"What did he look like? Dark and swarthy; rather short, I imagine, with curly, black hair."
"Turn that upside down, inside out and stretch it and you'll have it," said I.
She laughed and left the room.
What a charming fellow Jim was to get on with! Perhaps those virtues had been his resources in a wild career of crime and his strongest allies in effecting a concealment of his true self. Thus my analytical mind threshed out the ramifications of possibilities. My intimate relations with him for so many years further convinced me that if he had followed that long career of crime outlined by Tescheron he must have begun when he was playing "Injuns" up in Oswegatchie County.
Then I would cheer myself with the thought that something in Jim's favor would turn up soon and all would be well again, and we would get a new outfit of stuff for about eighty-five dollars—that's what we paid before—and start in housekeeping again; perhaps on the second floor, so as to get in line with the inexorable law of falling bodies.
Mr. Tescheron, I supposed, would somehow blame Jim for the fire and count it part of the grand plot to seize his daughter. Well, it was all too much for me, with my weak body and easily fatigued brain. It was hard work to keep my nerves calm under the circumstances.
My brother Silas had come down to see me, but when I began to mend he returned to Oswegatchie County, completely worn out with three weeks' tramping on city sidewalks. He made a number of inquiries for me concerning Hosley at the City Hall and among our old neighbors. He could learn nothing, however, so it was clear that Jim had departed for parts unknown. Silas carried back the news of my returning health to the folks, and was also able to inform them that the cars ran all night down here in New York—a matter they had never seen reported in the papers and I had never referred to in my letters. When he left, I was as lonesome as a retired pork packer dabbling in the fine arts. It seemed that
"Turn where'er I may I find
Thorns where roses bloomed before
O'er the green fields of my soul;
Where the springs of joy were found,
Now the clouds of sorrow roll,
Shading all the prospect round."
These lines of George P. Morris came to mind, and they, too, recalled Jim Hosley and the early days when I began to be the middleman in his love affairs, and gave my aid to his amorous cause by writing his love letters. I had worked Shakespeare, Scott, Burns, Byron and Morris (the only five we had handy) in relays to support his fervent song of love, for behind the scene with my pen Jim said I was a wonder in stringing this fetching gush together. But I tried to be modest about it. There was enough in those five to marry the inhabitants of Europe to those of Africa. I understood that anything Jim said to a woman would be taken in good part, and those love letters in which the green fields of his soul must have appeared well irrigated by those bubbling springs of joy, undoubtedly pleased the fair dames and, I supposed, did no harm. But a joke is the most dangerous thing a middleman in the love business can engage in. The business is full of danger anyhow, but joking is worse than dynamite.
If the mechanical part of our arrangements had been seen by the young women—Jim generally asleep and I copying the poetry from a clumsy, big book and scratching my tousled head for sentiment enough to glue the verses together in a prose somewhere near the same temperature—I don't suppose there would have been many victories. Perhaps there were none; Jim never spoke of results; he kept them to himself and I don't know what he did with them. All the margin there was in it for me was the literary exercise which in value hardly covered the cost of the ink. Perhaps he had married each one of the women and had killed them off, because he enjoyed the excitement of courtship's gamble more than the sure thing of matrimony. If so, I was undoubtedly an accomplice, although entirely innocent. A jury, however, might not take that comfortable view of it, if a handwriting expert were called and took seven weeks to tell them his story. They would certainly hang me to get home.