"Satan," said Jeff Peters, "is a hard boss to work for. When other
people are having their vacation is when he keeps you the busiest. As
old Dr. Watts or St. Paul or some other diagnostician says: 'He always
finds somebody for idle hands to do.'
"I remember one summer when me and my partner, Andy Tucker, tried to
take a layoff from our professional and business duties; but it seems
that our work followed us wherever we went.
"Now, with a preacher it's different. He can throw off his
responsibilities and enjoy himself. On the 31st of May he wraps
mosquito netting and tin foil around the pulpit, grabs his niblick,
breviary and fishing pole and hikes for Lake Como or Atlantic City
according to the size of the loudness with which he has been called by
his congregation. And, sir, for three months he don't have to think
about business except to hunt around in Deuteronomy and Proverbs and
Timothy to find texts to cover and exculpate such little midsummer
penances as dropping a couple of looey door on rouge or teaching a
Presbyterian widow to swim.
"But I was going to tell you about mine and Andy's summer vacation
that wasn't one.
"We was tired of finance and all the branches of unsanctified
ingenuity. Even Andy, whose brain rarely ever stopped working, began
to make noises like a tennis cabinet.
"'Heigh ho!' says Andy. 'I'm tired. I've got that steam up the yacht
Corsair and ho for the Riviera! feeling. I want to loaf and indict my
soul, as Walt Whittier says. I want to play pinochle with Merry del
Val or give a knouting to the tenants on my Tarrytown estates or do
a monologue at a Chautauqua picnic in kilts or something summery and
outside the line of routine and sand-bagging.'
"'Patience,' says I. 'You'll have to climb higher in the profession
before you can taste the laurels that crown the footprints of the
great captains of industry. Now, what I'd like, Andy,' says I, 'would
be a summer sojourn in a mountain village far from scenes of larceny,
labor and overcapitalization. I'm tired, too, and a month or so of
sinlessness ought to leave us in good shape to begin again to take
away the white man's burdens in the fall.'
"Andy fell in with the rest cure at once, so we struck the general
passenger agents of all the railroads for summer resort literature,
and took a week to study out where we should go. I reckon the first
passenger agent in the world was that man Genesis. But there wasn't
much competition in his day, and when he said: 'The Lord made the
earth in six days, and all very good,' he hadn't any idea to what
extent the press agents of the summer hotels would plagiarize from
him later on.
"When we finished the booklets we perceived, easy, that the United
States from Passadumkeg, Maine, to El Paso, and from Skagway to Key
West was a paradise of glorious mountain peaks, crystal lakes, new
laid eggs, golf, girls, garages, cooling breezes, straw rides, open
plumbing and tennis; and all within two hours' ride.
"So me and Andy dumps the books out the back window and packs our
trunk and takes the 6 o'clock Tortoise Flyer for Crow Knob, a kind of
a dernier resort in the mountains on the line of Tennessee and North
Carolina.
[Illustration: "Dumps the books out of the back window."]
"We was directed to a kind of private hotel called Woodchuck Inn, and
thither me and Andy bent and almost broke our footsteps over the rocks
and stumps. The Inn set back from the road in a big grove of trees,
and it looked fine with its broad porches and a lot of women in white
dresses rocking in the shade. The rest of Crow Knob was a post office
and some scenery set an angle of forty-five degrees and a welkin.
"Well, sir, when we got to the gate who do you suppose comes down
the walk to greet us? Old Smoke-'em-out Smithers, who used to be the
best open air painless dentist and electric liver pad faker in the
Southwest.
"Old Smoke-'em-out is dressed clerico-rural, and has the mingled air
of a landlord and a claim jumper. Which aspect he corroborates by
telling us that he is the host and perpetrator of Woodchuck Inn. I
introduces Andy, and we talk about a few volatile topics, such as will
go around at meetings of boards of directors and old associates like
us three were. Old Smoke-'em-out leads us into a kind of summer house
in the yard near the gate and took up the harp of life and smote on
all the chords with his mighty right.
"'Gents,' says he, 'I'm glad to see you. Maybe you can help me out
of a scrape. I'm getting a bit old for street work, so I leased this
dogdays emporium so the good things would come to me. Two weeks before
the season opened I gets a letter signed Lieut. Peary and one from
the Duke of Marlborough, each wanting to engage board for part of the
summer.
"'Well, sir, you gents know what a big thing for an obscure hustlery
it would be to have for guests two gentlemen whose names are famous
from long association with icebergs and the Coburgs. So I prints a
lot of handbills announcing that Woodchuck Inn would shelter these
distinguished boarders during the summer, except in places where it
leaked, and I sends 'em out to towns around as far as Knoxville and
Charlotte and Fish Dam and Bowling Green.
"'And now look up there on the porch, gents,' says Smoke-'em-out, 'at
them disconsolate specimens of their fair sex waiting for the arrival
of the Duke and the Lieutenant. The house is packed from rafters to
cellar with hero worshippers.
"'There's four normal school teachers and two abnormal; there's three
high school graduates between 37 and 42; there's two literary old
maids and one that can write; there's a couple of society women and
a lady from Haw River. Two elocutionists are bunking in the corn
crib, and I've put cots in the hay loft for the cook and the society
editress of the Chattanooga _Opera Glass_. You see how names draw,
gents.'
"'Well,' says I, 'how is it that you seem to be biting your thumbs at
good luck? You didn't use to be that way.'
"'I ain't through,' says Smoke-'em-out. 'Yesterday was the day for
the advent of the auspicious personages. I goes down to the depot to
welcome 'em. Two apparently animate substances gets off the train,
both carrying bags full of croquet mallets and these magic lanterns
with pushbuttons.
"I compares these integers with the original signatures to the letters
--and, well, gents, I reckon the mistake was due to my poor eyesight.
Instead of being the Lieutenant, the daisy chain and wild verbena
explorer was none other than Levi T. Peevy, a soda water clerk from
Asheville. And the Duke of Marlborough turned out to be Theo. Drake of
Murfreesborough, a bookkeeper in a grocery. What did I do? I kicked
'em both back on the train and watched 'em depart for the lowlands,
the low.
[Illustration: Instead of the Lieut. and the Duke.]
"'Now you see the fix I'm in, gents,' goes on Smoke-'em-out Smithers.
'I told the ladies that the notorious visitors had been detained on
the road by some unavoidable circumstances that made a noise like an
ice jam and an heiress, but they would arrive a day or two later. When
they find out that they've been deceived,' says Smoke-'em-out, 'every
yard of cross barred muslin and natural waved switch in the house will
pack up and leave. It's a hard deal,' says old Smoke-'em-out.
"'Friend,' says Andy, touching the old man on the æsophagus, 'why
this jeremiad when the polar regions and the portals of Blenheim are
conspiring to hand you prosperity on a hall-marked silver salver. We
have arrived.'
"A light breaks out on Smoke-'em-out's face.
"'Can you do it, gents?' he asks. 'Could ye do it? Could ye play the
polar man and the little duke for the nice ladies? Will ye do it?'
[Illustration: "'Can ye do it, gents?' he asks."]
"I see that Andy is superimposed with his old hankering for the oral
and polyglot system of buncoing. That man had a vocabulary of about
10,000 words and synonyms, which arrayed themselves into contraband
sophistries and parables when they came out.
"'Listen,' says Andy to old Smoke-'em-out. 'Can we do it? You behold
before you, Mr. Smithers, two of the finest equipped men on earth for
inveigling the proletariat, whether by word of mouth, sleight-of-hand
or swiftness of foot. Dukes come and go, explorers go and get lost,
but me and Jeff Peters,' says Andy, 'go after the come-ons forever. If
you say so, we're the two illustrious guests you were expecting. And
you'll find,' says Andy, 'that we'll give you the true local color of
the title rôles from the aurora borealis to the ducal portcullis.'
"Old Smoke-'em-out is delighted. He takes me and Andy up to the inn by
an arm apiece, telling us on the way that the finest fruits of the can
and luxuries of the fast freights should be ours without price as long
as we would stay.
"On the porch Smoke-'em-out says: 'Ladies, I have the honor to
introduce His Gracefulness the Duke of Marlborough and the famous
inventor of the North Pole, Lieut. Peary.'
"The skirts all flutter and the rocking chairs squeak as me and Andy
bows and then goes on in with old Smoke-'em-out to register. And then
we washed up and turned our cuffs, and the landlord took us to the
rooms he'd been saving for us and got out a demijohn of North Carolina
real mountain dew.
"I expected trouble when Andy began to drink. He has the artistic
metempsychosis which is half drunk when sober and looks down on
airships when stimulated.
"After lingering with the demijohn me and Andy goes out on the porch,
where the ladies are to begin to earn our keep. We sit in two special
chairs and then the schoolma'ams and literaterrers hunched their
rockers close around us.
"One lady says to me: 'How did that last venture of yours turn out,
sir?'
"Now, I'd clean forgot to have an understanding with Andy which I
was to be, the duke or the lieutenant. And I couldn't tell from
her question whether she was referring to Arctic or matrimonial
expeditions. So I gave an answer that would cover both cases.
"'Well, ma'am,' says I, 'it was a freeze out--right smart of a freeze
out, ma'am.'
"And then the flood gates of Andy's perorations was opened and I knew
which one of the renowned ostensible guests I was supposed to be. I
wasn't either. Andy was both. And still furthermore it seemed that
he was trying to be the mouthpiece of the whole British nobility and
of Arctic exploration from Sir John Franklin down. It was the union
of corn whiskey and the conscientious fictional form that Mr. W. D.
Howletts admires so much.
"'Ladies,' says Andy, smiling semicircularly, 'I am truly glad to
visit America. I do not consider the magna charta,' says he, 'or gas
balloons or snow-shoes in any way a detriment to the beauty and charm
of your American women, skyscrapers or the architecture of your
icebergs. The next time,' says Andy, 'that I go after the North Pole
all the Vanderbilts in Greenland won't be able to turn me out in the
cold--I mean make it hot for me.'
"'Tell us about one of your trips, Lieutenant,' says one of the
normals.
"'Sure,' says Andy, getting the decision over a hiccup. 'It was in
the spring of last year that I sailed the Castle of Blenheim up to
latitude 87 degrees Fahrenheit and beat the record. Ladies,' says
Andy, 'it was a sad sight to see a Duke allied by a civil and
liturgical chattel mortgage to one of your first families lost in a
region of semiannual days.' And then he goes on, 'At four bells we
sighted Westminster Abbey, but there was not a drop to eat. At noon we
threw out five sandbags, and the ship rose fifteen knots higher. At
midnight,' continues Andy, 'the restaurants closed. Sitting on a cake
of ice we ate seven hot dogs. All around us was snow and ice. Six
times a night the boatswain rose up and tore a leaf off the calendar,
so we could keep time with the barometer. At 12,' says Andy, with a
lot of anguish on his face, 'three huge polar bears sprang down the
hatchway, into the cabin. And then--'
"'What then, Lieutenant?' says a schoolma'am, excitedly.
"Andy gives a loud sob.
"'The Duchess shook me,' he cries out, and slides out of the chair and
weeps on the porch.
"Well, of course, that fixed the scheme. The women boarders all left
the next morning. The landlord wouldn't speak to us for two days, but
when he found we had money to pay our way he loosened up.
"So me and Andy had a quiet, restful summer after all, coming away
from Crow Knob with $1,100, that we enticed out of old Smoke-'em-out
playing seven up."