sound, which was a bad sign. Blinking and dazed by the garish blue
whiteness of a few moments before, they could see perfectly now where
the tamer was blind.
"Listen," said Toppan. Near to us, and on the inside of the cage, we
could hear a sound as of some slender body being whisked back and forth
over the surface of the floor. In an instant I guessed what it was; one
of the lions was crouched there, whipping his sides with his tail.
"When he stops that he'll spring," said Toppan, excitedly.
"Bring a light, Jerry--quick!" came the tamer's voice.
People were clambering to their feet by this time, talking loud, and we
heard a woman cry out.
"Please keep as quiet as possible, ladies and gentlemen!" cried the
tamer; "it won't do to excite--"
From the direction of the voice came the sound of a heavy fall and a
crash that shook the iron gratings in their sockets.
"He's got him!" shouted Toppan.
And then what a scene! In that thick darkness every one sprang up,
stumbling over the seats and over each other, all shouting and crying
out, suddenly stricken with a panic fear of something they could not
see. Inside the barred death-trap every lion suddenly gave tongue at
once, until the air shook and sang in our ears. We could hear the great
cats hurling themselves against the bars, and could see their eyes
leaving brassy streaks against the darkness as they leaped. Two more
sprang as the first had done toward that quarter of the cage from which
came sounds of stamping and struggling, and then the tamer began to
scream.
I think that so long as I shall live I shall not forget the sound of the
tamer's scream. He did not scream as a woman would have done, from the
head, but from the chest, which sounded so much worse that I was sick
from it in a second with that sickness that weakens one at the pit of
the stomach and along the muscles at the back of the legs. He did not
pause for a second. Every breath was a scream, and every scream was
alike, and one heard through it all the long snarls of satisfied hate
and revenge, muffled by the man's clothes and the _rip, rip_ of the
cruel, blunt claws.
Hearing it all in the dark, as we did, made it all the more dreadful. I
think for a time I must have taken leave of my senses. I was ready to
vomit for the sickness that was upon me, and I beat my hands raw upon
the iron bars or clasped them over my ears, against the sounds of the
dreadful thing that was doing behind them. I remember praying aloud
that it might soon be over, so only those screams might be stopped.
It seemed as though it had gone on for hours, when some men rushed in
with a lantern and long, sharp irons. A hundred voices cried: "Here he
is, over here!" and they ran around outside the cage and threw the light
of the lantern on a place where a heap of grey, gold-laced clothes
writhed and twisted beneath three great bulks of fulvous hide and
bristling black mane.
The irons were useless. The three furies dragged their prey out of
their reach and crouched over it again and recommenced. No one dared to
go into the cage, and still the man lived and struggled and screamed.
I saw Toppan's fingers go to his mouth, and through that medley of
dreadful noises there issued a sound that, sick as I was, made me shrink
anew and close my eyes and teeth and shudder as though some cold slime
had been poured through the hollow of my bones where the marrow should
be. It was as the noise of the whistling of a fine whiplash, mingled
with the whirr of a locust magnified a hundred times, and ended in an
abrupt clacking noise thrice repeated.
At once I remembered where I had heard it before, because, having once
heard the hiss of an aroused and angry serpent, no child of Eve can ever
forget it.
The sound that now came from between Toppan's teeth and that filled the
arena from wall to wall, was the sound that I had heard once before in
the Paris Jardin des Plantes at feeding-time--the sound made by the
great constrictors, when their huge bodies are looped and coiled like a
_reata_ for the throw that never misses, that never relaxes, and that no
beast of the field is built strong enough to withstand. All the filthy
wickedness and abominable malice of the centuries since the Enemy first
entered into that shape that crawls, was concentrated in that hoarse,
whistling hiss--a hiss that was cold and piercing like an icicle-made
sound. It was not loud, but had in it some sort of penetrating quality
that cut through the waves of horrid sounds about us, as the
snake-carved prow of a Viking galley might have cut its way through the
tumbling eddies of a tide-rip.
At the second repetition the lions paused. None better than they knew
what was the meaning of that hiss. They had heard it before in their
native hunting-grounds in the earlier days of summer, when the first
heat lay close over all the jungle like the hollow of the palm of an
angry god. Or if they themselves had not heard it, their sires before
them had, and the fear of the thing bred into their bones suddenly
leaped to life at the sound and gripped them and held them close.
When for a third time the sound sung and shrilled in their ears, their
heads drew between their shoulders, their great eyes grew small and
glittering, the hackles rose, and stiffened on their backs, their tails
drooped, and they backed slowly to the further side of the cage and
cowered there, whining and beaten.
Toppan wiped the sweat from the inside of his hands and went into the
cage with the keepers and gathered up the panting, broken body, with its
twitching fingers and dead, white face and ears, and carried it out. As
they lifted it, the handful of pitiful medals dropped from the shredded
grey coat and rattled down upon the floor. In the silence that had now
succeeded, it was about the only sound one heard.
As we sat that evening on the porch of Toppan's house, in a fashionable
suburb of the city, he said, for the third time: "I had that trick from
a Mpongwee headman," and added: "It was while I was at Victoria Falls,
waiting to cross the Kalahari Desert."
Then he continued, his eyes growing keener and his manner changing:
"There is some interesting work to be done in that quarter by some one.
You see, the Kalahari runs like this"--he drew the lines on the ground
with his cane--"coming down in something like this shape from the Orange
River to about the twentieth parallel south. The aneroid gives its
average elevation about six hundred feet. I didn't cross it at the time,
because we had sickness and the porters cut. But I made a lot of
geological observations, and from these I have built up a theory that
the Kalahari is no desert at all, but a big, well-watered plateau, with
higher ground on the east and west. The tribes, too, thereabout call
the place _Linoka-Noka_, and that's the Bantu for rivers upon rivers.
They're nasty, though, these Bantu, and gave us a lot of trouble. They
have a way of spitting little poisoned thorns into you unawares, and
your tongue swells up and turns blue and your teeth fall out and--"
His wife Victoria came out to us in evening dress.
"Ah, Vic," said Toppan, jumping up, with a very sweet smile, "we were
just talking about your paper-german next Tuesday, and _I_ think we
might have some very pretty favours made out of white
tissue-paper--roses and butterflies, you know."
*"*_*This Animal of a Buldy Jones*_*"*
We could always look for fine fighting at Julien's of a Monday morning,
because at that time the model was posed for the week and we picked out
the places from which to work. Of course the first ten of the
_esquisse_ men had first choice. So, no matter how early you got up and
how resolutely you held to your first row tabouret, chaps like Rounault,
or Marioton, or the little Russian, whom we nicknamed "Choubersky," or
Haushaulder, or the big American--"This Animal of a Buldy Jones"--all
strong _esquisse_ men, could always chuck you out when they came, which
they did about ten o'clock, when everything had quieted down. When two
particularly big, quick-tempered, obstinate, and combative men try to
occupy, simultaneously, a space twelve inches square, it gives rise to
complications. We used to watch and wait for these fights (after we had
been chucked out ourselves), and make things worse, and hasten the
crises by getting upon the outskirts of the crowd that thronged about
the disputants and shoving with all our mights. Then one of the
disputants would be jostled rudely against the other, who would hit him
in the face, and then there would be a wild hooroosh and a clatter of
overturned easels and the flashing of whitened knuckles and glimpses of
two fierce red faces over the shoulders of the crowd, and everything
would be pleasant. Then, perhaps, you would see an allusion in the
Paris edition of the next morning's "_Herald_" to "the brutal and
lawless students."
I remember particularly one fight--quite the best I ever saw at Julien's
or elsewhere, for the matter of that. It was between Haushaulder and
Gilet. Haushaulder was a Dane, and six feet two. Gilet was French, and
had a waist like Virginie's. But Gilet had just come back from his
three years' army service, and knew all about the savate. They squared
off at each other, Gilet spitting like a cat, and Haushaulder grommelant
under his mustache. "This Animal of a Buldy Jones," the big American,
bellowed to separate them, for it really looked like a massacre. And
then, all at once, Gilet spun around, bent over till his finger-tips
touched the floor, and balancing on the toe, lashed out backwards with
his leg at Haushaulder, like any cayuse. The heel of his boot caught the
Dane on the point of the chin. An hour and forty minutes later, when
Haushaulder recovered consciousness and tried to speak, we found that
the tip of his tongue had been sliced off between his teeth as if by a
pair of scissors. It was a really unfortunate affair, and the
government very nearly closed the atelier because of it. But "This
Animal of a Buldy Jones" gave us all his opinion of the savate, and
announced that the next man who savated from any cause whatever "_aurait
affaire avec lui, oui, avec lui, cre nom!_"
Heavens! No one _aimerait avoir affaire avec cette animal de_ Buldy
Jones. He was from Chicago (but, of course, he couldn't help that!),
and was taller than even Haushaulder, and much broader. The desire for
art had come upon him all of a sudden while he was studying law at
Columbia. For "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" had gone into law after
leaving Yale. Here we touch his great weakness. He was a Yale man!
Why, he was prouder of that fact than he was of being an American, or
even a Chicagoan--and that is saying much. Why, he couldn't talk of
Yale without his face flushing. Why, Yale was almost more to him than
his mother. I remember, at the students' ball at Bulliers, he got the
Americans together, and with infinite trouble taught us all the Yale
"yell", which he swore was a transcript from Aristophanes, and for three
hours he gravely headed a procession that went the rounds of a hall
howling "Brek! Kek! Kek! Kek! Co-ex!" and all the rest of it.
More than that, "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" had pitched on his
Varsity baseball nine. In his studio--quite the swellest in the
Quarter, by the way--he had a collection of balls that he had pitched in
match games at different times, and he used to show them to us
reverently, and if we were his especial friends, would allow us to
handle them. They were all written over with names and dates. He would
explain them to us one by one.
"This one," he would say, "I pitched in the Princeton game, and here's
two I pitched in the Harvard game--hard game that--our catcher gave
out--guess he couldn't hold me" (with a grin of pride), "and Harvard
made it interesting for me until the fifth inning; then I made two men
fan out one after the other, and then, just to show 'em what I could do,
filled the bases, got three balls called on me, and then pitched two
inshoots and an outcurve, just as hard as I could deliver. Printz of
Harvard was at the bat. He struck at every one of them--and fanned out.
Here's the ball I did it with. Yes, sir. Oh, I can pitch a ball all
right."
Now think of that! Here was this man, "This Animal of a Buldy Jones," a
Beaux Arts man, one of the best colour and line men on our side, who had
three _esquisses_ and five figures "on the wall" at Julien's (any Paris
art student will know what that means), and yet the one thing he was
proud of, the one thing he cared to be admired for, the one thing he
loved to talk about, was the fact that he had pitched for the Yale
'varsity baseball nine.
All this by way of introduction.
I wonder how many Julien men there are left who remember the _affaire_
Camme? Plenty, I make no doubt, for the thing was a monumental
character. I heard Roubault tell it at the "Dead Rat" just the other
day. "Choubersky" wrote to "The Young Pretender" that he heard it away
in the interior of Morocco, where he had gone to paint doorways, and
Adler, who is now on the "Century" staff, says it's an old story among
the illustrators. It has been bandied about so much that there is danger
of its original form being lost. Wherefore it is time that it should be
brought to print.
Now Camme, be it understood, was a filthy little beast--a
thorough-paced, blown-in-the-bottle blackguard with not enough
self-respect to keep him sweet through a summer's day--a rogue, a
bug--anything you like that is sufficiently insulting; besides all this,
and perhaps because of it, he was a duelist. He loved to have a man
slap his face--some huge, big-boned, big-hearted man, who knew no other
weapons but his knuckles. Camme would send him his card the next day,
with a message to the effect that it would give him great pleasure to
try and kill the gentleman in question at a certain time and place.
Then there would be a lot of palaver, and somehow the duel would never
come off, and Camme's reputation as a duelist would go up another peg,
and the rest of us--beastly little rapins that we were--would hold him
in increased fear and increased horror, just as if he were a rattler in
coil.
Well, the row began one November morning--a Monday--and, of course, it
was over the allotment of seats. Camme had calmly rubbed out the name
of "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" from the floor, and had chalked his
own in its place.
Now, Bouguereau had placed the _esquisse_ of "This Animal of a Buldy
Jones" fifth, the precedence over Camme.
But Camme invented reasons for a different opinion, and presented them
to the whole three ateliers at the top of his voice and with unclean
allusions. We were all climbing up on the taller stools by this time,
and Virginie, who was the model of the week, was making furtive signs at
us to give the crowd a push, as was our custom.
Camme was going on at a great rate.
"_Ah, farceur! Ah, espece de volveur, crapaud, va; c'est a moi cette
place la Saligaud va te prom'ner, va faire des copies au Louvre._"
To be told to go and make copies in the Louvre was in our time the last
insult. "This Animal of a Buldy Jones," this sometime Yale pitcher,
towering above the little frog-like Frenchman, turned to the crowd, and
said, in grave concern, his forehead puckered in great deliberation:
"I do not know, precisely, that which it is necessary to do with this
kind of a little toad of two legs. I do not know whether I should spank
him or administer the good kick of the boot. I believe I shall give him
the good kick of the boot. Hein!"
He turned Camme around, held him at arm's length, and kicked him twice
severely. Next day, of course, Camme sent his card, and four of us
Americans went around to the studio of "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" to
have a smoke-talk over it. Robinson was of the opinion to ignore the
matter.
"Now, we can't do that," said Adler; "these beastly continentals would
misunderstand. Can you shoot, Buldy Jones?"
"Only deer."
"Fence?"
"Not a little bit. Oh, let's go and punch the wadding out of him, and
be done with it!"
"No! No! He should be humiliated."
"I tell you what--let's guy the thing."
"Get up a fake duel and make him seem ridiculous."
"You've got the choice of weapons, Buldy Jones."
"Fight him with hat-pins."
"Oh, let's go punch the wadding out of him--he makes me tired."
"Horse" Wilson, who hadn't spoken, suddenly broke in with:
"Now, listen to me, you other fellows. Let me fix this thing. Buldy
Jones, I must be one of your seconds."
"Soit!"
"I'm going to Camme, and say like this: 'This Animal of a Buldy Jones'
has the naming of weapons. He comes from a strange country, near the
Mississippi, from a place called Shee-ka-go, and there it is not
considered etiquette to fight either with a sword or pistol; it is too
common. However, when it is necessary that balls should be exchanged in
order to satisfy honour, a curious custom is resorted to. Balls are
exchanged, but not from pistols. They are very terrible balls, large as
an apple, and of adamantine hardness. 'This Animal of a Buldy Jones,'
even now has a collection. No American gentleman of honour travels
without them. He would gladly have you come and make first choice of a
ball while he will select one from among those you leave. _Sur le
terrain_, you will deliver these balls simultaneously toward each other,
repeating till one or the other adversary drops. Then honour can be
declared satisfied."
"Yes, and do you suppose that Camme will listen to such tommy rot as
that?" remarked "This Animal of a Buldy Jones." "I think I'd better
just punch his head."
"Listen to it? Of course he'll listen to it. You've no idea what
curious ideas these continentals have of the American duel. You can't
propose anything so absurd in the dueling line that they won't give it
serious thought. And besides, if Camme won't fight this way we'll tell
him that you will have a Mexican duel."
"What's that?"
"Tie your left wrists together, and fight with knives in your right
hand. That'll scare the tar out of him."
And it did. The seconds had a meeting at the cafe of the _Moulin
Rouge_, and gave Camme's seconds the choice of the duel Yale or the duel
Mexico. Camme had no wish to tie himself to a man with a knife in his
hand, and his seconds came the next day and solemnly chose a league
ball--one that had been used against the Havard nine.
Will I--will any of us ever forget that duel? Camme and his people came
upon the ground almost at the same time as we. It was behind the mill
of Longchamps, of course. Roubault was one of Camme's seconds, and he
carried the ball in a lacquered Japanese tobacco-jar--gingerly as if it
were a bomb. We were quick getting to work. Camme and "This Animal of a
Buldy Jones" were each to take his baseball in his hand, stand back to
back, walk away from each other just the distance between the pitcher's
box and the home plate (we had seen to that), turn on the word,
and--deliver their balls.
"How do you feel?" I whispered to our principal, as I passed the ball
into his hands.
"I feel just as if I was going into a match game, with the bleachers
full to the top and the boys hitting her up for Yale. We ought to give
the yell, y' know."
"How's the ball?"
"A bit soft and not quite round. Bernard of the Harvard nine hit the
shape out of it in a drive over our left field, but it'll do all right."
"This Animal of a Buldy Jones" bent and gathered up a bit of dirt,
rubbed the ball in it, and ground it between his palms. The man's arms
were veritable connecting-rods, and were strung with tendons like
particularly well-seasoned rubber. I remembered what he said about few
catchers being able to hold him, and I recalled the pads and masks and
wadded gloves of a baseball game, and I began to feel nervous. If Camme
was hit on the temple or over the heart--
"Now, say, old man, go slow, you know. We don't want to fetch up in
Mazas for this. By the way, what kind of ball are you going to give
him? What's the curve?"
"I don't know yet. Maybe I'll let him have an up-shoot. Never make up
my mind till the last moment."
"All ready, gentlemen!" said Roubault, coming up.
Camme had removed coat, vest, and cravat. "This Animal of a Buldy Jones"
stripped to a sleeveless undershirt. He spat on his hands, and rubbed a
little more dirt on the ball.
"Play ball!" he muttered.
We set them back to back. On the word they paced from each other and
paused. "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" shifted his ball to his right
hand, and, holding it between his fingers, slowly raised both his arms
high above his head and a little over one shoulder. With his toe he
made a little depression in the soil, while he slowly turned the ball
between his fingers.
"Fire!" cried "Horse" Wilson.
On the word "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" turned abruptly about on one
foot, one leg came high off the ground till the knee nearly touched the
chest--you know the movement and position well--the uncanny contortions
of a pitcher about to deliver.
Camme threw his ball overhand--bowled it as is done in cricket, and it
went wide over our man's shoulder. Down came Buldy Jones' foot, and his
arm shot forward with a tremendous jerk. Not till the very last moment
did he glance at his adversary or measure the distance.
"It is an in-curve!" exclaimed "Horse" Wilson in my ear.
We could hear the ball whir as it left a grey blurred streak in the air.
Camme made as if to dodge it with a short toss of head and neck--it was
all he had time for--and the ball, faithful to the last twist of the
pitcher's fingers, swerved sharply inward at the same moment and in the
same direction.
When we got to Camme and gathered him up, I veritably believed that the
fellow had been done for. For he lay as he had fallen, straight as a
ramrod and quite as stiff, and his eyes were winking like the shutter of
a kinetoscope. But "This Animal of a Buldy Jones," who had seen
prize-fighters knocked out by a single blow, said it was all right. An
hour later Camme woke up and began to mumble in pain through his
clenched teeth, for the ball, hitting him on the point of the chin, had
dislocated his jaw.
The heart-breaking part of the affair came afterward, when "This Animal
of a Buldy Jones" kept us groping in the wet grass and underbrush until
after dark looking for his confounded baseball, which had caromed off
Camme's chin, and gone--no one knows where.
We never found it.
_*Dying Fires*_
Young Overbeck's father was editor and proprietor of the county paper in
Colfax, California, and the son, so soon as his high-school days were
over, made his appearance in the office as his father's assistant. So
abrupt was the transition that his diploma, which was to hang over the
editorial desk, had not yet returned from the framer's, while the first
copy that he was called on to edit was his own commencement oration on
the philosophy of Dante. He had worn a white pique cravat and a cutaway
coat on the occasion of its delivery, and the county commissioner, who
was the guest of honour on the platform, had congratulated him as he
handed him his sheepskin. For Overbeck was the youngest and the
brightest member of his class.
Colfax was a lively town in those days. The teaming from the valley
over into the mining country on the other side of the Indian River was
at its height then. Colfax was the headquarters of the business, and
the teamsters--after the long pull up from the Indian River
Canon--showed interest in an environment made up chiefly of saloons.
Then there were the mining camps over by Iowa Hill, the Morning Star,
the Big Dipper, and further on, up in the Gold Run country, the Little
Providence. There was Dutch Flat, full of Mexican-Spanish girls and
"breed" girls, where the dance-halls were of equal number with the bars.
There was--a little way down the line--Clipper Gap, where the mountain
ranches began, and where the mountain cow-boy lived up to the traditions
of his kind.
And this life, tumultuous, headstrong, vivid in colour, vigorous in
action, was bound together by the railroad, which not only made a single
community out of all that part of the east slope of the Sierras'
foothills, but contributed its own life as well--the life of oilers,
engineers, switchmen, eating-house waitresses and cashiers, "lady"
operators, conductors, and the like.