I gave him a cigar, a portion of which he broke up and stuffed into his pipe. He carefully stowed the remainder in his vest pocket and began to smoke composedly.
I asked him if he lived in the neighborhood.
“No, my place is about two miles from here. I’ve ben up the river after some snake root that’s wanted right away by the man I do business with. My name’s Erastus Wattles an’ I get all kinds of herbs around ’ere fer a man that sells ’em to the medicine makers somewheres down east.”
We sat on the bridge rail and talked for some time, and I became much interested in my new acquaintance. He spoke in a low voice, and his manner seemed rather furtive. He told me much of the herbs and rare plants that grew in the river country, and of his attempts to cultivate ginseng. “Certain influences” had repeatedly caused failures of his crop.
“That’s a fine scene out yonder,” he remarked, and the splendid glow of Jupiter in the western sky led to a subject that I found had enthralled his life, and his eyes quickened with a new light as he told me his story.
When he was a young man he had studied for the stage, but had made a failure of this, and had gone to work on an Ohio river steamboat as a clerk. A very old man, with long white whiskers and green spectacles came on board at Louisville late one night. He wanted to go to Cairo, but lacked a dollar of the amount necessary for his boat fare. He stated that he was a professor of astrology, and offered to cast the horoscope of anybody on the boat who would supply the deficiency. After an eloquent exposition of the wonders of astrology by the professor, Wattles furnished the dollar and the date and hour of his birth.
Amid the jibes of the other employees on the boat he received his horoscope just before the landing was made at Cairo. The aged seer departed down the gang plank and disappeared.
This was the turning point in the life of Erastus Wattles.
He sought a secluded place on the boat and studied the several closely written pages of foolscap, that were pinned together and numbered, and found that the old man had done a conscientious and thorough job.
Wattles extracted a large worn envelope from an inside pocket. It contained the document, which he said he always carried with him, and he asked me to read it.