Sixes and Sevens
by
O Henry

Part 1 out of 4



gburleson@yahoo.com





CONTENTS

I THE LAST OF THE TROUBADOURS
II THE SLEUTHS
III WITCHES' LOAVES
IV THE PRIDE OF THE CITIES
V HOLDING UP A TRAIN
VI ULYSSES AND THE DOGMAN
VII THE CHAMPION OF THE WEATHER
VIII MAKES THE WHOLE WORLD KIN
IX AT ARMS WITH MORPHEUS
X THE GHOST OF A CHANCE
XI JIMMIE PAYES AND MURIEL
XII THE DOOR OF UNREST
XIII THE DUPLICITY OF HARGRAVES
XIV LET ME FEEL YOUR PULSE
XV OCTOBER AND JUNE
XVI THE CHURCH WITH AN OVERSHOOT WHEEL
XVII NEW YORK BY CAMPFIRE LIGHT
XVIII THE ADVENTURES OF SHAMROCK JOLNES
XIX THE LADY HIGHER UP
XX THE GREATER CONEY
XXI LAW AND ORDER
XXII TRANSFORMATION OF MARTIN BURNEY
XXIII THE CALIPH AND THE CAD
XXIV THE DIAMOND OF KALI
XXV THE DAY WE CELEBRATE




I THE LAST OF THE TROUBADOURS



Inexorably Sam Galloway saddled his pony. He was going away from the
Rancho Altito at the end of a three-months' visit. It is not to be
expected that a guest should put up with wheat coffee and biscuits
yellow-streaked with saleratus for longer than that. Nick Napoleon, the
big Negro man cook, had never been able to make good biscuits: Once
before, when Nick was cooking at the Willow Ranch, Sam had been forced to
fly from his _cuisine_, after only a six-weeks' sojourn.

On Sam's face was an expression of sorrow, deepened with regret and
slightly tempered by the patient forgiveness of a connoisseur who cannot
be understood. But very firmly and inexorably he buckled his
saddle-cinches, looped his stake-rope and hung it to his saddle-horn, tied
his slicker and coat on the cantle, and looped his quirt on his right
wrist. The Merrydews (householders of the Rancho Altito), men, women,
children, and servants, vassals, visitors, employes, dogs, and casual
callers were grouped in the "gallery" of the ranch house, all with faces
set to the tune of melancholy and grief. For, as the coming of Sam
Galloway to any ranch, camp, or cabin between the rivers Frio or Bravo del
Norte aroused joy, so his departure caused mourning and distress.

And then, during absolute silence, except for the bumping of a hind elbow
of a hound dog as he pursued a wicked flea, Sam tenderly and carefully
tied his guitar across his saddle on top of his slicker and coat. The
guitar was in a green duck bag; and if you catch the significance of it,
it explains Sam.

Sam Galloway was the Last of the Troubadours. Of course you know about
the troubadours. The encyclopaedia says they flourished between the
eleventh and the thirteenth centuries. What they flourished doesn't seem
clear - -- you may be pretty sure it wasn't a sword: maybe it was a
fiddlebow, or a forkful of spaghetti, or a lady's scarf. Anyhow, Sam
Galloway was one of 'em.

Sam put on a martyred expression as he mounted his pony. But the
expression on his face was hilarious compared with the one on his pony's.
You see, a pony gets to know his rider mighty well, and it is not unlikely
that cow ponies in pastures and at hitching racks had often guyed Sam's
pony for being ridden by a guitar player instead of by a rollicking,
cussing, all-wool cowboy. No man is a hero to his saddle-horse. And even
an escalator in a department store might be excused for tripping up a
troubadour.

Oh, I know I'm one; and so are you. You remember the stories you memorize
and the card tricks you study and that little piece on the piano -- how
does it go? -- ti-tum-te-tum-ti-tum -- those little Arabian Ten Minute
Entertainments that you furnish when you go up to call on your rich Aunt
Jane. You should know that _omnae personae in tres partes divisae sunt_.
Namely: Brons, Troubadours, and Workers. Barons have no inclination to
read such folderol as this; and Workers have no time: so I know you must
be a Troubadour, and that you will understand Sam Galloway. Whether we
sing, act, dance, write, lecture, or paint, we are only troubadours; so
let us make the worst of it.

The pony with the Dante Alighieri face, guided by the pressure of Sam's
knees, bore that wandering minstrel sixteen miles southeastward. Nature
was in her most benignant mood. League after league of delicate, sweet
flowerets made fragrant the 'gently undulating prairie. The east wind
tempered the spring warmth; wool-white clouds flying in from the Mexican
Gull hindered the direct rays of the April sun. Sam sang songs as he
rode. Under his pony's bridle he had tucked some sprigs of chaparral to
keep away the deer flies. Thus crowned, the long-faced quadruped looked
more Dantesque than before, and, judging by his countenance, seemed to
think of Beatrice

Straight as topography permitted, Sam rode to, the sheep ranch of old man
Ellison. A visit to a sheep ranch seemed to him desirable just then.
There had been too many people, too much noise, argument, competition,
confusion, at Rancho Altito. He had never conferred upon old man Ellison
the favour of sojourning at his ranch; but he knew he would be welcome.
The troubadour is his own passport everywhere. The Workers in the castle
let down the drawbridge to him, and the Baron sets him at his left hand at
table in the banquet hall. There ladies smile upon him and applaud his
songs and stories, while the Workers bring boars' heads and flagons. If
the Baron nods once or twice in his carved oaken chair, he does not do it
maliciously.

Old man Ellison welcomed the troubadour flatteringly. He had often heard
praises of Sam Galloway from other ranchmen who had been complimented by
his visits, but had never aspired to such an honour for his own humble
barony. I say barony because old man Ellison was the Last of the Barons.
Of course, Mr. Bulwer-Lytton lived too early to know him, or he wouldn't
have conferred that sobriquet upon Warwick. In life it is the duty and
the function of the Baron to provide work for the Workers and lodging and
shelter for the Troubadours.

Old man Ellison was a shrunken old man, with a short, yellow-white beard
and a face lined and seamed by past-and-gone smiles. His ranch was a
little two-room box house in a grove of hackberry trees in the lonesomest
part of the sheep country. His household consisted of a Kiowa Indian man
cook, four hounds, a pet sheep, and a half-tamed coyote chained to a
fence-post. He owned 3,000 sheep, which he ran on two sections of leased
land and many thousands of acres neither leased nor owned. Three or four
times a year some one who spoke his language would ride up to his gate and
exchange a few bald ideas with him. Those were red-letter days to old man
Ellison. Then in what illuminated, embossed, and gorgeously decorated
capitals must have been written the day on which a troubadour -- - a
troubadour who, according to the encyclopaedia, should have flourished
between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries - -- drew rein at the
gates of his baronial castle!

Old man Ellison's smiles came back and filled his wrinkles when he saw
Sam. He hurried out of the house in his shuffling, limping way to greet
him.

"Hello, Mr. Ellison," called Sam cheerfully. "Thought I'd drop over and
see you a while. Notice you've had fine rains on your range. They ought
to make good grazing for your spring lambs."

"Well, well, well," said old man Ellison. "I'm mighty glad to see you,
Sam. I never thought you'd take the trouble to ride over to as
out-of-the-way an old ranch as this. But you're mighty welcome. 'Light.
I've got a sack of new oats in the kitchen -- - shall I bring out a feed
for your hoss?"

"Oats for him?" said Sam, derisively. "No, sir-ee. He's as fat as a pig
now on grass. He don't get rode enough to keep him in condition. I'll
just turn him in the horse pasture with a drag rope on if you don't mind."

I am positive that never during the eleventh and thirteenth centuries did
Baron, Troubadour, and Worker amalgamate as harmoniously as their
parallels did that evening at old man Ellison's sheep ranch. The Kiowa's
biscuits were light and tasty and his coffee strong. Ineradicable
hospitality and appreciation glowed on old man Ellison's weather-tanned
face. As for the troubadour, he said to himself that he had stumbled upon
pleasant places indeed. A well-cooked, abundant meal, a host whom his
lightest attempt to entertain seemed to delight far beyond the merits of
the exertion, and the reposeful atmosphere that his sensitive soul at that
time craved united to confer upon him a satisfaction and luxurious ease
that he had seldom found on his tours of the ranches.

After the delectable supper, Sam untied the green duck bag and took out
his guitar. Not by way of payment, mind you -- neither Sam Galloway nor
any other of the true troubadours are lineal descendants of the late Tommy
Tucker. You have read of Tommy Tucker in the works of the esteemed but
often obscure Mother Goose. Tommy Tucker sang for his supper. No true
troubadour would do that. He would have his supper, and then sing for
Art's sake.

Sam Galloway's repertoire comprised about fifty funny stories and between
thirty and forty songs. He by no means stopped there. He could talk
through twenty cigarettes on any topic that you brought up. And he never
sat up when he could lie down; and never stood when he could sit. I am
strongly disposed to linger with him, for I am drawing a portrait as well
as a blunt pencil and a tattered thesaurus will allow.

I wish you could have seen him: he was small and tough and inactive beyond
the power of imagination to conceive. He wore an ultramarine-blue woollen
shirt laced down the front with a pearl-gray, exaggerated sort of
shoestring, indestructible brown duck clothes, inevitable high-heeled
boots with Mexican spurs, and a Mexican straw sombrero.

That evening Sam and old man Ellison dragged their chairs out under the
hackberry trees. They lighted cigarettes; and the troubadour gaily
touched his guitar. Many of the songs he sang were the weird, melancholy,
minor-keyed _canciones_ that he had learned from the Mexican sheep herders
and _vaqueros_. One, in particular, charmed and soothed the soul of the
lonely baron. It was a favourite song of the sheep herders, beginning:
"_Huile, huile, palomita_," which being translated means, "Fly, fly,
little dove." Sam sang it for old man Ellison many times that evening.

The troubadour stayed on at the old man's ranch. There was peace and
quiet and appreciation there, such as he had not found in the noisy camps
of the cattle kings. No audience in the world could have crowned the work
of poet, musician, or artist with more worshipful and unflagging approval
than that bestowed upon his efforts by old man Ellison. No visit by a
royal personage to a humble woodchopper or peasant could have been
received with more flattering thankfulness and joy.

On a cool, canvas-covered cot in the shade of the hackberry trees Sam
Galloway passed the greater part of his time. There he rolled his brown
paper cigarettes, read such tedious literature as the ranch afforded, and
added to his repertoire of improvisations that he played so expertly on
his guitar. To him, as a slave ministering to a great lord, the Kiowa
brought cool water from the red jar hanging under the brush shelter, and
food when he called for it. The prairie zephyrs fanned him mildly;
mocking-birds at morn and eve competed with but scarce equalled the sweet
melodies of his lyre; a perfumed stillness seemed to fill all his world.
While old man Ellison was pottering among his flocks of sheep on his
mile-an-hour pony, and while the Kiowa took his siesta in the burning
sunshine at the end of the kitchen, Sam would lie on his cot thinking what
a happy world he lived in, and how kind it is to the ones whose mission in
life it is to give entertainment and pleasure. Here he had food and
lodging as good as he had ever longed for; absolute immunity from care or
exertion or strife; an endless welcome, and a host whose delight at the
sixteenth repetition of a song or a story was as keen as at its initial
giving. Was there ever a troubadour of old who struck upon as royal a
castle in his wanderings? While he lay thus, meditating upon his
blessings, little brown cottontails would shyly 'frolic through the yard;
a covey of white-topknotted blue quail would run past, in single file,
twenty yards away; a _paisano_ bird, out hunting for tarantulas, would hop
upon the fence and salute him with sweeping flourishes of its' long tail.
In the eighty-acre horse pasture the pony with the Dantesque face grew fat
and almost smiling. The troubadour was at the end of his wanderings.

Old man Ellison was his own _vaciero_. That means that he supplied his
sheep camps with wood, water, and rations by his own labours instead of
hiring a _vaciero_. On small ranches it is often done.

One morning he started for the camp of Incarnacion Felipe de la Cruz y
Monte Piedras (one of his sheep herders) with the week's usual rations of
brown beans, coffee, meal, and sugar. Two miles away on the trail from
old Fort Ewing he met, face to face, a terrible being called King James,
mounted on a fiery, prancing, Kentucky-bred horse.

King James's real name was James King; but people reversed it because it
seemed to fit him better, and also because it seemed to please his
majesty. King James was the biggest cattleman between the Alamo plaza in
San Antone and Bill Hopper's saloon in Brownsville. Also he was the
loudest and most offensive bully and braggart and bad man in southwest
Texas. And he always made good whenever he bragged; and the more noise he
made the more dangerous he was. In the story papers it is always the
quiet, mild-mannered man with light blue eyes and a low voice who turns
out to be really dangerous; but in real life and in this story such is not
the case. Give me my choice between assaulting a large, loudmouthed
rough-houser and an inoffensive stranger with blue eyes sitting quietly in
a corner, and you will see something doing in the corner every time.

King James, as I intended to say earlier, was a fierce, two-hundred-pound
sunburned, blond man, as pink as an October strawberry, and with two
horizontal slits under shaggy red eyebrows for eyes. On that day he wore
a flannel shirt that was tan-coloured, with the exception of certain large
areas which were darkened by transudations due to the summer sun. There
seemed to be other clothing and garnishings about him, such as brown duck
trousers stuffed into immense boots, and red handkerchiefs and revolvers;
and a shotgun laid across his saddle and a leather belt with millions of
cartridges shining in it -- but your mind skidded off such accessories;
what held your gaze was just the two little horizontal slits that he used
for eyes.

This was the man that old man Ellison met on the trail; and when you count
up in the baron's favour that he was sixty-five and weighed ninety-eight
pounds and had heard of King James's record and that he (the baron) had a
hankering for the _vita simplex_ and had no gun with him and wouldn't
have' used it if he had, you can't censure him if I tell you that the
smiles with which the troubadour had filled his wrinkles went out of them
and left them plain wrinkles again. But he was not the kind of baron that
flies from danger. He reined in the mile-an-hour pony (no difficult
feat), and saluted the formidable monarch.

King James expressed himself with royal directness. "You're that old
snoozer that's running sheep on this range, ain't you?" said he. "What
right have you got to do it? Do you own any land, or lease any?"

"I have two sections leased from the state," said old man Ellison, mildly.

"Not by no means you haven't," said King James. "Your lease expired
yesterday; and I had a man at the land office on the minute to take it
up. You don't control a foot of grass in Texas. You sheep men have got
to git. Your time's up. It's a cattle country, and there ain't any room
in it for snoozers. This range you've got your sheep on is mine. I'm
putting up a wire fence, forty by sixty miles; and if there's a sheep
inside of it when it's done it'll be a dead one. I'll give you a week to
move yours away. If they ain't gone by then, I'll send six men over here
with Winchesters to make mutton out of the whole lot. And if I find you
here at the same time this is what you'll get."

King James patted the breech of his shot-gun warningly.

Old man Ellison rode on to the camp of Incarnacion. He sighed many times,
and the wrinkles in his face grew deeper. Rumours that the old order was
about to change had reached him before. The end of Free Grass was in
sight. Other troubles, too, had been accumulating upon his shoulders.
His flocks were decreasing instead of growing; the price of wool was
declining at every clip; even Bradshaw, the storekeeper at Frio City, at
whose store he bought his ranch supplies, was dunning him for his last six
months' bill and threatening to cut him off. And so this last greatest
calamity suddenly dealt out to him by the terrible King James was a
crusher.

When the old man got back to the ranch at sunset he found Sam Galloway
lying on his cot, propped against a roll of blankets and wool sacks,
fingering his guitar.

"Hello, Uncle Ben," the troubadour called, cheerfully. "You rolled in
early this evening. I been trying a new twist on the Spanish Fandango
to-day. I just about got it. Here's how she goes -- listen."

"That's fine, that's mighty fine," said old man Ellison, sitting on the
kitchen step and rubbing his white, Scotch-terrier whiskers. "I reckon
you've got all the musicians beat east and west, Sam, as far as the roads
are cut out."

"Oh, I don't know," said Sam, reflectively. "But I certainly do get there
on variations. I guess I can handle anything in five flats about as well
as any of 'em. But you look kind of fagged out, Uncle Ben -- ain't you
feeling right well this evening?"

"Little tired; that's all, Sam. If you ain't played yourself out, let's
have that Mexican piece that starts off with: '_Huile, huile, palomita_.'
It seems that that song always kind of soothes and comforts me after I've
been riding far or anything bothers me."

"Why, _seguramente_, _senor_," said Sam. "I'll hit her up for you as
often as you like. And before I forget about it, Uncle Ben, you want to
jerk Bradshaw up about them last hams he sent us. They're just a little
bit strong."

A man sixty-five years old, living on a sheep ranch and beset by a
complication of disasters, cannot successfully and continuously
dissemble. Moreover, a troubadour has eyes quick to see unhappiness in
others around him -- because it disturbs his own ease. So, on the next
day, Sam again questioned the old man about his air of sadness and
abstraction. Then old man Ellison told him the story of King James's
threats and orders and that pale melancholy and red ruin appeared to have
marked him for their own. The troubadour took the news thoughtfully. He
had heard much about King James.

On the third day of the seven days of grace allowed him by the autocrat of
the range, old man Ellison drove his buckboard to Frio City to fetch some
necessary supplies for the ranch. Bradshaw was hard but not implacable.
He divided the old man's order by two, and let him have a little more
time. One article secured was a new, fine ham for the pleasure of the
troubadour.

Five miles out of Frio City on his way home the old man met King James
riding into town. His majesty could never look anything but fierce and
menacing, but to-day his slits of eyes appeared to be a little wider than
they usually were.

"Good day," said the king, gruffly. "I've been wanting to see you. I
hear it said by a cowman from Sandy yesterday that you was from Jackson
County, Mississippi, originally. I want to know if that's a fact."

"Born there," said old man Ellison, "and raised there till I was
twenty-one."

"This man says," went on King James, "that he thinks you was related to
the Jackson County Reeveses. Was he right?"

"Aunt Caroline Reeves," said the old man, "was my half-sister."

"She was my aunt," said King James. "I run away from home when I was
sixteen. Now, let's re-talk over some things that we discussed a few days
ago. They call me a bad man; and they're only half right. There's plenty
of room in my pasture for your bunch of sheep and their increase for a
long time to come. Aunt Caroline used to cut out sheep in cake dough and
bake 'em for me. You keep your sheep where they are, and use all the
range you want. How's your finances?"

The old man related his woes in detail, dignifiedly, with restraint and
candour.

"She used to smuggle extra grub into my school basket -- I'm speaking of
Aunt Caroline," said King James. "I'm going over to Frio City to-day, and
I'll ride back by your ranch to-morrow. I'll draw $2,000 out of the bank
there and bring it over to you; and I'll tell Bradshaw to let you have
everything you want on credit. You are bound to have heard the old saying
at home, that the Jackson County Reeveses and Kings would stick closer by
each other than chestnut burrs. Well, I'm a King yet whenever I run a
cross a Reeves. So you look out for me along about sundown to-morrow, and
don't worry about nothing. Shouldn't wonder if the dry spell don't kill
out the young grass."

Old man Ellison drove happily ranchward. Once more the smiles filled out
his wrinkles. Very suddenly, by the magic of kinship and the good that
lies somewhere in all hearts, his troubles had been removed.

On reaching the ranch he found that Sam Galloway was not there. His
guitar hung by its buckskin string to a hackberry limb, moaning as the
gulf breeze blew across its masterless strings.

The Kiowa endeavoured to explain.

"Sam, he catch pony," said he, "and say he ride to Frio City. What for no
can damn sabe. Say he come back to-night. Maybe so. That all."

As the first stars came out the troubadour rode back to his haven. He
pastured his pony and went into the house, his spurs jingling martially.

Old man Ellison sat at the kitchen table, having a tin cup of
before-supper coffee. He looked contented and pleased.

"Hello, Sam," said he. "I'm darned glad to see ye back. I don't know how
I managed to get along on this ranch, anyhow, before ye dropped in to
cheer things up. I'll bet ye've been skylarking around with some of them
Frio City gals, now, that's kept ye so late."

And then old man Ellison took another look at Sam's face and saw that the
minstrel had changed the man of action.

And while Sam is unbuckling from his waist old man Ellison's six-shooter,
that the latter had left behind when he drove to town, we may well pause
to remark that anywhere and whenever a troubadour lays down the guitar and
takes up the sword trouble is sure to follow. It is not the expert thrust
of Athos nor the cold skill of Aramis nor the iron wrist of Porthos that
we have to fear -- it is the Gascon's fury -- the wild and unacademic
attack of the troubadour -- the sword of D'Artagnan.

"I done it," said Sam. "I went over to Frio City to do it. I couldn't
let him put the skibunk on you, Uncle Ben. I met him in Summers's
saloon. I knowed what to do. I said a few things to him that nobody else
heard. He reached for his gun first -- half a dozen fellows saw him do it
-- but I got mine unlimbered first. Three doses I gave him -- right
around the lungs, and a saucer could have covered up all of 'em. He won't
bother you no more."

"This -- is -- King -- James -- you speak -- of?" asked old man Ellison,
while he sipped his coffee.

"You bet it was. And they took me before the county judge; and the
witnesses what saw him draw his gun first was all there. Well, of course,
they put me under $300 bond to appear before the court, but there was four
or five boys on the spot ready to sign the bail. He won't bother you no
more, Uncle Ben. You ought to have seen how close them bullet holes was
together. I reckon playing a guitar as much as I do must kind of limber a
fellow's trigger finger up a little, don't you think, Uncle Ben?"

Then there was a little silence in the castle except for the spluttering
of a venison steak that the Kiowa was cooking.

"Sam," said old man Ellison, stroking his white whiskers with a tremulous
hand, "would you mind getting the guitar and playing that '_Huile, huile,
palomita_' piece once or twice? It always seems to be kind of soothing
and comforting when a man's tired and fagged out."

There is no more to be said, except that the title of the story is wrong.
It should have been called "The Last of the Barons." There never will be
an end to the troubadours; and now and then it does seem that the jingle
of their guitars will drown the sound of the muffled blows of the pickaxes
and trip hammers of all the Workers in the world.




II THE SLEUTHS



In The Big City a man will disappear with the suddenness and completeness
of the flame of a candle that is blown out. All the agencies of
inquisition -- the hounds of the trail, the sleuths of the city's
labyrinths, the closet detectives of theory and induction -- will be
invoked to the search. Most often the man's face will be seen no more.
Sometimes he will reappear in Sheboygan or in the wilds of Terre Haute,
calling himself one of the synonyms of "Smith," and without memory of
events up to a certain time, including his grocer's bill. Sometimes it
will be found, after dragging the rivers, and polling the restaurants to
see if he may be waiting for a well-done sirloin, that he has moved next
door.

This snuffing out of a human being like the erasure of a chalk man from a
blackboard is one of the most impressive themes in dramaturgy.

The case of Mary Snyder, in point, should not be without interest.

A man of middle age, of the name of Meeks, came from the West to New York
to find his sister, Mrs. Mary Snyder, a widow, aged fifty-two, who had
been living for a year in a tenement house in a crowded neighbourhood.

At her address he was told that Mary Snyder had moved away longer than a
month before. No one could tell him her new address.

On coming out Mr. Meeks addressed a policeman who was standing on the
corner, and explained his dilemma.

"My sister is very poor," he said, "and I am anxious to find her. I have
recently made quite a lot of money in a lead mine, and I want her to share
my prosperity. There is no use in advertising her, because she cannot
read."

The policeman pulled his moustache and looked so thoughtful and mighty
that Meeks could almost feel the joyful tears of his sister Mary dropping
upon his bright blue tie.

"You go down in the Canal Street neighbourhood," said the policeman, "and
get a job drivin' the biggest dray you can find. There's old women always
gettin' knocked over by drays down there. You might see 'er among 'em.
If you don't want to do that you better go 'round to headquarters and get
'em to put a fly cop onto the dame."

At police headquarters, Meeks received ready assistance. A general alarm
was sent out, and copies of a photograph of Mary Snyder that her brother
had were distributed among the stations. In Mulberry Street the chief
assigned Detective Mullins to the case.

The detective took Meeks aside and said:

"This is not a very difficult case to unravel. Shave off your whiskers,
fill your pockets with good cigars, and meet me in the cafe of the Waldorf
at three o'clock this afternoon."

Meeks obeyed. He found Mullins there. They had a bottle of wine, while
the detective asked questions concerning the missing woman.

"Now," said Mullins, "New York is a big city, but we've got the detective
business systematized. There are two ways we can go about finding your
sister. We will try one of 'em first. You say she's fifty-two?"

"A little past," said Meeks.

The detective conducted the Westerner to a branch advertising office of
one of the largest dailies. There he wrote the following "ad" and
submitted it to Meeks:

"Wanted, at once -- one hundred attractive chorus girls for a new musical
comedy. Apply all day at No.- Broadway."

Meeks was indignant.

"My sister," said he, "is a poor, hard-working, elderly woman. I do not
see what aid an advertisement of this kind would be toward finding her."

"All right," said the detective. "I guess you don't know New York. But
if you've got a grouch against this scheme we'll try the other one. It's
a sure thing. But it'll cost you more."

"Never mind the expense," said Meeks; "we'll try it."

The sleuth led him back to the Waldorf. "Engage a couple of bedrooms and
a parlour," he advised, "and let's go up."

This was done, and the two were shown to a superb suite on the fourth
floor. Meeks looked puzzled. The detective sank into a velvet armchair,
and pulled out his cigar case.

"I forgot to suggest, old man," he said, "that you should have taken the
rooms by the month. They wouldn't have stuck you so much for em.

"By the month!" exclaimed Meeks. "What do you mean?"

"Oh, it'll take time to work the game this way. I told you it would cost
you more. We'll have to wait till spring. There'll be a new city
directory out then. Very likely your sister's name and address will be in
it."

Meeks rid himself of the city detective at once. On the next day some one
advised him to consult Shamrock Jolnes, New York's famous private
detective, who demanded fabulous fees, but performed miracles in the way
of solving mysteries and crimes.

After waiting for two hours in the anteroom of the great detective's
apartment, Meeks was shown into his presence. Jolnes sat in a purple
dressing-gown at an inlaid ivory chess table, with a magazine before him,
trying to solve the mystery of "They." The famous sleuth's thin,
intellectual face, piercing eyes, and rate per word are too well known to
need description.

Meeks set forth his errand. "My fee, if successful, will be $500," said
Shamrock Jolnes.

Meeks bowed his agreement to the price.

"I will undertake your case, Mr. Meeks," said Jolnes, finally. "The
disappearance of people in this city has always been an interesting
problem to me. I remember a case that I brought to a successful outcome a
year ago. A family bearing the name of Clark disappeared suddenly from a
small flat in which they were living. I watched the flat building for two
months for a clue. One day it struck me that a certain milkman and a
grocer's boy always walked backward when they carried their wares
upstairs. Following out by induction the idea that this observation gave
me, I at once located the missing family. They had moved into the flat
across the hall and changed their name to Kralc."

Shamrock Jolnes and his client went to the tenement house where Mary
Snyder had lived, and the detective demanded to be shown the room in which
she had lived. It had been occupied by no tenant since her disappearance.

The room was small, dingy, and poorly furnished. Meeks seated himself
dejectedly on a broken chair, while the great detective searched the walls
and floor and the few sticks of old, rickety furniture for a clue.

At the end of half an hour Jolnes had collected a few seemingly
unintelligible articles -- a cheap black hat pin, a piece torn off a
theatre programme, and the end of a small torn card on which was the word
"left" and the characters "C 12."

Shamrock Jolnes leaned against the mantel for ten minutes, with his head
resting upon his hand, and an absorbed look upon his intellectual face.
At the end of that time he exclaimed, with animation:

"Come, Mr. Meeks; the problem is solved. I can take you directly to the
house where your sister is living. And you may have no fears concerning
her welfare, for she is amply provided with funds -- for the present at
least."

Meeks felt joy and wonder in equal proportions.

"How did you manage it?" he asked, with admiration in his tones.

Perhaps Jolnes's only weakness was a professional pride in his wonderful
achievements in induction. He was ever ready to astound and charm his
listeners by describing his methods.

"By elimination," said Jolnes, spreading his clues upon a little table, "I
got rid of certain parts of the city to which Mrs. Snyder might have
removed. You see this hatpin? That eliminates Brooklyn. No woman
attempts to board a car at the Brooklyn Bridge without being sure that she
carries a hatpin with which to fight her way into a seat. And now I will
demonstrate to you that she could not have gone to Harlem. Behind this
door are two hooks in the wall. Upon one of these Mrs. Snyder has hung
her bonnet, and upon the other her shawl. You will observe that the
bottom of the hanging shawl has gradually made a soiled streak against the
plastered wall. The mark is clean-cut, proving that there is no fringe on
the shawl. Now, was there ever a case where a middle-aged woman, wearing
a shawl, boarded a Harlem train without there being a fringe on the shawl
to catch in the gate and delay the passengers behind her? So we eliminate
Harlem.

"Therefore I conclude that Mrs. Snyder has not moved very far away. On
this torn piece of card you see the word "Left," the letter "C," and the
number "12." Now, I happen to know that No. 12 Avenue C is a first-class
boarding house, far beyond your sister's means -- as we suppose. But then
I find this piece of a theatre programme, crumpled into an odd shape.
What meaning does it convey. None to you, very likely, Mr. Meeks; but it
is eloquent to one whose habits and training take cognizance of the small
est things.

"You have told me that your sister was a scrub woman. She scrubbed the
floors of offices and hallways. Let us assume that she procured such work
to perform in a theatre. Where is valuable jewellery lost the oftenest,
Mr. Meeks? In the theatres, of course. Look at that piece of programme,
Mr. Meeks. Observe the round impression in it. It has been wrapped
around a ring -- perhaps a ring of great value. Mrs. Snyder found the
ring while at work in the theatre. She hastily tore off a piece of a
programme, wrapped the ring carefully, and thrust it into her bosom. The
next day she disposed of it, and, with her increased means, looked about
her for a more comfortable place in which to live. When I reach thus far
in the chain I see nothing impossible about No. 12 Avenue C. It is there
we will find your sister, Mr. Meeks."

Shamrock Jolnes concluded his convincing speech with the smile of a
successful artist. Meeks's admiration was too great for words. Together
they went to No. 12 Avenue C. It was an old-fashioned brownstone house
in a prosperous and respectable neighbourhood.

They rang the bell, and on inquiring were told that no Mrs. Snyder was
known there, and that not within six months had a new occupant come to the
house.

When they reached the sidewalk again, Meeks examined the clues which he
had brought away from his sister's old room.

"I am no detective," he remarked to Jolnes as he raised the piece of
theatre programme to his nose, "but it seems to me that instead of a ring
having been wrapped in this paper it was one of those round peppermint
drops. And this piece with the address on it looks to me like the end of
a seat coupon -- No. 12, row C, left aisle."

Shamrock Jolnes had a far-away look in his eyes.

"I think you would do well to consult Juggins," said he.

"Who is Juggins?" asked Meeks.

"He is the leader," said Jolnes, "of a new modern school of detectives.
Their methods are different from ours, but it is said that Juggins has
solved some extremely puzzling cases. I will take you to him."

They found the greater Juggins in his office. He was a small man with
light hair, deeply absorbed in reading one of the bourgeois works of
Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The two great detectives of different schools shook hands with ceremony,
and Meeks was introduced.

"State the facts," said Juggins, going on with his reading.

When Meeks ceased, the greater one closed his book and said:

"Do I understand that your sister is fifty-two years of age, with a large
mole on the side of her nose, and that she is a very poor widow, making a
scanty living by scrubbing, and with a very homely face and figure?"

"That describes her exactly," admitted Meeks. Juggins rose and put on his
hat.

"In fifteen minutes," he said, "I will return, bringing you her present
address."

Shamrock Jolnes turned pale, but forced a smile.

Within the specified time Juggins returned and consulted a little slip of
paper held in his hand.

"Your sister, Mary Snyder," he announced calmly, "will be found at No.
162 Chilton street. She is living in the back hall bedroom, five flights
up. The house is only four blocks from here," he continued, addressing
Meeks. "Suppose you go and verify the statement and then return here.
Mr. Jolnes will await you, I dare say."

Meeks hurried away. In twenty minutes he was back again, with a beaming
face.

"She is there and well!" he cried. "Name your fee!"

"Two dollars," said Juggins.

When Meeks had settled his bill and departed, Shamrock Jolnes stood with
his hat in his hand before Juggins.

"If it would not be asking too much," he stammered -- "if you would favour
me so far -- would you object to --"

"Certainly not," said Juggins pleasantly. "I will tell you how I did it.
You remember the description of Mrs. Snyder? Did you ever know a woman
like that who wasn't paying weekly instalments on an enlarged crayon
portrait of herself? The biggest factory of that kind in the country is
just around the corner. I went there and got her address off the books.
That's all."




III WITCHES' LOAVES



Miss Martha Meacham kept the little bakery on the corner (the one where
you go up three steps, and the bell tinkles when you open the door).

Miss Martha was forty, her bank-book showed a credit of two thousand
dollars, and she possessed two false teeth and a sympathetic heart. Many
people have married whose chances to do so were much inferior to Miss
Martha's.

Two or three times a week a customer came in in whom she began to take an
interest. He was a middle-aged man, wearing spectacles and a brown beard
trimmed to a careful point.

He spoke English with a strong German accent. His clothes were worn and
darned in places, and wrinkled and baggy in others. But he looked neat,
and had very good manners.

He always bought two loaves of stale bread. Fresh bread was five cents a
loaf. Stale ones were two for five. Never did he call for anything but
stale bread.

Once Miss Martha saw a red and brown stain on his fingers. She was sure
then that he was an artist and very poor. No doubt he lived in a garret,
where he painted pictures and ate stale bread and thought of the good
things to eat in Miss Martha's bakery.

Often when Miss Martha sat down to her chops and light rolls and jam and
tea she would sigh, and wish that the gentle-mannered artist might share
her tasty meal instead of eating his dry crust in that draughty attic.
Miss Martha's heart, as you have been told, was a sympathetic one.

In order to test her theory as to his occupation, she brought from her
room one day a painting that she had bought at a sale, and set it against
the shelves behind the bread counter.

It was a Venetian scene. A splendid marble palazzio (so it said on the
picture) stood in the foreground -- or rather forewater. For the rest
there were gondolas (with the lady trailing her hand in the water),
clouds, sky, and chiaro-oscuro in plenty. No artist could fail to notice
it.

Two days afterward the customer came in.

"Two loafs of stale bread, if you blease.

"You haf here a fine bicture, madame," he said while she was wrapping up
the bread.

"Yes?" says Miss Martha, reveling in her own cunning. "I do so admire art
and" (no, it would not do to say "artists" thus early) "and paintings,"
she substituted. "You think it is a good picture?"

"Der balance," said the customer, is not in good drawing. Der
bairspective of it is not true. Goot morning, madame."

He took his bread, bowed, and hurried out.

Yes, he must be an artist. Miss Martha took the picture back to her room.

How gentle and kindly his eyes shone behind his spectacles! What a broad
brow he had! To be able to judge perspective at a glance -- and to live on
stale bread! But genius often has to struggle before it is recognized.

What a thing it would be for art and perspective if genius were backed by
two thousand dollars in bank, a bakery, and a sympathetic heart to -- But
these were day-dreams, Miss Martha.

Often now when he came he would chat for a while across the showcase. He
seemed to crave Miss Martha's cheerful words.

He kept on buying stale bread. Never a cake, never a pie, never one of
her delicious Sally Lunns.

She thought he began to look thinner and discouraged. Her heart ached to
add something good to eat to his meagre purchase, but her courage failed
at the act. She did not dare affront him. She knew the pride of artists.

Miss Martha took to wearing her blue-dotted silk waist behind the
counter. In the back room she cooked a mysterious compound of quince
seeds and borax. Ever so many people use it for the complexion.

One day the customer came in as usual, laid his nickel on the showcase,
and called for his stale loaves. While Miss Martha was reaching for them
there was a great tooting and clanging, and a fire-engine came lumbering
past.

The customer hurried to the door to look, as any one will. Suddenly
inspired, Miss Martha seized the opportunity.

On the bottom shelf behind the counter was a pound of fresh butter that
the dairyman had left ten minutes before. With a bread knife Miss Martha
made a deep slash in each of the stale loaves, inserted a generous
quantity of butter, and pressed the loaves tight again.

When the customer turned once more she was tying the paper around them.

When he had gone, after an unusually pleasant little chat, Miss Martha
smiled to herself, but not without a slight fluttering of the heart.

Had she been too bold? Would he take offense? But surely not. There was
no language of edibles. Butter was no emblem of unmaidenly forwardness.

For a long time that day her mind dwelt on the subject. She imagined the
scene when he should discover her little deception.

He would lay down his brushes and palette. There would stand his easel
with the picture he was painting in which the perspective was beyond
criticism.

He would prepare for his luncheon of dry bread and water. He would slice
into a loaf -- ah!

Miss Martha blushed. Would he think of the hand that placed it there as
he ate? Would he --

The front door bell jangled viciously. Somebody was coming in, making a
great deal of noise.

Miss Martha hurried to the front. Two men were there. One was a young
man smoking a pipe -- a man she had never seen before. The other was her
artist.

His face was very red, his hat was on the back of his head, his hair was
wildly rumpled. He clinched his two fists and shook them ferociously at
Miss Martha. _At Miss Martha_.

"_Dummkopf_!" he shouted with extreme loudness; and then "_Tausendonfer_!"
or something like it in German.

The young man tried to draw him away.

"I vill not go," he said angrily, "else I shall told her."

He made a bass drum of Miss Martha's counter.

"You haf shpoilt me," he cried, his blue eyes blazing behind his
spectacles. "I vill tell you. You vas von _meddingsome old cat_!"

Miss Martha leaned weakly against the shelves and laid one hand on her
blue-dotted silk waist. The young man took the other by the collar.

"Come on," he said, "you've said enough." He dragged the angry one out at
the door to the sidewalk, and then came back.

"Guess you ought to be told, ma'am," he said, "what the row is about.
That's Blumberger. He's an architectural draftsman. I work in the same
office with him.

"He's been working hard for three months drawing a plan for a new city
hall. It was a prize competition. He finished inking the lines
yesterday. You know, a draftsman always makes his drawing in pencil
first. When it's done he rubs out the pencil lines with handfuls of stale
bread crumbs. That's better than India rubber.

"Blumberger's been buying the bread here. Well, to-day -- well, you know,
ma'am, that butter isn't -- well, Blumberger's plan isn't good for
anything now except to cut up into railroad sandwiches."

Miss Martha went into the back room. She took off the blue-dotted silk
waist and put on the old brown serge she used to wear. Then she poured
the quince seed and borax mixture out of the window into the ash can.




IV THE PRIDE OF THE CITIES



Said Mr. Kipling, "The cities are full of pride, challenging each to
each." Even so.

New York was empty. Two hundred thousand of its people were away for the
summer. Three million eight hundred thousand remained as caretakers and
to pay the bills of the absentees. But the two hundred thousand are an
expensive lot.

The New Yorker sat at a roof-garden table, ingesting solace through a
straw. His panama lay upon a chair. The July audience was scattered
among vacant seats as widely as outfielders when the champion batter steps
to the plate. Vaudeville happened at intervals. The breeze was cool from
the bay; around and above -- everywhere except on the stage -- were
stars. Glimpses were to be had of waiters, always disappearing, like
startled chamois. Prudent visitors who had ordered refreshments by 'phone
in the morning were now being served. The New Yorker was aware of certain
drawbacks to his comfort, but content beamed softly from his rimless
eyeglasses. His family was out of town. The drinks were warm; the ballet
was suffering from lack of both tune and talcum -- but his family would
not return until September.

Then up into the garden stumbled the man from Topaz City, Nevada. The
gloom of the solitary sightseer enwrapped him. Bereft of joy through
loneliness, he stalked with a widower's face through the halls of
pleasure. Thirst for human companionship possessed him as he panted in
the metropolitan draught. Straight to the New Yorker's table he steered.

The New Yorker, disarmed and made reckless by the lawless atmosphere of a
roof garden, decided upon utter abandonment of his life's traditions. He
resolved to shatter with one rash, dare-devil, impulsive, hair-brained act
the conventions that had hitherto been woven into his existence. Carrying
out this radical and precipitous inspiration he nodded slightly to the
stranger as he drew nearer the table.

The next moment found the man from Topaz City in the list of the New
Yorker's closest friends. He took a chair at the table, he gathered two
others for his feet, he tossed his broad-brimmed hat upon a fourth, and
told his life's history to his new-found pard.

The New Yorker warmed a little, as an apartment-house furnace warms when
the strawberry season begins. A waiter who came within hail in an
unguarded moment was captured and paroled on an errand to the Doctor Wiley
experimental station. The ballet was now in the midst of a musical
vagary, and danced upon the stage programmed as Bolivian peasants, clothed
in some portions of its anatomy as Norwegian fisher maidens, in others as
ladies-in-waiting of Marie Antoinette, historically denuded in other
portions so as to represent sea nymphs, and presenting the tout ensemble
of a social club of Central Park West housemaids at a fish fry.

"Been in the city long?" inquired the New Yorker, getting ready the exact
tip against the waiter's coming with large change from the bill.

"Me?" said the man from Topaz City. "Four days. Never in Topaz City, was
you?"

"I!" said the New Yorker. "I was never farther west than Eighth Avenue.
I had a brother who died on Ninth, but I met the cortege at Eighth. There
was a bunch of violets on the hearse, and the undertaker mentioned the
incident to avoid mistake. I cannot say that I am familiar with the West."

"Topaz City," said the man who occupied four chairs, "is one of the finest
towns in the world."

"I presume that you have seen the sights of the metropolis," said the New
Yorker, "Four days is not a sufficient length of time in which to view
even our most salient points of interest, but one can possibly form a
general impression. Our architectural supremacy is what generally strikes
visitors to our city most forcibly. Of course you have seen our Flatiron
Building. It is considered --"

"Saw it," said the man from Topaz City. "But you ought to come out our
way. It's mountainous, you know, and the ladies all wear short skirts for
climbing and --"

"Excuse me," said the New Yorker, "but that isn't exactly the point. New
York must be a wonderful revelation to a visitor from the West. Now, as
to our hotels --"

"Say," said the man from Topaz City, "that reminds me -- there were
sixteen stage robbers shot last year within twenty miles of --"

"I was speaking of hotels," said the New Yorker. "We lead Europe in that
respect. And as far as our leisure class is concerned we are far --"

"Oh, I don't know," interrupted the man from Topaz City. "There were
twelve tramps in our jail when I left home. I guess New York isn't so --"

"Beg pardon, you seem to misapprehend the idea. Of course, you visited
the Stock Exchange and Wall Street, where the --"

"Oh, yes," said the man from Topaz City, as he lighted a Pennsylvania
stogie, "and I want to tell you chat we've got the finest town marshal
west of the Rockies. Bill Rainer he took in five pickpockets out of the
crowd when Red Nose Thompson laid the cornerstone of his new saloon.
Topaz City don't allow --"

"Have another Rhine wine and seltzer," suggested the New Yorker. "I've
never been West, as I said; but there can't be any place out there to
compare with New York. As to the claims of Chicago I --"

"One man," said the Topazite -- "one man only has been murdered and robbed
in Topaz City in the last three --"

"Oh, I know what Chicago is," interposed the New Yorker. "Have you been
up Fifth Avenue to see the magnificent residences of our mil --"

"Seen 'em all. You ought to know Reub Stegall, the assessor of Topaz.
When old man Tilbury, that owns the only two-story house in town, tried to
swear his taxes from $6,000 down to $450.75, Reub buckled on his
forty-five and went down to see --"

"Yes, yes, but speaking of our great city -- one of its greatest features
is our superb police department. There is no body of men in the world
that can equal it for --"

"That waiter gets around like a Langley flying machine," remarked the man
from Topaz City, thirstily. "We've got men in our town, too, worth
$400,000. There's old Bill Withers and Colonel Metcalf and --"

"Have you seen Broadway at night?" asked the New Yorker, courteously.
"There are few streets in the world that can compare with it. When the
electrics are shining and the pavements are alive with two hurrying
streams of elegantly clothed men and beautiful women attired in the
costliest costumes that wind in and out in a close maze of expensively --"

"Never knew but one case in Topaz City," said the man from the West. "Jim
Bailey, our mayor, had his watch and chain and $235 in cash taken from his
pocket while --"

"That's another matter," said the New Yorker. "While you are in our city
you should avail yourself of every opportunity to see its wonders. Our
rapid transit system --"

"If you was out in Topaz," broke in the man from there, "I could show you
a whole cemetery full of people that got killed accidentally. Talking
about mangling folks up! why, when Berry Rogers turned loose that old
double-barrelled shot-gun of his loaded 'with slugs at anybody --"

"Here, waiter!" called the New Yorker. "Two more of the same. It is
acknowledged by every one that our city is the centre of art, and
literature, and learning. Take, for instance, our after-dinner speakers.
Where else in the country would you find such wit and eloquence as emanate
from Depew and Ford, and --"

"If you take the papers," interrupted the Westerner, "you must have read
of Pete Webster's daughter. The Websters live two blocks north of the
court-house in Topaz City. Miss Tillie Webster, she slept forty days and
nights without waking up. The doctors said that --"

"Pass the matches, please," said the New Yorker. "Have you observed the
expedition with which new buildings are being run up in New York?
Improved inventions in steel framework and --"

"I noticed," said the Nevadian, "that the statistics of Topaz City showed
only one carpenter crushed by falling timbers last year and he was caught
in a cyclone."

"They abuse our sky line," continued the New Yorker, "and it is likely
that we are not yet artistic in the construction of our buildings. But I
can safely assert that we lead in pictorial and decorative art. In some
of our houses can be found masterpieces in the way of paintings and
sculpture. One who has the entree to our best galleries will find --"

"Back up," exclaimed the man from Topaz City. "There was a game last
month in our town in which $90,000 changed hands on a pair of --"

"Ta-romt-tara!" went the orchestra. The stage curtain, blushing pink at
the name "Asbestos" inscribed upon it, came down with a slow midsummer
movement. The audience trickled leisurely down the elevator and stairs.

On the sidewalk below, the New Yorker and the man from Topaz City shook
hands with alcoholic gravity. The elevated crashed raucously, surface
cars hummed and clanged, cabmen swore, newsboys shrieked, wheels clattered
ear-piercingly. The New Yorker conceived a happy thought, with which he
aspired to clinch the pre-eminence of his city.

"You must admit," said he, "that in the way of noise New York is far ahead
of any other --"

"Back to the everglades!" said the man from Topaz City. "In 1900, when
Sousa's band and the repeating candidate were in our town you couldn't --"

The rattle of an express wagon drowned the rest of the words.




V HOLDING UP A TRAIN



[Note. The man who told me these things was for several years an outlaw
in the Southwest and a follower of the pursuit he so frankly describes.
His description of the _modus_ _operandi_ should prove interesting, his
counsel of value to the potential passenger in some future "hold-up,"
while his estimate of the pleasures of train robbing will hardly induce
any one to adopt it as a profession. I give the story in almost exactly
his own words. O. H.]


Most people would say, if their opinion was asked for, that holding up a
train would be a hard job. Well, it isn't; it's easy. I have contributed
some to the uneasiness of railroads and the insomnia of express companies,
and the most trouble I ever had about a hold-up was in being swindled by
unscrupulous people while spending the money I got. The danger wasn't
anything to speak of, and we didn't mind the trouble.

One man has come pretty near robbing a train by himself; two have
succeeded a few times; three can do it if they are hustlers, but five is
about the right number. The time to do it and the place depend upon
several things.

The first "stick-up" I was ever in happened in 1890. Maybe the way I got
into it will explain how most train robbers start in the business. Five
out of six Western outlaws are just cowboys out of a job and gone wrong.
The sixth is a tough from the East who dresses up like a bad man and plays
some low-down trick that gives the boys a bad name. Wire fences and
"nesters" made five of them; a bad heart made the sixth. Jim S-- and I
were working on the 101 Ranch in Colorado. The nesters had the cowman on t
he go. They had taken up the land and elected officers who were hard to
get along with. Jim and I rode into La Junta one day, going south from a
round-up. We were having a little fun without malice toward any-body when
a farmer administration cut in and tried to harvest us. Jim shot a deputy
marshal, and I kind of corroborated his side of the argument. We
skirmished up and down the main street, the boomers having bad luck all
the time. After a while we leaned forward and shoved for the ranch down
on the Ceriso. We were riding a couple of horses that couldn't fly, but
they could catch birds.

A few days after that, a gang of the La Junta boomers came to the ranch
and wanted us to go back with them. Naturally, we declined. We had the
house on them, and before we were done refusing, that old 'dobe was plumb
full of lead. When dark came we fagged 'em a batch of bullets and shoved
out the back door for the rocks. They sure smoked us as we went. We had
to drift, which we did, and rounded up down in Oklahoma.

Well, there wasn't anything we could get there, and, being mighty hard up,
we decided to transact a little business with the railroads. Jim and I
joined forces with Tom and Ike Moore -- two brothers who had plenty of
sand they were willing to convert into dust. I can call their names, for
both of them are dead. Tom was shot while robbing a bank in Arkansas; Ike
was killed during the more dangerous pastime of attending a dance in the
Creek Nation.

We selected a place on the Santa Fe where there was a bridge across a deep
creek surrounded by heavy timber. All passenger trains took water at the
tank close to one end of the bridge. It was a quiet place, the nearest
house being five miles away. The day before it happened, we rested our
horses and "made medicine" as to how we should get about it. Our plans
were not at all elaborate, as none of us had ever engaged in a hold-up
before.

The Santa Fe flyer was due at the tank at 11.15 P. M. At eleven, Tom and
I lay down on one side of the track, and Jim and Ike took the other. As
the train rolled up, the headlight flashing far down the track and the
steam hissing from the engine, I turned weak all over, I would have worked
a whole year on the ranch for nothing to have been out of that affair
right then. Some of the nerviest men in the business have told me that
they felt the same way the first time.

The engine had hardly stopped when I jumped on the running-board on one
side, while Jim mounted the other. As soon as the engineer and fireman
saw our guns they threw up their hands without being told, and begged us
not to shoot, saying they would do anything we wanted them to.

"Hit the ground," I ordered, and they both jumped off. We drove them
before us down the side of the train. While this was happening, Tom and
Ike had been blazing away, one on each side of the train, yelling like
Apaches, so as to keep the passengers herded in the cars. Some fellow
stuck a little twenty-two calibre out one of the coach windows and fired
it straight up in the air. I let drive and smashed the glass just over
his head. That settled everything like resistance from that direction.

By this time all my nervousness was gone. I felt a kind of pleasant
excitement as if I were at a dance or a frolic of some sort. The lights
were all out in the coaches, and, as Tom and Ike gradually quit firing and
yelling, it got to be almost as still as a graveyard. I remember hearing
a little bird chirping in a bush at the side of the track, as if it were
complaining at being waked up.

I made the fireman get a lantern, and then I went to the express car and
yelled to the messenger to open up or get perforated. He slid the door
back and stood in it with his hands up. "Jump overboard, son," I said,
and he hit the dirt like a lump of lead. There were two safes in the car
-- a big one and a little one. By the way, I first located the
messenger's arsenal -- a double-barrelled shot-gun with buckshot
cartridges and a thirty-eight in a drawer. I drew the cartridges from the
shot-gun, pocketed the pistol, and called the messenger inside. I shoved
my gun against his nose and put him to work. He couldn't open the big
safe, but he did the little one. There was only nine hundred dollars in
it. That was mighty small winnings for our trouble, so we decided to go
through the passengers. We took our prisoners to the smoking-car, and
from there sent the engineer through the train to light up the coaches.
Beginning with the first one, we placed a man at each door and ordered the
passengers to stand between the seats with their hands up.

If you want to find out what cowards the majority of men are, all you have
to do is rob a passenger train. I don't mean because they don't resist --
I'll tell you later on why they can't do that -- but it makes a man feel
sorry for them the way they lose their heads. Big, burly drummers and
farmers and ex-soldiers and high-collared dudes and sports that, a few
moments before, were filling the car with noise and bragging, get so
scared that their ears flop.

There were very few people in the day coaches at that time of night, so we
made a slim haul until we got to the sleeper. The Pullman conductor met
me at one door while Jim was going round to the other one. He very
politely informed me that I could not go into that car, as it did not
belong to the railroad company, and, besides, the passengers had already
been greatly disturbed by the shouting and firing. Never in all my life
have I met with a finer instance of official dignity and reliance upon the
power of Mr. Pull-man's great name. I jabbed my six-shooter so hard
against Mr. Conductor's front that I afterward found one of his vest
buttons so firmly wedged in the end of the barrel that I had to shoot it
out. He just shut up like a weak-springed knife and rolled down the car
steps.

I opened the door of the sleeper and stepped inside. A big, fat old man
came wabbling up to me, puffing and blowing. He had one coat-sleeve on
and was trying to put his vest on over that. I don't know who he thought
I was.

"Young man, young man," says he, "you must keep cool and not get excited.
Above everything, keep cool."

"I can't," says I. "Excitement's just eating me up." And then I let out a
yell and turned loose my forty-five through the skylight.

That old man tried to dive into one of the lower berths, but a screech
came out of it and a bare foot that took him in the bread-basket and
landed him on the floor. I saw Jim coming in the other door, and I
hollered for everybody to climb out and line up.

They commenced to scramble down, and for a while we had a three-ringed
circus. The men looked as frightened and tame as a lot of rabbits in a
deep snow. They had on, on an average, about a quarter of a suit of
clothes and one shoe apiece. One chap was sitting on the floor of the
aisle, looking as if he were working a hard sum in arithmetic. He was
trying, very solemn, to pull a lady's number two shoe on his number nine
foot.

The ladies didn't stop to dress. They were so curious to see a real, live
train robber, bless 'em, that they just wrapped blankets and sheets around
themselves and came out, squeaky and fidgety looking. They always show
more curiosity and sand than the men do.

We got them all lined up and pretty quiet, and I went through the bunch.
I found very little on them -- I mean in the way of valuables. One man in
the line was a sight. He was one of those big, overgrown, solemn snoozers
that sit on the platform at lectures and look wise. Before crawling out
he had managed to put on his long, frock-tailed coat and his high silk
hat. The rest of him was nothing but pajamas and bunions. When I dug
into that Prince Albert, I expected to drag out at least a block of gold
mine stock or an armful of Government bonds, but all I found was a little
boy's French harp about four inches long. What it was there for, I don't
know. I felt a little mad because he had fooled me so. I stuck the harp
up against his mouth.

"If you can't pay -- play," I says.

"I can't play," says he.

"Then learn right off quick," says I, letting him smell the end of my
gun-barrel.

He caught hold of the harp, turned red as a beet, and commenced to blow.
He blew a dinky little tune I remembered hearing when I was a kid:

Prettiest little gal in the country -- oh!
Mammy and Daddy told me so.

I made him keep on playing it all the time we were in the car. Now and
then he'd get weak and off the key, and I'd turn my gun on him and ask
what was the matter with that little gal, and whether he had any intention
of going back on her, which would make him start up again like sixty. I
think that old boy standing there in his silk hat and bare feet, playing
his little French harp, was the funniest sight I ever saw. One little
red-headed woman in the line broke out laughing at him. You could have
heard her in the next car.

Then Jim held them steady while I searched the berths. I grappled around
in those beds and filled a pillow-case with the strangest assortment of
stuff you ever saw. Now and then I'd come across a little pop-gun pistol,
just about right for plugging teeth with, which I'd throw out the window.
When I finished with the collection, I dumped the pillow-case load in the
middle of the aisle. There were a good many watches, bracelets, rings,
and pocket-books, with a sprinkling of false teeth, whiskey flasks, fa
ce-powder boxes, chocolate caramels, and heads of hair of various colours
and lengths. There were also about a dozen ladies' stockings into which
jewellery, watches, and rolls of bills had been stuffed and then wadded up
tight and stuck under the mattresses. I offered to return what I called
the "scalps," saying that we were not Indians on the war-path, but none of
the ladies seemed to know to whom the hair belonged.

One of the women -- and a good-looker she was -- wrapped in a striped
blanket, saw me pick up one of the stockings that was pretty chunky and
heavy about the toe, and she snapped out:

"That's mine, sir. You're not in the business of robbing women, are you?"

Now, as this was our first hold-up, we hadn't agreed upon any code of
ethics, so I hardly knew what to answer. But, anyway, I replied: "Well,
not as a specialty. If this contains your personal property you can have
it back."

"It just does," she declared eagerly, and reached out her hand for it.

"You'll excuse my taking a look at the contents," I said, holding the
stocking up by the toe. Out dumped a big gent's gold watch, worth two
hundred, a gent's leather pocket-book that we afterward found to contain
six hundred dollars, a 32-calibre revolver; and the only thing of the lot
that could have been a lady's personal property was a silver bracelet
worth about fifty cents.

I said: "Madame, here's your property," and handed her the bracelet.
"Now," I went on, "how can you expect us to act square with you when you
try to deceive us in this manner? I'm surprised at such conduct."

The young woman flushed up as if she had been caught doing something
dishonest. Some other woman down the line called out: "The mean thing!" I
never knew whether she meant the other lady or me.

When we finished our job we ordered everybody back to bed, told 'em good
night very politely at the door, and left. We rode forty miles before
daylight and then divided the stuff. Each one of us got $1,752.85 in
money. We lumped the jewellery around. Then we scattered, each man for
himself.

That was my first train robbery, and it was about as easily done as any of
the ones that followed. But that was the last and only time I ever went
through the passengers. I don't like that part of the business.
Afterward I stuck strictly to the express car. During the next eight
years I handled a good deal of money.

The best haul I made was just seven years after the first one. We found
out about a train that was going to bring out a lot of money to pay off
the soldiers at a Government post. We stuck that train up in broad
daylight. Five of us lay in the sand hills near a little station. Ten
soldiers were guarding the money on the train, but they might just as well
have been at home on a furlough. We didn't even allow them to stick their
heads out the windows to see the fun. We had no trouble at all in getting
the money, which was all in gold. Of course, a big howl was raised at the
time about the robbery. It was Government stuff, and the Government got
sarcastic and wanted to know what the convoy of soldiers went along for.
The only excuse given was that nobody was expecting an attack among those
bare sand hills in daytime. I don't know what the Government thought
about the excuse, but I know that it was a good one. The surprise -- that
is the keynote of the train-robbing business. The papers published all k
inds of stories about the loss, finally agreeing that it was between nine
thousand and ten thousand dollars. The Government sawed wood. Here are
the correct figures, printed for the first time -- forty-eight thousand
dollars. If anybody will take the trouble to look over Uncle Sam's
private accounts for that little debit to profit and loss, he will find
that I am right to a cent.

By that time we were expert enough to know what to do. We rode due west
twenty miles, making a trail that a Broadway policeman could have
followed, and then we doubled back, hiding our tracks. On the second
night after the hold-up, while posses were scouring the country in every
direction, Jim and I were eating supper in the second story of a friend's
house in the town where the alarm started from. Our friend pointed out to
us, in an office across the street, a printing press at work striking off
handbills offering a reward for our capture.

I have been asked what we do with the money we get. Well, I never could
account for a tenth part of it after it was spent. It goes fast and
freely. An outlaw has to have a good many friends. A highly respected
citizen may, and often does, get along with very few, but a man on the
dodge has got to have "sidekickers." With angry posses and reward-hungry
officers cutting out a hot trail for him, he must have a few places
scattered about the country where he can stop and feed himself and his
horse and get a few hours' sleep without having to keep both eyes open.
When he makes a haul he feels like dropping some of the coin with these
friends, and he does it liberally. Sometimes I have, at the end of a
hasty visit at one of these havens of refuge, flung a handful of gold and
bills into the laps of the kids playing on the floor, without knowing
whether my contribution was a hundred dollars or a thousand.

When old-timers make a big haul they generally go far away to one of the
big cities to spend their money. Green hands, however successful a
hold-up they make, nearly always give themselves away by showing too much
money near the place where they got it.

I was in a job in '94 where we got twenty thousand dollars. We followed
our favourite plan for a get-away -- that is, doubled on our trail -- and
laid low for a time near the scene of the train's bad luck. One morning I
picked up a newspaper and read an article with big headlines stating that
the marshal, with eight deputies and a posse of thirty armed citizens, had
the train robbers surrounded in a mesquite thicket on the Cimarron, and
that it was a question of only a few hours when they would be dead men or
prisoners. While I was reading that article I was sitting at breakfast in
one of the most elegant private residences in Washington City, with a
flunky in knee pants standing behind my chair. Jim was sitting across the
table talking to his half-uncle, a retired naval officer, whose name you
have often seen in the accounts of doings in the capital. We had gone
there and bought rattling outfits of good clothes, and were resting from
our labours among the nabobs. We must have been killed in that mesquite
thicket, for I can make an affidavit that we didn't surrender.

Now I propose to tell why it is easy to hold up a train, and, then, why no
one should ever do it.

In the first place, the attacking party has all the advantage. That is,
of course, supposing that they are old-timers with the necessary
experience and courage. They have the outside and are protected by the
darkness, while the others are in the light, hemmed into a small space,
and exposed, the moment they show a head at a window or door, to the aim
of a man who is a dead shot and who won't hesitate to shoot.

But, in my opinion, the main condition that makes train robbing easy is
the element of surprise in connection with the imagination of the
passengers. If you have ever seen a horse that has eaten loco weed you
will understand what I mean when I say that the passengers get locoed.
That horse gets the awfullest imagination on him in the world. You can't
coax him to cross a little branch stream two feet wide. It looks as big
to him as the Mississippi River. That's just the way with the passenger.
He thinks there are a hundred men yelling and shooting outside, when maybe
there are only two or three. And the muzzle of a forty-five looks like
the entrance to a tunnel. The passenger is all right, although he may do
mean little tricks, like hiding a wad of money in his shoe and forgetting
to dig-up until you jostle his ribs some with the end of your six-shooter;
but there's no harm in him.

As to the train crew, we never had any more trouble with them than if they
had been so many sheep. I don't mean that they are cowards; I mean that
they have got sense. They know they're not up against a bluff. It's the
same way with the officers. I've seen secret service men, marshals, and
railroad detectives fork over their change as meek as Moses. I saw one of
the bravest marshals I ever knew hide his gun under his seat and dig up
along with the rest while I was taking toll. He wasn't afraid; he simply
knew that we had the drop on the whole outfit. Besides, many of those
officers have families and they feel that they oughtn't to take chances;
whereas death has no terrors for the man who holds up a train. He expects
to get killed some day, and he generally does. My advice to you, if you
should ever be in a hold-up, is to line up with the cowards and save your
bravery for an occasion when it may be of some benefit to you. Another
reason why officers are backward about mixing things with a train robber
is a financial one. Every time there is a scrimmage and somebody gets
killed, the officers lose money. If the train robber gets away they swear
out a warrant against John Doe et al. and travel hundreds of miles and
sign vouchers for thousands on the trail of the fugitives, and the
Government foots the bills. So, with them, it is a question of mileage
rather than courage.

I will give one instance to support my statement that the surprise is the
best card in playing for a hold-up.

Along in '92 the Daltons were cutting out a hot trail for the officers
down in the Cherokee Nation, Those were their lucky days, and they got so
reckless and sandy, that they used to announce before hand what job they
were going to undertake. Once they gave it out that they were going to
hold up the M. K. & T. flyer on a certain night at the station of Pryor
Creek, in Indian Territory.

That night the railroad company got fifteen deputy marshals in Muscogee
and put them on the train. Beside them they had fifty armed men hid in
the depot at Pryor Creek.

When the Katy Flyer pulled in not a Dalton showed up. The next station
was Adair, six miles away. When the train reached there, and the deputies
were having a good time explaining what they would have done to the Dalton
gang if they had turned up, all at once it sounded like an army firing
outside. The conductor and brakeman came running into the car yelling,
"Train robbers!"

Some of those deputies lit out of the door, hit the ground, and kept on
running. Some of them hid their Winchesters under the seats. Two of them
made a fight and were both killed.

It took the Daltons just ten minutes to capture the train and whip the
escort. In twenty minutes more they robbed the express car of
twenty-seven thousand dollars and made a clean get-away.

My opinion is that those deputies would have put up a stiff fight at Pryor
Creek, where they were expecting trouble, but they were taken by surprise
and "locoed" at Adair, just as the Daltons, who knew their business,
expected they would.

I don't think I ought to close without giving some deductions from my
experience of eight years "on the dodge." It doesn't pay to rob trains.
Leaving out the question of right and morals, which I don't think I ought
to tackle, there is very little to envy in the life of an outlaw. After a
while money ceases to have any value in his eyes. He gets to looking upon
the railroads and express companies as his bankers, and his six-shooter as
a cheque book good for any amount. He throws away money right and left.
Most of the time he is on the jump, riding day and night, and he lives so
hard between times that he doesn't enjoy the taste of high life when he
gets it. He knows that his time is bound to come to lose his life or
liberty, and that the accuracy of his aim, the speed of his horse, and the
fidelity of his "sider," are all that postpone the inevitable.

It isn't that he loses any sleep over danger from the officers of the
law. In all my experience I never knew officers to attack a band of
outlaws unless they outnumbered them at least three to one.

But the outlaw carries one thought constantly in his mind -- and that is
what makes him so sore against life, more than anything else -- he knows
where the marshals get their recruits of deputies. He knows that the
majority of these upholders of the law were once lawbreakers, horse
thieves, rustlers, highwaymen, and outlaws like himself, and that they
gamed their positions and immunity by turning state's evidence, by turning
traitor and delivering up their comrades to imprisonment and death. He
knows that some day -- unless he is shot first -- his Judas will set to
work, the trap will be laid, and he will be the surprised instead of a
surpriser at a stick-up.

That is why the man who holds up trains picks his company with a thousand
times the care with which a careful girl chooses a sweetheart. That is
why he raises himself from his blanket of nights and listens to the tread
of every horse's hoofs on the distant road. That is why he broods
suspiciously for days upon a jesting remark or an unusual movement of a
tried comrade, or the broken mutterings of his closest friend, sleeping by
his side.

And it is one of the reasons why the train-robbing profession is not so
pleasant a one as either of its collateral branches -- politics or
cornering the market.




VI ULYSSES AND THE DOGMAN



Do you know the time of the dogmen?

When the forefinger of twilight begins to smudge the clear-drawn lines of
the Big City there is inaugurated an hour devoted to one of the most
melancholy sights of urban life.

Out from the towering flat crags and apartment peaks of the cliff dwellers
of New York steals an army of beings that were once men, Even yet they go
upright upon two limbs and retain human form and speech; but you will
observe that they are behind animals in progress. Each of these beings
follows a dog, to which he is fastened by an artificial ligament.

These men are all victims to Circe. Not willingly do they become flunkeys
to Fido, bell boys to bull terriers, and toddlers after Towzer. Modern
Circe, instead of turning them into animals, has kindly left the
difference of a six-foot leash between them. Every one of those dogmen
has been either cajoled, bribed, or commanded by his own particular Circe
to take the dear household pet out for an airing.

By their faces and manner you can tell that the dogmen are bound in a
hopeless enchantment. Never will there come even a dog-catcher Ulysses to
remove the spell.

The faces of some are stonily set. They are past the commiseration, the
curiosity, or the jeers of their fellow-beings. Years of matrimony, of
continuous compulsory canine constitutionals, have made them callous.
They unwind their beasts from lamp posts, or the ensnared legs of profane
pedestrians, with the stolidity of mandarins manipulating the strings of
their kites.

Others, more recently reduced to the ranks of Rover's retinue, take their
medicine sulkily and fiercely. They play the dog on the end of their line
with the pleasure felt by the girl out fishing when she catches a
sea-robin on her hook. They glare at you threateningly if you look at
them, as if it would be their delight to let slip the dogs of war. These
are half-mutinous dogmen, not quite Circe-ized, and you will do well not
to kick their charges, should they sniff around your ankles.

Others of the tribe do not seem to feel so keenly. They are mostly
unfresh youths, with gold caps and drooping cigarettes, who do not
harmonize with their dogs. The animals they attend wear satin bows in
their collars; and the young men steer them so assiduously that you are
tempted to the theory that some personal advantage, contingent upon
satisfactory service, waits upon the execution of their duties.

The dogs thus personally conducted are of many varieties; but they are one
in fatness, in pampered, diseased vileness of temper, in insolent,
snarling capriciousness of behaviour. They tug at the leash fractiously,
they make leisurely nasal inventory of every door step, railing, and
post. They sit down to rest when they choose; they wheeze like the winner
of a Third Avenue beefsteak-eating contest; they blunder clumsily into
open cellars and coal holes; they lead the dogmen a merry dance.

These unfortunate dry nurses of dogdom, the cur cuddlers, mongrel
managers, Spitz stalkers, poodle pullers, Skye scrapers, dachshund
dandlers, terrier trailers and Pomeranian pushers of the cliff-dwelling
Circes follow their charges meekly. The doggies neither fear nor respect
them. Masters of the house these men whom they hold in leash may be, but
they are not masters of them. From cosey corner to fire escape, from
divan to dumbwaiter, doggy's snarl easily drives this two-legged being who
is commissioned to walk at the other end of his string during his outing.

One twilight the dogmen came forth as usual at their Circes' pleading,
guerdon, or crack of the whip. One among them was a strong man,
apparently of too solid virtues for this airy vocation. His expression
was melancholic, his manner depressed. He was leashed to a vile white
dog, loathsomely fat, fiendishly ill-natured, gloatingly intractable
toward his despised conductor.

At a corner nearest to his apartment house the dogman turned down a side
street, hoping for fewer witnesses to his ignominy. The surfeited beast
waddled before him, panting with spleen and the labour of motion.

Suddenly the dog stopped. A tall, brown, long-coated, wide-brimmed man
stood like a Colossus blocking the sidewalk and declaring:

"Well, I'm a son of a gun!"

"Jim Berry!" breathed the dogman, with exclamation points in his voice.

"Sam Telfair," cried Wide-Brim again, "you ding-basted old willy-walloo,
give us your hoof!"

Their hands clasped in the brief, tight greeting of the West that is death
to the hand-shake microbe.

"You old fat rascal!" continued Wide-Brim, with a wrinkled brown smile;
"it's been five years since I seen you. I been in this town a week, but
you can't find nobody in such a place. Well, you dinged old married man,
how are they coming?"

Something mushy and heavily soft like raised dough leaned against Jim's
leg and chewed his trousers with a yeasty growl.

"Get to work," said Jim, "and explain this yard-wide hydrophobia yearling
you've throwed your lasso over. Are you the pound-master of this burg?
Do you call that a dog or what?"

"I need a drink," said the dogman, dejected at the reminder of his old dog
of the sea. "Come on."

Hard by was a cafe. 'Tis ever so in the big city.

They sat at a table, and the bloated monster yelped and scrambled at the
end of his leash to get at the cafe cat.

"Whiskey," said Jim to the waiter.

"Make it two," said the dogman.

"You're fatter," said Jim, "and you look subjugated. I don't know about
the East agreeing with you. All the boys asked me to hunt you up when I
started, Sandy King, he went to the Klondike. Watson Burrel, he married
the oldest Peters girl. I made some money buying beeves, and I bought a
lot of wild land up on the Little Powder. Going to fence next fall. Bill
Rawlins, he's gone to farming. You remember Bill, of course -- he was
courting Marcella -- excuse me, Sam -- I mean the lady you married, while
she was teaching school at Prairie View. But you was the lucky man. How
is Missis Telfair?"

"S-h-h-h!" said the dogman, signalling the waiter; "give it a name."

"Whiskey," said Jim.

"Make it two," said the dogman.

"She's well," he continued, after his chaser. "She refused to live
anywhere but in New York, where she came from. We live in a flat. Every
evening at six I take that dog out for a walk. It's Marcella's pet.
There never were two animals on earth, Jim, that hated one another like me
and that dog does. His name's Lovekins. Marcella dresses for dinner
while we're out. We eat tabble dote. Ever try one of them, Jim?"

"No, I never," said Jim. "I seen the signs, but I thought they said
'table de hole.' I thought it was French for pool tables. How does it
taste?"

"If you're going to be in the city for awhile we will --"

"No, sir-ee. I'm starting for home this evening on the 7.25. Like to
stay longer, but I can't."

"I'll walk down to the ferry with you," said the dogman.

The dog had bound a leg each of Jim and the chair together, and had sunk
into a comatose slumber. Jim stumbled, and the leash was slightly
wrenched. The shrieks of the awakened beast rang for a block around.

"If that's your dog," said Jim, when they were on the street again,
"what's to hinder you from running that habeas corpus you've got around
his neck over a limb and walking off and forgetting him?"

"I'd never dare to," said the dogman, awed at the bold proposition. "He
sleeps in the bed, I sleep on a lounge. He runs howling to Marcella if I
look at him. Some night, Jim, I'm going to get even with that dog. I've
made up my mind to do it. I'm going to creep over with a knife and cut a
hole in his mosquito bar so they can get in to him. See if I don't do it!"

"You ain't yourself, Sam Telfair. You ain't what you was once. I don't
know about these cities and flats over here. With my own eyes I seen you
stand off both the Tillotson boys in Prairie View with the brass faucet
out of a molasses barrel. And I seen you rope and tie the wildest steer
on Little Powder in 39 1-2."

"I did, didn't I?" said the other, with a temporary gleam in his eye.
"But that was before I was dogmatized."

"Does Misses Telfair --" began Jim.

"Hush!" said the dogman. "Here's another cafe."

They lined up at the bar. The dog fell asleep at their feet.

"Whiskey," said Jim.

"Make it two," said the dogman.

"I thought about you," said Jim, "when I bought that wild land. I wished
you was out there to help me with the stock."

"Last Tuesday," said the dogman, "he bit me on the ankle because I asked
for cream in my coffee. He always gets the cream."

"You'd like Prairie View now," said Jim. "The boys from the round-ups for
fifty miles around ride in there. One corner of my pasture is in sixteen
miles of the town. There's a straight forty miles of wire on one side of
it."

"You pass through the kitchen to get to the bedroom," said the dogman,
"and you pass through the parlour to get to the bath room, and you back
out through the dining-room to get into the bedroom so you can turn around
and leave by the kitchen. And he snores and barks in his sleep, and I
have to smoke in the park on account of his asthma."

"Don't Missis Telfair--" began Jim.

"Oh, shut up!" said the dogman. "What is it this time?"

"Whiskey," said Jim.

"Make it two," said the dogman.

"Well, I'll be racking along down toward the ferry," said the other.

"Come on, there, you mangy, turtle-backed, snake-headed, bench-legged
ton-and-a-half of soap-grease!" shouted the dogman, with a new note in his
voice and a new hand on the leash. The dog scrambled after them, with an
angry whine at such unusual language from his guardian.

At the foot of Twenty-third Street the dogman led the way through swinging
doors.

"Last chance," said he. "Speak up."

"Whiskey," said Jim.

"Make it two," said the dogman.

"I don't know," said the ranchman, "where I'll find the man I want to take
charge of the Little Powder outfit. I want somebody I know something
about. Finest stretch of prairie and timber you ever squinted your eye
over, Sam. Now if you was --"

"Speaking of hydrophobia," said the dogman, "the other night he chewed a
piece out of my leg because I knocked a fly off of Marcella's arm. 'It
ought to be cauterized,' says Marcella, and I was thinking so myself. I
telephones for the doctor, and when he comes Marcella says to me: 'Help me
hold the poor dear while the doctor fixes his mouth. Oh, I hope he got no
virus on any of his toofies when he bit you.' Now what do you think of
that?"

"Does Missis Telfair--" began Jim.

"Oh, drop it," said the dogman. "Come again!"

"Whiskey," said Jim.

"Make it two," said the dogman.

They walked on to the ferry. The ranchman stepped to the ticket window.

Suddenly the swift landing of three or four heavy kicks was heard, the
air. was rent by piercing canine shrieks, and a pained, outraged,
lubberly, bow-legged pudding of a dog ran frenziedly up the street alone.

"Ticket to Denver," said Jim.

"Make it two," shouted the ex-dogman, reaching for his inside pocket.




VII THE CHAMPION OF THE WEATHER



If you should speak of the Kiowa Reservation to the average New Yorker he
probably wouldn't know whether you were referring to a new political dodge
at Albany or a leitmotif from "Parsifal." But out in the Kiowa Reservation
advices have been received concerning the existence of New York.

A party of us were on a hunting trip in the Reservation. Bud Kingsbury,
our guide, philosopher, and friend, was broiling antelope steaks in camp
one night. One of the party, a pinkish-haired young man in a correct
hunting costume, sauntered over to the fire to light a cigarette, and
remarked carelessly to Bud:

"Nice night!"

"Why, yes," said Bud, "as nice as any night could be that ain't received
the Broadway stamp of approval."

Now, the young man was from New York, but the rest of us wondered how Bud
guessed it. So, when the steaks were done, we besought him to lay bare
his system of ratiocination. And as Bud was something of a Territorial
talking machine he made oration as follows:

"How did I know he was from New York? Well, I figured it out as soon as
he sprung them two words on me. I was in New York myself a couple of
years ago, and I noticed some of the earmarks and hoof tracks of the
Rancho Manhattan."

"Found New York rather different from the Panhandle, didn't you, Bud?"
asked one of the hunters.

"Can't say that I did," answered Bud; "anyways, not more than some. The
main trail in that town which they call Broadway is plenty travelled, but
they're about the same brand of bipeds that tramp around in Cheyenne and
Amarillo, At first I was sort of rattled by the crowds, but I soon says to
myself, 'Here, now, Bud; they're just plain folks like you and Geronimo
and Grover Cleveland and the Watson boys, so don't get all flustered up
with consternation under your saddle blanket,' and then I feels calm and
peaceful, like I was back in the Nation again at a ghost dance or a green
corn pow-wow.

"I'd been saving up for a year to give this New York a whirl. I knew a
man named Summers that lived there, but I couldn't find him; so I played a
lone hand at enjoying the intoxicating pleasures of the corn-fed
metropolis.

"For a while I was so frivolous and locoed by the electric lights and the
noises of the phonographs and the second-story railroads that I forgot one
of the crying needs of my Western system of natural requirements. I never
was no hand to deny myself the pleasures of sociable vocal intercourse
with friends and strangers. Out in the Territories when I meet a man I
never saw before, inside of nine minutes I know his income, religion, size
of collar, and his wife's temper, and how much he pays for clothes, al
imony, and chewing tobacco. It's a gift with me not to be penurious with
my conversation.

"But this here New York was inaugurated on the idea of abstemiousness in
regard to the parts of speech. At the end of three weeks nobody in the
city had fired even a blank syllable in my direction except the waiter in
the grub emporium where I fed. And as his outpourings of syntax wasn't
nothing but plagiarisms from the bill of fare, he never satisfied my
yearnings, which was to have somebody hit. If I stood next to a man at a
bar he'd edge off and give a Baldwin-Ziegler look as if he suspected me of
having the North Pole concealed on my person. I began to wish that I'd
gone to Abilene or Waco for my _paseado_; for the mayor of them places
will drink with you, and the first citizen you meet will tell you his
middle name and ask' you to take a chance in a raffle for a music box.

"Well, one day when I was particular hankering for to be gregarious with
something more loquacious than a lamp post, a fellow in a caffy says to
me, says he:

"'Nice day!'

"He was a kind of a manager of the place, and I reckon he'd seen me in
there a good many times. He had a face like a fish and an eye like Judas,
but I got up and put one arm around his neck.

"'Pardner,' I says, 'sure it's a nice day. You're the first gentleman in
all New York to observe that the intricacies of human speech might not be
altogether wasted on William Kingsbury. But don't you think,' says I,
'that 'twas a little cool early in the morning; and ain't there a feeling
of rain in the air to-night? But along about noon it sure was gallupsious
weather. How's all up to the house? You doing right well with the caffy,
now?'

"Well, sir, that galoot just turns his back and walks off stiff, without a
word, after all my trying to be agreeable! I didn't know what to make of
it. That night I finds a note from Summers, who'd been away from town,
giving the address of his camp. I goes up to his house and has a good,
old-time talk with his folks. And I tells Summers about the actions of
this coyote in the caffy, and desires interpretation.

"'Oh,' says Summers, 'he wasn't intending to strike up a conversation with
you. That's just the New York style. He'd seen you was a regular
customer and he spoke a word or two just to show you he appreciated your
custom. You oughtn't to have followed it up. That's about as far as we
care to go with a stranger. A word or so about the weather may be
ventured, but we don't generally make it the basis of an acquaintance. '

"'Billy,' says I, 'the weather and its ramifications is a solemn subject
with me. Meteorology is one of my sore points. No man can open up the
question of temperature or humidity or the glad sunshine with me, and then
turn tail on it without its leading to a falling barometer. I'm going
down to see that man again and give him a lesson in the art of continuous
conversation. You say New York etiquette allows him two words and no
answer. Well, he's going to turn himself into a weather bureau and finish
what he begun with me, besides indulging in neighbourly remarks on other
subjects.'

"Summers talked agin it, but I was irritated some and I went on the street
car back to that caffy.

"The same fellow was there yet, walking round in a sort of back corral
where there was tables and chairs. A few people was sitting around having
drinks and sneering at one another.

"I called that man to one side and herded him into a corner. I unbuttoned
enough to show him a thirty-eight I carried stuck under my vest.

"'Pardner,' I says, 'a brief space ago I was in here and you seized the
opportunity to say it was a nice day. When I attempted to corroborate
your weather signal, you turned your back and walked off. Now,' says I,
'you frog-hearted, language-shy, stiff-necked cross between a Spitzbergen
sea cook and a muzzled oyster, you resume where you left off in your
discourse on the weather.'

"The fellow looks at me and tries to grin, but he sees I don't and he
comes around serious.

"'Well,' says he, eyeing the handle of my gun, 'it was rather a nice day;
some warmish, though.'

"'Particulars, you mealy-mouthed snoozer,' I says -- 'let's have the
specifications -- expatiate -- fill in the outlines. When you start
anything with me in short-hand it's bound to turn out a storm signal.'

"'Looked like rain yesterday,' says the man, 'but it cleared off fine in
the forenoon. I hear the farmers are needing rain right badly up-State.'

"'That's the kind of a canter,' says I. 'Shake the New York dust off your
hoofs and be a real agreeable kind of a centaur. You broke the ice, you
know, and we're getting better acquainted every minute. Seems to me I
asked you about your family?'

"'They're all well, thanks,' says he. 'We -- we have a new piano.'

"'Now you're coming it,' I says. 'This cold reserve is breaking up at
last. That little touch about the piano almost makes us brothers. What's
the youngest kid's name?' I asks him.

"'Thomas,' says he. 'He's just getting well from the measles.'

"'I feel like I'd known you always,' says I. 'Now there was just one more
-- are you doing right well with the caffy, now?'

"'Pretty well,' he says. 'I'm putting away a little money.'

"'Glad to hear it,' says I. 'Now go back to your work and get civilized.
Keep your hands off the weather unless you're ready to follow it up in a
personal manner, It's a subject that naturally belongs to sociability and
the forming of new ties, and I hate to see it handed out in small change
in a town like this.'

"So the next day I rolls up my blankets and hits the trail away from New
York City."

For many minutes after Bud ceased talking we lingered around the fire, and
then all hands began to disperse for bed.

As I was unrolling my bedding I heard the pinkish-haired young man saying
to Bud, with something like anxiety in his voice:

"As I say, Mr. Kingsbury, there is something really beautiful about this
night. The delightful breeze and the bright stars and the clear air unite
in making it wonderfully attractive."

"Yes," said Bud, "it's a nice night."




VIII MAKES THE WHOLE WORLD KIN



The burglar stepped inside the window quickly, and then he took his time.
A burglar who respects his art always takes his time before taking
anything else.

The house was a private residence. By its boarded front door and
untrimmed Boston ivy the burglar knew that the mistress of it was sitting
on some oceanside piazza telling a sympathetic man in a yachting cap that
no one had ever understood her sensitive, lonely heart. He knew by the
light in the third-story front windows, and by the lateness of the season,
that the master of the house had come home, and would soon extinguish his
light and retire. For it was September of the year and of the soul, in
which season the house's good man comes to consider roof gardens and
stenographers as vanities, and to desire the return of his mate and the
more durable blessings of decorum and the moral excellencies.

The burglar lighted a cigarette. The guarded glow of the match
illuminated his salient points for a moment. He belonged to the third
type of burglars.



 


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