I was her sole heir; five minutes before she closed her eyes she gave me
all her little fortune--to wit, the sweetest smile good mother ever left
to bless memory of her, a pat on my hand, a few whispered words in my
ear.
And then Uncle Deck took me in hand to make a man of me, so he said.
He wasn’t all bad--don’t understand me as saying that. He would pass
a sleepless night if he failed to cheat a man in a horse trade, but he
would sell his shirt before he would allow any old folks in our town
to go onto the poor-farm. He would sneak around with wood and groceries
after dark, that big, red face of his like a harvest moon, and when they
would start to thank him he would curse the miserable old creatures so
horribly that my blood used to run cold. He prided himself on language
which, so he said, “would break up a Sunday-school picnic if a little
bird sat overhead and twittered it out of a tree.” He saved his choicest
profanity for his comments on Judge Zebulon Kingsley. His hatred went
far back. I don’t know what started it. Perhaps it began in the natural
antipathy such a man as Uncle Deck would entertain for a cold, proud,
punctilious, professedly religious man like the judge. Uncle Deck would
have it that the judge was a hypocrite, a thief at heart, and my uncle’s
constant boast was that some day he would show the judge up; but all
that vaporing seemed to be silly spite, without foundation. Judge
Kingsley was our rich man; he had been judge of probate, and after
retiring from that office he was trusted with funds as a sort of private
banker; folks whose estates he had handled as judge just naturally
insisted on his keeping control; and he had been town treasurer of
Levant for years.
I hated to hear my uncle rave on about such a man; it was as irritating
as the barking of a cur.
I have said that my uncle was a horse-trader. Rather, he was a general
country dickerer, if you know the kind. He dealt in everything from a
sheet of fly-paper to a clap of thunder. He had car-loads of horses sent
to him from the West and peddled those to farmers, taking cash or bills
of sale or produce or second-hand furniture or anything else which he
could turn in a trade. He set me to peddling and collecting, and it
was a mean job. At first I used to believe everything which debtors or
sellers would tell me, and the result was that Uncle Deck bawled me out
most dreadfully; and thus being abused by both parties, I got so at last
that I believed nobody.
Therefore I was in a fair way to be made just the sort of man Uncle Deck
desired me to be.
And continually, after I was sufficiently hardened, he impressed on me
that I mustn’t be bothering him all the time, asking this and that about
running the business. I must act for myself and then report to him when
he called for an accounting. You shall see how his trying to make a man
of me in this fashion turned me into ways which neither he nor I could
have forecast. Don’t tell me that the activities of this life are very
much a matter of individual election, after all. To be sure, a man might
elect to live a hermit and might get away with the job in good shape;
but if a person throws himself into the ruck of the living, into the
running of humanity, he’ll be apt to find himself leaping from crag to
crag because he has been shooed or jarred.
I ran up against one Juvenal Bird, newly come to town from the rural
fastnesses of Vienna plantation--plantation meaning an unorganized
township. I had never heard of Mr. Bird, and when he came within range
of my vision I rather wondered because I had not; he seemed to be a
person of some importance. To be sure, his frock suit was rusty and his
plug-hat was fuzzy, but the garb was distinctive.
Mr. Bird was in search of furniture and I showed him our second-hand
stock; he ordered liberally and largely--especially largely. He took
the biggest stove, the largest bedsteads, the most expansive tables, and
bureaus of breadth. That plug-hat impressed me. When he told me to send
the goods out to his house on the Tumble-dick Road, and to call for
the pay at my convenience, I did not presume to ask for an advance
instalment, after our usual custom.
I promptly found out that this was one affair of business with which
I should have bothered my busy uncle, who knew all the cheats of the
section.
Mr. Bird was one of the most notable cheats. His raiment was garb
discarded by an up-country parson, who pitied Mr. Bird after the latter
had been evicted from timber-lands as a dangerous squatter, careless of
fire. Mr. Bird installed the furniture in a shack which he had hired,
then acted as his own carpenter and narrowed all the doors and the
windows. I went out after the money and learned that the law provides
for the replevin of furniture, but does not allow a house to be
mutilated in order to remove the furniture. Mr. Bird grinned at me
through a cracked window and thumbed his nose.
When I reported to my uncle he told me to go and get it. I refrain from
quoting the words in which he voiced that command.
“But the law says--” I ventured.
Again I suppress details. My uncle Deck’s opinion of the law would lack
authority.
However, being a Sidney, and resenting Mr. Bird’s betrayal of my
innocence, and needing a home and a job, I accepted my uncle’s opinion
of the law for the time being. I collected a gang of my boy intimates.
We went in the night and ripped the stuffing out of Mr. Bird’s nest.
There’s a queer kind of senseless and secret gratification in doing a
mob job. The human animal has a lot of primeval instincts which need
tickling once in a while. I reckon we boys gratified the wolf streak on
that occasion, running in a pack in the night-time.
We enjoyed it so much that we held a meeting a night or so later and
organized ourselves as the “Skokums.” I can’t remember how we happened
to light on that name. I was chosen as leader.
That first sortie was a great success--Mr. Bird was not in a position
to prosecute. We had had a wonderful night, had defied the law, and had
escaped punishment.
Judge Kingsley was the only man in town who proclaimed indignation
loudly and openly. He expressed himself before a crowd in the
post-office and declared that hoodlums had disgraced the town of Levant.
He looked straight at me and said he would give a reward of ten dollars
for evidence on which the ringleader could be convicted.
“And I would give one thousand dollars to pay for law to set him free,”
said my uncle.
“Some day the plug-uglies will be rooted out of this place--and good
riddance to ’em,” snarled the judge.
“The snout that goes rooting into that business will get twisted off’n
the face of the rooter,” retorted my uncle. He was never very choice in
his language. How those crimson patches on his face did glow and how his
eyes sparkled!
So, it will be seen, I was not getting on at all with my love-affair.
It is pretty presumptuous in me to refer to it as a love-affair. That
would intimate--calling it that--a bit of reciprocation on the part of
Celene Kingsley. But she never showed any visible interest in me, even
to looking my way when she met me on the street. I would have liked to
attract her attention, for at last I wore shoes and had clothes without
patches on them.
The Skokums flourished under cover of the night.
There was Oramandel Bangs. He was rather simple, and always carried his
mouth open, and nobody in Levant ever forgot that once a hornet flew in
and stung his tongue and it swelled and stuck out of his mouth for days
like the end of a bologna sausage.
Oramandel had a sneaking suspicion that witchcraft had never been wholly
stamped out by his forefathers in New England.
We decided to convince him that he was right--there’s nothing like
clinching a man’s faith in the good judgment of his ancestors.
We hoisted one of his calves into an apple-tree. He “unwitched” the
animal by cutting off its ears and tail before taking it down from the
tree.
We tied cords to his ox-chains and hid ourselves and slashed the chains
about the dooryard; he ran to the neighbors and reported that the
witches had changed his chains into big snakes. We did a lot more
things, and then imagination began to do the rest for him. He said
the witches wouldn’t allow him to do his farm-work, even though he had
sumac-wood splinters in all his tools and stuck shears around his chum
to make the butter come. Before we realized what mischief a lively
imagination can do to a man, they were obliged to carry the old chap
away to the asylum for the insane.
And again Judge Kingsley held forth in the post-office. I guess he did a
lot of talking at home, too.
At any rate, Celene Kingsley was mighty well posted, so I discovered.
I met her on Purgatory Hill one day--and never did that name seem to
apply so well! I had been out on my uncle’s business, and among
other plunder in the beach-wagon were two shotes in a crate, and they
certainly were taking on about leaving home and mother.
She was alone in her pony-chaise and the shaggy little brute she drove
was frightened--and I didn’t blame him. I pulled as far into the gutter
as I could and waited; I poked the butt of my whip into the crate and
prodded those shotes, but that only made them screech the louder.
So she came leading her pony past me. I didn’t expect that she would
stop and speak to me, but she did. I nearly fell off my seat. And she
called me “Mr. Sidney.” It was the first time anybody had ever given me
a handle to my name. I had pulled my hat off when I saw her coming; when
she spoke to me I put it back on again and then took it off so that I
could show her that I knew a little something about manners. However, I
wasn’t at all sure just what I was doing; my head was in a whirl, and I
was damning those pigs in my heart.
“I thank you, Mr. Sidney,” she said. “Pedro acts like a fool sometimes.”
Two hours afterward, I guess it was, I thought of just the right reply
to that remark; as it was, I didn’t say anything to her. I couldn’t.
She started on and then stopped and looked at me.
Perhaps she guessed something--I don’t know. Girls can act as if they
never notice anything and still they have an eye out all the time; and
what they don’t see they know by instinct. At any rate, there was a lot
of kindness in her face, and perhaps there was pity in her thoughts.
“I’m afraid I am very bold, Mr. Sidney. I hope you’ll forgive me for
speaking to you.”
She hesitated. Right there was another beautiful chance for me to say
the good thing which came to me that night after I was in bed. All I
could do at the time was duck my head.
“I’d hate to have any of the boys who went to school with me get
into trouble on account of their thoughtlessness. I’m sure it’s only
thoughtlessness and skylarking. But older folks, you know, don’t
understand and cannot sympathize with young folks. Now you won’t tell
anybody that I told you something, will you?”
Just think of it! A secret between Celene Kingsley and myself!