We reposed side by side on a lichened log with our toes gouging the green moss, and he rolled a cigarette and proceeded:
Like I was just now telling you, his name was Samson Goodhue. So you can see how easy it was to twist that around into Good Samaritan and then to render that down for kitchen use into Good Sam. It was a regular trick name and highly suitable, seeing that he counted that day lost which, as the poet says, its low descending sun didn’t find him trying to help somebody out of a jam.
In fact, he really made a profession out of it. You might say he was an expert promoter. He wasn’t one of your meek and lowly ones, though.
They say the meek shall inherit the earth but I reckon not until everybody else is through with it.
Not Good Sam. He was just as pushing and determinated and persisting in his work as though he was taking orders for enlarging crayon portraits. And probably it wasn’t his fault that about every time he tackled a job of philanthropping the scheme seemed to go wrong. You had to give him credit for that. But after a while it got so that when the word spread that Good Sam was going around doing good, smart people ran for cover. They didn’t know but what it might be their turn next, and they figured they’d had enough hard luck already without calling in a specialist.
I remember like it was yesterday the first time I ever saw him operating—down in Triple Falls, this state. I hadn’t been there very long. Winter-time had driven a bunch of us beef-herders in off the range and we were encouraging the saloon industry—in fact, you might say we were practically supporting it. That was before I quit. I haven’t taken a drink for fifteen years now but, at that, I figure I’m even with the game. The day I quit I had enough to last me fifteen years.
Good Sam hadn’t been there much longer than we had. He blew in from somewhere back East and to look at him you’d have said offhand that here was just an average pilgrim, size sixteen-and-a-half collar, three-dollar pants, addicted to five-cent cigars and a drooping mustache; otherwise no distinguishing marks. He didn’t look a thing in the world like a genius. His gifts were hidden. But it didn’t take him long to begin showing them.
One bright cold morning Whiz Bollinger came in from his place proudly riding in a brand-new buckboard that had cost him thirty-two dollars, and right in front of Billy Grimm’s filling-station the cayuse he was driving balked on him. You understand I’m speaking of a filling-station in the old-fashioned sense. We’d read about automobiles and seen pictures of them but they hadn’t penetrated to our parts as yet. If a fellow was going somewhere by himself he generally rode a hoss and if he was moving his womenfolks he packed ’em in a prairie-schooner. Sometimes he’d let ’em live in one for a few years so they could have constant change of scene and air. I recall one day a bunch of old-timers were discussing the merits of different wagons—Old Hickory and South Bend and even Conestoga—and old Mar’m Whitaker spoke up and says: “Well, boys, I always have claimed and always will that the Murphey wagon is the best one they is for raisin’ a family in.”
So Billy Grimm’s sign was a pile of empty beer kegs racked up alongside the front door. Sometimes in mild weather he’d have another sign—some wayfarer that had been overtaken just as he got outside and was sleeping it off on the sidewalk. After the first of November all the flies in the state that didn’t have anywhere else to go went to Billy’s place and wintered there. He was Montana’s leading house-fly fancier. He was getting his share of my patronage and I happened to be on the spot when this Bollinger colt decided to stop right where he was and stay there until he froze solid.