Nearly a year afterward—after many camping grounds and many hundreds of
miles guarded and defended—Lieutenant Manning, with almost the same
detachment of men, was sent to a point only a few miles below their old
camp on the river to look after some smuggling there. One afternoon,
while they were riding through a dense mesquite flat, they came upon a
patch of open hog-wallow prairie. There they rode upon the scene of an
unwritten tragedy.
In a big hog-wallow lay the skeletons of three Mexicans. Their clothing
alone served to identify them. The largest of the figures had once been
Sebastiano Saldar. His great, costly sombrero, heavy with gold
ornamentation—a hat famous all along the Rio Grande—lay there pierced
by three bullets. Along the ridge of the hog-wallow rested the rusting
Winchesters of the Mexicans—all pointing in the same direction.
The rangers rode in that direction for fifty yards. There, in a little
depression of the ground, with his rifle still bearing upon the three,
lay another skeleton. It had been a battle of extermination. There was
nothing to identify the solitary defender. His clothing—such as the
elements had left distinguishable—seemed to be of the kind that any
ranchman or cowboy might have worn.
“Some cow-puncher,” said Manning, “that they caught out alone. Good
boy! He put up a dandy scrap before they got him. So that’s why we
didn’t hear from Don Sebastiano any more!”
And then, from beneath the weather-beaten rags of the dead man, there
wriggled out a horned frog with a faded red ribbon around its neck, and
sat upon the shoulder of its long quiet master. Mutely it told the
story of the untried youth and the swift “paint” pony—how they had
outstripped all their comrades that day in the pursuit of the Mexican
raiders, and how the boy had gone down upholding the honour of the
company.
The ranger troop herded close, and a simultaneous wild yell arose from
their lips. The outburst was at once a dirge, an apology, an epitaph,
and a pæan of triumph. A strange requiem, you may say, over the body of
a fallen, comrade; but if Jimmy Hayes could have heard it he would have
understood.
XII.
THE DOOR OF UNREST
I sat an hour by sun, in the editor’s room of the Montopolis _Weekly
Bugle_. I was the editor.
The saffron rays of the declining sunlight filtered through the
cornstalks in Micajah Widdup’s garden-patch, and cast an amber glory
upon my paste-pot. I sat at the editorial desk in my non-rotary
revolving chair, and prepared my editorial against the oligarchies. The
room, with its one window, was already a prey to the twilight. One by
one, with my trenchant sentences, I lopped off the heads of the
political hydra, while I listened, full of kindly peace, to the
home-coming cow-bells and wondered what Mrs. Flanagan was going to have
for supper.
Then in from the dusky, quiet street there drifted and perched himself
upon a corner of my desk old Father Time’s younger brother. His face
was beardless and as gnarled as an English walnut. I never saw clothes
such as he wore. They would have reduced Joseph’s coat to a monochrome.
But the colours were not the dyer’s. Stains and patches and the work of
sun and rust were responsible for the diversity. On his coarse shoes
was the dust, conceivably, of a thousand leagues. I can describe him no
further, except to say that he was little and weird and old—old I began
to estimate in centuries when I saw him. Yes, and I remember that there
was an odour, a faint odour like aloes, or possibly like myrrh or
leather; and I thought of museums.
And then I reached for a pad and pencil, for business is business, and
visits of the oldest inhabitants are sacred and honourable, requiring
to be chronicled.
“I am glad to see you, sir,” I said. “I would offer you a chair,
but—you see, sir,” I went on, “I have lived in Montopolis only three
weeks, and I have not met many of our citizens.” I turned a doubtful
eye upon his dust-stained shoes, and concluded with a newspaper phrase,
“I suppose that you reside in our midst?”
My visitor fumbled in his raiment, drew forth a soiled card, and handed
it to me. Upon it was written, in plain but unsteadily formed
characters, the name “Michob Ader.”
“I am glad you called, Mr. Ader,” I said. “As one of our older
citizens, you must view with pride the recent growth and enterprise of
Montopolis. Among other improvements, I think I can promise that the
town will now be provided with a live, enterprising newspa—”
“Do ye know the name on that card?” asked my caller, interrupting me.
“It is not a familiar one to me,” I said.
Again he visited the depths of his ancient vestments. This time he
brought out a torn leaf of some book or journal, brown and flimsy with
age. The heading of the page was the _Turkish Spy_ in old-style type;
the printing upon it was this:
“There is a man come to Paris in this year 1643 who pretends to have
lived these sixteen hundred years. He says of himself that he was a
shoemaker in Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion; that his name is
Michob Ader; and that when Jesus, the Christian Messias, was condemned
by Pontius Pilate, the Roman president, he paused to rest while bearing
his cross to the place of crucifixion before the door of Michob Ader.
The shoemaker struck Jesus with his fist, saying: ‘Go; why tarriest
thou?’ The Messias answered him: ‘I indeed am going; but thou shalt
tarry until I come’; thereby condemning him to live until the day of
judgment. He lives forever, but at the end of every hundred years he
falls into a fit or trance, on recovering from which he finds himself
in the same state of youth in which he was when Jesus suffered, being
then about thirty years of age.
“Such is the story of the Wandering Jew, as told by Michob Ader, who
relates—” Here the printing ended.
I must have muttered aloud something to myself about the Wandering Jew,
for the old man spake up, bitterly and loudly.
“’Tis a lie,” said he, “like nine tenths of what ye call history. ’Tis
a Gentile I am, and no Jew. I am after footing it out of Jerusalem, my
son; but if that makes me a Jew, then everything that comes out of a
bottle is babies’ milk. Ye have my name on the card ye hold; and ye
have read the bit of paper they call the _Turkish Spy_ that printed the
news when I stepped into their office on the 12th day of June, in the
year 1643, just as I have called upon ye to-day.”
I laid down my pencil and pad. Clearly it would not do. Here was an
item for the local column of the _Bugle_ that—but it would not do.
Still, fragments of the impossible “personal” began to flit through my
conventionalized brain. “Uncle Michob is as spry on his legs as a young
chap of only a thousand or so.” “Our venerable caller relates with
pride that George Wash—no, Ptolemy the Great—once dandled him on his
knee at his father’s house.” “Uncle Michob says that our wet spring was
nothing in comparison with the dampness that ruined the crops around
Mount Ararat when he was a boy—” But no, no—it would not do.
I was trying to think of some conversational subject with which to
interest my visitor, and was hesitating between walking matches and the
Pliocene age, when the old man suddenly began to weep poignantly and
distressfully.
“Cheer up, Mr. Ader,” I said, a little awkwardly; “this matter may blow
over in a few hundred years more. There has already been a decided
reaction in favour of Judas Iscariot and Colonel Burr and the
celebrated violinist, Signor Nero. This is the age of whitewash. You
must not allow yourself to become down-hearted.”
Unknowingly, I had struck a chord. The old man blinked belligerently
through his senile tears.
“’Tis time,” he said, “that the liars be doin’ justice to somebody. Yer
historians are no more than a pack of old women gabblin’ at a wake. A
finer man than the Imperor Nero niver wore sandals. Man, I was at the
burnin’ of Rome. I knowed the Imperor well, for in them days I was a
well-known char-acter. In thim days they had rayspect for a man that
lived forever.
“But ’twas of the Imperor Nero I was goin’ to tell ye. I struck into
Rome, up the Appian Way, on the night of July the 16th, the year 64. I
had just stepped down by way of Siberia and Afghanistan; and one foot
of me had a frost-bite, and the other a blister burned by the sand of
the desert; and I was feelin’ a bit blue from doin’ patrol duty from
the North Pole down to the Last Chance corner in Patagonia, and bein’
miscalled a Jew in the bargain. Well, I’m tellin’ ye I was passin’ the
Circus Maximus, and it was dark as pitch over the way, and then I heard
somebody sing out, ‘Is that you, Michob?’
“Over ag’inst the wall, hid out amongst a pile of barrels and old
dry-goods boxes, was the Imperor Nero wid his togy wrapped around his
toes, smokin’ a long, black segar.
“‘Have one, Michob?’ says he.
“‘None of the weeds for me,’ says I—‘nayther pipe nor segar. What’s the
use,’ says I, ‘of smokin’ when ye’ve not got the ghost of a chance of
killin’ yeself by doin’ it?’
“‘True for ye, Michob Ader, my perpetual Jew,’ says the Imperor; ‘ye’re
not always wandering. Sure, ’tis danger gives the spice of our
pleasures—next to their bein’ forbidden.’
“‘And for what,’ says I, ‘do ye smoke be night in dark places widout
even a cinturion in plain clothes to attend ye?’
“‘Have ye ever heard, Michob,’ says the Imperor, ‘of
predestinarianism?’
“‘I’ve had the cousin of it,’ says I. ‘I’ve been on the trot with
pedestrianism for many a year, and more to come, as ye well know.’
“‘The longer word,’ says me friend Nero, ‘is the tachin’ of this new
sect of people they call the Christians. ’Tis them that’s raysponsible
for me smokin’ be night in holes and corners of the dark.’
“And then I sets down and takes off a shoe and rubs me foot that is
frosted, and the Imperor tells me about it. It seems that since I
passed that way before, the Imperor had mandamused the Impress wid a
divorce suit, and Misses Poppæa, a cilibrated lady, was ingaged, widout
riferences, as housekeeper at the palace. ‘All in one day,’ says the
Imperor, ‘she puts up new lace windy-curtains in the palace and joins
the anti-tobacco society, and whin I feels the need of a smoke I must
be after sneakin’ out to these piles of lumber in the dark.’ So there
in the dark me and the Imperor sat, and I told him of me travels. And
when they say the Imperor was an incindiary, they lie. ’Twas that night
the fire started that burnt the city. ’Tis my opinion that it began
from a stump of segar that he threw down among the boxes. And ’tis a
lie that he fiddled. He did all he could for six days to stop it, sir.”
And now I detected a new flavour to Mr. Michob Ader. It had not been
myrrh or balm or hyssop that I had smelled. The emanation was the odour
of bad whiskey—and, worse still, of low comedy—the sort that small
humorists manufacture by clothing the grave and reverend things of
legend and history in the vulgar, topical frippery that passes for a
certain kind of wit. Michob Ader as an impostor, claiming nineteen
hundred years, and playing his part with the decency of respectable
lunacy, I could endure; but as a tedious wag, cheapening his egregious
story with song-book levity, his importance as an entertainer grew
less.
And then, as if he suspected my thoughts, he suddenly shifted his key.
“You’ll excuse me, sir,” he whined, “but sometimes I get a little mixed
in my head. I am a very old man; and it is hard to remember
everything.”
I knew that he was right, and that I should not try to reconcile him
with Roman history; so I asked for news concerning other ancients with
whom he had walked familiar.
Above my desk hung an engraving of Raphael’s cherubs. You could yet
make out their forms, though the dust blurred their outlines strangely.
“Ye calls them ‘cher-rubs’,” cackled the old man. “Babes, ye fancy they
are, with wings. And there’s one wid legs and a bow and arrow that ye
call Cupid—I know where they was found. The
great-great-great-grandfather of thim all was a billy-goat. Bein’ an
editor, sir, do ye happen to know where Solomon’s Temple stood?”