THE BOSS CANVASMAN’S YARN.
The Boss Canvasman was always sad. He never talked—he just chewed his tobacco and worked. Like the Candy Butcher, he never wore a coat, but he cut the pink underwear the Lemonade Boy flashed when he had his sleeves rolled up at the tub. Of course, the Boss had a coat, one that had run through a dozen seasons, but he always kept it strapped down under the driver’s cushion on the pole wagon. Whenever he did use it, the coat was doing duty for a pillow when the last section was late pulling out, and he was sleeping on a gondola with the wall poles for a mat.
The Boss Canvasman’s pants were ancient history, and his vest was always open. He wore one of those motorman watches, with a shoestring for a chain. He never looked at the watch except at night, for when it was daytime he could pull off the hour on the second by the slant of the shadows across the big “top.” The Boss never wore a collar. On Sunday he would put a gold button in the shirt band, lean disconsolately against the tongue of the pole wagon, and feel uncomfortable because he was dressed up.
There was no coin and jewel flash about the Boss Canvasman. But he did wear a rusty button in the lapel of his vest—one of those G. A. R. things. Across his face there was a long red scar, and sometimes when he had been drinking he talked about the first Ohio Cavalry—Gettysburg was the answer. He feared nobody nor anything. He had no friends, except probably the Stock Boss, and there was a tie there, because the two had done the wagon show long years back before three rings were dreamed of and farmers were living on their own hog meat and were happy. If he ever did talk, it was when something went wrong, and then his line of words were unfit for publication—even in a Chicago weekly.
It looked like a squall just as the matinee was breaking, and the boys at the cages were hurrying the people along to get the tent clear before the water fell. The Boss Canvasman was hard at it getting the guys tight and throwing in cinders around the big poles, where the dirt was soft. He was taking no chances on a blow. He had been mixed up in several of those wind things down in Texas, where a cyclone struck the lot, and all that was left when the sun got back was the ticket wagon and the elephants that were chained to earth. He knew his game.
After the usual beef stew and the splash of beans had been put away with a cup of black in the meal tent, the gang gathered about the rink bank for a little rest. The Sawdust Spreader and the Gasoline Man were talking scandal, as usual. This time it was the Snake Charmer, who mixed it too strong with the bottles on the last stand, lost the keys to her snake-box and two boas and a black boy starved to death before the feeders could get the rabbits under the fangs.
The gang sat down in silence until the Concert Manager cut in with some weather talk. It looked stormy, and as it was the last night of the stand and a long haul to the cars, everybody was feeling a little sore. With a storm coming up, the tent to watch, and then the haul and an eight-hour jump with a hustle for the march in spangles down the highway the next morning. It had everybody grouchy and thinking about hall shows with a roof and a stove.
“Youse is doing a lot of guff about a rain,” cut in the Side Show Spieler, as he polished up his shiny brim on the corner of the leaping tick, “but youse kin stay inside when its droppin’, but for me—the open and still the same old gab for the dimes.”
The Boss Canvasman came up along the ring bank, and without noticing the crowd on the sawdust began to jamb down the cinders around the net-pole with the heel of his boot. From the distance came a low rumble of thunder. The gang looked at each other. Everybody in the outfit feared a storm; not so much for the storm itself, but for the effect it had on the Boss Canvasman. He never talked, but when the basses under the hills were growling and the lightning was doing a fancy jig against the blue, he let loose a vocabulary that would put a canalboat captain to the blush of shame and send a sea-soaked old jib reefer to flight as a down and out cusser beyond appeal, cards torn up, tables turned over and police at the door. He used the same two-em words, but the way they hit the air would have made holes in a battleship.
The broadcloth boys, who came over in the sailing ships and scared the Indians into religion by telling them how warm it was in perdition, couldn’t touch the Boss Canvasman for a scare when he got on the same topic. He had a way of saying “hell!” that made you want to turn in a fire alarm just for personal comfort.
Presently he came across to the gang, and to the surprise of all the rink-bank squatters loosened up.
“Talkin’ ’bout workin’ in the rain, is you?” he said, with a sneer, and a cross-hook glance at the Side Show Spieler. “You’ve got no kick. Say, you’ll have your head on some Mamie’s shoulder in the last day coach, up an’ away, while me an’ my gang is still workin’ on this lot gittin’ this round top on the wagon without streakin’ her wid mud.”
There was not a reply, for the boys knew he was right. The Side Show Spieler hung around a bit, and, with a typhoid smile, remarked that he guessed he’d bow hisself out, and more than that, he did.
“Speakin’ about storms,” said the Boss Canvasman, as he tied a long, running knot in the guy that held the triple bars, “I guess you fellows ’ceptin’ some of the old boys, dunno what it is for a rain an’ a blow. I dun bin circusin’ it for forty year, and, say, I’ve met some blows an’ lightnin’ that no sailor chap ain’t hit, I don’t care how often he’s bin ’round the Horn.”
You couldn’t have looked into the face of that old fellow without believing every word. He was burned brown by every clime, creased and seamed by every frost, and parched and dryed by every wind, and his hands for knots and gnarls had an old oak twice around the track and then past the judges and turf writers, all off and back to the street cars.
“Say, I’m going to tell you fellers sumthin’,” said the Boss, as he sat down and began twisting together a piece of rope that was getting to look like a lion’s tail. The gang was startled, for in the memory of none there never lodged the fact that the Boss Canvasman had been seen to sit down as long as the pole was standing. But he did, and what’s more, he reeled off a yarn.
“Jes, ’fore the war broke out,” he said, “I had enlisted in the First Ohio, I was workin’ down the Valley of Virginia wid a little wagon show doin’ the same kind of work I’se doin’ now, ’cept it was nothin’ but play to this. Funny, too, for six months afore I was down that same valley wid the cavalry cuttin’ into them rebs, an’ I don’t mind telling you they was a cuttin’ us, too, wid Mosby in the woods an’ ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, God knows where.
“Well, we had been doin’ a day an’ a night stand in one of the little towns, an’ had a fourteen mile haul down the pike for the next. We was hopin’ for a moon, not so much to strike by, but for the drive, for the people hadn’t got the roads to right, an’ they was still full of artillery ruts an’ wagon train wrecks. But we pulled off the show, an’ before the last bareback was on I has the menagerie canvas on the wagons, all stakes up and the dens down the road, with the boys leadin’ the elephants and the two camels over the hills. It had been squally like, all night, but I had the round top tightened up so hard that youse could have walked the ropes an’ there was no danger.
“But jes’ as Dutch Andy was playin’ his last piece there was a bust of wind an’ a flash of lightnin’, an’ she began to come down in solid sheets. We gets the people out and gets to work on the tent wall. This peels off in a jiffy, an’ the rain lets up. Then down wid the big top an’ on the wagon. But sumthin’ catches in the riggin’ on the main pole, an’ I sees I has to send me helper up on a climb to get her clear. Everything was gone but the pole wagon and a few side show things, an’ the ’bus we bosses rode in, with four grays pullin’ it. Afore I sends my helper, Jim, a fine boy, what had been a sailor, up the pole, I send four men out to hold her up by hangin’ on the long rope to the far stake. Jim skins up to the top an’ gits her loose, but before he kin git down the gang holdin’ the long guy loses their holt, an’ the pole falls.
“Well, we picks up Jim, an’ he is pretty bad. Ribs in, an’ a lot of cuts. We tried ev’ry house aroun’, but no doctor, though there was one good old lady who gave us some arnicy and strips of bandage she said she’d kept to use on her husband when he got shot up in the Saturday night fights ’bout the tavern. So we piles poor Jim into the ’bus, and drives off easy, while we walks along quiet like an’ sore. Poor Jim, he jes’ groans an’ talks ’bout doin’ his best, an’ I keeps givin’ him liquor to make him forget it.
“But it was all over for Jim, an’ we jes pullin’ out of a clump of woods down by a river when we sees he’s dead. There was no use carryin’ his body long, an’ he didn’t have no people to ship it to, so we decided to give him a decent burial. Two of the stakemen digs the place, an’ we lays poor Jim away under a willow tree. Jes’ then one of the boys speaks up an’ sez:
“‘Say, boys, it don’t seem right to plant Jim without sayin’ sumthin’.’
“But there wasn’t a mother’s son in the crowd knew what to say, though they is all on to what the fellow means. We waits awhile an’ I sez:
“‘Well, there might be a little singin’.’
“An’ I wishes that I had the principal clown there, for he was good on sad songs, ’specially if he’d been boozin’ a little.
“‘Might git the band,’ sez one of the boys.
“‘But the band is way ahead.’ We is all studyin’ like, when over the hills comes the whistling wagon.
“‘Here is the calliope,’ sez one of the stakemen.
“So we stops it, and ‘Reddy’ Cavenaugh, who played the whistles, besides doublin’ for Peter the Great in the street parade, sez he has enough steam on to play a little. We backs the calliope around, an’ three of the boys holds the hosses. Then Reddy played soft like, jes’ as soft as he could, on the whistles, an’ we all lifts our hats.”
“What did he play?” asked the Candy Butcher, as he wiped away a tear with his red cuff.
“Well,” said the Boss Canvasman, “he only knowed two tunes, ‘When Johnny Comes Marchin’ Home’ and ‘The Blue Danube,’ but we planted Jim to both.”