* * * * *The second Little Drama was wrought out for me the next day. I was sitting in the bay window of the club watching the world go by, when my eye was caught by a little group on the curbstone directly opposite. An old woman, meanly dressed, and two little children, both girls, the eldest about ten, the youngest, say, six or seven. They had been coming slowly along, and the old woman had been leading the youngest child by the hand. Just as they came opposite to where I was sitting the younger child lurched away from the woman once or twice, dragging limply at her hand, then its knees wobbled and bent and the next moment it had collapsed upon the pavement. Some children will do this from sheer perversity and with intent to be carried. But it was not perversity on this child's part. The poor old woman hauled the little girl up to her feet, but she collapsed again at once after a couple of steps and sat helplessly down upon the sidewalk, staring vaguely about, her thumb in her mouth. There was something wrong with the little child—one could see that at half a glance. Some complaint, some disease of the muscles, some weakness of the joints, that smote upon her like this at inopportune moments. Again and again her old mother, with very painful exertion—she was old and weak herself—raised her to her feet, only that she might sink in a heap before she had moved a yard. The old woman's bonnet fell off—a wretched, battered black bonnet, and the other little girl picked it up and held it while she looked on at her mother's efforts with an indifference that could only have been born of familiarity. Twice the old woman tried to carry the little girl, but her strength was not equal to it; indeed, the effort of raising the heavy child to its feet was exhausting her. She looked helplessly at the street cars as they passed, but you could see she had not enough money to pay even three fares. Once more she set her little girl upon her feet, and helped her forward half a dozen steps. And so, little by little, with many pauses for rest and breath, the little group went down the street and passed out of view, the little child staggering and falling as if from drunkenness, her sister looking on gravely, holding the mother's battered bonnet, and the mother herself, patient, half-exhausted, her grey hair blowing about her face, labouring on step by step, trying to appear indifferent to the crowd that passed by on either side, trying bravely to make light of the whole matter until she should reach home. As I watched them I thought of this woman's husband, the father of this paralytic little girl, and somehow it was brought to me that none of them would ever see him again, but that he was alive for all that.* * * * *The third Little Drama was lively, and there was action in it, and speech, and a curious, baffling mystery. On a corner near a certain bank in this city there is affixed to the lamp post a call-box that the police use to ring up for the patrol wagon. When an arrest is made in the neighbourhood the offender is brought here, the wagon called for, and he is conveyed to the City Prison. On the afternoon of the day of the second Little Drama, as I came near to this corner, I was aware of a crowd gathered about the lamp post that held the call-box, and between the people's heads and over their shoulders I could see the blue helmets of a couple of officers. I stopped and pushed up into the inner circle of the crowd. The two officers had in custody a young fellow of some eighteen or nineteen years. And I was surprised to find that he was as well dressed and as fine looking a lad as one would wish to see. I did not know what the charge was, I don't know it now,—but the boy did not seem capable of any great meanness. As I got into the midst of the crowd, and while I was noting what was going forward, it struck me that the people about me were unusually silent—silent as people are who are interested and unusually observant. Then I saw why. The young fellow's mother was there, and the Little Drama was enacting itself between her, her son, and the officers who had him in charge. One of these latter had the key to the call-box in his hand. He had not yet rung for the wagon. An altercation was going on between the mother and the son—she entreating him to come home, he steadily refusing."It's up to you," said one of the officers, at length; "if you don't go home with your mother, I'll call the wagon.""No!""Jimmy!" said the woman, and then, coming close to him, she spoke to him in a low voice and with an earnestness, an intensity, that it hurt one to see."No!""For the last time, will you come?""No! No! No!"The officer faced about and put the key into the box, but the woman caught at his wrist and drew it away. It was a veritable situation. It should have occurred behind footlights and in the midst of painted flats and flies, but instead the city thundered about it, drays and cars went up and down in the street, and the people on the opposite walk passed with but an instant's glance. The crowd was as still as an audience, watching what next would happen. The crisis of the Little Drama had arrived."For the last time, will you come with me?""No!"She let fall her hand then and turned and went away, crying into her handkerchief. The officer unlocked and opened the box, set the indicator and opened the switch. A few moments later, as I went on up the street, I met the patrol-wagon coming up on a gallop.What was the trouble here? Why had that young fellow preferred going to prison rather than home with his mother? What was behind it all I shall never know. It was a mystery—a little eddy in the tide of the city's life, come and gone in an instant, yet reaching down to the very depths of those things that are not meant to be seen.And as I went along I wondered where was the father of that young fellow who was to spend his first night in jail, and the father of the little paralytic girl, and the father of the blind idiot, and it seemed to me that the chief actors in these three Little Dramas of the Curbstone had been somehow left out of the programme.Shorty Stack, PugilistOver at the "Big Dipper" mine a chuck-tender named Kelly had been in error as regards a box of dynamite sticks, and Iowa Hill had elected to give an "entertainment" for the benefit of his family.The programme, as announced upon the posters that were stuck up in the Post Office and on the door of the Odd Fellows' Hall, was quite an affair. The Iowa Hill orchestra would perform, the livery-stable keeper would play the overture to "William Tell" upon his harmonica, and the town doctor would read a paper on "Tuberculosis in Cattle." The evening was to close with a "grand ball."Then it was discovered that a professional pugilist from the "Bay" was over in Forest Hill, and someone suggested that a match could be made between him and Shorty Stack "to enliven the entertainment." Shorty Stack was a bedrock cleaner at the "Big Dipper," and handy with his fists. It was his boast that no man of his weight (Shorty fought at a hundred and forty) no man of his weight in Placer County could stand up to him for ten rounds, and Shorty had always made good this boast. Shorty knew two punches, and no more—a short-arm jab under the ribs with his right, and a left upper-cut on the point of the chin.The pugilist's name was McCleaverty. He was an out and out dub—one of the kind who appear in four-round exhibition bouts to keep the audience amused while the "event of the evening" is preparing—but he had had ring experience, and his name had been in the sporting paragraphs of the San Francisco papers. The dub was a welter-weight and a professional, but he accepted the challenge of Shorty Stack's backers and covered their bet of fifty dollars that he could not "stop" Shorty in four rounds.And so it came about that extra posters were affixed to the door of the Odd Fellows' Hall and the walls of the Post Office to the effect that Shorty Stack, the champion of Placer County, and Buck McCleaverty, the Pride of Colusa, would appear in a genteel boxing exhibition at the entertainment given for the benefit, etc., etc.Shorty had two weeks in which to train. The nature of his work in the mine had kept his muscles hard enough, so his training was largely a matter of dieting and boxing an imaginary foe with a rock in each fist. He was so vigorous in his exercise and in the matter of what he ate and drank that the day before the entertainment he had got himself down to a razor-edge, and was in a fair way of going fine. When a man gets into too good condition, the least little slip will spoil him. Shorty knew this well enough, and told himself in consequence that he must be very careful.The night before the entertainment Shorty went to call on Miss Starbird. Miss Starbird was one of the cooks at the mine. She was a very pretty girl, just turned twenty, and lived with her folks in a cabin near the superintendent's office, on the road from the mine to Iowa Hill. Her father was a shift boss in the mine, and her mother did the washing for the "office." Shorty was recognised by the mine as her "young man." She was going to the entertainment with her people, and promised Shorty the first "walk-around" in the "Grand Ball" that was to follow immediately after the Genteel Glove Contest.Shorty came into the Starbird cabin on that particular night, his hair neatly plastered in a beautiful curve over his left temple, and his pants outside of his boots as a mark of esteem. He wore no collar, but he had encased himself in a boiled shirt, which could mean nothing else but mute and passionate love, and moreover, as a crowning tribute, he refrained from spitting."How do you feel, Shorty?" asked Miss Starbird.Shorty had always sedulously read the interviews with pugilists that appeared in the San Francisco papers immediately before their fights and knew how to answer."I feel fit to fight the fight of my life," he alliterated proudly. "I've trained faithfully and I mean to win.""It ain't a regular prize fight, is it, Shorty?" she enquired. "Pa said he wouldn't take ma an' me if it was. All the women folk in the camp are going, an' I never heard of women at a fight, it ain't genteel.""Well, I d'n know," answered Shorty, swallowing his saliva. "The committee that got the programme up called it a genteel boxing exhibition so's to get the women folks to stay. I call it a four round go with a decision.""My, itull be exciting!" exclaimed Miss Starbird. "I ain't never seen anything like it. Oh, Shorty, d'ye think you'll win?""I don'tthinknothun about it. I know I will," returned Shorty, defiantly. "If I once get in my left upper cut on him,huh!" and he snorted magnificently.Shorty stayed and talked to Miss Starbird until ten o'clock, then he rose to go."I gotta get to bed," he said, "I'm in training you see.""Oh, wait a minute," said Miss Starbird, "I been making some potato salad for the private dining of the office, you better have some; it's the best I ever made.""No, no," said Shorty, stoutly, "I don't want any.""Hoh," sniffed Miss Starbird airily, "you don't need to have any.""Well, don't you see," said Shorty, "I'm in training. I don't dare eat any of that kinda stuff.""Stuff!" exclaimed Miss Starbird, her chin in the air. "No oneelseever called my cooking stuff.""Well, don't you see, don't you see.""No, I don't see. I guess you must be 'fraid of getting whipped if you're so 'fraid of a little salad.""What!" exclaimed Shorty, indignantly. "Why I could come into the ring from a jag and whip him; 'fraid!who'safraid. I'll show you if I'm afraid. Let's have your potato salad, an' some beer, too. Huh!I'llshow you if I'm afraid."But Miss Starbird would not immediately consent to be appeased."No, you called it stuff," she said, "an' the superintendent said I was the best cook in Placer County."But at last, as a great favour to Shorty, she relented and brought the potato salad from the kitchen and two bottles of beer.When the town doctor had finished his paper on "Tuberculosis in Cattle," the chairman of the entertainment committee ducked under the ropes of the ring and announced that: "The next would be the event of the evening and would the gentlemen please stop smoking." He went on to explain that the ladies present might remain without fear and without reproach as the participants in the contest would appear in gymnasium tights, and would box with gloves and not with bare knuckles."Well, don't they always fight with gloves?" called a voice from the rear of the house. But the chairman ignored the interruption.The "entertainment" was held in the Odd Fellows' Hall. Shorty's seconds prepared him for the fight in a back room of the saloon, on the other side of the street, and towards ten o'clock one of the committeemen came running in to say:"What's the matter? Hurry up, you fellows, McCleaverty's in the ring already, and the crowd's beginning to stamp."Shorty rose and slipped into an overcoat."All ready," he said."Now mind, Shorty," said Billy Hicks, as he gathered up the sponges, fans and towels, "don't mix things with him, you don't have to knock him out, all you want's the decision."Next, Shorty was aware that he was sitting in a corner of the ring with his back against the ropes, and that diagonally opposite was a huge red man with a shaven head. There was a noisy, murmuring crowd somewhere below him, and there was a glare of kerosene lights over his head."Buck McCleaverty, the Pride of Colusa," announced the master of ceremonies, standing in the middle of the ring, one hand under the dub's elbow. There was a ripple of applause. Then the master of ceremonies came over to Shorty's corner, and, taking him by the arm, conducted him into the middle of the ring."Shorty Stack, the Champion of Placer County." The house roared; Shorty ducked and grinned and returned to his corner. He was nervous, excited. He had not imagined it would be exactly like this. There was a strangeness about it all; an unfamiliarity that made him uneasy."Take it slow," said Billy Hicks, kneading the gloves, so as to work the padding away from the knuckles. The gloves were laced on Shorty's hands."Up you go," said Billy Hicks, again. "No, not the fight yet, shake hands first. Don't get rattled."Then ensued a vague interval, that seemed to Shorty interminable. He had a notion that he shook hands with McCleaverty, and that some one asked him if he would agree to hit with one arm free in the breakaway. He remembered a glare of lights, a dim vision of rows of waiting faces, a great murmuring noise, and he had a momentary glimpse of someone he believed to be the referee, a young man in shirtsleeves and turned-up trousers. Then everybody seemed to be getting out of the ring and away from him, even Billy Hicks left him after saying something he did not understand. Only the referee, McCleaverty and himself were left inside the ropes."Time!"Somebody, that seemed to Shorty strangely like himself, stepped briskly out into the middle of the ring, his left arm before him, his right fist clinched over his breast. The crowd, the glaring lights, the murmuring noise, all faded away. There only remained the creaking of rubber soles over the resin of the boards of the ring and the sight of McCleaverty's shifting, twinkling eyes and his round, close-cropped head."Break!"The referee stepped between the two men and Shorty realised that the two had clinched, and that his right forearm had been across McCleaverty's throat, his left clasping him about the shoulders.What! Were they fighting already? This was the first round, of course, somebody was shouting."That's the stuff, Shorty."All at once Shorty saw the flash of a red muscled arm, he threw forward his shoulder ducking his head behind it, the arm slid over the raised shoulder and a bare and unprotected flank turned towards him."Now," thought Shorty. His arm shortened and leaped forward. There was a sudden impact. The shock of it jarred Shorty himself, and he heard McCleaverty grunt. There came a roar from the house."Give it to him, Shorty."Shorty pushed his man from him, the heel of his glove upon his face. He was no longer nervous. The lights didn't bother him."I'll knock him out yet," he muttered to himself.They fiddled and feinted about the ring, watching each other's eyes. Shorty held his right ready. He told himself he would jab McCleaverty again on the same spot when next he gave him an opening."Break!"They must have clinched again, but Shorty was not conscious of it. A sharp pain in his upper lip made him angry. His right shot forward again, struck home, and while the crowd roared and the lights began to swim again, he knew that he was rushing McCleaverty back, back, back, his arms shooting out and in like piston rods, now for an upper cut with his left on the—"Time!"Billy Hicks was talking excitedly. The crowd still roared. His lips pained. Someone was spurting water over him, one of his seconds worked the fans like a windmill. He wondered what Miss Starbird thought of him now."Time!"He barely had a chance to duck, almost double, while McCleaverty's right swished over his head. The dub was swinging for a knockout already. The round would be hot and fast."Stay with um, Shorty.""That's the stuff, Shorty."He must be setting the pace, the house plainly told him that. He stepped in again and cut loose with both fists."Break!"Shorty had not clinched. Was it possible that McCleaverty was clinching "to avoid punishment." Shorty tried again, stepping in close, his right arm crooked and ready."Break!"The dub was clinching. There could be no doubt of that. Shorty gathered himself together and rushed in, upper-cutting viciously; he felt McCleaverty giving way before him."He's got um going."There was exhilaration in the shout. Shorty swung right and left, his fist struck something that hurt him. Sure, he thought, that must have been a good one. He recovered, throwing out his left before him. Where was the dub? not down there on one knee in a corner of the ring? The house was a pandemonium, near at hand some one was counting, "one—two—three—four—"Billy Hicks shouted, "Come back to your corner. When he's up go right in to finish him. He ain't knocked out yet. He's just taking his full time. Swing for his chin again, you got him going. If you can put him out, Shorty, we'll take you to San Francisco.""Seven—eight—nine—"McCleaverty was up again. Shorty rushed in. Something caught him a fearful jar in the pit of the stomach. He was sick in an instant, racked with nausea. The lights began to dance."Time!"There was water on his face and body again, deliciously cool. The fan windmills swung round and round. "What's the matter, what's the matter," Billy Hicks was asking anxiously.Something was wrong. There was a lead-like weight in Shorty's stomach, a taste of potato salad came to his mouth, he was sick almost to vomiting."He caught you a hard one in the wind just before the gong, did he?" said Billy Hicks. "There's fight in him yet. He's got a straight arm body blow you want to look out for. Don't let up on him. Keep—""Time!"Shorty came up bravely. In his stomach there was a pain that made it torture to stand erect. Nevertheless he rushed, lashing out right and left. He was dizzy; before he knew it he was beating the air. Suddenly his chin jolted backward, and the lights began to spin; he was tiring rapidly, too, and with every second his arms grew heavier and heavier and his knees began to tremble more and more. McCleaverty gave him no rest. Shorty tried to clinch, but the dub sidestepped, and came in twice with a hard right and left over the heart. Shorty's gloves seemed made of iron; he found time to mutter, "If I only hadn't eaten that stuff last night."What with the nausea and the pain, he was hard put to it to keep from groaning. It was the dub who was rushing now; Shorty felt he could not support the weight of his own arms another instant. What was that on his face that was warm and tickled? He knew that he had just strength enough left for one more good blow; if he could only upper-cut squarely on McCleaverty's chin it might suffice."Break!"The referee thrust himself between them, but instantly McCleaverty closed again. Would the roundneverend? The dub swung again, missed, and Shorty saw his chance; he stepped in, upper-cutting with all the strength he could summon up. The lights swam again, and the roar of the crowd dwindled to a couple of voices. He smelt whisky."Gimme that sponge." It was Billy Hicks voice. "He'll do all right now."Shorty suddenly realised that he was lying on his back. In another second he would be counted out. He raised himself, but his hands touched a bed quilt and not the resined floor of the ring. He looked around him and saw that he was in the back room of the saloon where he had dressed. The fight was over."Did I win?" he asked, getting on his feet."Win!" exclaimed Billy Hicks. "You were knocked out. He put you out after you had him beaten. Oh, you're a peach of a fighter, you are!"* * * * *Half an hour later when he had dressed, Shorty went over to the Hall. His lip was badly swollen and his chin had a funny shape, but otherwise he was fairly presentable. The Iowa Hill orchestra had just struck into the march for the walk around. He pushed through the crowd of men around the door looking for Miss Starbird. Just after he had passed he heard a remark and the laugh that followed it:"Quitter, oh, what a quitter!"Shorty turned fiercely about and would have answered, but just at that moment he caught sight of Miss Starbird. She had just joined the promenade or the walk around with some other man. He went up to her:"Didn't you promise to have this walk around with me?" he said aggrievedly."Well, did you think I was going to wait all night for you?" returned Miss Starbird.As she turned from him and joined the march Shorty's eye fell upon her partner.It was McCleaverty.The Strangest ThingThe best days in the voyage from the Cape to Southampton are those that come immediately before and immediately after that upon which you cross the line, when the ship is as steady as a billiard table, and the ocean is as smooth and shiny and coloured as the mosaic floor of a basilica church, when the deck is covered with awning from stem to stern, and the resin bubbles out of the masts, and the thermometer in the companion-way at the entrance to the dining-saloon climbs higher and higher with every turn of the screw. Of course all the men people aboard must sleep on deck these nights. There is a pleasure in this that you will find nowhere else. At six your steward wakes you up with your morning cup of coffee, and you sit cross-legged in your pajamas on the skylight and drink your coffee and smoke your cigarettes and watch the sun shooting up over the rim of that polished basilica floor, and take pleasure in the mere fact of your existence, and talk and talk and tell stories until it's time for bath and breakfast.We came back from the Cape inThe Moor, with a very abbreviated cabin list. Only three of the smaller tables in the saloon were occupied, and those mostly by men—diamond-brokers from Kimberly, gold-brokers from the Rand, the manager of a war correspondent on a lecture tour, cut short by the Ashanti war, an English captain of twenty-two, who had been with Jameson at Krugersdorp and somehow managed to escape, an Australian reporter named Miller, and two or three others of a less distinct personality.Miller told the story that follows early one morning, sitting on the Bull board, tailor-fashion, and smoking pipefuls of straight perique, black as a nigger's wool. We were grouped around him on the deck in pajamas and bath robes. It was half after six, the thermometer was at 70 degrees,The Moorcut the still water with a soothing rumble of her screw, and at intervals flushed whole schools of flying fish. Somehow the talk had drifted to the inexplicable things that we had seen, and we had been piecing out our experiences with some really beautiful lies. Captain Thatcher, the Krugersdorp chap, held that the failure of the Jameson Raid was the most inexplicable thing he had ever experienced, but none of the rest of us could think of anything we had seen or heard of that did not have some stealthy, shadowy sort of explanation sneaking after it and hunting it down."Well, I saw something a bit thick once," observed Miller, pushing down the tobacco in his pipe bowl with the tip of a callous finger, and in the abrupt silence that followed we heard the noise of dishes from the direction of the galley."It was in Johannesburg three years back, when I was down on me luck. I had been rooked properly by a Welsh gaming chap who was no end of a bounder, and three quid was all that stood between me and—well," he broke in, suddenly, "I had three quid left. I wore down me feet walking the streets of that bally town looking for anything that would keep me going for a while, and give me a chance to look around and fetch breath, and there was nothing, but I tell ye nothing, and I was fair desperate. One dye, and a filthy wet dye it was, too, I had gone out to the race track, beyond Hospital Hill, where the pony races are run, thinking as might be I'd find a berth, handling ponies there, but the season was too far gone, and they turned me awye. I came back to town by another road—then by the waye that fetches around by the Mahomedan burying-ground. Well, the pauper burying-ground used to be alongside in those dyes, and as I came up, jolly well blown, I tell ye, for I'd but tightened me belt by wye of breakfast, I saw a chap diggin' a gryve. I was in a mind for gryves meself just then, so I pulled up and leaned over the fence and piped him off at his work. Then, like the geeser I'd come to be, I says:"'What are ye doing there, friend?' He looked me over between shovelfuls a bit, and then says:"'Oh, just setting out early violets;' and that shut me up properly."Well, I piped him digging that gryve for perhaps five minutes, and then, s' help me, I asked him for a job. I did—I asked that gryve-digger for a job—I was that low. He leans his back against the side of the gryve and looks me over, then by and bye, says he:"'All right, pardner!'"'I'm thinking your from the Stytes,' says I."'Guess yes,' he says, and goes on digging."Well, we came to terms after a while. He was to give me two bob a dye for helping him at his work, and I was to have a bunk in his 'shack', as he called it—a box of a house built of four boards, as I might sye, that stood just on the edge of the gryveyard. He was a rum 'un, was that Yankee chap. Over pipes that night he told me something of himself, and do y' know, that gryve-digger in the pauper burying-ground in Johannesburg, South Africa, was a Harvard graduate! Strike me straight if I don't believe he really was. The man was a wreck from strong drink, but that was the one thing he was proud of."'Yes, sir,' he'd say, over and over again, looking straight ahead of him, 'Yes, sir, I was a Harvard man once, and pulled at number five in the boat'—the 'varsity boat, mind ye; and then he'd go on talking half to himself. 'And now what am I? I'm digging gryves for hire—burying dead people for a living, when I ought to be dead meself. I am dead and buried long ago. Its just the whiskey that keeps me alive, Miller,' he would say; 'when I stop that I'm done for.'"The first morning I came round for work I met him dressed as if to go to town, and carrying a wickered demijohn. 'Miller',' he says, 'I'm going into town to get this filled. You must stop here and be ready to answer any telephone call from the police station.' S' help me if there wasn't a telephone in that beastly shack. 'If a pauper cops off they'll ring you up from town and notify you to have the gryve ready. If I'm awye, you'll have to dig it. Remember, if it's a man, you must dig a six foot six hole; if it's a woman, five feet will do, and if it's a kid, three an' half'll be a plenty. S'long.' And off he goes."Strike me blind but that was a long dye, that first one. I'd the pauper gryves for view and me own thoughts for company. But along about noon, the Harvard graduate not showing up, I found a diversion. The graduate had started to paint the shack at one time, but had given over after finishing one side, but the paint pot and the brushes were there. I got hold of 'em and mixed a bit o' paint and went the rounds of the gryves. Ye know how it is in a pauper burying-ground—no nymes at all on the headboards—naught but numbers, and half o' them washed awye by the rynes; so I, for a diversion, as I sye, started in to paint all manner o' fancy nymes and epitaphs on the headboards—any nyme that struck me fancy, and then underneath, an appropriate epitaph, and the dytes, of course—I didn't forget the dytes. Ye know, that was the rarest enjoyment I ever had. Ye don't think so? Try it once! Why, Gawd blyme me, there's a chance for imagination in it, and genius and art—highest kind of art. For instance now, I'd squat down in front of a blank headboard and think a bit, and the inspiration would come, and I'd write like this, maybe: 'Jno. K. Boggart, of New Zealand. Born Dec. 21, 1870; died June 5, 1890,' and then, underneath, 'He Rests in Peace'; or else, 'Elsie, Youngest Daughter of Mary B. and William H. Terhune; b. May 1st, 1880; d. Nov. 25, 1889—Not Lost, but Gone Before'; or agyne, 'Lucas, Lieutenant T. V. Killed in Battle at Wady Halfa, Egypt, August 30, 1889; born London, England, Jan. 3, 1850—He Lies Like a Warrior, Tyking His Rest with His Martial Cloak Around Him'; or something humorous, as 'Bohunkus, J. J.; born Germany; Oct. 3d, 1880; died (by request) Cape Town, Sept. 4, 1890'; or one that I remember as my very best effort, that read, 'Willie, Beloved Son of Anna and Gustave Harris; b. April 1st, 1878; d. May 5th, 1888—He was a Man Before His Mother.' Then I wrote me own nyme, with the epitaph, 'More Sinned Against Than Sinning;' and the Harvard chap's too. His motto, I remember, was 'He Pulled 5 in His 'Varsity's Boat.'"Well, I had more sport that afternoon than I've ever had since. Y'know I felt as if I really were acquainted with all those people—with John Boggart, and Lieutenant Lucas, and Bohunkus, and Willie and all. Ah, that was a proper experience. But right in the middle of me work here comes a telephone message from town: 'Body of dead baby found at mouth of city sewer—prepare gryve at once.' Well, I dug that gryve, the first, last and only gryve I ever hope to dig. It came on to ryne like a water-spout, and oh, but it was jolly tough work. Then about four o'clock, just as I was finishing, the Harvard chap comes home, howling drunk. I see him go into the shack, and pretty soon out he comes, with a hoe in one hand and a table leg in the other. Soon as ever he sees me he makes a staggering run at me, swinging the hoe and the table leg and yelling like a Zulu indaba. Just to make everything agreeable and appropriate, I was down in the gryve, and it occurred to me that the situation was too uncommon convenient. I scrambled out and made a run for it, for there was murder in his eye, and for upwards of ten minutes we two played blindman's buff in that gryveyard, me dodging from one headboard to another, and he at me heels, chivying me like a fox and with intent to kill. All at once he trips over a headboard, and goes down and can't get up, and at the same minute here comes the morgue wagon over Hospital Hill."Now here comes the queer part of this lamentable history. A trap was following that morgue wagon, a no-end swell trap, with a cob in the shafts that was worth an independent fortune. There was an old gent in the trap and a smart Cape boy driving. The old gent was the heaviest kind of a swell, but I'd never seen him before. The morgue wagon drives into the yard, and I—the Harvard chap being too far gone—points out the gryve. The driver of the morgue wagon chucks out the coffin, a bit of a three-foot box, and drives back to town. Then up comes the trap, and the old gent gets down—dressed up to the nines he was, in that heartbreaking ryne—and says he, 'My man, I would like to have that coffin opened.' By this time the Harvard chap had pulled himself together. He staggered up to the old gent and says, 'No, can't op'n no coffin, 'tsgainst all relugations—all regalutions, can't permit no coffin tobeopp'n.' I wish you would have seen the old gent. Excited! The man was shaking like a flagstaff in a gyle, talked thick and stammered, he was so phased. Gawd strike me, what a scene! I can see it now—that pauper burying ground wye down there in South Africa—no trees, all open and bleak. The pelting ryne, the open gryve and the drunken Harvard chap, and the excited old swell arguing over a baby's coffin."Pretty soon the old gent brings up a sovereign and gives it to the Harvard chap."'Let her go,' says he then, and with that he gives the top board of the coffin such a kick as started it an inch or more. With that—now listen to what I'm telling—with that the old gent goes down on his knees in the mud and muck, and kneels there waiting and fair gasping with excitement while the Harvard chap wrenches off the topboard. Before he had raised it four inches me old gent plunges his hand in quick, gropes there a second and takes out something—something shut in the palm of his hand."'That's all,' says he: 'Thank you, my man,' and gives us a quid apiece. We stood there like stuck swine, dotty with the queerness, the horribleness of the thing."'That's all,' he says again, with a long breath of relief, as he climbs into his trap with his clothes all foul with mud. 'That's all, thank Gawd.' Then to the Cape boy: 'Drive her home, Jim.' Five minutes later we lost him in the blur of the rain over Hospital Hill.""But what was it he took out of the baby's coffin?" said half a dozen men in a breath at this point. "What was it? What could it have been?""Ah, what was it?" said Miller. "I'll be damned if I know what it was. I never knew, I never will know."A Reversion to TypeSchuster was too damned cheeky. He was the floor-walker in a department store on Kearny street, and I had opportunity to observe his cheek upon each of the few occasions on which I went into that store with—let us say my cousin. A floor-walker should let his communications be "first aisle left," or "elevator, second floor front," or "third counter right," for whatsoever is more than this cometh of evil. But Schuster used to come up to—my cousin, and take her gently by the hand and ask her how she did, and if she was to be out of town much that season, and tell her, with mild reproach in his eye, that she had been quite a stranger of late, while I stood in the background mumbling curses not loud but deep.However, my cousin does not figure in this yarn, nor myself. Paul Schuster is the hero—Paul Schuster, floor-walker in a department-store that sold ribbons and lace and corsets and other things, fancy, now! He was hopelessly commonplace, lived with a maiden aunt and a parrot in two rooms, way out in the bleak streets around Lone Mountain. When on duty he wore a long black cutaway coat, a white pique four-in-hand and blue-grey "pants" that cost four dollars. Besides this he parted his hair on the side and entertained ideas on culture and refinement. His father had been a barber in the Palace Hotel barber shop.Paul Schuster had never heard anything of a grandfather.Schuster came to that department-store when he was about thirty. Five years passed; then ten—he was there yet—forty years old by now. Always in a black cutaway and white tie, always with his hair parted on one side, always with the same damned cheek. A floor-walker, respectable as an English barrister, steady as an eight-day clock, a figure known to every woman in San Francisco. He had lived a floor-walker; as a floor-walker he would die. Such he was at forty. At forty-one he fell. Two days and all was over.It sometimes happens that a man will live a sober, steady, respectable, commonplace life for forty, fifty or even sixty years, and then, without the least sign of warning, suddenly go counter to every habit, to every trait of character and every rule of conduct he has been believed to possess. The thing only happens to intensely respectable gentlemen, of domestic tastes and narrow horizons, who are just preparing to become old. Perhaps it is a last revolt of a restrained youth—the final protest of vigorous, heady blood, too long dammed up. This bolting season does not last very long. It comes upon a man between the ages of forty and fifty-five, and while it lasts the man should be watched more closely than a young fellow in his sophomore year at college. The vagaries of a sophomore need not be taken any more seriously than the skittishness of a colt, but when a fifty-year-old bolts, stand clear!On the second of May—two months and a day after his forty-first birthday—Paul Schuster bolted. It came upon him with the quickness of a cataclysm, like the sudden, abrupt development of latent mania. For a week he had been feeling ill at ease—restless; a vague discomfort hedged him in like an ill-fitting garment; he felt the moving of his blood in his wrists and his temples. A subtle desire to do something, he knew not what, bit and nibbled at his brain like the tooth of a tiny unfamiliar rodent.On the second of May, at twenty minutes after six, Schuster came out of the store at the tail end of the little army of home-bound clerks. He locked the door behind him, according to custom, and stood for a moment on the asphalt, his hands in his pockets, fumbling his month's pay. Then he said to himself, nodding his head resolutely:"To-night I shall get drunk—as drunk as I possibly can. I shall go to the most disreputable resorts I can find—I shall know the meaning of wine, of street fights, of women, of gaming, of jolly companions, of noisy mid-night suppers. I'll do the town, or by God, the town will do me. Nothing shall stop me, and I will stop at nothing. Here goes!"Now, if Paul Schuster had only been himself this bolt of his would have brought him to nothing worse than the Police Court, and would have lasted but twenty-four hours at the outside. But Schuster, like all the rest of us, was not merely himself. He was his ancestors as well. In him as in you and me, were generations—countless generations—of forefathers. Schuster had in him the characteristics of his father, the Palace Hotel barber, but also, he had the unknown characteristics of his grandfather, of whom he had never heard, and his great-grandfather, likewise ignored. It is rather a serious matter to thrust yourself under the dominion of unknown, unknowable impulses and passions. This is what Schuster did that night. Getting drunk was an impulse belonging to himself; but who knows what "inherited tendencies," until then dormant, the alcohol unleashed within him? Something like this must have happened to have accounted for what follows.Schuster went straight to the Palace Hotel bar, where he had cocktails, thence to the Poodle Dog, where he had a French dinner and champagne, thence to the Barbary Coast on upper Kearny street, and drank whiskey that rasped his throat like gulps of carpet tacks. Then, realising that San Francisco was his own principality and its inhabitants his vassals, he hired a carriage and drove to the Cliff House, and poured champagne into the piano in the public parlor. A waiter remonstrated, and Paul Schuster, floor-walker and respectable citizen, bowled him down with a catsup bottle and stamped upon his abdomen. At the beginning of that evening he belonged to that class whom policemen are paid to protect. When he walked out of the Cliff House he was a free-booter seven feet tall, with a chest expansion of fifty inches. He paid the hack-driver a double fare and strode away into the night and plunged into the waste of sand dunes that stretch back from the beach on the other side of the Park.It never could be found out what happened to Schuster, or what he did, during the next ten hours. We pick him up again in a saloon on the waterfront about noon the next day, with thirty dollars in his pocket and God knows what disorderly notions in his crazed wits. At this time he was sober as far as the alcohol went. It might be supposed that now would have been the time for reflection and repentance and return to home and respectability. Return home! Not much! Schuster had began to wonder what kind of an ass he had been to have walked the floor of a department-store for the last score of years. Something was boiling in his veins. B-r-r-r! Let 'em all stand far from him now.That day he left San Francisco and rode the blind baggage as far as Colfax on the Overland. He chose Colfax because he saw the name chalked on a freight car at the Oakland mole. At Colfax, within three hours after his arrival, he fought with a restaurant man over the question of a broken saucer, and the same evening was told to leave the town by the sheriff.Out of Colfax, some twenty-eight miles into the mountains, are placer gold mines, having for headquarters a one-street town called Iowa Hill. Schuster went over to the Hill the same day on the stage. The stage got in at night and pulled up in front of the postoffice. Schuster went into the postoffice, which was also a Wells-Fargo office, a candy store, a drug store, a cigar store, and a lounging-room, and asked about hotels.Only the postmaster was in at that time, but as Schuster leaned across the counter, talking to him, a young man came in, with a huge spur on his left boot-heel. He and the postmaster nodded, and the young man slid an oblong object about the size of a brick across the counter. The object was wrapped in newspaper and seemed altogether too heavy for anything but metal—metal of the precious kind, for example."He?" answered the postmaster to Schuster, when the young man had gone. "He's the superintendent of the Little Bear mine on the other side of the American River, about three miles by the trail."For the next week Schuster set himself to work to solve the problem of how a man might obtain a shotgun in the vicinity of Iowa Hill without the fact being remembered afterward and the man identified. It seemed good to him after a while to steal the gun from a couple of Chinamen who were washing gravel along the banks of the American River about two miles below the Little Bear. For two days he lay in the tarweed and witch hazel, on the side of the canyon overlooking the cabin, noted the time when both Chinamen were sufficiently far away, and stole the gun, together with a saw and a handful of cartridges loaded with buckshot. Within the next week he sawed off the gun-barrels sufficiently short, experimented once or twice with the buckshot, and found occasion to reconnoiter every step of the trail that led from the Little Bear to Iowa Hill. Also, he found out at the bar of the hotel at the Hill that the superintendent of the Little Bear amalgamated and reported the cleanup on Sundays. When he had made sure of this Schuster was seen no more about that little one-street mining town."He says it's Sunday," said Paul Schuster to himself; "but that's why it's probably Saturday or Monday. He ain't going to have the town know when he brings the brick over. It might even be Friday. I'll make it a four-night watch."There is a nasty bit on the trail from the Little Bear to the Hill, steep as a staircase, narrow as a rabbit-run, and overhung with manzanita. The place is trumpet-mouthed in shape, and sound carries far. So, on the second night of his watch, Schuster could at last plainly hear the certain sounds that he had been waiting for—sounds that jarred sharply on the prolonged roll of the Morning Star stamps, a quarter of a mile beyond the canyon. The sounds were those of a horse threshing through the gravel and shallow water of the ford in the river just below. He heard the horse grunt as he took the slope of the nearer bank, and the voice of his rider speaking to him came distinctly to his ears. Then silence for one—two—three minutes, while the stamp mill at the Morning Star purred and rumbled unceasingly and Schuster's heart pumped thickly in his throat. Then a blackness blacker than that of the night heaved suddenly against the grey of "the sky, close in upon him, and a pebble clicked beneath a shod hoof."Pull up!" Schuster was in the midst of the trail, his cheek caressing the varnished stock."Whoa! Steady there! What in hell——""Pull up. You know what's wanted. Chuck us that brick."The superintendent chirped sharply to the horse, spurring with his left heel."Stand clear there, God damn you! I'll ride you down!"The stock leaped fiercely in Schuster's arm-pit, nearly knocking him down, and, in the light of two parallel flashes, he saw an instantaneous picture—rugged skyline, red-tinted manzanita bushes, the plunging mane and head of a horse, and above it a Face with open mouth and staring eyes, smoke-wreathed and hatless. The empty stirrup thrashed across Schuster's body as the horse scraped by him. The trail was dark in front of him. He could see nothing. But soon he heard a little bubbling noise and a hiccough. Then all fell quiet again."I got you, all right!"Thus Schuster, the ex-floor-walker, whose part hitherto in his little life-drama had been to say, "first aisle left," "elevator, second floor," "first counter right."Then he went down on his knees, groping at the warm bundle in front of him. But he found no brick. It had never occurred to him that the superintendent might ride over to town for other reasons than merely to ship the week's cleanup. He struck a light and looked more closely—looked at the man he had shot. He could not tell whether it was the superintendent or not, for various reasons, but chiefly because the barrels of the gun had been sawn off, the gun loaded with buckshot, and both barrels fired simultaneously at close range.Men coming over the trail from the Hill the next morning found the young superintendent, and spread the report of what had befallen him.
* * * * *
The second Little Drama was wrought out for me the next day. I was sitting in the bay window of the club watching the world go by, when my eye was caught by a little group on the curbstone directly opposite. An old woman, meanly dressed, and two little children, both girls, the eldest about ten, the youngest, say, six or seven. They had been coming slowly along, and the old woman had been leading the youngest child by the hand. Just as they came opposite to where I was sitting the younger child lurched away from the woman once or twice, dragging limply at her hand, then its knees wobbled and bent and the next moment it had collapsed upon the pavement. Some children will do this from sheer perversity and with intent to be carried. But it was not perversity on this child's part. The poor old woman hauled the little girl up to her feet, but she collapsed again at once after a couple of steps and sat helplessly down upon the sidewalk, staring vaguely about, her thumb in her mouth. There was something wrong with the little child—one could see that at half a glance. Some complaint, some disease of the muscles, some weakness of the joints, that smote upon her like this at inopportune moments. Again and again her old mother, with very painful exertion—she was old and weak herself—raised her to her feet, only that she might sink in a heap before she had moved a yard. The old woman's bonnet fell off—a wretched, battered black bonnet, and the other little girl picked it up and held it while she looked on at her mother's efforts with an indifference that could only have been born of familiarity. Twice the old woman tried to carry the little girl, but her strength was not equal to it; indeed, the effort of raising the heavy child to its feet was exhausting her. She looked helplessly at the street cars as they passed, but you could see she had not enough money to pay even three fares. Once more she set her little girl upon her feet, and helped her forward half a dozen steps. And so, little by little, with many pauses for rest and breath, the little group went down the street and passed out of view, the little child staggering and falling as if from drunkenness, her sister looking on gravely, holding the mother's battered bonnet, and the mother herself, patient, half-exhausted, her grey hair blowing about her face, labouring on step by step, trying to appear indifferent to the crowd that passed by on either side, trying bravely to make light of the whole matter until she should reach home. As I watched them I thought of this woman's husband, the father of this paralytic little girl, and somehow it was brought to me that none of them would ever see him again, but that he was alive for all that.
* * * * *
The third Little Drama was lively, and there was action in it, and speech, and a curious, baffling mystery. On a corner near a certain bank in this city there is affixed to the lamp post a call-box that the police use to ring up for the patrol wagon. When an arrest is made in the neighbourhood the offender is brought here, the wagon called for, and he is conveyed to the City Prison. On the afternoon of the day of the second Little Drama, as I came near to this corner, I was aware of a crowd gathered about the lamp post that held the call-box, and between the people's heads and over their shoulders I could see the blue helmets of a couple of officers. I stopped and pushed up into the inner circle of the crowd. The two officers had in custody a young fellow of some eighteen or nineteen years. And I was surprised to find that he was as well dressed and as fine looking a lad as one would wish to see. I did not know what the charge was, I don't know it now,—but the boy did not seem capable of any great meanness. As I got into the midst of the crowd, and while I was noting what was going forward, it struck me that the people about me were unusually silent—silent as people are who are interested and unusually observant. Then I saw why. The young fellow's mother was there, and the Little Drama was enacting itself between her, her son, and the officers who had him in charge. One of these latter had the key to the call-box in his hand. He had not yet rung for the wagon. An altercation was going on between the mother and the son—she entreating him to come home, he steadily refusing.
"It's up to you," said one of the officers, at length; "if you don't go home with your mother, I'll call the wagon."
"No!"
"Jimmy!" said the woman, and then, coming close to him, she spoke to him in a low voice and with an earnestness, an intensity, that it hurt one to see.
"No!"
"For the last time, will you come?"
"No! No! No!"
The officer faced about and put the key into the box, but the woman caught at his wrist and drew it away. It was a veritable situation. It should have occurred behind footlights and in the midst of painted flats and flies, but instead the city thundered about it, drays and cars went up and down in the street, and the people on the opposite walk passed with but an instant's glance. The crowd was as still as an audience, watching what next would happen. The crisis of the Little Drama had arrived.
"For the last time, will you come with me?"
"No!"
She let fall her hand then and turned and went away, crying into her handkerchief. The officer unlocked and opened the box, set the indicator and opened the switch. A few moments later, as I went on up the street, I met the patrol-wagon coming up on a gallop.
What was the trouble here? Why had that young fellow preferred going to prison rather than home with his mother? What was behind it all I shall never know. It was a mystery—a little eddy in the tide of the city's life, come and gone in an instant, yet reaching down to the very depths of those things that are not meant to be seen.
And as I went along I wondered where was the father of that young fellow who was to spend his first night in jail, and the father of the little paralytic girl, and the father of the blind idiot, and it seemed to me that the chief actors in these three Little Dramas of the Curbstone had been somehow left out of the programme.
Shorty Stack, Pugilist
Over at the "Big Dipper" mine a chuck-tender named Kelly had been in error as regards a box of dynamite sticks, and Iowa Hill had elected to give an "entertainment" for the benefit of his family.
The programme, as announced upon the posters that were stuck up in the Post Office and on the door of the Odd Fellows' Hall, was quite an affair. The Iowa Hill orchestra would perform, the livery-stable keeper would play the overture to "William Tell" upon his harmonica, and the town doctor would read a paper on "Tuberculosis in Cattle." The evening was to close with a "grand ball."
Then it was discovered that a professional pugilist from the "Bay" was over in Forest Hill, and someone suggested that a match could be made between him and Shorty Stack "to enliven the entertainment." Shorty Stack was a bedrock cleaner at the "Big Dipper," and handy with his fists. It was his boast that no man of his weight (Shorty fought at a hundred and forty) no man of his weight in Placer County could stand up to him for ten rounds, and Shorty had always made good this boast. Shorty knew two punches, and no more—a short-arm jab under the ribs with his right, and a left upper-cut on the point of the chin.
The pugilist's name was McCleaverty. He was an out and out dub—one of the kind who appear in four-round exhibition bouts to keep the audience amused while the "event of the evening" is preparing—but he had had ring experience, and his name had been in the sporting paragraphs of the San Francisco papers. The dub was a welter-weight and a professional, but he accepted the challenge of Shorty Stack's backers and covered their bet of fifty dollars that he could not "stop" Shorty in four rounds.
And so it came about that extra posters were affixed to the door of the Odd Fellows' Hall and the walls of the Post Office to the effect that Shorty Stack, the champion of Placer County, and Buck McCleaverty, the Pride of Colusa, would appear in a genteel boxing exhibition at the entertainment given for the benefit, etc., etc.
Shorty had two weeks in which to train. The nature of his work in the mine had kept his muscles hard enough, so his training was largely a matter of dieting and boxing an imaginary foe with a rock in each fist. He was so vigorous in his exercise and in the matter of what he ate and drank that the day before the entertainment he had got himself down to a razor-edge, and was in a fair way of going fine. When a man gets into too good condition, the least little slip will spoil him. Shorty knew this well enough, and told himself in consequence that he must be very careful.
The night before the entertainment Shorty went to call on Miss Starbird. Miss Starbird was one of the cooks at the mine. She was a very pretty girl, just turned twenty, and lived with her folks in a cabin near the superintendent's office, on the road from the mine to Iowa Hill. Her father was a shift boss in the mine, and her mother did the washing for the "office." Shorty was recognised by the mine as her "young man." She was going to the entertainment with her people, and promised Shorty the first "walk-around" in the "Grand Ball" that was to follow immediately after the Genteel Glove Contest.
Shorty came into the Starbird cabin on that particular night, his hair neatly plastered in a beautiful curve over his left temple, and his pants outside of his boots as a mark of esteem. He wore no collar, but he had encased himself in a boiled shirt, which could mean nothing else but mute and passionate love, and moreover, as a crowning tribute, he refrained from spitting.
"How do you feel, Shorty?" asked Miss Starbird.
Shorty had always sedulously read the interviews with pugilists that appeared in the San Francisco papers immediately before their fights and knew how to answer.
"I feel fit to fight the fight of my life," he alliterated proudly. "I've trained faithfully and I mean to win."
"It ain't a regular prize fight, is it, Shorty?" she enquired. "Pa said he wouldn't take ma an' me if it was. All the women folk in the camp are going, an' I never heard of women at a fight, it ain't genteel."
"Well, I d'n know," answered Shorty, swallowing his saliva. "The committee that got the programme up called it a genteel boxing exhibition so's to get the women folks to stay. I call it a four round go with a decision."
"My, itull be exciting!" exclaimed Miss Starbird. "I ain't never seen anything like it. Oh, Shorty, d'ye think you'll win?"
"I don'tthinknothun about it. I know I will," returned Shorty, defiantly. "If I once get in my left upper cut on him,huh!" and he snorted magnificently.
Shorty stayed and talked to Miss Starbird until ten o'clock, then he rose to go.
"I gotta get to bed," he said, "I'm in training you see."
"Oh, wait a minute," said Miss Starbird, "I been making some potato salad for the private dining of the office, you better have some; it's the best I ever made."
"No, no," said Shorty, stoutly, "I don't want any."
"Hoh," sniffed Miss Starbird airily, "you don't need to have any."
"Well, don't you see," said Shorty, "I'm in training. I don't dare eat any of that kinda stuff."
"Stuff!" exclaimed Miss Starbird, her chin in the air. "No oneelseever called my cooking stuff."
"Well, don't you see, don't you see."
"No, I don't see. I guess you must be 'fraid of getting whipped if you're so 'fraid of a little salad."
"What!" exclaimed Shorty, indignantly. "Why I could come into the ring from a jag and whip him; 'fraid!who'safraid. I'll show you if I'm afraid. Let's have your potato salad, an' some beer, too. Huh!I'llshow you if I'm afraid."
But Miss Starbird would not immediately consent to be appeased.
"No, you called it stuff," she said, "an' the superintendent said I was the best cook in Placer County."
But at last, as a great favour to Shorty, she relented and brought the potato salad from the kitchen and two bottles of beer.
When the town doctor had finished his paper on "Tuberculosis in Cattle," the chairman of the entertainment committee ducked under the ropes of the ring and announced that: "The next would be the event of the evening and would the gentlemen please stop smoking." He went on to explain that the ladies present might remain without fear and without reproach as the participants in the contest would appear in gymnasium tights, and would box with gloves and not with bare knuckles.
"Well, don't they always fight with gloves?" called a voice from the rear of the house. But the chairman ignored the interruption.
The "entertainment" was held in the Odd Fellows' Hall. Shorty's seconds prepared him for the fight in a back room of the saloon, on the other side of the street, and towards ten o'clock one of the committeemen came running in to say:
"What's the matter? Hurry up, you fellows, McCleaverty's in the ring already, and the crowd's beginning to stamp."
Shorty rose and slipped into an overcoat.
"All ready," he said.
"Now mind, Shorty," said Billy Hicks, as he gathered up the sponges, fans and towels, "don't mix things with him, you don't have to knock him out, all you want's the decision."
Next, Shorty was aware that he was sitting in a corner of the ring with his back against the ropes, and that diagonally opposite was a huge red man with a shaven head. There was a noisy, murmuring crowd somewhere below him, and there was a glare of kerosene lights over his head.
"Buck McCleaverty, the Pride of Colusa," announced the master of ceremonies, standing in the middle of the ring, one hand under the dub's elbow. There was a ripple of applause. Then the master of ceremonies came over to Shorty's corner, and, taking him by the arm, conducted him into the middle of the ring.
"Shorty Stack, the Champion of Placer County." The house roared; Shorty ducked and grinned and returned to his corner. He was nervous, excited. He had not imagined it would be exactly like this. There was a strangeness about it all; an unfamiliarity that made him uneasy.
"Take it slow," said Billy Hicks, kneading the gloves, so as to work the padding away from the knuckles. The gloves were laced on Shorty's hands.
"Up you go," said Billy Hicks, again. "No, not the fight yet, shake hands first. Don't get rattled."
Then ensued a vague interval, that seemed to Shorty interminable. He had a notion that he shook hands with McCleaverty, and that some one asked him if he would agree to hit with one arm free in the breakaway. He remembered a glare of lights, a dim vision of rows of waiting faces, a great murmuring noise, and he had a momentary glimpse of someone he believed to be the referee, a young man in shirtsleeves and turned-up trousers. Then everybody seemed to be getting out of the ring and away from him, even Billy Hicks left him after saying something he did not understand. Only the referee, McCleaverty and himself were left inside the ropes.
"Time!"
Somebody, that seemed to Shorty strangely like himself, stepped briskly out into the middle of the ring, his left arm before him, his right fist clinched over his breast. The crowd, the glaring lights, the murmuring noise, all faded away. There only remained the creaking of rubber soles over the resin of the boards of the ring and the sight of McCleaverty's shifting, twinkling eyes and his round, close-cropped head.
"Break!"
The referee stepped between the two men and Shorty realised that the two had clinched, and that his right forearm had been across McCleaverty's throat, his left clasping him about the shoulders.
What! Were they fighting already? This was the first round, of course, somebody was shouting.
"That's the stuff, Shorty."
All at once Shorty saw the flash of a red muscled arm, he threw forward his shoulder ducking his head behind it, the arm slid over the raised shoulder and a bare and unprotected flank turned towards him.
"Now," thought Shorty. His arm shortened and leaped forward. There was a sudden impact. The shock of it jarred Shorty himself, and he heard McCleaverty grunt. There came a roar from the house.
"Give it to him, Shorty."
Shorty pushed his man from him, the heel of his glove upon his face. He was no longer nervous. The lights didn't bother him.
"I'll knock him out yet," he muttered to himself.
They fiddled and feinted about the ring, watching each other's eyes. Shorty held his right ready. He told himself he would jab McCleaverty again on the same spot when next he gave him an opening.
"Break!"
They must have clinched again, but Shorty was not conscious of it. A sharp pain in his upper lip made him angry. His right shot forward again, struck home, and while the crowd roared and the lights began to swim again, he knew that he was rushing McCleaverty back, back, back, his arms shooting out and in like piston rods, now for an upper cut with his left on the—
"Time!"
Billy Hicks was talking excitedly. The crowd still roared. His lips pained. Someone was spurting water over him, one of his seconds worked the fans like a windmill. He wondered what Miss Starbird thought of him now.
"Time!"
He barely had a chance to duck, almost double, while McCleaverty's right swished over his head. The dub was swinging for a knockout already. The round would be hot and fast.
"Stay with um, Shorty."
"That's the stuff, Shorty."
He must be setting the pace, the house plainly told him that. He stepped in again and cut loose with both fists.
"Break!"
Shorty had not clinched. Was it possible that McCleaverty was clinching "to avoid punishment." Shorty tried again, stepping in close, his right arm crooked and ready.
"Break!"
The dub was clinching. There could be no doubt of that. Shorty gathered himself together and rushed in, upper-cutting viciously; he felt McCleaverty giving way before him.
"He's got um going."
There was exhilaration in the shout. Shorty swung right and left, his fist struck something that hurt him. Sure, he thought, that must have been a good one. He recovered, throwing out his left before him. Where was the dub? not down there on one knee in a corner of the ring? The house was a pandemonium, near at hand some one was counting, "one—two—three—four—"
Billy Hicks shouted, "Come back to your corner. When he's up go right in to finish him. He ain't knocked out yet. He's just taking his full time. Swing for his chin again, you got him going. If you can put him out, Shorty, we'll take you to San Francisco."
"Seven—eight—nine—"
McCleaverty was up again. Shorty rushed in. Something caught him a fearful jar in the pit of the stomach. He was sick in an instant, racked with nausea. The lights began to dance.
"Time!"
There was water on his face and body again, deliciously cool. The fan windmills swung round and round. "What's the matter, what's the matter," Billy Hicks was asking anxiously.
Something was wrong. There was a lead-like weight in Shorty's stomach, a taste of potato salad came to his mouth, he was sick almost to vomiting.
"He caught you a hard one in the wind just before the gong, did he?" said Billy Hicks. "There's fight in him yet. He's got a straight arm body blow you want to look out for. Don't let up on him. Keep—"
"Time!"
Shorty came up bravely. In his stomach there was a pain that made it torture to stand erect. Nevertheless he rushed, lashing out right and left. He was dizzy; before he knew it he was beating the air. Suddenly his chin jolted backward, and the lights began to spin; he was tiring rapidly, too, and with every second his arms grew heavier and heavier and his knees began to tremble more and more. McCleaverty gave him no rest. Shorty tried to clinch, but the dub sidestepped, and came in twice with a hard right and left over the heart. Shorty's gloves seemed made of iron; he found time to mutter, "If I only hadn't eaten that stuff last night."
What with the nausea and the pain, he was hard put to it to keep from groaning. It was the dub who was rushing now; Shorty felt he could not support the weight of his own arms another instant. What was that on his face that was warm and tickled? He knew that he had just strength enough left for one more good blow; if he could only upper-cut squarely on McCleaverty's chin it might suffice.
"Break!"
The referee thrust himself between them, but instantly McCleaverty closed again. Would the roundneverend? The dub swung again, missed, and Shorty saw his chance; he stepped in, upper-cutting with all the strength he could summon up. The lights swam again, and the roar of the crowd dwindled to a couple of voices. He smelt whisky.
"Gimme that sponge." It was Billy Hicks voice. "He'll do all right now."
Shorty suddenly realised that he was lying on his back. In another second he would be counted out. He raised himself, but his hands touched a bed quilt and not the resined floor of the ring. He looked around him and saw that he was in the back room of the saloon where he had dressed. The fight was over.
"Did I win?" he asked, getting on his feet.
"Win!" exclaimed Billy Hicks. "You were knocked out. He put you out after you had him beaten. Oh, you're a peach of a fighter, you are!"
* * * * *
Half an hour later when he had dressed, Shorty went over to the Hall. His lip was badly swollen and his chin had a funny shape, but otherwise he was fairly presentable. The Iowa Hill orchestra had just struck into the march for the walk around. He pushed through the crowd of men around the door looking for Miss Starbird. Just after he had passed he heard a remark and the laugh that followed it:
"Quitter, oh, what a quitter!"
Shorty turned fiercely about and would have answered, but just at that moment he caught sight of Miss Starbird. She had just joined the promenade or the walk around with some other man. He went up to her:
"Didn't you promise to have this walk around with me?" he said aggrievedly.
"Well, did you think I was going to wait all night for you?" returned Miss Starbird.
As she turned from him and joined the march Shorty's eye fell upon her partner.
It was McCleaverty.
The Strangest Thing
The best days in the voyage from the Cape to Southampton are those that come immediately before and immediately after that upon which you cross the line, when the ship is as steady as a billiard table, and the ocean is as smooth and shiny and coloured as the mosaic floor of a basilica church, when the deck is covered with awning from stem to stern, and the resin bubbles out of the masts, and the thermometer in the companion-way at the entrance to the dining-saloon climbs higher and higher with every turn of the screw. Of course all the men people aboard must sleep on deck these nights. There is a pleasure in this that you will find nowhere else. At six your steward wakes you up with your morning cup of coffee, and you sit cross-legged in your pajamas on the skylight and drink your coffee and smoke your cigarettes and watch the sun shooting up over the rim of that polished basilica floor, and take pleasure in the mere fact of your existence, and talk and talk and tell stories until it's time for bath and breakfast.
We came back from the Cape inThe Moor, with a very abbreviated cabin list. Only three of the smaller tables in the saloon were occupied, and those mostly by men—diamond-brokers from Kimberly, gold-brokers from the Rand, the manager of a war correspondent on a lecture tour, cut short by the Ashanti war, an English captain of twenty-two, who had been with Jameson at Krugersdorp and somehow managed to escape, an Australian reporter named Miller, and two or three others of a less distinct personality.
Miller told the story that follows early one morning, sitting on the Bull board, tailor-fashion, and smoking pipefuls of straight perique, black as a nigger's wool. We were grouped around him on the deck in pajamas and bath robes. It was half after six, the thermometer was at 70 degrees,The Moorcut the still water with a soothing rumble of her screw, and at intervals flushed whole schools of flying fish. Somehow the talk had drifted to the inexplicable things that we had seen, and we had been piecing out our experiences with some really beautiful lies. Captain Thatcher, the Krugersdorp chap, held that the failure of the Jameson Raid was the most inexplicable thing he had ever experienced, but none of the rest of us could think of anything we had seen or heard of that did not have some stealthy, shadowy sort of explanation sneaking after it and hunting it down.
"Well, I saw something a bit thick once," observed Miller, pushing down the tobacco in his pipe bowl with the tip of a callous finger, and in the abrupt silence that followed we heard the noise of dishes from the direction of the galley.
"It was in Johannesburg three years back, when I was down on me luck. I had been rooked properly by a Welsh gaming chap who was no end of a bounder, and three quid was all that stood between me and—well," he broke in, suddenly, "I had three quid left. I wore down me feet walking the streets of that bally town looking for anything that would keep me going for a while, and give me a chance to look around and fetch breath, and there was nothing, but I tell ye nothing, and I was fair desperate. One dye, and a filthy wet dye it was, too, I had gone out to the race track, beyond Hospital Hill, where the pony races are run, thinking as might be I'd find a berth, handling ponies there, but the season was too far gone, and they turned me awye. I came back to town by another road—then by the waye that fetches around by the Mahomedan burying-ground. Well, the pauper burying-ground used to be alongside in those dyes, and as I came up, jolly well blown, I tell ye, for I'd but tightened me belt by wye of breakfast, I saw a chap diggin' a gryve. I was in a mind for gryves meself just then, so I pulled up and leaned over the fence and piped him off at his work. Then, like the geeser I'd come to be, I says:
"'What are ye doing there, friend?' He looked me over between shovelfuls a bit, and then says:
"'Oh, just setting out early violets;' and that shut me up properly.
"Well, I piped him digging that gryve for perhaps five minutes, and then, s' help me, I asked him for a job. I did—I asked that gryve-digger for a job—I was that low. He leans his back against the side of the gryve and looks me over, then by and bye, says he:
"'All right, pardner!'
"'I'm thinking your from the Stytes,' says I.
"'Guess yes,' he says, and goes on digging.
"Well, we came to terms after a while. He was to give me two bob a dye for helping him at his work, and I was to have a bunk in his 'shack', as he called it—a box of a house built of four boards, as I might sye, that stood just on the edge of the gryveyard. He was a rum 'un, was that Yankee chap. Over pipes that night he told me something of himself, and do y' know, that gryve-digger in the pauper burying-ground in Johannesburg, South Africa, was a Harvard graduate! Strike me straight if I don't believe he really was. The man was a wreck from strong drink, but that was the one thing he was proud of.
"'Yes, sir,' he'd say, over and over again, looking straight ahead of him, 'Yes, sir, I was a Harvard man once, and pulled at number five in the boat'—the 'varsity boat, mind ye; and then he'd go on talking half to himself. 'And now what am I? I'm digging gryves for hire—burying dead people for a living, when I ought to be dead meself. I am dead and buried long ago. Its just the whiskey that keeps me alive, Miller,' he would say; 'when I stop that I'm done for.'
"The first morning I came round for work I met him dressed as if to go to town, and carrying a wickered demijohn. 'Miller',' he says, 'I'm going into town to get this filled. You must stop here and be ready to answer any telephone call from the police station.' S' help me if there wasn't a telephone in that beastly shack. 'If a pauper cops off they'll ring you up from town and notify you to have the gryve ready. If I'm awye, you'll have to dig it. Remember, if it's a man, you must dig a six foot six hole; if it's a woman, five feet will do, and if it's a kid, three an' half'll be a plenty. S'long.' And off he goes.
"Strike me blind but that was a long dye, that first one. I'd the pauper gryves for view and me own thoughts for company. But along about noon, the Harvard graduate not showing up, I found a diversion. The graduate had started to paint the shack at one time, but had given over after finishing one side, but the paint pot and the brushes were there. I got hold of 'em and mixed a bit o' paint and went the rounds of the gryves. Ye know how it is in a pauper burying-ground—no nymes at all on the headboards—naught but numbers, and half o' them washed awye by the rynes; so I, for a diversion, as I sye, started in to paint all manner o' fancy nymes and epitaphs on the headboards—any nyme that struck me fancy, and then underneath, an appropriate epitaph, and the dytes, of course—I didn't forget the dytes. Ye know, that was the rarest enjoyment I ever had. Ye don't think so? Try it once! Why, Gawd blyme me, there's a chance for imagination in it, and genius and art—highest kind of art. For instance now, I'd squat down in front of a blank headboard and think a bit, and the inspiration would come, and I'd write like this, maybe: 'Jno. K. Boggart, of New Zealand. Born Dec. 21, 1870; died June 5, 1890,' and then, underneath, 'He Rests in Peace'; or else, 'Elsie, Youngest Daughter of Mary B. and William H. Terhune; b. May 1st, 1880; d. Nov. 25, 1889—Not Lost, but Gone Before'; or agyne, 'Lucas, Lieutenant T. V. Killed in Battle at Wady Halfa, Egypt, August 30, 1889; born London, England, Jan. 3, 1850—He Lies Like a Warrior, Tyking His Rest with His Martial Cloak Around Him'; or something humorous, as 'Bohunkus, J. J.; born Germany; Oct. 3d, 1880; died (by request) Cape Town, Sept. 4, 1890'; or one that I remember as my very best effort, that read, 'Willie, Beloved Son of Anna and Gustave Harris; b. April 1st, 1878; d. May 5th, 1888—He was a Man Before His Mother.' Then I wrote me own nyme, with the epitaph, 'More Sinned Against Than Sinning;' and the Harvard chap's too. His motto, I remember, was 'He Pulled 5 in His 'Varsity's Boat.'
"Well, I had more sport that afternoon than I've ever had since. Y'know I felt as if I really were acquainted with all those people—with John Boggart, and Lieutenant Lucas, and Bohunkus, and Willie and all. Ah, that was a proper experience. But right in the middle of me work here comes a telephone message from town: 'Body of dead baby found at mouth of city sewer—prepare gryve at once.' Well, I dug that gryve, the first, last and only gryve I ever hope to dig. It came on to ryne like a water-spout, and oh, but it was jolly tough work. Then about four o'clock, just as I was finishing, the Harvard chap comes home, howling drunk. I see him go into the shack, and pretty soon out he comes, with a hoe in one hand and a table leg in the other. Soon as ever he sees me he makes a staggering run at me, swinging the hoe and the table leg and yelling like a Zulu indaba. Just to make everything agreeable and appropriate, I was down in the gryve, and it occurred to me that the situation was too uncommon convenient. I scrambled out and made a run for it, for there was murder in his eye, and for upwards of ten minutes we two played blindman's buff in that gryveyard, me dodging from one headboard to another, and he at me heels, chivying me like a fox and with intent to kill. All at once he trips over a headboard, and goes down and can't get up, and at the same minute here comes the morgue wagon over Hospital Hill.
"Now here comes the queer part of this lamentable history. A trap was following that morgue wagon, a no-end swell trap, with a cob in the shafts that was worth an independent fortune. There was an old gent in the trap and a smart Cape boy driving. The old gent was the heaviest kind of a swell, but I'd never seen him before. The morgue wagon drives into the yard, and I—the Harvard chap being too far gone—points out the gryve. The driver of the morgue wagon chucks out the coffin, a bit of a three-foot box, and drives back to town. Then up comes the trap, and the old gent gets down—dressed up to the nines he was, in that heartbreaking ryne—and says he, 'My man, I would like to have that coffin opened.' By this time the Harvard chap had pulled himself together. He staggered up to the old gent and says, 'No, can't op'n no coffin, 'tsgainst all relugations—all regalutions, can't permit no coffin tobeopp'n.' I wish you would have seen the old gent. Excited! The man was shaking like a flagstaff in a gyle, talked thick and stammered, he was so phased. Gawd strike me, what a scene! I can see it now—that pauper burying ground wye down there in South Africa—no trees, all open and bleak. The pelting ryne, the open gryve and the drunken Harvard chap, and the excited old swell arguing over a baby's coffin."
Pretty soon the old gent brings up a sovereign and gives it to the Harvard chap.
"'Let her go,' says he then, and with that he gives the top board of the coffin such a kick as started it an inch or more. With that—now listen to what I'm telling—with that the old gent goes down on his knees in the mud and muck, and kneels there waiting and fair gasping with excitement while the Harvard chap wrenches off the topboard. Before he had raised it four inches me old gent plunges his hand in quick, gropes there a second and takes out something—something shut in the palm of his hand.
"'That's all,' says he: 'Thank you, my man,' and gives us a quid apiece. We stood there like stuck swine, dotty with the queerness, the horribleness of the thing.
"'That's all,' he says again, with a long breath of relief, as he climbs into his trap with his clothes all foul with mud. 'That's all, thank Gawd.' Then to the Cape boy: 'Drive her home, Jim.' Five minutes later we lost him in the blur of the rain over Hospital Hill."
"But what was it he took out of the baby's coffin?" said half a dozen men in a breath at this point. "What was it? What could it have been?"
"Ah, what was it?" said Miller. "I'll be damned if I know what it was. I never knew, I never will know."
A Reversion to Type
Schuster was too damned cheeky. He was the floor-walker in a department store on Kearny street, and I had opportunity to observe his cheek upon each of the few occasions on which I went into that store with—let us say my cousin. A floor-walker should let his communications be "first aisle left," or "elevator, second floor front," or "third counter right," for whatsoever is more than this cometh of evil. But Schuster used to come up to—my cousin, and take her gently by the hand and ask her how she did, and if she was to be out of town much that season, and tell her, with mild reproach in his eye, that she had been quite a stranger of late, while I stood in the background mumbling curses not loud but deep.
However, my cousin does not figure in this yarn, nor myself. Paul Schuster is the hero—Paul Schuster, floor-walker in a department-store that sold ribbons and lace and corsets and other things, fancy, now! He was hopelessly commonplace, lived with a maiden aunt and a parrot in two rooms, way out in the bleak streets around Lone Mountain. When on duty he wore a long black cutaway coat, a white pique four-in-hand and blue-grey "pants" that cost four dollars. Besides this he parted his hair on the side and entertained ideas on culture and refinement. His father had been a barber in the Palace Hotel barber shop.
Paul Schuster had never heard anything of a grandfather.
Schuster came to that department-store when he was about thirty. Five years passed; then ten—he was there yet—forty years old by now. Always in a black cutaway and white tie, always with his hair parted on one side, always with the same damned cheek. A floor-walker, respectable as an English barrister, steady as an eight-day clock, a figure known to every woman in San Francisco. He had lived a floor-walker; as a floor-walker he would die. Such he was at forty. At forty-one he fell. Two days and all was over.
It sometimes happens that a man will live a sober, steady, respectable, commonplace life for forty, fifty or even sixty years, and then, without the least sign of warning, suddenly go counter to every habit, to every trait of character and every rule of conduct he has been believed to possess. The thing only happens to intensely respectable gentlemen, of domestic tastes and narrow horizons, who are just preparing to become old. Perhaps it is a last revolt of a restrained youth—the final protest of vigorous, heady blood, too long dammed up. This bolting season does not last very long. It comes upon a man between the ages of forty and fifty-five, and while it lasts the man should be watched more closely than a young fellow in his sophomore year at college. The vagaries of a sophomore need not be taken any more seriously than the skittishness of a colt, but when a fifty-year-old bolts, stand clear!
On the second of May—two months and a day after his forty-first birthday—Paul Schuster bolted. It came upon him with the quickness of a cataclysm, like the sudden, abrupt development of latent mania. For a week he had been feeling ill at ease—restless; a vague discomfort hedged him in like an ill-fitting garment; he felt the moving of his blood in his wrists and his temples. A subtle desire to do something, he knew not what, bit and nibbled at his brain like the tooth of a tiny unfamiliar rodent.
On the second of May, at twenty minutes after six, Schuster came out of the store at the tail end of the little army of home-bound clerks. He locked the door behind him, according to custom, and stood for a moment on the asphalt, his hands in his pockets, fumbling his month's pay. Then he said to himself, nodding his head resolutely:
"To-night I shall get drunk—as drunk as I possibly can. I shall go to the most disreputable resorts I can find—I shall know the meaning of wine, of street fights, of women, of gaming, of jolly companions, of noisy mid-night suppers. I'll do the town, or by God, the town will do me. Nothing shall stop me, and I will stop at nothing. Here goes!"
Now, if Paul Schuster had only been himself this bolt of his would have brought him to nothing worse than the Police Court, and would have lasted but twenty-four hours at the outside. But Schuster, like all the rest of us, was not merely himself. He was his ancestors as well. In him as in you and me, were generations—countless generations—of forefathers. Schuster had in him the characteristics of his father, the Palace Hotel barber, but also, he had the unknown characteristics of his grandfather, of whom he had never heard, and his great-grandfather, likewise ignored. It is rather a serious matter to thrust yourself under the dominion of unknown, unknowable impulses and passions. This is what Schuster did that night. Getting drunk was an impulse belonging to himself; but who knows what "inherited tendencies," until then dormant, the alcohol unleashed within him? Something like this must have happened to have accounted for what follows.
Schuster went straight to the Palace Hotel bar, where he had cocktails, thence to the Poodle Dog, where he had a French dinner and champagne, thence to the Barbary Coast on upper Kearny street, and drank whiskey that rasped his throat like gulps of carpet tacks. Then, realising that San Francisco was his own principality and its inhabitants his vassals, he hired a carriage and drove to the Cliff House, and poured champagne into the piano in the public parlor. A waiter remonstrated, and Paul Schuster, floor-walker and respectable citizen, bowled him down with a catsup bottle and stamped upon his abdomen. At the beginning of that evening he belonged to that class whom policemen are paid to protect. When he walked out of the Cliff House he was a free-booter seven feet tall, with a chest expansion of fifty inches. He paid the hack-driver a double fare and strode away into the night and plunged into the waste of sand dunes that stretch back from the beach on the other side of the Park.
It never could be found out what happened to Schuster, or what he did, during the next ten hours. We pick him up again in a saloon on the waterfront about noon the next day, with thirty dollars in his pocket and God knows what disorderly notions in his crazed wits. At this time he was sober as far as the alcohol went. It might be supposed that now would have been the time for reflection and repentance and return to home and respectability. Return home! Not much! Schuster had began to wonder what kind of an ass he had been to have walked the floor of a department-store for the last score of years. Something was boiling in his veins. B-r-r-r! Let 'em all stand far from him now.
That day he left San Francisco and rode the blind baggage as far as Colfax on the Overland. He chose Colfax because he saw the name chalked on a freight car at the Oakland mole. At Colfax, within three hours after his arrival, he fought with a restaurant man over the question of a broken saucer, and the same evening was told to leave the town by the sheriff.
Out of Colfax, some twenty-eight miles into the mountains, are placer gold mines, having for headquarters a one-street town called Iowa Hill. Schuster went over to the Hill the same day on the stage. The stage got in at night and pulled up in front of the postoffice. Schuster went into the postoffice, which was also a Wells-Fargo office, a candy store, a drug store, a cigar store, and a lounging-room, and asked about hotels.
Only the postmaster was in at that time, but as Schuster leaned across the counter, talking to him, a young man came in, with a huge spur on his left boot-heel. He and the postmaster nodded, and the young man slid an oblong object about the size of a brick across the counter. The object was wrapped in newspaper and seemed altogether too heavy for anything but metal—metal of the precious kind, for example.
"He?" answered the postmaster to Schuster, when the young man had gone. "He's the superintendent of the Little Bear mine on the other side of the American River, about three miles by the trail."
For the next week Schuster set himself to work to solve the problem of how a man might obtain a shotgun in the vicinity of Iowa Hill without the fact being remembered afterward and the man identified. It seemed good to him after a while to steal the gun from a couple of Chinamen who were washing gravel along the banks of the American River about two miles below the Little Bear. For two days he lay in the tarweed and witch hazel, on the side of the canyon overlooking the cabin, noted the time when both Chinamen were sufficiently far away, and stole the gun, together with a saw and a handful of cartridges loaded with buckshot. Within the next week he sawed off the gun-barrels sufficiently short, experimented once or twice with the buckshot, and found occasion to reconnoiter every step of the trail that led from the Little Bear to Iowa Hill. Also, he found out at the bar of the hotel at the Hill that the superintendent of the Little Bear amalgamated and reported the cleanup on Sundays. When he had made sure of this Schuster was seen no more about that little one-street mining town.
"He says it's Sunday," said Paul Schuster to himself; "but that's why it's probably Saturday or Monday. He ain't going to have the town know when he brings the brick over. It might even be Friday. I'll make it a four-night watch."
There is a nasty bit on the trail from the Little Bear to the Hill, steep as a staircase, narrow as a rabbit-run, and overhung with manzanita. The place is trumpet-mouthed in shape, and sound carries far. So, on the second night of his watch, Schuster could at last plainly hear the certain sounds that he had been waiting for—sounds that jarred sharply on the prolonged roll of the Morning Star stamps, a quarter of a mile beyond the canyon. The sounds were those of a horse threshing through the gravel and shallow water of the ford in the river just below. He heard the horse grunt as he took the slope of the nearer bank, and the voice of his rider speaking to him came distinctly to his ears. Then silence for one—two—three minutes, while the stamp mill at the Morning Star purred and rumbled unceasingly and Schuster's heart pumped thickly in his throat. Then a blackness blacker than that of the night heaved suddenly against the grey of "the sky, close in upon him, and a pebble clicked beneath a shod hoof.
"Pull up!" Schuster was in the midst of the trail, his cheek caressing the varnished stock.
"Whoa! Steady there! What in hell——"
"Pull up. You know what's wanted. Chuck us that brick."
The superintendent chirped sharply to the horse, spurring with his left heel.
"Stand clear there, God damn you! I'll ride you down!"
The stock leaped fiercely in Schuster's arm-pit, nearly knocking him down, and, in the light of two parallel flashes, he saw an instantaneous picture—rugged skyline, red-tinted manzanita bushes, the plunging mane and head of a horse, and above it a Face with open mouth and staring eyes, smoke-wreathed and hatless. The empty stirrup thrashed across Schuster's body as the horse scraped by him. The trail was dark in front of him. He could see nothing. But soon he heard a little bubbling noise and a hiccough. Then all fell quiet again.
"I got you, all right!"
Thus Schuster, the ex-floor-walker, whose part hitherto in his little life-drama had been to say, "first aisle left," "elevator, second floor," "first counter right."
Then he went down on his knees, groping at the warm bundle in front of him. But he found no brick. It had never occurred to him that the superintendent might ride over to town for other reasons than merely to ship the week's cleanup. He struck a light and looked more closely—looked at the man he had shot. He could not tell whether it was the superintendent or not, for various reasons, but chiefly because the barrels of the gun had been sawn off, the gun loaded with buckshot, and both barrels fired simultaneously at close range.
Men coming over the trail from the Hill the next morning found the young superintendent, and spread the report of what had befallen him.