The Doubter goes on to give the genuine psycho-analytical data on most of the saints of Springfield at that time. These accounts are from his confidential records. For he treats the holy ones for all varieties of nervous disorder, epilepsy, and the like. He is quite sure Christ and Mohammed were epileptics, and that settles it with all such foolishness. But perhaps you too have doubted.
The Doubter’s variety of revelation during double consciousness is not all certified by the man who dreams he becomes Cave Man Thomas. It is not quite Y. M. C. A. enough.
CHAPTER IV
HISTORY OF THE MICHAELS FROM 1920 TO 2018
As news spreads of The Prognosticator’s Club, and of the remarkable tales and visions that are unfolded there, new men and women come to us, with the word that they, too, have a dream, persistent and recurring, of the Springfield of the next century. One such is Joseph Bartholdi Michael—whose father’s story belongs here in our narrative.
While many of the blacksmith shops of Springfield have slowly changed to garages, there is one in especial that has resisted the tide in a formidable way. It is the shop located on the southeast corner of Fifth Street and Capital Avenue. This place has kept most of the fancy horse-shoeing trade of the city in 1920.
The aged proprietor-patriarch, “The Iron Gentleman,” still does the heavy part of the work. He has,—with their own help, indeed, put three sons and three daughters through college, handsomely. He has trained his sons to his business and the extraordinary secrets of his shop, of which the whole tribe are inordinately proud.
In early youth he discovered the process of hammering out the old Damascus blades, and vastly improved upon it, and struck off a new type of sword for the world, and his work has remained in undeviating pattern and quality ever since. At his simple forge he hammers out those wonderful swords in plain sight of the passer-by or the detective from Europe. They cannot grasp the secret. He named his gift to the world, “The Avanel Blade.” It is waspish and supple, all-conquering in body and soul. Sideways it can be wound like watch spring steel, or even a coil of narrow ribbon. Edgewise it can cut more human flesh and bone than the heavy guillotine, it can cut straight through an iron or granite block of any thickness, as though it were cutting snow. In its standard form it is longer than the longest cavalry sword. It is the assumption of the strange old “Iron Gentleman” that it will be used mostly by women, his descendants, and in battle for this land. Legend has it that the blade is named for a sweetheart who died in his youth. Certainly there is no living Avanel. He and his sons and daughters, all of them trained to his trade, have shod the horses of the notables of the country round, of more than one president of the United States, and of innumerable forgotten candidates for the presidency who began their careers by ostentatiously going to his humble shop.
His daughters are quite accomplished in light, ornamental iron work. They are well bred, high strung girls, and have the vitality of young tigers. These girls and their father are responsible for the most remarkable phenomenon of the streets of Springfield in 1917. Inspired by the Amazons of the Russian Revolution, at the very beginning of that revolution, before it was declared a failure by the western world, they filled out an idea which had long been forming in their minds, and organized a troop of girl cavalry and offered it to the government for service against Germany. The girls were fully disciplined and equipped at the time of the declaration of war. Their services were refused, and almost all of the girls went into the stereotyped war work, many of them overseas. But now the whole body of troops is together again, riding our streets night and day, armed with the Avanel sword, and led, quite haughtily, by the Iron Gentleman’s youngest daughter.
The brothers have organized a similar group of cavalry, armed with the same blade, and call it The Horse Shoe Brotherhood. But, of course, it has not attracted the same attention as the dazzling girls. The Horse Shoe Brotherhood was not accepted by the government as a body. They enlisted, or were drafted, one at a time, in a conventional fashion. Many of the cavalry girls, following the example of the Michael women, are often gritty enough to shoe their own horses.
The “Iron Gentleman” is lean and ruddy, with a hooked and hatchet face. He has the habit of pointing his long, skinny fingers at the enemy he denounces, who may be present in imagination, or even in fact, while the oratory flows. Every street corner of Springfield is haunted with the legends of a series of fist fights in the boyhood biography of “The Iron Gentleman,” election scrimmages of his young manhood, and the like. It is said that at the interesting age of fourteen he broke half the street lamps of Springfield with well thrown cinders until one evening when he had his jacket thoroughly dusted by a most energetic father. He had several personal encounters on the streets of Springfield in middle age, horsewhipping some hereditary enemy, or thwarting some hereditary enemy who threatened, imminently, to horsewhip him.