The Wrong Twin

by Harry Leon Wilson

The advent of the following summer was marked by two events of importance; Mouser, the Penniman cat, after being repeatedly foiled throughout the winter, had gained access to the little house on a day when windows and doors were open for cleaning, stalked the immobile blue jay, and falling upon his prey had rent the choice bird limb from limb, scattering over a wide space wings, feathers, cotton, and twisted wire. Mouser had apparently found it beyond belief that so beautiful a bird should not be toothsome in any single part. But the discoverer of this sacrilege was not horrified as he would have been a year before. He had even the breadth of mind to feel an honest sympathy for poor Mouser, who had come upon arsenic where it could not by any known law of Nature have been apprehended, and who for two days remained beneath the woodshed sick unto death, and was not his old self for weeks thereafter. Wilbur was growing up.

Soon after this the other notable event transpired. Frank, the dog, became the proud but worried mother of five puppies, all multicoloured like himself. It is these ordeals that mature the soul, and it was an older Wilbur who went again to the Advance office to learn the loose trade, as his father had written him from New Orleans that he must be sure to do. He had increased his knowledge of convention in the use of capital letters, and that summer, as a day's work, he set up a column of leaded long primer which won him the difficult praise of Sam Pickering. Sam wrote a notice of the performance and printed it in the Advance—the budding craftsman feeling a double glow when he sat this up, too. The item predicted that Wilbur Cowan, son of our fellow townsman, Dave Cowan, would soon become one of the swiftest of compositors.

This summer he not only inked the forms on Wednesday, but he was permitted to operate the job press. You stood before this and turned a large wheel at the left to start it, after which you kept it going with one foot on a treadle. Then rhythmically the press opened wide its maw and you took out the printed card or small bill and put in another before the jaws closed down. It was especially thrilling, because if you should keep your hand in there until the jaws closed you wouldn't have it any longer.

But there was disquieting news about the loose trade he intended to follow. A new printer brought this. He was the second since the deaf one of the year before, the latter on an hour's notice having taken the six-fifty-eight for Florida one night in early winter—like one of the idle rich, Sam Pickering said. The new printer, a sour, bald one of middle age, reported bitterly that hand composition was getting to be no good nowadays; you had to learn the linotype, a machine that was taking the bread out of the mouths of honest typesetters. He had beheld one of these heinous mechanisms operated in a city office—by a slip of a girl that wouldn't know how to hold a real stick in her hand—and things had come to a pretty pass. It was an intricate machine, with thousands of parts, far more than seemed at all necessary. If you weren't right about machinery, and too old to learn new tricks, what were you going to do? Get sent to the printer's home, that was all! The new printer drank heavily to assuage his gloom, even to a degree that caused Herman Vielhaber to decline his custom, so that he must lean the gloomy hours away on the bar of Pegleg McCarron, where they didn't mind such things. Sam Pickering warned him that if this kept on there would no longer be jobs for hand compositors, even in country printing offices; that he, for one, would probably solve his own labour problem by installing a machine and running it himself. But the sad printer refused to be warned and went from bad to worse.

Wilbur Cowan partook of this pessimism about the craft, and wondered if his father had heard the news. If it had ceased to be important that a bright boy should set up a column of long primer, leaded, in a day, he might as well learn some other loose trade in which they couldn't invent a machine to take the bread out of your mouth. It was that summer he spent many forenoons on the steps of the ice wagon driven by his good friend, Bill Bardin. Bill said you made good-enough money delivering ice, and it was pleasant on a hot morning to rumble along the streets on the back steps of the covered wagon, cooled by the great blocks of ice still in its sawdust.

When they came to a house that took only twenty-five pounds Bill would let him carry it in with the tongs—unless it was one where Bill, a knightly person, chanced to sustain more or less social relations with the bondmaid. And you could chip off pieces of ice to hold in your mouth, or cool your bare feet in the cold wet sawdust; and you didn't have to be anywhere at a certain hour, but could just loaf along, giving people their ice when you happened to get there. He wondered, indeed, if delivering ice were not as loose a trade as typesetting had been, and whether his father would approve of it. It was pleasanter than sitting in a dusty printing office, and the smells were less obtrusive. Also, Bill Bardin went about bareheaded and clad above the waist only in a sleeveless jersey that was tight across his broad chest and gave his big arms free play. He chewed tobacco, too, like a printer, but cautioned his young helper against this habit in early youth. He said if indulged in at too tender an age it turned your blood to water and you died in great suffering. Wilbur longed for the return of his father, so he could tell him about the typesetting machine and about this other good loose trade that had opened so opportunely.

And there were other trades—seemingly loose enough—in which one drove the most delightful wagons, and which endured the year round and not, as with the ice trade, merely for the summer. There was, for example, driving an express wagon. Afternoons, when the ice chests of Newbern had been replenished and Bill Bardin disappeared in the more obscure interests of his craft, Wilbur would often ride with Rufus Paulding, Newbern's express agent. Rufus drove one excellent horse to a smart green wagon, and brought packages from the depot, which he delivered about the town. Being a companionable sort, he was not averse to Wilbur Cowan's company on his cushioned seat. It was not as cool work as delivering ice, and lacked a certain dash of romance present in the other trade, but it was lively and interesting in its own way, especially when Rufus would remain on his seat and let him carry packages in to people with a book for them to sign.

And there was the dray, driven by Trimble Cushman, drawn by two proud black horses of great strength. This trade was a sort of elder, heavier brother of the express trade, conveying huge cases of merchandise from the freight depot to the shops of the town. Progress was slower here than with the express wagon, or even the ice wagon; you had to do lots of backing, with much stern calling to the big horses, and often it took a long time to ease the big boxes to the sidewalk—time and grunting exclamations. Still it was not unattractive to the dilettante, and he rode beside Trimble with profit to his knowledge of men and affairs.

But better than all, for a good loose trade involving the direction of horses, was driving the bus from the Mansion House to the depot. The majestic yellow vehicle with its cushioned, lavishly decorated interior, its thronelike seat above the world, was an exciting affair, even when it rested in the stable yard. When the horses were hitched to it, and Starling Tucker from the high seat with whip and reins directed its swift progress, with rattles and rumbles like a real circus wagon, it was thrilling indeed. This summer marked the first admission of Wilbur to an intimacy with the privileged driver which entitled him to mount dizzily to the high seat and rattle off to trains. He had patiently courted Starling Tucker in the office of the Mansion House livery stable, sitting by him in silent admiration while he discoursed learnedly of men and horses, helping to hitch up the dappled grays to the bus, fetching his whip, holding his gloves, until it became a matter of course that he should mount to the high seat with him.

This seemed really to be the best of all loose trades. On that high seat, one hand grasping an iron railing at the side, sitting by grim-faced Starling Tucker in his battered hat, who drove carelessly with one hand and tugged at his long red moustache with the other, it was pleasantly appalling to reflect that he might be at any moment dashed to pieces on the road below; to remember that Starling himself, the daily associate of horses and a man of high adventure, had once fallen from this very seat and broken bones—the most natural kind of accident, Starling averred, though gossip had blamed it on Pegleg McCarron's whisky. Not only was it delectable to ride in the high place, to watch trains come and go, to carry your load of travellers back to the Mansion House, but there were interludes of relaxation when you could sit about in the office of the stables and listen to agreeable talk from the choice spirits of abundant leisure, with whom work seemed to be a tribal taboo, daily assembled there. The flow of anecdote was often of a pungent quality, and the amateur learned some words and phrases that would have caused Winona acute distress; but he learned about men and horses and dogs, and enlarged his knowledge of Newbern's inner life, having peculiar angles of his own upon it from his other contacts with its needs for ice and express packages and crates of bulkier merchandise.