He was old enough to know better, and a superficial observer might have thought that he did. But a severe and haughty manner in repose is not any indication of knowledge, nor is a well-kept beard, even when it is turning gray. Melrose Welty, the possessor of these and other ways and features symbolical of wisdom, had no higher occupation in life than to sit in club-houses and cafés, telling of conquests won by him over women, chiefly over soubrettes and chorus girls.
Of his means of livelihood, no one had certain knowledge. He always dressed well, but he abode in a lodging-house, to which he never invited any of his associates. He affected the society of newspaper men, some of whom pronounced him a good fellow until they discovered that he was an ass; and he never refused an invitation to have a drink.
When he had you at a table in a quiet corner of a café, or in front of a bar, or in the lobby of a theatre between the acts, no matter how the conversation began, he would invariably turn it into that realm to which his thoughts were confined.
“I've got a supper on hand to-night after the performance,” he would probably say, “with a blonde in the —— Company. A lovely girl, too! It's curious, old man, how I happened to meet her. I've talked to her only twice, but I made a hit with her in the first five minutes. I'll tell you how it was—”
Whereupon, if you were polite, and did not know Welty sufficiently to flee on a pretext, he would tell you how it was, inflicting upon you the wearisome minute details of the most commonplace thing in the world, the birth and growth of an acquaintance between a man about town and a silly young woman, not fastidious as to who pays for her food and drink as long as the food and drink are adequate.
If you were a newspaper man, Welty was apt to supplement his story with something like this:
“By the way, old fellow, if you have any pull with your dramatic editor, can't you give her a line or two? She hasn't much to do in the piece, but she does it well, and she's clever. She may get a good part one of these days. Have something nice said about her, won't you?”
And if you ever gave another thought to this plea, you determined to use whatever influence you had with the dramatic editor to this effect, that the young woman would have to exhibit very decided cleverness indeed ere she should have “something nice” said about her in the paper.
Welty was not wont to retain one divinity on the altar of his conversation longer than a week. But he did so once. He talked about the same girl every day for a month. And thereby came his undoing.
She was a slender little girl who was singing badly a small rôle in a certain comic opera at the time of these occurrences. She had a babyish manner across the footlights, and she was thought to be a blonde, for she was wearing a yellow wig over her own short black hair that season. Her first name was Emily.
Welty managed to be introduced to her by thrusting himself upon a little party of which she was a member, and in which was one acquaintance of his, at a restaurant one night. He called upon her at her boarding house the next day, where she received him with some surprise, and left most of the conversation to him. When he visited there again, she caused him to be told that she was out, and this took place a half dozen times. Their real acquaintance never went any further, but an imaginary acquaintance between them, growing from Welty's wish, made great progress in his fancy and in the stories told by him at his club to groups of men, some of whom doubted and looked bored, while others believed and grinned and envied.
It was at the point where Emily had quite forgotten Welty, and Welty's stories portrayed her as recklessly adoring him and seeking him in cabs at all hours, that Barry McGettigan, a despised young reporter, “doing police,” heard one of Welty's accounts of an alleged interview with Emily; and Barry, who had a way of knowing human nature and observing people, suspected.
Now Barry cherished a deep-rooted grudge against Welty, all the more dangerous because Welty was unaware of it. Its exact cause has never been torn from Barry's breast. Some have ascribed it to Welty's having mimicked Barry's brogue before a crowd in a saloon one night. Others have laid it to the following passage of words, which is now a part of the ancient history of the Nocturnal Club.
“Spakin' of ancestors,” Barry began, “I'd loike to bet—”
“I'd like to bet,” broke in Welty, “that your own ancestry leads directly to the Shandy family.”
There was a general laugh, which Barry, whose nose was as flat as any Shandy's could have been but who had never read Sterne, did not understand.
“What did he mane?” Barry asked a friend. The friend told him to read “Tristram Shandy.” He spent two hours in a public library next day and learned how his facial peculiarity had been used by Welty to create a laugh and incidentally to insult him.
This he never forgave. And he bided his time.
Now, having heard Welty boast of being the object of this Emily's infatuation, Barry McGettigan deflected his mind from the contemplation of murders, infanticides, fires, and other matters of general interest, and gave his best thoughts and skill to investigating this talked-of love affair of Welty's.
He discovered the true situation within three days. He found that Emily was engaged to be married to a college football player who came to the city once a week to see her.
He borrowed money, made himself very agreeable to Welty, and also got himself introduced to the football player. The latter was a tall, lithe, heavy-shouldered, brown-faced, thick-knuckled youth, who practiced all kinds of athletic diversions.
Barry McGettigan sounded the football man in one brief interview one night, between the acts of the comic opera, at the saloon next door. He found a means of fastening himself upon the football player's esteem. The collegian expressed a mild desire to see something of police-station life. Barry invited him to spend an evening with him on duty at Central Station. The collegian accepted. Barry appointed a time and named a certain café as a meeting place.
Then Barry invited Welty to dine with him at the same café on the same evening at the same hour. By means of his borrowed money, he had lavished costly drinks upon Welty of late, and Welty had reason to anticipate a dinner worth the accepting. Barry told Welty nothing of the collegian and he told the collegian nothing more of Welty.
When the evening came, Barry found Welty awaiting him at the café. The two sat down at a table. The preliminary cocktail had only arrived when in walked the collegian. Barry saluted him as if the meeting had only occurred by chance. He made the collegian and Welty known to each other by name only. And then he ordered dinner.
When a bottle had been drunk, Barry innocently turned the current of the conversation to women. He spoke modestly of a mythical conquest he had recently made. The football player listened without showing much interest. Presently Barry paused.
Welty took a drink and began:
“No, my boy,” said he to Barry, “you're wrong there. It's like you youngsters to think you know all about the sex, but the older you grow the less you think you know about them, until you get to my age.”
Barry made no answer, but looked at Welty with becoming deference.
The football man's eyes were wandering about the café, showing him to be indifferent to the theme of discussion.
“I know,” continued Welty, “that many more or less writers have said, as you say, that women must be sought and pursued to be won. They deduce that theory from the habits of lower animals and of barbarous nations, in which the man obtains the woman by chase and force. But it's all a theory, and simply shows that the learned writers study their books instead of their fellow men and women.”
The collegian looked restless, as if the conversation had gotten beyond his depth.
Barry remained silent, and with a flattering aspect of great interest in Welty's observations.
“Now,” went on Welty, striking the table with the bottom of his glass, “I've had a little experience of this sort of thing in my time, and I can say that in nine cases out of ten, once you've attracted the attention of your game, let it alone and it will chase you. That's how to win women.”
The collegian looked bored.
“Just to illustrate,” said Welty, “I'll tell of a little conquest of my own. I use it because it is the first that comes to my mind, not that I'm given to bragging about my success in these matters. I suppose you've seen the opera at the —— Theatre?”
The collegian ceased looking bored. Barry McGettigan sat perfectly, unnaturally still.
“And,” pursued Welty, “you've doubtless noticed the three girls who appear as the queen's maids of honour?”
The collegian looked somewhat concerned. Barry stopped breathing.
“Well,” continued Welty, “you mayn't believe it, for we've kept it really quiet, one of them girls is really dead gone on me.”
The collegian opened his mouth wide, and Barry began to nervously tap his hand upon the table.
“It's the one,” said Welty, “who wears the big blond wig. Her name's Emi—”
There was the noise of upsetting plates, bottles, and glasses, of a man's feet rapping up against the bottom of a table and his head thumping down against the floor. There was the sight of an agile youth leaping across an overturned table and alighting with one foot at each side of the prostrate form of an astonished man, whose gray whiskers were spattered with blood. There was the quick gathering of a crowd, an excited explanation on the part of the collegian, a slow recovery on the part of the man on the floor, and Barry McGettigan's vengeance was complete.
For, by one of those incredible coincidences that have the semblance of fatality, the football player's fist had reduced Melrose Welty's nose to a flatness which the nose of no imaginable Shandy ever has surpassed.
She was the wife of a railway locomotive engineer, and the two lived in the newly built house to which he had taken her as a bride a year before.
Many other people in the country railroad town used to laugh at a thing which she had once said to a gossiping neighbour:
“I can tell the sound of the whistle on Tom's engine from all other whistles. Every afternoon when his train gets to the crossing at the planing-mill, I hear that whistle, and then I know it's time to get Tom's supper.”
The gossips found something humourous in the fact that the engineer's wife recognized the whistle of her husband's engine and knew by it when to begin to prepare his supper. So are the small manifestations of love and devotion regarded by coarse minds. You frequently observe this in the conduct of certain people at the theatre when tender sentiments are uttered upon the stage.
Perhaps the men were envious of the engineer. He had a prettier wife, they said, when he was not present, than was deserved by a mere freight engineer, very recently elevated from the post of fireman. Perhaps, also, the petty malevolence of the women was due to the wife's superior comeliness. Be that as it may, each afternoon at half-past four or thereabouts, when Tom's whistle was blown at the crossing by the planing-mill, loungers in the grocery store and wives in their kitchens smiled knowingly and said:
“Time to begin to get Tom's supper, now.”
But the engineer was careless and his wife was disdainful of their neighbours. She loved the sound of that whistle. In the earliest days of their married life it even sent the crimson to her cheeks. The engineer could make it as expressive as music. It began like a sudden glad cry; it died away lingeringly, tenderly. Virtually it said to one pair of ears:
“My darling, I have come back to you.”
Whenever the engineer pulled the rope for that particular signal, he pictured his wife arising from her work-basket in their little parlour with a thrill of pleasure and affection, and passing out to the kitchen.
She, likewise, at the signal, made a mental image of Tom, seated in the engine cab, his one hand fixed upon the shining lever, his eyes fixed upon the glistening tracks ahead.
At six o'clock, usually, supper was hot, and Tom arrived through the front gateway, glancing at the flower-bed in the centre of the diminutive grass plot, carrying his dinner-pail, having divested himself of his grimy, greasy blouse and overalls at the great repair shops, where his engine had already begun, with much panting, to spend the night.
In a small railroad town on the main line, one is continually hearing locomotive whistles. All the inhabitants know that one long moan of the steam is the signal of the train's swift approach; that two short shrieks of the whistle direct the trainmen to tighten the brakes; that four, given when the train is still, are intended for the flagman, who has gone away to the rear to warn back the next train, and that they tell him to return to his own train as it is about to start; that five whistles in succession announce a wreck and command the immediate attendance of the wreck crew.
In the town many cheeks blanch when those five long, ominous wails of the escaping steam cleave the air. A husband, a son, a father who has gone forth blithely in the morning, with his dinner-pail full, may be brought out of the wreck, mangled or dead. And until complete details are known there is a tremor in the whole community. Some hearts beat faster, others seem to stand still. People speak in hushed tones.
One afternoon, the engineer's wife, observing the altitude of the sun, looked at the clock and saw that the time was a few minutes before five.
Tom's whistle had not yet blown.
At five-fifteen came the sound of another whistle. It was prolonged and then repeated. The engineer's wife stood still and counted.
Five!
The most docile and apparently cheerful patient in the —— Asylum for the Insane is a widow, still young, who spends the greater time of each day sewing and humming tunes softly to herself. Every afternoon at about half-past four she assumes a listening attitude, suddenly hears an inaudible whistle, smiles tenderly, starts up and places invisible dishes and impalpable viands upon an imaginary table, and then loses herself in a reverie which ends in slumber.
No striking clock is allowed within her hearing. It was long ago noticed that the stroke of five or any series of five similar sounds would cause her to moan piteously.
The people afar in the country town do not laugh now when they talk of Tom and the whistle which was shrieking madly as he and his engine plunged down the bank together on that day when the huge boulder rolled from the hillside stone quarry and lay upon the tracks, just on this side of the curve above the town.
The facts about the man we called “Whiskers” linger in my mind, asking to be recorded, and though they do not make much of a story, I am tempted to unburden myself by putting them on paper. It was mentally noted as a sure thing by everybody who saw him go into the managing editor's room, to ask for a position on the staff of the paper, that if he should obtain a place and become a fixture in the office, he would be generally known as Whiskers within twenty-four hours after his instalment.
What tale he told the managing editor no one knew, but every one in the editorial rooms deduced later that it must have been something a trifle out of the common, for the managing editor, who had gone through the form of taking the names of three previous applicants that afternoon and telling them that he would let them know when a vacancy should occur on the staff, told the man whom we eventually christened Whiskers that he might come around the next day and write whatever he might choose to in the way of Sunday “specials,” comic verses, or editorial paragraphs, on the chance of their being accepted.
The next day the hairy-faced man took possession of a desk in the room occupied by the exchange editor and one of the editorial writers, and began to grind out “copy.”
He was a slim, figure, with what is commonly denominated a “slight stoop.” His trousers were none too long for his thin legs, his tightly fitting frock coat, threadbare, shiny, and unduly creased, was hardly of a fit for his slender body and his long arms. It was his face, however, that mostly individualized his appearance.
The face was pale, the outlines symmetrical, but rather feeble, and the countenance would have seemed rather lamblike but for the fact that it was framed with thick, long hair and a luxuriant beard, which caressed his waistcoat.
These made him impressive at first sight.
On the first day of his presence, he said little to the men with whom he shared his room in the office. On the second day he grew communicative and talked rather pompously to the exchange editor. He prated of his past achievements as a newspaper man in other cities. He had a cheerful way of talking in a voice that was high but not loud. His undaunted manner of uttering self-praise caused the exchange editor to wink at the editorial writer. It engendered, too, a small degree of dislike on the part of these worthies; and the exchange editor made it a point to watch for some of the new man's work in the paper, that he might be certain whether the new man's ability was equal to the new man's opinion of it.
The exchange editor found that it was not. The new man had been in the office four days before any of his contributions had gone through the process of creation, acceptance, and publication. Some verses and some alleged jokes were his first matter printed. They were below mediocrity. The exchange editor ceased to dislike the whiskered man and thereafter regarded him as quite harmless and mildly amusing.
This view of him was eventually accepted by every one who came to know him, and he was made the object of a good deal of gentle chaffing.
He earned probably $15 or $20 at space rates, a lamentably small amount for so intellectual looking a man, but a very large amount considering the quality of work turned out by him.
Doubtless he would not have made nearly so much had not the managing editor whispered something in the ears of the assistant editor-in-chief, whose duty it was to judge of the acceptability of editorial matter offered, the editor of the Sunday's supplement, and other members of the staff who might have occasion to “turn down” the new man's contributions, or to wink at the deficiencies in his work.
One day Whiskers, with many apologies and much embarrassment, asked the exchange editor to lend him a quarter, which request having been complied with, he put on his much rubbed high hat and hurried from the room.
“It's funny the old man's hard up so soon,” the exchange editor said to the editorial writer at the next desk, “It's only two days since pay-day.”
“Where does he sink his money?” asked the editorial writer. “His sleeping-room costs him only $3 a week, and, eating the way he does, at the cheapest hash-houses, his whole expenses can't be more than $8. No one ever sees him spend a cent. He must sink it away in a bank.”
“Hasn't he any relatives?”
“He never spoke of any, and he lives alone. Wotherspoon, who lodges where he does, says no one ever comes to see him.”
“He certainly doesn't spend money on clothes.”
“No; and he never drinks at his own expense.”
“He's probably leading a double life,” said the exchange editor, jestingly, as he plunged his scissors into a Western paper, to cut out a poem by James Whitcomb Riley.
Without making many acquaintances, Whiskers, by reason of his hirsute peculiarity, became known throughout the building, from the business office on the ground floor to the composing-room on the top. When he went into the latter one day and passed down the long aisle between the long row of cases and type-setting machines, with a corrected proof in his hand, a certain printer, who was “setting” up a clothing-house advertisement, could not resist the temptation to give labial imitation of the blowing of wind. The bygone joke concerning whiskers and the wind was then current, and a score of compositors took up the whistle, so that all varieties of breeze were soon being simulated simultaneously. Whiskers coloured sightly, but, save a dignified straightening of his shoulders, he showed no other sign that he was conscious of the rude allusion to his copious beard.
Whiskers chose Tuesday for his day off.
It was on a certain Tuesday evening that one of the reporters came into the exchange editor's room and casually remarked:
“I saw your anti-shaving friend, who sits at that desk, riding out to the suburbs on a car to-day. He was all crushed up and carried a bouquet of roses.”
“That settles it,” cried the editorial writer to the exchange editor, with mock jubilation. “There can be no doubt the old man was leading a double life. The bouquet means a woman in the case.”
“And his money goes for flowers and presents,” added the exchange editor.
“Some of it, of course,” went on the editorial writer, “and the rest he's saving to get married on. Who'd have thought it at his age?”
“Why, he's not over forty. It's only his whiskers that make him look old. One can easily detect a sentimental vein in his composition.”
“That accounts for his fits of abstraction, too. So he's found favour in some fair one's eyes. I wonder what she's like.”
“Young and pretty, I'll bet,” said the exchange editor. “He's impressed her by his dignified aspect. No doubt she thinks he's nothing less than an editor-in-chief.”
The next day Whiskers was taciturn, as his office associates now recalled that he was wont to be after “his day off.” Doubtless his thoughts dwelt upon his visits to his divinity. He did not respond to their efforts to involve him in conversation.
He was observed upon his next day off to take a car for the suburbs and to have a bouquet in his hand and a package under his arm. The theory originated by the editorial writer had general acceptance. It was passed from man to man in the office.
“Have you heard about the queer old duck with the whiskers, who writes in the exchange room? He's engaged to a young and pretty girl up-town, and eats at fifteen-cent soup-shops so that he can buy her flowers and wine and things.”
“What! Old Whiskers in love! That's a good one!”
One day while Whiskers' pen was busily gliding across the paper, the exchange editor broke the silence by asking him, in a careless tone:
“How was she, yesterday, Mr. Croydon?”
Whiskers looked up almost quickly, an expression of almost pained surprise on his face.
“Who?” he inquired.
“Ah, you thought because you didn't tell us, it wouldn't out. But you've been caught. I mean the lady to whom you take roses every week, of course.”
Whiskers simply stared at the exchange editor, as if quite bewildered.
“Oh, pardon me,” said the exchange editor, somewhat abashed. “I didn't mean to offend you. One's affairs of the heart are sacred, I know. But we all guy each other about each other's amours here. We're hardened to that sort of pleasantry.”
A look of enlightenment, a blush, a deep sigh, and an “Oh, I'm not offended,” were the only manifestations made by Whiskers after the exchange editor's apology.
It was inferred from his manner that he did not wish to make confidences or receive jests about his love-affairs.
A time came when Whiskers seemed to have something constantly on his mind. Not content with one day's vacation each week, he would go off for periods of three or four hours on other days.
“Do you notice how queerly the old man behaves?” said the editorial writer to the exchange editor thereupon. “Things are coming to a crisis.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Why, the wedding, of course.”
This inference received a show of confirmation afterward when Whiskers had a private interview with the managing editor, received an order on the cashier for all the money due him, and for a part of the managing editor's salary as a loan, and quietly said to the exchange editor that he would be away for a week or so. The editorial writer happened to be at the cashier's window when Whiskers had his order cashed. So when the editorial writer and the exchange editor compared notes a few minutes later, the latter complimented the former upon the correctness of his prediction that Whiskers' marriage was imminent.
“He didn't invite us,” said the exchange editor, “but then I suppose the affair is to be a very quiet one, and we can't take offence at that. The old man's not a bad lot, by any means. Let's do something to please him and to flatter his bride. What do you say to raising a fund to buy them a present, in the name of the staff?”
“I'm in for it,” said the editorial writer, producing a half-dollar.
They canvassed the office and found everybody willing to contribute. The managing editor and the assistant editor-in-chief had gone home, but as they had shown kindness to Whiskers, and were, in fact, the only two men on the staff who knew anything about his private affairs, the exchange editor took his chances and put in a dollar for each of them.
“And now, what shall we get—and where shall we send it?” said the exchange editor.
“Not to his lodging-house, certainly. He'll probably be married at the residence of his bride's parents, as the notices say. We'd better get it quick, and rush it up there—wherever that is—somewhere up-town.”
“But say,” interposed the city editor, who was present at this consultation, “maybe the ceremony has already come off. I saw the old man giving in a notice for advertisement across the counter at the business office an hour ago.”
“Well, we may be able to learn from that where the bride lives, anyhow, and some one can go there and find out something definite about the happy pair's present and future whereabouts,” suggested the editorial writer.
“That's so,” said the city editor. “The notice is in the composing-room by this time. I'll run up and find it.”
The city editor left the editorial writer and the exchange editor alone together in the room, each sitting at their own desk.
“What shall we get with this money?” queried the former, touching the bills and silver dumped upon his desk.
“Something to please the woman. That'll give Whiskers the most pleasure. He evidently loves her deeply. These constant visits and gifts speak the greatest devotion.”
“Of course, but what shall it be?”
The two were battling with this question when the city editor returned. He came in and said quietly:
“I found the notice. At least, I suppose this is it. What is the old man's full name?”
“Horace W. Croydon.”
“This is it, then,” said the city editor, standing with his back to the door. “The notice reads: 'On March 3d, at the Arlington Hospital for Incurables, Rachel, widow of the late Horace W. Croydon, Sr., in her 59th year. Funeral services at the residence of Charles—'”
“Why,” interrupted the editorial writer, in a hushed voice, “that is a death notice.”
“His mother,” said the exchange editor. “The Hospital for Incurables—that is where the flowers went.”
The editorial writer's glance dropped to the desk, where the money lay for the intended gift. The exchange editor sat perfectly still, gazing straight in front of him. The city editor walked softly to the window and looked out.
“I'm a bad man,” said Tobit McStenger, after three glasses of whiskey. And he was. In making the declaration, he echoed the expression of the community.
He looked it. Not only in the sneering mouth above the half-formed chin, and in the lowering eyes of undecided colour beneath the receding brow, but also in every shiftless attitude and movement of his great gaunt body, and even in the torn coat and shapeless felt hat—both once black, but both now a dirty gray—his aspect proclaimed him the preeminent rowdy of his town.
When out of jail he was engaged in oyster opening at Couch's saloon, or selling fresh fish, caught in the river, or vagrancy in the streets of Brickville. He lived in a log house containing two rooms, by Muddy Creek, an intermittent stream that flowed—sometimes—through a corner of the town. He was a widower and had a son nine years old, little Tobe, who went to school occasionally, but gave most of his day to carrying a paper flour-sack around the town and begging cold victuals, in obedience to paternal commands, and throwing stones at other boys, who called him “Patches,” a nickname descended from his father.
Little Tobe's face was always black, from the dust of the bituminous coal that he was compelled to steal at night from the railroad companies' yard. His attire was in miniature what his father's was in the large, as his character was in embryo what the elder Tobit's was in complete development. With long, entangled hair, a thin, crafty face, and stealthy eyes, he was a true type of malevolent gamin, all the more uncanny for the crudity due to his semirustic environments.
Such were Tobit and little Tobe, the most conspicuous of the village “characters” of Brickville, a Pennsylvania town deriving sustenance from its brick-kiln, its railroads, and its contiguous farming interests.
It was town talk that Tobit McStenger was a hard father; drunk or sober, he chastised little Tobe upon the slightest occasion.
“But,” said Tobit McStenger, after admitting his severity as a parent before the bar in Couch's saloon, “let any one else lay a finger on that kid! Just let 'em! They'll find out, jail or no jail, I'm ugly!” And he went on to repeat for the thousandth time that when he was ugly he was a bad man.
Whereupon the other loungers in Couch's saloon, “Honesty Tom Yerkes,” the hauler, Sam Hatch, the bill-poster, and the rest, agreed that a man's manner of governing his household was his own business.
Tobit McStenger had his word to say upon all village topics. When in Couch's saloon one night he learned that the school directors had decided to take the primary school from the tutorship of a woman and to put a man over it as teacher, Tobit pricked up his ears and had many words to say. He was working at the time, and he spoke in loud, coarse tones, as he wielded his oyster-knife, having for an audience the usual dozen barroom tarriers.
“I know what that means,” cried Tobit McStenger. “It means they ain't satisfied with having our children ruled with kindness. It means Miss Wiggins, who's kep' a good school, which I know all about, fer my son's one of her scholars—it means she don't use the rod enough. They've made up their minds to control the kids by force, and they went and hired a man to lick book learnin' into 'em. Who is the feller, anyway?”
“Pap” Buckwalder read the answer to Tobit's question from the current number of the BrickvilleWeekly Gazette.
“The new teacher is Aubrey Pilling, the adopted son of farmer Josiah Pilling, of Blair Township. He has taught the school of that township for three winters, and is a graduate of the Brickville Academy.”
Sam Hatch, standing by the stove, remembered him.
“Why, that's the backward fellow,” said he, “that the girls used to guy. His hair and eyebrows is as white as tow, and when he'd blush his face used to turn pink. He always walked in from the country, four miles, every morning to school and back again at night. There ain't much use getting him take a woman's place. He's about the same as a woman hisself. He hardly talks above a whisper, and he's afraid to look a girl in the face.”
“Ain't he the boy Josiah Pilling took out o' the Orphans' Home, here about twenty years ago?” queried Pap Buckwalder.
“Yep,” replied Hatch. “I heerd somethin' about that when he went to the 'cademy here. He was took out of a home by a farmer, who gave him his name 'cause the boy didn't know his own, nor no one else did, and so he was brought up on the farm.”
“So that's the sort o' people they've put the education of our children into the hands uv!” exclaimed Tobit McStenger. “Well, all I got to say is, let him keep his hands off my boy Tobe, or he'll find out the kind of a tough customer I am.”
Tobit McStenger, in the few weeks immediately following this change in the primary school, remained continuously industrious, to the surprise of all who knew him. As Tobit was an expeditious oyster-opener, Tony Couch, the saloon-keeper who employed him, was much rejoiced. Tobit toiled at oyster-opening and little Tobe became regular in his attendance at school.
The new school-teacher, a broad, awkward, bashful youth, painfully blond, came to town and accomplished that for which he had been called. He brought discipline to the primary school, an achievement none easier for the fact that many of his pupils were in their teens, and incidentally he suspended Tobit McStenger the younger.
When little Tobe, glad of the enforced return to the liberties of his begging days, brought home his soiled first reader and told his father that the teacher had sent him from school with orders not to return until he could learn to keep his face clean, the father became swollen with an overflowing wrath. He swore frightfully, and started off, vowing that he would “show the white-faced foundling how to treat decent people's children.”
And he had two tall drinks of whiskey put on the slate against him at Couch's and proceeded to carry out his threat.
It was a cold day in December. Pilling, the teacher, sat near the stove in the little square school-room, listening to the irrepressible hum of his restless pupils and the predominating monotonous sound of a small girl's voice reciting multiplication tables.
“Three times three are nine,” she whined, drawlingly; “three times four are twelve, three times—”
The little girl with the braided hair stopped short. A loud knock fell upon the door.
A boy looked through the window, evidently saw the one who had knocked, then cast a curious look at Pilling, the teacher. Pilling observed this, and asked the boy:
“Who is it?”
After a moment of hesitation, the boy replied:
“It's old Patchy—I mean, Tobe McStenger's father.”
Pilling, whose bashfulness was manifest only in the presence of women, had the utmost calmness before his pupils. He walked quietly to the door and locked it.
McStenger, furious without, heard the sound of the bolt being thrust into place, whereupon he began to kick at the door. Pilling turned the chair facing his class and told the girl with the braided hair to continue.
“Three times five are fifteen, three times six—”
A crashing sound was heard. McStenger had broken a window. Pilling looked around, as if seeking some impromptu weapon. While he was doing so, McStenger broke another window-pane with a club. Then McStenger went away.
That evening, Pilling had Tobit McStenger arrested for malicious mischief. The oyster-opener was held pending trial until January court. He was then sentenced to thirty days more in the county jail. Meanwhile little Tobe mounted a freight-train one day to steal a ride, and Brickville has not seen or heard of him since. He enlisted in the great army of vagabonds, doubtless. Perhaps some city swallowed him.
Tobit McStenger felt at home in jail. It was not a bad place of residence during the coldest months. But for one defect, jail life would have been quite enviable; it forced upon him abstinence from alcoholic liquor.
Every period of thirty days has its termination, and Tobit McStenger became a free man. He returned to his old life, opening oysters during part of the time, idling and drinking during the other part. He made no attempt to spoil the peace of Aubrey Pilling, and he only laughed when he heard of the disappearance of Little Tobe.
Pilling, by his success in conducting the primary school, had won the esteem of Brickville's citizens. His timidity had diminished, or, rather, it had been discovered to be merely quietness, self-communion, instead of timidity. He had shown himself less prudish than he had been thought. Occasionally he drank whiskey or beer, which was looked upon as a good sign in a man of his kind.
Tobit McStenger did not know this. He invariably evaded mention of Pilling. People wondered what would happen when the two should meet. For Tobit was known to be revengeful, and he was now, more than ever, in speech and look, a bad man.
The expected and yet the unexpected happened one night in Couch's saloon,—the scene of most of the eventful incidents in Tobit McStenger's life since he had dawned upon Brickville. Tobit and Honesty Yerkes, Pap Buckwalder, old Tony Couch himself, and half a score others were making a conversational hubbub before the bar.
In walked Aubrey Pilling. He came quietly to an unoccupied spot at the end of the bar and ordered a glass of beer, without looking at the other drinkers. Some one nudged Tobit McStenger and pointed toward the white-haired young pedagogue. The noise of talk broke off abruptly.
McStenger placed his back against the bar, resting his elbows upon it, and turned a scornful gaze toward Pilling, who had taken one draught from his glass of beer.
“Say, Tony,” began McStenger, in his big, growling voice, “who's your ladylike customer? Oh, it's him, is it? Well, he needn't be skeered of me. I don't mix up with folks o' his sort. You see, people could only expect to be insulted through their children by fellows of his birth—”
“Hush, Mack!” whispered Tony Couch, whose sense of deportment advised him that McStenger was treading forbidden ground. Pilling had not looked up. He stood quietly at some distance from the others, intent upon his glass of beer on the bar before him, perfectly still.
But McStenger went on, more loudly than before:
“By fellows, as I said, who came from orphans' homes, and never knew who their parents was, and whose mothers may have been God knows what—”
Pilling, without turning, had lifted his glass. With an easy motion he had tossed its remaining contents of beer into the face of Tobit McStenger. The latter drew back from the splash of the liquid as if stung. Then, with a loud cry of rage, he leaped toward Pilling. The teacher turned and faced him.
McStenger clapped one huge hand against Pilling's neck, and in an instant thereafter his long, bony fingers were pressing upon the teacher's throat, in what had the looks of a fatal clutch. But Pilling, with both his arms, violently forced McStenger from him. The teacher took breath and McStenger reached for a whiskey decanter. The others in the saloon looked on with eager interest, fearing to come between such formidable combatants. Tony Couch ran out in search of the town's only policeman. McStenger advanced toward the teacher.
Pilling was farm bred. He had chopped down trees with his right arm alone in his time. Pilling thrust forth his arm with unexpected suddenness. Upon the floor, six feet behind his antagonist, was a cuspidor with jagged edges.
And Tobit McStenger slept with his fathers.
The jury acquitted the teacher on the plea of self-defense. The loungers in Couch's saloon judiciously said that it was a very bad break for Tobit McStenger to have made.