I advise all self-respecting citizens to skip this section. It is
nothing but over-strained, shabby farce.
The throng melted. Scribe and Pharisee, Dives, Mrs. Dives, and their
satellites went home to their comfortable beds. Many of the roughs on
our side of the house found somewhere else to stay. The fellow dressed
like a workingman in a melodrama sought the consolations of his own
home. Had the last authority departed? Were we to have anarchy? The
Frog, in his gentlest manner, sidled up to make friends again.
“Now you can have your nice warm bath, you two.” I looked around. There
were two of us then. Beside me, fresh from a box-car was a battered
scalawag. The Frog must have let him in at the last moment.
We three climbed to the bath-room.
“Wait a minute,” said the Amphibian. He disappeared. I opened my eyes,
for this creature spake with a voice of authority. The box-car scalawag
grinned sheepishly.
There was a scuffling overhead, a scratch and a rumble. We two looked
up just in time to dodge the astonishing vision of a clothes-horse
descending through a trap-door by a rope. At the upper end of the rope
was the absurd bald head of our newly achieved superintendent.
“Hello, Santy Claus,” said the box-car tramp. “Whose Christmas present
is this?”
The Frog shouted: “Put your shoes and hats in the corner. If you
have any tobacco, put it in your shoes. Hang everything else on the
clothes-horse.”
I obeyed, except that I had no tobacco. The rascal by my side had
a plenty, and sawdusted the bath-room floor with some of it, and
the remainder went into his foot-gear. Then we two, companions in
nakedness, watched the Frog haul up our clothes out of sight. He closed
the trap-door with many grunts.
Then this Amphibian, this boss, descended and entered the bath-room.
He was a dry-land Amphibian. He had never taken a bath himself, but
was there to superintend. He seemed to feel himself the accredited
representative of all the good people behind the mission, and no doubt
he was.
“Can it be possible,” I asked myself, “that they have chosen this
creature to apply their Christianity?”
The Frog said to my companion: “Git in the tub.”
Then he turned on the water, regulated the temperature, and watched as
though he expected one of us to steal the faucets from the wash-bowl.
He threw a gruesome rag at the tramp, and allowed him to scrub himself.
The creature bathing seemed well-disposed toward the idea, and had put
soap on about one-third of his person when the Frog shouted: “I’ve got
to get up at four-thirty.”
The scalawag took the hint and rose like Venus from the foam. He
splashed off part of it, and rubbed off the rest with a towel that was
a fallen sister of the wash-rag.
The Frog was evidently trying to enforce, in a literal way, regulations
he did not understand. He wiped out the bath-tub most carefully with
the unclean wash-rag. Then he provided the scalawag with a shirt for
night-wear. The creature put it on and said:--
“Ain’t I a peach?”
He was.
The nightie was an old, heavily-starched dress-shirt, once white. Maybe
it had once been worn by the Scribe or the Pharisee. But it had not
been washed since. The rascal cut quite a figure as he took long steps
down the corridor to bed, piloted by the hurrying Amphibian. He was a
long-legged rascal, and the slivered remainders of that ancient shirt
flapped about him gloriously.
I was hustled into the tub after the rascal. I was supervised after
the same manner. “Now wash,” boomed the Amphibian. He threw at me the
sloppy rag of my predecessor.