finished sharpening her pencil. "Oh, yes, along in the eighties came
the boom, and Samp tried to get in it and make some money. He seems to
have tried to catch up with us fellows of his age, and he began to
plunge. He got in debt, and, when the boom broke, he was still living in
a rented house with the rent ten months behind; his partnership was gone
and his practice was cut down to joint-keepers, gamblers, and the
farmers who hadn't heard the stories of his financial irregularities
that were floating around town.
"Yet his wife stuck to him, forever explaining to my wife that he would
be all right when he settled down. But he continued to soak up a
little--not much, but a little. He never was drunk in the daytime, but I
remember there used to be mornings when his office smelled pretty sour.
I had an office next to his for a while and he used to come in and talk
to me a good deal. The young fellows around town whom he would like to
run with were beginning to find him stupid, and the old fellows--except
me--were busy and he had no one to loaf with. He decided, I remember,
several times to brace up, and once he kept white shirts, cuffs and
collars on for nearly a year. But when Harrison was elected, he filled
up from his shoes to his hat and didn't go home for three days. One day
after that, when he had gone back to his flannel shirts and dirty
collars, he was sitting in my office looking at the fire in the big box
stove when he broke out with:
"'Alphabetical--what's the matter with me, anyway? This town sends men
to Congress; it makes Supreme Court judges of others. It sends fellows
to Kansas City as rich bankers. It makes big merchants out of grocery
clerks. Fortune just naturally flirts with everyone in town--but never a
wink do I get. I know and you know I'm smarter than those jays. I can
teach your Congressman economics, and your Supreme judge law. I can
think up more schemes than the banker, and can beat the merchant in any
kind of a game he'll name. I don't lie and I don't steal and I ain't
stuck up. What's the matter with me, anyway?'
"And of course," mused Colonel Morrison as he relighted the butt of his
cigar, "of course I had to lie to him and say I didn't know. But I did.
We all knew. He was too much of a good fellow. His failure to get on
bothered him a good deal, and one day he got roaring full and went up
and down town telling people how smart he was. Then his pride left him,
and he let his whiskers grow frowsy and used his vest for a spittoon,
and his eyes watered too easily for a man still in his forties.
"He went West a dozen years ago, about the time of Cleveland's second
election, expecting to get a job in Arizona and grow up with the
country. His wife was mighty happy, and she told our folks and the rest
of the women that when Horace got away from his old associates in this
town she knew that he would be all right. Poor Myrtle Kenwick, the
prettiest girl you ever saw along in the sixties--and she was through
here not long ago and stayed with my wife and the girls--a broken old
woman, going back to her kinfolk in Iowa after she left him. Poor
Myrtle! I wonder where she is. I see this Arizona paper doesn't say
anything about her."
Colonel Morrison read over the item again, and smiled as he proceeded:
"But it does say that he occupied many places of honour and trust in
his former home in Kansas, which seems to indicate that whisky made old
Samp a liar as well as a loafer at last. My, my!" sighed the Colonel as
he rose and put the paper on the desk. "My, my! What a treacherous
serpent it is! It gave him a good time--literally a hell of a good time.
And he was a good fellow--literally a damned good fellow--'damned from
here to eternity,' as your man Kipling says. God gave him every talent.
He might have been a respected, useful citizen; no honour was beyond
him; but he put aside fame and worth and happiness to play with whisky.
My Lord, just think of it!" exclaimed the Colonel as he reached for his
hat and put up his glasses. "And this is how whisky served him: brought
him to shame, wrecked his home, made his name a by-word, and lured him
on and on to utter ruin by holding before him the phantom of a good
time. What a pitiful, heart-breaking mocker it is!" He sighed a long
sigh as he stood in the door looking up at the sky with his hands
clasped behind him, and said half audibly as he went down the steps:
"And whoso is deceived thereby is not wise--not wise. 'He's good at
anything--and yet a fool'!"
That was what Colonel Morrison gave the stenographer. What we made for
the paper is entirely uninteresting and need not be printed here.
XVI
A Kansas "Childe Roland"
One of the wisest things ever said about the newspaper business was said
by the late J. Sterling Morton, of Nebraska. He declared that a
newspaper's enemies were its assets, and the newspaper's liabilities its
friends. This is particularly true of a country newspaper. For instance,
witness the ten-years' struggle of our own little paper to get rid of
the word "Hon." as a prefix to the names of politicians. Everyone in
town used to laugh at us for referring to whippersnapper statesmen as
"Honourable"; because everyone in town knew that for the most part these
whippersnappers were entirely dishonourable. It was easy enough to stop
calling our enemies "Hon.," for they didn't dare to complain; but if we
dropped the title even from so mangy a man as Abner Handy, within a week
Charley Hedrick would happen into the office with twenty or thirty
dollars' worth of legal printing, and after doing us so important a
favour would pause before going out to say:
"Boys, what you fellows got against Ab Handy?" And the ensuing dialogue
would conclude from old Charley: "Well, I know--I know--but Ab likes it,
and it really isn't much, and I know he's a fool about it; I don't care
in my own case, but if you can do it I kind of wish you would. Ab's
funny that way; he's never given up. He's like the fellow old Browning
tells about who has 'august anticipations, of a dim splendour ever on
before,' and when you fellows quit calling him 'Hon.' it makes him
blue."
And old Charley would grow purple with a big, wheezy, asthmatic laugh,
and shake his great six-foot hulk and toddle out leaving us vanquished.
For though the whole town reviles Abner Handy, Charley Hedrick still
looks after him.
It was said for thirty years that Handy did old Charley's dirty work in
politics, but we knew many of the mean things that Handy did were
unjustly charged to Hedrick. People in a small community are apt to put
two and two together and make five. Much of the talk about the alliance
between Hedrick and Handy is, of course, down-right slander; every
lawyer who tries lawsuits for forty years in a country town is bound to
make enemies of small-minded people, many of whom occupy large places in
the community, and a small-minded man, believing that his enemy is a
villain, makes up his facts to suit his belief, and then peddles his
story. It is always just as well to discount the home stories on an old
lawyer ninety-five per cent. if they are bad; and seventy per cent. if
they are good--for he may have saved the fellow who is telling them from
the penitentiary. But Abner Handy was never enough of a lawyer to come
within this rule. Indeed they used to say that he was not admitted to
the bar, at all, but that when he came to town, in 1871, he erased his
dead brother's name on a law diploma and substituted his own. Still, he
practised on the law--as Simon Mehronay used to say of Handy--and for
twenty years carried an advertisement in Eastern farm journals
proclaiming that his specialty was Kansas collections. He never took as
a fee less than ninety-five per cent. of the amount he collected. That
was the advantage which he had as a lawyer, which advantage inspired
Colonel Alphabetical Morrison to proclaim that a lawyer's diploma is
nothing but a license to steal; upon hearing which Charley Hedrick sent
back to the Colonel the retort that it would take two legal diplomas
working day and night to keep up with the Colonel's more or less honest
endeavours.
Now Ab Handy was a lean coyote, who was forever licking his bruises, and
some ten years later he tried to run for the school board solely to get
the Colonel's daughters dismissed as school-teachers. It was his boast
that he never forgot a foe; and for twenty years after Hedrick saved
Handy from going to jail for robbing a cattleman of a thousand dollars
in "Red" Martin's gambling-room, the only good thing the town knew of
Handy was that he never forgot a friend.
During that twenty years whenever, to further his ends in a primary or
in an election, Charley Hedrick needed the votes of the rough element
that gathered about our little town, Abner Handy, card-sharper and
jack-leg lawyer, would go forth into the byways and alleys and gather
them in. For this service, when Hedrick carried the county--which was
about four times out of five--Handy was rewarded by being put on the
delegation to the State convention. Thus he made his beginning in State
politics. The second time that he attended a State convention Handy
swelled up in his Sunday clothes, and by reason of his slight
acquaintance with the manipulators of State politics, began to patronise
the other members of our delegation--good, honest men, whose contempt
for him at home was unspeakable; but when they huddled like sheep in the
strange crowd at the convention they often accepted Handy as a guide in
important matters. In talking with the home delegation Handy very soon
began speaking of the convention leaders familiarly as "Jim" and "Dick"
and "Tawm" and "Bill," and sometimes Handy brought one of these
dignitaries to the rooms of our delegation and introduced him to our
people with a grand flourish. Every time the legislature met, Ab Handy
was a clerk in it, and, if he was a clerk of an important committee
like the railroad committee or the committee on the calendar, he
invariably came home with a few hundred dollars, three suits of clothes
and a railroad pass. No one but Charley Hedrick could live with him for
six months afterward.
It was when he returned from one of these profitable sessions that Abner
Handy and Nora Sinclair were married. The affinity between them was
this: his good clothes and proud manner caught her; and her social
position caught him. Everyone in town knew, however, that Nora Sinclair
had been too smart for Handy. She had him hooked through the gills
before he knew that he was more than nibbling at the bait. The town
concurred with Colonel Morrison--our only townsman who travelled widely
in those days--when he put it succinctly: "Ab Handy is Nora Sinclair's
last call for the dining-car."
Her influence on Abner Handy and his life was such that it is necessary
to record something of the kind of a woman she was before he met her. A
woman of the right sort might have made a man of Handy, even that late
in life. Strong, good women have made weak men fairly strong, but such
women were never girls like Nora. She was a nice enough little girl
until she became boy-struck--as our vernacular puts it. Her mother
thought this development of the child was "so cute," and told callers
about the boys who came to see Nora--before she was twelve. In those
days, and in some old-fashioned families in our town, little girls were
asked to run out to play when the neighbours had to be discussed. But
Mrs. Sinclair claimed Nora was "neither sugar nor salt nor anybody's
honey," and everything was talked over before the child. We knew at the
office from Colonel Morrison that his little girls did not play at the
Sinclairs'. Her mother put long dresses and picture hats upon her and
pushed her out into society, and the whole town knew that Nora was a
mature woman, in all her instincts, by the time she was sixteen. Her
mother, moreover, was manifestly proud that the child wasn't "one of
those long-legged, gangling tom-boy girls, who seem so backward" and
wear pigtails and chew slate pencils and dream.
The gilded youths who boarded at the Hotel Metropole began to notice
her. That pleased her mother also, and she said to the mothers of other
little girls of Nora's age who were climbing fences and wiping dishes:
"You know Nora is so popular with the gentlemen." When the girl was
seventeen she was engaged. She kept a town fellow and had a college
fellow. She acquired a "gentleman friend" in Kansas City who gave her
expensive presents. These her mother took great joy in displaying, and
never objected when he stayed after eleven o'clock; for she thought he
was "such a good catch" and such a "swell young man." But Nora shooed
him off the front porch in the summer following, because he objected to
her having two or three other eleven o'clock fellows. She said he was
"selfish, and would not let her have a good time." At nineteen she knew
more about matters that were none of her business than most women know
on their wedding day, and the boys said that she was soft. Every time
that Nora left town she came back with two or three correspondents. She
perfumed her stationery, used a seal, adopted all the latest frills,
and learned to write an angular hand. At twenty she was going with the
young married set, and was invited out to the afternoon card clubs. She
was known as a dashing girl at this time, and travelling men in three
States knew about her. Her mother used to send personal items to our
office telling of their exalted business positions and announcing their
visits to the Sinclair home. There was more or less talk about Nora in a
quiet way, but her mother said that "it is because the other girls don't
know how to wear their clothes as well as Nora does," and that "when a
girl has a fine figure--which few enough girls in this town have, Heaven
knows--why, she is a fool if she doesn't make the most of herself."
Then, gradually, Nora went to seed. She became a faded, hard-faced
woman, and all the sisters in town warned their brothers against her.
She was invited out only when there was a crowd. She took up with the
boys of the younger set, and the married women of her own age called her
the kidnapper. She was a social joke. About once a year a strange man
would show up in her parlour, and she kept up the illusion about being
engaged. But in the office we shared the town's knowledge that her harp
was on the willows. She was massaging her face at twenty-six and her
mother was sniffing at the town and saying that there were no social
advantages to be had here. She and the girl went to the Lakes every
summer, and Nora always came home declaring that she had had the time of
her life, and that she met so many lovely gentlemen. But that was all
there was to it, and in the end it was Abner Handy or no one.
After their wedding, Nora and Abner Handy set about the business of
making politics pay. That is a difficult thing to do in a country town,
where every voter is a watchdog of the county and city treasuries. Abner
gave up his gambling, he and his wife joined all the lodges in town, and
she dragged him into that coterie of people known as Society. She joined
a woman's club, and was always anxious to be appointed on the soliciting
committee when the women had any public work to do; so when the library
needed books, or the trash cans at the street corners needed paint, or
the park trees needed trimming, or the new hospital needed an additional
bed, or the band needed new uniforms, Mrs. Handy might be seen on the
streets with two or three women of a much better social status than she
had, making it clear that she was a public-spirited woman and that she
moved in the best circles. Whereupon Abner Handy got work in the
court-house--as a deputy, or as a clerk, or as an under-sheriff, or as a
juror--and when the legislature met he went to Topeka as a clerk.
No one knew how they lived, but they did live. Every two years they gave
a series of parties, and the splendour of these festivals made the town
exclaim in one voice: "Well, _how_ do they do it?" But Mrs. Handy, who
was steaming the wrinkles out of her face, and assuming more or less
kittenish airs in her late thirties, never offered the town an
explanation. "Hers not to answer why, hers not to make reply, hers but
to do and dye" was the way Colonel Morrison put it the day after Mrs.
Handy swooped down into Main Street with a golden yellow finish on her
hair. She walked serenely between Mrs. Frelinghuysen and Mrs. Priscilla
Winthrop Conklin. They were begging for funds with which to furnish a
rest room for farmers' wives. And when they bore down on our office,
Colonel Morrison folded his papers in his bosom and passed them on the
threshold as one hurrying to a fire in the roof of his own house. It was
interesting to observe, when the Federation Committee called on us that
day, that Mrs. Handy did all the talking. She was as full of airs and
graces as an actress, and ogled with her glassy eyes, and put on a sweet
babyish innocence of the ways of business and of men--as though men were
a race apart, greatly to be feared because they ate up little girls. But
she got her dollar before she left the office, and George Kirwin, who
happened to be in the front room at the time waiting for a proof, said
he thought that the performance and the new hair were worth the price.
Five years passed and in each year Mrs. Handy had found some artificial
way of deluding herself that she was cheating time. Then Charley
Hedrick, who needed a vote in the legislature, and was too busy to go
there himself, nominated Abner Handy and elected him to a seat in the
lower house. The thing that Hedrick needed was not important--merely
the creation of a new judicial district which would remove an obnoxious
district judge in an adjoining county from our district, and leave our
county in a district by itself. Hedrick hated the judge, and Hedrick
used Handy's vote for trading purposes with other statesmen desiring
similar small matters and got the district remade as he desired it.
When the Handys started to Topeka for the opening of the session, they
began to inflame with importance as the train whistled for the junction
east of town, and by the time they actually arrived at Topeka they were
so highly swollen that they could not get into a boarding-house door,
but went to the best hotel, and engaged rooms at seven dollars a day.
The town gasped for two days and then began to laugh and wink. Two weeks
after their arrival at the State capital, Abner Handy had been made
chairman of the joint committee on the calendar, second member of the
judiciary committee and member of the railroad committee, and Mrs. Handy
had established credit at a Topeka dry-goods store and was going it
blind. She gave her hair an extra dip, and used to come sailing down
the corridors of the hotel in gorgeous silk house-gowns with ridiculous
trains, and never appeared at breakfast without her diamonds. Before the
session was well under way she had been to Kansas City to have her face
enameled and had told the other "ladies of the hotel," as the wives of
members of the legislature stopping at the hotel were called, that
Topeka stores offered such a poor selection; she confided to them that
Mr. Handy always wore silk nightshirts, and that she was unable to find
anything in town that he would put on. She regarded herself as a
charmer, and made great eyes at all the important lobbyists, to whom she
put on her baby voice and manner and said that she thought politics were
just simply awful, and added that if she were a man she would show them
how honest a politician could be, but she wasn't, and when Abner tried
to explain it to her it made her head ache, and all she wanted him to do
was to help his friends, and she would add coyly: "I'm going to see that
he helps you--whatever he does."
Every bill that had a dollar in it was held at the bottom of the
calendar until satisfactory arrangements were made with Abner Handy and
his friends. When the legislative buccaneers under the black flag,
sailed after an insurance company, their bill remained at the bottom of
the calendar in one house or the other until Ab Handy had been seen, and
no one could find out why. And so, in spite of our dislike of the man,
our paper was forced to acknowledge that Handy was a house leader.
Although he had never had a dozen cases above the police court, he came
back at the end of the session with the local attorneyship of two
railroads, and was chairman of a house committee to investigate the
taxes paid by the railroads in the various counties. This gave him a
year's work, so he rented an office in the Worthington block and hired a
stenographer. Of course, we knew in town how Ab Handy had made his
money. But he paid so many of his old debts, and dispensed so many
favours with such a lordly hand, that it was hard to stir local
sentiment against him. He donned the clothes of a "prominent citizen,"
and in discussing public affairs assumed an owlish manner that impressed
his former associates, and fooled stupid people, who began to believe
that they had been harbouring a statesman unawares. But Charley Hedrick
only grinned when men talked to him of the rise of Handy, and replied to
the complaints of the scrupulous that Ab was no worse than he had always
been, and if he was making it pay better, no one was poorer for his
prosperity but Ab himself, and added: "Certainly he is a sincere
spender." One day when Handy appeared on the street in a particularly
fiery red necktie, Hedrick got him in a crowd, and began: "Just for a
handful of silver he left us--just for a riband to stick in his coat."
And when the crowd laughed with the joker, Hedrick continued in his
thick, gravy-coated voice: "Old Browning's the boy. You fellows that
want Shakespeare can have him; but Ab here knows that I take a little
dash of Browning in mine. Since Ab's got to be a statesman, he's bought
all of Webster's works and is learning 'em by heart. But"--and here
Hedrick chuckled and shook his fat sides before letting out the joke
which he enjoyed so much--"I says to Ab: as old Browning says, what does
'the fine felicity and flower of wickedness' like you need with
Webster; what you want to commit to memory is the penal statutes." And
he threw back his head and gurgled down in his abdomen, while the crowd
roared and Handy showed the wool in his teeth with a dog-like grin.
No other man in town would have dared that with Handy after he became a
statesman; but we figured it out in the office that old Charley Hedrick
was merely exhibiting his brand on Ab Handy to show the town that his
title to Handy was still good. For though there was considerable of the
King Cole about Hedrick--in that he was a merry old soul--he was always
king, and he insisted on having his divine right to rule the politics of
the county unquestioned. That was his vanity and he knew it, and was not
ashamed of it.
He was the best lawyer in the State in those days, and one of the best
in the West. Ten months in the year he paid no attention to politics,
pendulating daily between his house and his office. Often, being
preoccupied with his work, he would go the whole length of Main Street
speaking to no one. When a tangled case was in his mind he would enter
his office in the morning, roll up his desk top, and dig into his work
without speaking to a soul until, about the middle of the morning, he
would look up from his desk to say as though he had just left off
speaking: "Jim, hand me that 32 Kansas report over there on the table."
When he worked, law books sprang up around him and sprawled over his
desk and lay half open on chairs and tables near him until he had found
his point; then he would get up and begin rollicking, slamming books
together, cleaning up his debris and playing like a great porpoise with
the litter he had made. At such times--and, indeed, all the time unless
he was in what he called a "legal trance"--Hedrick was bubbling with
good spirits, and when he left his office for politics he could get out
in his shirt-sleeves at a primary and peddle tickets, or nose up and
down the street like a fat ferret looking for votes. So when Abner Handy
announced that he desired to go to the State Senate, to fill an
unexpired term for two years, he had Hedrick behind him to give strength
and respectability to his candidacy. Between the two Handy won. That was
before the days of reform, when it was supposed to be considerable of a
virtue for a man to stand by his friend; and, being a lawyer, Hedrick
naturally had the lawyer's view that no man is guilty until the jury is
in, and its findings have been reviewed by the supreme court.