_Regarding Liver-Eating Watkins and Others_
It was after I had moved to New York and had taken a desk job that I
detected myself in the act, as it were, of plumping out. Cognizant of the
fact, as I was, I nevertheless took no curative or corrective measures in
the way of revising my diet. I was content to make excuses inwardly. I
said to myself that I came of a breed whose members in their mature years
were inclined to broaden noticeably. I said to myself that I was not
getting the amount of exercise that once I had; that my occupation was now
more sedentary, and therefore it stood to reason that I should take on a
little flesh here and there over my frame. Moreover, I felt good. If I had
felt any better I could have charged admission. My appetite was perfect,
my digestion magnificent, nay, awe-inspiring.
To me it seemed that physically I was just as active and agile as I had
been in those 'prentice years of my professional career when the ability
to shift quickly from place to place and to think with an ornithological
aptitude were conducive to a continuance of unimpaired health among young
reporters. Anyhow--thus I to myself in the same strain,
continuing--anyhow, I was not actually getting fat. Nothing so gross as
that. I merely was attaining to a pleasant, a becoming and a dignified
fullness of contour as I neared my thirtieth birthday. So why worry about
what was natural and normal among persons of my temperament, and having my
hereditary impulses, upon attaining a given age?
I am convinced that men who are getting fat are generally like that. For
every added pound an added excuse, for each multiplying inch at the
waistline a new plea in abatement to be set up in the mind. I see the
truth of it now. When you start getting fat you start getting fatuous.
With the indubitable proof of his infirmity mounting in superimposed folds
of tissues before his very gaze, with the rounded evidence presented right
there in front of him where he can rest his elbows on it, your average
fattish man nevertheless refuses to acknowledge the visible situation.
Vanity blinds his one eye, love of self-indulgence blinds the other.
Observe now how I speak in the high moral tone of a reformed offender,
which is the way of reformed offenders and other reformers the world over.
We are always most virtuous in retrospect, as the fact of the crime
recedes. Moreover, he who has not erred has but little to gloat over.
There are two sorts of evidence upon which many judges look askance--that
sort of evidence which is circumstantial and that sort which purely is
hearsay. In this connection, and departing for the space of a paragraph or
so from the main theme, I am reminded of the incident through which a
certain picturesque gentleman of the early days in California acquired a
name which he was destined to wear forever after, and under which his
memory is still affectionately encysted in the traditions of our great Far
West. I refer to the late Liver-Eating Watkins. Mr. Watkins entered into
active life and passed through a good part of it bearing the
unilluminative and commonplace first name of Elmer or Lemuel, or perhaps
it was Jasper. Just which one of these or some other I forgot now, but no
matter; at least it was some such. One evening a low-down
terra-cotta-colored Piute swiped two of Mr. Watkins' paint ponies and by
stealth, under cover of the cloaking twilight, went away with them into
the far mysterious spaces of the purpling sage.
To these ponies the owner was deeply attached, not alone on account of the
intrinsic value, but for sentimental reasons likewise. So immediately on
discovering the loss the next morning, Mr. Watkins took steps. He saddled
a third pony which the thief had somehow overlooked in the haste of
departure, and he girded on him both cutlery and shootlery, and he mounted
and soon was off and away across the desert upon the trail of the vanished
malefactor. Now when Mr. Watkins fared forth thus accoutered it was a sign
he was not out for his health or anybody else's.
Friends and well-wishers volunteered to accompany him upon the chase, for
they foresaw brisk doings. But he declined their company. Folklore,
descending from his generation to ours, has it that he said this was his
own business and he preferred handling it alone in his own way. He did
add, however, that on overtaking the fugitive it was his intention, as an
earnest or token of his displeasure, to eat that Injun's liver raw. Some
versions say he mentioned liver rare, but the commonly accepted legend has
it that the word used was _raw_. With this he put the spur to his steed's
flank and was soon but a mere moving speck in the distance.
Now there was never offered any direct proof that our hero, in pursuance
of his plan for teaching the Indian a lesson, actually did do with regard
to the latter's liver what he had promised the bystanders he would do;
moreover, touching on this detail he ever thereafter maintained a
steadfast and unbreakable silence. In lieu of corroborative testimony by
unbiased witnesses as to the act itself, we have only these two things to
judge by: First, that when Mr. Watkins returned in the dusk of the same
day he was wearing upon his face a well-fed, not to say satiated,
expression, yet had started forth that morning with no store of
provisions; and second, that on being found in a deceased state some days
later, the Piute, who when last previously seen had with him two of Mr.
Watkin's pintos and one liver of his own, was now shy all three. By these
facts a strong presumptive case having been made out, Mr. Watkins was
thenceforth known not as Ezekiel or Emanuel, or whatever his original
first name had been, but as Liver-Eating, or among friends by the
affectionate diminutive of Liv for short.
This I would regard as a typical instance of the value of a chain of good
circumstantial evidence, with no essential link lacking. Direct testimony
could hardly have been more satisfactory, all things considered; and yet
direct testimony is the best sort there is, in the law courts and out. On
the other hand, hearsay evidence is viewed legally and often by the layman
with suspicion; in most causes of action being barred out altogether.
Nevertheless, it is a phase of the fattish man's perversity that,
rejecting the direct, the circumstantial and the circumferential testimony
which abounds about him, he too often awaits confirmation of his growing
suspicions at the hands of outsiders and bystanders before he is willing
openly to admit that condition of fatness which for long has been patent
to the most casual observer.
Women, as I have observed them, are even more disposed to avoid confession
on this point. A woman somehow figures that so long as she refuses to
acknowledge to herself or any other interested party that she has
progressed out of the ranks of the plumpened into the congested and
overflowing realms of the avowedly obese, why, for just so long may she
keep the rest of the world in ignorance too. I take it, the ostrich which
first set the example to all the other ostriches of trying to avoid
detection by the enemy through the simple expedient of sticking its head
in the sand was a lady ostrich, and moreover one typical of her sex. But
men are bad enough. I know that I was.