schoolgirl habits. A defensive assumption of impertinent reserve, varied
by fits of superficial garrulity, gave way to real thoughtfulness,
to natural amiability. Then came, too, an emboldenment of the facial
outline, a constancy to the colour of the cheeks, a certainty of gait,
and the first perceptible roundness of contour beneath the neck.
“At sixteen she had adorable hands, and she could wear short sleeves
with impunity. A rational, unforced, and coherent vivacity had now
revealed itself as a characteristic of her mode and conversation. Her
ankles had long before that grown too sightly to be exhibited. Such is
so-called civilization! Her hair seemed to darken before one's eyes. The
oval of her face attracted the attention of more than one of my artist
friends.
“At seventeen she had learned what styles of attire, what arrangements
of her hair, were best suited to display effectively her comeliness.
“This was one of the greatest steps of all.
“The simplest draperies, she found, the least complicated headgear, were
most advantageous to her appearance.
“A taste for reading the most ideal and artistic of books, as well as
her liking for poetry, the theatre, music, and pictures had implanted
that exalted something in her face which cannot be otherwise acquired.
“When she was eighteen people on the street turned to look at her as she
passed.
“At nineteen her figure was unsurpassable. Indeed, I think there cannot
be a more beautiful and charming woman in America. She is now twenty.
“It was my privilege to view closely the bursting of this bud into
bloom.”
The fin de siècle versewright became silent and lighted a fresh
cigarette.
“Will you permit me to ask,” said I, “what were the especial facilities
that you had for observing this evolution?”
“Yes,” he answered, softly, a tender look coming into his eyes. “She is
my wife. She was thirteen when I married her. Suddenly placed without
means of subsistence, knowing nothing of the world, she came to me. I
could see no other way. We are very happy together.”
The pretty narrative of the rhymer put each of us in a delectable mood.
The notes of a harp and violins came from the lower deck in the form of
a seductive Italian melody. White sails dotted the far-reaching sea.
XIX. -- A MAN WHO WAS NO GOOD
Hearken to the tale of how fortune fell to the widow of Busted Blake.
The outcome has shown that “Busted” was not radically bad. But he was
wretchedly weak of will to reject an opportunity of having another drink
with the boys--or with the girls--or with anybody or with nobody.
In the days of his ascendancy, when he was a young and newly married
architect, he was a buyer of drinks for others. Waiters in cafés vied
with each other in showing readiness to take his orders. He was rated a
jolly good fellow then. No one would have supposed it destined that
some fine night a leering barroom wit should reply to his whispered
application for a small loan by pouring a half-glass of whiskey upon his
head and saying:
“I hereby christen thee 'Busted.'”
The title stuck. Blake, through continued impecuniosity, lost all shame
of it in time; lost, too, his self-respect and his wife. Mrs. Blake, a
gentle and pretty little brunette, had wedded him against the will of
her parents. She had trusted, for his safety, to the allurements of his
future, which everybody said was bright, and to his love for her.
The years of tearful nights, the pleadings, the reproaches, the seesaw
of hope and despair, need not here be dwelt upon. They would make an old
story, and some of the details might be shocking to the young person.
They reached a culmination one day when she said to him:
“You love drink better than you love me. I have done with you.”
She was a woman and took a woman's view of the case.
When he came back to their rooms that night, she was not there. Then he
knew how much he loved her and how much he had underestimated his love.
She did not go to her parents. There was a very musty proverb that she
knew would meet her on the threshold. “You made your bed, now lie on
it.” Her father was a man of no originality, hence he would have put it
in that way.
She got employment in a photograph gallery, where she made herself
useful by being ornamental, sitting behind a desk in the anteroom.
I know not what duties devolve upon the woman who occupies that post
in the average photographer's service; whatever they are she performed
them. But within a very short time after she had left the “bed and
board” of Busted Blake, she had to ask for a vacation. She spent it in
a hospital and Busted became a father. She resumed her chair behind the
photographer's desk in due time, found a boarding-house where infants
were not tabooed, and managed to subsist, and to care for her child--a
girl.
Somebody lived in that boarding-house who knew Busted Blake, and it was
through inquiries resulting from, this somebody's jocularly calling him
“papa” one night in a saloon that Busted was made aware of his accession
to the paternal relation.
When the poor wretch heard the news, he made a prodigious effort to keep
his face composed. But the muscles would not be resisted. He burst out
crying, and he laid his head upon his arm upon a beer-flooded table and
wept copiously, causing a sudden hush to fall upon the crowd of
topers and a group to gather around his table and stare at him,--some
mystified, some grinning, none understanding.
The next day he made a herculean effort to pull himself together. He
obtained a position as draughtsman from one who had known him in his
respectable period, and he went tremblingly and sheepishly to call upon
his wife and child.
The consequence of his visit was a reunion, which endured for two whole
weeks. At the end of that time she cast him off in utter scorn.
How he lived for the next two years can be only known to those who are
familiar through experience with the existence of people who ask other
people on the street for a few cents toward a night's lodging. By those
who knew him he was said to be “no good to himself or any one else.” He
acquired the raggedness, the impudence, the phraseology of the vagabond
class. He would hang on the edge of a party of men drinking together
in front of a bar, on the slim chance of being “counted in” when the
question went round, “What'll you have?” He was perpetually being
impelled out of saloons at foot-race speed by the officials whose
function it is, in barrooms, to substitute an objectionable person's
room for his company.
One winter Sunday morning he slept late on a bench in a public square.
Awakened by an officer, he arose to go. Hazy in head and stiff at
joints, he slightly staggered. He heard behind him the cooing laugh of
a child. He looked around. It was himself that had awakened the infant's
mirth--or that strange something which precedes the dawn of a sense of
humour in children. The smiling babe was in a child's carriage which a
plainly dressed woman was pushing. He looked at the woman. It was his
wife and the pretty child was his own.
He walked rapidly from the place, and on the same day he decided to
leave the city. He had herded with vagrants of the touring class. The
methods of free transportation by means of freight-trains and free
living, by means of beggary and small thievery in country towns, were no
secret to him. He walked to the suburbs, and at nightfall he scrambled
up the side of a coal-car in a train slowly moving westward.
What hunger he suffered, what cold he endured, what bread he begged,
what police station cells he passed nights in, what human scum he
associated with, what thirst he quenched, and with what incredibly bad
whiskey, are particulars not for this unobjectionable narrative, for do
they not belong to low life? And who nowadays can tolerate low life
in print unless it be redeemed by a rustic environment and a laboured
exposition of clodhopper English and primitive expletives? Low life
outside of a dialect story and a dreary village? Never!
Mrs. Blake and the child lived in a fair degree of comfort upon the
mother's wages, but often the mother shuddered at thought of what might
happen should she ever lose her position at the photographer's.
Consumption had its hold on Busted Blake when he arrived in the
mining-town called Get-there City, in Kansas, one evening. Get-there
City had not gotten there beyond a single straggling street of shanties.
But it had acquired a saloon, although liquor-selling had already been
forbidden in Kansas.
Busted Blake, with ten cents in his clothes, entered the saloon and
asked in an asthmatic voice for as much whiskey as that sum was good
for.
While awaiting a response, his eyes turned toward the only other
persons in the saloon,--three burly, bearded miners of the conventional
big-hatted, big-booted, and big-voiced type. Above their heads and
against the wall was this sign, lettered roughly with charcoal, under a
crudely drawn death's head:
“Five thousand dollars will be paid by the undersigned to the widow of
the sneaking hound that informs on this saloon. This is no meer bluf. P.
GIBBS.”
Blake, after a brief coughing fit, looked up at the man behind the
bar,--a great thick-necked fellow with a mien of authority, and yet with
a certain bluff honesty expressed about his eyes and lips. This man,
whose air of proprietorship convinced Blake that he could be none other
than P. Gibbs, had first looked sneeringly at the ten cents, but had
shown some small sign of pity on hearing the ominous cough of the
attenuated vagrant. He set forth a bottle and glass.
“Help yerself,” said P. Gibbs. While Blake was doing so, Mr. Gibbs went
on:
“Bad cough o' yourn. Y' mightn't guess it, but that same cough runs in
my fam'ly. It took off a brother, but it skipped me.”
Here was a bond of sympathy between the big, law-defying saloon-keeper
and the frail toper from the East. Busted Blake drained his glass and
presently coughed again. P. Gibbs again set forth the bottle, and this
time he drank with Blake. Before long, by dint of repeated fits of
coughing on the part of Blake, the sympathy of P. Gibbs was so worked
upon that he invited the three miners in the saloon to join him and the
stranger.
Blake slept in a corner of the saloon that night. He left the next
morning, a curious expression of resolution on his face.
During the next three weeks he was now and then alluded to in P. Gibbs's
saloon as the “coughing stranger.”
In the middle of the third week, at nine o'clock in the evening, when
the lamps in P. Gibbs's saloon were exerting their smallest degree of
dimness and the bar was doing a good business, the door opened and in
staggered Busted Blake. His staggering on this occasion was manifestly
not due to drink. His face had the hideous concavities of a starved man
and the uncertainty of his gait was the token of a mortal feebleness.
His emaciation was painful to behold. His eyes glowed like huge gems.
The crowd of miners looked at him with surprise as he entered.
“The coughing stranger!” cried one.
“The coffin stranger, you mean,” said another.
Busted Blake lurched over to the bar. His eyes met those of P. Gibbs on
the other side, and the latter reached for a whiskey-bottle.
Blake fumbled in his pocket and brought forth a piece of soiled paper,
which he laid on the bar under the glance of P. Gibbs.
“Keep that!” said Blake, in a husky voice, whose service he compelled
with much effort. “And keep your word, too! That's where you'll find
her.”
P. Gibbs picked up the paper.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“That woman's name there. It's the name of my widow; the address, too,
of a photograph man who will tell you where she is. Get the money to her
quick, before the governor and the troops comes down on you to close you
up. And don't let her know how it comes about. Pick a man to take it to
her,--let him pay his expenses out of it,--a man you can trust, and make
him tell her I made it somehow, mining or something, so she'll take it.
You know.”
P. Gibbs, who had listened with increasing amazement, opened wide his
eyes and drew his revolver. He spoke in a strangely low, repressed
voice:
“Stranger, do you mean to say--”
“Yes, that's it,” shrieked Busted Blake, turning toward the crowd of
intensely interested onlookers. “And I call on all you here to witness
and to hold him to his word. That's no mere bluff he says in his notice
there, and I'm the sneaking hound that informed. My widow is entitled to
$5,000. I did it in Topeka, and for proof, see this newspaper.”
P. Gibbs fired a shot from his revolver through the newspaper that Blake
pulled from his shirt. Then the saloon-keeper brought his weapon on a
level with Blake's face.
“It's good your boots is on!” said P. Gibbs, ironically.
But he did not fire. Blake stood perfectly still, awaiting the shot, and
feebly laughing.
So the two remained for some moments, until Blake suddenly sank to the
floor, quite exhausted. He died within a half-hour on the saloon floor,
his head resting in the palm of P. Gibbs, who knelt by his side and
tried to revive him.
At the next dawn, a man whom they called Big Andy started East, and the
piece of paper that Blake handed to P. Gibbs was not all that he took
with him. The United States marshal arrived and duly closed Gibbs's
saloon, which reopened very shortly afterward, minus the $5,000 offer.
And Big Andy found the widow of Busted Blake, to whom he told a bit of
fiction in accounting for the legacy conveyed by him to her that would
have imposed upon the most incredulous legatee. When she had recovered
from the surprise of finding herself and her child provided with the
means of surviving the possible loss of her situation, she forgave the
late Busted, and there was a flow of tears unusual to a boarding-house
parlour and unnerving to Big Andy.
Presently she asked Andy whether he knew what her husband's last words
had been.
“Yep,” said Andy. “I heard'm plain and clear. Pete Gibbs,--the other
executor of the will, you know,--Pete says, 'It's all right, pardner,
me and Andy'll see to it,' and then your husband says, 'Thank Gawd I've
been some good to her and the child at last.'”
Which account was entirely correct. When Big Andy had returned to
Get-there City, and related how he had performed his mission, he added:
“I'd been such a lovely liar all through, it's a shame I had to go an'
spoil the story by puttin' in some truth at the finish.”
They put up a wooden grave-mark where Blake was buried, and after his
name they cut in the wood this testimonial:
“A tenderfoot that was some good to his folks at last.”
XX. -- MR. THORNBERRY'S ELDORADO
Near the uneven road among the hills a small field of stony ground lay
between woods and cultivated land. Nothing grew upon it and no house
could be seen from it. The sun beat upon it and crows flew over it to
and from the woods.
Along the road trudged a thin old negro with stooping back and gray
wool. His knees were bent and his cumbrously shod feet pointed far
outward from his line of progress. He wore an aged frock coat and
a battered stiff hat, although the month was June. His small face,
beginning with a smoothly curved forehead and ending with a cleanly
cut chin, was mild and conciliating, shiny, and of the colour of light
chocolate. He carried a tin bucket full of cherries. Pop Thornberry was
returning to the town.
Pop, whose proper name was Moses, and who was a deacon in the African
Methodist Church, made his living this way and that way. He did odd jobs
for people, and he fished and hunted when fishing and hunting were in
season.
On this June day he had risen early and walked three miles to pick
cherries “on shares.” He had picked ten quarts and left four of them
with the farmer whose trees had produced them. At six cents a quart he
would profit thirty-six cents by his walk of six miles and his work of a
half-day.
The sun was scorching and Pop was tired. He decided to rest in the
barren field, at its very edge in shade of the woods. He climbed
the zigzag fence with some labour and at the expense of a few of his
cherries. He sat down upon a little knob of earth, took off his hat,
drew a red handkerchief from the inside thereof, and slowly wiped his
perspiring brow.
He looked up at the sky, which was so brightly blue that it made his
eyes blink. He sought optical relief in the dark green of the woods.
Then, in steadying his pail of cherries between his legs, he turned his
glance to the ground in front of him.
His attention was caught by a lump of earth that sparkled at points In
the sun's rays, a mere clod composed of clay and mica, lying In the
dry bed of a bygone streamlet. Because it glittered he picked it up and
examined it. After a time he bethought him that he was yet two and a
half miles from town and very hungry. He arose, somewhat stiff, and put
the shining clod in his coat-tail pocket. On his way back to the road
he noticed other little earth lumps that shone. He resumed his walk
townward, his knees shaking regularly at every step, as was their wont.
At three o'clock in the afternoon he had reached home, sold his
cherries, and dined on dried beef and bread in his little unpainted
wooden house on the edge of the creek at the back of the town.
He owned his house and a small lot upon which it stood. Near it was a
flour-mill, whose owner held a mortgage upon Pop's house and lot. The
old negro had been compelled to borrow $200 to pay bills incurred during
the illness and subsequent funeral of the late Mrs. Thornberry, and thus
to avoid a sheriff's sale. Hence came the mortgage. It would expire
on the 10th of September. Pop was almost ready to meet that date. He
already had $192 hidden in his cellar, unknown to any one.
He had heard rumours of the mill-owner's desire to build an addition
to his mill. To do this would necessitate the acquisition of contiguous
property. But Pop had not suspected any ulterior motive when the miller
had offered to lend him the money.
“I kin soon lay by 'nuff t' pay off d' mohgage, w'en I ain't got no one
but m'se'f t' puvvide foh no moah,” he had said, after the loan had been
made.
And, having dined on this June day, he took twenty cents from the amount
received for cherries and placed it in a cigar-box to be added to the
$192. He kept that sixteen cents with which to purchase provisions
for to-morrow, and then he walked down the quiet street to the railway
station. He often made a dime by carrying some one's satchel from the
station to the hotel.
The railroad division superintendent, a well-fed and easy-going man,
came down from his office on the second floor of the station building
and saw Pop sitting on a baggage-truck. The old negro, forgetful of the
clod in his coat-tail pocket, had felt it when he sat down. He had taken
it out of his pocket and was now casually looking at it as he held it in
his hand.
“Hello, Pop!” said the division superintendent, upon whose hand time was
hanging heavily. “What have you there?”
“Doan' know, Mistah Monroe. Doan' know, sah. Looks like jes' a chunk o'
mud.”
He held out the clod to Mr. Monroe.
The spectacle of the division superintendent talking to the old negro
attracted a group of lazy fellows,--the driver of an express wagon,
the man who hauls the mail to the post-office, a boy who sold fruit to
passengers on the train, two porters, with tin signs upon their hats,
who solicited patronage from the hotels.
“Why, Pop,” said the superintendent, winking to the expressman, “this
lump looks as though it contained gold.”
“Yes,” put in the expressman, “that's how gold comes in a mine. I've
often handled it. That's the stuff, sure.”
The fruit-selling boy and the mail-man grinned. Pop Thornberry opened
wide his mouth and eyes and softly repeated the word:
“Goal!”
“I'd be careful of it,” advised Mr. Monroe, handing the clod back to the
negro.
Pop took it with a trembling hand and looked at it. Presently he asked:
“W'at'll you give me foh dat air goal, Mistah Monroe.”
“Oh, a piece like that would be no use to me. It has to be washed and it
wouldn't be worth while putting just one piece through the whole process
of cleaning. Now. If you have a lot of it, we might go into partnership
in the gold business.”
Before the old man could answer to this pleasantry a whistle was heard
up the track, and Pop was forgotten in the excitement attending the
arrival of the train.
Dislodged from the baggage-truck, the old man looked around for Mr.
Monroe, but the superintendent had disappeared. Pop did not seek to
carry any satchels that day. His mind was full of other matters. He went
behind the station and sat down beside the river.
“Goal!” That meant proper tombstones for the graves of his wife and
children, a new pulpit for the African Methodist Church, equal to that
of the African Baptist Church, future ease for his somewhat weary legs
and arms and back.
The next afternoon the division superintendent found himself awaited at
his office door by Pop Thornberry, who was very dusty and who carried
a basket heavy with clods of clay and mica. He had been out to the arid
field that morning.
“H-sh!” whispered Pop. “Doan' say a word, Mistah Monroe! Hyah's a lot o'
dem air goal lumps, and I know weah dey's bushels moah,--plenty 'nuff to
go into pahtnehship on.”
The superintendent, looked bewildered, then amused, then ashamed.
Embarrassed for a reply, he finally said:
“I haven't time to talk to you now, Pop. Besides, I've made up my mind
not to go into the gold business. You see, I'm rich enough already. Good
day.”
Thereafter Pop lay in wait for Mr. Monroe daily, but the superintendent
always avoided him. Pop neglected to earn his living and spent his
time going about town with his basket of clods in search of the
superintendent. Finally being openly ignored by Mr. Monroe when the two
met face to face, Pop became angry and took his secret to a jeweller
on Main Street. The jeweller laughed and told Pop that the gold in the
basket must be worth at least a thousand dollars, but he was not in a
position to buy crude gold. Then the jeweller made known to many that
Pop Thornberry was crazy over some lumps of mud and mica that he mistook
for gold.
After that, people would stop Pop on the street and say:
“Let's see a piece of the gold in your basket.”
Pop, astonished that his secret was out, but somewhat proud at being
thought the possessor of a treasure, would hesitate and then comply.
The small boys soon recognized in Pop's delusion a new means of fun.
Observing the solicitude with which he watched his clod while out of his
own hands, they would innocently ask for a glimpse into his basket. This
granted, they would grasp a piece of his treasure and run away, greatly
annoying the old man, who was in a state of keen distress until he
recovered the abstracted clod. These affairs between Pop and the
boys were of hourly recurrence. They diverted barroom loungers and
passers-by.
Pop called on one local capitalist after another, seeking one who would
buy his gold or aid into preparing it for the market. All laughed at
his delusion, deeming it harmless, and all gave him good reason for not
accepting his offer of business partnership. So he went from the bank
president to the baker, from the member of congress for whom he had
voted to the barber, from the hotel proprietor to the bartender. The
negroes of the town, feeling that their race was humiliated in Pop,
began to hold aloof from him. No serious-minded person who learned of
his delusion gave it a second thought.
“Say Pop, where do you get this gold, anyhow?” asked a tobacco-chewing
gamin at the railroad station one day.
“Dat's my business,” replied Thornberry, with some dignity.
“Oh,” said his questioner, “I know. Tobe McStenger followed you out the
other day and saw where you got it. He'd a brung some in hisself, but it
wasn't on his property.”
“Yes, Pop, you better look out,” put in a telegraph operator, “or you'll
be taken up for trespassing. 'Tisn't your land, you know, where you find
your gold.”
There was no truth in the assertion of the gamin. No one had taken the
trouble to follow Pop in his semiweekly excursions to the barren field.
But the old man knew that the field was not his. A ludicrous expression
of overwhelming fright came over his face.
Three days afterward, the farmer who owned the worthless field was
astonished when Pop offered to buy it.
“But what on earth do you want that land fer?” asked the farmer, sitting
on his barnyard fence.