On a sycamore tree that has grown from the river bottom up opposite my bluff, a crow suns himself and eyes me foolishly. I never see a crow but I think of Poe, the weird, wild genius, and his heavenly rhythm. I don’t exactly fancy that bird, and if I were not too lazy I’d throw a pebble at him.
But let me go on with the history of the man who was kicked to death. “Shall I make him young or old?” I asked myself. “Young. Why? Because an old horseman would have had better sense than to get too close to a strange horse’s kicking end.” Again: “Ten to one an old horseman would have had the best horse in the world himself and would have been staying with him, telling everybody so, and proving it by his pedigree, instead of running around examining the hind legs of some other fellow’s worthless beast!
“Why, how nicely it all ravels out,” I laughed. “This reminds me of Conan Doyle. It must be so easy to write a catchy little book, without a line of literary merit in it, in which having the causes all in your own mind, you can reason back so glibly to effect and make it sound so real to thoughtless people. ‘Trilby,’ ‘Sherlock Holmes!’ Lord, where are we at that this kind of stuff can live in the same age with the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ and ‘Lorna Doone’?
“A young horseman,” I continued; “ah, then, there is more of it. Perhaps:
“‘A nearer one still,
And a dearer one yet
Than all others.’”
The crow turned ’round and deliberately winked his left graveyard eye at me. The villain! He knows the human heart. How fine the sunshine feels! “What would I not give,” I said aloud, “to know all that poor fellow’s history!”
The sycamore bowed its limbs; the crow gravely nodded his head. They would like to hear it, too.
A shadow darkened my rock. I glanced up, half frowning at being interrupted just as I was making up such a nice romance—with Poe’s raven helping me, too! A man sat down beside me. I didn’t notice him particularly, because I didn’t want to. I have a nasty habit of refusing to talk when I want to think. I never could do both at the same time. Indeed, I think the working of the lower jaw is fatal to the minds of most men. Besides, this is my rock. This hour is a slice of my time-cake (there are just so many slices in it before Waiter Death calls for the plate), and I have the right to eat it without the help of every loafing glutton who does not know the difference between the husks of idleness and the cake of labor.