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Ladies and Gentlemen

by Irvin S. Cobb · English · Gutenberg #45320 · 449,049 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Ladies and Gentlemen

Author: Irvin S. Cobb


        
Release date: April 5, 2014 [eBook #45320]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LADIES AND GENTLEMEN ***

Transcriber's note:

      Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).





LADIES AND GENTLEMEN

by

IRVIN SHREWSBURY COBB






First Published 1927




  _To my friend_
  G. W. LILLIE




_Contents_


                                          PAGE
  A Lady and a Gentleman                     1

  The Order of the Bath                     28

  Two of Everything                         67

  We of the Old South                       99

  Killed with Kindness                     136

  Peace on Earth                           161

  Three Wise Men of the East Side          202

  The Cowboy and the Lady and Her Pa       226

  A Close Shave                            259

  Good Sam                                 270

  How to Choke a Cat without Using Butter  300




  _Ladies
  and Gentlemen_




_Ladies and Gentlemen_




A LADY AND A GENTLEMAN

[Decoration]


There were the hotel lobbies; they roared and spun like whirlpools with
the crowds that were in them. But the streets outside were more like
mill-races, and the exits from the railroad stations became flumes down
which all morning and all afternoon the living torrents unceasingly
had poured. Every main crossing was in a twist of opposing currents.
Overhead, on cornices and across window-ledges and against house-fronts
and on ropes which passed above the roadway from one building to
another, hung buntings and flags and streamers, the prevalent colors
being red and white; and also many great goggle-eyed and bewhiskered
portraits of dead warriors done on sail-cloth in the best styles of
two domestic schools--sign-painting and election-bannering. Numbers
of brass bands marched to and fro, playing this, that, and the next
appropriate air, but when in doubt playing "Dixie"; and the musicians
waded knee-deep through an accumulating wreckage of abandoned
consonants--softly dropped _g's_, eliminated _r's_. In short, the
United Confederate Veterans were holding their annual reunion, this
being the evening of the opening day.

For absolute proof that this really was a reunion of his kind, there
was visible here and there a veteran. His average age was eighty-three
years and some odd months. He was feeble or he was halt or sometimes
he was purblind. Only very rarely did he carry his years and his frame
straight. He was near to being swept away and drowned in a vast and
fragrant sea of gracious, chattering femininity. His daughters and his
granddaughters and his nieces and his younger sisters and, very rarely,
his wife--they collectively were as ten to one against him. They were
the sponsors and the maids of honor and the matrons of honor and the
chaperons; they represented such-and-such a camp or such-and-such a
state, wearing flowing badges to attest their queenly distinctions;
wearing, also, white summery gowns, the most of them, with touches of
red. But the older women nearly always were in black.

Here and there moved the Amazonian figure of one among them who had
decked herself for this great occasion in a gray uniform with bullet
buttons of brass in twin rows down the front of the jacket and with
a soldier cap on her bobbed hair--nearly always it was bobbed--and
gold braid at the seams of her short walking skirt. A crafty stylist
even had thought out the added touches of epaulets for her straight
shoulders and a pair of black cavalry boots; and she went about much
admired by herself and the rest.

You see, it was like this: In the days when there were many of them,
the veterans had shared their reunions with their women. Now that
they were so few and so weakly, their women would let the veterans
share the reunions with them. It was very much like this--a gorgeous
social event, the whole South participating; with sentiment for
its half-erased background, with the memories of a war that ended
nearly sixty years before for its fainting, fading excuse; with the
splendid promise of balls and parties and receptions and flirting and
love-making and match-making for its assembly call to the campaigning
rampaging young of the species.

Only over by the river at the big yellow pine auditorium did the
puny veteran element yet hold its own against the dominant attendant
tides of the newer generations of its descendants. "General Van Brunk
of Texas, honored leader of the Trans-Mississippi Department, will
now present the important report of the Committee on History," the
octogenarian commander-in-chief was announcing to those fifteen hundred
white heads that nodded before him like so much ripened cotton in the
bolls. So General Van Brunk, holding the typewritten fruitage of one
year's hard work in his palsied hands, took the platform and cleared a
shrunken throat and began.

But just then the members of the Orphan Brigade of Kentucky--thirty-two
of them, no less--marched down the middle aisle with a fife-and-drum
corps at their head and a color-bearer bearing a tattered rag on a
scarred staff, and everybody rose up shakily to give the Rebel yell,
and nobody, not even General Van Brunk, ever heard a word of General
Van Brunk's report. It was ordered spread upon the minutes, though,
while the commander-in-chief stood up there with his arms outstretched
and wept a welcome to the straggly incoming column. He was an Orphan
himself.

The proceedings were proceeding according to custom. The orator chosen
to deliver the annual oration would have an easy time of it when his
hour came next day. "Comrades of my father," he would say and they
would applaud for five minutes. He would mention Jackson and they would
whoop for seven minutes; mention Lee and that would mean ten minutes of
the same. And so on.

At a quarter to ten a certain portly churchman--lately a chaplain with
the A.E.F.--who by invitation had come down from Minneapolis to bear
an affectionate message to these old men on behalf of the American
Legion, wormed his way out of a side door of the auditorium, his job
done. Inside his black garments he was perspiring heavily. The air of
the packed hall had been steaming hot. He stood for a minute on the
sidewalk, grateful for the cooling wind of the May night and trying
to decide whether he ought to turn east or west to get back to his
hotel. He was a bishop of the Episcopal Church and he had the bishop's
look and manner. On his arm he felt a bony clutch, like the clutch of a
parrot's foot.

A bent shell of a man was alongside him; it was this shell had fastened
its skeleton fingers upon his sleeve. Out of a head that was just a
skull with a brown hard skin stretched over it, a pair of filmed eyes
looked up into his face, and from behind an ambush of dense white
whiskers came a piping voice saying:

"Howdy, son."

The bishop was startled and secretly amused. He was used to being
called "Father"--frequently his collar and vest deceived Romanists--but
he couldn't remember when anyone had addressed him as "son."

"Good evening, sir," he answered.

"Son," quavered the other--he must be all of ninety, the bishop
decided--"say, son, I heared you back thar--part of whut you said. You
done fust-rate--yep, fust-rate, fur a Yankee. You air a Yankee, ain't
you?"

"Well, I was born in Nebraska, but I live now in Minnesota," said the
bishop.

"That so? Well, I'm an Alabama boy!"

All at once the bishop ceased to be amused. As the talon released its
fumbling hold on him and the remnant tottered away, the bishop's right
arm came up smartly but involuntarily in a military salute.

"He calls himself a boy!" quoth the bishop, addressing no one in
particular. "I know now why they fought four years against such odds!"

Suddenly he was prouder than ever of being an American. And he, a
stranger to these parts, felt the pathos of it all--the pathos of age
and decrepitude, the pathos of the thronging shadows of an heroic Lost
Cause, the gallant pathos of these defeated men who even now at their
time of life would never admit they had been defeated--these things,
thrown out in relief against this screen of blaring brass and pretty
young girls and socially ambitious mothers and general hullabaloo.

But this story, such as it is, is not concerned with this particular
reunion so much as it is concerned with the reactions to the reunion
of one surviving Confederate who attended it. He was not an imported
orator nor a thwarted deliverer of historical reports, nor yet the
commander of some phantom division whose main camp ground now was a
cemetery. He was still what he had been back yonder in '65--a high
private of the rear rank. He was fond of saying so. With him it was one
favorite little joke which never staled.

He was a very weary high private as he trudged along. An exceedingly
young and sleepy Boy Scout was his guide, striving to keep in stride
with him. First the old man would tote his small valise, then the Scout
would take it over for a spell.

They had ridden together on a street-car. At a corner which the guide
thought must be their corner, they got off. They were entering an
outlying part of the city, that much was certain, at least. The last
high-dangled example of the art preservative as practiced by local
masters of outdoor advertising service--it was labeled with the name
of President Jefferson Davis, so it must be a likeness of President
Davis--was swinging aloft far behind them. Those thin broken sounds
of distant band-music no longer came to their ears. The houses were
getting scarcer, getting to be farther apart. They stumbled in the
darkness across railroad tracks, thence passed on through a sort of
tunnel that was as black inside as a pocket. When they came out from
under the culvert they found themselves in a desert so far as stirring
life went.

"Shore you're not lost, sonny?" asked the old man for the second or
third time.

"No, suh, I think not." But the youngster's tone had lost its earlier
manful conviction. "It oughter be right down this way somewhere. I
guess we'll strike it soon."

So they went ahead. The veteran's trudge became a shamble. The Scout's
step became a drowsy stagger. That Scout was growing very tired in his
legs; they were such short legs. He had been on duty since breakfast
time.

It was the high private's turn to carry the grip. He halted and put it
down to ease his cramped hand and to breathe. His companion lurched
with a bump against the telephone pole and gave a comatose grunt.

"Look here, little pardner," said the old man, "you act like to me
you're mighty near played out. Whereabouts do you live?"

"Clean over--over--on the other side of town from here." The child
spoke between jaw-stretching yawns. "That car-line back there goes
right past our house though." His voice was very wistful as he said
that.

"Tell you what, then. It'd be wrong to keep you up any longer. But me,
I'm one of these here old-time campaigners. You hand me over that piece
of paper with the name and the number and all on it, and then you put
out for home and get yourself a good night's rest. By myself I'll be
shore to locate the place we're hunting for. Anyway, you've done enough
good deeds for one day."

That Scout might be sleepy, but sleepy or not he had a bounden service
to perform and would have so stated. But the veteran cut short those
plucky semiconscious protests of his, and being outargued, the boy
surrendered a scrap of cardboard and bade his late charge good-by and
good night and set out on his return to civilization.

Under a near-by electric this old-time campaigner adjusted his glasses
and studied the scribbled face of the card. Immediately above his head
a street-marker showed on the lamp-post where the light would fall
on it, and next he looked up and spelled out the lettering there. He
merely was reconfirming a fact already confirmed.

"This is certainly the right street," he said to himself. "But the
question is--which-a-way is the right house? The thing for me to do, I
reckin, is to roust up somebody and ask--if I can find anybody awake."

Diagonally opposite, he made out the square bulk of a sizable two-story
structure. It must be a dwelling, for it had a bit of lawn in front
of it; it must be tenanted because a patchy dullish crescent of
illumination made outlines for a transom above the door. Maybe somebody
over there might be smart enough to tell him.

He went across, moving very slowly, and toiled up a flight of porch
steps. There were only four of the steps; he would have taken his oath
there were a full dozen of them. He fumbled at the door-jamb until he
found a knocker.

To his knocking the response was immediate. From the inner side there
was the scraping sound as of a heavy bolt being withdrawn. Next a lock
clicked, and then discreetly, almost cautiously, the door opened a few
inches and the face of a negro girl was revealed to him in the dim glow
of a heavily hooded light burning behind her in the entry hall. She
squinted hard at him.

"Whut you want yere this time o' night, mista?" she demanded. Her
manner was not hospitable; it bordered on the suspicious.

"I'm looking for an address," he began.

"Dis can't be it."

"I know that. But I thought maybe somebody here might help direct me."
From his growing exhaustion the intruder fairly was panting. "I'm sort
of lost."

"Oh, so tha's it? Wait a minute, then." Still holding the door slightly
ajar, she called rearward over her shoulder: "Miss Sissie! Oh, Miss
Sissie!"

"What is it?" The answer came from back of her.

"They's a ole, kinder feebled-up lookin' w'ite gen'elman out yere w'ich
he think he's lost his way."

"Wait, I'll come talk to him."

A middle-aged tall woman, who was dressed, so the stranger decided, as
though expecting stylish company, appeared now at the door and above
the servant's shoulder eyed him appraisingly. He tried to tell her his
mission, but his voice weakened on him and trailed off. He caught at
the door-casing; he felt dizzy.

The white woman elbowed the black one aside.

"Come on in," she ordered. "Get out of the way, can't you, Pansy?" She
threw this second command at her maid. "Don't you see he's about ready
to drop? Pick up his valise. There, that's it, mister. Just put your
weight on me."

She half-lifted him across the threshold and eased him down upon a sofa
in the hall. The negress closed and barred the door.

"Run make some hot coffee," her employer bade her. "Or maybe you'd
rather have a little liquor? I've got plenty of it in the house." She
addressed the slumped intruder.

"Nome, I never touch anything strong. But I reckin a cup of coffee
would taste good to me--if I'm not putting you out too much? You'll
please have to excuse me, ma'am, for breaking in on you this way, but
I--" Remembering his manners, he got his hat off in a little flurry of
confusion.

"Where were you trying to get to?"

With difficulty he brought his card forth from his pocket and she took
it from him and read what was written upon it.

"You're a good long two miles and a half from where you belong," she
told him sharply.

"But ain't this Bonaventure Avenue?"

"Yes, North Bonaventure. You came out Lawes Drive, didn't you?--the
wide street where the trolley-line is? Well, you should have gone south
when you turned off. Instead of that you came north. These people"--she
consulted the card again--"Philipson or whatever the name is--are they
friends of yours?"

"Well, yes, ma'am, and nome. I've never met them. But they're
taking in one old soldier during the reunion, the hotels and the
boarding-houses and all being so full up. And a gentleman at Tennessee
Headquarters--that's my headquarters, ma'am--he gave me that card and
sent me there."

"Send you alone?" Her angular shoulders, bare above a low-cut evening
gown, shrugged impatiently.

"Oh, nome, one of these here little Boy Scouts he came with me to show
me the way. You see, ma'am, it's rightly my own fault, my not being
all settled before dark. But I didn't get in on the steam-cars till
about six o'clock this evening and I didn't want to miss the opening
session at the big hall. So I went right there, packing my baggage
along with me, just as soon as I'd got me a snack of supper, me not
wanting to miss anything, as I was saying to you, ma'am. Then when
the speechmaking and all was over, me and this little Boy Scout--he'd
stayed right along with me at the hall--we put out to find where I was
to stay. But he couldn't hardly drag one foot behind the other. Poor
little wore-out fellow, I reckin he'd been running around all day.
So a few minutes ago I made him go on home, me figuring I could find
the house my own self. And--well, here I am, ma'am, imposing on your
kindness and mighty sorry to do it, too."

"Never mind that part of it."

"But just as soon as I can get a dram of hot coffee in me I expect I'll
feel stronger and then I'll be shoving along and not bother you any
more. I reckin that long train ride and the excitement and everything
must 'a' took it out of me, some way. There was a time when it wouldn't
have bothered me at all--not a bit. Still, I'll have to confess I'm
getting along, ma'am. I'll be eighty-four this coming ninth of August."

"Listen to me: You're not going to stir another inch tonight. You stay
right here and tomorrow morning I'll decide myself whether you're fit
to go trapesing off across to the other side of town."

"Oh, ma'am, I couldn't do that!"

"Why couldn't you?"

"But, ma'am, are you taking in any visitors during the reunion?"

"I wasn't aiming to." Her voice was grim. "But I'm fixing now to do
that very little thing, whether or no."

"But honest, now--I--" He scuffled with his tired feet. "It's mighty
good and mighty sweet of you, ma'am, but I'd hate to impose on you like
that."

"No imposition. There're five spare bedrooms in this house--and nobody
in any of them. And nobody going to be in any of them, either, while
you're here--except you. I think you'll be comfortable."

"I know I'd be comfortable but--"

"Then it's all settled. By the way, I don't know your name yet?"

"My name is Braswell--Nathan Braswell, late high private of the
rear rank in the Eighteenth Tennessee Infantry. But up at Forks
of Hatchie--that's my home town, ma'am, a little town up in West
Tennessee--they call me the Reverend Braswell, sometimes."

"Reverend?" Her eyelids narrowed. "Are you a minister?"

"Oh, nome. But sometimes when we're short on a preacher I make out to
take the pulpit and read the Scriptures and make a little kind of a
talk--not a regular sermon--just a little kind of a religious talk. And
I'm purty active in church work generally. So I reckin that's why some
people call me the Reverend Braswell. But I never use the entitlement
myself--it wouldn't be becoming in a layman."

"I see. You preach but you're not a preacher. I guess you practice what
you preach, too. You look like a good man, to me--and a good man can be
set down anywhere and not suffer by it; at least that's my opinion. So,
Mr. Braswell, right here is where you camp."

"Just as you say, ma'am." His surrender was complete now, his weariness
was, too. "Probably you're right--if I tried to go any further tonight
it's likely I wouldn't be much good tomorrow and I want to be spry and
fresh so I can knock around and see if I can't run across some of my
old pardners in the army. But excuse me again--you got my name but you
ain't told me yours?"

"Call me Miss Sissie, if you want to. That's what nearly everybody does
call me. Or else just plain Sis."

"All right, Miss Sissie, just as you say." He bowed to her with a grave
simplicity. "And I'm sure I'm very much beholden to you, ma'am. It
ain't every day that an old fellow like me is lucky enough to run into
such a lovely nice lady as you."

He drank his coffee, and, being helped to his feet, he went upstairs
with some aid from the lovely nice lady and presently was sound asleep
in a clean bed in what he regarded as a very fine bedroom indeed. Its
grandeur impressed him even through his tiredness.

Coming back down after seeing him properly bestowed, the mistress of
the house hailed the colored girl. "Pansy," she said, "this place is
out of business until further orders, understand?"

At that, Pansy seemed deeply puzzled. "But, Miss Sissie," she
expostulated, "don't you remember 'at a suttin party--you know, Mista
J. W. B.--is 'spectin' to be yere most any time wid--"

"Did you hear what I told you?" A quality of metallic harshness in Miss
Sissie's voice was emphasized.

"Yessum, but you know yo'se'f how that there party, Mista J. W. B., is.
He'll shore be dis'p'inted. He's liable raise Cain. He's--"

"Get him on the telephone; you know his number. Tell him this place
is closed for tonight and for every day and every night until further
notice from me. And tell the same thing to everybody else who calls up
or stops by during the reunion. Get me?" By her tone she menaced the
darky.

"Yassum."

"Then turn that hall light out."

       *       *       *       *       *

For three days Mr. Braswell abode under that roof. Frequently during
that time he remarked that he couldn't remember when he'd had a
pleasanter stay anywhere. Nor could it be said that Miss Sissie failed
in any possible effort to make the visit pleasant for him.

He limped down to breakfast next morning; to limp was the best he could
do. His entertainer gave her household staff a double surprise, first
by coming down to join him at the meal instead of taking her coffee
and rolls in her room and second by appearing not in negligée but in a
plain dark house-gown which accentuated rather than softened the square
contours of her face and the sharp lines in it. By daylight the two
had better opportunity to study each other than the somewhat hurried
meeting of the night before had afforded.

She saw in him a gentle tottery relic of a man with a pair of faded
unworldly old eyes looking out from a bland, wrinkly, rather empty
face. He saw in her a most kindly and considerate hostess. Privately he
decided she must have had plenty of sorrow in her time--something or
other about her told him that life had bestowed upon her more than her
proper share of hard knocks. He figured that living here alone in such
a big house--except for the servants she seemed to be quite alone--must
be lonesome for her, too.

As they sat down, just the two of them, he said, not apologetically
exactly but a bit timidly:

"I hope, ma'am, you don't mind if I say a grace at your table? I always
like to invoke the divine blessing before I break bread--seems like
to me it makes the victuals taste better. Or maybe"--he hesitated
politely--"maybe it's your custom to ask the blessing your own self?"

"You say it, please," she urged him in a curious strained fashion,
which, however, he did not notice, and lowered her head. She lifted
it once--to shoot a quick venomous glance at Pansy, who stood to
serve, and a convulsive giggle which had formed in Pansy's throat died
instantly. Then she bowed it again and kept it bowed while he asked God
to sanctify this food to their uses and to be merciful to all within
those walls and to all His children everywhere. For Jesus' sake, Amen!

She piled his plate abundantly and, for all his bodily infirmity, he
showed her a healthy appetite. He talked freely, she encouraging him by
proving a good listener. He was a widower with one married daughter.
Since his wife's death he had made his home with this daughter. Her
husband was a mighty fine man--not religious, but high-principled and
doing very well indeed as a banker, considering that Forks of Hatchie
was such a small town. He himself had been in the grain and feed
business for most of his life but was retired now. He'd never been much
of a hand for gadding over the world. Going to reunions once a year
was about the extent of his traveling around. In all the time since
the United Confederate Veterans had been formed he'd missed but one
reunion--that was the spring when his wife died.

"Minty--that's my daughter, ma'am--Minty, she didn't want me to come to
this one," he went on. "She was afraid for me to be putting out alone
on such a long trip 'way down here; she kept saying, Minty did, she
was afraid the excitement might be too much for me at my age. But I
says to her, I says, 'Minty, child, when my time comes for me to go I
don't ask anything better than that it should be whilst I'm amongst my
old comrades, with the sound of one of our old battle songs ringing in
my ears!' I says to her, 'Shucks, but what's the use of talking that
way! Nothing's going to happen to me. I can get there and I can get
back!' I says to her. 'Going to reunion makes me feel young and spry
all over again.' But, ma'am, I'm afraid Minty was right about it, this
time anyhow. I actually don't believe I'm going to be able to get back
down-town for today's doings--not for the morning's session anyway. I
have to own up to you that I feel all kind of let-down and no-account,
someway."

So through the forenoon he sat in an easy chair in an inner sitting-room
and Miss Sissie, abandoning whatever else she might have had to do,
read to him the accounts of the great event which filled column after
column of the morning paper. He dozed off occasionally but she kept
on reading, her voice droning across the placid quiet. Following the
dinner which came at midday, she prevailed on him to take a real
nap, and he stretched out on a sofa under a light coverlid which she
tucked about him and slept peacefully until four o'clock. Late in the
afternoon a closed car containing a couple--a man and a woman--stopped
in the alleyway behind the house and the driver came to the back door,
but Miss Sissie went out and gave him a message for his passengers and
he returned to his car and drove away. There were no other callers that
day.

Mr. Braswell fretted a little after supper over his inability to muster
up strength for getting to the auditorium, but somewhat was consoled by
her assurances that a good night's rest should put him in proper trim
for marching in the big parade next morning. By nine o'clock he was in
bed and Miss Sissie had a silent idle evening at home and seemed not
ungrateful for it.

On the second morning the ancient greeted her in what plainly was his
official wardrobe for parading. A frayed and threadbare butternut
jacket, absurdly short, with a little peaked tail sticking out behind
and a line of tarnished brass buttons spaced down its front, hung
grotesquely upon his withered framework. Probably it had fitted him
once; now it was acres too loose. Pinned to the left breast was a huge
badge, evidently home-made, of yellowed white silk, and lengthwise of
it in straggled letters worked with faded red floss ran the number
and name of his regiment. In his hand he carried a slouch-hat which
had been black once but now was a rusty brown, with a scrap of black
ostrich-plume fastened to its band by a brass token.

With trembling fingers he proudly caressed the badge.

"My wife made it for me out of a piece of her own wedding-dress nearly
thirty years ago," he explained. "I've worn it to every reunion since
then. It's funny how you put me in mind of my wife. Not that you look
like her nor talk like her either. She was kind of small and she had a
low voice and you're so much taller and your way of speaking is deeper
and carries further than hers did. And of course you can't be more
than half as old as she'd be if she'd lived. Funny, but you do remind
me of her, though. Still, I reckin that's easy to explain. All good
women favor each other some way even when they don't look alike. It's
something inside of them that does it, I judge--goodness and purity and
thinking Christian thoughts."

If she winced at that last his innocent, weakened old eyes missed it.
Anyhow the veteran very soon had personal cause for distress. He had
to confess that he wasn't up to marching. Leaving the dining-room, he
practically collapsed. He was heart-broken.

"Don't you worry," said Miss Sissie, in that masterful way of hers.
"Even if you're not able to turn out with the rest of them you're going
to see the parade. I can't send you down-town in my own car--it's--it's
broken down--and I can't go with you myself--I--I'm going to be busy.
But I can send you in a taxicab with a careful man to drive and you can
see the parade."

"That's mighty sweet of you--but then, I reckin it's your nature to
be sweet and thoughtful for other folks," he said gratefully. "But,
ma'am"--and doubt crept into his voice--"but ain't all the public hacks
likely to be engaged beforehand for today?"

"I happen to know the manager of the leading taxicab company here," she
told him. "He'll do what I say even if he has to take a rig away from
somebody else. I'll telephone him."

"But with the streets all crowded the way they'll be, won't it be hard
to find a place where I can watch the other boys marching by?" In his
eagerness he was childish.

"That'll be arranged, too," she stated. "As it so happens, I also know
the chief of police. I'll call him up and give him the number of the
taxi you're in and I'll guarantee one of his policemen will be on the
special lookout for you at the far end of the Drive to see to it that
you get a good place somewhere along the route."

"Seems like to me the most important people in this town must respect
you mighty highly!" he exclaimed happily. "Well, I guess it's that same
way everywhere--all kinds of people are bound to recognize a real lady
when they meet her and look up to her!"

"Oh, yes, there's one thing more." She added this as if by an
afterthought. "You needn't tell anybody you meet--any of your
old friends or any of the committeemen or anybody--where you're
stopping. You see, I didn't arrange to take in any visitors for the
reunion--there were reasons why I didn't care to take in anyone--and
now that I have you with me I wouldn't care for anybody connected
with the local arrangements to know about it. You understand, don't
you?--they might think I was presuming on their rights."

"Oh, yes'm, I understand," he said unsuspectingly. "It'll just be a
little secret between us if that's the way you'd rather it was. But I
couldn't rightly tell anybody anyhow--seeing that you ain't ever told
me what your last name is. I'd like to know it, too--I aim to write you
a letter after I get home."

"My name is Lamprey," she said. "Cecelia Lamprey. I don't hear it very
often myself--at least, not spoken out in full. And now I'd better
be ringing up those influential friends of mine--you mustn't be late
getting started."

       *       *       *       *       *

The same taxicab driver who drove him on this day came again on the
third day to take Miss Sissie's venerable house guest to his train. It
would appear that her car still was out of commission.

She did not accompany him to the station. Domestic cares would hold
her, she told him. She did not go to the front of the house to see him
off, either. Indeed a more observant person than Mr. Braswell might
have marveled that so constantly she had secluded herself indoors
during his visit; and not only indoors, but behind windows curtained
against the bright, warm Southern sunshine. They exchanged their
farewells in her living-room.

"I ain't never going to forget you," he told her. "If you'd been my own
daughter you couldn't 'a' treated me any nicer than what you have--and
me just an old stove-up spavined country-jake that you never saw before
in your life and probably never will see again. You ain't seen fit,
ma'am, to tell me much about yourself--seems like you let me do most of
the talking, and that suited me--but old as I am I know a perfect lady
when I see one and that's what you are, ma'am, and what always you must
have been and always will be--good-by and God bless you!"

Saying nothing, she bent in the attitude of one accepting a
benediction, and a moment later she was following him to the door and
watching him as he crept in his labored, faltering gait along the
entrance-hall. Under his arm was his luncheon to be eaten on the train;
she had with her own hands prepared and boxed it. She waited there on
the threshold until the hooded front door clicked behind him.

"Pansy," she called then toward the back of the house, and now her
voice had in it a customary rasping quality which, strangely, had been
almost altogether lacking from it these past two or three days. "You,
Pansy!"

"Yassum."

"You might call up that party that we turned down the other night and
tell him this place has reopened for business as usual."

       *       *       *       *       *

Approximately two weeks later, Mr. Randolph Embury, president of the
Forks of Hatchie People's Bank, wrote as follows to the mayor of that
city where the veterans had met:

  "Dear Mr. Mayor: You may possibly recall that we met in 1922
  while serving as delegates for our respective states at the
  Inter-Southern Commercial Congress in Norfolk? I am therefore
  taking advantage of our slight acquaintance and am trespassing upon
  your patience to ask a favor which means a great deal to my wife.

  "Her aged father, the late Nathan Braswell, attended the recent
  Confederate Reunion in your city. Almost immediately upon his
  arrival back at this place he suffered a stroke of paralysis.
  Within ten days a second stroke resulted fatally to him. The
  interment took place yesterday, the twenty-ninth inst. His loss in
  this community is very deeply mourned. He was the last old soldier
  left here.

  "Although rendered completely helpless by the first stroke, he
  remained almost entirely rational and coherent until the second
  one occurred. In this stage of his illness he spoke repeatedly
  of his experiences while at the reunion. He was a guest in the
  private home of one who must have been a most cultured and
  charming lady--undoubtedly a lady of position and affluence. By
  her graciousness and her zealous care of him and her constant
  ministrations to his comfort she made a deep impression upon
  him. He was most anxious that she should know of his gratitude,
  and repeatedly he charged us to write her, telling how much he
  appreciated the attentions shown him.

  "Naturally, during his illness and until after the interment
  neither my wife nor myself had much time for letter-writing.
  But this morning Mrs. Embury wrote to this lady, thanking her
  in her dead father's name and in ours and telling her that with
  practically his last conscious breath he spoke affectionately of
  her and paid tribute to her splendid womanly qualities and even
  uttered a little prayer for her well-being. He was a very devout
  man. That letter I enclose with this one, but in an unaddressed
  envelop. Mrs. Embury, of course, is most anxious that it should
  reach the intended recipient promptly.

  "The reason for not addressing it you will understand when I tell
  you that my father-in-law could not remember his benefactress's
  last name except that it began with an 'L' and sounded something
  like 'Lampey' or 'Lambry.' He referred to her always as 'Miss
  Sissie,' which I would judge was her familiar name among more
  intimate friends. He could not remember the name of the street upon
  which she resided. However, he did describe the residence as being
  a very large and very handsome one, standing in a somewhat secluded
  part of the outskirts and not far from where a railroad track and
  an overhead viaduct were.

  "This, then, is the favor I would ask of you: If the lady is
  as prominently connected as I had reason to believe from Mr.
  Braswell's statements, I assume you know her already. If not, I
  take it that it should not be a very difficult matter to locate one
  whose character and attainments must have given her a high standing
  among your good citizens. So I am asking you to see to it that the
  enclosed letter is put at once into her hands.

  "Thanking you in advance for any trouble or inconvenience to which
  you may be put in carrying out our wishes, I remain,

    "Yours most sincerely,
      "RANDOLPH EMBURY."

And within four days got back the following reply:

      "Mayor's Office, June 2.

  "Dear Sir:

  "Yours received and contents carefully noted. In reply to same
  would say that while ready at any time to serve you and your good
  wife in every way possible, yet in this case I am put in a delicate
  attitude and fear you also may be put in one should I undertake to
  fulfill your desire.

  "Undoubtedly the person that your late father-in-law had in mind
  was one Cecelia Lamprey, better known as 'Sis.' But not by the
  widest stretch of imagination could anyone think of her as a
  'lady.' She is the proprietress of a most notorious assignation
  house located on North Bonaventure Avenue, this city, and according
  to my best information and belief, has always been a woman of loose
  morals and bad repute. I might add that having been elected on a
  reform ticket and being committed to the task of ridding our city
  of evil, I am at present setting on foot an effort to close up her
  establishment, which has until lately enjoyed secret 'protection,'
  and to drive her from our midst.

  "Accordingly, I am constrained to believe that, being probably
  semi-delirious, the lately deceased, your esteemed father-in-law,
  must have made a mistake. I assume that he had 'Sis' Lamprey's
  house pointed out to him and in his ravings got it confused with
  the domicile where he was housed during his sojourn among us. It
  is not conceivable to me that a man such as you describe would,
  while in his sober senses, set foot inside an establishment so
  readily recognizable at a glance as being absolutely disreputable,
  let alone remain there for any appreciable period of time. It is
  equally incredible to think of 'Sis' opening her doors to any
  decent person or for any worthy purpose.

  "In view of these facts I am constrained to believe your wife
  would shrink from any contact or any communication with such an
  individual. I am therefore taking the liberty of holding her letter
  on my desk until you and she have had opportunity to consider
  this embarrassing situation and to decide what you should do. My
  advice is that you instruct me to return the letter to you at once
  and consider the incident closed. However, I await your further
  instruction.

    (Signed)   "JASON BRODERICK, Mayor."

To which the following reply was immediately dispatched by wire:

  "Nevertheless, on behalf of my wife and myself, kindly be so good
  as immediately to deliver the letter in question to the lady in
  question."




THE ORDER OF THE BATH

[Decoration]


It seemed like everything that was happening that week happened to
the Gridleys. Substantially, these were Mrs. Gridley's own words in
speaking of the phenomena.

To begin with, their waitress quit practically without any warning
at all. Afflicted by that strange and sudden migratory impulse which
at times affects most of the birds and many of the hired help, she
walked out between two suns. In the second place, the water famine
reached a point where the board of trustees forbade the use of water
for all-over bathing purposes or for wetting-down lawns or washing cars
or sprinkling streets or spraying flower-beds even; and Mr. Gridley,
as one of the trustees, felt it incumbent upon him to set a proper
example before the rest of the community by putting his own household
upon the strictest of rations, abluently speaking. In the third place,
Mr. Jeffreys Boyce-Upchurch, the eminent English novelist, became their
guest. And fourthly, although not occurring in this order, the Gridleys
took on a butler of the interesting name of Launcelot Ditto.

To a considerable extent, three of these events were interrelated. The
drought which had brought on the shortage in the village reservoir
was the isolated exception, a manifestation of freaky nature and of
absolutely unprecedented weather conditions. But the others were
more or less coordinated. If their old waitress had not quit on them
the Gridleys would not have been in the market for a new servant to
fill the vacancy, and if Mr. Boyce-Upchurch had not been coming to
stay with them it was possible she might not have quit at all. There
was a suspicion that she was influenced by a private objection to so
much company in the heat of the summer, Mrs. Gridley's mother and
sister from Baltimore, the latter bringing her little boy with her,
having just concluded a two weeks' stay; and if it had not been Mr.
Boyce-Upchurch who was coming, but some less important person, the
Gridleys would have been content with hiring for the succession one who
also was a female and home-grown, or if not exactly home-grown, one
belonging to almost any of the commoner Nordic stocks--say Scandinavian
or Celtic--whereas it was felt that the advent of a Boyce-Upchurch
called for something of an especially rich and fruity imported nature
in the line of butlers. At least, such was the language employed by
Mrs. Gridley's brother, Mr. Oliver Braid, in describing, this phase of
the issue. He--young Mr. Braid--was the only member of the household
who declined to take the situation seriously. In this regard he stood
quite alone. Mr. Gridley took it seriously, as, to a more or less
degree, did the neighbors also. But Mrs. Gridley took it most seriously
of all.

Its seriousness began to lay hold upon her in the morning on a Monday,
which proverbially is a bothersome day for housewives anyhow, when
Miss Rena Belle Titworthy, the recording secretary of the Ingleglade
Woman's Club and its only salaried officer, called to break the news to
her, it being that in the judgment of a majority of the active workers
in the club Mrs. Gridley should have the distinguished pleasure of
entertaining Mr. Boyce-Upchurch on the occasion of his impending visit.
In a more vulgar circle of life the same thing has been termed passing
the buck.

"But," expostulated Mrs. Gridley, "but--of course I feel flattered and
I am sure Henry will, too, when he comes home tonight and hears about
it--but I'm afraid we couldn't make such a prominent man comfortable.
Our house is rather small and all that, and besides there's Olga
having packed up and left only last night and all that. Really, don't
you think, Miss Rena Belle, that he would prefer to go to the hotel
where he could be--you know--quieter and more to himself? Or to Mrs.
Wainwright's? She's the president of the club and she's the madam
chairman of the executive committee besides, and naturally the pleasure
of having Mr. Boyce-Upchurch should go to her. Her house is a mansion,
almost, while we--"

Miss Titworthy caught her up right there.

"No," said Miss Titworthy firmly. Miss Titworthy had authority about
her and a considerable distinction. She was large and deep-chested and
combined in her manner the magisterial and the managerial and, subtly,
the maternal. She had all that a motherly woman should have, except
children. And, as just stated, she was large, while on the other hand
Mrs. Gridley was slight and, upon the whole, plastic by temperament,
not to say bordering on the yielding. And bulk, in such cases, counts.

"Pardon me," said Miss Titworthy still more firmly, "pardon me, my
dear, but no. Madam Chairman Wainwright is closing up their place to
go to their other place in the Berkshires; you must have known that.
Probably you forgot it. And the hotel is quite out of the question.
I had a letter only yesterday from Mr. Boyce-Upchurch, written by
him personally--it seems he doesn't carry a secretary with him on
his tour--saying he preferred stopping at some private home. He
mentioned the inconveniences of American hotels and something about
their exceedingly high rates. I'm going to keep it as a souvenir. And
so, what with Madam Chairman Wainwright closing up and you being the
first vice-president--well, there you are, aren't you?" concluded Miss
Titworthy with a gesture which was meant to be a death blow to further
argument.

"And then the water being shut off--I'm thinking of that, too," said
Mrs. Gridley, but in a weakening tone. "Henry had the plumber come and
disconnect all three of the bathtubs. He said he wasn't going to put
temptation in the way of his own family or himself, either. I know lots
of people are doing it on the sly--using a hose, too--but I can't even
have a little water in a sprinkling can for my poor withered flowers.
Look at them out of that window there--just literally drying up. And
we're sending all the wash, even the flat pieces, to the Eagle Laundry.
And Henry is going to his club in town for a bath every day, and I'm
doing the best I can with the wash-basin and a sponge, and the way
Nora--that's my cook's name--and Delia, the waitress--now that Olga
has gone, Delia's the only other girl we've got left--the way those
two carry on and complain you'd think I was personally responsible for
the fact that not a drop of rain has fallen in over two months. And
the English being such great hands for their tubs and all, and Mr.
Boyce-Upchurch being an Englishman and all, why, I'm honestly afraid,
Miss Rena Belle, that he'll be awfully put out.

"I dessay he'll be able to accommodate himself to a condition over
which none of us has any control," stated Miss Titworthy. "He'll
arrive Wednesday afternoon on the five o'clock boat. He asked that he
be met with a car. I dessay you'll be wanting to give a little dinner
to him Wednesday evening. I don't know what he'll want to do Thursday
morning--be driven around, I imagine. And Thursday afternoon there's
the reception at the Woman's Club, and his lecture is that night, and
Friday he leaves for Trenton where he has his next date on Saturday. He
did write something about preferring to be ridden over to Trenton."

"I could take him over myself," said Mrs. Gridley, her citadel
undermined and she rapidly capitulating, "if he doesn't mind going in a
two-seated runabout."

"There'll be no trouble about the car," stated Miss Titworthy. "I
dessay someone will proffer the use of a touring car."

"Well, that point is settled then," agreed Mrs. Gridley, now entirely
committed to the undertaking. "But I must get somebody in and broken in
to take Olga's place between now and Wednesday. Really that gives me
only today and tomorrow, and help is so hard to get, you've no idea,
Miss Titworthy! I suppose I'd better run into town this afternoon and
go to the employment agencies. No, I can't,--there's my bridge lesson.
And tomorrow is the Fergus' tea. I can't go then, either. I promised
Mrs. Fergus I'd pour. I suppose I'll have to get Henry or my brother
Oliver to do it. But neither one of them would know how to pick out a
girl, provided there's any choice at the agencies to pick from--oh,
dear!"

"Had you thought of a butler?" inquired Miss Titworthy.

"A butler?"

"Yes, instead of a maid. You'll pardon the suggestion but I was
thinking that Mr. Boyce-Upchurch being a foreigner and accustomed, of
course, to butlers, and a butler giving a sort of air--a tone, as it
were--to a household, that perhaps--well--"

They had fallen on fertile ground, those seeds. They were sprouting,
germinating. Before the massive shoulders of the Ingleglade Woman's
Club's efficient recording secretary had vanished down the bowery and
winding reaches of Edgecliff Avenue they were putting forth small green
speculative shoots through Mrs. Gridley's mind. Always and ever, from
the very first days of her married life, Mrs. Gridley had cherished in
the back of her mind a picture of an establishment in which the butler,
a figure of dignity and poise and gray striped trousers in the daytime
but full-dress by night, would be the chief of staff. As what woman
has not? And now for the gratifying of that secret ambition she had an
excuse and a reason.

       *       *       *       *       *

Section Two of this narrative brings us to another conversation. At
this stage the narrative seems somehow to fall naturally into sections,
but one has a premonition that toward the last it will become a thing
of cutbacks and close-ups and iris-ins and fade-outs, like a movie. It
brings us to this other conversation, which passed over the telephone
between Mrs. Gridley and her brother Mr. Oliver Braid.

"Well, Dumplings," said that gentleman, speaking at noon of Tuesday
from his office, "the hellish deed is done!"

"You got one then?" she answered eagerly.

"Got one? Madam, you wrong me and you low-rate him. I got the One and
only One--the Original One. The only misleading thing about him is his
name. Be prepared for a pleasant shock. It's Launcelot Ditto. I ask you
to let that soak into your tissues and be absorbed by the system. Only
Ditto means more of the same and if I'm any judge, there aren't any
more at home like him and there never will be. But the Launcelot part
fits like a union suit.

"Oh, girl, I'm telling you he's got everything, including the adenoids.
Not the puny domestic brand of our own faulty and deficient land, mind
you, but the large, super-extra-fine export, golden-russet adenoid of
that favored island whose boast is that Britons never shall be slaves
except to catarrh. And he's as solemn as a Masonic funeral. And he
stepped right out of a book by way of the stage. He ought to be serving
strawberries and Devonshire cream on the terrace to the curate of St.
Ives and the dear old Dowager Duchess of What-you-may-call-'em, while
the haw-haw blooms in the hedgerow. He ought to be coming on at the
beginning of Act One to answer the telephone and pat the sofa pillows
smooth and fold up 'The Pink 'Un,' and sigh deeply because the Young
Marster is going to the dogs. He ought to be outlining the plot to a
housekeeper in rustling black silk named Meadows."

"Ollie Braid, are you delirious?"

"Not at all. I am dazed, dazzled, blinded, but I am not delirious. I
can half shut my eyes and see him in his hours of ease sitting in our
buttery perusing that sprightly volume with full-page illustrations
entitled 'The Stately Homes of Old England.' Sounds pretty good, eh
what? Good--hell! He's perfect. He certainly ought to do a lot for us
socially over there in Ingleglade. I can half shut 'em again and see
the local peasantry turning a lovely pea-green with envy as he issues
forth on the front lawn to set up the archery butts so that we may
practice up on our butting. That's another place where the buttery will
come in handy."

"He was willing to come out, then?"

"Well, at first he did balk a little on the idea of demeaning himself
by accepting a position with the lower or commuting classes. The
country, yes; the town, perhaps, but the environs--well, hardly. That
was his attitude. But with my lilting love-song I won him, he-siren
that I am. I told him Ingleglade was not really suburban but merely
outlying, if one gets what one means. That wasn't deception, that was
diplomacy. Anyhow, haven't we got some of the outlyingest real-estate
dealers in the entire state of New Jersey? Do we not combine all
the drawbacks of the city with few or none of the advantages of the
country? I often sit and wonder whence comes this magic power of mine
for bending strong natures to my will. The crowning stroke was when
I told him Boyce-Upchurch was so shortly to honor us. That won him.
He admires Boyce-Upchurch tremendously. Not his books--he hasn't read
'em--but it seems he knows Boyce-Upchurch's uncle, who's an archduke or
a belted earl or something well up among the face-cards."

"You talk too much, Oliver. You think you're funny and you aren't."

"Oh, but, madam--"

"Shut up a minute! He has references, of course?"

"Fair lady, sweet dame, I plight you my solemn word that with the
references he's got from noble British families he could be our
ambassador to the Court of St. James the day after he took out his
naturalization papers. He's temporarily unattached but that's because
he hasn't been able to find anybody worthy of him. He's only taking us
on trial. Why hark ye, lass, he used to work for the 'Un'rable 'Urrible
'Ubbs. He's got the documents to prove it."

"The what?"

"I'm merely telling you what he said. It didn't sound like a name to
me, either, at first. But now it's beginning to grow on me; I may make
a song out of it."

"When will he be out?"

"This very night. I'm chaperoning him personally. We are to meet at
the ferry, and I'm to wear a primrose in my buttonhole in case he's
forgotten how I look. I'm reading up now on the history of the Norman
Conquest. I want to be prepared to meet him on his own ground should he
care for conversation."

"Ollie, you always were an idiot."

"Dear wench, 'tis a family failing. I have a sister, a flower-like slip
of a thing, but, alas, she suffers from pollen in the pod."

"And what's more, she's going to give you a hard slap the first
chance." Over the line her voice took on an uncertain tone. "Of course
I know you're exaggerating frightfully but--"

"As regards Launcelot, you couldn't exaggerate. He confounds the powers
of description. He baffles the most inventive imagination. He--"

"Oh, do listen! All at once I'm beginning to worry about Norah. I
hadn't thought of her until right now."

"What of Norah?"

"Well, from what you say and even making allowances for your romancing,
this man must be very English. And Norah's so--so Irish. Delia is, too,
for that matter. But especially Norah."

"Strange, but I had noticed that myself about our Norah."

"Notice it?--I should say. She calls the English--what is it she calls
them?"

"Black-and-Tans. Also Saxon oppressors. Also a name which is pronounced
by hissing first and then gritting the teeth in a bitter manner. I
think it's an old Gaelic word signifying Oliver Cromwell. You may
recall having heard that Norah has a brother who had some personal
misunderstanding with the authorities in Dublin in the year 1916.
He became at that time very seriously antagonized toward them. And
it looks to me as though Norah was inclined to take sides in the
controversy."

"Naturally. But she may make trouble. I hadn't thought of that before.
And if he should happen to do anything or say anything to arouse her or
if she should take one of her grudges against Mr. Boyce-Upchurch--oh,
I'm scared, Oliver!"

"Prithee be blithe and gay. Norah and I understand each other. We have
a bond between us or will have one as soon as I tell her privately that
I'm contributing to a fund for financing an uprising on the part of
those poor down-trodden Hindus. Immediately on my arrival this evening
I'll take Norah apart and--"

"You'll do what?"

"Don't worry. I'm going to put her back together again, so you'd never
notice it. But I'll take her apart and beg her for my sake to remain
calm, cool, and collected. You leave Norah to me."

"I suppose I'll have to; there's nothing else to be done. And, Oliver,
you may be a born idiot but just the same you're a dear for going to
all this trouble on my account and I do appreciate it. There--I'm
throwing you a kiss by wire."

"Kindly confine yourself to appreciating Launcelot--that, God wot, will
be reward enough for me, fond heart. And in case either our butler or
our guest, or both of them, should desire to call the tenants in from
the estate, all to stand and join in singing the Royal Anthem, please
remember how it goes--God Save the King until Norah's Brother Can Get
at Him!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Ditto shifted from civilian garb and served dinner that evening. It
became a meal that was more than a meal; it became a ceremonial. There
was a formalism to it, there was pomp and circumstance. The passing
of a dish was invested with a ritualistic essence. Under Ditto's
ministrations so simple a dessert as cold rice pudding took on a new
meaning. One wondered what Ditto could have done with a fancy ice. One
felt that merely with a loaf of bread and a jug of wine and none of
the other ingredients of Old Omar's recipe for a pleasant evening, he
nevertheless could have fabricated the plausible illusion of a banquet
of courses. Mrs. Gridley was thrilled to her marrows--possibly a trifle
self-conscious but thrilled.

After dinner and a visit to the service wing, Mr. Braid sought out
his sister on the veranda where she was doing what most of her
sister-villagers of parched Ingleglade were doing at that same
hour--wishing for rain.

"Well, Dumplings," he said, "you may continue to be your own serene
self. In me behold a special plenipotentiary doing plenipotenching by
the day, week, or job, satisfaction guaranteed or money refunded. I've
just had a little heart-to-heart chat with Norah and there isn't a
cloud in the sky as large as a man's hand."

"I wish there were--this terrible drought!" she said, her thoughts
divided between the two concerns uppermost in her mind. "What did you
say to her?"

"I approached the subject with my customary tact. With a significant
glance toward the visiting nobleman I reminded Norah that blood was
thicker than water, to which she piously responded by thanking God for
three thousand miles of the water. Still, I think she's going to keep
the peace. For the moment, she's impressed, or shall I say fascinated.
Ditto is high-hatting her something scandalous, and she's taking
it. For all our Norah's democratic principles she evidently carries
in her blood the taint of a lurking admiration for those having an
aristocratic bearing, and Ditto is satisfying the treasonable instinct
which until now she has had no chance to gratify--at least, not while
living with us. As for Delia, that shameless hussy is licking the spoon
and begging for more. She's a traitor to United Ireland and the memory
of Daniel O'Connell.

"Mind you, I'm not predicting that the spell will endure. The ancient
feud may blaze up. We may yet have a race war in our kitchen. For
all you know, you may at this moment be sitting pretty on a seething
volcano; but unless something unforeseen occurs I think I may safely
promise you peace and harmony, during the great event which is about to
ensue in our hitherto simple lives.

"For, as I said just now, Norah is under a thrall--temporary perhaps
but a thrall just the same. Well, I confess to being all thralled-up
myself. That certainly was a high-church dinner--that one tonight
was. Several times I was almost overcome by a well-nigh irrepressible
temptation to get up and ask Ditto to take my place and let me pass a
few things to him."

"I don't believe there ever has been such a drought," said Mrs. Gridley.

"Ho, hum, well, I suppose we'll all get used to this grandeur in time,"
said Mr. Braid. "I wonder if he is going to put on the full vestments
every night no matter whether we have company or not? I wish on nights
when we do have very special company he'd loan me his canonicals and
wear mine. I expect he'd regard it as presuming if I asked for the
address of his tailor? What do you think, Dumplings?"

"I wish it would rain," said Mrs. Gridley. "And I hope and pray
Norah doesn't fly off into one of her tantrums. I wonder does Mr.
Boyce-Upchurch like Thousand Islands dressing or the Russian better?
What were you just saying, Ollie?"

Mr. Braid tapped his skull with his forefinger.

"Ah, the family failing," he murmured, "that dread curse which afflicts
our line! With some of the inmates it day by day grows worse. And
there's nothing to be done--it's congenital."

"I expect the best thing to do is just to take a chance on the
Russian," said Mrs. Gridley. "If he doesn't like it, why he doesn't
like it and I can't help myself, I didn't catch what you said just
then, Ollie?"

"Abstraction overcomes the victim; the mind wanders; the reason
totters," said Mr. Braid. "By the way, I wonder if Ditto would care to
have his room brightened with a group view of the Royal Family--the
King in shooting costume, the Queen wearing the sort of hat that the
King would probably like to shoot; the lesser members grouped about?
You know the kind of thing I mean."

"Would you start off tomorrow night with clams or a melon?" asked Mrs.
Gridley.

"Or perhaps he'd prefer an equestrian photograph of the Prince of
Wales," said Mr. Braid. "I know where I can pick up one second hand.
I'll stop by tomorrow and price it. It's a very unusual pose. Shows the
Prince _on_ the horse."

"Melon, I guess," said Mrs. Gridley. "Most Englishmen like cantaloups,
I hear. They're not so common among them."

"My duty being done I think I shall retire to my chamber to take a
slight, not to say sketchy bath in a shaving mug," said Mr. Braid.

"I wish it would rain," said Mrs. Gridley.

       *       *       *       *       *

Numbers of friendly persons met Mr. Boyce-Upchurch at the boat that
Wednesday afternoon. Miss Titworthy inevitably was there and riding
herd, so to speak, on a swaying flock of ewes of the Ingleglade
Woman's Club. She organized a sort of impromptu welcoming committee at
the ferry-house. Mrs. Gridley missed this, though. She had to stay
outside with her runabout. Her husband and brother--the latter had
escorted Mr. Boyce-Upchurch to One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street
from the University Club where he had been a guest of someone since
finishing his New England swing the week before--were with the visiting
celebrity. They surrendered him over to Miss Titworthy, who made him
run the gantlet of the double receiving line and introduced him to all
the ladies. Of these a bolder one would seek to detain him a minute
while she told him how much she admired his books and which one of them
she admired most, but an awed and timider one would merely say she was
_so_ glad to meet him, having heard of him _so_ often. Practically
every timider one said this. It was as though she followed a memorized
formula. Now and then was a bolder bold one who breasted forward at him
and cooed in the manner of a restrained but secretly amorous hen-pigeon.

Mr. Boyce-Upchurch bore up very well under the strain of it all.
Indeed, he seemed rather to expect it, having been in this country for
several months now and having lectured as far west as Omaha. He plowed
along between the greeters, a rather short and compact figure but very
dignified, with his monocle beaming ruddy in the rays of the late
afternoon sun and with a set smile on his face, and he murmuring the
conventional words.

The ceremonial being concluded, the two gentlemen reclaimed him and
led him outside, and there he met Mrs. Gridley, who drove him up the
Palisades Road, her husband and brother following in a chartered taxi
with Mr. Boyce-Upchurch's luggage. There was quite a good deal of
luggage, including a strapped steamer-rug and two very bulging, very
rugged-looking kit bags and a leather hat-box and a mysterious flat
package in paper wrappings which Mr. Braid told Mr. Gridley he was sure
must contain a framed steel engraving of the Death of Nelson.

Mr. Braid pattered on:

"For a truly great and towering giant of literature, our friend seems
very easy to control in money matters. Docile--that's the word for it,
docile. He let me tip the porter at the club for bringing down these
two tons of his detachable belongings, and on the way up Madison Avenue
he deigned to let me jump out and go in a shop and buy him an extra
strap for his blanket roll, and he graciously suffered me to pay for a
telegram he sent from the other side, and also for that shoe-shine and
those evening papers he got on the boat. Told me he hadn't learned to
distinguish our Yankee small change. Always getting the coins mixed up,
he said. Maybe he hasn't had any experience."

"Rather brusk in his way of speaking to a fellow," admitted Mr.
Gridley. "You might almost call it short. And rather fussy about
getting what he wants, I should say. Still, I suppose he has a great
deal on his mind."

"Launcelot will fairly dote on him," said Mr. Braid. "Mark my words,
Launcelot is going to fall in love with him on the spot."

Meanwhile, Mrs. Gridley was endeavoring to explain to Mr. Boyce-Upchurch
why it was that in a town lying practically on a river so large and so
wide as the Hudson there could be a water shortage. He couldn't appear
to grasp it. He declared it to be extraordinary.

This matter of a water shortage apparently lingered in his mind, for
half an hour later following tea, as he was on the point of going
aloft to his room to dress for dinner he called back to his host from
half-way up the stairs:

"I say, Gridley, no water in the taps, your wife tells me.
Extraordinary, what? Tell you what: I'll be needing a rub-down
tonight--stuffy climate here and all that. So later on just let one of
your people fetch up a portable tub to my room and bring along lots of
water, will you? The water needn't be hot. Like it warm, though. Speak
about it, will you, to that slavey of yours."

Mrs. Gridley gave a quick little wincing gasp and a hunted look about
her. But Delia had gone to carry Mr. Boyce-Upchurch's waistcoat
upstairs. The episode of the waistcoat occurred a few minutes before,
immediately after the guest had been ushered into the house.

"Frightfully warm," he remarked on entering the living-room. "Tell me,
is America always so frightfully warm in summer?" Then, without waiting
for an answer, he said: "Think I must rid myself of the wescut. All
over perspiration, you know." So saying, he took off first his coat and
next his waistcoat and hung the waistcoat on a chair and then put the
coat back on again. Still, as Mr. Braid remarked in an undertone to
nobody in particular, it wasn't exactly as though Mr. Boyce-Upchurch
had stripped to his shirt-sleeves because, so Mr. Braid pointed out to
himself, the waistband of the trousers came up so high, especially at
the back, and the suspenders--he caught himself here and mentally used
the word "braces" instead--the braces were so nice and broad that you
didn't see enough of the shirt really to count.

Dinner was at seven-thirty, with twelve at the table and place cards,
and Delia impressed to aid Ditto at serving, and the finest show of
flowers that Mrs. Gridley's dusty and famished garden could yield. She
had spent two hours that afternoon picking the least wilted of the
blossoms and designing the decorative effects. Little things occurred,
one or two of them occurring before the dinner got under way.

Ditto approached the lady of the house. "Madame," he said throatily, in
the style of one who regally bears yet more regal tidings, "madame, Mr.
Boyce-Upchurch doesn't care for cocktails. 'E would prefer a sherry and
bittez."

"Oh!" exclaimed Mrs. Gridley in a small panic of dismay. "Oh, I'm so
sorry but I'm afraid there isn't any sherry."

"There's cooking sherry out in the kitchen, sis," said Mr. Braid, who
stood alongside her smiling happily about nothing apparently. "Tackled
it myself the other day when I was feeling daredevilish."

"But the bitters--whatever they are!"

"Give him some of that cooking sherry of yours and he'll never miss the
bitters."

"Sh-h-h," she warned, "he might hear you."

He didn't, though. At that moment Mr. Boyce-Upchurch was in conversation
with Mrs. Thwaites and her husband from two doors away. He was speaking
to them of the hors d'oeuvres which had just been passed, following the
cocktails. The Thwaites were fellow countrymen of his; their accent had
betrayed them. Perhaps he felt since they spoke his language that he
could be perfectly frank with them. Frankness appeared to be one of his
outstanding virtues.

It now developed that the relish attracted him and at the same time
repelled. Undeniably, Norah's fancy ran to the concoction of dishes,
notably, appetizers and salads, which one read about in certain
standard women's magazines. Her initial offering this night had novelty
about it, with a touch of mystery. Its general aspect suggested that
Norah had drowned a number of inoffensive anchovies in thick mayonnaise
and then, repenting of the crime, had vainly endeavored to resuscitate
her victims with grated cheese.

"Messy-looking, eh?" Mr. Boyce-Upchurch was pointing an accusing
finger at the coiled remains on a bit of toast which Mrs. Thwaites had
accepted, and he was speaking in a fairly clear voice audible to any
who might be near at hand. "Glad I didn't take one. Curious fancy, eh
what, having the savory before dinner instead of afterwards--that is,
if the ghastly thing is meant to be a savory?"

Major Thwaites mumbled briefly in a military way. It might have been
an affirmative mumble or almost any other variety of mumble; you could
take your choice. Mrs. Thwaites, biting at her lower lip, went over
and peered out of a front window. She had an unusually high color, due
perhaps to the heat.

That, substantially, was all that happened in the preliminary stages of
the dinner party. There was one more trifling incident which perhaps is
worthy to be recorded but this did not occur until the second course
was brought on. The second course was terrapin. Mrs. Gridley was a
Marylander and she had been at pains to order real diamond-backs from
down on the Eastern Shore and personally to make the stew according to
an old recipe in her family. Besides, the middle of July was not the
regular season for terrapin and it had required some generalship to
insure prime specimens, and so naturally Mrs. Gridley was proud when
the terrapin came on, with the last of her hoarded and now vanishing
store of Madeira accompanying it in tiny glasses.

Mr. Boyce-Upchurch sniffed at the fragrance arising from the dish
which had been put before him. He sniffed rather with the air of a
reluctant patient going under the ether, and with his spoon he stirred
up from the bottom fragments of the rubbery black meat and bits of the
queer-shaped little bones and then he inquired what this might be. He
emphasized the '_this_.'

"It's terrapin," explained Mrs. Gridley, who had been fluttering
through a small pause for him to taste the mixture and give his
verdict. "One of the special dishes of my own state."

"And what's terrapin?" he pressed. She told him.

"Oh," he said, "sort of turtle, eh? I shan't touch it. Take it away,
please,"--this to the reverential Ditto hovering in the immediate
background.

From this point on, the talk ceased to be general. In spots, the dinner
comparatively was silent, then again in other spots conversation
abounded. From his seat near the foot, Mr. Braid kept casting
interpolations in the direction of the farther end of the table.
Repeatedly his sister squelched him. At least, she tried to do so.
He seemed to thrive on polite rebuffs, though. He sat between the
Thwaites, and Major Thwaites was almost inarticulate, as was usual with
him, and Mrs. Thwaites said very little, which was not quite so usual
a thing with her, and Mr. Braid apparently felt that he must sow his
ill-timed whimsicalities broad-cast rather than bestow them upon the
dead eddy of his immediate neighborhood.

For instance, when Miss Rachel Semmes, who was one of Ingleglade's most
literary women, bent forward from her favored position almost directly
opposite the guest of honor and said, facing eagerly toward him over
the table, "Oh, Mr. Boyce-Upchurch, talk to me of English letters," Mr.
Braid broke right in:

"Let's all talk about English letters," he suggested. "My favorite one
is 'Z.' Well, I like 'H,' too, fairly well. But to me, after all, 'Z'
is the most intriguing. What's your favorite, everybody?"

Here, as later, his attempted levity met deservedly the interposed
barrier of Miss Semmes' ignoring shoulders. She twisted in her place,
turning her back on him, the more forcibly to administer the reproof
and with her eyes agleam behind her glasses and her lips making
little attentive sucked-in gasping sounds, she harkened while Mr.
Boyce-Upchurch discoursed to her of English letters with frequent
references to his own contributions in that great field.

As the traveled observer in his own time may have noted, there is a
type of cultured Britisher who regards it as stupid to appear smart
in strange company, and yet another type who regards it as smart to
appear stupid. Mr. Boyce-Upchurch fell into neither grouping. He spoke
with a fluency, with an authoritative definiteness, with a finality,
which checked all counter-thoughts at their sources. In his criticisms
of this one and that one, he was severe or he was commendatory, as
the merits of the individual case required. He did not give opinions
so much as he rendered judgments. There was about him a convincing
firmness. There was never even a trace, a suggestion of doubt. There
were passages delivered with such eloquence that almost it seemed
to some present as though Mr. Boyce-Upchurch must be quoting from a
familiar manuscript. As, if the truth must be known, he was. Still, had
not all of intellectual America as far west as Omaha acclaimed "Masters
of the Modern English Novel, with Selected Readings from the Author's
Own Books" as a noteworthy platform achievement?

Thus the evening passed, and the Gridleys' dinner party. All had
adjourned back again to the living-room, where coffee and cigarettes
were being handed about, when from without came gusts of a warm swift
wind blowing the curtains and bringing a breath of moistness.

"Oh, I believe it's really fixing to rain," declared Mrs. Gridley,
hopefully, and on this, as if in confirmation, they all heard a grumble
of distant summer thunder off to the northwest.

At that, Mrs. Thwaites said she and the Major really must run
home--they'd come away leaving all the windows open. So they bade
everybody good night--the first ones to go.

Mr. Braid saw them to the door. In fact he saw them as far as the front
porch.

"Coming to the lecture tomorrow night, I suppose," he said. "Rally
around a brother Briton, and all that sort of thing?"

"I am not," said little Mrs. Thwaites, with a curious grim twist in her
voice. "I heard it tonight."

"Perishing blighter!" said the Major; which was quite a long speech for
the Major.

"I'm ashamed!" burst out Mrs. Thwaites in a vehement undertone. "Aren't
you ashamed, too, Rolf?"

"Rarther!" stated the Major. He grunted briefly but with passion.

"Fault of any non-conformist country," pleaded young Mr. Braid, finely
assuming mortification. "Raw, crude people--that sort of thing.
Well-meaning but crude! Appalling ignorance touching on savories. No
bitters in the home. No--"

"Don't make fun," said Mrs. Thwaites. "You know I don't mean that."

"Surely, surely you are not referring to our notable guest? Oh,
Perfidious Albinos!" He registered profound grief.

"I am not." Her words were like little screws turning. "Why should
we be ashamed of him--Rolf and I? He's not typical--the insufferable
bounder! Our writing folk aren't like that. He may have been
well-bred--I doubt it. But now utterly spoiled."

"Decayed," amended her husband. "Blighting perisher!" he added,
becoming, for him, positively oratorical.

"It's you Americans I'm ashamed of," continued this small, outspoken
lady. "Do you think we'd let an American, no matter how talented
he might be, come over to England to snub us in our own homes and
patronize us and preach to us on our shortcomings and make unfair
comparisons between his institutions and ours and find fault with our
fashion of doing things? We'd jolly well soon put him in his place.
But you Americans let him and others like him do it. You bow down and
worship before them. You hang on their words. You flock to hear them.
You pay them money, lots of it. You stuff them up with food, and they
stuff you with insults. This one, now--he's a sponge. He's notorious
for his sponging."

"Pardon, please," interjected Mr. Braid. "There you touch my Yankee
pride. Sponging is an aquatic pastime not confined to one hemisphere.
You perhaps may claim the present international champion but we have
our candidates. Gum we may chew, horn-rimmed cheaters we may wear,
but despite our many racial defects we, too, have our great spongers.
Remember that and have a care lest you boast too soon."

"You won't let me be serious, you do spoof so," said Mrs. Thwaites.
"Still, I shall say it again, it's you Americans that I'm ashamed of.
But I was proud of you tonight, young man. When you mispronounced the
name of Maudlin College by calling it 'Magdeline,' the Yankee way, and
he corrected you, and when immediately after that when you mentioned
Sinjin Ervine as 'St. John' Ervine and he corrected you again, I knew
you must be setting a trap. I held my breath. And then when you asked
him about his travels and what he thought of your scenic wonders and
he praised some of them, and you brought in Buffalo and he said he had
been there and he recalled his trip to Niagara Falls and you said:
'Not Niagara Falls, dear fellow--_Niffls!_' why that was absolutely
priceless scoring. Wasn't it absolutely priceless, Rolf?"

"Rarther!" agreed the Major. He seemed to feel that the tribute
demanded elaboration, so he thought briefly and then expanded it into
"Oh, rarther!"

"We do our feeble best," murmured young Mr. Braid modestly, "and
sometimes Heaven rewards us. Heaven was indeed kind tonight....
Speaking of heavenly matters--look!"

As though acting on cue the horizon to the west had split asunder, and
the red lightning ran down the skies in zig-zag streaks, like cracks in
a hot stove, and lusty big drops spattered on the porch roof above them.

"It's beginning to shower--and thank you once more for 'Niffls.'" Mrs.
Thwaites threw the farewell over her shoulder. "We shall have to run
for it, Rolf."

       *       *       *       *       *

In the steeple of the First Baptist Church of Ingleglade, two blocks
distant, the clock struck eleven times. Except for the kitchen wing
the residence of the Gridleys on Edgecliff Avenue was, as to its lower
floor, all dark and shuttered. The rain beat down steadily, no longer
in scattered drops but in sheets. It was drunk up by the thirsty
earth. It made a sticky compound of a precious wagon-load of stable
leavings with which Mrs. Gridley, one week before, had mulched her
specimen roses in their bed under the living-room windows. It whipped
and it drenched a single overlooked garment dangling on the clothes
line between the two cherry trees in the back yard. Daylight, to any
discriminating eye, would have revealed it as a garment appertaining
to the worthy and broad-beamed Norah; would have proven, too, that
Norah was not one who held by these flimsy, new-fangled notions of
latter-day times in the details of feminine lingerie. For this was an
ample garment, stoutly fashioned, generously cut, intimate, bifurcated,
white, fit for a Christian woman to wear. It surreptitiously had been
laved that morning in the sink and wrung out and hung for drying upon a
lately almost disused rope, and then, in the press of culinary duties,
forgotten. Now the rain was more or less having its way with it, making
its limp ornamentation of ruffles limper still, making the horn buttons
upon its strong waistband slippery. So much for the exterior of this
peaceful homestead.

       *       *       *       *       *

Above in the main guest-room, Mr. Boyce-Upchurch fretted as he
undressed for bed. He felt a distinct sense of irritation. He had set
forth his desires regarding a portable tub and plenty of water to be
made ready against his hour of retiring yet, unaccountably, these had
not been provided. His skin called for refreshment; it was beastly
annoying.

A thought, an inspirational thought, came to him. He crossed to his
front window and drew back the twin sashes. The sashes opened quite
down to the floor and immediately outside, and from the same level,
just as he remembered having noted it following his arrival, the roof
of the veranda sloped away with a gentle slant. The light behind him
showed its flat tin covering glistening and smooth, with a myriad of
soft warm drops splashing and stippling upon it. Beyond was cloaking
impenetrable blackness, a deep and Stygian gloom; the most confirmed
Styg could have desired none deeper.

So Mr. Boyce-Upchurch walked back and entered the bathroom. There, from
a pitcher, he poured the basin full of water and then stripped to what
among athletes is known as the buff, meaning by that the pink, and
he dipped an embroidered guest towel in the basin and with it sopped
himself from head to feet, then dampened a cake of soap and wielded it
until his body and his head and his limbs and members richly had been
sudded. This done he recrossed his chamber, pausing only to turn out
the lights. He stepped out upon the porch roof, gasping slightly as the
downpouring torrent struck him on his bare flesh.

       *       *       *       *       *

From the head of the stairs Mr. Gridley, in a puzzled way, called down:

"Say, Emaline?"

"In a minute--I'm just making sure everything is locked up down here,"
answered Mrs. Gridley in a voice oddly strained.

"Say, do you know what?" Mr. Gridley retreated a few steps downward.
"He's gone and put his shoes outside his door in the hall. What do you
suppose the big idea is?"

"Put out to be cleaned," explained Mr. Braid from the foot of the
stairs. "Quaint old custom--William the Conqueror always put his out.
But don't call 'em shoes; that's one of those crude Americanisms of
yours. The proper word is 'boot.'"

"Well, who in thunder does he expect is going to clean them?--that's
what I want to know!" demanded the pestered Mr. Gridley.

"Perhaps the slavey--" began Mr. Braid.

"Ollie, for heaven's sake hush!" snapped Mrs. Gridley. "I warn you
my nerves can't stand much more tonight. They're still up out in the
kitchen--and suppose Delia heard you. It's a blessing she didn't hear
him this afternoon."

"I wonder if he thinks I'm going to shine 'em?" inquired Mr. Gridley,
his tone plaintive, querulous, protesting. He strengthened himself with
a resolution: "Well, I'm not! Here's one worm that's beginning to turn."

"There's Ditto," speculated Mrs. Gridley. "I wouldn't dare suggest such
a thing to either of those other two. But maybe possibly Ditto--"

"Never, except over my dead body," declared Mr. Braid. "I'd as soon
ask His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury to press my pants for me.
Fie, for shame, Dumplings!"

"But who--"

"I, gallant Jack Harkaway the volunteer fireman," proclaimed Mr. Braid.
"I, Michael Strogoff the Courier of the Czar--I'll shine his doggone
shoes--I mean, his doggone boots. I'll slip up and get 'em now. There's
a brush and some polish out back somewheres. Only, by rights, I should
have some of the genuine Day & Martin to do it with. And I ought to
whistle through my teeth. In Dickens they always whistled through their
teeth, cleaning shoes."

"Well, for one, I'm going to take a couple of aspirin tablets and go
straight to bed," said Mrs. Gridley. "Thank goodness for one thing,
anyway--it's just coming down in bucketsful outside!"

       *       *       *       *       *

On the porch top in the darkness, Mr. Boyce-Upchurch gasped anew but
happily. The last of the lather coursed in rivulets down his legs; his
grateful pores opened widely and he outstretched his arms, the better
to let the soothing cloudburst from on high strike upon his expanded
chest.

On the sudsy underfooting his bare soles slipped--first one sole
began to slip, then the other began to slip. He gasped once more, but
with a different inflection. His spread hands grasped frantically and
closed on the void. Involuntarily he sat down, painfully and with
great violence. He began to slide: he began to slide faster: he kept
on sliding. His curved fingers, still clutching, skittered over stark
metal surfaces as he picked up speed. He slid thence, offbound and
slantwise, toward the edge. He gave one low muffled cry. He slid faster
yet. He slid across the spouting gutter, over the verge, on, out, down,
into swallowing space.

       *       *       *       *       *

Out in the service ell the last of the wastage from the Gridleys'
dinner party was being disposed of and the place tidied up against the
next gustatory event in this house, which would be breakfast. Along
the connecting passage from his butler's pantry where he racked up
tableware, Ditto was speaking rearward to the two occupants of the
kitchen. He had been speaking practically without cessation for twenty
minutes. With the _h's_ it would have taken longer--probably twenty-two
to twenty-four minutes.

He was speaking of the habits, customs, and general excellencies of the
British upper classes among whom the greater part of his active life
congenially had been spent. He was approaching a specific illustration
in support and confirmation of his thesis. He reached it:

"Now, you tyke Mr. Boyce-Upchurch, now. Wot pride of bearin' 'e's got!
Wot control! Wot a flow of language when the spirit moves 'im! Always
the marster of any situation--that's 'im all oaver. Never losin' 'is
'ead. Never jostled out of 'is stride. Never lackin' for a word. Stock
of the old bull-dog--that's wot it is!"

Where he stood, so discouraging, he could not see Norah. Perhaps it was
just as well he could not see her. For a spell was lifting from Norah.
If there is such a word as 'unenglamored' then 'unenglamored' is the
proper word for describing what Norah rapidly was becoming.

From Delia the tattle-tale, Norah had but just now heard whispered
things. She was sitting at ease, resting after an arduous spell of
labors, but about her were signs and portents--small repressed signs
but withal significant. The lips tightly were compressed; one toe
tapped the floor with an ominous little tattoo; through the clenched
teeth she made a low steady wasp-like humming noise; in the eyes
smoldered and kindled a hostile bale. It was plain that before long
Norah would herself be moved to utterance. She did but bide her time.

However, as stated, Ditto could not see. He proceeded to carry on:

"No nonsense abaht 'im, I tell you. Knows wot 'e wants and speaks up
and arsks for it, stryte out."

       *       *       *       *       *

Several of Mrs. Gridley's specimen rose bushes served somewhat
to break the force of Mr. Boyce-Upchurch's crash, though their
intertwining barbed fronds sorely scratched him here and there as he
plunged through to earth. He struck broadside in something soft and
gelatinous. Dazed and shaken, he somehow got upon his feet and first he
disentangled himself from the crushed-down thorny covert and then he
felt himself all over to make sure no important bones were broken.

Very naturally, the thought next uppermost with him, springing forward
in his mind through a swirl of confused emotions, was to reenter the
house and return, without detection, to his room. He darted up the
front porch steps and tried the front door. It was barred fast. He
tried the windows giving upon the porch; their blinds were drawn,
latched from within.

Out again in the storm he half circled the main body of the house,
fumbling in the cloaking blackness at yet more snugly fastened windows.
An unbelievable, an appalling, an incredible conviction began to fasten
its horrid talons upon Mr. Boyce-Upchurch. He could not get in without
arousing someone and certainly in this, his present state, he dare not
arouse anyone in order to get in. Yet he must get in. Desperation,
verging already on despair, mounted in his swirling brain.

Past a jog in the side wall he saw, thirty feet on beyond and
patterning through some lattice-work, a foggy shaft of light from a
rain-washed window. As cautiously he moved toward it a taut obstacle in
the nature of a cord or small hawser rasped him just under the nose
and, shrinking back, he was aware of a ghostly white article swinging
gently within arm-reach of him. Partly by touch, partly by sight, he
made out its texture--woven linen or cotton cloth, limp and clammy with
wetness--and he made out its contours; divined likewise its customary
purposes. At home a few old-fashioned ladies still were addicts; he
recognized the pattern; he had an elderly maiden aunt. In emergency
it would provide partial covering--of a sort. Most surely this was an
emergency. And yet--

As he hesitated, with tentative fingers still pawing the sopping shape
of it, and torn between a great loathing and a great and compelling
temptation, the sound of a human voice penetrated the clapboards
alongside him and caused him to cower down close.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Doggone it!"

Mr. Braid, bearing in one hand a brace of varnished boots of Regent
Street manufacture, tumbled over a sharp-cornered object in the inky
darkness of the cuddy behind the living-room and barked his shins, and
his cry was wrung with anguish.

"Doggone it!" he repeated. "Who's gone and hid the infernal electric
light in this infernal Mammoth Cave of a storeroom? And where in
thunder is that box of polish and that blacking brush? I'm sure I saw
'em here the other day on one of these dad-blamed shelves. Ouch!"

His exploring arm had brought what from weight and impact might have
been an iron crowbar to clatter down upon his shoulders. As a matter of
fact, it was the discarded handle of a patent detachable mop.

"Oh, damn!" soliloquized Mr. Braid. "Everything else in the condemned
world is here but what I'm after. And I haven't got any matches and I
can't find the light bulb. Maybe Norah or Delia 'll know."

He backed out of the cavernous closet into the hall, heading for the
kitchen by way of the intervening pantry.

       *       *       *       *       *

That vocal threat of peril from within diminished, died out. Mr.
Boyce-Upchurch straightened, and in that same instant, piercing the
night from a distance but drawing nearer, came to his dripping ears the
warning of a real and an acute danger. A dog--a very large and a very
fierce dog, to judge by its volume of noise output--was coming toward
him from the right and coming very swiftly.

The Thwaites' police dog, born in Germany but always spoken of by its
owners as Belgian, was the self-constituted night guard of all premises
in the entire block. To her vigilant senses suspicions of a prowler
abroad had floated out of the void. Baying, belling, she was now
bounding across lots to investigate.

With a frenzied snatch, Mr. Boyce-Upchurch tore the pendent flapping
thing free from its clothes-pin moorings and he thrust his two legs
into its two legs and convulsively he clutched its hemmed girth about
his middle, and forgetting all else save that a menacing monster was
almost upon him breathing its hot panted breaths upon his flinching
rear, he flung himself headlong toward that sheltering entryway from
whence the blurry radiance poured.

       *       *       *       *       *

Enlarging upon his subject, Ditto stepped into the kitchen.

"As I was syin' a bit ago, tyke Mr. Boyce-Upchurch," he continued.
"Look at 'm, I arsk you? Poise, composture, dignity--that's 'im agyne!
It's qualities like them 'as mykes the English wot they are the 'ole
world over. It's--"

"Saints defind us!" shrieked Norah, starting up.

In through the back door burst Mr. Boyce-Upchurch, and he slammed it
to behind him and backed against it, and for a measurable space stood
there speechless, transfixed, as it were, being, in a way of speaking,
breeched but otherwise completely uncovered excepting for certain
clingy smears of compost--compost is the word we will use, please--upon
the face and torso.

Delia's accompanying scream was just a plain scream but Norah's further
outcry took on the form of articulated words:

"Proud, sez you? Yis, too proud to sup our cocktails but not too proud
to be rampagin' around in the rain turnin' somersaults in somebody's
cow-yard. Dignified, you sez? Yis, too dignified to ate the vittles I
was after fixin' fur him, but not too dignified to come lapein' in on
two dacint women wearin' nothin' only a pair of somebody's--_Whooroo_,
it's me own best Sunday pair he has on him!"

On the linoleum of the butler's pantry behind them Mr. Oliver Braid
laid him down, holding in either hand a Regent Street boot, and uttered
gurgling sounds denoting a beautiful joy.

       *       *       *       *       *

From the American of July 22d:

  Among the passengers sailing today on the Mulrovia for Southampton
  was Mr. Jeffreys Boyce-Upchurch, the well-known English novelist,
  returning home after suddenly breaking off his lecture tour in
  this country on account of lameness resulting from a severe fall
  which he is reported to have had less than a week ago while filling
  an engagement in New Jersey. Mr. Boyce-Upchurch declined to see
  the reporters desirous of questioning him regarding the accident.
  Walking with a pronounced limp, he went aboard early this morning
  and remained secluded in his stateroom until sailing-time.

From the Telegram, same date, under Situations Wanted:

  BUTLER, English, unimpeachable references, long experience,
  perfectly qualified, desires employment in cultured household, city
  preferred. Positively will not accept position where other members
  of domestic staff are Irish. Address: L. D., General Delivery.




TWO OF EVERYTHING

[Decoration]


There was no warning. There rarely is in such cases. To be sure, those
gophers acted peculiarly a minute before the tremor started, and that
whistling marmot did too. But until he felt the first heave, Chaney
attached no significance to the behavior of such as these. He was not
concerned with the small mammalia of northern Montana. The fishing was
what interested him.

He was disentangling a fly from where, on the back cast, it had woven
itself into an involved pattern with the adjacent shrubbery, when he
became aware that dozens of the little gray ground-squirrels were
popping out of the mouths of their burrows and scooting about in all
directions, making sharp chirking noises as they went. Through the day
he had seen them by the hundreds and usually they were in motion, but
this was the only time he heard an outcry from any of them. A fat one
popped up out of the dirt crust almost between his toes and caromed
off against an ankle. It appeared to be in an especial haste to get
somewhere else.

Just about this time the marmot, a much larger animal, scuttled
down the hill, whistling steadily and wrinkling up its back like a
caterpillar in a hurry. What happened, of course, was that the earth
sent along a preliminary notification to the creatures who delve in
the earth and live in the earth, telling them their ancient mother was
about to have a very hard chill. This is the way a layman might put it;
no doubt a geologist would phrase the explanation differently. But it
was a warning, all right enough.

While Chaney still was mildly speculating regarding the reasons for the
panic among these ground-dwellers, the solid boulder beneath his feet
seemed to lift and stir and the scrub aspens behind him all at once
began to bend the wrong way, that is, toward the wind instead of from
it. So then he knew it must be a quake. Instinctively he slid off the
stone and splashed down on the loose shale in the edge of the creek
bed. As he half crouched there, up to his shanks in water and suddenly
apprehensive, he felt through his boot soles a progressive rippling
movement that grew swift and more violent. It was as though the world
were flindering its skin on the haunches of these mountains precisely
as a pestered horse does to get rid of a horse-fly.

Evidently this meant to be quite a shock. It was quite a shock. The
newspapers were full of it for a week; the scientists were full of it
for months after the newspapers eased up. Over in southern California
it shuffled the houses of one coast town like a pack of cards and down
in the Wyoming Rockies it blocked a gap through which a river ran,
so that a valley of ambitious irrigation projects became a lake while
the dispossessed residents were getting their families and their cattle
out. But when Chaney looked up and saw the face of the cliff above him
starting to come loose, he very naturally jumped to the conclusion that
the whole thing had been devised for the main purpose of annihilating
him; there was going to be a disaster and he was going to be the chief
victim.

The mental process of any normal human being would operate thus in
a similar abnormal emergency. Lightning strikes near us and in the
moment of escape we give thanks for deliverance from a peril launched
expressly at us. Heaven sped its direst artillery bolt with intent for
our destruction, but we were too smart for it; we dodged. Probably it
is mortal vanity that makes us say that to ourselves--and even believe
it. We are forever assuming that nature gets up her principal effects
either for our benefit or for our undoing.

Anyhow, that was how it was with Chaney. There he squatted with his
pleasant sins all heavy upon him, and the front of Scalded Peak was
fetching away from its foundation to coast down and totally abolish
Chaney. His bodily reflexes synchronized with his mind's. As his brain
recorded the thought his legs bent to jump and set him running off to
the left along the shore. But before he could take ten long leaps the
slide was finished and over with.

It was miraculous--he marveled over that detail later when he was in a
frame fit for sorting out emotions--it really was miraculous that the
entire contour of one side of the basin could change while a scared man
was traveling thirty yards. Yet that was exactly what took place. In so
brief a space of time as this, the façade of the steep, rocky wall had
been rent free and shoved off and had descended a thousand feet or so,
picking up a million billion bushels of loose stuff on the way, and had
stopped and was settling.

In another half-minute the grit clouds were lifting, and Chaney was
rising up from where he had flopped over into a tangle of windfall.
He was bringing his face slowly out from under the arms which
instinctively he had crossed on his head as he stumbled and sprawled
and he was wiping his hand across his eyes and taking stock of the
accomplished transformation and of his own sensations.

There had been an intolerable numbing, deafening roaring and crashing
in his ears, and a great incredible passing before his eyes; he could
remember that. There had been a sense that the air about him was filled
with sweeping stones as big as court-houses, that tons upon tons of
weight were crushing down about him and on him; that something else,
which was minute but unutterably dense and thick, was pressing upon
him and flattening him to death; that tree tops near at hand overhead
were whipping and winnowing in a cyclonic gale that played above all
else; and then all definitely he knew for a little while was that his
mouth was full of a sour powder and his right cheek was bleeding. Also
that the earthquake had passed on to other parts and that the avalanche
begotten of it had missed him by a margin of, say, six rods.

He lay almost on the verge of the damage. He turned over, but very
cautiously through a foolish momentary fright of jarring to life some
poised boulder near by, and sat up in a kind of nest of dead roots and
dead boughs and cleared his vision and stared fearsomely to his right.
Just over there was a raw gray pyramidal smear, narrow at the top where
a new gouge showed in the rim-rock, and broad at the base. It was slick
and it was scoured out smoothly up the steep slope, but below, closer
to him, the overturned slabs and chunks of stone had a nasty, naked
aspect to them, an obscene aspect what with their scraped bare bellies
turned uppermost.

In a minute for creation, or put it at fifty years as men measure time,
the kindly lichens and mosses would grow out on their gouged shoulders
and along their ribs, and the soil and the wood-mold would gather in
their seams, and grass would come up between them, and then shrubs and
finally evergreens from the crevices; in a few centuries more this
scarred place would be of a pattern again with its neighborhood. But
now it was artificial looking, like a mine working or the wreckage of a
tremendous nitro-glycerine blast.

The stream had turned from steel-blue in its depths and greenish white
on the rapids to a roiled muddy gray, but as Chaney rolled his eyes
that way it showed signs of clearing. Seemingly there had been only one
great splash and wave when the slide came down, and the course of the
stream had not materially been changed. Already the dust had gone out
of the air; it covered the leaves, though.

He stood up and mastered the trembling in his legs and shrugged the
stupefaction out of himself. He was not even bruised. Except for that
little scratch on his cheek he had no wound whatsoever. But in certain
regards he decidedly was out of luck. His present possessions were
reduced to precisely such garments as he stood in and what articles
he had in the pockets of those garments, and to one fishing rod which
might or might not be smashed.

The guide who had brought him into this country--Hurley was the guide's
name--and the camp which he and the guide had made an hour earlier and
their two saddle-horses and their one pack-horse and all their joint
belongings had vanished with not a single scrap left to show for them.
Chaney convinced himself of this tragic fact as soon as he scrambled up
on the lowermost breadth of the slide. Presently he balanced himself,
so he figured, directly above where the pup-tent had stood and the camp
litter had been spread about. He saw then that so far as Hurley and the
horses and the dunnage were concerned, this was their tomb for all time.

About four o'clock they had come over the top and on down the steep
drop to Cache Creek. They turned the stock loose to graze on the thin
pickings among the cottonwoods and willows. He put up the tent and
spread the bed-rolls while Hurley was making a fireplace of stones and
rustling firewood. He left Hurley at the job of cooking and went a
short distance along the creek toward its inlet in the canyon between
the west flank of Scalded Peak and the east flank of Sentinel Peak to
pick up some cut-throats for their supper. On the second cast he lashed
his leader around a springy twig. He climbed a big rock to undo the
snarl--and then this old and heretofore dependable earth began to get
up and walk.

And now here it was not five o'clock yet, and he was alone among these
mountains, and Hurley's crushed body was where neither digging nor
dynamite would bring it forth. By his calculation it was hard to say
exactly, with everything altered the way it was; but as nearly as he
could guess, he was right above where Hurley ought to be--with at least
forty feet of piled-up, wedged-in, twisted-together soil and boulders
and tree roots between him and Hurley. Probably the poor kid never knew
what hit him. He had been right in the path of the slide and now he
was beneath the thickest part of it. He had seemed to be a pretty fair
sort too, although as to that Chaney couldn't say positively, having
hired the boy only the day before at an independent outfitter's near
Polebridge on the North Fork, where he had left his car.

For him, the lone survivor of this quick catastrophe, there was nothing
to do except to get out. That part of it didn't worry Chaney much. He
was at home in this high country. He had hunted and fished and ranged
over a good part of it. With the taller peaks to guide him and the
water courses to follow--on this side of the Continental Divide they
nearly all ran west or southwest--a man could hold to his compass
points even through unfamiliar going.

He would scale the wall of the bowl right away. He didn't want darkness
to catch up with him before he was over the top; the place already
was beginning to be haunted. Except on the eastern slopes night came
late in these altitudes; it would be after nine o'clock before the
sunset altogether failed him. He would lie down until morning came,
then shove ahead, holding to the trail over which he and Hurley had
traveled in until it brought him out on the Flathead plateau. To save
time and boot-leather, he might even take a short cut down through the
timber to the foot-hills; there were ranches and ranger stations and
fire-watchers' lookouts scattered at intervals of every few miles along
the river flats.

He might be footsore by the time he struck civilization with word of
the killing and certainly he would be pretty hungry, but that was
all. He wouldn't get cold when the evening chill came on. He had on
a coat and it was a heavy blanket coat, which was lucky, and he had
matches, plenty of them. He had loose matches in the breast pocket
of his shirt and a waterproof box of matches in the fob pocket of his
riding-breeches. He even had two knives; a hunting-knife in a sheath on
his belt, a penknife in his pocket.

Chaney was a great one for doubling up on the essentials whenever he
took to the woods. He'd have a small comb and toothbrush in his folding
pocket kit; another comb and another toothbrush tucked away somewhere
in his saddle-bags or his blanket roll. He always carried two pairs of
boots too.

It was a regular passion with him, this fad for taking along spares
and extras on a camping trip or, for that matter, on any sort of
trip. People had laughed at him for being so old-maidish, as they put
it. Chaney let them laugh; the blamed fools! It was his business,
wasn't it, if he chose to be methodical about these small private
duplications? More than once his care had been repaid in dividends of
comfort. And anyhow the thing had come to be a part of him. He was
forty-five, at the age when men turn systematic and set in their ways.

The only salvage left out of the disaster was his rod. He might as well
take that along. Uncoupled and with the links tied together, it would
not encumber him on the hike. He descended from the cairn and, finding
the rod uninjured, was in the act of freeing the leader from its
entanglement in the brushy top of an aspen when all at once his nervous
hands became idle while his brain became active over a new thought.

It was a big notion and in that same instant he decided to follow after
the impulse of it.

Suppose, just suppose now for the sake of argument, that he went away
from this spot leaving no trace behind to betray that he had gone away
alive and sound? He canvassed the contingency from this angle and
that, his imagination busy with one conjecture, one speculation, one
eventuality after another, and nowhere found a flaw in the prospect.

This is what would happen--it morally was bound to happen, unless he
made a false step: Sooner or later and in all probability before a week
was up, a rescue party would come into Cache Creek looking for him and
Hurley. They were due out in four days to refit with fresh supplies for
another journey down on Pronghorn Lake, twenty miles to the southwest.
Within five days or six their prolonged absence, coupled with their
failure to send back word of their whereabouts by some passing
tourist, would be enough to cause alarm at Polebridge, where Hurley's
people lived. Besides, the earthquake surely would make the natives
apprehensive of accidents in the mountains.

So the relief force would set out on the hunt for the missing pair.
Any seasoned mountaineer could hold to their trail. There was the site
where they had camped last night, the place where they had halted
at noon today to graze the horses and eat their own luncheon; the
cigarette butts and dead matches dropped by them. Eventually, picking
up a clue here and a clue there, the searchers would arrive at this
spot--to find what? A land-slip covering the only fit camp-ground in
the Scalded Peak basin and covering it forty or fifty feet deep at that.

It would take a crew of men with tackles and hoists and explosives six
months to explore the lower part of that slide, even if you conceded
they could transport their machinery over the range and set it up.
Yes, it would take longer than that. Because as fast as they excavated
below, the smaller stuff would sift down from above and more or less
undo what they had done. So they wouldn't do it; they couldn't.

Besides, what would be the use of trying? So the searchers would argue.
Hurley and Chaney were buried in a mighty grave of the mountains' own
providing. Let them stay buried. That undoubtedly would be the final
conclusion. It had to be.

Well, Hurley eternally would be buried, but as for him, he would be
far away, released by the supposition, yes, by the seeming indubitable
proof of a violent death, from all present entanglements--his debts,
his distasteful obligations, his meager and unprofitable business back
in that dull North Dakota town, which he hated. He would have quittance
of certain private difficulties more burdensome to bear than any of
these. And for good and all he would be done with that wife of his.
And this thought was the most delectable of all the thoughts that he
shuttled in review through his mind.

Heaven knows how often he had wished he might get clear of the woman,
with her naggings and her suspicions and her jealousies. He cared for
her not at all; he was sure she cared for him only in the proprietorial
sense. She wanted him only because he was somebody to be scolded,
somebody to be managed, something to take the blame for what went
wrong. And there had been plenty going wrong, at that. She wouldn't
miss him; with her talent for dramatizing herself, she would glory in
the rôle of widowhood. As for missing her--he grinned.

Let her take the insurance. He carried a policy for five thousand, the
annual premium paid up, and sooner or later the insurance company would
have to fork over. Five thousand was enough for her and more than she
deserved. Let her collect it and save it or blow it in just as she
pleased; she was welcome to it and welcome to what few odd dollars she
might make from the sale of the shop. The prospect of an insurance
company being mulcted for money not honestly owed appealed mightily to
a phase of his nature.

Legally speaking, officially speaking, Herb Chaney would be dead
and spoiling under these rocks, with his score wiped out and his
transgressions atoned for. But the man who had been Herb Chaney
would be abroad in the world, foot-loose as a ram, free as a bird,
with no past behind him and all the future before him. Independence,
irresponsibility, liberty, a fresh start, a good time--golly, but it
sounded good!

It remained, though, not to muddle by any slip or miscue what
Providence had vouchsafed. There should be more evidence, he decided,
to support the plausible theory now provided; but no rebuttal to weaken
or upset that evidence. He set about manufacturing this added evidence.

He finished the job of getting his line loose, then broke the second
joint of the rod just below the top ferrule, making the fracture clean
and straight across so it might appear that a whizzing missile had
cut it through. By pounding it with a stone he battered the reel to
bits. Where the outflung verge of the slip met the creek he tipped up
as heavy a boulder as he could raise with the trunk of a snapped-off
lodge-pole pine for a lever, and propped the large boulder with a
smaller one. Into the cranny thus provided, he shoved the butt of the
rod and the fragments of the reel; then kicked out the prop and eased
the main boulder down again into its former place.

The broken second section stuck out, pressed flat upon the gravel in
the creek; the stout casting line held fast the rest of that section
and the tip, so that they bobbed in the shore ripples, scraping on the
wet pebbles. There was the marker plain enough to see. To any trained
eye it would be like a signal post. The finders would pry up the big
stone, but that was as far as they could go. Behind and beyond, the
mass of the slide arose. They must inevitably figure him as dropping
his fishing gear when the danger impended and fleeing blindly
rearward, not away from but directly into the path of the avalanche.

He satisfied himself that no sign of his handiwork, nothing to suggest
human connivance, was left behind at the scene of this artifice. Then
the refugee started climbing the wall down which less than an hour
before he had descended. The trail was rocky; it would register no
tell-tale retreating footprints. Even so, he took pains to leap from
stone to stone, avoiding any spots of hard-packed soil.

Two-thirds up he came to a flattish stretch where a vein of fine gravel
and coarse quartzy sand was exposed. Coming down, he recalled having
noticed that sandy streak. It presented an obstacle, being fully twenty
feet broad. Immediately, though, an old Indian device for deceiving a
pursuer occurred to him. As a boy in Iowa he had heard it described.
So he turned the other way and backed across the strip, lifting his
feet high at each step and setting them down again well apart, with
the heels pressed deeply in so that the toe impressions would be the
lighter. From the farther side he looked back and was well content.
Anybody would be willing to swear those prints had been made by a man
going down the trail, not by one returning.

After that, until the afterglow faded out and darkness caught up with
him, he traveled north, holding to the ridges whenever he could. All
along he had a nagging feeling that he had overlooked something or
failed in something. Something had been left, something forgotten. But
what was it? Or was it anything? This harassment first beset him at the
top of the rim when he was crawling over it like a fly out of an empty
teacup. He hesitated momentarily and was inclined to turn back and make
search but could not muster the will for the effort. His nerves had
had a tremendous jolt and that silent void below him, with the shadows
sliding up its sides as though to overtake him, already was peopled
with ghosts.

It abode with him, this worry did, through his flight in the sunset and
the twilight. It walked with him through the dusk, lively as a cricket
and ticking like a watch, and bothered him that night where he slept
lightly in a gully among clumped huckleberry bushes. It was next day
before it left him. He shook it off finally. Anyhow, he couldn't put
a finger on it, whatever the darn thing was, and probably it didn't
matter anyhow.

He traveled north, as I was just saying. Nobody saw the solitary
swift figure of the fugitive when occasionally it appeared against a
sky-line. There was nobody within ten miles to see it. That evening,
finishing a forced march, he passed the international boundary without
knowing it, spending the night in an abandoned shanty on an abandoned
coal prospector's claim. He had huckleberries for supper. His dinner
and breakfast had been the same.

On the second morning he was dead tired and his stomach gnawed and
fretted him, but he resisted a strong yearning to enter a very small
town which he saw below him in a wooded valley, with the Canadian flag
floating from the peaked roof of a customs agency. He was across the
line then; he had hoped he was but until now hadn't been sure.

Having mastered his temptation, Chaney swung wide of the settlement.
By good luck the detour took him through a pass in an east-and-west
spur of the foot-hills and brought him out on a flatter terrain and
presently, to a railroad track. He followed along the track and so he
came to a water-tank looming like a squatty watch-tower above an empty,
almost treeless plain. This was about the middle of the forenoon.

Chaney had the virtue of patience. He dozed in the shade of the tank
until a west-bound freight came across the prairie and stopped to water
the locomotive. He had money in his pocket; he might have tried bribing
the train crew to let him ride in the caboose. This didn't suit his
plan, though. Avoiding detection for as long as possible, his pose
after detection did come would be that of a penniless adventurer, a
vagrant wandering aimlessly. He found the door of a vacant furniture
car open and hopped nimbly in.

Sixty miles farther along, a brakeman booted the supposed tramp off
into the outskirts of a sizable British Columbia community. He walked
into the municipal center and found a lunch-wagon. He spent a solid
hour eating orders of ham and eggs and never missed a stroke. The chain
of sequences between the man who dodged the avalanche in Scalded Peak
basin and the man, a much thinner and a much dirtier man with half a
week's beard on his face, who gulped down food in this owl wagon, now
had a wide missing link in it.

Still, to make sure, he journeyed briskly on, paying his way this
time, to the coast. In Vancouver he stayed two weeks and accumulated a
wardrobe and had some dental work done. He had a different name and a
different face, for he let his whiskers grow. At Vancouver, where he
lodged in a cheap hotel, he posed as a timber cruiser on a vacation. He
had cut timber as a young fellow and knew the jargon.

Feeling perfectly secure of his disguise and his new identity, he
presently drifted over to his own side of the line, making a way down
the Pacific across Washington and Oregon to California and thence by
slow stages into Arizona. En route he earned money at various odd
jobs--helping to harvest alfalfa, picking fruit, working in a vineyard,
in a cannery. He enjoyed his vagabondage after spending so many
uncongenial years in a dead hole of a North Dakota county-seat.

He enjoyed it all the more upon reading in a Los Angeles paper a
dispatch from Helena wherein it was set forth that the insurance
company after considerable backing and filling, eventually had flinched
at the prospect of a lawsuit and had conceded his death and settled
in full with his wife. He didn't begrudge her the money. He, the
deceased, was having a pretty good time of it himself. A bunch of wise
guys, those insurance guys had been, to pay up. They'd saved themselves
lawyers' fees and court costs. Juries nearly always sided with a widow.
It was a cinch any jury would have sided with his widow. His widow--he
liked that. Gee, how he did like that! It meant he was absolutely safe.

So safe did he reckon himself to be that within four months he married
the daughter of an Arizona rancher on whose place he had been working
as a sheep-hand. Probably the girl liked his sophisticated ways, and
his white even teeth, shining through his crisp black beard when he
grinned. Probably she didn't know some of the teeth were false teeth
until after the marriage. Whether he liked her or not the fact remained
that within sixty days he deserted this wife. He knew now that he
wasn't cut out to be a husband, at least not for long. He had the
gipsy's callus on his heel.

So one night, feeling restless, he just up and went. Next morning his
father-in-law's adobe was a hundred miles of desert behind him.

Another night--this was months later, though--he was killing time with
some associate loafers in a poolroom in El Paso. His name now was
Harper; his Arizona name had been Hayes. Harper wore a mustache but no
chin beard. The original owner of the face, away back yonder, had been
smooth-shaven. It was a great convenience to be able to take on a new
personality either by using a razor or by letting it be. Harper owned a
brace of razors.

This night in the poolroom a heavy-set, sort of countrified guy, a guy
who didn't look at all as a detective should look, came in and flashed
a badge and a warrant on him and called him Chaney--Herbert H. Chaney,
that way, in full, to prove there was no mistake, and told him he was
under arrest.

Chaney was never the one to start a jam; the stranger had shown the
butt of an automatic when he was showing the badge. There was no
trouble whatsoever. With an admirable docility he submitted to being
pinched. His captor escorted him to a second-rate American-plan hotel
and took him up to a room on the third floor. Here after Chaney had
stripped to his undershirt and drawers, the other man handcuffed him by
the left wrist to the iron side-rail of one of the twin beds that were
in the room and Chaney lay down; then the officer took off his coat and
vest and collar and took a chair and sat down to talk the thing over
with him.

Almost the talk ran through a friendly groove; really across stretches
of it you might call it downright friendly. The stranger was jubilant
over his coup, having made the arrest so deftly with no mussiness or
cutting up. It seemed that there had been a long stern chase leading up
to this present culmination and he wanted a breathing space in which to
get his wind back, so to speak, and congratulate himself.

For his part, Chaney was inclined to accept the inevitable without
crabbing. Something the heavy-set man said now at the outset bent him
strongly to that course. It stilled a sudden fear in him. What charge
could these insurance people bring against him except breach of trust,
or whichever fancy name it was they called it by when a fellow kept
his mouth shut and let somebody else pay over coin that wasn't exactly
owing?

Of course, having rounded him up this way, they would have to go
through the forms of getting him extradited to Montana and getting him
indicted and then bringing him to trial or something; but from what he
knew about the law, he judged it would be more like a civil proceeding
than a criminal one. It wasn't as though he had profited in a money
way by his own duplicity. An innocent party to the transaction had
the spending of that five thousand. All along Chaney had viewed his
behavior under this head in more or less a heroic light--standing aside
and not saying a word while a dependent woman came into a mighty snug
little fortune.

And wife-desertion was no felony; he had looked that point up. Even if
Mrs. Chaney were inclined to be spiteful, they couldn't stick you away
for sliding out and leaving a woman. Thank heaven, a husband had a few
rights left in this country. Chaney even abandoned a notion he had of
denying that he was Chaney and fighting it out on that line. What would
be the good? He settled on the hillocky mattress to hear what this
hick-looking bull might have further to say about it all.

"I guess maybe you're wondering in your own mind how I come to get into
the case to begin with," the latter had said a minute or two earlier.
"Well, you might as well know it--I've been on the payroll of the
Equity and Warranty Company from back when this thing first broke. Yes,
sir, from the start back up there in Montana. It was them sent me out
with orders to keep on goin' till I'd turned you up. When you monkey
with those folks you're monkeyin' with a buzzsaw. They don't ever quit,
not that outfit don't. That's why they paid up when your wife pushed
her claim--to throw you off the track, case you heard about it. They'd
rather see you nailed than have the money back. That's them!"

He lighted a cheap cigar and then as an afterthought offered Chaney its
mate. But Chaney didn't want to smoke just then. All Chaney wanted to
do was just to listen.

"Come to think about it, though, I guess the thing you're wonderin'
about the most is how us insurance people come to figger out that you
wasn't dead but 'live and kickin'," continued the smoker. "I know good
and well that if I was in your fix that's what I would be interested in
the most. That's right, ain't it?"

Chaney raised his head from the pillow and nodded, and was, as the
saying is, all ears.

"Well, sir, I got to take the compliments for that part of it all by
myself. You might not believe it, but if it hadn't been for me they or
nobody else would probably never have suspicioned anything out of the
way about you bein' squashed out nice and flat under that landslide.
The way it come up was this way: I live at Kalispel, out in the
Flathead valley, you know. I'm the resident agent there for the Equity
and Warranty Company and on the side I'm a deputy sheriff for Flathead
County, or the other way around, whichever way you want to put it. And
it so happened I was the second human bein' to get into that Scalded
Creek basin after the quake last year. But this boy Hurley's brother
was the first.

"Just as soon as they felt the quake down on the river, this here
brother, name Sherman Hurley, he took a notion into his head that
something was wrong up in the mountains with his brother, the one that
had hired out to guide you. It was almost like as if he'd got a message
from his brother's spirit. So nothin' would do but what he must start
right in and make sure, one way or the other. So he lit out and he
traveled all that night, him knowin' all the trails and the lay of the
land, and by movin' about as fast over them ridges as his pony could
take him he made the trip in four or five hours less time than 'twould
take doin' it the regular easy way.

"By daylight next mornin' he was there and he took one look around
him and didn't see hide nor hair of you two nor of the horses, but he
did see that slide where it had come down right square on top of the
camp-ground along the creek, and he decided to himself, the same as
anybody else with good sense would, that the whole outfit of you was
under that mess of truck. He didn't waste no time foolin' around. If he
went in there fast, he came out still faster. It wasn't noon yet when
he got back to Polebridge with the news. His pony had went lame and
he'd finished the trip, jumpin' and runnin'.

"Well, they telephoned down to Kalispel and the sheriff sent me on up
by automobile to sort of represent the county, and he sent word on
ahead for the gang that was goin' in to wait till I got there. Well,
I burnt up the road gettin' through. They had quite a posse organized
when I pulled in--rangers and several kinfolks of the Hurleys and some
neighbors and part of a road crew out of the Park. This young Sherm
Hurley was practically all in from what he'd been through with and
mighty near grieved to death besides--he took on worse than any of his
family did--but he was still bent and determined on goin' back the
second time. He just would go, takin' the lead, tired as he was.

"Somehow him and me was ahead of the rest when we hit the rim and purty
soon after that I seen somethin' that set me to thinkin'. I always did
have kind of a turn for the detectin' business; that was partly what
induced me to be a deputy sheriff. Yes, sir, I seen something. Guess
what it was I seen?"

Chaney shook his head.

"Tracks, that's what. But I seen something a heap more significant
right shortly after that. But these first things were tracks. I didn't
tell nobody what was sproutin' in my mind, but I motioned everybody to
stay where they was for a minute and then I got down off the plug I was
ridin' and made one or two rough measurements and sized up things. Then
I holloed back to the others to come ahead and we went on down.

"So in a few minutes more we was all down there together in that basin.
But while the crowd was prowlin' round, with young Hurley beggin' 'em
to fix up some way of gettin' his brother's body out from under those
jagged rocks and them all keepin' on tellin' him it looked to them like
it was goin' to be an impossible job, I was doin' some prowlin' on my
own hook. Inside of three minutes I'd run onto something else that set
me to thinkin' harder than ever. Try guessin' what that was."

"Was it--was it the fishing rod?" asked Chaney. The question popped out
of him of its own accord.

"Nope--you're gettin' warm though. It was something right close by.
Say"--he raised his voice admiringly--"say, plantin' that busted bamboo
pole there wasn't such a bad idea on your part. I've said that to
myself often since then and I still say so. It showed you two had been
there before the slide and it made it look like you'd been took by
surprise when the big disturbance started. But the thing I'm speakin'
about now wasn't anything you'd fixed up for a plant. It was something
you must have overlooked in the excitement. Well, nobody could have
blamed you much for that. It must have been pretty squally times down
in that deep hole when the earth began to rock and the cliffs began to
crumble. You bet!

"Try to think of something besides the pole," he prompted. "Go on and
try!"

His prisoner, who was sitting up now, made a gesture to indicate that
he still was entirely at a loss.

"I'll give you a hint to help tip you off. What was you doin' just
before the hell-raisin' broke loose?"

"Well, my line got twisted in a sapling--"

"No, no, before that even."

"I--let's see? I--oh, by gosh!"

It all came back to Chaney; the answer to the riddle that had pestered
him that afternoon on the rim-rock nearly a year before. The thing that
had made him hesitate, half persuaded to return. The same thing which
subconsciously had fretted him through his sleeping on that first night
of flight. It came back vividly--how his duplicate false upper plate
had fallen out of his shirt pocket on the wet shale; how, absently,
he had wondered why the plate should be in his pocket when properly
it belonged in the canvas carryall which fitted under a flap of his
ground-cloth; how he had picked it up and balanced it momentarily on a
flat stone, not restoring it to his pocket for fear of another fall;
how then he noticed a sizable trout nosing in out of deep water to the
shallows and how, hoping to land him, he cast. And then the gut leader
snagging and he turning to free it and then--the first astounding
quiver underfoot.

"Exactly," affirmed the deputy as though he read what rolled in
Chaney's mind. "Your extry set of store teeth! There they was, settin'
on a rock, smilin' at me as pleasant as you please and shinin' in the
sunlight.

"I don't know why 'twas, but right then and there there popped into my
head something that happened once up in Nevada when I was a kid livin'
with my folks just outside of Carson City. A fellow in Carson that had
a glass eye hired a lot of Piute Indians to clean up a piece of ground
for him--get the rocks and stumps out, you know. Well, them Piutes
would work along all right as long as he stood right over them, but the
minute he'd go away they'd every last single one of 'em lay down and
take a nap. So finally he got an idea. He took his glass eye out of the
socket and set it on a stump facing down the field and he says to old
Johnson Sides, the Peacemaker of the Piutes, who could speak English
and acted as interpreter for the gang, he says to him:

"'You tell your bunch that I'm goin' away a little while, but I'm
leavin' my eye behind me to watch and see that none of 'em don't loaf
on the job.'

"And old Johnson translated it and he put off somewheres. Well, sir,
it worked fine for several days. Every time he quit the job he left his
eye behind him on the stump. And every time a buck felt like loafing
he'd look around and see that glass eye glarin' his way, or anyhow
seemin' to, and he'd duck his head and spit on his hands and go to it
again.

"But one day the boss came back and every blamed Indian in sight was
stretched out on the ground snorin' to beat thunder. One smart one had
slipped up behind the glass eye and slipped an empty tomato can down
over it so it couldn't spy on 'em. And so when I seen your false teeth
I thought of that Carson City feller's false eye, only his was covered
up with an old tin can and yours was settin' out in the open, tellin'
me things.

"For one thing they was tellin' me I maybe might be right on the
suspicions I'd had about them tracks up above. First, though, I asked
some questions without lettin' on to anybody what I had in my mind. A
detective on a case don't go round blabbin' his business to everybody
in sight, you know. I found out Hurley never had a bad tooth in his
head. So this plate must belong to the fellow that was with him, which
was you. That was point number one.

"I found out what size foot Hurley had and what kind of a boot he was
wearin.' Point number two: them fake tracks up above couldn't have been
made by him. They must have been made by you. Question then was, why
should you want to sneak out of that basin and duck your nut without
spreadin' the word? Says I to myself, 'That's for me to find out.' So
havin' quietly confisticated that plate for evidence, I climbed up to
the sandy stretch of the trail without bein' noticed particular by any
of the party and I made certain I hadn't been wrong in the first place
about them tracks."

"You keep harping on that," said Chaney with irritation. "What was
wrong with those tracks? Mind you, I'm not admitting anything nor
confessing anything, but I'm asking you what was wrong there?"

The under-sheriff grinned in appreciation of his own shrewdness.

"Nothin' much was wrong with them, only this," he explained. "There
was one set too many, that's all. When you backed across that sand you
done a first-rate job, but you plumb forgot to brush out the prints
you'd already made comin' in. You'd got down out of the saddle and
was walking your horse when you started down that day. I'm right,
ain't I? You needn't answer--I know I am. Well, that was your mistake,
brother--not wipin' out the first set. So there they was as plain as
the nose on your face--two sets of prints, about a yard and a half
apart and both pointin' in the same direction!

"They say a feller that's fixin' to commit a cold-blooded murder always
leaves something behind him to convict him, and I judge it's the same
way with a feller that takes it in his head all of a sudden to try
to work a fraud on an insurance company or somebody. Lawsy me, that
double set of tracks showin' there to give you away, and no doubt you
sayin to yourself how smart you was all the time you was makin' 'em!
Why, say, listen, the only way it could 'a' been possible for you to
make 'em honest would for you to be twins.

"Well, later on when I found out more about you, I wouldn't been much
surprised to hear you was twins and carried the other twin hid on your
person somewheres and trotted him out when you wanted to use him.
Because by all accounts you certainly are a great one, Chaney, for
havin' an extry supply of everything in your war bags. Well, maybe that
is good medicine--I won't say; but it certainly turned out bad for you
this one time.

"Well, anyhow, I kept my mouth shut, not takin' nobody in my
confidence, on the trip back to Polebridge. As soon as I could get
a minute to myself I called up Kalispel--and say, talk about your
coincidences! The news of you and young Hurley bein' missin' had been
given out the day before by the sheriff and it was telegraphed all over
the country to the newspapers, and the home office of our company in
New Haven, Connecticut, had seen the dispatch and wired to the district
agency at Helena sayin' you carried a policy with us and for them to
start an inquiry into the circumstances and get confirmation and all;
and the district agency had wired to me sayin' the same thing.

"Maybe them home-office folks wasn't astonished when the word came
right back to 'em that their local representative was already on the
job and smellin' a rat. Just to show you, they thought so well of me
on account of what I'd already nosed out they didn't send no special
investigator out from headquarters to handle the matter. They turned it
over to me, with an expense account and a drawin' account and all; just
told me to drop everything else and stick to this case till I found
you. So I got a leave of absence from the sheriff's office, and, buddy,
I've been on your trail ever since, and that's goin' on eleven months.

"Sometimes I'd think I was right close up behind you and then again
there'd be times when I'd lose the scent altogether and have to scout
round on the loose till I crossed it again. There's been gaps and
breaks to your movements where I just had to take a chance and bridge
over the jump and bulge ahead. Why, I'd lose sign of you and your
probable whereabouts for weeks and months hand-runnin'. But I didn't
quit you, not for a single minute, never, at no time."

Having achieved the somewhat difficult feat of incorporating four
separate negatives into one positive sentence, the pleased man-hunter
contemplated his legs outstretched before him with a gloating,
reminiscent smile.

"Well, that's about all of the yarn," he added after a short pause.
"No, it ain't quite all, neither. There was the way I first came to
come to get you spotted definite. Startin' off, I says to myself:
'He wouldn't go east or south; if he did, he'd run into one of the
Park hotels or a bunch of dude tourists on one of the main trails. He
couldn't come back out at the west side because that's where people who
saw him when he went into the mountains would be sure to meet him and
remember him. So, if he's got any gumption at all, he's went north.'
That's what I says, dopin' things out.

"So I goes north my own self. About all I had to go on for a spell
was a photograph of you that the home-office people dug up--that and
a pretty complete schedule of your ways and your habits. I banked on
them more'n I did on the picture--a fellow can change the way he looks,
but he ain't so apt to change the way he does. As it turned out, I was
right. Because when I'd worked along as far as Vancouver and made a
canvass of all the dentists in the telephone directory, and run across
one dentist over on a back street that had only just lately finished
makin' an extra upper plate for a feller answering to your general
plans and specification--a feller, by gee, that already had a perfectly
good plate in his top jaw--why, then I knowed I was on the right track.

"When you come right down to it, old-timer, that was what finally fixed
your clock for you. Say, you certainly are a great hand, ain't you, for
havin' two of everything? Yes, sir, you bet, two of everything!"

Seeming to like the phrase, he repeated it again and once again. All
at once then it flashed to Chaney's brain that in the drawled and
deliberate repetition was a special emphasis, the hint and the menace
of a special meaning. What was this guy driving at, anyhow? What
revelation as yet unmentioned was impending? Then, with the next words
from his captor it came--the realization.

"I gotta hand it to you there, yes, sir. Two of everything for you,
includin' aliases--_and wives_. Whoa! Stiddy, boy! Stand hitched!"

For the bigamist, with a vision of state's prison before his eyes, had
jerked so hard in his scrambling leap that he almost dislocated his
shackled wrist and did rack the frail bed down.




WE OF THE OLD SOUTH

[Decoration]


Just as he was, Captain Ransom Teal might have stepped right out of
the pages of some story book. He looked like a refugee from a list
of illustrations. Still, and with all that, there was on his part no
conscious striving for effect. He looked that way because that was the
way he looked. And his general walk and conversation matched in. He
moved in the gentle prismatic shimmer of his own local color. He was
the genuine article, absolutely.

On the other hand, Miss Blossom Lamar Clayton was what you might call
self-assembled.

Hers was a synthetic blend, the name being borrowed in these quarters,
the accent in those. As for the spare parts, such as mannerisms and
tricks of gesture and the fashion of dressing the hair, they had been
picked up here, there and elsewhere, as the lady went along. Almost
the only honest thing about her was the original background of an
inconsequential little personality. She was so persistent a cadger,
though, that only once in a while did the primary tints show through
those pilfered, piled-on coats of overglazing.

She was living proof of what petty larceny will do for a practitioner
who keeps it up long enough and gets away with it most of the time. She
was guilty on twenty counts but the trouble was you couldn't convict
her. Not with the evidence on hand, anyhow.

They met--the escaped frontispiece and the human loan collection--in
Hollywood, hard by one of the larger moving-picture plants. It was a
first-rate site for such a meeting between two such specimens to take
place, and highly suitable, because out there so many of the fictions
are dressed up as facts and nearly every fact has a foundation of
fiction which lies under it and lies and lies and lies. Almost anything
can happen in Hollywood. And almost everything does, if you believe
what you read in the Sunday supplements.

To be exact, the trails of these two first crossed in the dining-room
of Mrs. H. Spicer. They crossed there and shortly thereafter became
more or less interwoven.

Miss Clayton had been a guest at Mrs. H. Spicer's for some weeks past
now, long enough to be able to describe beforehand what would be served
for dinner on any given day. In the matter of her menus Mrs. H. Spicer
was very High-church; she followed after ritual. This saved mental fag,
which is a thing to be avoided when one is conducting a high-grade
boarding-house mainly patronized by temperamental ladies and gentlemen
who either are connected with, or who hope ultimately to be connected
with, what used to be the largest single amusement industry in the
United States before bootlegging crowded it back down into second
place.

A tapeworm would have some advantage over a surviving sojourner beneath
Mrs. H. Spicer's roof because the tapeworm never can tell in advance
what it is going to have for its chief meal for the day, whereas if you
were hardy and lasted through the second week at Spicer's, you knew
that Monday's dinner would be based on the solid buttresses of corned
beef and cabbage, and Tuesday's on lamb stew with cole-slaw on the
side, and Wednesday's on liver and bacon, and so on through to Sunday's
crowning feast, which was signalized by chicken fricassee accompanied
by a very durable variety of flour dumpling with fig ice-cream for
dessert; then repeat again in serial order, as named.

It was Mrs. Spicer's brag that she ran a homelike establishment. She
said it really was more like one big happy family than a mere boarding
house; to make it such was her constant aim, she said. But Tobe Daly
said--behind her back, of course--that if this was home he knew now why
so many girls left it. Tobe was always pulling some comical line.

This, being a Friday, was fish day with rice pudding to follow. Miss
Clayton, having finished her rice pudding, was in the act of rising
from her chair to go out and join this same Mr. Tobe Daly on the porch
when Mrs. H. Spicer brought in a strange old gentleman. With the air
which she always wore when presenting a fresh recruit to the other
members of her constantly changing family groups--a kind of soothing
yet a fluttering air--the landlady piloted him to the small table for
four over in the far corner and presented him to the pair who still
lingered at it--Miss Clayton and a Mrs. Scofield--and assigned him to
the one vacant place there and told Katie, the second dining-room girl,
to bring him some dinner.

Immediately there was something about the newcomer to catch the fancy
and set the mind to work. There was more than a something, there was a
great deal. It was not so much that he wore white whiskers and wore his
white hair rather long. Hollywood is one spot where whiskers--a vast
number of them--command favorable attention and have a money value.
The reckless partisan who swore never to trim until William Jennings
Bryan had been elected president comes into his belated own there.
After all these long and cumbered years he has at last his place in
the sun--as a benevolent uncle, or a veteran mining prospector, or the
shaggy but kind-hearted keeper of the lighthouse on the coast where the
little child drifts ashore in the storm, lashed to a mast, or the aged
wanderer of the waste-lands who in Reel Three turns up and in Reel Six
turns out to be the long-lost father of the heroine. Or what not.

So it was not this new boarder's whiskers and his long hair which
centered the collective eye of the dining-room so much as it was his
tall, slim, almost straight old figure, his ruddy and distinguished
but rather vacuous face, his high white collar and black string tie,
his black frock coat with the three upper buttons of the waistcoat
unfastened so that the genteel white pleated shirt bosom ballooned out
of the vent, his slim "low quarter" shoes. More than these it was his
bearing, so courtly, which meant so old-fashioned, and most of all it
was the sweeping low salute he rendered to Mrs. Scofield and to Miss
Clayton before he sat down and drew up. It was as though he said: "As
examples of fair womanhood I render tribute to you both. Through you I
honor all the gracious sex of which you two are such shining ornaments."

You almost could hear him saying it; your imagination told you this was
precisely the sort of high-flown, hifalutin language he would use, and
use it naturally, too. For here was a type come to life, a character
bit in the flesh. And that's a rare bird to find even in Hollywood
where types do so freely abound.

He asked Miss Clayton a question or two, and she made hurried and, one
might have thought, confused answers before she escaped to the veranda
where Tobe Daly, that canny squire of dames, was holding space for her
alongside him on the top step.

"Gee," began Tobe, "did you make it?"

"Make what?" she asked, settling and smoothing her skirts.

"The old pappy guy, who else?"

"He's nice," said Miss Clayton, still engaged in the business of
drawing the skirt down over her knees.

"He's a freak," said Mr. Daly. He cocked a shrewd appraising squint
at her side face. "Say, I was piping it off through the front window
when the old battle-ax towed him in and interduced him to you gals, and
the way it looked to me you kind of ducked soon as he began shooting
conversation at you."

"Never mind that part of it," she countered. "Who is he and where did
he come from? Or, don't you know? All I caught was his name. Teal,
something like that."

"Teal, huh? Swell name for an old duck, I'll claim. Jimmy Hoster
yonder was just giving me the low-down on him. It seems like Chief
Gillespie--you know, director with the Lobel outfit--well, Gillespie he
piped him off down there in Alabama or wherever it was down South that
he's had his bunch on location, shooting stuff for that new costume
picture that Winifred Desiree and Basil Derby are being featured in.
So Gil brought him along with 'em when they got back this morning,
figuring, I guess, on using him in that picture or else in something
else.

"They had him over on the Lobel lot this afternoon and they tell
me he went big just on his looks. Well, you got to hand it to that
Gillespie--he's some picker. If that old boy only had one of these here
white goatees on his chin instead of those mountain-goat drapes, he'd
be the most perfect Southern Colonel ever I saw in the fillums or on
the talking stage, either one. But he's the first one ever I saw--you
know what I mean, O. K. in every touch--outside of a book or a show
shop. I figure quite a lot of 'em around here will be wanting him."

"I wish somebody would decide they wanted me," she said. "This just
hanging round and hanging round gets on my nerves--not to speak of
other reasons."

"Well, ain't I told you I'm on the look-out for something for you?
Ain't I told you all about what I been doing 'specially on your
account? But with a million of these janes from all over the country
swarming in here and fighting for every chance that turns up, it's kind
of hard making an opening for a new hand."

"If I could just get on once, even as an extra, I'd show 'em something."

"If you'd listen to reason, kid, and be good to me"--he sank his
voice--"you know, be a real little cozy pal, I'll guarantee you'll be
something better than an extra. A fella likes to be a good fella and a
good sport and all, and go through for somebody, but what I say is he's
due his reward. Now, ain't he?"

The girl seemed not to have heard him.

"He's nice," she said, as though to herself. "I'll bet anything he's
awfully nice."

"Who? Oh, you mean old Uncle Whiskers. Forget him--think about me a
spell. Why not be reasonable now, like I was just now saying?" He
scrooged in closer.

She edged away, keeping distance between them. Mr. Daly caught a flash
of her quick grimace. From wheedling, his tone changed to a rasping
one of rising temper. "Maybe he's nice," he said, "but even so I
noticed you sort of run out on him a while ago." He let a little grit
of satire sift into the next sentence: "What's the matter--don't you
real Southerners like to get together when you get a chance and hold
hands and sing Dixie Land? Or is it you was scared of something?"

"Say, look her-r-r-e, you lay off that stuff." If the truth must be
known Miss Clayton was a child of Pittsburgh. And in Pittsburgh to
r-r-r is human, to forgive almost impossible--if you're a purist in the
matter of phonetics. And in moments of stress this native was prone
to forget things which laboriously she had learned, and revert to the
native idioms.

"Well, then, all I got to say is that if you're Southern I'm a Swede
watchmaker." He shrugged, then got on his legs. "Say, little one, if
you want to get huffy and act standoffish I'm pretty well up on the
huff stuff myself. But stick around here awhile longer and you'll see
how far a head of taffy hair and a doll-baby face will get you without
you got somebody on the inside of one of the big plants to plug your
game." Young Mr. Daly, camera-man by profession and skirt-chaser on the
side, tipped his hat brim the fractional part of an inch. "So long; and
think it over."

The dusk gathering under the pepper trees along the sidewalk absorbed
his runty but swaggering shape. Left alone, Miss Clayton put her elbows
on her knees and her chin on her fisted hands and thought it over.
She took stock of herself and her prospects, social and artistic, also
financial. On the whole she didn't have such a very cheerful evening
sitting there all by herself.

It was next morning when the California pathways of those two
Southerners--the seventy-nine-year-old regular and the twenty-year-old
volunteer--really met and joined. It started at the breakfast table,
which they had now to themselves. The disgruntled Mr. Daly had come
down earlier. Mrs. Scofield would come down later. Between engagements
in small mother rôles--not necessarily small mothers but nearly always
small rôles--she was resting, which is a professional term signifying
restlessness.

Captain Teal had eaten his prunes--Native Sons, Tobe would have called
them--and was waiting for his bacon with an egg, when Miss Clayton
entered. At sight of her he instantly was on his feet, much to the
surprise of Katie, the other dining-room girl, who thought she knew
boarding-house manners but was always willing to learn something; and
he made a featly bow of greeting in which the paternal was blended with
a court chamberlain's best flourish, and drew out Miss Clayton's chair
for her. Katie perceived that the old gentleman was not welcoming his
fellow lodger to a place at Mrs. H. Spicer's board so much as he seemed
to be welcoming her to his own. For the moment, he was the entertainer,
Miss Clayton his honored guest. There was a trick about it, someway.

He waited in a silence which throbbed with the pulse of a considerate
gallantry until the lady had stated her wishes to Katie, she choosing
the apple sauce in preference to the prunes. Then he took up at the
point where he had left off on the interruption of her flight the
evening before.

"I hardly dared hope I should have the esteemed pleasure of meeting a
fellow Southerner--and one so charming--so soon after my advent into
this far Western city," he said. "When our delightful hostess mentioned
the fact I was agreeably surprised, most agreeably. You will pardon me
the liberty I take in paying you compliments at so early a stage of our
mutual acquaintance. But between Southerners meeting so far from home
there is bound to be a bond, as you know." His antique stilted language
had a pleasant flavor for the show girl. She wanted to giggle and yet
she was flattered. "I was on the point of putting more questions last
evening when something intervened--I believe you were called away.
Pardon me again, but might I inquire from what part of our beloved
South you hail?"

"From Georgia," she answered, more or less on a venture. Back in
New York it usually had sufficed when she announced that she was a
Southerner.

"Why, then, that does indeed strengthen the tie between us," he said.
"By birth I am a Carolinian but my dear mother was a Georgian of the
Georgians. She was a Colquit--one of the Savannah Colquits." So, in
another century, a descendant of a Tudor or a Percy might have spoken.
"From what part of that noble old state do you come?"

"Well, not from any place in particular," she parried desperately. "I
mean, not from any regular town, you understand. I was born out in the
country, on a kind of a country place--a farm, sort of."

"Ah, a plantation," he corrected her gently. "In our country we call
them plantations. But near where? And in what county?"

To gain time she spooned her mouth full of apple sauce. This was like
filling in a blank for a census taker, only worse. In a panic she cast
about in that corner of her mind where her knowledge of geography
should have been. She thought of Columbus. There ought to be a Columbus
in Georgia; there just must he. There was one in Ohio, she remembered:
she played it once with a Shubert road show. And one in Indiana, too.
She knew a fellow from there, a chorus man in the Follies. So she took
a chance:

"I was born out from a town called Columbus--about twenty miles out, I
think."

"Oh, Columbus--a lovely and a thriving little city," he said, and she
breathed easier but only for an instant. "I know it well; I know many
of the older families there. If you are from near Columbus you must
know the--"

She broke in on him. These waters grew steadily deeper.

"Well, you see, I left there when I was only just a little thing. All
I can remember is a big white house and a lot of colored peop--" she
caught herself--"a lot of darkies. My parents both died and my--my aunt
took me. That is to say, she wasn't my real aunt; just a close friend
of the family." Swiftly she continued to improvise. "But I always
called her Auntie. She moved up North to live and brought me along with
her. Her name was Smith." (That much was pure inspiration, Smith being
such a good safe common name.) "So that's where I've lived most of my
life--in the North. I don't know scarcely anything about my relatives.
But at heart I've always been a very intense Southerner."

"I can well understand that," he said, and the badgered fictionist
hoped she had steered him back into safer shallows. "A real Southerner
never ceases to be one. But I might have guessed that you had been
reared among Northern influences and Northern surroundings. Your voice,
in speaking, seems to betray the fact."

She experienced a disconcerting shock. Until now, she had thought
practice had made perfect. Besides, she had studied under what she
regarded as first-rate schooling. At the outset of her stage career,
when she first decided to be a Southern girl because being a Southern
girl was popular and somehow had romance in it, she had copied her
dialectics from a leading lady in a musical production, who in turn
had copied the intonations of a stage director who once had been a
successful black-face comedian. And if a man who had been an end man in
a minstrel show for years didn't know how Southerners talked, who did?
For months, now, barring only that nosey Tobe Daly, nobody had shown
suspicion. Possibly Captain Teal read the flustered look on her face
and mistook its purport, for he hastened to add:

"I mean to say that the North has contaminated--or perhaps I should
say, affected--your Southern pronunciation. My hearing is not the
best in the world but, as well as I may hear, it would seem that you
speak certain words with--shall we say, an alien inflection. Pardon me
again--the fault lies with my partial deafness--but I am afraid I did
not quite catch your name last evening?"

She told him.

He bent toward her across the slopped breakfast dishes. He was as eager
and happy as a child with a bright new toy. That was what he would have
put you in mind of--a bearded octogenarian débutante in that pitiable
state we call second childhood, but for the moment tremendously
uplifted by a disclosure held to be of the utmost importance.

"Why, my dear child," he said, "you don't mean to tell me! Where did
you get your middle name? Was Lamar, by any chance, your mother's
maiden name."

She nodded dubiously. As well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. But she
had not hanged herself; in another minute she was to find that out.
She had soundly strengthened herself.

"Then we are related, you and I, my dear. Not closely related, but
even so, there is a relationship. I suppose you might say we are very
distant cousins. Now--"

"I never was the one to bother much about family."

"Ah, but you would have bothered, as you call it, had you but known.
Why, my dear child, you are related to some of the finest and oldest
families in the South. Let me tell you who you are."

They sat there then, she listening and secretly amused at first and
on the whole rather pleased with herself, and he all afire with the
enthusiasm which the aging so often give to trivialities. While his
bacon grew stiffer and his egg grew limper, each according to its
own special chemistry, in the nest of their pooled cold greases, he
ramified a luxuriant family tree, trunk, branch and twig, dowering her
with a vast wealth of kinspeople whose names she knew she never would
be able to remember--Waltours, Bullochs, Gordons, Telfairs, Hustouns.

It seemed that among her forbears commonplace persons had found mighty
few places. They had been statesmen, educators, railroad builders,
gracious belles, warriors, orators, noble mothers, racers of fast
horses, owners of broad fertile acres, kindly masters and mistresses of
hundreds of black slaves, and their memories were a noble inheritance
for her to carry onward with her. Just trying to keep track of the
main lines almost made her head ache.

"My dear young lady," he was saying as they got up together to quit the
dining-room, emptied now of all except them, "we must see more of each
other while we both are in this strange city. We who are of the old
South will never lack for a congenial topic of conversation when we are
thrown together. Northerners might not understand it, but you, with the
legacy of blood that is in your veins--you will understand. After you,
my dear; after you, please." This was when they had gone as far as the
door into the hallway. "And now then," he was saying, as they passed
along the hall, "let me tell you something more about your Grandfather
Lamar's estate and domestic establishment. The house itself I remember
very clearly, as a youth. The Yankee general, Sherman, burnt it. It was
white with...."

That was the proper beginning of as freakish a companionship as that
habitat for curious intimacies and spiteful enmities, Mrs. H. Spicer's,
had ever seen. Of a younger man, of a man who had been indubitable
flesh and blood, Tobe Daly might have felt, in a way of speaking,
jealous. At least he would have been annoyed that an interloper should
all of a sudden come between him and his desires upon this casual
little Doll Tearsheet of the theater who called herself Blossom Lamar
Clayton. But of a man old enough to be the kid's grandfather, almost
old enough to be her great-grandfather--furthermore a pompous,
stilted, stupid, toploftical old dodo who behaved more like something
out of one of these old-timey before-the-war novels than a regular
honest-to-gracious human being--well, to be jealous of such a man would
be just plain downright foolish, that's all. For Tobe an attitude of
contemptuousness appeared to be the indicated mood. So he rode, as the
saying goes, the high horse, and only once did he take advantage of a
favoring opportunity openly to twit the girl regarding her choice of
beaux.

"That will be about all from you," she snapped at him, using back-stage
language. "I'm picking my own friends these days. And you lay off from
handing out your little digs at him across the table meal-times. He
may not be on to you--he's too decent and polite himself to suspect
anybody else of trying to razz him on the sly--but I'm on. So I'm
serving notice on you to quit it because if you don't, the first thing
you know you'll be in a jam with me. I know how to handle your kind. I
was raised that way. I guess it's a kind of a tip-off on the way I was
raised that I had to wait until I met a man who'll be eighty his next
birthday before I met somebody who knows how to treat a girl like she
was a lady."

Tobe, drawing off, flung a parting retort at her.

"Say, kiddo, how did you find out what it feels like to be a lady?"

"I never found out," she said. "I never knew before. But I'm taking
lessons now."

That precisely was what she was doing--taking lessons. For her it
was a new experience to be on terms of confidence with a man holding
her in somewhat the affectionate regard which he might have bestowed
upon a daughter, did he have one. Most of the men with whom she had
come in contact before this coveted to possess her. Here at last was
a relationship in which the carnal played no part; she somehow sensed
that had he been in his prime instead of, as he was, teetering toward
an onrushing senility, Captain Teal, believing her virginal--she
grimaced bitterly to herself at that--yet would have shown her no
fleshly side to his nature. In these present environments he was as
much out of place as Sir Roger de Coverley would be at a Tammany
clambake, but the thing she liked about him was that for all his
age and mental creakiness he nevertheless created out of himself an
atmosphere of innate chivalry in which he moved and by which he went
insulated against all unchaste and vulgarizing contacts. Not that she
put this conception of him in any such words as these. But she was a
woman reared in a business where observation counts, and she could feel
things which she might not always express.

Toward him her own attitude rapidly became more and more protecting as
a thwarted maternal complex in her--that same mothering instinct which
in one shape or another expresses itself in every woman--was roused
and quickened. She was pleased now that she had not obeyed an impulse
which had come to her more than once in that first week of their
acquaintance to confess to him that she was an imposter masquerading
under false colors, making believe to be something she had never been.
Confessing might have eased her conscience, but it would have wrecked
his faith in her and surely it would have marred their partnership,
might even have smashed it up entirely. And she didn't want that to
happen. Oddly, she felt that with each passing day she was going deeper
and deeper into debt to the Captain.

The obligation, though, was mutual; it fell both ways. If from him she
was absorbing a belated respect for the moralities and a desire to put
on certain small grace-notes of culture, she in return was giving the
antiquarian company for long hours which otherwise would have been
his hours of homesickness and loneliness. Probably he was used to
loneliness. He never had married--a fact which he had confided to her
in their first prolonged talk. But beyond question he would, lacking
her companionship, have been most woefully homesick. So she let him
bore her with interminable stories of a time which was to her more
ancient that the Stone Age, to the end that he should not be bored. It
cost her an effort, but from some heretofore unused reservoir of her
shallow being she pumped up the patience to lend a seemingly attentive
ear while he discoursed unendingly and with almost an infantile vanity
upon the glories of the stock from which he sprang. These repetitious
tales of grandeur were pitched in the past tense; she took due note of
that. She fully understood that his time of affluence was behind him.
He didn't tell her so. There was about him no guile. At seventy-nine
he was as innocent a babe as ever strayed in the Hollywood woods.
Nevertheless it would appear that by his code a gentleman did not plead
his poverty. Honorable achievement might be mentioned; but adversity,
even honorable adversity, was not a subject for conversation. But she
saw how threadbare his black frock coat had become and how shiny along
the seams, and how fragile and ready to fall apart his linen was. A
woman would see those things. Adversity was spreading over him like a
mold. But it was a clean mold. Soon, unless his fortunes mended, he
would be downright shabby; but never would he be squalid or careless of
the small niceties. That much was to be sensed as a certainty.

For sake of his peace of mind she secretly was glad that she had
never let him see her smoking cigarettes. It seemed that in his day
ladies had not smoked cigarettes. She sat up through most of one night
letting out hems in her skirts. She concealed from him that she used
a lip-stick and face paint. She derived a tardy satisfaction from the
circumstance that in a feminine world almost universally barbered and
bobbed she, months before she met him, had elected to keep her curls
unshorn. Then her intent had been to conform to the image she was
assuming. Flappers were common among the juveniles and some who could
not be rated among the juveniles likewise flapped; but who knew when
a casting director might require an old-fashioned type of girl for a
costume piece. Her present reward was the old Captain's praise for her
tawny poll. He was much given to saying that a woman's crowning glory
was her hair and deploring the tendency of the newer generation to
shear and shingle until the average woman's head was like the average
boy's.

When he chid her for some slip not in keeping with his venerated ideals
of womanhood on a pedestal he did it so gently that the reproof never
hurt. Frequently it helped. Besides, he never put the fault on her;
always he put it on the accident of her Northern upbringing.

There were lesser things that she learned from him. For instance, that
it was a crime against a noble foodstuff to put sweetening in corn
bread; that it was an even worse offense to the palate when one ate
boiled rice with sugar and milk on it; that a cantaloup never should
be regarded as a dessert but always as an appetizer; that hot biscuit
should be served while hot, not after the cold clamminess of _rigor
mortis_ had set in; that Robert E. Lee was the noblest figure American
life ever had produced or conceivably ever would.

To the Captain this last, though, was not to be numbered among the
lesser verities. It was a very great and outstanding fact and a
fact indisputable by any person inclined to be in the least degree
fair-minded. He had served four years as a soldier under General
Lee--a private at eighteen, a company commander at twenty-one. To have
been a Confederate soldier was a more splendid and a more gallant thing
even than being a member of one of the old families. He told her that
half a dozen times a day. He told her many men of her family had been
Confederate soldiers, too; some of them officers of high rank. She
began, without conscious effort, to think of them as members of her
family who belonged to her and to whom, through the binder of blood
ties, she belonged.

By virtue of a certain adaptability of temperament she did more than
this. That flexible mimetic quality which enabled her to slip easily
into any given rôle lent itself to the putting on of a passable
semblance to a full-flowered creation which might never have existed at
all excepting in Captain Teal's fancy, and one which we know probably
doesn't exist at all nowadays but which all the same was to him very
real, as being the typical well-bred Southern woman of all days and all
times--a sprigged-muslin, long-ringletted, soft-voiced, ultra-maidenly
vision. Physically she differed from this purely abstract picture;
concretely she strove to fit herself into the frame of that canvas. To
herself she had an acceptable excuse for the deception. For one thing,
it was good business. Her venerable admirer should know if anybody did
what real old-fashioned Southern girls were like. And to one who had
modeled after his pet pattern there must, sooner or later, come an
opportunity to play the rôle before the camera.

So, through three weeks of that Hollywood autumn, they waited, each
of them, for the call to work; and while their funds shrank, they met
regularly for meals and they took strolls together and she gave to
him most of her evenings. He spun his droning reminiscences of dusty
years and deplored the changes worked by a devastating modernism, and
she postured and posed and, bit by bit, built up and rounded out her
amended characterization--a self-adopted daughter of the Lamars and
Claytons--and constantly did her level best to look and act and be the
part.

This went on until the end of the third week, at which point Destiny,
operating through the agency of Mr. Andrew Gillespie, took a hand in
their commingled affairs.

Gillespie, coming in off the lot to the head offices, was pleasantly
excited over his new notion. He revealed it with no preamble:

"Say, you two, I've got an idea for livening up that big fight scene a
little bit."

The executive head gave a grunt which terminated in a groan. He craved
to swear; but not even Mr. M. Lobel, of Lobel's Superfilms, Inc., dared
swear now. Employees whose salaries ranged above a certain figure might
be groaned at but could not, with impunity, be sworn at. The ethics
forbade it; also such indulgence might result in the loss of a desired
director or a popular star. And Gillespie appertained to the polar list
of the high salaried. So Mr. Lobel merely groaned.

"What's the matter?" asked Gillespie sharply.

"Nothing, nothing at all, only I am thinking," rejoined Mr. Lobel, with
sorrowful resignation. "I am thinking that only two days ago right here
in this very room you promised me that positively without a question
you would keep down the expensives from now on on this here dam'
costume production which already it has run up into money something
frightful."

"Who said I was going to spend any more money?"

"An idea you just mentioned, Gillespie," stated Mr. Lobel, "and with
you I got to say it that ideas are usually always expensive."

"This thing won't cost anything--it won't cost a cent over a couple of
hundred for salary, costumes, props and all, if it costs that much. And
it'll put a little note of newness, a kind of different touch into that
battle scene; that's what I'm counting on."

"Oh, well, Gillespie, in that case--" The grief was lifting from Mr.
Lobel. He turned to his second in command. "Wasn't I only just now
saying to you, Milton, that Gillespie is the one always for novelties?"

The director chose to disregard the compliment.

"Do you recall that handsome-looking old scout that I brought back with
me here last month from the Southern trip?"

"Like a skinny Santa Claus, huh? Sure, I seen him," said Mr. Lobel,
"and wondered what you was maybe going to do with him."

"Me, too," said Mr. Liebermann, affectionately known among lesser
members of the staff as "Oh-yes-yes Milton." "The one with the w'ite
w'iskez, you mean. Also I wondered about him."

"Well, then, here's the answer," explained Gillespie. "Just a few
minutes ago it came to me. I'm going to give him a bit to play in the
Gettysburg stuff. Did either of you two ever happen to hear of John
Burns?"

"Let me think--the name comes familiar," said Mr. Lobel; "wasn't he a
middle-weight prize-fighter here some few years back? Let's see, who
was it licked that sucker?"

"No, no, no," Gillespie broke in on the revery. "I mean the John Burns
of the poem."

"Sure," assented Mr. Liebermann, who prided himself that although
somewhat handicapped by lack of education in his earlier days he had
broadened his acquaintance with literary subjects after he quit dress
findings and tailors' accessories. "What Gillespie means, Lobel, is the
notorious poet, John Burns."

"Are you, by any chance, referring to Robert Burns, of Scotland?"
demanded Gillespie with a burr of rising indignation in his voice.
Gillespie had been born in the land of cakes and haggis.

"Robert or John or Henry, what's the odds?" countered Mr. Liebermann,
and shrugged. "Are you, anyhow, so sure it was Robert? Seems to me--"

"Am I sure? Oh, Lord!" With an effort Mr. Gillespie regained control of
his feelings. "The poet I am thinking of was the American poet, Bret
Harte. And Harte wrote a poem about old John Burns of Gettysburg. I
don't believe that even you ever read that particular poem, Milt."
His elaborated sarcasm was lost, though, on Mr. Liebermann. "Anyhow,
I'm going to introduce the character of John Burns into the main
battle-shots. And this old-timer of mine is going to play him. We can
use extracts from the poem for the sub-titles. That's what I came
over to tell you, Lobel, not to discuss with our cultured friend here
whether the noblest poet that ever lived--a genius that every school
child in this country should be familiar with--was named Robert Burns
or Oscar Burns or Isadore Burns. By the way, have either of you seen
Herzog this morning? He hasn't been on the set, or if he has I missed
him. I want to send him in to Hollywood to the address where the old
boy's stopping."

       *       *       *       *       *

Herzog may have been a capable assistant-director--the film world so
acclaimed him--but as an emissary his performances might be open to
criticism as lacking in some of the subtler shadings of diplomacy.

All went smoothly at the meeting in Mrs. H. Spicer's parlor until
after he delivered the purport of his superior's message, Captain Teal
harkening attentively.

"Very well, sir," said the Captain. "I am indebted to you, sir,
for bringing me this summons. Kindly present my compliments to Mr.
Gillespie and inform him that I shall report for duty tomorrow morning
promptly on the hour named."

"He ain't waiting for any compliments, I guess," said Herzog. "What he
wants is for you to be there on time so's we can give you the dope on
the bit you're going to play and get you measured for the clothes and
all. Did I mention to you that you're cast for a battle scene? Well,
you are. Possibly you seen some of this here war-stuff in your day, eh?"

"Sir," said the Captain stiffly, "I had four years of service in a
heroic struggle such as this world never before had seen. Permit me to
ask you a question: Possibly--I say possibly--you may have heard of the
War Between the Sections for the Southern Confederacy?"

"Well, if I did, it wasn't by that name," confessed the tactless Mr.
Herzog. "What's the diff', if I did or I didn't?"

"None whatsoever, sir, to you," stated Captain Teal. "The difference to
me is that I took part in that great conflict." But his irony was lost
and spent itself on the soft California air. By clamping his hat, which
he had worn throughout the interview, more firmly down upon his head,
Mr. Herzog, still all tolerant affability, now indicated that he was
about to take his departure.

"One moment, if you please," added Captain Teal. "There is another
matter which I desire may be brought to the attention of my worthy
friend, Mr. Gillespie." He spoke as one conferring favors rather than
as one who just had been made the recipient of a favor. "Stopping here
in this same establishment is a most gifted young Southern lady--a
Miss Blossom Lamar Clayton. She has had experience of the dramatic
profession; I would say she has undoubted gifts. But as yet she has
been unable, through lack of suitable opportunity, to demonstrate her
abilities in the local field. Personally, I am most deeply interested
in her future--"

"Why, Foxy Grandpa, you old son of a gun!" exclaimed the edified Mr.
Herzog. With a jovial thumb he harpooned the Captain in the ribs. "What
do you mean, you old rascal, hooking up with a skirt at your age?"

"Sir," said Captain Teal, in an awful, withering voice, "it pleases you
to be offensive. The young lady in question not only is my protégée,
in a way of speaking, but I have the very great honor to be distantly
related to her family. Do I make myself sufficiently plain to your
understanding? And kindly remember also that my name to you, sir, and
all your ilk is Teal, Captain Rodney Teal, sir."

But Mr. Herzog declined to wither.

"No offense," he said. "Just let me see if I get the big idea? I
suppose you want Gillespie to give the gal the once-over and see
whether he can use her?"

"In other words than those you use, that, sir, was the concern I had in
mind," said Captain Teal.

"Well, then, why not bring her along with you in the morning?"
suggested Mr. Herzog, with a placating gesture, he being now vaguely
contrite over having in some utterly inexplicable way given offense to
this touchy old party, and somehow impressed by the other's tremendous
show of outraged dignity. "I suppose there's no harm in that. If
Gillespie likes her looks he might give her a show at some little thing
or other; you never can tell. And he's a great hand for making his own
finds. And if he don't fall for her you pass her along to me for a
screen test, and if she comes clean there I might work her in among the
extras and let her pick up a little money that way to carry her along.
Get me?"

Which generous avowal so mollified the old Captain that, in token of
his forgiveness and his gratitude, he bestowed upon Mr. Herzog a most
ceremonious handshake at parting.

As it turned out, here was one beginner who needed no rehearsals.
Noting how aptly the aged novice seemed to slip into the personality
of the part as soon as he had put on the costume, with its saffron
vest, its curl-brimmed, bell-crowned high hat, its blue coat that was
swallow-tailed and tall in the collar, "and large gilt buttons size of
a dollar"--see the poem for further details--Gillespie decided that a
rehearsal might be a mistake. It might make this eleventh hour addition
to the cast self-conscious, which of course was what Gillespie above
all things desired to avoid. He didn't want Captain Teal to try to act.
As he repeatedly emphasized, he just wanted him to be himself.

Nor did it occur to Gillespie, any more than it occurred to Herzog,
assisting him in the day's job, to take the old man into their
confidence touching on what of theme and development had gone before in
the making of this masterpiece of an historical production, or on what
would follow after. Players of character bits are not supposed to know
what the thing's about. Indeed, there are times when the patron of the
silent drama, going to his favorite theater and viewing the completed
work, is inclined to believe that some of the principal performers
could have had but a hazy conception of what it was all about. Nobody,
one figures, ever explained the whys and wherefores to them, either.
However, that is neither here nor there, this being no critique of the
technique of the motion-picture art but merely an attempt to describe
an incident in the filming of one particular scene in one particular
motion-picture, namely the epic entitled "Two Lovers of War-Time."

There should have been a broad sea of ripening wheat rolling upward
along a hillside slope to a broken stone wall. Gillespie, usually a
stickler for the lesser verities, was compelled to forego the ripening
wheat because, while outdoor stagecraft has gone far in these later
times and studio stagecraft has gone still farther, you cannot, in
California in the fall of the year, months after the standing crop has
been cut, artificially produce a plausible semblance of many acres of
nodding grain all ready for the reaper. So he contented himself with a
stubble field, and privately hoped no caption observer would record the
error. But the traditional stone fence, which is so famous in song and
story, was there. And thither the Captain was presently escorted.

"Now, here's the layout," specified Herzog, who actively was in charge
of this phase of the undertaking. "You're supposed to be the only
civilian"--Herzog pronounced it _civil-an_--"the only civilian in the
whole town that didn't beat it when the enemy came along. All the rest
of 'em took it on the run to the woods but you stuck because you ain't
scared of nobody. You're one of these game old patr'ots, see? So you
just loaded up your old rifle and you declared yourself in. So that
makes you the hero of the whole outfit, for the time being. Get me?...
Good! Well, then--now follow me clos't, because this is where the real
action starts--the very next morning you happen to be out here on the
edge of the town and right over yonder is where the big doings bust
out. The book that the chief got the notion for these shots out of
don't say how you got here in the first place but we're taking it for
granted, me and Gillespie are, that you're just fiddling around looking
for trouble on your own hook. The book does say, though--it's a poetry
book--that your gang get a slant at you when you show up and they start
in making funny cracks and asking you where you got them funny clothes
you got on and asking you what you think you're going to do anyhow with
that there big old musket you're lugging with you.

"But I figure that would kind of slow up the action, so I've changed it
around some from the way the book's got it. The way it's going to be is
the battle gets going good before you join in. One gang--one army, I
mean--is behind that fence and the other army comes running up towards
'em from down at the foot of that hill yonder, whooping and yelling and
shooting and all. And with that, you cut in right between 'em, all by
your lonesome, and take a hand. That brings you out prominent because
you're the only guy in sight that's dressed different from everybody
else. All the rest of these guys are in soldier's clothes. So this
gives you your chance to hog the picture for a w'ile. It's good and fat
for you along here.

"Well, then, that other army that I've just been telling you about
comes charging on right up to the wall and there's close-in fighting
back and forth--hand-to-hand stuff, what I mean--for two or three
minutes before the break comes and the gang that is due to be licked
decide they've had enough and start retreating. And all this time
you're right in the thick of it, shooting first, and then when your
gun's empty you club it by the barrel and fight with it that way. Don't
be afraid of being too rough, neither. These extras are under orders
to go at one another raw, so it'll be more like a battle ought to be.
Them that puts the most steam into it will get a finnuf slipped to 'em.
They know that, and I wouldn't be surprised but what probably a couple
of dozen of 'em should get laid out in earnest; so you needn't feel
backward about wading in and doing your share. Just put yourself right
into it, that's the idea, and cut loose regardless. I'll be off to one
side cueing you through my megaphone which way to go when they first
pick you up for the long shots, but after that it's all up to you.
Don't think about the camera nor nothing else. Don't look at a camera.
Don't look around, even to see where any of the cameras are. But then,
seeing you told me yourself only last week about having fought in one
of them regular wars, I guess I don't need to tell you how to go to it.
It'll all come back to you in less than a minute, I'll bet you.... Now
then, come on over here and let me get you set."

Herzog's optimistic prediction was justified. In less than a minute
it did come back to Captain Teal. The first preliminary crackle of
musketry fire brought it back to him with a mighty surge of clamoring,
swirling memories. The first whiff of acrid powder smoke in his
nostrils, the first sight of those ragged gray uniforms, those dusty
blue uniforms, changed the memories into actualities. The weight of
sixty years slipped off his shoulders; the rich saps of youth mounted
for a little passing time into his pithy marrows, giving swiftness to
his rickety legs and strength to his withered arms. It was proof of
what an imagination fired by vivid reminders of clanging bygone things
could do for an ancient's body.

Headlong once more into battle went Captain Teal, and as he did he
uttered sundry long-drawn wolfish yells, one yell right behind another,
until you would have thought, had you been there to listen, that his
throat surely must split itself wide open.

In he went, and he took sides. He took the wrong side. That is to
say, and speaking from strictly a technical standpoint, he took the
wrong side. But from Captain Teal's standpoint he took the right side
and the only side which with honor he might take. To be sure, no one
beforehand had advised him specifically in this matter of taking
sides. It had been Herzog's oversight that he had not dwelt more
clearly upon this highly important point, which he had assumed his
venerable pupil would understand. And now it was Herzog's handicap, as
the Captain's intention became plain, that Herzog's hoarsely bellowed
commands--commands at the outset but merging swiftly into harsh and
agonized outcries--should fall upon that ear of Captain Teal which was
his deafer ear.

Not that it would have made any difference to Captain Teal had he been
able to hear. With his head back and his parted white whiskers flowing
rearward over his shoulders, with the Rebel yell still shrilly and
constantly issuing from him, he went in and he took command of those
onrushing supernumeraries who wore the gray, and he bade them go with
him and give the Yankees hell, and he led them on up the hill to where
the blue-clad forces held its crest. Theirs not to question why, theirs
but to do or die; which, as may be recalled, was once upon a time
precisely and identically the case with other doughty warriors taking
part in an earlier onslaught upon the serried field of battle. If, at
the last moment their overlords chose to amend the preordained course
of events, so be it. Since confusion and chaos were to rule the hour,
why then in that case might the best man win. Behold, now, how all
drilled plans had suddenly been tossed aside; but at least they had a
fit commander to follow after. And at least they knew the purport of
that most dwelt-upon and salient order--to smite and spare not. They
were lusty lads, these extras, no lustier perhaps than the Unionists
yonder awaiting the clash and grapple, but better captained.

And so, while the obedient camera-men kept on grinding, and while
Herzog shrieked and impotently danced and finally, casting his
megaphone from him, stood and profaned his Maker's name, Long John
Burns led Pickett's charge, and Gettysburg, after sanguinary losses
on both sides, was a Confederate victory, and American history most
wondrously was remade.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Ow!" Mr. Lobel heaved the sorrowful expletive up from his lower
stomach spaces. "All them extras to pay for all over again! All them
re-takes to be retook. All that money wasted because a crazy old loafer
must run--must run--" He grasped for the proper word.

"Run amuck," supplied Liebermann, proud of his erudition.

"--Must run a regular muck. Yes, if you should ask me, one of the worst
mucks ever I have seen in my whole life," continued Mr. Lobel. "And
you it was, Gillespie, that stood right here in this office only last
Toosday of this week and promised me you should keep down expensives.
Who's a man going to believe in this picture business? I ask you!"

"What of it?" said Gillespie. "It was worth a little money to let the
old laddy-boy get the smoke of battle in his nose once more before
he dies and have a thrill. I didn't think so awhile ago when he was
rampaging through that flock of extras, but I'm beginning to think so
now. We'll tell him he's just a trifle too notionate for this game and
pay him off--with a wee something on the side for a bonus. If you won't
do it I'll do it myself out of my own pocket. And then we'll ship him
back to that sleepy little town where he came from. Anyhow, it's not a
total loss, Lobel, remember that. We're going to salvage something out
of the wreck. And we owe the old boy for that."

"What do you mean, salve something out of it?" inquired Mr. Lobel.

"We grab off that little Clayton girl--the one I tried out in those
interior shots yesterday. She's got it in her, that kid has. I don't
mean brains, although at that I guess she's about as smart as the
average fluffy-head that's doing ingénues along this coast. But she's
got the stuff in her to put it over. Tell her a thing once and she's
got it. And she screens well. And she's naturally camera-wise. She'll
go a good way, I predict. And if it hadn't been for the old man we
wouldn't have her. He practically rammed her down my throat. It seems
she's his cousin, eight or ten times removed, and nothing would do him
but that I must hitch her onto the payroll. To get him in the proper
humor I had to take her on. But now I'm glad of it. I'll be wanting a
little contract soon for this Clayton, Lobel, so we'll have her tied
up before somebody else begins to want her. Because, sooner or later,
somebody else will."

       *       *       *       *       *

Traffic swirled past the two Southerners where they stood in a side
eddy in the train shed. They were saying good-by, and now all at once
the girl felt a curious weakness in her knees as though she were losing
a dependable prop.

"I must get aboard," he said, looking down at her from his greater
height. "We'll be leaving in a minute or so. You need not distress
yourself about me, my dear. I could never have been happy for very long
in this place--it's not like our country. These Northern people mean
well no doubt; but after all they're not our people, are they? And this
avocation was not suited for one of my years and--and antecedents; that
I also realize. I have no regrets. In fact"--a flare lit in his faded
old eyes--"in fact, I greatly enjoyed the momentary excitement of once
more facing the enemies of our beloved land--even in make-believe.
Indeed, I enjoyed it more than I can tell. I shall have that to look
back on always--that and the very great pleasure of having known you,
my dear."

He lifted her hand and kissed it and started away, and she saw him
going--a picture out of a picture book--through a sudden mist of tears.
But he came back for one more farewell passage:

"Remember, my dear," he said, "that we--you and I--are of the Old
South--the land of real gentlemen and real ladies. You'll remember that
always, won't you?"

And now, with both her arms around him and her lips pressed hard
against his ruddy old cheek, she promised him she would.

She meant it, too, at the moment. And perhaps she did and then again
perhaps she didn't. The world she lived in is so full of Tobe Dalys.
As the brethren of the leathern pants and the silken neckerchiefs of
Hollywood are so fond of saying--those mail-order movie cow-punchers
who provide living backgrounds for the Westerns--"_Quien sabe?_"




KILLED WITH KINDNESS

[Decoration]


Needles and pins, needles and pins, when a man's married his trouble
begins. That's the way the old application goes. But in the case of
Jerome Bracken it didn't go. After he married, life ran for him on
very smooth rollers and there were neither needles nor pins to prick
him. Possibly that was because he chose for his wife a virtuous and
well-meaning woman, one a bit narrow in her views perhaps and rather
stiffly opinionated, as a good many good women are who protect their
own tepid moralities behind a quill-work of sharp-pointed prejudices.
They are the female porcupines of the human race, being colorless and
lethargic in their mentalities but acute and eager when they take a
dislike. Still, the porcupine rates high among the animals. While
generally not beloved, it generally is respected. And undoubtedly this
lady who became Mrs. Jerome Bracken was well-meaning and remained
straitly so until the end of all regulated things.

Or then on the other hand, possibly Jerome Bracken's marriage was a
success because he picked precisely the sort of woman who had the
qualifications for being a suitable wife to an up-and-coming man, a
man who kept on up and kept on coming until he had arrived, with both
feet planted on how firm a foundation! But then Jerome always had
been, as the phrase is, a clever picker. He proved that when as a very
young man he moved to Dyketon and picked Queen Sears for his girl. He
kept on proving it--by picking the right business, the right code of
deportment before the eyes of mankind, the right church to belong to,
and precisely the right father-in-law.

This Queenie Sears, now; she was not the one he married, naturally not.
Queenie Sears was not the sort any man in his sane senses would marry,
she being what used to be called a fancy woman. She was an inmate of
Madam Carrie Rupert's house when he first met her and it was there,
under that hospitable but disreputable roof, down on Front Street in
Dyketon's red-light district, that the meeting took place.

About this first meeting there was nothing significant. He called, a
stranger, and she entertained him, it being her business to entertain
callers. He at this time was a shrewd but countrified youth of
twenty or thereabouts. She was a little older than that, blonde,
simple-minded, easy-going, rather pretty in an insipid way, with a
weak, self-indulgent mouth. Already she was plump, with the certainty
before her that, barring ill health to pull her down, the succeeding
years would enhance her plumpness into rolls and cushions of fat.
Probably, if the truth were known, she deliberately elected to take on
this life she was leading. However, and be that as it may, she had the
customary story to account for her present vocation when somebody who
was maudlin with a sympathy based on alcohol asked her how she came to
be what she was.

Hers was a stock story lacking novelty as well as sincerity--a
sentimental fiction dealing with a trusting and ignorant maiden's
downfall in an orange grove vaguely described as being "away down
South," and then discovery and disgrace and a traditional proud father
whose heart could be flinty and yet broken, and a shamed girl's flight
in the night and all the rest of the stage props. But sometimes it was
a plantation instead of an orange grove; or if the inquirer happened
to be a Southerner, it might be a ranch in the far West. Queenie was
taking no chances on getting herself checked up.

As for Jerome, his tale was a short one, not particularly interesting
but having the merit, as hers did not, of a background of fact. Raised
on a farm in the central part of the state; poor parents; common school
education; lately landed in Dyketon; stopping now at a second-rate
boarding-house out on Ninth Street; working for eighteen a week as
a bookkeeper at Stout & Furst's clothing store; ambitious to better
himself in both these latter regards--that, brought up to date, was
young Bracken.

Nor was there any special significance in the intimacy which
followed between these two. He visited her at more or less regular
intervals. Thus early he was shaping his days into a calculated and
orderly routine which remained a part of him forever after. She liked
him, being at heart kindly and, considering her trade, susceptible
to affectionate impulses; he liked her, being lonely, and that
substantially was all there was to it.

At the end of a year he began his journey up in the world. Mr. Gus
Ralph, president of the Ralph State Bank, took him on as an assistant
receiving teller at a hundred a month and prospects. Unknown to the
newcomer, Mr. Ralph had had his eye on him for some time--a young man
of good manners and presumably of good habits, bright, dignified,
industrious, discreet, honest--in short, a hustler. Mr. Ralph was on
the lookout for that kind. He made a place for the young man, and from
the hour when he walked into the counting-house and hung up his hat
Jerome was justifying the confidence Mr. Ralph put in him. If he was
continuing to sow his wild oats--and privately he was--at least he
sowed none during banking hours, nor did any part of his harvesting in
public, which was sufficient for his new boss. Mr. Ralph often said
he had been a youngster once himself, saying it with an air which
indicated that he had been very much of a youngster indeed.

At the end of six months more, which would make it about eighteen
months in all, young Jerome ceased his sowing operations altogether.
He didn't fray the rope; he cut it clean through at a single decisive
stroke.

"Queenie," he said to her one night, "this is going to be the last time
I'm ever coming down here to see you."

"Well, Jerry," she answered, "that'll be all right with me unless you
start going to see some other girl in some other house along the row
here."

"It's not that," he explained. "I'm going to quit going down the line
altogether. I'm through"--he made a gesture with his hands--"through
with the whole thing from now on."

"I see," she said, after a moment or two. "Been getting yourself
engaged to some nice girl--is that the way it is, Jerry?"

"Yes," he told her, "that's the way it is, Queenie."

She did not ask who the nice girl might be nor did he offer to tell
her. In that ancient age--the latter decades of the last century before
this one--there was a code for which nearly everybody of whatsoever
station had the proper reverence. In some places--bar-rooms, for
example, and certain other places--a gentleman did not bring up the
name of a young lady. It was never the thing to do.

"Here, Jerry," she said next. "I'll be kind of sorry to say good-by,
but I want you to know I wish you mighty well. Not that you need my
good wishes--you're going ahead and you'll keep on going--but I want
you to have them. Because, Jerry, if it was my dying words I was
speaking I'd still say it just the same--you've always been on the
square with me, and that's what counts with a girl like me. You never
came down here drunk, you never used rough language before me, you
never tried to bilk me or take advantage of me any kind of way. Yes,
sir, that's what counts. Even if I don't never see you face to face
again I won't forget how kind and pleasant you've been towards me. And
I'd die before I'd make any trouble for you, ever. You go your way and
I'll go mine, such as it is, and that'll be all there is to it so far
as I'm concerned.

"Now then, you've told me some news; I'll tell you some. I'm fixing
to buy out Miss Carrie. She wants to quit this business and go over
to Chicago and live decent. She's got a married daughter there, going
straight, and anyhow she's made her pile out of this drum and can
afford to quit, and I don't blame her any, at her age, for wanting to
quit. But me, it's different with. I've got a little money saved up of
my own and she's willing to take that much down and take

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