In apprehension, more or less successfully concealed from casual scrutiny, I rose to my feet. At the same instant the porter precipitately re-entered, closely followed by six gendarmes, eight foot soldiers, a personage in a high hat, whom I afterward ascertained to be the mayor, and a mixed assemblage of citizens of both sexes and all ages, amounting in the aggregate to a multitude of not inconsiderable proportions. Agitating his arms with inconceivable activity and crying out words of unknown purport at the top of his lungs, the porter pointed accusingly at Zeno, at the locked box, at me!
For the moment I was left unmolested. With loud and infuriated cries the gendarmes threw themselves on the black box. The foot soldiers hurled themselves on Zeno the Great, precipitating him to the floor, and quite covering him up beneath a quivering and straining mass of human forms. The mayor tripped over a stool and fell prone. The populace gave vent to shrill outcries. In short and in fine, I may affirm, without fear of successful contradiction, that chaos reigned supreme.
One felt that the time had come to assert one's sovereign position as an American citizen and, if need be, as a member of a family able to trace its genealogy in an unbroken line to the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers at or near Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts. I drew forth from my pocket the small translating manual, previously described as containing English and French sentences of similar purport arranged in parallel columns, and, holding it in one hand, I endeavoured to advance to the centre of the turmoil, with my free arm meantime uplifted in a gesture calling for silence and attention; but a variety of causes coincidentally transpired to impede seriously my efforts to be heard.
To begin with, the uproar was positively deafening in volume, and my voice is one which in moments of declamation is inclined to verge on the tenor. In addition to this, the complete freedom of my movements was considerably impaired by a burly whiskered creature, in a long blouse such as is worn in these parts by butchers and other tradespeople, who, coming on me from behind, fixed a firm grasp in the back of my garments at the same instant when one of his fellows possessed himself of my umbrella and my small portmanteau.
Finally, I could not locate in the book the exact phrases I meant to utter. Beneath my eyes, as the printed leaves fluttered back and forth, there flashed paragraphs dealing with food, with prices of various articles, with the state of the weather, with cab fares, with conjectures touching on the whereabouts of imaginary relatives, with questions and answers in regard to the arrival and departure of trains, but nothing at all concerning unfounded suspicions directed against private individuals; nothing at all concerning the inherent rights of strangers travelling abroad; nothing at all concerning the procedure presumed to obtain among civilised peoples as to the inviolate sacredness of one's personal property from sumptuary and violent search at the hands of unauthorised persons—in short, nothing at all that would have the slightest bearing on, or be of the slightest value in explaining, the present acute situation. Given a modicum of leisure for painstaking search among the pages and a lessening of tensity in the state of the popular excitement, I should undoubtedly have succeeded in finding that which I sought; but such was destined not to be.
Of a sudden a chorus of exultant shrieks, louder than any of the cries that until then had arisen, caused all and sundry to face a spot near the door. The gendarmes had forced open the black box so highly prized by Zeno the Great and now bared its contents to the common gaze.
Mister President, think of the result on the minds of the mob already inflamed by stories of spies and infernal devices. The box contained six cannon balls and a German captain's uniform!
Ah, sir, how many times since then, dreaming in my peaceful bed of the things that immediately ensued, have I wakened to find my extremities icy cold and my body bathed in an icy moisture! Yet, in my waking hours, whene'er I seek mentally to reconstruct those hideous scenes I marvel that I should preserve so confused, so inchoate a recollection of it all, though from the picture certain episodes stand out in all their original and terrifying vividness.
Again do I hear the maledictions of the frenzied populace; again do I behold their menacing faces, their threatening gestures. Again, with pitying and sympathetic eyes, do I see myself hurried through the streets, a breathless prisoner, hatless, coatless—for my coat came away in the hands of the whiskered wretch in the blouse—deprived through forcible confiscation of my translating manual, by means of which I might yet have made all clear to my accusers, and still wearing on my sorely trampled feet the parting gift of Great-Aunt Paulina. Again am I carried for arraignment before a mixed tribunal in a crowded room of some large building devoted in ordinary times, I presume, to civic purposes.
The trial scene—how clearly do I envisage that! Come with me, Your Excellency, and look on it: Zeno the Great is there, writhing impotently in the grasp of his captors and, at such intervals as his voice can be heard, hoarsely importuning me to make all clear. The gendarmes are there. The troopers are there in full panoply of lethal equipment and carnage-dealing implements of war. The mayor is there, as before, but has lost his high hat. Hundreds of the vociferating citizens are there. And finally I—Roscoe T. Fibble—am there also, still preserving, I may fondly trust, such dignity, such poise, such an air of conscious rectitude as is possible, considering gyves on one's wrists, no covering for one's head, and a pair of embroidered bedroom slippers on one's feet.