professor stood rooted to the spot for a moment, and then was about to
leap to the door, when the simulacrums before him sprang to their feet
and with a tremendous stamping, smote their wooden legs upon the
floor, "stamp, stamp--stamp, stamp, stamp--stamp."
The professor stared at the twelve mutes. There were their immobile
faces, as wooden as their wooden legs, wearing their perpetual grin,
but the westering sun shone on their eyes and there he saw an abject,
grovelling fear, dreadful to behold, the master passion of twelve
souls, slaves to some mysterious will which had just made itself
manifest out of the unseen. By what means the will had gained this
ascendancy, the terrible disfigurements of their remnants of bodies
told only too well, and he who ran could read the utter prostration
before the power which in their lives had been the greatest and most
terrible in the universe. Again, far off in a distant corridor of the
building, slowly rumbled to them: "knock, knock--knock; knock,
knock--knock," and the twelve unfortunates, like so many automatons,
gave token of their obedience. They had been warned to keep the
secret.
And so was foiled the attempts of the learned anthropologists to hold
converse with these rudimentary beings. The alphabet of such elaborate
devisings went for naught. Never did the twelve persons in the state
of primitive culture get further than the letter C: "knock,
knock--knock; knock, knock--knock."
_What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Fifth Gift of the Emir._
"I am at a loss to understand," said Mr. Middleton, "why you have
entitled the narration you have just related, 'The Pleasant Adventures
of Dr. McDill.' For to my mind, they seemed anything but pleasant
adventures."
"How so?" asked the emir. "Is it not pleasant to thwart the
machinations and defeat the evil intentions of the villains such as
composed the confederacy that sought the doctor's life? Does there not
reside in mankind a sense of justice which rejoices at seeing meted
out to wrong-doers the deserts of their crimes?"
To which Mr. Middleton replying with a nod of thoughtful assent, after
a proper period of rumination upon the words of the emir, that
accomplished ruler continued:
"Despite the boasted protection of the law, how often is a man
compelled to rely for his protection upon his own prowess, skill or
address. There are many occasions when right under the nose of the
police, one saves himself by the resort to physical strength, weapons,
or the use of a cajoling tongue. Theoretically, Dr. McDill was amply
protected by the mantle of the law. In reality, it was man to man as
much as if he had met his foes in the Arabian desert, with none but
himself and them and the vultures. Do you go armed?"
"No," replied Mr. Middleton, with a flippant smile; "but I can go
pretty fast, and that has heretofore done as well as going armed."
"Young man," said the emir, sternly, "a bullet can outstrip your
fleetest footsteps. There may never be but one occasion when you will
need a weapon, but on that occasion the possession of the means of
protection may spell the difference between life and life."
Hardly had he uttered them, before Mr. Middleton regretted his forward
and pert words, for never before had he answered the emir lightly,
such was his respect for him as a man of goodly parts and as one set
in authority, and such was his gratitude toward him as a benefactor.
Stammering forth what was at once an apology and an acknowledgement of
the wisdom of what the emir had said, Mr. Middleton began to make
preparations to go. But Prince Achmed bade him wait, and saying a few
words to Mesrour in the Arabic language, the blackamore brought to him
a pair of pistols of a formidable aspect. In sooth, one could hardly
tell whether they ought to be called pistols, or culverins. In the
shape of the stocks alone could anyone detect that they were pistols.
The bore of each was more than an inch in diameter, and the octagonal
barrels of thick steel, heavily inlaid with silver, were a foot and a
half long. The handles, which were in proportion to the barrels and so
long that four hands could grasp them, were so completely covered with
an inlay of pearl that no wood was visible. Taking one of them, the
emir rammed home a great load of powder, upon which he placed a
handful of balls as large as marbles. Having served the second
likewise, he handed the pair to Mr. Middleton.
"Take them. Protected by them, you need have little fear. But woe
betide the man who stands in front of them, for so wide is the
distribution of their charge, that he must be a most indifferent
marksman who could not do execution with them."
Thanking the emir for the gift and the entertainment and instruction
of his discourse, Mr. Middleton departed. Impressed though he had been
by Prince Achmed's counsel and by the lesson to be derived from the
recital of the experiences of Dr. McDill, Mr. Middleton did not carry
the pistols as he went about his daily vocation. It was impossible to
so bestow them about his garments that they did not cause large and
unsightly protuberances and to carry them openly was not to be thought
of. Their weight, too, was so great that it was burdensome to carry
them in any manner. Coming into his room unexpectedly in the middle of
the forenoon of the Thursday following the acquisition of the weapons,
he surprised Hilda Svenson, maid of all work, in the act of examining
one of them, which she had extracted from the place where they lay
concealed in the lower bureau drawer beneath a pile of underclothing.
With a start of guilty surprise, Hilda let the pistol fall to the
floor. Fortunately it did not go off, but nonetheless was he convinced
that he ought to dispose of the two weapons, for any day Hilda might
shoot herself with one, while on the weekly sheet changing day, Mrs.
Leschinger, the landlady, might shoot herself with the other. There
was no place in the room where he could conceal them from the
painstaking investigations of Hilda and Mrs. Leschinger, and the
expedient of extracting the charges not occurring to him, he felt that
it was clearly his duty to remove the lives of the two women from
jeopardy by disposing of the pistols. He was in truth pained at the
necessity of parting with the gifts which the emir had made with such
solicitude for his welfare and as some assuagement to this regret he
sought to dispose of them as profitably as possible. With this end in
view, he made an appointment for a private audience after hours with
Mr. Sidney Kuppenheimer, who conducted a large loan bank on Madison
Street and was reputed a connoisseur and admirer of all kinds of
curios.
On the evening for which he had made the appointment, he set forth,
intending to make an early and short call upon his friend Chauncy
Stackelberg and wife, before repairing to Mr. Kuppenheimer's place of
business. But such was the engaging quality of the conversation of the
newly married couple, abounding both in humor and good sense, and so
interested was he in hearing of the haps and mishaps of married life,
a state he hoped to enter as soon as fortune and the young lady of
Englewood should be propitious, that he was unaware of the flight of
time until in the midst of a pause in the conversation, he heard the
cathedral clock Mrs. Stackelberg's uncle had given her as a wedding
present, solemnly tolling the hour of eleven. The hour Mr.
Kuppenheimer had named was one hour agone. To have kept the
appointment, he should have started two hours before.
Another half hour had flown before Mr. Middleton, having paused to
partake of some chow-chow recently made by Mrs. Stackelberg and highly
recommended by her liege, finally left the house, carrying a pistol in
either hand. The night was somewhat cloudy, but although there was
neither moon nor stars, it was much lighter than on some nights when
all the minor luminaries are ablaze, or the moon itself is aloft,
shining in its first or last quarter, a phenomenon remarked upon by an
able Italian scientist in the middle of the last century and by him
attributed to some luminous quality that inheres in the clouds
themselves. Mr. Middleton was walking along engrossed in thoughts of
the scene of domestic bliss he had lately quitted and in dreams of the
even more delightful home he hoped to some day enjoy with the young
lady of Englewood, when he suddenly became cognizant of four
individuals a short distance away, comporting themselves in an unusual
and peculiar manner. Cautiously approaching them as quietly as
possible, he perceived that it was two robbers despoiling two citizens
of their valuables, one pair standing in the middle of the street, one
on the sidewalk, the citizens with their hands elevated above their
heads in a strained and uncomfortable attitude, while each
robber--with back to him--was pointing a revolver with one hand and
turning pockets inside out with the other.
With a resolution and celerity that astonished him, as he afterwards
dwelt upon it in retrospect, Mr. Middleton rushed silently upon the
nearest robber, him in the street, and dealt him a terrible blow upon
the head with the barrel of a pistol. Without a sound, the robber sank
to the earth, whereupon the citizen, whether he had lost his head
through fear, or thought Mr. Middleton a new and more dangerous
outlaw, fled away like the wind. Snatching the bag of valuables in the
unconscious thief's hands, Mr. Middleton made toward the other robber,
who, to his astonishment, hissed without looking around:
"What did you let your man get away for, you fool? Try and make
yourself useful somehow. Hold this swag and cover the man, so I can
have both hands and get through quick."
Taking the valuables the robber handed him, Mr. Middleton with
calmness and deliberation placed them in his pockets, after which he
placed a muzzle of a pistol in the back of the robber's neck and
sharply commanded:
"Hands up!"
Up went the robber's hands as if he were a jumping-jack jerked by a
string, whereupon his late victim, doubtless animated by the same
emotions as those of the other citizens, fled away like the wind, but
not in silence, for at every jump he bellowed, "Thieves, murder,
help!"
A window slammed up in the house before which they were standing and
the glare of an electric bicycle lamp played full upon Mr. Middleton
and his prisoner.
"I've got him," said Mr. Middleton, proudly.
"Got him! Got him!" gasped an astonished voice. "Well, of all
effrontery! Got him, you miserable thief? The police are coming and
they'll get you, and I can identify you, if they don't succeed in
nabbing you red-handed."
Shocked and almost paralyzed, Mr. Middleton turned to expostulate with
the misled householder, when the robber, seizing the opportunity, fled
away like the wind, bellowing at every jump, "Thieves, murder, help!"
and as if aroused by the sound of his compatriot's voice, the thief
who had been lying unconscious in the street all this while, arose and
hastened away, somewhat unsteadily, it is true, yet at a considerable
degree of speed.
It did not require any extended reflective processes for Mr. Middleton
to tell himself that if he waited for the police, he would be in a
very bad plight, for he had the stolen property upon his person, the
thieves had gone, and even if the victims were able to say he was not
one of the two original thieves--which their disturbed state of mind
made most uncertain--they would be likely to declare him a thief
notwithstanding, a charge which the stolen property on his person
would bear out. The police could now be heard down the street and the
householder was making the welkin ring with vociferous shouts. With a
sudden access of rage at this individual whose well-intended efforts
had thwarted justice and might yet fasten crime upon innocence, Mr.
Middleton pointed a pistol at the upper pane of the window where shone
the bicycle lamp. There was a roar that shook the air, followed by a
crash of glass and the clatter of a dozen bullets upon the brick wall
of the house, and a shriek of terror from the householder and the
bicycle lamp instantly vanished. With a heart strangely at peace in
the midst of the dangers that encompassed him, Mr. Middleton sped up
the street, dashed through an alleyway, back for a block on the next
street in the direction he had just come, and thenceforth leisurely
and with an appearance of virtue he did not need to feign, made his
way home without molestation.
Upon examining the booty that had so strangely come into his
possession, Mr. Middleton was at a loss to think which were the
greater villains, those who had robbed, or those who had been robbed.
One wallet contained five hundred and forty dollars in greenbacks and
some memoranda accompanying it showed that it was a corruption fund to
be used in bribing voters at an approaching election. The other wallet
contained sixty dollars and a detailed plan for bribery, fraud, and
intimidation which was to be carried out in one of the doubtful wards.
There were also some silver coins, and two gold watches bearing no
names or marks that could identify their owners, but the detailed plan
contained the name of the politician who had drawn it up and who was
to be benefited by its successful accomplishment. This was a clue by
following which Mr. Middleton might have found the parties who had
been robbed and return their property, but he was deterred from doing
so by several considerations. The knowledge he had of the proposed
fraud was exceedingly dangerous to the interests of one of the
political parties and to the personal interests of one of the bosses
of that party. It would be clearly to their advantage to have Mr.
Middleton jailed and so put where there would be no danger that he
would divulge the information in his possession. Besides this, the
money was to be used for corrupt purposes, would go into the hands of
evil men who would spend it evilly. Deprived of it, a thoroughly bad
man was less likely to be elected. For these moral and prudential
reasons, Mr. Middleton saw that it was plainly his duty to the public
and to himself to retain the money. The victims, bearing in mind that
the recovery of the money by the police would also mean the discovery
of the incriminating documents and that any persecution of the robbers
might incite them to sell the documents to the opposite party, would
be very chary about doing or saying anything. But there was the
householder, who surely would tell his tale and who had an idea of Mr.
Middleton's personal appearance. Accordingly, that excellent young man
disposed of the gold watches to one Isaac Fiscovitz on lower State
Street, and with the results of the exchange purchased an entirely new
suit, new hat, and new shoes. The incriminating documents, he placed
under the carpet in his room against a time when he might see an
opportunity to safely dispose of them to the pecuniary advantage of
himself and to the discomfiture of the contemptible creature whose
handiwork they were.
He said nothing of these transactions when on the appointed evening he
once more sat in the presence of the urbane prince of the tribe of
Al-Yam. Having handed him a bowl of delicately flavored sherbet,
Achmed began the narration of The Adventure of Miss Clarissa Dawson.
_The Adventure of Miss Clarissa Dawson._
Miss Clarissa Dawson was a young lady who had charge of the cutlery
counter in one of the great emporiums of State Street. She was
reckoned of a pretty wit and not more cutting were the Sheffield
razors that were piled before her than the remarks she sometimes made
to those who, incited thereto by her reputation for readiness of
retort, sought to engage her in a contest of repartee. It was seldom
that she issued from these encounters other than triumphant, leaving
her presumptuous opponents defeated and chagrined. But in the month of
November of the last year, for once she owned to herself that she had
been overcome,--overcome, it is true, because her adversary was
plainly a person of stupidity, mailed by his doltishness against the
keenest sarcasm she could launch against him, yet nevertheless
overcome. To her choicest bit of irony, the individual replied,
"Somebody left you on the grindstone and forgot to take you off," to
which the most adroit in quips and quirks could find no fitting
replication, unless it were to indulge in facial contortion or
invective, and Miss Clarissa was too much of a lady to do either.
Forced into silence, she had no resource but to seek to transfix him
with a protracted and contemptuous stare, which, though failing to
disconcert the object, put her in possession of the facts that he had
mild blue eyes, that the remnants of his hair were red, that he was
slightly above middle height and below middle age, and that there was
little about his face and still less his figure to distinguish him
from a multitude of men of the average type. Indeed, one could not
even conjecture his nationality, for his type was one to be seen in
all branches of the Indo-European race. If from a package in his upper
left-hand coat pocket, which, broken, disclosed some wieners, you
concluded he was of the German nation, a short dudeen in an upper vest
pocket would seem to indicate that he was an Irishman. His coat was of
black cheviot, new, and of the current cut. His vest was of corduroy,
of the kind in vogue in the past decade, while his pantaloons, black,
with a faint green line in them, were a compromise, being of a
non-commital cut that would never be badly out of style in any modern
period.
Sustaining Miss Clarissa's stare with great composure, he purchased
six German razors at thirty-five cents each, six English at fifty,
twelve American at the same price, and a stray French razor at
sixty-two.
"Don't you want some razorine?" asked Miss Clarissa. "It makes
razors--and other things--sharper."
"Why don't you use it, then, instead of lobsterine?" replied the
stranger, picking up his package and the change. Miss Clarissa
deigning to give no reply but an angry frown, the stranger expressed
his gratitude for the amusement he intimated she had afforded him and
he further said he hoped he would see her at the Charity Ball and he
made bold to ask her to save the second two-step for him, and
thereafter departed, having declined Miss Clarissa's offer to have his
purchases sent to his address, an offer dictated not by a spirit of
accommodation and kindliness, but by a desire to learn in what part of
the city he had his residence.
On the morrow again came a man to purchase razors, of which there was
a large number on Miss Clarissa's counter, traveling men's samples for
sale at ridiculous prices. The man had purchased two dozen razors
before Miss Clarissa, noting this similarity to the transactions of
the odious person and thereby led to take a good look at him, observed
with astonishment that this new man had on exactly the same suit that
had been worn by the purchaser of the day before. She recognized the
fabric, the color, everything down to a discoloration on the left coat
lapel. Here the resemblance ended. The second individual was a young
man. He had a heavy shock of abundant hair. He was not more than
twenty-eight years old and so far from being commonplace, he was of a
distinguished appearance. But as the eyes of Miss Clarissa continued
to dwell upon him in some admiration, she told herself that the
resemblance did not end with the clothes, after all. His eyes were of
the same blue, his hair of the same auburn as those of the man of
yesterday. Indeed, the man of yesterday might have been this man with
twenty years added on him, with the light of hope and ambition dimmed
by contact with the world, and his youthful alertness and dash
succeeded by the resigned vacuity of one who has seen none of his
early dreams realized. Again did Miss Clarissa ask if he would have
his purchases sent to his address, but this time it was not entirely
curiosity and the perfunctory performance of a duty, for she would
gladly have been of service to one of such a pleasing presence.
Communing with himself for a moment, the young man said:
"On the whole, you may. But they must be delivered to me in person,
into my own hands. I would take them, but I have a number of other
things to take. Remember, they are to be delivered to me in person,"
and he handed her a card which announced that his name was Asbury
Fuller and on which was written in lead pencil the address of a house
in a quarter of the city which, once the most fashionable of all, had
suffered from the encroachments of trade and where a few mansions yet
occupied by the aristocracy were surrounded by the deserted homes of
families which had fled to the newer haunts of fashion, leaving their
former abodes to be occupied by boarding mistresses, dentists,
doctors, clairvoyants, and a whole host of folk whose names would
never be in the papers until their burial permits were issued.
Miss Clarissa did a very peculiar thing. It was already four o'clock
of a Saturday afternoon. Instead of immediately giving the package
into the hands of the delivery department, she retained it and, at
closing time, going to the room where ready made uniforms for
messenger boys were kept, she purloined one. Now it must be known that
the principal reason for doing a thing so unusual, not to say
indiscreet, was her desire to obey the young man's injunction to hand
the razors into his own hands and no others. She had become possessed
of the idea that some disaster would befall if the razors came into
the possession of any one else. Moreover, the stranger had humbled her
in the contest of repartee, which, as a true woman, had made her
entertain an admiration for him, and this and his strange disguises
and his unaccountable purchases had surrounded him with a mist of
romantic mystery she fain would penetrate. Some little time before, it
had been Miss Clarissa's misfortune, through sickness, to lose much of
her hair. It had now begun to grow again and resume its former
luxuriant abundance, but by removing several switches--of her own
hair--and the bolster commonly called a rat, and sleeking her hair
down hard with oil, she appeared as a boy might who was badly in need
of a haircut. After a light supper, she set out alone for the
residence of Asbury Fuller and at the end of her journey found herself
at the gateway of a somber edifice, which was apparently the only one
in the block that was inhabited. On either side and across the way
were vacant houses, lonesome and forbidding. Indeed, the residence of
Asbury Fuller was itself scarcely less lonesome and forbidding. The
grass of the plot before it was long and unkempt and heavily covered
with mats of autumn leaves. The bricks of the front walk were sunken
and uneven and the steps leading to the high piazza were deeply
warped, as by pools of water that had lain and dried on their unswept
surface through many seasons. The blinds hung awry and the paint on
the great front doors was scaling, and altogether it was a faded
magnificence, this of Asbury Fuller. She pulled the handle of the
front-door bell and in response to its jangling announcement came a
maid.
"Asbury Fuller?" said the maid, omitting the "Mr." Miss Clarissa had
affixed. "Go to the side door around to the right."
Wondering if this were a lodging house and Asbury Fuller had a private
entrance, or if it being his own house he had left word that callers
should be sent to the side door to prevent the delivery of the razors
being seen by others, Clarissa followed the walk through an avenue of
dead syringa bushes and came to the side door. The same maid who had
met her before, ushered her in and presently she found herself in a
small apartment, almost a closet, standing at the back of Asbury
Fuller. But though small, she remarked that the apartment was one of
some magnificence, for on all sides was a quantity of burnished
copper, binding the edges of a row of shelves and covering the whole
top of a broad counter-like projection running along one side of the
wall. Before this, Asbury Fuller was standing, assorting a number of
cut-glass goblets of various sizes and putting them upon silver
salvers, bottles of various colored wines being placed upon each
salver with the goblets. He turned at her entrance and the look of sad
and gloomy abstraction sitting upon his countenance instantly changed
to one of relief and joy.