“Mr. Silo!” cried I.
“Mr. Silo,” said the Doctor; “but he did not go to the Assembly, and that picture has never been presented. When you saw him to-day he was running away from his brother-in-law, to get to New York to go on any sort of a spree to drown his misery. Come along, and you shall hear the tale of a fallen idol. And if, as you listen, an ant should cross your path, do not step on it. Mr. Silo stepped upon an ant, and the ant made of him the thing you saw.”
I do not tell this story exactly in the Doctor’s own words, though I will let it look as if I did. The trouble of letting non-literary people tell stories in their own language is that the “says I’s,” and the “says he’s,” and the “well, this man” passages, and “then this other man I was telling you about” interpolations take up so much of the narrative that a story like this could not be read while a pound of candles burned.
But here is about the way the Doctor ought to have told it:
I do not wish to undervaluate the good influence of Mr. Silo in our city. He has been a large and enterprising investor. He has built up the town in many ways. He has been charitable and patriotic. He was a good man; but he was not a saint. And a man has to be a saint to boom town lots and keep straight. No; I’ll go further than that—it can’t be done! George Washington couldn’t have boomed town lots and kept straight. And Silo, as you can see by those whiskers, was no George Washington. Real estate isn’t sold on the Golden Rule, you know. There were times when it was mighty lucky for Silo that he was six feet high and weighed two hundred pounds.
I don’t know the details of the transaction, but I am afraid that Silo treated the little newspaper man pretty shabbily. He was a decent, hard-working, unobtrusive little fellow, and he and his wife had been scraping and saving for years and years to buy a house with a garden to it, in just such a town as this. Well, no, that’s not the way to put it. They had fixed on a particular house in this particular town, and they had been waiting several years for the lease of it to fall in. They were ready with the price, and I do not doubt that Silo or his agents had at one time accepted their offer for the place. But when the time came, Silo backed out, refused to sell, and disowned the whole transaction.
That, in itself, was a mean act. It was a trifling matter to Silo, but it was a biggest kind of matter to the other man and his wife. They had set their hearts on that particular house; they had stinted themselves for a long, long time to lay up the money to buy it; and probably no other house in the whole world could ever be so desirable to those two people. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The man might have put up with his disappointment, and perhaps even have forgiven Silo for the shabby trick. But Silo, I suppose, felt ashamed of himself and went further than he had meant to, in trying to lash himself into a real good, honest indignation. At least, that is my guess at it; for Silo was neither brutal nor stupid by nature; but on this occasion he had the incredible cussedness to twit the little man on his helplessness. It was purely a question of veracity between the two, and Silo pointed out that, as against him, nobody would take the stranger’s word. That was true; but, good Lord! Silo himself told me subsequently that it was the meanest thing, under the circumstances, that he ever heard one man say to another. He always maintained that he was right about the sale; but he admitted that his roughing of the poor fellow was inexcusable; and the thing that graveled him most and frightened him most in the end was that he had called the poor man “Mr. Thingumajig.” He had not caught the real name; he only remembered that it had some sort of a foreign sound that suggested “Thingumajig” to his mind.
Now, all that Silo had had before him previous to that outburst was only a plain case of angry man; but from that time on he had ahead of him through his pathway in life an incarnation of human hatred, out for vengeance, and bound to have it.
“Well, now the fun of the thing comes in,” said the Doctor.