Ladies and Gentlemen

by Irvin S. Cobb

You know how it is when a hoss goes balky. In less than no time at all the entire leisure class of Triple Falls were assembled, giving advice about how to get that hoss started again. They twisted his ear and they tried stoving in his ribs by kicking him in the side and they pushed against his hind quarters and dragged at the bit, and through it all that wall-eyed, Roman-nosed plug remained just as stationary as an Old Line Republican. Alongside of him, the Rock of Gibraltar would seem downright restless.

And then this Samson Goodhue comes bulging into the circle and takes charge. “Stand back, everybody, please,” he says, “while I show you how to unbalk a horse. Get me a few pieces of kindling wood, somebody,” he says, “and some paper or some straw or something.” Various persons hurry off in all directions, eager to obey. In every crowd there are plenty of suckers who’ll carry out any kind of orders if somebody who acts executive will give them. So when they’ve assembled his supplies for him he makes a little pile of ’em on the packed snow right under the cayuse’s belly and is preparing to scratch a match and telling Whiz Bollinger to climb back on his seat and take a strong grip on the reins, when Mrs. Oliver J. Doheny, who’s among the few ladies present, interferes with the proceedings.

Now this here Mrs. Oliver J. Doheny is at that remote period our principal reform element. She’s ’specially strong on cruelty to dumb beasts, being heartily against it. It’s only been a few weeks before this that a trapper trails down from across the international boundary with one of those big Canada bobcats that he’s caught in a trap and he’s got it on exhibition in a cage in Hyman Frieder’s Climax Clothing Store, when Mrs. Doheny happens along and sees how the thing sort of drags one foot where the trap pinched it and she begins tongue-lashing the Canuck for not having bound up its wounds.

When she’s slowed down for breath he says to her very politely: “Ma’am, in reply to same I would just state this: Ma’am, when my dear old mother was layin’ on her death-bed she called me to her side and she whispered to me, ‘My son, whatever else you do do, don’t you never try to nurse no sick lynxes.’ And, ma’am, I aim to keep that farewell promise to my dear dyin’ mother! But I ain’t no objections to your tryin’. Only, ma’am, I feels it my Christian duty to warn you right now that if you would get too close to this here unfortunate patient of mine he’s liable to turn you every way you can think of except loose.”

So on that occasion Mrs. Doheny thought better of her first impulse but now she is very harsh toward this stranger. “Do you mean to tell me,” she says, “that it is your deliberate intention to ignite a fire beneath this poor misguided animal’s—er—person?” Although a born reformer she was always very ladylike in her language.

“That, madam,” he says, “is the broad general idea.”

“How dare you!” she says. Then she says it again: “How dare you! Think of the poor brute’s agony!” she says.

“Madam,” he says right back at her, “you do me a grave injustice. Not for worlds would I inflict suffering upon any living creature. The point is, madam, that the instant this here chunk of obstinacy feels the heat singeing of him he will move. Observe, madam!” And before she can say anything more he has lighted the match and stuck it in the paper and the flames shoot up and, just as he’s predicted, Whiz Bollinger’s balked cayuse responds to the appeal to a dormant better nature.

You never saw a horse move forward more briskly or more willingly than that one did. There was just one drawback to the complete success of the plan and, as everybody agreed afterwards when the excitement had died down and there was time for sober reason, this Goodhue party as we called him then, or Good Sam as we took to calling him afterwards, couldn’t really be held responsible for that. The hoss moved forward but he stopped again when he’d gone just exactly far enough for the fire to get a good chance at Whiz’s shiny beautiful new buckboard, which it blazed up like a summer hotel, the paint being fresh and him having only that morning touched up the springs with coal-oil. A crate of celluloid hair combs burning up couldn’t have thrown off any prettier sparks or more of them. Before the volunteer fire department could put their uniforms on and get there that ill-fated buckboard was a total loss with no insurance.

This was Good Sam’s first appearance amongst us in, as you might say, a business capacity. It wasn’t long, though, before he was offering us more and more and still more evidences of his injurious good toward afflicted humanity. It was no trouble to show samples. With that misguided zealot it amounted to a positive passion.