Part 10

Time, the only patrician, will not step lively for the pert subway guards of human need, nor yet slacken pace for any bawling traffic cop of man's desire; he comes of an old family too proud to rush, too proud to wait; a fine old fellow with a sense of his own value. Time walked with Merriwether Buck as he loitered up Fifth Avenue, for the old gentleman loves to assist personally at these little comedies, sometimes; with Death a hang-dog third. Not even a fly-cop took note of the trio, although several, if they robbed a jewelry store or anything like that, would tell the reporters later that they had noticed something suspicious at the time. And the patron deities of New York City might have been over in Hoboken playing pinochle for all the heed _they_ took.

Which brings us to Sixty-fifth Street and 1.58 o'clock and the presence of the great man, all at once.

When Merriwether Buck first saw him, Meriwether Buck gasped. He couldn't believe it. And, indeed, it was a thing that might not happen again this year or next year or in five years--J. Dupont Evans, minus bulwark or attendant, even minus his habitual grouch, walking leisurely toward him like any approachable and common mortal. Merriwether Buck might well be incredulous. But it was he; the presentment of that remarkable face has been printed a hundred thousand times; it is as well known to the world at large as Uncle Pete Watson's cork leg is on the streets of Prairie Centre, Ill.; it is unmistakable.

To have J. Dupont Evans at the point of a pistol might almost intoxicate some sane and well-fed men, and Merriwether Buck was neither. J. Dupont Evans--the wealth of Croesus would be just one cracked white chip in the game he plays. But at this moment his power and his importance had been extraordinarily multiplied by circumstances. The chances of the street had tumbled down a half dozen banks--(well did Merriwether Buck know that, since it had ruined him)--and financial panic was in the air; an epochal and staggering disaster threatened; and at this juncture a president in no wise humble had publicly confessed his own impotence and put it up to J. Dupont Evans to avert, to save, to reassure.

Merriwether Buck had not dreamed of this; in the crook of his trigger finger lay, not merely the life of a man, but the immediate destiny of a nation.

He grasped the pistol in his pocket, and aimed it through the cloth.

“Do you know what time it is?” he asked J. Dupont Evans, politely enough.

It was only a second before the man answered. But in that second Merriwether Buck, crazily exalted, and avid of the sensation he was about to create, had a swift vision. He saw bank after bank come crashing down; great railroad systems ruined; factories closed and markets stagnant; mines shut and crops ungathered in the fields; ships idle at the wharves; pandemonium and ruin everywhere.

“Huh?” said J. Dupont Evans, gruffly, removing an unlighted cigar from his mouth. He looked at Merriwether Buck suspiciously, and made as if to move on. But he thought better of it the next instant, evidently, for he pulled out a plain silver watch and said grudgingly: “Two minutes of two.” And then, in a tone less unpleasant, he asked: “Have you got a match, young man?”

Merriwether fumbled in his vest pocket. In a minute and a half he would perfunctorily ask this man for lunch, and then he would kill him. But he would give him a match first--for Merriwether Buck was a well-brought-up young man. As he fumbled he picked out the exact spot on the other's waistcoat where he would plant the bullet. But the idea of a man on the edge of the grave lighting a cigar tickled him so that he laughed aloud as he held out the matches.

“What can I do with these?” snorted J. Dupont Evans. “They are the sort that light only on their own box.” From his glance one might have gained the impression that he thought Merriwether Buck a fool.

“Great principle that,” said Merriwether Buck, cackling with hysteria. It was so funny that a dead man should want to smoke a cigar! He would let him play he was alive for fifty seconds longer.

“Principle?” said Evans. “Principle? What Principle?”

“Well,” said Merriwether, with the random argumentativeness of insanity, “it _is_ a great principle. Apply that principle to some high explosive, for instance, and you have no more battleship flare-backs--no premature mine blasts----”

“Say,” the other suddenly interrupted, “are you an inventor?”

“Yes,” lied Merriwether Buck, glibly, although he had never given five seconds' thought to the subject of high explosives in his life. “That's how I know. I've invented an explosive more powerful than dynamite. But it won't explode by contact with fire, like powder. Won't explode with a jar, like dynamite. Won't freeze, like dynamite. Only one way to explode it--you've got to bring it into contact with a certain other chemical the same as scratching one of these matches on its own box.”

“The deuce, young man!” said the other. “There's a fortune in it! Is it on the market at all?”

“No,” said Merriwether Buck, raising his pistol hand slightly and thrusting it a bit forward, under the mask of his coat pocket, “no money to start it going.”

“Hum,” mused the other. “I tell you what you do, young man. You come along to lunch with me and we'll talk the thing over--money and all.”

And the directing deities of New York struck twice on all the city clocks, and striking, winked.

IX.--The Professor's Awakening

|How I ever come to hit such a swell-looking house for a handout I never knew. Not that there was anything so gaudy about it, neither, as far as putting up a bluff at being a millionaire's mansion went, which I found out afterwards it was, or pretty near that at any rate. But it was just about the biggest house in that Illinois town, and it's mostly that kind o' place with them naked iron heathens in the front yard and a brick stable behind that it ain't no use to go up against unless you're looking for a lemon. If you need real food and need it sudden and ain't prospecting around town for no other kind of an opening you better make for the nearest public works like a canal being dug, or a railroad gang. Hit the little tin dinner buckets, men that does the unskilled labor on jobs like that, except Swedes and Dagos, knowing what it is to be up against it themselves now and then and not inclined to ask no fool questions.

Well, I went around to the back door, and Biddy Malone she lets me in. I found out that was her name afterwards, but as soon as I seen her face I guessed if her name wasn't Bridget it was Nora. It's all in the first look they give you after they open the door. If that look's right they're coming across and you'll get some kind of a surprise for your digestive ornaments and you don't need to make no fool breaks about sawing wood neither. I makes my little talk and Biddy she says come in; and into the kitchen I went.

“It's Minnesota you're working towards,” says Biddy, pouring me out a cup of coffee.

She was thinking of the wheat harvest where there's thousands makes for every fall. But not for me, I never did like to work for none of them Scandiluvian Swedes and Norwegians that gets into the field before daylight and stays at it so long the hired men got to milk the cows by moonlight. They got no sense of proportion, them Gusses and Oles ain't.

“I been across the river into I'way,” I says, “working at my trade, and I'm going back to Chicago to work at it some more.”

“And what may your trade be?” says Biddy, sizing me up careful. I seen I made a hit somehow or she wouldn't of asked me in the first place was I going to the wheat harvest, but would of just supposed I was a hobo, which I ain't. I got a lot of trades when I want to use one, and as a regular thing I rather work at one of them for a while, too, but can't stand it very long on account of not feeling right to stay in one place too long, especially in the summer. When I seen I made a hit with Biddy I thinks I'll hand her a good one she never heard tell of before.

“I'm an agnostic by trade,” I says. I spotted that one in a Carnegie library one time and that was the first chance I ever had to spring it.

“I see,” says Biddy. And she opened her eyes and mouth to once. I seen she didn't see, but I didn't help her none. She would of rather killed herself than let on she didn't see. Most of the Irish is like that whether they is kitchen mechanics or what. After a while she says, pouring me out some more coffee and handing me a little glass jar full of watermelon rinds boiled in with molasses and things, she says:

“And ain't that the dangerous thing to work at, though!”

“It is,” I says, and says nothing further.

She sets down and folds her arms like she was thinking about it, watching my hands all the time as if she was looking for scars where something slipped when I done that agnostic work. Finally she says with a sigh:

“Sure, and it's dangerous! Me brother Patrick was kilt at it in the old country. He was the most vinturesome lad of thim all!”

She was putting up a stiff front, and for a minute I don't know whether she's stringing me or I'm stringing her. The Irish is like that. So being through eating I says:

“Did it fly up and hit him?”

She looks at me scornful and tosses her chin up and says:

“No. He fell off of it. And I'm thinking you don't know what one of them is, after!”

“What is it, then?” says I.

“Then you _don't_ know,” says she; and the next thing I knew I'd been eased out the back door and she was grinning at me through the crack of it with superiousness all over her face.

So I was walking slow around towards the front thinking to myself how the Irish was a great people; and shall I go to Chicago and maybe get a job sailing on the lakes till navigation closes, or shall I go back to Omaha and work in the railroad yards again, which I don't like much, or shall I go on down to Saint Looey just to see what's doing. And then I thinks: “Billy, you was a fool to let that circus walk off and leave you asleep with nothing over you but a barb wire fence this morning, and what are you going to do now? First thing you know you'll be a regular hobo, which some folks can't distinguish you ain't now.” And then I thinks I'll go down to the river and take a swim and lazy around in the grass a while and think things over and maybe something will happen. Anyways, you can always join the army. And just when I was thinking that I got by one of them naked stone heathens that was squirting water out of a sea shell and a guy comes down the front steps on the jump and nabs me by the coat collar. I seen he was a doctor or else a piano tuner by the satchel he dropped when he grabbed me.

“Did you come out of this house?” he says.

“I did,” I says, wondering what next.

“Back in you goes,” he says, marching me towards the front steps. “They've got smallpox in there.”

I liked to a-jumped loose when he said that, but he twisted my coat collar and dug his thumbs into my neck and I seen they wasn't no use pulling back. If a guy that's knocking around mixes up with one of the solid citizens the magistrate's going to give him the worst of it on principle. I ain't no hobo and never was, and never traveled much with none of them professional bums, but there has been times I had hard work making some people believe it. I seen I couldn't jerk away and I seen I couldn't fight and so I went along. He rung the door bell, and I says:

“Smallpox ain't no inducement to me, doc.”

“No?” says he. And the door opened, and in we went. The girl that opened it, she drew back when she seen me.

“Tell Professor Booth that Dr. Wilkins wants to see him,” says the doc, not letting loose of me.

And we stood there saying nothing till the per-fessor come in, which he did slow and absent-minded. When he seen me he stopped and took off a pair of thick glasses that was split in two like a mended show case, so he could see me better, and he says:

“What is that you have there, Dr. Wilkins?”

“A guest for you,” says Dr. Wilkins, grinning all over himself. “I caught him leaving the house, and you being under quarantine and me being secretary to the board of health, I'll have to ask you to keep him here until we can get Miss Margery on her feet again,” he says. Or they was words to that effect, as the lawyers asks you.

“Dear me,” says Perfessor Booth, kind o' helplesslike.

And he put his glasses on and took them off again, and come up close and looked at me like I was one of them amphimissourian specimens in a free museum. “Dear me,” he says, looking worrieder and worrieder all the time. And then he went to the foot of the stairs and pipes out in a voice that was so flat-chested and bleached-out it would a-looked just like him if you could a-saw it--“Estelle,” he says, “O Estelle!”

I thinks the perfessor is one of them folks that can maybe do a lot of high-class thinking, but has got to have some one tell 'em what the answer is. But I doped him out wrong as I seen later on.

Estelle, she come down stairs looking like she was the perfessor's big brother. I found out later she was his old maid sister. She wasn't no spring chicken, Estelle wasn't, and they was a continuous grin on her face. I figgered it must of froze there years and years ago. They was a kid about ten or eleven years old come along down with her, that had hair down to its shoulders and didn't look like it knowed whether it was a girl or a boy. Miss Estelle, she looks me over in a way that makes me shiver, while the doctor and the per-fessor jaws about whose fault it is the smallpox sign ain't been hung out. And when she was done listening she says to the perfessor: “You had better go back to your laboratory.” And the perfessor he went along out, and the doctor with him.

“What are you going to do with him, Aunt Estelle?” the kid asks her.

“What would _you_ suggest, William Dear?” asks his aunt. I ain't feeling very comfortable, and I was getting all ready just to natcherally bolt out the front door now the doctor was gone. Then I thinks it mightn't be no bad place to stay in fur a couple o' days, even risking the smallpox. Fur I had ricolected I couldn't ketch it nohow, having been vaccinated a few months before in Terry Hutt by compulsory medical advice, me being temporary engaged in repair work on the city pavements through a mistake in the police court.

William Dear looks at me when his aunt put it up to him just as solemn as if it was the day of judgment and his job was separating the fatted calves from the goats and the prodigals, and he says:

“Don't you think, Aunt Estelle, we better cut his hair and bathe him and get him some clothes the first thing?”

“William is my friend,” thinks I, and I seen right off he was one of them serious kids that you can't tell what is going on inside their heads.

So she calls James, which was the butler, and James he buttled me into a bathroom the like of which I never see before; and he buttled me into a suit of somebody's clothes and into a room at the top of the house next to his'n, and then he come back and buttled a razor and a comb and brush at me; him being the most mournful-looking fat man I ever seen, and he informs me that me not being respectable I will eat alone in the kitchen after the servants is done. People has made them errors about me before. And I looks around the room and I thinks to myself that this is all right so far as it has went. But is these four walls, disregarding the rest of the house, to be my home, and them only? Not, thinks I, if little Billy knows it. It was not me that invited myself to become the guest of this family; and if I got to be a guest I be damned if I don't be one according to Hoyle's rules of etiquette or I'll quit the job. Will I stay in this one room? Not me. Suppose the perfessor takes it next? And then William Dear? And suppose when William Dear gets through with it he gives it to Aunt Estelle? Am I to waste the golden hours when, maybe, my country needs me, just for accommodation? But I thinks it's all right for a day or two and then I'll leave my regrets and go on down to Saint Looey or somewheres. And then James he buttles back into the room like a funeral procession and says the perfessor says he wants to see me in the laboratory.

That was a big room and the darndest looking room I ever see, and it smelt strong enough to chase a Hungarian pig sticker out of a Chicago slaughter house. It smelt like a drug store had died of old age and got buried in a glue factory. I never seen so much scientific effusions and the things to hold 'em in mixed up in one place before. They must of been several brands of science being mixed up there all to once. They was dinky little stoves, they was glass jars of all shapes and sizes labeled with Dago names standing around on shelves like in one of them Dutch delicatessen stores; they was straight glass tubes and they was glass tubes that had the spinal contortions; they was bones and they was whole skeletons, and they was things that looked like whisky stills; they was a bookcase full of bugs and butterflies against one wall; they was chunks of things that might have been human for all I know floating around in vats like pickled pork in a barrel; they was beer schooners with twisted spouts to them; they was microscopes and telescopes and twenty-seven shapes and sizes of knives; they was crates of stuff that was unpacked and crates that wasn't; and they was tables with things just piled and spilled over 'em, every which way, and the looks of everything was dirty on account of the perfessor not allowing any one in there but himself and Miss Estelle and William. And whether you knowed anything about them different brands of science or not you could see the perfessor was one of them nuts that's always starting to do things and then leaving them go and starting something else. It looked as if the operating room of an emergency hospital and a blacksmith shop and a people's free museum and a side show full of freaks, snakes and oneeyed calves had all gone out and got drunk together, all four of them, and wandered into a cremation plant to sleep off that souse; and when they woke up they couldn't tell which was which nor nothing else except they had a bad taste in their mouth and was sentenced to stay there unseparated and unhappy and unsociable in each other's company for evermore. And every time you turned around you stepped on something new, and if you saw a rat or a lizard or a spider you better let him alone for how was you going to tell he was dead or alive till he crawled up you?

The perfessor, he was setting over by a window, and he pushed out another chair for me and he says sit down.

“You are a gentleman of leisure?” he says, with a grin; or words to that effect.

“I work at that sometimes,” I told him, “although it ain't rightly my trade.”

“Biddy Malone says you're an agnostic,” he says, looking at me close. It won't do, I thinks, to spring none of them agnostic gags on him, so I says nothing.

“I'm one myself,” he says.

“Regular,” I asks him, “or just occasional?” He kind o' grins again, and I thinks: “Billy, you're making a hit somehow.”

Then he says, like he was apologizing to someone about something: “Being interested in sociology and the lower classes in general, I sent for you to get some first-hand observations on your train of mind,” he says. Or it was words like them. “I'm a sociologist,” he says.

I seen I made a hit before and I thinks I'll push my luck, so I swells up and says:

“I'm a kind of sociologist myself.”

“Hum,” he says, thoughtful-like. “Indeed? And your itinerant mode of subsistence is persecuted in pursuit of your desire to study knowledge of the human specimen and to observe wisdom as to the ways they live in the underworld,” he says. Or it was words to that effect. I wish I'd a-had him wrote them words down. Then I'd a-had 'em just right now. I seen a bunch of good words help a man out of a hole before this. Words has always been more or less my admiration; you can never tell what one of them long gazaboos is going to do till you spring it on somebody. So I says:

“That's me, perfessor. I likes to float around and see what's doing.”

Then he tells me that sociology was how the criminal classes and the lower classes in general was regarded by the scientific classes, only it's a difficult brand of science to get next to, he says, on account of the lower classes like me being mostly broke out with environment he says, unbeknownst even to theirselves. He's not what you would call a practicing sociologist all the time, being afraid, I suppose, he would catch it if he got too close to it; he's just one of the boys that writes about it, so as both the lower classes and the scientific classes won't make no bad breaks, he says.

But what he wants of me just now ain't got nothing to do with that, he says. He's been making experiments with all kinds of canned victuals, that is put up with acid that eats holes in your stomach, he says, and so long as I'm going to be a guest he's going to mix some of them acids in my chuck and weigh me after each meal. He says I'll start slow and easy and there won't be nothing dangerous about it. He's been practicing on William Dear and Miss Estelle, which I suppose it was the acids got into her smile, but he's going to give them a rest, them being naturally delicate. I ain't got no kick, I thinks, and I'm going to leave this place in a day or two anyhow. Besides, I always was intrusted in scientific things and games of chance of all kinds.

But I didn't leave in a few days, and the first thing I knew I'd been there a week. I had pretty much the run of the house, and I eat my meals with Biddy Malone, the only uncomfortable feature of being a guest being that Miss Estelle, soon as she found out I was an agnostic (whatever brand of science that is, which I never found out to this day, just having come across the word accidental), she begun to take charge of my religion and intellectuals and things like that. She used to try to cure the perfessor, too, but she had to give it up for a bad job, Biddy says.

Biddy, she says Mrs. Booth's been over to her mother's while this smallpox has been going on; which I hadn't knowed they was a Mrs. Booth before. And Biddy, she says if she was Mrs. Booth she'd stay there, too. They's been a lot of talk, anyhow, Biddy says, about Mrs. Booth and some musician fellow around town. But Biddy she likes Mrs. Booth, and even if it was so who could blame her?

Things ain't right around that house since Miss Estelle's been there, which the perfessor's science, though worrying to the nerves, ain't cut much ice till about four years ago when Miss Estelle come.

But Mrs. Booth she's getting where she can't stand it much longer, Biddy says. I didn't blame her none for feeling sore about things.