Uncle Peter Bines Comes to Town With His Man
One day in December Peter Bines of Montana City dropped in on the
family,--came with his gaunt length of limb, his kind, brown old face
with eyes sparkling shrewdly far back under his grizzled brows, with
his rough, resonant, musical voice, the spring of youth in his step,
and the fresh, confident strength of the big hills in his bearing.
He brought Billy Brue with him, a person whose exact social status some
of Percival's friends were never able to fix with any desirable
certainty. Thus, Percival had presented the old man, the morning after
his arrival, to no less a person than Herbert Delancey Livingston, with
whom he had smoked a cigar of unusual excellence in the _cafe_ of the
Hightower Hotel.
"If you fancy that weed, Mr. Bines," said Livingston, graciously, to
the old man, "I've a spare couple of hundred I'd like to let you have.
The things were sent me, but I find them rather stiffish. If your man's
about the hotel I'll give him a card to my man, and let him fetch
them."
"My man?" queried Uncle Peter, and, sighting Billy Brue at that moment,
"why, yes, here's my man, now. Mr. Brue, shake hands with Mr.
Livingston. Billy, go up to the address he gives you, and get some of
these se-gars. You'll relish 'em as much as I do. Now don't talk to any
strangers, don't get run over, and don't lose yourself."
Livingston had surrendered a wavering and uncertain hand to the warm,
reassuring clasp of Mr. Brue.
"He ain't much fur style, Billy ain't," Uncle Peter explained when that
person had gone upon his errand, "he ain't a mite gaudy, but he's got
friendly feelings."
The dazed scion of the Livingstons had thereupon made a conscientious
tour of his clubs in a public hansom, solely for the purpose of
relating this curious adventure to those best qualified to marvel at
it.
The old man's arrival had been quite unexpected. Not only had he sent
no word of his coming, but he seemed, indeed, not to know what his
reasons had been for doing a thing so unusual.
"Thought I'd just drop in on your all and say 'howdy,'" had been his
first avowal, which was lucid as far as it went. Later he involved
himself in explanations that were both obscure and conflicting. Once it
was that he had felt a sudden great longing for the life of a gay city.
Then it was that he would have been content in Montana City, but that
he had undertaken the winter in New York out of consideration for Billy
Brue.
"Just think of it," he said to Percival, "that poor fellow ain't ever
been east of Denver before now. It wa'n't good for him to be holed up
out there in them hills all his life. He hadn't got any chance to
improve his mind."
"He'd better improve his whiskers first thing he does," suggested
Percival. "He'll be gold-bricked if he wears 'em scrambled that way
around this place."
But in neither of these explanations did the curious old man impress
Percival as being wholly ingenuous.
Then he remarked casually one day that he had lately met Higbee, who
was on his way to San Francisco.
"I only had a few minutes with him while they changed engines at Green
River, but he told me all about you folks--what a fine time you was
havin', yachts and card-parties, and all like that. Higbee said a man
had ought to come to New York every now and then, jest to keep from
gettin' rusty."
Back of this Percival imagined for a time that he had discovered Uncle
Peter's true reason for descending upon them. Higbee would have regaled
him with wild tales of the New York dissipations, and Uncle Peter had
come promptly on to pull him up. Percival could hear the story as
Higbee would word it, with the improving moral incident of his own son
snatched as a brand from the "Tenderloin," to live a life of
impecunious usefulness in far Chicago. But, when he tried to hold this
belief, and to prove it from his observations, he was bound to admit
its falsity. For Uncle Peter had shown no inclination to act the part
of an evangel from the virtuous West. He had delivered no homilies, no
warnings as to the fate of people who incontinently "cut loose." He had
evinced not the least sign of any disposition even to criticise.
On the contrary, indeed, he appeared to joy immensely in Percival's way
of life. He manifested a willingness and a capacity for unbending in
boon companionship that were, both of them, quite amazing to his
accomplished grandson. By degrees, and by virtue of being never at all
censorious, he familiarised himself with the young man's habits and
diversions. He listened delightedly to the tales of his large gambling
losses, of the bouts at poker, the fruitless venture in Texas Oil land,
the disastrous corner in wheat, engineered by Burman, and the uniformly
unsuccessful efforts to "break the bank" in Forty-fourth Street. He
never tired of hearing whatever adventures Percival chose to relate;
and, finding that he really enjoyed them, the young man came to confide
freely in him, and to associate with him without restraint.
Uncle Peter begged to be introduced at the temple of chance, and spent
a number of late evenings there with his popular grandson. He also
frequently made himself one of the poker coterie, and relished keenly
the stock jokes as to his grandson's proneness to lose.
"Your pa," he would say, "never _could_ learn to stay out of a Jack-pot
unless he had Jacks or better; he'd come in and draw four cards to an
ace any time, and then call it 'hard luck' when he didn't draw out. And
he just loved straights open in the middle; said anybody could fill
them that's open at both ends; but, after all, I guess that's the only
way to have fun at the game. If a man ain't got the sperrit to overplay
aces-up when he gets 'em, he might as well be clerkin' in a bank for
all the fun he'll have out of the game."
The old man's endurance of late suppers and later hours, and his
unsuspected disposition to "cut loose," became twin marvels to
Percival. He could not avoid contrasting this behaviour with his past
preaching. After a few weeks he was forced to the charitable conclusion
that Uncle Peter's faculties were failing. The exposure and hardships
of the winter before had undoubtedly impaired his mental powers.
"I can't make him out," he confided to his mother. "He never wants to
go home nights; he can drink more than I can without batting an eye,
and show up fresher in the morning, and he behaves like a young fellow
just out of college. I don't know where he would bring up if he didn't
have me to watch over him."
"I think it's just awful--at his time of life, too," said Mrs. Bines.
"I think that's it. He's getting old, and he's come along into his
second childhood. A couple of more months at this rate, and I'm afraid
I'll have to ring up one of those nice shiny black wagons to take him
off to the foolish-house."
"Can't you talk to him, and tell him better?"
"I could. I know it all by heart--all the things to say to a man on the
downward path. Heaven knows I've heard them often enough, but I'd feel
ashamed to talk that way to Uncle Peter. If he were my son, now, I'd
cut off his allowance and send him back to make something of himself,
like Sile Higbee with little Hennery; but I'm afraid all I can do is to
watch him and see that he doesn't marry one of those little pink-silk
chorus girls, or lick a policeman, or anything."
"You're carryin' on the same way yourself," ventured his mother.
"That's different," replied her perspicacious son.
Uncle Peter had refused to live at the Hightower after three days in
that splendid and populous caravansary.
"It suits me well enough," he explained to Percival, "but I have to
look after Billy Brue, and this ain't any place for Billy. You see
Billy ain't city broke yet. Look at him now over there, the way he goes
around butting into strangers. He does that way because he's all the
time looking down at his new patent-leather shoes--first pair he ever
had. He'll be plumb stoop-shouldered if he don't hurry up and get the
new kicked off of 'em. I'll have to get him a nice warm box-stall in
some place that ain't so much on the band-wagon as this one. The
ceilings here are too high fur Billy. And I found him shootin' craps
with the bell-boy this mornin'. The boy thinks Billy, bein' from the
West, is a stage robber, or somethin' like he reads about in the Cap'
Collier libr'ies, and follows him around every chance he gets. And
Billy laps up too many of them little striped drinks; and them
French-cooked dishes ain't so good fur him, either. He caught on to the
bill-of-fare right away. Now he won't order anything but them
allas--them dishes that has 'a la' something or other after 'em," he
explained, when Percival looked puzzled. "He knows they'll always be
something all fussed up with red, white, and blue gravy, and a little
paper bouquet stuck into 'em. I never knew Billy was such a fancy eater
before."
So Uncle Peter and his charge had established themselves in an
old-fashioned but very comfortable hotel down on one of the squares, a
dingy monument to the time when life had been less hurried. Uncle Peter
had stayed there thirty years before, and he found the place unchanged.
The carpets and hangings were a bit faded, but the rooms were
generously broad, the chairs, as the old man remarked, were "made to
sit in," and the _cuisine_ was held, by a few knowing old epicures who
still frequented the place, to be superior even to that of the more
pretentious Hightower. The service, it is true, was apt to be slow.
Strangers who chanced in to order a meal not infrequently became
enraged, and left before their food came, trailing plain short words of
extreme dissatisfaction behind them as they went. But the elect knew
that these delays betokened the presence of an artistic conscience in
the kitchen, and that the food was worth tarrying for. "They know how
to make you come back hungry for some more the next day," said Uncle
Peter Bines.
From this headquarters the old man went forth to join in the diversions
of his grandson. And here he kept a watchful eye upon the uncertain
Billy Brue; at least approximately. Between them, his days and nights
were occupied to crowding. But Uncle Peter had already put in some hard
winters, and was not wanting in fortitude.
Billy Brue was a sore trouble to the old man. "I jest can't keep him
off the streets nights," was his chief complaint. By day Billy Brue
walked the streets in a decent, orderly trance of bewilderment. He was
properly puzzled and amazed by many strange matters. He never could
find out what was "going on" to bring so many folks into town. They all
hurried somewhere constantly, but he was never able to reach the centre
of excitement. Nor did he ever learn how any one could reach those high
clothes-lines, strung forty feet above ground between the backs of
houses; nor how there could be "so many shows in town, all on one
night;" nor why you should get so many good things to eat by merely
buying a "slug of whiskey;" nor why a thousand people weren't run over
in Broadway each twenty-four hours.
At night, Billy Brue ceased to be the astounded alien, and, as Percival
said Dr. Von Herzlich would say, "began to mingle and cooperate with
his environment." In the course of this process he fell into
adventures, some of them, perhaps, unedifying. But it may be told that
his silver watch with the braided leather fob was stolen from him the
second night out; also that the following week, in a Twenty-ninth
Street saloon, he accepted the hospitality of an affable stranger, who
had often been in Montana City. His explanation of subsequent events
was entirely satisfactory, at least, from the time that he returned to
consciousness of them.
"I only had about thirty dollars in my clothes," he told Percival, "but
what made me so darned hot, he took my breastpin, too, made out of the
first nugget ever found in the Early Bird mine over Silver Bow way.
Gee! when I woke up I couldn't tell where I was. This cop that found me
in a hallway, he says I must have been give a dose of Peter. I says,
'All right--I'm here to go against all the games,' I says, 'but pass me
when the Peter comes around again,' I says. And he says Peter was
knockout drops. Say, honestly, I didn't know my own name till I had a
chanst to look me over. The clothes and my hands looked like I'd seen
'em before, somehow--and then I come to myself."
After this adventure, Uncle Peter would caution him of an evening:
"Now, Billy, don't stay out late. If you ain't been gone through by
eleven, just hand what you got on you over to the first man you
meet--none of 'em'll ask any questions--and then pike fur home. The
later at night it gets in New York the harder it is fur strangers to
stay alive. You're all right in Wardner or Hellandgone, Billy, but in
this here camp you're jest a tender little bed of pansies by the
wayside, and these New Yorkers are terrible careless where they step
after dark."
Notwithstanding which, Mr. Brue continued to behave uniformly in a
manner to make all judicious persons grieve. His place of supreme
delight was the Hightower. Its marble splendours, its myriad lights,
the throngs of men and women in evening dress, made for him a scene of
unfailing fascination. The evenings when he was invited to sit in the
_cafe_ with Uncle Peter and Percival made memories long to be
cherished.
He spent such an evening there at the end of their first month in New
York. Half a dozen of Percival's friends sat at the table with them
from time to time. There had been young Beverly Van Arsdel, who,
Percival disclosed, was heir to all the Van Arsdel millions, and no end
of a swell. And there was big, handsome, Eddie Arledge, whose father
had treated him shabbily. These two young gentlemen spoke freely about
the inferiority of many things "on this side"--as they denominated this
glorious Land of Freedom--of many things from horses to wine. The
country was rapidly becoming, they agreed, no place for a gentleman to
live. Eddie Arledge confessed that, from motives of economy, he had
been beguiled into purchasing an American claret.
"I fancied, you know," he explained to Uncle Peter, "that it might do
for an ordinary luncheon claret, but on my sacred honour, the stuff is
villainous. Now you'll agree with me, Mr. Bines, I dare say, that a
Bordeaux of even recent vintage is vastly superior to the very best
so-called American claret."
Whereupon Beverly Van Arsdel having said, "To be sure--fancy an
American Burgundy, now! or a Chablis!" Uncle Peter betrayed the first
sign of irritation Percival had detected since his coming.
"Well, you see, young men, we're not much on vintages in Montana.
Whiskey is mostly our drink--whiskey and spring water--and if our
whiskey is strong, it's good enough. When we want to test a new barrel,
we inject three drops of it into a jack-rabbit, and if he doesn't lick
a bull clog in six seconds, we turn down the goods. That's as far's our
education has ever gone in vintages."
It sounded like the old Uncle Peter, but he was afterward so
good-natured that Percival concluded the irritation could have been but
momentary.