As a specimen of the playful spirit in which the two men went at their work I recall a story told me that night by the major of how in a far western State, owing to a delayed train, they were kept waiting on a railway station platform for several hours.
"Look here, Pond!" said Clemens after much dreary waiting. "You may not know it, but this is a violation of our contract. You agreed to keep me traveling, and this ain't traveling: it's just nothing but pure, cussed condemned loafing!"
"All right, Mark," said the major. "Just a second and I'll fix you out."
The major walked up to the end of the platform, where there was an empty baggage truck standing in front of the baggage room door. This he pushed along to where Clemens was standing, and then picking the humorist up in his arms he put him on board the truck and wheeled him up and down the platform, to the astonishment of the gathered natives, until the train came in, thus filling his contract to the letter, as was his invariable custom.
Nor shall I ever forget the major's delightful characterization of the platform work of Matthew Arnold.
"Arnold spoke from a manuscript," said he. "It was a printed affair, done in large letters on ordinary cap paper, and bound up in a portfolio. This he insisted on having on an easel at his right hand. After bowing to his audience he would fasten his eyes on the manuscript and then turn and recite a sentence from it to the people in front. Then he would go back to the manuscript again, corral another sentence, and recite that. And so it went to the end of the show—and all in a voice that nobody could hear!"
The major paused a moment, and chuckled.
"General and Mrs. Grant attended the first Arnold lecture at Chickering Hall," he said. "The place was packed; but I got them seats, well back, but the best there were. After Arnold's lips had been moving without a sign of a word that anybody could hear for ten or fifteen minutes the General turned to Mrs. Grant and said, 'Well, my dear, we've seen the British Lion at least; but inasmuch as we cannot hear him roar I guess we'd better go home!' Grant was known as the silent man," continued the major; "but Arnold gave him a pointer on how a man could be silent and talking at the same time."
The major was a great believer in the value of Author's Readings by what he used to call "running mates,"—teams, as the vaudevillains have it. He had had great success with such combinations as Mark Twain and George W. Cable, Thomas Nelson Page and F. Hopkinson Smith, and Bill Nye and James Whitcomb Riley. Trotting in double harness had proved in these cases most profitable for everybody concerned, and the major was constantly in search of new alliances. How his ordinarily sane judgment ever came to be warped to such point that he could think of me in such a connection I cannot even pretend to surmise; but it did happen that in the mid-nineties of the last century he began singing a siren song in my ears, to which in an hour of greed and weakness I yielded, the burden of whose refrain was that R. K. Munkittrick of Puck, a man with a rare gift of buoyant humor, and I could make a fortune for everybody if we would only consent to "trot" together.
I had no particular illusions as to my abilities; but the fact that Major Pond believed I could do it was enough for me. If the Gaekwar of Baroda should ever assure me that a cracked bit of Pittsburg plate glass was a diamond of fairest ray serene, I should be inclined to think there was something in it so long as he wasn't trying to sell it to me, and so when Major Pond was willing to stake his professional reputation on it that Munkittrick and I would make a highly acceptable platform constellation it was not for me to refuse to twinkle.