leaped, the wheels locked again. Jay Dee's buckboard, thrust slanting
aside, went over the edge, slid and stopped with a thud, caught by the
hemlock trunks. A ghostly glimmer of white hair one instant, and Jay Dee
was gone down the black pit of the gorge. A wheezing moan, and nothing
more was heard in the confusion. Then only the complaining murmur of the
brook, the hemlocks at their secrets.
“Jay! Jay!” called Albion, and then leaped out, ran and whispered,
“Jay!”
Only the mutter of the brook and the shimmer of foam could be made out
as he stared and listened, leaning over, clinging to a tree, feeling
about for the buckboard. He fumbled, lit a match and lifted it. The
seat was empty, the left wheels still in the road. The two horses, with
twisted necks and glimmering eyes, were looking back quietly at him,
Albion Dee, a man of ideas and determination, now muttering things
unintelligible in the same tone with the muttering water, with wet
forehead and nerveless hands, heir of Jay Dee's thousands, staring down
the gorge of Diggory Brook, the scene of old crime. He gripped with
difficulty as he let himself slide past the first row of trees, and felt
for some footing below. He noticed dully that it was a steep slope, not
a precipice at that point. He lit more matches as he crept down, and
peered around to find something crushed and huddled against some tree, a
lifeless, fearful thing. The slope grew more moderate. There were thick
ferns. And closely above the brook, that gurgled and laughed quietly,
now near at hand, sat Jay Dee. He looked up and blinked dizzily,
whispered and piped:
“Twenty dollars and costs! You oughtn't to pester me. I ain't made my
will.”
Albion sat down. They sat close together in the darkness some moments
and were silent.
“You ain't hurt?” Albion asked at last. “We'll get out.”
They went up the steep, groping and stumbling.
Albion half lifted his enemy into the buckboard, and led the horse, his
own following. They were out into the now almost faded daylight. Jay sat
holding his lines, bowed over, meek and venerable. The front of his coat
was torn. Albion came to his wheel.
“Will twenty dollars make peace between you and me, Jay Dee?”
“The costs was ten,” piping sadly.
“Thirty dollars, Jay Dee? Here it is.”
He jumped into his buggy and drove rapidly. In sight of the foundry he
drew a huge breath.
“I been a sinner and a fool,” and slapped his knee. “It's sixty thousand
dollars, maybe seventy. A self-righteous sinner and a cocksure fool. God
forgive me!”
Between eight and nine Jay Dee sat down before his meagre fire and rusty
stove, drank his weak tea and toasted his bread. The windows clicked
with the night wind. The furniture was old, worn, unstable, except the
large desk behind him full of pigeonholes and drawers. Now and then
he turned and wrote on scraps of paper. Tea finished, he collected the
scraps and copied:
Mr. Stephen Ballister: I feel, as growing somewhat old, I ought to make
my will, and sometime, leaving this world for a better, would ask you
to make my will for me, for which reasonable charge, putting this so
it cannot be broken by lawyers, who will talk too much and are vain
of themselves, that is, leaving all my property of all kinds to my
relative, James Winslow of Wimberton, and not anything to Albion Dee;
for he has not much sense but is hasty; for to look after the choir is
not his business, and to sit on an old man and throw him from his own
wagon and pay him thirty dollars is hasty, for it is not good sense, and
not anything to Stephen Ballister, for he must be rich with talking so
much in courts of this world. Put this all in my will, but if unable or
unwilling on account of remorse for speaking so in the court, please to
inform that I may get another lawyer. Yours,
Jay Dee.
He sealed and addressed the letter, put it in his pocket, and noticed
the ruinous rent in his coat. He sighed, murmured over it complainingly,
and turned up the lapel of the coat. Pins in great variety and number
were there in careful order, some new, some small, some long and old and
yellow. He selected four and pinned the rent together, sighing. Then he
took three folded bills from his vest pocket, unfolded, counted and put
them back, felt of the letter in his coat gently, murmured, “I had the
best of Albion there; I had him there,” took his candle and went up
peacefully and venerably to bed.
A NIGHT'S LODGING
FATHER WILISTON was a retired clergyman, so distinguished from his
son Timothy, whose house stood on the ridge north of the old village
of Win-throp, and whose daily path lay between his house and the new
growing settlement around the valley station. It occurred at odd times
to Father Wiliston that Timothy's path was somewhat undeviating. The
clergyman had walked widely since Win-throp was first left behind
fifty-five years back, at a time when the town was smaller and cows
cropped the Green but never a lawn mower.
After college and seminary had come the frontier, which lay this side
of the Great Lakes until Clinton stretched his ribbon of waterway to
the sea; then a mission in Wisconsin, intended to modify the restless
profanity of lumbermen who broke legs under logs and drank disastrous
whiskey. A city and twenty mills were on the spot now, though the same
muddy river ran into the same blue lake. Some skidders and saw-tenders
of old days were come to live in stone mansions and drive in
nickel-plated carriages; some were dead; some drifting like the refuse
on the lake front; some skidding and saw-tending still. Distinction
of social position was an idea that Father Wiliston never was able to
grasp.
In the memories of that raw city on the lake he had his place among its
choicest incongruities; and when his threescore and ten years were full,
the practical tenderness of his nickel-plated and mansioned parishioners
packed him one day into an upholstered sleeping car, drew an astonishing
check to his credit, and mailed it for safety to Timothy Wiliston of
Winthrop. So Father Wiliston returned to Winthrop, where Timothy, his
son, had been sent to take root thirty years before.
One advantage of single-mindedness is that life keeps on presenting us
with surprises. Father Wiliston occupied his own Arcadia, and Wisconsin
or Winthrop merely sent in to him a succession of persons and events
of curious interest. “The parson”--Wisconsin so spoke of him, leaning
sociably over its bar, or pausing among scented slabs and sawdust--“the
parson resembles an egg as respects that it's innocent and some
lopsided, but when you think he must be getting addled, he ain't. He
says to me, 'You'll make the Lord a deal of trouble, bless my soul!'
he says. I don't see how the Lord's going to arrange for you.
But'--thinking he might hurt my feelings--'I guess he'll undertake it by
and by.' Then he goes wabbling down-street, picks up Mike Riley, who's
considerable drunk, and takes him to see his chickens. And Mike gets so
interested in those chickens you'd like to die. Then parson goes off,
absent-minded and forgets him, and Mike sleeps the balmy night in the
barnyard, and steals a chicken in the morning, and parson says, 'Bless
my soul! How singular!' Well,” concluded Wisconsin, “he's getting pretty
young for his years. I hear they're going to send him East before he
learns bad habits.”
The steadiness and repetition of Timothy's worldly career and semi-daily
walk to and from his business therefore seemed to Father Wiliston
phenomenal, a problem not to be solved by algebra, for if _a_ equalled
Timothy, _b_ his house, _c_ his business, _a + b + c_ was still not
a far-reaching formula, and there seemed no advantage in squaring it.
Geometrically it was evident that by walking back and forth over the
same straight line you never so much as obtained an angle. Now,
by arithmetic, “Four times thirty, multiplied by--leaving out
Sundays--Bless me! How singular! Thirty-seven thousand five hundred and
sixty times!”
He wondered if it had ever occurred to Timothy to walk it backward, or,
perhaps, to hop, partly on one foot, and then, of course, partly on
the other. Sixty years ago there was a method of progress known as
“hop-skip-and-jump,” which had variety and interest. Drawn in the train
of this memory came other memories floating down the afternoon's slant
sunbeams, rising from every meadow and clump of woods; from the elder
swamp where the brown rabbits used to run zigzag, possibly still ran
in the same interesting way; from the great sand bank beyond the Indian
graves. The old Wiliston house, with roof that sloped like a well-sweep,
lay yonder, a mile or two. He seemed to remember some one said it was
empty, but he could not associate it with emptiness. The bough apples
there, if he remembered rightly, were an efficacious balm for regret.
He sighed and took up his book. It was another cure for regret, a
Scott novel, “The Pirate.” It had points of superiority over Cruden's
Concordance. The surf began to beat on the Shetland Islands, and trouble
was imminent between Cleveland and Mor-daunt Mertoun.
Timothy and his wife drove away visiting that afternoon, not to
return till late at night, and Bettina, the Scandinavian, laid Father
Wiliston's supper by the open window, where he could look out across the
porch and see the chickens clucking in the road.
“You mus' eat, fater,” she commanded.
“Yes, yes, Bettina. Thank you, my dear. Quite right.”
He came with his book and sat down at the table, but Bettina was
experienced and not satisfied.
“You mus' eat firs'.”
He sighed and laid down “The Pirate.” Bettina captured and carried it to
the other end of the room, lit the lamp though it was still light, and
departed after the mail. It was a rare opportunity for her to linger in
the company of one of her Scandinavian admirers. “Fater” would not know
the difference between seven and nine or ten.
He leaned in the window and watched her safely out of sight, then went
across the room, recaptured “The Pirate,” and chuckled in the tickling
pleasure of a forbidden thing, “asked the blessing,” drank his tea
shrewdly, knowing it would deteriorate, and settled to his book. The
brown soft dusk settled, shade by shade; moths fluttered around the
lamp; sleepy birds twittered in the maples. But the beat of the surf
on the Shetland Islands was closer than these. Cleveland and Mordaunt
Mertoun were busy, and Norna--“really, Norna was a remarkable
woman”--and an hour slipped past.
Some one hemmed! close by and scraped his feet. It was a large man
who stood there, dusty and ragged, one boot on the porch, with a red
handkerchief knotted under his thick tangled beard and jovial red face.
He had solid limbs and shoulders, and a stomach of sloth and heavy
feeding.
The stranger did not resemble the comely pirate, Cleveland; his linen
was not “seventeen hun'red;” it seemed doubtful if there were any linen.
And yet, in a way there was something not inappropriate about him, a
certain chaotic ease; not piratical, perhaps, although he looked like
an adventurous person. Father Wiliston took time to pass from one
conception of things to another. He gazed mildly through his glasses.
“I ain't had no supper,” began the stranger in a deep moaning bass; and
Father Wiliston started.
“Bless my soul! Neither have I.” He shook out his napkin. “Bettina, you
see “--
“Looks like there's enough for two,” moaned and grumbled the other.
He mounted the porch and approached the window, so that the lamplight
glimmered against his big, red, oily face.
“Why, so there is!” cried Father Wiliston, looking about the table in
surprise. “I never could eat all that. Come in.” And the stranger rolled
muttering and wheezing around through the door.
“Will you not bring a chair? And you might use the bread knife. These
are fried eggs. And a little cold chicken? Really, I'm very glad you
dropped in, Mr.”--
“Del Toboso.” By this time the stranger's mouth was full and his
enunciation confused.
“Why”--Father Wiliston helped himself to an egg--“I don't think I caught
the name.”
“Del Toboso. Boozy's what they calls me in the push.”
“I'm afraid your tea is quite cold. Boozy? How singular! I hope it
doesn't imply alcoholic habits.”
“No,” shaking his head gravely, so that his beard wagged to the judicial
negation. “Takes so much to tank me up I can't afford it, let alone it
ain't moral.”
The two ate with haste, the stranger from habit and experience, Father
Wiliston for fear of Bettina's sudden return. When the last egg and
slice of bread had disappeared, the stranger sat back with a wheezing
sigh.
“I wonder,” began Father Wiliston mildly, “Mr. Toboso--Toboso is the
last name, isn't it, and Del the first?”
“Ah,” the other wheezed mysteriously, “I don't know about that, Elder.
That's always a question.”
“You don't know! You don't know!”
“Got it off'n another man,” went on Toboso sociably. “He said he
wouldn't take fifty dollars for it. I didn't have no money nor him
either, and he rolled off'n the top of the train that night or maybe the
next I don't know. I didn't roll him. It was in Dakota, over a canyon
with no special bottom. He scattered himself on the way down. But I
says, if that name's worth fifty dollars, it's mine. Del Toboso. That's
mine. Sounds valuable, don't it?”
Father Wiliston fell into a reverie. “To-boso? Why, yes. Dulcinea del
Toboso. I remember, now.”
“What's that? Dulcinea, was it? And you knowed him?”
“A long while ago when I was younger. It was in a green cover. 'Don
Quixote'--he was in a cage, 'The Knight of the Rueful Countenance.' He
had his face between the bars.”
“Well,” said Toboso, “you must have knowed him. He always looked glum,
and I've seen him in quad myself.”
“Yes. Sancho Panza. Dulcinea del Toboso.”
“I never knowed that part of it. Dulcinea del Toboso! Well, that's me.
You know a ruck of fine names, Elder. It sounds like thirteen trumps,
now, don't it?”
Father Wiliston roused himself, and discriminated. “But you look more
like Sancho Panza.”
“Do? Well, I never knowed that one. Must've been a Greaser. Dulcinea's
good enough.”
Father Wiliston began to feel singularly happy and alive. The regular
and even paced Timothy, his fidgeting wife, and the imperious Bettina
were to some extent shadows and troubles in the evening of his life.
They were careful people, who were hemmed in and restricted, who somehow
hemmed in and restricted him. They lived up to precedents. Toboso did
not seem to depend on precedents. He had the free speech, the casual
inconsequence, the primitive mystery, desired of the boy's will and the
wind's will, and travelled after by the long thoughts of youth. He was
wind-beaten, burned red by the sun, ragged of coat and beard, huge, fat,
wallowing in the ease of his flesh. One looked at him and remembered the
wide world full of crossed trails and slumbering swamps.
Father Wiliston had long, straight white hair, falling beside his
pale-veined and spiritual forehead and thin cheeks. He propped
his forehead on one bony hand, and looked at Toboso with eyes of
speculation. If both men were what some would call eccentric, to each
other they seemed only companionable, which, after all, is the main
thing.
“I have thought of late,” continued Father Wiliston after a pause, “that
I should like to travel, to examine human life, say, on the highway. I
should think, now, your manner of living most interesting. You go from
house to house, do you not?--from city to city? Like Ulysses, you see
men and their labors, and you pass on. Like the apostles--who surely
were wise men, besides that were especially maintained of God--like
them, and the pilgrims to shrines, you go with wallet and staff or
merely with Faith for your baggage.”
“There don't nothing bother you in warm weather, that's right,” said
Toboso, “except your grub. And that ain't any more than's interesting.
If it wasn't for looking after meals, a man on the road might get right
down lazy.”
“Why, just so! How wonderful! Now, do you suppose, Mr. Toboso, do you
suppose it feasible? I should very much like, if it could be equably
arranged, I should very much like to have this experience.”
Toboso reflected. “There ain't many of your age on the road.” An
idea struck him suddenly. “But supposing you were going sort of
experimenting, like that--and there's some folks that do--supposing you
could lay your hands on a little bunch of money for luck, I don't see
nothing to stop.”
“Why, I think there is some in my desk.” Toboso leaned forward and
pulled his beard. The table creaked under his elbow. “How much?”
“I will see. Of course you are quite right.”
“At your age, Elder.”
“It is not as if I were younger.”
Father Wiliston rose and hurried out.
Toboso sat still and blinked at the lamp. “My Gord!” he murmured and
moaned confidentially, “here's a game!”
After some time Father Wiliston returned. “Do you think we could start
now?” he asked eagerly.
“Why sure, Elder. What's hindering?”
“I am fortunate to find sixty dollars. Really, I didn't remember. And
here's a note I have written to my son to explain. I wonder what Bettina
did with my hat.”
He hurried back into the hall. Toboso took the note from the table and
pocketed it. “Ain't no use taking risks.”
They went out into the warm night, under pleasant stars, and along the
road together arm in arm.
“I feel pretty gay, Elder.” He broke into bellowing song, “Hey, Jinny!
Ho, Jinny! Listen, love, to me.”
“Really, I feel cheerful, too, Mr. Toboso, wonderfully cheerful.”
“Dulcinea, Elder. Dulcinea's me name. Hey, Jinny! Ho, Jinny!”
“How singular it is! I feel very cheerful. I think--really, I think I
should like to learn that song about Jinny. It seems such a cheerful
song.”
“Hit her up, Elder,” wheezed Toboso jovially. “Now then”--
“Hey, Jinny! Ho, Jinny! Listen, love, to me.”
So they went arm in arm with a roaring and a tremulous piping.
The lamp flickered by the open window as the night breeze rose. Bettina
came home betimes and cleared the table. The memory of a Scandinavian
caress was too recent to leave room for her to remark that there were
signs of devastating appetite, that dishes had been used unaccountably,
and that “Fater” had gone somewhat early to bed. Timothy and his wife
returned late. All windows and doors in the house of Timothy were
closed, and the last lamp was extinguished.
Father Wiliston and Toboso went down the hill, silently, with furtive,
lawless steps through the cluster of houses in the hollow, called
Ironville, and followed then the road up the chattering hidden brook.
The road came from the shadows of this gorge at last to meadows and wide
glimmering skies, and joined the highway to Redfield. Presently they
came to where a grassy side road slipped into the highway from the
right, out of a land of bush and swamp and small forest trees of twenty
or thirty years' growth. A large chestnut stood at the corner.
“Hey, Jinny!” wheezed Toboso. “Let's look at that tree, Elder.”
“Look at it? Yes, yes. What for?” Toboso examined the bark by the dim
starlight; Father Wiliston peered anxiously through his glasses to where
Toboso's finger pointed.
“See those marks?”
“I'm afraid I don't. Really, I'm sorry.”
“Feel 'em, then.”
And Father Wiliston felt, with eager, excited finger.
“Them there mean there's lodging out here; empty house, likely.”
“Do they, indeed. Very singular! Most interesting!” And they turned into
the grassy road. The brushwood in places had grown close to it, though
it seemed to be still used as a cart path. They came to a swamp, rank
with mouldering vegetation, then to rising ground where once had been
meadows, pastures, and plough lands.
Father Wiliston was aware of vaguely stirring memories. Four vast and
aged maple trees stood close by the road, and their leaves whispered to
the night; behind them, darkly, was a house with a far sloping roof in
the rear. The windows were all glassless, all dark and dead-looking,
except two in a front room, in which a wavering light from somewhere
within trembled and cowered. They crept up, and looking through saw
tattered wall paper and cracked plaster, and two men sitting on the
floor, playing cards in the ghostly light of a fire of boards in the
huge fireplace.
“Hey, Jinny!” roared Toboso, and the two jumped up with startled oaths.
“Why, it's Boston Alley and the Newark Kid!” cried Toboso. “Come on,
Elder.”
The younger man cast forth zigzag flashes of blasphemy. “You big fat
fool! Don't know no mor' 'n to jump like that on _me!_ Holy Jims! I
ain't made of copper.”
Toboso led Father Wiliston round by the open door. “Hold your face, Kid.
Gents, this here's a friend of mine we'll call the Elder, and let
that go. I'm backing him, and I hold that goes. The Kid,” he went on
descriptively, addressing Father Wiliston, “is what you see afore you,
Elder. His mouth is hot, his hands is cold, his nerves is shaky, he's
always feeling the cops gripping his shirt-collar. He didn't see no
clergy around. He begs your pardon. Don't he? I says, don't he?”
He laid a heavy red hand on the Newark Kid's shoulder, who wiped his
pallid mouth with the back of his hand, smiled, and nodded.
Boston Alley seemed in his way an agreeable man. He was tall and slender
limbed, with a long, thin black mustache, sinewy neck and hollow chest,
and spoke gently with a sweet, resonant voice, saying, “Glad to see you,
Elder.”
These two wore better clothes than Toboso, but he seemed to dominate
them with his red health and windy voice, his stomach and feet, and
solidity of standing on the earth.
Father Wiliston stood the while gazing vaguely through his spectacles.
The sense of happy freedom and congenial companionship that had been
with him during the starlit walk had given way gradually to a stream of
confused memories, and now these memories stood ranged about, looking at
him with sad, faded eyes, asking him to explain the scene. The language
of the Newark Kid had gone by him like a white hot blast. The past and
present seemed to have about the same proportions of vision and reality.
He could not explain them to each other. He looked up to Toboso,
pathetically, trusting in his help.
“It was my house.”
Toboso stared surprised. “I ain't on to you, Elder.”
“I was born here.”
Indeed Toboso was a tower of strength even against the ghosts of other
days, reproachful for their long durance in oblivion.
“Oh! Well, by Jinny! I reckon you'll give us lodging, Elder,” he puffed
cheerfully. He took the coincidence so pleasantly and naturally that
Father Wiliston was comforted, and thought that after all it was
pleasant and natural enough.
The only furniture in the room was a high-backed settle and an
overturned kitchen table, with one leg gone, and the other three
helplessly in the air--so it had lain possibly many years. Boston Alley
drew forward the settle and threw more broken clapboards on the fire,
which blazed up and filled the room with flickering cheer. Soon the
three outcasts were smoking their pipes and the conversation became
animated.
“When I was a boy,” said Father Wiliston--“I remember so
distinctly--there were remarkable early bough apples growing in the
orchard.”
“The pot's yours, Elder,” thundered To-boso. They went out groping under
the old apple trees, and returned laden with plump pale green fruit.
Boston Alley and the Newark Kid stretched themselves on the floor on
heaps of pulled grass. Toboso and Father Wiliston sat on the settle. The
juice of the bough apples ran with a sweet tang. The palate rejoiced and
the soul responded. The Newark Kid did swift, cunning card tricks that
filled Father Wiliston with wonder and pleasure.
“My dear young man, I don't see how you do it!”