III
The Hansards lived in an old-fashioned, two-storied, white frame building. It had dormer windows in the gray shingled roof and a long veranda with massive fluted columns. Back of the house rose a rocky hill covered with pines, and in front lay a wide, rolling lawn, through which, for a quarter of a mile, stretched a white-graveled drive, shaded by fine old water oaks from the house to the main traveled road.
Along this drive the next morning Joe Thompson drove his mother in a rickety buggy. On the left near the house was a row of cabins where the negro servants lived, and standing somewhat to itself was the white cottage of the overseer of the plantation. The doors of all the cabins were closed, and no one was in sight.
“I’m afeared she’s wuss, an’ they’ve all gone to the big house,” sighed Mrs. Thompson. “Maybe we won’t git thar in time.”
Joe made no response, but he whipped his mare into a quicker pace. When they reached the veranda and alighted no one came to meet them. A negro woman hastened across the hall, but she did not look toward Mrs. Thompson, who stood on the steps waiting for Joe to hitch his mare to a post nearby.
“Ain’t you goin’ to come in?” she asked, when he came toward her.
“No, I’ll wait out here,” he answered, and he sat down on the steps.
She hesitated for an instant, then she turned resolutely into the great carpeted hall, and through a door on the right she entered a large parlor. No one was there. The carpet was rich in color and texture, the furniture massive and fine. Over the mantel was a large oil portrait of Colonel Hansard, and on the opposite wall one of his wife painted just after her marriage. Set into the wall and hung about with lace drapery was a mirror that reached from the floor to the ceiling. From this room, through an open door on her left, Mrs. Thompson went into another. It was the library. No one was there. On all sides of the room were glass-doored cases of richly bound books. Here and there on tables and stands stood time-yellowed marble busts and pots of plants. In a corner of the room was a revolving bookcase, and in the centre a long writing-table covered with green cloth.
The old woman looked about her perplexed. Everything was so still that she could hear the scratching of a honeysuckle vine against the window under the touch of the breeze. She wondered if her sister had died, and if everybody had gone to the funeral.
She was on the point of returning to Joe, when she was startled by a low moan in an adjoining room. The sound came through a door on her right, which was slightly ajar. She cautiously pushed it open. The room contained an awed and silent group. The crisis had come. Mrs. Hansard was dying. She lay on a high-canopied bed in a corner, hidden from Mrs. Thompson’s view by the family and servants gathered at the bed. Seeing a vacant chair in a row of women against a wall, the visitor went in and sat down. Her black cotton sunbonnet hid her face, and, as there were others present as humbly clad as she, she attracted little notice.
There was a breathless silence for a moment. Those at the bed seemed to be leaning forward in great agitation. Suddenly one of the daughters of the dying woman cried out: “Oh, doctor! Come quick!” and a physician who stood near advanced and bent over his patient.
After a moment he silently withdrew to the fireplace, where he simply stood looking at the fire in the grate. Edith, the eldest child, followed and asked him a question. He gravely nodded, and with her handkerchief to her eyes she burst into tears. Her husband, the Governor’s son, a handsome, manly fellow, came to her and, putting his arm around her, drew her back to the bed.
“She’s trying to speak,” he whispered, and for the next moment the dying woman’s labored breathing was the only sound in the room.
“Father! Mother!” Mrs. Thompson was hearing her sister’s voice for the first time in twenty-five years. “Brother Thomas! Uncle Frank! Where are you?”
“She is thinking of her childhood,” said Edith in a whisper. She bent over her mother and in a calm, steady voice said:
“We are all here, mother dear—Susie and Annie and Jasper and I.”
There was silence for a moment; then the voice of the dying woman rose in keen appeal.
“Martha! Oh, I want Martha—I want Martha!”
The two sisters exchanged anxious glances.
“She means Aunt Martha Thompson,” whispered Susie; “we have not sent for her. What shall we do?”
Edith bent over the pillow.
“Mother dear——”
“I want Martha, my sister Martha!” Mrs. Hansard said impatiently, and she beat the white coverlet with her thin hand. “Martha, sister Martha, where are you?”
“Here I am, Melissa.” The gaunt figure rose suddenly, to the surprise of all, and moved toward the bed. They made room for her. There was no time for formal explanations or greetings. “I’m here, Melissa; I heard you was sick, an’ ’lowed I’d better drap in.”
“Thank God!” cried Mrs. Hansard, as she took the hardened hand in her frail fingers and tried to press it. “I’ve been prayin’ God to let me see you once more. I want you to forgive me, Martha. I’m dying. I’ve done you a great wrong. Forgive me, forgive me!”
“La, me, Melissa, I hain’t a thing to forgive!” was the calm, insistent reply; “not a blessed thing! It was all as much my doin’ as yore’n. We was both jest natural—that’s all—jest natural, like the Lord made us—me in my way, and you in yore’n.”
Edith kissed her aunt’s wrinkled cheek gratefully, and, with her cheek on the old woman’s shoulder, she wept silently.
“I thank God; I feel easier now,” said Mrs. Hansard. “You’ve made me happier, Martha. I can die easier now. God is good.”
Someone gave Mrs. Thompson a chair, and she sat down and held her sister’s hand till it was all over. Then the Governor’s son took the old woman’s arm and led her into the sitting-room, and there the three motherless girls joined her.
“You are much like her,” sobbed Susie, the youngest; “you have her eyes and mouth.”
“Yes, folks used to say we favored,” said Mrs. Thompson simply.
“You must not leave us, Aunt Martha,” said Edith. “We must keep you with us. She would like to have it so.”
“Yes, do, do, Aunt Martha,” chimed in Susie and Annie.
The old woman had folded her bonnet in her lap and was holding her rough hands out to the fire. She smiled as if vaguely pleased, and yet she shook her head.
“No, don’t ax me that, girls,” she said. “I’ve got ways an’ habits that ain’t one bit like yore’n. I’d feel out o’ place anywhar except in my cabin. I couldn’t change at my time o’ life. Joe’s workin’ fer me, an’ he’ll never marry. He hates the sight of a woman. He says they meddle. He’s waitin’ fer me now outside, an’ I reckon I ort to be a-goin’.”
“But not till after—after the funeral,” said Susie.
“Yes, honey. I don’t think I ort to wait. I’ve got lots to do at home. My cows are to feed an’ milk, an’ it’s a long drive. It’ll be in the night when we git home. Remember, me an’ yore mother hain’t been intimate sence we was childern. I’m her sister by blood, but not by raisin’, an’ I hain’t the same sort o’ mourner as you-uns, an’ don’t think I ort to pass as one in public. I wouldn’t feel exactly natural, that’s all.”
The Governor’s son nodded his head as if he agreed with her, and the girls silently gave her her wish.
A Remorseful Regret
“IF I’d only married her!” muttered Tanquerly, with the bitter regret of a lost soul bewailing vanished opportunities.
I thought of the sweet little wife he had at home, and was swamped with surprise.
“Oh, if I’d only married her!” he repeated, still more intensely.
The woman referred to occupied a seat across and further down the car from us. She had a form that made the ordinary carpenter’s scaffolding look graceful and huggable, her jaw reminded one of a trip-hammer, her face was plotted to throw a nervous child into convulsions, and her voice!—her voice would make a busy boiler-factory seem restful and serene after a second of it. She had just had a slight controversy with the conductor, and that official—you know how shy and shrinking the ordinary street-car conductor is—had been reduced to quivering pulp in a trifle over a minute. He, one of the most explosive and overbearing of his kind, had joined issue with her confidently and gleefully, but when her strident voice once got to working full time, about two hundred and fifty words to the second, I calculated, analyzing his character, dissecting his reputation, tearing up his habits, unjointing his hopes, shredding his ambitions, and ruthlessly forecasting his future, it was pathetic to watch that strong man striving fruitlessly to stem the torrent, then yielding little by little, still struggling strenuously to get in a word, until at last he was swept out on to the back platform, a mangled and lacerated bundle of raw nerves, too broken-spirited to so much as curse a little fussy old gentleman who berated him for not stopping the car at his corner. I never saw the stiffening so thoroughly, quickly and completely taken out of a man in my life. Oh, it was pitiable!
“If I’d only married her!” murmured Tanquerly again.
“Are you crazy?” I demanded sharply.
Tanquerly shook his head slowly and painfully. “No,” he said, “not yet. But I’ll bet if I’d only married her I wouldn’t have been to that banquet last night and felt like this this morning.”
Nothing to Gain
FARMER MOSSBACKER—Are ye goin’ to send your son to college, Ezry?
Farmer Bentover—Hod-durn him—no! He’s a reg’lar rowdy now!
Franchise Wealth and Municipal Ownership
BY JOHN H. GIRDNER, M.D.
THERE is much writing and talk about municipal ownership in these days. When you talk about a municipality or an individual owning something, it implies that there is something to own. It is about this “something” that I want to write. I want to make it clear to the reader what I mean by franchise wealth or franchise property, and exactly how it differs from private wealth or private property.
When you buy a house and lot in a town or city, your property is of two kinds, private property and franchise property. Your private property begins at the building line in front and extends backward the full width of your lot to the fence or line which divides your back yard from the back yard of your neighbor who fronts on the next street. Your franchise property extends from the building or stoop line, outward, the full width of your lot, across the sidewalk and on to the middle of the street where it meets the franchise property of your neighbor on the opposite side of your street.
The money to grade, drain and pave the street in front of your lot was raised by assessments levied on that lot. These assessments were added, by previous owners, perhaps, to the cost of the lot, and were a part of the price you paid for the lot. In other words, you bought and paid for the franchise property in front of your stoop line as directly as you did for the private property behind the stoop line, and you are therefore entitled to the usufruct of the one as much as the other.
The aggregate of the franchise wealth of all the individual owners in any given street is the sum total of the franchise wealth of that street. And the aggregate of the franchise wealth of all the streets of a given town or city is the sum total of the franchise wealth of that city. And it is absolutely owned by all the inhabitants of that city, for everyone contributes in some manner to the creation and maintenance of this franchise wealth.
There is another thing about this kind of property which the people ought to keep in mind. Like their private property, their rights in this franchise property extend from the surface right down into the earth, as far as it is practical to dig; and, from the surface, right up into the sky, as high as it is practical to build. It is well, I say, to keep these facts in mind; they may come in handy when a corrupt mayor and board of aldermen, or an eminently respectable board of rapid transit commissioners, are about to hand over to a private corporation a city subway or elevated road.
The tremendous importance of the franchise wealth on all social and economic questions in a city like New York may be more fully appreciated if we call to mind this fact, viz.:
That the value of any piece of city real estate is determined almost entirely by the character of the franchise property in front of and nearby it.
Why does a lot one hundred feet deep, with twenty-five feet front on Fifth avenue, sell for so much more than a similar lot fronting on Second avenue? They are the same size. They are composed alike of earth and rock. You can dig as deep a foundation and build as high in the air on the one as the other. But why the great difference in price? You say because Fifth avenue is a better street than Second avenue. But this answer does not explain much. What you mean to say is, that there are certain characteristics, which I have not time to discuss here in detail, connected with the franchise property in front of and contiguous to the Fifth avenue lot which make it more valuable than similar characteristics connected with the franchise property in front of and contiguous to the Second avenue lot. And this is my point, that it is at last the character of the franchise property of a street or a city which determines the value of the private property or real estate of that street or city.
The streets of New York City, which I have called franchise wealth or franchise property to distinguish this kind of property from the private property of the individual, were built and are maintained with money contributed by all the citizens; and all the citizens are as fully entitled to the usufruct of them, as is any individual to the usufruct of his private property.
The individual manages his private property or he employs an agent to manage it for him. And he holds this agent to a strict account. If the agent appropriates the income from the use of his private property the law steps in and justly punishes him. Acting collectively, the individuals elect by ballot a mayor and board of aldermen and members of the State legislature as agents to manage their franchise property for them.
“Wheresoever the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered together.” In every large city there is a fat carcass of franchise wealth, and there you find the corporation eagles, and the political eagles gathered together to gorge themselves on it. The corporation eagles deceive the unsuspecting citizens by a pretended desire to serve them. They call themselves “public service corporations.” There never was a worse misnomer than this. They are wolves in sheep’s clothing. They fatten on the people’s franchise wealth and serve no one except themselves and their congeners, the political eagles. So far from being servants they become the masters of the people whose property they have obtained by every corrupt device that the vulpine instinct of man can invent.
The political eagles that feed on the franchise carcass have a different way of deceiving the people. They organize themselves into what they call a political party, and, by working three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, while other men are attending to their legitimate businesses, they get control of the legal political machinery of one of the great national parties. The name by which they call their organization will depend on the particular city they are operating in. In New York, for instance, they call themselves Democrats, not because they know or care anything about the principles of Democracy, but because a majority of the independent voters are Democrats, and then they secure the votes to elect their candidates from the very people they intend to despoil once they get in. For a similar reason the political eagles of Philadelphia call their organization Republican. If the majority of the voters of any city favored prohibition, you would have that city’s organized political eagles calling themselves Prohibitionists. New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, every city in this country which has a fat franchise wealth carcass, has its corporation and political eagles gathered together to devour it.
When a complete history of New York City for the past forty years is written, not the least interesting chapters will be an account of the development, growth and present perfection of the system by which the corporations and politicians enriched themselves at the expense of the people, and how the people were so hypnotized that they were unable to rise in their might and drive out these cormorants. This era of corruption began with William M. Tweed. The enterprise was in its infancy then and Tweed was a blunderer. He and his associates robbed the city treasury on false vouchers, fraudulent bills, etc. Then came Jake Sharp, who bribed the aldermen outright with cash to induce them to hand over to him some millions worth of the people’s franchise wealth. Tweed and his people, Jake Sharp and the boodle aldermen got into trouble, state prison or exile.
Politicians do not like striped clothes when the stripes all run one way any better than other folks do. So a new and safer system had to be found for exploiting the people. Money in the form of campaign contributions from the individual or corporation who wants something to the head of the organization who could deliver that something after election, looked good and safe, and this is the plan which has been in operation in New York for some years.
During the last mayoralty campaign in this city I was told one evening by a man who is thoroughly reliable, and who is in a position to know, that the Consolidated Gas Company, of this city, had paid $300,000 into the campaign fund of Tammany Hall. George B. McClellan, the Tammany candidate for mayor, was elected. In less than one year after taking office he signed the so-called Remsen gas bill. Had it become a law it would have tightened the clutch of the Gas Trust more firmly on the people of this city and would have turned over to that corporation some millions more of their franchise wealth. Fortunately a Republican governor vetoed it and saved, for the time at least, further encroachments on the people’s rights.
And you have today the spectacle of this so-called Democratic mayor lined up with the Trust magnates and their money-bags at the big ends of the gas-tubes and against the people of all parties who suffer extortion at the little ends of the gas-tubes. He is actually opposing the efforts of the people of this city to secure the necessary legislation to permit them to build and operate their own gas-plants and deliver the gas to themselves through pipes laid in their own streets. And if you refuse to support such a man you are likely to be told by an insolent Tammany Hall henchman that you are no Democrat.
Talk about municipal ownership! Why, the municipality, which is another name for the people, already own everything they need. They own the streets and the right of way through them, and they own the money to build lighting plants, railways and telephone lines. The only thing they do not own is permission to use their own property. And this is withheld from them by greedy Trust magnates through their bought-up politicians.
We need MEN in this city who cannot be deceived by the names Democracy and Republicanism. We need men who will stand together and protect our franchise property against grafting politicians and grafting political organizations, no matter by what names they call themselves. New York City may be likened to a big “skyscraper” laid on its side. The streets correspond to the elevator shafts. Now, what would be thought of the sanity of a company of men who built a high office building, hotel or apartment house and allowed their agents to give away to outsiders the right to run the elevators and the further right to prey upon the tenants who are obliged to use them? Yet this is exactly what the politicians have done and are doing with the streets of this city.
Make an inventory of the Gas Trust’s property, find out how much it would cost to duplicate its plant, then subtract that sum from the capitalization of the Trust and the remainder is franchise property, and that belongs to the people. Go through the list of telephone, telegraph and railway companies the same way, and you will begin to get an idea of the value and earning capacity of your franchise property which has been stolen from you by your agents, the officeholders.
If the agent of an individual deeds away a piece of his private property and fails to make a just return to the owner, the law holds the title to be spurious and punishes that agent. But the officeholders, the agents appointed by all the individuals to care for their franchise property, deed it away to so-called public service corporations, pocket the proceeds and go scot-free!
The telephone, telegraph and all the corporations that use wires and electricity appropriate and use the people’s private property as well as their franchise property. Go on your roofs, New Yorkers, and count the electric wires that the thieving electricity corporations have attached to your houses or have strung across your lots without your permission. Remember that you own a space equal to the surface dimensions of your lot down into the bowels of the earth and up into the sky as far as you like to go. And nobody has the right to string wires across this space in the air or in the earth without your permission. The New York Telephone Company attached a wire to the roof of a house I had leased. I threatened to cut the wire. The company insolently replied that they needed that wire on my roof to carry on their business. I insisted on justice and my rights in the matter. The company then came round with a lease, which I signed, granting them permission to pass their wire over my roof, and I received a substantial annual rental for that privilege.
These corporations appropriate your private property as well as your franchise property for their own enrichment and pay nothing for it. They would string wires on your teeth if they needed them and you did not object. And to cap the climax they charge extortionate rates for service in order to pay dividends on watered stock. I wrote these facts a few years ago and offered the article to two daily newspapers in this town, and they did not dare to publish it. But thank God Tom Watson’s Magazine exists to tell the truth. New Yorkers, you ought to examine the fences around your backyards. You surely own them, and they are valuable property. They produce an enormous income to—the telephone company. Tens of thousands of yards of telephone wires are strung on these fences. The company uses them to get wires into your houses, in order to charge you extortionate prices for ’phone service. The company will tell you they need these fences to give you ’phone service. That answer reminds me of the answer given by a negro girl caught stealing raisins from her mistress’s bureau drawer. “Why did you steal those raisins?” asked the mistress. Sally replied, “Why, missus, dey’s good.”
The Cause of the Congregating
“MY friends,” began the Great Man, in a voice admirably adapted for declamatory purposes, as he stepped out upon the platform of the car and beheld the major portion of the inhabitants of the wayside hamlet seething and jostling around the station, “I thank you from the bottom of my heart for this enthusiastic greeting, this spontaneous outpouring of your best citizens, this wholesale welcome, this——”
“Wholesale gran’mother!” broke in a youthful and pessimistic voice. “It ain’t you that’s the attraction—a big fat drummer is havin’ the gol-rammedest fit you ever had the pleasure of witnessin’, right there in the waitin’-room!”
That Fateful Day
FREDDIE—How long does the honeymoon last, dad?
Cobwigger—Until a fellow’s wife learns not to be afraid of him.
The Storm-Petrel
PROSE POEM BY MAXIM GORKY
TRANSLATED BY ABRAHAM CAHAN
[Note: The following prose poem by Maxim Gorky was written a few years ago in prophecy of the present crisis in Russia and was published only in Life, the leading literary magazine of St. Petersburg. In consequence the periodical was immediately suppressed. The editor and his entire staff voluntarily expatriated themselves and re-established the magazine in London, whence, during the few months of its existence in exile, thousands of copies were smuggled over the frontier for secret circulation.
Gorky was arrested for complicity in the strikers’ movement that resulted in the St. Petersburg massacre of January 22 last. The rumor that the Russian Government purposed to sentence him to death excited so much feeling, that the foremost literary men of Germany, England and the United States concerted in an appeal for clemency, on the ground that the life and work of a great writer belong not alone to his country but to the world.
Gorky has risen from the depths of poverty and ignorance to literary eminence as the interpreter of life among the masses. His first successful short stories appeared in the newspapers and attracted attention for their truth and vigor. Since 1893 he has made his literary position secure by the production of various novels and plays. He is now thirty-six years old.
Abraham Cahan, translator of the poem, is a Russian who has attained distinction among American writers of fiction through short stories and the novels, “Yekl” and “The White Terror and the Red.”—Editors.]
OVER the gray expanse of sea the wind is gathering the clouds. Circling between the clouds and the sea, like a black flash of lightning, is the storm-petrel on high.
Now touching a wave with his wing, now shooting heavenward, dart-like, he is crying, and the clouds hear glad tidings in his cry.
There is thirst for storm in that cry. The force of rage, the flame of passion, the confidence of victory do the clouds hear in that cry.
The gulls are groaning before the storm, groaning and tossing over the sea; ready to hide their terror at the bottom of the sea.
The cargeese, too, are groaning. The joy of the struggle is unknown to them; the din of strife awes them.
The silly albatross hides his fat body in the cliffs. The proud storm-petrel alone is soaring boldly, freely over the sea, the waves singing, dancing on high, coming to meet the thunder.
The thunder roars. Foaming with fury, the waves are raging, battling with the wind. Now the wind seizes a flock of waves in gigantic embrace, now hurls them with savage hate to the rocks, shattering them to dust and masses of emerald spray.
Shouting joyously, the storm-petrel is circling like a black flash of lightning, piercing the clouds like a spear, brushing foam off the waves with its wings.
There he is, flying like a demon, a proud, black storm-demon, laughing and sobbing at once. It is at the clouds he is laughing; it is for joy he is sobbing.
In the thunder’s rage the sensitive demon perceives a weary note, the voice of defeat. He knows that the clouds cannot conceal the sun—not they!
The wind is sighing; the thunder is pealing. Hundreds of clouds gleam bluish over the precipice of the sea. The sea is catching darts of lightning and smothering them in its bosom. Like serpents of fire the reflections of the lightning are writhing, vanishing one after the other.
The storm is advancing! Another minute and the storm will come with a crash.
It is the intrepid storm-petrel who is proudly careering among the flashes of lightning over the roaring, infuriated sea; it is the prophet of victory who is shouting.
Let the storm blow and roar with all its might!
What Buzz-Saw Morgan Thinks
BY W. S. MORGAN
TRUSTS breed distrust.
Law cannot make wrong right.
Charity is no cure for poverty; it is only a plaster.
A forty-three-cent protective tariff is worse than a fifty-cent dollar.
Fiat dollars are better than the fiat promises of the old party politicians.
The rich will continue to grow richer and the poor poorer as long as the present financial system exists.
I want to ask our Democratic friends how often do they need to be fooled by their leaders before they will get their eyes open?
Liberty is not safe in a country where greed and avarice are the basis of its prosperity.
The gold power owes allegiance to no party, yet it controls the machines of both old parties.
If there is anything that is calculated to give the political bosses the jim-jams it is a show of independence on the part of the masses.
I would rather be a dog and scratch at the root of a stump for a mouse, than to feel as small as most rich people do when the assessor and tax-collector come round.
Money paid out for public improvements is a blessing compared with that paid out for war expenses.
An honest dollar is one that preserves the equity in contracts, and not the one of increasing or decreasing value, or whose value depends upon the caprice or self-interest of a few bankers.
The greatest need of this country is for about seven million men who have the courage to vote for what they want.
“The poverty of the poor is their destruction,” and the wealth of the rich has the same effect on its possessors. These two extremes are the cause of the downfall of the nations.
There are some things of which there can be an overproduction, and one of them is yellow-dog politics.
Is there a farmer or laborer in all the land that ever signed a petition to Congress for the destruction of the greenbacks?
The question of 16 to 1 is still an issue; that is, there are sixteen reasons why the Democratic party should permit itself to be buried to one against it.
The banks are in the field to destroy the greenbacks and secure complete control of the currency.
It is not despair but hope that incites revolution. Despair is death.
The workingmen divide what they produce with every idler in the land, rich and poor.
The way to get even with a private trust is for the people to establish a public trust.
It wasn’t the so-called “sound money” men that saved the flag.
It is the hog nature in man that causes most of the suffering in the world.
Our commercial system rests upon the basis of skinning the other fellow before he has an opportunity to skin us.
One of the strongest planks in the devil’s platform is yellow-dog politics.
The best way to abolish poverty is to establish justice.
You can’t cheat the devil by passing a law that calls stealing business.
The lower classes are those who act low—rich or poor.
The practice of redeeming one kind of a dollar with another kind constitutes the banker’s cinch.
The harmony that will likely prevail in the next national Democratic convention might best be illustrated by pouring out a barrel of Kilkenny cats upon a wet floor.
I don’t think that Mr. Bryan is a thief, but he had the Populist platform borrowed so long that he has perhaps inadvertently fallen into the habit of thinking it is his own.
Railroads under private ownership form the strongest prop on which the trusts lean. Through special and reduced rates in the way of rebates they are enabled to freeze out all competitors.
It is stated that the rebate given to the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company by the Santa Fé Railroad while Paul Morton was its traffic manager amounted to $400,000 a year. Morton was a heavy stockholder in the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. If this is true, and this is the kind of man President Roosevelt is depending on to reform railroad rates and abolish rebates, we may know just what to expect.
The supreme test of any question is, is it right? If it is, then no man should hesitate to declare himself for the right.
Direct legislation is the very essence of democracy, and that is why the politicians don’t want it.
If Thomas Lawson is telling the truth it appears that about three-fourths of the Captains of Industry ought to be wearing striped clothes behind prison bars.
The President’s recommendation for the control of the railroads, and the plan he seems to have adopted to go about it, consultation with the railroad magnates, reminds me of a story I once heard related by a German speaker at a public meeting. A man who had been considered as having an unsound mind was found one morning hanging to a beam in the barn, the rope under his arms. He was promptly cut down, and on being asked why he hanged himself that way he answered that he was trying to commit suicide.
“But why didn’t you place the rope around your neck?” he was asked.
“I’ve tried it that way twice,” he replied, “and it always chokes me.”
Is the President afraid of choking the railroad corporations?
The question of how to get something for nothing is pretty well illustrated in the free government deposits in national banks. The banks have now over one hundred millions of dollars of government money for their own use, for which they do not pay a cent. Yet when the farmer talks about borrowing money from the government on his land at 2 per cent. interest, the banks raise a howl of paternalism that can be heard all around the world. If President Roosevelt is sincere in his fight on the trusts let him yank that money out of the hands of the biggest trust of all—the money trust. This is something that he can do and that ought to be done. There is no constitutional question involved, and if it be urged that it is necessary for the money to be in circulation let the government loan it direct to the people without a rake-off for the banks. This thing of prosecuting the little trusts and aiding the big ones won’t add any laurels to Teddy’s brow. Let no guilty trust escape, and there ain’t any innocent ones.
Toledo has just brought in a batch of indictments against some of her public officials. Governor Durbin, of Indiana, declares: “Statistics of political debauchery in this State for 1904, if it were possible to present them, would be nothing short of stunning.” Several other governors in their messages have called attention to the growth of corruption in their States, and in Colorado the situation is alarming. Three United States senators have been indicted within the past year, besides scores of lesser officials, some of whom are now serving terms in the penitentiary. Four Republican candidates for governor have been defeated in Republican States on account of their connection or sympathy with corrupt practices, and yet the work is only begun. Let the crusade against political corruption continue. If there is not room enough in the jails, I move that some of the horse thieves be turned out and the public thieves turned in.
The express companies once had a monopoly of transmitting money and charged exorbitant rates for the service. Then the government went into the business and reduced the rates. The express companies were compelled to come to the government rates or not get any business. Thus money is saved to the people, and the business is established on a firm basis. Of course the express companies set up the usual cry of paternalism, but it did no good, and the people would not think now of surrendering this prerogative to private companies. Now, why can’t the government add to its postal system the carrying of parcels, say up to ten or twelve pounds’ weight, and a telegraph and telephone system? The latter are just as legitimate and necessary as the former. Is it because the express companies, that have grown immensely rich, have a lobby in Congress to prevent the passage of such a bill? In England they have the parcels post and the government telegraph, and they save the people millions of dollars. In the past few years nineteen congressional committees have been appointed to investigate the use of the telegraph in connection with the postal department and seventeen of them have reported favorably toward establishing it. A majority of Postmaster Generals have recommended it, and the people demand it, yet the telegraph companies, or rather one company which is controlled by one family, has been successful in thwarting all legislation toward the establishment of a government telegraph system.
The readiness of the Democrats to vote for any old thing they see coming down the pike with the Democratic label on—Parker or Bryan, the gold standard or free silver—reminds me of an incident that happened down in Texas. A wealthy farmer who employed a great many negroes was going into town one day, and one of the negroes on the farm asked him to bring him back a marriage license.
“All right, Pete,” said the farmer, “but what’s the girl’s name?”
“Ann Brown,” replied the darkey.
When the farmer returned that evening he gave the negro his marriage license.
Pete took it and slowly read it over.
“Look heah, Marse Henry, you’se done gone an’ got dis license fer Mary Clarke. I’se gwine t’ marry Ann Brown.”
“I’m sorry, Pete,” the farmer replied, “but never mind; when I go into town again next week I’ll get you another license.”
“What’ll dat cost?” asked Pete.
“One dollar.”
“Lordy, nebber mind, Marse. Dere ain’t a dollar’s wuff ob difference ’tween all de coons on de fa’m.”
Every effort is now being put forth by the banks to have the greenbacks retired. So long as they continue to be issued by the government the banks have not complete control of the money of the country. This movement to retire the greenbacks was begun directly after the Civil War. At that time the bankers said: “It will not do to allow the greenback, as it is called, to circulate as money for any length of time, for we cannot control that.” Hugh McCulloch, then Secretary of the Treasury, acting on the bankers’ suggestion, said: “The first thing to be done is to establish the policy of contraction.” It was done, and we had the panic of 1873, on account of which thousands lost their homes. The panic aroused the people and caused the bankers to pause in their conspiracy. The Greenback party came and $346,000,000 in greenbacks were saved from destruction. But in the meantime the bankers had silver secretly demonetized. In 1878, however, it was partially restored by the Bland-Allison law. But the bankers were still at work. In October, 1877, the famous Buell circular letter was sent to the bankers throughout the country. “It is advisable,” said this circular, “to do all in your power to sustain such prominent daily and weekly newspapers, especially the agricultural and religious press, as will oppose the issuing of greenback paper money, and that you also withhold patronage or favors from all applicants who are not willing to oppose the government issue of money. Let the government issue the coin and the banks issue the paper money of the country, for then we can better protect each other.”
In March, 1893, the American Bankers’ Association sent out to all the national banks what is known as the “panic circular.” In view of the present efforts on the part of the banks to retire the greenbacks, this circular furnishes some very good reading matter:
Dear Sir: The interests of national bankers require immediate financial legislation by Congress. Silver, silver certificates and Treasury notes must be retired and national bank-notes upon a gold basis made the only money. This will require the authorization of from $500,000,000 to $1,000,000,000 of new bonds as a basis of circulation. You will at once retire one-third of your circulation and call in one-half of your loans. Be careful to make a money stringency felt among your patrons, especially among influential business men. Advocate an extra session of Congress for the repeal of the purchasing clause of the Sherman law, and act with the other banks of your city in securing a large petition to Congress for its unconditional repeal, as per accompanying form. Use personal influence with congressmen and particularly let your wishes be known to senators. The future life of national banks as safe investments depends upon immediate action, as there is an increasing sentiment in favor of government legal tender notes and silver coinage.
Does anyone but the bankers themselves, and their paid agents, believe for a moment that it would be safe to surrender the control of the currency of the country into the hands of men who would put out such a circular as that? May we not conjecture what they would do when once they had us in their power? If there are those who are in doubt about this question, or the patriotism and honesty of the national bankers, let them read the history of the panics of 1873 and 1893, both of which were precipitated by the bankers. Let the government take the bankers at their word and compel them to keep in their banks a reserve gold fund for the redemption of their own notes. Abolish the gold reserve in the Treasury and make every greenback a perpetual, absolute money, receivable for all dues to the United States, and a legal tender for the payment of private debts. In other words, put the banks where the government is now, if they are to issue any notes at all, and give the government the prerogatives which the banks now want, and some of which they already have. Instead of the government loaning money to the banks at one-fourth of one per cent., let it loan it to the people direct at two per cent. Instead of the government maintaining a large supply of gold for the benefit of the banks, let the banks furnish their own gold for the redemption of their notes, and compel them to maintain a 100-cent reserve, for a note that has only 50 cents behind it is worse than any 50-cent dollar that the banker has ever conjured in his mind. Money issued by the banks and that issued by the government are entirely different propositions. If the banks have proved anything they have proved too much. They have proved that the government credit is the best in the world, that it will even make the note of a dishonest banker good. They have proved that it would not be safe to place the control of the currency into their hands, for they might at any time issue another panic circular asking the banks to call in “one-third of their circulation and one-half of their loans,” and a lot of other mean things that an honest man and a patriot would not do. The question is now up, and it is nearing the climax where the people must decide as to whether the banks will control the currency of the country, and through it the business of the country, or whether the power shall remain in the hands of the people, as Jefferson says, “where it belongs.”
A Family Necessity
“JAMES,” said Mrs. Talkyerdeth, as she discontentedly jabbed her hatpins into the hat she had just taken off, “one of us has got to be operated on.”
“Wha-at!” ejaculated Mr. Talkyerdeth, sitting up with a jolt.
“And right away, and seriously, too,” continued Mrs. Talkyerdeth, setting her lips firmly.
“What are you talking about, Maria?” demanded Mr. Talkyerdeth impatiently.
“Well, it’s so,” asserted Mrs. Talkyerdeth decidedly. “Will you telephone for a surgeon, or shall I?”
“Why, my dear,” protested Mr. Talkyerdeth anxiously, “I hadn’t the least suspicion that there was anything the matter with you.”
“There isn’t,” snapped Mrs. Talkyerdeth. “Do you take me for one of these puling, pasty, putty-like females all the women seem to be nowadays?”
“Well, there’s nothing the matter with me, either,” asserted Mr. Talkyerdeth, with intense relief in every glad accent. “I never felt better in my life than I do this minute.”
“I know it. But what difference does that make?” demanded Mrs. Talkyerdeth sharply.
“Eh?” cried Mr. Talkyerdeth, his eyelids flying up and his lower jaw dropping down until there seemed to be some danger of their colliding, if they kept on, in the middle of the back of his head.
“I never was so mortified in my life as I was at the sewing society this afternoon, and it’s never going to happen again,” replied Mrs. Talkyerdeth positively. “So you can just make up your mind that the doctor is going to chop something, I don’t care what, out of one of us right straight off. Why, every woman there was telling all about either her own or her husband’s operation, and I had to sit with my mouth shut all afternoon, just because we’ve never had one!”
Alex. Ricketts.
The Songs We Love
BY EUGENE C. DOLSON
THE songs we love, the dear heart songs
That light us on our way,
Are records of our smiles and tears—
Our lives from day to day.
For words to simple nature true
Are those that reach the heart,
And that which thrills the common soul
Is still the highest art.
The Alligator of Blique Bayou
A CUBAN TALE
BY FRANK SAVILE
THE smoking-room steward yawned his despair. The card parties had broken up half an hour before, nightcap drinks had been ordered, tumblers had been emptied, and half a dozen men had risen to their feet with “Good night” upon their lips. It looked as if the long-suffering attendant were to be allowed a real six hours’ sleep below.
And then a single word—“fishing”—had changed all these bright prospects in the twinkling of an eye. The globe-trotting Englishman, Mathers, was vaunting the fifty-six-pound salmon he had caught in the Sands River, British Columbia. It seemed that not a man in the room could take to his bed in peace till he had confuted the boaster from stores of personal experience. Fresh cigars were lit, tumblers were refilled, and story climbed upon story in unctuous mendacity.
Muller, the German bagman, bumbled tales of Baltic sturgeon that would make two bites of the British Columbian salmon if they encountered them after breakfast time; Morehead, fresh from Florida, smiled superiorly as he told of one-hundred-and-fifty-pound tarpon, caught with a line and rod, of the weight of a walking-cane; Rivaz, the creole, asked what was the matter with a two-hundred-weight tuna that it should score second place to what was nothing more than a glorified herring? Across the clouds of smoke romance answered to romance; falsehood was fought with its own weapons.
Finally Morehead, abandoning his earliest illustration, harked back to the land from which it was drawn. Alligators—had any one of them enjoyed the sport of hanging a looped line over an alligator run, and opening a manhole through the earth upon their lairs? That was fishing if you liked, with the odds upon the fish! Till you had joined in the tug which yanked a fighting saurian ashore you didn’t know what human muscles could stand—you might go shark-fishing every day of your life, and miss learning it.
The suddenness of the topic left him, for the moment, master of the field. Professional liars, hurriedly reviewing their conversational equipments, found themselves with no better weapon than an already over-tempered imagination. None of them had been in Florida—none could supply the substratum of fact which alone is a true foundation for convincing fiction.
Then a new voice shattered the periods of Morehead’s triumph. In the corner, with one foot banked against the table and the other stretched across the lounge, sat a long and lanky graybeard, his extended limbs giving him something of the effect of a pair of human compasses. So far he had added nothing to the conversation.
“Say, now, my dear sir,” he drawled plaintively, “you know you have not got any real alligators in Florida.”
The young man’s face grew purple.
“Not got any!” he blared. “Not got any!”
“Not to call alligators!” persisted the veteran complacently. “What, now, would be your idea of the length, breadth and jaw-capacity of one of your little pets?”
The youth drew a calculating breath and eyed his questioner narrowly.
“I assisted, a short time back, to capture one eighteen feet long,” he lied coldly. The man on the lounge accepted the statement with a patronizing little nod.
“There now!” he agreed. “It just bears out what I say. Nowadays there aren’t any of a size to call alligators. When I was in Florida, it might be forty or it might be fifty years ago, that kind of small fry were reckoned in among the lizards. When we went hunting what the New York manufacturers call crocodile leather, anything less than four fathoms from tail-tip to smile we shouldered out of the way. One of thirty feet, I allow, we considered a circumstance.”
A murmur rustled up from the assembly. Even the steward’s unconscious grimace spoke of incredulity.
“Yes,” continued the old man pleasantly. “I see your eyebrows rise, but that won’t prevent my assuring you that my recollections don’t stop there. For over a year I had the personal acquaintance of one that measured from end to end not a single inch less than twelve slimy yards. But that,” he allowed generously, “was not in Florida.”
“Barnum’s Museum?” suggested Morehead contemptuously, and the listeners grinned. The veteran was not put out.
“No,” he contradicted, “not even in the United States. Yet, at the same time, not so far from home. In Cuba—to be explicit.”
There was a shout of derision. Not less than six of those present had been volunteers in the war.
“Cuba!” they bawled in chorus. “There isn’t a crocodile in the island that would crowd a bathtub!” added Morehead defiantly.
The graybeard eyed them serenely.
“Of course,” he said, with a humble note of interrogation, “you’re posted—you know every inch of the country from Baracoa to Corrientes?”
Morehead moved a little restlessly.
“I was three months around Santiago with my regiment,” said he.
“And spent every spare second examining the creeks, I don’t doubt,” said the other cheerfully. “My boy,” he went on, “I had been five years in the country before you began to attend kindergarten. In those days the fame of the Blique Bayou alligator was known to every soul within a hundred miles of Guantanama. I don’t mind allowing that the name of Everett P. Banks—which is what I’m called when I’m at home, gentlemen—was a good deal in men’s mouths about the same time. We were much mixed up together, one way or another, that astounding beast and I.”
The steward leaned his head upon his palms, and swore gently beneath his breath. He told himself that this evil old man was about to knock another half-hour off the night’s rest. He recognized in the gray eyes a triumphant light—the gleam that illumines the face of the raconteur whose audience is assured.
Morehead was still dissatisfied.
“Blique Bayou?” he repeated superciliously. “Blique Bayou?”
Banks nodded with an indulgent air.
“On the map it appears as the San Antonio River,” he explained, “and it flows into the sea about a mile to the west of the Buena Esperanza Mining Company’s settlement. As it was notorious that Emil Blique, the West Indian, owned all the shares, the hill that was topped by the shafting was called Blique Mountain, and the creek and swamp around it Blique Bayou. For five years I was manager of the whole outfit. And a knock-kneed crowd they were,” he added reminiscently.
Mathers interrupted. It looked as if the narrative were going to jump the tracks to be wrecked on outside issues.
“The alligator,” he insisted. “We want the tale of the alligator!”
The old man stared at him in gentle surprise.
“You wouldn’t keep a man of my age out of his berth to tell you yarns thirty years old?” he deprecated.
“We would,” said Mathers determinedly. “What’s yours?”
Startled out of his equanimity, the ancient allowed that so far he had encountered nothing to abash whisky—plain. But as for the story at that time of night—well, well, they needn’t make all that noise. If it had to be done he supposed he had better get to it as quickly as possible. He paused, took a gulp at the tumbler the steward placed before him, and let a meditative glance dwell upon Morehead, who had made a motion to rise. Catching his eye, the Floridian suddenly abandoned his purpose, and sat down in a pose of exasperated resignation.
“It was somewhere about ’81—or it might be ’82,” began the old man, anchoring his gaze mildly upon Morehead’s uncompromising features, “that I landed at Santiago from Savannah, with a letter in my pocket from my late employer, George S. Gage, to Señor Emil Blique, Buena Esperanza; the letter and myself being respectively part answers to a wild telegram that my boss had received ten days before. The West Indian had cabled that his manager had died of yellow fever, and that he was alone with nothing but creole help to drive the congregation of hard-shell niggers and dagos that he paid to grub manganese from the bowels of the earth.
“He wanted a man, he said, with a knowledge of mining and with two working fists. He laid particular stress upon the second qualification, and offered such a one three hundred dollars a month to come at the earliest opportunity.
“Gage told me that if I’d the spirit of a louse I’d run along and take it. Otherwise, he said, he’d offer it to Altsheler, the under manager, who was a wicked man behind a pistol, but with no kind of idea of using four fingers and a thumb when the gun got lost. That’s a terrible fault among dagos. They are frightened of a knock-down blow, because they don’t understand it. But when you start gunning among them—well, they can gun and knife themselves—some.
“You mightn’t think it, gentlemen, but in those days I’d a fist like a ham, and I concluded, after consideration, that the job was built for my particular talents and not for Altsheler’s. Ten days after that telegram arrived I was bumping along the trail to Blique Mountain, wondering just how hard those three hundred dollars would be to collect at the end of every four weeks.
“I needn’t have troubled. For a Jamaican, old Emil was as straight a man as I have ever known. His cheque was good money every time I cashed it, and, when I’d got the hang of the business, fairly easy earned. During the first fortnight I filled an eye for two mine hands per diem, and by the end of that time the crowd began to understand just where their best interest lay. They reasoned it out that they’d have to do as they were told, and after that things went like clockwork. When I’d got them really tame, indeed, I found that I could slack off in the afternoons when old man Blique was moving about himself, and so I looked around for relaxation. Like all of you, I was something of a fisherman.
“Naturally, I turned my steps toward the bayou, and it was there that I made the acquaintance of Pedro Garsia, Concepcion, his son, and the other member of the family, as I must call him, for from every point of view, he was treated like a relation. I allude to my friend Joaquin el Legardo—Jimmy the Alligator, in the vernacular—and he, I repeat, was every inch of thirty-six feet long. I dare say he was a hundred and fifty years old, and he led a more or less blameless existence in the swamp and stream adjacent to the Garsia bungalow.
“At first, though, it looked as if our relations might be strained. I’d got down to the bank, fitted up my rod and cast a speculative lump of frog’s flesh into the water just to see if anything sizeable was on the move. No sooner had I made the cast than there was a boil and a rush ’way out in midstream, and an ugly dun snout bobbed above the surface and took down my bait and half my line before I realized what was happening. It didn’t take me long to understand. I saw the great jaws open and champ viciously on the good catgut that was tangled in the yellow teeth, and I said a wicked word. Also I drew my revolver. Before I’d got it cocked I heard a terrible uproar from behind.
“An old man, with silver-white hair hanging over a chocolate-brown face, was running toward me, shouting as if he’d break a blood vessel.
“‘No shoot!’ he bawled, ‘no shoot!’ and he waved his arms with some of the most complete gesticulations I have ever witnessed. I put down my pistol and waited till he arrived panting.
“He was too much out of breath to say much at first, but what he did manage to whisper was to the point. ‘Bueno legardo—bueno,’ he repeated, pointing to the brute that was playing cat’s-cradle with my fishing line, and then, tapping the butt of my revolver, ‘no shoot—no!’
“I can tell you I was mystified, for the idea of a good alligator, as he kept calling it, was outside the pale of my experiences. I told him so. But he nodded and beckoned and led me down the bank a couple of hundred yards till we were opposite his house. There I found a rope stretched between two stumps across the river, with a loop running on it, and this last was lashed to the bow of a pirogue.
“‘This mine,’ he explained, smiling. ‘This what you call a ferry.’ I looked at the boat. Then I remembered that coming up from Santiago the road had circled widely. Blique Mountain had been in sight a good hour before we reached it and my driver had made me understand that we were avoiding the river. This was evidently the short cut for foot travelers.
“‘If this is the ferry, why in the name of gracious don’t you let me fill that old pirate with lead?’ I asked, as the brute floated comfortably by. ‘Not that he’d mind,’ I added, as I realized the size of him, ‘but you should get a howitzer and pump a six-pound ball through him. Some day, when your catboat’s full of people, he’ll upset it and fill his larder for a fortnight.’
“The old man smiled agreeably and put his head on one side like a magpie. He cocked me a comical look out of the corner of his eye.
‘This river not deep,’ he explained glibly. ‘This what you call ford one time,’ and he pointed toward the eddies that swirled between us and the opposite bank. I could see that they were running over shallows nowhere more than four feet deep. And at that the old chap toddled into the house and reappeared with a basket load of decaying lizard flesh. He came close to me and gave me a little nudge.
“‘Ford one time,’ he repeated, taking a lump of offal and tossing it into the stream. Then he gave me another nudge, and grinned. ‘Joaquin—’ he drew my attention to the dun snout that came floating down upon the bait—‘Joaquin make it ferry!’
“I gave him one look, and he answered me with a grimace that would have done credit to an idol. Then I sat down and laughed and laughed till I was sore. The originality of it! The old scoundrel was positively and actually maintaining his private alligator to put the fear of death upon the niggers and mulattos that used the short cut into the town, and was reaping a harvest of ferry dues over a four-foot deep river!
“He watched me, as I shouted, quite politely, and when I’d had my laugh out insisted on escorting me into his house and offering me a glass of aguardiente. While I was sipping it he was rummaging among his litter and finally produced me a line in the place of the one that Joaquin had snatched. He insisted on binding it on to my reel, and then, in his broken English, began to explain just where the best fishing stands could be found along the banks. And he didn’t stop a-telling. He took me out when the sun got lower and gave me a few practical hints upon the spot. He laid himself out to be agreeable, and at the end of a couple of hours we were as thick as thieves.
“When we got back to the shanty we found a thick, squat, low-browed young man smoking a cigarette on the veranda. The old man introduced him as his son, Concepcion. The youth bowed, smirked and expressed his sense of the honor in perfect English, yet somehow I didn’t take to him as I had done to his parent. He had the same magpie way of looking at you as his father had, but with a difference. The old man did it with a laugh in his eye: the young one furtively, shiftily and without the ghost of a smile.
“It came about that for the next twelve months I was thrown a good deal into the company of the Garsias. They lived openly on the earnings of their ferry, but I suspected that they made a little by selling aguardiente to my dagos and niggers. But they knew when to stop—they never sent one of my crowd back so’s he couldn’t take his spell the day after a carouse, and anything short of that I winked at.
“Old man Blique was not a conversationalist, and the two at the bungalow were practically my only company for days together. And when they were out of the way I got into the habit of regarding even Joaquin as a sort of companion. I got to know his haunts, and where a newcomer would have seen nothing but an ugly log, half buried in the mud, I could recognize the upper half of the alligator’s countenance and his little, straight, slit eyes winking at me most benevolent.
“And yet he was the one that put an end to all this simplicity and loving kindness. I don’t know if the fish supply in the river grew short. Perhaps in his old age he developed epicurean tastes. But nasty stories suddenly began to come in. Fowls went, pigs were missed and never heard of again, a couple of steers disappeared from an estancia higher up the river, and a mare of Emil’s was robbed of her colt and pervaded the banks of the bayou for weeks, neighing like a lost soul. Joaquin grew to be the most unpopular personage in the neighborhood.
“The worst, however, was to come. Red Rambo, the head man of a gang that worked Number 44 level, and a mulatto went spreeing off to Santiago one fine evening before a Saint’s Day. The next afternoon, late, as I was fishing, he appeared on the opposite bank, evidently full up, calling to Pedro to fetch him and his mates across. The moment the old man had got the pirogue against the far bank Red Rambo started to call him every kind of extortioner and money-sucker, and, seeing that it was from a mulatto to a pure-breed creole, I don’t wonder that the old man got mad. He refused to take the fellow over—told him to cool his blood by walking six miles round.
“Unfortunately Rambo had drunk himself up to the pitch of Dutch obstinacy and Dutch courage. He came splashing into the river, wading after the pirogue and cursing Pedro by every saint in the nigger calendar.
“Some of the low-down half-castes, who’d believe anything, used to declare that Joaquin was the familiar spirit of the Garsia family and was sworn to protect them in this life in return for a note of hand for their souls in the life to come. I could see some of the men in the boat just shivering for Red Rambo as they listened to the insults he was piling upon the old boy, and their shivers were prophetic. For there came a sudden swirl upon the surface of the calm in midstream, and then a little grooving eddy shot toward the mulatto with the rush of a millrace.
“He yelled, tossed up his arms, and made a half-turn toward the shore. Through a long instant I could see his finger-tips quiver against the green of a fern palm opposite. And then he was gone—snatched down from below as suddenly as the pantomime clown drops through the trap in the boards. A little foaming cone of water burst up from the whirl where he disappeared, and long, irregular stains floated away from its crimson centre. But never another sign of Rambo was seen again, either in the water or out of it. Joaquin was both his murderer and his grave!
“In justice to poor old Pedro I must allow that he was the man who took the thing most to heart. He screeched, he gesticulated, he called down curses upon the alligator from all the angels of paradise, and he made as if he would leap into the river and fall upon Joaquin with nothing more than a pocket-knife; in fact, it took all the exertions of the other niggers to keep him from it. They got him ashore at last pretty well demented and fighting like a maniac. He had to be tied to his bed before we durst leave him to himself. When the others had gone jabbering off home I shook my head solemnly at Concepcion.
“‘That means the end of Joaquin,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow I shall get orders from the boss to fill him up with Winchester bullets, and then where’s your ferry?’
“The Spaniard was as pale as milk. He looked away from me to his father foaming upon the bed, and then he gave a queer little high-pitched laugh.
“‘Señor Banks,’ he answered, ‘there may be two sides to that question. Señor Blique owns the mines, but not the river or the alligator. That dirt-begotten negro brought his fate upon himself.’
“I looked at him narrowly, and noticed that he was ostentatiously and abnormally calm. That’s a bad sign in a creole. They are safer red and roaring. Cold and white they’re malicious.
“‘My dear friend,’ said I politely, ‘there is no law against alligator shooting. Whatever orders I get I shall obey—be sure of that and take a friendly warning. Joaquin can’t stay hereabouts after that bloody exploit—it’s absurd to expect it.’
“He bowed quite pleasantly.
“‘If warnings are in order, señor,’ he replied, ‘take one from me. The man that kills Joaquin will not live long to boast of it!’ And at that he drew back the curtain from before the door and gave me a very significant view of the street. I took the hint and, without another word, marched out. And I did it sideways, too. You don’t expose the broad of your back to a man of Concepcion’s singular talents without making sure that he’s leaving his knife in his belt.
“Of course, as I predicted, old Emil was not prepared to stand any nonsense from Pedro Garsia, his son, or Joaquin. Rambo was one of his best foremen. He gave me the strictest orders to take my gun to the alligator the first thing in the morning and to revenge the mulatto if it took all day. I nodded, shrugged my shoulders, and went to bed.
“The first news brought me in the morning was that old Pedro was dead. The shock had brought on brain fever, and the son’s homeopathic treatment of forcing aguardiente down his throat had lifted the fever to the point of delirium. In the night the patient had burst his bonds and broken straight for the river. His son and their nigger servant had been aroused by the noise and had followed.
“They were just about ten seconds too late. The old man stumbled upon the bank and went sprawling half in and half out of the water, his outstretched hand falling upon what the nigger thought was a floating log.
“It wasn’t. For the log split into twin jaws, and, as the other two snatched the poor old fellow up, the open fangs came together just below the unfortunate wretch’s shoulder. It was only a piece of corpse that they carried back into the veranda, while Joaquin went smiling off into midstream to enjoy a most unexpected dessert.
“I considered, of course, that any son with Christian feelings would spare me any further trouble in the matter of the alligator’s death. That, for the sake of commercial advantage, Concepcion would allow his parent to go unrevenged seemed out of the question. I took my Winchester with me as I strolled down to the river merely because I thought he might be too much overcome with grief to have completed his obvious duty, and that I might do him a neighborly turn by forestalling him.
“You can imagine my surprise, then, when I saw, as I turned the corner of the Garsia bungalow, Concepcion, standing alone upon the river bank, the usual basket of offal on the ground beside him, tossing the contents into the water, lump by lump! The alligator was taking them, serenely and regularly, waiting for them with half-open jaws as a lapdog waits for biscuits!
“There are moments when one’s impulses take the reins into their teeth and bolt. I made no sound—I said nothing. I strode silently up behind the man, drew a clear bead upon the brute’s eye and sent a bullet plumb into his wicked brain. And as he ripped out of the water and rolled over in his agony I fired another cartridge at the junction of his forearm and body, and that was the end of his floundering. He sank like a lump of lead.
“The Spaniard gave a yell as I fired the first time. I brought my rifle down from the second shot to see him springing straight at me. I pulled him up short. With the butt at my hip and the muzzle pointing straight at his chest, I made him understand just what to expect if he came a step nearer. He halted five yards away—panting.
“For ten seconds we two stood there, each glaring into the other’s face, and if the light of hell ever burns in a man’s eyes, I saw it so burning in the eyes of Concepcion Garsia. His shirt was open at the neck—I could watch the drumming of his heart within his ribs!
“And then the tenseness of his limbs gave. He seemed to fall in upon himself. He just gasped one threatening word—‘Mañana!’ (tomorrow!)—turned upon his heel and staggered off toward his house like a drunken man! I did not see him again for a fortnight.
“Of course, after that, the fact that there was a strain of madness in the Garsia family didn’t seem to me open to doubt. And, pondering the question, I determined that I must be very much upon my guard whenever I visited the ferry. My fishing excursions I gave up entirely and I wore my six-shooter night and day. No—with Concepcion I was taking no risks.
“That same evening Joaquin’s carcass floated up upon a sandbank a hundred yards below the bungalow. The next morning it was gone. The bush behind the bank was trampled and bloodstained, and the niggers began to whisper. They told me, in confidence, that the Spaniard had dug his heart out to make a fetich of and that I was doomed to many lingering torments. Naturally, I took small notice of that sort of thing.
“The hands, now that the ferry had become a ford again, went much more frequently down to Santiago, and it was not long before I heard that Concepcion had been seen there. But his bungalow was closed, his nigger had been sent about his business, and the weeds began to fill his garden, as weeds do in tropical countries alone. At the end of a couple of weeks I began to believe that we had seen the last of Señor Concepcion.
“And then a thing happened that appeared to be no less than a miracle. One evening, less than half an hour after a score of the hands had set out to spend the next day’s fiesta in the town, nineteen of them were back in my veranda, yelling, screeching that Joaquin was returned—back and playing his old tricks again! He had risen in the midst of them as they forded the stream and had taken down Tome, a quadroon pickman, exactly as he had taken down Red Rambo less than a month before.
“Of course, I didn’t believe them. I had seen my bullets go home into Joaquin’s brain and heart and I opined that Tome, for the joke of the thing, had dived with a bit of a splutter and was probably laughing himself into convulsions at the success of the trick. I put this view of the case to the others mildly.
“They didn’t seem to have breath enough to pour all the contempt they felt upon the idea. ‘Dived! Joking!’ He was pulled down, screaming, they declared—they saw the jaws close on him—there wasn’t one of them five yards from him when he was taken!
“I shrugged my shoulders, took my rifle and went back with them to the river bank. You can just figure my astonishment when a dun snout, as like the late Joaquin’s as one pea is like another, cut a lazy ripple across the surface as it went sliding out from the bank into midstream! And the boil of his tail showed up ten yards behind his head. I hadn’t believed that there was another such alligator in the wide world!
“These reflections didn’t prevent my rifle-butt coming up to my shoulder. I aimed for a point three inches behind the snout. We heard the bullet thud, but the brute didn’t twitch—he didn’t even close his half-open eye! He just let the water close slowly over his head—so slowly that I found time to empty my magazine at him as he sank. Every one of the five bullets hit his wicked head, and the last glanced off! We knew it by the sound of a second thud among the echoes of the report, while a splash of splintered wood showed on a branch on the opposite side of the stream. Positively and actually, this new Joaquin had a shot-proof skull!
“The niggers were gabbling excitedly about Ju-ju, and such like idolatries, while the dagos were little better. As for me, I sat down upon a stump and took my head in my hands. That two brutes of the same size should appear in the same unimportant little Cuban creek was almost unbelievable—to the superstitious imaginations of the mine hands it could be explained in one way alone. It was debbil-debbil, and they went off home up the hill, starting out of their skins if a bird rustled in the bushes. I was left sitting and wondering.
“At the sound of an opening door some time later I looked up. Concepcion Garsia came sauntering out of the bungalow. I reached for my Winchester.
“He strolled on toward me slowly and complacently, halted a few yards away and bowed. There was a wicked sneer round his thin lips.
“‘Buenos dias, señor,’ (Good day) he said as he raised his hat. ‘As you remarked, it is permitted to shoot alligators. That, it appears, does not always include the killing of them,’ and he laughed—his queer high-pitched laugh.
“For the moment I was tongue-tied. The suggestion that an animal whose brain had been shattered by my bullet was still alive was ridiculous, but—well, the ‘but’ was to explain this new brute of the same size in precisely the same spot. I looked Garsia squarely in the eyes.
“‘Do you mean to imply that Joaquin has come back?’ I asked.
“He shrugged his shoulders.
“‘Quien sabe—who knows?’ he answered, with that impudent smile still twisting his lips. ‘What is your own opinion, señor?’
“I patted the breech of my rifle.
“‘It is here,’ I said quietly. ‘Joaquin—or another, I shall continue the old treatment, amigo (friend). Half an ounce of lead—at frequent intervals.’
“He laughed again jeeringly, and turned upon his heel.
“‘Continue it, señor, continue it,’ he cried over his shoulder, ‘but remember that all things come to an end, even your treatment and perhaps—yourself!’
“The next minute he had slammed the door of his bungalow, and I, not forgetting what an excellent mark for a bullet I was against the yellow of the tinder-dry bush, hastened to put a tree between myself and the shuttered window.
“There is no need to go into details of the next three months. It is sufficient to say that the alligator began a reign of terror at the ford. Horses went—goats, steers, poultry. And the river was almost deserted, for boats were no longer a protection. The planters, who had been accustomed to use the water for a highway between their estancias, gave it up after no less than five pirogues had been charged by the monster, and upset. One of the crew always sank, never to rise again. Strangers using the foot road, and too impatient to wait for the chance of being ferried when the boat was the wrong side, were snatched up. Finally the heavy ferry pirogue itself was capsized, and Manuel, the creole overseer, was lost. With him went, moreover, two thousand pesetas in cash, which he was bringing up from the bank at Santiago for pay day.
“No less than twenty poor wretches went to their account in one way or another in those twelve weeks, and the countryside grew desperate. Enough bullets were showered upon the alligator to sink him by pure weight if they had only stuck in him, but he seemed to mind them no more than peas! I spent a week’s pay in cartridges myself.
“Of course, it is all very well to sit here in this smoking-room and laugh out of court ideas about Ju-ju, fetish work, Whydah and all those sorts of deviltries. They don’t go with ten-thousand-ton boats, electric light and the last special edition Marconigram. But it gets on your nerves if you sit day after day beside a jungle-ringed swamp, listening to all that a couple of hundred niggers have to tell you about the tropical powers of the Evil One. And that there was something mysterious in the business I could swear—something, too, that my instincts told me Concepcion Garsia held the key to. The sight of his face the few times I passed him witnessed to that. There was a glint of triumph in his eye that was simply diabolical. And yet he seldom showed himself. Passers-by used the ferry pirogue as they liked—the centimos that his father used to collect he seemed to think no more about.
“Well, as Concepcion himself remarked, there is an end to everything, even to this story, and it fell to my lot to write finis across it. But it was Providence alone that kept me from being the page and the Spaniard the writer. It was just this way.
“I sat, one evening, on the bank not far from the bungalow, reading. I was keeping an occasional lookout for the alligator, though as the seasonal floods were just falling he hadn’t been seen for two or three weeks. I had my revolver in my belt, more by habit than with any hope of doing him mortal harm with it. Experience had proved that the heaviest rifle bullets didn’t affect him. Just as I finished a chapter a voice hailed me from across the stream.
“I looked up, and recognized Señora Barenna, the wife of the planter at the estancia behind Blique Mountain. She was waving her hand, and beckoning to me to bring the pirogue across.
“I was surprised to see her there, for neither she nor her husband used the ferry, as the metaled road to Santiago passed close to their house. But naturally I didn’t wait for explanations at that distance. I ran down, got into the boat and began to pull hand over hand on the guide-rope. The señora welcomed me with a smile.
“‘You may well stare,’ she said, as I gave her my hand to help her down the bank, ‘to find me in such a situation. I was driving from the town when our stupid mules took fright at a wild pig that ran between their feet. They swerved, bolted into the bush, smashed a wheel and there I found myself, less than three miles from home by the ford, and six by the road! You may imagine which I chose.’
“‘I’m truly sorry for your misfortune,’ said I, ‘but truly glad of the opportunity of doing you a service,’ for Spanish ladies expect this sort of thing and I began to collect my ideas for a further succession of compliments. I never had a chance to frame them, for the pirogue, which was in midstream again by now, quivered with a tremendous shock. It was lifted half out of the water!
“The next instant it began to rock from side to side, broke from the loop which held it to the guide-rope, and finally upset. The señora screamed, and both she and I instinctively grasped the strands above our heads. The boat floated on its side from beneath our feet!
“She was hanging by her hands alone. I swung up my feet, got a good purchase by crooking my knee, and so, freeing one arm, hauled her up by the waist beside me.
“Fortunately, she was an active woman, and she kept her presence of mind. I shouted to her to unfasten the shoulder-shawl she wore, and to fasten it over the rope and around her waist. She had done it in less time than it takes to tell of it, but as she did it my heart jumped into my mouth. Our combined weights amounted to more than the rope had been stayed up to bear. The poles to which it was lashed at each end slanted. We dipped till, owing to the height of the flood, we swung a bare six inches above the surface! And, of course, I had a very good idea of what had upset the boat!
“I had not to wait long. There was a boil of the eddies not ten yards away and the familiar dun snout lifted and showed the upper half of an open jaw. The brute made a bee-line for the bait that hung so attractively at his mercy.
“Señora Barenna’s shriek was piercing. As for me—well, I spoke before of the sudden way in which an impulse masters one. I saw in an instant that it was a case of two or one, and a sort of frenzy of rage seized upon me. With a curse I flung myself down upon the brute’s head, feeling with my thumbs for his eyes, while, released from my weight, the rope jerked the señora up six feet into safety.
“The next few seconds were a sort of disconnected nightmare. The water closed over my head, the great jaws worked beneath my hands, and then a blow struck me on the chest, exactly over the book that I had placed in my breast-pocket a minute or two before.
“At times like those one’s reason is not in the very best working order, but even then I was quite capable of recognizing that the blow could not have been dealt by an alligator’s clumsy limbs. And my legs and feet, too, instead of meeting the resistance of the brute’s back, were sprawled along nothing more solid than a twenty-foot pole!
“My hand gripped my revolver from my belt, searched with it aimlessly downward and sideways, and blundered against what I felt to be a living body. At the same time the blow was repeated, but not quite in the same place. The point of an edged weapon slipped across the smooth cover of the book and gashed into my ribs. At that I pulled the trigger!
“And many a time since have I thanked Providence for the man that invented brass-drawn, water-tight cartridges. For as I fired there was a great bubbling rush from the explosion that rocked me over, while the huge head below me heaved violently. Like a leaping salmon it burst with me above the surface!
“The flood caught us, gripped us, and whirled us away together, to fling us up upon a shallow bank of mud. And as I struggled to my feet I looked down upon Concepcion’s dead body, a wound gaping in it from my bullet, while beside him was stranded a great sheet-iron shell, floated with leathern bags and surmounted with the stuffed head of old Joaquin! Behind it stretched a pole ornamented with the tip of the same animal’s tail!
“Well, gentlemen, I don’t know that there is much more to add. After I had climbed along the rope and dragged Señora Barenna into safety I kicked open the door of the bungalow and left her there, while I hurried up to the works for help. But before I sent old Emil and his housekeeper down with cordials, and so forth, I got the old man’s permission to knock the hands off at once. I had my reasons.
“I lined those superstitious fools along the mud-bank before that sham scaffolding of an alligator, and the sermon I preached them on the follies of Ju-ju ought to have converted them then and there. But the results were entirely contrary to my expectations. For when, some years later, after I had left old Emil, I returned for a short visit to the Barennas, who were always my grateful friends, I found Joaquin’s head hung in their veranda.
“A servant who did not know me saw me looking at it.
“‘That American debbil-debbil,’ he explained politely, and pointed to the little brass plate his master had had stuck upon it with an inscription setting forth that I had shot the brute on such and such a date. ‘Him name Banks,’ he added, ‘and great big Ju-ju. Nigger boy say prayers to him ebry night!’”
The Boy; His Hand and Pen
BY TOM P. MORGAN
MY Aunt Almira, who is an old maid, says that spring is the time when the young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love; but my Uncle Bill, who has been a bachelor so long that it’s chronic with him, says that ’most every spring he gets as bilious as a goat. That’s the way it goes; women are romantic and are everlastingly thinking about their hearts and souls, while men are generally more concerned about their stomachs and pocketbooks. You give a man enough to eat and a few dollars to squander and he’ll manage to scuffle along, but a woman won’t be happy unless she’s worrying about love, or something.
Uncle Bill once knew an old maid who lived in constant dread of finding a man under the bed. She kept on hopefully fearing him for thirty-seven years, and early in the thirty-eighth she was drowned. One time there was a Brighamyoungamist who married twenty-three different women in rapid succession, and he looked a good deal like the last end of a hard winter, too. Well, the judge threw up his hands in astonishment, and asked him how in all-git-out a man would go to work to marry twenty-three women. And the Brighamyoungamist grinned and replied:
“Aw—tee! hee!—Judge, I just asked ’em!”
But, on the other hand, spring is the time when your neighbor borrows your lawn-mower and keeps it till he is ready to borrow your snow-shovel. In the spring all Nature seems to smile, especially in the Third Reader, and the little flowers go gaily skipping over hill and dale. The grass pops up, the boys begin fighting regularly, the birds warble all the day long in the leafy boughs, and the book-agent comes hurriedly up the road with a zealous but firm dog appended to his pants. About this time you feel achy and itchy and stretchy and gappy, and so forth, all of which is a sign that you’ve got the spring fever. Some men have the spring fever all the year round. Then they join all the lodges they can squeeze into, and owe everybody, and talk about the workingman needing his beer on Sunday.
This is all I know about spring, and most of it is what Uncle Bill told me.
Old Saws Filed New
“VICE is contagious”—and so few of us have been vaccinated!
“A man must keep his mouth open a long time before a roast pigeon flies into it”—but the chances are worse if he keeps it shut.
“Associate with men of good judgment”—if their good judgment will permit.
“Duty is a power which rises with us in the morning and goes to rest with us in the evening”—or even earlier in the day.
The Force of Circumstance
BY CHAUNCEY C. HOTCHKISS
THEY came up to me, he and his daughter, as I was sitting on the half-deserted piazza of the hotel. His soft felt hat had been replaced by a tall one, and there was no suggestion of his former outing costume in the stiff linen and conventionally cut clothing he wore. His daughter stood by his side, her hand within his arm, a little impatient pout on her lips and a petulant wrinkle on her fine brows, as fair a specimen of the typical American girl, in beauty of face and form and taste in dress, as one could find or wish for.
“Ah, Alan, my boy!” said he heartily. “I’m off—quite suddenly. Some plaguy business in town, you know. Sorry, but can’t help it! Wish you were going along! Will be back tomorrow night—I think.” And here he gave me a decided wink with the eye farthest from his daughter. The girl twisted him about to see his face, as though suspicious of his honesty.
“Why must you go, papa? And why won’t you take me? Aunt Margaret and her rheumatism are poor company!”
“No, no, little woman—not this time! Force of circumstances, you know. Mustn’t leave your aunt alone—not for the world! Have many things to see to in town. How’s your arm, Alan? Better? That’s good! There’s the stage, by Jove! Keep her out of mischief, my boy. Kiss your dad, puss. Good-bye, Alan!”
As I looked at this fine specimen of metropolitan growth while he clambered into the ramshackle stage that ran to the station, I felt pretty sure that his conscience was not quite easy in thus hurrying to town and leaving his daughter to her own devices. That the easy-going, retired lawyer, whose hardest work consisted in killing time, had no such pressing matters on hand as he had intimated, I was certain, and had small doubt that visions of the stock-ticker, cool cocktails and club cronies were the “plaguy business” which demanded his attention. Nor did I blame him, for had it not been for the young girl who was now looking blankly at the rapidly retreating vehicle my own place at the table of the hotel would have been vacated days before.
A broken arm just cut of its sling and still almost useless was my ostensible reason for lingering. It served me as an excuse for protracting the pleasures of the broad Sound and stunted but picturesque woods, though it did not blind me to the fact that I was playing with fire by remaining. I was not born with a great deal of conceit and am too well acquainted with the times to have faith in the infallibility of love as a leveling power when applied to cash considerations. In finances the girl was an aristocrat and I a plebeian. My meditations were to myself, but the young lady gave vent to hers.
“Very good, sir! I’ll pay you well for this,” she said, shaking her finger in the direction of the vanished stage. “You wouldn’t take me with you! Well, you’ll wish you had!” Then she turned to me. “Why did he go, Mr. Alan?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. Force of circumstances, he said.”
“Force of fiddlesticks! He always gives that as an excuse when he does anything I dislike. I don’t believe in the force of circumstances. Do you?”
“Most assuredly,” I returned.
“Well, I don’t, then. I’m a free agent. You and papa might as well confess to fatalism. I would like to see circumstances force me!”
“I might weave a story showing the contrary. You have just seen——”
“Oh, that and your story would prove nothing,” she interrupted, with a charming lack of logic. “A truce to nonsense—it’s too hot. Look at me, sir!” she commanded, with mock severity. “Papa has practically thrown me on your hands without regard to my opinion in the matter, as though I were a small child. Aunt Margaret has a mild spell of rheumatism and the religious mood that always seems to go with it. I understand that you are responsible for me; how dare you assume the burden?”
“I accept, however,” I replied, with secret warmth.
“You will probably live to repent it. What shall we do?”
“Anything you elect. I am under your orders.”
“Then see that you obey them. The woods are too wet for a walk since last night’s storm, and as for staying about here after being cooped up two whole days by rain, it is intolerable. Let’s try to get Maxwell to take us out on his fishing-sloop. He will do it for you.”
“No,” I said firmly. “That is the one thing your father prohibits. It is mere nervousness, of course, but I will not be a party to such a thing. Think of something else—the force of circumstance is still against you.”
“Plague take the force of circumstance!” she exclaimed, but did not urge me further, though my suspicions should have been aroused when she said:
“We will take lunch and go to the beach anyway. Shall we?”
“Well, you might do that without breaking the fifth commandment,” I returned, with much less enthusiasm than I felt at the idea of a tête-à-tête picnic with her.
Her answer was a light laugh. There was a swishing of skirts and a twinkle of tan-colored shoes as she sped from the piazza to get ready, leaving me with the certainty that I was a fool, or worse, for allowing her to go unchaperoned, though I was too selfish to attempt to right the neglect.
Something over an hour later a scraggy horse hitched to a scraggy wagon was drawing us to the “Cove,” a mile or so distant from the hotel. A well-packed hamper had been provided and the pace set for the day was nothing less innocent than lunch on the beach, which at this quarter of Long Island is a stretch of snow-white sand and the perfection of isolation.
It was not with feelings of positive delight that, as we neared the Sound, I noticed the Flying Fish, of which Maxwell was master, moored at the edge of the expanse of blue water. From an artistic point it might have satisfied me, as fine material for an aquarelle as, with its mainsail loosely hoisted for drying, it lay against the strip of woods on the other side of the little bay, but it did not satisfy me to have a controversy on the point of taking my companion for a sail, a thing to which I knew her father to be strongly opposed. However, it was not a lengthy skirmish.
“Will you ask Maxwell to take us out—for just an hour?” she asked demurely.
“Not for one instant,” I replied. “Besides, there is no wind.”
“There will be wind enough; you are just determined to be meanly perverse. I will ask him!” And she sent her clear voice across the water in a long-drawn call.
I saw the man on board look up from the work he was fussing over; presently the sail was lowered and, shortly after, the punt drove its nose into the sand of the beach and Maxwell came toward us.
“Miss Edith,” I said, with dignity and as much severity as I dared show her, “I am well aware that I have no right to dictate to you, but if you are determined to go sailing in spite of your father’s wishes you will go without me.”
“Do you really mean it?” she asked, with a light laugh and a wicked glint in her eyes. “What a goose you are! Of course I wouldn’t go, but we can compromise. Let’s go out to her and lunch on board. It will be ever so much nicer than the sand, and I have never even stepped on board of a sloop. Can’t we go out to her, Mr. Maxwell?”
“Sartin, miss, but it’s lucky that’s all ye want,” said that worthy. Then, turning to me, he continued:
“The old tub’s ’most used up, Mr. Alan. She broke up a good deal of her riggin’ in the storm last night. That ain’t all, neither. I find the anchor shackle most rusted out and the moorin’ line ’most chafed through. I was just startin’ for a new shackle. Tell you what ye might do, sir, an’ ’twould be a big favor. Let me put you two aboard and then take your hoss to go to the Centre with. That will suit the lady an’ be a savin’ to my legs. I will be back in a shake.”
“Where’s your deck-hand?” I asked, wavering in my determination.
“Gone home sick, sir. Last night used him up.”
Doubts of propriety and prudence were of little avail against the coaxing demands of my companion. She was used to having her way in most things. Nothing but the novelty of taking lunch on board the old fishing-boat would satisfy her, and, as it would not do for me to carry the air of protector too far, it was but a short time before we were on the deck of the vessel, from which we watched Maxwell climb into the wagon and start for the village. The lady’s expression was one of subdued triumph.
I confess that as I saw the little boat pulled high on the beach and realized how completely we were cut off from the land, I was conscious of a feeling that was not one of unalloyed content. From the physical conditions there seemed to be nothing to fear. The water of the Cove was like glass in the hot sunshine, and the vessel as steady as the Rock of Ages; but the situation would certainly become compromising to the fair young girl if our isolation should be generally known, and, though I was willing enough to shoot at folly as it flew, I was in hopes that the absence of Maxwell would not be prolonged, and so set to work to entertain and enlighten Miss Edith, who was a very child in her curiosity and her demands to have it satisfied.
The Flying Fish, a fearful misnomer, was an old acquaintance of mine, and was typical of her class. Clean enough on deck, she was an abomination of vile smells below, the combination of fish, clams and bilge-water making a forcible compound. The inevitable scuttle-butt of fresh water stood before the mast, and forward was a mass of rusty chain cable, tangled gear, mops, winch-handles, buckets and the anchor, the latter secured with a piece of rope.
In the stern of the boat the conditions were improved. The long tiller projected into the roomy cockpit, the seats of which were as clean as water could make them, while overhead the broken boom with its loose sail made a wide strip of shade that was very acceptable.
For me there was no novelty in the craft, but it was a monstrous toy for my companion, who flitted from stem to stern, picking up her dainty skirts as she explored the bow, or wrinkling her delicate nose as she met the odor of the cabin she insisted on entering.
“Does Maxwell cook on that thing?” asked the girl, pointing to the small stove red with old rust, “and sleep in one of those dirty boxes?”
“Undoubtedly. That is a sailor’s lot.”
“Horrors! I wouldn’t be a sailor for the world! Let’s get into the air—I’m stifled!”
An hour passed quickly enough and without the return of Maxwell. The lunch was spread and eaten in the strip of shade, which took another hour. A slight restraint followed the smoking of my cigar, for our conversation was becoming as circumscribed as our freedom, probably due to the fact that we both began to realize we were prisoners. At best there is no exhilaration of spirits to be found on the hot deck of a dilapidated fishing-sloop at anchor, and I dreaded the dulness which would ensue if our confinement became protracted beyond a certain point.
But we were not destined to be beset by stupidity through lack of events. Two hours, three hours passed and yet no Maxwell. The conversation waned like a slowly dying blaze. I was becoming desperate and Miss Edith was beginning to question me with her eyes, when I saw matters were to be made worse by a thunderstorm which showed its black head over the woods to the southwest. Was Maxwell crazy? What could he be thinking of to leave us in this predicament? Again and again I searched the opening into the woods through which the horse and wagon had disappeared, but the shore remained as wild and deserted as when Columbus discovered America. The little boat lay temptingly on the sand five hundred feet away, but it might as well have been as many miles, for my broken arm made swimming impossible.
From being slightly compromising our situation had become fully so—and more; it was irksome, awkward and not at all heroic. It was evident from her manner that the girl was becoming fully alive to her position.
Rapidly the clouds approached the zenith. They were terribly sinister, and, though there appeared to be no more danger to us than the remote chance of being struck by lightning, I dreaded for Miss Edith the closer imprisonment in the unwholesome cabin and a probable drenching in the end.
Even should Maxwell now arrive it would be impossible to return to the hotel before the storm broke, and as the sun became suddenly quenched by the sulphur-colored mass that had risen to it, and a sickly green shade settled over us, I turned my attention to cheering my companion, who, awed by the tragic light that overspread us, seemed lost in fearful contemplation of the approaching tempest, and sat silent in the cockpit with both hands tightly clutching the tiller. The tide was full flood and not a wrinkle marred the polished surface of the Sound. In the distance were some motionless vessels taking in their lighter sails and over all nature there brooded a portentous quiet.
It was evident that we were about to experience something out of the common, for though the edge of the squall had no more than the usual threat of a summer shower, the clouds behind it sent through me a thrill of awe mingled with fear. As I stood with my hands on the shrouds watching a space of inky blackness it opened and from it descended a bulb of vapor shaped like a bowl, its edges hidden in the clouds above. It was a mass lighter than the rest, and it elongated until its form changed to a funnel-shaped pipe which gradually neared the surface of the earth, trailing as it moved along. Its approach was accompanied with a roar as of a distant cataract, and as I saw the sinuous tube lose itself in a mist of dust, flying branches and heavier debris and appear to be coming toward us, a fearful knowledge of what we were about to encounter burst upon my mind and I turned quickly to the girl, who in her fright had risen to her feet.
“What is it?” she cried, blanching at the sight of the awful column.
“A tornado! Into the cabin, quick!” I shouted.
She obeyed without a word, and I had barely time to snatch up the basket containing the remains of our lunch and scramble through the door after her when, with a howl it is impossible to describe, the vortex of whirling air was upon us.
The darkness that came down like a curtain was appalling; the din deafening. The centre of the tornado must have missed us, else I would not now be telling this tale, but the sight through the open doors, which I had not had time to close, showed it had missed us but narrowly. I saw the surface of the Cove turn to milk under the lash of the wind, but had scant time to see more, for, as we were lying broadside to the blast, it struck us fairly on the side and careened us until the deck stood wellnigh up and down.
With a shriek the girl threw herself into my arms, and we both slid to leeward. There came a jar as though we had been struck, a crash overhead that sent the skylight shivering in fragments about us, a quick blast of icy air, and the vessel righted with a jerk.
Placing the fainting girl on a locker I ran up the steps to the deck. The whirlwind was passing out into the Sound, its shape hidden by the muck that flew in its wake, though a well-defined path of fallen trees and boiling water marked its track. A moment’s observation showed its outskirts had created havoc aboard the sloop.
The mainsail, having been only held in stops, had been blown open by the fearful power of the wind and, split into ribbons, was whipping in the gale with quick, pistol-like reports. The boom-jack had been torn away and the broken spar fallen on the cabin-house, which accounted for the smashed skylight. The topsail had clean gone, hardly a rag remaining. The buckets and all loose articles had been blown overboard; the scuttle-butt had fetched away and lay bung down, its contents gurgling out through the vent, while the only things outside the hull that remained intact were the jib-sail and its gearing.
I had hardly made the last observation when I discovered we were adrift! The first fierce tug of the wind had snapped our moorings, which Maxwell had spoken of as chafed, and, under the weight of the gale which was blowing, we were rapidly drawing into open water.
I caught my breath for a moment, but was immediately relieved as I thought of the anchor. Throwing off my coat I tossed it into the cabin, and, opening my pocket-knife, ran forward; but before I could reach the bow I was drenched by a sudden downpour of rain the volume and icy coldness of which made me gasp. It took but a second to cut the lashings that held the anchor, but, as the iron plunged to the bottom followed by only some half-fathom of chain, I nearly fainted. The shackle lay at my feet with its pin gone. The anchor was lost—the mooring parted; we were adrift in a storm and on a crippled boat.
For a moment I was completely stunned at the realization and stood looking over the side like a fool, as though expecting to see the mass of lost iron float to the surface; but the violent beating of the rain, now mixed with hail, forced sense into me and compelled a hasty retreat to the cabin.
So far as danger to life was concerned there was none at present, and the one menace of the future lay in being blown across the Sound and going to pieces on the rocky coast of Connecticut. I was something of a fair-weather yachtsman and knew the danger of a lee shore; but whether my wit would be sufficient to offset the predicament we were in I was by no means sure. For a rescue I trusted more to being picked up by some passing craft than to my own efforts. But what a situation for the lady!
How to enlighten her as to our double disaster was troubling me not a little as I entered the cabin, but I had barely cleared the steps when we were beset by a volley of hail that thundered on the cabin-house and rivaled the uproar of the tornado itself. Great icy lumps larger than marbles drove through the broken skylight and bounded through the open door. The hail was followed by another downpour of rain accompanied by vivid lightning and bellowing thunder. Between the flashes the darkness was that of midnight.
Knowing the terror of my companion I attempted to speak to her, but my voice was lost in the turmoil. Striking a match I lighted the small lamp hanging against the bulkhead and found the girl had recovered from her faint and was sitting on the locker with her face buried in her hands. At that moment the sky lightened a trifle and the thunder rolled more at a distance. Shaken as I was, I little wondered at the convulsive shudders that swept over her slight frame; had I been alone I might have succumbed to panic. Presently she looked up at me; her face was like chalk, but I was thankful to see that she had not lost control of herself.
“Oh, wasn’t it awful!” she exclaimed, and was about to rise when she caught sight of my streaming clothing. “Why did you go out? What have you been doing? Have you seen Maxwell?”
“Maxwell? No, but I have seen enough else,” I returned, determined to hide nothing.
“What do you mean? What has happened?”
“I mean that we have met with disaster. We are adrift.”
“Adrift!” Her eyes widened with sudden terror.
“We have been torn from our moorings,” I answered, with an attempt at ease that I might not increase her panic. “But there is no present danger.”
“I—I do not understand,” she said weakly.
“I have made a mistake, which makes it worse,” I continued desperately. “I have cut away the anchor but lost it—the shackle-pin was gone. We must——”
“But you knew the shackle-pin—or something—was gone! I heard Maxwell tell you!” she interrupted, with a flash of temper in her eye that took the place of fear.
“I remembered when too late,” I returned meekly. “In the confusion it went from my mind. When I found we had broken from the mooring I naturally turned to the anchor and cut it free. Will you—can you forgive me? I will make what reparation I may.”
For an answer she dropped limply on the locker, and, again burying her face in her hands, sobbed violently while I stood silent, not knowing how to comfort her, though my brain was busy enough. Presently the paroxysm passed and she looked up with a changed expression; then, heedless of her dainty costume, she approached me and placed both hands on my wringing sleeve.
“Oh, it is for you to forgive me!” she said, the tears still in her eyes. “It is all my fault! If I had only heeded you in the beginning! And I am such a cowardly girl; but I’ll try to be brave and not make it worse. What must we do?” And a divine smile brightened her woebegone face.
“I will tell you all I fear,” I said, mightily relieved at her changed attitude. “With the wind from its present quarter it is impossible to return to the Cove, and to continue drifting is dangerous. Stratford Shoal lies directly in our way, and unless some other direction can be given the vessel we are certain to be wrecked upon it. Listen quietly,” I added, as I saw fright come again to her eyes. “I think I can avert that danger. It may appear strange and hard to you, but it is necessary that we run from home instead of toward it. Will you trust me entirely?”
“Oh, yes! I must—I will.”
“Then excuse me for a time; I have work to do.”
“And am I to sit still and do nothing?”
“You may make a fire, if you will; we will need it. This may be an all-night matter.”
She shrank visibly, but made no reply, and, not daring to lose more time, I abruptly left her.
All I had told her was true. The afternoon had waned and the storm would cause the September day to darken early. The gale, yet strong from the southwest, was carrying us with considerable rapidity toward the well-known shoal that lies in the centre of the Sound—a line of black teeth marked by a lighthouse, and a deadly thing to have close to leeward. There was but one action for me to take, and that to set the jib and under this single sail run to the eastward until we had the fortune to be picked up by some passing craft.
By this we had drawn so far into open water that the seas, which were rapidly rising, had a jump to them, making it a matter of some risk for me to crawl out on the foot-ropes of the bowsprit and throw off the ropes that confined the jib; for it must be remembered that my left arm was almost useless. It was an infinite labor for me to get the wet canvas aloft, but I finally set the sail after a fashion. Loosening the sheet until the great spread of cotton blew out like a balloon, I took the tiller and put the helm hard a-port.
There was life in the old tub at once. She had been wallowing heavily in the trough of the sea, but now we ran across the waves, and the change of motion was a relief. The rain had ceased by this time, but the sky was of an even blackness or the color of the smoke now pouring from the funnel of the cabin stove. As the gloom of evening fell the shore lights twinkled coldly across the water. No vessel came near enough to be hailed, and, as there is nothing distinctively distressing in the appearance of a fishing-smack running before the wind under her jib, I saw it would be foolish to expect a rescue before daylight, save by the merest chance of being passed close at hand.
The gale was decreasing rapidly, but it was getting cold—bitter cold to me in my wet state. Not daring to leave the helm I called to Miss Edith to hand up my coat, but she appeared on deck with it. Her face was hot and flushed, her head bare, and the wind caught her disordered hair and blew it about her eyes.
“Why, you poor fellow!” she exclaimed as the cold air struck her. “You must not do this! Let me take your place while you go down and get warm and dry.”
“You are a ministering angel,” I returned through my chattering teeth, “but unfortunately you can’t steer. However, if you will watch here I will go down and wring myself out. I can lash the tiller. Do you realize our situation?”
“I—I believe so,” she faltered. “I did not even tell Aunt Margaret we were going anywhere. It is too awful to think of—I dare not think—I try not to. This is——”
“The force of circumstance,” I interrupted, with an attempt at levity as I proceeded to fasten the helm. “A force you denied only a few hours ago.”
“And do now!” she said, with some spirit, catching back her blowing hair with her hand. “It was the desire to make you do something against your will. It was pure foolishness. Don’t argue now. Do something for yourself; you will find that I have been neither idle nor useless.”
I was surprised at the change she had wrought in the cabin. On a locker was spread the remains of our lunch; the bunks had been put in some kind of order, the floor wiped up, and the indefinable air of femininity she had given to the dingy hole was accentuated by the gay color of her little hat, which hung against the blackened bulkhead. Rank as it was, the warm atmosphere was a welcome change from that of the deck, and through it floated the odor of coffee. A pot was simmering on the stove, the grate of which was all aglow.
While wondering how she had brought herself to forage through the repulsive mess below and where she had obtained fresh water, I emptied two cups of the scalding beverage and, after stripping myself of my wet clothing, was in a mood to have enjoyed the adventure had it not been for my anxiety for the future. By overhauling a bunk I found an old pair of trousers and an oil-coat, both smelling villainously of fish, and putting them on, wrapped a grimy blanket about me and returned to the deck.
Even during my short absence the wind had fallen decidedly, but the young lady was shivering in her summer dress as she sat looking over the blank water at the distant shore, and I could see that the loneliness filled her with an awe I well understood. She laughed a little as she noticed the figure I cut, but her chattering teeth belied her forced spirits.
“You are freezing, Miss Edith. Go down and drink a cup of your own coffee. Where did you get fresh water? The scuttle-butt was wrecked with the rest.”
“I melted hail-stones—there were plenty of them. Don’t you see I am superior to mere circumstance? You must go down, too; you must rest and keep warm.”
“I must do my resting here,” I replied, cutting the helm lashing.
“What! All night?”
I laughed at her simplicity. “I could not guarantee you a tomorrow—certainly not a rescue, if I stayed in the cabin.”
“Then I will watch, too.”
“It is far too cold—and—and I am afraid you are forgetting the proprieties,” I answered lightly. “I have much to think about.”
I believe she suspected what was in my mind, for she asked soberly:
“Were—were you referring to—to me?”
“Could it be otherwise? And I was thinking of poor Maxwell and his probable loss,” I answered, in an attempt to shift the subject I was not yet ready to discuss.
She drew herself up with sudden hauteur. “Mr. Maxwell’s loss—probable or otherwise—shall be made more than good to him. As for me, I am still above the circumstance that has brought us to this state,” she answered, and, turning quickly, went below.
It was a rebuke, and I saw that I might better have taken her into my confidence then and there, for Maxwell’s loss had had little weight with me. It was her loss and possibly my own. Though her position in society was too well assured for her to suffer in character through an adventure of the sort we were experiencing, there would be many who would talk behind their hands. When the facts were known—as they were bound to be—advantage would be taken of the opportunity to cast reflections and give the smile incredulous to any explanation. A young man and a young woman adrift for an indefinite number of hours in the night after having deliberately cut off communication with the shore would be a tempting morsel for scandalmongers. And what then?
It was just that “what,” and another, which were bothering me. My love for the girl was as pure as man’s love could be, yet after this what could I be to her? Must I cease to be even a friend? Was I to be sacrificed on the altar of circumstance, the force of which I asserted as strongly as she denied? I sat at the helm and turned my thoughts inward until the stars came out from behind the scattering clouds, and the wind, grown colder, fell to a force that barely filled the jib. I looked at my watch—it was past eleven. I was becoming faint for want of food, and, as the wind was now harmless, I dropped the helm and went below.
The fire was almost out and the oil in the lamp so low that it added another smell to the cabin. The girl lay on the hard locker fast asleep, and I could see that she had been weeping. For a time I gazed at her eagerly, then taking some food with me, stole back to my dreary watch. As the hours waned so did my spirits. I may have dozed, but about two o’clock the girl’s ghostly white dress appeared in the companionway and she stepped out on deck. She looked around at the darkness for a moment, then came and seated herself by my side.
“You have had an uncomfortable nap, I fear,” I said as I saw her dispirited face.
“Yes,” wearily, “but how did you know?”
“I went below and saw you. I am very sorry for you, Miss Edith.”
“You saw I had been crying. I am more than sorry to have exposed my weakness to you. I was lonely and—and you did not wish me here. Is it so very wrong?”
“I was only thinking of your comfort.”
“Did you imagine it greater down there? And you said you were thinking of the proprieties and—and Maxwell.”
“Of Maxwell—incidentally only.”
She made no answer to this. I had hoped she would, for now I was as ready to talk of our peculiar situation as before I had been unwilling. But the small hours of the morning are not conducive to discussion. The girl was fagged out and silent in consequence. Once or twice she nodded, but refused to go below, though I urged her to get out of the cold. I finally prevailed on her to put on my coat, and then we sat in silence. But Nature asserted herself at last, and she unconsciously but gradually drooped toward me until her head touched my shoulder, and there it settled. I brought half of the blanket about her and passed my arm around her waist that she might not pitch forward to the deck.
And in this fashion we remained, I with the tiller in the hollow of my left arm, and she in a heavy slumber, her face close to mine. I sat thus, immovable, until I was as sore and uncomfortable as though in bonds, but I may as well confess that I felt repaid for all I had undergone and was then undergoing through my self-enforced rigidity. I lost all sense of drowsiness and was never more wide awake in my life than when I determined to take advantage of the cursed force of circumstance and keep her by me as a right. I would use the argument placed in my power, which argument was the force of circumstance itself. I had been a coward long enough.
The time went easily. The girl slept as quietly as a child, oblivious of all the world. My own mind undoubtedly strayed from purely practical matters, but I was suddenly brought to my senses by the sight of a red and a green light, topped by a white one, bearing directly down upon us. The vessel with the night signals was almost into us before I realized its approach. If the pilot of the oncoming tug—for as such I recognized her—had been no more attentive than I, we should be a wreck in less than thirty seconds, and with no blame to him, as we carried no light. Rudely awakening the girl I put the helm up and shouted with all my power.
The black mass forged on until within two lengths of us. I heard the powerful throbbing of her engine, the tearing hiss and splash from her cut-water, and the churning of the propeller. In an instant more I would hear the crashing of timbers, but as I strained my eyes on the oncoming boat and threw my arm around the girl, ready for the worst, I saw the shadow of a man as he ran from the engine-room to the wheel, and then the tug suddenly swerved and passed us so close that I could have touched her rail! In an instant she had slid by and then I leaped up and shouted like one possessed:
“Come to! Come to, for God’s sake! We are in distress!”
There was a hoarse answer and the vessel sank into the darkness. I thought we were to be abandoned and for an instant felt all the deep hopelessness of a shipwrecked mariner in mid-ocean as he marks the loss of a possible rescue. But presently I saw the green starboard light reappear and knew, when the red light joined it, they were working to return to us. There was the clang of a gong, a quick churning of the reversed wheel, and the tug slowed up close at hand, keeping way gently until it bumped against the sloop and a man leaped from its deck to ours.
“What’s the row here?” he asked.
“We are crippled and adrift,” I answered. “I am no sailor, and there is a lady aboard.”
The girl stood at my side as the man listened to my story, the lividness of dawn in the east just touching his coarse face. His little eyes shifted from her to me incessantly, and when I had finished he gave an irritating laugh, for which I could have knocked him down with a good grace.
“Blowed away, hey!” he said, expectorating over the rail and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “D’ye mean ye hadn’t sense enough to know when a cable’s bent an’ when it’s onbent? Wall, ’tain’t no business o’ mine. Want to get aboard o’ us, hey? Yer green, fer a fact, an’ I’ll be frank with ye. If ye leaves the sloop she’ll be derelict, an’ I can pull her in an’ claim salvage. That’s the law. Course I’ll take ye aboard if ye want, but ye had better bide here an’ give me a hundred dollars fer a tow to New Haven. I got a date there an’ can’t do better fer ye.”
“Where are we now?” I asked.
“Sum’ers off the Thimbles.”
I well knew that I was being taken advantage of, but a slight pressure on my arm from the hand of Miss Edith told me it was no time for bargaining, so, after a deal of backing and going ahead, we found ourselves under way behind the tug, I still at the helm to prove that the sloop had not been deserted.
Safe thus far I felt relieved, but, the first difficulty passed, the remaining and greater phase of the situation reasserted itself. For a long time neither the girl nor I spoke, and I fancied her face was more deeply anxious in its expression than I had yet seen it. The light broadened; the shore showed faintly against a clear sky, and the stars grew pale and disappeared. Probably two hours more would get us into harbor, and the subject of our adventure and our probable reception home, even a plan for future movements, had not been touched upon. Something must be said, but in my intense interest my brain went all adrift and my intended delicacy was lost in my first blundering speech.
“You are looking tired, Miss Edith, but your last sleep was more restful than your first.”
It was man-like stupidity. Her face flushed hotly as she turned it away, but presently she looked at me and said:
“It has all been like a terrible dream, now that we are out of danger. It seems days since we left the hotel, and—and—oh! what will papa say—and Aunt Margaret? What will people think?” And she covered her face with her hands.
“The last is not a knotty problem,” I replied gently, though I could not spare her distress. “We will not be overburdened with Christ-like charity, and the result may be hard for you to bear.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, dropping her hands.
“Do you not see?” said I, as with my heart beating rapidly I went boldly to meet my fate. “Do you know so little of the world—of the venom of it? We have done an innocent thing, but, forgive me, will people believe it? Your father will be fiercely angry, society will be skeptical, and—and I would protect you from all scandal; I would bear your father’s anger for you.”
She was rosy now and her lips were half apart, but she did not answer.
“I know I am taking an undue advantage by making such a proposal here, but it is the old force of circumstances which permits me. There is but one way, Edith. Give me the right I would have—the right to protect you! Does not your heart understand my meaning? We could then face the world together and not care. No, that is not all,” I continued as I saw she was about to speak. “God knows that affection lacks proper words to express it! I have been so fearful—that is why I have been dumb so long! To me the gale has been a godsend, not a misfortune. Edith, must I be wrecked at last?”
She had turned away her face, but now she looked at me, not in anger nor amazement. As she fixed her beautiful eyes on mine I saw the tears come into them and overflow, but she made no answer.
“Have I hurt you?” I cried.
“You are generous,” she said; “but are you honest now? Are you sure you wish this? Is it me you really want? You are a man and will not be blamed—and I—well, I can live it down. The fault was mine, not yours. Perhaps you will regret; perhaps it is because you are sorry for me that you offer me your—your protection. Oh! be sure—be sure!”
I do not remember what I said or did then, but I know I had a ready answer for this and urged it so vehemently, becoming oblivious to all else, that the sloop yawed widely and I was called to earth by a shout from the tug to the effect that I had better “mind my eye” and see what in the devil I was about.
It was a strange wooing. Five o’clock in the morning is not a usual hour for inspiration, yet I was never more eloquent. Nor were the chief elements of the little drama picturesque—a woebegone and very much mussed-up young lady with unkempt hair, her figure lost in the folds of a dirty blanket, and a man with the appearance of having been hurriedly starched and rough-dried. But there was a new pink in the cheeks of the one and a new light in the eyes of the other, as Edith, without a word in answer to my pleading, simply placed her soft hand in mine for a moment, then brushing away her tears, ran below.
To the casual observer on the streets of New Haven no doubt we looked somewhat time-worn, but this was partly mended by the milliner and the tailor. I was still as idiotic as a man is likely to be after a heavy stroke of good fortune, and it was when sitting in the hotel where I had just penned the last of a number of telegrams that I turned to the girl for my final triumph.
“Edith, it was only yesterday morning that you scoffed at the force of circumstance and I hinted at a tale I could write that would convince you. But I need not use invention—we have acted a story ourselves. You have been forced to capitulate. Was I not right?”
“No, dear,” she returned softly. “My answer would have been the same had you asked me long ago.”
Before and After
WANDERING WILLIE—Why wudn’t yer wanter be a millionaire, pard?
Weary Raggles—What’s de diff’rence? Dose fellers git de dyspepsie an’ hev de distressed feelin’ arter eatin’, ’stead of afore, dat’s all.
Declined
TED—It was a case of love at first sight with him.
Ned—How was it with the girl?
Ted—From the answer she gave him she must have had second sight.
A Terrible Example
LATSON—He used to be a newsboy, and now he is in the legislature.
Codwell—That’s just what you might expect shooting craps would lead to.
EVERYBODY tells you not to worry. The point is: how not to worry. Worry is discontent swathed with timidity. Be brave in your worries by making them protests. At least it helps your circulation.
An Ideal Cruise in an Ideal Craft
BY WALLACE IRWIN
IT were the good ship Gentle Jane
On which we et and slept,
The tightest, safest little craft
As ever sailed, except—
Her cargo it wuz gasolene
And pitch-wood kindling light
And powder fine and turpentine
And tar and dynamite.
Our crew wuz tried and trusty men
As ever sailed the wet,
And so I had full confidence
In their discretion, yet—
The cook would dump hot, glowin’ coals
In that there gasolene,
And them there tars would smoke cigars
In the powder magazine.
“Oh, Cap,” I sez to Capting White
With reverent respect,
“Now couldn’t we in trifles be
A bit more circumspect?”
“Well I’ll be blowed!” the Capting sez
To pass the matter by.
“Unless I’m wrong ere very long
We’ll all be blowed,” sez I.
And as I croke this little joke
The sea got very rough,
The gong went clang! the hull went bang!
Our gallant ship went puff!
A cloud o’ smoke with us on top
A million fathoms lept—
Yet in that muss not one of us
Wuz scratched or hurt, except—
Our gallant Capting lost his head.
Our Mate his limbs and breath,
The soup wuz spilled, our crew wuz killed,
Our cook wuz scared to death.
So often in the stilly night
I long with fond regret
To sail again the Gentle Jane
Upon the sea, and yet—
The Heritage of Maxwell Fair
BY VINCENT HARPER