Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His People

by Irvin S. Cobb

IV. A JUDGMENT COME TO DANIEL

THE sidewheel packet Belle of Memphis landed at the wharf, and the personal manager of Daniel the Mystic came up the gravel levee with a darky behind him toting his valises. That afternoon all of the regular town hacks were in use for a Masonic funeral, or he could have ridden up in solitary pomp. You felt on first seeing him that he was the kind of person who would naturally prefer to ride.

He was a large man and, to look at, very impressive. On either lapel of his coat he wore a splendid glittering golden emblem. One was a design of a gold ax and the other was an Indian's head. His watch-charm was made of two animal claws—a tiger's claws I know now they must have been—jointed together at their butts by a broad gold band to form a downward-dropping crescent. On the middle finger of his right hand was a large solitaire ring, the stone being supported by golden eagles with their wings interwoven. His vest was the most magnificent as to colors and pattern that I ever saw. The only other vest that to my mind would in any way compare with it I saw years later, worn by the advance agent of a trained dog and pony show.

From our perch on the whittled railings of the boat-store porch we viewed his advent into our town. Steamboats always brought us to the river front if there was no business more pressing on hand, and particularly the Belle of Memphis brought us, because she was a regular sidewheeler with a double texas, and rising suns painted on her paddle boxes, and a pair of enormous gilded buckhorns nailed over her pilot house to show she held the speed record of the White Collar Line. A big, red, sheet-iron spread-eagle was swung between her stacks, and the tops of the stacks were painted red and cut into sharp points like spearheads. She had a string band aboard that came out on the guards and played Suwannee River when she was landing and Goodby, My Lover, Goodby when she pulled out, and her head mate had the loudest swearing voice on the river and, as everybody knew, would as soon kill you as look at you, and maybe sooner.

The Belle was not to be compared with any of our little stem wheel local packets. Even her two mud clerks, let alone her captain and her pilots, wore uniforms; and she came all the way from Cincinnati and ran clean through to New Orleans, clearing our wharf of the cotton and tobacco and the sacked ginseng and peanuts and such commonplace things, and leaving behind in their stead all manner of interesting objects in crates and barrels. Once she brought a whole gipsy caravan—the Stanley family it was called—men, women and children, dogs, horses, wagons and all, a regular circus procession of them.

She was due Tuesdays, but generally didn't get in until Wednesdays, and old Captain Rawlings would be the first to see her smoke coiling in a hazy smudge over Livingston Point and say the Belle was coming. Captain Rawlings had an uncanny knack of knowing all the boats by their smokes. The news would spread, and by the time she passed the Lower Towhead and was quartering across and running down past town, so she could turn and land upstream, there would be a lot of pleasurable excitement on the wharf. The black draymen standing erect on their two-wheeled craft, like Roman chariot racers, would whirl their mules down the levee at a perilous gallop, scattering the gravel every which way, and our leisure class—boys and darkies—and a good many of the business men, would come down to the foot of Main Street to see her land and watch the rousters swarm off ahead of the bellowing mates and eat up the freight piles. One trip she even had white rousters, which was an event to be remembered and talked about afterward. They were grimy foreigners, who chattered in an outlandish tongue instead of chanting at their work as regular rousters did.

This time when the Belle of Memphis came and the personal manager of Daniel the Mystic came up the levee, half a dozen of us were there and saw him coming. We ran down the porch steps and trailed him at a respectful distance, opinion being acutely divided among us as to what he might be. He was associated with the great outer world of amusement and entertainment; we knew that by the circumstances of his apparel and his jewels and high hat and all, even if his whole bearing had not advertised his calling as with banners. Therefore, we speculated freely as we trailed him. He couldn't be the man who owned the Eugene Robinson Floating Palace, because the Floating Palace had paid its annual visit months before and by now must be away down past the Lower Bends in the bayou country. Likewise, the man who came in advance of the circus always arrived by rail with a yellow car full of circus bills and many talented artists in white overalls. I remember I decided that he must have something to do with a minstrel show—Beach & Bowers' maybe, or Thatcher, Primrose & West's.

He turned into the Richland House, with the darky following him with his valises and us following the darky; and after he had registered, old Mr. Dudley Dunn, the clerk, let us look at the register. But two or three grown men looked first; the coming of one who was so plainly a personage had made some stir among the adult population. None there present, though, could read the name the stranger had left upon the book. Old Mr. Dunn, who was an expert at that sort of thing, couldn't decide himself whether it was O. O. Driscoll or A. A. Davent. The man must have spent years practicing to be able to produce a signature that would bother any hotel clerk. I have subsequently ascertained that there are many abroad gifted as he was—mainly traveling salesmen. But if you couldn't read his name, all who ran might read the nature of his calling, for 'twas there set forth in two colors—he had borrowed the red-ink bottle from Mr. Dunn to help out the customary violet—and done in heavy shaded letters—“Representing Daniel the Mystic”—with an ornamental flourish of scrolls and feathery beaded lines following after. The whole took up a good fourth of one of Mr. Dudley Dunn's blue-ruled pages.

Inside of an hour we were to know, too, who Daniel the Mystic might be, for in the hotel office and in sundry store windows were big bills showing a likeness of a man of magnificent mien, with long hair and his face in his hand, or rather in the thumb and forefinger of his hand, with the thumb under the chin and the finger running up alongside the cheek. Underneath were lines to the effect that Daniel the Mystic, Prince of Mesmerism and Seer of the Unseen, was Coming, Coming! Also that night the Daily Evening News had a piece about him. He had rented St. Clair Hall for two nights hand-running and would give a mysterious, edifying and educational entertainment dealing with the wonders of science and baffling human description. The preliminaries, one learned, had been arranged by his affable and courteous personal representative now in our midst, Mr. D. C. Davello—so old Mr. Dudley Dunn was wrong in both of his guesses.

Next morning Daniel the Mystic was on hand, looking enough like his pictured likeness to be recognized almost immediately. True, his features were not quite so massive and majestic as we had been led to expect, and he rather disappointed us by not carrying his face in his hand, but he was tall and slim enough for all purposes and wore his hair long and was dressed all in black. He had long, slender hands, and eyes that, we agreed, could seem to look right through you and tell what you were thinking about.