Chapter 1

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[Transcriber's Note: The Table of Contents and the list of illustrations were added by the transcriber.]

McCLURE'S MAGAZINE

VOL. XXXI MAY, 1908 No. 1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS. THE MISADVENTURES OF CASSIDY. By Edward S. Moffat. MARY BAKER G. EDDY. By Georgine Milmine. IN CHARGE OF TRUSTY. By Lucy Pratt. FIRST DAYS OF THE RECONSTRUCTION. By Carl Schurz. Restless Foot-loose Negroes. The Freedmen's Bureau. Pickles and Patriotism. The South's Hopeless Poverty. Johnson's Haste for Reconstruction. Arming the Young Men of the South. The President Defends Southern Militia. Criticism and Personal Discomfort. The End of an Aristocracy. An Ungracious Reception. Why the President Reversed his Policy. Congress and General Grant's Report. THE FLOWER FACTORY. By Florence Wilkinson. THE SILLY ASS. By James Barnes. WAR ON THE TIGER. By W. G. Fitz-gerald. THE RADICAL JUDGE. By Anita Fitch. POVERTY AND DISCONTENT IN RUSSIA. By George Kennan. "THE HEART KNOWETH." By Charlotte Wilson. IN THE DARK HOUR. By Perceval Gibbon. "OLIVIA" and "FAUST" AT THE LYCEUM. By Ellen Terry. "Olivia" a Family Play. Ellen Terry and Eleanora Duse. "Faust." George Alexander and the Barmaids. "Faust" a Paradoxical Success. Irving on Long Runs. Irving's Mephistopheles. "Faust's" Four Hundred Ropes. THE LIE DIRECT. By Caroline Duer. THE WAYFARERS. By Mary Stewart Cutting. XV. XVI. XVII. XVIII.

ILLUSTRATIONS

"FOR FOUR LONG SUMMER MONTHS OF DUST AND HEAT CASSIDY HAD BEEN A FREIGHTER." "'I'VE SOLD THEM WHEELERS!'" "NEAREST TO THE ROUGH PINE BOX STOOD THE WIDOW, WITH LOWERED EYES" "'I HEREBY PRONOUNCE YUH MAN AND WIFE!'" GREETING THE PILGRIMS. GEORGE WASHINGTON GLOVER. THE MOTHER CHURCH IN BOSTON. "'I'SE JUS 'BLIGE WHUP 'IM ALL DE WAY TER SCHOOL'" "I KIN GET 'EM YERE, EF YER WANTS." "TWO SMALL FIGURES PUSHED THEIR WAY INTO THE ROOM" "THAT LITTLE BOY, SMILED THE ROSY-CHEEKED GENTLEMAN" MAJOR-GENERAL O. O. HOWARD. A PHOTOGRAPH OF GENERAL HOWARD. MAJOR-GENERAL H. W. SLOCUM FROM A WAR-TIME PHOTOGRAPH. MAJOR-GENERAL H. W. SLOCUM BEFORE HIS DEATH IN 1894. MAJOR-GENERAL E. R. S. CANBY. SENATOR WILLIAM LEWIS SHARKEY. "HE COULD HEAR THE CRASH, SEE THE GREAT BOW SINKING" "FIRST A MAGNIFICENT YELLOW HEAD EMERGES, THEN THE LONG, LITHE BODY" HOWDAH ELEPHANT TRAINING MADE EASY. LAST WALL OF DEFENSE. SLAYER OF SEVENTY-SIX NATIVES LAID LOW AT LAST. TIGRESS ALSO IS SLAIN. "'WADICAL!'" "AN UNTIDY MIDGET FOLLOWING CLOSELY AT HIS HEELS" "HOPE CAROLINA, FROM HER MARVELOUS BED, COULD SEE EVERYTHING." "FOREVER TURNING BACK TO KISS HIM...." "IT WAS THE QUAINT CUSTOM ... TO FOLLOW MOURNERS ... FROM THE GRAVE" PAUL MILYUKOV. P. A. STOLYPIN. THE AUDREY ARMS, OXBRIDGE, MIDDLESEX. ELLEN TERRY AS "OLIVIA." ELLEN TERRY AS OLIVIA. HENRY IRVING AS THE VICAR. H. BEERBOHM TREE. ELEANORA DUSE WITH LENBACH'S CHILD. ELLEN TERRY AS ELLALINE IN "THE AMBER HEART." HENRY IRVING AS MEPHISTOPHELES IN "FAUST." ELLEN TERRY. ELLEN TERRY'S FAVOURITE PHOTOGRAPH AS OLIVIA. ELLEN TERRY AS OLIVIA AND HENRY IRVING AS THE VICAR. ELLEN TERRY AS MARGUERITE IN "FAUST." "MRS. LEVERICH BOWED INCIDENTALLY" "WITH EYES FOR NOBODY ELSE" "FLOWERS AND CHILDREN--CHILDREN AND FLOWERS!" "'THE LITTLE SPIDER WON'T HURT YOU'" "'NEVER LET HIM COME HERE AGAIN--NEVER, NEVER!'"

McCLURE'S MAGAZINE

VOL. XXXI MAY, 1908 No. 1

THE MISADVENTURES OF CASSIDY

BY EDWARD S. MOFFAT

ILLUSTRATIONS BY N.C. WYETH

Cassidy gazed long and blankly across the desert. "Wot a life!" he muttered grimly. "Say, _wot_ a life this is!" Cassidy made the words by putting his tongue against his set teeth and forcibly wrenching the sounds out by the roots. The words had been a long time in the making, but now, because of the infinite sourness of their birth and because of the acrid grinding and gritting that had been going on in the dark recesses of his soul, Cassidy was forced at last to listen. Rudely and forever they dispelled Cassidy's dull impression that things were well with Cassidy, and in so doing tore away the veil and revealed Truth standing before him, naked, yet gloriously unashamed. But the general outlines of the goddess had not been entirely unfamiliar to him. Although his previous skull-gropings had brought forth neither a cause nor a remedy, he had so long felt that things were far from satisfactory that when at last she fronted him brazenly, eye to eye, he only sighed heavily, spat twice in sad reflection, and----nodded for her to pass on; she had been accepted.

"Gosh, wot a thirst I got!" he pondered, and kicked the empty canteen at his feet. "Wot a simply horrible thirst! Say, pardner, I wonder did a feller _ever_ have a thirst like this?" Luckily for Cassidy, his throat was not yet so dry but that he could amuse himself by fancifully measuring his thirst, first by pints, then by quarts.

"A quart would never do it, though," he meditated whimsically. "It would be a mean, low trick to make it think so. This yere job rightly belongs to a water-tank. Oh, gosh! And ten miles yet, across that darned dry lake, tuh Ochre. Gid-ap, Tawmm!"

In slow response, the four blacks settled into their sweaty collars, and the big Bain freighter, with its tugging trailer, heaved up the swale and lurched drunkenly down the other side to the glittering mesa.

For four long summer months of dust and heat Cassidy had been a freighter. From sun-up to sun-down he had dragged with snail-like progress up and down the cañons, through the rocky washes and crooked draws; and now that the road had dropped into the Southwestern Basin it was sickening mesa work, with the fine dust running like water ahead of his wheels or whirling up in fantastic, dancing pillars of grit that drove spitefully into his slack, parched mouth and sleepy eyes.

"It's the goll-dinged monotonosity of it I cain't stand!" he whined, as he drove his boot-heel down on the rasping brake-lever and waited sullenly for the inevitable bump from the trailer. "Gawd never meant fer a feller tuh do this work. I don't know Him very good," wailed Cassidy, "but I bet He wouldn't deal no such a raw hand. It ain't _human!_"

He frowned heavily at the sky-line of jagged mountains blued with haze. "They look like a lot of big old alligators--just as if they was asleep and lyin' with their shoulders half out of water," he murmured in gentle, subdued reminiscence. "The darned old no-good things!"

Then, as the bitterness of his lonely life rose up and dulled his mind and soured his tongue, "Why don't yuh get some mineral into yuh?" he yelled with abrupt ferocity. "Why ain't yuh some good tuh a feller? _Zing, zing, zing_--I _hate_ your old heat a-singin' in my ears all the gosh-blamed time! Why don't yuh _do_ something? Huh? Yuh don't make it so's anything kin live. Yuh don't give no water, yuh don't give no grass, yuh don't do nothin'! Yuh jest lay there and make _heat!_"

Across the mesa the shimmering white surface of a dry lake caught his angry eye. As he looked, it began to rock gently from side to side. Presently, in a freakish spirit of its own, it curled up at the edges. Later, it seemed to turn into a dimpling sheet of water, cool, sweet, and alluring.

Cassidy burst into a howl of derision that startled his blacks into a jogging trot: "Oh, yuh cain't fool me, yuh darned old fake!" He shook a huge red fist in defiance of his ancient foe. "I'll beat yuh yet--darn yuh!"

Late that night, a large man with a red face and a sunburned neck on which the skin lay in little cobwebs, stumbled in under the lights of Number One Commissary Tent.

"I want my time and I want my money. I ain't a-goin' tuh work _no more!_ he announced with a displeased frown.

"Going back home tuh Coloraydo?" asked the youthful clerk.

"Back home?" repeated Cassidy mechanically. "How--how's that, young feller?"

"I asked yuh if yuh were going tuh hit the grit fer home?" the boy repeated.

"Aoh!" said Cassidy, and a blank look spread across his countenance. He spoke as if he did not understand. For a while he stood quite still, unknowingly twiddling the time-check in his thick, fat-cushioned fingers into a moist pink ball. His face grew heavy and dull. It seemed to have been robbed, with a surprising suddenness, of all the good spirits, all the abounding, virile life, of the moment before. It grew to look old and lined under the flickering lamplight, and this was odd, because Cassidy was not by any means an old man.

For a time the only sound he made was a queer little ejaculation of surprise, the only movement a bewildered stare at the boy. Together they were the actions of a child who, in the first numbing moments of a gashed finger, only gazes at the wound in round-eyed wonder. Cassidy had begun to remember.

He remembered that "back home" a man didn't have to live _all_ the time on sour bread and canned tomatoes; "back home" you didn't have to die of thirst, coming in with day-empty water-barrels to find the spring dried up; "back home" the mountains didn't jiggle up and down in front of you, through glassy waves of heat that rightfully belonged in a blast-furnace. Things were different--and better--"back home."

Cassidy lifted his head and listened. He had heard the sound of water. Half hidden in the brush, a little brook was running by him down a dark ravine. Joyously, tumultuously, it churked and gurgled over the smooth green stones and moss down to the level, and then slipped away, with low, contented murmurings, among the cottonwoods and willows. Cassidy found himself following that brook. It took him down through fields of dark lucerne. It led him through yellow pasturage, deep with stubble and wild oats. It showed him long-aisled orchards glinting with fruit in the sunlight. It ushered him into a wide and pleasant valley. In the distance Cassidy saw a ranch. Near by, with blowsy forelock and careless mane, a shaggy pony stood knee-deep in the river-sedge.

"Why, hello, hossy!" whispered Cassidy, with soft surprise. "Why, say! I know yuh!"

A full, warm wind began to sough through the pines on the hillside. He could hear it blowing, blowing unendingly, from across the hills. His ears rang with the whirring sound, as it came singing along with the vox humana chords of a great 'cello, streaming down from the heights, gentle-fingered, but wondrously vast-bodied--booming along with half a world behind it. Fair in the face it smote him with its resinous breath, and he felt his lips parting to inhale its fiery tonic--felt, as he used to feel, the magic glow tingling in his veins again and brightening his eyes with the pure pagan glory of his living.

And then, very sadly indeed for Cassidy, and in much the same way that whisky and he had let it all slip through their fingers long ago, the sound of the brook stilled. The valley, the meadows, the ranch, and the kind, warm wind faded, one by one. In their stead came the creak and shock of a belated wagon-train pulling into camp. He heard the panting of laboring horses. He caught the salt reek of sweaty harness. He heard the drivers curse querulously as they jammed down the brake-levers, tossed the reins away, and clambered stiffly down.

Cassidy turned a strained, hard face on the boy. "I reckon not," he said sadly, grimly. "I ain't a-goin' home. Nope; I ain't a-goin' no place that's good. Yuh kin always be sure of that, kid."

"Oh, now, that's all right. Don't get sore," soothed the boy. "That's all right, Cassidy."

"No, it ain't!" roared Cassidy, angry with the long, hot days and stifling nights, angry with the work and the scanty pay, angry most of all with himself. "No, it _ain't_ all right!"

As a previously concealed resolve crystallized at last somewhere in his brain, his voice rasped up a whole octave.

"Nothin's all right, pardner!" he yelled. "Yuh hear me? Yuh know what I'm goin' tuh do?" He waved the time-check defiantly above his head and let go one last howl of sardonic self-derision:

"I'm goin' down tuh the Bucket of Blood _tuh get drunk_!"

* * * * *

The desert town of Ochre, in its more salient points, was not unlike a desert flower, although its makers were far from desiring it to blush unseen. Yesterday it had slept unborn in a nook of the sand-hills, the abiding-place of cat's-claw, mesquit, and flickering lizards.

To-day it burst, with an almost tropic vigor, into riotous growth. Flamboyant youth, calculating middle age, doddering senility, all these were there, all treading on one another's heels, to reap and be reaped. To-day a scene of marvelous activity, a maelstrom of bustling commissariat and fretting supply-trains, cut by never-ending counter-currents of hoboes to and from the front, to-morrow it would simmer down into the desuetude of a siding. Thus is vanity repaid.

Although Cassidy had begun at the "Bucket," he soon discovered that it possessed no phonograph, and, possessing a craving for music, he had removed himself and the remains of the pink check to where an aged instrument in "Red Eye Mike's" guttered forth a doubtful plea for one "Bill Bailey" to come home.

Here he had remained for five fateful, forgetting days. What Mike and Mike's friends did to him in that space of time cannot be dwelt upon. Suffice it to say that on the morning of the sixth day the bleary semblance of a man who had slept all night in the sand, alongside of a saloon, awoke to the daylight and a hell of pain.

By dint of soul-racking exertions it managed to roll to its hands and knees. Then, by slow stages, it pulled itself together, and after several unsuccessful attempts, tottering, stood on its feet. Tents, horses, sky, desert, and sun revolved in a bewildering kaleidoscope before his eyes. In the vastness of his skull a point of pain darted agonizingly back and forth. In his mouth was a taste like unto nothing known on this earth or in either bourn.

"I got money yet," he mumbled dazedly to himself, as was his conversational wont. "Say! I'm tellin' yuh, I got money yet!" Fumbling, he searched his pockets, but quite to no avail. Sadder yet, a repetition of the search, even to turning his clothes inside out and then looking anxiously on the sand, produced nothing. With a puzzled look on his haggard face, he stumbled into Mike's saloon.

Not at all disconcerted by the bedraggled form that leaned on his bar and mouthed disconnectedly, the worthy keeper of the hostel proceeded to produce a sheet of paper from the till.

"I don't savvy what you're talking about at all," he remarked ingenuously; "but seein' as you've been spendin' a few bucks amongst your friends here, I'll tell you how you stand."

"How do I stand?" asked Cassidy thickly.

Mike laughed in his face. "You don't stand, pardner. You're all in."

A moment necessarily had to be allowed Cassidy to fathom this catastrophe. When the agony had come and passed, he was heard to sigh heavily and remark: "Well, I reckon it'll be the old job again. I got the outfit yet."

"Have you, indeed?" mocked Mike, well up to his lay. "I'm glad to have you mention it. See here, pardner." He slapped the sheet of paper flat on the bar, under Cassidy's astonished eyes. "Do you figure this is your name at the bottom, or don't you?" he demanded in peremptory tones.

Cassidy frowned and regarded the paper. Then, as the words swam and blurred together in one long, discouraging line, he weakly gave it up.

"Wot's it say, Mike?" he asked feebly.

"This here paper says," responded the other, with the cold, forceful air of one well within his rights, "that last night you sold me your teams and your outfit--fer a consideration. Of course, now, I ain't sayin' just what you done with the consideration I give you. Mebbe you spent it like a gent fer booze, mebbe you was foolish and went to some strong-arm shack and got rolled. I dunno; I can't say. All I know is that you got your money and I got the outfit. Savvy?"

Cassidy's face took on a queer, pasty white. His hands clawed ineffectively at the bar.

"Sold you my _outfit_?" he quavered, with an awful break in his voice. "_Sold it_, Mike? Why, how do you figure that?"

"Is that your name?" barked Mike in answer. He thrust the paper out at arm's length and shook it under Cassidy's nose with astonishing ferocity. "Just you say one little short word, friend. Is that your name, or isn't it?"

Cassidy wavered. It was unquestionably his name; whether _he_ had written it there or not was yet to be decided.

If psychological moments come to the Cassidys, this one felt such a thing near him. _Now_ was the time for him to leap in the air and pound wrathfully upon the bar. _Now_ was the instant for him to rush into the open and call vociferously on his friends. _Now_ was the fraction of a second left for him to reach out his hard knuckles and pin Mike to the wall and tear the paper from his hands. But instead, and with a queer feeling of aloofness from it all, much as if he were the helpless spectator of activities proceeding in some fantastic dream, he felt the moment thrilling up to him; felt it stand obediently waiting; felt himself slowly gathering in response to its mute query; then felt himself drop helplessly back into a stupid coma of whisky fumes and sodden inertia.

When he came to, Mike had put the paper back in his till and was assiduously cleaning up his bar. It was all over.

Cassidy shifted irresolutely from one foot to the other. A sickening feeling of hollowness within him was crying aloud to be appeased by either food or drink, and his shaking body begged for a place to rest itself into tranquillity; but still for a while he stood there, fighting off these yearnings while he gathered his far-strayed wits. Now and then he weakly attempted to catch the other's eye, but as Mike studiously refused to be caught, Cassidy could only blink owlishly and fumble again with the tangled ends of the skein. Finally, abandoning it all as useless, he turned toward the door, yet arrested his dazed shambling to ask one last question.

"How's that?" Mike responded vaguely over his shoulder. "Still harping on that, are you?"

"Did I really sell you them blacks?" ventured Cassidy quaveringly, controlling his voice only with a tremendous effort. "Reelly, truly--did I sell 'em?"

Mike rolled a cigar over in his mouth, with a complacent lick of his tongue. "That's what," he replied laconically.

Cassidy gulped down something in his throat. He leaned for a moment against the door-jamb; his gaunt, hollow-cheeked face quivered with misery.

"I mean them black wheelers, Mike. Just them two--them wheelers," he pleaded. Hesitating a little, as the other deigned no response, he ventured weakly on:

"I was figurin', now--of course, I don't mean nothin' by it, Mike, only yuh see how a feller _c'u'd_ figger it--that mebbe--mebbe you made some mistake in readin' that paper. Yuh see how it could happen. A feller _c'u'd_ make a mistake in readin', now, c'u'dn't he?" With this flimsy appeal Cassidy played his last and poorest card.

In answer the other snapped some ashes from his sleeve, turned his back, slapped the cash-register shut, and strode masterfully down the room. "Not this time, pardner."

Cassidy stumbled out.

"I've sold them wheelers!" he sobbed under his breath. "Why, it seems like I was just this minute thinkin' I'd get tuh go and water 'em, and rub 'em down a bit. _Now_ it ain't no use thinkin' about it--not any more. It ain't me that's goin' tuh do that. I cain't water 'em. I ain't got rights to even lay my hands on 'em! O-h-h!" he shuddered, and agonizedly pulled taut on every tired, aching muscle. "Yuh oughter be beat up with a club. Yuh oughter get pounded with a rawk. You're a rotten, whisky-soaked bum, that's all yuh are now, and yuh oughter be killed and kicked out in the street!"

Half whining, half crying miserably, he drove himself out of the town, for a mile or more, on the desert, then plodded painfully back again, mauling and beating himself with the bludgeon of his awful self-pity.

At the foot of a fast-rising "grade" he halted wearily and watched the work. It was well on toward noon by this time, and the sun was blazing down through a choking pall of dust that hung in the lifeless air. Men were driving horses to and fro. They were men with weak, deeply lined faces and shambling gaits. They broke into querulous curses and beat their animals savagely on ridiculously small pretexts. They handled their reins with a uniformly betraying awkwardness.

Cassidy sized them up and sniffed contemptuously to himself. _He_ knew. "That's wot _you_'ll be doing to-morrow," he muttered. "Durn your hide, that's all you're good for. That's yuh to-morrow, yuh and the rest of the 'boes."

Not knowing what to do with himself now, he drifted back to the town and sat in the scanty shade of a joshua, prepared to commune further with himself. Looking up after a time, his eyes descried in the distance the figures of two men who were walking toward him.

"I bet that's Con Maguire," he murmured. "Yep--him and that old 'Arkinsaw.' They've got their time-checks, tuh; I kin tell the way they walk. I bet I know wot they're sayin'. Con, he's got a little ranch up tuh Provo, and he's fer makin' right up the line and gettin' that old no-good Arkinsaw to go along and pass up the booze.

"Poor old Arkinsaw!" mused Cassidy shrewdly. "He's worked three months steady for Donovans', drivin' scraper, the poor old slob, and their chuck is rotten. I'll bet he's terrible glad to get back tuh Number One. He's got forty dollars now. I bet he's near crazy. He allers looks that way when he's got forty dollars," said Cassidy.

"Sure I'll go with you, Con," Arkinsaw was saying. "I always meant to go, reelly, truly I did. You ask any of the fellers back to Donovans'. I was allers savin', 'I'm goin' out home when Con Maguire goes'--and, sure enough, here I am. I'll be to the train the same time as you. We'll go home on the same train, Con; sure we will." The old man laughed nervously. His eyes were bright with some strange excitement--but half of it was fear.

"Say, Con," he whispered hoarsely, "I'll be all right. You jest ketch holt of my arm when we go by; I'll be all right then. Say, Con," he guttered, in an agony of fear and desperation, "you hear me? Only git me by that first saloon."

But the approaching twain had been seen by other eyes than Cassidy's. By some odd fortuity, a phonograph broke into wheezy song as the wayfarers swung down the street. Dice began to roll invitingly across the bars, and from a distant spot came the hollow sound of the roulette-ball. Quite by chance, a man appeared in a doorway, holding a glass of beer. He was seen to drain it, just as they passed. Then he noticed them for the first time.

"Come in and cool off, boys," he suggested cordially. "It's all on ice. Good, cold lager, boys!"

Under its mask of dust, Arkinsaw's face worked horribly. He stumbled, loitered along the way to fix his shoe, zigzagged from one side to the other, fumbled at his pack, and finally stopped.

"Say, Con," he rasped feebly. "Oh, Con! Say, I gotter see a feller here. Say!" as his friend looked back at him with disconcerting doubt written on every feature. "Say, Con!--reelly, truly I have!"

"Well, hurry up, then," replied the other, and went on his dogged way.