Grimm's where a gang of us were doing our Christmas shopping early
and, as usual when he had a load aboard, he was leaking tears and
lamentations with every faltering step he took. Talk about your crying
jags, when this here Little Al got going he had riparian rights. It
made you wonder where he kept his reservoirs hid at, him not weighing
more than about ninety pounds and being short-waisted besides. Maybe he
had hydraulic legs; I don't know. Likewise always on such occasions,
which they were frequent, he acted low and suicidal in his mind. He was
our official melancholi_hic_.
So he drifted in out of the starry night and leaned up against the bar,
and between sobs he says to Billy Grimm, "Billy," he says, "have you
got any real deadly poison round here?"
"Only the regular staple brands," says Billy. "What'll it be--rye or
Bourbon?"
"Billy," he says, "don't trifle with a man that's already the same as
dead. Licker has been my curse and downfall. It's made me what I am
tonight. Look at me--no good to myself or anybody else on this earth.
Just a poor derelick without a true friend on this earth. But this is
the finish with me. I've said that before but now I mean it. Before
tomorrow morning I'm going to end everything. If one of you boys won't
kindly trust me with a pistol I'd be mighty much obliged to somebody
for the loan of a piece of rope about six or seven or eight feet long.
Just any little scrap of rope that you happen to have handy will do
me," he says.
I put in my oar. "Why, you poor little worthless
sawed-off-and-hammered-down," I says to him, "don't try to hang
yourself without you slip an anvil into the seat of your pants first."
One of the other boys--Rawhide Rawlings, I think it was--speaks up also
and says, "And don't try jumping off a high roof, neither; you'd only
go up!"
You see we were acquainted with Little Al's peculiarities and we knew
he didn't mean a word he said, and so we were just aiming to cheer him
up. But Good Sam, who'd joined our little group of intense drinkers
only a few minutes before, he didn't enter into the spirit of it at
all. He motioned to us to come on down to the other end of the rail
and he asks us haven't we got any sympathy for a fellow being that's
sunk so deep in despondency he's liable to drown himself in his own
water-works plant any minute?
"You don't want to be prodding him that-away," he says; "what you want
to do is humor him along. You want to lead him so close up to the
Pearly Gates that he can hear the hinges creaking; that'll make him see
things different," he says. "That'll scare him out of this delusion of
his that he wants to be a runt angel."
"I suppose then you think you could cure him yourself?" asks one of the
gang.
"In one easy lesson," says Good Sam, speaking very confident. "All I
ask from you gents is for one of you to let me borrow his six-gun
off of him for a little while and then everybody agree to stand
back and not interfere. If possible I'd like for it to be a big
unhealthy-looking six-gun," he says.
Well, that sounded plausible enough. So Rawhide passes over his belt,
which it's got an old-fashioned single-action Colt's swinging in
its holster, and Good Sam buckles this impressive chunk of hardware
around him and meanders back to where Little Al is humped up with his
shoulders heaving and his face in his hands and a little puddle forming
on the bar from the salty tears oozing out of his system and running
down his chin and falling off.
"My poor brother," says Good Sam, in a very gentle way like a
missionary speaking, "are you really in earnest about feeling a deep
desire to quit this here vale of tears?"
"I sure am," says Little Al; "it's the one ambition I've got left."
"And I don't blame you none for it neither," says Good Sam. "What's
life but a swindle anyhow--a brace game--that nobody ever has beaten
yet? And look at the fix you're in--too big for a midget in a side-show
and too little for other laudable purposes. No sir, I don't blame you a
bit. And just to show you my heart's in the right place I'm willing to
accommodate you."
"That's all I'm craving," says Little Al. "Just show me how--ars'nic or
a gun or the noose or a good sharp butcher-knife, I ain't particular.
If it wasn't for the river being frozen over solid I wouldn't be
worrying you for that much help," he says.
"Now hold on, listen here," says Good Sam, "you mustn't do it that
way--not with your own hands."
"How else am I going to do it, then?" says Little Al, acting surprised.
"Why, I'm going to do it for you myself," says Good Sam, "and don't
think I'm putting myself out on your account neither. Why, it won't be
any trouble--you might almost say it'll be a pleasure to me. Because
if you should go and commit suicide you'll be committing a mortal sin
that you won't never get forgiveness for. But if I plug you, you ain't
responsible, are you? I've already had to kill seven or eight fellows
in my time," says this amiable liar of a Good Sam, "or maybe the
correct count is nine; I forget sometimes. Anyhow, one more killin' on
my soul won't make a particle of difference with me. And to bump off a
party that's actually aching to be done so, one that'll thank me with
his last expiring breath for the favor--why, brother," he says, "it
_will_ be a pleasure! Just come on with me," he says, "and we can get
this little matter over and done with in no time at all."
With that he leads the way to a little shack of a room that Billy
Grimm's got behind his saloon. Al follows along but I observe he's quit
weeping all of a sudden and likewise it looks to me like he's lost or
is losing considerable of his original enthusiasm. He's beginning
to sort of hang back and lag behind by the time they've got to the
doorway, and he casts a sort of pitiful imploring look backwards over
his shoulder; but Good Sam takes him by the arm and leads him on in
and closes the door behind them. The rest of us wait a minute and then
tiptoe up to the door and put our ears close to the crack and listen.
First we hear a match being struck. "Now then, that's the ticket," we
hear Good Sam say very cheerfully; "we don't want to take any chances
on messing this job up by trying to do it in the dark." So from that
we know he's lighted the coal-oil lamp that's in there. Then he
says: "Wait till I open this here back window, so's to let the smoke
out--these old black powder cartridges are a blamed nuisance, going off
inside a house." There's a sound of a sash being raised. "Suppose you
sit down here on this beer box and make yourself comfortable," is what
Good Sam says next. There's a scuffling sound from Little Al's feet
dragging across the floor. "No, that won't hardly do," goes on Good
Sam, "sitting down all caved in the way you are now, I'd only gut-shoot
you and probably you'd linger and suffer and I'd have to plug you a
second time. I'd hate to botch you all up, I would so.
"Tell you what, just stand up with your arms down at your sides....
There, that's better, brother. No, it ain't neither! I couldn't bear
afterwards to think of that forlorn look out of your eyes. The way
they looked out of their eyes is the only thing that ever bothers me
in connection with several of the fellows I've had to shoot heretofore.
Maybe you'll think I'm morbid but things like that certainly do prey
on a fellow's mind afterward--if he's kind-hearted which, without
any flattery, I may say I'm built that way. So while I hate to keep
pestering you with orders when you're hovering on the very brink of
eternity, won't you please just turn around so you'll have your back
to me? Thank you kindly, that'll do splendid. Now you stay perfectly
still and I'll count three, kind of slow, and when I get to 'three'
I'll let you have it slick as a whistle right between the shoulders....
_One!_" And we can hear that old mule's ear of a hammer on that six-gun
go _click, click_. Then: "_Two-o-o!_... Steady, don't wiggle or you're
liable to make me nervous.... _Thr--_"
Somebody lets out the most gosh-awful yell you ever heard and we shove
the door open just in time to see Little Al sailing out of that window,
head first, like a bird on the wing; and then we heard a hard thump on
the frozen ground 'way down below, followed by low moaning sounds. In
his hurry Little Al must have plumb forgot that while Billy Grimm's
saloon was flush with the street in front, at the far end it was
scaffolded up over a hollow fifteen or twenty feet deep.
So we swarmed down the back steps and picked him up and you never saw
a soberer party in your life than what that ex-suicider was, or one
that was gladder to see a rescue party arrive. Soon as he got his
wind back he clung to us, pleading with us to protect him from that
murdering scoundrel of a man-killer and demanding to know what kind of
a fellow he was not to be able to take a joke, and stating that he'd
had a close call which it certainly was going to be a lesson to him,
and so on. Pretty soon after that he began to take note that he was
hurting all over. You wouldn't have believed that a man who wasn't over
five-feet-two could be bunged up and bruised up in so many different
localities as Little Al was. Even his hair was sore to the touch.
When he got so he could hobble around he joined an organization
which up until then it'd only had one other charter member in good
standing, the same being Whiz Bollinger, former owner and chief mourner
of that there late-lamented buckboard. It was a club with just one
by-law--which was entertaining a profound distrust for Samson Goodhue,
Esquire--but there were quite a good many strong rich cuss-words in the
ritual.
Still, any man who devotes himself to the public welfare is bound to
accumulate a few detractors as he goes along. Good Sam went booming
ahead like as if there wasn't a private enemy on his list or a cloud
in his sky. He'd do this or that or the other thing always, mind you,
with the highest and the purest motives and every pop it would turn
out wrong. Was he discouraged? Did he throw up his hands and quit in
the face of accumulating ingratitude? Not so as to be visible to the
naked eye. The milk of human kindness that was sloshing about inside of
him appeared to be absolutely curdle-proof. I wish I knew his private
formula--I could invent a dandy patent churn.
Let's see, now, what was his next big outstanding failure? I'm passing
over the little things such as him advising Timber-Line Hance about
what was the best way to encourage a boil on his neck that wouldn't
come to a head and getting the medicines mixed in his mind and
recommending turpentine instead of hog-lard. I'm trying to pick out the
high points in his career. Let's see? Now I've got it. Along toward
spring, when the thaws set in, somebody told him how Boots Darnell and
Babe Louder had been hived up all winter in a shanty up on the Blue
Shell with nobody to keep them company except each other, and how Babe
was laid up with a busted leg and Boots couldn't leave him except to
run their traps. So nothing would do Good Sam but what he must put
out to stay a couple of days with that lonesome pair and give 'em the
sunshine of his presence.
They welcomed him with open arms and made him right to home in their
den, such as it was. I ought to tell you before we go any further that
this here Babe and this here Boots were a couple of simple-minded,
kind-hearted old coots that had been baching it together for going on
fifteen or twenty years. It was share and share alike with those two.
Living together so long, they got so they divided their thoughts. One
would know what was on the other's mind before he said it and would
finish the sentence for him. They'd actually split a word when it
was a word running into extra syllables. "Well, I'll be dad--" Boots
would say; "--gummed," Babe would add, signifying that they were going
partners even on the dad-gumming. Their conversation would put you in
mind of one of these here anthems.
They certainly were glad to see Good Sam. In honor of the occasion
Boots cooked up a muskrat stew and made a batch of sour-dough biscuits
for supper and Babe sat up in his bunk and told his favorite story
which Boots had already heard it probably two or three million times
already but carried on like he enjoyed it. They showed him their catch
of pelts and, taking turn and turn about, they told him how they'd
been infested all winter by a worthless stray hound-dog. It seems this
hound-dog happened along one day and adopted them and he'd been with
'em ever since and he'd just naturally made their life a burden to
them--getting in the way and breeding twice as many fleas as he needed
for his own use and letting them have the overflow; and so on.
But they said his worst habit was his appetite. He was organized inside
like a bottomless pit, so they said. If they took him along with them
he'd scare all the game out of the country by chasing it but never
caught any; and if they left him behind locked up in the cabin he'd
eat a side of meat or a pack-saddle or something before they got back.
A set of rawhide harness was just a light snack to him, they said--sort
of an appetizer. And his idea of a pleasant evening was to sit on his
haunches and howl two or three hours on a stretch with a mournful
enthusiasm and after he did go to sleep he'd have bad dreams and howl
some more without waking up, but they did. Altogether, it seemed he had
more things about him that you wouldn't care for than a relative by
marriage.
They said, speaking in that overlapping way of theirs, that they'd
prayed to get shut of him but didn't have any luck. So Good Sam asked
them why somebody hadn't just up and killed him. And they hastened to
state that they were both too tender-hearted for that. But if he felt
called upon to take the job of being executioner off their hands, the
hound being a stranger to him and he not a member of the family as was
the case with them, why, they'd be most everlastingly grateful. And he
said he would do that very little trick first thing in the morning.
Now, of course, the simplest and the quickest and the easiest way
would have been for Good Sam to toll the pup outdoors and bore him
with Boots' old rifle. But no, that wouldn't do. As he explained to
them, he was sort of tender himself when it came to taking life, but I
judge the real underlying reason was that he liked to go to all sorts
of pains and complicate the machinery when he was working at being a
philanthropist. Soon as supper was over he reared back to figure on
a plan and all at once his eye lit on a box of dynamite setting over
in a corner. During the closed season on fur those two played at being
miners.
"I've got it now," he told them. "I'll take a stick of that stuff there
with me and I'll lead this cussed dog along with me and take him half a
mile up the bottoms and fasten him to a tree with a piece of line. Then
I'll hitch a time-fuse onto the dynamite and tie the dynamite around
his neck with another piece of rope and leave him there. Pretty soon
the fuse will burn down and the dynamite will go off--_kerblooie!_--and
thus without pain or previous misgivings that unsuspecting canine
will be totally abolished. But the most beautiful part of it is that
nobody--you nor me neither--will be a witness to his last moments."
So they complimented him on being so smart and so humane at the same
time and said they ought to have thought up the idea themselves only
they didn't have the intellect for it--they admitted that, too--and
after he'd sopped up their praise for a while and felt all warm and
satisfied, they turned in, and peace and quiet reigned in that cabin
until daylight, except for some far-and-wide snoring and the dog having
a severe nightmare under the stove about two-thirty A. M.
Up to a certain point the scheme worked lovely. Having established
the proper connections between the dog and the tree, the fuse and the
dynamite, Good Sam is gamboling along through the slush on his way
back and whistling a merry tune, when all of a sudden his guiding
spirit makes him look back behind him--and here comes that pup! He's
either pulled loose from the rope or else he's eaten it up--it would be
more like him to eat it. But the stick of dynamite is dangling from his
neck and the fuse is spitting little sparks.
Good Sam swings around and yells at the animal to go away and he grabs
up a chunk of wood and heaves it at him. But the dog thinks that's only
play and he keeps right on coming, with his tail wagging in innocent
amusement and his tongue hanging out like a pink plush necktie and
his eyes shining with gratefulness for the kind gentleman who's gone
to all the trouble of thinking up this new kind of game especially on
his account. So then Good Sam lights out, running for the cabin, and
the dog, still entering heartily into the sport, takes after him and
begins gaining at every jump. It's a close race and getting closer all
the time and no matter which one of 'em finishes first it looks like a
mortal cinch that neither winner nor loser is going to be here to enjoy
his little triumph afterwards.
Inside the cabin Boots and Babe hear the contestants drawing nearer.
Mixed in with much happy frolicsome barking is a large volume of
praying and yelling and calls for help, and along with all this a noise
like a steam snow-plow being driven at a high rate of speed. Boots
jumps for the door but before he can jerk it open, Good Sam busts in
with his little playmate streaking along not ten feet behind him, and
at that instant the blast goes off and the pup loses second money, as
you might say, by about two lengths.
It's a few minutes after that when Boots and Babe reach the unanimous
conclusion that they've been pretty near ruined by too much benevolence.
Boots is propping up the front side of the cabin, the explosion having
jarred it loose, and Babe is still laying where he landed against the
back wall and nursing his game leg. The visiting humanitarian has gone
down the ridge to get his nerves ca'mmed.
"Babe," says Boots, "you know what it looks like to me?"
"What it looks like to us two, you mean," says Babe.
"Sure," says Boots; "well, it looks like to both of us that we've been
dern near killed with kindness."
"As regards that there pup," says Babe, continuing the clapboarded
conversation, "we complained that he was all over the place and--"
"Now he's all over us," states Boots, combing a few more fine fragments
of dog-hash out of his hair.
"I'd say we've had about enough of being helped by this here obliging
well-wisher, wouldn't you?" says Babe.
"Abso--" says Boots.
"--lutely!" says Babe.
"I've run plum out of hospi--" says Boots.
"--tality!" says Babe. "What we ought to do is take a gun and kill him
good--"
"--and dead!" says Boots.
But they didn't go that far. They make it plain to him though, when he
gets back, that the welcome is all petered out and he takes the hint
and pikes out for town, leaving those two still sorting what's left of
their house-keeping junk out of the wreckage.
So it went and so it kept on going. Every time Good Sam set his willing
hands to lifting some unfortunate fellow citizen out of a difficulty
he won himself at least one more sincere critic before he was through.
Even so, as long as he stuck to retailing it wasn't so bad. Certain
parts of town he was invited to stay out of but there were other
neighborhoods that he could still piroot around in without much danger
of being assassinated. It was only when he branched out as a jobber
that his waning popularity soured in a single hour. That was when the
entire community clabbered on him, as you might say, by acclamation.
It happened this way: Other towns east and west of us were having
booms, but our town, seemed like, was being left out in the cold. She
wasn't growing a particle. So some of the leading people got up a
mass-meeting to decide on ways and means of putting Triple Falls on the
map. One fellow would rise up and suggest doing this and another fellow
would rise up and suggest doing that; but every proposition called for
money and about that time money was kind of a scarce article amongst
us. So far as I was concerned, it was practically extinct.
Along toward the shank of the evening Good Sam took the floor.
"Gents," he said, "I craves your attention. There's just one sure way
of boosting a town and that's by advertising it. Get its name in print
on all the front pages over the country. Get it talked about; stir up
curiosity; arouse public interest. That brings new people in and they
bring their loose coinage with 'em and next thing you know you've got
prosperity by the tail with a down-hill pull. Now, I've got a simple
little scheme of my own. I love this fair young city of ours and I'm
aiming to help her out of the kinks and I ain't asking assistance from
anybody else neither. Don't ask me how I'm going about it because in
advance it's a secret. I ain't telling. You just leave it to me and
I'll guarantee that inside of one week or less this'll be the most
talked-about town of its size in the whole United States; with folks
swarming in here by every train--why, they'll be running special
excursions on the railroad. And it's not going to cost a single one of
you a single red cent, neither."
Of course his past record should have been a plentiful warning.
Somebody ought to have headed him off and bent a six-gun over his
skull. But no, like the misguided suckers that we were, we let him go
off and cook up his surprise.
I will say this: He kept his promise--he got us talked about and he
brought strangers in. Inside of forty-eight hours special writers from
newspapers all over the Rocky Mountains were pouring in and strangers
were dropping off of through trains with pleased, expectant looks on
their faces; and Father Staples was getting rush telegrams from his
bishop asking how about it, and the Reverend Claypool--he was the
Methodist minister--was hurrying back from conference all of a tremble,
and various others who'd been away were lathering back home as fast as
they could get here.
What'd happened? I'm coming to that now. All that happened was that
Good Sam got the local correspondent for the press association
stewed, and seduced him into sending out a dispatch that he'd written
out himself, which it stated that an East Indian sun worshiper had
lighted in Triple Falls and started up a revival meeting, and such
was his hypnotic charm and such was the spell of his compelling fiery
eloquence that almost overnight he'd converted practically the entire
population--men, women, children, half-breeds, full-bloods, Chinks and
Mexies--to the practice of his strange Oriental doctrines, with the
result that pretty near everybody was engaged in dancing in the public
street--without any clothes on!
So it was shortly after that, when cooler heads had discouraged talk of
a lynching, that Good Sam left us--by request. And I haven't seen him
since.
* * * * *
The Native Genius pointed up the trail. Toward us came Eagle Ribs,
titular head of the resident group of members of the Blackfeet
Confederacy, now under special retainers by the hotel management to
furnish touches of true Western color to the adjacent landscape. The
chief was in civilian garb; he was eating peanut brittle from a small
paper bag.
"You'll observe that old Ribs has shucked his dance clothes," said my
friend, "which means the official morning reception is over and the
latest batch of sight-seers from all points East have scattered off or
something. I guess it'll be safe for us to go back."
We fell into step; the path was wide enough for two going abreast.
"So you never heard anything more of the Good Samaritan?" I prompted,
being greedy for the last tidbitty bite of this narrative.
"Nope. I judge somebody who couldn't appreciate his talents must have
beefed him. But I'm reasonably certain he left descendants to carry on
the family inheritance. One of 'em is in this vicinity now, I think."
"You're referring to what's-his-name who started the second fire last
night--aren't you?" I asked.
"Not him. If he'd had a single drop of the real Good Sam blood in him
his fire would be raging yet and my camp would be only a recent site.
"No, the one I've got in mind is the party with the saxophone. Did you
get some faint feeble notion of the nature of the tune he was trying to
force out of that reluctant horn of his? Well, it would be just like
Good Sam's grandson to practice up on some such an air as that--and
then play it as a serenade at midnight under the window of a sick
friend."
HOW TO CHOKE A CAT WITHOUT USING BUTTER
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