Terrific sound waves beat upon the Arrowhead ranch house this night. At
five o'clock a hundred and twenty Hereford calves had been torn from
their anguished mothers for the first time and shut into a too adjacent
feeding pen. Mothers and offspring, kept a hundred yards apart by two
stout fences, unceasingly bawled their grief, a noble chorus of yearning
and despair. The calves projected a high, full-throated barytone, with
here and there a wailing tenor against the rumbling bass of their dams.
And ever and again pealed distantly into the chorus the flute obbligato
of an emotional coyote down on the flat. There was never a diminuendo.
The fortissimo had been steadily maintained for three hours and would
endure the night long, perhaps for two other nights.
At eight o'clock I sleepily wondered how I should sleep. And thus
wondering, I marvelled at the indifference to the racket of my hostess,
Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill. Through dinner and now as she read a San
Francisco newspaper she had betrayed no consciousness of it. She read
her paper and from time to time she chuckled.
"How do you like it?" I demanded, referring to the monstrous din.
"It's great," she said, plainly referring to something else. "One of
them real upty-up weddings in high life, with orchestras and bowers of
orchids and the bride a vision of loveliness--"
"I mean the noise."
"What noise?" She put the paper aside and stared at me, listening
intently. I saw that she was honestly puzzled, even as the chorus
swelled to unbelievable volume. I merely waved a hand. The coyote was
then doing a most difficult tremolo high above the clamour.
"Oh, that!" said my enlightened hostess. "That's nothing; just a little
bunch of calves being weaned. We never notice that--and say, they got
the groom's mother in here, too. Yes, sir, Ellabelle in all her tiaras
and sunbursts and dog collars and diamond chest protectors--Mrs. Angus
McDonald, mother of groom, in a stunning creation! I bet they didn't
need any flashlight when they took her, not with them stones all over
her person. They could have took her in a coal cellar."
"How do you expect to sleep with all that going on?" I insisted.
"All what? Oh, them calves. That's nothing! Angus says to her when they
first got money: 'Whatever you economize in, let it not be in diamonds!'
He says nothing looks so poverty-stricken as a person that can only
afford a few. Better wear none at all than just a mere handful, he
says. What do you think of that talk from a man named Angus McDonald?
You'd think a Scotchman and his money was soon parted, but I heard him
say it from the heart out. And yet Ellabelle never does seem to get him.
Only a year ago, when I was at this here rich place down from San
Francisco where they got the new marble palace, there was a lovely
blow-up and Ellabelle says to me in her hysteria: 'Once a Scotchman,
always a Scotchman!' Oh, she was hysteric all right! She was like what I
seen about one of the movie actresses, 'the empress of stormy emotion.'
Of course she feels better now, after the wedding and all this newspaper
guff. And it was a funny blow-up. I don't know as I blamed her at the
time."
I now closed a window and a door upon the noisy September night. It
helped a little. I went back to a chair nearer to this woman with ears
trained in rejection. That helped more. I could hear her now, save in
the more passionate intervals of the chorus.
"All right, then. What was the funny blow-up?" She caught the
significance of the closed door and window.
"But that's music," she insisted. "Why, I'd like to have a good record
of about two hundred of them white-faced beauties being weaned, so I
could play it on a phonograph when I'm off visiting--only it would make
me too homesick." She glanced at the closed door and window in a way
that I found sinister.
"I couldn't hear you," I suggested.
"Oh, all right!" She listened wistfully a moment to the now slightly
dulled oratorio, then: "Yes, Angus McDonald is his name; but there are
two kinds of Scotch, and Angus is the other kind. Of course he's one of
the big millionaires now, with money enough to blind any kind of a
Scotchman, but he was the other kind even when he first come out to us,
a good thirty years ago, without a cent. He's a kind of second or third
cousin of mine by marriage or something--I never could quite work it
out--and he'd learned his trade back in Ohio; but he felt that the East
didn't have any future to speak of, so he decided to come West. He was a
painter and grainer and kalsominer and paperhanger, that kind of
thing--a good, quiet boy about twenty-five, not saying much, chunky and
slow-moving but sure, with a round Scotch head and a snub nose, and one
heavy eyebrow that run clean across his face--not cut in two like most
are.
"He landed on the ranch and slowly looked things over and let on after a
few days that he mebbe would be a cowboy on account of it taking him
outdoors more than kalsomining would. Lysander John was pretty busy, but
he said all right, and gave him a saddle and bridle and a pair of bull
pants and warned him about a couple of cinch-binders that he mustn't try
to ride or they would murder him. And so one morning Angus asked a
little bronch-squeezer we had, named Everett Sloan, to pick him out
something safe to ride, and Everett done so. Brought him up a nice old
rope horse that would have been as safe as a supreme-court judge, but
the canny Angus says: 'No, none of your tricks now! That beast has the
very devil in his eye, and you wish to sit by and laugh your fool head
off when he displaces me.' 'Is that so?' says Everett. 'I suspect you,'
says Angus. 'I've read plentifully about the tricks of you cowlads.'
'Pick your own horse, then,' says Everett. 'I'd better,' says Angus, and
picks one over by the corral gate that was asleep standing up, with a
wisp of hay hanging out of his mouth like he'd been too tired to finish
eating it. 'This steed is more to my eye,' says Angus. 'He's old and
withered and he has no evil ambitions. But maybe I can wake him up.'
'Maybe you can,' says Everett, 'but are you dead sure you want to?'
Angus was dead sure. 'I shall thwart your murderous design,' says he. So
Everett with a stung look helped him saddle this one. He had his alibi
all right, and besides, nothing ever did worry that buckaroo as long as
his fingers wasn't too cold to roll a cigarette.
"The beast was still asleep when Angus forked him. Without seeming to
wake up much he at once traded ends, poured Angus out of the saddle, and
stacked him up in some mud that was providentially there--mud soft
enough to mire your shadow. Angus got promptly up, landed a strong kick
in the ribs of the outlaw which had gone to sleep again before he lit,
shook hands warmly with Everett and says: 'What does a man need with two
trades anyway? Good-bye!'
"But when Lysander John hears about it he says Angus has just the right
stuff in him for a cowman. He says he has never known one yet that you
could tell anything to before he found it out for himself, and Angus
must sure have the makings of a good one, so he persuades him to stay
round for a while, working at easy jobs that couldn't stack him up, and
later he sent him to Omaha with the bunch in charge of a trainload of
steers.
"The trip back was when his romance begun. Angus had kept fancy-free up
to that time, being willing enough but thoroughly cautious. Do you
remember the eating-house at North Platte, Nebraska? The night train
from Omaha would reach there at breakfast time and you'd get out in the
frosty air, hungry as a confirmed dyspeptic, and rush into the big red
building past the man that was rapidly beating on a gong with one of
these soft-ended bass-drum sticks. My, the good hot smells inside!
Tables already loaded with ham and eggs and fried oysters and fried
chicken and sausage and fried potatoes and steaks and hot biscuits and
corn bread and hot cakes and regular coffee--till you didn't know which
to begin on, and first thing you knew you had your plate loaded with too
many things--but how you did eat!--and yes, thank you, another cup of
coffee, and please pass the sirup this way. And no worry about the
train pulling out, because there the conductor is at that other table
and it can't go without him, so take your time--and about three more of
them big fried oysters, the only good fried ones I ever had in the
world! To this day I get hungry thinking of that North Platte breakfast,
and mad when I go into the dining-car as we pass there and try to get
the languid mulatto to show a little enthusiasm.
"Well, they had girls at that eating-house. Of course no one ever
noticed 'em much, being too famished and busy. You only knew in a
general way that females was passing the food along. But Angus actually
did notice Ellabelle, though it must have been at the end of the meal,
mebbe when she was pouring the third cup. Ellabelle was never right
pretty to my notion, but she had some figure and kind of a sad dignity,
and her brown hair lacked the towers and minarets and golden domes that
the other girls built with their own or theirs by right of purchase. And
she seems to have noticed Angus from the very first. Angus saw that when
she wasn't passing the fried chicken or the hot biscuits along, even for
half a minute, she'd pick up a book from the window sill and glance
studiously at its pages. He saw the book was called 'Lucile.' And he
looked her over some more--between mouthfuls, of course--the
neat-fitting black dress revealing every line of her lithe young figure,
like these magazine stories say, the starched white apron and the look
of sad dignity that had probably come of fresh drummers trying to teach
her how to take a joke, and the smooth brown hair--he'd probably got
wise to the other kind back in the social centres of Ohio--and all at
once he saw there was something about her. He couldn't tell what it was,
but he knew it was there. He heard one of the over-haired ones call her
Ellabelle, and he committed the name to memory.
"He also remembered the book she was reading. He come back with a copy
he'd bought at Spokane and kept it on his bureau. Not that he read it
much. It was harder to get into than 'Peck's Bad Boy,' which was his
favourite reading just then.
"Pretty soon another load of steers is ready--my sakes, what scrubby
runts we sent off the range in them days compared to now!--and Angus
pleads to go, so Lysander John makes a place for him and, coming back,
here's Ellabelle handing the hot things along same as ever, with
'Lucile' at hand for idle moments. This time Angus again made certain
there was something about her. He cross-examined her, I suppose, between
the last ham and eggs and the first hot cakes. Her folks was corn
farmers over in Iowa and she'd gone to high school and had meant to be a
teacher, but took this job because with her it was anything to get out
of Iowa, which she spoke of in a warm, harsh way.
"Angus nearly lost the train that time, making certain there was
something about her. He told her to be sure and stay there till he
showed up again. He told me about her when he got back. 'There's
something about her,' he says. 'I suspect it's her eyes, though it might
be something else.'
"Me? I suspected there was something about her, too; only I thought it
was just that North Platte breakfast and his appetite. No meal can ever
be like breakfast to them that's two-fisted, and Angus was. He'd think
there was something about any girl, I says to myself, seeing her through
the romantic golden haze of them North Platte breakfast victuals. Of
course I didn't suggest any such base notion to Angus, knowing how
little good it does to talk sense to a man when he thinks there's
something about a girl. He tried to read 'Lucile' again, but couldn't
seem to strike any funny parts.
"Next time he went to Omaha, a month later, he took his other suit and
his new boots. 'I shall fling caution to the winds and seal my fate,' he
says. 'There's something about her, and some depraved scoundrel might
find it out.' 'All right, go ahead and seal,' I says. 'You can't expect
us to be shipping steers every month just to give you twenty minutes
with a North Platte waiter girl.' 'Will she think me impetuous?' says
he. 'Better that than have her think you ain't,' I warns him. 'Men have
been turned down for ten million reasons, and being impetuous is about
the only one that was never numbered among them. It will be strange
o'clock when that happens.' 'She's different,' says Angus. 'Of course,'
I says. 'We're all different. That's what makes us so much alike.' 'You
might know,' says he doubtfully.
"He proved I did, on the trip back. He marched up to Ellabelle's end of
the table in his other suit and his new boots and a startling necktie
he'd bought at a place near the stockyards in South Omaha, and proposed
honourable marriage to her, probably after the first bite of sausage and
while she was setting his coffee down. 'And you've only twenty minutes,'
he says, 'so hurry and pack your grip. We'll be wed when we get off the
train.' 'You're too impetuous,' says Ellabelle, looking more than ever
as if there was something about her. 'There, I was afraid I'd be,' says
Angus, quitting on some steak and breaking out into scarlet rash. 'What
did you think I am?' demands Ellabelle. 'Did you think I would answer
your beck and call or your lightest nod as if I were your slave or
something? Little you know me,' she says, tossing her head indignantly.
'I apologize bitterly,' says Angus. 'The very idea is monstrous,' says
she. 'Twenty minutes--and with all my packing! You will wait over till
the four-thirty-two this afternoon,' she goes on, very stern and
nervous, 'or all is over between us.' 'I'll wait as long as that for
you,' says Angus, going to the steak again. 'Are the other meals here as
good as breakfast?' 'There's one up the street,' says Ellabelle; 'a
Presbyterian.' 'I would prefer a Presbyterian,' says Angus. 'Are those
fried oysters I see up there?'
"That was about the way of it, I gathered later. Anyway, Angus brought
her back, eating on the way a whole wicker suitcase full of lunch that
she put up. And she seemed a good, capable girl, all right. She told me
there was something about Angus. She'd seen that from the first. Even
so, she said, she hadn't let him sweep her off her feet like he had
meant to, but had forced him to give her time to do her packing and
consider the grave step she was taking for better or worse, like every
true, serious-minded woman ought to.
"Angus now said he couldn't afford to fritter away any more time in the
cattle business, having a wife to support in the style she had been
accustomed to, so he would go to work at his trade. He picked out
Wallace, just over in Idaho, as a young and growing town where he could
do well. He rented a nice four-room cottage there, with an icebox out on
the back porch and a hammock in the front yard, and begun to paper and
paint and grain and kalsomine and made good money from the start.
Ellabelle was a crackajack housekeeper and had plenty of time to lie out
in the hammock and read 'Lucile' of afternoons.
"By and by Angus had some money saved up, and what should he do with
bits of it now and then but grubstake old Snowstorm Hickey, who'd been
scratching mountainsides all his life and never found a thing and likely
never would--a grouchy old hardshell with white hair and whiskers
whirling about his head in such quantities that a body just naturally
called him Snowstorm without thinking. It made him highly indignant,
but he never would get the things cut. Well, and what does this old
snow-scene-in-the-Alps do after about a year but mush along up the cañon
past Mullan and find a high-grade proposition so rich it was scandalous!
They didn't know how rich at first, of course, but Angus got assays and
they looked so good they must be a mistake, so they sunk a shaft and
drifted in a tunnel, and the assays got better, and people with money
was pretty soon taking notice.
"One day Snowstorm come grouching down to Angus and tells about a
capitalist that had brought two experts with him and nosed over the
workings for three days. Snowstorm was awful dejected. He had hated the
capitalist right off. 'He wears a gold watch chain and silk underclothes
like one of these fly city dames,' says Snowstorm, who was a knowing old
scoundrel, 'and he says his syndicate on the reports of these two
thieving experts will pay twelve hundred for it and not a cent more.
What do you think of that for nerve?'
"'Is that all?' says Angus, working away at his job in the new
International Hotel at Wallace. Graining a door in the dining-room he
was, with a ham rind and a stocking over one thumb nail, doing little
curlicues in the brown wet paint to make it look like what the wood was
at first before it was painted at all. 'Well,' he says, 'I suspected
from the assays that we might get a bit more, but if he had experts
with him you better let him have it for twelve hundred. After all,
twelve hundred dollars is a good bit of money.'
"'Twelve hundred thousand,' says Snowstorm, still grouchy.
"'Oh,' says Angus. 'In that case don't let him have it. If the shark
offers that it'll be worth more. I'll go into the mining business myself
as soon as I've done this door and the wainscoting and give them their
varnish.'
"He did so. He had the International finished in three more days, turned
down a job in the new bank building cold, and went into the mining
business just like he'd do anything else--slow and sure, yet impetuous
here and there. It wasn't a hard proposition, the stuff being there
nearly from the grass roots, and the money soon come a-plenty. Snowstorm
not only got things trimmed up but had 'em dyed black as a crow's wing
and retired to a life of sinful ease in Spokane, eating bacon and beans
and cocoanut custard pie three times a day till the doctors found out
what a lot of expensive things he had the matter with him.
"Angus not only kept on the job but branched out into other mines that
he bought up, and pretty soon he quit counting his money. You know what
that would mean to most of his race. It fazed him a mite at first. He
tried faithfully to act like a crazy fool with his money, experimenting
with revelry and champagne for breakfast, and buying up the Sans Soosy
dance hall every Saturday night for his friends and admirers. But he
wasn't gaited to go on that track long. Even Ellabelle wasn't worried
the least bit, and in fact she thought something of the kind was due his
position. And she was busy herself buying the things that are champagne
to a woman, only they're kept on the outside. That was when Angus told
her if she was going in for diamonds at all to get enough so she could
appear to be wasteful and contemptuous of them. Two thousand she give
for one little diamond circlet to pin her napkin up on her chest with.
It was her own idea.
"Then Angus for a time complicated his amateur debauchery with fast
horses. He got him a pair of matched pacing stallions that would go
anywhere, he said. And he frequently put them there when he had the main
chandelier lighted. In driving them over a watering-trough one night an
accident of some sort happened. Angus didn't come to till after his leg
was set and the stitches in--eight in one place, six in another, and so
on; I wonder why they're always so careful to count the stitches in a
person that way--and he wished to know if his new side-bar buggy was
safe and they told him it wasn't, and he wanted to know where his team
was, but nobody knew that for three days, so he says to the doctors and
Ellabelle: 'Hereafter I suspect I shall take only soft drinks like beer
and sherry. Champagne has a bonnier look but it's too enterprising. I
might get into trouble some time.' And he's done so to this day. Oh,
I've seen him take a sip or two of champagne to some one's health, or
as much Scotch whiskey in a tumbler of water as you could dribble from a
medium-boilered fountain pen. But that's a high riot with him. He'll eat
one of these corned peaches in brandy, and mebbe take a cream pitcher of
beer on his oatmeal of a morning when his stomach don't feel just right,
but he's never been a willing performer since that experiment in
hurdling.
"When he could walk again him and Ellabelle moved to the International
Hotel, where she wouldn't have to cook or split kindling and could make
a brutal display of diamonds at every meal, and we went down to see
them. That was when Angus give Lysander John the scarfpin he'd sent
clear to New York for--a big gold bull's head with ruby eyes and in its
mouth a nugget of platinum set with three diamonds. Of course Lysander
John never dast wear it except when Angus was going to see it.
"Then along comes Angus, Junior, though poor Ellabelle thinks for
several days that he's Elwin. We'd gone down so I could be with her.
"'Elwin is the name I have chosen for my son,' says she to Angus the
third day.
"'Not so,' says Angus, slumping down his one eyebrow clear across in a
firm manner. 'You're too late. My son is already named. I named him
Angus the night before he was born.'
"'How could you do that when you didn't know the sex?' demands Ellabelle
with a frightened air of triumph.
"'I did it, didn't I?' says Angus. 'Then why ask how I could?' And he
curved the eyebrow up one side and down the other in a fighting way.
"Ellabelle had been wedded wife of Angus long enough to know when the
Scotch curse was on him. 'Very well,' she says, though turning her face
to the wall. Angus straightened the eyebrow. 'Like we might have two
now, one of each kind,' says he quite soft, 'you'd name your daughter as
you liked, with perhaps no more than a bit of a suggestion from me, to
be taken or not by you, unless we'd contend amiably about it for a
length of time till we had it settled right as it should be. But a
son--my son--why, look at the chest on him already, projecting outward
like a clock shelf--and you would name him--but no matter! I was
forehanded, thank God.' Oh, you saw plainly that in case a girl ever
come along Ellabelle would have the privilege of naming it anything in
the world she wanted to that Angus thought suitable.
"So that was settled reasonably, and Angus went on showing what to do
with your mine instead of selling it to a shark, and the baby fatted up,
being stall-fed, and Ellabelle got out into the world again, with more
money than ever to spend, but fewer things to buy, because in Wallace
she couldn't think of any more. Trust her, though! First the
International Hotel wasn't good enough. Angus said they'd have a
mansion, the biggest in Wallace, only without slippery hardwood floors,
because he felt brittle after his accident. Ellabelle says Wallace
itself ain't big enough for the mansion that ought to be a home to his
only son. She was learning how to get to Angus without seeming to. He
thought there might be something in that, still he didn't like to trust
the child away from him, and he had to stick there for a while.
"So Ellabelle's health broke down. Yes, sir, she got to be a total
wreck. Of course the fool doctor in Wallace couldn't find it out. She
tried him and he told her she was strong as a horse and ought to be
doing a tub of washing that very minute. Which was no way to talk to the
wife of a rich mining man, so he lost quite a piece of money by it.
Ellabelle then went to Spokane and consulted a specialist. That's the
difference. You only see a doctor, but a specialist you consult. This
one confirmed her fears about herself in a very gentlemanly way and
reaped his reward on the spot. Ellabelle's came after she had convinced
Angus that even if she did have such a good appetite it wasn't a normal
one, but it was, in fact, one of her worst symptoms and threatened her
with a complete nervous breakdown. After about a year of this, when
Angus had horned his way into a few more mines--he said he might as well
have a bunch of them since he couldn't be there on the spot anyway--they
went to New York City. Angus had never been there except to pass from a
Clyde liner to Jersey City, and they do say that when he heard the
rates, exclusive of board, at the one Ellabelle had picked out from
reading the papers, he timidly asked her if they hadn't ought to go to
the other hotel. She told him there wasn't any other--not for them. She
told him further it was part of her mission to broaden his horizon, and
she firmly meant to do it if God would only vouchsafe her a remnant of
her once magnificent vitality.
"She didn't have to work so hard either. Angus begun to get a broader
horizon in just a few days, corrupting every waiter he came in contact
with, and there was a report round the hotel the summer I was there that
a hat-boy had actually tried to reason with him, thinking he was a
foreigner making mistakes with his money by giving up a dollar bill
every time for having his hat snatched from him. As a matter of fact,
Angus can't believe to this day that dollar bills are money. He feels
apologetic when he gives 'em away. All the same I never believed that
report about the hat-boy till someone explained to me that he wasn't
allowed to keep his loot, not only having clothes made special without
pockets but being searched to the hide every night like them poor
unfortunate Zulus that toil in the diamond mines of Africa. Of course I
could see then that this boy had become merely enraged like a wild-cat
at having a dollar crowded onto him for some one else every time a head
waiter grovelled Angus out of the restaurant.
"The novelty of that life wore off after about a year, even with side
trips to resorts where the prices were sufficiently outrageous to charm
Ellabelle. She'd begun right off to broaden her own horizon. After only
one week in New York she put her diamond napkin pincher to doing other
work, and after six months she dressed about as well as them prominent
society ladies that drift round the corridors of this hotel waiting for
parties that never seem on time, and looking none too austere while they
wait.
"So Ellabelle, having in the meantime taken up art and literature and
gone to lectures where the professor would show sights and scenes in
foreign lands with his magic lantern, begun to feel the call of the Old
World. She'd got far beyond 'Lucile'--though 'Peck's Bad Boy' was still
the favourite of Angus when he got time for any serious reading--- and
was coming to loathe the crudities of our so-called American
civilization. So she said. She begun to let out to Angus that they
wasn't doing right by the little one, bringing him up in a hole like New
York City where he'd catch the American accent--though God knows where
she ever noticed that danger there!--and it was only fair to the child
to get him to England or Paris or some such place where he could have
decent advantages. I gather that Angus let out a holler at first so that
Ellabelle had to consult another specialist and have little Angus
consult one, too. They both said: 'Certainly, don't delay another day if
you value the child's life or your own,' and of course Angus had to give
in. I reckon that was the last real fight he ever put up till the time
I'm going to tell you about.
"They went to England and bought a castle that had never known the
profane touch of a plumber, having been built in the time of the first
earl or something, and after that they had to get another castle in
France, account of little Angus having a weak throat that Ellabelle got
another gentlemanly specialist to find out about him; and so it went,
with Ellabelle hovering on the very edge of a nervous breakdown, and
taking up art and literature at different spots where fashion gathered,
going to Italy and India's coral strand to study the dead past, and so
forth, and learning to address her inferiors in a refined and hostile
manner, with little Angus having a maid and a governess and something
new the matter with him every time Ellabelle felt the need of a change.
"At first Angus used to make two trips back every year, then he cut them
down to one, and at last he'd only come every two or three years, having
his hirelings come to him instead. He'd branched out a lot, even at that
distance, getting into copper and such, and being president of banks and
trusts here and there and equitable cooperative companies and all such
things that help to keep the lower classes trimmed proper. For a whole
lot of years I didn't see either of 'em. I sort of lost track of the
outfit, except as I'd see the name of Angus heading a new board of
directors after the reorganization, or renting the north half of
Scotland for the sage-hen and coyote shooting, or whatever the game is
there. Of course it took genius to do this with Angus, and I've never
denied that Ellabelle has it. I bet there wasn't a day in all them years
that Angus didn't believe himself to be a stubborn, domineering brute,
riding roughshod over the poor little wreck of a woman. If he didn't it
wasn't for want of his wife accusing him of it in so many words--and
perhaps a few more.
"I guess she got to feeling so sure of herself she let her work coarsen
up. Anyway, when little Angus come to be eighteen his pa shocked her one
day by saying he must go back home to some good college. 'You mean
England,' says Ellabelle, they being at the time on some other foreign
domains.
"'I do not,' says Angus, 'nor Sweden nor Japan nor East Africa. I mean
the United States.' 'You're jesting,' says she. 'You wrong me cruelly,'
says Angus. 'The lad's eighteen and threatening to be a foreigner.
Should he stay here longer it would set in his blood.' 'Remember his
weak throat,' says Ellabelle. 'I did,' says Angus. 'To save you trouble
I sent for a specialist to look him over. He says the lad has never a
flaw in his throat. We'll go soon.'
"Of course it was dirty work on the part of Angus, getting to the
specialist first, but she saw she had to take it. She knew it was like
the time they agreed on his name--she could see the Scotch blood leaping
in his veins. So she gave in with never a mutter that Angus could hear.
That's part of the genius of Ellabelle, knowing when she can and when
she positively cannot, and making no foolish struggle in the latter
event.
"Back they come to New York and young Angus went to the swellest college
Ellabelle could learn about, and they had a town house and a country
house and Ellabelle prepared to dazzle New York society, having met
frayed ends of it in her years abroad. But she couldn't seem to put it
over. Lots of male and female society foreigners that she'd met would
come and put up with her and linger on in the most friendly manner, but
Ellabelle never fools herself so very much. She knew she wasn't making
the least dent in New York itself. She got uncomfortable there. I bet
she had that feeling you get when you're riding your horse over soft
ground and all at once he begins to bog down.
"Anyway, they come West after a year or so, where Angus had more drag
and Ellabelle could feel more important. Not back to Wallace, of course.
Ellabelle had forgotten the name of that town, and also they come over a
road that misses the thriving little town of North Platte by several
hundred miles. And pretty soon they got into this darned swell little
suburb out from San Francisco, through knowing one of the old families
that had lived there man and boy for upward of four years. It's a town
where I believe they won't let you get off the train unless you got a
visitor's card and a valet.
"Here at last Ellabelle felt she might come into her own, for parties
seemed to recognize her true worth at once. Some of them indeed she
could buffalo right on the spot, for she hadn't lived in Europe and such
places all them years for nothing. So, camping in a miserable rented
shack that never cost a penny over seventy thousand dollars, with only
thirty-eight rooms and no proper space for the servants, they set to
work building their present marble palace--there's inside and outside
pictures of it in a magazine somewhere round here--bigger than the state
insane asylum and very tasty and expensive, with hand-painted ceilings
and pergolas and cafés and hot and cold water and everything.
"It was then I first see Ellabelle after all the years, and I want to
tell you she was impressive. She looked like the descendant of a long
line of ancestry or something and she spoke as good as any reciter you
ever heard in a hall. Last time I had seen her she was still forgetting
about the r's--she'd say: 'Oh, there-urr you ah!' thus showing she was
at least half Iowa in breed--but nothing like that now. She could give
the English cards and spades and beat them at their own game. Her face
looked a little bit overmassaged and she was having trouble keeping her
hips down, and wore a patent chin-squeezer nights, and her hair couldn't
be trusted to itself long at a time; but she knew how to dress and she'd
learned decency in the use of the diamond except when it was really
proper to break out all over with 'em. You'd look at her twice in any
show ring. Ain't women the wonders! Gazing at Ellabelle when she had
everything on, you'd never dream that she'd come up from the vilest
dregs only a few years before--helping cook for the harvest hands in
Iowa, feeding Union Pacific passengers at twenty-two a month, or
splitting her own kindling at Wallace, Idaho, and dreaming about a new
silk dress for next year, or mebbe the year after if things went well.
"Men ain't that way. Angus had took no care of his figure, which was now
pouchy, his hair was gray, and he was either shedding or had been
reached, and he had lines of care and food in his face, and took no
pains whatever with his accent--or with what he said, for that matter. I
never saw a man yet that could hide a disgraceful past like a woman can.
They don't seem to have any pride. Most of 'em act like they don't care
a hoot whether people find it out on 'em or not.
"Angus was always reckless that way, adding to his wife's burden of
anxiety. She'd got her own vile past well buried, but she never knew
when his was going to stick its ugly head up out of its grave. He'd go
along all right for a while like one of the best set had ought to--then
Zooey! We was out to dinner at another millionaire's one night--in that
town you're either a millionaire or drawing wages from one--and Angus
talked along with his host for half an hour about the impossibility of
getting a decent valet on this side of the water, Americans not knowing
their place like the English do, till you'd have thought he was born to
it, and then all at once he breaks out about the hardwood finish to the
dining-room, and how the art of graining has perished and ought to be
revived. 'And I wish I had a silver dollar,' he says, 'for every door
like that one there that I've grained to resemble the natural wood so
cunningly you'd never guess it--hardly.'
"At that his break didn't faze any one but Ellabelle. The host was an
old train-robber who'd cut your throat for two bits--I'll bet he
couldn't play an honest game of solitaire--and he let out himself right
off that he had once worked in a livery stable and was proud of it; but
poor Ellabelle, who'd been talking about the dear Countess of Comtessa
or somebody, and the dukes and earls that was just one-two-three with
her on the other side, she blushed up till it almost showed through the
second coating. Angus was certainly poison ivy to her on occasion, and
he'd refuse to listen to reason when she called him down about it. He'd
do most of the things she asked him to about food and clothes and so
forth--like the time he had the two gold teeth took out and replaced by
real porcelain nature fakers--but he never could understand why he
wasn't free to chat about the days when he earned what money he had.
"It was this time that I first saw little Angus since he had changed
from a governess to a governor--or whatever they call the he-teacher of
a millionaire's brat. He was home for the summer vacation. Naturally I'd
been prejudiced against him not only by his mother's praise but by his
father's steady coppering of the same. Judiciously comparing the two, I
was led to expect a kind of cross between Little Lord Fauntleroy and the
late Sitting Bull, with the vices of each and the virtues of neither.
Instead of which I found him a winsome whelp of six-foot or so with
Scotch eyes and his mother's nose and chin and a good, big, straight
mouth, and full of the most engaging bedevilments for one and all. He
didn't seem to be any brighter in his studies than a brute of that age
should be, and though there was something easy and grand in his manner
that his pa and ma never had, he wasn't really any more foreign than
what I be. Of course he spoke Eastern American instead of Western, but
you forgive him that after a few minutes when you see how nice he
naturally meant to be. I admit we took to each other from the start.
They often say I'm a good mixer, but it took no talent to get next to
that boy. I woke up the first night thinking I knew what old silly would
do her darndest to adopt him if ever his poor pa and ma was to get
buttered over the right of way in some railroad accident.
"And yet I didn't see Angus, Junior, one bit the way either of his
parents saw him. Ellabelle seemed to look on him merely as a smart
dresser and social know-it-all that would be a 98 cent credit to her in
the position of society queen for which the good God had always intended
her. And his father said he wasn't any good except to idle away his time
and spend money, and would come to a bad end by manslaughter in a
high-powered car; or in the alcoholic ward of some hospital; that he
was, in fact, a mere helling scapegrace that would have been put in some
good detention home years before if he hadn't been born to a father that
was all kinds of a so-and-so old Scotch fool. There you get Angus,
_fills_, from three different slants, and I ain't saying there wasn't
justification for the other two besides mine. The boy could act in a
crowd of tea-drinking women with a finish that made his father look like
some one edging in to ask where they wanted the load of coal dumped. But
also Angus, _peer_, was merely painting the lily, as they say, when he'd
tell all the different kinds of Indian the boy was. That very summer
before he went back to the educational centre where they teach such
arts, he helped wreck a road house a few miles up the line till it
looked like one of them pictures of what a Zeppelin does to a rare old
English drug store in London. And a week later he lost a race with the
Los Angeles flyer, account of not having as good a roadbed to run on as
the train had, and having to take too short a turn with his new car.
"I remember we three was wondering where he could be that night the
telephone rung from the place where kindly strangers had hauled him for
first aid to the foolish. But it was the boy himself that was able to
talk and tell his anxious parents to forget all about it. His father
took the message and as soon as he got the sense of it he begun to get
hopeful that the kid had broke at least one leg--thinking, he must have
been, of the matched pacing stallions that once did himself such a good
turn without meaning to. His disappointment was pitiful as he turned to
us after learning that he had lit on his head but only sustained a few
bruises and sprains and concussions, with the wall-paper scraped off
here and there.
"'Struck on his head, the only part of him that seems invulnerable,'
says the fond father. 'What's that?' he yells, for the boy was talking
again. He listened a minute, and it was right entertaining to watch his
face work as the words come along. It registered all the evil that
Scotland has suffered from her oppressors since they first thought up
the name for it. Finally he begun to splutter back--it must have sounded
fine at the other end--but he had to hang up, he was that emotional.
After he got his face human again he says to us:
"'Would either of you think now that you could guess at what might have
been his dying speech? Would you guess it might be words of cheer to the
bereaved mother that nursed him, or even a word of comfort to the idiot
father that never touched whipleather to his back while he was still
husky enough to get by with it? Well, you'd guess wild. He's but
inflamed with indignation over the state of the road where he passed out
for some minutes. He says it's a disgrace to any civilized community,
and he means to make trouble about it with the county supervisor, who
must be a murderer at heart, and then he'll take it up to the supreme
court and see if we can't have roads in this country as good as
Napoleon the First made them build in France, so a gentleman can speed
up a bit over five miles an hour without breaking every bone in his
body, to say nothing of totally ruining a car costing forty-eight
hundred dollars of his good money, with the ink on the check for it
scarce dry. He was going on to say that he had the race for the crossing
as good as won and had just waved mockingly at the engineer of the
defeated train who was pretending to feel indifferent about it--but I
hung up on him. My strength was waning. Was he here this minute I make
no doubt I'd go to the mat with him, unequal as we are in prowess.' He
dribbled off into vicious mutterings of what he'd say to the boy if he
was to come to the door.
"Then dear Ellabelle pipes up: 'And doesn't the dear boy say who was
with him in this prank?'
"Angus snorted horribly at the word 'prank,' just like he'd never had
one single advantage of foreign travel. 'He does indeed--one of those
Hammersmith twin louts was with him--the speckled devil with the lisp, I
gather--and praise God his bones, at least, are broke in two places!'
"Ellabelle's eyes shined up at this with real delight. 'How terrible!'
she says, not looking it. 'That's Gerald Hammersmith, son of Mrs. St.
John Hammersmith, leader of the most exclusive set here--oh, she's quite
in the lead of everything that has class! And after this we must know
each other far, far better than we have in the past. She has never
called up to this time. I must inquire after her poor boy directly
to-morrow comes.' That is Ellabelle. Trust her not to overlook a single
bet.
"Angus again snorted in a common way. 'St. John Hammersmith!' says he,
steaming up, 'When he trammed ore for three-fifty a day and went to bed
with his clothes on any night he'd the price of a quart of gin-and-beer
mixed--liking to get his quick--his name was naked 'John' with never a
Saint to it, which his widow tacked on a dozen years later. And speaking
of names, Mrs. McDonald, I sorely regret you didn't name your own son
after your first willful fancy. It was no good day for his father when
you put my own name to him.'
"But Ellabelle paid no attention whatever to this rough stuff, being
already engaged in courting the Hammersmith dame for the good of her
social importance. I make no doubt before the maid finished rubbing in
the complexion cream that night she had reduced this upstart to the
ranks and stepped into her place as leader of the most exclusive social
set between South San Francisco and old Henry Miller's ranch house at
Gilroy. Anyway, she kept talking to herself about it, almost over the
mangled remains of her own son, as you might say.
"A year later the new mansion was done, setting in the centre of sixty
acres of well-manicured land as flat as a floor and naturally called
Hillcrest. Angus asked me down for another visit. There had been grand
doings to open the new house, and Ellabelle felt she was on the way to
ruling things social with an iron hand if she was just careful and
didn't overbet her cards. Angus, not being ashamed of his scandalous
past, was really all that kept her nerves strung up. It seems he'd give
her trouble while the painters and decorators was at work, hanging round
'em fascinated and telling 'em how he'd had to work ten hours a day in
his time and how he could grain a door till it looked exactly like the
natural wood, so they'd say it wasn't painted at all. And one day he
become so inflamed with evil desire that Ellabelle, escorting a bunch of
the real triple-platers through the mansion, found him with his coat off
learning how to rub down a hardwood panel with oil and pumice stone.
Gee! Wouldn't I like to of been there! I suppose I got a lower nature as
well as the rest of us.
"After I'd been there a few days, along comes Angus, _fills_, out into
the world from college to make a name for himself. By ingenuity or
native brute force he had contrived to graduate. He was nice as ever and
told me he was going to look about a bit until he could decide what his
field of endeavour should be. Apparently it was breaking his neck in
outdoor sports, including loop-the-loop in his new car on roads not
meant for it, and delighting Ellabelle because he was a fine social drag
in her favour, and enraging his father by the same reasons. Ellabelle
was especially thrilled by his making up to a girl that was daughter to
this here old train-robber I mentioned. It was looking like he might
form an alliance, as they say, with this old family which had lived
quite a decent life since they actually got it. The girl looked to me
nice enough even for Angus, Junior, but his pa denounced her as a
yellow-haired pest with none but frivolous aims in life, who wouldn't
know whether a kitchen was a room in a house or a little woolly animal
from Paraguay. We had some nice, friendly breakfasts, I believe not,
whilst they discussed this poisonous topic, old Angus being only further
embittered when it comes out that the train-robber is also dead set
against this here alliance because his only daughter needs a decent,
reputable man who would come home nights from some low mahogany den in a
bank building, and not a worthless young hound that couldn't make a
dollar of his own and had displayed no talent except for winning the
notice of head waiters and policemen. Old Angus says he knows well
enough his son can be arrested out of most crowds just on that
description alone, but who is this So-and-So old thug to be saying it in
public?
"And so it went, with Ellabelle living in high hopes and young Angus
busy inventing new ways to bump himself off, and old Angus getting more
and more seething--quiet enough outside, but so desperate inside that it
wasn't any time at all till I saw he was just waiting for a good chance
to make some horrible Scotch exhibition of himself.
"Then comes the fatal polo doings, with young Angus playing on the side
that won, and Ellabelle being set up higher than ever till she actually
begins to snub people here and there at the game that look like they'd
swallow it, and old Angus ashamed and proud and glaring round as if he'd
like to hear some one besides himself call his son a worthless young
hound--if they wanted to start something.
"And the polo victory of course had to be celebrated by a banquet at the
hotel, attended by all the players and their huskiest ruffian friends.
They didn't have the ponies there, but I guess they would of if they'd
thought of it. It must have been a good banquet, with vintages and song
and that sort of thing--I believe they even tried to have food at
first--and hearty indoor sports with the china and silver and chairs
that had been thoughtlessly provided and a couple of big mirrors that
looked as if you could throw a catsup bottle clear through them, only
you couldn't, because it would stop there after merely breaking the
glass, and spatter in a helpless way.
"And of course there was speeches. The best one, as far as I could
learn, was made by the owner of the outraged premises at a late
hour--when the party was breaking up--as you might put it. He said the
bill would be about eighteen hundred dollars, as near as he could tell
at first glance. He was greeted with hearty laughter and applause from
the high-spirited young incendiaries and retired hastily through an
unsuspected door to the pantry as they rushed for him. It was then they
found out what to do with the rest of the catsup--and did it--so the
walls and ceiling wouldn't look so monotonous, and fixed the windows so
they would let out the foul tobacco smoke, and completed a large
painting of the Yosemite that hung on the wall, doing several things to
it that hadn't occurred to the artist in his hurry, and performed a
serious operation on the piano without the use of gas. The tables, I
believe, was left flat on their backs.
"Angus, _fills_, was fetched home in a car by a gang of his roguish
young playmates. They stopped down on the stately drive under my window
and a quartet sung a pathetic song that run:
"Don't forget your parents,
Think all they done for you!
"Then young Angus ascended the marble steps to the top one, bared his
agreeable head to the moonlight, and made them a nice speech. He said
the campaign now in progress, fellow-citizens, marked the gravest crisis
in the affairs of our grand old state that an intelligent constituency
had ever been called upon to vote down, but that he felt they were on
the eve of a sweeping victory that would sweep the corrupt hell-hounds
of a venal opposition into an ignominy from which they would never be
swept by any base act of his while they honoured him with their
suffrages, because his life was an open book and he challenged any
son-of-a-gun within sound of his voice to challenge this to his face or
take the consequences of being swept into oblivion by the high tide of
a people's indignation that would sweep everything before it on the
third day of November next, having been aroused in its might at last
from the debasing sloth into which the corrupt hell-hounds of a venal
opposition had swept them, but a brighter day had dawned, which would
sweep the onrushing hordes of petty chicanery to where they would get
theirs; and, as one who had heard the call of an oppressed people, he
would accept this fitting testimonial, not for its intrinsic worth but
for the spirit in which it was tendered. As for the nefarious tariff on
watch springs, sawed lumber, and indigo, he would defer his masterly
discussion of these burning issues to a more fitting time because a man
had to get a little sleep now and then or he wasn't any good next day.
In the meantime he thanked them one and all, and so, gentlemen,
good-night.
"The audience cheered hoarsely and drove off. I guess the speech would
have been longer if a light hadn't showed in the east wing of the castle
where Angus, _peer_, slept. And then all was peace and quiet till the
storm broke on a rocky coast next day. It didn't really break until
evening, but suspicious clouds no bigger than a man's hand might have
been observed earlier. If young Angus took any breakfast that morning it
was done in the privacy of his apartment under the pitying glances of a
valet or something. But here he was at lunch, blithe as ever, and full
of merry details about the late disaster. He spoke with much humour
about a wider use for tomato catsup than was ever encouraged by the old
school of house decorators. Old Angus listened respectfully, taking only
a few bites of food but chewing them long and thoughtfully. Ellabelle
was chiefly interested in the names of the hearty young vandals. She was
delighted to learn that they was all of the right set, and her eyes
glowed with pride. The eyes of Angus, _peer_, was now glowing with what
I could see was something else, though I couldn't make out just what it
was. He never once exploded like you'd of thought he was due to.
"Then come a note for the boy which the perfect-mannered Englishman that
was tending us said was brought by a messenger. Young Angus glanced at
the page and broke out indignantly. 'The thieving old pirate!' he says.
'Last night he thought it would be about eighteen hundred dollars, and
that sounded hysterical enough for the few little things we'd scratched
or mussed up. I told him he would doubtless feel better this morning,
but in any event to send the bill to me and I would pay it.'
"'Quite right of you,' says Ellabelle proudly.
"'And now the scoundrel sends me one for twenty-three hundred and odd.
He's a robber, net!'
"Old Angus said never a word, but chewed slowly, whilst various puzzling
expressions chased themselves acrost his eloquent face. I couldn't make
a thing out of any of them.
"'Never patronize the fellow again,' says Ellabelle warmly.
"'As to that,' says her son, 'he hinted something last night about
having me arrested if I ever tried to patronize him again, but that
isn't the point. He's robbing me now.'
"'Oh, money!' says Ellabelle in a low tone of disgust and with a gesture
like she was rebuking her son for mentioning such a thing before the
servant.
"'But I don't like to be taken advantage of,' says he, looking very
annoyed and grand. Then old Angus swallowed something he'd been chewing
for eight minutes and spoke up with an entirely new expression that
puzzled me more than ever.
"'If you're sure you have the right of it, don't you submit to the
outrage.'
"Angus, Junior, backed up a little bit at this, not knowing quite how to
take the old man's mildness. 'Oh, of course the fellow might win out if
he took it into court,' he says. 'Every one knows the courts are just a
mass of corruption.'
"'True, I've heard gossip to that effect,' says his father. 'Yet there
must be some way to thwart the crook. I'm feeling strangely ingenious at
the moment.' He was very mild, and yet there was something sinister and
Scotch about him that the boy felt.
"'Of course I'd pay it out of my own money,' he remarks generously.
"'Even so, I hate to see you cheated,' says his father kindly. 'I hate
to have you pay unjust extortions out of the mere pittance your
tight-fisted old father allows you.'
"Young Angus said nothing to this, but blushed and coughed
uncomfortably.
"'If you hurt that hotel anything like twenty-three hundred dollars'
worth, it must be an interesting sight,' his father goes on brightly.
"'Oh, it was funny at the time,' says Angus boy, cheering up again.
"'Things often are,' says old Angus. 'I'll have a look.'
"'At the bill?'
"'No, at the wreck,' says he. The old boy was still quiet on the
outside, but was plainly under great excitement, for he now folded his
napkin with care, a crime of which I knew Ellabelle had broken him the
first week in New York, years before. I noticed their butler had the
fine feeling to look steadily away at the wall during this obscenity.
The offender then made a pleasant remark about the beauty of the day and
left the palatial apartment swiftly. Young Angus and his mother looked
at each other and strolled after him softly over rugs costing about
eighty thousand dollars. The husband and father was being driven off by
a man he could trust in a car they had let him have for his own use.
Later Ellabelle confides to me that she mistrusts old Angus is
contemplating some bit of his national deviltry. 'He had a strange look
on his face,' says she, 'and you know--once a Scotchman, always a
Scotchman! Oh, it would be pitiful if he did anything peculiarly Scotch
just at our most critical period here!' Then she felt of her face to
see if there was any nervous lines come into it, and there was, and she
beat it for the maid to have 'em rubbed out ere they set.
"Yet at dinner that night everything seemed fine, with old Angus as
jovial as I'd ever seen him, and the meal come to a cheerful end and we
was having coffee in the Looey de Medisee saloon, I think it is, before
a word was said about this here injured hotel.
"'You were far too modest this morning, you sly dog!' says Angus,
_peer_, at last, chuckling delightedly. 'You misled me grievously. That
job of wrecking shows genius of a quality that was all too rare in my
time. I suspect it's the college that does it. I shouldn't wonder now if
going through college is as good as a liberal education. I don't believe
mere uneducated house-wreckers could have done so pretty a job in twice
the time, and there's clever little touches they never would have
thought of at all.'
"'It did look thorough when we left,' says young Angus, not quite
knowing whether to laugh.
"'It's nothing short of sublime,' says his father proudly. 'I stood in
that deserted banquet hall, though it looks never a bit like one, with
ruin and desolation on every hand as far as the eye could reach. It
inspired such awe in the bereaved owner and me that we instinctively
spoke in hushed whispers. I've had no such gripping sensation as that
since I gazed upon the dead city of Pompeii. No longer can it be said
that Europe possesses all the impressive ruins.'
"Angus boy grinned cheerfully now, feeling that this tribute was
heartfelt.
"'I suspect now,' goes on the old boy, 'that when the wreckage is
cleared away we shall find the mangled bodies of several that perished
when the bolts descended from a clear sky upon the gay scene.'
"'Perhaps under the tables,' says young Angus, chirking up still more at
this geniality. 'Two or three went down early and may still be there.'
"'Yet twenty-three hundred for it is a monstrous outrage,' says the old
man, changing his voice just a mite. 'Too well I know the cost of such
repairs. Fifteen hundred at most would make the place better than
ever--and to think that you, struggling along to keep up appearances on
the little I give you, should be imposed upon by a crook that
undoubtedly has the law on his side! I could endure no thought of it, so
I foiled him.'
"'How?' says young Angus, kind of alarmed.
"Angus, _peer_, yawned and got up. 'It's a long story and would hardly
interest you,' says he, moving over to the door. 'Besides, I must be to
bed against the morrow, which will be a long, hard day for me.' His
voice had tightened up.
"'What have you done?' demands Ellabelle passionately.
"'Saved your son eight hundred dollars,' says Angus, 'or the equivalent
of his own earnings for something like eight hundred years at current
prices for labour.'
"'I've a right to know,' says Ellabelle through her teeth and stiffening
in her chair. Young Angus just set there with his mouth open.
"'So you have,' says old Angus, and he goes on as crisp as a bunch of
celery: 'I told you I felt ingenious. I've kept this money in the family
by the simple device of taking the job. I've engaged two other painters
and decorators besides myself, a carpenter, an electrician, a glazier,
and a few proletariats of minor talent for clearing away the wreckage. I
shall be on the job at eight. The loafers won't start at seven, as I
used to. Don't think I'd see any son of mine robbed before my very eyes.
My new overalls are laid out and my valet has instructions to get me
into them at seven, though he persists in believing I'm to attend a
fancy-dress ball at some strangely fashionable hour. So I bid you all
good evening.'
"Well, I guess that was the first time Ellabelle had really let go of
herself since she was four years old or thereabouts. Talk about the
empress of stormy emotion! For ten minutes the room sounded like a
torture chamber of the dark Middle Ages. But the doctor reached there at
last in a swift car, and him and the two maids managed to get her laid
out all comfortable and moaning, though still with outbreaks about every
twenty minutes that I could hear clear over on my side of the house.
"And down below my window on the marble porch Angus, _fills_, was
walking swiftly up and down for about one hour. He made no speech like
the night before. He just walked and walked. The part that struck me was
that neither of them had ever seemed to have the slightest notion of
pleading old Angus out of his mad folly. They both seemed to know the
Scotch when it did break out.
"At seven-thirty the next morning the old boy in overalls and jumper and
a cap was driven to his job in a car as big as an apartment house. The
curtains to Ellabelle's Looey Seez boudoir remained drawn, with hourly
bulletins from the two Swiss maids that she was passing away in great
agony. Angus, Junior, was off early, too, in his snakiest car. A few
minutes later they got a telephone from him sixty miles away that he
would not be home to lunch. Old Angus had taken his own lunch with him
in a tin pail he'd bought the day before, with a little cupola on top
for the cup to put the bottle of cold coffee in.
"It was a joyous home that day, if you don't care how you talk. All it
needed was a crêpe necktie on the knob of the front door. That ornery
old hound, Angus, got in from his work at six, spotty with paint and
smelling of oil and turpentine, but cheerful as a new father. He washed
up, ridding himself of at least a third of the paint smell, looked in at
Ellabelle's door to say, 'What! Not feeling well, mamma? Now, that's too
bad!' ate a hearty dinner with me, young Angus not having been heard
from further, and fell asleep in a gold armchair at ten minutes past
nine.
"He was off again next morning. Ellabelle's health was still breaking
down, but young Angus sneaked in and partook of a meagre lunch with me.
He was highly vexed with his pa. 'He's nothing but a scoundrelly old
liar,' he says to me, 'saying that he gives me but a pittance. He's
always given me a whale of an allowance. Why, actually, I've more than
once had money left over at the end of the quarter. And now his talk
about saving money! I tell you he has some other reason than money for
breaking the mater's heart.' The boy looked very shrewd as he said this.
"That night at quitting time he was strangely down at the place with his
own car to fetch his father home. 'I'll trust you this once,' says the
old man, getting in and looking more then ever like a dissolute working
man. On the way they passed this here yellow-haired daughter of the old
train-robber that there had been talk of the boy making a match with.
She was driving her own car and looked neither to right nor left.
"'Not speaking?' says old Angus.
"'She didn't see us,' says the boy.
"'She's ashamed of your father,' says the old man.
"'She's not,' says the boy.
"'You know it,' says the old scoundrel.
"'I'll show her,' says his son.
"Well, we had another cheerful evening, with Ellabelle sending word to
old Angus that she wanted me to have the necklace of brilliants with the
sapphire pendant, and the two faithful maids was to get suitable
keepsakes out of the rest of her jewels, and would her son always wear
the seal ring with her hair in it that she had given him when he was
twenty? And the old devil started in to tell how much he could have
saved by taking charge of the work in his own house, and how a union man
nowadays would do just enough to keep within the law, and so on; but he
got to yawning his head off and retired at nine, complaining that his
valet that morning had cleaned and pressed his overalls. Young Angus
looked very shrewd at me and again says: 'The old liar! He has some
other reason than money. He can't fool me.'
"I kind of gathered from both of them the truth of what happened the
next day. Young Angus himself showed up at the job about nine A.M., with
a bundle under his arm. 'Where's the old man?' his father heard him
demand of the carpenter, he usually speaking of old Angus as the
governor.
"'Here,' says he from the top of a stepladder in the entry which looked
as if a glacier had passed through it.
"'Could you put me to work?' says the boy.
"'Don't get me to shaking with laughter up here,' says the old brute.
'Can't you see I'd be in peril of falling off?'
"Young Angus undoes his bundle and reveals overalls and a jumper which
he gets into quickly. 'What do I do first?' says he.
"His father went on kalsomining and took never a look at him more. 'The
time has largely passed here,' says he, 'for men that haven't learned to
do something, but you might take some of the burnt umber there and work
it well into a big gob of that putty till it's brown enough to match the
woodwork. Should you display the least talent for that we may see later
if you've any knack with a putty knife.'
"The new hand had brought no lunch with him, but his father spared him a
few scraps from his own, and they all swigged beer from a pail of it
they sent out for. So the scandal was now complete in all its details.
The palatial dining-room that night, being a copy of a good church or
something from ancient Italy, smelled like a paint shop indeed--and
sounded like one through dinner. 'That woodwork will be fit to
second-coat first thing in the morning,' says old Angus. 'I'll have it
sandpapered in no time,' says the boy. 'Your sandpapering ain't bad,'
says the other, 'though you have next to no skill with a brush.' 'I
thought I was pretty good with that flat one though.' 'Oh, fair; just
fair! First-coating needs little finesse. There! I forgot to order more
rubbing varnish. Maybe the men will think of it.' And so on till they
both yawned themselves off to their Scotch Renaysence apartments.
Ellabelle had not yet learned the worst. It seemed to be felt that she
had a right to perish without suffering the added ignominy of knowing
her son was acting like a common wage slave.
"They was both on the job next day. Of course the disgraceful affair had
by now penetrated to the remotest outlying marble shack. Several male
millionaires this day appeared on the scene to josh Angus, _peer_, and
Angus, _fills_, as they toiled at their degrading tasks. Not much
attention was paid to 'em, it appears, not even to the old train-robber
who come to jest and remained to cross-examine Angus about how much he
was really going to clear on the job, seriously now. Anything like that
was bound to fascinate the old crook.
"And next day, close to quitting time, what happens but this here robber
chieftain's petted daughter coming in and hanging round and begging to
be let to help because it was such jolly fun. I believe she did get hold
of a square of sandpaper with which she daintily tried to remove some
fresh varnish that should have been let strictly alone; and when they
both ordered her out in a frenzy of rage, what does she do but wait for
'em with her car which she made them enter and drove them to their abode
like they belonged to the better class of people that one would care to
know. The two fools was both kind of excited about this that night.
"The next day she breezes in again and tries to get them to knock off an
hour early so she can take them to the country club for tea, but they
refuse this, so she makes little putty statues of them both and drove a
few nails where they would do no good and upset a bucket of paste and
leaned a two-hundred-dollar lace thing against a varnished wall to the
detriment of both, and fell off a stepladder. Old Angus caught her and
boxed her ears soundly. And again she drove them through the avenues of
a colony of fine old families with money a little bit older, by a few
days, and up the drive to their own door.
"Ellabelle was peeking between the plush curtains on this occasion, for
some heartless busybody during the day had told her that her son and
husband was both renegades now. And strangely enough, she begun to get
back her strength from that very moment--seeing that exclusive and
well-known young debby-tant consorting in public with the reprobates.
I'm darned if she didn't have the genius after that to treat the whole
thing as a practical joke, especially when she finds out that none of
them exclusives had had it long enough to look down on another
millionaire merely for pinching a penny now and then. Old Angus as a
matter of fact had become just a little more important than she had ever
been and could have snubbed any one he wanted to. The only single one in
the whole place that throwed him down was his own English valet. He was
found helpless drunk in a greenhouse the third day, having ruined nine
thousand dollars' worth of orchids he'd gone to sleep amongst, and he
resigned his position with bitter dignity the moment he recovered
consciousness.
"Moreover, young Angus and this girl clenched without further
opposition. Her train-robber father said the boy must have something in
him even if he didn't look it, and old Angus said he still believed the
girl to be nothing but a yellow-haired soubrette; but what should we
expect of a woman, after all?
"The night the job was finished we had the jolliest dinner of my visit,
with a whole gang of exclusive-setters at the groaning board, including
this girl and her folks, and champagne, of which Angus, _peer_, consumed
near one of the cut-glass vases full.
"I caught him with young Angus in the deserted library later, while the
rest was one-stepping in the Henry Quatter ballroom or dance hall. The
old man had his arms pretty well upon the boy's shoulders. Yes, sir, he
was almost actually hugging him. The boy fled to this gilded café where
the rest was, and old Angus, with his eyes shining very queer, he grabs
me by the arm and says, 'Once when he was very small--though unusually
large for his age of three, mind you--he had a way of scratching my face
something painful with his little nails, and all in laughing play, you
know. I tried to warn him, but he couldn't understand, of course; so,
not knowing how else to instruct him, I scratched back one day, laughing
myself like he was, but sinking my nails right fierce into the back of
his little fat neck. He relaxed the tension in his own fingers. He was
hurt, for the tears started, but he never cried. He just looked puzzled
and kept on laughing, being bright to see I could play the game, too.
Only he saw it wasn't so good a game as he'd thought. I wonder what
made me think of that, now! I don't know. Come--from yonder doorway we
can see him as he dances.'
"And Ellabelle was saying gently to one and all, with her merry peal of
laughter, 'Ah, yes--once a Scotchman, always--'
"My land! It's ten o'clock. Don't them little white-faced beauties make
the music! Honestly I'd like to have a cot out in the corral. We miss a
lot of it in here."
V