."

Her assertion was a question clothed as best it could be in a loving 
woman's pride.  But through the thin disguise the hermit saw easily 
that his lady had come back to him--if he chose.  He had won a golden 
crown--if it pleased him to take it.  The reward of his decade of 
faithfulness was ready for his hand--if he desired to stretch it 
forth.


For the space of one minute the old enchantment shone upon him with a 
reflected radiance.  And then by turns he felt the manly sensations of 
indignation at having been discarded, and of repugnance at having 
been--as it were--sought again.  And last of all--how strange that it 
should have come at last!--the pale-blue vision of the beautifulest of 
the Trenholme sisters illuminated his mind's eye and left him without 
a waver.

"It is too late," he said, in deep tones, pressing the baking-powder 
can against his heart.

Once she turned after she had gone slowly twenty yards down the path.  
The hermit had begun to twist the lid off his can, but he hid it again 
under his sacking robe.  He could see her great eyes shining sadly 
through the twilight; but he stood inflexible in the doorway of his 
shack and made no sign.


Just as the moon rose on Thursday evening the hermit was seized by the 
world-madness.

Up from the inn, fainter than the horns of elf-land, came now and then 
a few bars of music played by the casino band.  The Hudson was 
broadened by the night into an illimitable sea--those lights, dimly 
seen on its opposite shore, were not beacons for prosaic trolley-
lines, but low-set stars millions of miles away.  The waters in front 
of the inn were gay with fireflies--or were they motor-boats, smelling 
of gasoline and oil?  Once the hermit had known these things and had 
sported with Amaryllis in the shade of the red-and-white-striped 
awnings.  But for ten years he had turned a heedless ear to these far-
off echoes of a frivolous world.  But to-night there was something 
wrong.

The casino band was playing a waltz--a waltz.  What a fool he had been 
to tear deliberately ten years of his life from the calendar of 
existence for one who had given him up for the false joys that wealth-
-"tum ti tum ti tum ti"--how did that waltz go?  But those years had 
not been sacrificed--had they not brought him the star and pearl of 
all the world, the youngest and beautifulest of--
"But do not come on Thursday evening," she had insisted.  Perhaps by 
now she would be moving slowly and gracefully to the strains of that 
waltz, held closely by West-Pointers or city commuters, while he, who 
had read in her eyes things that had recompensed him for ten lost 
years of life, moped like some wild animal in its mountain den.  Why 
should--"

"Damn it," said the hermit, suddenly, "I'll do it!"

He threw down his Marcus Aurelius and threw off his gunny-sack toga.  
he dragged a dust-covered trunk from a corner of the cave, and with 
difficulty wrenched open its lid.

Candles he had in plenty, and the cave was soon aglow.  Clothes--ten 
years old in cut--scissors, razors, hats, shoes, all his discarded 
attire and belongings, were dragged ruthlessly from their renunciatory 
rest and strewn about in painful disorder.

A pair of scissors soon reduced his beard sufficiently for the dulled 
razors to perform approximately their office.  Cutting his own hair 
was beyond the hermit's skill.  So he only combed and brushed it 
backward as smoothly as he could.  Charity forbids us to consider the 
heartburnings and exertions of one so long removed from haberdashery 
and society.

At the last the hermit went to an inner corner of his cave and began 
to dig in the soft earth with a long iron spoon.  Out of the cavity he 
thus made he drew a tin can, and out of the can three thousand dollars 
in bills, tightly rolled and wrapped in oiled silk.  He was a real 
hermit, as this may assure you.

You may take a brief look at him as he hastens down the little 
mountain-side.  A long, wrinkled black frock-coat reached to his 
calves.  White duck trousers, unacquainted with the tailor's goose, a 
pink shirt, white standing collar with brilliant blue butterfly tie, 
and buttoned congress gaiters.  But think, sir and madam--ten years!  
>From beneath a narrow-brimmed straw hat with a striped band flowed his 
hair.  Seeing him, with all your shrewdness you could not have guessed 
him.  You would have said that he played Hamlet--or the tuba--or 
pinochle--you would never have laid your hand on your heart and said: 
"He is a hermit who lived ten years in a cave for love of one lady--to 
win another."

The dancing pavilion extended above the waters of the river.  Gay 
lanterns and frosted electric globes shed a soft glamour within it.  A 
hundred ladies and gentlemen from the inn and summer cottages flitted 
in and about it.  To the left of the dusty roadway down which the 
hermit had tramped were the inn and grill-room.  Something seemed to 
be on there, too.  The windows were brilliantly lighted, and music was 
playing--music different from the two-steps and waltzes of the casino 
band.

A negro man wearing a white jacket came through the iron gate, with 
its immense granite posts and wrought-iron lamp-holders.

"What is going on here to-night?" asked the hermit.

"Well, sah," said the servitor, "dey is having de reg'lar Thursday-
evenin' dance in de casino.  And in de grill-room dere's a beefsteak 
dinner, sah."

The hermit glanced up at the inn on the hillside whence burst suddenly 
a triumphant strain of splendid harmony.

"And up there," said he, "they are playing Mendelssohn--what is going 
on up there?"

"Up in de inn," said the dusky one, "dey is a weddin' goin' on.  Mr.  
Binkley, a mighty rich man, am marryin' Miss Trenholme, sah--de young 
lady who am quite de belle of de place, sah."




HE ALSO SERVES



If I could have a thousand years--just one little thousand years--more 
of life, I might, in that time, draw near enough to true Romance to 
touch the hem of her robe.

Up from ships men come, and from waste places and forest and road and 
garret and cellar to maunder to me in strangely distributed words of 
the things they have seen and considered.  The recording of their 
tales is no more than a matter of ears and fingers.  There are only 
two fates I dread--deafness and writer's cramp.  The hand is yet 
steady; let the ear bear the blame if these printed words be not in 
the order they were delivered to me by Hunky Magee, true camp-follower 
of fortune.

Biography shall claim you but an instant--I first knew Hunky when he 
was head-waiter at Chubb's little beefsteak restaurant and cafe on 
Third Avenue.  There was only one waiter besides.

Then, successively, I caromed against him in the little streets of the 
Big City after his trip to Alaska, his voyage as cook with a treasure-
seeking expedition to the Caribbean, and his failure as a pearl-fisher 
in the Arkansas River.  Between these dashes into the land of 
adventure he usually came back to Chubb's for a while.  Chubb's was a 
port for him when gales blew too high; but when you dined there and 
Hunky went for your steak you never knew whether he would come to 
anchor in the kitchen or in the Malayan Archipelago.  You wouldn't 
care for his description--he was soft of voice and hard of face, and 
rarely had to use more than one eye to quell any approach to a 
disturbance among Chubb's customers.

One night I found Hunky standing at a corner of Twenty-third Street 
and Third Avenue after an absence of several months.  In ten minutes 
we had a little round table between us in a quiet corner, and my ears 
began to get busy.  I leave out my sly ruses and feints to draw 
Hunky's word-of-mouth blows--it all came to something like this:

"Speaking of the next election," said Hunky, "did you ever know much 
about Indians? No? I don't mean the Cooper, Beadle, cigar-store, or 
Laughing Water kind-I mean the modern Indian--the kind that takes 
Greek prizes in colleges and scalps the half-back on the other side in 
football games.  The kind that eats macaroons and tea in the 
afternoons with the daughter of the professor of biology, and fills up 
on grasshoppers and fried rattlesnake when they get back to the 
ancestral wickiup.

"Well, they ain't so bad.  I like 'em better than most foreigners that 
have come over in the last few hundred years.  One thing about the 
Indian is this: when he mixes with the white race he swaps all his own 
vices for them of the pale-faces--and he retains all his own virtues.  
Well, his virtues are enough to call out the reserves whenever he lets 
'em loose.  But the imported foreigners adopt our virtues and keep 
their own vices--and it's going to take our whole standing army some 
day to police that gang.

"But let me tell you about the trip I took to Mexico with High jack 
Snakefeeder, a Cherokee twice removed, a graduate of a Pennsylvania 
college and the latest thing in pointed-toed, rubber-heeled, patent 
kid moccasins and Madras hunting-shirt with turned-back cuffs.  He was 
a friend of mine.  I met him in Tahlequah when I was out there during 
the land boom, and we got thick.  He had got all there was out of 
colleges and had come back to lead his people out of Egypt.  He was a 
man of first-class style and wrote essays, and had been invited to 
visit rich guys' houses in Boston and such places.

"There was a Cherokee girl in Muscogee that High Jack was foolish 
about.  He took me to see her a few times.  Her name was Florence Blue 
Feather--but you want to clear your mind of all ideas of squaws with 
nose-rings and army blankets.  This young lady was whiter than you 
are, and better educated than I ever was.  You couldn't have told her 
from any of the girls shopping in the swell Third Avenue stores.  I 
liked her so well that, I got to calling on her now and then when High 
Jack wasn't along, which is the way of friends in such matters.  She 
was educated at the Muscogee College, and was making a specialty of--
let's see--eth--yes, ethnology.  That's the art that goes back and 
traces the descent of different races of people, leading up from 
jelly-fish through monkeys and to the O'Briens.  High Jack had took up 
that line too, and had read papers about it before all kinds of 
riotous assemblies--Chautauquas and Choctaws and chowder-parties, and 
such.  Having a mutual taste for musty information like that was what 
made 'em like each other, I suppose.  But I don't know!  What they 
call congeniality of tastes ain't always it.  Now, when Miss Blue 
Feather and me was talking together, I listened to her affidavits 
about the first families of the Land of Nod being cousins german 
(well, if the Germans don't nod, who does?) to the mound-builders of 
Ohio with incomprehension and respect.  And when I'd tell her about 
the Bowery and Coney Island, and sing her a few songs that I'd heard 
the Jamaica niggers sing at their church lawn-parties, she didn't look 
much less interested than she did when High Jack would tell her that 
he had a pipe that the first inhabitants of America originally arrived 
here on stilts after a freshet at Tenafly, New Jersey.

"But I was going to tell you more about High Jack.

"About six months ago I get a letter from him, saying he'd been 
commissioned by the Minority Report Bureau of Ethnology at Washington 
to go down to Mexico and translate some excavations or dig up the 
meaning of some shorthand notes on some ruins--or something of that 
sort.  And if I'd go along he could squeeze the price into the expense 
account.

"Well, I'd been holding a napkin over my arm at Chubb's about long 
enough then, so I wired High Jack 'Yes'; and he sent me a ticket, and 
I met him in Washington, and he had a lot of news to tell me.  First 
of all, was that Florence Blue Feather had suddenly disappeared from 
her home and environments.

"'Run away?' I asked.

"'Vanished,' says High Jack.  'Disappeared like your shadow when the 
sun goes under a cloud.  She was seen on the street, and then she 
turned a corner and nobody ever seen her afterward.  The whole 
community turned out to look for her, but we never found a clew.'

"'That's bad--that's bad,' says I.  'She was a mighty nice girl, and 
as smart as you find em.

"High Jack seemed to take it hard.  I guess he must have esteemed Miss 
Blue Feather quite highly.  I could see that he'd referred the matter 
to the whiskey-jug.  That was his weak point--and many another man's.  
I've noticed that when a man loses a girl he generally takes to drink 
either just before or just after it happens.

"From Washington we railroaded it to New Orleans, and there took a 
tramp steamer bound for Belize.  And a gale pounded us all down the 
Caribbean, and nearly wrecked us on the Yucatan coast opposite a 
little town without a harbor called Boca de Coacoyula.   Suppose the 
ship had run against that name in the dark!

"'Better fifty years of Europe than a cyclone in the bay,' says High 
Jack Snakefeeder.  So we get the captain to send us ashore in a dory 
when the squall seemed to cease from squalling.

"'We will find ruins here or make 'em,' says High.  'The Government 
doesn't care which we do.  An appropriation is an appropriation.'

"Boca de Coacoyula was a dead town.  Them biblical towns we read 
about--Tired and Siphon--after they was destroyed, they must have 
looked like Forty-second Street and Broadway compared to this Boca 
place.  It still claimed 1300 inhabitants as estimated and engraved on 
the stone court-house by the census-taker in 1597.  The citizens were 
a mixture of Indians and other Indians; but some of 'em was light-
colored, which I was surprised to see.  The town was huddled up on the 
shore, with woods so thick around it that a subpoena-server couldn't 
have reached a monkey ten yards away with the papers.  We wondered 
what kept it from being annexed to Kansas; but we soon found out that 
it was Major Bing.

"Major Bing was the ointment around the fly.  He had the cochineal, 
sarsaparilla, log-wood, annatto, hemp, and all other dye-woods and 
pure food adulteration concessions cornered.  He had five-sixths of 
the Boca de Thingama jiggers working for him on shares.  It was a 
beautiful graft.  We used to brag about Morgan and E.  H.  and others 
of our wisest when I was in the provinces--but now no more.  That 
peninsula has got our little country turned into a submarine without 
even the observation tower showing.

"Major Bing's idea was this.  He had the population go forth into the 
forest and gather these products.  When they brought 'em in he gave 
'em one-fifth for their trouble.  Sometimes they'd strike and demand a 
sixth.  The Major always gave in to 'em.

"The Major had a bungalow so close on the sea that the nine-inch tide 
seeped through the cracks in the kitchen floor.  Me and him and High 
Jack Snakefeeder sat on the porch and drank rum from noon till 
midnight.  He said he had piled up $300,000 in New Orleans banks, and 
High and me could stay with him forever if we would.  But High Jack 
happened to think of the United States, and began to talk ethnology.

"'Ruins!' says Major Bing.  'The woods are full of 'em.  I don't know 
how far they date back, but they was here before I came.'

"High Jack asks what form of worship the citizens of that locality are 
addicted to.

"'Why,' says the Major, rubbing his nose, 'I can't hardly say.  I 
imagine it's infidel or Aztec or Nonconformist or something like that.  
There's a church here--a Methodist or some other kind--with a parson 
named Skidder.  He claims to have converted the people to 
Christianity.  He and me don't assimilate except on state occasions.  
I imagine they worship some kind of gods or idols yet.  But Skidder 
says he has 'em in the fold.'

"A few days later High Jack and me, prowling around, strikes a plain 
path into the forest, and follows it a good four miles.  Then a branch 
turns to the left.  We go a mile, maybe, down that, and run up against 
the finest ruin you ever saw--solid stone with trees and vines and 
under-brush all growing up against it and in it and through it.  All 
over it was chiselled carvings of funny beasts and people that would 
have been arrested if they'd ever come out in vaudeville that way.  We 
approached it from the rear.

"High Jack had been drinking too much rum ever since we landed in 
Boca.  You know how an Indian is--the palefaces fixed his clock when 
they introduced him to firewater.  He'd brought a quart along with 
him.

"'Hunky,' says he, 'we'll explore the ancient temple.  It may be that 
the storin that landed us here was propitious.  The Minority Report 
Bureau of Ethnology,' says he, 'may yet profit by the vagaries of wind 
and tide.'

"We went in the rear door of the bum edifice.  We struck a kind of 
alcove without bath.  There was a granite davenport, and a stone wash-
stand without any soap or exit for the water, and some hardwood pegs 
drove into holes in the wall, and that was all.  To go out of that 
furnished apartment into a Harlem hall bedroom would make you feel 
like getting back home from an amateur violoncello solo at an East 
Side Settlement house.

"While High was examining some hieroglyphics on the wall that the 
stone-masons must have made when their tools slipped, I stepped into 
the front room.  That was at least thirty by fifty feet, stone floor, 
six little windows like square port-holes that didn't let much light 
in.

"I looked back over my shoulder, and sees High Jack's face three feet 
away.

"'High,' says I, 'of all the--'

"And then I noticed he looked funny, and I turned around.

"He'd taken off his clothes to the waist, and he didn't seem to hear 
me.  I touched him, and came near beating it.  High Jack had turned to 
stone.  I had been drinking some rum myself.

"'Ossified!' I says to him, loudly.  'I knew what would happen if you 
kept it up.'

"And then High Jack comes in from the alcove when he hears me 
conversing with nobody, and we have a look at Mr.  Snakefeeder No.  2.  
It's a stone idol, or god, or revised statute or something, and it 
looks as much like High Jack as one green pea looks like itself.  It's 
got exactly his face and size and color, but it's steadier on its 
pins.  It stands on a kind of rostrum or pedestal, and you can see 
it's been there ten million years.

"'He's a cousin of mine,' sings High, and then he turns solemn.

"'Hunky,' he says, putting one hand on my shoulder and one on the 
statue's, 'I'm in the holy temple of my ancestors.'

"'Well, if looks goes for anything,' says I, 'you've struck a twin.  
Stand side by side with buddy, and let's see if there's any 
diff'erence.'

"There wasn't.  You know an Indian can keep his face as still as an 
iron dog's when he wants to, so when High Jack froze his features you 
couldn't have told him from the other one.

"'There's some letters,' says I, 'on his nob's pedestal, but I can't 
make 'em out.  The alphabet of this country seems to be composed of 
sometimes a, e, I, o, and u, but generally z's, l's, and t's.'

"High Jack's ethnology gets the upper hand of his rum for a minute, 
and he investigates the inscription.

"'Hunky,' says he, 'this is a statue of Tlotopaxl, one of the most 
powerful gods of the ancient Aztecs.'

"'Glad to know him,' says I, 'but in his present condition he reminds 
me of the joke Shakespeare got off on Julius Caesar.  We might say 
about your friend:

  "'Imperious what's-his-name, dead and tunied to stone--
  No use to write or call him on the 'phone.'

"'Hunky,' says High Jack Snakefeeder, looking at me funny, 'do you 
believe in reincarnation?'

"'It sounds to me,' says I, 'like either a clean-up of the slaughter-
houses or a new kind of Boston pink.  I don't know.'

"'I believe,' says he, 'that I am the reincarnation of Tlotopaxl.  My 
researches have convinced me that the Cherokees, of all the North 
American tribes, can boast of the straightest descent from the proud 
Aztec race.  That,' says he, 'was a favorite theory of mine and 
Florence Blue Feather's.  And she--what' if she--!'

"High Jack grabs my arm and walls his eyes at me.  Just then he looked 
more like his eminent co-Indian murderer, Crazy Horse.

"'Well,' says I, 'what if she, what if she, what if she? You're 
drunk,' says I.  'Impersonating idols and believing in--what was it ?-
-recarnalization?  Let's have a drink,' says I.  'It's as spooky here 
as a Brooklyn artificial-limb factory at midnight with the gas turned 
down.'

"Just then I heard somebody coming, and I dragged High Jack into the 
bedless bedchamber.  There was peep-holes bored through the wall, so 
we could see the whole front part of the temple.

Major Bing told me afterward that the ancient priests in charge used 
to rubber through them at the congregation.

"In a few minutes an old Indian woman came in with a' big oval earthen 
dish full of grub.  She set it on a square block of stone in front of 
the graven image, and laid down and walloped her face on the floor a 
few times, and then took a walk for herself.

"High Jack and me was hungry, so we came out and looked it over.  
There was goat steaks and fried rice-cakes, and plantains and cassava, 
and broiled land-crabs and mangoes--nothing like what you get at 
Chubb's.

"We ate hearty--and had another round of rum.

"'It must be old Tecumseh's--or whatever you call him--birthday,' says 
I.  'Or do they feed him every day?  I thought gods only drank vanilla 
on Mount Catawampus.'

"Then some more native parties in short kimonos that showed their 
aboriginees punctured the near-horizon, and me and High had to skip 
back into Father Axletree's private boudoir.  They came by ones, twos, 
and threes, and left all sorts of offerings--there was enough grub for 
Bingham's nine gods of war, with plenty left over for the Peace 
Conference at The Hague.  They brought jars of honey, and bunches of 
bananas, and bottles of wine, and stacks of tortillas, and beautiful 
shawls worth one hundred dollars apiece that the Indian women weave of 
a kind of vegetable fibre like silk.  All of 'em got down and wriggled 
on the floor in front of that hard-finish god, and then sneaked off 
through the woods again.

"'I wonder who gets this rake-off?' remarks High Jack.

"'Oh,' says I, 'there's priests or deputy idols or a committee of 
disarrangements somewhere in the woods on the job.  Wherever you find 
a god you'll find somebody waiting to take charge of the burnt 
offerings.'

"And then we took another swig of rum and walked out to the parlor 
front door to cool off, for it was as hot inside as a summer camp on 
the Palisades.

"And while we stood there in the breeze we looks down the path and 
sees a young lady approaching the blasted ruin.  She was bare-footed 
and had on a white robe, and carried a wreath of white flowers in her 
hand.  When she got nearer we saw she had a long blue feather stuck 
through her black hair.  And when she got nearer still me and High 
Jack Snakefeeder grabbed each other to keep from tumbling down on the 
floor; for the girl's face was as much like Florence Blue Feather's as 
his was like old King Toxicology's.

"And then was when High Jack's booze drowned his system of ethnology.  
He dragged me inside back of the statue, and says:

"'Lay hold of it, Hunky.  We'll pack it into the other room.  I felt 
it all the time,' says he.  'I'm the reconsideration of the god 
Locomotorataxia, and Florence Blue Feather was my bride a thousand 
years ago.  She has come to seek me in the temple where I used to 
reign.'

"'All right,' says I.  'There's no use arguing against the rum 
question.  You take his feet.'

"We lifted the three-hundred-pound stone god, and carried him into the 
back room of the cafe--the temple, I mean--and leaned him against the 
wall.  It was more work than bouncing three live ones from an all-
night Broadway joint on New-Year's Eve.

"Then High Jack ran out and brought in a couple of them Indian silk 
shawls and began to undress himself.

"'Oh, figs!' says I.  'Is it thus?  Strong drink is an adder and 
subtractor, too.  Is it the heat or the call of the wild that's got 
you ?'

"But High Jack is too full of exaltation and cane-juice to reply.  He 
stops the disrobing business just short of the Manhattan Beach rules, 
and then winds them red-and-white shawls around him, and goes out and.  
stands on the pedestal as steady as any platinum deity you ever saw.  
And I looks through a peek-hole to see what he is up to.

"In a few minutes in comes the girl with the flower wreath.  Danged if 
I wasn't knocked a little silly when she got close, she looked so 
exactly much like Florence Blue Feather.  'I wonder,' says I to 
myself, 'if she has been reincarcerated, too?  If I could see,' says I 
to myself, 'whether she has a mole on her left--' But the next minute 
I thought she looked one-eighth of a shade darker than Florence; but 
she looked good at that.  And High Jack hadn't drunk all the rum that 
had been drank.

"The girl went up within ten feet of the bum idol, and got down and 
massaged her nose with the floor, like the rest did.  Then she went 
nearer and laid the flower wreath on the block of stone at High Jack's 
feet.  Rummy as I was, I thought it was kind of nice of her to think 
of offering flowers instead of household and kitchen provisions.  Even 
a stone god ought to appreciate a little sentiment like that on top of 
the fancy groceries they had piled up in front of him.

"And then High Jack steps down from his pedestal, quiet, and mentions 
a few words that sounded just like the hieroglyphics carved on the 
walls of the ruin.  The girl gives a little jump backward, and her 
eyes fly open as big as doughnuts; but she don't beat it.

"Why didn't she?  I'll tell you why I think why.  It don't seem to a 
girl so supernatural, unlikely, strange, and startling that a stone 
god should come to life for her.  If he was to do it for one of them 
snub-nosed brown girls on the other side of the woods, now, it would 
be different--but her!  I'll bet she said to herself:

'Well, goodness me! you've been a long time getting on your job.  I've 
half a mind not to speak to you.'

"But she and High Jack holds hands and walks away out of the temple 
together.  By the time I'd had time to take another drink and enter 
upon the scene they was twenty yards away, going up the path in the 
woods that the girl had come down.  With the natural scenery already 
in place, it was just like a play to watch 'em--she looking up at him, 
and him giving her back the best that an Indian can hand, out in the 
way of a goo-goo eye.  But there wasn't anything in that 
recarnification and revulsion to tintype for me.

"'Hey! Injun!' I yells out to High Jack.

'We've got a board-bill due in town, and you're leaving me without a 
cent.  Brace up and cut out the Neapolitan fisher-maiden, and let's go 
back home.'

"But on the two goes; without looking once back until, as you might 
say, the forest swallowed 'em up.  And I never saw or heard of High 
Jack Snakefeeder from that day to this.  I don't know if the Cherokees 
came from the Aspics; but if they did, one of 'em went back.

"All I could do was to hustle back to that Boca place and panhandle 
Major Bing.  He detached himself from enough of his winnings to buy me 
a ticket home.  And I'm back again on the job at Chubb's, sir, and I'm 
going to hold it steady.  Come round, and you'll find the steaks as 
good as ever."

I wondered what Hunky Magee thought about his own story; so I asked 
him if he had any theories about reincarnation and transmogrification 
and such mysteries as he had touched upon.

"Nothing like that," said Hunky, positively.  "What ailed High Jack 
was too much booze and education.  They'll do an Indian up every 
time."

"But what about Miss Blue Feather?" I persisted.

"Say," said Hunky, with a grin, "that little lady that stole High Jack 
certainly did give me a jar when I first took a look at her, but it 
was only for a minute.  You remember I told you High Jack said that 
Miss Florence Blue Feather disappeared from home about a year ago?  
Well, where she landed four days later was in as neat a five-room flat 
on East Twenty-third Street as you ever walked sideways through--and 
she's been Mrs.  Magee ever since."




THE MOMENT OF VICTORY



Ben Granger is a war veteran aged twenty-nine--which should enable you 
to guess the war.  He is also principal merchant and postmaster of 
Cadiz, a little town over which the breezes from the Gulf of Mexico 
perpetually blow.

Ben helped to hurl the Don from his stronghold in the Greater 
Antilles; and then, hiking across half the world, he marched as a 
corporal-usher up and down the blazing tropic aisles of the open-air 
college in which the Filipino was schooled.  Now, with his bayonet 
beaten into a cheese-slicer, he rallies his corporal's guard of 
cronies in the shade of his well-whittled porch, instead of in the 
matted jungles of Mindanao.  Always have his interest and choice been 
for deeds rather than for words; but the consideration and digestion 
of motives is not beyond him, as this story, which is his, will 
attest.

"What is it," he asked me one moonlit eve, as we sat among his boxes 
and barrels, "that generally makes men go through dangers, and fire, 
and trouble, and starvation, and battle, and such rucouses?  What does 
a man do it for?  Why does he try to outdo his fellow-humans, and be 
braver and stronger and more daring and showy than even his best 
friends are?  What's his game?  What does he expect to get out of it?  
He don't do it just for the fresh air and exercise.  What would you 
say, now, Bill, that an ordinary man expects, generally speaking, for 
his efforts along the line of ambition and extraordinary hustling in 
the marketplaces, forums, shooting-galleries, lyceums, battle-fields, 
links, cinder-paths, and arenas of the civilized and vice versa places 
of the world?"

"Well, Ben," said I, with judicial seriousness, "I think we might 
safely limit the number of motives of a man who seeks fame to three-to 
ambition, which is a desire for popular applause; to avarice, which 
looks to the material side of success; and to love of some woman whom 
he either possesses or desires to possess."

Ben pondered over my words while a mocking-bird on the top of a 
mesquite by the porch trilled a dozen bars.

"I reckon," said he, "that your diagnosis about covers the case 
according to the rules laid down in the copy-books and historical 
readers.  But what I had in my mind was the case of Willie Robbins, a 
person I used to know.  I'll tell you about him before I close up the 
store, if you don't mind listening.

"Willie was one of our social set up in San Augustine.  I was clerking 
there then for Brady & Murchison, wholesale dry-goods and ranch 
supplies.  Willie and I belonged to the same german club and athletic 
association and military company.  He played the triangle in our 
serenading and quartet crowd that used to ring the welkin three nights 
a week somewhere in town.

"Willie jibed with his name considerable.  He weighed about as much as 
a hundred pounds of veal in his summer suitings, and he had a 'where-
is-Mary?' expression on his features so plain that you could almost 
see the wool growing on him.

"And yet you couldn't fence him away from the girls with barbed wire.  
You know that kind of young fellows-a kind of a mixture of fools and 
angels-they rush in and fear to tread at the same time; but they never 
fail to tread when they get the chance.  He was always on hand when 'a 
joyful occasion was had,' as the morning paper would say, looking as 
happy as a king full, and at the same time as uncomfortable as a raw 
oyster served with sweet pickles.  He danced like he had hind hobbles 
on; and he had a vocabulary of about three hundred and fifty words 
that he made stretch over four germans a week, and plagiarized from to 
get him through two ice-cream suppers and a Sunday-night call.  He 
seemed to me to be a sort of a mixture of Maltese kitten, sensitive 
plant, and a member of a stranded Two Orphans company.

"I'll give you an estimate of his physiological and pictorial make-up, 
and then I'll stick spurs into the sides of my narrative.

"Willie inclined to the Caucasian in his coloring and manner of style.  
His hair was opalescent and his conversation fragmentary.  His eyes 
were the same blue shade as the china dog's on the right-hand corner 
of your Aunt Ellen's mantelpiece.  He took things as they come, and I 
never felt any hostility against him.  I let him live, and so did 
others.

"But what does this Willie do but coax his heart out of his boots and 
lose it to Myra Allison, the liveliest, brightest, keenest, smartest, 
and prettiest girl in San Augustine.  I tell you, she had the blackest 
eyes, the shiniest curls, and the most tantalizing-- Oh, no, you're 
off--I wasn't a victim.  I might have been, but I knew better.  I kept 
out.  Joe Granberry was It from the start.  He had everybody else beat 
a couple of leagues and thence east to a stake and mound.  But, 
anyhow, Myra was a nine-pound, full-merino, fall-clip fleece, sacked 
and loaded on a four-horse team for San Antone.

"One night there was an ice-cream sociable at Mrs.  Colonel 
Spraggins', in San Augustine.  We fellows had a big room up-stairs 
opened up for us to put our hats and things in, and to comb our hair 
and put on the clean collars we brought along inside the sweat-bands 
of our hats-in short, a room to fix up in just like they have 
everywhere at high-toned doings.  A little farther down the hall was 
the girls' room, which they used to powder up in, and so forth.  
Downstairs we--that is, the San Augustine Social Cotillion and 
Merrymakers' Club--had a stretcher put down in the parlor where our 
dance was going on.

"Willie Robbins and me happened to be up in our--cloak-room, I believe 
we called it when Myra Allison skipped through the hall on her way 
down-stairs from the girls' room.  Willie was standing before the 
mirror, deeply interested in smoothing down the blond grass-plot on 
his head, which seemed to give him lots of trouble.  Myra was always 
full of life and devilment.  She stopped and stuck her head in our 
door.  She certainly was good-looking.  But I knew how Joe Granberry 
stood with her.  So did Willie; but he kept on ba-a-a-ing after her 
and following her around.  He had a system of persistence that didn't 
coincide with pale hair and light eyes.

"'Hello, Willie!' says Myra.  'What are you doing to yourself in the 
glass?'

"I'm trying to look fly,' says Willie.

"'Well, you never could be fly,' says Myra, with her special laugh, 
which was the provokingest sound I ever heard except the rattle of an 
empty canteen against my saddle-horn.

"I looked around at Willie after Myra had gone.  He had a kind of a 
lily-white look on him which seemed to show that her remark had, as 
you might say, disrupted his soul.  I never noticed anything in what 
she said that sounded particularly destructive to a man's ideas of 
self-consciousness; but he was set back to an extent you could 
scarcely imagine.

"After we went down-stairs with our clean collars on, Willie never 
went near Myra again that night.  After all, he seemed to be a diluted 
kind of a skim-milk sort of a chap, and I never wondered that Joe 
Granberry beat him out.

"The next day the battleship Maine was blown up, and then pretty soon 
somebody-I reckon it was Joe Bailey, or Ben Tillman, or maybe the 
Government-declared war against Spain.

"Well, everybody south of Mason & Hamlin's line knew that the North by 
itself couldn't whip a whole country the size of Spain.  So the 
Yankees commenced to holler for help, and the Johnny Rebs answered the 
call.  'We're coming, Father William, a hundred thousand strong--and 
then some,' was the way they sang it.  And the old party lines drawn 
by Sherman's march and the Kuklux and nine-cent cotton and the Jim 
Crow street-car ordinances faded away.  We became one undivided.  
country, with no North, very little East, a good-sized chunk of West, 
and a South that loomed up as big as the first foreign label on a new 
eight-dollar suit-case.

"Of course the dogs of war weren't a complete pack without a yelp from 
the San Augustine Rifles, Company D, of the Fourteenth Texas Regiment.  
Our company was among the first to land in Cuba and strike terror into 
the hearts of the foe.  I'm not going to give you a history of the 
war, I'm just dragging it in to fill out my story about Willie 
Robbins, just as the Republican party dragged it in to help out the 

election in 1898.

"If anybody ever had heroitis, it was that Willie Robbins.  From the 
minute he set foot on the soil of the tyrants of Castile he seemed to 
engulf danger as a cat laps up cream.  He certainly astonished every 
man in our company, from the captain up.  You'd have expected him to 
gravitate naturally to the job of an orderly to the colonel, or 
typewriter in the commissary--but not any.  He created the part of the 
flaxen-haired boy hero who lives and gets back home with the goods, 
instead of dying with an important despatch in his hands at his 
colonel's feet.

"Our company got into a section of Cuban scenery where one of the 
messiest and most unsung portions of the campaign occurred.  We were 
out every day capering around in the bushes, and having little 
skirmishes with the Spanish troops that looked more like kind of 
tired-out feuds than anything else.  The war was a joke to us, and of 
no interest to them.  We never could see it any other way than as a 
howling farce-comedy that the San Augustine Rifles were actually 
fighting to uphold the Stars and Stripes.  And the blamed little 
senors didn't get enough pay to make them care whether they were 
patriots or traitors.  Now and then somebody would get killed.  It 
seemed like a waste of life to me.  I was at Coney Island when I went 
to New York once, and one of them down-hill skidding apparatuses they 
call 'roller-coasters' flew the track and killed a man in a brown 
sack-suit.  Whenever the Spaniards shot one of our men, it struck me 
as just about as unnecessary and regrettable as that was.

"But I'm dropping Willie Robbins out of the conversation.

"He was out for bloodshed, laurels, ambition, medals, recommendations, 
and all other forms of military glory.  And he didn't seem to be 
afraid of any of the recognized forms of military danger, such as 
Spaniards, cannon-balls, canned beef, gunpowder, or nepotism.  He went 
forth with his pallid hair and china-blue eyes and ate up Spaniards 
like you would sardines a la canopy.  Wars and rumbles of wars never 
flustered him.  He would stand guard-duty, mosquitoes, hardtack, 
treat, and fire with equally perfect unanimity.  No blondes in history 
ever come in comparison distance of him except the Jack of Diamonds 
and Queen Catherine of Russia.

"I remember, one time, a little caballard of Spanish men sauntered out 
from behind a patch of sugar-cane and shot Bob Turner, the first 
sergeant of our company, while we were eating dinner.  As required by 
the army regulations, we fellows went through the usual tactics of 
falling into line, saluting the enemy, and loading and firing, 
kneeling.

"That wasn't the Texas way of scrapping; but, being a very important 
addendum and annex to the regular army, the San Augustine Rifles had 
to conform to the red-tape system of getting even.

"By the time we had got out our 'Upton's Tactics,' turned to page 
fifty-seven, said 'one--two--three--one--two--three' a couple of 
times, and got blank cartridges into our Springfields, the Spanish 
outfit had smiled repeatedly, rolled and lit cigarettes by squads, and 
walked away contemptuously.

"I went straight to Captain Floyd, and says to him: 'Sam, I don't 
think this war is a straight game.  You know as well as I do that Bob 
Turner was one of the whitest fellows that ever threw a leg over a 
saddle, and now these wirepullers in Washington have fixed his clock.  
He's politically and ostensibly dead.  It ain't fair.  Why should they 
keep this thing up?  If they want Spain licked, why don't they turn 
the San Augustine Rifles and Joe Seely's ranger company and a car-load 
of West Texas deputy-sheriffs onto these Spaniards, and let us 
exonerate them from the face of the earth?  I never did,' says I, 
'care much about fighting by the Lord Chesterfield ring rules.  I'm 
going to hand in my resignation and go home if anybody else I am 
personally acquainted with gets hurt in this war.  If you can get 
somebody in my place, Sam,' says I, 'I'll quit the first of next week.  
I don't want to work in an army that don't give its help a chance.  
Never mind my wages,' says I; 'let the Secretary of the Treasury keep 
'em.'

"'Well, Ben,' says the captain to me, 'your allegations and 
estimations of the tactics of war, government, patriotism, guard-
mounting, and democracy are all right.  But I've looked into the 
system of international arbitration and the ethics of justifiable 
slaughter a little closer, maybe, than you have.  Now, you can hand in 
your resignation the first of next week if you are so minded.  But if 
you do,' says Sam, 'I'll order a corporal's guard to take you over by 
that limestone bluff on the creek and shoot enough lead into you to 
ballast a submarine air-ship.  I'm captain of this company, and I've 
swore allegiance to the Amalgamated States regardless of sectional, 
secessional, and Congressional differences.  Have you got any smoking-
tobacco?' winds up Sam.  'Mine got wet when I swum the creek this 
morning.'

"The reason I drag all this non ex parte evidence in is because Willie 
Robbins was standing there listening to us.  I was a second sergeant 
and he was a private then, but among us Texans and Westerners there 
never was as much tactics and subordination as there was in the 
regular army.  We never called our captain anything but 'Sam' except 
when there was a lot of major-generals and admirals around, so as to 
preserve the discipline.

"And says Willie Robbins to me, in a sharp construction of voice much 
unbecoming to his light hair and previous record:

"'You ought to be shot, Ben, for emitting any such sentiments.  A man 
that won't fight for his country is worse than a, horse-thief.  If I 
was the cap, I'd put you in the guard-house for thirty days on round 
steak and tamales.  War,' says Willie, 'is great and glorious.  I 
didn't know you were a coward.'

"'I'm not,' says I.  'If I was, I'd knock some of the pallidness off 
of your marble brow.  I'm lenient with you,' I says, 'just as I am 
with the Spaniards, because you have always reminded me of something 
with mushrooms on the side.  Why, you little Lady of Shalott,' says I, 
'you underdone leader of cotillions, you glassy fashion and moulded 
form, you white-pine soldier made in the Cisalpine Alps in Germany for 
the late New-Year trade, do you know of whom you are talking to?  
We've been in the same social circle,' says I, 'and I've put up with 
you because you seemed so meek and self-un-satisfying.  I don't 
understand why you have so sudden taken a personal interest in 
chivalrousness and murder.  Your nature's undergone a complete 
revelation.  Now, how is it?'

"'Well, you wouldn't understand, Ben,' says Willie, giving one of his 
refined smiles and turning away.

"'Come back here!' says I, catching him by the tail of his khaki coat.  
'You've made me kind of mad, in spite of the aloofness in which I have 
heretofore held you.  You are out for making a success in this hero 
business, and I believe I know what for.  You are doing it either 
because you are crazy or because you expect to catch some girl by it.  
Now, if it's a girl, I've got something here to show you.'

"I wouldn't have done it, but I was plumb mad.  I pulled a San 
Augustine paper out of my hip-pocket, and showed him an item.  It was 
a half a column about the marriage of Myra Allison and Joe Granberry.

"Willie laughed, and I saw I hadn't touched him.

"'Oh,' says he, 'everybody knew that was going to happen.  I heard 
about that a week ago.'  And then he gave me the laugh again.

"'All right,' says I.  'Then why do you so recklessly chase the bright 
rainbow of fame? Do you expect to be elected President, or do you 
belong to a suicide club ?'

"And then Captain Sam interferes.

"'You gentlemen quit jawing and go back to your quarters,' says he, 
'or I'll have you escorted to the guard-house.  Now, scat, both of 
you!  Before you go, which one of you has got any chewing-tobacco?'

"'We're off, Sam,' says I.  'It's supper-time, anyhow.  But what do 
you think of what we was talking about?  I've noticed you throwing out 
a good many grappling-hooks for this here balloon called fame--  
What's ambition, anyhow?  What does a man risk his life day after day 
for?  Do you know of anything he gets in the end that can pay him for 
the trouble?  I want to go back home,' says I.  'I don't care whether 
Cuba sinks or swims, and I don't give a pipeful of rabbit tobacco 
whether Queen Sophia Christina or Charlie Culberson rules these fairy 
isles; and I don't want my name on any list except the list of 
survivors.  But I've noticed you, Sam,' says I, 'seeking the bubble 
notoriety in the cannon's larynx a number of times.  Now, what do you 
do it for?  Is it ambition, business, or some freckle-faced Pheebe at 
home that you are heroing for ?'

"'Well, Ben,' says Sam, kind of hefting his sword out from between his 
knees, 'as your superior officer I could court-martial you for 
attempted cowardice and desertion.  But I won't.  And I'll tell you 
why I'm trying for promotion and the usual honors of war and conquest.  
A major gets more pay than a captain, and I need the money.'

"'Correct for you!' says I.  'I can understand that.  Your system of 
fame-seeking is rooted in the deepest soil of patriotism.  But I can't 
comprehend,' says I, 'why Willie Robbins, whose folks at home are well 
off, and who used to be as meek and undesirous of notice as a cat with 
cream on his whiskers, should all at once develop into a warrior bold 
with the most fire-eating kind of proclivities.  And the girl in his 
case seems to have been eliminated by marriage to another fellow.  I 
reckon,' says I, 'it's a plain case of just common ambition.  He wants 
his name, maybe, to go thundering down the coroners of time.  It must 
be that.'

"Well, without itemizing his deeds, Willie sure made good as a hero.  
He simply spent most of his time on his knees begging our captain to 
send him on forlorn hopes and dangerous scouting expeditions.  In 
every fight he was the first man to mix it at close quarters with the 
Don Alfonsos.  He got three or four bullets planted in various parts 
of his autonomy.  Once he went off with a detail of eight men and 
captured a whole company of Spanish.  He kept Captain Floyd busy 
writing out recommendations of his bravery to send in to head-
quarters; and he began to accumulate medals for all kinds of things-
heroism and target-shooting and valor and tactics and 
uninsubordination, and all the little accomplishments that look good 
to the third assistant secretaries of the War Department.

"Finally, Cap Floyd got promoted to be a major-general, or a knight 
commander of the main herd, or something like that.  He pounded around 
on a white horse, all desecrated up with gold-leaf and hen-feathers 
and a Good Templar's hat, and wasn't allowed by the regulations to 
speak to us.  And Willie Robbins was made captain of our company.

"And maybe he didn't go after the wreath of fame then!  As far as I 
could see it was him that ended the war.  He got eighteen of us boys--
friends of his, too--killed in battles that he stirred up himself, and 
that didn't seem to me necessary at all.  One night he took twelve of 
us and waded through a little nil about a hundred and ninety yards 
wide, and climbed a couple of mountains, and sneaked through a mile of 
neglected shrubbery and a couple of rock-quarries and into a rye-straw 
village, and captured a Spanish general named, as they said, Benny 
Veedus.  Benny seemed to me hardly worth the trouble, being a blackish 
man without shoes or cuffs, and anxious to surrender and throw himself 
on the commissary of his foe.

"But that job gave Willie the big boost he wanted.  The San Augustine 
News and the Galveston, St.  Louis, New York, and Kansas City papers 
printed his picture and columns of stuff about him.  Old San Augustine 
simply went crazy over its 'gallant son.'  The News had an editorial 
tearfully begging the Government to call off the regular army and the 
national guard, and let Willie carry on the rest of the war single-
handed.  It said that a refusal to do so would be regarded as a proof 
that the Northern jealousy of the South was still as rampant as ever.

"If the war hadn't ended pretty soon, I don't know to what heights of 
gold braid and encomiums Willie would have climbed; but it did.  There 
was a secession of hostilities just three days after he was appointed 
a colonel, and got in three more medals by registered mail, and shot 
two Spaniards while they were drinking lemonade in an ambuscade.

"Our company went back to San Augustine when the war was over.  There 
wasn't anywhere else for it to go.  And what do you think?  The old 
town notified us in print, by wire cable, special delivery, and a 
nigger named Saul sent on a gray mule to San Antone, that they was 
going to give us the biggest blow-out, complimentary, alimentary, and 
elementary, that ever disturbed the kildees on the sand-flats outside 
of the immediate contiguity of the city.

"I say 'we,' but it was all meant for ex-Private, Captain de facto, 
and Colonel-elect Willie Robbins.  The town was crazy about him.  They 
notified us that the reception they were going to put up would make 
the Mardi Gras in New Orleans look like an afternoon tea in Bury St.  
Edmunds with a curate's aunt.

"Well, the San Augustine Rifles got back home on schedule time.  
Everybody was at the depot giving forth Roosevelt-Democrat--they used 
to be called Rebel--yells.  There was two brass-bands, and the mayor, 
and schoolgirls in white frightening the street-car horses by throwing 
Cherokee roses in the streets, and-well, maybe you've seen a 
celebration by a town that was inland and out of water.

"They wanted Brevet-Colonel Willie to get into a carriage and be drawn 
by prominent citizens and some of the city aldermen to the armory, but 
he stuck to his company and marched at the head of it up Sam Houston 
Avenue.  The buildings on both sides was covered with flags and 
audiences, and everybody hollered 'Robbins!' or 'Hello, Willie!' as we 
marched up in files of fours.  I never saw a illustriouser-looking 
human in my life than Willie was.  He had at least seven or eight 
medals and diplomas and decorations on the breast of his khaki coat; 
he was sunburnt the color of a saddle, and he certainly done himself 
proud.

"They told us at the depot that the courthouse was to be illuminated 
at half-past seven, and there would be speeches and chili-con-came at 
the Palace Hotel.  Miss Delphine Thompson was to read an original poem 
by James Whitcomb Ryan, and Constable Hooker had promised us a salute 
of nine guns from Chicago that he had arrested that day.

"After we had disbanded in the armory, Willie says to me:

"'Want to walk out a piece with me?'

"'Why, yes,' says I, 'if it ain't so far that we can't hear the tumult 
and the shouting die away.  I'm hungry myself,' says I, 'and I'm 
pining for some home grub, but I'll go with you.'

"Willie steered me down some side streets till we came to a little 
white cottage in a new lot with a twenty-by-thirty-foot lawn decorated 
with brickbats and old barrel-staves.

"'Halt and give the countersign,' says I to Willie.  'Don't you know 
this dugout?  It's the bird's-nest that Joe Granberry built before he 
married Myra Allison.  What you going there for?'

"But Willie already had the gate open.  He walked up the brick walk to 
the steps, and I went with him.  Myra was sitting in a rocking-chair 
on the porch, sewing.  Her hair was smoothed back kind of hasty and 
tied in a knot.  I never noticed till then that she had freckles.  Joe 
was at one side of the porch, in his shirtsleeves, with no collar on, 
and no signs of a shave, trying to scrape out a hole among the 
brickbats and tin cans to plant a little fruit-tree in.  He looked up 
but never said a word, and neither did Myra.

"Willie was sure dandy-looking in his uniform, with medals strung on 
his breast and his new gold-handled sword.  You'd never have taken him 
for the little white-headed snipe that the girls used to order about 
and make fun of.  He just stood there for a minute, looking at Myra 
with a peculiar little smile on his face; and then he says to her, 
slow, and kind of holding on to his words with his teeth:

"'Oh, I don't know!  Maybe I could if I tried!'

"That was all that was said.  Willie raised his hat, and we walked 
away.

"And, somehow, when he said that, I remembered, all of a sudden, the 
night of that dance and Willie brushing his hair before the looking-
glass, and Myra sticking her head in the door to guy him.

"When we got back to Sam Houston Avenue, Willie says:

"'Well, so long, Ben.  I'm going down home and get off my shoes and 
take a rest.'

"'You?' says I.  'What's the matter with you?  Ain't the court-house 
jammed with everybody in town waiting to honor the hero?  And two 
brass-bands, and recitations and flags and jags and grub to follow 
waiting for you?'

"Willie sighs.

"'All right, Ben,' says he.  'Darned if I didn't forget all about 
that.'

"And that's why I say," concluded Ben Granger, "that you can't tell 
where ambition begins any more than you can where it is going to wind 
up."




THE HEAD-HUNTER



When the war between Spain and George Dewey was over, I went to the 
Philippine Islands.  There I remained as bushwhacker correspondent for 
my paper until its managing editor notified me that an eight-hundred-
word cablegram describing the grief of a pet carabao over the death of 
an infant Moro was not considered by the office to be war news.  So I 
resigned, and came home.

On board the trading-vessel that brought me back I pondered much upon 
the strange things I had sensed in the weird archipelago of the 
yellow-brown people.  The manoeuvres and skirmishings of the petty war 
interested me not: I was spellbound by the outlandish and unreadable 
countenance of that race that had turned its expressionless gaze upon 
us out of an unguessable past.

Particularly during my stay in Mindanao had I been fascinated and 
attracted by that delightfully original tribe of heathen known as the 
head-hunters.  Those grim, flinty, relentless little men, never seen, 
but chilling the warmest noonday by the subtle terror of their 
concealed presence, paralleling the trail of their prey through 
unmapped forests, across perilous mountain-tops, adown bottomless 
chasms, into uninhabitable jungles, always near with the invisible 
hand of death uplifted, betraying their pursuit only by such signs as 
a beast or a bird or a gliding serpent might make-a twig crackling in 
the awful, sweat-soaked night, a drench of dew showering from the 
screening foliage of a giant tree, a whisper at even from the rushes 
of a water-level-a hint of death for every mile and every hour-they 
amused me greatly, those little fellows of one idea.

When you think of it, their method is beautifully and almost 
hilariously effective and simple.

You have your hut in which you live and carry out the destiny that was 
decreed for you.  Spiked to the jamb of your bamboo doorway is a 
basket made of green withes, plaited.  From time to time, as vanity or 
ennui or love or jealousy or ambition may move you, you creep forth 
with your snickersnee and take up the silent trail.  Back from it you 
come, triumphant, bearing the severed, gory head of your victim, which 
you deposit with pardonable pride in the basket at the side of your 
door.  It may be the head of your enemy, your friend, or a stranger, 
according as competition, jealousy, or simple sportiveness has been 
your incentive to labor.

In any case, your reward is certain.  The village men, in passing, 
stop to congratulate you, as your neighbor on weaker planes of life 
stops to admire and praise the begonias in your front yard.  Your 
particular brown maid lingers, with fluttering bosom, casting soft 
tiger's eyes at the evidence of your love for her.  You chew betel-nut 
and listen, content, to the intermittent soft drip from the ends of 
the severed neck arteries.  And you show your teeth and grunt like a 
water-buffalo--which is as near as you can come to laughing-at the 
thought that the cold, acephalous body of your door ornament is being 
spotted by wheeling vultures in the Mindanaoan wilds.

Truly, the life of the merry head-hunter captivated me.  He had 
reduced art and philosophy to a simple code.  To take your adversary's 
head, to basket it at the portal of your castle, to see it lying 
there, a dead thing, with its cunning and stratagems and power gone--  
Is there a better way to foil his plots, to refute his arguments, to 
establish your superiority over his skill and wisdom?

The ship that brought me home was captained by an erratic Swede, who 
changed his course and deposited me, with genuine compassion, in a 
small town on the Pacific coast of one of the Central American 
republics, a few hundred miles south of the port to which he had 
engaged to convey me.  But I was wearied of movement and exotic 
fancies; so I leaped contentedly upon the firm sands of the village of 
Mojada, telling myself I should be sure to find there the rest that I 
craved.  After all, far better to linger there (I thought), lulled by 
the sedative plash of the waves and the rustling of palm-fronds, than 
to sit upon the horsehair sofa of my parental home in the East, and 
there, cast down by currant wine and cake, and scourged by fatuous 
relatives, drivel into the ears of gaping neighbors sad stories of the 
death of colonial governors.


When I first saw Chloe Greene she was standing, all in white, in the 
doorway of her father's tile-roofed 'dobe house.  She was polishing a 
silver cup with a cloth, and she looked like a pearl laid against 
black velvet.  She turned on me a flatteringly protracted but a 
wiltingly disapproving gaze, and then went inside, humming a light 
song to indicate the value she placed upon my existence.

Small wonder: for Dr.  Stamford (the most disreputable professional 
man between Juneau and Valparaiso) and I were zigzagging along the 
turfy street, tunelessly singing the words of Auld Lang Syne to the 
air of Muzzer's Little Coal-Black Coon.  We had come from the ice 
factory, which was Mojada's palace of wickedness, where we had been 
playing billiards and opening black bottles, white with frost, that we 
dragged with strings out of old Sandoval's ice-cold vats.

I turned in sudden rage to Dr.  Stamford, as sober as the verger of a 
cathedral.  In a moment I had become aware that we were swine cast 
before a pearl.

"You beast," I said, "this is half your doing.  And the other half is 
the fault of this cursed country.  I'd better have gone back to 
Sleepy-town and died in a wild orgy of currant wine and buns than to 
have had this happen."

Stamford filled the empty street with his roaring laughter.

"You too!" he cried.  "And all as quick as the popping of a cork.  
Well, she does seem to strike agreeably upon the retina.  But don't 
burn your fingers.  All Mojada will tell you that Louis Devoe is the 
man.

"We will see about that," said I.  "And, perhaps, whether he is a man 
as well as the man."

I lost no time in meeting Louis Devoe.  That was easily accomplished, 
for the foreign colony in Mojada numbered scarce a dozen; and they 
gathered daily at a half-decent hotel kept by a Turk, where they 
managed to patch together the fluttering rags of country and 
civilization that were left them.  I sought Devoe before I did my 
pearl of the doorway, because I had learned a little of the game of 
war, and knew better than to strike for a prize before testing the 
strength of the enemy.

A sort of cold dismay-something akin to fear-filled me when I had 
estimated him.  I found a man so perfectly poised, so charming, so 
deeply learned in the world's rituals, so full of tact, courtesy, and 
hospitality, so endowed with grace and ease and a kind of careless, 
haughty power that I almost overstepped the bounds in probing him, in 
turning him on the spit to find the weak point that I so craved for 
him to have.  But I left him whole-I had to make bitter acknowledgment 
to myself that Louis Devoe was a gentleman worthy of my best blows; 
and I swore to give him them.  He was a great merchant of the country, 
a wealthy importer and exporter.  All day he sat in a fastidiously 
appointed office, surrounded by works of art and evidences of his high 
culture, directing through glass doors and windows the affairs of his 
house.

In person he was slender and hardly tall.  His small, well-shaped head 
was covered with thick, brown hair, trimmed short, and he wore a 
thick, brown beard also cut close and to a fine point.  His manners 
were a pattern.

Before long I had become a regular and a welcome visitor at the Greene 
home.  I shook my wild habits from me like a worn-out cloak.  I 
trained for the conflict with the care of a prize-fighter and the 
self-denial of a Brahmin.

As for Chloe Greene, I shall weary you with no sonnets to her eyebrow.  
She was a splendidly feminine girl, as wholesome as a November pippin, 
and no more mysterious than a windowpane.  She had whimsical little 
theories that she had deduced from life, and that fitted the maxims of 
Epictetus like princess gowns.  I wonder, after all, if that old 
duffer wasn't rather wise!

Chloe had a father, the Reverend Homer Greene, and an intermittent 
mother, who sometimes palely presided over a twilight teapot.  The 
Reverend Homer was a burr-like man with a life-work.  He was writing a 
concordance to the Scriptures, and had arrived as far as Kings.  
Being, presumably, a suitor for his daughter's hand, I was timber for 
his literary outpourings.  I had the family tree of Israel drilled 
into my head until I used to cry aloud in my sleep: "And Aminadab 
begat Jay Eye See," and so forth, until he had tackled another book.  
I once made a calculation that the Reverend Homer's concordance would 
be worked up as far as the Seven Vials mentioned in Revelations about 
the third day after they were opened.

Louis Devoe, as well as I, was a visitor and an intimate friend of the 
Greenes.  It was there I met him the oftenest, and a more agreeable' 
man or a more accomplished I have never hated in my life.

Luckily or unfortunately, I came to be accepted as a Boy.  My 
appearance was youthful, and I suppose I had that pleading and 
homeless air that always draws the motherliness that is in women and 
the cursed theories and hobbies of pater-familiases.

Chloe called me "Tommy," and made sisterly fun of my attempts to woo 
her.  With Devoe she was vastly more reserved.  He was the man of 
romance, one to stir her imagination and deepest feelings had her 
fancy leaned toward him.  I was closer to her, but standing in no 
glamour; I had the task before me of winning her in what seems to me 
the American way of fighting--with cleanness and pluck and everyday 
devotion to break away the barriers of friendship that divided us, and 
to take her, if I could, between sunrise and dark, abetted by neither 
moonlight nor music nor foreign wiles.

Chloe gave no sign of bestowing her blithe affections upon either of 
us.  But one day she let out to me an inkling of what she preferred in 
a man.  It was tremendously interesting to me, but not illuminating as 
to its application.  I had been tormenting her for the dozenth time 
with the statement and catalogue of my sentiments toward her.

"Tommy," said she, "I don't want a man to show his love for me by 
leading an army against another country and blowing people off the 
earth with cannons."

"If you mean that the opposite way," I answered, "as they say women 
do, I'll see what I can do.  The papers are full of this diplomatic 
row in Russia.  My people know some big people in Washington who are 
right next to the army people, and I could get an artillery commission 
and--"

"I'm not that way," interrupted Chloe.  "I mean what I say.  It isn't 
the big things that are done in the world, Tommy, that count with a 
woman.  When the knights were riding abroad in their armor to slay 
dragons, many a stay-at-home page won a lonesome lady's hand by being 
on the spot to pick up her glove and be quick with her cloak when the 
wind blew.  The man I am to like best, whoever he shall be, must show 
his love in little ways.  He must never forget, after hearing it once, 
that I do not like to have any one walk at my left side; that I detest 
bright-colored neckties; that I prefer to sit with my back to a light; 
that I like candied violets; that I must not be talked to when I am 
looking at the moonlight shining on water, and that I very, very often 
long for dates stuffed with English walnuts."

"Frivolity," I said, with a frown.  "Any well-trained servant would be 
equal to such details."

"And he must remember," went on Chloe, to remind me of what I want 
when I do not know, myself, what I want."

"You're rising in the scale," I said.  "What you seem to need is a 
first-class clairvoyant."

"And if I say that I am dying to hear a Beethoven sonata, and stamp my 
foot when I say it, he must know by that that what my soul craves is 
salted almonds; and he will have them ready in his pocket."

"Now," said I, "I am at a loss.  I do not know whether your soul's 
affinity is to be an impresario or a fancy grocer."

Chole turned her pearly smile upon me.

"Take less than half of what I said as a jest," she went on.  "And 
don't think too lightly of the little things, Boy.  Be a paladin if 
you must, but don't let it show on you.  Most women are only very big 
children, and most men are only very little ones.  Please us; don't 
try to overpower us.  When we want a hero we can make one out of even 
a plain grocer the third time he catches our handkerchief before it 
falls to the ground."

That evening I was taken down with pernicious fever.  That is a kind 
of coast fever with improvements and high-geared attachments.  Your 
temperature goes up among the threes and fours and remains there, 
laughing scornfully and feverishly at the cinchona trees and the coal-
tar derivatives.  Pernicious fever is a case for a simple 
mathematician instead of a doctor.  It is merely this formula:  
Vitality + the desire to live--the duration of the fever the result.

I took to my bed in the two-roomed thatched hut where I had been 
comfortably established, and sent for a gallon of rum.  That was not 
for myself.  Drunk, Stamford was the best doctor between the Andes and 
the Pacific.  He came, sat at my bedside, and drank himself into 
condition.

"My boy," said he, "my lily-white and reformed Romeo, medicine will do 
you no good.  But I will give you quinine, which, being bitter, will 
arouse in you hatred and anger-two stimulants that will add ten per 
cent.  to your chances.  You are as strong as a caribou calf, and you 
will get well if the fever doesn't get in a knockout blow when you're 
off your guard."

For two weeks I lay on my back feeling like a Hindoo widow on a 
burning ghat.  Old Atasca, an untrained Indian nurse, sat near the 
door like a petrified statue of What's-the-Use, attending to her 
duties, which were, mainly, to see that time went by without slipping 
a cog.  Sometimes I would fancy myself back in the Philippines, or, at 
worse times, sliding off the horsehair sofa in Sleepytown.

One afternoon I ordered Atasca to vamose, and got up and dressed 
carefully.  I took my temperature, which I was pleased to find 104.  I 
paid almost dainty attention to my dress, choosing solicitously a 
necktie of a dull and subdued hue.  The mirror showed that I was 
looking little the worse from my illness.  The fever gave brightness 
to my eyes and color to my face.  And while I looked at my reflection 
my color went and came again as I thought of Chloe Greene and the 
millions of eons that had passed since I'd seen her, and of Louis 
Devoe and the time he had gained on me.

I went straight to her house.  I seemed to float rather than walk; I 
hardly felt the ground under my feet; I thought pernicious fever must 
be a great boon to make one feel so strong.

I found Chloe and Louis Devoe sitting under the awning in front of the 
house.  She jumped up and met me with a double handshake.

"I'm glad, glad, glad to see you out again!" she cried, every word a 
pearl strung on the string of her sentence.  "You are well, Tommy--or 
better, of course.  I wanted to come to see you, but they wouldn't let 
me.

"Oh yes," said I, carelessly, "it was nothing.  Merely a little fever.  
I am out again, as you see."

We three sat there and talked for half an hour or so.  Then Chloe 
looked out yearningly and almost piteously across the ocean.  I could 
see in her sea-blue eyes some deep and intense desire.  Devoe, curse 
him! saw it too.

"What is it?" we asked, in unison.

"Cocoanut-pudding," said Chloe, pathetically.  "I've wanted some--oh, 
so badly, for two days.  It's got beyond a wish; it's an obsession.

"The cocoanut season is over," said Devoe, in that voice of his that 
gave thrilling interest to his most commonplace words.  "I hardly 
think one could be found in Mojada.  The natives never use them except 
when they are green and the milk is fresh.  They sell all the ripe 
ones to the fruiterers."

"Wouldn't a broiled lobster or a Welsh rabbit do as well?" I remarked, 
with the engaging idiocy of a pernicious-fever convalescent.

Chloe came as near to pouting as a sweet disposition and a perfect 
profile would allow her to come.

The Reverend Homer poked his ermine-lined face through the doorway and 
added a concordance to the conversation.

"Sometimes," said he, "old Campos keeps the dried nuts in his little 
store on the hill.  But it would be far better, my daughter, to 
restrain unusual desires, and partake thankfully of the daily dishes 
that the Lord has set before us."

"Stuff!" said I.

"How was that?" asked the Reverend Homer, sharply.

"I say it's tough," said I, "to drop into the vernacular, that Miss 
Greene should be deprived of the food she desires-a simple thing like 
kalsomine-pudding.  Perhaps," I continued, solicitously, "some pickled 
walnuts or a fricassee of Hungarian butternuts would do as well."

Every one looked at me with a slight exhibition of curiosity.

Louis Devoe arose and made his adieus.  I watched him until he had 
sauntered slowly and grandiosely to the corner, around which he turned 
to reach his great warehouse and store.  Chloe made her excuses, and 
went inside for a few minutes to attend to some detail affecting the 
seven-o'clock dinner.  She was a passed mistress in housekeeping.  I 
had tasted her puddings and bread with beatitude.

When all had gone, I turned casually and saw a basket made of plaited 
green withes hanging by a nail outside the door-jamb.  With a rush 
that made my hot temples throb there came vividly to my mind 
recollections of the head-hunters--those grim, flinty, relentless 
little men, never seen, but chilling the warmest noonday by the subtle 
terror of their concealed presence.  .  .  .  From time to time, as 
vanity or ennui or love or jealousy or ambition may move him, one 
creeps forth with his snickersnee and takes up the silent trail.  .  .  
.  Back he comes, triumphant, bearing the severed, gory head of his 
victim .  .  .  His particular brown or white maid lingers, with 
fluttering bosom, casting soft tiger's eyes at the evidence of his 
love for her.

I stole softly from the house and returned to my hut.  From its 
supporting nails in the wall I took a machete as heavy as a butcher's 
cleaver and sharper than a safety-razor.  And then I chuckled softly 
to myself, and set out to the fastidiously appointed private office of 
Monsieur Louis Devoe, usurper to the hand of the Pearl of the Pacific.

He was never slow at thinking; he gave one look at my face and another 
at the weapon in my hand as I entered his door, and then he seemed to 
fade from my sight.  I ran to the back door, kicked it open, and saw 
him running like a deer up the road toward the wood that began two 
hundred yards away.  I was after him, with a shout.  I remember 
hearing children and women screaming, and seeing them flying from the 
road.

He was fleet, but I was stronger.  A mile, and I had almost come up 
with him.  He doubled cunningly and dashed into a brake that extended 
into a small canon.  I crashed through this after him, and in five 
minutes had him cornered in an angle of insurmountable cliffs.  There 
his instinct of self-preservation steadied him, as it will steady even 
animals at bay.  He turned to me, quite calm, with a ghastly smile.

"Oh, Rayburn!" he said, with such an awful effort at ease that I was 
impolite enough to laugh rudely in his face.  "Oh, Rayburn!" said he, 
"come, let's have done with this nonsense.  Of course, I know it's the 
fever and you're not yourself; but collect yourself, man-give me that 
ridiculous weapon, now, and let's go back and talk it over."

"I will go back," said I, "carrying your head with me.  We will see 
how charmingly it can discourse when it lies in the basket at her 
door."

"Come," said he, persuasively, "I think better of you than to suppose 
that you try this sort of thing as a joke.  But even the vagaries of a 
fever-crazed lunatic come some time to a limit.  What is this talk 
about heads and baskets?  Get yourself together and throw away that 
absurd cane-chopper.  What would Miss Greene think of you?" he ended, 
with the silky cajolery that one would use toward a fretful child.

"Listen," said I.  "At last you have struck upon the right note.  What 
would she think of me? Listen," I repeated.

"There are women," I said, "who look upon horsehair sofas and currant 
wine as dross.  To them even the calculated modulation of your well-
trimmed talk sounds like the dropping of rotten plums from a tree in 
the night.  They are the maidens who walk back and forth in the 
villages, scorning the emptiness of the baskets at the doors of the 
young men who would win them.

One such as they," I said, "is waiting.  Only a fool would try to win 
a woman by drooling like a braggart in her doorway or by waiting upon 
her whims like a footman.  They are all daughters of Herodias, and to 
gain their hearts one must lay the heads of his enemies before them 
with his own hands.  Now, bend your neck, Louis Devoe.  Do not be a 
coward as well as a chatterer at a lady's tea-table."

"There, there!" said Devoe, falteringly.  "You know me, don't you, 
Rayburn?"

"Oh yes," I said, "I know you.  I know you.  I know you.  But the 
basket is empty.  The old men of the village and the young men, and 
both the dark maidens and the ones who are as fair as pearls walk back 
and forth and see its emptiness.  Will you kneel now, or must we have 
a scuffle?  It is not like you to make things go roughly and with bad 
form.  But the basket is waiting for your head."

With that he went to pieces.  I had to catch him as he tried to 
scamper past me like a scared rabbit.  I stretched him out and got a 
foot on his chest, but he squirmed like a worm, although I appealed 
repeatedly to his sense of propriety and the duty he owed to himself 
as a gentleman not to make a row.

But at last he gave me the chance, and I swung the machete.

It was not hard work.  He flopped like a chicken during the six or 
seven blows that it took to sever his head; but finally he lay still, 
and I tied his head in my handkerchief.  The eyes opened and shut 
thrice while I walked a hundred yards.  I was red to my feet with the 
drip, but what did that matter?  With delight I felt under my hands 
the crisp touch of his short, thick, brown hair and close-trimmed 
beard.

I reached the house of the Greenes and dumped the head of Louis Devoe 
into the basket that still hung by the nail in the door-jamb.  I sat 
in a chair under the awning and waited.  The sun was within two hours 
of setting.  Chloe came out and looked surprised.

"Where have you been, Tommy?" she asked.  "You were gone when I came 
out."

"Look in the basket," I said, rising to my feet.  She looked, and gave 
a little scream--of delight, I was pleased to note.

"Oh, Tommy!" she said.  "It was just what I wanted you to do.  It's 
leaking a little, but that doesn't matter.  Wasn't I telling you?  
It's the little things that count.  And you remembered."

Little things!  She held the ensanguined head of Louis Devoe in her 
white apron.  Tiny streams of red widened on her apron and dripped 
upon the floor.  Her face was bright and tender.

"Little things, indeed!" I thought again.  "The head-hunters are 
right.  These are the things that women like you to do for them."

Chloe came close to me.  There was no one in sight.  She looked tip at 
me with sea-blue eyes that said things they had never said before.

"You think of me," she said.  "You are the man I was describing.  You 
think of the little things, and they are what make the world worth 
living in.  The man for me must consider my little wishes, and make me 
happy in small ways.  He must bring me little red peaches in December 
if I wish for them, and then I will love him till June.  I will have 
no knight in armor slaying his rival or killing dragons for me.  You 
please me very well, Tommy."

I stooped and kissed her.  Then a moisture broke out on my forehead, 
and I began to feel weak.  I saw the red stains vanish from Chloe's 
apron, and the head of Louis Devoe turn to a brown, dried cocoanut.

"There will be cocoanut-pudding for dinner, Tommy, boy," said Chloe, 
gayly, "and you must come.  I must go in for a little while."

She vanished in a delightful flutter.

Dr.  Stamford tramped up hurriedly.  He seized my pulse as though it 
were his own property that I had escaped with.

"You are the biggest fool outside of any asylum!" he said, angrily.  
"Why did you leave your bed?  And the idiotic things you've been 
doing!--and no wonder, with your pulse going like a sledge-hammer."

"Name some of them," said I.

"Devoe sent for me," said Stamford.  "He saw you from his window go to 
old Campos' store, chase him up the hill with his own yardstick, and 
then come back and make off with his biggest cocoanut."

"It's the little things that count, after all," said I.

"It's your little bed that counts with you just now," said the doctor.  
"You come with me at once, or I'll throw up the case.  'You're as 
loony as a loon."

So I got no cocoanut-pudding that evening, but I conceived a distrust 
as to the value of the method of the head-hunters.  Perhaps for many 
centuries the maidens of the villages may have been looking wistfully 
at the heads in the baskets at the doorways, longing for other and 
lesser trophies.




NO STORY



To avoid having this book hurled into corner of the room by the 
suspicious reader, I will assert in time that this is not a newspaper 
story.  You will encounter no shirt-sleeved, omniscient city editor, 
no prodigy "cub" reporter just off the farm, no scoop, no story--no 
anything.

But if you will concede me the setting of the first scene in the 
reporters' room of the Morning Beacon, I will repay the favor by 
keeping strictly my promises set forth above.

I was doing space-work on the Beacon, hoping to be put on a salary.  
Some one had cleared with a rake or a shovel a small space for me at 
the end of a long table piled high with exchanges, Congressional 
Records, and old files.  There I did my work.  I wrote whatever the 
city whispered or roared or chuckled to me on my diligent wanderings 
about its streets.  My income was not regular.

One day Tripp came in and leaned on my table.  Tripp was something in 
the mechanical department--I think he had something to do with the 
pictures, for he smelled of photographers' supplies, and his hands 
were always stained and cut up with acids.  He was about twenty-five 
and looked forty.  Half of his face was covered with short, curly red 

whiskers that looked like a door-mat with the "welcome" left off.  He 
was pale and unhealthy and miserable and fawning, and an assiduous 
borrower of sums ranging from twenty-five cents to a dollar.  One 
dollar was his limit.  He knew the extent of his credit as well as the 
Chemical National Bank knows the amount of H20 that collateral will 
show on analysis.  When he sat on my table he held one hand with the 
other to keep both from shaking.  Whiskey.  He had a spurious air of 
lightness and bravado about him that deceived no one, but was useful 
in his borrowing because it was so pitifully and perceptibly assumed.

This day I had coaxed from the cashier five shining silver dollars as 
a grumbling advance on a story that the Sunday editor had reluctantly 
accepted.  So if I was not feeling at peace with the world, at least 
an armistice had been declared; and I was beginning with ardor to 
write a description of the Brooklyn Bridge by moonlight.

"Well, Tripp," said I, looking up at him rather impatiently, "how goes 
it?"  He was looking to-day more miserable, more cringing and haggard 
and downtrodden than I had ever seen him.  He was at that stage of 
misery where he drew your pity so fully that you longed to kick him.

"Have you got a dollar?" asked Tripp, with his most fawning look and 
his dog-like eyes that blinked in the narrow space between his high-
growing matted beard and his low-growing matted hair.

"I have," said I; and again I said, "I have," more loudly and 
inhospitably, "and four besides.  And I had hard work corkscrewing 
them out of old Atkinson, I can tell you.  And I drew them," I 
continued, "to meet a want--a hiatus--a demand--a need--an exigency--a 
requirement of exactly five dollars."

I was driven to emphasis by the premonition that I was to lose one of 
the dollars on the spot.

"I don't want to borrow any," said Tripp, and I breathed again.  "I 
thought you'd like to get put onto a good story," he went on.  "I've 
got a rattling fine one for you.  You ought to make it run a column at 
least.  It'll make a dandy if you work it up right.  It'll probably 
cost you a dollar or two to get the stuff.  I don't want anything out 
of it myself."

I became placated.  The proposition showed that Tripp appreciated past 
favors, although he did not return them.  If he had been wise enough 
to strike me for a quarter then he would have got it.

"What is the story ?" I asked, poising my pencil with a finely 
calculated editorial air.

"I'll tell you," said Tripp.  "It's a girl.  A beauty.  One of the 
howlingest Amsden's Junes you ever saw.  Rosebuds covered with dew-
violets in their mossy bed--and truck like that.  She's lived on Long 
Island twenty years and never saw New York City before.  I ran against 
her on Thirty-fourth Street.  She'd just got in on the East River 
ferry.  I tell you, she's a beauty that would take the hydrogen out of 
all the peroxides in the world.  She stopped me on the street and 
asked me where she could find George Brown.  Asked me where she could 
find George Brown in New York City!  What do you think of that?

"I talked to her, and found that she was going to marry a young farmer 
named Dodd--Hiram Dodd--next week.  But it seems that George Brown 
still holds the championship in her youthful fancy.  George had 
greased his cowhide boots some years ago, and came to the city to make 
his fortune.  But he forgot to remember to show up again at Greenburg, 
and Hiram got in as second-best choice.  But when it comes to the 
scratch Ada--her name's Ada Lowery--saddles a nag and rides eight 
miles to the railroad station and catches the 6.45 A.M.  train for the 
city.  Looking for George, you know--you understand about women--
George wasn't there, so she wanted him.

"Well, you know, I couldn't leave her loose in Wolftown-on-the-Hudson.  
I suppose she thought the first person she inquired of would say: 
'George Brown ?--why, yes--lemme see--he's a short man with light-blue 
eyes, ain't he?  Oh yes--you'll find George on One Hundred and Twenty-
fifth Street, right next to the grocery.  He's bill-clerk in a saddle-
and-harness store.'  That's about how innocent and beautiful she is.  
You know those little Long Island water-front villages like Greenburg-
-a couple of duck-farms for sport, and clams and about nine summer 
visitors for industries.  That's the kind of a place she comes from.  
But, say--you ought to see her!

"What could I do? I don't know what money looks like in the morning.  
And she'd paid her last cent of pocket-money for her railroad ticket 
except a quarter, which she had squandered on gum-drops.  She was 
eating them out of a paper bag.  I took her to a boarding-house on 
Thirty-second Street where I used to live, and hocked her.  She's in 
soak for a dollar.  That's old Mother McGinnis' price per day.  I'll 
show you the house."

"What words are these, Tripp?" said I.  "I thought you said you had a 
story.  Every ferryboat that crosses the East River brings or takes 
away girls from Long Island."

The premature lines on Tripp's face grew deeper.  He frowned seriously 
from his tangle of hair.  He separated his hands and emphasized his 
answer with one shaking forefinger.

"Can't you see," he said, "what a rattling fine story it would make?  
You could do it fine.  All about the romance, you know, and describe 
the girl, and put a lot of stuff in it about true love, and sling in a 
few stickfuls of funny business--joshing the Long Islanders about 
being green, and, well--you know how to do it.  You ought to get 
fifteen dollars out of it, anyhow.  And it'll.  cost you only about 
four dollars.  You'll make a clear profit of eleven."

"How will it cost me four dollars?" I asked, suspiciously.

"One dollar to Mrs.  McGinnis," Tripp answered, promptly, "and two 
dollars to pay the girl's fare back home."

"And the fourth dimension?" I inquired, making a rapid mental 
calculation.

"One dollar to me," said Tripp.  "For whiskey.  Are you on?"

I smiled enigmatically and spread my elbows as if to begin writing 
again.  But this grim, abject, specious, subservient, burr-like wreck 
of a man would not be shaken off.  His forehead suddenly became 
shiningly moist.

"Don't you see," he said, with a sort of desperate calmness, "that 
this girl has got to be sent home to-day--not to-night nor to-morrow, 
but to-day?  I can't do anything for her.  You know, I'm the janitor 
and corresponding secretary of the Down-and-Out Club..  I thought you 
could make a newspaper story out of it and win out a piece of money on 
general results.  But, anyhow, don't you see that she's got to get 
back home before night?"

And then I began to feel that dull, leaden, soul-depressing sensation 
known as the sense of duty.  Why should that sense fall upon one as a 
weight and a burden?  I knew that I was doomed that day to give up the 
bulk of my store of hard-wrung coin to the relief of this Ada Lowery.  
But I swore to myself that Tripp's whiskey dollar would not be 
forthcoming.  He might play knight-errant at my expense, but he would 
indulge in no wassail afterward, commemorating my weakness and 
gullibility.  In a kind of chilly anger I put on my coat and hat.

Tripp, submissive, cringing, vainly endeavoring to please, conducted 
me via the street-cars to the human pawn-shop of Mother McGinnis.  I 
paid the fares.  It seemed that the collodion-scented Don Quixote and 
the smallest minted coin were strangers.

Tripp pulled the bell at the door of the mouldly red-brick boarding-
house.  At its faint tinkle he paled, and crouched as a rabbit makes 
ready to spring away at the sound of a hunting-dog.  I guessed what a 
life he had led, terror-haunted by the coming footsteps of landladies.

"Give me one of the dollars--quick!" he said.

The door opened six inches.  Mother McGinnis stood there with white 
eyes--they were white, I say--and a yellow face, holding together at 
her throat with one hand a dingy pink flannel dressing-sack.  Tripp 
thrust the dollar through the space without a word, and it bought us 
entry.

"She's in the parlor," said the McGinnis, turning the back of her sack 
upon us.

In the dim parlor a girl sat at the cracked marble centre-table 
weeping comfortably and eating gum-drops.  She was a flawless beauty.  
Crying had only made her brilliant eyes brighter.  When she crunched a 
gum-drop you thought only of the poetry of motion and envied the 
senseless confection.  Eve at the age of five minutes must have been a 
ringer for Miss Ada Lowery at nineteen or twenty.  I was introduced, 
and a gum-drop suffered neglect while she conveyed to me a naive 
interest, such as a puppy dog (a prize winner) might bestow upon a 
crawling beetle or a frog.

Tripp took his stand by the table, with the fingers of one hand spread 
upon it, as an attorney or a master of ceremonies might have stood.  
But he looked the master of nothing.  His faded coat was buttoned 
high, as if it sought to be charitable to deficiencies of tie and 
linen.

I thought of a Scotch terrier at the sight of his shifty eyes in the 
glade between his tangled hair and beard.  For one ignoble moment I 
felt ashamed of having been introduced as his friend in the presence 
of so much beauty in distress.  But evidently Tripp meant to conduct 
the ceremonies, whatever they might be.  I thought I detected in his 
actions and pose an intention of foisting the situation upon me as 
material for a newspaper story, in a lingering hope of extracting from 
me his whiskey dollar.

"My friend" (I shuddered), "Mr.  Chalmers," said Tripp, "will tell 
you, Miss Lowery, the same that I did.  He's a reporter, and he can 
hand out the talk better than I can.  That's why I brought him with 
me."  (0 Tripp, wasn't it the silver-tongued orator you wanted?)  
"He's wise to a lot of things, and he'll tell you now what's best to 
do."

I stood on one foot, as it were, as I sat in my rickety chair.

"Why--er--Miss Lowery," I began, secretly enraged at Tripp's awkward 
opening, "I am at your service, of course, but--er--as I haven't been 
apprized of the circumstances of the case, I--er--"

"Oh," said Miss Lowery, beaming for a moment, "it ain't as bad as 
that--there ain't any circumstances.  It's the first time I've ever 
been in New York except once when I was five years old, and I had no 
idea it was such a big town.  And I met Mr.--Mr.  Snip on the street 
and asked him about a friend of mine, and he brought me here and asked 
me to wait."

"I advise you, Miss Lowery," said Tripp, "to tell Mr.  Chalmers all.  
He's a friend of mine" (I was getting used to it by this time), "and 
he'll give you the right tip."

"Why, certainly," said Miss Ada, chewing a gum-drop toward me.  "There 
ain't anything to tell except that--well, everything's fixed for me to 
marry Hiram Dodd next Thursday evening.  Hi has got two hundred acres 
of land with a lot of shore-front, and one of the best truck-farms on 
the Island.  But this morning I had my horse saddled up--he's a white 
horse named Dancer--and I rode over to the station.  I told 'em at 
home I was going to spend the day with Susie Adams.  It was a story, I 
guess, but I don't care.  And I came to New York on the train, and I 
met Mr.--Mr.  Flip on the street and asked him if he knew where I 
could find G--G--"

"Now, Miss Lowery," broke in Tripp, loudly, and with much bad taste, I 
thought, as she hesitated with her word, "you like this young man, 
Hiram Dodd, don't you?  He's all right, and good to you, ain't he?"

"Of course I like him," said Miss Lowery emphatically.  "Hi's all 
right.  And of course he's good to me.  So is everybody."

I could have sworn it myself.  Throughout Miss Ada Lowery's life all 
men would be to good to her.  They would strive, contrive, struggle, 
and compete to hold umbrellas over her hat, check her trunk, pick up 
her handkerchief, buy for her soda at the fountain.

"But," went on Miss Lowery, "last night got to thinking about G--
George, and I--"

Down went the bright gold head upon dimpled, clasped hands on the 
table.  Such a beautiful April storm!  Unrestrainedly sobbed.  I 
wished I could have comforted her.  But I was not George.  And I was 
glad I was not Hiram--and yet I was sorry, too.

By-and-by the shower passed.  She straightened up, brave and half-way 
smiling.  She would have made a splendid wife, for crying only made 
her eyes more bright and tender.  She took a gum-drop and began her 
story.

"I guess I'm a terrible hayseed," she said between her little gulps 
and sighs, "but I can't help it.  G--George Brown and I were sweet-
hearts since he was eight and I was five.  When he was nineteen--that 
was four years ago--he left Greenburg and went to the city.  He said 
he was going to be a policeman or a railroad president or something.  
And then he was coming back for me.  But I never heard from him any 
more.  And I--I--liked him."

Another flow of tears seemed imminent, but Tripp hurled himself into 
the crevasse and dammed it.  Confound him, I could see his game.  He 
was trying to make a story of it for his sordid ends and profit.

"Go on, Mr.  Chalmers," said he, "and tell the lady what's the proper 
caper.  That's what I told her--you'd hand it to her straight.  Spiel 
up."

I coughed, and tried to feel less wrathful toward Tripp.  I saw my 
duty.  Cunningly I had been inveigled, but I was securely trapped.  
Tripp's first dictum to me had been just and correct.  The young lady 
must be sent back to Greenburg that day.  She must be argued with, 
convinced, assured, instructed, ticketed, and returned without delay.  
I hated Hiram and despised George; but duty must be done.

Noblesse oblige and only five silver dollars are not strictly romantic 
compatibles, but sometimes they can be made to jibe.  It was mine to 
be Sir Oracle, and then pay the freight.  So I assumed an air that 
mingled Solomon's with that of the general passenger agent of the Long 
Island Railroad.

"Miss Lowery," said I, as impressively as I could, "life is rather a 
queer proposition, after all."  There was a familiar sound to these 
words after I had spoken them, and I hoped Miss Lowery had never heard 
Mr.  Cohan's song.  "Those whom we first love we seldom wed.  Our 
earlier romances, tinged with the magic radiance of youth, often fail 
to materialize."  The last three words sounded somewhat trite when 
they struck the air.  "But those fondly cherished dreams," I went on, 
"may cast a pleasant afterglow on our future lives, however 
impracticable and vague they may have been.  But life is full of 
realities as well as visions and dreams.  One cannot live on memories.  
May I ask, Miss Lowery, if you think you could pass a happy--that is, 
a contented and harmonious life with Mr.-er--Dodd--if in other ways 
than romantic recollections he seems to--er--fill the bill, as I might 
say?"

"Oh, Hi's all right," answered Miss Lowery.  "Yes, I could get along 
with him fine.  He's promised me an automobile and a motor-boat.  But 
somehow, when it got so close to the time I was to marry him, I 
couldn't help wishing--well, just thinking about George.  Something 
must have happened to him or he'd have written.  On the day he left, 
he and me got a hammer and a chisel and cut a dime into two pieces.  I 
took one piece and he took the other, and we promised to be true to 
each other and always keep the pieces till we saw each other again.  
I've got mine at home now in a ring-box in the top drawer of my 
dresser.  I guess I was silly to come up here looking for him.  I 
never realized what a big place it is."

And then Tripp joined in with a little grating laugh that he had, 
still trying to drag in a little story or drama to earn the miserable 
dollar that he craved.

"Oh, the boys from the country forget a lot when they come to the city 
and learn something.  I guess George, maybe, is on the bum, or got 
roped in by some other girl, or maybe gone to the dogs on account of 
whiskey or the races.  You listen to Mr.  Chalmers and go back home, 
and you'll be all right."

But now the time was come for action, for the hands of the clock were 
moving close to noon.  Frowning upon Tripp, I argued gently and 
philosophically with Miss Lowery, delicately convincing her of the 
importance of returning home at once.  And I impressed upon her the 
truth that it would not be absolutely necessary to her future 
happiness that she mention to Hi the wonders or the fact of her visit 
to the city that had swallowed up the unlucky George.

She said she had left her horse (unfortunate Rosinante) tied to a tree 
near the railroad station.  Tripp and I gave her instructions to mount 
the patient steed as soon as she arrived and ride home as fast as 
possible.  There she was to recount the exciting adventure of a day 
spent with Susie Adams.  She could "fix" Susie--I was sure of that--
and all would be well.

And then, being susceptible to the barbed arrows of beauty, I warmed 
to the adventure.  The three of us hurried to the ferry, and there I 
found the price of a ticket to Greenburg to be but a dollar and eighty 
cents.  I bought one, and a red, red rose with the twenty cents for 
Miss Lowery.  We saw her aboard her ferryboat, and stood watching her 
wave her handkerchief at us until it was the tiniest white patch 
imaginable.  And then Tripp and I faced each other, brought back to 
earth, left dry and desolate in the shade of the sombre verities of 
life.

The spell wrought by beauty and romance was dwindling.  I looked at 
Tripp and almost sneered.  He looked more careworn, contemptible, and 
disreputable than ever.  I fingered the two silver dollars remaining 
in my pocket and looked at him with the half-closed eyelids of 
contempt.  He mustered up an imitation of resistance.

"Can't you get a story out of it?" he asked, huskily.  "Some sort of a 
story, even if you have to fake part of it?"

"Not a line," said I.  "I can fancy the look on Grimes' face if I 
should try to put over any slush like this.  But we've helped the 
little lady out, and that'll have to be our only reward."

"I'm sorry," said Tripp, almost inaudibly.  "I'm sorry you're out your 
money.  Now, it seemed to me like a find of a big story, you know--
that is, a sort of thing that would write up pretty well."

"Let's try to forget it," said I, with a praiseworthy attempt at 
gayety, "and take the next car 'cross town."

I steeled myself against his unexpressed but palpable desire.  He 
should not coax, cajole, or wring from me the dollar he craved.  I had 
had enough of that wild-goose chase.

Tripp feebly unbuttoned his coat of the faded pattern and glossy seams 
to reach for something that had once been a handkerchief deep down in 
some obscure and cavernous pocket.  As he did so I caught the shine of 
a cheap silver-plated watch-chain across his vest, and something 
dangling from it caused me to stretch forth my hand and seize it 
curiously.  It was the half of a silver dime that had been cut in 
halves with a chisel.
"What!" I said, looking at him keenly.

"Oh yes," he responded, dully.  "George Brown, alias Tripp.  what's 
the use?"

Barring the W.  C.  T.  U., I'd like to know if anybody disapproves of 
my having produced promptly from my pocket Tripp's whiskey dollar and 
unhesitatingly laying it in his hand.




THE HIGHER PRAGMATISM


I


Where to go for wisdom has become a question of serious import.  The 
ancients are discredited; Plato is boiler-plate; Aristotle is 
tottering; Marcus Aurelius is reeling; Aesop has been copyrighted by 
Indiana; Solomon is too solemn; you couldn't get anything out of 
Epictetus with a pick.

The ant, which for many years served as a model of intelligence and 
industry in the school-readers, has been proven to be a doddering 
idiot and a waster of time and effort.  The owl to-day is hooted at.  
Chautauqua conventions have abandoned culture and adopted diabolo.  
Graybeards give glowing testimonials to the venders of patent hair-
restorers.  There are typographical errors in the almanacs published 
by the daily newspapers.  College professors have become--

But there shall be no personalities.  To sit in classes, to delve into 
the encyclopedia or the past-performances page, will not make us wise.  
As the poet says, "Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers."  Wisdom is 
dew, which, while we know it not, soaks into us, refreshes us, and 
makes us grow.  Knowledge is a strong stream of water turned on us 
through a hose.  It disturbs our roots.

Then, let us rather gather wisdom.  But how to do so requires 
knowledge.  If we know a thing, we know it; but very often we are not 
wise to it that we are wise, and--

But let's go on with the story.


II


Once upon a time I found a ten-cent magazine lying on a bench in a 
little city park.  Anyhow, that was the amount he asked me for when I 
sat on the bench next to him.  He was a musty, dingy, and tattered 
magazine, with some queer stories bound in him, I was sure.  He turned 
out to be a scrap-book.

"I am a newspaper reporter," I said to him, to try him.  "I have been 
detailed to write up some of the experiences of the unfortunate ones 
who spend their evenings in this park.  May I ask you to what you 
attribute your downfall in--"

I was interrupted by a laugh from my purchase--a laugh so rusty and 
unpractised that I was sure it had been his first for many a day.

"Oh, no, no," said he.  "You ain't a reporter.  Reporters don't talk 
that way.  They pretend to be one of us, and say they've just got in 
on the blind baggage from St.  Louis.  I can tell a reporter on sight.  
Us park bums get to be fine judges of human nature.  We sit here all 
day and watch the people go by.  I can size up anybody who walks past 
my bench in a way that would surprise you."

"Well," I said, "go on and tell me.  How do you size me up?"

"I should say," said the student of human nature with unpardonable 
hesitation, "that you was, say, in the contracting business--or maybe 
worked in a store--or was a sign-painter.  You stopped in the park to 
finish your cigar, and thought you'd get a little free monologue out 
of me.  Still, you might be a plasterer or a lawyer--it's getting kind 
of dark, you see.  And your wife won't let you smoke at home."

I frowned gloomily.

"But, judging again," went on the reader of men, "I'd say you ain't 
got a wife."

"No," said I, rising restlessly.  "No, no, no, I ain't.  But I will 
have, by the arrows of Cupid! That is, if--"

My voice must have trailed away and muffled itself in uncertainty and 
despair.

"I see you have a story yourself," said the dusty vagrant--impudently, 
it seemed to me.  "Suppose you take your dime back and spin your yarn 
for me.  I'm interested myself in the ups and downs of unfortunate 
ones who spend their evenings in the park."

Somehow, that amused me.  I looked at the frowsy derelict with more 
interest.  I did have a story.  Why not tell it to him?  I had told 
none of my friends.  I had always been a reserved and bottled-up man.  
It was psychical timidity or sensitiveness-perhaps both.  And I smiled 
to myself in wonder when I felt an impulse to confide in this stranger 
and vagabond.

"Jack," said I.

"Mack," said he.

"Mack," said I, "I'll tell you."

"Do you want the dime back in advance ?" said he.

I handed him a dollar.

"The dime," said I, "was the price of listening to your story."

"Right on the point of the jaw," said he.  "Go on."

And then, incredible as it may seem to the lovers in the world who 
confide their sorrows only to the night wind and the gibbous moon, I 
laid bare my secret to that wreck of all things that you would have 
supposed to be in sympathy with love.

I told him of the days and weeks and months that I had spent in 
adoring Mildred Telfair.  I spoke of my despair, my grievous days and 
wakeful nights, my dwindling hopes and distress of mind.  I even 
pictured to this night-prowler her beauty and dignity, the great sway 
she had in society, and the magnificence of her life as the elder 
daughter of an ancient race whose pride overbalanced the dollars of 
the city's millionaires.

"Why don't you cop the lady out?" asked Mack, bringing me down to 
earth and dialect again.

I explained to him that my worth was so small, my income so minute, 
and my fears so large that I hadn't the courage to speak to her of my 
worship.  I told him that in her presence I could only blush and 
stammer, and that she looked upon me with a wonderful, maddening smile 
of amusement.

"She kind of moves in the professional class, don't she?" asked Mack.

"The Telfair family--" I began, haughtily.

"I mean professional beauty," said my hearer.

"She is greatly and widely admired," I answered, cautiously.

"Any sisters?"

"One."

"You know any more girls?"

"Why, several," I answered.  "And a few others."

"Say," said Mack, "tell me one thing--can you hand out the dope to 
other girls?  Can you chin 'em and make matinee eyes at 'em and 
squeeze 'em?  You know what I mean.  You're just shy when it comes to 
this particular dame--the professional beauty--ain't that right ?"

"In a way you have outlined the situation with approximate truth," I 
admitted.

"I thought so," said Mack, grimly.  "Now, that reminds me of my own 
case.  I'll tell you about it."

I was indignant, but concealed it.  What was this loafer's case or 
anybody's case compared with mine?  Besides, I had given him a dollar 
and ten cents.

"Feel my muscle," said my companion, suddenly, flexing his biceps.  I 
did so mechanically.  The fellows in gyms are always asking you to do 
that.  His arm was as hard as cast-iron.

"Four years ago," said Mack, "I could lick any man in New York outside 
of the professional ring.  Your case and mine is just the same.  I 
come from the West Side--between Thirtieth and Fourteenth--I won't 
give the number on the door.  I was a scrapper when I was ten, and 
when I was twenty no amateur in the city could stand up four rounds 
with me.  'S a fact.  You know Bill McCarty?  No?  He managed the 
smokers for some of them swell clubs.  Well, I knocked out everything 
Bill brought up before me.  I was a middle-weight, but could train 
down to a welter when necessary.  I boxed all over the West Side at 
bouts and benefits and private entertainments, and was never put out 
once.

"But, say, the first time I put my foot in the ring with a 
professional I was no more than a canned lobster.  I dunno how it was-
-I seemed to lose heart.  I guess I got too much imagination.  There 
was a formality and publieness about it that kind of weakened my 
nerve.  I never won a fight in the ring.  Light-weights and all kinds 
of scrubs used to sign up with my manager and then walk up and tap me 
on the wrist and see me fall.  The minute I seen the crowd and a lot 
of gents in evening clothes down in front, and seen a professional 
come inside the ropes, I got as weak as ginger-ale.

"Of course, it wasn't long till I couldn't get no backers, and I 
didn't have any more chances to fight a professional--or many 
amateurs, either.  But lemme tell you--I was as good as most men 
inside the ring or out.  It was just that dumb, dead feeling I had 
when I was up against a regular that always done me up.

"Well, sir, after I had got out of the business, I got a mighty grouch 
on.  I used to go round town licking private citizens and all kinds of 
unprofessionals just to please myself.  I'd lick cops in dark streets 
and car-conductors and cab-drivers and draymen whenever I could start 
a row with 'em.  It didn't make any difference how big they were, or 
how much science they had, I got away with 'em.  If I'd only just have 
had the confidence in the ring that I had beating up the best men 
outside of it, I'd be wearing black pearls and heliotrope silk socks 
to-day.

"One evening I was walking along near the Bowery, thinking about 
things, when along comes a slumming-party.  About six or seven they 
was, all in swallowtails, and these silk hats that don't shine.  One 
of the gang kind of shoves me off the sidewalk.  I hadn't had a scrap 
in three days, and I just says, 'De-lighted!' and hits him back of the 
ear.

"Well, we had it.  That Johnnie put up as decent a little fight as 
you'd want to see in the moving pictures.  It was on a side street, 
and no cops around.  The other guy had a lot of science, but it only 
took me about six minutes to lay him out.

"Some of the swallowtails dragged him up against some steps and began 
to fan him.  Another one of 'em comes over to me and says:

"'Young man, do you know what you've done?'

"'Oh, beat it,' says I.  'I've done nothing but a little punching-bag 
work.  Take Freddy back to Yale and tell him to quit studying 
sociology on the wrong side of the sidewalk.'

"'My good fellow,' says he, 'I don't know who you are, but I'd like 
to.  You've knocked out Reddy Burns, the champion middle-weight of the 
world!  He came to New York yesterday, to try to get a match on with 
Jim Jeifries.  If you--'

"But when I come out of my faint I was laying on the floor in a drug-
store saturated with aromatic spirits of ammonia.  If I'd known that 
was Reddy Burns, I'd have got down in the gutter and crawled past him 
instead of handing him one like I did.  Why, if I'd ever been in a 
ring and seen him climbing over the ropes, I'd have been all to the 
sal volatile.

"So that's what imagination does," concluded Mack.  "And, as I said, 
your case and mine is simultaneous.  You'll never win out.  You can't 
go up against the professionals.  I tell you, it's a park bench for 
yours in this romance business."

Mack, the pessimist, laughed harshly.

"I'm afraid I don't see the parallel," I said, coldly.  "I have only a 
very slight acquaintance with the prize-ring."

The derelict touched my sleeve with his forefinger, for emphasis, as 
he explained his parable.

"Every man," said he, with some dignity, "has got his lamps on 
something that looks good to him.  With you, it's this dame that 
you're afraid to say your say to.  With me, it was to win out in the 
ring.  Well, you'll lose just like I did."

"Why do you think I shall lose?" I asked warmly.

"'Cause," said he, "you're afraid to go in the ring.  You dassen't 
stand up before a professional.  Your case and mine is just the same.  
You're a amateur; and that means that you'd better keep outside of the 
ropes."

"Well, I must be going," I said, rising and looking with elaborate 
care at my watch.

When I was twenty feet away the park-bencher called to me.

"Much obliged for the dollar," he said.  "And for the dime.  But 
you'll never get 'er.  You're in the amateur class."

"Serves you right," I said to myself, "for hobnobbing with a tramp.  
His impudence!"

But, as I walked, his words seemed to repeat themselves over and over 
again in my brain.  I think I even grew angry at the man.

"I'll show him!" I finally said, aloud.  "I'll show him that I can 
fight Reddy Burns, too--even knowing who he is."

I hurried to a telephone-booth and rang up the Telfair residence.

A soft, sweet voice answered.  Didn't I know that voice?  My hand 
holding the receiver shook.

"Is that you?" said I, employing the foolish words that form the 
vocabulary of every talker through the telephone.

"Yes, this is I," came back the answer in the low, clear-cut tones 
that are an inheritance of the Telfairs.  "Who is it, please?"

"It's me," said I, less ungrammatically than egotistically.  "It's me, 
and I've got a few things that I want to say to you right now and 
immediately and straight to the point."

"Dear me," said the voice.  "Oh, it's you, Mr.  Arden!"

I wondered if any accent on the first word was intended; Mildred was 
fine at saying things that you had to study out afterward.

"Yes," said I.  "I hope so.  And now to come down to brass tacks."  I 
thought that rather a vernacularism, if there is such a word, as soon 
as I had said it; but I didn't stop to apologize.  "You know, of 
course, that I love you, and that I have been in that idiotic state 
for a long time.  I don't want any more foolish
ness about it--that is, I mean I want an answer from you right now.  
Will you marry me or not?  Hold the wire, please.  Keep out, Central.  
Hello, hello!  Will you, or will you not.?"

That was just the uppercut for Reddy Burns' chin.  The answer came 
back:

"Why, Phil, dear, of course I will!  I didn't know that you--that is, 
you never said--oh, come up to the house, please--I can't say what I 
want to over the 'phone.  You are so importunate.  But please come up 
to the house, won't you?"

Would I?

I rang the bell of the Telfair house violently.  Some sort of a human 
came to the door and shooed me into the drawing-room.

"Oh, well," said I to myself, looking at the ceiling, "any one can 
learn from any one.  That was a pretty good philosophy of Mack's, 
anyhow.  He didn't take advantage of his experience, but I get the 
benefit of it.  If you want to get into the professional class, you've 
got to--"

I stopped thinking then.  Some one was coming down the stairs.  My 
knees began to shake.  I knew then how Mack had felt when a 
professional began to climb over the ropes.

I looked around foolishly for a door or a window by which I might 
escape.  If it had been any other girl approaching, I mightn't have--
But just then the door opened, and Bess, Mildred's younger sister, 
came in.  I'd never seen her look so much like a glorified angel.  She 
walked straight tip to me, and--and--I'd never noticed before what 
perfectly wonderful eyes and hair Elizabeth Telfair had.

"Phil," she said, in the Telfair, sweet, thrilling tones, "why didn't 
you tell me about it before?  I thought it was sister you wanted all 
the time, until you telephoned to me a few minutes ago!"

I suppose Mack and I always will be hopeless amateurs.  But, as the 
thing has turned out in my case, I'm mighty glad of it.




BEST-SELLER



I


One day last summer I went to Pittsburgh--well, I had to go there on 
business.

My chair-car was profitably well filled with people of the kind one 
usually sees on chair-cars.  Most of them were ladies in brown-silk 
dresses cut with square yokes, with lace insertion, and dotted veils, 
who refused to have the windows raised.  Then there was the usual 
number of men who looked as if they might be in almost any business 
and going almost anywhere.  Some students of human nature can look at 
a man in a Pullman and tell you where he is from, his occupation and 
his stations in life, both flag and social; but I never could.  The 
only way I can correctly judge a fellow-traveller is when the train is 
held up by robbers, or when he reaches at the same time I do for the 
last towel in the dressing-room of the sleeper.

The porter came and brushed the collection of soot on the window-sill 
off to the left knee of my trousers.  I removed it with an air of 
apology.  The temperature was eighty-eight.  One of the dotted-veiled 
ladies demanded the closing of two more ventilators, and spoke loudly 
of Interlaken.  I leaned back idly in chair No.  7, and looked with 
the tepidest curiosity at the small, black, bald-spotted head just 
visible above the back of No.  9.

Suddenly No.  9 hurled a book to the floor between his chair and the 
window, and, looking, I saw that it was The Rose-Lady and Trevelyan, 
one of the best-selling novels of the present day.  And then the 
critic or Philistine, whichever he was, veered his chair toward the 
window, and I knew him at once for John A.  Pescud, of Pittsburgh, 
travelling salesman for a plate-glass company--an old acquaintance 
whom I had not seen in two years.

In two minutes we were faced, had shaken hands, and had finished with 
such topics as rain, prosperity, health, residence, and destination.  
Politics might have followed next; but I was not so ill-fated.

I wish you might know John A.  Pescud.  He is of the stuff that heroes 
are not often lucky enough to be made of.  He is a small man with a 
wide smile, and an eye that seems to be fixed upon that little red 
spot on the end of your nose.  I never saw him wear but one kind of 
necktie, and he believes in cuff-holders and button-shoes.  He is as 
hard and true as anything ever turned out by the Cambria Steel Works; 
and he believes that as soon as Pittsburgh makes smoke-consumers 
compulsory, St.  Peter will come down and sit at the foot of 
Smithfield Street, and let somebody else attend to the gate up in the 
branch heaven.  He believes that "our" plate-glass is the most 
important commodity in the world, and that when a man is in his home 
town he ought to be decent and law-abiding.

During my acquaintance with him in the City of Diurnal Night I had 
never known his views on life, romance, literature, and ethics.  We 
had browsed, during our meetings, on local topics, and then parted, 
after Chateau Margaux, Irish stew, flannel-cakes, cottage-pudding, and 
coffee (hey, there!--with milk separate).  Now I was to get more of 
his ideas.  By way of facts, he told me that business had picked up 
since the party conventions, and that he was going to get off at 
Coketown.


II


"Say," said Pescud, stirring his discarded book with the toe of his 
right shoe, "did you ever read one of these best-sellers?  I mean the 
kind where the hero is an American swell--sometimes even from Chicago-
-who falls in love with a royal princess from Europe who is travelling 
under an alias, and follows her to her father's kingdom or 
principality?  I guess you have.  They're all alike.  Sometimes this 
going-away masher is a Washington newspaper correspondent, and 
sometimes he is a Van Something from New York, or a Chicago wheat-
broker worthy fifty millions.  But he's always ready to break into the 
king row of any foreign country that sends over their queens and 
princesses to try the new plush seats on the Big Four or the B.  and 
0.  There doesn't seem to be any other reason in the book for their 
being here.

"Well, this fellow chases the royal chair-warmer home, as I said, and 
finds out who she is.  He meets here on the corso or the strasse one 
evening and gives us ten pages of conversation.  She reminds him of 
the difference in their stations, and that gives him a chance to ring 
in three solid pages about America's uncrowned sovereigns.  If you'd 
take his remarks and set 'em to music, and then take the music away 
from 'em, they'd sound exactly like one of George Cohan's songs.

"Well, you know how it runs on, if you ve read any of 'em--he slaps 
the king's Swiss body-guards around like everything whenever they get 
in his way.  He's a great fencer, too.  Now, I've known of some 
Chicago men who were pretty notorious fences, but I never heard of any 
fencers coming from there.  He stands on the first landing of the 
royal staircase in Castle Schutzenfestenstein with a gleaming rapier 
in his hand, and makes a Baltimore broil of six platoons of traitors 
who come to massacre the said king.  And then he has to fight duels 
with a couple of chancellors, and foil a plot by four Austrian 
archdukes to seize the kingdom for a gasoline-station.

"But the great scene is when his rival for the princess' hand, Count 
Feodor, attacks him between the portcullis and the ruined chapel, 
armed with a mitrailleuse, a yataghan, and a couple of Siberian 
bloodhounds.  This scene is what runs the best-seller into the twenty-
ninth edition before the publisher has had time to draw a check for 
the advance royalties.

"The American hero shucks his coat and throws it over the heads of the 
bloodhounds, gives the mitrailleuse a slap with his mitt, says 'Yah!' 
to the yataghan, and lands in Kid McCoy's best style on the count's 
left eye.  Of course, we have a neat little prize-fight right then and 
there.  The count--in order to make the go possible--seems to be an 
expert at the art of self-defence, himself; and here we have the 
Corbett-Sullivan fight done over into literature.  The book ends with 
the broker and the princess doing a John Cecil Clay cover under the 
linden-trees on the Gorgonzola Walk.  That winds up the love-story 
plenty good enough.  But I notice that the book dodges the final 
issue.  Even a best-seller has sense enough to shy at either leaving a 
Chicago grain broker on the throne of Lobsterpotsdam or bringing over 
a real princess to eat fish and potato salad in an Italian chalet on 
Michigan Avenue.  What do you think about 'em?"

"Why," said I, "I hardly know, John.  There's a saying: 'Love levels 
all ranks,' you know."

"Yes," said Pescud, "but these kind of love-stories are rank--on the 
level.  I know something about literature, even if I am in plate-
glass.  These kind of books are wrong, and yet I never go into a train 
but what they pile 'em up on me.  No good can come out of an 
international clinch between the Old-World aristocracy and one of us 
fresh Americans.  When people in real life marry, they generally hunt 
up somebody in their own station.  A fellow usually picks out a girl 
that went to the same high-school and belonged to the same singing-
society that he did.  When young millionaires fall in love, they 
always select the chorus-girl that likes the same kind of sauce on the 
lobster that he does.  Washington newspaper correspondents always many 
widow ladies ten years older than themselves who keep boarding-houses.  
No, sir, you can't make a novel sound right to me when it makes one of 
C.  D.  Gibson's bright young men go abroad and turn kingdoms upside 
down just because he's a Taft American aud took a course at a 
gymnasium.  And listen how they talk, too!"

Pescud picked up the best-seller and hunted his page.

"Listen at this," said he.  "Trevelyan is chinning with the Princess 
Alwyna at the back end of the tulip-garden.  This is how it goes:


"'Say not so, dearest and sweetest of earth's fairest flowers.  Would 
I aspire?  You are a star set high above me in a royal heaven; I am 
only--myself.  Yet I am a man, and I have a heart to do and dare.  I 
have no title save that of an uncrowned sovereign; but I have an arm 
and a sword that yet might free Schutzenfestenstein from the plots of 
traitors.'

"Think of a Chicago man packing a sword, and talking about freeing 
anything that sounded as much like canned pork as that!  He'd be much 
more likely to fight to have an import duty put on it."

"I think I understand you, John," said I.  "You want fiction-writers 
to be consistent with their scenes and characters.  They shouldn't mix 
Turkish pashas with Vermont farmers, or English dukes with Long Island 
clam-diggers, or Italian countesses with Montana cowboys, or 
Cincinnati brewery agents with the rajahs of India."

"Or plain business men with aristocracy high above 'em," added Pescud.  
"It don't jibe.  People are divided into classes, whether we admit it 
or not, and it's everybody's impulse to stick to their own class.  
They do it, too.  I don't see why people go to work and buy hundreds 
of thousands of books like that.  You don't see or hear of any such 
didoes and capers in real life."


III


"Well, John," said I, "I haven't read a best-seller in a long time.  
Maybe I've had notions about them somewhat like yours.  But tell me 
more about yourself.  Getting along all right with the company?"

"Bully," said Pescud, brightening at once.  "I've had my salary raised 
twice since I saw you, and I get a commission, too.  I've bought a 
neat slice of real estate out in the East End, and have run up a house 
on it.  Next year the firm is going to sell me some shares of stock.  
Oh, I'm in on the line of General Prosperity, no matter who's 
elected!"

"Met your affinity yet, John?" I asked.

"Oh, I didn't tell you about that, did I?" said Pescud with a broader 
grin.

"0-ho!" I said.  "So you've taken time enough off from your plate-
glass to have a romance?"

"No, no," said John.  "No romance--nothing like that!  But I'll tell 
you about it.

"I was on the south-bound, going to Cincinnati, about eighteen months 
ago, when I saw, across the aisle, the finest-looking girl I'd ever 
laid eyes on.  Nothing spectacular, you know, but just the sort you 
want for keeps.  Well, I never was up to the flirtation business, 
either handkerchief, automobile, postage-stamp, or door-step, and she 
wasn't the kind to start anything.  She read a book and minded her 
business, which was to make the world prettier and better just by 
residing on it.  I kept on looking out of the side doors of my eyes, 
and finally the proposition got out of the Pullman class into a case 
of a cottage with a lawn and vines running over the porch.  I never 
thought of speaking to her, but I let the plate-glass business go to 
smash for a while.

"She changed cars at Cincinnati, and took a sleeper to Louisville over 
the L.  and N.  There she bought another ticket, and went on through 
Shelbyville, Frankfort, and Lexington.  Along there I began to have a 
hard time keeping up with her.  The trains came along when they 
pleased, and didn't seem to be going anywhere in particular, except to 
keep on the track and the right of way as much as possible.  Then they 
began to stop at junctions instead of towns, and at last they stopped 
altogether.  I'll bet Pinkerton would outbid the plate-glass people 
for my services any time if they knew how I managed to shadow that 
young lady.  I contrived to keep out of her sight as much as I could, 
but I never lost track of her.

"The last station she got off at was away down in Virginia, about six 
in the afternoon.  There were about fifty houses and four hundred 
niggers in sight.  The rest was red mud, mules, and speckled hounds.

"A tall old man, with a smooth face and white hair, looking as proud 
as Julius Caesar and Roscoe Conkling on the same post-card, was there 
to meet her.  His clothcs were frazzled, but I didn't notice that till 
later.  He took her little satchel, and they started over the plank-
walks and went up a road along the hill.  I kept along a piece behind 
'em, trying to look like I was hunting a garnet ring in the sand that 
my sister had lost at a picnic the previous Saturday.

"They went in a gate on top of the hill.  It nearly took my breath 
away when I looked up.  Up there in the biggest grove I ever saw was a 
tremendous house with round white pillars about a thousand feet high, 
and the yard was so full of rose-bushes and box-bushes and lilacs that 
you couldn't have seen the house if it hadn't been as big as the 
Capitol at Washington.

"'Here's where I have to trail,' says I to myself.  "I thought before 
that she seemed to be in moderate circumstances, at least.  This must 
be the Governor's mansion, or the Agricultural Building of a new 
World's Fair, anyhow.  I'd better go back to the village and get 
posted by the postmaster, or drug the druggist for some information.

"In the village I found a pine hotel called the Bay View House.  The 
only excuse for the name was a bay horse grazing in the front yard.  I 
set my sample-case down, and tried to be ostensible.  I told the 
landlord I was taking orders for plate-glass.

"'I don't want no plates,' says he, 'but I do need another glass 
molasses-pitcher.'

"By-and-by I got him down to local gossip and answering questions.

"'Why,' says he, 'I thought everybody knowed who lived in the big 
white house on the hill.  It's Colonel Allyn, the biggest man and the 
finest quality in Virginia, or anywhere else.  They're the oldest 
family in the State.  That was his daughter that got off the train.  
She's been up to Illinois to see her aunt, who is sick.'

"I registered at the hotel, and on the third day I caught the young 
lady walking in the front yard, down next to the paling fence.  I 
stopped and raised my hat--there wasn't any other way.

"'Excuse me,' says I, 'can you tell me where Mr.  Hinkle lives?'

"She looks at me as cool as if I was the man come to see about the 
weeding of the garden, but I thought I saw just a slight twinkle of 
fun in her eyes.

"'No one of that name lives in Birchton,' says she.  'That is,' she 
goes on, 'as far as I know.  Is the gentleman you are seeking white?'

"Well, that tickled me.  'No kidding,' says I.  'I'm not looking for 
smoke, even if I do come from Pittsburgh.'

"'You are quite a distance from home,' says she.

"'I'd have gone a thousand miles farther,' says I.

"'Not if you hadn't waked up when the train started in Shelbyville,' 
says she; and then she turned almost as red as one of the roses on the 
bushes in the yard.  I remembered I had dropped off to sleep on a 
bench in the Shelbyville station, waiting to see which train she took, 
and only just managed to wake up in time.

"And then I told her why I had come, as respectful and earnest as I 
could.  And I told her everything about myself, and what I was making, 
and how that all I asked was just to get acquainted with her and try 
to get her to like me.

"She smiles a little, and blushes some, but her eyes never get mixed 
up.  They look straight at whatever she's talking to.

"'I never had any one talk like this to me before, Mr.  Pescud,' says 
she.  'What did you say your name is--John?'

"'John A.,' says I.

"'And you came mighty near missing the train at Powhatan Junction, 
too,' says she, with a laugh that sounded as good as a mileage-book to 
me.

"'How did you know?' I asked.

"'Men are very clumsy,' said she.  'I knew you were on every train.  I 
thought you were going to speak to me, and I'm glad you didn't.'

"Then we had more talk; and at last a kind of proud, serious look came 
on her face, and she turned and pointed a finger at the big house.

"'The Allyns,' says she, 'have lived in Elmcroft for a hundred years.  
We are a proud family.  Look at that mansion.  It has fifty rooms.  
See the pillars and porches and balconies.  The ceilings in the 
reception-rooms and the ball-room are twenty-eight feet high.  My 
father is a lineal descendant of belted earls.'

"'I belted one of 'em once in the Duquesne Hotel, in Pittsburgh,' says 
I, 'and he didn't offer to resent it.  He was there dividing his 
attentions between Monongahela whiskey and heiresses, and he got 
fresh.'

"'Of course,' she goes on, 'my father wouldn't allow a drummer to set 
his foot in Elmeroft.  If he knew that I was talking to one over the 
fence he would lock me in my room.'

"'Would you let me come there?' says I.  'Would you talk to me if I 
was to call?  For,' I goes on, 'if you said I might come and see you, 
the earls might be belted or suspendered, or pinned up with safety-
pins, as far as I am concerned.'

"'I must not talk to you,' she says, 'because we have not been 
introduced.  It is not exactly proper.  So I will say good-bye, Mr.--'
"'Say the name,' says I.  'You haven't forgotten it.'

"'Pescud,' says she, a little mad.

"'The rest of the name!' I demands, cool as could be.

"'John,' says she.

"'John-what?' I says.

"'John A.,' says she, with her head high.  'Are you through, now?'

"'I'm coming to see the belted earl to-morrow,' I says.

"'He'll feed you to his fox-hounds,' says she, laughing.

"'If he does, it'll improve their running,' says I.  'I'm something of 
a hunter myself.'

"'I must be going in now,' says she.  'I oughtn't to have spoken to 
you at all.  I hope you'll have a pleasant trip back to Minneapolis --
or Pittsburgh, was it?  Good-bye!'

"'Good-night,' says I, 'and it wasn't Minneapolis.  What's your name, 
first, please?'

"She hesitated.  Then she pulled a leaf off a bush, and said:

"'My name is Jessie,' says she.

"'Good-night, Miss Allyn,' says I.

"The next morning at eleven, sharp, I rang the door-bell of that 
World's Fair main building.  After about three-quarters of an hour an 
old nigger man about eighty showed up and asked what I wanted.  I gave 
him my business card, and said I wanted to see the colonel.  He showed 
me in.

"Say, did you ever crack open a wormy English walnut?  That's what 
that house was like.  There wasn't enough furniture in it to fill an 
eight-dollar flat.  Some old horsehair lounges and three-legged chairs 
and some framed ancestors on the walls were all that met the eye.  But 
when Colonel Allyn comes in, the place seemed to light up.  You could 
almost hear a band playing, and see a bunch of old-timers in wigs and 
white stockings dancing a quadrille.  It was the style of him, 
although he had on the same shabby clothes I saw him wear at the 
station.

"For about nine seconds he had me rattled, and I came mighty near 
getting cold feet and trying to sell him some plate-glass.  But I got 
my nerve back pretty quick.  He asked me to sit down, and I told him 
everything.  I told him how I followed his daughter from Cincinnati, 
and what I did it for, and all about my salary and prospects, and 
explained to him my little code of living--to be always decent and 
right in your home town; and when you're on the road, never take more 
than four glasses of beer a day or play higher than a twenty-five-cent 
limit.  At first I thought he was going to throw me out of the window, 
but I kept on talking.  Pretty soon I got a chance to tell him that 
story about the Western Congressman who had lost his pocket-book and 
the grass widow--you remember that story.  Well, that got him to 
laughing, and I'll bet that was the first laugh those ancestors and 
horsehair sofas had heard in many a day.

"We talked two hours.  I told him everything I knew; and then he began 
to ask questions, and I told him the rest.  All I asked of him was to 
give me a chance.  If I couldn't make a hit with the little lady, I'd 
clear out, and not bother any more.  At last he says:

"'There was a Sir Courtenay Pescud in the time of Charles I, if I 
remember rightly.'

"'If there was,' says I, 'he can't claim kin with our bunch.  We've 
always lived in and around Pittsburgh.  I've got an uncle in the real-
estate business, and one in trouble somewhere out in Kansas.  You can 
inquire about any of the rest of us from anybody in old Smoky Town, 
and get satisfactory replies.  Did you ever run across that story 
about the captain of the whaler who tried to make a sailor say his 
prayers?' says I.

"'It occurs to me that I have never been so fortunate,' says the 
colonel.

"So I told it to him.  Laugh!  I was wishing to myself that he was a 
customer.  What a bill of glass I'd sell him!  And then he says:

"'The relating of anecdotes and humorous occurrences has always seemed 
to me, Mr.  Pescud, to be a particularly agreeable way of promoting 
and perpetuating amenities between friends.  With your permission, I 
will relate to you a fox-hunting story with which I was personally 
connected, and which may furnish you some amusement.'

So he tells it.  It takes forty minutes by the watch.  Did I laugh?  
Well, say!  When I got my face straight he calls in old Pete, the 
super-annuated darky, and sends him down to the hotel to bring up my 
valise.  It was Elmcroft for me while I was in the town.

"Two evenings later I got a chance to speak a word with Miss Jessie 
alone on the porch while the colonel was thinking up another story.

"'It's going to be a fine evening,' says I.

"'He's coming,' says she.  'He's going to tell you, this time, the 
story about the old negro and the green watermelons.  It always comes 
after the one about the Yankees and the game rooster.  There was 
another time,' she goes on, 'that you nearly got left--it was at 
Pulaski City.'

"'Yes,' says I, 'I remember.  My foot slipped as I was jumping on the 
step, and I nearly tumbled off.'

"'I know,' says she.  'And--and I--I was afraid you had, John A.  I 
was afraid you had.'

"And then she skips into the house through one of the big windows."


IV


"Coketown!" droned the porter, making his way through the slowing car.

Pescud gathered his hat and baggage with the leisurely promptness of 
an old traveller.

"I married her a year ago," said John.  "I told you I built a house in 
the East End.  The belted--I mean the colonel--is there, too.  I find 
him waiting at the gate whenever I get back from a trip to hear any 
new story I might have picked up on the road."

I glanced out of the window.  Coketown was nothing more than a ragged 
hillside dotted with a score of black dismal huts propped up against 
dreary mounds of slag and clinkers.  It rained in slanting torrents, 
too, and the rills foamed and splashed down through the black mud to 
the railroad-tracks.

"You won't sell much plate-glass here, John," said I.  "Why do you get 
off at this end-o'-the-world?"

"Why," said Pescud, "the other day I took Jessie for a little trip to 
Philadelphia, and coming back she thought she saw some petunias in a 
pot in one of those windows over there just like some she used to 
raise down in the old Virginia home.  So I thought I'd drop off here 
for the night, and see if I could dig up some of the cuttings or 
blossoms for her.  Here we are.  Good-night, old man.  I gave you the 
address.  Come out and see us when you have time."

The train moved forward.  One of the dotted brown ladies insisted on 
having windows raised, now that the rain beat against them.  The 
porter came along with his mysterious wand and began to light the car.

I glanced downward and saw the best-seller.  I picked it up and set it 
carefully farther along on the floor of the car, where the rain-drops 
would not fall upon it.  And then, suddenly, I smiled, and seemed to 
see that life has no geographical metes and bounds.

"Good-luck to you, Trevelyan," I said.  "And may you get the petunias 
for your princess!"



RUS IN URBE



Considering men in relation to money, there are three kinds whom I 
dislike: men who have more money than they can spend; men who have 
more money than they do spend; and men who spend more money than they 
have.  Of the three varieties, I believe I have the least liking for 
the first.  But, as a man, I liked Spencer Grenville North pretty 
well, although he had something like two or ten or thirty millions--
I've forgotten exactly how many.

I did not leave town that summer.  I usually went down to a village on 
the south shore of Long Island.  The place was surrounded by duck-
farms, and the ducks and dogs and whippoorwills and rusty windmills 
made so much noise that I could sleep as peacefully as if I were in my 
own flat six doors from the elevated railroad in New York.  But that 
summer I did not go.  Remember that.  One of my friends asked me why I 
did not.  I replied:

"Because, old man, New York is the finest summer resort in the world."  
You have heard that phrase before.  But that is what I told him.

I was press-agent that year for Binkly & Bing, the theatrical managers 
and producers.  Of course you know what a press-agent is.  Well, he is 
not.  That is the secret of being one.

Binkly was touring France in his new C.  & N.  Williamson car, and 
Bing had gone to Scotland to learn curling, which he seemed to 
associate in his mind with hot tongs rather than with ice.  Before 
they left they gave me June and July, on salary, for my vacation, 
which act was in accord with their large spirit of liberality.  But I 
remained in New York, which I had decided was the finest summer resort 
in--

But I said that before.  

On July the 10th, North came to town from his camp in the Adirondacks.  
Try to imagine a camp with sixteen rooms, plumbing, eiderdown quilts, 
a butler, a garage, solid silver plate, and a long-distance telephone.  
Of course it was in the woods--if Mr.  Pinchot wants to preserve the 
forests let him give every citizen two or ten or thirty million 
dollars, and the trees will all gather around the summer camps, as the 
Birnam woods came to Dunsinane, and be preserved.

North came to see me in my three rooms and bath, extra charge for 
light when used extravagantly or all night.  He slapped me on the back 
(I would rather have my shins kicked any day), and greeted me with 
out-door obstreperousness and revolting good spirits.  He was 
insolently brown and healthy-looking, and offensively well dressed.

"Just ran down for a few days," said he, "to sign some papers and 
stuff like that.  My lawyer wired me to come.  Well, you indolent 
cockney, what are you doing in town?  I took a chance and telephoned, 
and they said you were here.  What's the matter with that Utopia on 
Long Island where you used to take your typewriter and your villanous 
temper every summer?  Anything wrong with the--er--swans, weren't 
they, that used to sing on the farms at night?"

"Ducks," said I.  "The songs of swans are for luckier ears.  They swim 
and curve their necks in artificial lakes on the estates of the 
wealthy to delight the eyes of the favorites of Fortune."

"Also in Central Park," said North, "to delight the eyes of immigrants 
and bummers.  I've seen em there lots of times.  But why are you in 
the city so late in the summer?"

"New York City," I began to recite, "is the finest sum--"

"No, you don't," said North, emphatically.  "You don't spring that old 
one on me.  I know you know better.  Man, you ought to have gone up 
with us this summer.  The Prestons are there, and Tom Volney and the 
Monroes and Lulu Stanford and the Miss Kennedy and her aunt that you 
liked so well."

"I never liked Miss Kennedy's aunt," I said.

"I didn't say you did," said North.  "We are having the greatest time 
we've ever had.  The pickerel and trout are so ravenous that I believe 
they would swallow your hook with a Montana copper-mine prospectus 
fastened on it.  And we've a couple of electric launches; and I'll 
tell you what we do every night or two--we tow a rowboat behind each 
one with a big phonograph and a boy to change the discs in 'em.  On 
the water, and twenty yards behind you, they are not so bad.  And 
there are passably good roads through the woods where we go motoring.  
I shipped two cars up there.  And the Pinecliff Inn is only three 
miles away.  You know the Pinecliff.  Some good people are there this 
season, and we run over to the dances twice a week.  Can't you go back 
with me for a week, old man?"

I laughed.  "Northy," said I--"if I may be so familiar with a 
millionaire, because I hate both the names Spencer and Grenville--your 
invitation is meant kindly, but--the city in the summer-time for me.  
Here, while the bourgeoisie is away, I can live as Nero lived-barring, 
thank heaven, the fiddling-while the city burns at ninety in the 
shade.  The tropics and the zones wait upon me like handmaidens.  I 
sit under Florida palms and eat pomegranates while Boreas himself, 
electrically conjured up, blows upon me his Arctic breath.  As for 
trout, you know, yourself, that Jean, at Maurice's, cooks them better 
than any one else in the world."

"Be advised," said North.  "My chef has pinched the blue ribbon from 
the lot.  He lays some slices of bacon inside the trout, wraps it all 
in corn-husks--the husks of green corn, you know--buries them in hot 
ashes and covers them with live coals.  We build fires on the bank of 
the lake and have fish suppers."

"I know," said I.  "And the servants bring down tables and chairs and 
damask cloths, and you eat with silver forks.  I know the kind of 
camps that you millionaires have.  And therc are champagne pails set 
about, disgracing the wild flowers, and, no doubt, Madame Tetrazzini 
to sing in the boat pavilion after the trout."

"Oh no," said North, concernedly, "we were never as bad as that.  We 
did have a variety troupe up from the city three or four nights, but 
they weren't stars by as far as light can travel in the same length of 
time.  I always like a few home comforts even when I'm roughing it.  
But don't tell me you prefer to stay in the city during summer.  I 
don't believe it.  If you do, why did you spend your summers there for 
the last four years, even sneaking away from town on a night train, 
and refusing to tell your friends where this Arcadian village was?"

"Because," said I, "they might have followed me and discovered it.  
But since then I have learned that Amaryllis has come to town.  The 
coolest things, the freshest, the brightest, the choicest, are to be 
found in the city.  If you've nothing on hand this evening I will show 
you."

"I'm free," said North, "and I have my light car outside.  I suppose, 
since you've been converted to the town, that your idea of rural sport 
is to have a little whirl between bicycle cops in Central Park and 
then a mug of sticky ale in some stuffy rathskeller under a fan that 
can't stir up as many revolutions in a week as Nicaragua can in a 
day."

"We'll begin with the spin through the Park, anyhow," I said.  I was 
choking with the hot, stale air of my little apartment, and I wanted 
that breath of the cool to brace me for the task of proving to my 
friend that New York was the greatest--and so forth.

"Where can you find air any fresher or purer than this?" I asked, as 
we sped into Central's boskiest dell.

"Air!" said North, contemptuously.  "Do you call this air?--this muggy 
vapor, smelling of garbage and gasoline smoke.  Man, I wish you could 
get one sniff of the real Adirondack article in the pine woods at 
daylight."

"I have heard of it," said I.  "But for fragrance and tang and a joy 
in the nostrils I would not give one puff of sea breeze across the 
bay, down on my little boat dock on Long Island, for ten of your 
turpentine-scented tornadoes."

"Then why," asked North, a little curiously, "don't you go there 
instead of staying cooped up in this Greater Bakery?"

"Because," said I, doggedly, "I have discovered that New York is the 
greatest summer--"

"Don't say that again," interrupted North, "unless you've actually got 
a job as General Passenger Agent of the Subway.  You can't really 
believe it."

I went to some trouble to try to prove my theory to my friend.  The 
Weather Bureau and the season had conspired to make the argument 
worthy of an able advocate.

The city seemed stretched on a broiler directly above the furnaces of 
Avernus.  There was a kind of tepid gayety afoot and awheel in the 
boulevards, mainly evinced by languid men strolling about in straw 
hats and evening clothes, and rows of idle taxicabs with their flags 
up, looking like a blockaded Fourth of July procession.  The hotels 
kept up a specious brilliancy and hospitable outlook, but inside one 
saw vast empty caverns, and the footrails at the bars gleamed brightly 
from long disacquaintance with the sole-leather of customers.  In the 
cross-town streets the steps of the old brownstone houses were 
swarming with "stoopers," that motley race hailing from sky-light room 
and basement, bringing out their straw doorstep mats to sit and fill 
the air with strange noises and opinions.

North and I dined on the top of a hotel; and here, for a few minutes, 
I thought I had made a score.  An east wind, almost cool, blew across 
the roofless roof.  A capable orchestra concealed in a bower of 
wistaria played with sufficient judgment to make the art of music 
probable and the art of conversation possible.

Some ladies in reproachless summer gowns at other tables gave 
animation and color to the scene.  And an excellent dinner, mainly 
from the refrigerator, seemed to successfully back my judgment as to 
summer resorts.  But North grumbled all during the meal, and cursed 
his lawyers and prated so of his confounded camp in the woods that I 
began to wish he would go back there and leave me in my peaceful city 
retreat.

After dining we went to a roof-garden vaudeville that was being much 
praised.  There we found a good bill, an artificially cooled 
atmosphere, cold drinks, prompt service, and a gay, well-dressed 
audience.  North was bored.

"If this isn't comfortable enough for you on the hottest August night 
for five years," I said, a little sarcastically, "you might think 
about the kids down in Delancey and Hester streets lying out on the 
fire-escapes with their tongues hanging out, trying to get a breath of 
air that hasn't been fried on both sides.  The contrast might increase 
your enjoyment."

"Don't talk Socialism," said North.  "I gave five hundred dollars to 
the free ice fund on the first of May.  I'm contrasting these stale, 
artificial, hollow, wearisome 'amusements' with the enjoyment a man 
can get in the woods.  You should see the firs and pines do skirt-
dances during a storm; and lie down flat and drink out of a mountain 
branch at the end of a day's tramp after the deer.  That's the only 
way to spend a summer.  Get out and live with nature."

"I agree with you absolutely," said I, with emphasis.

For one moment I had relaxed my vigilance, and had spoken my true 
sentiments.  North looked at me long and curiously.

"Then why, in the name of Pan and Apollo," he asked, "have you been 
singing this deceitful paean to summer in town?"

I suppose I looked my guilt.

"Ha," said North, "I see.  May I ask her name?"

"Annie Ashton," said I, simply.  "She played Nannette in Binkley & 
Bing's production of The Silver Cord.  She is to have a better part 
next season."

"Take me to see her," said North.

Miss Ashton lived with her mother in a small hotel.  They were out of 
the West, and had a little money that bridged the seasons.  As press-
agent of Binkley & Bing I had tried to keep her before the public.  As 
Robert James Vandiver I had hoped to withdraw her; for if ever one was 
made to keep company with said Vandiver and smell the salt breeze on 
the south shore of Long Island and listen to the ducks quack in the 
watches of the night, it was the Ashton set forth above.

But she had a soul above ducks--above nightingales; aye, even above 
birds of paradise.  She was very beautiful, with quiet ways, and 
seemed genuine.  She had both taste and talent for the stage, and she 
liked to stay at home and read and make caps for her mother.  She was 
unvaryingly kind and friendly with Binkley & Bing's press-agent.  
Since the theatre had closed she had allowed Mr.  Vandiver to call in 
an unofficial role.  I had often spoken to her of my friend, Spencer 
Grenville North; and so, as it was early, the first turn of the 
vaudeville being not yet over, we left to find a telephone.

Miss Ashton would be very glad to see Mr.  Vandiver and Mr.  North.

We found her fitting a new cap on her mother.  I never saw her look 
more charming.

North made himself disagreeably entertaining.  He was a good talker, 
and had a way with him.  Besides, he had two, ten, or thirty millions, 
I've for gotten which.  I incautiously admired the mother's cap, 
whereupon she brought out her store of a dozen or two, and I took a 
course in edgings and frills.  Even though Annie's fingers had pinked, 
or ruched, or hemmed, or whatever you do to 'em, they palled upon me.  
And I could hear North drivelling to Annie about his odious Adirondack 
camp.

Two days after that I saw North in his motor-car with Miss Ashton and 
her mother.  On the next afternoon he dropped in on me.

"Bobby," said he, "this old burg isn't such a bad proposition in the 
summer-time, after all.  Since I've keen knocking around it looks 
better to me.  There are some first-rate musical comedies and light 
operas on the roofs and in the outdoor gardens.  And if you hunt up 
the right places and stick to soft drinks, you can keep about as cool 
here as you can in the country.  Hang it! when you come to think of 
it, there's nothing much to the country, anyhow.  You get tired and 
sunburned and lonesome, and you have to eat any old thing that the 
cook dishes up to you."

"It makes a difference, doesn't it?" said I.

"It certainly does.  Now, I found some whitebait yesterday, at 
Maurice's, with a new sauce that beats anything in the trout line I 
ever tasted."

"It makes a difference, doesn't it?" I said.

"Immense.  The sauce is the main thing with whitebait."

"It makes a difference, doesn't it?" I asked, looking him straight in 
the eye.  He understood.

"Look here, Bob," he said, "I was going to tell you.  I couldn't help 
it.  I'll play fair with you, but I'm going in to win.  She is the 
'one particular' for me."

"All right," said I.  "It's a fair field.  There are no rights for you 
to encroach upon."

On Thursday afternoon Miss Ashton invited North and myself to have tea 
in her apartment.  He was devoted, and she was more charming than 
usual.  By avoiding the subject of caps I managed to get a word or two 
into and out of the talk.  Miss Ashton asked me in a make-
conversational tone something about the next season's tour.

"Oh," said I, "I don't know about that.  I'm not going to be with 
Binkley & Bing next season."

"Why, I thought," said she, "that they were going to put the Number 
One road company under your charge.  I thought you told me so."

"They were," said I, "but they won't..  I'll tell you what I'm going 
to do.  I'm going to the south shore of Long Island and buy a small 
cottage I know there on the edge of the bay.  And I'll buy a catboat 
and a rowboat and a shotgun and a yellow dog.  I've got money enough 
to do it.  And I'll smell the salt wind all day when it blows from the 
sea and the pine odor when it blows from the land.  And, of course, 
I'll write plays until I have a trunk full of 'em on hand.

"And the next thing and the biggest thing I'll do will be to buy that 
duck-farm next door.  Few people understand ducks.  I can watch 'em 
for hours.  They can march better than any company in the National 
Guard, and they can play 'follow my leader' better than the entire 
Democratic party.  Their voices don't amount to much, but I like to 
hear 'em.  They wake you up a dozen times a night, but there's a 
homely sound about their quacking that is more musical to me than the 
cry of 'Fresh strawber-rees!' under your window in the morning when 
you want to sleep.

"And," I went on, enthusiastically, "do you know the value of ducks 
besides their beauty and intelligence and order and sweetness of 
voice?  Picking their feathers gives you an unfailing and never 
ceasing income.  On a farm that I know the feathers were sold for $400 
in one year.  Think of that!  And the ones shipped to the market will 
bring in more money than that.  Yes, I am for the ducks and the salt 
breeze coming over the bay.  I think I shall get a Chinaman cook, and 
with him and the dog and the sunsets for company I shall do well.  No 
more of this dull, baking, senseless, roaring city for me."

Miss Ashton looked surprised.  North laughed.

"I am going to begin one of my plays tonight," I said, "so I must be 
going."  And with that I took my departure.

A few days later Miss Ashton telephoned to me, asking me to call at 
four in the afternoon.

I did.

"You have been very good to me," she said, hesitatingly, "and I 
thought I would tell you.  I am going to leave the stage."

"Yes," said I, "I suppose you will.  They usually do when there's so 
much money."

"There is no money," she said, "or very little.  Our money is almost 
gone."

"But I am told," said I, "that he has something like two or ten or 
thirty millions--I have forgotten which."

"I know what you mean," she said.  "I will not pretend that I do not.  
I am not going to marry Mr.  North."

"Then why are you leaving the stage ?" I asked, severely.  "What else 
can you do to earn a living?"

She came closer to me, and I can see the look in her eyes yet as she 
spoke.

"I can pick ducks," she said.

We sold the first year's feathers for $350.




A POOR RULE



I have always maintained, and asserted ime to time, that woman is no 
mystery; that man can foretell, construe, subdue, comprehend, and 
interpret her.  That she is a mystery has been foisted by herself upon 
credulous mankind.  Whether I am right or wrong we shall see.  As 
"Harper's Drawer" used to say in bygone years: "The following good 
story is told of Miss --, Mr. --, Mr. --and Mr. --."

We shall have to omit "Bishop X" and "the Rev. --," for they do not 
belong.

In those days Paloma was a new town on the line of the Southern 
Pacific.  A reporter would have called it a "mushroom" town; but it 
was not.  Paloma was, first and last, of the toadstool variety.

The train stopped there at noon for the engine to drink and for the 
passengers both to drink and to dine.  There was a new yellow-pine 
hotel, also a wool warehouse, and perhaps three dozen box residences.  
The rest was composed of tents, cow ponies, "black-waxy" mud, and 
mesquite-trees, all bound round by a horizon.  Paloma was an about-to-
be city.  The houses represented faith; the tents hope; the twice-a-
day train by which you might leave, creditably sustained the role of 
charity.

The Parisian Restaurant occupied the muddiest spot in the town while 
it rained, and the warmest when it shone.  It was operated, owned, and 
perpetrated by a citizen known as Old Man Hinkle, who had come out of 
Indiana to make his fortune in this land of condensed milk and 
sorghum.

There was a four-room, unpainted, weather-boarded box house in which 
the family lived.  From the kitchen extended a "shelter" made of poles 
covered with chaparral brush.  Under this was a table and two benches, 
each twenty feet long, the product of Paloma home carpentry.  Here was 
set forth the roast mutton, the stewed apples, boiled beans, soda-
biscuits, puddinorpie, and hot coffee of the Parisian menu.

Ma Hinkle and a subordinate known to the ears as "Betty," but denied 
to the eyesight, presided at the range.  Pa Hinkle himself, with 
salamandrous thumbs, served the scalding viands.  During rush hours a 
Mexican youth, who rolled and smoked cigarettes between courses, aided 
him in waiting on the guests.  As is customary at Parisian banquets, I 
place the sweets at the end of my wordy menu.

Ileen Hinkle!

The spelling is correct, for I have seen her write it.  No doubt she 
had been named by ear; but she so splendidly bore the orthography that 
Tom Moore himself (had he seen her) would have indorsed the 
phonography.

Ileen was the daughter of the house, and the first Lady Cashier to 
invade the territory south of an east-and-west line drawn through 
Galveston and Del Rio.  She sat on a high stool in a rough pine grand-
stand--or was it a temple?--under the shelter at the door of the 
kitchen.  There was a barbed-wire protection in front of her, with a 
little arch under which you passed your money.  Heaven knows why the 
barbed wire; for every man who dined Parisianly there would have died 
in her service.  Her duties were light; each meal was a dollar; you 
put it under the arch, and she took it.

I set out with the intent to describe Ileen Hinkle to you.  Instead, I 
must refer you to the volume by Edmund Burke entitled: A Philosophical 
Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.  It 
is an exhaustive treatise, dealing first with the primitive 
conceptions of beauty--roundness and smoothness, I think they are, 
according to Burke.  It is well said.  Rotundity is a patent charm; as 
for smoothness--the more new wrinkles a woman acquires, the smoother 
she becomes.

Ileen was a strictly vegetable compound, guaranteed under the Pure 
Ambrosia and Balm-of-Gilead Act of the year of the fall of Adam.  She 
was a fruit-stand blonde-strawberries, peaches, cherries, etc.  Her 
eyes were wide apart, and she possessed the calm that precedes a storm 
that never comes.  But it seems to me that words (at any rate per) are 
wasted in an effort to describe the beautiful.  Like fancy, "It is 
engendered in the eyes."  There are three kinds of beauties--I was 
foreordained to be homiletic; I can never stick to a story.

The first is the freckle-faced, snub-nosed girl whom you like.  The 
second is Maud Adams.  The third is, or are, the ladies in 
Bouguereau's paintings.  Ileen Hinkle was the fourth.  She was the 
mayoress of Spotless Town.  There were a thousand golden apples coming 
to her as Helen of the Troy laundries.

The Parisian Restaurant was within a radius.  Even from beyond its 
circumference men rode in to Paloma to win her smiles.  They got them.  
One meal--one smile--one dollar.  But, with all her impartiality, 
Ileen seemed to favor three of her admirers above the rest.  According 
to the rules of politeness, I will mention myself last.

The first was an artificial product known as Bryan Jacks--a name that 
had obviously met with reverses.  Jacks was the outcome of paved 
cities.  He was a small man made of some material resembling flexible 
sandstone.  His hair was the color of a brick Quaker meeting-house; 
his eyes were twin cranberries; his mouth was like the aperture under 
a drop-letters-here sign.

He knew every city from Bangor to San Francisco, thence north to 
Portland, thence S. 45 E. to a given point in Florida.  He had 
mastered every art, trade, game, business, profession, and sport in 
the world, had been present at, or hurrying on his way to, every head-
line event that had ever occurred between oceans since he was five 
years old.  You might open the atlas, place your finger at random upon 
the name of a town, and Jacks would tell you the front names of three 
prominent citizens before you could close it again.  He spoke 
patronizingly and even disrespectfully of Broadway, Beacon Hill, 
Michigan, Euclid, and Fifth avenues, and the St. Louis Four Courts.  
Compared with him as a cosmopolite, the Wandering Jew would have 
seemed a mere hermit.  He had learned everything the world could teach 
him, and he would tell you about it.

I hate to be reminded of Pollock's Course of Time, and so do you; but 
every time I saw Jacks I would think of the poet's description of 
another poet by the name of G. G. Byron who "Drank early; deeply 
drank--drank draughts that common millions might have quenched; then 
died of thirst because there was no more to drink."

That fitted Jacks, except that, instead of dying, he came to Paloma, 
which was about the same thing.  He was a telegrapher and station- and 
express-agent at seventy-five dollars a month.  Why a young man who 
knew everything and could do everything was content to serve in such 
an obscure capacity I never could understand, although he let out a 
hint once that it was as a personal favor to the president and 
stockholders of the S. P. Ry. Co.

One more line of description, and I turn Jacks over to you.  He wore 
bright blue clothes, yellow shoes, and a bow tie made of the same 
cloth as his shirt.

My rival No.2 was Bud Cunningham, whose services had been engaged by a 
ranch near Paloma to assist in compelling refractory cattle to keep 
within the bounds of decorum and order.  Bud was the only cowboy off 
the stage that I ever saw who looked like one on it.  He wore the 
sombrero, the chaps, and the handkerchief tied at the back of his 
neck.

Twice a week Bud rode in from the Val Verde Ranch to sup at the 
Parisian Restaurant.  He rode a many-high-handed Kentucky horse at a 
tremendously fast lope, which animal he would rein up so suddenly 
under the big mesquite at the corner of the brush shelter that his 
hoofs would plough canals yards long in the loam.

Jacks and I were regular boarders at the restaurant, of course.

The front room of the Hinkle House was as neat a little parlor as 
there was in the black-waxy country.  It was all willow rocking-
chairs, and home-knit tidies, and albums, and conch shells in a row.  
And a little upright piano in one comer.

Here Jacks and Bud and I--or sometimes one or two of us, according to 
our good-luck--used to sit of evenings when the tide of trade was 
over, and "visit" Miss Hinkle.

Ileen was a girl of ideas.  She was destined for higher things (if 
there can be anything higher) than taking in dollars all day through a 
barbed-wire wicket.  She had read and listened and thought.  Her looks 
would have formed a career for a less ambitious girl; but, rising 
superior to mere beauty, she must establish something in the nature of 
a salon--the only one in Paloma.

"Don't you think that Shakespeare was a great writer?" she would ask, 
with such a pretty little knit of her arched brows that the late 
Ignatius Donnelly, himself, had he seen it, could scarcely have saved 
his Bacon.

Ileen was of the opinion, also, that Boston is more cultured than 
Chicago; that Rosa Bonheur was one of the greatest of women painters; 
that Westerners are more spontaneous and open-hearted than Easterners; 
that London must be a very foggy city, and that California must be 
quite lovely in the springtime.  And of many other opinions indicating 
a keeping up with the world's best thought.

These, however, were but gleaned from hearsay and evidence: Ileen had 
theories of her own.  One, in particular, she disseminated to us 
untiringly.  Flattery she detested.  Frankness and honesty of speech 
and action, she declared, were the chief mental ornaments of man and 
woman.  If ever she could like any one, it would be for those 
qualities.

"I'm awfully weary," she said, one evening, when we three musketeers 
of the mesquite were in the little parlor, "of having compliments on 
my looks paid to me.  I know I'm not beautiful."

(Bud Cunningham told me afterward that it was all he could do to keep 
from calling her a liar when she said that.)

"I'm only a little Middle-Western girl," went on Ileen, "who justs 
wants to be simple and neat, and tries to help her father make a 
humble living."

(Old Man Hinkle was shipping a thousand silver dollars a month, clear 
profit, to a bank in San Antonio.[)]

Bud twisted around in his chair and bent the rim of his hat, from 
which he could never be persuaded to separate.  He did not know 
whether she wanted what she said she wanted or what she knew she 
deserved.  Many a wiser man has hesitated at deciding.  Bud decided.

"Why--ah, Miss Ileen, beauty, as you might say, ain't everything.  Not 
sayin' that you haven't your share of good looks, I always admired 
more than anything else about you the nice, kind way you treat your ma 
and pa.  Any one what's good to their parents and is a kind of home-
body don't specially need to be too pretty."

Ileen gave him one of her sweetest smiles.  "Thank you, Mr.  
Cunningham," she said.  "I consider that one of the finest compliments 
I've had in a long time.  I'd so much rather hear you say that than to 
hear you talk about my eyes and hair.  I'm glad you believe me when I 
say I don't like flattery."

Our cue was there for us.  Bud had made a good guess.  You couldn't 
lose Jacks.  He chimed in next.

"Sure thing, Miss Ileen," he said; "the good-lookers don't always win 
out.  Now, you ain't bad looking, of course-but that's nix-cum-rous.  
I knew a girl once in Dubuque with a face like a cocoanut, who could 
skin the cat twice on a horizontal bar without changing hands.  Now, a 
girl might have the California peach crop mashed to a marmalade and 
not be able to do that.  I've seen--er--worse lookers than you, Miss 
Ileen; but what I like about you is the business way you've got of 
doing things.  Cool and wise--that's the winning way for a girl.  Mr. 
Hinkle told me the other day you'd never taken in a lead silver dollar 
or a plugged one since you've been on the job.  Now, that's the stuff 
for a girl--that's what catches me."

Jacks got his smile, too.

"Thank you, Mr. Jacks," said Ileen.  "If you only knew how I 
appreciate any one's being candid and not a flatterer!  I get so tired 
of people telling me I'm pretty.  I think it is the loveliest thing to 
have friends who tell you the truth."

Then I thought I saw an expectant look on Ileen's face as she glanced 
toward me.  I had a wild, sudden impulse to dare fate, and tell her of 
all the beautiful handiwork of the Great Artificer she was the most 
exquisite--that she was a flawless pearl gleaming pure and serene in a 
setting of black mud and emerald prairies--that she was--a--a corker; 
and as for mine, I cared not if she were as crtiel as a serpent's 
tooth to her fond parents, or if she couldn't tell a plugged dollar 
from a bridle buckle, if I might sing, chant, praise, glorify, and 
worship her peerless and wonderful beauty.

But I refrained.  I feared the fate of a flatterer.  I had witnessed 
her delight at the crafty and discreet words of Bud and Jacks.  No!  
Miss Hinkle was not one to be beguiled by the plated-silver tongue of 
a flatterer.  So I joined the ranks of the candid and honest.  At once 
I became mendacious and didactic.

"In all ages, Miss Hinkle," said I, "in spite of the poetry and 
romance of each, intellect in woman has been admired more than beauty.  
Even in Cleopatra, herself, men found more charm in her queenly mind 
than in her looks."

"Well, I should think so!" said Ileen.  "I've seen pictures of her 
that weren't so much.  she had an awfully long nose."

"If I may say so," I went on, "you remind me of Cleopatra, Miss 
Ileen."

"Why, my nose isn't so long!" said she, opening her eyes wide and 
touching that comely feature with a dimpled forefinger.

"Why--er--I mean," said I--" I mean as to mental endowments."

"Oh!" said she; and then I got my smile just as Bud and Jacks had got 
theirs.

"Thank every one of you," she said, very, very sweetly, "for being so 
frank and honest with me.  That's the way I want you to be always.  
Just tell me plainly and truthfully what you think, and we'll all be 
the best friends in the world.  And now, because you've been so good 
to me, and understand so well how I dislike people who do nothing but 
pay me exaggerated compliments, I'll sing and play a little for you."

Of course, we expressed our thanks and joy; but we would have been 
better pleased if Ileen had remained in her low rocking-chair face to 
face with us and let us gaze upon her.  For she was no Adelina Patti--
not even on the fare-wellest of the diva's farewell tours.  She had a 
cooing little voice like that of a turtle-dove that could almost fill 
the parlor when the windows and doors were closed, and Betty was not 
rattling the lids of the stove in the kitchen.  She had a gamut that I 
estimate at about eight inches on the piano; and her runs and trills 
sounded like the clothes bubbling in your grandmother's iron wash-pot.  
Believe that she must have been beautiful when I tell you that it 
sounded like music to us.

"She Must Have Been Beautiful When I Tell You That It Sounded Like 
Music To Us"

Ileen's musical taste was catholic.  She would sing through a pile of 
sheet music on the left-hand top of the piano, laying each slaughtered 
composition on the right-hand top.  The next evening she would sing 
from right to left.  Her favorites were Mendelssohn, and Moody and 
Sankey.  By request she always wound up with Sweet Violets and When 
the Leaves Begin to Turn.

When we left at ten o'clock the three of us would go down to Jacks' 
little wooden station and sit on the platform, swinging our feet and 
trying to pump one another for dews as to which way Miss Ileen's 
inclinations seemed to lean.  That is the way of rivals--they do not 
avoid and glower at one another; they convene and converse and 
construe--striving by the art politic to estimate the strength of the 
enemy.

One day there came a dark horse to Paloma, a young lawyer who at once 
flaunted his shingle and himself spectacularly upon the town.  His 
name was C. Vincent Vesey.  You could see at a glance that he was a 
recent graduate of a southwestern law school.  His Prince Albert coat, 
light striped trousers, broad-brimmed soft black hat, and narrow white 
muslin bow tie proclaimed that more loudly than any diploma could.  
Vesey was a compound of Daniel Webster, Lord Chesterfield, Beau 
Brummell, and Little Jack Horner.  His coming boomed Paloma.  The next 
day after he arrived an addition to the town was surveyed and laid off 
in lots.

Of course, Vesey, to further his professional fortunes, must mingle 
with the citizenry and outliers of Paloma.  And, as well as with the 
soldier men, he was bound to seek popularity with the gay dogs of the 
place.  So Jacks and Bud Cunningham and I came to be honored by his 
acquaintance.

The doctrine of predestination would have been discredited had not 
Vesey seen Ileen Hinkle and become fourth in the tourney.  
Magnificently, he boarded at the yellow pine hotel instead of at the 
Parisian Restaurant; but he came to be a formidable visitor in the 
Hinkle parlor.  His competition reduced Bud to an inspired increase of 
profanity, drove Jacks to an outburst of slang so weird that it 
sounded more horrible than the most trenchant of Bud's imprecations, 
and made me dumb with gloom.

For Vesey had the rhetoric.  Words flowed from him like oil from a 
gusher.  Hyperbole, compliment, praise, appreciation, honeyed 
gallantry, golden opinions, eulogy, and unveiled panegyric vied with 
one another for pre-eminence in his speech.  We had small hopes that 
Ileen could resist his oratory and Prince Albert.

But a day came that gave us courage.

About dusk one evening I was sitting on the little gallery in front of 
the Hinkle parlor, waiting for Ileen to come, when I heard voices 
inside.  She had come into the room with her father, and Old Man 
Hinkle began to talk to her.  I had observed before that he was a 
shrewd man, and not unphilosophic.

"Ily," said he, "I notice there's three or four young fellers that 
have been callin' to see you regular for quite a while.  Is there any 
one of 'em you like better than another?"

"Why, pa," she answered, "I like all of 'em very well.  I think Mr. 
Cuninngham and Mr. Jacks and Mr. Harris are very nice young men.  They 
are so frank and honest in everything they say to me.  I haven't known 
Mr. Vesey very long, but I think he's a very nice young man, he's so 
frank and honest in everything he says to me."

"Now, that's what I'm gittin' at," says old Hinkle.  "You've always 
been sayin' you like people what tell the truth and don't go 
humbuggin' you with compliments and bogus talk.  Now, suppose you make 
a test of these fellers, and see which one of 'em will talk the 
straightest to you."

"But how'll I do it, pa?"

"I'll tell you how.  You know you sing a little bit, Ily; you took 
music-lessons nearly two years in Logansport.  It wasn't long, but it 
was all we could afford then.  And your teacher said you didn't have 
any voice, and it was a waste of money to keep on.  Now, suppose you 
ask the fellers what they think of your singin', and see what each one 
of 'em tells you.  The man that 'll tell you the truth about it 'll 
have a mighty lot of nerve, and 'll do to tie to.  What do you think 
of the plan?"

"All right, pa," said Ileen.  "I think it's a good idea.  I'll try 
it."

Ileen and Mr. Hinkle went out of the room through the inside doors.  
Unobserved, I hurried down to the station.  Jacks was at his telegraph 
table waiting for eight o'clock to come.  It was Bud's night in town, 
and when he rode in I repeated the conversation to them both.  I was 
loyal to my rivals, as all true admirers of all Ileens should be.

Simultaneously the three of us were smitten by an uplifting thought.  
Surely this test would eliminate Vesey from the contest.  He, with his 
unctuous flattery, would be driven from the lists.  Well we remembered 
Ileen's love of frankness and honesty--how she treasured truth and 
candor above vain compliment and blandishment.

Linking arms, we did a grotesque dance of joy up and down the 
platform, singing Muldoon Was a Solid Man at the top of our voices.

That evening four of the willow rocking-chairs were filled besides the 
lucky one that sustained the trim figure of Miss Hinkle.  Three of us 
awaited with suppressed excitement the application of the test.  It 
was tried on Bud first.

"Mr. Cunningham," said Ileen, with her dazzling smile, after she had 
sung When the Leaves Begin to Turn, "what do you really think of my 
voice?  Frankly and honestly, now, as you know I want you to always be 
toward me."

Bud squirmed in his chair at his chance to show the sincerity that he 
knew was required of him.

"Tell you the truth, Miss Ileen," he said, earnestly, "you ain't got 
much more voice than a weasel--just a little squeak, you know.  Of 
course, we all like to hear you sing, for it's kind of sweet and 
soothin' after all, and you look most as mighty well sittin' on the 
piano-stool as you do faced around.  But as for real singin'--I reckon 
you couldn't call it that."

I looked closely at Ileen to see if Bud had overdone his frankness, 
but her pleased smile and sweetly spoken thanks assured me that we 
were on the right track.

"And what do you think, Mr. Jacks?" she asked next.
"Take it from me," said Jacks, "you ain't in the prima donna class.  
I've heard 'em warble in every city in the United States; and I tell 
you your vocal output don't go.  Otherwise, you've got the grand opera 
bunch sent to the soap factory--in looks, I mean; for the high 
screechers generally look like Mary Ann on her Thursday out.  But nix 
for the gargle work.  Your epiglottis ain't a real side-stepper--its 
footwork ain't good."

With a merry laugh at Jacks' criticism, Ileen looked inquiringly at 
me.

I admit that I faltered a little.  Was there not such a thing as being 
too frank?  Perhaps I even hedged a little in my verdict; but I stayed 
with the critics.

"I am not skilled in scientific music, Miss Ileen," I said, "but, 
frankly, I cannot praise very highly the singing-voice that Nature has 
given you.  It has long been a favorite comparison that a great singer 
sings like a bird.  Well, there are birds and birds.  I would say that 
your voice reminds me of the thrush's--throaty and not strong, nor of 
much compass or variety--but still--er--sweet--in--er--its--way, and--
er--"

"Thank you, Mr.  Harris," interrupted Miss Hinkle.  "I knew I could 
depend Upon your frankness and honesty."

And then C. Vincent Vesey drew back one sleeve from his snowy cuff, 
and the water came down at Lodore.

My memory cannot do justice to his masterly tribute to that priceless, 
God-given treasure--Miss Hinkle's voice.  He raved over it in terms 
that, if they had been addressed to the morning stars when they sang 
together, would have made that stellar choir explode in a meteoric 
shower of flaming self-satisfaction.

He marshalled on his white finger-tips the grand opera stars of all 
the continents, from Jenny Lind to Emma Abbott, only to depreciate 
their endowments.  He spoke  of larynxes, of chest notes, of phrasing, 
arpeggios, and other strange paraphernalia of the throaty art.  He 
admitted, as though driven to a corner, that Jenny Lind had a note or 
two in the high register that Miss Hinkle had not yet acquired--but--
"!!!"-that was a mere matter of practice and training.

And, as a peroration, he predicted--solemnly predicted--a career in 
vocal art for the "coming star of the Southwest--and one of which 
grand old Texas may well be proud," hitherto unsurpassed in the annals 
of musical history.

When we left at ten, Ileen gave each of us her usual warm, cordial 
handshake, entrancing smile, and invitation to call again.  I could 
not see that one was favored above or below another--but three of us 
knew--we knew.

We knew that frankness and honesty had won, and that the rivals now 
numbered three instead of four.

Down at the station Jacks brought out a pint bottle of the proper 
stuff, and we celebrated the downfall of a blatant interloper.

Four days went by without anything happening worthy of recount.

On the fifth, Jacks and I, entering the brush arbor for our supper, 
saw the Mexican youth, instead of a divinity in a spotless waist and a 
navy-blue skirt, taking in the dollars through the barbed-wire wicket.

We rushed into the kitchen, meeting Pa Hinkle coming out with two cups 
of hot coffee in his hands.

"Where's Ileen?" we asked, in recitative.

Pa Hinkle was a kindly man.  "Well, gents," said he, "it was a sudden 
notion she took; but I've got the money, and I let her have her way.  
She's gone to a corn--a conservatory in Boston for four years for to 
have her voice cultivated.  Now, excuse me to pass, gents, for this 
coffee's hot, and my thumbs is tender."

That night there were four instead of three of us sitting on the 
station platform and swinging our feet.  C. Vincent Vesey was one of 
us.  We discussed things while dogs barked at the moon that rose, as 
big as a five-cent piece or a flour barrel, over the chaparral.

And what we discussed was whether it is better to lie to a woman or to 
tell her the truth.

And as all of us were young then, we did not come to a decision.


THE END