BIT BY A GRAND VIZIER
Ma Doane sure was a worker. The supper dishes washed and put away in
the cupboard, each dish in its proper place, she got out a little
comb-like machine for making switches. A switch, as you probably know,
if you have any old ladies in the family, is a tail of false hair. Some
oldish women still use them. It’s a part of their dressing-up scheme.
Camouflage, Dad calls it.
Switch making, we learned, was a sort of side line with Ma. She
earned about a hundred dollars a year that way. A customer wanting a
switch would save her hair combings, and Ma would take this tangle of
stuff and make it into a switch with the aid of her home made combing
machine. In talking with her about the work, which interested us at
first, she laughingly told us how she had made wigs for bald-headed
men, too. She wanted us to know, I guess, as much as anything, that
_all_ wearers of false hair weren’t women!
After watching her for a few minutes, with the feeling that she was
mostly doing this work to quiet her mind, or, rather, as a sort of
accompaniment to her tangled thoughts, we went upstairs to talk with
Pa. For that was our plan, you know. To our surprise, we found the old
man smoking in bed, as chipper as you please. Old Goliath was there,
too, with another pipe. And in their new friendship if you think the
two old geezers weren’t messing up the air with tobacco smoke you
should have been there to cut off a sample for yourself.
“Yes, sir,” drawled the runaway, “it’s the nature of some wimmin to be
that way. They just kain’t help it, I reckon. Not so much temper, I
take it, as temperament.”
“Or _dis_temper, hey?” cackled the other smoker.
“Exactly. Take my Clarissa fur example. She just seemed to have a
natural hankerin’ fur throwin’ things at me. I didn’t mind cold ’taters
so much, or even soggy dough, though it were blamed oncomfortable
sometimes to git some of it squashed in my face, especially when I
wasn’t lookin’ fur it. But what I hated worser ’an that, even, was
stove lids an’ flatirons. An’ to make it all the more onfortunate fur
me, Clarissa had a most powerfully perfect aim.” A big hand parted the
brown hair that hung almost to the giant’s shoulders. “See that bump?
Some of Clarissa’s fine work. An’ that, mind you, is the very spot
she aimed for, too. Every _push_ with that old gal meant a _put_. So
you see, Mr. Doane, everything considered, me not havin’ eyes in the
back of my head to pertect me there, to say nothin’ of gittin’ soaked
when I was asleep in my chair, it weren’t sech a terribly useless or
onreasonable notion of mine to skin out.”
“Ma never throwed stuff at me much,” came the second henpecked tale,
“but her jawin’ apparatus is the confoundest waggingest an’ most
con_sistent_ thing I ever heerd tell of in all my born days. Talk
about perpet’al motion! One day when her throat got stopped up so she
couldn’t talk I swar to Peter I thought I’d lost my hearin’. I stand
her gab jest so long an’ then I send her away on a vacation, so I kin
git a rest.”
Poppy nudged me as we stood in the doorway.
“I guess old Pop isn’t so dumb, huh?” says he in my ear.
We had surprised the old man, all right. And listening, I was further
puzzled over him. Was it a sort of lifelong game of his, I wondered,
to play dumb in his wife’s eyes? It would seem so, from what we knew
of him and from what we just had overheard. To hear his wife tell it,
he had about as much brains as a hitching post. But in the right kind
of company, as now, and with his wife out of his sight, he seemed
perfectly able to spread around plenty of fairly intelligent gab.
How shrewd was this trick of his, I then thought. By pretending
dumbness he saved himself the job of saying “yes” and “no” all day long
as punctuation marks to his wife’s endless tongue wagging. Furthermore,
he had no managing job as head of the house, for, of course, not being
“all there” in his upper story, he couldn’t be expected to do much
work! Some men, you know, are lazy enough to jump at any kind of a
scheme to save their backs.
Sort of summing up, I felt that I had a pretty good line on the
tricky old man now. And I liked him the less for what I knew about
him. Here he was taking it easy--and to that point faithful little
old Ma undoubtedly had lugged his dinner and supper up to him on a
tray!--while downstairs the innocent one was straining her eyes over a
tangle of human hair to earn money to keep him in smoking tobacco.
Getting sight of us through the smoke screen, the two old gossips sort
of rolled up their gab, as though they didn’t want us to know too much
about their family affairs, though why old Goliath should act this way
all of a sudden was a puzzle to me, for certainly, on the way out, he
hadn’t been backward in spilling his grief to us.
Then Ma breezed into the room, jawing to beat the cars. _Such_ a smoke!
What would the curtains and bedclothes be like? Up went the window ...
and out went old Goliath. Not out of the window, you understand, but
out of the room.
We grinned at him as he swung past us into the hall.
“I guess,” he drawled, looking back with a comical twist to his face,
like a spanked kid, “they wasn’t no false bottom to that story of the
old man’s. She sure _kin_ talk. They’s no ifs or ands about that. She’s
what you call _pur_-ficient. An’ between rollin’ pins an’ _this_, I
think, fur a life’s job of it, I’d prefer the rollin’ pins.... Wa-al,
where do we bunk?”
“Jerry and I have the notion,” says Poppy--only it was _his_ notion and
not mine--“that we’d like to sleep in the dead man’s room. Mrs. Doane
says we can. And she’s going to bring quilts and things for you to
sleep on the floor in front of the door, if that’s agreeable with you.”
Ma was bustling around in the smoke house, getting ready to go to
bed, so Pa was out of our reach for the night at least. However, it
wasn’t important for us to talk with him right away, Poppy said. He
had lost some of his sympathy for the old geezer, I guess. And I was
glad of that. For it looked like a crazy stunt to me to show our hand
to the tricky old man, as the other had suggested. He’d have us at a
disadvantage then.
Eleven-thirty found us parked in our bedrooms for the night, Ma and Pa
in their room halfway down the long hall, and the three of us in the
“master’s chamber,” as the big room was called. A sweller bedroom I
never hope to see. Say, it was more like a parlor than a bedroom. Boy,
the carpet was so thick that it tickled our knees. And the bed alone
must have cost a thousand dollars. It was _some_ bed. Like a king’s.
On top of the headboard was a fancy doo-dad--a sort of red-plush
curtain, folded as slick and pretty as you please, with gold fringe.
And there was more of the same plush stuff over the windows. The walls
were laid out in big panels, and each panel was a separate picture
worked into cloth. Tapestry--I guess that’s the right word to use.
The ceiling was a big picture of dancing ladies wrapped in strings of
flowers--and bu-lieve me, all those ladies _did_ have on was flowers!
That was an awful side-show for a man to lay in bed and look at, I
thought, blushing. The chairs had biscuit cushions and toothpick legs.
Further, there was a table, a swell dresser that matched the bed,
a grandfather’s clock and a writing desk. Everything being new to
us, it was an awful temptation to start snooping. For one thing, we
thought, the desk might be crammed full of money! Of course, it wasn’t
money that we could take--I don’t mean that--but it would be exciting
to count it. Thousand-dollar bills, maybe. Millionaires _do_ have
thousand-dollar bills. Sure thing. And having died very suddenly, the
rich man might not have remembered, as a last act, to send his money
back to the bank. But we didn’t snoop, even though the thought came
to us that among the packages of greenbacks in the desk we might find
a private paper, or some such thing, that would clear up the crazy
mystery. For Mrs. Doane hadn’t told us that we could open the desk.
Anyway, we couldn’t have opened it if she had said so, for it was
locked.
Poppy spent quite a bit of time examining the clock. For it was his
idea that there might be a pair of hidden electric wires between the
timepiece and the door. But he could find no wires. And we were dead
sure, too, that there were no hidden springs in or around the door.
Helping old Goliath make up his floor bed, we tucked him in and then
went to bed ourselves. The light was out now. And though I wasn’t
_scared_, still, as I lay there in the dark, I had a queer feeling. I
put my nose against the sheets. They smelt all right. And just because
they were _cold_ didn’t mean that they had been touched by dead hands.
Sheets were naturally cold, I told myself. Yet somehow these sheets
felt _different_. Sort of clammy-like.
I got closer to Poppy. If the sheets would only hurry up and get warm,
was my thought. _What was that?_ Oh!... Goliath had kicked the wall in
his sleep. I tried to quit shivering. Those blamed co-old sheets.
“If you want to shimmey,” purred Poppy, kept awake, “why don’t you get
out on the roof where you’ll have more room?”
“This is a crazy notion,” says I unhappily.
“What?”
“Sleeping here. What good’ll it do us, anyway?”
“You seem to be getting a lot of exercise out of it.”
“I’ve got a notion to get up and sleep with old Goliath.”
“If he rolls over on top of you in the middle of the night you’ll wish
you’d stayed here.”
“I’d rather be a pancake than an icicle.”
“You don’t mean to say you’re cold!”
“Oh, no! I’m roasting. Get me a fan.”
“But how can you be _cold_ on a hot night like this?”
“Ask me why porcupines have whiskers.”
“You and your porcupines!”
“Tell me why you want to sleep here,” I pressed.
“For the same reason that a ten-year-old likes to monkey with the
family clock. I’m curious to know if anything spooky _can_ happen in
this room.”
“I’ll never sleep a wink!”
“Kid, you aren’t half as shivery as you try to let on.”
“What if the spy breaks into the house?”
“Let him. We know who he’s working for. And at our orders old Goliath
will lay him cold.”
“I feel better,” I told him, after a few minutes.
“That’s the stuff,” he encouraged, like the good pal that he was.
“Shall we go to sleep?”
“Sure thing. For if we don’t we’ll be half dead to-morrow.”
The sheets were nice and warm now. And how different I felt! That’s the
way it is with a fellow--he gets shivery one minute and then in another
minute he’s all right again. I rather liked it now. I felt like a king.
What was that story in the _Arabian Nights_? Oh, yes! A boy wanted to
be king, and one night the real king, in going around secretly, heard
the boy wishing. And for a joke the boy was carried in his sleep to the
palace where he was put in the king’s bed. Waking up the next morning,
he was king, all right, just as he had wanted to be! He was king all
that day. Then in the dark they carried him home again.
That was me. _I_ was king, too. And in the morning the black eunuchs,
or whatever you call ’em, would come in, bowing and scraping. The Grand
Vizier would come in, too, to find out which of my six hundred suits
I wanted to wear that morning, and how many prisoners’ heads I wanted
cut off before breakfast. Maybe I would be asleep when the Grand
Vizier came. He wouldn’t dare to wake me up, me being king. That is, he
wouldn’t dare to shake the tar out of me as Mother does when she gets
out of patience with me on school mornings. Still, he might ever so
gently touch my royal fingers as they lay on the solid gold coverlet.
And that’s exactly what he _did_ do! He reached down and touched my
fingers--only it wasn’t my fingers it was my bare _toes_. More than
that, he _pinched_. _Good_ night! Didn’t the dumb-bell know any better
than to pinch the king’s toes? I’d fix him for this. I’d have his head
cut off. And _now_ what was he doing? Why was he stooping over? Was
he going to _bite_ my toe? Well, of all things! I could see his white
teeth ... and then, as he took hold, I could _feel_ his teeth.
I woke up to find Poppy shaking me.
“For the love of mud, kid! Why don’t you kick the house down.”
“The Grand Vizier bit my toe,” I yipped.
“The Grand Vizier! You’ve been dreaming.”
“But my toe hurts. Something _did_ bite it.”
“Urk! Urk!” says a familiar throaty voice beside the bed. “Urk! Urk!”
The spotted gander! It was in the room. Some one had mysteriously
brought it into the house while we were asleep. And wanting to wake us
up, or so it seemed, it had pecked at the first hunk of flesh that it
had seen hanging out of the bed, which happened to be one of my bare
feet.
Poppy got up then and lit the lamp.
“You better get up, too,” says he in a queer voice. “For there’s no
telling what’s liable to happen next in _this_ house.”