Flanagan would enjoy the joke, I thought, on my way home. Coroner Tim
Flanagan, the Tammany leader of the district in which we lived, was the
friend of everybody in his territory, and took a kindly interest in Jim
and me, although we held office on other tenure than "pull." We bought
tickets every year for the annual clam-bake of the Timothy J. Flanagan
Association, held at Rockaway, and there mingled with the politicians
big and little, and the fellows from our departments. We office-holders
knew which side our bread was buttered on, and we also liked clams. We
did not attend the annual mid-winter ball of the same association, but
we never failed to buy tickets admitting "ladies and gent." If the news
that I had taken undue liberty with his name came back to Flanagan I
knew he would quickly forgive me. Flanagan was a good fellow, straight
and loyal.
As I passed through the vestibule of our apartment house I looked at
the letter-boxes and noticed the narrow string of crape tied on the
little knob, under the badly written name, "Browning." If the sad event
had closed, as reported by the subordinates of Smith, the careless
undertaker had forgotten to remove this shred of formality.
I found the murderer, forger and bad man of the border, in bed, snoring
as if he was glad he had always stuck to the treadmill of virtue, and
had never murdered a wife to get another with money, or had raised a
check for a cool million or so without the formalities of a pious
purloiner from the people's purse. No criminal in history had ever slept
with a smoother rhythm to his heart-beat than this one, with the elite
of New York's private detective bureaus hot upon his trail for a long
chase. His sonorous snore might have sent a waver through the mind of
the crafty Tescheron, and made the wily Smith feel that the case would
dwindle to less than a week's job, when he was probably figuring on a
good two thousand dollars in it, having sized up the buyer pretty well.
I felt satisfied that my telegram would put some insomnia in
Ninety-sixth Street when the great work closed for the night at the
Fifth Avenue Hotel, and the protector of the household returned to rest
those tired wheels that had been whirring fast in his head since 2 P. M.,
short-belted to the Smith dynamo of fraud.
I didn't expect to do much sleeping myself, so I proceeded to divest and
relax under the sedative pull of my pipe. For about half an hour I
creaked the comfortable rocker, and pondered on that old subject of
fools and their money, and how it was that wise men like myself had so
little of it. The solitudes and soliloquies of life appealed to
me--especially with a nice bunch of fake crime hovering in the air
between me and, say, a few feet beneath my rocker. I was lolling in our
front parlor, probably not ten feet above the spot just vacated by the
latest victim, and the man who would swing or singe for the deed was
playing a soft nostrilian air two doors down the hall--but, no! The tune
stopped! The villain had turned 216 pounds over on a set of springs
which shiveringly reported the man-quake in their midst. A brief moment
of calm--just enough for a murderer to lick his chops and gather a
lulling sense of monotony from the contemplation of a fresh
wife-slaying, and he was off again with the sheriff after him for
exceeding the speed limit. His horn was clearing the track and the
vibrations blended in a romping continuity.
The deeper Jim got into his Bluebeard dreams, or his fairyland of love,
the deeper I got into my hobby, political economy, and to thinking of
the wide difference between us.
Somebody had to do a little thinking, for Fate was tying our affairs in
hard, wet knots, and the chances were we'd have to stay under the stream
of life's perplexities. Jim was so smooth in appearance (alas! but not
in tongue) he might slip out of a corner as easily as his fine manners
enabled him to progress in society. But I was no man for style. I could
cut no swath with women. The few times I had tried it, the scythe had
turned upon me, took me for an extra tough bunch of wet grass and stung
me badly. I could see that my chances there were poor. If Jim got out of
this murder business, as I believed he would soon, I intended to run the
flat alone, fill it full of books written by people who have advised the
country out of a spirit of pure patriotism (and into a worse hole), and
after reading all they had to say, I thought I could produce something
original that would put them all out of print, with my small volume
standing alone on the shelves, as the last word on the pursuit of
happiness, containing full directions on how to keep to the trail, from
birth to the grave, with a stop-over ticket at the last-named junction.
I felt that all this was in me, just as Jim felt there was something in
him, he didn't know what, but so long as it kept him fidgeting he knew
it was there.
It was not surprising to my friends that I had given up all hope for
myself. As I have said, I was no man for style. It always seemed to me
that my clothes fitted me when I was buying them, but it never struck
anybody else that way afterward. I paid the same prices as Jim, but I
would have done just as badly at three times as much, and might just as
well have saved money buying second-hand through a want "ad." Nature
designed me to spoil tailoring. If I had lived in Eden the fig leaves on
my belt would have browned and cracked before noon the first day, and if
a few figs were then worn on the side as fringe ornaments, I would have
carelessly picked them inside out, making the suit look seedier still.
On a foggy morning the dewdrops of Paradise would have spotted me, and
on a windy day the flying burrs and feather-tailed seeds would have
taken me for good ground; the pussy willows and all such forest fuzz and
excelsior--for a good thing. If I had been a Roman no one would have
seen me down street, for I would be in the baths waiting for my wrapper
to be scoured, washed and mended.
This is a way Fate has of keeping a few scholars and investigators in
the world. Herbert Spencer would have been swamped in a family, and the
same with George Eliot. If they had married each other, as Herbert says
they might (had Georgie been better-looking), philosophical and
imaginative genius would have been lost in getting the meals and bending
posterity over the parental knee to make sin seem undesirable. I had
always felt that Jim was cut out to get married, and I stood ready to
help him through the entire catalogue of crime and conspiracy, for I
knew he could not undertake so much alone as well as I knew glue from
tallow coming two miles by air line. If Jim wanted to do it, though, I
would give him the benefit of my knowledge of the theory of courtship, a
subject I was well up in, having read considerably more fiction than he
had. This with my keen intuitive perceptions, I felt fitted me to act
again in an advisory capacity, for my critical faculties were massive,
although, as I have hinted, my executive qualities as a lover were
undersized.
I had time for Jim's affairs, because society had peculiar horrors for
me. Let a woman say something at a dinner or a reception, and my neck
would begin to swell like a pouter pigeon's and my collar would close
down like a pair of hedge clippers centered at the back collar button.
This would cause no alarm in the young woman, for she would imagine the
choking symptoms were only signs of an embarrassment produced by her
interest in me. This would not have been a bad thing, for bashful men
always get the most encouragement, and if persistently bashful, are
coaxed into all the intricate arts of the gentle game by the woman who
is interested in them. Thus I always seemed to have the good luck of the
bashful man up to the last gasp, and until I began to turn blue. She
would then see that it was apoplexy, and not her charms, which was
undoing me. But the apoplexy, the bulging veins and the reddening eyes
were forgotten when I sought relief by inserting the first two fingers
of each hand on either side of my collar, and with a short, outward
jerk, would open the starchy shears that were fastening like a
constrictor around my air valves. This would startle the young creature
into diffidence, and I always hated to do it, but it was the only way I
could assume my self-control. Following the application of the
two-finger movement, relief would come quickly, with a splutter and a
stammering apology for not catching her last remark. My volubility from
that point to the next attack, when interrupted by a suggestion which
would derail me, or by a third party not following our train of thought,
would impress the hearer that it was the collar which was tight. This
remarkable misfortune, of course, deprived me of the influence of the
bashful man, and as I was no dissembler I could not take advantage of
the appearance of my distress. My blushes were wholly due to choking and
could not pass for flashes reflexed by heart-throbs.
There was another thing I had to battle with from my entrance into
society. Jim could look like a lord in a dress suit. I always looked
like a lord knows what! The _Sun_ once published a picture of the dress
trousers of Grover Cleveland and David B. Hill lined up with those of
Governor Montague of Virginia, for impartial presentation by a
flashlight photograph. It was an astonishing revelation of Democracy
below the waist line. Jim cut it out and put it in a pretty straw frame.
He said he never wanted me to lose sight of the styles set by great
statesmen. Montague, as became his aristocratic name and lineage, was a
model of perfection about the legs, and Jim said it proved he would
never get to Washington and take rank with our great men. Cleveland and
Hill, however, who had been there, evidently pinned their trousers in
curl-papers, so that they were always ready to look fancy in society and
be snap-shotted. Mine followed the Washington route without urging.
Then, as to vest, coat and shirts: no tailor could make a coat for me
that could trail after my neck when it was engaged in the throes of a
society conversation. The coat had to go off at the back of the collar
and stand to one side until the neck was through talking. The vest
generally showed only two square inches and gave little trouble to the
public, so long as I kept my coat on and hid the safety-pins which
reefed it in the back. The shirt, up to a certain course of the dinner,
would keep under the napkin, but until I learned of a patent mixture to
cover the bosom with a transparent waterproofing, used to protect
wall-paper and other delicate fabrics from ink stains and finger-marks,
I found it a burden to carry so much exposed linen. But with this wax
paint, I care not what drops on it; it won't stick unless it's hot
metal, and there is not so much of that in the air at dinners this side
of Arizona.
Studs are a source of mortification to me. I have paid as high as fifty
cents for a set of three and had them all break off the first night,
exposing the brass settings. I sought to reduce this torment by wearing
only one stud-hole, but that makes it necessary to go away into a far
country, three times during the dinner, to bore out the stump of the old
stud and drive in the new. Any man who has done the job with his collar
and tie on, knows that he is as pop-eyed as a lobster when he gets
through, trying to keep the field of operations in view. I had special
bolts made which I had soldered on. This is practicable where the wax
paint is used and the mangle of the laundry avoided. A good paint will
last three years.
Shaving for society appearances cut windfalls all over my face, that I
had to cover with the overhang of whiskers. I tried the old-style razor,
but my shaving ran into big money for court plaster, so I got some
safety razors, several brands of them, determined to keep a
decent-looking lawn. These devices are like mowing machines in that they
have teeth to grip the crop and make it stand straight for the attack of
the knife, but the knife doesn't move in a shuttle like that of the
mowing machine--it is stationary, so that you have an arrangement that
is a combination of mowing machine and road scraper. I think the safety
razors were responsible for most of the blanks in my whisker area. They
dug chunks out of some of the most fertile spots, and as nothing would
grow there, I covered them by the ivy process adopted by bald men, who
train eighteen hairs from back of the left ear diagonally up and across
the cranial arbor and down the front to a point over the right eye,
where the ends are brought up short as if they were rooted near there. I
could say I was not bald. This gave me some satisfaction, but I never
boasted of it in public. There was a streak of porcupine in our family.
This accounted for the trod-grass appearance of my head, even when
prepared carefully for public appearance. It was at its best when it
looked like a meadow of tall timothy that had been walked over by the
cows on a wet day. Curry-combing would not disturb it. Herr Most, Ibsen,
Old Hoss Hoey and I had a common quill-haired ancestor.
There were some other points that fitted me to blush unseen. When I was
fifteen years old and my voice was changing, it struck a peculiar gait.
It ran up and down about six octaves, to the tune of a five-finger
exercise. I talked around town for a few weeks in a surprisingly new
style, that reminded me of a boarder who came up to our place one
summer from New York and undertook to show us how to ride a horse. When
the horse got as fast as a spry walk the boarder would teeter up and
down in the saddle as if he had been practicing on a spring bed and had
kept a chunk of it in each hip pocket for elasticity. George Honkey, our
druggist and censor of public manners, said it was the most insipid
piece of equine pitty-patter he had ever seen on Main Street, and from
the get-up-and-down of it, he guessed it must be the Episcopal ritual
for horseback exercise. My vocal cords, while tuning for my lowly part
in life's orchestra, for a day at a time would seem to stick to a decent
tenor or drop to an impressive bass which would have fitted me to be a
preacher, but a sudden attack of mumps, with measles complicating,
pulled them to one side and burned the bridge. They afterward drew tight
down on the sounding board, so that now when I talk the rickety buzz is
like that of a horse-fiddle played with the tremolo and the soft pedal.
An aeolian harp made of rubber bands on a bicycle, aroused by the wind as
the machine moves swiftly, gives the same soft rasp--a prolonged "sizz."
What chance had a man with women, handicapped as I was? And I have
mentioned only a few minor matters, which have come quickly to mind, as
I hastily pen this narrative of my adventures as the middleman in Jim's
love affairs. And yet I had a true and noble heart, with a capacity for
manly devotion as great as any ever advertised on Sunday in the
"personal" column. I make this statement because a man in my position
must take the stand in his own behalf, if any testimony is to be given
for his side of the case. I am the only competent witness to my own
virtues. In order to appreciate me, a woman would need to have a fine
discrimination. My beauty might have been revealed to such a woman if
she had concentrated by absent treatment on my lofty, self-sacrificing
character, evidenced by my pursuit of the chaste in art and the sane in
philosophy. But all hope had then well-nigh departed. I realized that
there were inconsistencies in the theories of the survival of the
fittest and natural selection. I was an example of the exception to the
rule. Excluded, I became the last of my race. I was the last candy in
the box--just as full of sugar as those that had been devoured, but
condemned to rattle in solitude because, forsooth, chocolate creams are
preferred to gum-drops. Chilled by a want of sympathetic appreciation
while mingling with my fellows, I had gradually withdrawn to the
scholarly cloisters of our fifth-story apartment, adjacent to the tin
roof, which so fascinated the summer sun, and far above the turmoil of a
world of men and women wholly disinterested in me. Perhaps this may seem
a little too pessimistic for a philosopher whose experience had taught
him to be above disappointment, yet I must confess it is true I could
not witness the social achievements of my companion without pangs of
remorse; the indifference of the world to merit, to much pure gold in
the ore, convinced me that a varnished label in six colors maintains the
market for mediocrity. Driven to desperation, I might yet seek a beauty
doctor and obtain the glazed surface so essential to social success.
Bachelorhood with Jim seemed to have been due to his lack of
appreciation of others, for according to the favorable comment his
comely appearance created, he seemed to be filled with indifference;
while with me, as I warmed into high enthusiasm over certain
well-defined representatives of the angelic sex, coolness, growing to
statuesque frigidity, would develop in the object of my devotions, and
the beauty whose charms had bedeviled me into insomnia and wild-eyed
desperation became related to me thereafter as the angel surmounting the
tombstone that marked the resting place of my folly.
Moderation, therefore, I concluded, was the keynote of success in
courtship. When the current became balanced in negative and positive
qualities, the desirable equilibrium recognized by each pole as the real
thrill of mutual romance, jealousy and despair would spark, blow out the
fuse and short-circuit into a proposal and an acceptance. Jim was
negative in desire and positive in appearance, thus securing neutrality,
and my passive state was the resultant of a positive inclination and a
negative exterior. Thus Jim was admired and I was tolerated, but he had
progressed no further than I.
One Sunday he and I were strolling through an art gallery.
"What do you call this, Ben?" he whispered behind his hand, pointing to
the portrait of a red-haired Diana sitting on a low, mossy stump in a
lonely spot. Her back was turned toward us, and she seemed to be taking
a sun bath. He looked stealthily around to make sure his curiosity was
not noted by the spectators near us.
"It says on the label that Titty Ann painted it. It is the
bluest-looking woman I ever saw; how did they come to let it in?"
"Yes," said I, not attempting to disturb his view of the painting or the
name of the artist, "Titty Ann was a great painter of the blue-blooded
women of the aristocracy, so blue-blooded they seemed to be bruised all
over, and Titty Ann wanted you to see there was no place they had not
been hurt."
The incident shows how keen was Jim's appreciation of this great subject
of universal interest to bachelors. It seemed to me in those days that
the fairest creature that ever fluttered could not charm him with the
siren whistle of her swishing silk, nor throw a damaging spark from her
bright eyes. But here he was, plunged into the most dreadful
complications, which seemed in the mind of Tescheron, at least, to be
fastening him in the electric chair.
It must have been about 11:30 o'clock when Jim got out of bed and began
to mope around the flat, tramp nervously up and down the private hall
and scuffle through the closets, the cupboard and among the pots and
pans, which fretfully clashed in a heap upon the floor when he sought to
unhook his favorite, the upper story of the double boiler. I wondered
what ailed him now. From the way the alleged murderer was rattling the
crockery and the tinware, back in the kitchen, I knew he had it bad.
What prompted him to invade the kitchen and unhook our outfit I don't
know, but I think he was trying to heat some water, poor chap!--to
accompany a certain pill, on a theory that it was dyspepsia which
disturbed his dreams.
Presently he wandered into the front room, looking badly rumpled. He had
on his yellow and brown dressing gown and a pair of pink-bowed knitted
slippers of a piebald variety, that I had seen displayed by a
neighboring gents' furnishing goods store.
"Ben, what are you doing up this time of night? Pretty late, ain't it?"
he asked.
"Oh, I'm just cogitating," I answered. "You look sick; anything the
matter with you?--and, say, when you go into that kitchen, I wish you
wouldn't chuck everything in the place on the floor for me to pick up."
"I picked 'em all up, Ben," was his meek reply.
I never could scold him, so I forgave him and invited him to sit down
and have a smoke. He fairly jumped at the idea, and it pleased me to see
him bite. I thought then how little Tescheron could know of this
innocent blockhead, Jim Hosley, whose heart and brain traps were built
on the open, sanitary order, with nothing concealed.
Jim continued fidgety and wide-awake as he took his seat near the table
and the county papers. He squirmed on the cushions, smoked hard and
complained of the tobacco, the weather, the police magistrates, his
tight shoes, the careless washerwoman and a string of matters incidental
to the world's work and its burdens that he had never mentioned before
so long as I had lived with him, and that was pretty close to ten years.
It was easy to see that this was no ordinary case. Several times I had
suffered the same sort of misery; had looked for a soft seat and
reposeful thoughts in vain. Jim had not noticed it.
A man who has been forty miles over a mountain road on an empty lumber
wagon knows what thrills are. I could see that Jim was aboard and that
the team had cut loose down hill, for his bones were fairly rattling
with the vibrations from the bog hollows, "thank yer, mums," old stumps
and disagreeable boulders. He needed help. He couldn't hang on much
longer.
"Say, Ben, there was a little matter I wanted to speak to you about,"
said Jim, with the same uneasy manner in which he had rubbed all our
household arrangements the wrong way and aroused the resentment of the
frying-pan and its "pards" of the domestic range.
I at once began to talk about something I was reading, to let him down
easy and to open him up wider, for I was anxious to burrow into the
mystery and dig exploration shafts in all directions. As he seemed to
close again, I allowed my comment to drool off into a hum, and then
looked up short in a way to send his ideas from mark-time to a
continuance of the procession.
"You know that young lady, Miss Tescheron--Miss Gabrielle Tescheron?"
asked Jim, tossing his hair into windrows and looking straight away from
me.
"Why, I know that lovely girl I've seen you with; is her name--"
"Yes, that's her name, and we're to be married."
"Jim, old boy, let me congratulate you." And we shook hands over this
creature who was to wreck our happy home--still, I felt there wouldn't
be enough crockery to continue on unless the thing was settled in church
or at Sing Sing pretty soon.
"When is it to come off?" I continued, that question usually being No. 2
to the hand-shake and congratulations.
"Ben, I mention this matter because I feel that I need your friendship
now more than ever," said he, disregarding my inquiry in a way which
clearly showed that Cupid had stubbed a toe. "I am up against it. Tell
me, what should be done? You must know a lot about such matters, and I
don't seem to understand. It's the old man, her pa; a little
whipper-snapper of a dude. I could swat him with my little finger and
settle him in a minute. George! I've a mind to, at that."
"That, of course, is out of the question," I advised, tackling the
matter as if time and again the fat of my theories had been tried out
into the dripping of wedded affinities. "Soft dealing with parents is
essential." This wisdom came also as if I were quoting from a book by a
Mormon, who had handled every variety of father-in-law. "On what does pa
base his opposition?"
"Well, I'll tell you," said Jim, preparing to confess all and let me do
the penance. "But it's such blamed nonsense, I'm almost afraid to. It
shows what an infernal old fool he is."
"How old is pa?" I inquired.
"Oh, he's an old 'un."
"Says you're old enough to be her father, doesn't he?"
"That's it, but he's off; and how would you get around it, anyway--by
postponing it?"
Jim's notion of ages, and Tescheron's, I feared were both wide of the
mark, but I let that pass. One was vain and mad, and the other did not
observe closely.
"Is that all he said?" I asked.
"Well, no. I'll tell you just what he said as near as I can remember,
and see if you can figure out the answer. I came away to-day from his
office, squeezed out and dried up, but I gave him no back talk. I simply
said, 'Mr. Tescheron, I love your daughter, Gabrielle, and I am here,
sir, to ask you to set the day for the wedding,' just like that, as
pleasant as if I was chatting to him after church. Say, I thought he
would hurrah, or take me around to lunch (it was then after noon) and
introduce me to his friends. But he proceeded to breathe an early frost
on my green and tender leaves. As I was about to say, Ben, as near as I
can remember after rehearsing all this afternoon is this--and I tell
you, because if I don't the chances are I'll go right on rehearsing it
forever in some asylum, and then everybody will hear it till they are
sick and tired of it, and the curtain won't rise on the real show. Said
he: 'Well, so you say, so you say, so you say!' This beat me. I had
never heard a man talk that way."
"I've heard that kind," said I, knowingly. "He took stitches in his
conversation."
"'So you say, so you say. What say I? So? No.' That has been running
through my head in a way to set me crazy," continued Jim. "'Do I want a
son-in-law nearly as old as I am?' the little jackanapes asked me. 'Not
I. So you see, you are too old for Gabrielle.' Now, what do you think of
that? Doesn't that beat you? Why, the old chap is over fifty, and he
says I am older than he is. I actually believe he's crazy. Hair dye and
cologne and young men's clothes seem to give him the notion that he is
about thirty and became Gabrielle's father when he was about five years
old. He's got an idea from somewhere that I'm twice as old as I am
because I'm twice as big as he is--that's the most reasonable way I can
look at it. Well, I got so dry in the roof of my mouth I couldn't stub
my tongue on it to turn a word; my eyes burned and a cold sweat started.
No man his size had ever floored me before. I tried hard to remember he
was Gabrielle's father, and out of respect for her I should not injure
him. He then piled in on me again. 'That is not all,' he said.
'Gabrielle is ambitious. You are lazy. You have wasted your youth. Look
at you! A man of your age who has done nothing yet!'"
From this I gathered that Tescheron's objections were at first personal.
He did not find Jim to his liking and was probably urging his daughter
to regard the suitor in the same light. Later in the day the better
excuse learned from the great detective bureau came to his support.
"What do you think of that, Ben?" continued Jim. "What has he done to
brag about? Should I bring a birth certificate?"
"Yes, but he is not marrying Gabrielle himself," said I. "He is trying
to help her to find a good husband. You must be generous, Jim, and give
a father his due."
"Shucks! He spends all his pay on his clothes. Such a dresser you never
saw, and what is he? A rubber-neck, that's all."
"A what?"
"I asked one of the fellows who worked where he does, some time ago,
what old man Tescheron did, and he told me he was a rubber-neck. Now, I
know very well that a rubber-neck is a fellow who goes around to corner
groceries to see what other kinds of crackers are sold there besides the
brands furnished by his house. He starts in talking about the price of
green-groceries, drifts along for five or ten minutes, and keeps
squinting over the cracker boxes. To stave off suspicion he buys an
apple, peels it carefully and eats it slowly, while he incidentally
craves a cracker and proceeds to pump the innocent grocer on his cracker
business. He writes out his notes in full afterward and that grocer is
then described on a card index at the main office as handling such and
such goods. I ought to know what rubber-necks are, having been around
groceries enough."
"A sort of cracker detective," said I.
"That's all. A common, ordinary rubber-neck--gets about fifteen a week.
By the way he dresses you'd think he had a king's job. Think of him
looking down upon me. Small as I am, I lead him."
"I wonder would he turn up his nose at me, an Inspector of Offensive
Trades?" I queried, sadly. "But go ahead, Jim, and stick to your story,
for I can see that there is plenty of trouble ahead for you."
This startled Jim into a more direct presentation of his problem.
"Well, I up and told him, said I: 'Mr. Tescheron, Miss Gabrielle and I
would like to be married at her home some time soon,' said I; 'and if
you don't wish it that way,' said I, 'I guess we can find a place that
will be big enough and will answer just as well,' said I; and then I
began to start up warmer and get bolder, when he shut me off with a
string of cuss words that ran all over me. I didn't suppose he could
talk that way, but no one in the office seemed to mind, although I'll
bet you could have heard him a mile down South Street."
"South Street?" I asked, in a surprised tone not observed by the
single-minded Jim. "Where's his office?"
"Fulton Market."
"The place they deal in fish at wholesale. And yet you say he is a
rubber-neck for a cracker house?" I connected the faint suggestion of
fish at the Fifth Avenue Hotel with the case at this point, and knew at
once Tescheron's business, and from my knowledge gained by many
inspections at the market inferred that the father of the girl was a
millionaire.
"A queer place for the cracker business," said I.
"Well, a fellow told me; that's all I know," said Jim. "I haven't been
sitting on the same sofa with the old gentleman asking him questions."
"Jim, do you know that you have this prospective father-in-law all
twisted? He's something besides a cheap dude," said I. "He's no
rubber-neck. I'll bet the old chap is well off, and do you want to know
why he dresses so fine and keeps cologne on his handkerchief?"
"That's right, he does," said Jim with a wondering gaze. "And it's
sickening to find a little, weazened, sawed-off cuss doing it--just to
get people to look around to locate him, I warrant. There'd be no
questions about old Tescheron if it warn't for his gasoline."
"No, no. You are away off, Jim. You don't know so much about perfumes
and their antidotes as I do, and besides, you're not expected to,
because it is not your profession. My nose is my bread and butter. I am
an expert in the analysis of the nether atmosphere. Any composite bunch
of air striking my acute analytic apparatus is at once split into its
elements. Put me blindfolded in a woman's kitchen and I can tell you if
there is pumpkin pie and rhubarb under cover there, and where they keep
the butter and cheese. I can tell you what kind of microbes live in the
cellar and all about their relatives, and even if there are moths or
other evidences of winged occupancy among the fauna of the mattresses on
the floors above. Wonderful, of course; but it's in my line, that's all.
Given a peculiar kind of brains and any man can do it just as easily. My
great deficiencies in other respects have all tended to the enlargement
of this faculty. By some accident of nature my ancestors appear to have
inclined toward obtaining a higher development of this sense so
important to the protection of life in these days of crowded living. Of
course, they did it unconsciously; but Fate wisely predisposes, I
believe--"
"Well, what has this all got to do with Gabrielle?" interrupted Jim,
crossing first one leg and then the other, and tossing his hair into
cocks ready to be thrown on the rigging.
"Patience, Jim, old boy. You can't solve these great mysteries of life
which confront us at every crisis of our existence, by jumping off the
handle. I am ready to tell you, however, that I have hastily turned over
in my mind such data as you have given me, and I find that you have
blundered into a favorable position. It will not do for you to make any
moves without consulting me, however. If you can patiently bear up while
I handle the case for you for a few days--"
"You may handle the father all you please," interrupted Jim, "but not
Gabrielle. Everything is quiet at that end of the line."
"Of course," said I. "I would be no good there. Let me adjust the old
gentleman. You may be thankful that the trail leads to a wholesale
fish-market. I will be right at home there. I think I can surprise
you."