Part 7

He turned into the Richland House, with the darky following him with his valises and us following the darky; and after he had registered, old Mr. Dudley Dunn, the clerk, let us look at the register. But two or three grown men looked first; the coming of one who was so plainly a personage had made some stir among the adult population. None there present, though, could read the name the stranger had left upon the book. Old Mr. Dunn, who was an expert at that sort of thing, couldn't decide himself whether it was O. O. Driscoll or A. A. Davent. The man must have spent years practicing to be able to produce a signature that would bother any hotel clerk. I have subsequently ascertained that there are many abroad gifted as he was--mainly traveling salesmen. But if you couldn't read his name, all who ran might read the nature of his calling, for 'twas there set forth in two colors--he had borrowed the red-ink bottle from Mr. Dunn to help out the customary violet--and done in heavy shaded letters--“Representing Daniel the Mystic”--with an ornamental flourish of scrolls and feathery beaded lines following after. The whole took up a good fourth of one of Mr. Dudley Dunn's blue-ruled pages.

Inside of an hour we were to know, too, who Daniel the Mystic might be, for in the hotel office and in sundry store windows were big bills showing a likeness of a man of magnificent mien, with long hair and his face in his hand, or rather in the thumb and forefinger of his hand, with the thumb under the chin and the finger running up alongside the cheek. Underneath were lines to the effect that Daniel the Mystic, Prince of Mesmerism and Seer of the Unseen, was Coming, Coming! Also that night the Daily Evening News had a piece about him. He had rented St. Clair Hall for two nights hand-running and would give a mysterious, edifying and educational entertainment dealing with the wonders of science and baffling human description. The preliminaries, one learned, had been arranged by his affable and courteous personal representative now in our midst, Mr. D. C. Davello--so old Mr. Dudley Dunn was wrong in both of his guesses.

Next morning Daniel the Mystic was on hand, looking enough like his pictured likeness to be recognized almost immediately. True, his features were not quite so massive and majestic as we had been led to expect, and he rather disappointed us by not carrying his face in his hand, but he was tall and slim enough for all purposes and wore his hair long and was dressed all in black. He had long, slender hands, and eyes that, we agreed, could seem to look right through you and tell what you were thinking about.

For one versed in the mysteries of the unseen he was fairly democratic in his minglings with the people; and as for D. C. Davello, no one, not even a candidate, could excel him in cordiality. Together they visited the office of the Daily Evening News and also the office of our other paper, the Weekly Argua-Eye, which was upstairs over Leaken's job-printing shop. They walked through the market house and went to the city hall to call on the mayor and the city marshal and invite them to come to St. Clair Hall that night and bring their families with them, free of charge. Skinny Collins, who was of their tagging juvenile escort, at once began to put on airs before the rest. The city marshal was his father.

About the middle of the afternoon they went into Felsburg Brothers Oak Hall Clothing Emporium, steered by Van Wallace, who seemed to be showing them round. We followed in behind, half a dozen or more of us, scuffling our dusty bare feet on the splintery floor between the aisles of racked-up coats. In the rear was Willie Richey, limping along on one toe and one heel. Willie Richey always had at least one stone bruise in the stone-bruise season, and sometimes two.

They went clear back to the end of the store where the office was and the stove, but we, holding our distance, halted by the counter where they kept the gift suspenders and neckties--Felsburg Brothers gave a pair of suspenders or a necktie with every suit, the choice being left to the customer and depending on whether in his nature the utilitarian or the decorative instinct was in the ascendency. We halted there, all eyes and ears and wriggling young bodies. The proprietors advanced and some of the clerks, and Van Wallace introduced the visitors to Mr. Herman Felsburg and to Mr. Ike Felsburg, his brother. Mr. Herman said, “Pleased to meetcher,” with professional warmth, while Mr. Ike murmured, “Didn't catch the name?” inquiringly, such being the invariable formula of these two on greeting strangers. Cigars were passed round freely by D. C. Davello. He must have carried a pocketful of cigars, for he had more of them for some of the business men who came dropping in as if by chance. All of a sudden Van Wallace, noting how the group had grown, said it would be nice if the professor would show us what he could do. D. C. Davello said it wasn't customary for Daniel the Mystic to vulgarize his art by giving impromptu demonstrations, but perhaps he would make an exception just for this once. He spoke to Daniel the Mystic who was sitting silently in the Messrs. Felsburg's swivel office-chair with his face in his hands--the poster likeness was vindicated at last--and after a little arguing he got up and looked all about him slowly and in silence. His eye fell on the little huddle of small boys by the necktie counter and he said sharp and quick to Jack Irons: “Come here, boy!”

I don't know yet how Jack Irons came to be of our company on that day; mostly Jack didn't run with us. He was sickly. He had spells and was laid up at home a good deal.

He couldn't even go barefooted in summer, because if he did his legs would be broken out all over with dew poison in no time.

Jack Irons didn't belong to one of the prominent families either. He lived in a little brown house on the street that went down by the old Enders place. His mother was dead, and his sister worked in the county clerk's office and always wore black alpaca sleeves buttoned up on her forearms. His father was old Mr. Gid Irons that stayed in Scotter's hardware store. He didn't own the store, he just clerked there. Winter and summer he passed by our house four times a day, going to work in the morning and coming back at night, coming to dinner at twelve o'clock and going back at one. He was so regular that people used to say if the whistle on Langstock's planing mill ever broke down they could still set the clocks by old Mr. Gid Irons. Perhaps you have known men who were universally called old while they were yet on the up-side of middle life? Mr. Gid Irons was such a one as that.

I used to like to slip into Scotter's just to see him scooping tenpenny nails and iron bolts out of open bins and kegs with his bare hands. Digging his hands down into those rusty, scratchy things never seemed to bother him, and it was fascinating to watch him and gave you little flesh-crawling sensations. He was a silent, small man, short but very erect, and when he walked he brought his heels down very hard first. The skin of his face and of his hands and his hair and mustache were all a sort of faded pinkish red, and he nearly always had iron rust on his fingers, as though to advertise that his name was Irons.

By some boy intuition of my own I knew that he cut no wide swath in the lazy field of town life. When the veterans met at the city hall and organized their veterans' camp and named it the Gideon K. Irons Camp, it never occurred to me that they could be offering that honor to our old Mr. Gid Irons. I took it as a thing granted that there were some other Gideon Irons somewhere, one with a K in his name, a general probably, and no doubt a grand looking man on a white horse with a plume in his hat and a sword dangling, like the steel engraving of Robert E. Lee in our parlor. Whereas our Mr. Irons was shabby and poor; he didn't even own the house he lived in.

This Jack Irons who was with us that day was his only son, and when Daniel the Mystic looked at him and called him, Jack stepped out from our midst and went toward him, his feet dragging a little and moving as if some one had him by the shoulders leading him forward. His thin arms dangled at his sides. He went on until he was close up to Daniel the Mystic. The man threw up one hand and snapped out “Stop,” as though he were teaching tricks to a dog, and Jack flinched and dodged. He stopped though, with red spots coming and going in the cheeks as though under the stoking of a blowpipe, and he breathed in sharp puffs that pulled his nostrils almost shut. Standing so, he looked as poor and weak and futile as a sprig of bleached celery, as a tow string, as a limp rag, as anything helpless and spineless that you had a mind to think of. The picture of him has hung in my mind ever since. Even now I recall how his meager frame quivered as Daniel the Mystic stooped until his eyes were on a level with Jack's eyes, and said something to Jack over and over again in a half-whisper.

Suddenly his hands shot out and he began making slow stroking motions downward before Jack's face, with his fingers outstretched as though he were combing apart banks of invisible yam. Next with a quick motion he rubbed Jack's eyelids closed, and massaged his temples with his thumbs, and then stepped back.

There stood Jack Irons with his eyes shut, fast asleep. He was still on his feet, bolt upright, but fast asleep--that was the marvel of it--with his hands at his side and the flushed color all gone from his cheeks. It scared us pretty badly, we boys. I think some of the grown men were a little bit scared too. We were glad that none of us had been singled out for this, and yet envious of Jack and his sudden elevation to prominence and the center of things.

Daniel the Mystic seemed satisfied. He mopped drops of sweat off his face. He forked two fingers and darted them like a snake's tongue at Jack, and Jack, still asleep, obeyed them, as if he had been steel and they the two horns of a magnetic horseshoe. He swayed back and forth, and then Daniel the Mystic gave a sharp shove at the air with the palms of both hands--and Jack fell backward as though he had been hit.

But he didn't fall as a boy would, doubling up and giving in. He fell stiff, like a board, without a bend in him anywhere. Daniel the Mystic leaped forward and caught him before he struck, and eased him down flat on his back and folded his arms up across his breast, and that made him look like dead.

More wonders were coming. Daniel the Mystic and D. C. Davello hauled two wooden chairs up close together and placed them facing each other; then lifting Jack, still rigid and frozen, they put his head on the seat of one chair and his heels on the seat of the other and stepped back and left him suspended there in a bridge. We voiced our astonishment in an anthem of gasps and overlapping exclamations. Not one of us in that town, boy or man, had ever seen a person in hypnotic catalepsy.

Before we had had time enough to take this marvel all in, Daniel the Mystic put his foot on Jack and stepped right up on his stomach, balancing himself and teetering gently above all our heads. He was tall and must have been heavy; for Jack's body bent and swayed under the weight, yet held it up in the fashion of a hickory springboard. Some of the men jumped up then and seemed about to interfere. Old Mr. Herman Felsburg's face was red and he sputtered, but before he could get the words out Daniel the Mystic was saying soothingly:

“Be not alarmed, friends. The subject is in no danger. The subject feels no pain and will suffer no injury.”

“Just the same, Mister, you get down off that little boy,” ordered Mr. Felsburg. “And you please wake him up right away. I don't care much to see things done like that in my store.”

“As you say,” said Daniel the Mystic easily, smiling all round him at the ring of our startled faces. “I merely wished to give you a small demonstration of my powers. And, believe me, the subject feels no pain whatsoever.”

He stepped off of him, though, and Jack's body came up straight and flat again. They lifted him off the chairs and straightened him up, and Daniel the Mystic made one or two rapid passes in front of his face. Jack opened his eyes and began to cry weakly. One of the clerks brought him a drink, but he couldn't swallow it for sobbing, and only blubbered up the water when Mr. Felsburg held the glass to his lips. Van Wallace, who looked a little frightened and uneasy himself, gave two of the boys a nickel apiece and told us we had better get Jack home.

Jack could walk all right, with one of us upon either side of him, but he was crying too hard to answer the questions we put to him, we desiring exceedingly to know how he felt and if he knew anything while he was asleep. Just as we got him to his own gate he gasped out, “Oh, fellows, I'm sick!” and collapsed bodily at our feet, hiccoughing and moaning. His sister met us at the door as we lugged Jade in by his arms and legs. Even at home she had her black alpaca sleeves buttoned up to her elbows. I think she must have slept in them. We told her what had happened, or tried to tell her, all of us talking at once, and she made us lay Jack on a little rickety sofa in their parlor--there was a sewing machine in there, too, I noticed--and as we were coming away we saw a negro girl who worked for them running across the street to Tillman & Son's grocery where there was a telephone that the whole neighborhood used.

When I got home it was suppertime and the family were at the table. My sister said somebody must be sick down past the old Enders place, because she had seen Doctor Lake driving out that way as fast as his horse would take him. But I listened with only half an ear, being mentally engaged elsewhere. I was wondering how I was going to get my berry-picking money out of a nailed-up cigar-box savings bank without attracting too much attention on the part of other members of the family. I had been saving up that money hoping to amass seventy-five cents, which was the lowest cash price for Tom Birch's tame flying squirrel, a pet thing that would stay in your pocket all day and not bite you unless you tried to drag him out; but now I had a better purpose in view for my accumulated funds. If it took the last cent I meant to be in St. Clair Hall that night.

There was no balcony in St. Clair Hall, but only a sort of little hanging coop up above where the darkies sat, and the fifteen-cent seats were the two back rows of seats on the main floor. These were very handy to the door but likely to be overly warm on cold nights, when the two big, pearshaped stoves would be red hot, with the live coals showing through the cracks in their bases like broad grins on the faces of apoplectic twins. The cracked varnish upon the back of the seats would boil and bubble visibly then and the scorching wood grow so hot you couldn't touch your bare hand to it, and a fine, rich, turpentiny smell would savor up the air.

Being the first of the boys to arrive I secured the coveted corner seat from which you had a splendid view of the stage, only slightly obscured by one large wooden post painted a pale sick blue. D. C. Davello was at the door taking tickets, along with Sid Farrell, who ran

St. Clair Hall. It kept both of them pretty busy, because there were men paying their way in whom I had never seen there at all except when the Democrats had their rally just before election, or when the ladies were holding memorial services on President Jefferson Davis' birthday--men like old Judge Priest, and Major Joe Sam Covington, who owned the big tan yard, and Captain Howell, the bookdealer, and Mr. Herman Felsburg, and Doctor Lake, and a lot of others. Most of them took seats well down in front, I supposing that the educational and scientific features of the promised entertainment had drawn them together.

The curtain was cracked through in places and had a peephole in the middle, with black smudges round it like a bruised eye. It had a painting on it showing a street full of backwater clean up to the houses, and some elegant ladies and gentlemen in fancy-dress costumes coming down the stone steps of a large building like a county courthouse and getting into a couple of funny-looking skiffs. I seem to have heard somewhere that this represented a street scene in Venice, but up until the time St. Clair Hall burned down I know that I considered it to be a picture of some other, larger town than ours during a spring rise in the river, the same as we had every March. All round the inundated district were dirty white squares containing the lettered cards of business houses--Doctor Cupps, the dentist, and Anspach, the Old-Established Hatter--which never varied from year to year, even when an advertiser died or went out of business. We boys knew these signs by heart.

But to pass the time of waiting we read them over and over again, until the curtain rolled up disclosing the palace scene, with a double row of chairs across the stage in half-moon formation, and down in front, where the villains died at regular shows, a table with a water pitcher on it. Daniel the Mystic came out of the wings and bowed, and there was a thin splashing of hand-clapping, mostly from the rear seats, with Sid Farrell and D. C. Davello furnishing lustier sounds of applause. First off Daniel the Mystic made a short speech full of large, difficult words. We boys wriggled during it, being anxious for action. We had it soon. D. C. Davello mounted the stage and he and Daniel the Mystic brought into view a thing they called a cabinet, but which looked to us like a box frame with black calico curtains nailed on it. When they got this placed to their satisfaction, Daniel the Mystic, smiling in a friendly way, asked that a committee of local citizens kindly step up and see that no fraud or deception was practiced in what was about to follow. I was surprised to see Doctor Lake and Mr. Herman Felsburg rise promptly at the invitation and go up on the stage, where they watched closely while D. C. Davello tied Daniel the Mystic's hands behind him with white ropes, and then meshed him to a chair inside the cabinet with so many knottings and snarlings of the twisted bonds that he looked like some long, black creature helplessly caught in a net. This done, the two watchers slipped into chairs at opposite ends of the half-moon formation. D. C. Davello laid a tambourine, a banjo and a dinner bell on the bound man's knees and whipped the calico draperies to. Instantly the bell rang, the banjo was thrummed and the tambourine rattled giddily, and white hands flashed above the shielding draperies. But when the manager cried out and jerked the curtains back, there sat the Mystic one still a prisoner, tied up all hard and fast. We applauded then like everything.

The manager unroped him and went back to his place by the door, and after Daniel the Mystic had chafed his wrists where the red marks of the cords showed he came down a sort of little wooden runway into the audience, and standing in the aisle said something about now giving a demonstration of something. I caught the words occultism and spiritualism, both strangers to my understanding up to that time. He put his hands across his eyes for a moment, with his head thrown bade, and then he walked up the aisle four or five steps hesitating and faltering, and finally halted right alongside of Mr. Morton Harrison, the wharf master.

“I seem,” he said slowly, in a deep, solemn voice, “to see a dim shape of a young man hovering here. I get the name of Claude--no, no, it is Clyde. Clyde would tell you,” his voice sank lower and quavered effectively--“Clyde says to tell you that he is very happy over there--he says you must not worry about a certain matter that is now worrying you for it will all turn out for the best--and you will be happy. And now Clyde seems to be fading away. Clyde is gone!”

We didn't clap our hands at that--it would have been too much like clapping hands at a funeral--because we knew it must be Clyde Harrison, who had got drowned not two months before trying to save a little girl that fell overboard off the wharfboat. Just a day or two before there had been a piece in the paper telling about the public fund that was being raised to put a monument over Clyde's grave.

So we couldn't applaud that, wonderful as it was, and we shivered in a fearsome, wholly delightful anticipation and sat back and waited for more spirits to come. But seemingly there weren't any more spirits about just then, and after a little Daniel the Mystic returned to the stage and announced that we would now have the crowning achievement of the evening's entertainment--a scientific exhibition of the new and awe-inspiring art of mesmerism in all its various branches.

“For this,” he stated impressively, “I desire the aid of volunteers from the audience, promising them that I will do them no harm, but on the contrary will do them much good. I want fellow townspeople of yours for this--gentlemen in whom you all have confidence and respect. I insist only upon one thing--that they shall be one and all total strangers to me.”

He advanced to the tin trough of the flickering gas footlights and smiled out over it at us.

“Who among you will come forward now? Come!”

Before any one else could move, two young fellows got up from seats in different parts of the hall and went up the little runway. We had never seen either of them before, which seemed a strange thing, for we boys kept a sharp eye upon those who came and went. They were both of them tall and terribly thin, with lank hair and listless eyes, and they moved as though their hip joints were rusty and hurt them. But I have seen the likes of them often since then--lying in a trance in a show window, with the covers puckered close up under the drawn face. I have peered down a wooden chute to see such a one slumbering in his coffin underground for a twenty-four or forty-eight-hour test. But these were the first of the tribe our town had encountered.

On their lagging heels followed two that I did know. One was the lumpish youth who helped Riley Putnam put up showbills and the other was Buddy Grogan, who worked in Sid Farrell's livery stable. Both of them were grinning sheepishly and falling over their own feet. And following right behind them in turn came a shabby little man who had iron rust on his clothes, and walked all reared back, bringing his heels down hard with thumps at every step. It was old Mr. Gid Irons. We gaped at him.

I had never seen Mr. Gid Irons at St. Clair Hall before, none of us had; and in our limited capacities we were by way of being consistent patrons of the drama. In a flash it came over me that Jack must have told his father what a wonderful sensation it was to be put to sleep standing up on your feet, and that his father had come to see for himself how it felt. I judged that others besides us were surprised. There was a burring little stir, and some of the audience got up and edged down closer to the front.

Mr. Gid Irons went on up the little runway and took a seat near one end of the half-moon of chairs. Where he sat the blowy glare of one of the gas footlights flickered up in his face and we could see that it seemed redder than common, and his eyes were drawn together so close that only little slits of them showed under his red-gray, bushy eyebrows. But that might have been the effect of the gaslight at his feet. You could tell though that Daniel the Mystic was puzzled and perplexed, startled almost, by the appearance of this middle-aged person among his volunteers. He kept eyeing him furtively with a worried line between his eyes as he made a round of the other four, shaking hands elaborately with each and bending to find out the names. He came to Mr. Irons last.