Mrs. Sellers returned, now, with her composure restored, and began to
ask after Hawkins’s wife, and about his children, and the number of
them, and so on, and her examination of the witness resulted in a
circumstantial history of the family’s ups and downs and driftings to
and fro in the far West during the previous fifteen years. There was a
message, now, from out back, and Colonel Sellers went out there in
answer to it. Hawkins took this opportunity to ask how the world had
been using the Colonel during the past half-generation.
“Oh, it’s been using him just the same; it couldn’t change its way of
using him if it wanted to, for he wouldn’t let it.”
“I can easily believe that, Mrs. Sellers.”
“Yes, you see, he doesn’t change, himself—not the least little bit in
the world—he’s always Mulberry Sellers.”
“I can see _that_ plain enough.”
“Just the same old scheming, generous, good-hearted, moonshiny,
hopeful, no-account failure he always was, and still everybody likes
him just as well as if he was the shiningest success.”
“They always did: and it was natural, because he was so obliging and
accommodating, and had something about him that made it kind of easy to
ask help of him, or favors—you didn’t feel shy, you know, or have that
wish—you—didn’t—have—to—try feeling that you have with other people.”
“It’s just so, yet; and a body wonders at it, too, because he’s been
shamefully treated, many times, by people that had used him for a
ladder to climb up by, and then kicked him down when they didn’t need
him any more. For a time you can see he’s hurt, his pride’s wounded,
because he shrinks away from that thing and don’t want to talk about
it—and so I used to think _now_ he’s learned something and he’ll be
more careful hereafter—but laws! in a couple of weeks he’s forgotten
all about it, and any selfish tramp out of nobody knows where can come
and put up a poor mouth and walk right into his heart with his boots
on.”
“It must try your patience pretty sharply sometimes.”
p038.jpg (36K)
“Oh, no, I’m used to it; and I’d rather have him so than the other way.
When I call him a failure, I mean to the world he’s a failure; he isn’t
to me. I don’t know as I want him different much different, anyway. I
have to scold him some, snarl at him, you might even call it, but I
reckon I’d do that just the same, if he was different—it’s my make. But
I’m a good deal less snarly and more contented when he’s a failure than
I am when he isn’t.”
“Then he isn’t always a failure,” said Hawking, brightening.
“Him? Oh, bless you, no. He makes a strike, as he calls it, from time
to time. Then’s my time to fret and fuss. For the money just
flies—first come first served. Straight off, he loads up the house with
cripples and idiots and stray cats and all the different kinds of poor
wrecks that other people don’t want and he _does_, and then when the
poverty comes again I’ve _got_ to clear the most of them out or we’d
starve; and that distresses him, and me the same, of course.
“Here’s old Dan’l and old Jinny, that the sheriff sold south one of the
times that we got bankrupted before the war—they came wandering back
after the peace, worn out and used up on the cotton plantations,
helpless, and not another lick of work left in their old hides for the
rest of this earthly pilgrimage—and we so pinched, _oh_ so pinched for
the very crumbs to keep life in us, and he just flung the door wide,
and the way he received them you’d have thought they had come straight
down from heaven in answer to prayer. I took him one side and said,
‘Mulberry we can’t have them—we’ve nothing for ourselves—we can’t feed
them.’ He looked at me kind of hurt, and said, ‘Turn them out?—and
they’ve come to me just as confident and trusting as—as—why Polly, I
must have _bought_ that confidence sometime or other a long time ago,
and given my note, so to speak—you don’t get such things as a
_gift_—and how am I going to go back on a debt like that? And you see,
they’re so poor, and old, and friendless, and—’ But I was ashamed by
that time, and shut him off, and somehow felt a new courage in me, and
so I said, softly, ‘We’ll keep them—the Lord will provide.’ He was
glad, and started to blurt out one of those over-confident speeches of
his, but checked himself in time, and said humbly, ‘_I_ will, anyway.’
It was years and years and years ago. Well, you see those old wrecks
are here yet.”
“But don’t they do your housework?”
“Laws! The idea. They would if they could, poor old things, and perhaps
they think they _do_ do some of it. But it’s a superstition. Dan’l
waits on the front door, and sometimes goes on an errand; and sometimes
you’ll see one or both of them letting on to dust around in here—but
that’s because there’s something they want to hear about and mix their
gabble into. And they’re always around at meals, for the same reason.
But the fact is, we have to keep a young negro girl just to take care
of _them_, and a negro woman to do the housework and _help_ take care
of them.”
“Well, they ought to be tolerably happy, I should think.”
“It’s no name for it. They quarrel together pretty much all the
time—most always about religion, because Dan’l’s a Dunker Baptist and
Jinny’s a shouting Methodist, and Jinny believes in special Providences
and Dan’l don’t, because he thinks he’s a kind of a free-thinker—and
they play and sing plantation hymns together, and talk and chatter just
eternally and forever, and are sincerely fond of each other and think
the world of Mulberry, and he puts up patiently with all their spoiled
ways and foolishness, and so—ah, well, they’re happy enough if it comes
to that. And I don’t mind—I’ve got used to it. I can get used to
anything, with Mulberry to help; and the fact is, I don’t much care
what happens, so long as he’s spared to me.”
“Well, here’s to him, and hoping he’ll make another strike soon.”
“And rake in the lame, the halt and the blind, and turn the house into
a hospital again? It’s what he would do. I’ve seen aplenty of that and
more. No, Washington, I want his strikes to be mighty moderate ones the
rest of the way down the vale.”
“Well, then, big strike or little strike, or no strike at all, here’s
hoping he’ll never lack for friends—and I don’t reckon he ever will
while there’s people around who know enough to—”
“Him lack for friends!” and she tilted her head up with a frank
pride—“why, Washington, you can’t name a man that’s anybody that isn’t
fond of him. I’ll tell you privately, that I’ve had Satan’s own time to
keep them from appointing him to some office or other. They knew he’d
no business with an office, just as well as I did, but he’s the hardest
man to refuse anything to a body ever saw. Mulberry Sellers with an
office! laws goodness, you know what that would be like. Why, they’d
come from the ends of the earth to see a circus like that. I’d just as
lieves be married to Niagara Falls, and done with it.” After a
reflective pause she added—having wandered back, in the interval, to
the remark that had been her text: “Friends?—oh, indeed, no man ever
had more; and _such_ friends: Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Johnston,
Longstreet, Lee—many’s the time they’ve sat in that chair you’re
sitting in—” Hawkins was out of it instantly, and contemplating it with
a reverential surprise, and with the awed sense of having trodden shod
upon holy ground—
“_They!_” he said.
“Oh, indeed, yes, a many and a many a time.”
He continued to gaze at the chair fascinated, magnetized; and for once
in his life that continental stretch of dry prairie which stood for his
imagination was afire, and across it was marching a slanting flamefront
that joined its wide horizons together and smothered the skies with
smoke. He was experiencing what one or another drowsing, geographically
ignorant alien experiences every day in the year when he turns a dull
and indifferent eye out of the car window and it falls upon a certain
station-sign which reads “Stratford-on-Avon!” Mrs. Sellers went
gossiping comfortably along:
“Oh, they like to hear him talk, especially if their load is getting
rather heavy on one shoulder and they want to shift it. He’s all air,
you know,—breeze, you may say—and he freshens them up; it’s a trip to
the country, they say. Many a time he’s made General Grant laugh—and
that’s a tidy job, I can tell you, and as for Sheridan, his eye lights
up and he listens to Mulberry Sellers the same as if he was artillery.
You see, the charm about Mulberry is, he is so catholic and
unprejudiced that he fits in anywhere and everywhere. It makes him
powerful good company, and as popular as scandal. You go to the White
House when the President’s holding a general reception—sometime when
Mulberry’s there. Why, dear me, _you_ can’t tell which of them it is
that’s holding that reception.”
“Well, he certainly is a remarkable man—and he always was. Is he
religious?”
“Clear to his marrow—does more thinking and reading on that subject
than any other except Russia and Siberia: thrashes around over the
whole field, too; nothing bigoted about him.”
“What is his religion?”
“He—” She stopped, and was lost for a moment or two in thinking, then
she said, with simplicity, “I think he was a Mohammedan or something
last week.”
Washington started down town, now, to bring his trunk, for the
hospitable Sellerses would listen to no excuses; their house must be
his home during the session. The Colonel returned presently and resumed
work upon his plaything. It was finished when Washington got back.
“There it is,” said the Colonel, “all finished.”
“What is it for, Colonel?”
“Oh, it’s just a trifle. Toy to amuse the children.”
Washington examined it.
“It seems to be a puzzle.”
“Yes, that’s what it is. I call it Pigs in the Clover. Put them in—see
if you can put them in the pen.”
After many failures Washington succeeded, and was as pleased as a
child.
“It’s wonderfully ingenious, Colonel, it’s ever so clever and
interesting—why, I could play with it all day. What are you going to do
with it?”
“Oh, nothing. Patent it and throw it aside.”
“Don’t you do anything of the kind. There’s money in that thing.”
A compassionate look traveled over the Colonel’s countenance, and he
said:
“Money—yes; pin money: a couple of hundred thousand, perhaps. Not
more.”
Washington’s eyes blazed.
“A couple of hundred thousand dollars! do you call that pin money?”
The colonel rose and tip-toed his way across the room, closed a door
that was slightly ajar, tip-toed his way to his seat again, and said,
under his breath:
“You can keep a secret?”
Washington nodded his affirmative, he was too awed to speak.
“You have heard of materialization—materialization of departed
spirits?”
Washington had heard of it.
“And probably didn’t believe in it; and quite right, too. The thing as
practised by ignorant charlatans is unworthy of attention or
respect—where there’s a dim light and a dark cabinet, and a parcel of
sentimental gulls gathered together, with their faith and their
shudders and their tears all ready, and one and the same fatty
degeneration of protoplasm and humbug comes out and materializes
himself into anybody you want, grandmother, grandchild, brother-in-law,
Witch of Endor, John Milton, Siamese twins, Peter the Great, and all
such frantic nonsense—no, that is all foolish and pitiful. But when a
man that is competent brings the vast powers of _science_ to bear, it’s
a different matter, a totally different matter, you see. The spectre
that answers _that_ call has come to stay. Do you note the commercial
value of that detail?”
“Well, I—the—the truth is, that I don’t quite know that I do. Do you
mean that such, being permanent, not transitory, would give more
general satisfaction, and so enhance the price—of tickets to the show—”
“Show? Folly—listen to me; and get a good grip on your breath, for you
are going to need it. Within three days I shall have completed my
method, and then—let the world stand aghast, for it shall see marvels.
Washington, within three days—ten at the outside—you shall see me call
the dead of any century, and they will arise and walk. Walk?—they shall
walk forever, and never die again. Walk with all the muscle and spring
of their pristine vigor.”
“Colonel! Indeed it does take one’s breath away.”
“_Now_ do you see the money that’s in it?”
“I’m—well, I’m—not really sure that I do.”
“Great Scott, look here. I shall have a monopoly; they’ll all belong to
me, won’t they? Two thousand policemen in the city of New York. Wages,
four dollars a day. I’ll replace them with dead ones at half the
money.”
“Oh, prodigious! I never thought of that. F-o-u-r thousand dollars a
day. Now I do begin to see! But will dead policemen answer?”
“Haven’t they—up to this time?”
“Well, if you put it that way—”
“Put it any way you want to. Modify it to suit yourself, and my lads
shall still be superior. They won’t eat, they won’t drink—don’t need
those things; they won’t wink for cash at gambling dens and unlicensed
rum-holes, they won’t spark the scullery maids; and moreover the bands
of toughs that ambuscade them on lonely beats, and cowardly shoot and
knife them will only damage the uniforms and not live long enough to
get more than a momentary satisfaction out of that.”
“Why, Colonel, if you can furnish policemen, then of course—”
“Certainly—I can furnish any line of goods that’s wanted. Take the
army, for instance—now twenty-five thousand men; expense, twenty-two
millions a year. I will dig up the Romans, I will resurrect the Greeks,
I will furnish the government, for ten millions a year, ten thousand
veterans drawn from the victorious legions of all the ages—soldiers
that will chase Indians year in and year out on materialized horses,
and cost never a cent for rations or repairs. The armies of Europe cost
two billions a year now—I will replace them all for a billion. I will
dig up the trained statesmen of all ages and all climes, and furnish
this country with a Congress that knows enough to come in out of the
rain—a thing that’s never happened yet, since the Declaration of
Independence, and never will happen till these practically dead people
are replaced with the genuine article. I will restock the thrones of
Europe with the best brains and the best morals that all the royal
sepulchres of all the centuries can furnish—which isn’t promising very
much—and I’ll divide the wages and the civil list, fair and square,
merely taking my half and—”
“Colonel, if the half of this is true, there’s millions in
it—millions.”
“Billions in it—billions; that’s what you mean. Why, look here; the
thing is so close at hand, so imminent, so absolutely immediate, that
if a man were to come to me now and say, Colonel, I am a little short,
and if you could lend me a couple of billion dollars for—come in!”
This in answer to a knock. An energetic looking man bustled in with a
big pocket-book in his hand, took a paper from it and presented it,
with the curt remark:
“Seventeenth and last call—you want to out with that three dollars and
forty cents this time without fail, Colonel Mulberry Sellers.”
The Colonel began to slap this pocket and that one, and feel here and
there and everywhere, muttering:
“What _have_ I done with that wallet?—let me see—um—not here, not there
—Oh, I must have left it in the kitchen; I’ll just run and—”
“No you won’t—you’ll stay right where you are. And you’re going to
disgorge, too—this time.”
Washington innocently offered to go and look. When he was gone the
Colonel said:
“The fact is, I’ve got to throw myself on your indulgence just this
once more, Suggs; you see the remittances I was expecting—”
“Hang the remittances—it’s too stale—it won’t answer. Come!”
The Colonel glanced about him in despair. Then his face lighted; he ran
to the wall and began to dust off a peculiarly atrocious chromo with
his handkerchief. Then he brought it reverently, offered it to the
collector, averted his face and said:
“Take it, but don’t let me see it go. It’s the sole remaining Rembrandt
that—”
“Rembrandt be damned, it’s a chromo.”
“Oh, don’t speak of it so, I beg you. It’s the only really great
original, the only supreme example of that mighty school of art which—”
“Art! It’s the sickest looking thing I—”
The colonel was already bringing another horror and tenderly dusting
it.
“Take this one too—the gem of my collection—the only genuine Fra
Angelico that—”
“Illuminated liver-pad, that’s what it is. Give it here—good day—people
will think I’ve robbed a’ nigger barber-shop.”
As he slammed the door behind him the Colonel shouted with an anguished
accent—
“Do please cover them up—don’t let the damp get at them. The delicate
tints in the Angelico—”
But the man was gone.
Washington re-appeared and said he had looked everywhere, and so had
Mrs. Sellers and the servants, but in vain; and went on to say he
wished he could get his eye on a certain man about this time—no need to
hunt up that pocket-book then. The Colonel’s interest was awake at
once.
“What man?”
“One-armed Pete they call him out there—out in the Cherokee country I
mean. Robbed the bank in Tahlequah.”
“Do they have banks in Tahlequah?”
“Yes—_a_ bank, anyway. He was suspected of robbing it. Whoever did it
got away with more than twenty thousand dollars. They offered a reward
of five thousand. I believe I saw that very man, on my way east.”
“No—is that so?
“I certainly saw a man on the train, the first day I struck the
railroad, that answered the description pretty exactly—at least as to
clothes and a lacking arm.”
“Why din’t you get him arrested and claim the reward?”
“I couldn’t. I had to get a requisition, of course. But I meant to stay
by him till I got my chance.”
“Well?”
“Well, he left the train during the night some time.”
“Oh, hang it, that’s too bad.”
“Not so very bad, either.”
“Why?”
“Because he came down to Baltimore in the very train I was in, though I
didn’t know it in time. As we moved out of the station I saw him going
toward the iron gate with a satchel in his hand.”
“Good; we’ll catch him. Let’s lay a plan.”
“Send description to the Baltimore police?”
“Why, what are you talking about? No. Do you want them to get the
reward?”
“What shall we do, then?”
The Colonel reflected.
“I’ll tell you. Put a personal in the Baltimore _Sun_. Word it like
this:
“A. DROP ME A LINE, PETE.”
“Hold on. Which arm has he lost?”
“The right.”
“Good. Now then—
“A. DROP ME A LINE, PETE, EVEN IF YOU HAVE to write with your left
hand. Address X. Y. Z., General Postoffice, Washington. From YOU KNOW
WHO.”
“There—that’ll fetch him.”
“But he _won’t_ know who—will he?”
“No, but he’ll want to know, won’t he?”
“Why, certainly—I didn’t think of that. What made you think of it?”
“Knowledge of human curiosity. Strong trait, very strong trait.”
“Now I’ll go to my room and write it out and enclose a dollar and tell
them to print it to the worth of that.”