My friend the tune-maker has often unintentionally amused his acquaintances by the gravity with which he attributes significance to the most trivial occurrences.
He turns the most thoughtless speeches, uttered in jest, into prophecies.
“Very well,” he used to say to us at a café table, “you may laugh. But it's astonishing how things turn out sometimes.”
“As for instance?” some one would inquire.
“Never mind. But I could give an instance if I wished to do so.”
One evening, over a third bottle, he grew unusually communicative.
“Just to illustrate how things happen,” he began, speaking so as to be audible above the din of the café to the rest of us around the table, “I'll tell you about a man I know. One February morning, about eight years ago, he was hurrying to catch a train. There was ice on the sidewalks and people had to walk cautiously or ride. As he was turning a corner he saw by a clock that he had only five minutes in which to reach the station, three blocks away. An instant later he saw a shapely figure in soft furs suddenly describe a forward movement and drop in a heap to the sidewalk, ten feet in front of him. A melodious light soprano scream arose from the heap. A divinely turned ankle in a quite human black stocking was momentarily visible. He was by the side of the mass of furs and skirts in three steps.
“He caught the pretty girl under the arms and elevated her to a standing posture. She recovered her breath and her self-possession promptly and glowed upon him with the brightest of smiles. He had never before seen her.
“'Oh, thank you,' she said; adding, with the unconscious exaggeration of a schoolgirl, 'You've saved my life.'
“Realizing the absurdity of this speech, she blushed. Whereupon her rescuer, feeling that the situation warranted him in turning the matter to jest, replied:
“'That being the case, according to the rules of romance, I ought to marry you, like all the men who rescue the heroines in stories.'
“'Oh,' she answered, quickly, 'this isn't in a novel; it's real life.'
“'Yes; besides which, I see by the clock over there I have only four minutes in which to catch a train. Good morning.'
“And he ran off without taking a second glance at her. He arrived at the station in due time.
“Three years after that he married the most charming woman in the world, after an acquaintance of only six months.
“This woman is as beautiful as she is amiable. Nature has not been guilty of a single defect in her construction. A tiny scar upon her knee is all the more noticeable because of its solitude.
“It is a peculiarity of scars that each has a history. The history of this one has thus far, for no adequate reason, remained a family secret.
“Another noteworthy fact about scars is that they may be, and in many cases they are, useful for purposes of identification.
“Of course you anticipate the dramatic climax of my story, gentlemen. Nevertheless, let me give it, for the sake of completeness, in the form of a dialogue between the husband and the wife.
“'How came the wound there?'
“'Oh, I fell against the corner of a paving-stone one icy morning three years ago.'
“'And to think that I was not there to help you up!'
“'True; but another young man served the purpose, and I'm afraid he missed a train on my account.'
“'What! It wasn't on the corner of —— and —— Streets?'
“'It was just there. How did you know?'
“So you see, as they completely proved by comparing recollections, the little speech uttered in merriment had been prophetic, a fact that they probably would never have learned had it not been for the identifying service of the scar.”
“But if this has been kept a family secret, how do you happen to know it, and by what right do you divulge it?” one of us asked.
The ballad composer blushed and clouded his face with tobacco smoke; and then it recurred to us all that “the most charming woman in the world” is his wife.
This is not an attempt to palliate the foolishness of Billy Folsom. It is not an essay in the emotional or the pathetic. You may pity him or reproach him, if you like, but my purpose is not to evoke any feeling toward or opinion of him. I do not seek to play upon your sympathies or to put you into a mood, or to delineate a character. I simply tell the story of how certain critical points in a man's life were accompanied by music; how a destiny was affected by a tune. Anything aside from mere narrative in this account will be incidental and accidental. The manifestations of love, of wounded vanity, of recklessness; of even the death itself, are here subsidiary in interest to the train of circumstance. He who underwent them is not the hero of the recital; she who caused them is not the heroine. The heroine is a melody, the waltz tune of “La Gitana.”
Everybody remembers when the tune was regnant. Its notes leaped gaily from the strings of every theatre orchestra; soubrettes in fluffy raiment and silk stockings yelled it singly and in chorus; hand-organs blared it forth; dancers kicked up their toes to it; it monopolized the atmosphere for its dwelling-place; it was everywhere.
Until one night, however, it did not touch the ear of Billy Folsom. He had stayed late in the country, under the delusion that he was hunting. It seems there are a few shootable things yet in certain parts of Pennsylvania, and Folsom had the time and money to linger in search of them. He came back to town in fine, exhilarating November weather, and on one of these evenings when the joy of living is keenest, he and I strolled with the crowd. Why I strolled with Folsom I do not know, for he was not a man of ideas. He was even so bad as to be vain of his personal appearance, especially upon having resumed the dress of the city after months of outing.
We passed one of these theatres whose stages are near the street. A musical farce was current there. From an open window came the tune, waylaying us as we walked. The orchestra was playing it fortissimo. You could hear it above the footfalls, the laughter, and the conversation of the promenaders.
Folsom stopped. “Listen to that.”
“Yes, 'La Gitana.' It's all around. It's a catchy thing, and suits this intoxicating weather.”
“It goes to the spot. Let's go inside. What's the play?”
He turned at once toward the main entrance of the theatre.
“A farce called 'Three Cheers and a Tiger,'—a Hoyt sort of a piece. The little Tyrrell is doing her tambourine dance to the music.”
“Never heard of the lady,” he said to me. And then to the youth on the other side of the box-office window, “Have you any seats left in the front row?”
Folsom always asked for seats in the front row. This time it was fatal. As we walked up the aisle, Folsom ahead, the little Tyrrell shot one casual glance of her gray eyes at him, as almost any dancer would have done at a front row newcomer entering while she was on the stage. In the next instant her eyes were following her toe in its swift flight upward to the centre of the tambourine that her hand brought downward to meet it. But the one glance across the footlights had been productive. Folsom sat staring over the heads of the musicians, his gaze fastened upon the little Tyrrell, who was leaping about on the stage to the tune of “La Gitana.” His lips opened slightly and remained so. His eyes feasted upon the flying dancer in the rippling blond wig, his ears drank in the buoyant notes.
It is well known that power lies in a saltatorial ensemble of white lace skirts, pale blue hose, lustrous naked arms, undulating bodice, magnetic eyes, flying hair, and an unchanging smile, to focus the perceptions of a man, to absorb his consciousness, aided by a tune which seems to close out from him all the rest of the world.
And there, while this plump little girl danced and the frivolous, stupid crowd looked eagerly on, from all parts of the overheated theatre, began the tragedy of Billy Folsom.
He gazed in rapture, and when she had finished and stood panting and kissing her hands in response to applause, he heaved an eloquent sigh.
“I'd like to meet that girl,” he whispered to me, assuming a tone of carelessness.
Thereafter he kept his eye fixed upon the wings until she reappeared. And the rest of the performance interested him only when she was in view.
I knew the symptoms, but I did not think the malady would become chronic.
He managed to have himself introduced to her a week later in New York by Ted Clarke, the artist, who made newspaper sketches of her in some of her dances. Folsom saw her going up the steps to an elevated railway station. He ran after her, in order to be near her. He followed her into a car, where Ted Clarke, recognizing her, rose to give her his seat. She rewarded the artist by opening a conversation with him, and Folsom availed himself of his acquaintance with Clarke to salute the latter with surprising cordiality. She looked a few years older and less girlish without her blond wig but she was still quite pretty in brown hair. She treated Folsom with her wonted offhand amiability. He left the train when she left it, and he walked a block with her. With pardonable shrewdness she inspected his visage, attire, and manner, for indications of his pecuniary and social standing, while he was indulging in silly commonplaces. When they parted at the quiet hotel where she lived she said lightly:
“Come and see me sometime.”
To her surprise, perhaps, he came the next day, preceded by several dozen roses and a few pounds of bonbons.
Every night thereafter he was at the theatre where she was appearing, watching her dance from the front row or from the lobby, agitated with mingled pleasure and jealousy when she received loud applause, angry at the audience when the plaudits were not enthusiastic. When their acquaintance was two weeks old, she allowed him to wait for her at the stage door, and at last he was permitted to take her to supper.
There was a second supper, at which four composed the party. We had a room to ourselves, with a piano in the corner. The event lasted long, and near the end, while the other soubrette played the tune on the piano, and Folsom kept time by clinking the champagne glass against the bottle, the little Tyrrell, continually laughing, did her skirt dance, “La Gitana.”
Thus with that waltz tune ever sounding in his ears, he fell in love with her; strangely enough, really in love. She, having her own affairs to mind, gave him no thought when he was not with her, and when they were together she deemed him quite a good-natured, bearable fellow, as long as he did not bore her.
He made several declarations of love to her. She smiled at them, and said, “You're like the rest; you'll get over it. Meanwhile, don't look like that; be cheerful.” At certain times, when circumstances were auspicious, when there was night and electric light and a starry sky with a moon in it, she was half-sentimental, but such moods were only superficial and short-lived, and she invariably brought an end to them with flippant laughter or some matter-of-fact speech that came with a shock to Billy, although it did not cool his adoration.
Billy became quite gloomy. He was the veritable sighing lover. Although for a month he was admittedly the chief of her admirers and saw her every day, he seemed to make no progress toward securing a hospitable reception for and a response to his love.
One day, as they were walking together on Broadway, she said:
“You're always in the dumps nowadays. Really you must not be that way. Doleful people make me tired.”
And thereafter Billy, possessed by a horrible fear that his mournful demeanour might cause his banishment from her, kept making desperate efforts to be lively, which were a dismal failure. It was ludicrous. The gayer he affected to be, the more emphatic was his manifest depression. So she wearied of his company. One day he called at her hotel, and, as was his custom, went immediately to her sitting-room without sending in his card. Before he knocked at the door, he heard the notes of her piano; some one was playing the air of “La Gitana” with one finger. After two or three bars, the instrument was silent. Then a man's voice was heard. Billy knocked angrily. Miss Tyrrell opened the door, looked annoyed when she saw him, and introduced him to the tenor of a comic opera company of which she recently had been engaged as leading soubrette. Billy's call was a short one.
At eight o'clock that evening he sent this note to her from the café where he was dining:
“Will be at stage door with carriage at eleven, as before.”
He was there at eleven. So was the tenor. The little Tyrrell came out and looked from one to the other. Billy pointed to his waiting carriage. The dancer took the tenor's arm and said:
“I'm sorry I can't accept your invitation, Mr. Folsom. Really I'm very much obliged to you, but I have an engagement.”
She went off with the tenor, and Billy went off with the cab and made himself drunker than he had ever been in his life. At dawn his feet were seen protruding from the window of a coupé that was being driven up Broadway, and he was bawling forth, as best he could, the tune which had served indirectly to bring the little Tyrrell into his life.
After that night, it was the old story, a woman ridding herself of a man for whom she had never cared, and who indeed was not worth caring for. But the operation was just as hard upon Folsom as if he had been. You know the stages of the process. She began by being not at home or just about to go out. He wrote pleading notes to her, in boyish phraseology, and she laughed over these with the tenor. He made the breaking off the more painful by going nightly to see her dance that fatal melody. He watched her from afar upon the street, and almost invariably saw the tenor by her side. He drank continually, and he begged Ted Clarke to tell her, in a casual way, that he was going to the dogs on account of her treatment of him. Whereupon she laughed and then looked scornful, saying: “If he's fool enough to drink himself to death because a woman didn't happen to fall in love with him, the sooner he finishes the work the better. I have no use for such a man.”
No one has, and I told Billy so. But he kept up his pace toward the goal of confirmed drunkenness. He ceased his attendance at the theatre where she danced, only after he learned that the tenor had married her. But that dance of hers had become a part of his life. Its accompanying tune was now as necessary to his aural sensibilities as food to his stomach. He therefore spent his evenings going to theatres and concert-halls where “La Gitana” was likely to be sung or played. He rarely sought in vain. The melody was to be found serving some purpose or other at almost every theatre that winter. It was the “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay” of its time.
Some men who drink themselves to death require years and wit to complete the task. Others save time by catching pneumonia through exposure due to drink. Billy Folsom was one of the pneumonia class. He “slept off” the effects of a long lark in an area-way belonging to a total stranger. A policeman took him to his lodgings by way of the station house, and a day later his landlord sent for a doctor. Five days after that I went over to see him. He was in bed, and one of his friends, a man of his own kind, but of stronger fibre, was keeping him company. Billy told us how it had come about:
“I wouldn't have gone on that racket if it hadn't been for one thing. I'd made up my mind to turn over a new leaf, and I was walking along full of plans for reformation. Suddenly I heard the sound of a banjo, coming from an up-stairs window, playing a certain tune I've got somewhat attached to. I saw the place was a kind of a dive and I went in. I got the banjo-player to strum the piece over again, and I bought drinks for the crowd. Then I made him play once more, and there were other rounds of drinks, and the last I remember is that I was waltzing around the place to that air. Two days after that the officer found me trespassing on some one's property by sleeping on it. I dropped my overcoat and hat somewhere, and it seemed there must have been a draft around, for I caught this cold.”
I told Folsom to stop talking, as he was manifestly much weaker than he or his friend supposed him to be. There ensued a few seconds of silence. A loud noise broke upon the stillness with a shocking suddenness. It was the clamour of a band-piano in the street beneath Folsom's window, and of all the tunes in the world the tune that it shrieked out was “La Gitana.” I looked at Folsom.
He rose in his bed and, clenching his teeth, he propelled through their interstices the word:
“Damn!”
He remained sitting for a time, his hair tumbled about, his eyes wide open but expressive of meditation as the notes continued to be thumped upward by the turbulent instrument. Presently he said, in a husky voice:
“How that thing pursues me! It's like a fiend. It has no let-up. It follows me even into the next world.”
He sat for a moment more, intently listening. Then, with a quick, peevish sigh, he fell back from weakness. We by his side did not know it at the instant, but we discovered in a short time what had taken place when his head had touched the pillow, for he remained so still.
And that was the last of Billy Folsom, and up from the murmuring street below came the notes of the band-piano playing “La Gitana.”
Three of us sat upon an upper deck, sailing to an island. The day was sunlit, the wind was gentle, and the faintest ripple passed over the sea.
“Do you see the tremulous old man sitting over there by the pilot-house absorbing the sunshine? He reminds me of another old man, one whom I watched for six years, while he faded and died. He never knew me, but he walked by my house daily and I walked by his. It was an interesting study. The conclusion of the process was so inevitable. The time came when he did not pass my house. Then he took the sunlight in a bow-window on the second floor of his residence. So closely had I watched his decadence during the six years that I was able to say to myself one morning, 'There will be crape on his door before the day is out.' And so there was.”
The bon-vivant laughed rather mechanically, but the other, he who makes verses so dainty that the world does not heed them, smiled softly and sympathetically to me and said:
“You are right. Nothing is so fascinating as the study of a progress—a development or a decline. The inevitability of the end makes it more engrossing, for it relieves it of the undue eagerness of curiosity, the feverishness of uncertainty.”
“Well, I am content rather to live than to contemplate life,” said the bon-vivant. “It's true I have given myself up to observing anxiously such an advancement as you describe—a vulgar one you will say. When I was a very young man I was a very thin man. I determined to amplify my dimensions. I followed with careful interest my daily increase toward my present—let us not say obesity, but call it portliness.”
“You are inclined to be easy upon yourself,” I commented.
“Indeed I am—in all matters.”
After a pause the verse-maker, throwing away his cigarette, took up again the theme that I had introduced.
“Yes, it is an engaging occupation to note any progression, even when it is toward a fatal or a horrible culmination. But when it is to some beautiful and happy outcome, this advancement is an ineffably charming spectacle. Such it is when it is the unfolding of a flower or the filling out of a poetic thought.
“But no growth nor transformation in the material world is more entrancing to observe than that by which a young girl becomes a lovely woman.
“This transition seems to be sudden. It is not so. It is rapid, perhaps, as life goes, but each stage is distinctly marked. All men have not time to watch the change, however, and so most men awaken to its occurrence only when it is completed. Such was the case of the young and lowborn lover of Consuelo in George Sand's romance. Do you remember that incomparable scene in which he suddenly begins to notice that some feature of Consuelo is handsome, and, with surprise, calls her attention to its comeliness? She, equally astonished and delighted, joins him in the visual examination of her charms, and the two pass from one attraction to the other, finally completing the discovery that she is a beautiful woman.
“The Italian gamin was not the sort of man to have anticipated this transfiguration and to have watched its stages.
“You may argue that his delight at suddenly opening his eyes to the finished work was greater than would have been his pleasure at contemplating the alteration in process. Doubtless his was. As to whether yours would be in such a case, depends upon your temperament.
“I have experienced both of these pleasures. Perhaps it may be due to certain special circumstances that I cherish the memory of the more lasting delight, even though it was tempered by occasional doubts as to the end, more tenderly than I do the more sudden and keen awakening.
“There is a woman who first came under my observations when she was thirteen years old. She was then agreeable enough to the eye, more by reason of the gentleness of her expression than for any noteworthy attractions of face and figure. Her face, indeed, was plain and uninteresting; her figure unformed and too slim. Her hair, however, was charming, being soft and extremely light in colour. She seemed awkward, too, and timid, through fear of offending or making a bad impression.
“For a reason I was particularly interested in her. I knew, young as I then was, that plain girls, in many cases, develop into handsome women.
“At fourteen her hair showed indications of changing its tint. Its tendency was unmistakably toward brown. This was temporarily unfavourable, but a brightening of the blue eyes and a newly acquired poise of the head, with a step toward self-confidence in manner, were compensating alterations.
“At fifteen there came an emancipation of mind and speech from schoolgirl habits. A defensive assumption of impertinent reserve, varied by fits of superficial garrulity, gave way to real thoughtfulness, to natural amiability. Then came, too, an emboldenment of the facial outline, a constancy to the colour of the cheeks, a certainty of gait, and the first perceptible roundness of contour beneath the neck.
“At sixteen she had adorable hands, and she could wear short sleeves with impunity. A rational, unforced, and coherent vivacity had now revealed itself as a characteristic of her mode and conversation. Her ankles had long before that grown too sightly to be exhibited. Such is so-called civilization! Her hair seemed to darken before one's eyes. The oval of her face attracted the attention of more than one of my artist friends.
“At seventeen she had learned what styles of attire, what arrangements of her hair, were best suited to display effectively her comeliness.
“This was one of the greatest steps of all.
“The simplest draperies, she found, the least complicated headgear, were most advantageous to her appearance.
“A taste for reading the most ideal and artistic of books, as well as her liking for poetry, the theatre, music, and pictures had implanted that exalted something in her face which cannot be otherwise acquired.
“When she was eighteen people on the street turned to look at her as she passed.
“At nineteen her figure was unsurpassable. Indeed, I think there cannot be a more beautiful and charming woman in America. She is now twenty.
“It was my privilege to view closely the bursting of this bud into bloom.”
The fin de siècle versewright became silent and lighted a fresh cigarette.
“Will you permit me to ask,” said I, “what were the especial facilities that you had for observing this evolution?”
“Yes,” he answered, softly, a tender look coming into his eyes. “She is my wife. She was thirteen when I married her. Suddenly placed without means of subsistence, knowing nothing of the world, she came to me. I could see no other way. We are very happy together.”
The pretty narrative of the rhymer put each of us in a delectable mood. The notes of a harp and violins came from the lower deck in the form of a seductive Italian melody. White sails dotted the far-reaching sea.
The outcome has shown that “Busted” was not radically bad. But he was wretchedly weak of will to reject an opportunity of having another drink with the boys—or with the girls—or with anybody or with nobody.
In the days of his ascendancy, when he was a young and newly married architect, he was a buyer of drinks for others. Waiters in cafés vied with each other in showing readiness to take his orders. He was rated a jolly good fellow then. No one would have supposed it destined that some fine night a leering barroom wit should reply to his whispered application for a small loan by pouring a half-glass of whiskey upon his head and saying:
“I hereby christen thee 'Busted.'”
The title stuck. Blake, through continued impecuniosity, lost all shame of it in time; lost, too, his self-respect and his wife. Mrs. Blake, a gentle and pretty little brunette, had wedded him against the will of her parents. She had trusted, for his safety, to the allurements of his future, which everybody said was bright, and to his love for her.
The years of tearful nights, the pleadings, the reproaches, the seesaw of hope and despair, need not here be dwelt upon. They would make an old story, and some of the details might be shocking to the young person. They reached a culmination one day when she said to him:
“You love drink better than you love me. I have done with you.”
She was a woman and took a woman's view of the case.
When he came back to their rooms that night, she was not there. Then he knew how much he loved her and how much he had underestimated his love.
She did not go to her parents. There was a very musty proverb that she knew would meet her on the threshold. “You made your bed, now lie on it.” Her father was a man of no originality, hence he would have put it in that way.
She got employment in a photograph gallery, where she made herself useful by being ornamental, sitting behind a desk in the anteroom.
I know not what duties devolve upon the woman who occupies that post in the average photographer's service; whatever they are she performed them. But within a very short time after she had left the “bed and board” of Busted Blake, she had to ask for a vacation. She spent it in a hospital and Busted became a father. She resumed her chair behind the photographer's desk in due time, found a boarding-house where infants were not tabooed, and managed to subsist, and to care for her child—a girl.
Somebody lived in that boarding-house who knew Busted Blake, and it was through inquiries resulting from, this somebody's jocularly calling him “papa” one night in a saloon that Busted was made aware of his accession to the paternal relation.
When the poor wretch heard the news, he made a prodigious effort to keep his face composed. But the muscles would not be resisted. He burst out crying, and he laid his head upon his arm upon a beer-flooded table and wept copiously, causing a sudden hush to fall upon the crowd of topers and a group to gather around his table and stare at him,—some mystified, some grinning, none understanding.
The next day he made a herculean effort to pull himself together. He obtained a position as draughtsman from one who had known him in his respectable period, and he went tremblingly and sheepishly to call upon his wife and child.
The consequence of his visit was a reunion, which endured for two whole weeks. At the end of that time she cast him off in utter scorn.
How he lived for the next two years can be only known to those who are familiar through experience with the existence of people who ask other people on the street for a few cents toward a night's lodging. By those who knew him he was said to be “no good to himself or any one else.” He acquired the raggedness, the impudence, the phraseology of the vagabond class. He would hang on the edge of a party of men drinking together in front of a bar, on the slim chance of being “counted in” when the question went round, “What'll you have?” He was perpetually being impelled out of saloons at foot-race speed by the officials whose function it is, in barrooms, to substitute an objectionable person's room for his company.
One winter Sunday morning he slept late on a bench in a public square. Awakened by an officer, he arose to go. Hazy in head and stiff at joints, he slightly staggered. He heard behind him the cooing laugh of a child. He looked around. It was himself that had awakened the infant's mirth—or that strange something which precedes the dawn of a sense of humour in children. The smiling babe was in a child's carriage which a plainly dressed woman was pushing. He looked at the woman. It was his wife and the pretty child was his own.
He walked rapidly from the place, and on the same day he decided to leave the city. He had herded with vagrants of the touring class. The methods of free transportation by means of freight-trains and free living, by means of beggary and small thievery in country towns, were no secret to him. He walked to the suburbs, and at nightfall he scrambled up the side of a coal-car in a train slowly moving westward.
What hunger he suffered, what cold he endured, what bread he begged, what police station cells he passed nights in, what human scum he associated with, what thirst he quenched, and with what incredibly bad whiskey, are particulars not for this unobjectionable narrative, for do they not belong to low life? And who nowadays can tolerate low life in print unless it be redeemed by a rustic environment and a laboured exposition of clodhopper English and primitive expletives? Low life outside of a dialect story and a dreary village? Never!
Mrs. Blake and the child lived in a fair degree of comfort upon the mother's wages, but often the mother shuddered at thought of what might happen should she ever lose her position at the photographer's.
Consumption had its hold on Busted Blake when he arrived in the mining-town called Get-there City, in Kansas, one evening. Get-there City had not gotten there beyond a single straggling street of shanties. But it had acquired a saloon, although liquor-selling had already been forbidden in Kansas.
Busted Blake, with ten cents in his clothes, entered the saloon and asked in an asthmatic voice for as much whiskey as that sum was good for.
While awaiting a response, his eyes turned toward the only other persons in the saloon,—three burly, bearded miners of the conventional big-hatted, big-booted, and big-voiced type. Above their heads and against the wall was this sign, lettered roughly with charcoal, under a crudely drawn death's head:
“Five thousand dollars will be paid by the undersigned to the widow of the sneaking hound that informs on this saloon. This is no meer bluf. P. GIBBS.”
Blake, after a brief coughing fit, looked up at the man behind the bar,—a great thick-necked fellow with a mien of authority, and yet with a certain bluff honesty expressed about his eyes and lips. This man, whose air of proprietorship convinced Blake that he could be none other than P. Gibbs, had first looked sneeringly at the ten cents, but had shown some small sign of pity on hearing the ominous cough of the attenuated vagrant. He set forth a bottle and glass.
“Help yerself,” said P. Gibbs. While Blake was doing so, Mr. Gibbs went on:
“Bad cough o' yourn. Y' mightn't guess it, but that same cough runs in my fam'ly. It took off a brother, but it skipped me.”
Here was a bond of sympathy between the big, law-defying saloon-keeper and the frail toper from the East. Busted Blake drained his glass and presently coughed again. P. Gibbs again set forth the bottle, and this time he drank with Blake. Before long, by dint of repeated fits of coughing on the part of Blake, the sympathy of P. Gibbs was so worked upon that he invited the three miners in the saloon to join him and the stranger.
Blake slept in a corner of the saloon that night. He left the next morning, a curious expression of resolution on his face.
During the next three weeks he was now and then alluded to in P. Gibbs's saloon as the “coughing stranger.”
In the middle of the third week, at nine o'clock in the evening, when the lamps in P. Gibbs's saloon were exerting their smallest degree of dimness and the bar was doing a good business, the door opened and in staggered Busted Blake. His staggering on this occasion was manifestly not due to drink. His face had the hideous concavities of a starved man and the uncertainty of his gait was the token of a mortal feebleness. His emaciation was painful to behold. His eyes glowed like huge gems.
The crowd of miners looked at him with surprise as he entered.
“The coughing stranger!” cried one.
“The coffin stranger, you mean,” said another.
Busted Blake lurched over to the bar. His eyes met those of P. Gibbs on the other side, and the latter reached for a whiskey-bottle.
Blake fumbled in his pocket and brought forth a piece of soiled paper, which he laid on the bar under the glance of P. Gibbs.
“Keep that!” said Blake, in a husky voice, whose service he compelled with much effort. “And keep your word, too! That's where you'll find her.”
P. Gibbs picked up the paper.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“That woman's name there. It's the name of my widow; the address, too, of a photograph man who will tell you where she is. Get the money to her quick, before the governor and the troops comes down on you to close you up. And don't let her know how it comes about. Pick a man to take it to her,—let him pay his expenses out of it,—a man you can trust, and make him tell her I made it somehow, mining or something, so she'll take it. You know.”
P. Gibbs, who had listened with increasing amazement, opened wide his eyes and drew his revolver. He spoke in a strangely low, repressed voice:
“Stranger, do you mean to say—”
“Yes, that's it,” shrieked Busted Blake, turning toward the crowd of intensely interested onlookers. “And I call on all you here to witness and to hold him to his word. That's no mere bluff he says in his notice there, and I'm the sneaking hound that informed. My widow is entitled to $5,000. I did it in Topeka, and for proof, see this newspaper.”
P. Gibbs fired a shot from his revolver through the newspaper that Blake pulled from his shirt. Then the saloon-keeper brought his weapon on a level with Blake's face.
“It's good your boots is on!” said P. Gibbs, ironically.
But he did not fire. Blake stood perfectly still, awaiting the shot, and feebly laughing.
So the two remained for some moments, until Blake suddenly sank to the floor, quite exhausted. He died within a half-hour on the saloon floor, his head resting in the palm of P. Gibbs, who knelt by his side and tried to revive him.
At the next dawn, a man whom they called Big Andy started East, and the piece of paper that Blake handed to P. Gibbs was not all that he took with him. The United States marshal arrived and duly closed Gibbs's saloon, which reopened very shortly afterward, minus the $5,000 offer.
And Big Andy found the widow of Busted Blake, to whom he told a bit of fiction in accounting for the legacy conveyed by him to her that would have imposed upon the most incredulous legatee. When she had recovered from the surprise of finding herself and her child provided with the means of surviving the possible loss of her situation, she forgave the late Busted, and there was a flow of tears unusual to a boarding-house parlour and unnerving to Big Andy.
Presently she asked Andy whether he knew what her husband's last words had been.
“Yep,” said Andy. “I heard'm plain and clear. Pete Gibbs,—the other executor of the will, you know,—Pete says, 'It's all right, pardner, me and Andy'll see to it,' and then your husband says, 'Thank Gawd I've been some good to her and the child at last.'”
Which account was entirely correct. When Big Andy had returned to Get-there City, and related how he had performed his mission, he added:
“I'd been such a lovely liar all through, it's a shame I had to go an' spoil the story by puttin' in some truth at the finish.”
They put up a wooden grave-mark where Blake was buried, and after his name they cut in the wood this testimonial:
“A tenderfoot that was some good to his folks at last.”
Near the uneven road among the hills a small field of stony ground lay between woods and cultivated land. Nothing grew upon it and no house could be seen from it. The sun beat upon it and crows flew over it to and from the woods.
Along the road trudged a thin old negro with stooping back and gray wool. His knees were bent and his cumbrously shod feet pointed far outward from his line of progress. He wore an aged frock coat and a battered stiff hat, although the month was June. His small face, beginning with a smoothly curved forehead and ending with a cleanly cut chin, was mild and conciliating, shiny, and of the colour of light chocolate. He carried a tin bucket full of cherries. Pop Thornberry was returning to the town.
Pop, whose proper name was Moses, and who was a deacon in the African Methodist Church, made his living this way and that way. He did odd jobs for people, and he fished and hunted when fishing and hunting were in season.
On this June day he had risen early and walked three miles to pick cherries “on shares.” He had picked ten quarts and left four of them with the farmer whose trees had produced them. At six cents a quart he would profit thirty-six cents by his walk of six miles and his work of a half-day.
The sun was scorching and Pop was tired. He decided to rest in the barren field, at its very edge in shade of the woods. He climbed the zigzag fence with some labour and at the expense of a few of his cherries. He sat down upon a little knob of earth, took off his hat, drew a red handkerchief from the inside thereof, and slowly wiped his perspiring brow.
He looked up at the sky, which was so brightly blue that it made his eyes blink. He sought optical relief in the dark green of the woods. Then, in steadying his pail of cherries between his legs, he turned his glance to the ground in front of him.
His attention was caught by a lump of earth that sparkled at points In the sun's rays, a mere clod composed of clay and mica, lying In the dry bed of a bygone streamlet. Because it glittered he picked it up and examined it. After a time he bethought him that he was yet two and a half miles from town and very hungry. He arose, somewhat stiff, and put the shining clod in his coat-tail pocket. On his way back to the road he noticed other little earth lumps that shone. He resumed his walk townward, his knees shaking regularly at every step, as was their wont.
At three o'clock in the afternoon he had reached home, sold his cherries, and dined on dried beef and bread in his little unpainted wooden house on the edge of the creek at the back of the town.
He owned his house and a small lot upon which it stood. Near it was a flour-mill, whose owner held a mortgage upon Pop's house and lot. The old negro had been compelled to borrow $200 to pay bills incurred during the illness and subsequent funeral of the late Mrs. Thornberry, and thus to avoid a sheriff's sale. Hence came the mortgage. It would expire on the 10th of September. Pop was almost ready to meet that date. He already had $192 hidden in his cellar, unknown to any one.
He had heard rumours of the mill-owner's desire to build an addition to his mill. To do this would necessitate the acquisition of contiguous property. But Pop had not suspected any ulterior motive when the miller had offered to lend him the money.
“I kin soon lay by 'nuff t' pay off d' mohgage, w'en I ain't got no one but m'se'f t' puvvide foh no moah,” he had said, after the loan had been made.
And, having dined on this June day, he took twenty cents from the amount received for cherries and placed it in a cigar-box to be added to the $192. He kept that sixteen cents with which to purchase provisions for to-morrow, and then he walked down the quiet street to the railway station. He often made a dime by carrying some one's satchel from the station to the hotel.
The railroad division superintendent, a well-fed and easy-going man, came down from his office on the second floor of the station building and saw Pop sitting on a baggage-truck. The old negro, forgetful of the clod in his coat-tail pocket, had felt it when he sat down. He had taken it out of his pocket and was now casually looking at it as he held it in his hand.
“Hello, Pop!” said the division superintendent, upon whose hand time was hanging heavily. “What have you there?”
“Doan' know, Mistah Monroe. Doan' know, sah. Looks like jes' a chunk o' mud.”
He held out the clod to Mr. Monroe.
The spectacle of the division superintendent talking to the old negro attracted a group of lazy fellows,—the driver of an express wagon, the man who hauls the mail to the post-office, a boy who sold fruit to passengers on the train, two porters, with tin signs upon their hats, who solicited patronage from the hotels.
“Why, Pop,” said the superintendent, winking to the expressman, “this lump looks as though it contained gold.”
“Yes,” put in the expressman, “that's how gold comes in a mine. I've often handled it. That's the stuff, sure.”
The fruit-selling boy and the mail-man grinned. Pop Thornberry opened wide his mouth and eyes and softly repeated the word:
“Goal!”
“I'd be careful of it,” advised Mr. Monroe, handing the clod back to the negro.
Pop took it with a trembling hand and looked at it. Presently he asked:
“W'at'll you give me foh dat air goal, Mistah Monroe.”
“Oh, a piece like that would be no use to me. It has to be washed and it wouldn't be worth while putting just one piece through the whole process of cleaning. Now. If you have a lot of it, we might go into partnership in the gold business.”
Before the old man could answer to this pleasantry a whistle was heard up the track, and Pop was forgotten in the excitement attending the arrival of the train.
Dislodged from the baggage-truck, the old man looked around for Mr. Monroe, but the superintendent had disappeared. Pop did not seek to carry any satchels that day. His mind was full of other matters. He went behind the station and sat down beside the river.
“Goal!” That meant proper tombstones for the graves of his wife and children, a new pulpit for the African Methodist Church, equal to that of the African Baptist Church, future ease for his somewhat weary legs and arms and back.
The next afternoon the division superintendent found himself awaited at his office door by Pop Thornberry, who was very dusty and who carried a basket heavy with clods of clay and mica. He had been out to the arid field that morning.
“H-sh!” whispered Pop. “Doan' say a word, Mistah Monroe! Hyah's a lot o' dem air goal lumps, and I know weah dey's bushels moah,—plenty 'nuff to go into pahtnehship on.”
The superintendent, looked bewildered, then amused, then ashamed. Embarrassed for a reply, he finally said:
“I haven't time to talk to you now, Pop. Besides, I've made up my mind not to go into the gold business. You see, I'm rich enough already. Good day.”
Thereafter Pop lay in wait for Mr. Monroe daily, but the superintendent always avoided him. Pop neglected to earn his living and spent his time going about town with his basket of clods in search of the superintendent. Finally being openly ignored by Mr. Monroe when the two met face to face, Pop became angry and took his secret to a jeweller on Main Street. The jeweller laughed and told Pop that the gold in the basket must be worth at least a thousand dollars, but he was not in a position to buy crude gold. Then the jeweller made known to many that Pop Thornberry was crazy over some lumps of mud and mica that he mistook for gold.
After that, people would stop Pop on the street and say:
“Let's see a piece of the gold in your basket.”
Pop, astonished that his secret was out, but somewhat proud at being thought the possessor of a treasure, would hesitate and then comply. The small boys soon recognized in Pop's delusion a new means of fun. Observing the solicitude with which he watched his clod while out of his own hands, they would innocently ask for a glimpse into his basket. This granted, they would grasp a piece of his treasure and run away, greatly annoying the old man, who was in a state of keen distress until he recovered the abstracted clod. These affairs between Pop and the boys were of hourly recurrence. They diverted barroom loungers and passers-by.
Pop called on one local capitalist after another, seeking one who would buy his gold or aid into preparing it for the market. All laughed at his delusion, deeming it harmless, and all gave him good reason for not accepting his offer of business partnership. So he went from the bank president to the baker, from the member of congress for whom he had voted to the barber, from the hotel proprietor to the bartender. The negroes of the town, feeling that their race was humiliated in Pop, began to hold aloof from him. No serious-minded person who learned of his delusion gave it a second thought.
“Say Pop, where do you get this gold, anyhow?” asked a tobacco-chewing gamin at the railroad station one day.
“Dat's my business,” replied Thornberry, with some dignity.
“Oh,” said his questioner, “I know. Tobe McStenger followed you out the other day and saw where you got it. He'd a brung some in hisself, but it wasn't on his property.”
“Yes, Pop, you better look out,” put in a telegraph operator, “or you'll be taken up for trespassing. 'Tisn't your land, you know, where you find your gold.”
There was no truth in the assertion of the gamin. No one had taken the trouble to follow Pop in his semiweekly excursions to the barren field. But the old man knew that the field was not his. A ludicrous expression of overwhelming fright came over his face.
Three days afterward, the farmer who owned the worthless field was astonished when Pop offered to buy it.
“But what on earth do you want that land fer?” asked the farmer, sitting on his barnyard fence.
Pop made a guilty attempt to appear guileless, and told the farmer that he wished to build a shanty and raise potatoes. He was tired of living in town and sought the quietude of the hills.
“Bein' as dat ere fiel' ain't good foh much, I thought you might be willin' to paht with it,” explained Pop.
The farmer eventually agreed to build a shanty on the field and sell it to Pop for $180. Pop desired immediate occupancy. There was a legal hitch, owing to the badness of the land and the questionable condition of Pop's mind. But the transfer of the property was finally recorded.
Pop no longer had to fear arrest for trespass. His gold field was now legally his. But he was still kept uneasy by his inability to make his gold marketable. His uneasiness increased as September approached. He had applied to the purchase of the field the sum saved to cancel the mortgage upon his house at the rear end of the town.
The three days before the foreclosure of the mortgage were days of exquisite anguish to Pop. When the foreclosure came and he and his goods were turned out on the banks of the creek to make room for the mill-owner's improvements, his mental turmoil ended. He took the crisis calmly.
“Jes' wait,” he said to a neighbour who had stopped at sight of the moving-out. “Wait till I get dat ere goal on de mahket. I'll bull' a mill dat'll drive dis yer mill out o' d' business. Den I'll done buy back dis yer ol' home.”
But the next day, when the unexpected happened,—when builders began to tear down his house,—the enormity of his deed dawned upon him. After a day of moaning and staring, as he sat amidst his household goods on the bank of the creek, he became animated by a deep rage against the mill-owner. Now more than ever had he a special purpose for enriching himself by means of his treasure across the hill.
The coming of two circuses in succession had taken the interest of the boys away from Pop during August and part of September. Now they turned again to him for amusement. First they besieged the abandoned stable to which he had conveyed his goods, and in which he slept,—for he had not found will to betake himself from the town he had so long inhabited, and his shanty in the field remained unoccupied. His purchase of the land had betrayed to general knowledge the location of his treasure, of which he continued to bring in new specimens.
One October day he had just come from vainly attempting to induce the postmaster to join him in the enterprise of exploiting his gold-field. In front of the post-office, he was met by some boys coming noisily from school. They surrounded him and demanded to see the gold in his basket. As the town policeman was sauntering up the street, Pop felt safe in refusing. The boys, also observing the officer of the law, contented themselves with retaliating in words only,
“Say, Pop,” cried one of them, “you'd better keep an eye on your gold-field. Nick Hennessey knows where it is, and he's gittin' up a diggin' party to take a wagon out some night and bring away all your gold.”
The boys, laughing at this quickly invented announcement, ran off after a hand-organ. The old man stood perfectly still, or as nearly so as the feebleness of his legs would permit.
That evening Pop was missing from the town. And when Abraham Wesley, who had often lent his shotgun to the old man, went to look for that weapon, intending to shoot glass balls in the fairgrounds across the river, the fowling-piece too was missing.
Pop had gone out to protect his possession. Three nights passed and three days. The few country folk and others who travelled that way during this time saw the old man walking about in his field or sitting in front of his shanty, his shotgun on his shoulders, his eyes fixed suspiciously on all who might become intruders. Night and day he patrolled his little domain.
At dusk of the third day a lively party was returning to the town in a wagon from a search for nuts. The full moon was rising and the merrymakers were singing. One of the girls was thirsty. When she saw the shanty in the rugged field, she asked a young man to get her a glass of water at the hut. The wagon stopped and the youth climbed astride the rail fence. Suddenly an unnaturally shrill and excited voice was heard:
“Hyah, you, doan' come no farder! Dese yer's my premises!”
From behind the empty shanty appeared the thin old negro, bareheaded, his shotgun at his shoulder, a striking figure against the rising moon.
The young man descended from the fence into the field. There came a flash and a crack from Pop Thornberry's gun. The youth felt the sting of a piece of birdshot in his leg. Howling and limping, he turned quickly over the fence into the wagon, which made a hasty flight.
The next morning some idlers went out from the town to the scene of the adventure. They found the old man lying hatless in the middle of the field, face downwards, upon the shotgun. He had died of sheer exhaustion, on guard—and on his own land, as befit an honest citizen who had never intruded upon the peace of other men.