“Let’s have it!” we all cried in one breath. No one was so lively and entertaining once we got him started.
“That’s all there is to it. They had locked the door on me—three of them—and when the back of the chair gave out—I was swinging it around my head—I made a break for out-of-doors.”
“Oh!—go on—go on, Louis!” came the chorus.
“No, I’d rather listen to you men. I haven’t been tattooed in the South Seas, nor half murdered rounding Cape Horn. I’m just a plain painter, and my experience is limited, and my three Perugian villains were just three dirty Italians, one of whom was the landlord who had charged me five prices for my meal, and tried to hold me up until I paid it—only a vulgar brawl, don’t you see? The landlord had his head in splints when I passed him the next day.”
“You were lucky to escape,” said The Engineer. “They have a way of knifing you while you are asleep. I had a friend who just got out of one of those Italian dives with his life.”
“Yes, that was why I was swinging the chair. Hard for any three men to get at you if its legs and back hold out. Of course a fellow can sneak up behind you with a knife and then you—By Jingo!—come to think of it, I can tell you a story! It just popped into my head. You have brought it all back”—and he nodded to our guest—“about the closest shave—so I thought at the time—that I ever had in my life. Your ghost stories don’t hold a candle to it—stealthy assassin—intended victim sound asleep—miraculous escape!—Oh! a blood-curdler!—I was scared blue.”
Everybody shifted their chairs and craned their heads to watch Louis’ face the better, overjoyed that he had at last wakened up. Louis scared blue—and he a match for any five men—meant a tale worth hearing.
“It was the summer I made those studies of mountain brooks flowing out of the glaciers—you remember them, Herbert? Anyway, I was across the Swiss border, and in a ragged Italian town dumped down on the side of a hill as if it had been spilt from a cart—one of those sprawled-out towns with a white candle of a campanile overtopping the heap. The diligence, about sunup, had dropped me at the exact spot with my traps, and was hardly out of sight before I had started to work, and I kept it up all day, pegging away like mad, as I always do when a subject takes hold of me—and this particular mountain brook was choking the life out of me, with lots of deep greens and transparent browns all through it, and the creamy froth of a glass of beer floating on the top.
“When the sun began to sink down behind the mountains I realized that it was about time to find a place to sleep. I was at work on a 40 x 30—rather large for out-doors—and, as it would take me several days, I had arranged with a goatherd—who lived in a slant with stones enough on its roof to keep it from being blown into space—to let me store my wet canvas and my palette and box under its supports. I’d have bunked in with the goats if I’d had anything to cover me from the cold—and it gets pretty cold there at night. Then again I knew from experience that a goatherd’s sour bread and raw onions were not filling at any price. What I really wanted was two rooms in some private house, or over a wine-shop or village store, with a good bed and a place where I could work in bad weather. I had found just such a place the summer before, on the Swiss side of the mountains, belonging to an old woman who kept a cheap grocery and who gave me for a franc a day her two upper rooms—and mighty comfortable rooms they were, and with a good north light. So I hung the wet canvas where the goats couldn’t lick off my undertones, shouldered my knapsack, and started downhill to the village.
“I found that the red-tiled houses followed a tangle of streets, no two of them straight, but all twisting in and out with an eye on the campanile, and so I struck into the crookedest, wormed my way around back stoops, water barrels, and stone walls with a ripening pumpkin here and there lolling over their edges, and reached the church porch just as the bell was ringing for vespers. When you want to get any information in an Italian village, you go to the priest, and if he is out, or busy, or checking off some poor devil’s sins—and he has plenty of it to do—then hunt up the sacristan.