FOLLOWING UP THE PRINCE STREET MYSTERY--TOM LESLIE'S PECULIAR IDEAS--A
CALL UPON SUPERINTENDENT KENNEDY--THE DEPARTURE OF A REGIMENT--JOSEY
HARRIS IN A STREET-SQUALL--A RENCONTRE.
It was not to be supposed that Tom Leslie and Walter Lane Harding, after
the expenditure of ten dollars, a whole night's rest and a considerable
amount of bodily energy, in the investigation of what they called the
'Prince Street mystery,' would permit it to remain uninvestigated
afterwards, so far as a little more money and a good deal more of
inquisitiveness could go in unravelling it. Even before they parted,
late on the night of the adventure, they had discussed half a dozen
plans for gaining admission to the house on Prince Street or that on
East 5--th, by fair means or foul. Harding, who was something of a
stickler for propriety in ordinary cases, in spite of the fact that he
had on that one occasion been inveigled into following a carriage and
playing spy under a front stoop--Harding expressed himself satisfied
that there being now in their minds a sufficient certainty of the
existence of a disloyal organization in the city to make affidavits to
that effect a duty--the proper course would be to lay the matter at once
before the Superintendent of Police and request that a watch might be
set upon the houses or some proceedings taken to "work up" the case for
after proceedings. The young merchant no doubt had more confidence in
this plan than he might otherwise have done, from the fact that a few
months previous a robbery had been committed at his place of business,
and that upon his laying the matter at once before the police
authorities, such steps had been taken as within two weeks secured the
detection of the leading culprit and the recovery of most of the missing
property. Here was a detective "bridge" that had once "carried him safe
over" in a commercial point of view: why would not the same bridge offer
both of them a safe footing when attempting to unravel a mystery of
disloyalty?
Tom Leslie, as was natural to one of his temperament, took a different
view of the whole matter. Mysteries "bothered" the straight-forward
Harding; but to Tom they formed one of the necessities of existence--a
little less indispensable than his breakfast, but much more important
than his cigar. Had he been precisely the sort of man for employing
police agency where personal investigation was possible, he would never
have climbed the tree in Prince Street or dragged Harding under the
stoop of the brown-stone house. He suggested that Harding would not have
much difficulty in making himself up for a postman, and getting inside
the up-town house in that capacity, trusting to his own skill to
_remain_ within until he had made the necessary investigations; while as
for himself--well, he had no particular objections to entering
temporarily upon the occupation of a tinker or a gatherer of old rags
and bottles, with a disguise from his friend Williams, the costumer, and
working the basement of the house on Prince Street, and the domestics
therein employed, in one of those capacities. He had no doubt whatever
that if he could only succeed in concealing himself in the sub-cellar or
the coal-vault, until the house should be closed for the night, he could
then, with the aid of a few matches and a pair of list slippers carried
in the pocket, make a "rummage" of the premises which must prove
eminently satisfactory. He did not seem to labor under any fear that the
little accident of being discovered while lying perdu or while making
his explorations, and arrested and sent to Blackwell's Island as an
ordinary sneak-thief, might possibly stand in the way. In fact, if all
stories of his earlier life were to be credited, he had taken some
pains, in more than one instance, to be arrested by the Police under
what appeared to be suspicious circumstances, spend a night in the
station-house, and astound the Police Justices, who personally knew him
somewhat too well for their comfort, by his appearance as a very
woe-begone culprit in the morning. "_De gustibus non est_," etc.--there
is really no disputing about tastes, since St. Simeon Stylites roosted
upon the top of a very inconvenient pillar, and the first ostrich
inaugurated the dietary proclivities of the race by gobbling down a
small cart-load of cord-wood with a garnish of a peck of paving-stones!
A night in a station-house may not be so very unpleasant a thing, when
taken from choice and with a certainty of the door being laughingly
opened in the morning: Whiskey Tom or Scratching Sall, who visit the
institution perforce, for small burglaries or big vagrancies, with a
prospect of "six months" or "two years" at the end, may form a very
different opinion of it!
Tom Leslie, as has been remarked, did not seem to have any fears of such
a result as an arrest, to his proposed spy-movements; but it cannot be
concealed that for a moment Walter Harding, who had before thought that
he knew him well, looked at him out of the corners of his eyes, with
some impression that he must unwittingly have been keeping company with
a genteel house-breaker. At all events, Harding did not fall in with the
spy-proposition, so far as his own action was concerned, alleging that
there might be such a thing as a business man having other occupations
than traversing the city in disguise as a volunteer detective; and so
that project, if any there had really been in the mind of Leslie, was
abandoned.
A resort to the police remained; for neither of the friends, after what
they had seen and heard, could think of the whole affair being allowed
to go by default. Superintendent Kennedy must be visited, after all; and
though Harding's business for the next day would interfere, it was more
than half agreed upon before they separated, that they would call
together upon that official on the next day but one and lay the whole
matter before him.
The agreement, though only half made, was better kept than many that are
made more conclusively; for at eleven o'clock on the day named Leslie
made his appearance at the place of business of Harding, and dragged him
away from a series of mercantile calculations over the desk, in which he
had more than half forgotten the existence of his friend as well as the
whole adventure of the chase and the mystery. He came up to the work
pretty readily, however--the presence of the rattling, go-ahead Leslie
always having the effect of carrying him a little off his feet; and half
an hour afterwards the two friends had entered that melancholy-looking
five-story brick building on the corner of Broome and Elm, then and till
lately known as the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police,--and were
being shown by a policeman in attendance, with the blue of his suit
undimmed by exposure to the weather and the brass of his buttons
radiantly untarnished, into the presence of John A. Kennedy,
Superintendent of the Metropolitan Police District and for the time
Provost Marshal of the City of New York. They entered from the hall of
the building by a side door to the left, in the rear of what had been
the centre of the house when occupied as a private residence before New
York moved up "above Bleecker,"--and advancing towards the front under
the guidance of the respectful official, passed the table at which sat
the half-bald, stern-faced, and iron-gray Deputy Superintendent
Carpenter, through the door that had once separated the two parlors, and
stood in the presence of another iron-gray man, seated writing at a
table covered with books and papers, his back to the front of the
building, and the smooth-shaven and round-faced Inspector Leonard busily
examining a roll of papers behind him in the corner.
Few men in this whole country have occupied a more marked position in
the public mind, during all this struggle, than Superintendent Kennedy,
in his legitimate position at the head of the Police and in what we must
believe to have been his illegitimate one as Provost Marshal. He made
himself peculiarly conspicuous, and won the enmity of all the secession
wing of the Northern democracy, by stopping the shipment of arms to the
rebellious States, and blocking the apparent game of Mayor Wood and his
aiders and abettors to curry favor with the extreme South by truckling
to every one of its arrogant dictations. The enmity then created has
never died, and can never die until those who hold it happen to die
themselves. At the same time, those who were and are unconditionally
loyal to the Union, have never judged the action of Superintendent
Kennedy very harshly--aware that _something_ needed to be done to
prevent the existing evil, and that only a man of his indomitable
"pluck" could be found to apply the remedy at such a period.
A somewhat broader and more general charge has since been preferred
against him--that in the exercise of the duties of Provost Marshal,
which he assumed without propriety, he showed himself a willing tool of
governmental despotism and displayed indefensible harshness and
arrogance. There is something of truth in this charge, beyond a
question,--as the impossibility of "touching pitch" without being
"defiled," applies to intercourse with wrong-doers high in power as well
as to those in lower station. The station-houses of the New York police
were certainly made receptacles for accused parties whose crimes were
very different from those contemplated in their erection,--just as the
forts in the harbors of New York and Boston have been made "Bastilles"
for state-prisoners whose arrests were signally reckless and improper.
Many of the prisoners, in both cases, have deserved more than all the
punishment received; but the blind uncertainty as to their guilt, and
the impossibility of discovering even the nature of the charges against
them, have made those imprisonments equally indefensible and dangerous,
and brought them at last to their end.
There is a woman at the bottom of almost every revolution--political as
well as social. Tradition tells us, though history is silent on the
subject, that the sad fate of the daughter of a French citizen, flung
into the Bastille for alleged complicity in a conspiracy during the
early days of Louis XVI., and dying there--rankled in the minds of the
Parisians much more than the wrongs done to thousands of brave and noble
men during the centuries previous, and furnished the burden of the
terrible cry with which the men of 1789 thundered at the walls of that
old fortress of feudal oppression, and with which they butchered not
only De Launay, the Governor of the Bastille, but Flesselles, the
_Provost Marshal_. The case of a woman--Mrs. Brinsmaid--was the last
drop in the cup of endurance, here, and the event which we believe was
finally and forever to close the melancholy doors of Lafayette and
Warren, against arrest without charge and imprisonment without
trial--spite of indemnity bills passed and unlimited powers conferred
upon the President by a mad Congress.
Through all this, meanwhile, John A. Kennedy was unquestionably more
sinned against than sinning--made the tool of worse and more
unscrupulous men, who used his hard conscientiousness and his narrow
bigotry of mind, fostered by too long and too close connection with the
lodges of secret societies--to carry out their own designs of despotism,
without the nobility to stand between him and his possible sacrifice for
obeying the very orders they had given. He is not the first man who has
been misused and placed in a false position, nor the last, as a later
victim of blind confidence and obedience, Burnside,[8] is very likely to
bear sad witness.
[Footnote 8: January 25th, 1863.]
But all this while, for the purposes of this narrative, Tom Leslie and
his friend Harding have been standing unnoticed in the presence of the
Superintendent. Not very long in reality--scarcely longer than enabled
them to note the hair and closely-cut full beard of iron gray, the keen
but troubled eyes, that had scarcely yet ceased to moisten at the memory
of the loss of a dearly loved brother,[9] the face care-worn and
anxious, and the shoulders bent over a little as he sat,--scarcely
longer time than this was given them, when the Superintendent laid down
his pen and said, sharply and decisively:
"Well, gentlemen?"
[Footnote 9: Col. William D. Kennedy, of the Tammany Regiment.]
There was nothing very cordial in the tone, and no indication that the
Superintendent considered it peculiarly his place to listen to all the
persons who came to him upon business; but perhaps this comparative
_brusquerie_ is necessary, in the carrying on of any important
department, to discourage bores and send idle people the sooner about
their business. It does not add to popularity, however, and may add
materially to the opposite.
Under such circumstances, it did not need a very long period of time for
Tom Leslie, with the occasional assistance of Harding, whose memory was
much more accurate if not more retentive--to convey to the
Superintendent the main facts of their midnight adventure, with the
impression that adventure had made, of some disloyal movements going on
in the City, and probably with extended ramifications elsewhere. Except
to say that one of the women seen on that evening had before fallen
under his notice in Europe. Leslie did not allude to the episode of the
"red woman," nor did he enter into the particulars of his previous
meetings with Dexter Ralston, though he asserted his knowledge of him as
a Virginian of peculiar influence and a very ambiguous position. The
Superintendent showed few signs of interest in the narration, though his
sharp eye occasionally glanced at the face of the principal narrator,
and though he two or three times made motions with the pencil lying
before him, which might have been merely listless occupation of his
fingers and might have been something very different.
"Well, gentlemen," said the Superintendent, when they had concluded. "It
is certainly a strange story you have been telling, and of course I do
not question the entire veracity of your narration of what you saw or
_thought_ you saw. But there is nothing proved, so far, that could
justify any arrest, even if we could find the persons to arrest. I do
not see that there is anything _I_ could do in the matter."
"I told you so!" said Leslie in a low voice to his friend. He had
opposed coming to the Superintendent at all, be it remembered.
"Nothing?--not even to set a watch upon the two houses we have named?"
asked Harding, a good deal surprised and not a little out of temper.
"Humph!" answered the Superintendent. "This is not France under the
Empire, and I am not Fouche."
"The latter part of that sentence may probably be true: I have my doubts
about the other!" thought Tom Leslie, though he waited a more prudent
occasion for communicating the thought to Harding.
"And so, Mr. Superintendent, you consider all this of no consequence?"
said Harding, going back to first principles, and not by any means
improving in the matter of temper.
"I did not say anything of the kind!" answered the Superintendent, his
face sterner but his voice even as before. "I said there was nothing
upon which I could act, and the police force of the district is scarcely
sufficient to set a watch around all the houses that may happen to have
traitors in them. I would advise you to say nothing of this affair to
any other persons, if you have not yet done so; and if you see or hear
of anything more that _will_ seem to justify an arrest, communicate with
this office again."
He did not say "good morning!" as a sign of dismissal, but his manner
indicated as much, and the two friends left him with merely an
additional nod. Harding was in decided dudgeon as the policeman of the
bright blue cloth and the unimpeachable buttons accompanied them to the
door, and muttered something very like "I'm d--d if I _do_ communicate
with that office again, in a hurry!" Leslie, who had seen more of police
operations, both abroad and at home, than his friend, and who had
expected little or nothing else from the first,--kept his good humor
admirably; and he bored Harding, before they had walked from the office
to Broadway, with the information that that was about all the thanks any
man ever received for attempting to do a service to government or
individuals, and a relation of how at Naples a couple of years before,
he had attempted to save the life of an Englishman threatened with
assassination, and been arrested and very nearly imprisoned for an
attempt to stab the man himself, with his penknife or tooth-pick--he
never knew precisely which!
The two friends were scarcely in the street, when the Superintendent
called sharply:
"Mr. Carpenter!"
The Deputy was in the room in a moment. The Superintendent was writing a
few words on a piece of paper.
"You heard the story those men were telling?"
"A part of it--perhaps all," answered the Deputy.
"There may be something in it--I think there _is_," continued the
Superintendent. "At all events, put those two houses"--handing him the
slip of paper--"under close watch, and discover who enters and who
leaves them, and at what hours. Put B---- and another good man in charge
of the Prince Street house, and L---- and another good man at the one in
East 5-- Street. That is all."
The Deputy merely bowed and returned to his own table, beckoning to one
of the policemen near the door and giving the necessary orders to carry
out the directions of his superior. So that almost by the time the two
friends reached Broadway, and certainly some time before Leslie
concluded his illustrative narration of police management in Naples, the
arrangement for which they had especially come, and which had been
apparently denied, was already in active operation. The reasons which
had induced the Superintendent to underrate to Harding and Leslie the
importance of the intelligence he had just received, or which had led to
so sudden a change of mind, will probably remain a mystery even after
the profounder mysteries of governmental management during the war are
brought into broad daylight. There is no Sphynx like your "man in
authority," whether his reasons for silence be that he does not wish
others to know his intentions, or that he _does not know them himself_.
It was perhaps one o'clock when the two friends reached Broadway and
turned downward to return to their different places of business--Harding
of course to his store near the Hospital, and Leslie to his little desk
in the office of the _Daily Thundergust_, or anywhere else in the more
frequented parts of the town, where he might chance to pick up material
for an item or an article. Broadway at that point and at that moment
presented an appearance that used to be extraordinary, but that of late
months has been almost as common as its ordinary crowded condition. One
of the Eastern regiments, that had just landed at the New Haven Railroad
Depot, was on its way down to the Park Barracks, and the police had been
clearing the street of omnibuses and carriages to make room for them.
The sidewalks on both sides were pretty well filled with
spectators--idlers who never find anything better to do than gazing at
street spectacles, and people of both sexes, with more or less of
business on hand, who cannot avoid pausing for a moment when the police
sweep by to clear the street and the tap of the bass-drum is
heard,--just to see what the excitement is all about. In this instance a
file of policemen extending almost from curb to curb were marching
abreast to keep the way clear in front of the regiment; close behind
them sounded the crashing of brass, the screaming of clarionet-reeds and
the tap of drums; and a little farther behind, over the heads of the
advancing column, a couple of flags caught the sun and waved softly in
the light summer air--one the glorious old banner, with its three colors
that blend truth, purity and devotion till death,--and the other a
fringed and tasselled embroidery of dark blue silk, bearing the peculiar
arms of the one State that was sending forth more of its bravest sons to
do battle for all.
"A Massachusetts regiment," said Harding. "One was to come down by the
New Haven Road, this morning."
"Yes," said Leslie. "You can afford half an hour more, while I can
afford all day if I wish. Let us wait until the show passes." They
paused accordingly and took shelter beside a lamp-post against the
downward pressure of the sidewalk crowd that was coming.
Nearer came the soldiers, their long line of sloped bayonets glancing
off the sunbeams with a peculiarly threatening aspect, and their
equipments showing the perfection which has been accorded by the Old Bay
State to all her troops, in contradistinction to the men of some of the
other States, that have been allowed to go down to the conflict looking
more like a mob of scarecrows than a body of trained soldiers. The
Colonel, who rode first, lolled easily on his saddle, like one who had
not mounted a horse for the first time when he first put on his
sword-belts; the Captains of the various companies stepped out boldly
and clearly in front of their men, turning occasionally to see that the
line was properly kept; and the rank and file tramped on, their step
almost steady enough for the march of veteran troops, and the dull
thunder of the fall of each thousand of feet on the solid pavement,
making the most impressive sound in the world except that supplied by
the multitudinous clink of the iron hoofs of a cavalry squadron passing
over the same stony road.
It was an impressive spectacle, like all of the same kind that have
preceded and followed it--a glorious spectacle, when the faces of most
of the men were observed, and nothing of the despairing dullness of the
conscript's eye seen there, but the vigorous pride and determination of
men who were going forth at the call of their country to battle for that
country to the death. And yet a sad spectacle, as all the others have
been, when waste of life and mismanagement of power were taken into the
account, and when the thinned ranks that should return, of the full
ranks that went so proudly away, came to be remembered. Something of
this latter feeling, and the peculiarities of the time, made the waving
of handkerchiefs and the clapping of hands less frequent and cordial
than the fine-looking fellows and their excellent appointments really
deserved.
"The d--l take the politics and policy of Massachusetts!" broke out Tom
Leslie, when the array had half passed. "I do not like her, and never
did. But she _does_ send out troops as the old Trojan horse poured out
heroes; she _does_ know how to equip and take care of them, as _we_ do
not; and they _fight_--oh, Harding, don't they?"
"Not any better than most of our New York troops, I fancy!" replied
Harding, an incarnate New Yorker, to the last observation.
"Not better, perhaps, but more steadily--not so dashingly, but more
inevitably," said Leslie, going into one of his fits of abstract
philosophy, where he must perforce be followed, like a maniac by his
keeper. "Our New York boys go into the fight more as a spree--the New
Englanders more as a duty. Our boys enjoy it--they endure it; and some
one else than myself must decide which is the higher order of courage.
Almost all the New Englanders are comparatively fanatics, while we have
very few indeed, unless it may be fanaticism to worship the old
flag--God bless it! If it could have been possible for England to be
plunged into a general war with some other country, immediately after
the Restoration, something like this same distinction would have been
seen. Sir Gervase Langford would have charged upon the foe, his feathers
flying and his lady's colors woven into a love-knot above his cuirass,
singing a roundelay of decidedly loose tendencies, precisely as he had
once charged beside Prince Rupert on the bloody day of Long Marston; and
Master John Grimston would have snuffled a psalm through his nose and
made a thanksgiving prayer over a cut throat, swinging his long
two-handed sword meanwhile, as he had done when mowing down the
'malignants' at Naseby, under the very eye of Oliver himself. That would
have been an odd mixture for the same army; but we have an odder, when
the neat-whiskered clerk from behind the dry-goods counter in this
city--the rough fisherman from Cape Cod--the lumberman from the forests
of Maine--and the long, gangling squirrel-hunters from the wilds of
Wisconsin,--all meet together to fight for the same cause."
"True," said Harding--"true. And I suppose that fanaticism _does_ fight
well. It has no fear of death, and very little of consequences. How much
difference was there, I wonder, between Ali at the head of his Moslem
horde, fresh from the teachings of Mohammed himself, and fully impressed
with the belief that if he died he should go at once to the company of
the Houris in Paradise,--and Cromwell--or Old John Brown--in a
corresponding madness of supposed Christianity? Not much, eh?"
"Not much--none at all!" replied Leslie. "But see how long this one
regiment has been in filing past. Only one regiment--not much more than
a thousand men, and yet the street seems full of the glisten of their
bayonets for half-a-mile. We have grown used to handling the phrases
'thirty thousand,' 'fifty thousand,' 'one hundred thousand,' or even 'a
quarter of a million' of men, just as glibly as we speak of one, two or
ten millions of money; and yet we realize very little of the force of
those numbers. Fifty thousand men are considered to be no army--nothing
more than a skirmishing party, now-a-days; and yet to form it, forty or
fifty such bodies of men as that which has just passed us must be
included. Is it any wonder--after studying a thousand men in this
manner--that while we have many generals capable of managing five or ten
thousand, very few can command fifty thousand without making a mess of
it, and a hundred thousand succeeds in crazing almost every one of our
commanders?"
"Wonder? No, I should think not," said Harding, laughing. "I have puzzle
enough, sometimes, with even that number of _figures_, and I should make
a bad muddle of handling that quantity of men. But, by the way, did you
ever read that singular novel, 'Border War,' by a South-western writer,
Jones, published several years ago?"
"I have skimmed it--never read it," said Leslie. "Remarkable book, I
should say, to be read over now-a-days, when the event then handled as
romance has become reality!"
"The numbers of his opposing forces, as compared with the actual armies
of the present day, are the great point of interest," said Harding. "He
makes terrible blunders in guessing at the great battle-ground of the
war, as he lays the principal battles in Upper Maryland, Pennsylvania
and New Jersey, and does not seem to contemplate the possibility of
there being any fighting on _Southern_ soil. But his numbers--I think he
made each of the opposing forces number some one hundred and fifty or
two hundred thousand men; and a sharp reviewer broke out into a loud
guffaw over the impossibility that any such number of men could ever be
arrayed against each other, on the soil of the United States, by any
possible convulsion. Only a few years have passed, and we have three or
four times his numbers in the fight on either side, with half a million
more men to be called for."
"We are travelling fast--that is all," replied Leslie.
"You couldn't exactly inform me _where_, could you?" asked Harding.
"But,--phew!--w!--w!" looking at his watch, "the soldiers are gone and
time is up; I must look after my deposits before three."
"And what are we to do about our mystery?" asked Leslie, as the other
was about to leave him. "Give that up altogether?--or will you agree to
take a hand in at personal investigation?"
"Yes--no--I really do not know what to say, Tom!" was the reply of
Harding. "At all events, I have spent all the time I can spare to-day,
looking after that and the soldiers. 'Business first and pleasure
afterwards,' you know."
"Yes," said Leslie, "as the excellent Duke of Gloster remarked, when he
first killed the old King and then murdered the young Princes."
"Pshaw!" replied Harding, "I think I may have heard that before."
"Very possibly," said Leslie, too much used to slight rebuffs to pay
them any great attention.
"Well, I shall walk down faster than you--bye-bye, old fellow. Look in
at my place to-morrow and let us see whether we can arrange to do
anything more in opposition to His High Mightiness Superintendent and
Provost Marshal Kennedy," said Harding, moving away.
"Look! look! over there!" said Leslie, just as his friend was leaving
him. "There is a piece of infernal impudence!"
The two friends were yet on the East side of Broadway, as they had come
out from Broome Street. The procession had passed from the street, and
the crowd on the sidewalks had materially cleared away. Leslie had been
looking across at the passengers on the "shilling side." Two ladies,
neatly dressed in street costume, and wearing light gypsies, were
walking together, downward. Behind them, and so close that he nearly
trod upon their dresses, a tall man was walking apparently upon tip-toe
and leaning over so that his head was almost between theirs. He was
evidently not of their party--was apparently listening to their
conversation and scanning the necks and busts before him somewhat too
closely; they all the while unconscious what a miserable libel on
humanity was dogging them. He looked foreign--perhaps French, especially
in the extraordinary curve and bell of his black round hat,--was
well-dressed, and seemed to be gray-haired enough to know better.
"Impudence? I should think so," replied Harding, as he caught sight of
the two girls and their unobserved follower. "That dirty hound would rob
a church! Oh, if I could only see that taller one turn around, now, and
fetch him such a slap in the face that it would ring for a twelvemonth!
Why, by Heavens, Leslie!" he said, looking closer. "I ought to know that
figure, and I _do_. Come over, and let us see the end of this."
"And your bank account?" asked Leslie.
"Oh, never mind that--come along!" and in half a minute they were across
the street and close behind the ladies and their persecutor. The latter
kept his place, dodging his head around at every opportunity as if to
get a sight of the face of the taller girl, and both apparently yet
unconscious of his presence.
"Do you see a policeman?" asked Harding, in a low voice. "I will have
that fellow taken up."
"Not a policeman!" answered Leslie. "If you know either of the ladies,
take the scoundrel by the collar, or let _me_."
"I _do_ know the taller girl," said Harding, "and--"
Suddenly he was interrupted. The taller lady on the outside wheeled
around so suddenly as almost to throw the tip-toe follower off his feet,
confronted him boldly, flung up the short light veil that depended from
her gypsy and partially hid her features, ineffable scorn and delicious
impudence dancing at the same moment out of her dark eyes and flushed
cheeks,--and burst out with:
"You have followed me long enough. Perhaps you want a better look? Here
it is! How do you like me?"
"Oh, Joe!" said the other lady, almost sinking with fright.
"Upon my honor, miss--ladies--it was all a mistake--I was not following
you--that is--I thought--"
"You are lying, sir, and you know it!" spoke the strange girl, the words
fairly hissing from her red lips and the coming tears already combating
with anger in her voice. "You have followed us for more than a block,
leaning over our very shoulders, and if I was only a man I would flog
you within an inch of your life!" Here pride and shame overcame anger,
and the tears burst out in spite of her; so that by the time she had
concluded she was nearly as weak and helpless as her frightened
companion.
The sneaking scoundrel attempted to get away, not less from the anger of
the outraged girl than from the passers-by, a dozen or two of whom had
already collected; but before he could make any movement in that
direction, a hand--that of Walter Harding, was laid on his collar,
swinging him violently around; and a small Malacca cane--that of Tom
Leslie, was laid about his shoulders and back with such good will that
the human hound literally yelled with pain. "Serve him right!" "Give it
to him!" and other exclamations of the same character, broke from those
who had heard the girl's words and who saw the punishment; and in thirty
seconds he was perhaps as thoroughly-flogged a man as Broadway ever saw.
Then Harding released him with a kick, and he made three howling leaps
to an omnibus passing up, and disappeared inside. The impression on the
minds of the spectators was that he would not much enjoy his ride; and
they no doubt had another impression in which we may fully share, that
though vulgarism is "bred in the bone and will come out in the flesh,"
yet the flogged man would be very careful of the locality in which he
again indulged in the same atrocious habit.
All this time the taller girl, though endeavoring to control her
emotion, was literally sobbing with shame and anger, while yet
half-laughing at the sudden punishment of her persecutor. The other lady
had been too much frightened to utter a second exclamation, and neither
had paid any attention to the personality of their defenders.
But at this stage of the proceedings, Walter Harding lifted his hat (his
hands having been too busy before) and approached the taller lady.
"Miss Harris, if I am not mistaken."
"Harris--that is my name, certainly," said the lady, "and you do not
know how much we thank you for your kindness, but--"
"But you don't remember me, eh?" This was said with a smile that brought
some new expression to his face, and the wild girl instantly cried:
"Yes, I do remember you--you are--you are--" but she had not yet
recovered the name from the mists of forgetfulness, if she remembered
the face.
"Walter Harding, merchant, of this city, Miss Josephine, and very glad
to meet you again, even under such circumstances."
"Mr. Harding--oh yes, what a crazy head I have!" said the lady, smiles
now altogether taking the place of the struggling tears, and giving him
both her hands with the freedom of a school-girl--either in
acknowledgment of his late service or as an apology for her momentary
forgetfulness. "Mr. Harding, of course! Newport--Purgatory--Dumpling
Rocks--everywhere--what fish we caught and what a jolly month we
had--didn't we? And then to think that I should have forgotten you, even
for a moment!"
The explanation of which is, that Walter Lane Harding had met Miss
Josephine Harris at Newport, in the summer of 1860, and that they had
been much pleased with the society of each other and companions in many
a stroll and fishing-excursion. Probably neither believed, when they
parted, that two years would elapse without another meeting; but in the
great Babel of city life it is only occasionally that we can manage to
make ourselves heard by each other, above the clattering of the hammers
and the confusion of tongues. Had they been lovers, they would have
found each other before, no matter what stood in the way; but
friendships, even the warmest, have little of the fierce energy of love,
and a very cobweb mesh of circumstances or business engagements can bind
the sentiment, while there is no cord spun in the long rope-walk of
life, strong enough to fetter the free limbs of the passion. That Walter
Harding and Josephine Harris had only met by accident after two years,
and yet both living in the same city and moving in the same walk of
society--proved that they might have _liked_ but had never _loved_.
The few passers-by who had collected around the ladies at the time of
the insult, had separated when they proved to be in the company of male
acquaintances; and in a moment after the recognition between Harding and
Joe Harris, the latter had introduced Miss Bell Crawford, the heroine of
the cerise ribbon, to both the gentlemen; and she had received an
introduction which caused her to start and color singularly the moment
their eyes met--to Mr. Tom Leslie, traveler, newspaper-correspondent,
Jack-at-all-trades and general good fellow. Was that interested and
conscious look repaid by another on the part of Tom Leslie, or had he
had sufficient time after seeing the young girl and before speaking to
her, to recover from any agitation, pleasurable or the contrary,
incident to the meeting? Did they know each other or only something _of_
each other? Had they met before, and if so, when and where? Perhaps some
light may be thrown on all these questions, a little later in the
progress of this story.
At the present juncture two of the parties were hungry; the third what
is called "peckish," which means a _little_ hungry and quite capable of
bolting a sandwich or the wing of a cold turkey; and the fourth very
much in a hurry and anxious to get away to his business.
"We sent our carriage home, knowing that we could not get through
Broadway while the troops were passing," said Bell Crawford, "with
orders to have it call for us late in the afternoon, at a friend's house
near Union Square. We were just going down to Taylor's for a little
lunch, when this awkward affair occurred: may we ask you to join us,
gentlemen?"
"Oh yes," said Josephine Harris, with her school-girl pleasure at the
proposition ill-concealed. "That will be--yes, well, I may as well say
out what I think--that will be jolly."
"As for my friend Leslie here," said Harding, "_he_ has nothing to do,
and can certainly ask no greater pleasure than to join you. We were just
about separating when we saw you. For myself, I _must_ forego the
pleasure, for I have the misfortune to be a busy man, and I must really
wish you a hurried good-morning, leaving you in my friend's care."
With a promise to call upon the ladies at his earliest convenience, the
young merchant hurried away, with every evidence that his thoughts were
intent upon the balance at his banker's and the question whether certain
regular customers who were to have called during the morning had been
duly impressed by his clerks with the merits of certain choice styles of
goods, rapidly on the rise, that he would himself have commended to
their particular attention. And yet there are odd mixtures, sometimes,
even in the minds of merchants--mixtures in which customers become
blended with curls and profits with profiles; for Walter Lane Harding,
as he wasted yet one more moment to step into Gilsey's and light a
choice Havana, indulged in a train of thought which might have been
shaped into words something in the manner following:
"A pretty woman--that Miss Crawford, decidedly ladylike--which the other
is _not_, however pleasant a companion. I should as soon think of
falling in love with a handsome bombshell, as with _her_. No knowing
when she might explode. Now if I had met _Miss Crawford_ at Newport two
years ago, who knows but affairs might have been different? Heigho!" And
so Walter Harding went on to his business; while Tom Leslie, the member
of the party who was "peckish," accompanied the two girls, who were
decidedly hungry, to that over-gilt and tawdry caricature upon some of
the palace-halls of the Old World, known as "Taylor's Saloon."