He not only knew all these people, but he never by any means used family names. He did not say, “Mr. Fechter,” it was “Charley,” “Old Charley,” and when he spoke of women it was not “Miss Rose Eytinge,” it was “Rosy.” And he kept on talking of clubs, and horses, and yachts, and fishing, and gunning, and cards, and women, and racing, and “events” of that sort, till Tibbitts pounced down upon him as a cat does upon a mouse.
“May I ask what part of the Great Republic you are from?” asked Tibbitts.
“I hail from Kokomo, Indiana, but I spend most of my time East.”
“Your business?”
“Business, ah, I am in hardware.”
MR. TIBBITTS’ ROMANCE.
“I see—you have a branch house in New York. Do you know Billy Vanderbilt? No? You ought to know him. Take Billy Vanderbilt and Russ Sage, and Cy Field, and little Gouldy, and you just more than have an everlasting team. And there’s Chet Arthur; who’d ever spose that Chet would ever have got to be President? Some men have all the luck. And there’s Jack Sherman, of Ohio, why Jack and I—but never mind. I don’t let on all I know. But I tell you, when Jack and his brother Cump—he’s the general of the armies now, and his other brother Charley, is a judge. Poor Scotty, of Philadelphia, the president of the Pennsylvania Road, he’s gone. He couldn’t stand the racket, and he went under. But Hughy Jewett, of the Erie, he’s another kind of a rooster, he is. He is in with Gus Belmont, and they two, with Jim Keene and Dave Mills, of San Francisco—well you ought to just see them punish wine after they have taken the boys in and done for ’em. They are up to everything, they are. I remember one night—”
“Where are you from?” asked the knowing young man, gasping in astonishment at this array of names and the familiarity with which they were used.
“Me! Oh, I’m from Oshkosh; but I have a branch house in New York too. I go down just once a year to sell live stock, and I pick up more names in the week I stay there than an ordinary man can remember, and I remember all their given names, and I can reel them off just as fast as any Indiana young man I ever met, and I know them just as well. Only I prefer financiers and statesmen to horse men, actors and prize fighters. I am very select. Next year I shall not know anybody under a senator. You may just as well know big men, really great men, as merely notorious ones. Now there’s ‘Lyss Grant and Bob Schenck, and Rufe Ingalls, and Black Jack Logan, you ought to just sit down with them at a game of poker! That’s where you have sport, and as for fishing, Bill Wheeler, till he got spoiled by being Vice-President, he could everlastingly handle a rod, and the way he’d yank ’em out was a caution. He was no slouch. Many a time I’ve—”
The wise young man from Kokomo, Indiana, Who Knew Everybody, could not endure the reminiscences of the Oshkosh young man, and he beat a precipitate retreat and we saw him no more. Tibbitts drew a sigh of relief and remarked that he had never strained his imagination so frightfully in all his life.