By sin pneumonia came into the world, and the docile aboriginal, with dilapidated undergarments, or none, became a shining mark. The honest, intelligent Mule restores an equilibrium of virtue lost through his depraved and dissolute driver. The virtues of the Mule atone for the vices of the man. He raises the average of merit and sum total of achievement, so that credit for their joint share in the grand climacteric will be as enduring as the solemn temples, the great globe itself.
Man approximated to the Mule ideal of gentility when he began to suspect that the entire system of army team discipline rested on a false basis. But that suspicion had not dawned at the close of the war for the suppression of the rebellion—if, indeed, it has yet dawned. The platform of the Mule millennial: Six quarts of oats at a feed; a blanket; two curry-combs of assorted fineness; no spurs; no whip; no cursing—this was a dim vision of futurity; alluring but delusive as the seductive rustle of grain in a tin pan, with the ensnaring halter deftly hidden.
Fortunately for the Mule his epidermis was thick and tough, a non-conductor of pain, as it were; fortunately for his flagitious tormentor, likewise for other glowing lights of genus human, he was speechless. If the Mule could talk! What new aspects would be given to war-memoirs; what side-gleams would be thrown on historic events; what showers and floods of reinforcement would be added to the gurgling, vasty streams of patriotic reminiscence. He had his opinions on the conduct of the war, and on the character of the warriors, also the teamsters; but those opinions remain unrecorded and to all intents and purposes unexpressed. He reserved them, which would be deliciously sweet of him, don't you know, if it had not been involuntary and unavoidable.
Out in Oregon, apples grow to the diameter of Daniel Webster's skull, though with diluted flavor and contradictory aromas, it is claimed; but the inefficiently tutored Shoshone nevertheless affects his dejeuner of decayed salmon whose aroma is indisputable and widely permeative. Arizona, latitude some hundreds of feet below the sea level, offers a splendid climate in exceptionally large quantities, where the insidious and terrible tubercle is unknown; but some of her citizens are accused of entertaining loose opinions as to the strict enforcement of law, and low, coarse views of the editorial function.
At Spuyten-Duyvel-on-Hudson, the local four hundred, exploiting the astrakhan hair and chinchilla whiskers inherited from a fused Iroquois and Rotterdam ancestry, can only be coaxed into activity by an elaborate expenditure of stimulants; then, however, they will very cheerfully pump you full of sententious legendary lore while you wait. In Rhode Island, walk under the mistletoe with a young lady and tradition will do the rest. In Chicago, hand an attractive widow out of a cable car, and gossips will supply all necessary additional ingredients for a five-column sensation. Thus every locality has its advantages and its drawbacks, its vexations and its compensations. By parallel lines of illustration it may be demonstrated that what the Mule lacks in volubility he fully makes up in sagaciousness.
The capacity of this observant, discriminating animal to sit in judgment on the character of his stridulous driver can scarcely be subject to reasonable question. The judicial cast of intellect is so universally associated with solemnity of visage that the terms become substantially interconvertible, like the principles of a polished politician. When the Army Mule lowers his head and lifts his eyebrows and searches profoundly through his stable litter with his deliberative hoof, the rich trolley-line tenor of his tuneful meditations were worth a royal largess to read, assimilate and store away for reference.
The animated dialogue between a truckman and a cab driver in a New York street blockade is said to embody linguistic traits and miracles of lexicography peculiar to the atmosphere of that latitude. The murmurings of a town that is stricken with paralysis at the first intimations of a whisky famine, are marvelously intense and realistic. But the Army Mule's honest and unbiased opinion as to the true character of the army teamster, translated from his equi-asinine vernacular, and rendered into the anglo-effervescent jargon of the bivouac, would rattle like a regimental long-roll and yield aroma rivaling the effluvium of a lime-kiln. His reprobate tormentor, with no perceptible circulation of blood above the ears, presents multiplied testimonials of having long been habitually fed on aqua-fortis, hell-broth and ratsbane. Yet he reveals a cruel coldness that would freeze the milk in a mother's wasted breast or the marrow in her infant's fleshless bones. Hideous as is his chimpanzee conformation of countenance inherited from root-eating ancestors, it only indexes his whole physical structure—a sour aggregation of compost, vitalized by a fetid protoplasm. Within his Nova Zembla skull the pulpy and mysterious growth called brain lies fusty and fumid, steeped in the vapidity of its own purulence.
Offspring of the exiled offal and offscourings of civilization, he grew up in the back settlements untaught, untrained, unkempt, unchristened—not even vaccinated or manicured; and the unwholesomeness of his exhalations vie with the complexities of his vocabulary. The bath-room knows him never, nor tooth-brush ever. To night-shirt, napkin, finger-bowl and fine stationery he is as utterly alien as the remotest autocrat of Congo's jungles. The Indian has now become about as bad as the white man can make him. But it is the firm opinion of the Army Mule that there are lower depths. Somewhere between the Indian's level and that bottomless perdition, where the arches of Tophet redden in the glow of its quenchless flame, there is a midway plaisance tableland, reserved transcendent in its horrors for the ruminating promenades of the teamster terrific. Somewhat lower than the Indian; a little higher than satan and his imps—not much—there is the plane of character assigned with ghoulish gladness to the hare-lipped caliph of the wagon train, by one best fitted, through intimate, hourly association, to measure his moral girth and estimate his mental altitude. There let him roam and range. In years triumphant of the war era, now fast vanishing into the vague and misty past, he had his jubilant day. This bog-spawn of humanity, with his ashes-of-marigold face and his unthatched upper teeth, with his three-cornered hot temper that scorned life's amenities; this slouchy man with moist nostrils and an affliction in his left hip, who at one time hoped to sometime shine as chambermaid to a livery stable but failed, has run his course.
What a child is taught in the abstract he is liable to practice in the concrete, as his subjectivity develops into objectivity, his sentiment into devilment. The Mule driver's unamiable childhood was punctuated with copious threats that the goblins of desperation would get him if he didn't watch out. The events of his pseudo war experience fully verified this dreadful prophecy's prophetic inspiration. The goblins got him and energized him, until his fury often bade fair to shred the Mule into his by-products of kip-leather, trousers buttons and mucilage.