What doesn't belong in this list: Meat, Eggs, Wife, Blowjob?
Blowjob: You can beat your meat, eggs or wife, but you can't beat a blowjob.
Q: What's the speed limit of sex?
A: 68 because at 69 you have to turn around.
What do a Rubix cube and a penis have in common?
The longer you play with them, the harder they get.
What's the difference between your paycheck and your cock?
You don't have to beg your wife to blow your paycheck!
Three words to ruin a man's ego.
How does a guy know if he has a high spermcount?
If the girl has to chew, before she swallows.
What do you get when you cross Raggedy Ann and the Pillsbury Dough Boy?
A red headed bitch with a yeast infection.
Q: What do you do with 365 used rubbers?
A: Melt them down, make a tire, and call it Goodyear.
What does bungee jumping and hookers have in common?
They both cost a hundred bucks and if the rubber breaks, you're screwed.
Curl Up and Die.
I walked into a hair salon with my husband and three kids in tow and asked loudly, How much do you charge for a shampoo and a blow job?
Pad, please!
An insurance man visited me at home to talk about our mortgage insurance.
He was throwing a lot of facts and figures at me, and I wanted to follow as best I could, so I told my 6-year-old son to run and get me a pad.
He came back and handed me a Kotex right in front of our guest.
Ho, Ho, Ho.
I was taking a shower when my two year old son came into the bathroom and wrapped himself in toilet paper.
Although he made a mess, he looked adorable, so I ran for my camera and took a few shots.
They came out so well that I had copies made and included one with each of our Christmas cards.
Days later, a relative called about the picture, laughing hysterically, and suggesting I take a closer look.
Puzzled, I stared at the photo and was shocked to discover that in addition to my son, I had captured my reflection in the mirror - wearing nothing but a camera!
Lady Golfer.
I was at the golf store comparing different kinds of golf balls.
I was unhappy with the women's type I had been using.
After browsing for several minutes, I was approached by one of the good-looking gentlemen who works at the store.
He asked if he could help me.
Without thinking, I looked at him and said, I think I like playing with men's balls.
Nuts about You.
My sister and I were at the mall and passed by a store that sold a variety of nuts.
As we were looking at the display case, the boy behind the counter asked if we needed any help.
I replied, No, I'm just looking at your nuts.
My sister started to laugh hysterically, the boy grinned, and I turned beet-red and walked away.
To this day, my sister has never let me forget.
Na-na na-na na-nah!
While in line at the bank one afternoon, my toddler decided to release some pent-up energy and ran amok.
I was finally able to grab hold of her after receiving looks of disgust and annoyance from other patrons.
I told her that if she did not start behaving right now she would be punished.
To my horror, she looked me in the eye and said in a voice just as threatening, If you don't let me go right now, I will tell Grandma that I saw you kissing Daddy's pee-pee last night!
The silence was deafening after this enlightening exchange.
Even the tellers stopped what they were doing.
I mustered up the last of my dignity and walked out of the bank with my daughter in tow.
The last thing I heard when the door closed behind me were screams of laughter.
It was the day before my eighteenth birthday.
I was living at home, but my parents had gone out for the evening, so I invited my girlfriend over for a romantic night alone.
As we lay in bed after making love, we heard the telephone ring downstairs.
I suggested to my girlfriend that I give her a nude piggyback ride to the phone.
Since we didn't want to miss the call, we didn't have time to get dressed.
My entire family: aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins and all my friends were standing there.
My girlfriend and I were frozen in a state of shock and embarrassment for what seemed like an eternity.
Since then, no one in my family has planned a surprise party again.
Priceless.
One of the funniest most-embarrassing-moment stories I've come upon in a long time was about a lady who picked up several items at a discount store.
When she finally got up to the checker, she learned that one of her items had no price tag.
In a business-like tone, a voice boomed back over the intercom.
Mom's Advice.
A teacher noticed that a little boy at the back of the class was squirming around, scratching his crotch and not paying attention.
The teacher told him to go down to the principal's office.
He was to phone his mother and ask her what he should do about it.
He did it and returned to his class.
Suddenly, there was a commotion at the back of the room.
She went back to investigate only to find him sitting at his desk with his penis hanging out.
I thought I told you to call your mom, she screamed.
I did, he said, And she told me that if I could stick it out till noon, she'd come and pick me up from school.
An escape convict, imprisoned for 1st degree murder, had spend 25-years of his sentence in prison.
While on the run, he broke into a house and tied up a young couple who had been sleeping in the bedroom.
He tied the man to a chair on one side of the room.
He got on the bed right over the woman, and it appeared he was kissing her neck.
Suddenly he got up and left the room.
I saw him kissing on your neck and then he left in a hurry.
Just cooperate and do anything he wants.
If he wants to have sex with you, just go along with it and pretend you like it.
Our lives depend on it!
Be Strong and I Love You.
You are right, he hasn't seen a woman in years, but he wasn't kissing my neck.
He was whispering in my ear.
He said that he thinks you are really cute and ask if we keep the Vaseline in the bedroom.
Be Strong and I Love you.
I'm making a black man cake cause I'm hungry as hell.
And the sweet tooth I have, only a brother can break the spell.
Let me reach into my spice rack to see what I can get.
To make a mix that will stick to my stomach you can bet.
Cause he's got to be sweet, mental, sound and deep.
Cinnamon is always good to accent the taste.
A few cups of culture So he's down for his race.
You see I won't bite into anything That's not conscious of its own.
That's why I stick to chocolate And leave the angel food alone.
I am adding butter cause he must be smooth.
I must add nuts so he can reproduce.
Can't leave him hanging cause I like kids too!
I think I'll add a little salt to balance him out.
And a dominant profile to show him some clout.
For a responsible man I'll throw in some yeast So he can rise to the occasion when I'm ready to feast.
I'll add 8 cups of strength and into the oven to bake.
Turn it up to 360 degrees to balance out his mental state.
Now that it's done, I'm sorry ladies I won't share the wealth That's why I'm sharing the recipe because I'm eating this black man all by myself.
Alcohol was an acquired taste.
Because of the warmth of the day I had had several drinks before casting my ballot, and divers drinks after casting it.
She uttered an exclamation of surprise.
For, be it known, in my younger days, despite my ardent democracy, I had been opposed to woman suffrage.
In my later and more tolerant years I had been unenthusiastic in my acceptance of it as an inevitable social phenomenon.
I answered.
I answered at length.
I answered indignantly.
The more I answered, the more indignant I became.
I was lighted up, I was feeling "good," I was pleasantly jingled.
"When the women get the ballot, they will vote for prohibition," I said.
I never am.
I am never less his friend than when he is with me and when I seem most his friend.
He is the king of liars.
He is the frankest truthsayer.
He is the august companion with whom one walks with the gods.
He is also in league with the Noseless One.
His way leads to truth naked, and to death.
He gives clear vision, and muddy dreams.
He is a red-handed killer, and he slays youth.
And Charmian looked at me, and I knew she wondered where I had got it.
I continued to talk.
As I say, I was lighted up.
In my brain every thought was at home.
Every thought, in its little cell, crouched ready-dressed at the door, like prisoners at midnight a jail-break.
I liked saloons.
Especially I liked the San Francisco saloons.
And once, I remember, a barkeeper mixed me a sweet temperance drink of syrup and sodawater.
My father did not pay for it.
I dreamed daydreams of him for years.
The saloon was south of Market Street in San Francisco.
It stood on the west side of the street.
As you entered, the bar was on the left.
On the right, against the wall, was the free lunch counter.
It was a long, narrow room, and at the rear, beyond the beer kegs on tap, were small, round tables and chairs.
The barkeeper was blue-eyed, and had fair, silky hair peeping out from under a black silk skullcap.
He and my father talked long, and I sipped my sweet drink and worshipped him.
And for years afterward I worshipped the memory of him.
Here was a child, forming its first judgments of the world, finding the saloon a delightful and desirable place.
Yes, the saloon was a mighty fine place, and it was more than that.
By the time I was ten years old, my family had abandoned ranching and gone to live in the city.
And here, at ten, I began on the streets as a newsboy.
One of the reasons for this was that we needed the money.
Another reason was that I needed the exercise.
I had found my way to the free public library, and was reading myself into nervous prostration.
On the poor ranches on which I had lived there had been no books.
In ways truly miraculous, I had been lent four books, marvellous books, and them I had devoured.
I was not a forward child.
Unlike Oliver Twist, I was incapable of asking for more.
When I returned the "Alhambra" to the teacher I hoped she would lend me another book.
I waited and yearned for her to lend me another book.
Here were thousands of books as good as my four wonder-books, and some were even better.
Libraries were not concerned with children in those days, and I had strange adventures.
I read everything, but principally history and adventure, and all the old travels and voyages.
I read mornings, afternoons, and nights.
You make me nervous.
And so, at ten, I was out on the streets, a newsboy.
I had no time to read.
I was busy getting exercise and learning how to fight, busy learning forwardness, and brass and bluff.
I had an imagination and a curiosity about all things that made me plastic.
Not least among the things I was curious about was the saloon.
And I was in and out of many a one.
In the saloons life was different.
Men talked with great voices, laughed great laughs, and there was an atmosphere of greatness.
Here was something more than common every-day where nothing happened.
There were no big moments when I trudged along the street throwing my papers in at doors.
And more, the saloons were right.
The city fathers sanctioned them and licensed them.
They were not the terrible places I heard boys deem them who lacked my opportunities to know.
Besides, in saloons I saw reporters, editors, lawyers, judges, whose names and faces I knew.
They put the seal of social approval on the saloon.
They verified my own feeling of fascination in the saloon.
They, too, must have found there that something different, that something beyond, which I sensed and groped after.
What it was, I did not know; yet there it must be, for there men focused like buzzing flies about a honey pot.
Not that I drank at that time.
From ten to fifteen I rarely tasted liquor, but I was intimately in contact with drinkers and drinking places.
Big jovial Josie Harper ran a road house at Telegraph Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street.
Here for a year I delivered an evening paper, until my route was changed to the water-front and tenderloin of Oakland.
I was ashamed to refuse, so I drank it.
The others asked for beer.
The boys snickered, and I noticed the barkeeper favoured me with a strange, searching scrutiny.
Nevertheless, he opened a bottle of ginger ale.
Afterward, back in the alleys, in the pauses between games, the boys enlightened me.
I had offended the barkeeper.
Besides, beer was food.
I could work better on it.
There was no food in ginger ale.
I was always aware that I was missing something.
What I really liked in those days was candy.
For five cents I could buy five "cannon-balls" - big lumps of the most delicious lastingness.
I could chew and worry a single one for an hour.
Then there was a Mexican who sold big slabs of brown chewing taffy for five cents each.
It required a quarter of a day properly to absorb one of them.
And many a day I made my entire lunch off one of those slabs.
In truth, I found food there, but not in beer.
I wanted to go to sea.
I wanted to get away from monotony and the commonplace.
Little I guessed how all the warp and woof of that manworld was entangled with alcohol.
So, one day, as I hoisted sail on my skiff, I met Scotty.
He was a husky youngster of seventeen, a runaway apprentice, he told me, from an English ship in Australia.
He had just worked his way on another ship to San Francisco; and now he wanted to see about getting a berth on a whaler.
Across the estuary, near where the whalers lay, was lying the sloop-yacht Idler.
The caretaker was a harpooner who intended sailing next voyage on the whale ship Bonanza.
Would I take him, Scotty, over in my skiff to call upon the harpooner?
And the harpooner who was caretaker!
How often had I seen him and envied him his freedom.
He never had to leave the water.
He slept aboard the Idler each night, while I had to go home upon the land to go to bed.
Would I take Scotty, the runaway sailor, to visit the harpooner, on the opiumsmuggler Idler?
The harpooner came on deck to answer our hail, and invited us aboard.
We went below.
It was the first sea-interior I had ever seen.
The clothing on the wall smelled musty.
But what of that?
Was it not the sea-gear of men?
And everywhere was in evidence the economy of space - the narrow bunks, the swinging tables, the incredible lockers.
At last I was living.
The harpooner suggested the eminent desirableness of a drink, and Scotty searched his pockets for dimes and nickels.
We drank the cheap rotgut out of tumblers.
Was I any the less strong, any the less valiant, than the harpooner and the sailor?
They were men.
They proved it by the way they drank.
Drink was the badge of manhood.
Divers times we filled the flask that afternoon.
I was only fourteen, and had never been on the ocean in my life.
We unbent.
Our inhibitions and taciturnities vanished.
The harpooner told of misadventures and secret shames.
And Scotty proved it.
Nor was I loath.
I could whip any runaway sailor seventeen years old.
By this time the singing stage was reached, and I joined Scotty and the harpooner in snatches of sea songs and chanties.
I was beginning to grasp the meaning of life.
We were not ordinary.
We were three tipsy young gods, incredibly wise, gloriously genial, and without limit to our powers.
But this is not a world of free freights.
Intenseness and duration are as ancient enemies as fire and water.
They are mutually destructive.
They cannot co-exist.
And John Barleycorn, mighty necromancer though he be, is as much a slave to organic chemistry as we mortals are.
We pay for every nerve marathon we run, nor can John Barleycorn intercede and fend off the just payment.
Yet the foregoing is all in after wisdom spoken.
His talk grew incoherent.
He groped for words and could not find them, while the ones he found his lips were unable to form.
His poisoned consciousness was leaving him.
The brightness went out of his eyes, and he looked as stupid as were his efforts to talk.
His face and body sagged as his consciousness sagged.
All his correlations were breaking down.
He strove to take another drink, and feebly dropped the tumbler on the floor.
Then, to my amazement, weeping bitterly, he rolled into a bunk on his back and immediately snored off to sleep.
Then the harpooner faded away into his bunk, and I was left alone, unthrown, on the field of battle.
I was very proud, and John Barleycorn was proud with me.
I could carry my drink.
I was a man.
I had drunk two men, drink for drink, into unconsciousness.
And I was still on my two feet, upright, making my way on deck to get air into my scorching lungs.
The fortunate man is the one who cannot take more than a couple of drinks without becoming intoxicated.
There were plenty of bunks below.
I did not need to go home.
But I wanted to demonstrate to myself how much I was a man.
There lay my skiff astern.
The last of a strong ebb was running out in channel in the teeth of an ocean breeze of forty miles an hour.
I set sail, cast off, took my place at the tiller, the sheet in my hand, and headed across channel.
The skiff heeled over and plunged into it madly.
The spray began to fly.
I was at the pinnacle of exaltation.
I sang "Blow the Man Down" as I sailed.
I was no boy of fourteen, living the mediocre ways of the sleepy town called Oakland.
I was a man, a god, and the very elements rendered me allegiance as I bitted them to my will.
The tide was out.
A full hundred yards of soft mud intervened between the boat-wharf and the water.
It was then that my correlations began to break down.
I lost my balance and pitched head-foremost into the ooze.
But what of it?
Across the channel two strong sailormen lay unconscious in their bunks where I had drunk them.
I WAS a man.
I was still on my legs, if they were knee-deep in mud.
I disdained to get back into the skiff.
I waded through the mud, shoving the skiff before me and yammering the chant of my manhood to the world.
I paid for it.
I was sick for a couple of days, meanly sick, and my arms were painfully poisoned from the barnacle scratches.
For a week I could not use them, and it was a torture to put on and take off my clothes.
The price was too stiff.
I had no moral qualms.
My revulsion was purely physical.
No exalted moments were worth such hours of misery and wretchedness.
When I got back to my skiff, I shunned the Idler.
I would cross the opposite side of the channel to go around her.
The harpooner was still about, but him I avoided.
Once, when he landed on the boat-wharf, I hid in a shed so as to escape seeing him.
I was afraid he would propose some more drinking, maybe have a flask full of whisky in his pocket.
It was memorable.
My mind dwelt on it continually.
I went over the details, over and over again.
The harpooner had told me terribly wonderful things of himself.
I had got behind my own soul and found unguessed potencies and greatnesses.
Yes, that day stood out above all my other days.
To this day it so stands out.
The memory of it is branded in my brain.
But the price exacted was too high.
I refused to play and pay, and returned to my cannon-balls and taffy-slabs.
The point is that all the chemistry of my healthy, normal body drove me away from alcohol.
It was abominable.
And detest and hate him all the time.
Month in and month out, the shortest day I ever worked was ten hours.
Very well.
I shall so appear.
But I shall drink no more than is unavoidable.
She went upon deck to take the air, and took me with her.
And the heat of my shame burned up my neck and into my cheeks and forehead.
I have blushed many times in my life, but never have I experienced so terrible a blush as that one.
And sitting there on the stringer-piece in my shame, I did a great deal of thinking and transvaluing of values.
I had been born poor.
Poor I had lived.
I had gone hungry on occasion.
I had never had toys nor playthings like other children.
My first memories of life were pinched by poverty.
The pinch of poverty had been chronic.
I was eight years old when I wore my first little undershirt actually sold in a store across the counter.
And then it had been only one little undershirt.
When it was soiled I had to return to the awful home-made things until it was washed.
I was famous as a trader.
I was notorious as a miser.
I could even make a junkman weep when I had dealings with him.
I was now with men I admired.
I was proud to be with them.
Then what was worth while - money or thrills?
These men had no horror of squandering a nickel, or many nickels.
Why, Nelson had just spent sixty cents on beer for the two of us.
Which was it to be?
I was aware that I was making a grave decision.
I was deciding between money and men, between niggardliness and romance.
"Come on and have a beer," I invited.
Again we stood at the bar and drank and talked, but this time it was I who paid ten cents!
I had achieved a concept.
Money no longer counted.
It was comradeship that counted.
And we had another, and I paid for it.
Yet the charge was the same - five cents.
Besides, I was learning.
There was more in this buying of drinks than mere quantity.
I got my finger on it.
"Sure," Johnny agreed, with a smile.
At once I became possessed with a desire to have a page in that book.
Almost it seemed the final badge of manhood.
After a couple more drinks, for which I insisted on paying, Nelson decided to go.
We parted true comradely, and I wandered down the wharf to the Razzle Dazzle.
Spider was just building the fire for supper.
Then an idea came to me.
Here was another one of them.
Now that I had achieved my concept, I might as well practice it thoroughly.
Going up the wharf, we met Clam coming down.
Come on along.
There was more in him than the bad taste when you swallowed him.
"Small beer for me, Johnny," I said, when the others had ordered schooners.
Aye, even the barkeeper was giving me a recommendation as a man.
The accolade delivered by a barkeeper with a beer glass!
I had shown them I could spend with the best of them.
Amongst strong men I had proved myself strong.
There are no purple passages in machine toil.
While out on the water, we never carried any drink along.
The world was opening up to me.
Came the whisper to range farther.
I had not found it yet.
There was more behind.
But even this much of the world was too wide for Nelson.
He wearied for his beloved Oakland water-front, and when he elected to return to it we separated in all friendliness.
I now made the old town of Benicia, on the Carquinez Straits, my headquarters.
I held my own with any one, drink for drink; and often drank more than my share to show the strength of my manhood.
It was an exploit.
And when I never drew a sober breath, on one stretch, for three solid weeks, I was certain I had reached the top.
Surely, in that direction, one could go no farther.
It was time for me to move on.
This whisper was my good fortune.
I happened to be so made that I could hear it calling, always calling, out and away over the world.
It was not canniness on my part.
What was this life for, I demanded, if this were all?
All you got to do is walk right up and call for it.
Oh, those politicians had handled our kind before.
At Haywards there were no drinks either.
Parade first, and earn your booze, was the order of the night.
We paraded.
Then the saloons were opened.
Extra barkeepers had been engaged, and the drinkers jammed six deep before every drinkdrenched and unwiped bar.
There was no time to wipe the bar, nor wash glasses, nor do anything save fill glasses.
The Oakland water-front can be real thirsty on occasion.
This method of jamming and struggling in front of the bar was too slow for us.
The drink was ours.
It was not a clear vision, however, and there were two phases of it, somewhat jumbled at the time.
Everywhere I saw men doing, drunk, what they would never dream of doing sober.
It was the penalty that must be paid.
Crime was destructive.
And then the police gathered them in and they vanished from our ken.
When they took sick, even with trifling afflictions that any ordinary man could pull through, they just pegged out.
So I considered my situation and knew that I was getting into a bad way of living.
It made toward death too quickly to suit my youth and vitality.
And there was only one way out of this hazardous manner of living, and that was to get out.
I met the seal-hunter, Pete Holt, and agreed to be his boat-puller and to sign on any schooner he signed on.
And I had to have half a dozen drinks with Pete Holt there and then to seal our agreement.
And at once awoke all my old unrest that John Barleycorn had put to sleep.
I lived more circumspectly, drank less deeply, and went home more frequently.
When drinking grew too wild, I got out.
When Nelson was in his maniacal cups, I managed to get separated from him.
Yet never did he refuse me any sum I asked of him.
Unfortunately, before I became prosperous, he moved away to another city.
And to this day I regret that he is gone.
It is the code I have learned.
This is not to exalt saloon-keepers.
But to return to the run of my narrative.
Nobody about me drank.
If any had drunk, and had they offered it to me, I surely would have drunk.
Also, I had found my way into the realm of the mind, and I was intellectually intoxicated.
I grew impatient.
Also, my schooling was becoming financially impossible.
At such rate I could not last out, and I did greatly want to go to the state university.
When I had done a year of high school, I decided to attempt a short cut.
I borrowed the money and paid to enter the senior class of a "cramming joint" or academy.
I was scheduled to graduate right into the university at the end of four months, thus saving two years.
And how I did cram!
There was but one prescription for such a condition, and I gave it to myself - the adventure-path.
I stowed a roll of blankets and some cold food into a borrowed whitehall boat and set sail.
Benicia showed before me.
And right here something happened to me, the gravity of which I never dreamed for many a long year to come.
I had had no intention of stopping at Benicia.
The tide favoured, the wind was fair and howling - glorious sailing for a sailor.
Bull Head and Army Points showed ahead, marking the entrance to Suisun Bay which I knew was smoking.
On the instant, out of the profound of my brainfag, I knew what I wanted.
I wanted to drink.
I wanted to get drunk.
They came and went, but I stayed on and drank with all.
I guzzled.
I swilled.
I ran the liquor down and joyed as the maggots mounted in my brain.
They had to help me down the rickety wharf and into the salmon boat.
Likewise they stretched my boom and sprit until the sail set like a board.
Some feared to set the sprit; but I insisted, and Charley had no doubts.
He knew me of old, and knew that I could sail as long as I could see.
They cast off my painter.
The tide had turned, and the fierce ebb, running in the teeth of a fiercer wind, kicked up a stiff, upstanding sea.
Suisun Bay was white with wrath and sea-lump.
But a salmon boat can sail, and I knew how to sail a salmon boat.
I hailed myself a master of life, riding on the back of the unleashed elements, and John Barleycorn rode with me.
Here were old friends aboard, who fried my black bass in olive oil.
I had wanted the drink that first day, and in the days that followed I did not want it.
My tired brain had recuperated.
I am afraid I always was an extremist.
My difficulty was that I had no one to advise me.
I was very indignant about this at the time; though now I can understand it.
They did not know the trick of successful writing in the years 1895 and 1896.
They knew all about "Snow Bound" and "Sartor Resartus"; but the American editors of 1899 did not want such truck.
I really did work, and went on short commons of sleep.
Critics have complained about the swift education one of my characters, Martin Eden, achieved.
In three years, from a sailor with a common school education, I made a successful writer of him.
The critics say this is impossible.
Now the foregoing means work, especially the last year of it, when I was learning my trade as a writer.
And in that year, running short on sleep and tasking my brain to its limit, I neither drank nor cared to drink.
So far as I was concerned, alcohol did not exist.
I did suffer from brain-fag on occasion, but alcohol never suggested itself as an ameliorative.
Editorial acceptances and cheques were all the amelioratives I needed.
And if a cheque of decent amount came out of the envelope, such incident in itself was a whole drunk.
Furthermore, at that time in my life I did not know what a cocktail was.
We sat in most wonderful leather chairs, and drinks were ordered.
A cocktail or two, or several, I found, cheered me up for the foolishness of foolish people.
The cocktail was a prod, a spur, a kick, to my jaded mind and bored spirits.
A poor companion without a cocktail, I became a very good companion with one.
I achieved a false exhilaration, drugged myself to merriment.
And the thing began so imperceptibly that I, old intimate of John Barleycorn, never dreamed whither it was leading me.
I was beginning to call for music and wine; soon I should be calling for madder music and more wine.
It was at this time I became aware of waiting with expectancy for the pre-dinner cocktail.
I remember, while war-corresponding in the Far East, of being irresistibly attracted to a certain home.
Besides accepting all invitations to dinner, I made a point of dropping in almost every afternoon.
Now, the hostess was a charming woman, but it was not for her sake that I was under her roof so frequently.
Up at the club, down at the hotels, and in other private houses, no such cocktails were created.
Her cocktails were subtle.
They were masterpieces.
Several bottles of whisky were always to be found on the backs of my pack-horses.
Yet I never broached a bottle for myself, never took a drink by myself, and never knew a desire to take such a drink.
Only in retrospect can I mark the almost imperceptible growth of my desire.
For instance, for some years it had been my practice each winter to cruise for six or eight weeks on San Francisco Bay.
My stout sloop yacht, the Spray, had a comfortable cabin and a coal stove.
A Korean boy did the cooking, and I usually took a friend or so along to share the joys of the cruise.
Also, I took my machine along and did my thousand words a day.
On the particular trip I have in mind, Cloudesley and Toddy came along.
But on this cruise the situation was different.
Toddy was so nicknamed because of his diabolical cleverness in concocting toddies.
So I brought whisky along - a couple of gallons.
I liked those toddies.
I grew to look forward to the making of them.
We never got drunk.
But I will say that four times a day we were very genial.
But that was only on the boat.
Back on the land, in my house, I took no before breakfast eye-opener, no bed-going nightcap.
The geniality of which they were provocative was marvellous.
They were eloquent proselyters for John Barleycorn in their own small insidious way.
They were tickles of the something destined to grow into daily and deadly desire.
As a result, I grew tired of the city.
On the ranch, in the Valley of the Moon, I found my paradise.
I gave up living in cities.
All the cities held for me were music, the theatre, and Turkish baths.
And all went well with me.
I worked hard, played hard, and was very happy.
I read more fiction and less fact.
I did not study a tithe as much as I had studied in the past.
I deliberately blinded myself to what I took to be the savage interpretation of biological fact.
After all, I was merely forswearing a bad habit, forgoing a bad frame of mind.
And I repeat, I was very happy.
And I wanted that effect.
This became schedule - three cocktails in the hour that intervened between my desk and dinner.
And these are two of the deadliest drinking habits: regular drinking and solitary drinking.
I was always willing to drink when any one was around.
I drank by myself when no one was around.
Then I made another step.
But John Barleycorn furnished the extenuation.
It was a wrong thing to trip a guest up with excess of hospitality and get him drunk.
Please remember, as I recite this development of my drinking, that I am no fool, no weakling.
My body is a strong body.
It has survived where weaklings died like flies.
And yet these things which I am relating happened to my body and to me.
I am a fact.
My drinking is a fact.
I knew the way.
A cocktail before supper was not the way.
Two or three, at the very least, was what was needed.
I took them.
It was living.
I had always dearly loved to live.
This also became part of the daily schedule.
Then, too, I was perpetually finding excuses for extra cocktails.
It was immaterial what the excuse might be, once the desire had germinated in me.
At last, after a score and more of years of dallying and of not wanting, now I wanted it.
And my strength was my weakness.
One rule I observed.
My work ceased from my consciousness.
This was a desirable condition of mind to achieve.
I conserved my energy by means of this alcoholic inhibition.
John Barleycorn was not so black as he was painted.
He did a fellow many a good turn, and this was one of them.
And I turned out work that was healthful, and wholesome, and sincere.
It was never pessimistic.
The way to life I had learned in my long sickness.
I knew the illusions were right, and I exalted the illusions.
Oh, I still turn out the same sort of work, stuff that is clean, alive, optimistic, and that makes toward life.
And while on this digression, let me repeat the question I have repeated to myself ten thousand times.
What need was there for it?
I was happy.
Was it because I was too happy?
I was strong.
Was it because I was too strong?
Did I possess too much vitality?
I cannot answer, though I can voice the suspicion that ever grows in me.
I had been in too-familiar contact with John Barleycorn through too many years.
A left-handed man, by long practice, can become a right-handed man.
Had I, a non-alcoholic, by long practice become an alcoholic?
I was so happy.
The more I drank the more I was required to drink to get an equivalent effect.
There was no pre-dinner kick in it.
Once, I was in a rush.
I had no time decently to accumulate the several drinks.
A brilliant idea came to me.
I told the barkeeper to mix me a double cocktail.
Thereafter, whenever I was in a hurry, I ordered double cocktails.
It saved time.
One result of this regular heavy drinking was to jade me.
Alcohol became more and more imperative in order to meet people, in order to become sociably fit.
Another result was that John Barleycorn was beginning to trip me up.
But this came on gradually.
My thoughts were growing harsh again, though they grew harsh slowly.
Sometimes warning thoughts crossed my mind.
Where was this steady drinking leading?
But trust John Barleycorn to silence such questions.
And it works.
One morning, a week after I had come off the table, I lay on my hospital bed, weak and weary.
My doctor stood at my bedside on the verge of departure.
He glared disapprovingly at the cigarette I was smoking.
He was about my own age, broad-shouldered, deepchested, eyes sparkling, and ruddy-cheeked with health.
A finer specimen of manhood one would not ask.
"I used to smoke," he went on.
But I gave even them up.
And look at me.
The man was arrogant, and rightly arrogant, with conscious wellbeing.
And within a month he was dead.
It was no accident.
Half a dozen different bugs of long scientific names had attacked and destroyed him.
He died screaming.
He even stopped smoking cigars.
Pretty rotten, eh?
But the bugs will jump.
Your magnificent doctor took every precaution, yet they got him.
It may be you.
Look what he missed.
Nobody ever saw me drunk, for the simple reason that I never was drunk.
It was the old proposition.
The more I drank, the more I was compelled to drink in order to get an effect.
The time came when cocktails were inadequate.
I had neither the time in which to drink them nor the space to accommodate them.
Whisky had a more powerful jolt.
It gave quicker action with less quantity.
Bourbon or rye, or cunningly aged blends, constituted the premidday drinking.
In the late afternoon it was Scotch and soda.
My sleep, always excellent, now became not quite so excellent.
I had been accustomed to read myself back asleep when I chanced to awake.
But now this began to fail me.
Sometimes two or three drinks were required.
In fact I did not feel good.
I was suffering from the morning sickness of the steady, heavy drinker.
What I needed was a pick-me-up, a bracer.
So it was a drink before breakfast to put me right for breakfast - the old poison of the snake that has bitten one!
I achieved a condition in which my body was never free from alcohol.
Nor did I permit myself to be away from alcohol.
If I travelled to out-of-the-way places, I declined to run the risk of finding them dry.
I took a quart, or several quarts, along in my grip.
In the past I had been amazed by other men guilty of this practice.
Now I did it myself unblushingly.
The work refused to be done without drinking.
I had to drink in order to do it.
I was beginning to fight now.
I had the craving at last, and it was mastering me.
I would sit at my desk and dally with pad and pen, but words refused to flow.
When, in despair, I took my drink, at once my brain loosened up and began to roll off the thousand words.
In my town house, in Oakland, I finished the stock of liquor and wilfully refused to purchase more.
It was no use, because, unfortunately, there remained in the bottom of the liquor cabinet a case of beer.
In vain I tried to write.
The worst of it was that the beer caused me severe heart-burn; but despite the discomfort I soon finished off the case.
The liquor cabinet was now bare.
I did not replenish it.
But all the time I wrote I was keenly aware of the craving for a drink.
Merciful goodness!
The old long sickness, which had been purely an intellectual sickness, recrudesced.
The old ghosts, long laid, lifted their heads again.
But they were different and more deadly ghosts.
The old ghosts, intellectual in their inception, had been laid by a sane and normal logic.
I look about me as I ride and on every hand I see the merciless and infinite waste of natural selection.
I return across the ranch.
Twilight is on, and the hunting animals are out.
I watch the piteous tragic play of life feeding on life.
Here is no morality.
Yet all this I knew before, in the weary days of my long sickness.
I did but stir them, and let them lie.
I was too wise, too wicked wise, to wake them.
I am truth.
You know it.
You cannot combat me.
They say I make for death.
What of it?
It is truth.
Life lies in order to live.
Life is a perpetual lietelling process.
Appearances are ghosts.
You are such an appearance, composed of countless appearances out of the past.
All an appearance can know is mirage.
You know mirages of desire.
Life is apparitional, and passes.
You are an apparition.
They, being born, must die, and, being dead, are glad to be at rest.
But here through the dusk comes one who is not glad to be at rest.
He is a workman on the ranch, an old man, an immigrant Italian.
He takes his hat off to me in all servility, because, forsooth, I am to him a lord of life.
I am food to him, and shelter, and existence.
He has toiled like a beast all his days, and lived less comfortably than my horses in their deep-strawed stalls.
He is labour-crippled.
He shambles as he walks.
One shoulder is twisted higher than the other.
His hands are gnarled claws, repulsive, horrible.
As an apparition he is a pretty miserable specimen.
His brain is as stupid as his body is ugly.
"His brain is so stupid that he does not know he is an apparition," the White Logic chuckles to me.
He is the slave of the dream of life.
His brain is filled with superrational sanctions and obsessions.
He believes in a transcendent over-world.
To-day I have those three fields sown with Canada peas, and in the spring they shall be ploughed under for green manure.
He broke the soil, reared stone walls and a house, and planted apple trees.
"Dreamers and ghosts," the White Logic chuckles.
"But surely the striving was not altogether vain," I contend.
"A vital lie," I retort.
Fill your glass and let us examine these vital liars who crowd your bookshelves.
Let us dabble in William James a bit.
"A man of health," I say.
"Rationality gelded to sentiment," the White Logic grins.
Facts transmuted in the alembic of hope into terms of faith.
The ripest fruit of reason the stultification of reason.
Or is it an extraneous something possessed by you?
Your body - what is it?
A machine for converting stimuli into reactions.
Stimuli and reactions are remembered.
They constitute experience.
Then you are in your consciousness these experiences.
You are at any moment what you are thinking at that moment.
Your I is both subject and object; it predicates things of itself and is the things predicated.
The thinker is the thought, the knower is what is known, the possessor is the things possessed.
But this, man will not accept of himself.
He refuses to accept his own passing.
He will not pass.
He will live again if he has to die to do it.
The voodoos and medicine men and the devildevil doctors were the fathers of metaphysics.
Night and the Noseless One were ogres that beset the way of light and life.
And the metaphysicians would win by if they had to tell lies to do it.
They were vexed by the brazen law of the Ecclesiast that men die like the beasts of the field and their end is the same.
Your glass is empty.
Fill and forget.
Not one drinker in a million began drinking alone.
These social connotations are the stuff of which the drink habit is largely composed.
I do assume that such rare individuals are born, but I have never encountered one.
But this I did find: my need was mental and social.
When I thought of alcohol, the connotation was fellowship.
When I thought of fellowship, the connotation was alcohol.
Fellowship and alcohol were Siamese twins.
He poured out a third drink that was larger by a finger than the first and second.
Baldy was in consultation; and the consultee is worthy of his hire.
Webb Yeager pushed back his flat-brimmed Stetson, and made further disorder in his straw-coloured hair.
The tonsorial recourse being without avail, he followed the liquid example of the more resourceful Baldy.
"Go easy," said Webb.
Say that you or me or one of them Dutch dukes marries in a royal family.
Well, by and by our wife gets to be queen.
Are we king?
Not in a million years.
At the coronation ceremonies we march between little casino and the Ninth Grand Custodian of the Royal Hall Bedchamber.
The only use we are is to appear in photographs, and accept the responsibility for the heirapparent.
You was line-rider on the Nopalito Ranch when I married Santa McAllister.
I was foreman then; but what am I now?
You had as much to say on the ranch as he did.
Then he kept me out on the range as far from the ranch-house as he could.
But his active and sinewy seventy-two inches, and his girded revolvers forbade the comparison.
You come in sort of between Jack-high and a four-card flush.
Webb Yeager sighed, and gathered the strap of his Winchester scabbard from the floor.
At Dry Lake, where their routes diverged, they reined up for a parting cigarette.
But in Texas discourse is seldom continuous.
You may fill in a mile, a meal, and a murder between your paragraphs without detriment to your thesis.
So, without apology, Webb offered an addendum to the conversation that had begun ten miles away.
Why, you dad-blamed old long-horned turtledove, the boys in camp was all cognoscious about them hiroglyphs.
They was marked in charcoal on the sacks of flour and in lead-pencil on the newspapers.
That heart-and-cross sign was her scheme.
And I never laid eyes on it but what I burnt the wind for the ranch the same night.
I used to see her in that coma mott back of the little horse-corral.
We was all for you.
We knowed why you always kept that fast paint in camp.
You remember Scurry - that educated horse-wrangler we had - the college fellow that tangle-foot drove to the range?
I noticed it as soon as I hit camp, and I galloped Pinto forty mile that night.
I just started a Mexican to bring you.
Santa wants you.
Go in that room and see her.
The two men shook hands with Western ceremony.
A hundred yards on his route Baldy reined in on the top of a bare knoll, and emitted a yell.
In Santa they survived, transposed to the feminine key.
"Morning," said Bud briefly.
Now, to answer that had been the prerogative of the queen.
All the reins of business - buying, selling, and banking - had been held by her capable fingers.
The handling of cattle had been entrusted fully to her husband.
Bud turned on his high boot-heels.
She looked at her husband with surprise in her steady gray eyes.
Barber has handled every head of stock from this ranch in that market for five years.
She faced Bud Turner.
"Deliver those cattle to Barber," she concluded positively.
Bud gazed impartially at the water-jar hanging on the gallery, stood on his other leg, and chewed a mesquite-leaf.
"Nonsense," said Santa impatiently.
Let me tell you.
I was a man before I married a cattle-queen.
What am I now?
The laughing-stock of the camps.
Santa looked at him closely.
Do I ever interfere in your management of the cattle?
I know the business side of the ranch much better than you do.
I learned it from Dad.
Be sensible.
I punch the cattle and you wear the crown.
These he began to tie deliberately upon his saddle.
Santa, a little pale, followed him.
Webb swung up into the saddle.
His serious, smooth face was without expression except for a stubborn light that smouldered in his eyes.
Lobos have killed three of the calves.
I forgot to leave orders.
"I am going to be a man again," he answered.
"I wish you success in a praiseworthy attempt," she said, with a sudden coldness.
She turned and walked directly into the house.
Webb Yeager rode to the southeast as straight as the topography of West Texas permitted.
And when he reached the horizon he might have ridden on into blue space as far as knowledge of him on the Nopalito went.
He was a tall, light-haired man, not saying much.
Perhaps he was some kin of yours, do you think?
"A husband," said Santa cordially.
Yeager is one of the best stockmen in the West.
The dropping out of a prince-consort rarely disorganises a monarchy.
The experiments were found satisfactory; and a pasture had been set aside for the blue-bloods.
The fame of them had gone forth into the chaparral and pear as far as men ride in saddles.
Other ranches woke up, rubbed their eyes, and looked with new dissatisfaction upon the long-horns.
If you can fill the order please deliver the cattle to the bearer; and a check will be forwarded to you at once.
Business is business, even - very scantily did it escape being written "especially" - in a kingdom.
Or did she file the letter, in her business way, retaining her royal balance and strength?
Wonder, if you will; but royalty is sacred; and there is a veil.
She paused for a moment under the live-oak trees.
The prairies were somewhat dim, and the moonlight was pale orange, diluted with particles of an impalpable, flying mist.
Santa turned her face to the southeast and threw three kisses thitherward; for there was none to see.
Then she sped silently to the blacksmith-shop, fifty yards away; and what she did there can only be surmised.
But the forge glowed red; and there was a faint hammering such as Cupid might make when he sharpens his arrow-points.
To the corral where the Sussex cattle were penned she sped with these things swiftly in the moonlight.
She opened the gate and slipped inside the corral.
The Sussex cattle were mostly a dark red.
But among this bunch was one that was milky white - notable among the others.
And now Santa shook from her shoulder something that we had not seen before - a rope lasso.
She freed the loop of it, coiling the length in her left hand, and plunged into the thick of the cattle.
The white cow was her object.
She swung the lasso, which caught one horn and slipped off.
The next throw encircled the forefeet and the animal fell heavily.
Santa made for it like a panther; but it scrambled up and dashed against her, knocking her over like a blade of grass.
Again she made her cast, while the aroused cattle milled around the four sides of the corral in a plunging mass.
And then she ran swiftly to her furnace at the gate and brought the branding-iron, queerly shaped and white-hot.
The beasts arrived at Rancho Seco one evening at dusk; and were received and counted by the foreman of the ranch.
He dismounted stiffly, and strode, with whizzing spurs, to the house.
His horse gave a great sigh and swayed foam-streaked, with down-drooping head and closed eyes.
But waste not your pity upon Belshazzar, the flea-bitten sorrel.
The horseman stumbled into the house.
"I was a skunk," said Webb Yeager.
"I saw it," said Webb.
What they meant God knows; and you shall know, if you rightly read the primer of events.
I was a mangy, sheep-stealing coyote.
Do you know who I am?
I am Santa Yeager, First Lady of the Bedchamber.
Come here.
She dragged him from the gallery into the room to the right.
Down on your knees and look at his Highness.
Them beeves is just turned out on the trail.
"You hear your boss, Bud," said Webb Yeager, with a broad grin - just as he had said a year ago.
"I thought so," said Quinn.
What brand is that?
I turned to "What to do in Case of Accidents," on page 117.
I run my finger down the page, and struck it.
Good old Herkimer, he never overlooked anything!
It said: Suffocation from Inhaling Smoke or Gas.
There is nothing better than flaxseed.
Place a few seed in the outer corner of the eye.
I shoved the Handbook back in my pocket, and grabbed a boy that was running by.
Four of the firemen and citizens grabs hold of me.
And then I busted into the house.
I was a heap more cooked than the hurry-up orders of broiled chicken that you get in restaurants.
I carried her out fifty yards from the house and laid her on the grass.
And up runs the boy with the flaxseed.
"S-s-sh," says I.
They fetched my coat, and I gets out the Handbook.
Flaxseed in the outer corner of the eye, it says.
That flaxseed done me more good than anything I ever tried.
Sampson, embellishing and adorning it.
Some of the boys been telling you about me and that pancake racket?
Was there a story about pancakes?
They never irritated me like they do most cowmen.
I never thought it was worth while to be hostile with a snoozer.
The sheep person helped her off; and they stood throwing each other sentences all sprightful and sagacious for a while.
His seeing arrangement was grey enough, but his eye-lashes was pink and his hair was sandy, and that gave you the idea.
Sheep man?
I popped over one after the other with my forty-five, just to show him.
That is a bad habit you have got of riding with young ladies over at Pimienta.
What would I do with a wife?
If you ever saw that ranch of mine!
I do my own cooking and mending.
She sang some, and exasperated the piano quite a lot with quotations from the operas.
Thinks I, if Jackson Bird can now be persuaded to migrate, I win.
Pancakes is just whirling in my head like wagon wheels.
Start her off, now - pound of flour, eight dozen eggs, and so on.
He turns around to get a glass on the table, and I see a forty-five in his hip pocket.
We got there in time for dinner; and I put our thumb-prints on the register of the most expensive hotel in the city.
Object is no expense.
It was all served at once.
The dinner comes in threes of a kind.
Louis topics, the water supply and the colour line.
Solly gets up and comes around to me.
I thought you said they had some beans here.
He saw a saddleshop open, and some of the sadness faded from his eyes.
Eleven hundred dollars the two cost him.
In a little side street, where there was no street and no sidewalks and no houses, he finds what he is looking for.
We go into a shanty and sit on high stools among stevedores and boatmen, and eat beans with tin spoons.
Yes, sir, beans - beans boiled with salt pork.
And the building-and-loan associations and the fair have about killed it.
Guess we might as well go to bed.
Wait till you see Chicago, though.
But not for the grass-fed man of the pampas!
Solly grew sadder day by day.
And I got fearful about my salary, and knew I must play my trump card.
I knew his habits by then; so in a couple of hours I found him in a saddle-shop.
He invested about nine hundred dollars in there.
I wanted to know where to look for Solly when he got lost.
I showed him the horse-cars on Broadway and the Staten Island ferry-boats.
And then I piled up the sensations on him, but always keeping a lot of warmer ones up my sleeve.
They were out in numerous quantities, with the fat of the land showing in their clothes.
It was his first in two weeks, and it gave me hope.
I knew her well.
She was a chorus-girl in a Broadway musical comedy.
I followed him.
I wondered whether anybody was.
But pretty soon afterward Solly failed to show up at dinner-time for several days.
I cornered him.
He confessed that he had found a restaurant on Third Avenue where they cooked beans in Texas style.
I made him take me there.
The minute I set foot inside the door I threw up my hands.
And then we sat down and had beans.
I saw her working it.
She was healthy-looking and plain dressed.
When she wants a man, she manages it so that every time he looks at her he finds her looking at him.
I went out and found a cab.
I felt sure there was something wrong.
Neither was the smooth-haired lady.
I asked Solly to step around the corner for a few words.
He was grinning clear across his face; but I had not administered the grin.
And they are fit for kings to ride on.
The six he sent me must have cost him three thousand dollars.
Who would buy one except one of these rajahs and princes of Asia and Africa?
I know every tan royal dub and smoked princerino from Mindanao to the Caspian Sea.
Now look here.
From an inside pocket he drew a tightly folded newspaper with muchworn edges, and indicated a paragraph.
"Read that," said the saddler to royalty.
His stables contain more than a thousand horses of the purest Persian breeds.
It is said that this powerful prince contemplates a visit to the United States at an early date.
Polk triumphantly.
Have you three dollars that you could loan me for a short time?
It happened that I had; and I did.
The floor was bare and clean.
White curtains waved in the gulf breeze through the open windows.
Some well-mounted heads of deer and one of an enormous black javeli projected from the walls.
A wide, cool cot-bed stood in a corner.
Nueces County people regarded this guest chamber as fit for a prince.
McGuire showed his eyeteeth at it.
He took out his nickel and spun it up to the ceiling.
Well, you can frisk me if you wanter.
Once was quite a plenty.
I never held you up for a cent.
I never gave you a hard-luck story till you asked me.
Here I am fifty miles from a bellboy or a cocktail.
Raidler went to the door and called.
A slender, bright-complexioned Mexican youth about twenty came quickly.
Raidler spoke to him in Spanish.
He is very sick.
Place yourself at his side.
Attend to his wants at all times.
Have much patience and care with him.
"Here, take him this," he said.
Thus was instituted the reign of terror at the Solito Ranch.
He was an absolutely new experience to them.
He explained to them all the intricate points of sparring and the tricks of training and defence.
His jargon of slang was a continuous joy and surprise to them.
His gestures, his strange poses, his frank ribaldry of tongue and principle fascinated them.
He was like a being from a new world.
Strange to say, this new world he had entered did not exist to him.
He was an utter egoist of bricks and mortar.
He had dropped out, he felt, into open space for a time, and all it contained was an audience for his reminiscences.
Neither the limitless freedom of the prairie days nor the grand hush of the close-drawn, spangled nights touched him.
All the hues of Aurora could not win him from the pink pages of a sporting journal.
"Get something for nothing," was his mission in life; "Thirty-seventh" Street was his goal.
Nearly two months after his arrival he began to complain that he felt worse.
He shut himself in his room like some venomous kobold or flibbertigibbet, whining, complaining, cursing, accusing.
With all his dire protestations of increasing illness, to the eye of others he remained unchanged.
When he returned, he would be met by a string of violent and stinging reproaches.
Try a week or two in one of the cow camps.
Well, sir, it started him getting well, which he done.
Try a little hossback riding now.
Besides, inquiries concerning the health of cowpunchers were not only superfluous, but bordered on flaccidity.
It was not like the boss to make them.
He had in his mind a white slab such as he had seen in the Alabama church-yard.
But immediately he knew that was foolish.
Cow camps change in two months.
Raidler nerved himself.
First night in camp the boys started to initiate him in the leather breeches degree.
Ross Hargis busted him one swipe with his chaparreras, and what do you reckon the poor child did?
Got up, the little skeeter, and licked Ross.
Licked him good.
Hit him plenty and everywhere and hard.
A little, brown-faced, grinning chap, springing from his saddle in the full light of the fire.
And - say!
You never sat me.
Dis is de whitest bunch of sports I ever travelled with.
Raidler looked wonderingly toward Ross Hargis.
He and a following of similar bravoes were addicted to the pastime of retrieving towns from stagnation.
Their instructions were to prevent the invasion of Garcia, either alone or attended by his gang.
Then three shots were fired down the street, the sound coming clear and snappy through the still air.
The four rangers quickened from sprawling, symbolic figures of indolence to alert life, but only one rose to his feet.
The three relapsed into resigned inertia and plaintive comment.
He never learned how to git skeered.
He seems to dread taking the slightest advantage.
Neither his friends nor his enemies had suspected him of aught else than the finest courage.
Two squares down the street stood the Top Notch Saloon.
Here Buckley came upon signs of recent upheaval.
At the entrance of the ranger Bud turned appealingly to him for confirmation of the devastation he might have dealt.
There stood a patient grey burro cropping the grass along the gutter, with a load of kindling wood tied across its back.
On the ground lay a black shawl and a voluminous brown dress.
"He went down this side street," said the bartender.
"I no hurt-y you, Senorita," he said.
The man smiled again, and set his foot to ascend the slope.
Alvarita leaned swiftly and picked up a stone the size of a cocoanut.
She turned her eyes to see what had diverted his interest.
His breath whistled through his constricted air passages.
His feet seemed like lumps of lead.
His mouth was dry as dust.
His heart, congested with blood, hurt his ribs as it thumped against them.
The hot June day turned to moist November.
"Go to the other end of the lake and use this," he said.
The tramp obeyed without protest.
By the time supper was ready he had returned to camp.
He was hardly to be recognized in his new shirt and brown duck clothes.
Ranse observed him out of the corner of his eye.
His doubts were soon allayed.
Curly walked straight to where he stood.
His light-blue eyes were blazing.
Now, what do you think of that?
The print of his hand stood out a dull red against the tan.
Ranse smiled happily.
The cowpunchers talk to this day of the battle that followed.
Somewhere in his restless tour of the cities Curly had acquired the art of self-defence.
The two attributes nearly matched.
There were no formal rounds.
At last the fibre of the clean liver prevailed.
Ranse went to the water barrel and washed the red from a cut on his chin in the stream from the faucet.
On his face was a grin of satisfaction.
But their system was their own.
He became on friendly and then on intimate terms with soap and water.
But the steps were sometimes far apart.
And then the punchers punished him in their own way.
For three days they did not speak to him, except to reply to his own questions or remarks.
And they spoke with absolute and unfailing politeness.
He saw it, and it stung him as much as Ranse hoped it would.
Then came a night that brought a cold, wet norther.
Wilson, the youngest of the outfit, had lain in camp two days, ill with fever.
Then the other punchers rose up softly and began to make preparations.
Others were getting out their six-shooters.
I was hoping you would.
That was merely their way of gently awaking their victim.
Then they hazed him for an hour, carefully and ridiculously, after the code of cow camps.
Nevermore would they be polite to him.
I looked across the table at Mame and smiled, for I had recollections.
Mame was looking at the table like a boy looks at his first stem-winder.
Then she looked at me, straight in the face, and two big tears came in her eyes.
The waiter was gone after more grub.
I never felt this way before.
They get tired of the same old sights - the same old dinner table, washtub, and sewing machine.
Therefore a woman loved him.
Hardly had you ridden away when he came out of the pear.
When he first talked he said he would stay three days or more.
Then as it grew later he was like a wolf or a fox, and walked about without rest, looking and listening.
Soon he said he must leave before daylight when it is dark and stillest.
And then he seemed to suspect that I be not true to him.
He looked at me so strange that I am frightened.
I swear to him that I love him, his own Tonia.
Last of all he said I must prove to him I am true.
He thinks that even now men are waiting to kill him as he rides from my house.
This before he goes, so he can tell if I am true and if men are hidden to shoot him.
It is a terrible thing.
An hour before daybreak this is to be.
Come, my dear one, and kill this man and take me for your Tonia.
Do not try to take hold of him alive, but kill him quickly.
Knowing all, you should do that.
It is dark in there.
He will wear my red skirt and blue waist and brown mantilla.
I send you a hundred kisses.
Come surely and shoot quickly and straight.
Even the lady passenger was moved to expression.
"I think it is quite charming," she said, in her slow, crystal tones.
At intervals some one of the passengers would rise and humorously explore the room.
There was little evidence to be collected of its habitation by old man Redruth.
He never allowed nobody to come nigh him.
There was spinning-wheels up in his loft, all right.
Just ordinary trouble.
I never heard of no romance.
She never married him.
This man said she was the kind of girl you like to have reach across you in a car to pay the fare.
Although she was a staked claim, Miss Alice and the new entry seemed to strike a mutual kind of a clip.
Then he lifts his hat and walks away, and that was the last anybody in that town seen of him, as far as this man knew.
A little silence followed, except for the wind and the crackling of the fire.
Nameless to us, he travels the road from Paradise to Sunrise City.
He began with a rasping chuckle that gradually formed itself into words.
My money on the lad with the butterfly tie and the certified checks in his trouserings.
All right.
Away with him!
Get platonic, if you please.
No jack-pots for mine.
Go and hate your friend some more.
What turned him into a hermit?
One says laziness; one says remorse; one says booze.
I say women did it.
How old is the old man now?
He conducted his hermit shop here for twenty years.
Say he was twenty-five when he took off his hat at the gate.
That leaves twenty years for him to account for, or else be docked.
Where did he spend that ten and two fives?
Up for bigamy.
Redruth gets his cases mixed, and they send him up the road.
Enclosed find stamps.
If she be worthy of the name, no gold or rank will outweigh with her a genuine devotion.
Yet, who is on trial?
Not Redruth, for he has been punished.
Not those immortal passions that clothe our lives with the joy of the angels.
Each man of us here to-night stands at the bar to answer if chivalry or darkness inhabits his bosom.
To judge us sits womankind in the form of one of its fairest flowers.
I have not found woman to be so unspiritual or venal.
Tormented by jealousy, young Redruth vanished from his native haunts.
But had he just cause to do so?
There is no evidence for or against.
Then his withdrawal from the world of sorrow and the subsequent derangement of his faculties becomes intelligible.
She is old now.
Her hair is white and smoothly banded.
Each day she sits at the door and gazes longingly down the dusty road.
Presently, from the other, as Kinney and I sat without, there burst a volume of sudden and brilliant music.
A piano, and one so well played, seemed to me to be an unusual thing to find in that small and unpromising ranchhouse.
"A wise and generous theory," I assented.
Kinney plays well.
I am not learned in the science of music, but I should call her an uncommonly good performer.
She has technic and more than ordinary power.
"I did," said I.
I could see by the broken corrals that no one lived there.
And she was the most elegant kind of a housekeeper.
He had a pretty bad cold and cough.
I stayed to supper.
I like a man who is kind to animals.
Yes; there was even admiration in her gaze now.
After all, there was a hero rising out of the ruins of the anti-climax.
She held out her hand penitently.
There was a bright, unshed drop in each of her eyes.
Givens took the proffered hand.
Dry Valley had had no youth.
Even his childhood had been one of dignity and seriousness.
His life as a young man had been wasted.
But a sheepman is a hardy animal.
Dry Valley Johnson had weathered too many northers to turn his back on a late summer, spiritual or real.
He would show them.
Dry Valley kept indoors closely for a week except for frequent sallies after youthful strawberry snatchers.
Then, a few days later, he suddenly emerged brilliantly radiant in the hectic glow of his belated midsummer madness.
A jay-bird-blue tennis suit covered him outwardly, almost as far as his wrists and ankles.
A little flat straw hat with a striped band desecrated his weather-beaten head.
Lemon-coloured kid gloves protected his oak-tough hands from the benignant May sunshine.
It lasted two weeks and then came to a sudden end.
"Merry Christmas, little boy," said Cherokee.
What do I want with dolls and tin horses?
I want to go home.
Trinidad stepped into the breach.
But me and the Judge was sure we could round up a wagonful of candidates for your gimcracks.
We can dump the stuff down a shaft or throw it away.
Bobby had retreated to a distant chair, and was coldly regarding the scene with ennui plastered thick upon him.
Cherokee, lingering with his original idea, went over and sat beside him.
"Granite Junction," said Bobby without emphasis.
The room was warm.
Cherokee took off his cap, and then removed his beard and wig.
The boy hesitated.
"On the bureau at home," he answered.
The picture belongs to my mother.
She puts it under her pillow of nights.
And once I saw her kiss it.
But women are that way.
Cherokee rose and beckoned to Trinidad.
"Keep this boy by you till I come back," he said.
I wish I was at home.
Bobby slipped a cigarette from his pocket and was trying to snap a match.
"Throw that cigarette away," said Cherokee, in a quiet but new voice.
Bobby hesitated, and then dropped the cylinder overboard.
"Throw the box, too," commanded the new voice.
More reluctantly the boy obeyed.
I seen her do it.
Will you get me one?
Cherokee took out his watch.
Are you cold?
Sit closer, son.
Down in the hotel office three or four of the labourers were growling and swearing over a belated game of checkers.
Heavy odours of stewed meat, hot grease, and cheap coffee hung like a depressing fog about the house.
Lena lit the stump of a candle and sat limply upon her wooden chair.
She was eleven years old, thin and ill-nourished.
Her back and limbs were sore and aching.
But the ache in her heart made the biggest trouble.
The last straw had been added to the burden upon her small shoulders.
Fritz urged them along, himself dizzy and muddled over his fearful adventure.
According to schedule time, he should have reached Fredericksburg at daylight.
He stopped his team at the gate and called.
Her little Lena drown herself!
Why had they sent her from home?
What could be done?
Perhaps it would be too late by the time they could send for her now.
Peter Hildesmuller dropped his meerschaum on the walk and it shivered into pieces.
It is your fault if she comes home to us no more.
Fritz stared at her with eyes that bulged behind his spectacles.
What an opportunity it would offer to Calliope!
He had only to step out the other door, mount the train, and away.
The members of the posse heard one shot fired inside, and then there was silence.
At length the wounded man opened his eyes.
After a blank space he again could see and hear and feel and think.
Turning his eyes about, he found himself lying on a wooden bench.
A tall man with a perplexed countenance, wearing a big badge with "City Marshal" engraved upon it, stood over him.
He was trying to get these facts fixed in his mind and connected with past events, when the old woman began to talk.
That bullet never tetched ye!
Jest skeeted along the side of your head and sort of paralysed ye for a spell.
You just lay still a while longer and let me bathe your head.
I come in on that train from Alabama to see my son.
This is my son, sir.
Jest think, now, that little boy of mine has got to be a officer - a city marshal of a whole town!
But, laws!
I never was much of a hand to git skeered.
I knowed him at oncet.
He sat, somewhat weakly yet, leaning against the wall.
He was a rugged man, big-boned and straight.
His eyes, steady and keen, seemed to linger upon the face of the man standing so still above him.
Be a good man, and leave liquor alone and live peaceably and goodly.
Keep away from bad company and work honest and sleep sweet.
The black-mitted hand of the old pleader gently touched the breast of the man she addressed.
Very earnest and candid her old, worn face looked.
Still the man to whom she spoke gazed above her head, contemplating the silent son of the old mother.
The tall man moved uneasily.
He fingered the badge on his breast for a moment, and then he put an arm around the old woman and drew her close to him.
The other man rose to his feet, trying his limbs and stretching his muscles.
The unblessed condition of Yellowhammer had been truly described.
Later they would come.
But of children there were none.
Christmas would come on Thursday.
On Tuesday morning Trinidad, instead of going to work, sought the Judge at the Lucky Strike Hotel.
You might say that that man made this town.
I am indebted to Cherokee for past favours.
I learned about that Latin word at school.
"I will accompany you," declared the Judge, waving his cane.
Trinidad made careful notes of all such, and then hastened to secure a vehicle and team.
He sat in the snow, arms tied behind him, waiting the torture.
He stared curiously before him at a huge Cossack, prone in the snow, moaning in his pain.
The men had finished handling the giant and turned him over to the women.
Subienkow looked on, and shuddered.
He was not afraid to die.
He had carried his life too long in his hands, on that weary trail from Warsaw to Nulato, to shudder at mere dying.
But he objected to the torture.
It offended his soul.
This would not be nice.
To pass out bravely and cleanly, with a smile and a jest - ah!
There had been no chance to escape.
He sighed.
They were certainly doing it.
It was inconceivable that a man could suffer so much and yet live.
Big Ivan was paying for his low order of nerves.
Already he had lasted twice as long as any of the others.
He would go mad if that screaming did not cease.
But when it did cease, his turn would come.
Yakaga would attend to him.
Doubtlessly Yakaga was saving for him more refined tortures, more exquisite nerve-racking.
The squaws bending over him stepped back with laughter and clapping of hands.
Subienkow saw the monstrous thing that had been perpetrated, and began to laugh hysterically.
The Indians looked at him in wonderment that he should laugh.
But Subienkow could not stop.
This would never do.
He controlled himself, the spasmodic twitchings slowly dying away.
He strove to think of other things, and began reading back in his own life.
Once more he saw Paris, and dreary London, and gay Vienna, and Rome.
Ah, there it was that the long trail began.
Well, he had lasted longest.
Petersburg, he took up the count of the passing of those brave spirits.
Always it had been savagery-brutal, bestial savagery.
They had died - of fever, in the mines, under the knout.
It had been nothing but savagery.
All the years, with his heart in studios, and theatres, and courts, he had been hemmed in by savagery.
He had purchased his life with blood.
Everybody had killed.
He had killed that traveller for his passports.
He had proved that he was a man of parts by duelling with two Russian officers on a single day.
He had had to prove himself in order to win to a place among the furthieves.
He had had to win to that place.
Behind him lay the thousand-years-long road across all Siberia and Russia.
He could not escape that way.
The only way was ahead, across the dark and icy sea of Bering to Alaska.
The way had led from savagery to deeper savagery.
Thrice he had sailed east from Kamtchatka.
And thrice, after all manner of hardship and suffering, the survivors had come back to Kamtchatka.
Again, the fourth and last time, he had sailed east.
He had sworn never to go back.
He knew that to win to those dear capitals of Europe he must go on.
So he had changed ships and remained in the dark new land.
He, with one Finn, had been the sole survivor of such a company.
But always the terrible savagery had hemmed him in.
Passing from ship to ship, and ever refusing to return, he had come to the ship that explored south.
All down the Alaska coast they had encountered nothing but hosts of savages.
Every anchorage among the beetling islands or under the frowning cliffs of the mainland had meant a battle or a storm.
South, south they had coasted, clear to the myth-land of California.
Here, it was said, were Spanish adventurers who had fought their way up from Mexico.
He had had hopes of those Spanish adventurers.
But they had met no Spaniards.
Only had they encountered the same impregnable wall of savagery.
The denizens of the confines of the world, painted for war, had driven them back from the shores.
The years had passed.
Two summers, in the month of June, he had managed to be at the head of Kotzebue Sound.
Every far-journeyer or strange tribesman was brought before him.
They were to the east - far, far to the east.
No one had seen them.
It was the word that had been passed along.
It was a hard school.
But at last came the whisper that gave Subienkow courage.
In the east lay a great river where were these blue-eyed men.
The river was called the Yukon.
These two rivers were one, ran the whisper.
The long winter was coming on.
It would be better to wait.
Came the building of the fort.
It was enforced labour.
The other half had passed under the torture.
Subienkow caught Yakaga grinning at him.
The mark of the lash was still on his face.
Then, too, he thought of bursting his bonds and dying fighting.
Such an end would be quick.
But he could not break his bonds.
Caribou thongs were stronger than he.
Still devising, another thought came to him.
I am a great man, and it were foolishness for me to die.
In truth, I shall not die.
I am not like these other carrion.
He looked at the moaning thing that had once been Big Ivan, and stirred it contemptuously with his toe.
Behold, I have a great medicine.
I alone know this medicine.
Since I am not going to die, I shall exchange this medicine with you.
Subienkow debated with himself for a moment, as if loth to part with the secret.
The strongest blow of a cutting weapon is a vain thing against it.
A bone knife becomes like a piece of mud; and it will turn the edge of the iron knives we have brought among you.
What will you give me for the secret of the medicine?
Subienkow laughed scornfully.
The Pole laughed more scornfully.
"Untie my hands and feet and let us talk," he said.
The chief made the sign; and when he was loosed Subienkow rolled a cigarette and lighted it.
It cannot be.
A cutting edge is stronger than any medicine.
The chief was incredulous, and yet he wavered.
He had seen too many deviltries of fur-thieves that worked.
He could not wholly doubt.
"I will give you your life; but you shall not be a slave," he announced.
Subienkow played his game as coolly as if he were bartering for a foxskin.
It has saved my life many times.
Subienkow shrugged his shoulders and remained silent.
He blew cigarette smoke out on the icy air, and curiously regarded what remained of the big Cossack.
The cutting edge was stronger than the medicine.
For at that place there were no berries of a certain kind, of which I see you have plenty in this country.
The medicine here will be strong.
Behold, I now demand more.
I want one hundred beaver skins.
And my rifle must be returned to me.
If you do not like the price, in a little while the price will grow.
Yakaga whispered to the chief.
"You can send twenty hunters with me," Subienkow went on.
Then can your strongest hunter take the axe and strike three times on my neck.
You yourself can strike the three times.
Makamuk stood with gaping mouth, drinking in this latest and most wonderful magic of the fur-thieves.
The axe is heavy and sharp, and I want no mistakes.
Subienkow concealed his elation.
He was playing a desperate game, and there must be no slips.
He spoke arrogantly.
My medicine is offended.
To make the offence clean you must give me your daughter.
He pointed to the girl, an unwholesome creature, with a cast in one eye and a bristling wolf-tooth.
Makamuk was angry, but the Pole remained imperturbable, rolling and lighting another cigarette.
"Make haste," he threatened.
Again he remembered the singer and dancer and hummed aloud a song she had taught him.
But be it understood that I myself strike the three blows with the axe on your neck.
"But each time I shall put on the medicine," Subienkow answered, with a show of ill-concealed anxiety.
Here are the hunters who shall see you do not escape.
Go into the forest and gather your medicine.
It may be his ears.
Very well; we will thrust a spear in one ear and out the other.
Or it may be his eyes.
Surely the medicine will be much too strong to rub on his eyes.
The chief nodded.
If he possesses no other devil-things, we will then destroy him.
A few frozen roots completed his supply, and he led the way back to camp.
"You must be careful that the moss-berries go in first," he explained.
Here, Yakaga, let me cut off your finger.
But Yakaga put his hands behind him and scowled.
"Just a small finger," Subienkow pleaded.
The amazed savages saw the head bounce a yard away from the blood-spouting trunk.
The fur-thief had outwitted them.
Alone, of all their prisoners, he had escaped the torture.
That had been the stake for which he played.
A great roar of laughter went up.
Makamuk bowed his head in shame.
The furthief had fooled him.
He had lost face before all his people.
Still they continued to roar out their laughter.
Makamuk turned, and with bowed head stalked away.
He knew that thenceforth he would be no longer known as Makamuk.
A goodly portion of Dawson was lined up on the bank, saying good-bye.
As the gang-plank came in and the steamer nosed into the stream, the clamour of farewell became deafening.
The latter grew red in the face with vain vociferation.
Still the water widened between steamboat and shore.
The gongs clanged, and the big stern wheel reversed, then stopped.
All hands on steamboat and on bank took advantage of this respite to exchange final, new, and imperative farewells.
His head disappeared inside the pilothouse, coming into view a moment later behind a big megaphone.
This official remonstrance from the pilot-house spread a film of silence over the tumult.
Tell him to get it and bring it out when he comes.
Bring it out when you come!
Churchill waved his hand in token that he had got it.
It was half-past four in the afternoon when the two men started.
The current of the Thirty Mile River was so strong that rarely could they use the paddles.
It was exhausting work.
They never paused for rest.
It was go, go, and keep on going.
As night came on, they were compelled to trust to luck.
They fell repeatedly on the untravelled banks and tore their clothing to sheds in the underbrush they could not see.
Both men were badly scratched and bleeding.
A dozen times, in their wild dashes from bank to bank, they struck snags and were capsized.
The first time this happened, Churchill dived and groped in three feet of water for the gripsack.
He lost half an hour in recovering it, and after that it was carried securely lashed to the canoe.
As long as the canoe floated it was safe.
Antonsen jeered at the grip, and toward morning began to curse it; but Churchill vouchsafed no explanations.
Their delays and mischances were endless.
They succeeded finally by an accident.
Churchill made a blind leap at the bluff and landed in a crevice.
Holding on with one hand, he held the swamped canoe with the other till Antonsen dragged himself out of the water.
Then they pulled the canoe out and rested.
A fresh start at this crucial point took them by.
They landed on the bank above and plunged immediately ashore and into the brush with the tow-line.
Daylight found them far below Tagish Post.
They lay down and slept in their wet rags by the stove.
Tagish Lake was white with a fall gale that blew in their teeth.
Big, swinging seas rushed upon the canoe, compelling one man to bale and leaving one man to paddle.
Headway could not be made.
They ran along the shallow shore and went overboard, one man ahead on the towline, the other shoving on the canoe.
That night, at the head of Tagish Lake, in the thick of a driving snow-squall, they overhauled the Flora.
Antonsen fell on board, lay where he had fallen, and snored.
Churchill looked like a wild man.
His clothes barely clung to him.
As for his feet, it was an agony to stand upon them.
The captain of the Flora was loth to go back to White Horse.
I just sat down and looked at the dog, and he looked at me, till I thought I was going crazy.
Do you want to know what I did?
I threw down the gun and ran back to camp with the fear of God in my heart.
Steve laughed at me.
Steve spoke to him the first time we put him in harness, and he sort of shivered, that was all.
Not an ounce on the traces.
He just stood still and wobbled, like so much jelly.
Steve touched him with the whip.
He yelped, but not an ounce.
Steve touched him again, a bit harder, and he howled - the regular long wolf howl.
Then Steve got mad and gave him half a dozen, and I came on the run from the tent.
He threw the whip down in the snow and walked away mad.
I picked it up and went to it.
Next he lay down in the snow.
I started the rest of the dogs, and they dragged him along while I threw the whip into him.
On top of that, he was the cleverest thief.
There was no circumventing him.
Many a breakfast we went without our bacon because Spot had been there first.
And it was because of him that we nearly starved to death up the Stewart.
But he was impartial.
He stole from everybody.
He was a restless dog, always very busy snooping around or going somewhere.
He could fight, too, that Spot.
He could do everything but work.
He never pulled a pound, but he was the boss of the whole team.
The way he made those dogs stand around was an education.
He bullied them, and there was always one or more of them fresh-marked with his fangs.
But he was more than a bully.
Did I say he could eat?
I caught him eating the whip once.
He started in at the lash, and when I caught him he was down to the handle, and still going.
But he was a good looker.
At the end of the first week we sold him for seventy-five dollars to the Mounted Police.
I say we KNEW, for we were just getting acquainted with that Spot.
A little later we were not brash enough to know anything where he was concerned.
It was that Spot come back and knocking the team into shape.
That Spot was only three days in coming back, and, as usual, celebrated his arrival with a rough house.
Also, we made money out of Spot.
If we sold him once, we sold him twenty times.
It was nearly the death of us.
The moose had gone back several hundred miles and the Indians with them.
There we were.
Spring was on, and we had to wait for the river to break.
We got pretty thin before we decided to eat the dogs, and we decided to eat Spot first.
Do you know what that dog did?
He sneaked.
Now how did he know our minds were made up to eat him?
We sat up nights laying for him, but he never came back, and we ate the other dogs.
We ate the whole team.
And now for the sequel.
You know what it is when a big river breaks up and a few billion tons of ice go out, jamming and milling and grinding.
Just in the thick of it, when the Stewart went out, rumbling and roaring, we sighted Spot out in the middle.
Steve and I yelled and shouted and ran up and down the bank, tossing our hats in the air.
Now how did he get out of that ice?
To my astonishment, Lon was affected by her words and manner.
The terror faded out of her eyes and her whole body relaxed.
"Oh, yes, I do remember," she said.
Her own bunk, I noticed, was made up at the opposite end.
"I thought it was Dave coming when I heard your dogs," she said.
I lay back on the blankets and smoked and watched.
Here was mystery; I could make that much out, but no more could I make out.
I looked at her face, unnoticed by her, and the longer I looked the harder it was to take my eyes away.
Abruptly, as if for the first time, she became aware of my presence.
The bacon might have caused that cough, but I took it as a hint and left my question unasked.
"Tell him about Dave," she said to Lon.
Lon seemed put out, but he began in that hearty, genial manner that I had noticed before.
It seemed a shade too hearty and genial, and it irritated me.
"Oh, Dave is a fine man," he said.
His word is as good as his bond.
For Dave is a fighter.
He went into the cave on purpose to get that grizzly.
Through his recital she had followed every word with keenest interest.
Lon served supper at one end of the table of whip-sawed spruce, and we fell to eating.
A howling of the dogs took the woman to the door.
She opened it an inch and listened.
"Dead," Lon answered.
"But you just said that you expected to meet him here to-night," I challenged.
Lon washed the dishes, while I smoked and watched the woman.
She seemed more beautiful than ever - strangely and weirdly beautiful, it is true.
This enabled me to know, without discussion, that the woman, too, was real.
"Crazy as a loon," he answered.
And before I could formulate my next question, Lon McFane, I swear, was off to sleep.
Lon never snored.
And in the morning it was quick breakfast, feed the dogs, load the sled, and hit the trail.
We said good-bye as we pulled out, and the woman stood in the doorway and watched us off.
I did not utter it.
I could wait until we knocked off in the middle of the day.
Then we sat on our blankets, our moccasins steaming on upended sticks before the fire, and had our evening smoke.
I shook my head.
She was called Flush of Gold.
Ever heard of her?
Somewhere I had a confused and misty remembrance of having heard the name, yet it meant nothing to me.
The Flush of Gold that I knew, that Dawson knew, and that Forty Mile knew before that, is dead.
That dumb, lunatic creature we saw last night was not Flush of Gold.
He is dead.
She is waiting for him there.
She half believes he is not dead.
But who can know the whim of a crazed mind?
Maybe she wholly believes he is not dead.
At any rate, she waits for him there in the cabin he built.
Who would rouse the dead?
Then who would rouse the living that are dead?
Not I, and that is why I let on to expect to meet Dave Walsh there last night.
"I do not understand," I said.
And Lon began.
He came to California in the days of gold.
He was a pioneer.
He found no gold, but, instead, became a maker of bottled sunshine - in short, a grape-grower and wine-maker.
Also, he followed gold excitements.
He carried the first mail into Arctic City.
He staked those coal-mines on the Porcupine a dozen years ago.
He grubstaked Loftus into the Nippennuck Country.
Now it happened that Victor Chauvet was a good Catholic, loving two things in this world, wine and woman.
Wine of all kinds he loved, but of woman, only one, and she was the mother of Marie Chauvet.
Lon calmly lighted his pipe, took one good puff, then put the pipe aside.
"And you asked me to begin at the beginning," he said.
What more do you want?
Victor Chauvet never had much luck to speak of.
He managed to live, and to get along, and to take good care of Marie, who resembled the one woman he had loved.
He took very good care of her.
Flush of Gold was the pet name he gave her.
Flush of Gold Creek was named after her - Flush of Gold town site, too.
The old man was great on town sites, only he never landed them.
How does she strike your beauty sense?
"She is remarkably beautiful," I said.
In spite of the fact, last night, that I guessed she was mad, I could not keep my eyes off of her.
It was wonder, sheer wonder, she was so strangely beautiful.
"She was more strangely beautiful before the darkness fell upon her," Lon said softly.
It was her beauty that made all men love her.
You remember what I said last night of Dave Walsh - Big Dave Walsh?
He was all that I said, and more, many times more.
He was twenty years old then.
He was a young bull.
When he was twenty-five he could lift clear of the ground thirteen fifty-pound sacks of flour.
At first, each fall of the year, famine drove him out.
It was a lone land in those days.
No river steamboats, no grub, nothing but salmon bellies and rabbit tracks.
He lived on straight meat when he was lucky enough to get it; he ate eleven dogs that winter; but he stayed.
And the next winter he stayed, and the next.
He never did leave the country again.
He was a bull, a great bull.
He could kill the strongest man in the country with hard work.
And yet he was soft and easynatured.
Anybody could do him, the latest short-horn in camp could lie his last dollar out of him.
You remember about the bear he went after with the popgun.
When it came to fighting Dave was the blamedest ever.
He discovered Mammon Creek.
And there he saw Flush of Gold.
I remember the night.
I shall always remember.
Some friend had brought Dave along to talk over town sites on Mammon Creek.
But little talking did he do, and what he did was mostly gibberish.
I tell you the sight of Flush of Gold had sent Dave clean daffy.
Old Victor Chauvet insisted after Dave left that he had been drunk.
And so he had.
He was drunk, but Flush of Gold was the strong drink that made him so.
He did not start back down the Yukon in a week, as he had intended.
He lingered on a month, two months, all summer.
And we who had suffered understood, and wondered what the outcome would be.
Undoubtedly, in our minds, it seemed that Flush of Gold had met her master.
And why not?
There was romance sprinkled all over Dave Walsh.
Dave put Dusky Burns in charge of the Mammon Creek claim, and himself lingered on in Dawson.
Little use.
Oh, yes, she recovered.
You saw her last night, and know how much recovered she is.
She is not violent, it is true, but she lives in darkness.
She is no longer fickle.
Last night was the first time she ever recognized me, though.
Do you know, I think the Count is the one to be really sorry for.
And she does not suffer.
Her darkness is merciful to her.
I lay silently under the blankets for the space of a minute.
But there was a gentle sound of heavy breathing, and I knew Lon McFane was asleep.
That will do, I think.
Arizona Jack cast a bleak glance out over the Yukon.
It was a swollen, chocolate flood, running a mile wide and nobody knew how deep.
These portions went into the gaping mouths of the endless army of brown swirls and vanished away.
Several inches more, and Red Cow would be flooded.
What for did I kill Ferguson?
Answer me that.
One little bird was enough.
But no, he must sing two little birds.
I went to him almighty polite and requested him kindly to discard one little bird.
I pleaded with him.
There was witnesses that testified to that.
Go on with the funeral.
You go and get the grub, Leclaire.
Leclaire brought the grub, tied up in a flour-sack, and put it on board.
You done it with provocation.
Somebody untied the painter and threw it in.
The current gripped the boat and whirled it away.
The murderer did not bother with the oars, contenting himself with sitting in the stern-sheets and rolling a cigarette.
Completing it, he struck a match and lighted up.
Those that watched on the bank could see the tiny puffs of smoke.
They remained on the bank till the boat swung out of sight around the bend half a mile below.
Justice had been done.
There was no law on the Yukon save what they made for themselves.
They were compelled to make it for themselves.
No surveyor had ever happened along to give them their latitude and longitude.
Red Cow was situated somewhere along the Yukon, and that was sufficient for them.
So far as flags were concerned, they were beyond all jurisdiction.
They made their own law, and it was very simple.
The Yukon executed their decrees.
Some two thousand miles below Red Cow the Yukon flowed into Bering Sea through a delta a hundred miles wide.
Every mile of those two thousand miles was savage wilderness.
But that was many hundreds of miles away.
Also, it was rumoured that many hundreds of miles farther on there were missions.
This last, however, was merely rumour; the men of Red Cow had never been there.
They had entered the lone land by way of Chilcoot and the head-waters of the Yukon.
The men of Red Cow ignored all minor offences.
To be drunk and disorderly and to use vulgar language were looked upon as natural and inalienable rights.
The men of Red Cow were individualists, and recognized as sacred but two things, property and life.
There were no women present to complicate their simple morality.
Besides, the paramount question of grub negatived such a procedure.
The quantity of grub he received was proportioned to the gravity of the offence.
A murderer got no grub at all.
A man found guilty of manslaughter would receive grub for from three days to a week.
A man who broke the law took his chances.
The Yukon swept him away, and he might or might not win to Bering Sea.
No grub meant practically capital punishment, though there was a slim chance, all depending on the season of the year.
Two things happened that day that were momentous.
He washed out a dollar, a dollar and a half, and two dollars, from three successive pans.
He had found the streak.
He was there to make money out of the earth, he declared with heat, and not out of his fellowmen.
Besides, he appraised his strike at a whole lot more than ten thousand.
The second event of moment occurred in the afternoon, when Siskiyou Pearly ran his boat into the bank and tied up.
He was fresh from the Outside, and had in his possession a four-months-old newspaper.
Furthermore, he had half a dozen barrels of whisky, all consigned to Curly Jim.
The men of Red Cow quit work.
The first half of the scheme worked beautifully.
But the second half of the scheme failed to connect.
He hesitated, it is true, and trembled now and again on the verge of giving in.
Inside his muddled head, however, he was chuckling to himself.
The whisky was good.
It came out of one special barrel, and was about a dozen times better than that in the other five barrels.
He went into the bar-room and returned with Mucluc Charley and Percy Leclaire.
No indeed.
Never said so.
Never thought of it all by myself.
The more whiskey they downed, the more fertile of imagination they became.
He exhausted his last argument and sat speechless.
He looked pleadingly at the friends who had deserted him.
Curly Jim got pen and ink and paper and wrote out the bill of sale.
Curly Jim filled the glasses triumphantly.
Then he reached his conclusion.
A benevolent radiance suffused his countenance.
He turned to the faro dealer, took his hand, and spoke solemnly.
The longer they talked the more maudlin and the more noble the discussion became.
All sordid motives were banished.
They were a trio of philanthropists striving to save Curly Jim from himself and his own philanthropy.
They insisted that he was a philanthropist.
They refused to accept for a moment that there could be found one ignoble thought in all the world.
Curly Jim sweated and fumed and poured out the whisky.
One by one he led his helpless guests across the kitchen floor and thrust them outside.
Credit to you.
Oh, got it!
Funny how ideas slip.
I had dog - great rabbit dog.
"But manner of life is neither here nor there," he went on.
Debts are mischances, and I am in mischance with you.
What of my debt, and how great is it?
Porportuk searched in his pouch and brought forth a memorandum.
He sipped at his glass and began.
The interest has never been paid.
And the note of the next year for five hundred dollars.
This note was included in the note of two months later for a thousand dollars.
The whole!
The round whole!
How much is it?
Porportuk referred to his memorandum.
"Fifteen thousand nine hundred and sixty-seven dollars and seventy-five cents," he read with careful precision.
And now - and it is for this that I have sent for you - make me out a new note for sixteen thousand, which I shall sign.
I have no thought of the interest.
Then the note will be paid.
This I promise you.
Porportuk looked perplexed, and loudly the laughter arose and shook the room.
"Nay," he cried.
I but speak in fairness.
It was for this I sent for you, Porportuk.
Make out the note.
The dying man regarded him with frank amazement.
"I know naught of the next world," Porportuk explained.
"This comes of sleeping cold of nights," he laughed.
There remains to me this house.
Take it, and burn the debt in the candle there.
"They have never paid to work," was the reply.
I am half owner.
It was last spring when the ice went out.
Name it, and it is yours, and the debt is no more.
Klakee-Nah could not understand.
He peered down the table, brushed his eyes, and peered again.
I will burn the debt there in the candle.
Porportuk waited patiently, sipping from his glass and studying the double row of faces down the board.
"It is no joke," he said finally.
I am twenty years old and a maid.
I will be a good wife to the man who buys me.
I can make my own clothes, and sew, and wash, and mend.
I can read and write English, and I know how to play the organ.
Also I can do arithmetic and some algebra - a little.
I shall be sold to the highest bidder, and to him I will make out a bill of sale of myself.
I forgot to say that I can sing very well, and that I have never been sick in my life.
I weigh one hundred and thirty-two pounds; my father is dead and I have no relatives.
Who wants me?
She looked over the crowd with flaming audacity and stepped down.
From afar came the faint cries of myriads of wild-fowl on the nestinggrounds.
Swallows were skimming up overhead from the placid surface of the Yukon, and robins were singing.
This red glow shone in the faces of all, and made everything seem unearthly and unreal.
The bidding began slowly.
The bidding dragged.
With laughter and tumult, the great crowd scattered out to see the chase.
And Porportuk, always a leap behind, or a leap this side or that, like a lean hound strained after her.
They crossed the open ground beyond the encampment and disappeared in the forest.
Tana-naw Station waited their reappearance, and long and vainly it waited.
Twenty-four hours later Porportuk returned.
He was tired and savage.
He spoke to no one but Akoon, and with him tried to pick a quarrel.
But Akoon shrugged his shoulders and walked away.
Porportuk did not waste time.
Next day the steamer Seattle, bound up river, pulled in to the shore and wooded up.
When the lines were cast off and she churned out from the bank, Akoon was on board in the pilot-house.
Not many hours afterward, when it was his turn at the wheel, he saw a small birchbark canoe put off from the shore.
There was only one person in it.
He studied it carefully, put the wheel over, and slowed down.
The captain entered the pilot-house.
"We do not know the speech you make," one said.
"He but said that he would kill me," Porportuk volunteered.
He is a young man, and what are broken bones to youth!
The one-eyed old man arose and stood upright.
We are here to give judgment, and judgment we give.
We have no doubt.
Nor did he come next day, nor the next.
He awoke next morning in torment.
His stomach had been calcined by the inordinate quantity of whisky he had drunk, and was a dry and raging furnace.
His head ached all over, inside and out; and, worse than that, was the pain in his face.
It was only by a severe exertion of will that he was able to open narrow slits in his face through which he could peer.
He happened to move his hands, and they hurt.
He squinted at them, but failed to recognize them, so puffed were they by the mosquito virus.
He was lost, or rather, his identity was lost to him.
Besides, he was so sick and miserable that he lacked energy and inclination to seek after who and what he was.
On the instant his past rushed into his consciousness.
His first thought was that he was ill - that he had had river fever.
It hurt him so much to open his eyes that he kept them closed.
A small floating branch struck the boat a sharp rap.
But as he lay there, the past night began to reconstruct itself in his brain.
Work suggested his mine, and he remembered that he had refused ten thousand dollars for it.
He sat up abruptly and squeezed open his eyes.
He saw himself in a boat, floating on the swollen brown flood of the Yukon.
The spruce-covered shores and islands were unfamiliar.
He was stunned for a time.
He closed his eyes and held his aching head in his hands.
What had happened?
Slowly the dreadful thought arose in his mind.
He fought against it, strove to drive it away, but it persisted: he had killed somebody.
That alone could explain why he was in an open boat drifting down the Yukon.
The law of Red Cow that he had so long administered had now been administered to him.
He had killed some one and been set adrift.
Who were they?
Maybe he had killed more than one.
He reached to his belt.
The knife was missing from its sheath.
He had done it with that undoubtedly.
But there must have been some reason for the killing.
He opened his eyes and in a panic began to search about the boat.
There was no grub, not an ounce of grub.
He sat down with a groan.
He had killed without provocation.
Nor would it thaw out his hands and feet.
Then the thought came to him that the frozen portions of his body must be extending.
But the thought asserted itself, and persisted, until it produced a vision of his body totally frozen.
This was too much, and he made another wild run along the trail.
Once he slowed down to a walk, but the thought of the freezing extending itself made him run again.
And all the time the dog ran with him, at his heels.
The warmth and security of the animal angered him, and he cursed it till it flattened down its ears appeasingly.
This time the shivering came more quickly upon the man.
He was losing in his battle with the frost.
It was creeping into his body from all sides.
The thought of it drove him on, but he ran no more than a hundred feet, when he staggered and pitched headlong.
It was his last panic.
However, the conception did not come to him in such terms.
Well, he was bound to freeze anyway, and he might as well take it decently.
With this new-found peace of mind came the first glimmerings of drowsiness.
A good idea, he thought, to sleep off to death.
It was like taking an anaesthetic.
Freezing was not so bad as people thought.
There were lots worse ways to die.
He pictured the boys finding his body next day.
Papineau, shook his head a little at the lines, for he was a man of books, and he had not drunk with the rest.
David went out into the village street, where the night air drove the wine vapour from his head.
With this upon a staff, he set his face outward upon the road that ran from Vernoy.
Perhaps that light meant that she rued, sleepless, her anger, and that morning might - But, no!
His decision was made.
Vernoy was no place for him.
Not one soul there could share his thoughts.
Out along that road lay his fate and his future.
Never so far from Vernoy had David travelled before.
It joined with another and a larger road at right angles.
On the road at one side stood a huge, black-clothed man and a slender lady wrapped in a long, light cloak.
David saw the lack of skill in the efforts of the servants.
He quietly assumed control of the work.
He directed the outriders to cease their clamour at the horses and to exercise their strength upon the wheels.
The outriders climbed to their places.
David stood for a moment upon one foot.
The huge gentleman waved a hand.
"You will enter the carriage," he said, in a voice large, like himself, but smoothed by art and habit.
Obedience belonged in the path of such a voice.
In the darkness he perceived dimly the form of the lady upon the rear seat.
He was about to seat himself opposite, when the voice again swayed him to its will.
The gentleman swung his great weight to the forward seat.
The carriage proceeded up the hill.
The lady was shrunk, silent, into her corner.
Here was an adventure such as he had often imagined.
But as yet he held no key to it, for no word was spoken while he sat with his impenetrable companions.
Then it stopped in front of a closed and darkened house, and a postilion alighted to hammer impatiently upon the door.
A latticed window above flew wide and a nightcapped head popped out.
My house is closed.
Cease knocking at my door, and be off.
Inside was heard the clink of chain and bar, and the door was flung open.
David followed the Marquis out of the carriage.
"Assist the lady," he was ordered.
The poet obeyed.
He felt her small hand tremble as he guided her descent.
"Into the house," was the next command.
The room was the long dining-hall of the tavern.
A great oak table ran down its length.
The huge gentleman seated himself in a chair at the nearer end.
The lady sank into another against the wall, with an air of great weariness.
David stood, considering how best he might now take his leave and continue upon his way.
A dozen more lighted candles shone in the hall.
The great bulk of the marquis overflowed his chair.
He was dressed in fine black from head to foot save for the snowy ruffles at his wrist and throat.
Even the hilt and scabbard of his sword were black.
His expression was one of sneering pride.
The ends of an upturned moustache reached nearly to his mocking eyes.
The lady sat motionless, and now David perceived that she was young, and possessed of pathetic and appealing beauty.
He was startled from the contemplation of her forlorn loveliness by the booming voice of the marquis.
I am a poet.
The moustache of the marquis curled nearer to his eyes.
She is of noble descent and is possessed of ten thousand francs a year in her own right.
As to her charms, you have but to observe for yourself.
Do not interrupt me.
You, shepherd, are the first.
Mademoiselle must be wed this night.
If not you, then another.
You have ten minutes in which to make your decision.
Do not vex me with words or questions.
Ten minutes, shepherd; and they are speeding.
The marquis drummed loudly with his white fingers upon the table.
He sank into a veiled attitude of waiting.
It was as if some great house had shut its doors and windows against approach.
"Mademoiselle," he said, and he marvelled to find his words flowing easily before so much elegance and beauty.
I have also had the fancy, at times, that I am a poet.
If it be the test of a poet to adore and cherish the beautiful, that fancy is now strengthened.
Can I serve you in any way, mademoiselle?
The young woman looked up at him with eyes dry and mournful.
He is my uncle, the brother of my father, and my only relative.
He loved my mother, and he hates me because I am like her.
He has made my life one long terror.
I am afraid of his very looks, and never before dared to disobey him.
But to-night he would have married me to a man three times my age.
You will forgive me for bringing this vexation upon you, monsieur.
You will, of course, decline this mad act he tries to force upon you.
But let me thank you for your generous words, at least.
I have had none spoken to me in so long.
Poet he must have been, for Yvonne was forgotten; this fine, new loveliness held him with its freshness and grace.
The subtle perfume from her filled him with strange emotions.
His tender look fell warmly upon her.
She leaned to it, thirstily.
But here David found housing commensurate to his scant purse.
Daylight and candlelight found him at pen and paper.
One afternoon he was returning from a foraging trip to the lower world, with bread and curds and a bottle of thin wine.
A loose, dark cloak, flung open, showed a rich gown beneath.
Her eyes changed swiftly with every little shade of thought.
One hand raised her gown, undraping a little shoe, high-heeled, with its ribbons dangling, untied.
So heavenly she was, so unfitted to stoop, so qualified to charm and command!
Perhaps she had seen David coming, and had waited for his help there.
Ah, would monsieur pardon that she occupied the stairway, but the shoe!
He leaned against the balustrade, clutching his bottle of sour wine.
"You have been so good," she said, smiling.
I have met him twice or thrice upon the stairs.
I questioned him, fearing that he might dwell too near the room in which we are accustomed to meet.
He is mine, if I will.
He writes poems in his garret, and I think he dreams of me.
He will do what I say.
He shall take the message to the palace.
The marquis rose from his chair and bowed.
"You did not permit me to finish my sentence, countess," he said.
I believe you to be good and true, and I know of no other help.
How I flew through the streets among the swaggering men!
Monsieur, my mother is dying.
My uncle is a captain of guards in the palace of the king.
Some one must fly to bring him.
And then, sitting there, his eye fell upon a bright star, one that he and Yvonne had named for theirs.
That set him thinking of Yvonne, and he wondered if he had not been too hasty.
Why should he leave her and his home because a few hot words had come between them?
Was love so brittle a thing that jealousy, the very proof of it, could break it?
Mornings always brought a cure for the little heartaches of evening.
There was yet time for him to return home without any one in the sweetly sleeping village of Vernoy being the wiser.
David rose, and shook off his unrest and the wild mood that had tempted him.
He set his face steadfastly back along the road he had come.
By the time he had retravelled the road to Vernoy, his desire to rove was gone.
The corner of her eye was engaged in a search for David, albeit her set mouth seemed unrelenting.
He saw the look; braved the mouth, drew from it a recantation and, later, a kiss as they walked homeward together.
Three months afterwards they were married.
He gave them a wedding that was heard of three leagues away.
Both the young people were favourites in the village.
The sheep and the cottage descended to him.
He already had the seemliest wife in the village.
But you must keep your eyes upon her yard, for her flower beds were so neat and gay they restored to you your sight.
But a day came when David drew out paper from a long-shut drawer, and began to bite the end of a pencil.
Spring had come again and touched his heart.
Poet he must have been, for now Yvonne was well-nigh forgotten.
This fine new loveliness of earth held him with its witchery and grace.
The perfume from her woods and meadows stirred him strangely.
Daily had he gone forth with his flock, and brought it safe at night.
But now he stretched himself under the hedge and pieced words together on his bits of paper.
Her pans and kettles grew dull, but her eyes had caught their flash.
She pointed out to the poet that his neglect was reducing the flock and bringing woe upon the household.
David hired a boy to guard the sheep, locked himself in the little room at the top of the cottage, and wrote more poems.
The boy, being a poet by nature, but not furnished with an outlet in the way of writing, spent his time in slumber.
Sometimes she would stand in the yard and rail at David through his high window.
Papineau, the kind, wise, meddling old notary, saw this, as he saw everything at which his nose pointed.
It would distress me to be obliged to attest a paper signifying the bankruptcy of his son.
But that is what you are coming to.
I speak as an old friend.
He took David inside to his study and sat him down upon a little island beat upon by a sea of books.
Monsieur Bril had a conscience.
He flinched not even at a mass of manuscript the thickness of a finger-length and rolled to an incorrigible curve.
He broke the back of the roll against his knee and began to read.
He slighted nothing; he bored into the lump as a worm into a nut, seeking for a kernel.
Meanwhile, David sat, marooned, trembling in the spray of so much literature.
It roared in his ears.
He held no chart or compass for voyaging in that sea.
Half the world, he thought, must be writing books.
Then he took off his spectacles, and wiped them with his handkerchief.
"In the best of health," said David.
The flock has had ill fortune.
To that number it has decreased from eight hundred and fifty.
The sheep brought you plenty.
You went into the fields with them and lived in the keen air and ate the sweet bread of contentment.
Am I right thus far?
"It was so," said David.
"I see a crow," said David, looking.
You know that bird, Monsieur Mignot; he is the philosopher of the air.
He is happy through submission to his lot.
None so merry or full-crawed as he with his whimsical eye and rollicking step.
The fields yield him what he desires.
Is the nightingale any happier, do you think?
David rose to his feet.
The crow cawed harshly from his tree.
"I thank you, Monsieur Bril," he said, slowly.
"I could not have missed it," said Monsieur Bril, with a sigh.
Live your poetry, man; do not try to write it any more.
"I thank you," said David, again.
Back along the road to Vernoy he trudged with his poems under his arm.
I must purchase firearms to protect them.
What have you?
There are some choice firearms in the lot.
This pistol - oh, a weapon fit for a prince!
"I will charge it," said Zeigler.
David laid his pistol under his coat and walked to his cottage.
Yvonne was not there.
Of late she had taken to gadding much among the neighbours.
But a fire was glowing in the kitchen stove.
David opened the door of it and thrust his poems in upon the coals.
As they blazed up they made a singing, harsh sound in the flue.
He went up to his attic room and closed the door.
So quiet was the village that a score of people heard the roar of the great pistol.
They flocked thither, and up the stairs where the smoke, issuing, drew their notice.
The women chattered in a luxury of zealous pity.
Robert, taking his cigar from his mouth.
Robert began to mask, as was his habit, a tendency to softheartedness with a spurious anger.
I told you to go home, Bushrod.
Miss Lucy said that, did she?
Confound it!
Are you going to stand there all night gabbing like a coffee-coloured gander?
The train whistled again.
Now it was at the water tank, a mile away.
"Marse Robert," said Uncle Bushrod, laying his hand on the satchel that the banker held.
I knows where you got it in de bank.
Uncle Bushrod bowed his head to the expected storm, but he did not flinch.
If the house of Weymouth was to fall, he would fall with it.
The banker spoke, and Uncle Bushrod blinked with surprise.
The storm was there, but it was suppressed to the quietness of a summer breeze.
You have presumed upon the leniency with which you have been treated to meddle unpardonably.
So you know what is in this satchel!
Your long and faithful service is some excuse, but - go home, Bushrod - not another word!
But Bushrod grasped the satchel with a firmer hand.
The headlight of the train was now lightening the shadows about the station.
The roar was increasing, and folks were stirring about at the track side.
The train was standing at the station.
Some men were pushing trucks along the side.
Two or three sleepy passengers got off and wandered away into the night.
Robert released his hold on the satchel.
You can understand that, of course.
"Listen," said the millionaire, impressively.
"Then you force me to say good night," said the millionaire.
Twice that day had his money been scorned by simple ones to whom his dollars had appeared as but tin tobacco-tags.
Pilkins walked away rapidly, and then turned abruptly and returned to the bench where the young couple sat.
He took off his hat and began to speak.
His voice just suited me.
Man, three days of that light-housekeeping was plenty for me.
Aunt Maggie was affectionate as ever.
She was a hedger from Hedgersville, Hedger County.
Seventy-five cents a day was the limit she set.
We cooked our own meals in the room.
She offers to move into a swell room with a two-burner stove and running water.
I walked straight to the Acropolis and asked for my job back, and I got it.
How did you say your writings were getting along?
And, by the way, did you ever happen to know a newspaper artist - oh, shut up!
I know I asked you before.
I wonder what paper he works on?
Ida Bates saw who it was with her back-hair comb.
I saw her turn pink, perfect statue that she was - a miracle that I share with Pygmalion only.
After the ceremony I dragged Lathrop aside.
It was me that they hung out paper flowers and palm branches for.
I am not a jealous man; I am stating facts.
The people were Nebuchadnezzars; they bit the grass before me; there was no dust in the town for them to bite.
They bowed down to Judson Tate.
They knew that I was the power behind Sancho Benavides.
Looking handsome.
Oh, what a mistake!
But I was going to tell you.
The Little Big High Low Jack-in-the-game of the town came around and kowtowed.
They had heard about Judson Tate.
But there are compensations.
For instance, I am It in this country as far as the eye can reach, and then a few perches and poles.
Or large, either.
With your reputation and my looks combined in one man, how can she resist him?
And what do you think he wants me to do?
For him to ask me was a compliment - an acknowledgment of his own shortcomings.
Well, Fergus and the duenna, Francesca, attended to the details.
And one night they fetched me a long black cloak with a high collar, and led me to the house at midnight.
And, smothering a laugh as I thought of the tongue-tied Fergus, I began to talk.
Both of us knew English and Spanish; so in two languages I tried to win the heart of the lady for my friend Fergus.
But for the bars to the window I could have done it in one.
At the end of the hour she dismissed me and gave me a big, red rose.
I handed it over to Fergus when I got home.
At last she admitted that her heart was mine, and spoke of having seen me every afternoon when she drove in the plaza.
It was Fergus she had seen, of course.
But it was my talk that won her.
And she put her hand between the bars for me to kiss.
I bestowed the kiss and took the news to Fergus.
But I went; and children and dogs took to the banana groves and mangrove swamps as soon as they had a look at my face.
I saw at a glance that I must be hers and she mine forever.
I thought of my face and nearly fainted; and then I thought of my other talents and stood upright again.
And I had been wooing her for three weeks for another man!
But she never looked at me.
And that handsome man only ruffles his curls and smirks and prances like a lady-killer at my side.
I am no man to play tricks on a friend.
Struck too, are you?
Francesca tells me that Anabela talks of nothing but me, day and night.
Judson Tate.
But up prances the alcalde and almost wipes the dust off my shoes with his forehead.
No mere good looks could have won me that sensational entrance.
Fergus was at the other end of the room trying to break away from two maroons and a claybank girl.
When she took the first look at my face she dropped her fan and nearly turned her chair over from the shock.
When she heard me speak she jumped, and her eyes got as big as alligator pears.
She was coming my way.
She knew of Judson Tate, and what a big man he was, and the big things he had done; and that was in my favour.
I ranged from the second G below the staff up to F-sharp above it.
I set my voice to poetry, art, romance, flowers, and moonlight.
Oh, the vocal is the true art - no doubt about that.
Handsome is as handsome palavers.
In two weeks Anabela was engaged to me, and Fergus was out.
I was calling regular every evening then, and we were to be married in a month.
She looked at my rugged features without any expression of fear or repugnance.
I walked slowly up to the little park near my hotel, leaving Judson Tate alone with his conscience.
My feelings were lacerated.
He had poured gently upon me a story that I might have used.
And, at the last it had proven to be a commercial pill, deftly coated with the sugar of fiction.
The worst of it was that I could not offer it for sale.
Advertising departments and counting-rooms look down upon me.
And it would never do for the literary.
Therefore I sat upon a bench with other disappointed ones until my eyelids drooped.
I went to my room, and, as my custom is, read for an hour stories in my favourite magazines.
This was to get my mind back to art again.
And as I read each story, I threw the magazines sadly and hopelessly, one by one, upon the floor.
And when the last one was hurled from me I took heart.
Genius, whose coronations alone are democratic, had woven a chaplet of chaparral for the brow of Lonny Briscoe.
The outcome, seven feet by twelve of besmeared canvas, stood, gilt-framed, in the lobby of the Capitol.
The boarding-houses were corralling the easy dollars of the gamesome law-makers.
Order reigned within her borders.
Life and property were as safe there, sir, as anywhere among the corrupt cities of the effete East.
With impunity might the tenderfoot ventilate his "stovepipe" or his theories of culture.
The arts and sciences received nurture and subsidy.
Rarely has the San Saba country contributed to the spread of the fine arts.
Why he came to woo art is beyond postulation.
Beyond doubt, some spore of the afflatus must have sprung up within him in spite of the desert soil of San Saba.
The landscape presented fitting and faithful accessories.
Chaparral, mesquit, and pear were distributed in just proportions.
A richly mottled rattlesnake lay coiled beneath a pale green clump of prickly pear in the foreground.
Citizens and lawmakers passed there by twos and groups and sometimes crowds to gaze upon it.
Many - perhaps a majority of them - had lived the prairie life and recalled easily the familiar scene.
Hundreds of connoisseurs had straddled their broncos and ridden miles to view it before its removal to the capital.
Senator Mullens desired reelection, and he knew the importance of the San Saba vote.
He also knew that with the help of Senator Kinney - who was a power in the legislature - the thing could be put through.
Few artists have uncovered their first picture to the world under happier auspices than did Lonny Briscoe.
It looks like the worst kind of a chromo to me.
The man who carved the state out of the wilderness.
The man who settled the Indians.
The man who cleaned out the horse thieves.
The man who refused the crown.
Do you see the point now?
"Wrap up the picture," said Kinney.
By the hour and minute of it you must dwell under the sway and direct authority of Phoebe, the ninth satellite.
And for many years before.
I told him that for the time we would banish both astrology and astronomy from our heads.
The manifest valour and enthusiasm of the man drew me.
We sent for a tug to tow us back and lost three days.
When we struck the blue waters of the Gulf, all the storm clouds of the Atlantic seemed to have concentrated above us.
He weathered every storm on deck, smoking a black pipe, to keep which alight rain and sea-water seemed but as oil.
And he shook his fist at the black clouds behind which his baleful star winked its unseen eye.
When the skies cleared one evening, he reviled his malignant guardian with grim humour.
Twinkle, twinkle, little devil!
Get busy and sink the ship, you one-eyed banshee.
Sounds as mild as a milkmaid.
Five days only should have landed us in Esperando.
Also in the manual of arms - but, alas!
Even a Mexican might have crossed his path in safety while he was in this mood.
The Kid openly boarded the north-bound passenger train that departed five minutes later.
But at Webb, a few miles out, where it was flagged to take on a traveller, he abandoned that manner of escape.
There were telegraph stations ahead; and the Kid looked askance at electricity and steam.
Saddle and spur were his rocks of safety.
The man whom he had shot was a stranger to him.
Most of them waited, half asleep, with sagging limbs and drooping heads.
But one, a long-legged roan with a curved neck, snorted and pawed the turf.
For the Kid there was no turning back now.
With the springing roan under him he felt little care or uneasiness.
A sailor had been dispatched for the missing cargo.
Meanwhile the captain paced the sands, chewing profanely at his pocket store.
His complexion was naturally dark; and the sun and wind of an outdoor life had burned it to a coffee brown.
He looked beyond Captain Boone at the gulf with the impersonal and expressionless dignity of a Chinese emperor.
I never saw it before.
I was just looking at it.
Not thinking of selling it, are you?
"Not this trip," said the captain.
Boone, skipper.
Cargo - lumber, corrugated iron, and machetes.
The bananys and oranges and hurricanes and pineapples that ye eat comes from there.
Second cabin.
"All right, buddy," said the captain.
Thacker, the United States consul at Buenas Tierras, was not yet drunk.
They told me it was customary to light at your camp before starting in to round up the town.
I just came in on a ship from Texas.
The Kid laughed.
"Sprague Dalton," he said.
Try a cigar?
"They speak Spanish here," said the consul.
Everybody speaks it on the range where I come from.
He regarded the kid absorbedly.
"You look like a Spaniard, too," he continued.
And I come down to your parrot-and-monkey range just for to smell the morning-glories and marigolds.
Thacker got up and closed the door.
"Let me see your hand," he said.
"I can do it," he said excitedly.
It will heal in a week.
But no barehanded scrapping, like ladies at a tea-party, for me.
Old Santos Urique lives there.
He owns half the gold-mines in the country.
Twelve years ago they lost a kid.
Everybody knows about it.
Brace up, and make a man of yourself.
Stop cracking safes, and live straight.
"Oh, no," laughed the warden.
How was it you happened to get sent up on that Springfield job?
Or was it simply a case of a mean old jury that had it in for you?
Unlock him at seven in the morning, and let him come to the bull-pen.
Better think over my advice, Valentine.
The warden gave him a cigar, and shook hands.
They came by the hotel where Jimmy still boarded, and he ran up to his room and brought along his suitcase.
Then they went on to the bank.
The clerks were pleased to be greeted by the good-looking, agreeable young man who was going to marry Miss Annabel.
Jimmy set his suit-case down.
Ralph, how heavy it is?
Feels like it was full of gold bricks.
The Elmore Bank had just put in a new safe and vault.
Adams was very proud of it, and insisted on an inspection by every one.
The vault was a small one, but it had a new, patented door.
It fastened with three solid steel bolts thrown simultaneously with a single handle, and had a time-lock.
Spencer, who showed a courteous but not too intelligent interest.
The two children, May and Agatha, were delighted by the shining metal and funny clock and knobs.
Suddenly there was a scream or two from the women, and a commotion.
Robbins, an investigator by nature, sent a curious glance roving about the room.
Oh, madame!
Since when - oh!
At his words, Madame Tibault and Dumars approached.
Where I get them from?
Robbins explained.
Mister Morin was right.
He dragged Dumars by the arm into the outer room.
I advise you to join me.
Now, that green stuff you drink is no good.
It stimulates thought.
What we want to do is to forget to remember.
Her name is Belle of Kentucky, twelveyear-old Bourbon.
In quarts.
How does the idea strike you?
A man with a thick black-leather wallet under his arm left the train and walked rapidly up the main street of the town.
Indecision had no part in the movements of the man with the wallet.
He was well dressed in the prevailing Eastern style.
His air denoted a quiet but conscious reserve force, if not actual authority.
Upon one corner stood the post-office.
The cashier was examining the mail when he noticed the stranger standing at his window.
He had had to make that statement so often to early birds since San Rosario adopted city banking hours.
"I am well aware of that," said the other man, in cool, brittle tones.
Walk right around, please.
Edlinger, the cashier - a middle-aged gentleman of deliberation, discretion, and method.
Not overly much money on hand, but able to stand the storms, sir, stand the storms.
I will take the cash first, please.
He knew it was right to a cent, and he had nothing to fear, but he was nervous and flustered.
So was every man in the bank.
He looked to be a man who would never make nor overlook an error.
Nettlewick first seized the currency, and with a rapid, almost juggling motion, counted it by packages.
Then he spun the sponge cup toward him and verified the count by bills.
The air was full of fractional currency when he came to the halves and quarters.
He counted the last nickle and dime.
He had the scales brought, and he weighed every sack of silver in the vault.
This newly-imported examiner was so different from Sam Turner.
Halves and quarters and dimes?
Not for Sam Turner.
"No chicken feed for me," he would say when they were set before him.
List of over-drafts, please.
Unsigned bills of the bank, next.
Two men of very different types shook hands.
One was a finished product of the world of straight lines, conventional methods, and formal affairs.
The other was something freer, wider, and nearer to nature.
Tom Kingman had not been cut to any pattern.
He had been mule-driver, cowboy, ranger, soldier, sheriff, prospector, and cattleman.
We will take them up now, if you please.
He had gone through the First National at almost record-breaking speed - but thoroughly, as he did everything.
The running order of the bank was smooth and clean, and that had facilitated his work.
There was but one other bank in the town.
He received from the Government a fee of twenty-five dollars for each bank that he examined.
He should be able to go over those loans and discounts in half an hour.
Otherwise, he would have to spend the night and Sunday in this uninteresting Western town.
Nettlewick was rushing matters.
Nobody in the bank knows those notes as I do.
Next, he took up the larger loans, inquiring scrupulously into the condition of their endorsers or securities.
The clerical work seems to be done accurately and punctually.
Your past-due paper is moderate in amount, and promises only a small loss.
And now, there is one thing more, and I will have finished with the bank.
They are secured, according to their faces, by various stocks, bonds, shares, etc.
Those securities are missing from the notes to which they should be attached.
I suppose you have them in the safe or vault.
You will permit me to examine them.
I have taken them.
You may hold me personally responsible for their absence.
Nettlewick felt a slight thrill.
He had not expected this.
He had struck a momentous trail when the hunt was drawing to a close.
"The securities were taken by me," repeated the major.
There was a desk, and a table, and half-a-dozen leather-covered chairs.
On the wall was the mounted head of a Texas steer with horns five feet from tip to tip.
You are aware, also, of what my duty must compel me to do.
Do your duty.
But, I spoke of my friend.
I did want you to hear me tell you about Bob.
Nettlewick settled himself in his chair.
There would be no leaving San Rosario for him that day.
It was not the first crime the examiner had unearthed.
One cashier had shot himself at his desk before him.
The day is that hot, senor.
Maybeso it is of desirableness to leave him out to get the cool.
I know what you want.
You want to tell me that story again about Johnny Ammiger and the widow on the train.
Sitting on ice, and calling his best friends pseudonyms.
Now, what was it Johnny said to the widow first?
Yes, neither me nor Jones breathed with soul so dead.
He was some pumpkin both in politics and colour, and the friend of me and Jones.
While he was in the States he had acquired a synopsis of the English language and the art of admiring our institutions.
The hearts of Americans and Salvadorians should beat together.
Of your history and your great Washington I know.
It made us feel good.
He must have heard the news going round in Philadelphia about that disturbance we had with England.
We were talking about it when you came in.
He might suspend the rules for one day.
He will aid us.
He dug his trench on the plaza, and got half a beef on the coals for an all-night roast.
None of them have ever held Federal positions.
They have been land-holders, slave-owners, and planters on a large scale.
Have you decided to accept this appointment, William?
"I am thinking it over," said Billy, slowly, regarding the ash of his cigar.
"You have been a good son to me," continued the Governor, stirring his pipe with the handle of a penholder.
Especially in this, our native town, is your name linked with mine in the talk of our citizens.
"I never knew anyone to forget the vindculum," murmured Billy, unintelligibly.
I have not hesitated to exert it in your behalf whenever opportunity offered.
And you have deserved it, William.
And now this appointment comes to take you away from me.
I have but a few years left to live.
I am almost dependent upon others now, even in walking and dressing.
What would I do without you, my son?
A tear trickled from his eye.
Elmville is good enough for me.
The General whistled.
When does he leave?
We must have a reception.
Great Gatlings!
Think of it!
Our little, wood-sawing, mealy-mouthed Billy!
Elmville is disgraced forever until she lines up in a hurry for ratification and apology.
The venerable Moloch smiled fatuously.
He refuses to leave me in my old age.
He is a good son.
The commissioner betrayed a slight impatience.
Am I just a knot on a mesquite stump?
Charge it up to Insurance and the other two sideshows.
Come, now, Uncle Frank, let her have the money.
The clerks were beginning to listen.
Neither can you.
The treasurer called him back.
"Never mind, Uncle Frank," said the commissioner, in a softer tone.
Besides, her case is in my hands.
It seems to be about as important as an almanac or a hotel register.
You want to keep your eye on the Department of Insurance, Statistics, and History.
The commissioner returned to his office, looking thoughtful.
He opened and closed an inkstand on his desk many times with extreme and undue attention.
The department will see you through.
He is living there now.
He wanted to give a dinner at his old home to a few friends.
To hire the complete and elegant equipment of a dining-room, hall, receptionroom, and cloak-rooms.
All damage or loss to be promptly paid for.
Many of those old merchants knew Grandemont by sight, and the Charleses of old by association.
"Choose what you want," they said to him.
See that the damage bill is kept low, and the charges for the loan will not oppress you.
To the wine merchants next; and here a doleful slice was lopped from the six hundred.
It was an exquisite pleasure to Grandemont once more to pick among the precious vintages.
The champagne bins lured him like the abodes of sirens, but these he was forced to pass.
With his six hundred he stood before them as a child with a penny stands before a French doll.
Perhaps he was yet somewhere about the plantation.
On the next Sunday after the thought Grandemont rode, horseback, down to Charleroi.
The big, square house with its two long ells looked blank and cheerless with its closed shutters and doors.
The shrubbery in the yard was ragged and riotous.
Fallen leaves from the grove littered the walks and porches.
You walk for miles - hundreds of them.
By and by the mountains are all gone, and you come to the prairies.
They do not dance at night; they are merciful, and you sleep.
Then you come to the river, and it says things to you.
Jack leaned back in his chair, and his eyes slowly closed.
The food and wine had steeped him in a deep calm.
The tense strain had been smoothed from his face.
The languor of repletion was claiming him.
Drowsily he spoke again.
The owner of the name started and set down his glass.
There is more with me - moocho more.
Plentee moneys shall you be supplied, Senor Galloway.
More I shall send you at all times that you need.
I shall desire to pay feefty - one hundred thousand pesos, if necessario, to be elect.
Sacramento!
If that I am president and do not make one meelion dolla in the one year you shall keek me on that side!
General Rompiro escorted us to the steamer.
On the pier he hugged Denver around the waist and sobbed.
Go, in the hands of the saints to do the work for your friend.
Howard Payne to the growler.
The one opened the door with a latch-key and went in, followed by a young fellow who awkwardly removed his cap.
He did not know what to do with his cap, and was stuffing it into his coat pocket when the other took it from him.
The act was done quietly and naturally, and the awkward young fellow appreciated it.
"He understands," was his thought.
His heavy arms hung loosely at his sides.
He experienced a momentary pang of shame that he should walk so uncouthly.
"Hold on, Arthur, my boy," he said, attempting to mask his anxiety with facetious utterance.
Give me a chance to get my nerve.
And the stranger understood and appreciated.
His was the gift of sympathy, understanding; and beneath his alarmed exterior that sympathetic process went on.
He saw the glance, but he gave no sign, for among the things he had learned was discipline.
Also, that dagger-thrust went to his pride.
The lines of his face hardened, and into his eyes came a fighting light.
He was responsive to beauty, and here was cause to respond.
An oil painting caught and held him.
There was beauty, and it drew him irresistibly.
He forgot his awkward walk and came closer to the painting, very close.
The beauty faded out of the canvas.
His face expressed his bepuzzlement.
He stared at what seemed a careless daub of paint, then stepped away.
Immediately all the beauty flashed back into the canvas.
He did not know painting.
He had been brought up on chromos and lithographs that were always definite and sharp, near or far.
He glanced around at his friend reading the letter and saw the books on the table.
For the rest, they were strange books and strange authors.
He chanced upon a volume of Swinburne and began reading steadily, forgetful of where he was, his face glowing.
Twice he closed the book on his forefinger to look at the name of the author.
That fellow had eyes, and he had certainly seen color and flashing light.
Was he dead a hundred years or so, like most of the poets?
Or was he alive still, and writing?
He turned to the title-page.
He went back to the text and lost himself.
He did not notice that a young woman had entered the room.
Under that muscled body of his he was a mass of quivering sensibilities.
And then he turned and saw the girl.
The phantasmagoria of his brain vanished at sight of her.
She was a pale, ethereal creature, with wide, spiritual blue eyes and a wealth of golden hair.
He did not know how she was dressed, except that the dress was as wonderful as she.
He likened her to a pale gold flower upon a slender stem.
No, she was a spirit, a divinity, a goddess; such sublimated beauty was not of the earth.
Or perhaps the books were right, and there were many such as she in the upper walks of life.
She might well be sung by that chap, Swinburne.
Perhaps he had had somebody like her in mind when he painted that girl, Iseult, in the book there on the table.
All this plethora of sight, and feeling, and thought occurred on the instant.
There was no pause of the realities wherein he moved.
He saw her hand coming out to his, and she looked him straight in the eyes as she shook hands, frankly, like a man.
The women he had known did not shake hands that way.
For that matter, most of them did not shake hands at all.
But he shook them aside and looked at her.
Never had he seen such a woman.
The women he had known!
Immediately, beside her, on either hand, ranged the women he had known.
There were women of the cattle camps, and swarthy cigarette-smoking women of Old Mexico.
She repressed a smile at sight of the red line that marked the chafe of the collar against the bronzed neck.
He was evidently unused to stiff collars.
This was a new experience for him.
All his life, up to then, he had been unaware of being either graceful or awkward.
Such thoughts of self had never entered his mind.
He sat down gingerly on the edge of the chair, greatly worried by his hands.
They were in the way wherever he put them.
Arthur was leaving the room, and Martin Eden followed his exit with longing eyes.
He felt lost, alone there in the room with that pale spirit of a woman.
I am sure it must have been some adventure.
"A Mexican with a knife, miss," he answered, moistening his parched lips and clearing hip throat.
After I got the knife away, he tried to bite off my nose.
But of all this no hint had crept into his speech.
"He tried to bite off my nose," he concluded.
"Oh," the girl said, in a faint, far voice, and he noticed the shock in her sensitive face.
Such sordid things as stabbing affrays were evidently not fit subjects for conversation with a lady.
People in the books, in her walk of life, did not talk about such things - perhaps they did not know about them, either.
There was a brief pause in the conversation they were trying to get started.
Then she asked tentatively about the scar on his cheek.
"It was just an accident," he said, putting his hand to his cheek.
"This man Swineburne," he began, attempting to put his plan into execution and pronouncing the I long.
"Swineburne," he repeated, with the same mispronunciation.
"Swinburne," she corrected.
"I never clapped eyes on him," was the reply.
How do you like his poetry?
And thereat she began to talk quickly and easily upon the subject he had suggested.
Here was intellectual life, he thought, and here was beauty, warm and wonderful as he had never dreamed it could be.
He forgot himself and stared at her with hungry eyes.
Here was something to live for, to win to, to fight for - ay, and die for.
The books were true.
There were such women in the world.
She was one of them.
But she, who knew little of the world of men, being a woman, was keenly aware of his burning eyes.
She had never had men look at her in such fashion, and it embarrassed her.
She stumbled and halted in her utterance.
The thread of argument slipped from her.
He frightened her, and at the same time it was strangely pleasant to be so looked upon.
She was clean, and her cleanness revolted; but she was woman, and she was just beginning to learn the paradox of woman.
"Yes, thank you," she said.
There are many of his poems that should never be read.
Not a line of the great poets can be spared without impoverishing the world by that much.
I had no idea he was such a - a scoundrel.
I guess that crops out in his other books.
He broke off lamely.
He was confused, painfully conscious of his inarticulateness.
He had felt the bigness and glow of life in what he had read, but his speech was inadequate.
Well, he decided, it was up to him to get acquainted in this new world.
It sounded like a threat.
His voice was determined, his eyes were flashing, the lines of his face had grown harsh.
And to her it seemed that the angle of his jaw had changed; its pitch had become unpleasantly aggressive.
At the same time a wave of intense virility seemed to surge out from him and impinge upon her.
"I think you could make it in - in your class," she finished with a laugh.
And though he sat there, blushing and humble, again she felt drawn to him.
She was surprised by a wanton thought that rushed into her mind.
She was shocked by this thought.
It seemed to reveal to her an undreamed depravity in her nature.
Besides, strength to her was a gross and brutish thing.
Her ideal of masculine beauty had always been slender gracefulness.
Yet the thought still persisted.
It bewildered her that she should desire to place her hands on that sunburned neck.
In truth, she was far from robust, and the need of her body and mind was for strength.
But she did not know it.
Never trained that way, you see.
Mebbe you can put me right.
"By going to school, I fancy, and by studying," she answered.
"I went to school when I was a kid," he began to object.
He felt that she had become remoter from him by at least a million miles.
He did not know what "English" meant, but he made a mental note of that item of ignorance and passed on.
You have never attended high school?
"I had two years to run, when I left," he answered.
At the same moment he became aware that a woman was entering the room.
He saw the girl leave her chair and trip swiftly across the floor to the newcomer.
That must be her mother, he thought.
She was a tall, blond woman, slender, and stately, and beautiful.
Her gown was what he might expect in such a house.
His eyes delighted in the graceful lines of it.
She and her dress together reminded him of women on the stage.
Next his mind leaped to the Grand Hotel at Yokohama, where, too, from the sidewalk, he had seen grand ladies.
Then the city and the harbor of Yokohama, in a thousand pictures, began flashing before his eyes.
But he swiftly dismissed the kaleidoscope of memory, oppressed by the urgent need of the present.
The process of getting into the dining room was a nightmare to him.
Between halts and stumbles, jerks and lurches, locomotion had at times seemed impossible.
But at last he had made it, and was seated alongside of Her.
The array of knives and forks frightened him.
He watched them eating, and decided that they ate like pigs.
Well, he would be careful here.
He would make no noise.
He would keep his mind upon it all the time.
He glanced around the table.
They were her brothers, he reminded himself, and his heart warmed toward them.
How they loved each other, the members of this family!
Not in his world were such displays of affection between parents and children made.
It was a revelation of the heights of existence that were attained in the world above.
It was the finest thing yet that he had seen in this small glimpse of that world.
He was moved deeply by appreciation of it, and his heart was melting with sympathetic tenderness.
He had starved for love all his life.
His nature craved love.
It was an organic demand of his being.
Yet he had gone without, and hardened himself in the process.
He had not known that he needed love.
Nor did he know it now.
He merely saw it in operation, and thrilled to it, and thought it fine, and high, and splendid.
Morse was not there.
It was difficult enough getting acquainted with her, and her mother, and her brother, Norman.
Arthur he already knew somewhat.
The father would have been too much for him, he felt sure.
It seemed to him that he had never worked so hard in his life.
He was oppressed throughout the meal by the thought of finger-bowls.
Irrelevantly, insistently, scores of times, he wondered when they would come on and what they looked like.
What should his attitude be?
He wrestled continually and anxiously with the problem.
It was during the first part of the dinner, struggling to decide upon his attitude, that he was very quiet.
So he sat at table, perturbed by his own unfitness and at the same time charmed by all that went on about him.
For the first time he realized that eating was something more than a utilitarian function.
He was unaware of what he ate.
It was merely food.
He was feasting his love of beauty at this table where eating was an aesthetic function.
It was an intellectual function, too.
His mind was stirred.
The romance, and beauty, and high vigor of the books were coming true.
He curbed the impulse, arising out of his sea-training, to say "Yes, sir," and "No, sir," to her brothers.
Also, it was a dictate of his pride.
He was a civilized man, that was what he was, shoulder to shoulder, at dinner, with people he had read about in books.
He was in the books himself, adventuring through the printed pages of bound volumes.
He was no gentle lamb, and the part of second fiddle would never do for the high-pitched dominance of his nature.
Besides, he was confident that he could not keep it up.
He was by nature powerful of thought and sensibility, and the creative spirit was restive and urgent.
But he recovered himself quickly.
His cheeks were hot.
He took it as an exposure of another of his deficiencies.
"Yes," he said depreciatingly.
I can hit like a mule with my arms and shoulders.
He was not happy at what he had said.
He was filled with disgust at himself.
He had loosed the guard upon his tongue and talked about things that were not nice.
He certainly had not succeeded so far.
The masquerade would fail, and besides, masquerade was foreign to his nature.
There was no room in him for sham or artifice.
Whatever happened, he must be real.
Upon that he was resolved.
"Mathematics, arithmetic," was the answer.
Martin Eden nodded.
He had caught a glimpse of the apparently illimitable vistas of knowledge.
What he saw took on tangibility.
His abnormal power of vision made abstractions take on concrete form.
It was like wine to him.
Martin Eden remembered his decision.
He had been a member of the crew of the smuggling schooner Halcyon when she was captured by a revenue cutter.
He saw with wide eyes, and he could tell what he saw.
He brought the pulsing sea before them, and the men and the ships upon the sea.
He communicated his power of vision, till they saw with his eyes what he had seen.
And while he talked, the girl looked at him with startled eyes.
His fire warmed her.
She wondered if she had been cold all her days.
She felt that she must lean toward him, and resisted by an effort.
Then, too, there was the counter impulse to shrink away from him.
And ever and again would come the draw of him, till she thought he must be evil to have such power over her.
All that was most firmly established in her mind was rocking.
His romance and adventure were battering at the conventions.
This man from outer darkness was evil.
Her mother saw it, and her mother was right.
The fire of him was no longer warm, and the fear of him was no longer poignant.
He gazed upon her in awe.
In his mind, as in her own, the gulf widened; but faster than it widened, towered his ambition to win across it.
He was remarkably susceptible to music.
It banished sordid fact, flooded his mind with beauty, loosed romance and to its heels added wings.
He did not understand the music she played.
It was different from the dancehall piano-banging and blatant brass bands he had heard.
Once, it entered his mind that there was a deliberate rebuff in all this.
He caught her spirit of antagonism and strove to divine the message that her hands pronounced upon the keys.
Then he dismissed the thought as unworthy and impossible, and yielded himself more freely to the music.
The old delightful condition began to be induced.
The known and the unknown were commingled in the dream-pageant that thronged his vision.
He entered strange ports of sun-washed lands, and trod market-places among barbaric peoples that no man had ever seen.
Swift as thought the pictures came and went.
He lay on a coral beach where the cocoanuts grew down to the mellowsounding surf.
It was a sensuous, tropic night.
In the background a volcano crater was silhouetted against the stars.
Overhead drifted a pale crescent moon, and the Southern Cross burned low in the sky.
He did not merely feel.
And she, glancing at him across her shoulder, saw something of all this in his face.
She was startled.
His mood was essentially religious.
He was humble and meek, filled with selfdisparagement and abasement.
In such frame of mind sinners come to the penitent form.
He was convicted of sin.
But this possession of her was dim and nebulous and totally different from possession as he had known it.
He did not think it.
For that matter, he did not think at all.
A policeman on a street corner eyed him suspiciously, then noted his sailor roll.
Martin Eden came back to earth.
His was a fluid organism, swiftly adjustable, capable of flowing into and filling all sorts of nooks and crannies.
He lighted his cigarette, said good night, and went on.
He caught a Telegraph Avenue car that was going to Berkeley.
It was crowded with youths and young men who were singing songs and ever and again barking out college yells.
He studied them curiously.
They were university boys.
His thoughts wandered on.
He noticed one with narrow-slitted eyes and a looselipped mouth.
That fellow was vicious, he decided.
On shipboard he would be a sneak, a whiner, a tattler.
He, Martin Eden, was a better man than that fellow.
The thought cheered him.
It seemed to draw him nearer to Her.
He began comparing himself with the students.
He grew conscious of the muscled mechanism of his body and felt confident that he was physically their master.
But their heads were filled with knowledge that enabled them to talk her talk, - the thought depressed him.
But what was a brain for?
What they had done, he could do.
They had been studying about life from the books while he had been busy living life.
His brain was just as full of knowledge as theirs, though it was a different kind of knowledge.
How many of them could tie a lanyard knot, or take a wheel or a lookout?
His life spread out before him in a series of pictures of danger and daring, hardship and toil.
He remembered his failures and scrapes in the process of learning.
He was that much to the good, anyway.
Later on they would have to begin living life and going through the mill as he had gone.
The very thought of her ennobled and purified him, made him better, and made him want to be better.
This was new to him.
He had never known women who had made him better.
They had always had the counter effect of making him beastly.
He did not know that many of them had done their best, bad as it was.
This was not just to them, nor to himself.
He got up abruptly and tried to see himself in the dirty lookingglass over the wash-stand.
He passed a towel over it and looked again, long and carefully.
It was the first time he had ever really seen himself.
What kind of a brain lay behind there?
What was it capable of?
How far would it take him?
Would it take him to her?
He wondered, also, how his eyes looked to her.
He tried to imagine himself she, gazing into those eyes of his, but failed in the jugglery.
He did not know her way of life.
She was wonder and mystery, and how could he guess one thought of hers?
Well, they were honest eyes, he concluded, and in them was neither smallness nor meanness.
The brown sunburn of his face surprised him.
He had not dreamed he was so black.
He rolled up his shirt-sleeve and compared the white underside if the arm with his face.
Yes, he was a white man, after all.
But the arms were sunburned, too.
It was very white.
At times, so tightly did they draw, the mouth became stern and harsh, even ascetic.
They were the lips of a fighter and of a lover.
They could taste the sweetness of life with relish, and they could put the sweetness aside and command life.
The chin and jaw, strong and just hinting of square aggressiveness, helped the lips to command life.
They were white and strong and regular, he decided, as he looked at them.
But as he looked, he began to be troubled.
They were the people from up above - people in her class.
She must wash her teeth every day, too.
What would she think if she learned that he had never washed his teeth in all the days of his life?
He resolved to get a tooth-brush and form the habit.
He would begin at once, to-morrow.
It was not by mere achievement that he could hope to win to her.
How different was her palm!
He thrilled deliciously at the remembrance.
Like a rose-petal, he thought; cool and soft as a snowflake.
He caught himself imagining the wonder of a caress from such a hand, and flushed guiltily.
It was too gross a thought for her.
In ways it seemed to impugn her high spirituality.
He was used to the harsh callousness of factory girls and working women.
Well he knew why their hands were rough; but this hand of hers.
It was soft because she had never used it to work with.
The gulf yawned between her and him at the awesome thought of a person who did not have to work for a living.
He suddenly saw the aristocracy of the people who did not labor.
It towered before him on the wall, a figure in brass, arrogant and powerful.
He had worked himself; his first memories seemed connected with work, and all his family had worked.
There was Gertrude.
And there was his sister Marian.
She had worked in the cannery the preceding summer, and her slim, pretty hands were all scarred with the tomato-knives.
He remembered the hard palms of his mother as she lay in her coffin.
He sat back on the bed with a bitter laugh, and finished taking off his shoes.
And then, suddenly, before his eyes, on the foul plaster-wall appeared a vision.
He stood in front of a gloomy tenement house.
It was night-time, in the East End of London, and before him stood Margey, a little factory girl of fifteen.
He had seen her home after the beanfeast.
She lived in that gloomy tenement, a place not fit for swine.
His hand was going out to hers as he said good night.
Somehow he was afraid of her.
And then her hand closed on his and pressed feverishly.
He felt her callouses grind and grate on his, and a great wave of pity welled over him.
Her glad little cry rang in his ears, and he felt her clinging to him like a cat.
Poor little starveling!
He continued to stare at the vision of what had happened in the long ago.
His flesh was crawling as it had crawled that night when she clung to him, and his heart was warm with pity.
It was a gray scene, greasy gray, and the rain drizzled greasily on the pavement stones.
He took the Browning and the Swinburne from the chair and kissed them.
Just the same, she told me to call again, he thought.
Understand!
Norman and Arthur knew that speech.
He had heard them talking it.
And they were her brothers.
He left the alcove in despair.
From every side the books seemed to press upon him and crush him.
He had never dreamed that the fund of human knowledge bulked so big.
He was frightened.
How could his brain ever master it all?
And so he wandered on, alternating between depression and elation as he stared at the shelves packed with wisdom.
In a way, it spoke a kindred speech.
Both he and it were of the sea.
There it was; he would teach himself navigation.
He would quit drinking, work up, and become a captain.
Ruth seemed very near to him in that moment.
As a captain, he could marry her (if she would have him).
He cast his eyes about the room and closed the lids down on a vision of ten thousand books.
No; no more of the sea for him.
There was power in all that wealth of books, and if he would do great things, he must do them on the land.
Besides, captains were not allowed to take their wives to sea with them.
Noon came, and afternoon.
But when he found the right shelf, he sought vainly for the answer.
He abandoned his search.
The man nodded.
Are you a sailor?
"Yes, sir," he answered.
Now, how did he know that?
A terrible restlessness that was akin to hunger afflicted Martin Eden.
He could not steel himself to call upon her.
He was afraid that he might call too soon, and so be guilty of an awful breach of that awful thing called etiquette.
The many books he read but served to whet his unrest.
Every page of every book was a peep-hole into the realm of knowledge.
His hunger fed upon what he read, and increased.
Also, he did not know where to begin, and continually suffered from lack of preparation.
The commonest references, that he could see plainly every reader was expected to know, he did not know.
And the same was true of the poetry he read which maddened him with delight.
He read more of Swinburne than was contained in the volume Ruth had lent him; and "Dolores" he understood thoroughly.
But surely Ruth did not understand it, he concluded.
These thoughts he had tried to share, but never had he found a woman capable of understanding - nor a man.
He had tried, at times, but had only puzzled his listeners.
And as his thoughts had been beyond them, so, he argued now, he must be beyond them.
He felt power move in him, and clenched his fists.
Those bold black eyes had nothing to offer.
He knew the thoughts behind them - of ice-cream and of something else.
They offered books and painting, beauty and repose, and all the fine elegance of higher existence.
Behind those black eyes he knew every thought process.
It was like clockwork.
He could watch every wheel go around.
Their bid was low pleasure, narrow as the grave, that palled, and the grave was at the end of it.
He had caught glimpses of the soul in them, and glimpses of his own soul, too.
"Lizzie," she replied, softening toward him, her hand pressing his arm, while her body leaned against his.
He talked on a few minutes before saying good night.
I kept it for you.
A week of heavy reading had passed since the evening he first met Ruth Morse, and still he dared not call.
Time and again he nerved himself up to call, but under the doubts that assailed him his determination died away.
But his eyes were strong, and they were backed by a body superbly strong.
Furthermore, his mind was fallow.
It had never been jaded by study, and it bit hold of the knowledge in the books with sharp teeth that would not let go.
It seemed to him, by the end of the week, that he had lived centuries, so far behind were the old life and outlook.
But he was baffled by lack of preparation.
He attempted to read books that required years of preliminary specialization.
It was the same with the economists.
He was bewildered, and yet he wanted to know.
She had never had any experiences of the heart.
She did not know the actual fire of love.
She did not dream of the volcanic convulsions of love, its scorching heat and sterile wastes of parched ashes.
She knew neither her own potencies, nor the potencies of the world; and the deeps of life were to her seas of illusion.
It was only natural.
There was something cosmic in such things, and there was something cosmic in him.
He came to her breathing of large airs and great spaces.
The blaze of tropic suns was in his face, and in his swelling, resilient muscles was the primordial vigor of life.
He was untamed, wild, and in secret ways her vanity was touched by the fact that he came so mildly to her hand.
Likewise she was stirred by the common impulse to tame the wild thing.
His swift development was a source of surprise and interest.
She detected unguessed finenesses in him that seemed to bud, day by day, like flowers in congenial soil.
She read Browning aloud to him, and was often puzzled by the strange interpretations he gave to mooted passages.
Then she played to him - no longer at him - and probed him with music that sank to depths beyond her plumb-line.
In an immediate way it personified his life.
But her singing he did not question.
It was too wholly her, and he sat always amazed at the divine melody of her pure soprano voice.
She enjoyed singing and playing to him.
Besides, it was pleasant to be with him.
He did not repel her.
That first repulsion had been really a fear of her undiscovered self, and the fear had gone to sleep.
Though she did not know it, she had a feeling in him of proprietary right.
Also, he had a tonic effect upon her.
Strength was what she needed, and he gave it to her in generous measure.
To come into the same room with him, or to meet him at the door, was to take heart of life.
And when he had gone, she would return to her books with a keener zest and fresh store of energy.
She knew her Browning, but it had never sunk into her that it was an awkward thing to play with souls.
As her interest in Martin increased, the remodelling of his life became a passion with her.
Butler, Charles Butler he was called, found himself alone in the world.
His father had come from Australia, you know, and so he had no relatives in California.
She paused for breath, and to note how Martin was receiving it.
Butler; but there was a frown upon his face as well.
How could he live on it?
He must have lived like a dog.
His early denials are paid for a thousand fold.
Martin looked at her sharply.
Her eyes dropped before his searching gaze.
By nature he is sober and serious.
He always was that.
"You can bet he was," Martin proclaimed.
Her own limits were the limits of her horizon; but limited minds can recognize limitations only in others.
"But I have not finished my story," she said.
Butler was always eager to work.
He never was late, and he was usually at the office a few minutes before his regular time.
And yet he saved his time.
Every spare moment was devoted to study.
He quickly became a clerk, and he made himself invaluable.
Father appreciated him and saw that he was bound to rise.
He became a lawyer, and hardly was he back in the office when father took him in as junior partner.
He is a great man.
Such a life is an inspiration to all of us.
It shows us that a man with will may rise superior to his environment.
"He is a great man," Martin said sincerely.
And then, in splendor and glory, came the great idea.
He would write.
He would write - everything - poetry and prose, fiction and description, and plays like Shakespeare.
There was career and the way to win to Ruth.
Butlers who earned thirty thousand a year and could be Supreme Court justices if they wanted to.
Once the idea had germinated, it mastered him, and the return voyage to San Francisco was like a dream.
He was drunken with unguessed power and felt that he could do anything.
In the midst of the great and lonely sea he gained perspective.
Clearly, and for the first lime, he saw Ruth and her world.
The thought was fire in him.
He would begin as soon as he got back.
The first thing he would do would be to describe the voyage of the treasure-hunters.
He would sell it to some San Francisco newspaper.
He would not tell Ruth anything about it, and she would be surprised and pleased when she saw his name in print.
While he wrote, he could go on studying.
There were twenty-four hours in each day.
He was invincible.
He knew how to work, and the citadels would go down before him.
She did not think much of his plan.
Not that I know anything about it, of course.
I only bring common judgment to bear.
This education is indispensable for whatever career you select, and it must not be slipshod or sketchy.
You should go to high school.
"I would have to," he said grimly.
I must live and buy books and clothes, you know.
This change in him was her handiwork, and she was proud of it and fired with ambition further to help him.
But the most radical change of all, and the one that pleased her most, was the change in his speech.
Not only did he speak more correctly, but he spoke more easily, and there were many new words in his vocabulary.
Also, there was an awkward hesitancy, at times, as he essayed the new words he had learned.
He was just beginning to orientate himself and to feel that he was not wholly an intruder.
He told her of what he had been doing, and of his plan to write for a livelihood and of going on with his studies.
But he was disappointed at her lack of approval.
Up to then he had accepted existence, as he had lived it with all about him, as a good thing.
Who could tell?
He did not know enough to ask the man at the desk, and began his adventures in the philosophy alcove.
He had heard of book philosophy, but had not imagined there had been so much written about it.
The high, bulging shelves of heavy tomes humbled him and at the same time stimulated him.
Here was work for the vigor of his brain.
He could read English, but he saw there an alien speech.
How could she, living the refined life she did?
Higginbotham, who would have preferred the money taking the form of board.
On another night, his vigil was rewarded by a glimpse of Ruth through a second-story window.
He saw only her head and shoulders, and her arms raised as she fixed her hair before a mirror.
Then she pulled down the shade.
She was of the class that dealt with banks.
In one way, he had undergone a moral revolution.
He had always been easy-going.
It was not in his nature to give rebuff.
In the old days he would have smiled back, and gone further and encouraged smiling.
But now it was different.
He did smile back, then looked away, and looked no more deliberately.
But several times, forgetting the existence of the two girls, his eyes caught their smiles.
It was nothing new to him.
But it was different now.
He had it in his heart to wish that they could possess, in some small measure, her goodness and glory.
And not for the world could he hurt them because of their outreaching.
He was not flattered by it; he even felt a slight shame at his lowliness that permitted it.
He left his seat before the curtain went down on the last act, intent on seeing Her as she passed out.
They were looking for him, he knew; and for the moment he could have cursed that in him which drew women.
Their casual edging across the sidewalk to the curb, as they drew near, apprised him of discovery.
They slowed down, and were in the thick of the crown as they came up with him.
One of them brushed against him and apparently for the first time noticed him.
She was a slender, dark girl, with black, defiant eyes.
But they smiled at him, and he smiled back.
Also, she was struck by his face.
It was almost violent, this health of his, and it seemed to rush out of him and at her in waves of force.
And he, in turn, knew again the swimming sensation of bliss when he felt the contact of her hand in greeting.
The difference between them lay in that she was cool and self-possessed while his face flushed to the roots of the hair.
He stumbled with his old awkwardness after her, and his shoulders swung and lurched perilously.
Once they were seated in the living-room, he began to get on easily - more easily by far than he had expected.
She made it easy for him; and the gracious spirit with which she did it made him love her more madly than ever.
She had thought of this often since their first meeting.
She wanted to help him.
The old fascination of his neck was there, and there was sweetness in the thought of laying her hands upon it.
It seemed still a wanton impulse, but she had grown more used to it.
She did not dream that in such guise new-born love would epitomize itself.
Nor did she dream that the feeling he excited in her was love.
She did not know she desired him; but with him it was different.
As he gazed at her and listened, his thoughts grew daring.
He reviewed all the wild delight of the pressure of her hand in his at the door, and longed for it again.
His gaze wandered often toward her lips, and he yearned for them hungrily.
But there was nothing gross or earthly about this yearning.
Their substance was not mere human clay.
I was never inside a house like this.
I wanted it.
I want it now.
Here it is.
I want to make my way to the kind of life you have in this house.
Mebbe I ought to ask him.
Ruth did not speak immediately.
She had never looked in eyes that expressed greater power.
And for that matter so complex and quick was her own mind that she did not have a just appreciation of simplicity.
And yet she had caught an impression of power in the very groping of this mind.
It had seemed to her like a giant writhing and straining at the bonds that held him down.
Her face was all sympathy when she did speak.
You should go back and finish grammar school, and then go through to high school and university.
"But that takes money," he interrupted.
But then you have relatives, somebody who could assist you?
He shook his head.
The oldest died in India.
What it means is that a trust is like an egg, and it is not like an egg.
If you want to break an egg you have to do it from the outside.
The only way to break up a trust is from the inside.
Keep sitting on it until it hatches.
Somewhat to my surprise he acknowledged the corner.
"Once," said he.
But we lost out.
"Some unforeseen opposition came up, I suppose," I said.
We were self-curbed.
It was a case of auto-suppression.
There was a rift within the loot, as Albert Tennyson says.
That man was the most talented conniver at stratagems I ever saw.
Andy was educated, too, besides having a lot of useful information.
Oh, yes, the mine was all right.
The other half interest must have been worth two or three thousand.
I often wondered who owned that mine.
The town had about 2,000 inhabitants, mostly men.
I figured out that their principal means of existence was in living close to tall chaparral.
Me and Andy put up at a hotel that was built like something between a roof-garden and a sectional bookcase.
It began to rain the day we got there.
As the saying is, Juniper Aquarius was sure turning on the water plugs on Mount Amphibious.
But we could see the townspeople making a triangular procession from one to another all day and half the night.
Everybody seemed to know what to do with as much money as they had.
Bird City was built between the Rio Grande and a deep wide arroyo that used to be the old bed of the river.
Andy looks at it a long time.
And then he unfolds to me a instantaneous idea that has occurred to him.
Right there was organized a trust; and we walked back into town and put it on the market.
The river had busted through its old channel, and the town was surrounded by roaring torrents.
But the worst was yet to come.
So, naturally the body politic emits thirsty ejaculations of surprise and ports hellum for the Blue Snake.
And what does it find there?
The town marshal is there with two deputies to keep order, having been promised free drinks by the trust.
The nearest railroad was thirty miles away; and it would be two weeks at least before the river would be fordable.
So they began to cuss, amiable, and throw down dollars on the bar till it sounded like a selection on the xylophone.
It was beautiful and simple as all truly great swindles are.
We told the bartenders to take advantage of the lull, and do the same.
Then me and Andy counted the receipts.
He got off the safe and lit the biggest cigar in the house.
We have sure handed the small consumer a giant blow in the sole apoplectic region.
This little turn in bug juice is, verily, all to the Skibo.
It was the first drink I had ever known him to take.
I watched him to see what turn the whiskey was going to take in him.
There are two times when you never can tell what is going to happen.
One is when a man takes his first drink; and the other is when a woman takes her latest.
He was outwardly decent and managed to preserve his aquarium, but inside he was impromptu and full of unexpectedness.
I feel like if I once turned loose people would begin to call Senator Beveridge the Grand Young Sphinx of the Wabash.
Me and the boys will take care of the business.
Everybody will be through dinner pretty soon, and salt pork and beans makes a man pretty thirsty.
The streets were deserted except for some ducks and ladies going to the stores.
There was only a light drizzle falling then.
We put him in bed while he still muttered and gesticulated with his hands and feet.
I met a man who told me all about it.
Andy had made the finest two hour speech that had ever been heard in Texas, he said, or anywhere else in the world.
And say, Jeff, make that succotash fancier give you nice, clean, new bills.
I drove out to the Plunkett farm and hitched.
There was a man sitting on the front steps of the house.
He had on a white flannel suit, a diamond ring, golf cap and a pink ascot tie.
I see the left pocket of your coat sags a good deal.
Out with the goldbrick first.
I put it back in my pocket.
Yes; this is Plunkett, of Woodbine Centre.
Reserve four orchestra seats for Friday evening - my usual ones.
Have you got him there?
Let me see him.
Get away from the transmitter.
Now make him trot in a circle.
Yes, I can hear him.
Keep on - faster yet.
Now lead him up to the phone.
Get his nose nearer.
Then he passes the Henry Clays and sets out a bottle of green chartreuse, and goes over and looks at the ticker tape.
The horse turned round and took me back to the hotel.
I hitched him and went in to see Andy.
It looks incredulous to me that he could have inoculated himself against all the preordained systems of bucolic bunco.
Farmers was made for a purpose; and that was to furnish a livelihood to men like me and you.
Else why was we given brains?
His vest is red with blue dots, and he wears a high silk hat.
Wait here till I come back.
My life is never safe.
