But blowing your brains out is a noisy, rackety performance, and Pupkin
soon found that only special kinds of brains are suited for it. So he
always sneaked back again later in the night and put the revolver in its
place, deciding to drown himself instead. Yet every time that he walked
down to the Trestle Bridge over the Ossawippi he found it was quite
unsuitable for drowning--too high, and the water too swift and black,
and the rushes too gruesome--in fact, not at all the kind of place for a
drowning.
Far better, he realized, to wait there on the railroad track and throw
himself under the wheels of the express and be done with it. Yet, though
Pupkin often waited in this way for the train, he was never able to pick
out a pair of wheels that suited him. Anyhow, it's awfully hard to tell
an express from a fast freight.
I wouldn't mention these attempts at suicide if one of them hadn't
finally culminated in making Peter Pupkin a hero and solving for him the
whole perplexed entanglement of his love affair with Zena Pepperleigh.
Incidentally it threw him into the very centre of one of the most
impenetrable bank mysteries that ever baffled the ingenuity of some of
the finest legal talent that ever adorned one of the most enterprising
communities in the country.
It happened one night, as I say, that Pupkin decided to go down into
the office of the bank and get his revolver and see if it would blow his
brains out. It was the night of the Firemen's Ball and Zena had danced
four times with a visitor from the city, a man who was in the fourth
year at the University and who knew everything. It was more than Peter
Pupkin could bear. Mallory Tompkins was away that night, and when Pupkin
came home he was all alone in the building, except for Gillis, the
caretaker, who lived in the extension at the back.
He sat in his room for hours brooding. Two or three times he picked up a
book--he remembered afterwards distinctly that it was Kant's Critique
of Pure Reason--and tried to read it, but it seemed meaningless and
trivial. Then with a sudden access of resolution he started from his
chair and made his way down the stairs and into the office room of the
bank, meaning to get a revolver and kill himself on the spot and let
them find his body lying on the floor.
It was then far on in the night and the empty building of the bank was
as still as death. Pupkin could hear the stairs creak under his feet,
and as he went he thought he heard another sound like the opening or
closing of a door. But it sounded not like the sharp ordinary noise of
a closing door but with a dull muffled noise as if someone had shut
the iron door of a safe in a room under the ground. For a moment Pupkin
stood and listened with his heart thumping against his ribs. Then he
kicked his slippers from his feet and without a sound stole into the
office on the ground floor and took the revolver from his teller's desk.
As he gripped it, he listened to the sounds on the back-stairway and in
the vaults below.
I should explain that in the Exchange Bank of Mariposa the offices are
on the ground floor level with the street. Below this is another floor
with low dark rooms paved with flagstones, with unused office desks and
with piles of papers stored in boxes. On this floor are the vaults of
the bank, and lying in them in the autumn--the grain season--there is
anything from fifty to a hundred thousand dollars in currency tied in
bundles. There is no other light down there than the dim reflection from
the lights out on the street, that lies in patches on the stone floor.
I think as Peter Pupkin stood, revolver in hand, in the office of
the bank, he had forgotten all about the maudlin purpose of his first
coming. He had forgotten for the moment all about heroes and love
affairs, and his whole mind was focussed, sharp and alert, with the
intensity of the night-time, on the sounds that he heard in the vault
and on the back-stairway of the bank.
Straight away, Pupkin knew what it meant as plainly as if it were
written in print. He had forgotten, I say, about being a hero and he
only knew that there was sixty thousand dollars in the vault of the bank
below, and that he was paid eight hundred dollars a year to look after
it.
As Peter Pupkin stood there listening to the sounds in his stockinged
feet, his faced showed grey as ashes in the light that fell through the
window from the street. His heart beat like a hammer against his ribs.
But behind its beatings was the blood of four generations of Loyalists,
and the robber who would take that sixty thousand dollars from the
Mariposa bank must take it over the dead body of Peter Pupkin, teller.
Pupkin walked down the stairs to the lower room, the one below the
ground with the bank vault in it, with as fine a step as any of his
ancestors showed on parade. And if he had known it, as he came down the
stairway in the front of the vault room, there was a man crouched in the
shadow of the passage way by the stairs at the back. This man, too, held
a revolver in his hand, and, criminal or not, his face was as resolute
as Pupkin's own. As he heard the teller's step on the stair, he turned
and waited in the shadow of the doorway without a sound.
There is no need really to mention all these details. They are only
of interest as showing how sometimes a bank teller in a corded smoking
jacket and stockinged feet may be turned into such a hero as even the
Mariposa girls might dream about.
All of this must have happened at about three o'clock in the night.
This much was established afterwards from the evidence of Gillis, the
caretaker. When he first heard the sounds he had looked at his watch and
noticed that it was half-past two; the watch he knew was three-quarters
of an hour slow three days before and had been gaining since. The exact
time at which Gillis heard footsteps in the bank and started downstairs,
pistol in hand, became a nice point afterwards in the cross-examination.
But one must not anticipate. Pupkin reached the iron door of the bank
safe, and knelt in front of it, feeling in the dark to find the fracture
of the lock. As he knelt, he heard a sound behind him, and swung round
on his knees and saw the bank robber in the half light of the passage
way and the glitter of a pistol in his hand. The rest was over in an
instant. Pupkin heard a voice that was his own, but that sounded strange
and hollow, call out: "Drop that, or I'll fire!" and then just as he
raised his revolver, there came a blinding flash of light before his
eyes, and Peter Pupkin, junior teller of the bank, fell forward on the
floor and knew no more.
At that point, of course, I ought to close down a chapter, or volume,
or, at least, strike the reader over the head with a sandbag to force
him to stop and think. In common fairness one ought to stop here and
count a hundred or get up and walk round a block, or, at any rate,
picture to oneself Peter Pupkin lying on the floor of the bank,
motionless, his arms distended, the revolver still grasped in his hand.
But I must go on.
By half-past seven on the following morning it was known all over
Mariposa that Peter Pupkin the junior teller of the Exchange had been
shot dead by a bank robber in the vault of the building. It was known
also that Gillis, the caretaker, had been shot and killed at the foot of
the stairs, and that the robber had made off with fifty thousand dollars
in currency; that he had left a trail of blood on the sidewalk and that
the men were out tracking him with bloodhounds in the great swamps to
the north of the town.
This, I say, and it is important to note it, was what they knew at
half-past seven. Of course as each hour went past they learned more
and more. At eight o'clock it was known that Pupkin was not dead, but
dangerously wounded in the lungs. At eight-thirty it was known that he
was not shot in the lungs, but that the ball had traversed the pit of
his stomach.
At nine o'clock it was learned that the pit of Pupkin's stomach was all
right, but that the bullet had struck his right ear and carried it away.
Finally it was learned that his ear had not exactly been carried away,
that is, not precisely removed by the bullet, but that it had grazed
Pupkin's head in such a way that it had stunned him, and if it had been
an inch or two more to the left it might have reached his brain. This,
of course, was just as good as being killed from the point of view of
public interest.
Indeed, by nine o'clock Pupkin could be himself seen on the Main Street
with a great bandage sideways on his head, pointing out the traces of
the robber. Gillis, the caretaker, too, it was known by eight, had not
been killed. He had been shot through the brain, but whether the injury
was serious or not was only a matter of conjecture. In fact, by ten
o'clock it was understood that the bullet from the robber's second shot
had grazed the side of the caretaker's head, but as far as could be
known his brain was just as before. I should add that the first report
about the bloodstains and the swamp and the bloodhounds turned out to
be inaccurate. The stains may have been blood, but as they led to the
cellar way of Netley's store they may have also been molasses, though it
was argued, to be sure, that the robber might well have poured molasses
over the bloodstains from sheer cunning.
It was remembered, too, that there were no bloodhounds in Mariposa,
although, mind you, there are any amount of dogs there.
So you see that by ten o'clock in the morning the whole affair was
settling into the impenetrable mystery which it ever since remained.
Not that there wasn't evidence enough. There was Pupkin's own story
and Gillis's story, and the stories of all the people who had heard the
shots and seen the robber (some said, the bunch of robbers) go running
past (others said, walking past), in the night. Apparently the robber
ran up and down half the streets of Mariposa before he vanished.
But the stories of Pupkin and Gillis were plain enough. Pupkin related
that he heard sounds in the bank and came downstairs just in time to
see the robber crouching in the passage way, and that the robber was
a large, hulking, villainous looking man, wearing a heavy coat. Gillis
told exactly the same story, having heard the noises at the same
time, except that he first described the robber as a small thin fellow
(peculiarly villainous looking, however, even in the dark), wearing a
short jacket; but on thinking it over, Gillis realized that he had been
wrong about the size of the criminal, and that he was even bigger, if
anything, than what Mr. Pupkin thought. Gillis had fired at the robber;
just at the same moment had Mr. Pupkin.
Beyond that, all was mystery, absolute and impenetrable.
By eleven o'clock the detectives had come up from the city under orders
from the head of the bank.
I wish you could have seen the two detectives as they moved to and fro
in Mariposa--fine looking, stern, impenetrable men that they were. They
seemed to take in the whole town by instinct and so quietly. They found
their way to Mr. Smith's Hotel just as quietly as if it wasn't design at
all and stood there at the bar, picking up scraps of conversation--you
know the way detectives do it. Occasionally they allowed one or two
bystanders--confederates, perhaps,--to buy a drink for them, and you
could see from the way they drank it that they were still listening for
a clue. If there had been the faintest clue in Smith's Hotel or in the
Mariposa House or in the Continental, those fellows would have been at
it like a flash.
To see them moving round the town that day--silent, massive,
imperturbable--gave one a great idea of their strange, dangerous
calling. They went about the town all day and yet in such a quiet
peculiar way that you couldn't have realized that they were working at
all. They ate their dinner together at Smith's cafe and took an hour and
a half over it to throw people off the scent. Then when they got them
off it, they sat and talked with Josh Smith in the back bar to keep them
off. Mr. Smith seemed to take to them right away. They were men of his
own size, or near it, and anyway hotel men and detectives have a
general affinity and share in the same impenetrable silence and in their
confidential knowledge of the weaknesses of the public.
Mr. Smith, too, was of great use to the detectives. "Boys," he said, "I
wouldn't ask too close as to what folks was out late at night: in this
town it don't do."
When those two great brains finally left for the city on the
five-thirty, it was hard to realize that behind each grand, impassible
face a perfect vortex of clues was seething.
But if the detectives were heroes, what was Pupkin? Imagine him with
his bandage on his head standing in front of the bank and talking of the
midnight robbery with that peculiar false modesty that only heroes are
entitled to use.
I don't know whether you have ever been a hero, but for sheer
exhilaration there is nothing like it. And for Mr. Pupkin, who had gone
through life thinking himself no good, to be suddenly exalted into the
class of Napoleon Bonaparte and John Maynard and the Charge of the Light
Brigade--oh, it was wonderful. Because Pupkin was a brave man now and
he knew it and acquired with it all the brave man's modesty. In fact,
I believe he was heard to say that he had only done his duty, and that
what he did was what any other man would have done: though when somebody
else said: "That's so, when you come to think of it," Pupkin turned on
him that quiet look of the wounded hero, bitterer than words.
And if Pupkin had known that all of the afternoon papers in the city
reported him dead, he would have felt more luxurious still.
That afternoon the Mariposa court sat in enquiry,--technically it was
summoned in inquest on the dead robber--though they hadn't found the
body--and it was wonderful to see them lining up the witnesses and
holding cross-examinations. There is something in the cross-examination
of great criminal lawyers like Nivens, of Mariposa, and in the counter
examinations of presiding judges like Pepperleigh that thrills you to
the core with the astuteness of it.
They had Henry Mullins, the manager, on the stand for an hour and a
half, and the excitement was so breathless that you could have heard a
pin drop. Nivens took him on first.
"What is your name?" he said.
"Henry August Mullins."
"What position do you hold?"
"I am manager of the Exchange Bank."
"When were you born?"
"December 30, 1869."
After that, Nivens stood looking quietly at Mullins. You could feel that
he was thinking pretty deeply before he shot the next question at him.
"Where did you go to school?"
Mullins answered straight off: "The high school down home," and Nivens
thought again for a while and then asked:
"How many boys were at the school?"
"About sixty."
"How many masters?"
"About three."
After that Nivens paused a long while and seemed to be digesting the
evidence, but at last an idea seemed to strike him and he said:
"I understand you were not on the bank premises last night. Where were
you?"
"Down the lake duck shooting."
You should have seen the excitement in the court when Mullins said this.
The judge leaned forward in his chair and broke in at once.
"Did you get any, Harry?" he asked.
"Yes," Mullins said, "about six."
"Where did you get them? What? In the wild rice marsh past the river?
You don't say so! Did you get them on the sit or how?"
All of these questions were fired off at the witness from the court in a
single breath. In fact, it was the knowledge that the first ducks of the
season had been seen in the Ossawippi marsh that led to the termination
of the proceedings before the afternoon was a quarter over. Mullins and
George Duff and half the witnesses were off with shotguns as soon as the
court was cleared.
I may as well state at once that the full story of the robbery of the
bank of Mariposa never came to the light. A number of arrests--mostly
of vagrants and suspicious characters--were made, but the guilt of the
robbery was never brought home to them. One man was arrested twenty
miles away, at the other end of Missinaba county, who not only
corresponded exactly with the description of the robber, but, in
addition to this, had a wooden leg. Vagrants with one leg are always
regarded with suspicion in places like Mariposa, and whenever a robbery
or a murder happens they are arrested in batches.
It was never even known just how much money was stolen from the bank.
Some people said ten thousand dollars, others more. The bank, no doubt
for business motives, claimed that the contents of the safe were intact
and that the robber had been foiled in his design.
But none of this matters to the exaltation of Mr. Pupkin. Good fortune,
like bad, never comes in small instalments. On that wonderful day, every
good thing happened to Peter Pupkin at once. The morning saw him a
hero. At the sitting of the court, the judge publicly told him that his
conduct was fit to rank among the annals of the pioneers of Tecumseh
Township, and asked him to his house for supper. At five o'clock he
received the telegram of promotion from the head office that raised
his salary to a thousand dollars, and made him not only a hero but a
marriageable man. At six o'clock he started up to the judge's house with
his resolution nerved to the most momentous step of his life.
His mind was made up.
He would do a thing seldom if ever done in Mariposa. He would propose to
Zena Pepperleigh. In Mariposa this kind of step, I say, is seldom taken.
The course of love runs on and on through all its stages of tennis
playing and dancing and sleigh riding, till by sheer notoriety of
circumstance an understanding is reached. To propose straight out would
be thought priggish and affected and is supposed to belong only to
people in books.
But Pupkin felt that what ordinary people dare not do, heroes are
allowed to attempt. He would propose to Zena, and more than that, he
would tell her in a straight, manly way that he was rich and take the
consequences.
And he did it.
That night on the piazza, where the hammock hangs in the shadow of
the Virginia creeper, he did it. By sheer good luck the judge had
gone indoors to the library, and by a piece of rare good fortune Mrs.
Pepperleigh had gone indoors to the sewing room, and by a happy trick
of coincidence the servant was out and the dog was tied up--in fact,
no such chain of circumstances was ever offered in favour of mortal man
before.
What Zena said--beyond saying yes--I do not know. I am sure that when
Pupkin told her of the money, she bore up as bravely as so fine a girl
as Zena would, and when he spoke of diamonds she said she would wear
them for his sake.
They were saying these things and other things--ever so many other
things--when there was such a roar and a clatter up Oneida Street as
you never heard, and there came bounding up to the house one of the most
marvellous Limousine touring cars that ever drew up at the home of a
judge on a modest salary of three thousand dollars. When it stopped
there sprang from it an excited man in a long sealskin coat--worn not
for the luxury of it at all but from the sheer chilliness of the autumn
evening. And it was, as of course you know, Pupkin's father. He had seen
the news of his son's death in the evening paper in the city. They drove
the car through, so the chauffeur said, in two hours and a quarter, and
behind them there was to follow a special trainload of detectives and
emergency men, but Pupkin senior had cancelled all that by telegram half
way up when he heard that Peter was still living.
For a moment as his eye rested on young Pupkin you would almost have
imagined, had you not known that he came from the Maritime Provinces,
that there were tears in them and that he was about to hug his son to
his heart. But if he didn't hug Peter to his heart, he certainly did
within a few moments clasp Zena to it, in that fine fatherly way in
which they clasp pretty girls in the Maritime Provinces. The strangest
thing is that Pupkin senior seemed to understand the whole situation
without any explanations at all.
Judge Pepperleigh, I think, would have shaken both of Pupkin senior's
arms off when he saw him; and when you heard them call one another
"Ned" and "Phillip" it made you feel that they were boys again attending
classes together at the old law school in the city.
If Pupkin thought that his father wouldn't make a hit in Mariposa,
it only showed his ignorance. Pupkin senior sat there on the judge's
verandah smoking a corn cob pipe as if he had never heard of Havana
cigars in his life. In the three days that he spent in Mariposa that
autumn, he went in and out of Jeff Thorpe's barber shop and Eliot's drug
store, shot black ducks in the marsh and played poker every evening at
a hundred matches for a cent as if he had never lived any other life in
all his days. They had to send him telegrams enough to fill a satchel to
make him come away.
So Pupkin and Zena in due course of time were married, and went to live
in one of the enchanted houses on the hillside in the newer part of the
town, where you may find them to this day.
You may see Pupkin there at any time cutting enchanted grass on a little
lawn in as gaudy a blazer as ever.
But if you step up to speak to him or walk with him into the enchanted
house, pray modulate your voice a little musical though it is--for there
is said to be an enchanted baby on the premises whose sleep must not
lightly be disturbed.