“What you got there, Eb?” He held it gingerly, for his profession had, of course, made him fastidious. He was always careful of his hands, my father. He always washed them with soap, before coming home to meals, even after shaving a dozen customers! My treasure displeased his cleanly instinct, I could see.
“A murderer’s knife,” I whispered. “It’s mine! I found it under the McWhorter house. See—there’s some hairs stuck to it!”
My father flung it from him. “You’d ought to know the difference between bristles and hair—and you a barber’s son! That ain’t a knife—’tain’t nothin’ only Dib McWhorter’s old sow-scraper! Seen a hundred jes’ like it! Folks used to keep ’em for hog-killin’ time, when everybody kep’ a pig and done his own butcherin’. Scrape the bristles with.”
I was crestfallen at the sordid truth. For a moment I almost shared my father’s fastidious disgust. But, when he had gone, my instinct reasserted its control of my emotions. I recovered the sow-scraper from the rag-carpet where it lay. I replaced it reverently in its hiding-place. Why? I told myself, then, that my father was wrong; that it was no sow-scraper, but in truth the instrument of some forgotten, gory deed. I clung to it. And, later, when it had lost its first vivid appeal, I fetched it down to exhibit it to that great patron of antiqueing, no less a person than Cornelius Obenchain Van Loot himself.
He had stumbled on our humble dwelling in one of his tireless searches for the antique—quests which, the world knows, have led him even farther afield than Yonkers and Poughkeepsie. He had bought from my mother an excellent set of bedroom enamelware [circa ’88] and his appetite had been whetted by the success. He wanted more. I remembered my relic. This man, to my untutored eye, seemed artless and even a little contemptible—an opinion in which, I perceived, my mother concurred. [He possessed then, as now, that remarkable faculty of the gifted antiquer for convincing vendors of his complete simplicity.] I might persuade him, I reflected, that the bristles were human hair; it seemed unlikely that he could be expert in such distinctions, unless he had been, like me, a barber’s son. I shall not soon forget his cry of joy as his eye fell on my scraper. It was the one time in my acquaintance with him that he permitted himself to betray satisfaction before a bargain had been closed. It cost him, on this occasion, twenty dollars.
“By all the gods, a sow-scraper—a genuine, unquestionable sow-scraper, with bristles, intact, in excellent condition! Boy, did you come honestly by this? No tricks, now! Is it your own to sell?”
I established, with my mother’s ardent corroboration, my character and my title. The great Van Loot believed, at last.
“Priceless,” I heard him murmur. “Perfect! Superb!” and then aloud, to me: “Little man, I’ll give you twenty dollars for this old piece of iron. Twenty dollars—!”
“I guess you will,” I said, even then actuated by the instinct of the antiquer. “Who wouldn’t? See any green in my eye?” [A phrase since fallen into disuse, but at that date much in favor.] “You gimme fifty and we’ll talk.”
We compromised at forty. It was a triumph rather for my family than for me, for my mother expropriated the cash before I could escape, and subsequently invested it, happily for me, on a mustache-cup dutifully gilt-lettered “Father,” a small bone carved in the crude semblance of a human hand and attached to a long slender rod [an instrument employed, as all antiquers know, in the day of red-flannel underwear, for the comforting purpose of scratching an itching back without the tiresome routine of removing clothes], and a pottery sculpture of a pug-dog, which articles, ripened into antiques by the amiable, intervening years, yielded me some thousands per centum on the investment. But the episode was far more significant than it seemed, in its effect upon my life.