Tictocq's room in the Avenue Hotel.
A knock is heard at the door.
Tictocq opens it and looks at his watch.
"Ah," he says, "it is just six. Entrez, Messieurs."
The messieurs entrez. There are seven of them; the Populist Candidate
who is there by invitation, not knowing for what purpose; the chairman
of the Democratic Executive Committee, platform No. 2, the hotel
proprietor, and three or four Democrats and Populists, as near as could
be found out.
"I don't know," begins the Populist Candidate, "what in the h----"
"Excuse me," says Tictocq, firmly. "You will oblige me by keeping silent
until I make my report. I have been employed in this case, and I have
unravelled it. For the honor of France I request that I be heard with
attention."
"Certainly," says the chairman; "we will be pleased to listen."
Tictocq stands in the centre of the room. The electric light burns
brightly above him. He seems the incarnation of alertness, vigor,
cleverness, and cunning.
The company seat themselves in chairs along the wall.
"When informed of the robbery," begins Tictocq, "I first questioned the
bell boy. He knew nothing. I went to the police headquarters. They knew
nothing. I invited one of them to the bar to drink. He said there used
to be a little colored boy in the Tenth Ward who stole things and kept
them for recovery by the police, but failed to be at the place agreed
upon for arrest one time, and had been sent to jail.
"I then began to think. I reasoned. No man, said I, would carry a
Populist's socks in his pocket without wrapping them up. He would not
want to do so in the hotel. He would want a paper. Where would he get
one? At the _Statesman office_, of course. I went there. A young man
with his hair combed down on his forehead sat behind the desk. I knew
he was writing society items, for a young lady's slipper, a piece of
cake, a fan, a half emptied bottle of cocktail, a bunch of roses, and
a police whistle lay on the desk before him.
"'Can you tell me if a man purchased a paper here in the last three
months?' I said.
"'Yes,' he replied; 'we sold one last night.'
"'Can you describe the man?'
"'Accurately. He had blue whiskers, a wart between his shoulder blades,
a touch of colic, and an occupation tax on his breath.'
"'Which way did he go?'
"'Out.'
"I then went--"
"Wait a minute," said the Populist Candidate, rising; "I don't see why
in the h----"
"Once more I must beg that you will be silent," said Tictocq, rather
sharply. "You should not interrupt me in the midst of my report."
"I made one false arrest," continued Tictocq. "I was passing two finely
dressed gentlemen on the street, when one of them remarked that he had
'stole his socks.' I handcuffed him and dragged him to a lighted store,
when his companion explained to me that he was somewhat intoxicated and
his tongue was not entirely manageable. He had been speaking of some
business transaction, and what he intended to say was that he had 'sold
his stocks.'
"I then released him.
"An hour afterward I passed a saloon, and saw this Professor von Bum
drinking beer at a table. I knew him in Paris. I said 'here is my man.'
He worshipped Wagner, lived on limburger cheese, beer, and credit, and
would have stolen anybody's socks. I shadowed him to the reception at
Colonel St. Vitus's, and in an opportune moment I seized him and tore
the socks from his feet. There they are."
With a dramatic gesture, Tictocq threw a pair of dingy socks upon the
table, folded his arms, and threw back his head.
With a loud cry of rage, the Populist Candidate sprang once more to his
feet.
"Gol darn it! I WILL say what I want to. I--"
The two other Populists in the room gazed at him coldly and sternly.
"Is this tale true?" they demanded of the Candidate.
"No, by gosh, it ain't!" he replied, pointing a trembling finger at the
Democratic Chairman. "There stands the man who has concocted the whole
scheme. It is an infernal, unfair political trick to lose votes for
our party. How far has thing gone?" he added, turning savagely to the
detective.
"All the newspapers have my written report on the matter, and the
_Statesman_ will have it in plate matter next week," said Tictocq,
complacently.
"All is lost!" said the Populists, turning toward the door.
"For God's sake, my friends," pleaded the Candidate, following them;
"listen to me; I swear before high heaven that I never wore a pair of
socks in my life. It is all a devilish campaign lie."
The Populists turn their backs.
"The damage is already done," they said. "The people have heard the
story. You have yet time to withdraw decently before the race."
All left the room except Tictocq and the Democrats.
"Let's all go down and open a bottle of fizz on the Finance Committee,"
said the Chairman of the Executive Committee, Platform No. 2.
[Illustration: "The Plunkville Patriot," April 2, 1895]
TRACKED TO DOOM
Or
The Mystery of the Rue de Peychaud
'Tis midnight in Paris.
A myriad of lamps that line the Champs Elysées and the Rouge et Noir,
cast their reflection in the dark waters of the Seine as it flows
gloomily past the Place Vendôme and the black walls of the Convent
Notadam.
The great French capital is astir.
It is the hour when crime and vice and wickedness reign.
Hundreds of fiacres drive madly through the streets conveying women,
flashing with jewels and as beautiful as dreams, from opera and concert,
and the little bijou supper rooms of the Café Tout le Temps are filled
with laughing groups, while bon mots, persiflage and repartee fly upon
the air--the jewels of thought and conversation.
Luxury and poverty brush each other in the streets. The homeless gamin,
begging a sou with which to purchase a bed, and the spendthrift roué,
scattering golden louis d'or, tread the same pavement.
When other cities sleep, Paris has just begun her wild revelry.
The first scene of our story is a cellar beneath the Rue de Peychaud.
The room is filled with smoke of pipes, and is stifling with the reeking
breath of its inmates. A single flaring gas jet dimly lights the scene,
which is one Rembrandt or Moreland and Keisel would have loved to paint.
A garçon is selling absinthe to such of the motley crowd as have a few
sous, dealing it out in niggardly portions in broken teacups.
Leaning against the bar is Carnaignole Cusheau--generally known as the
Gray Wolf.
He is the worst man in Paris.
He is more than four feet ten in height, and his sharp, ferocious
looking face and the mass of long, tangled gray hair that covers his
face and head, have earned for him the name he bears.
His striped blouse is wide open at the neck and falls outside of his
dingy leather trousers. The handle of a deadly looking knife protrudes
from his belt. One stroke of its blade would open a box of the finest
French sardines.
"Voilà, Gray Wolf," cries Couteau, the bartender. "How many victims
to-day? There is no blood upon your hands. Has the Gray Wolf forgotten
how to bite?"
"Sacrè Bleu, Mille Tonnerre, by George," hisses the Gray Wolf. "Monsieur
Couteau, you are bold indeed to speak to me thus.
"By Ventre St. Gris! I have not even dined to-day. Spoils indeed. There
is no living in Paris now. But one rich American have I garroted in a
fortnight.
"Bah! those Democrats. They have ruined the country. With their income
tax and their free trade, they have destroyed the millionaire business.
Carrambo! Diable! D----n it!"
"Hist!" suddenly says Chamounix the rag-picker, who is worth 20,000,000
francs, "some one comes!"
The cellar door opened and a man crept softly down the rickety steps.
The crowd watches him with silent awe.
He went to the bar, laid his card on the counter, bought a drink of
absinthe, and then drawing from his pocket a little mirror, set it up on
the counter and proceeded to don a false beard and hair and paint his
face into wrinkles, until he closely resembled an old man seventy-one
years of age.
He then went into a dark corner and watched the crowd of people with
sharp, ferret-like eyes.
Gray Wolf slipped cautiously to the bar and examined the card left by
the newcomer.
"Holy Saint Bridget!" he exclaims. "It is Tictocq, the detective."
Ten minutes later a beautiful woman enters the cellar. Tenderly
nurtured, and accustomed to every luxury that money could procure,
she had, when a young vivandière at the Convent of Saint Susan de la
Montarde, run away with the Gray Wolf, fascinated by his many crimes and
the knowledge that his business never allowed him to scrape his feet in
the hall or snore.
"Parbleu, Marie," snarls the Gray Wolf. "Que voulez vous? Avez-vous le
beau cheval de mon frère, ou le joli chien de votre père?"
"No, no, Gray Wolf," shouts the motley group of assassins, rogues and
pickpockets, even their hardened hearts appalled at his fearful words.
"Mon Dieu! You cannot be so cruel!"
"Tiens!" shouts the Gray Wolf, now maddened to desperation, and drawing
his gleaming knife. "Voilà! Canaille! Tout le monde, carte blanche
enbonpoint sauve que peut entre nous revenez nous a nous moutons!"
The horrified sans-culottes shrink back in terror as the Gray Wolf
seizes Maria by the hair and cuts her into twenty-nine pieces, each
exactly the same size.
As he stands with reeking hands above the corpse, amid a deep silence,
the old, gray-bearded man who has been watching the scene springs
forward, tears off his false beard and locks, and Tictocq, the famous
French detective, stands before them.
Spellbound and immovable, the denizens of the cellar gaze at the
greatest modern detective as he goes about the customary duties of his
office.
He first measures the distance from the murdered woman to a point on the
wall, then he takes down the name of the bartender and the day of the
month and the year. Then drawing from his pocket a powerful microscope,
he examines a little of the blood that stands upon the floor in little
pools.
"Mon Dieu!" he mutters, "it is as I feared--human blood."
He then enters rapidly in a memorandum book the result of his
investigations, and leaves the cellar.
Tictocq bends his rapid steps in the direction of the headquarters of
the Paris gendarmerie, but suddenly pausing, he strikes his hand upon
his brow with a gesture of impatience.
"Mille tonnerre," he mutters. "I should have asked the name of that man
with the knife in his hand."
* * * * * *
It is reception night at the palace of the Duchess Valerie du Bellairs.
The apartments are flooded with a mellow light from paraffine candles
in solid silver candelabra.
The company is the most aristocratic and wealthy in Paris.
Three or four brass bands are playing behind a portière between the coal
shed, and also behind time. Footmen in gay-laced livery bring in beer
noiselessly and carry out apple-peelings dropped by the guests.
Valerie, seventh Duchess du Bellairs, leans back on a solid gold ottoman
on eiderdown cushions, surrounded by the wittiest, the bravest, and the
handsomest courtiers in the capital.
"Ah, madame," said the Prince Champvilliers, of Palais Royale, corner
of Seventy-third Street, "as Montesquiaux says, 'Rien de plus bon
tutti frutti'--Youth seems your inheritance. You are to-night the most
beautiful, the wittiest in your own salon. I can scarce believe my own
senses, when I remember that thirty-one years ago you--"
"Saw it off!" says the Duchess peremptorily.
The Prince bows low, and drawing a jewelled dagger, stabs himself to the
heart.
"The displeasure of your grace is worse than death," he says, as he
takes his overcoat and hat from a corner of the mantelpiece and leaves
the room.
"Voilà," says Bèebè Francillon, fanning herself languidly. "That is the
way with men. Flatter them, and they kiss your hand. Loose but a moment
the silken leash that holds them captive through their vanity and
self-opinionativeness, and the son-of-a-gun gets on his ear at once. The
devil go with him, I say."
"Ah, mon Princesse," sighs the Count Pumpernickel, stooping and
whispering with eloquent eyes into her ear. "You are too hard upon us.
Balzac says, 'All women are not to themselves what no one else is to
another.' Do you not agree with him?"
"Cheese it!" says the Princess. "Philosophy palls upon me. I'll shake
you."
"Hosses?" says the Count.
Arm and arm they go out to the salon au Beurre.
Armande de Fleury, the young pianissimo danseuse from the Folies Bergère
is about to sing.
She slightly clears her throat and lays a voluptuous cud of chewing gum
upon the piano as the first notes of the accompaniment ring through the
salon.
As she prepares to sing, the Duchess du Bellairs grasps the arm of her
ottoman in a vice-like grip, and she watches with an expression of
almost anguished suspense.
She scarcely breathes.
Then, as Armande de Fleury, before uttering a note, reels, wavers, turns
white as snow and falls dead upon the floor, the Duchess breathes a sigh
of relief.
The Duchess had poisoned her.
Then the guests crowd about the piano, gazing with bated breath, and
shuddering as they look upon the music rack and observe that the song
that Armande came so near singing is "Sweet Marie."
Twenty minutes later a dark and muffled figure was seen to emerge from
a recess in the mullioned wall of the Arc de Triomphe and pass rapidly
northward.
It was no other than Tictocq, the detective.
The network of evidence was fast being drawn about the murderer of Marie
Cusheau.
* * * * * *
It is midnight on the steeple of the Cathedral of Notadam.
It is also the same time at other given points in the vicinity.
The spire of the Cathedral is 20,000 feet above the pavement, and a
casual observer, by making a rapid mathematical calculation, would have
readily perceived that this Cathedral is, at least, double the height of
others that measure only 10,000 feet.
At the summit of the spire there is a little wooden platform on which
there is room for but one man to stand.
Crouching on this precarious footing, which swayed, dizzily with every
breeze that blew, was a man closely muffled, and disguised as a
wholesale grocer.
Old François Beongfallong, the great astronomer, who is studying the
sidereal spheres from his attic window in the Rue de Bologny, shudders
as he turns his telescope upon the solitary figure upon the spire.
"Sacrè Bleu!" he hisses between his new celluloid teeth. "It is Tictocq,
the detective. I wonder whom he is following now?"
While Tictocq is watching with lynx-like eyes the hill of Montmartre, he
suddenly hears a heavy breathing beside him, and turning, gazes into the
ferocious eyes of the Gray Wolf.
Carnaignole Cusheau had put on his W. U. Tel. Co. climbers and climbed
the steeple.
"Parbleu, monsieur," says Tictocq. "To whom am I indebted for the honor
of this visit?"
The Gray Wolf smiled softly and depreciatingly.
"You are Tictocq, the detective?" he said.
"I am."
"Then listen. I am the murderer of Marie Cusheau. She was my wife and
she had cold feet and ate onions. What was I to do? Yet life is sweet
to me. I do not wish to be guillotined. I have heard that you are on my
track. Is it true that the case is in your hands?"
"It is."
"Thank le bon Dieu, then, I am saved."
The Gray Wolf carefully adjusts the climbers on his feet and descends
the spire.
Tictocq takes out his notebook and writes in it.
"At last," he says, "I have a clue."
* * * * * *
Monsieur le Compte Carnaignole Cusheau, once known as the Gray Wolf,
stands in the magnificent drawing-room of his palace on East 47th
Street.
Three days after his confession to Tictocq, he happened to look in the
pockets of a discarded pair of pants and found twenty million francs in
gold.
Suddenly the door opens and Tictocq, the detective, with a dozen
gensd'arme, enters the room.
"You are my prisoner," says the detective.
"On what charge?"
"The murder of Marie Cusheau on the night of August 17th."
"Your proofs?"
"I saw you do it, and your own confession on the spire of Notadam."
The Count laughed and took a paper from his pocket. "Read this," he
said, "here is proof that Marie Cusheau died of heart failure."
Tictocq looked at the paper.
It was a check for 100,000 francs.
Tictocq dismissed the gensd'arme with a wave of his hand.
"We have made a mistake, monsieurs," he said, but as he turns to leave
the room, Count Carnaignole stops him.
"One moment, monsieur."
The Count Carnaignole tears from his own face a false beard and reveals
the flashing eyes and well-known features of Tictocq, the detective.
Then, springing forward, he snatches a wig and false eyebrows from his
visitor, and the Gray Wolf, grinding his teeth in rage, stands before
him.
The murderer of Marie Cusheau was never discovered.
[Illustration: _The Rolling Stone_, January 26, 1895]
A SNAPSHOT AT THE PRESIDENT
[This is the kind of waggish editorial O. Henry was writing
in 1894 for the readers of _The Rolling Stone_. The reader
will do well to remember that the paper was for local
consumption and that the allusions are to a very special
place and time.]
(It will be remembered that about a month ago there were special
rates offered to the public for a round trip to the City of
Washington. The price of the ticket being exceedingly low, we
secured a loan of twenty dollars from a public-spirited citizen
of Austin, by mortgaging our press and cow, with the additional
security of our brother's name and a slight draught on Major
Hutchinson for $4,000.
We purchased a round trip ticket, two loaves of Vienna bread,
and quite a large piece of cheese, which we handed to a member
of our reportorial staff, with instructions to go to Washington,
interview President Cleveland, and get a scoop, if possible, on
all other Texas papers.
Our reporter came in yesterday morning, via the Manor dirt road,
with a large piece of folded cotton bagging tied under each foot.
It seems that he lost his ticket in Washington, and having
divided the Vienna bread and cheese with some disappointed office
seekers who were coming home by the same route, he arrived home
hungry, desiring food, and with quite an appetite.
Although somewhat late, we give his description of his interview
with President Cleveland.)
I am chief reporter on the staff of _The Rolling Stone_.
About a month ago the managing editor came into the room where we were
both sitting engaged in conversation and said:
"Oh, by the way, go to Washington and interview President Cleveland."
"All right," said I. "Take care of yourself."
Five minutes later I was seated in a palatial drawing-room car bounding
up and down quite a good deal on the elastic plush-covered seat.
I shall not linger upon the incidents of the journey. I was given carte
blanche to provide myself with every comfort, and to spare no expense
that I could meet. For the regalement of my inside the preparations had
been lavish. Both Vienna and Germany had been called upon to furnish
dainty viands suitable to my palate.
I changed cars and shirts once only on the journey. A stranger wanted
me to also change a two-dollar bill, but I haughtily declined.
The scenery along the entire road to Washington is diversified. You
find a portion of it on one hand by looking out of the window, and upon
turning the gaze upon the other side the eye is surprised and delighted
by discovering some more of it.
There were a great many Knights of Pythias on the train. One of them
insisted upon my giving him the grip I had with me, but he was
unsuccessful.
On arriving in Washington, which city I instantly recognized from
reading the history of George, I left the car so hastily that I forgot
to fee Mr. Pullman's representative.
I went immediately to the Capitol.
In a spirit of jeu d'esprit I had had made a globular representation of
a "rolling stone." It was of wood, painted a dark color, and about the
size of a small cannon ball. I had attached to it a twisted pendant
about three inches long to indicate moss. I had resolved to use this in
place of a card, thinking people would readily recognize it as an emblem
of my paper.
I had studied the arrangement of the Capitol, and walked directly to Mr.
Cleveland's private office.
I met a servant in the hall, and held up my card to him smilingly.
I saw his hair rise on his head, and he ran like a deer to the door,
and, lying down, rolled down the long flight of steps into the yard.
"Ah," said I to myself, "he is one of our delinquent subscribers."
A little farther along I met the President's private secretary, who had
been writing a tariff letter and cleaning a duck gun for Mr. Cleveland.
When I showed him the emblem of my paper he sprang out of a high window
into a hothouse filled with rare flowers.
This somewhat surprised me.
I examined myself. My hat was on straight, and there was nothing at all
alarming about my appearance.
I went into the President's private office.
He was alone. He was conversing with Tom Ochiltree. Mr. Ochiltree saw my
little sphere, and with a loud scream rushed out of the room.
President Cleveland slowly turned his eyes upon me.
He also saw what I had in my hand, and said in a husky voice:
"Wait a moment, please."
He searched his coat pocket, and presently found a piece of paper on
which some words were written.
He laid this on his desk and rose to his feet, raised one hand above
him, and said in deep tones:
"I die for Free Trade, my country, and--and--all that sort of thing."
I saw him jerk a string, and a camera snapped on another table, taking
our picture as we stood.
"Don't die in the House, Mr. President," I said. "Go over into the
Senate Chamber."
"Peace, murderer!" he said. "Let your bomb do its deadly work."
"I'm no bum," I said, with spirit. "I represent _The Rolling Stone_, of
Austin, Texas, and this I hold in my hand does the same thing, but, it
seems, unsuccessfully."
The President sank back in his chair greatly relieved.
"I thought you were a dynamiter," he said. "Let me see; Texas! Texas!"
He walked to a large wall map of the United States, and placing his
finger thereon at about the location of Idaho, ran it down in a zigzag,
doubtful way until he reached Texas.
"Oh, yes, here it is. I have so many things on my mind, I sometimes
forget what I should know well.
"Let's see; Texas? Oh, yes, that's the State where Ida Wells and a lot
of colored people lynched a socialist named Hogg for raising a riot at a
camp-meeting. So you are from Texas. I know a man from Texas named Dave
Culberson. How is Dave and his family? Has Dave got any children?"
"He has a boy in Austin," I said, "working around the Capitol."
"Who is President of Texas now?"
"I don't exactly--"
"Oh, excuse me. I forgot again. I thought I heard some talk of its
having been made a Republic again."
"Now, Mr. Cleveland," I said, "you answer some of my questions."
A curious film came over the President's eyes. He sat stiffly in his
chair like an automaton.
"Proceed," he said.
"What do you think of the political future of this country?"
"I will state that political exigencies demand emergentistical
promptitude, and while the United States is indissoluble in conception
and invisible in intent, treason and internecine disagreement have
ruptured the consanguinity of patriotism, and--"
"One moment, Mr. President," I interrupted; "would you mind changing
that cylinder? I could have gotten all that from the American Press
Association if I had wanted plate matter. Do you wear flannels? What
is your favorite poet, brand of catsup, bird, flower, and what are you
going to do when you are out of a job?"
"Young man," said Mr. Cleveland, sternly, "you are going a little too
far. My private affairs do not concern the public."
I begged his pardon, and he recovered his good humor in a moment.
"You Texans have a great representative in Senator Mills," he said. "I
think the greatest two speeches I ever heard were his address before the
Senate advocating the removal of the tariff on salt and increasing it on
chloride of sodium."
"Tom Ochiltree is also from our State," I said.
"Oh, no, he isn't. You must be mistaken," replied Mr. Cleveland, "for he
says he is. I really must go down to Texas some time, and see the State.
I want to go up into the Panhandle and see if it is really shaped like
it is on the map."
"Well, I must be going," said I.
"When you get back to Texas," said the President, rising, "you must
write to me. Your visit has awakened in me quite an interest in your
State which I fear I have not given the attention it deserves. There are
many historical and otherwise interesting places that you have revived
in my recollection--the Alamo, where Davy Jones fell; Goliad, Sam
Houston's surrender to Montezuma, the petrified boom found near Austin,
five-cent cotton and the Siamese Democratic platform born in Dallas. I
should so much like to see the gals in Galveston, and go to the wake in
Waco. I am glad I met you. Turn to the left as you enter the hall and
keep straight on out." I made a low bow to signify that the interview
was at an end, and withdrew immediately. I had no difficulty in leaving
the building as soon as I was outside.
I hurried downtown in order to obtain refreshments at some place where
viands had been placed upon the free list.
I shall not describe my journey back to Austin. I lost my return ticket
somewhere in the White House, and was forced to return home in a manner
not especially beneficial to my shoes. Everybody was well in Washington
when I left, and all send their love.
[Illustration: A page from "The Plunkville Patriot"]
AN UNFINISHED CHRISTMAS STORY
[Probably begun several years before his death. Published,
as it here appears, in _Short Stories_, January, 1911.]
Now, a Christmas story should be one. For a good many years the
ingenious writers have been putting forth tales for the holiday numbers
that employed every subtle, evasive, indirect and strategic scheme they
could invent to disguise the Christmas flavor. So far has this new
practice been carried that nowadays when you read a story in a holiday
magazine the only way you can tell it is a Christmas story is to look at
the footnote which reads: ["The incidents in the above story happened on
December 25th.--ED."]
There is progress in this; but it is all very sad. There are just as
many real Christmas stories as ever, if we would only dig 'em up. Me,
I am for the Scrooge and Marley Christmas story, and the Annie and
Willie's prayer poem, and the long lost son coming home on the stroke
of twelve to the poorly thatched cottage with his arms full of talking
dolls and popcorn balls and--Zip! you hear the second mortgage on the
cottage go flying off it into the deep snow.
So, this is to warn you that there is no subterfuge about this
story--and you might come upon stockings hung to the mantel and plum
puddings and hark! the chimes! and wealthy misers loosening up and
handing over penny whistles to lame newsboys if you read further.
Once I knocked at a door (I have so many things to tell you I keep on
losing sight of the story). It was the front door of a furnished room
house in West 'Teenth Street. I was looking for a young illustrator
named Paley originally and irrevocably from Terre Haute. Paley doesn't
enter even into the first serial rights of this Christmas story; I
mention him simply in explaining why I came to knock at the door--some
people have so much curiosity.
The door was opened by the landlady. I had seen hundreds like her. And
I had smelled before that cold, dank, furnished draught of air that
hurried by her to escape immurement in the furnished house.
She was stout, and her face and lands were as white as though she had
been drowned in a barrel of vinegar. One hand held together at her
throat a buttonless flannel dressing sacque whose lines had been cut
by no tape or butterick known to mortal woman. Beneath this a too-long,
flowered, black sateen skirt was draped about her, reaching the floor in
stiff wrinkles and folds.
The rest of her was yellow. Her hair, in some bygone age, had been
dipped in the fountain of folly presided over by the merry nymph
Hydrogen; but now, except at the roots, it had returned to its natural
grim and grizzled white.
Her eyes and teeth and finger nails were yellow. Her chops hung low and
shook when she moved. The look on her face was exactly that smileless
look of fatal melancholy that you may have seen on the countenance of a
hound left sitting on the doorstep of a deserted cabin.
I inquired for Paley. After a long look of cold suspicion the landlady
spoke, and her voice matched the dingy roughness of her flannel sacque.
Paley? Was I sure that was the name? And wasn't it, likely, Mr.
Sanderson I meant, in the third floor rear? No; it was Paley I wanted.
Again that frozen, shrewd, steady study of my soul from her pale-yellow,
unwinking eyes, trying to penetrate my mask of deception and rout out my
true motives from my lying lips. There was a Mr. Tompkins in the front
hall bedroom two flights up. Perhaps it was he I was seeking. He worked
of nights; he never came in till seven in the morning. Or if it was
really Mr. Tucker (thinly disguised as Paley) that I was hunting I would
have to call between five and--
But no; I held firmly to Paley. There was no such name among her
lodgers. Click! the door closed swiftly in my face; and I heard through
the panels the clanking of chains and bolts.
I went down the steps and stopped to consider. The number of this house
was 43. I was sure Paley had said 43--or perhaps it was 45 or 47--I
decided to try 47, the second house farther along.
I rang the bell. The door opened; and there stood the same woman. I
wasn't confronted by just a resemblance--it was the SAME woman holding
together the same old sacque at her throat and looking at me with the
same yellow eyes as if she had never seen me before on earth. I saw
on the knuckle of her second finger the same red-and-black spot made,
probably, by a recent burn against a hot stove.
I stood speechless and gaping while one with moderate haste might have
told fifty. I couldn't have spoken Paley's name even if I had remembered
it. I did the only thing that a brave man who believes there are
mysterious forces in nature that we do not yet fully comprehend could
have done in the circumstances. I backed down the steps to the sidewalk
and then hurried away frontward, fully understanding how incidents like
that must bother the psychical research people and the census takers.
Of course I heard an explanation of it afterward, as we always do about
inexplicable things.
The landlady was Mrs. Kannon; and she leased three adjoining houses,
which she made into one by cutting arched doorways through the walls.
She sat in the middle house and answered the three bells.
I wonder why I have maundered so slowly through the prologue. I have it!
it was simply to say to you, in the form of introduction rife through
the Middle West: "Shake hands with Mrs. Kannon."
For, it was in her triple house that the Christmas story happened; and
it was there where I picked up the incontrovertible facts from the
gossip of many roomers and met Stickney--and saw the necktie.
Christmas came that year on Thursday, and snow came with it.
Stickney (Harry Clarence Fowler Stickney to whomsoever his full
baptismal cognominal burdens may be of interest) reached his address
at six-thirty Wednesday afternoon. "Address" is New Yorkese for "home."
Stickney roomed at 45 West 'Teenth Street, third floor rear hall
room. He was twenty years and four months old, and he worked in a
cameras-of-all-kinds, photographic supplies and films-developed store. I
don't know what kind of work he did in the store; but you must have seen
him. He is the young man who always comes behind the counter to wait on
you and lets you talk for five minutes, telling him what you want. When
you are done, he calls the proprietor at the top of his voice to wait on
you, and walks away whistling between his teeth.
I don't want to bother about describing to you his appearance; but, if
you are a man reader, I will say that Stickncy looked precisely like
the young chap that you always find sitting in your chair smoking a
cigarette after you have missed a shot while playing pool--not billiards
but pool--when you want to sit down yourself.
There are some to whom Christmas gives no Christmassy essence. Of
course, prosperous people and comfortable people who have homes or
flats or rooms with meals, and even people who live in apartment houses
with hotel service get something of the Christmas flavor. They give one
another presents with the cost mark scratched off with a penknife; and
they hang holly wreaths in the front windows and when they are asked
whether they prefer light or dark meat from the turkey they say: "Both,
please," and giggle and have lots of fun. And the very poorest people
have the best time of it. The Army gives 'em a dinner, and the 10 A. M.
issue of the Night Final edition of the newspaper with the largest
circulation in the city leaves a basket at their door full of an apple,
a Lake Ronkonkoma squab, a scrambled eggplant and a bunch of Kalamazoo
bleached parsley. The poorer you are the more Christmas does for you.
But, I'll tell you to what kind of a mortal Christmas seems to be only
the day before the twenty-sixth day of December. It's the chap in
the big city earning sixteen dollars a week, with no friends and few
acquaintances, who finds himself with only fifty cents in his pocket
on Christmas eve. He can't accept charity; he can't borrow; he knows
no one who would invite him to dinner. I have a fancy that when the
shepherds left their flocks to follow the star of Bethlehem there was
a bandy-legged young fellow among them who was just learning the sheep
business. So they said to him, "Bobby, we're going to investigate this
star route and see what's in it. If it should turn out to be the first
Christmas day we don't want to miss it. And, as you are not a wise man,
and as you couldn't possibly purchase a present to take along, suppose
you stay behind and mind the sheep."
So as we may say, Harry Stickney was a direct descendant of the shepherd
who was left behind to take care of the flocks.
Getting back to facts, Stickney rang the doorbell of 45. He had a habit
of forgetting his latchkey.
Instantly the door opened and there stood Mrs. Kannon, clutching her
sacque together at the throat and gorgonizing him with her opaque,
yellow eyes.
(To give you good measure, here is a story within a story. Once a roomer
in 47 who had the Scotch habit--not kilts, but a habit of drinking
Scotch--began to figure to himself what might happen if two persons
should ring the doorbells of 43 and 47 at the same time. Visions of two
halves of Mrs. Kannon appearing respectively and simultaneously at the
two entrances, each clutching at a side of an open, flapping sacque that
could never meet, overpowered him. Bellevue got him.)
"Evening," said Stickney cheerlessly, as he distributed little piles of
muddy slush along the hall matting. "Think we'll have snow?"
"You left your key," said--
[Here the manuscript ends.]
[Illustration: A front page of _The Rolling Stone_.]
THE UNPROFITABLE SERVANT
[Left unfinished, and published as it here appears in
_Everybody's Magazine_, December, 1911.]
I am the richer by the acquaintance of four newspaper men. Singly,
they are my encyclopedias, friends, mentors, and sometimes bankers.
But now and then it happens that all of them will pitch upon the same
printworthy incident of the passing earthly panorama and will send in
reportorial constructions thereof to their respective journals. It is
then that, for me, it is to laugh. For it seems that to each of them,
trained and skilled as he may be, the same occurrence presents a
different facet of the cut diamond, life.
One will have it (let us say) that Mme. André Macarté's apartment was
looted by six burglars, who descended via the fire-escape and bore away
a ruby tiara valued at two thousand dollars and a five-hundred-dollar
prize Spitz dog, which (in violation of the expectoration ordinance)
was making free with the halls of the Wuttapesituckquesunoowetunquah
Apartments.
My second "chiel" will take notes to the effect that while a friendly
game of pinochle was in progress in the tenement rooms of Mrs. Andy
McCarty, a lady guest named Ruby O'Hara threw a burglar down six flights
of stairs, where he was pinioned and held by a two-thousand-dollar
English bulldog amid a crowd of five hundred excited spectators.
My third chronicler and friend will gather the news threads of the
happening in his own happy way; setting forth on the page for you to
read that the house of Antonio Macartini was blown up at 6 A. M., by the
Black Hand Society, on his refusing to leave two thousand dollars at
a certain street corner, killing a pet five-hundred-dollar Pomeranian
belonging to Alderman Rubitara's little daughter (see photo and diagram
opposite).
Number four of my history-makers will simply construe from the premises
the story that while an audience of two thousand enthusiasts was
listening to a Rubinstein concert on Sixth Street, a woman who said she
was Mrs. Andrew M. Carter threw a brick through a plate-glass window
valued at five hundred dollars. The Carter woman claimed that some one
in the building had stolen her dog.
Now, the discrepancies in these registrations of the day's doings need
do no one hurt. Surely, one newspaper is enough for any man to prop
against his morning water-bottle to fend off the smiling hatred of his
wife's glance. If he be foolish enough to read four he is no wiser than
a Higher Critic.
I remember (probably as well as you do) having read the parable of the
talents. A prominent citizen, about to journey into a far country, first
hands over to his servants his goods. To one he gives five talents;
to another two; to another one--to every man according to his several
ability, as the text has it. There are two versions of this parable, as
you well know. There may be more--I do not know.
When the p. c. returns he requires an accounting. Two servants have put
their talents out at usury and gained one hundred per cent. Good. The
unprofitable one simply digs up the talent deposited with him and hands
it out on demand. A pattern of behavior for trust companies and banks,
surely! In one version we read that he had wrapped it in a napkin and
laid it away. But the commentator informs us that the talent mentioned
was composed of 750 ounces of silver--about $900 worth. So the
chronicler who mentioned the napkin, had either to reduce the amount of
the deposit or do a lot of explaining about the size of the napery used
in those days. Therefore in his version we note that he uses the word
"pound" instead of "talent."
A pound of silver may very well be laid away--and carried away--in a
napkin, as any hotel or restaurant man will tell you.
But let us get away from our mutton.
When the returned nobleman finds that the one-talented servant has
nothing to hand over except the original fund entrusted to him, he is as
angry as a multi-millionaire would be if some one should hide under his
bed and make a noise like an assessment. He orders the unprofitable
servant cast into outer darkness, after first taking away his talent and
giving it to the one-hundred-per cent. financier, and breathing strange
saws, saying: "From him that hath not shall be taken away even that
which he hath." Which is the same as to say: "Nothing from nothing
leaves nothing."
And now closer draw the threads of parable, precept, allegory, and
narrative, leading nowhere if you will, or else weaving themselves into
the little fiction story about Cliff McGowan and his one talent. There
is but a definition to follow; and then the homely actors trip on.
Talent: A gift, endowment or faculty; some peculiar ability, power,
or accomplishment, natural or acquired. (A metaphor borrowed from the
parable in Matt. XXV. 14-30.)
In New York City to-day there are (estimated) 125,000 living creatures
training for the stage. This does not include seals, pigs, dogs,
elephants, prize-fighters, Carmens, mind-readers, or Japanese wrestlers.
The bulk of them are in the ranks of the Four Million. Out of this
number will survive a thousand.
Nine hundred of these will have attained their fulness of fame when they
shall dubiously indicate with the point of a hatpin a blurred figure
in a flashlight photograph of a stage tout ensemble with the proud
commentary: "That's me."
Eighty, in the pinkest of (male) Louis XIV court costumes, shall welcome
the Queen of the (mythical) Pawpaw Isles in a few well-memorized words,
turning a tip-tilted nose upon the nine hundred.
Ten, in tiny lace caps, shall dust Ibsen furniture for six minutes after
the rising of the curtain.
Nine shall attain the circuits, besieging with muscle, skill, eye, hand,
voice, wit, brain, heel and toe the ultimate high walls of stardom.
One shall inherit Broadway. Sic venit gloria mundi.
Cliff McGowan and Mac McGowan were cousins. They lived on the West Side
and were talented. Singing, dancing, imitations, trick bicycle riding,
boxing, German and Irish dialect comedy, and a little sleight-of-hand
and balancing of wheat straws and wheelbarrows on the ends of their
chins came as easy to them as it is for you to fix your rat so it won't
show or to dodge a creditor through the swinging-doors of a well-lighted
café--according as you may belong to the one or the other division
of the greatest prestidigitators--the people. They were slim, pale,
consummately self-possessed youths, whose fingernails were always
irreproachably (and clothes seams reproachfully) shiny. Their
conversation was in sentences so short that they made Kipling's seem as
long as court citations.
Having the temperament, they did no work. Any afternoon you could find
them on Eighth Avenue either in front of Spinelli's barber shop, Mike
Dugan's place, or the Limerick Hotel, rubbing their forefinger nails
with dingy silk handkerchiefs. At any time, if you had happened to
be standing, undecisive, near a pool-table, and Cliff and Mac had,
casually, as it were, drawn near, mentioning something disinterestedly,
about a game, well, indeed, would it have been for you had you gone your
way, unresponsive. Which assertion, carefully considered, is a study in
tense, punctuation, and advice to strangers.
Of all kinships it is likely that the closest is that of cousin. Between
cousins there exist the ties of race, name, and favor--ties thicker
than water, and yet not coagulated with the jealous precipitations of
brotherhood or the enjoining obligations of the matrimonial yoke. You
can bestow upon a cousin almost the interest and affection that you
would give to a stranger; you need not feel toward him the contempt and
embarrassment that you have for one of your father's sons--it is the
closer clan-feeling that sometimes makes the branch of a tree stronger
than its trunk.
Thus were the two McGowans bonded. They enjoyed a quiet celebrity in
their district, which was a strip west of Eighth Avenue with the Pump
for its pivot. Their talents were praised in a hundred "joints"; their
friendship was famed even in a neighborhood where men had been known to
fight off the wives of their friends--when domestic onslaught was being
made upon their friends by the wives of their friends. (Thus do the
limitations of English force us to repetends.)
So, side by side, grim, sallow, lowering, inseparable, undefeated, the
cousins fought their way into the temple of Art--art with a big A, which
causes to intervene a lesson in geometry.
One night at about eleven o'clock Del Delano dropped into Mike's place
on Eighth Avenue. From that moment, instead of remaining a Place, the
café became a Resort. It was as though King Edward had condescended to
mingle with ten-spots of a different suit; or Joe Gans had casually
strolled in to look over the Tuskegee School; or Mr. Shaw, of England,
had accepted an invitation to read selections from "Rena, the Snow-bird"
at an unveiling of the proposed monument to James Owen O'Connor at
Chinquapin Falls, Mississippi. In spite of these comparisons, you will
have to be told why the patronizing of a third-rate saloon on the West
Side by the said Del Delano conferred such a specific honor upon the
place.
Del Delano could not make his feet behave; and so the world paid him
$300 a week to see them misconduct themselves on the vaudeville stage.
To make the matter plain to you (and to swell the number of words), he
was the best fancy dancer on any of the circuits between Ottawa and
Corpus Christi. With his eyes fixed on vacancy and his feet apparently
fixed on nothing, he "nightly charmed thousands," as his press-agent
incorrectly stated. Even taking night performance and matinée together,
he scarcely could have charmed more than eighteen hundred, including
those who left after Zora, the Nautch girl, had squeezed herself through
a hoop twelve inches in diameter, and those who were waiting for the
moving pictures.
But Del Delano was the West Side's favorite; and nowhere is there a more
loyal Side. Five years before our story was submitted to the editors,
Del had crawled from some Tenth Avenue basement like a lean rat and had
bitten his way into the Big Cheese. Patched, half-starved, cuffless,
and as scornful of the Hook as an interpreter of Ibsen, he had danced
his way into health (as you and I view it) and fame in sixteen minutes
on Amateur Night at Creary's (Variety) Theatre in Eighth Avenue. A
bookmaker (one of the kind that talent wins with instead of losing) sat
in the audience, asleep, dreaming of an impossible pick-up among the
amateurs. After a snore, a glass of beer from the handsome waiter, and
a temporary blindness caused by the diamonds of a transmontane blonde
in Box E, the bookmaker woke up long enough to engage Del Delano for a
three-weeks' trial engagement fused with a trained-dog short-circuit
covering the three Washingtons--Heights, Statue, and Square.
By the time this story was read and accepted, Del Delano was drawing
his three-hundred dollars a week, which, divided by seven (Sunday acts
not in costume being permissible), dispels the delusion entertained by
most of us that we have seen better days. You can easily imagine the
worshipful agitation of Eighth Avenue whenever Del Delano honored it
with a visit after his terpsichorean act in a historically great and
vilely ventilated Broadway theatre. If the West Side could claim
forty-two minutes out of his forty-two weeks' bookings every year, it
was an occasion for bonfires and repainting of the Pump. And now you
know why Mike's saloon is a Resort, and no longer a simple Place.
Del Delano entered Mike's alone. So nearly concealed in a fur-lined
overcoat and a derby two sizes too large for him was Prince Lightfoot
that you saw of his face only his pale, hatchet-edged features and a
pair of unwinking, cold, light blue eyes. Nearly every man lounging at
Mike's bar recognized the renowned product of the West Side. To those
who did not, wisdom was conveyed by prodding elbows and growls of
one-sided introduction.
Upon Charley, one of the bartenders, both fame and fortune descended
simultaneously. He had once been honored by shaking hands with the great
Delano at a Seventh Avenue boxing bout. So with lungs of brass he now
cried: "Hallo, Del, old man; what'll it be?"
Mike, the proprietor, who was cranking the cash register, heard. On the
next day he raised Charley's wages five a week.
Del Delano drank a pony beer, paying for it carelessly out of his
nightly earnings of $42.85-5/7. He nodded amiably but coldly at the long
line of Mike's patrons and strolled past them into the rear room of the
café. For he heard in there sounds pertaining to his own art--the light,
stirring staccato of a buck-and-wing dance.
In the back room Mac McGowan was giving a private exhibition of the
genius of his feet. A few young men sat at tables looking on critically
while they amused themselves seriously with beer. They nodded approval
at some new fancy steps of Mac's own invention.
At the sight of the great Del Delano, the amateur's feet stuttered,
blundered, clicked a few times, and ceased to move. The tongues of one's
shoes become tied in the presence of the Master. Mac's sallow face took
on a slight flush.
From the uncertain cavity between Del Delano's hat brim and the lapels
of his high fur coat collar came a thin puff of cigarette smoke and then
a voice:
"Do that last step over again, kid. And don't hold your arms quite so
stiff. Now, then!"
Once more Mac went through his paces. According to the traditions of the
man dancer, his entire being was transformed into mere feet and legs.
His gaze and expression became cataleptic; his body, unbending above
the waist, but as light as a cork, bobbed like the same cork dancing on
the ripples of a running brook. The beat of his heels and toes pleased
you like a snare-drum obligato. The performance ended with an amazing
clatter of leather against wood that culminated in a sudden flat-footed
stamp, leaving the dancer erect and as motionless as a pillar of the
colonial portico of a mansion in a Kentucky prohibition town. Mac felt
that he had done his best and that Del Delano would turn his back upon
him in derisive scorn.
An approximate silence followed, broken only by the mewing of a café cat
and the hubbub and uproar of a few million citizens and transportation
facilities outside.
Mac turned a hopeless but nervy eye upon Del Delano's face. In it he
read disgust, admiration, envy, indifference, approval, disappointment,
praise, and contempt.
Thus, in the countenances of those we hate or love we find what we most
desire or fear to see. Which is an assertion equalling in its wisdom and
chiaroscuro the most famous sayings of the most foolish philosophers
that the world has ever known.
Del Delano retired within his overcoat and hat. In two minutes he
emerged and turned his left side to Mac. Then he spoke.
"You've got a foot movement, kid, like a baby hippopotamus trying to
side-step a jab from a humming-bird. And you hold yourself like a truck
driver having his picture taken in a Third Avenue photograph gallery.
And you haven't got any method or style. And your knees are about
as limber as a couple of Yale pass-keys. And you strike the eye as
weighing, let us say, 450 pounds while you work. But, say, would you
mind giving me your name?"
"McGowan," said the humbled amateur--"Mac McGowan."
Delano the Great slowly lighted a cigarette and continued, through its
smoke:
"In other words, you're rotten. You can't dance. But I'll tell you one
thing you've got."
"Throw it all off of your system while you're at it," said Mac. "What've
I got?"
"Genius," said Del Delano. "Except myself, it's up to you to be the
best fancy dancer in the United States, Europe, Asia, and the colonial
possessions of all three."
"Smoke up!" said Mac McGowan.
"Genius," repeated the Master--"you've got a talent for genius. Your
brains are in your feet, where a dancer's ought to be. You've been
self-taught until you're almost ruined, but not quite. What you need
is a trainer. I'll take you in hand and put you at the top of the
profession. There's room there for the two of us. You may beat me,"
said the Master, casting upon him a cold, savage look combining so much
rivalry, affection, justice, and human hate that it stamped him at once
as one of the little great ones of the earth--"you may beat me; but I
doubt it. I've got the start and the pull. But at the top is where you
belong. Your name, you say, is Robinson?"
"McGowan," repeated the amateur, "Mac McGowan."
"It don't matter," said Delano. "Suppose you walk up to my hotel with
me. I'd like to talk to you. Your footwork is the worst I ever saw,
Madigan--but--well, I'd like to talk to you. You may not think so, but
I'm not so stuck up. I came off of the West Side myself. That overcoat
cost me eight hundred dollars; but the collar ain't so high but what I
can see over it. I taught myself to dance, and I put in most of nine
years at it before I shook a foot in public. But I had genius. I didn't
go too far wrong in teaching myself as you've done. You've got the
rottenest method and style of anybody I ever saw."
"Oh, I don't think much of the few little steps I take," said Mac, with
hypocritical lightness.
"Don't talk like a package of self-raising buckwheat flour," said Del
Delano. "You've had a talent handed to you by the Proposition Higher Up;
and it's up to you to do the proper thing with it. I'd like to have you
go up to my hotel for a talk, if you will."
In his rooms in the King Clovis Hotel, Del Delano put on a scarlet house
coat bordered with gold braid and set out Apollinaris and a box of sweet
crackers.
Mac's eye wandered.
"Forget it," said Del. "Drink and tobacco may be all right for a man who
makes his living with his hands; but they won't do if you're depending
on your head or your feet. If one end of you gets tangled, so does the
other. That's why beer and cigarettes don't hurt piano players and
picture painters. But you've got to cut 'em out if you want to do mental
or pedal work. Now, have a cracker, and then we'll talk some."
"All right," said Mac. "I take it as an honor, of course, for you to
notice my hopping around. Of course I'd like to do something in a
professional line. Of course I can sing a little and do card tricks
and Irish and German comedy stuff, and of course I'm not so bad on the
trapeze and comic bicycle stunts and Hebrew monologues and--"
"One moment," interrupted Del Delano, "before we begin. I said you
couldn't dance. Well, that wasn't quite right. You've only got two or
three bad tricks in your method. You're handy with your feet, and you
belong at the top, where I am. I'll put you there. I've got six weeks
continuous in New York; and in four I can shape up your style till
the booking agents will fight one another to get you. And I'll do it,
too. I'm of, from, and for the West Side. 'Del Delano' looks good on
bill-boards, but the family name's Crowley. Now, Mackintosh--McGowan,
I mean--you've got your chance--fifty times a better one than I had."
"I'd be a shine to turn it down," said Mac. "And I hope you understand I
appreciate it. Me and my cousin Cliff McGowan was thinking of getting a
try-out at Creary's on amateur night a month from to-morrow."
"Good stuff!" said Delano. "I got mine there. Junius T. Rollins, the
booker for Kuhn & Dooley, jumped on the stage and engaged me after
my dance. And the boards were an inch deep in nickels and dimes and
quarters. There wasn't but nine penny pieces found in the lot."
"I ought to tell you," said Mac, after two minutes of pensiveness, "that
my cousin Cliff can beat me dancing. We've always been what you might
call pals. If you'd take him up instead of me, now, it might be better.
He's invented a lot of steps that I can't cut."
"Forget it," said Delano. "Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays
of every week from now till amateur night, a month off, I'll coach you.
I'll make you as good as I am; and nobody could do more for you. My
act's over every night at 10:15. Half an hour later I'll take you up and
drill you till twelve. I'll put you at the top of the bunch, right where
I am. You've got talent. Your style's bum; but you've got the genius.
You let me manage it. I'm from the West Side myself, and I'd rather see
one of the same gang win out before I would an East-Sider, or any of the
Flatbush or Hackensack Meadow kind of butt-iners. I'll see that Junius
Rollins is present on your Friday night; and if he don't climb over the
footlights and offer you fifty a week as a starter, I'll let you draw
it down from my own salary every Monday night. Now, am I talking on the
level or am I not?"
Amateur night at Creary's Eighth Avenue Theatre is cut by the same
pattern as amateur nights elsewhere. After the regular performance the
humblest talent may, by previous arrangement with the management, make
its debut upon the public stage. Ambitious non-professionals, mostly
self-instructed, display their skill and powers of entertainment along
the broadest lines. They may sing, dance, mimic, juggle, contort,
recite, or disport themselves along any of the ragged boundary lines of
Art. From the ranks of these anxious tyros are chosen the professionals
that adorn or otherwise make conspicuous the full-blown stage.
Press-agents delight in recounting to open-mouthed and close-eared
reporters stories of the humble beginnings of the brilliant stars whose
orbits they control.
Such and such a prima donna (they will tell you) made her initial bow
to the public while turning handsprings on an amateur night. One great
matinée favorite made his debut on a generous Friday evening singing
coon songs of his own composition. A tragedian famous on two continents
and an island first attracted attention by an amateur impersonation of a
newly landed Scandinavian peasant girl. One Broadway comedian that turns
'em away got a booking on a Friday night by reciting (seriously) the
graveyard scene in "Hamlet."
Thus they get their chance. Amateur night is a kindly boon. It is
charity divested of almsgiving. It is a brotherly hand reached down by
members of the best united band of coworkers in the world to raise up
less fortunate ones without labelling them beggars. It gives you the
chance, if you can grasp it, to step for a few minutes before some badly
painted scenery and, during the playing by the orchestra of some ten or
twelve bars of music, and while the soles of your shoes may be clearly
holding to the uppers, to secure a salary equal to a Congressman's or
any orthodox minister's. Could an ambitious student of literature or
financial methods get a chance like that by spending twenty minutes in a
Carnegie library? I do not not trow so.
But shall we look in at Creary's? Let us say that the specific Friday
night had arrived on which the fortunate Mac McGowan was to justify the
flattering predictions of his distinguished patron and, incidentally,
drop his silver talent into the slit of the slot-machine of fame and
fortune that gives up reputation and dough. I offer, sure of your
acquiescence, that we now forswear hypocritical philosophy and bigoted
comment, permitting the story to finish itself in the dress of material
allegations--a medium more worthy, when held to the line, than the most
laborious creations of the word-milliners . . .
[Page of (O. Henry's) manuscript missing here.]
. . . easily among the wings with his patron, the great Del Delano. For,
whatever footlights shone in the City-That-Would-Be-Amused, the freedom
of their unshaded side was Del's. And if he should take up an amateur--
see? and bring him around--see? and, winking one of his cold blue eyes,
say to the manager: "Take it from me--he's got the goods--see?" you
wouldn't expect that amateur to sit on an unpainted bench sudorifically
awaiting his turn, would you? So Mac strolled around largely with the
nonpareil; and the seven waited, clammily, on the bench.
A giant in shirt-sleeves, with a grim, kind face in which many stitches
had been taken by surgeons from time to time, i. e., with a long stick,
looped at the end. He was the man with the Hook. The manager, with his
close-smoothed blond hair, his one-sided smile, and his abnormally easy
manner, pored with patient condescension over the difficult program of
the amateurs. The last of the professional turns--the Grand March of the
Happy Huzzard--had been completed; the last wrinkle and darn of their
blue silkolene cotton tights had vanished from the stage. The man in
the orchestra who played the kettle-drum, cymbals, triangle, sandpaper,
whang-doodle, hoof-beats, and catcalls, and fired the pistol shots, had
wiped his brow. The illegal holiday of the Romans had arrived.
While the orchestra plays the famous waltz from "The Dismal Wife," let
us bestow two hundred words upon the psychology of the audience.
The orchestra floor was filled by People. The boxes contained Persons.
In the galleries was the Foreordained Verdict. The claque was there as
it had originated in the Stone Age and was afterward adapted by the
French. Every Micky and Maggie who sat upon Creary's amateur bench, wise
beyond their talents, knew that their success or doom lay already meted
out to them by that crowded, whistling, roaring mass of Romans in the
three galleries. They knew that the winning or the losing of the game
for each one lay in the strength of the "gang" aloft that could turn the
applause to its favorite. On a Broadway first night a wooer of fame may
win it from the ticket buyers over the heads of the cognoscenti. But not
so at Creary's. The amateur's fate is arithmetical. The number of his
supporting admirers present at his try-out decides it in advance. But
how these outlying Friday nights put to a certain shame the Mondays,
Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and matinées of the Broadway
stage you should know . . .
[Here the manuscript ends.]
[Illustration: A page from "The Plunkville Patriot"]
ARISTOCRACY VERSUS HASH
[From _The Rolling Stone_.]
The snake reporter of _The Rolling Stone_ was wandering up the avenue
last night on his way home from the Y.M.C.A. rooms when he was approached
by a gaunt, hungry-looking man with wild eyes and dishevelled hair. He
accosted the reporter in a hollow, weak voice.
"'Can you tell me, Sir, where I can find in this town a family of
scrubs?'
"'I don't understand exactly.'
"'Let me tell you how it is,' said the stranger, inserting his
forefinger in the reporter's buttonhole and badly damaging his
chrysanthemum. 'I am a representative from Soapstone County, and I and
my family are houseless, homeless, and shelterless. We have not tasted
food for over a week. I brought my family with me, as I have indigestion
and could not get around much with the boys. Some days ago I started out
to find a boarding house, as I cannot afford to put up at a hotel. I
found a nice aristocratic-looking place, that suited me, and went in and
asked for the proprietress. A very stately lady with a Roman nose came
in the room. She had one hand laid across her stom--across her waist,
and the other held a lace handkerchief. I told her I wanted board for
myself and family, and she condescended to take us. I asked for her
terms, and she said $300 per week.
"'I had two dollars in my pocket and I gave her that for a fine teapot
that I broke when I fell over the table when she spoke.'
"'You appear surprised,' says she. 'You will please remembah that I
am the widow of Governor Riddle of Georgiah; my family is very highly
connected; I give you board as a favah; I nevah considah money any
equivalent for the advantage of my society, I--'
"'Well, I got out of there, and I went to some other places. The next
lady was a cousin of General Mahone of Virginia, and wanted four dollars
an hour for a back room with a pink motto and a Burnet granite bed in
it. The next one was an aunt of Davy Crockett, and asked eight dollars
a day for a room furnished in imitation of the Alamo, with prunes for
breakfast and one hour's conversation with her for dinner. Another one
said she was a descendant of Benedict Arnold on her father's side and
Captain Kidd on the other.
"'She took more after Captain Kidd.
"'She only had one meal and prayers a day, and counted her society worth
$100 a week.
"'I found nine widows of Supreme Judges, twelve relicts of Governors
and Generals, and twenty-two ruins left by various happy Colonels,
Professors, and Majors, who valued their aristocratic worth from $90
to $900 per week, with weak-kneed hash and dried apples on the side. I
admire people of fine descent, but my stomach yearns for pork and beans
instead of culture. Am I not right?'
"'Your words,' said the reporter, 'convince me that you have uttered
what you have said.'
"'Thanks. You see how it is. I am not wealthy; I have only my per diem
and my perquisites, and I cannot afford to pay for high lineage and
moldy ancestors. A little corned beef goes further with me than a
coronet, and when I am cold a coat of arms does not warm me.'
"'I greatly fear,' said the reporter, with a playful hiccough, 'that you
have run against a high-toned town. Most all the first-class boarding
houses here are run by ladies of the old Southern families, the very
first in the land.'
"'I am now desperate,' said the Representative, as he chewed a tack
awhile, thinking it was a clove. 'I want to find a boarding house where
the proprietress was an orphan found in a livery stable, whose father
was a dago from East Austin, and whose grandfather was never placed on
the map. I want a scrubby, ornery, low-down, snuff-dipping, back-woodsy,
piebald gang, who never heard of finger bowls or Ward McAllister, but
who can get up a mess of hot cornbread and Irish stew at regular market
quotations.'
"'Is there such a place in Austin?'
"The snake reporter sadly shook his head. 'I do not know,' he said, 'but
I will shake you for the beer.'
"Ten minutes later the slate in the Blue Ruin saloon bore two additional
characters: 10."
[Illustration: "Dear me, General, who is that dreadful man?" (cartoon)]
[Illustration: "Well, I declare, those gentlemen must be brothers."
(cartoon)]
THE PRISONER OF ZEMBLA
[From _The Rolling Stone_.]
So the king fell into a furious rage, so that none durst go near him
for fear, and he gave out that since the Princess Ostla had disobeyed
him there would be a great tourney, and to the knight who should prove
himself of the greatest valor he would give the hand of the princess.
And he sent forth a herald to proclaim that he would do this.
And the herald went about the country making his desire known, blowing a
great tin horn and riding a noble steed that pranced and gambolled; and
the villagers gazed upon him and said: "Lo, that is one of them tin horn
gamblers concerning which the chroniclers have told us."
And when the day came, the king sat in the grandstand, holding the gage
of battle in his hand, and by his side sat the Princess Ostla, looking
very pale and beautiful, but with mournful eyes from which she scarce
could keep the tears. And the knights which came to the tourney gazed
upon the princess in wonder at her beauty, and each swore to win so that
he could marry her and board with the king. Suddenly the heart of the
princess gave a great bound, for she saw among the knights one of the
poor students with whom she had been in love.
The knights mounted and rode in a line past the grandstand, and the king
stopped the poor student, who had the worst horse and the poorest
caparisons of any of the knights and said:
"Sir Knight, prithee tell me of what that marvellous shacky and
rusty-looking armor of thine is made?"
"Oh, king," said the young knight, "seeing that we are about to engage
in a big fight, I would call it scrap iron, wouldn't you?"
"Ods Bodkins!" said the king. "The youth hath a pretty wit."
About this time the Princess Ostla, who began to feel better at the
sight of her lover, slipped a piece of gum into her mouth and closed
her teeth upon it, and even smiled a little and showed the beautiful
pearls with which her mouth was set. Whereupon, as soon as the knights
perceived this, 217 of them went over to the king's treasurer and
settled for their horse feed and went home.
"It seems very hard," said the princess, "that I cannot marry when I
chews."
But two of the knights were left, one of them being the princess' lover.
"Here's enough for a fight, anyhow," said the king. "Come hither, O
knights, will ye joust for the hand of this fair lady?"
"We joust will," said the knights.
The two knights fought for two hours, and at length the princess' lover
prevailed and stretched the other upon the ground. The victorious knight
made his horse caracole before the king, and bowed low in his saddle.
On the Princess Ostla's cheeks was a rosy flush; in her eyes the light
of excitement vied with the soft glow of love; her lips were parted, her
lovely hair unbound, and she grasped the arms of her chair and leaned
forward with heaving bosom and happy smile to hear the words of her
lover.
"You have foughten well, sir knight," said the king. "And if there is
any boon you crave you have but to name it."
"Then," said the knight, "I will ask you this: I have bought the patent
rights in your kingdom for Schneider's celebrated monkey wrench, and I
want a letter from you endorsing it."
"You shall have it," said the king, "but I must tell you that there is
not a monkey in my kingdom."
With a yell of rage the victorious knight threw himself on his horse and
rode away at a furious gallop.
The king was about to speak, when a horrible suspicion flashed upon him
and he fell dead upon the grandstand.
"My God!" he cried. "He has forgotten to take the princess with him!"
[Illustration: "Oh papa, what is that?" (cartoon from _The Rolling
Stone_, April 27, 1895)]
A STRANGE STORY
[From _The Rolling Stone_.]
In the northern part of Austin there once dwelt an honest family by
the name of Smothers. The family consisted of John Smothers, his wife,
himself, their little daughter, five years of age, and her parents,
making six people toward the population of the city when counted for a
special write-up, but only three by actual count.
One night after supper the little girl was seized with a severe colic,
and John Smothers hurried down town to get some medicine.
He never came back.
The little girl recovered and in time grew up to womanhood.
The mother grieved very much over her husband's disappearance, and it
was nearly three months before she married again, and moved to San
Antonio.
The little girl also married in time, and after a few years had rolled
around, she also had a little girl five years of age.
She still lived in the same house where they dwelt when her father had
left and never returned.
One night by a remarkable coincidence her little girl was taken with
cramp colic on the anniversary of the disappearance of John Smothers,
who would now have been her grandfather if he had been alive and had a
steady job.
"I will go downtown and get some medicine for her," said John Smith (for
it was none other than he whom she had married).
"No, no, dear John," cried his wife. "You, too, might disappear forever,
and then forget to come back."
So John Smith did not go, and together they sat by the bedside of little
Pansy (for that was Pansy's name).
After a little Pansy seemed to grow worse, and John Smith again
attempted to go for medicine, but his wife would not let him.
Suddenly the door opened, and an old man, stooped and bent, with long
white hair, entered the room.
"Hello, here is grandpa," said Pansy. She had recognized him before any
of the others.
The old man drew a bottle of medicine from his pocket and gave Pansy a
spoonful.
She got well immediately.
"I was a little late," said John Smothers, "as I waited for a street
car."
[Illustration: Cartoon by O. Henry]
FICKLE FORTUNE OR HOW GLADYS HUSTLED
[From _The Rolling Stone_.]
"Press me no more Mr. Snooper," said Gladys Vavasour-Smith. "I can never
be yours."
"You have led me to believe different, Gladys," said Bertram D. Snooper.
The setting sun was flooding with golden light the oriel windows of a
magnificent mansion situated in one of the most aristocratic streets
west of the brick yard.
Bertram D. Snooper, a poor but ambitious and talented young lawyer, had
just lost his first suit. He had dared to aspire to the hand of Gladys
Vavasour-Smith, the beautiful and talented daughter of one of the oldest
and proudest families in the county. The bluest blood flowed in her
veins. Her grandfather had sawed wood for the Hornsbys and an aunt on
her mother's side had married a man who had been kicked by General Lee's
mule.
The lines about Bertram D. Snooper's hands and mouth were drawn tighter
as he paced to and fro, waiting for a reply to the question he intended
to ask Gladys as soon as he thought of one.
At last an idea occurred to him.
"Why will you not marry me?" he asked in an inaudible tone.
"Because," said Gladys firmly, speaking easily with great difficulty,
"the progression and enlightenment that the woman of to-day possesses
demand that the man shall bring to the marriage altar a heart and body
as free from the debasing and hereditary iniquities that now no longer
exist except in the chimerical imagination of enslaved custom."
"It is as I expected," said Bertram, wiping his heated brow on the
window curtain. "You have been reading books."
"Besides that," continued Gladys, ignoring the deadly charge, "you have
no money."
The blood of the Snoopers rose hastily and mantled the cheek of Bertram
D. He put on his coat and moved proudly to the door.
"Stay here till I return," he said, "I will be back in fifteen years."
When he had finished speaking he ceased and left the room.
When he had gone, Gladys felt an uncontrollable yearning take possession
of her. She said slowly, rather to herself than for publication, "I
wonder if there was any of that cold cabbage left from dinner."
She then left the room.
When she did so, a dark-complexioned man with black hair and gloomy,
desperate looking clothes, came out of the fireplace where he had been
concealed and stated:
"Aha! I have you in my power at last, Bertram D. Snooper. Gladys
Vavasour-Smith shall be mine. I am in the possession of secrets that
not a soul in the world suspects. I have papers to prove that Bertram
Snooper is the heir to the Tom Bean estate, [12] and I have discovered
that Gladys' grandfather who sawed wood for the Hornsby's was also a
cook in Major Rhoads Fisher's command during the war. Therefore, the
family repudiate her, and she will marry me in order to drag their proud
name down in the dust. Ha, ha, ha!"
[Footnote 12: An estate famous in Texas legal history. It took
many, many years for adjustment and a large part of the property
was, of course, consumed as expenses of litigation.]
As the reader has doubtless long ago discovered, this man was no other
than Henry R. Grasty. Mr. Grasty then proceeded to gloat some more, and
then with a sardonic laugh left for New York.
* * * * * *
Fifteen years have elapsed.
Of course, our readers will understand that this is only supposed to the
the case.
It really took less than a minute to make the little stars that
represent an interval of time.
We could not afford to stop a piece in the middle and wait fifteen years
before continuing it.
We hope this explanation will suffice. We are careful not to create any
wrong impressions.
Gladys Vavasour-Smith and Henry R. Grasty stood at the marriage altar.
Mr. Grasty had evidently worked his rabbit's foot successfully, although
he was quite a while in doing so.
Just as the preacher was about to pronounce the fatal words on which he
would have realized ten dollars and had the laugh on Mr. Grasty, the
steeple of the church fell off and Bertram D. Snooper entered.
The preacher fell to the ground with a dull thud. He could ill afford to
lose ten dollars. He was hastily removed and a cheaper one secured.
Bertram D. Snooper held a _Statesman_ in his hand.
"Aha!" he said, "I thought I would surprise you. I just got in this
morning. Here is a paper noticing my arrival."
He handed it to Henry R. Grasty.
Mr. Grasty looked at the paper and turned deadly pale. It was dated
three weeks after Mr. Snooper's arrival.
"Foiled again!" he hissed.
"Speak, Bertram D. Snooper," said Gladys, "why have you come between me
and Henry?"
"I have just discovered that I am the sole heir to Tom Bean's estate and
am worth two million dollars."
With a glad cry Gladys threw herself in Bertram's arms.
Henry R. Grasty drew from his breast pocket a large tin box and opened
it, took therefrom 467 pages of closely written foolscap.
"What you say is true, Mr. Snooper, but I ask you to read that," he
said, handing it to Bertram Snooper.
Mr. Snooper had no sooner read the document than he uttered a piercing
shriek and bit off a large chew of tobacco.
"All is lost," he said.
"What is that document?" asked Gladys. "Governor Hogg's message?"
"It is not as bad as that," said Bertram, "but it deprives me of my
entire fortune. But I care not for that, Gladys, since I have won you."
"What is it? Speak, I implore you," said Gladys.
"Those papers," said Henry R. Grasty, "are the proofs of my appointment
as administrator of the Tom Bean estate."
With a loving cry Gladys threw herself in Henry R. Grasty's arms.
* * * * * *
Twenty minutes later Bertram D. Snooper was seen deliberately to enter a
beer saloon on Seventeenth Street.
[Illustration: Cartoon by O. Henry]
AN APOLOGY
[This appeared in _The Rolling Stone_ shortly before it
"suspended publication" never to resume.]
The person who sweeps the office, translates letters from foreign
countries, deciphers communications from graduates of business colleges,
and does most of the writing for this paper, has been confined for the
past two weeks to the under side of a large red quilt, with a joint
caucus of la grippe and measles.
We have missed two issues of _The Rolling Stone_, and are now slightly
convalescent, for which we desire to apologize and express our regrets.
Everybody's term of subscription will be extended enough to cover
all missed issues, and we hope soon to report that the goose remains
suspended at a favorable altitude. People who have tried to run a funny
paper and entertain a congregation of large piebald measles at the same
time will understand something of the tact, finesse, and hot sassafras
tea required to do so. We expect to get out the paper regularly from
this time on, but are forced to be very careful, as improper treatment
and deleterious after-effects of measles, combined with the high price
of paper and presswork, have been known to cause a relapse. Any one not
getting their paper regularly will please come down and see about it,
bringing with them a ham or any little delicacy relished by invalids.
[Illustration: Can he make the jump? (cartoon from _The Rolling
Stone_, October 13, 1894]
LORD OAKHURST'S CURSE
[This story was sent to Dr. Beall of Greensboro, N. C., in a
letter in 1883, and so is one of O. Henry's earliest attempts
at writing.]
I
Lord Oakhurst lay dying in the oak chamber in the eastern wing of
Oakhurst Castle. Through the open window in the calm of the summer
evening, came the sweet fragrance of the early violets and budding
trees, and to the dying man it seemed as if earth's loveliness and
beauty were never so apparent as on this bright June day, his last day
of life.
His young wife, whom he loved with a devotion and strength that the
presence of the king of terrors himself could not alter, moved about
the apartment, weeping and sorrowful, sometimes arranging the sick
man's pillow and inquiring of him in low, mournful tones if anything
could be done to give him comfort, and again, with stifled sobs, eating
some chocolate caramels which she carried in the pocket of her apron.
The servants went to and fro with that quiet and subdued tread which
prevails in a house where death is an expected guest, and even the crash
of broken china and shivered glass, which announced their approach,
seemed to fall upon the ear with less violence and sound than usual.
Lord Oakhurst was thinking of days gone by, when he wooed and won his
beautiful young wife, who was then but a charming and innocent girl. How
clearly and minutely those scenes rose up at the call of his memory. He
seemed to be standing once more beneath the old chestnut grove where
they had plighted their troth in the twilight under the stars; while the
rare fragrance of the June roses and the smell of supper came gently
by on the breeze. There he had told her his love; how that his whole
happiness and future joy lay in the hope that he might win her for a
bride; that if she would trust her future to his care the devotedness of
his lifetime should be hers, and his only thought would be to make her
life one long day of sunshine and peanut candy.
How plainly he remembered how she had, with girlish shyness and coyness,
at first hesitated, and murmured something to herself about "an old
bald-headed galoot," but when he told her that to him life without her
would be a blasted mockery, and that his income was £50,000 a year, she
threw herself on to him and froze there with the tenacity of a tick on a
brindled cow, and said, with tears of joy, "Hen-ery, I am thine."
And now he was dying. In a few short hours his spirit would rise up at
the call of the Destroyer and, quitting his poor, weak, earthly frame,
would go forth into that dim and dreaded Unknown Land, and solve with
certainty that Mystery which revealeth itself not to mortal man.
II
A carriage drove rapidly up the avenue and stopped at the door.
Sir Everhard FitzArmond, the famous London physician, who had been
telegraphed for, alighted and quickly ascended the marble steps. Lady
Oakhurst met him at the door, her lovely face expressing great anxiety
and grief. "Oh, Sir Everhard, I am so glad you have come. He seems to
be sinking rapidly. Did you bring the cream almonds I mentioned in the
telegram?"
Sir Everhard did not reply, but silently handed her a package, and,
slipping a couple of cloves into his mouth, ascended the stairs that led
to Lord Oakhurst's apartment. Lady Oakhurst followed.
Sir Everhard approached the bedside of his patient and laid his hand
gently on this sick man's diagnosis. A shade of feeling passed over his
professional countenance as he gravely and solemnly pronounced these
words: "Madam, your husband has croaked."
Lady Oakhurst at first did not comprehend his technical language, and
her lovely mouth let up for a moment on the cream almonds. But soon
his meaning flashed upon her, and she seized an axe that her husband
was accustomed to keep by his bedside to mangle his servants with, and
struck open Lord Oakhurst's cabinet containing his private papers, and
with eager hands opened the document which she took therefrom. Then,
with a wild, unearthly shriek that would have made a steam piano go out
behind a barn and kick itself in despair, she fell senseless to the
floor.
Sir Everhard FitzArmond picked up the paper and read its contents. It
was Lord Oakhurst's will, bequeathing all his property to a scientific
institution which should have for its object the invention of a means
for extracting peach brandy from sawdust.
Sir Everhard glanced quickly around the room. No one was in sight.
Dropping the will, he rapidly transferred some valuable ornaments and
rare specimens of gold and silver filigree work from the centre table to
his pockets, and rang the bell for the servants.
III--THE CURSE
Sir Everhard FitzArmond descended the stairway of Oakhurst Castle and
passed out into the avenue that led from the doorway to the great iron
gates of the park. Lord Oakhurst had been a great sportsman during his
life and always kept a well-stocked kennel of curs, which now rushed out
from their hiding places and with loud yelps sprang upon the physician,
burying their fangs in his lower limbs and seriously damaging his
apparel.
Sir Everhard, startled out of his professional dignity and usual
indifference to human suffering, by the personal application of feeling,
gave vent to a most horrible and blighting CURSE and ran with great
swiftness to his carriage and drove off toward the city.
[Illustration: Page from "The Plunkville Patriot"]
BEXAR SCRIP NO. 2692
[From _The Rolling Stone_, Saturday, March 5, 1894.]
Whenever you visit Austin you should by all means go to see the General
Land Office.
As you pass up the avenue you turn sharp round the corner of the court
house, and on a steep hill before you you see a mediÊval castle.
You think of the Rhine; the "castled crag of Drachenfels"; the Lorelei;
and the vine-clad slopes of Germany. And German it is in every line of
its architecture and design.
The plan was drawn by an old draftsman from the "Vaterland," whose heart
still loved the scenes of his native land, and it is said he reproduced
the design of a certain castle near his birthplace, with remarkable
fidelity.
Under the present administration a new coat of paint has vulgarized its
ancient and venerable walls. Modern tiles have replaced the limestone
slabs of its floors, worn in hollows by the tread of thousands of feet,
and smart and gaudy fixtures have usurped the place of the time-worn
furniture that has been consecrated by the touch of hands that Texas
will never cease to honor.
But even now, when you enter the building, you lower your voice, and
time turns backward for you, for the atmosphere which you breathe is
cold with the exudation of buried generations.
The building is stone with a coating of concrete; the walls are
immensely thick; it is cool in the summer and warm in the winter; it
is isolated and sombre; standing apart from the other state buildings,
sullen and decaying, brooding on the past.
Twenty years ago it was much the same as now; twenty years from now the
garish newness will be worn off and it will return to its appearance of
gloomy decadence.
People living in other states can form no conception of the vastness and
importance of the work performed and the significance of the millions of
records and papers composing the archives of this office.
The title deeds, patents, transfers and legal documents connected with
every foot of land owned in the state of Texas are filed here.
Volumes could be filled with accounts of the knavery, the
double-dealing, the cross purposes, the perjury, the lies, the bribery,
the alteration and erasing, the suppressing and destroying of papers,
the various schemes and plots that for the sake of the almighty dollar
have left their stains upon the records of the General Land Office.
No reference is made to the employees. No more faithful, competent
and efficient force of men exists in the clerical portions of any
government, but there is--or was, for their day is now over--a class of
land speculators commonly called land sharks, unscrupulous and greedy,
who have left their trail in every department of this office, in the
shape of titles destroyed, patents cancelled, homes demolished and torn
away, forged transfers and lying affidavits.
Before the modern tiles were laid upon the floors, there were deep
hollows in the limestone slabs, worn by the countless feet that daily
trod uneasily through its echoing corridors, pressing from file room
to business room, from commissioner's sanctum to record books and back
again.
The honest but ignorant settler, bent on saving the little plot of
land he called home, elbowed the wary land shark who was searching the
records for evidence to oust him; the lordly cattle baron, relying on
his influence and money, stood at the Commissioner's desk side by side
with the preëmptor, whose little potato patch lay like a minute speck of
island in the vast, billowy sea, of his princely pastures, and played
the old game of "freeze-out," which is as old as Cain and Abel.
The trail of the serpent is through it all.
Honest, earnest men have wrought for generations striving to disentangle
the shameful coil that certain years of fraud and infamy have wound.
Look at the files and see the countless endorsements of those in
authority:
"Transfer doubtful--locked up."
"Certificate a forgery--locked up."
"Signature a forgery."
"Patent refused--duplicate patented elsewhere."
"Field notes forged."
"Certificates stolen from office"--and so on ad infinitum.
The record books, spread upon long tables, in the big room upstairs,
are open to the examination of all. Open them, and you will find the
dark and greasy finger prints of half a century's handling. The quick
hand of the land grabber has fluttered the leaves a million times; the
damp clutch of the perturbed tiller of the soil has left traces of his
calling on the ragged leaves.
Interest centres in the file room.
This is a large room, built as a vault, fireproof, and entered by but a
single door.
There is "No Admission" on the portal; and the precious files are handed
out by a clerk in charge only on presentation of an order signed by the
Commissioner or chief clerk.
In years past too much laxity prevailed in its management, and the files
were handled by all comers, simply on their request, and returned at
their will, or not at all.
In those days most of the mischief was done. In the file room, there
are about ---- files, each in a paper wrapper, and comprising the title
papers of a particular tract of land.
You ask the clerk in charge for the papers relating to any survey in
Texas. They are arranged simply in districts and numbers.
He disappears from the door, you hear the sliding of a tin box, the lid
snaps, and the file is in your hand.
Go up there some day and call for Bexar Scrip No. 2692.
The file clerk stares at you for a second, says shortly:
"Out of file."
It has been missing twenty years.
The history of that file has never been written before.
Twenty years ago there was a shrewd land agent living in Austin who
devoted his undoubted talents and vast knowledge of land titles, and
the laws governing them, to the locating of surveys made by illegal
certificates, or improperly made, and otherwise of no value through
non-compliance with the statutes, or whatever flaws his ingenious and
unscrupulous mind could unearth.
He found a fatal defect in the title of the land as on file in Bexar
Scrip No. 2692 and placed a new certificate upon the survey in his own
name.
The law was on his side.
Every sentiment of justice, of right, and humanity was against him.
The certificate by virtue of which the original survey had been made was
missing.
It was not be found in the file, and no memorandum or date on the
wrapper to show that it had ever been filed.
Under the law the land was vacant, unappropriated public domain, and
open to location.
The land was occupied by a widow and her only son, and she supposed her
title good.
The railroad had surveyed a new line through the property, and it had
doubled in value.
Sharp, the land agent, did not communicate with her in any way until he
had filed his papers, rushed his claim through the departments and into
the patent room for patenting.
Then he wrote her a letter, offering her the choice of buying from him
or vacating at once.
He received no reply.
One day he was looking through some files and came across the missing
certificate. Some one, probably an employee of the office, had by
mistake, after making some examination, placed it in the wrong file, and
curiously enough another inadvertence, in there being no record of its
filing on the wrapper, had completed the appearance of its having never
been filed.
Sharp called for the file in which it belonged and scrutinized it
carefully, fearing he might have overlooked some endorsement regarding
its return to the office.
On the back of the certificate was plainly endorsed the date of filing,
according to law, and signed by the chief clerk.
If this certificate should be seen by the examining clerk, his own
claim, when it came up for patenting, would not be worth the paper on
which it was written.