|A “LARGE” dinner at Antoine's that night (Webster had heard of Antoine's
dinners, both large and small and was resolved not to leave New Orleans
until he had visited the famous restaurant) and a stroll through the
picturesque old French quarter and along the levee next day, helped to
render his enforced stay in New Orleans delightful, interesting, and
instructive. Webster was one of those distinctful individual types to
whom a chamber of horrors would be productive of more enjoyment than the
usual round of “points of interest.” Experience had demonstrated to
him that such points usually are uninteresting and wearing on the
imagination, for the reason that the tourist trappers and proprietors of
automobile 'buses, who map out the tours have no imagination themselves.
Consequently, Webster preferred to prowl around quietly on little tours
of discovery, personally conducted by himself. The search for obscure
restaurants of unquestioned merit was with him almost a mania, and since
in quaint New Orleans the food and drink specialist finds his highest
heaven, no cloud marked the serenity of his delightful peregrinations.
The next day would be Sunday, and Webster planned an early morning
visit to the old French market, around which still lingers much of the
picturesque charm and colourful romance of a day that is done--that
echo of yesterday, as it were, which has left upon New Orleans an
individuality as distinct as that which the olden, golden, godless days
have left upon San Francisco.
He rose before six o'clock, therefore; found a taxi, with the driver
sound asleep inside, at the curb in front of the hotel; gave the latter
his instructions, and climbed in.
It being Sunday morning New Orleans slept late. Save for the few early
morning worshippers hurrying to mass--mostly servants in a hurry to
return to their kitchens and cook breakfast--the streets were deserted.
The languorous air of dawn was redolent of the perfume of orange, rose,
and sweet olive; from the four comers of the old town the mellow chimes
of the Catholic church bells pealed their sweet, insistent call to the
faithful; an atmosphere of subtle peace and sanctity pervaded the silent
streets and awoke in John Stuart Webster's heart a vague nostalgia.
Perhaps it was because so much of his life had been spent in lonely
mountain or desert camps, or perhaps it was because this taxi ride
through the pleasant southern dawn was so typical of the swift passing
of the youth which had gone from him before he had had an opportunity to
taste, even moderately, of its joys and allurements. He sighed--a little
regretful sigh.
“That's you, Johnny Webster,” he told himself, “breezing along through
life like a tin-canned dog; f passing the sweet and the beautiful and
battling with the harsh and unlovely; here to-day and gone to-morrow, a
poor harried devil with your trunk on your back, a slave to the call
of gold; restless, in a great hurry to get there and an equal hurry to
leave for the new diggings, and all the time Life passes you by and you
don't grab so much as a tail feather! On such a morn as this Eve entered
the Garden of Eden, while I, consummate idiot, shut myself up in a taxi
to watch a bill of expense run up on the clock, while sniffing myrrh and
incense through this confounded window. I'll get out and walk!”
He was opposite Jackson Square and the cloying sweetness of palmetto,
palm, and fig burdened the air. Above the rumble of the taxi he could
hear the distant babel of voices in the French market across the square,
so he halted the taxicab, alighted, and handed the driver a bill.
“I want to explore this square,” he said. He had recognized it by the
heroic statue of General Jackson peeping through the trees. “I'll walk
through the square Up the market, and you may proceed to the market and
meet me there. Later we will return to the hotel.”
The chauffeur nodded, and Webster, every fibre of his alert, healthy
body once more tingling with the sheer joy of living, entered the
square, found a path that wound its way through the shrubbery, and came
out at length in the main pathway, close to the Jackson memorial statue.
A Creole girl--starry-eyed, beautiful, rich with the glorious colouring
of her race--passed him bound for the cathedral across the square, as
Webster thought, for she carried a large prayer book on her arm. To
Webster she seemed to fit perfectly into her surroundings, to lend to
them the last, final touch of beauty, the apotheosis of peace, and again
the nostalgic fever submerged the quiet joy with which he had approached
his journey through the square. His glance followed the girl down the
walk.
Presently she halted. A young man rose from a bench where evidently he
had been waiting for her, and bowed low, his hat clasped to his breast,
as only a Frenchman or a Spanish grandee can bow. Webster saw the Creole
girl turn to him with a little gesture of pleasure. She extended her
hand and the young man kissed it with old-fashioned courtesy.
John Stuart Webster knew now what was missing in his scheme of things,
as with reverent and wistful eyes he watched their meeting.
“Forty years old,” he thought, “and I haven't spoken to a dozen women
that caused me a second thought, or who weren't postmistresses or
biscuit shooters! Forty years old and I've never been in love! Spring
time down that little path and Indian summer in my old fool heart. Why,
I ought to be arrested for failure to live!”
The lovers were walking slowly, arm in arm, back along the path by which
the girl had come, so with a courtesy and gentleness that were innate in
him, Webster stepped out of sight behind the statue of Old Hickory; for
he did not desire, by his mere presence, to intrude a discordant note in
the perfect harmony of those two human hearts. He knew they desired that
sylvan path to themselves; that evidently they had sought their early
morning tryst in the knowledge that the square was likely to be deserted
at this hour. Therefore, to provoke selfconsciousness in them now
savoured to John Stuart Webster of a high crime and misdemeanour, for
which reason he was careful to keep General Jackson between himself and
the lovers until they had gone by.
The young man was speaking as they passed; his voice was rich, pleasant,
vibrant with the earnestness of what he had to say: with a pretty little
silver-mounted walking stick he slashed at spears of grass alongside the
path; the girl was crying a little. Neither of them had seen him, so he
entered a path that led from them at right angles.
He had proceeded but a few feet along this trail when, through a break
in the shrubbery ahead of him, he saw two men. They were crossing
Webster's path and following a course paralleling that of the lovers in
the broad main walk. Brief as was his glimpse of them, however, Webster
instantly recognized the two Central Americans he had seen in the
steamship ticket office two days previous.
They were not walking as walk two men abroad at this hour for a
constitutional. Neither did they walk as walk men churchward bound. A
slight, skulking air marked their progress, and caused Webster to wonder
idly what they were stalking.
He turned into the path down which the two men had passed, not with the
slightest idea of shadowing them, but because his destination lay in
that direction. The Central Americans were approximately fifty yards
in advance of him as he turned in their wake, and at sight of them his
suspicion that they were stalking something was quickened into belief.
Both men had forsaken the gravelled path and were walking on the soft
velvet of blue grass lawn that fringed it!
“Perhaps I'd better deaden my hoof beats also,” John Stuart Webster
soliloquized, and followed suit immediately.
He had scarcely done so when the men ahead of him paused abruptly.
Webster did likewise, and responding--subconsciously, perhaps, to the
remembrance of the menace in the glance of the man with the puckered
eye--he stepped out of sight behind a broad oak tree. Through the
trees and shrubbery he could still see the lovers, who had halted and
evidently were about to part.
Webster saw the young man glance warily about; then, apparently
satisfied there was none to spy upon them, he drew the girl gently
toward him. She clung to him for nearly a minute, sobbing; then he
raised her face tenderly, kissed her, pressed her from him, and walked
swiftly away without looking back.
It was a sweet and rather touching little tableau; to John Stuart
Webster, imaginative and possessed of a romantic streak in his nature,
it was more than a tableau. It was a moving picture!
“I suppose her old man objects to the young fellow,” he muttered to
himself sympathetically, “and he can't come near the house. They've met
here for the fond farewell, and now the young fellow's going out West
to make his fortune, so he can come back and claim the girl. Huh! If he
wants her, why the devil doesn't he take her? I'd tell her old man I'd
picked on him for my father-in-law, and then if he didn't like me I'd
let the old fellow rave; and see how much good it would do him. But the
French are different; they always let the old folks step in and rock the
boat----- Hello! By Judas priest! Now I know what those two paraqueets
are up to. One of them is the father of that girl. They've been spying
on the lovers, and now they're going to corner the young fellow and
shingle him for his nerve.”
The girl had stood for a moment, gazing after her companion, before she
turned with her handkerchief to her eyes, and continued on her way to
the cathedral. Webster had observed that the two men ahead of him paid
no attention to her, but pressed eagerly forward after the man.
Webster could look across about thirty yards of low shrubbery at the
girl as she passed. He heard her sobbing as she stumbled blindly by, and
he was distressed about her, for all the world loves a lover and John
Stuart Webster was no exception to this universal rule.
“By George, this is pretty tough,” he reflected. “That young fellow
treated that girl with as much gentleness and courtesy as any gentleman
should, and I'm for him and against this idea of corporal punishment.
Don't you worry, Tillie, my dear. I'm going to horn into this game
myself if it goes too far.”
The two dusky skulkers ahead of him, having come to another crosspath,
turned into it and came out on the main path in the rear of the young
man. Webster noticed that they were walking twice as fast as when he had
first observed them, and more than ever convinced that presently there
might be work for a strong man and true, he hastened after them.
As he came out into the main walk again, he noticed that the pair were
still walking on the grass. He padded gently along behind them.
The four were now rapidly approaching the old French market, and the
steadily rising babel of voices speaking in French, Italian, Spanish,
Creole patois and Choctaw, was sufficient to have drowned the slight
noise of the pursuit, even had the young man's mind not been upon other
things, and the interest of the two Central Americans centred upon their
quarry, to the exclusion, of any thought of possible interruption.
Webster felt instinctively that the two men would rush and make a
concerted attack from the rear. He smiled.
“I'll just fool you two _hombres_ a whole lot,” he thought, and
stooping, picked up a small stone. On the instant the two men, having
approached within thirty feet of their quarry, made a rush for him.
Their charge was swift, but swift though it was, the little stone which
John Stuart Webster hurled was swifter. It struck the young man fairly
between the shoulderblades with a force sufficient to bring him out of
his sentimental reverie with a jerk, as it were. He whirled, saw the
danger that threatened him, and--sprang to meet it.
“Bravo!” yelled Webster, and ran to his aid, for he had seen now that it
was to be knife work. Tragedy instead of melodrama.
The man with the puckered eye closed in with such eagerness it was
apparent to Webster that here was work to his liking. The young man
raised his light cane, but Pucker-eye did not hesitate. He merely threw
up his left forearm to meet the expected blow aimed at his head, lunged
forward and slashed viciously at the young man's abdomen. The latter
drew back a step, doubled like a jack-knife, and brought his cane down
viciously across the knuckles of his assailant's right hand.
“So it is thou, son of a pig,” he called pleasantly in Spanish. “I
fooled you that time, didn't I?” he added in English. “Thought I would
aim for your head, didn't you?”
The blow temporarily paralyzed the assassin's hand; he dropped the
knife, and as he stooped to recover it with his left hand, the young
man, before retreating from Pop-eye, kicked Pucker-eye in the face and
quite upset him.
“Stop it!” shouted Webster.
Pop-eye turned his head at the outcry. The man he was attacking fell
into the position of a swordsman en garde, and thrust viciously with
the ferule at the face of the pop-eyed man, who, disregarding Webster's
approach, seized the cane in his left hand and with a quick, powerful
tug actually drew his victim toward him a foot before the latter let go
the stick.
Before he could give ground again Pop-eye was upon him. He grasped the
young man by the latter's left arm and held him, while he drew back for
the awful disembowelling stroke; as his long arm sped forward the hook
of John Stuart Webster's heavy cane descended upon that flexed arm in
the brook of the elbow, snagging it cleverly.
The knife never reached its destination!
“You would, would you?” said Webster reproachfully, and jerked the
fellow violently around. The man he had rescued promptly struck Pop-eye
a terrible blow in the face with his left hand and broke loose from the
grip that had so nearly been his undoing; whereupon Webster tapped the
assassin a meditative tap or two on the top of his sinful head for good
measure and to awaken in him some sense of the impropriety and futility
of resistance, after which Webster turned to discuss a similar question
of ethics with Pucker-eye.
The scar-cheeked man was on his knees, groping groggily for his knife,
for he had received a severe kick under the chin, and for the nonce was
far from dangerous. Stooping, Webster picked up the knife; then with
knife and cane grasped in his left hand he seized Pucker-eye by the nape
with his right and jerked him to his feet. The assassin stood glowering
at him in a perfect frenzy of brutish, inarticulate fury.
“Take the knife away from the other fellow before he gets active again,”
Webster called over his shoulder. “I'll manage this rascal. We'll march
them over to the market and turn them over to the police.” He spoke in
Spanish.
“Thanks, ever so much, for my life,” the young man answered lightly, and
in English, “but where I come from it is not the fashion to settle
these arguments in a court of law. To call an officer is considered
unclublike; to shoot a prisoner in this country is considered murder,
and consequently I have but one alternative and I advise you, my good
friend, to have a little of the same. I'm going to run like the devil.”
And he did. He was in full flight before Webster could glance around,
and in an instant he was lost to sight among the trees.
“That advice sounds eminently fair and reasonable,” Webster yelled after
him, and was about to follow when he observed that the young man had
abandoned his pretty little silver-chased walking stick.
“That's too nice a little stick to leave to these brigands,” he thought,
and forthwith possessed himself of it and the pop-eyed man's knife,
after which he tarried not upon the order of his going but went,
departing at top speed.
The young man he had saved from being butchered was right. An entangling
alliance with the police was, decidedly, not to John Stuart Webster's
liking, for should, he, unfortunately, form such an alliance, he would
be haled into court as a witness and perhaps miss the steamer to San
Buenaventura.
“Drat it,” he soliloquized, as he emerged from the square and observed
his taxi parked at the entrance to the market, “I came through that
square so fast I haven't the slightest idea what the last half of it
looks like. That's what I get for mixing in a little Donnybrook that's
none of my business.”
He had planned to spend an hour in the market, drink a cup of _café
noir_, smoke a cigarette, and return to his hotel in time for a
leisurely breakfast, but his recent bout with grim reality had blunted
the edge of romance. He ordered his driver to take him back to the
hotel, sprang inside and congratulated himself on his lucky escape.