We only saw Montague to talk to but once that day. Then he peeked out from under the winder shade at the hotel and asked us if we’d told anybody where’d he been. When he found we hadn’t, he was thankful.
“You tell Petey,” says he, “that he’s won the whole pot, kitty and all. I don’t think I’ll visit him again, nor Belle, neither.”
“I wouldn’t,” says I. “They might write to Maudina that you was a married man. And old Stumpton’s been prayin’ for somethin’ alive to shoot at,” I says.
The manager give Jonadab and me a couple of tickets, and we went to the show that night. And when we saw Booth Hank Montague paradin’ about the stage and defyin’ the slave hunters, and tellin’ ’em he was a free man, standin’ on the Lord’s free soil, and so on, we realized ’twould have been a crime to let him do anything else.
“As an imitation poet,” says Jonadab, “he was a kind of mildewed article, but as a play actor—well, there may be some that can beat him, but I never see ’em!”
AS IT ENDED
GOD planned me for a butterfly,
But I was marred i’ the making;
What is it that old Omar says
Of the Potter’s hand a-shaking?
Ah, no, not that, the colors ran,
The form turned out awry,
And so I’m what they call a man
Who’d be a butterfly.
Farringdon Davis.