“I tell you, Erickson,” he would exclaim, “an externalized delirium tremens of this sort is worse than drink. Beats me how people ever came to think well of these critters. They’re the most painfully unpleasant denizens of this earth that I have ever encountered—to me. Tastes differ of course, but I can’t help feeling that nobody really likes ’em, and pretences to the contrary are just plain lies, or the deponents have never enjoyed the advantages of a public school education, a hot bath, towels, soap, the morning newspaper, pure food, clean shirts, and the white things that generally go to make up white civilization—in other words, Alfred, they’re just savages like these big and little demons all around us.”
“How about Ziliah?” I might ask mischievously.
The handsome fellow would smile bewitchingly. “Say Erickson, if Ziliah and I ever go to housekeeping we’ll cut out the snakes—I will—and I’ll start up Anti-Snake missions, until we get the people converted into regular Christians—the real Irish sort. Then I’ll come the St. Patrick act on them, and exterminate the varmints, and coming generations, hereabouts, will call me blessed.”
We were somewhat more astonished to enter the western doorway of the Capitol and still find no one, but we could see darkly through its dingy length—the radium lamps were covered—and noted a crowd outside of its eastern entrance. At the same time something like beating cymbals and tanging drums came to our ears, and then unmistakably the shouts of people.
“They’ve come back,” shouted Oogalah in his lingo, and he rushed past us, mad with expectation.
We followed him with almost equal precipitancy, and the bag of radium mineral that had cost us all this effort was forgotten. Oogalah dropped it, we neglected it in the sudden excitement, and—it was never again found.
CHAPTER XII
The Pool of Oblation
Oogalah was right. It was the return of the pilgrims, and the delighted city, plunged for days in wondering doubt over their safety had rushed bodily out to meet them. Our momentary importance was hopelessly eclipsed. I dreaded lest it might undergo an inverted resurrection, and that these potent little men, incensed over our discovered depredations, might turn angrily upon us and destroy us. For the moment I forgot these apprehensions in pure admiration at the novel exhibition.
When we emerged on the courtyard at the eastern entrance of the Capitol we found the broad mound on which the gold house was erected crowded. Immediately in front of it was a jostling mass of women, and prominent among them, by reason of stature and position, was standing the pretty Ziliah, arrayed in certainly her best and most becoming costume, at the head of the broad stairway, a view down which led the eye straight eastward over the wide thoroughfare, now fenced in by enthusiastic multitudes. Literary reminders constantly recur to me, and just then I was amused to find myself picturing Rome when Pompey entered it and recalling Marullus’ proud words, in Julius Caesar: