Chapter 5

There was animation at the Nocturnal Club at three o'clock in the morning. The city reporters who had been dropping in since midnight were now reinforced by telegraph editors, for the country editions of the big dailies were already being rushed in light wagons over the sounding stones to the railroad stations.

The cheery and urbane African--naturally called Delmonico by the habitués of the Nocturnal Club--found his time crowded in serving bottled beer, sandwiches, or boiled eggs to the groups around the tables.

To a large group in the back room Fetterson related how he had once missed the last car at the distant extremity of West Philadelphia, and, failing to find a cab west of Broad Street, had walked fifty blocks after midnight and had still succeeded in getting his report in the second edition and thus making a “beat on the town.”

Then spoke up a needy outsider whom Fetterson had brought in at one o'clock.

I neglected to mention Fetterson's penchant for queer company. It is quite right that reporters know policemen, are on chaffing terms with night cabmen, and have large acquaintance with pugilists and even with “crooks.” But Fetterson picks up the most remarkable and out-of-the-way--not to speak of out-at-elbows--specimens of mankind, craft in distress on the sea of humanity. The needy outsider was his latest acquisition.

It is enough to say of this destitute acquaintance of Fetterson's that he was a ragged man needing a shave. In daylight, in the country, you would have termed him a tramp. Hitherto he had sat in our group in silence. When he opened his mouth to discourse, it was natural that he should have a prompt and somewhat curious hearing.

“Speaking of walking,” he said, “I have walked a bit in my time. Mostly, though, I've rode--on freight-cars. The longest straight tramp I ever made was from Harrisburg to Philadelphia once when the trains weren't running. The cold weather made walking unpleasant. But what do you think of a woman--no tramp woman, either--starting from Pittsburg to walk to Philadelphia?”

“Oh, there is a so-called actress who recently walked from San Francisco to New York,” put in some one.

“Yes, but she took her time, and had all the necessaries of life on the way. She walked for an advertisement. The woman I speak of walked in order to get there. She walked because she hadn't the money to pay her fare. Her husband was with her, to be sure. He was a pal o' mine. You see, it was a hard winter, years ago, and work was so scarce in Pittsburg that the husband had to remain idle until the two had begun to starve. He had some education, and had been an office clerk. At that time of his life he couldn't have stood manual labour. Still he tried to get it, for he was willing to do anything to keep a lining to his skin. If you've never been in his predicament, you can't realize how it is and you won't believe it possible. But I've known more than one man to starve because he couldn't get work and wouldn't take public charity. Starvation was the prospect of this young fellow and his wife. So they decided to leave Pittsburg and come to Philadelphia, where they thought it would be easier for the husband to get work.

“'But how can we get there?' the husband asked.

“She was a plucky girl and had known hardship, although she was frail to look at.

“'Walk,' she replied.

“And two days later they started.”

The outsider paused and lighted a forbidding-looking pipe.

When he resumed his narrative he spoke in a lower tone. The recollections that he called up seemed to stir him within, although he was calm enough of exterior.

“I won't describe the experience of my pal on that trip. It was his first tramp. He knew nothing of the art of vagabondage. Of course they had to beg. That was tough, although he got used to it and to many tricks in the trade. They slept in barns and they ate when and where they could. It cut him to the heart to see his wife in such hunger and fatigue. But her spirits kept up better than his--or at least they seemed to. Often he repented of having started upon such a trip. But he kept that to himself.

“When the wife did at last give in to the cold, the hunger, and the weariness, it was to collapse all at once. It happened in the mountain country. In the evening of a cold, dull day they were trudging along on the railroad ties, keeping on the west-bound track so they could face approaching trains and get off the track in time to avoid being run down.

“'We'll stop in the town ahead,' the husband said. 'We can get warm in the station, and you shall have supper if we have to knock at every door in the town.'

“And the wife said:

“'Yes, we'll stop, for I feel, Harry, as if--as if I couldn't--go any fur--Harry, where are you?'

“She fell forward on the track. When the man picked her up she was unconscious. Clasping her in his arms, he set his teeth and fixed his eyes on the lights of the town ahead and hurried forward.

“But before he reached the town, he found it was a dead body he was carrying.

“You see she had kept up until the very last moment, in the hope of reaching the town before dark.

“What the man did, how he felt when he discovered that her heart had ceased to beat, there in the solitude upon the mountains, with the town in sight at the foot of the slope in the gathering night, I can leave to the vivid imaginations of you newspaper men. For four hours he mourned over her body by the side of the track, and those in the train that passed could not see him for the darkness.

“Then my pal took the body in his arms and started up the mountain, for the track at that point passed through what they call a cut, and the hills rise steep on each side of it. He had his prejudices against pauper burial, my pal had, and he shrunk from going to the town and begging a grave for her. He didn't need a doctor's certificate to tell him that life had gone for ever from her fragile body. He knew that she had died of cold and exhaustion.

“As he turned the base of the hill to begin to descend it, he saw in the clouded moonlight a deserted railroad tool-house by the track. In front of it lay a broken, rusty spade. He shouldered this and proceeded up the mountain. It was a long walk, and he had to stop more than once to rest, but he got to the top at last. There was a little clearing in the woods here, where some one had camped. The ruins of a shanty still remained.

“My pal laid down the body of her who had been his wife, with the dead face turned toward the sky, which was beginning to be cleared of its clouds. Then he started to dig.

“It was a longer job than he had expected it to be, for my pal was tired and numb. But the grave was made at last, upon the very summit of the mountain.

“He lifted up the body of that brave girl, he kissed the cold lips, and he took off his coat and wrapped it carefully about the head, so that the face would be protected from the earth. He stooped and laid the body in the shallow grave, and he knelt down there and prayed.

“He filled the grave up with earth with the broken spade that he had used in digging it. All these things required a long time. He didn't observe how the night was passing, nor that the sky became clear and the stars shone and the moon crossed the zenith and began to descend in the west. He didn't notice that the stars began to pale. But he worked on until he had finished, and then he stopped and prayed again.

“When he arose, his face was toward the east, and over the distant hilltops he saw the purple of the dawn.”

The outsider ceased to speak.

“What then?”

“That's all. My pal walked down the mountain, jumped upon the first freight-train that passed, and has been a wanderer on the face of the earth ever since.”

There were various opinions expressed of this narrative. I quietly asked the needy outsider as we left the club at sunrise:

“Will you tell me who your pal was--the man who buried his wife on the mountain-top?”

There was contemptuous pity in the outsider's look as it dwelt a moment upon me before he replied: “The man was myself.”

And then he condescended to borrow a quarter from me.

VIII. -- TIME AND THE TOMBSTONE

Tommy McGuffy was growing old. The skin of his attenuated face was so shrunk and so stretched from wrinkle to wrinkle that it seemed narrowly to escape breaking. About the pointed chin and the cheekbones it had the colour of faded brick.

Old Tommy had become so thin that he dared not venture to the top of the hill above his native village of Rearward on a windy day.

His knees bent comically when he walked.

For some years the villagers had been counting the nephews and nieces to whom the savings of the old retired dealer in dry-goods would eventually descend.

Ten thousand dollars and a house and lot constituted a heritage worth anticipating in Rearward.

The innocent old man was not upon terms of intimacy with his prospective heirs. Having remained unmarried, his only close associates were two who had been his companions in that remote period which had been his boyhood. One of these, Jerry Hurley, was a childless widower, a very estimable and highly respected man who owned two farms. The other, like himself a bachelor, was Billy Skidmore, the sexton of the church, and, therefore, the regulator of the town clock upon the steeple.

There came a great shock to Tommy one day. As old Mrs. Sparks said, Jerry Hurley, “all sudden-like, just took a notion and died.”

The wealth and standing of Jerry Hurley insured him an imposing funeral. They laid his body beside that which had once been his wife in Rearward cemetery. His heirs possessed his farm, and time went on--slowly as it always does at Rearward. Tommy went frequently to Hurley's grave and wondered when his heirs would erect a monument to his memory. It is necessary that your grave be marked with a monument if you would stand high in that still society that holds eternal assembly beneath the pines and willows, where only the breezes speak, and they in subdued voices.

Years passed, and the grave of Tommy's old friend, Jerry, remained unmarked. Jerry's relatives had postponed the duty so long that they had grown callous to public opinion. Besides, they had other purposes to which to apply Jerry's money. It was easy enough to avoid reproach; they had only to refrain from visiting the graveyard.

“Jerry never deserved such treatment,” Tommy would say to Billy the sexton, as the two met to talk it over every sunny afternoon.

“It's an outrage, that's what it is!” Billy would reply, for the hundredth time.

It was, in their eyes, an omission almost equal to that of baptism or that of the funeral service.

One day, as Tommy was aiding himself along the main street of Rearward by means of a hickory stick, a frightful thought came to him. He turned cold.

What if his own heirs should neglect to mark his own grave?

“I'll hurry home at once, and put the money for it in a stocking foot,” thought Tommy, and his knees bent more than usually as he accelerated his pace.

But as he tied a knot in the stocking, came the fear that even this money might be misapplied; even his will might be ignored, through repeated postponement and the law's indifference.

Who, save old Billy Skidmore, would care whether old Tommy McGuffy's last resting-place were designated or not? Once let the worms begin operations upon this antique morsel, what would it matter to Rearward folks where the banquet was taking place?

Tommy now underwent a second attack of horror, from which he came victorious, a gleeful smile momentarily lifting the dimness from his excessively lachrymal eyes.

“I'll fix 'em,” he said to himself. “I'll go to-day to Ricketts, the marble-cutter, and order my own tombstone.”

Three months thereafter, Ricketts, the marble-cutter, untied the knot in the stocking that had been Billy's and deposited the contents in the local savings-bank.

In the cemetery stood a monument very lofty and elaborate. Around it was an iron fence. Within the enclosure there was no grave as yet.

“Here,” said the monument, in deep-cut-letters, but bad English, “lies all that remains of Thomas McGuffy, born in Rearward, November 11, 1820; died----. Gone whither the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest.”

This supplementary information was framed in the words of Tommy's favourite passage in his favourite hymn. His liking for this was mainly on account of its tune.

He had left the date of his death to be inserted by the marble cutter after its occurrence.

Rearward folks were amused at sight of the monument, and they ascribed the placing of it there to the eccentricity of a taciturn old man.

Tommy seemed to derive much pleasure from visiting his tombstone on mild days. He spent many hours contemplating it. He would enter the iron enclosure, lock the gate after him, and sit upon the ground that was intended some day to cover his body.

He was a familiar sight to people riding or walking past the graveyard,--this thin old man leaning upon his cane, contentedly pondering over the inscription on his own tombstone.

He undoubtedly found much innocent pleasure in it.

One afternoon, as he was so engaged, he was assailed by a new apprehension.

Suppose that Ricketts, the marble-cutter, should fail to inscribe the date of his death in the space left vacant for it!

There was almost no likelihood of such an omission, but there was at least a possibility of it.

He glanced across the cemetery to Jerry Hurley's unmarked mound, and shuddered.

Then he thought laboriously.

When he left the cemetery in such time as to avoid a delay of his evening meal and a consequent outburst of anger on the part of his old housekeeper, he had taken a resolution.

“Threescore years and ten, says the Bible,” he muttered to himself as he walked homeward. “The scriptural lifetime'll do for me.”

A week thereafter old Tommy gazed proudly upon the finished inscription.

“Died November 11, 1890,” was the newest bit of biography there engraved.

“But it's two years and more till November 11, 1890,” said a voice at his side.

Tommy merely cast an indifferent look upon the speaker and walked off without a word.

The whole village now thought that Tommy had become a monomaniac upon the subject of his tombstone. Perhaps he had. No one has been able to learn from his friend, Billy Skidmore, what thoughts he may have communicated to the latter upon the matter.

Tommy now lived for no other apparent purpose than to visit his tombstone daily. He no longer confined his walks thither to the pleasant days. He went in weather most perilous to so old and frail a man.

One of his prospective heirs took sufficient interest in him to advise more care of his health.

“I can easily keep alive till the time comes,” returned the antique; “there's only a year left.”

Rapidly his hold upon life relaxed. A week before November 11, 1890, he went to bed and stayed there. People began to speculate as to whether his unique prediction--or I should say, his decree--would be fulfilled to the very day.

Upon the fifth day of his illness Death threatened to come before the time that had been set for receiving him.

“Isn't this the tenth?” the old man mumbled.

“No,” said his housekeeper, who with one of his nieces, the doctor, and Billy Skidmore, attended the ill man, “it's only the 9th.”

“Then I must fight for two days more; the tombstone must not lie.”

And he rallied so well that it seemed as if the tombstone would lie, nevertheless, for Tommy was still alive at eleven-thirty on the night of November 11. Moreover he had been in his senses when last awake, and there was every likelihood that he would look at the clock whenever his eyes should next open.

“He can't live till morning, that's sure,” said the doctor.

“But, good Lord! you don't mean to say that he'll hold out till after twelve o'clock,” said Billy Skidmore, whose anxiety only had sustained him in his grief at the approaching dissolution of his friend.

“Quite probably,” replied the doctor.

“Good heavens! Tommy won't rest easy in his grave if he don't die on the 11th. The monument will be wrong.”

“Oh, that won't matter,” said the niece.

Billy looked at her in amazement. Was his old friend's sacred wish to miscarry thus?

“Yes, 'twill matter,” he said, in a loud whisper. “And if time won't wait for Tommy of its own accord, we'll make it. When did he last see the clock?”

“Half-past nine,” said the housekeeper.

“Then we'll turn it back to ten,” said Skidmore, acting as he spoke.

“But he may hear the town clock strike.”

Billy said never a word, but plunged into his overcoat, threw on his hat, and hurried on into the cold night.

“Ten minutes to midnight,” he said, as he looked up at the town clock upon the church steeple. “Can I skin up them ladders in time?”

Tommy awoke once before the last slumber. Billy was by his bedside, as were the doctor, the housekeeper, and the niece. The old man's eyes sought the clock.

“Eleven,” he murmured. Then he was silent, for the town clock had begun to strike. He counted the strokes--eleven. Then he smiled and tried to speak again.

“Almost--live out--birthday--seventy--tombstone--all right.”

He closed his eyes, and, inasmuch as the town clock furnishes the official time for Rearward, the published report of Tommy McGuffy's going records that he passed at twenty-five minutes after eleven P.M., November 11, 1890.

Very few people know that time turned back one hour and a half in order that the reputation of Tommy McGuffy's tombstone for veracity might be spotless in the eyes of future generations.

Billy Skidmore, the sexton, arranged to have Rearward time ready for the sun when it rose upon the following morning.

IX. -- HE BELIEVED THEM

He was a bachelor, and he owned a little tobacco store in the suburbs. All the labour, manual and mental, requisite to the continuance of the establishment, however, was done by the ex-newsboy, to whom the old soldier paid $4 per week and allowed free tobacco.

He had come into the neighbourhood from the interior of the state shortly after the war, and for a time there were not ten houses within a block of his shop. The shop is now the one architectural blemish in a long row of handsome stores. Miles of streets have been built up around it.

The old soldier used to sit in an antique armchair in the rear of his shop, smoking, from meal to meal.

“I l'arnt the habit in the army,” he would say. “I never teched tobacker till I went to the war.”

People would look inquiringly at his empty sleeve.

“I got that at Gettysburg in the second day's fight,” he would explain, complacently.

He was often asked whether he was a member of the Grand Army of the Republic.

“No; 'tain't worth while. I done my fightin' in '63 and '64--them times. I don't care about doin' it over again in talk. Talk's cheap.”

This made folks smile, for he was continually fighting his battles over again in conversation. Every regular customer had been made acquainted with the part that he had taken in each contest, where he had stood when he received his wound, what regiment had the honour of possessing him, and how promptly he had enlisted against the wishes of parents and sweetheart.

“Of course you get a pension,” many would observe.

He would shake his head and answer, in a mild tone of a man consciously repressing a pardonable pride.

“I never 'plied, and as long as the retail tobacker trade keeps up like this, I reckon I won't make no pull on the gover'ment treash'ry.”

And he would puff at his cigar vigorously, beam upon the group that surrounded his chair, and start on one of his long trains of reminiscences.

He was an amiable old fellow, with gray hair carefully combed back from his curved forehead, a florid countenance, boyish blue eyes, puffed cheeks, a smooth chin, and very military-looking gray moustache. He was manifestly a man who ate ample dinners and amply digested them. He would glance contentedly downward at his broad, round body, and smilingly remark:

“I didn't have that girth in my fightin' days. I got it after the war was over.”

All who knew him admired him. He would tell with simple frankness how, after distinguishing himself at Antietam, he chose to remain a private rather than take the lieutenancy that was placed within his reach. He would frequently say:

“I ain't none o' them that thinks the country belongs to the soldiers because they saved it. No, sir! If they want the country as a reward, where's the credit in savin' it?”

How could one help exclaiming: “What a really noble old man!”

Finally some of the young men who received daily inspiration from his autobiographical narratives arranged a surprise for the old soldier. They presented him with a finely framed picture of the battle of Gettysburg, under which was the inscription:

“To a True Patriot. Who Fought and Suffered Not for Self-Interest or Glory, but for Love of His Country.”

This hung in his shop until the day of his death. Then his brother came from his native village to attend to his burial. The brother stared at the picture, inquired as to the meaning of the inscription, and then laughed vociferously.

In the old soldier's trunk was found a faded newspaper that had been published in his village in 1865. It contained an account of an accident by which a grocer's clerk had lost his arm in a thrashing-machine. The grocer's clerk and the old soldier were one person.

He had never seen a battle, but so often had he told his war stories that in his last days he believed them.

X. -- A VAGRANT

On a July evening at dusk, two boys sat near the crest of a grass-grown embankment by the railroad at the western side of a Pennsylvania town. They talked in low tones of the sky's glow above where the sun had set beyond the low hills across the river, and also of the stars, and of the moon, which was over the housetop behind them. Then there was noise of insects chirping in the grass and of steam escaping from the locomotive boilers in the engine shed.

A rumble sounded as from the north, and in that direction a locomotive headlight came into view. It neared as the rumble grew louder, and soon a freight-train appeared. This rolled past at the foot of the embankment.

From between two grain cars leaped a man, and after him another. So rapidly was the train moving that they seemed to be hurled from it. Both alighted upon their feet. One tall and lithe, led the way up the embankment, followed by the other, who was short and stocky.

“Bums,” whispered one of the boys at the top of the embankment.

The tramps stood still when they reached the top. Even in the half-light it could be seen that their clothes were ill-fitting, frayed, and torn. They wore cast-off hats. The tall man, whose face was clean-cut and made a pretence of being smooth-shaven, had a pliable one; the other was capped by a dented derby.

“Here's yer town at last! And it looks like a very jay place at that,” said the short tramp to the tall one, casting his eyes toward the house roofs eastward.

The boys sitting twenty feet away became silent and cautiously watched the newcomers.

“Yep,” replied the tall tramp, in a deep but serious and quiet voice, “and right about here is the spot where I jumped on a freight-train fifteen years ago, the night I ran away from home. That seems like yesterday, though I've not been here since.”

“Skipped a good home because the old lady brought you a new dad! You wouldn't catch me being run out by no stepfather. Billy, you was rash.”