Chapter 6

“Mebby I was. But, on the dead, Pete, it was mostly jealousy. I thought my mother couldn't care for me any more if she could take a second husband. My sister thought so too, but she wasn't able to get away like me. Of course I was strong. It was boyish pique that drove me away. I didn't fancy having another man in my dead father's place, either. And I wanted to get around and see the world a bit. After I'd gone I often wished I hadn't. I'd never imagined how much I loved mother and sis. But I was tougher and prouder in some ways than most kids. You can't understand that sort of thing, Pete. And you can't guess how I feel, bein' back here for the first time in fifteen years. Think of it, I was just fifteen when I came away. Why, I spent half my life here, Petie!”

“Oh, I've read somewhere about that,--the way great men feel when they visit their native town.”

The short tramp took a clay pipe from his coat pocket and stuffed into it a cigar-end fished from another pocket. Then he inquired:

“And now you're here, Billy, what are you go'n to do?”

“Only ask around what's become o' my folks, then go away. It won't take me long.”

“There'll be a through coal-train along in about an hour, 'cordin' to what the flagmen told us at that last town. Will you be back in time to bounce that?”

“Yes. We needn't stay here. There's little to be picked up in a place like this.”

“Then skin along and make your investigations. I'll sit here and smoke till you come back. If you could pinch a bit of bread and meat, by the way, it wouldn't hurt.”

“I'll try,” answered the tall tramp. “I'm goin' to ask the kids yonder, first, if any o' my people still live here.”

The tall tramp strode over to the two boys. His companion shambled down the embankment to obtain, at the turntable near the locomotive shed across the railroad, a red-hot cinder with which to light his pipe.

“Do you youngsters know people here by the name of Kershaw?” began the tall tramp, standing beside the two boys.

Both remained sitting on the grass. One shook his head. The other said, “No.”

The tramp was silent for a moment. Then it occurred to him that his mother had taken his stepfather's name and his sister might be married. Therefore he asked:

“How about a family named Coates?”

“None here,” replied one of the boys.

But the other said, “Coates? That's the name of Tommy Hackett's grandmother.”

The tramp drew and expelled a quick, audible breath.

“Then,” he said, “this Mrs. Coates must be the mother of Tommy's mother. Do you know what Tommy's mother's first name is?”

“I heard Tom call her Alice once.”

The tramp's eyes glistened.

“And Mr. Coates?” he inquired.

“Oh, I never heard of him. I guess he died long ago.”

“And Tommy Hackett's father, who's he?”

“He's the boss down at the freight station. Agent, I think they call him.”

“Where does this Mrs. Coates live?”

“She lives with the Hacketts. Would you like to see the house? Me and Dick has to go past it on the way home. We'll show you.”

“Yes, I would like to see the house.”

The boys arose, one of them rather sleepily. They led the way across the railway company's lot, then along a sparsely built up street, and around the corner into a more populous but quiet highway. At the corner was a grocery and dry-goods store; beyond that were neat and airy two-story houses, fronted by a yard closed in by iron fences. One of these houses had a little piazza, on which sat two children. From the open half-door and from two windows came light.

“That's Hackett's house,” said one of the boys.

“Thanks, very much,” replied the tramp, continuing to walk with them.

The boys looked surprised at his not stopping at the house, but they said nothing.

At the next corner the tramp spoke up:

“I think I'll go back now. Good night, youngsters.”

The boys trudged on, and the tramp retraced his steps. When he reached the Hacketts' house, he paused at the gate. The children, a boy of eight and a girl of six, looked at him curiously from the piazza.

“Are you Mr. Hackett's little boy and girl?” he asked.

The girl stepped back to the hall door and stood there. The boy looked up at the tramp and answered, “Yes, sir.”

“Is your mother in?”

“No, she's across the street at Mrs. Johnson's.”

“Grandmother's in, though,” continued the boy. “Would you like to see her?”

“No, no! Don't call her. I just wanted to see your mother.”

“Do you know mamma?” inquired the girl.

“Well--no. I knew her brother, your uncle.”

“We haven't any uncle--except Uncle George, and he's papa's brother,” said the boy.

“What! Not an uncle Will--Uncle Will Kershaw?”

“O--h, yes,” assented the boy. “Did you know him before he died? That was a long time ago.”

The tramp made no other outward manifestation of his surprise than to be silent and motionless for a time. Presently he said, in a trembling voice:

“Yes, before he died. Do you remember when he died?”

“Oh, no. That was when mamma was a girl. She and grandmother often talk about it, though. Uncle Will started West, you know, when he was fifteen years old. He was standing on a bridge out near Pittsburg one day, and he saw a little girl fall into the river. He jumped in to save her, but he was drowned, 'cause his head hit a stone and that stunned him. They didn't know it was Uncle Will or who it was, at first, but mamma read about it in the papers and Grandpa Coates went out to see if it wasn't Uncle Will. Grandpa 'dentified him and they brought him back here, but, what do you think, the doctor wouldn't allow them to open his coffin, and so grandma and mamma couldn't see him. He's buried up in the graveyard next Grandpa Kershaw, and there's a little monument there that tells all about how he died trying to save a little girl from drownin'. I can read it, but Mamie can't. She's my little sister there.”

The tramp had seated himself on the piazza step. He was looking vacantly before him. He remained so until the boy, frightened at his silence, moved further from him, toward the door. Then the tramp arose suddenly.

“Well,” he said, huskily, “I won't wait to see your mamma. You needn't tell her about me bein' here. But, say--could I just get a look at--at your grandma, without her knowing anythin about it?”

The boy took his sister's hand and withdrew into the doorway. Then he said, “Why, of course. You can see her through the window.”

The tramp stood against the edge of the piazza upon his toes, and craned his neck to see through one of the lighted windows. So he remained for several seconds. Once during that time he closed his eyes, and the muscles of his face contracted. Then he opened his eyes again. They were moist.

He could see a gentle old lady, with smooth gray hair, and an expression of calm and not unhappy melancholy. She was sitting in a rocking-chair, her hands resting on the arms, her look fixed unconsciously on the paper on the wall. She was thinking, and evidently her thoughts, though sad, perhaps, were not keenly painful.

The tramp read that much upon her face. Presently, without a word, he turned quickly about and hurried away, closing the gate after him.

When the two children told about their visitor later, their mother said:

“You mustn't talk to strange men, Tommy. You and Mamie should have come right in to grandma.”

Their father said: “He was probably looking for a chance to steal something. I'll let the dog out in the yard to-night.”

And their grandmother: “I suppose he was only a man who likes to hear children talk, and perhaps, poor fellow, he has no little ones of his own.”

The tramp knew the way to the cemetery. But first he found the house where he had lived as a boy. It looked painfully rickety and surprisingly small. So he hastened from before it and went up by a back street across the town creek and up a hill, where at last he stood before the cemetery gate. It was locked; so he climbed over the wall. He went still further up the hill, past tombstones that looked very white, and trees that looked very green in the moonlight. At the top of the hill he found his father's grave. Beside it was another mound, and at the head of this, a plain little pillar. The moon was high now and the tramp was used to seeing in the night. Word by word he could slowly read upon the marble this inscription:

“William Albert, beloved son of the late Thomas Kershaw and his wife Rachel; born in Brickville, August 2, 1862; drowned in the Allegheny River near Pittsburg, July 27, 1877, while heroically endeavouring to save the life of a child.”

The tramp laughed, and then uttered a sigh.

“I wonder,” he said, aloud, “what poor bloke it is that's doin' duty for me under the ground here.”

And at the thought that he owed an excellent posthumous reputation to the unknown who had happened to resemble him fifteen years before, he laughed louder. Having no one near to share his mirth, he looked up at the amiable moon, and nodded knowingly thereat, as if to say:

“This is a fine joke we're enjoying between ourselves, isn't it?”

And by and by he remembered that he was being waited for, and he strode from the grave and from the cemetery.

By the railroad the short tramp, having smoked all the refuse tobacco in his possession, was growing impatient. Already the expected coal-train had heralded its advent by whistle and puff and roar when his associate had joined him.

“Found out all you wanted to know?” queried the stout little vagabond, starting down the embankment to mount the train.

“Yep,” answered the tall vagrant, contentedly.

The small man grasped the iron rod attached to the side of one of the moving coal-cars and swung his foot into the iron stirrup beneath. His companion mounted the next car in the same way.

“Are you all right, Kersh?” shouted back the small tramp, standing safe above the “bumpers.”

“All right,” replied the tall tramp, climbing upon the end of a car. “But don't ever call me Kersh any more. After this I'm always Bill the Bum. Bill Kershaw's dead--” and he added to himself, “and decently buried on the hill over there under the moon.”

XI. -- UNDER AN AWNING

For ten minutes we had been standing under the awning, driven there at two o'clock at night by a shower that had arisen suddenly.

“A pocket umbrella is one of the unsupplied necessities of the age,” said my companion.

“Yes, and the peculiarity of the age is that while such luxuries as the phonograph and the kinetograph multiply day by day, important necessities remain unsupplied.”

My friend mused for a time, while he watched the reflection of the electric light in the little street pools that were agitated by the falling fine drops of rain.

He looked from the reflection to the light itself, and thus his eyes turned upward.

An expression of surprise changed to mirth, and then dropping his glance until it met mine, he said:

“Have you noticed anything peculiar about this awning?”

“No, what is it?”

“Simply that there is no awning. Look up and see. Here are the posts and there is the framework, but only the sky is above, and we've been getting rained upon for the past ten minutes in blissful ignorance.”

It was as he said, so we ran to the next awning, which was a fact, not a figment of fancy.

“That reminds me,” resumed my friend, “of Simpkins. He was a young man who used to catch cold at the slightest dampness. His being out in the rain without an umbrella never failed to result in his remaining in the house for two or three subsequent days.

“One night, Simpkins, surprised by an unexpected shower, took refuge beneath the framework of an awning, which framework lacked the awning itself. He waited for an hour, until the shower had passed, and then joyously took up again his homeward way, without having observed his mistake. He told me on the next day of his narrow escape from the rain. I happened to know that the awning to which he alluded had been removed a few weeks before. But I did not tell him so until there no longer seemed to exist any likelihood of his catching cold from that wetting. You see, his imagination had saved him.”

“That tale is singularly reminiscent of those dear old stories about the man who took cold through sitting at a window that was composed of one solid sheet of glass, so clean that he thought it was no glass at all; and the men who, awaking in the night, stifling for want of fresh air, broke open the door of a bookcase which they took to be a window, and immediately noticed a pleasant draught of pure outside air.”

“There is a likeness, which simply goes toward proving the truth of all three accounts. But the remarkable thing about Simpkins' case is that when he once learned that there had been nothing over his head during that rain, he immediately caught cold, although two weeks had passed since the night of the shower. Wonderful, wasn't it?”

“Astonishing, indeed.”

Silence ensued and we meditated for awhile. Evidently the same thought came simultaneously into the minds of both of us, for while I was mentally commenting upon the deserted and lonely condition of the city streets at two o'clock on a rainy night, my friend spoke:

“A man is alone with his conscience, the electric lights, the shadows of the houses, and the sound of the rain at a time and place like this, isn't he? Standing as we stand now, under an awning, during a persistent rainfall, at this hour, with no other human being in sight, a man is for the time upon a desert island. Which reminds me:

“One night, at a later hour than this, when the rain was heavier than this, I was alone under an awning that was smaller than this. Being without umbrella and overcoat, I saw at least a quarter of an hour waiting for me. The thought was dismal.

“Happy idea! I would smoke. I had a cigar in my mouth in an instant.

“Horrors! I had no matches.

“The desire to smoke instantly increased tenfold. I puffed despairingly at my unlit cigar. No miracle occurred to ignite it. I looked longingly at the electric lights and the gas-lamps in the distance.

“Like a sailor cast upon an island and straining his eyes on the lookout for a ship, I stood there scanning the prospect in search of a man with a light. I was Enoch Arden; the awning was my palm-tree.

“Ten minutes passed. No craft hove in sight.

“Suddenly uncertain footsteps were heard. I looked. Some one came that way. It was a squalid-looking personage--a professional beggar, half-drunk. He landed upon my island, beneath my awning.

“'For charity's sake, give me a match!' I cried.

“He looked at me--'sized me up,' in the technical terminology of his trade. Intelligence began to illumine his countenance. He saw that the opportunity of his life had come. He held out a match.

“'I'll sell it to you for fifty cents,' he said, with a grin.

“I had erred in revealing the depth of my want, the extent of my distress.

“I compromised by promising to give him a half-dollar if I should succeed in lighting my cigar with his solitary match. We did succeed. He took the fifty and started back for the saloon from whence he had come.

“Oh, my boy, the irony of fate--that same old oft-quoted irony!

“I hadn't blown three mouthfuls of smoke from that cigar when a friend came along with a lighted cigar, an umbrella, and a box full of matches.

“The whole effect of this story lies in the value that fifty cents possessed for me at that time. It was my last fifty cents, and two days stood between that night and salary day.

“I had another experience--”

But a night car came in view from around a corner, my friend ran for it, and his third tale remains untold.

XII. -- SHANDY'S REVENGE

He was old enough to know better, and a superficial observer might have thought that he did. But a severe and haughty manner in repose is not any indication of knowledge, nor is a well-kept beard, even when it is turning gray. Melrose Welty, the possessor of these and other ways and features symbolical of wisdom, had no higher occupation in life than to sit in club-houses and cafés, telling of conquests won by him over women, chiefly over soubrettes and chorus girls.

Of his means of livelihood, no one had certain knowledge. He always dressed well, but he abode in a lodging-house, to which he never invited any of his associates. He affected the society of newspaper men, some of whom pronounced him a good fellow until they discovered that he was an ass; and he never refused an invitation to have a drink.

When he had you at a table in a quiet corner of a café, or in front of a bar, or in the lobby of a theatre between the acts, no matter how the conversation began, he would invariably turn it into that realm to which his thoughts were confined.

“I've got a supper on hand to-night after the performance,” he would probably say, “with a blonde in the ---- Company. A lovely girl, too! It's curious, old man, how I happened to meet her. I've talked to her only twice, but I made a hit with her in the first five minutes. I'll tell you how it was--”

Whereupon, if you were polite, and did not know Welty sufficiently to flee on a pretext, he would tell you how it was, inflicting upon you the wearisome minute details of the most commonplace thing in the world, the birth and growth of an acquaintance between a man about town and a silly young woman, not fastidious as to who pays for her food and drink as long as the food and drink are adequate.

If you were a newspaper man, Welty was apt to supplement his story with something like this:

“By the way, old fellow, if you have any pull with your dramatic editor, can't you give her a line or two? She hasn't much to do in the piece, but she does it well, and she's clever. She may get a good part one of these days. Have something nice said about her, won't you?”

And if you ever gave another thought to this plea, you determined to use whatever influence you had with the dramatic editor to this effect, that the young woman would have to exhibit very decided cleverness indeed ere she should have “something nice” said about her in the paper.

Welty was not wont to retain one divinity on the altar of his conversation longer than a week. But he did so once. He talked about the same girl every day for a month. And thereby came his undoing.

She was a slender little girl who was singing badly a small rôle in a certain comic opera at the time of these occurrences. She had a babyish manner across the footlights, and she was thought to be a blonde, for she was wearing a yellow wig over her own short black hair that season. Her first name was Emily.

Welty managed to be introduced to her by thrusting himself upon a little party of which she was a member, and in which was one acquaintance of his, at a restaurant one night. He called upon her at her boarding house the next day, where she received him with some surprise, and left most of the conversation to him. When he visited there again, she caused him to be told that she was out, and this took place a half dozen times. Their real acquaintance never went any further, but an imaginary acquaintance between them, growing from Welty's wish, made great progress in his fancy and in the stories told by him at his club to groups of men, some of whom doubted and looked bored, while others believed and grinned and envied.

It was at the point where Emily had quite forgotten Welty, and Welty's stories portrayed her as recklessly adoring him and seeking him in cabs at all hours, that Barry McGettigan, a despised young reporter, “doing police,” heard one of Welty's accounts of an alleged interview with Emily; and Barry, who had a way of knowing human nature and observing people, suspected.

Now Barry cherished a deep-rooted grudge against Welty, all the more dangerous because Welty was unaware of it. Its exact cause has never been torn from Barry's breast. Some have ascribed it to Welty's having mimicked Barry's brogue before a crowd in a saloon one night. Others have laid it to the following passage of words, which is now a part of the ancient history of the Nocturnal Club.

“Spakin' of ancestors,” Barry began, “I'd loike to bet--”

“I'd like to bet,” broke in Welty, “that your own ancestry leads directly to the Shandy family.”

There was a general laugh, which Barry, whose nose was as flat as any Shandy's could have been but who had never read Sterne, did not understand.

“What did he mane?” Barry asked a friend. The friend told him to read “Tristram Shandy.” He spent two hours in a public library next day and learned how his facial peculiarity had been used by Welty to create a laugh and incidentally to insult him.

This he never forgave. And he bided his time.

Now, having heard Welty boast of being the object of this Emily's infatuation, Barry McGettigan deflected his mind from the contemplation of murders, infanticides, fires, and other matters of general interest, and gave his best thoughts and skill to investigating this talked-of love affair of Welty's.

He discovered the true situation within three days. He found that Emily was engaged to be married to a college football player who came to the city once a week to see her.

He borrowed money, made himself very agreeable to Welty, and also got himself introduced to the football player. The latter was a tall, lithe, heavy-shouldered, brown-faced, thick-knuckled youth, who practiced all kinds of athletic diversions.

Barry McGettigan sounded the football man in one brief interview one night, between the acts of the comic opera, at the saloon next door. He found a means of fastening himself upon the football player's esteem. The collegian expressed a mild desire to see something of police-station life. Barry invited him to spend an evening with him on duty at Central Station. The collegian accepted. Barry appointed a time and named a certain café as a meeting place.

Then Barry invited Welty to dine with him at the same café on the same evening at the same hour. By means of his borrowed money, he had lavished costly drinks upon Welty of late, and Welty had reason to anticipate a dinner worth the accepting. Barry told Welty nothing of the collegian and he told the collegian nothing more of Welty.

When the evening came, Barry found Welty awaiting him at the café. The two sat down at a table. The preliminary cocktail had only arrived when in walked the collegian. Barry saluted him as if the meeting had only occurred by chance. He made the collegian and Welty known to each other by name only. And then he ordered dinner.

When a bottle had been drunk, Barry innocently turned the current of the conversation to women. He spoke modestly of a mythical conquest he had recently made. The football player listened without showing much interest. Presently Barry paused.

Welty took a drink and began:

“No, my boy,” said he to Barry, “you're wrong there. It's like you youngsters to think you know all about the sex, but the older you grow the less you think you know about them, until you get to my age.”

Barry made no answer, but looked at Welty with becoming deference.

The football man's eyes were wandering about the café, showing him to be indifferent to the theme of discussion.

“I know,” continued Welty, “that many more or less writers have said, as you say, that women must be sought and pursued to be won. They deduce that theory from the habits of lower animals and of barbarous nations, in which the man obtains the woman by chase and force. But it's all a theory, and simply shows that the learned writers study their books instead of their fellow men and women.”

The collegian looked restless, as if the conversation had gotten beyond his depth.

Barry remained silent, and with a flattering aspect of great interest in Welty's observations.

“Now,” went on Welty, striking the table with the bottom of his glass, “I've had a little experience of this sort of thing in my time, and I can say that in nine cases out of ten, once you've attracted the attention of your game, let it alone and it will chase you. That's how to win women.”

The collegian looked bored.