CHAPTER XI.
THE STORY OF BILLY BROKE
I
Do you know that fiction, without side-tracking interest, can often teach a man what he will never learn in a class-room or from a text-book? It can, and the lesson sticks, because the human mind is so constituted that it will retain and assimilate a moral wrapped up in a story, whereas the moral naked and unadorned would be forgotten in fifteen minutes or rejected at once.
I wonder how many men have been saved from selling old lamps for new by the story of Aladdin!
I, like hosts of other men, am a nervy and imaginative individual, and the devil of the thing is that with us our imagination is our worst enemy, keeps us awake at night counting up our losses instead of our profits, fills us with fantastic fears of the future, and, should any of us ever find ourselves in an incriminating position—which God forbid—would, were we innocent, ten to one make us look or act like criminals.
Here is the story of a man who acted like an ass, a highly moral married man whose imagination betrayed him, the story of Billy Broke of Los Angeles, told me by Brent.
Brent had a little fishing boat he kept at a slip near Circular Wharf and he and I used often to go out fishing in Sydney Harbour. One day we were out late, fishing off Farm Cove, so late that on our return a huge moon was rising, flooding the harbour and city with its light. We left the boat tied up in charge of the wharf keeper and tramped off with our fish. Coming up along Halkin Street we saw something like a bundle of old clothes lying in the moonlight right before us, and when we got to it we found it was a dead Chink.
It was a narrow street of tenement houses and not a soul to be seen. There was a big Labour demonstration on that night, so I suppose the inhabitants were all off demonstrating and that accounted for the desolation of the place.
Brent knelt down to inspect. Then he rose up:
“Stabbed,” said he, “and as dead as mutton.”