It was five o'clock in the morning when Captain Maguffy delivered me at my hotel.
"Good-by, Captain," said I. "For a few moments I was afraid you were going to kidnap me—and now, by George! my only regret is that you didn't!"
He laughed heartily. "Well," he said, "if you really mean that, come back on board. I think it can be arranged."
But freedom was too sweet, and besides I had to make my living; so I reluctantly bade the captain good morning, and have thought of him affectionately ever since.
XVI
A PIONEER MANAGER
No record made by a grateful pen of the joys and trials of the lecture platform could be complete without some reference to the spiritual benefits made possible by the profession of "Gad and Gab," as Mr. Strickland Gillilan, the astute author of "Off Ag'in, On Ag'in, Finnigin," himself a happy worker in the vineyard of peripatetic eloquence, calls it, in the matter of friendships. Both as a producer and as a consumer of the platform product I have been the beneficiary of many friendships and acquaintances that I now hold among the cherished memories of my professional life. As I think of them now they rush in upon me with such tidal force that I find myself unable for lack of space to treat of them in this volume, and they must be left for other pages. And yet in the light of grateful reasoning it becomes clear that I should not close this portion of my story without some reference to one splendid soul, to whom primarily I owe all the happiness in this line of human effort that it has been my privilege and my blessing to enjoy, James B. Pond—the good old major, who during his long and busy career as an organizer and manager was guide, mentor, and friend, always faithful, always true, to the Man on the Platform. He was a big man in every way, physically as well as spiritually. The only misfit about him, if there were any, perhaps was in the size of his heart, which was, I suspect, too large even for his gigantic frame. If any man was ever born to be a pioneer in any kind of human endeavor requiring tenacity of purpose, scrupulous integrity, courage in the face of trial, tolerance of the shortcomings of others, and a dogged insistence upon "quality," that man was Major Pond, and he looked it.
If I were a painter, and wanted a model for one of those sturdy Americans who were not afraid of anything, and went out into the wilds of a new and dangerous country with all the zest of a boy on the trail of a fox, to hew by main strength a way that civilization might follow in his train, I should seek no further than that huge, strengthful figure, massive, graceful even in its ungainliness, surmounted by the frank, vigorous, hewn face that from its deep-set eyes flashed determination and kindliness always. Somehow or other Major Pond always made me think of the days of Forty-nine, and when he first dawned, or I should perhaps better say loomed, on the horizon of my life, I began first to sense the smallness of a mere library as a world in which to live, and to think of those vast, remoter stretches where men did not read and write romances, but lived them.