Ladies and Gentlemen

by Irvin S. Cobb

So the relief force would set out on the hunt for the missing pair. Any seasoned mountaineer could hold to their trail. There was the site where they had camped last night, the place where they had halted at noon today to graze the horses and eat their own luncheon; the cigarette butts and dead matches dropped by them. Eventually, picking up a clue here and a clue there, the searchers would arrive at this spot—to find what? A land-slip covering the only fit camp-ground in the Scalded Peak basin and covering it forty or fifty feet deep at that.

It would take a crew of men with tackles and hoists and explosives six months to explore the lower part of that slide, even if you conceded they could transport their machinery over the range and set it up. Yes, it would take longer than that. Because as fast as they excavated below, the smaller stuff would sift down from above and more or less undo what they had done. So they wouldn’t do it; they couldn’t.

Besides, what would be the use of trying? So the searchers would argue. Hurley and Chaney were buried in a mighty grave of the mountains’ own providing. Let them stay buried. That undoubtedly would be the final conclusion. It had to be.

Well, Hurley eternally would be buried, but as for him, he would be far away, released by the supposition, yes, by the seeming indubitable proof of a violent death, from all present entanglements—his debts, his distasteful obligations, his meager and unprofitable business back in that dull North Dakota town, which he hated. He would have quittance of certain private difficulties more burdensome to bear than any of these. And for good and all he would be done with that wife of his. And this thought was the most delectable of all the thoughts that he shuttled in review through his mind.

Heaven knows how often he had wished he might get clear of the woman, with her naggings and her suspicions and her jealousies. He cared for her not at all; he was sure she cared for him only in the proprietorial sense. She wanted him only because he was somebody to be scolded, somebody to be managed, something to take the blame for what went wrong. And there had been plenty going wrong, at that. She wouldn’t miss him; with her talent for dramatizing herself, she would glory in the rôle of widowhood. As for missing her—he grinned.

Let her take the insurance. He carried a policy for five thousand, the annual premium paid up, and sooner or later the insurance company would have to fork over. Five thousand was enough for her and more than she deserved. Let her collect it and save it or blow it in just as she pleased; she was welcome to it and welcome to what few odd dollars she might make from the sale of the shop. The prospect of an insurance company being mulcted for money not honestly owed appealed mightily to a phase of his nature.

Legally speaking, officially speaking, Herb Chaney would be dead and spoiling under these rocks, with his score wiped out and his transgressions atoned for. But the man who had been Herb Chaney would be abroad in the world, foot-loose as a ram, free as a bird, with no past behind him and all the future before him. Independence, irresponsibility, liberty, a fresh start, a good time—golly, but it sounded good!

It remained, though, not to muddle by any slip or miscue what Providence had vouchsafed. There should be more evidence, he decided, to support the plausible theory now provided; but no rebuttal to weaken or upset that evidence. He set about manufacturing this added evidence.