Chapter 9

“How that thing pursues me! It's like a fiend. It has no let-up. It follows me even into the next world.”

He sat for a moment more, intently listening. Then, with a quick, peevish sigh, he fell back from weakness. We by his side did not know it at the instant, but we discovered in a short time what had taken place when his head had touched the pillow, for he remained so still.

And that was the last of Billy Folsom, and up from the murmuring street below came the notes of the band-piano playing “La Gitana.”

XVIII. -- TRANSITION

Three of us sat upon an upper deck, sailing to an island. The day was sunlit, the wind was gentle, and the faintest ripple passed over the sea.

“Do you see the tremulous old man sitting over there by the pilot-house absorbing the sunshine? He reminds me of another old man, one whom I watched for six years, while he faded and died. He never knew me, but he walked by my house daily and I walked by his. It was an interesting study. The conclusion of the process was so inevitable. The time came when he did not pass my house. Then he took the sunlight in a bow-window on the second floor of his residence. So closely had I watched his decadence during the six years that I was able to say to myself one morning, 'There will be crape on his door before the day is out.' And so there was.”

The bon-vivant laughed rather mechanically, but the other, he who makes verses so dainty that the world does not heed them, smiled softly and sympathetically to me and said:

“You are right. Nothing is so fascinating as the study of a progress--a development or a decline. The inevitability of the end makes it more engrossing, for it relieves it of the undue eagerness of curiosity, the feverishness of uncertainty.”

“Well, I am content rather to live than to contemplate life,” said the bon-vivant. “It's true I have given myself up to observing anxiously such an advancement as you describe--a vulgar one you will say. When I was a very young man I was a very thin man. I determined to amplify my dimensions. I followed with careful interest my daily increase toward my present--let us not say obesity, but call it portliness.”

“You are inclined to be easy upon yourself,” I commented.

“Indeed I am--in all matters.”

After a pause the verse-maker, throwing away his cigarette, took up again the theme that I had introduced.

“Yes, it is an engaging occupation to note any progression, even when it is toward a fatal or a horrible culmination. But when it is to some beautiful and happy outcome, this advancement is an ineffably charming spectacle. Such it is when it is the unfolding of a flower or the filling out of a poetic thought.

“But no growth nor transformation in the material world is more entrancing to observe than that by which a young girl becomes a lovely woman.

“This transition seems to be sudden. It is not so. It is rapid, perhaps, as life goes, but each stage is distinctly marked. All men have not time to watch the change, however, and so most men awaken to its occurrence only when it is completed. Such was the case of the young and lowborn lover of Consuelo in George Sand's romance. Do you remember that incomparable scene in which he suddenly begins to notice that some feature of Consuelo is handsome, and, with surprise, calls her attention to its comeliness? She, equally astonished and delighted, joins him in the visual examination of her charms, and the two pass from one attraction to the other, finally completing the discovery that she is a beautiful woman.

“The Italian gamin was not the sort of man to have anticipated this transfiguration and to have watched its stages.

“You may argue that his delight at suddenly opening his eyes to the finished work was greater than would have been his pleasure at contemplating the alteration in process. Doubtless his was. As to whether yours would be in such a case, depends upon your temperament.

“I have experienced both of these pleasures. Perhaps it may be due to certain special circumstances that I cherish the memory of the more lasting delight, even though it was tempered by occasional doubts as to the end, more tenderly than I do the more sudden and keen awakening.

“There is a woman who first came under my observations when she was thirteen years old. She was then agreeable enough to the eye, more by reason of the gentleness of her expression than for any noteworthy attractions of face and figure. Her face, indeed, was plain and uninteresting; her figure unformed and too slim. Her hair, however, was charming, being soft and extremely light in colour. She seemed awkward, too, and timid, through fear of offending or making a bad impression.

“For a reason I was particularly interested in her. I knew, young as I then was, that plain girls, in many cases, develop into handsome women.

“At fourteen her hair showed indications of changing its tint. Its tendency was unmistakably toward brown. This was temporarily unfavourable, but a brightening of the blue eyes and a newly acquired poise of the head, with a step toward self-confidence in manner, were compensating alterations.

“At fifteen there came an emancipation of mind and speech from schoolgirl habits. A defensive assumption of impertinent reserve, varied by fits of superficial garrulity, gave way to real thoughtfulness, to natural amiability. Then came, too, an emboldenment of the facial outline, a constancy to the colour of the cheeks, a certainty of gait, and the first perceptible roundness of contour beneath the neck.

“At sixteen she had adorable hands, and she could wear short sleeves with impunity. A rational, unforced, and coherent vivacity had now revealed itself as a characteristic of her mode and conversation. Her ankles had long before that grown too sightly to be exhibited. Such is so-called civilization! Her hair seemed to darken before one's eyes. The oval of her face attracted the attention of more than one of my artist friends.

“At seventeen she had learned what styles of attire, what arrangements of her hair, were best suited to display effectively her comeliness.

“This was one of the greatest steps of all.

“The simplest draperies, she found, the least complicated headgear, were most advantageous to her appearance.

“A taste for reading the most ideal and artistic of books, as well as her liking for poetry, the theatre, music, and pictures had implanted that exalted something in her face which cannot be otherwise acquired.

“When she was eighteen people on the street turned to look at her as she passed.

“At nineteen her figure was unsurpassable. Indeed, I think there cannot be a more beautiful and charming woman in America. She is now twenty.

“It was my privilege to view closely the bursting of this bud into bloom.”

The fin de siècle versewright became silent and lighted a fresh cigarette.

“Will you permit me to ask,” said I, “what were the especial facilities that you had for observing this evolution?”

“Yes,” he answered, softly, a tender look coming into his eyes. “She is my wife. She was thirteen when I married her. Suddenly placed without means of subsistence, knowing nothing of the world, she came to me. I could see no other way. We are very happy together.”

The pretty narrative of the rhymer put each of us in a delectable mood. The notes of a harp and violins came from the lower deck in the form of a seductive Italian melody. White sails dotted the far-reaching sea.

XIX. -- A MAN WHO WAS NO GOOD

Hearken to the tale of how fortune fell to the widow of Busted Blake.

The outcome has shown that “Busted” was not radically bad. But he was wretchedly weak of will to reject an opportunity of having another drink with the boys--or with the girls--or with anybody or with nobody.

In the days of his ascendancy, when he was a young and newly married architect, he was a buyer of drinks for others. Waiters in cafés vied with each other in showing readiness to take his orders. He was rated a jolly good fellow then. No one would have supposed it destined that some fine night a leering barroom wit should reply to his whispered application for a small loan by pouring a half-glass of whiskey upon his head and saying:

“I hereby christen thee 'Busted.'”

The title stuck. Blake, through continued impecuniosity, lost all shame of it in time; lost, too, his self-respect and his wife. Mrs. Blake, a gentle and pretty little brunette, had wedded him against the will of her parents. She had trusted, for his safety, to the allurements of his future, which everybody said was bright, and to his love for her.

The years of tearful nights, the pleadings, the reproaches, the seesaw of hope and despair, need not here be dwelt upon. They would make an old story, and some of the details might be shocking to the young person. They reached a culmination one day when she said to him:

“You love drink better than you love me. I have done with you.”

She was a woman and took a woman's view of the case.

When he came back to their rooms that night, she was not there. Then he knew how much he loved her and how much he had underestimated his love.

She did not go to her parents. There was a very musty proverb that she knew would meet her on the threshold. “You made your bed, now lie on it.” Her father was a man of no originality, hence he would have put it in that way.

She got employment in a photograph gallery, where she made herself useful by being ornamental, sitting behind a desk in the anteroom.

I know not what duties devolve upon the woman who occupies that post in the average photographer's service; whatever they are she performed them. But within a very short time after she had left the “bed and board” of Busted Blake, she had to ask for a vacation. She spent it in a hospital and Busted became a father. She resumed her chair behind the photographer's desk in due time, found a boarding-house where infants were not tabooed, and managed to subsist, and to care for her child--a girl.

Somebody lived in that boarding-house who knew Busted Blake, and it was through inquiries resulting from, this somebody's jocularly calling him “papa” one night in a saloon that Busted was made aware of his accession to the paternal relation.

When the poor wretch heard the news, he made a prodigious effort to keep his face composed. But the muscles would not be resisted. He burst out crying, and he laid his head upon his arm upon a beer-flooded table and wept copiously, causing a sudden hush to fall upon the crowd of topers and a group to gather around his table and stare at him,--some mystified, some grinning, none understanding.

The next day he made a herculean effort to pull himself together. He obtained a position as draughtsman from one who had known him in his respectable period, and he went tremblingly and sheepishly to call upon his wife and child.

The consequence of his visit was a reunion, which endured for two whole weeks. At the end of that time she cast him off in utter scorn.

How he lived for the next two years can be only known to those who are familiar through experience with the existence of people who ask other people on the street for a few cents toward a night's lodging. By those who knew him he was said to be “no good to himself or any one else.” He acquired the raggedness, the impudence, the phraseology of the vagabond class. He would hang on the edge of a party of men drinking together in front of a bar, on the slim chance of being “counted in” when the question went round, “What'll you have?” He was perpetually being impelled out of saloons at foot-race speed by the officials whose function it is, in barrooms, to substitute an objectionable person's room for his company.

One winter Sunday morning he slept late on a bench in a public square. Awakened by an officer, he arose to go. Hazy in head and stiff at joints, he slightly staggered. He heard behind him the cooing laugh of a child. He looked around. It was himself that had awakened the infant's mirth--or that strange something which precedes the dawn of a sense of humour in children. The smiling babe was in a child's carriage which a plainly dressed woman was pushing. He looked at the woman. It was his wife and the pretty child was his own.

He walked rapidly from the place, and on the same day he decided to leave the city. He had herded with vagrants of the touring class. The methods of free transportation by means of freight-trains and free living, by means of beggary and small thievery in country towns, were no secret to him. He walked to the suburbs, and at nightfall he scrambled up the side of a coal-car in a train slowly moving westward.

What hunger he suffered, what cold he endured, what bread he begged, what police station cells he passed nights in, what human scum he associated with, what thirst he quenched, and with what incredibly bad whiskey, are particulars not for this unobjectionable narrative, for do they not belong to low life? And who nowadays can tolerate low life in print unless it be redeemed by a rustic environment and a laboured exposition of clodhopper English and primitive expletives? Low life outside of a dialect story and a dreary village? Never!

Mrs. Blake and the child lived in a fair degree of comfort upon the mother's wages, but often the mother shuddered at thought of what might happen should she ever lose her position at the photographer's.

Consumption had its hold on Busted Blake when he arrived in the mining-town called Get-there City, in Kansas, one evening. Get-there City had not gotten there beyond a single straggling street of shanties. But it had acquired a saloon, although liquor-selling had already been forbidden in Kansas.

Busted Blake, with ten cents in his clothes, entered the saloon and asked in an asthmatic voice for as much whiskey as that sum was good for.

While awaiting a response, his eyes turned toward the only other persons in the saloon,--three burly, bearded miners of the conventional big-hatted, big-booted, and big-voiced type. Above their heads and against the wall was this sign, lettered roughly with charcoal, under a crudely drawn death's head:

“Five thousand dollars will be paid by the undersigned to the widow of the sneaking hound that informs on this saloon. This is no meer bluf. P. GIBBS.”

Blake, after a brief coughing fit, looked up at the man behind the bar,--a great thick-necked fellow with a mien of authority, and yet with a certain bluff honesty expressed about his eyes and lips. This man, whose air of proprietorship convinced Blake that he could be none other than P. Gibbs, had first looked sneeringly at the ten cents, but had shown some small sign of pity on hearing the ominous cough of the attenuated vagrant. He set forth a bottle and glass.

“Help yerself,” said P. Gibbs. While Blake was doing so, Mr. Gibbs went on:

“Bad cough o' yourn. Y' mightn't guess it, but that same cough runs in my fam'ly. It took off a brother, but it skipped me.”

Here was a bond of sympathy between the big, law-defying saloon-keeper and the frail toper from the East. Busted Blake drained his glass and presently coughed again. P. Gibbs again set forth the bottle, and this time he drank with Blake. Before long, by dint of repeated fits of coughing on the part of Blake, the sympathy of P. Gibbs was so worked upon that he invited the three miners in the saloon to join him and the stranger.

Blake slept in a corner of the saloon that night. He left the next morning, a curious expression of resolution on his face.

During the next three weeks he was now and then alluded to in P. Gibbs's saloon as the “coughing stranger.”

In the middle of the third week, at nine o'clock in the evening, when the lamps in P. Gibbs's saloon were exerting their smallest degree of dimness and the bar was doing a good business, the door opened and in staggered Busted Blake. His staggering on this occasion was manifestly not due to drink. His face had the hideous concavities of a starved man and the uncertainty of his gait was the token of a mortal feebleness. His emaciation was painful to behold. His eyes glowed like huge gems.

The crowd of miners looked at him with surprise as he entered.

“The coughing stranger!” cried one.

“The coffin stranger, you mean,” said another.

Busted Blake lurched over to the bar. His eyes met those of P. Gibbs on the other side, and the latter reached for a whiskey-bottle.

Blake fumbled in his pocket and brought forth a piece of soiled paper, which he laid on the bar under the glance of P. Gibbs.

“Keep that!” said Blake, in a husky voice, whose service he compelled with much effort. “And keep your word, too! That's where you'll find her.”

P. Gibbs picked up the paper.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“That woman's name there. It's the name of my widow; the address, too, of a photograph man who will tell you where she is. Get the money to her quick, before the governor and the troops comes down on you to close you up. And don't let her know how it comes about. Pick a man to take it to her,--let him pay his expenses out of it,--a man you can trust, and make him tell her I made it somehow, mining or something, so she'll take it. You know.”

P. Gibbs, who had listened with increasing amazement, opened wide his eyes and drew his revolver. He spoke in a strangely low, repressed voice:

“Stranger, do you mean to say--”

“Yes, that's it,” shrieked Busted Blake, turning toward the crowd of intensely interested onlookers. “And I call on all you here to witness and to hold him to his word. That's no mere bluff he says in his notice there, and I'm the sneaking hound that informed. My widow is entitled to $5,000. I did it in Topeka, and for proof, see this newspaper.”

P. Gibbs fired a shot from his revolver through the newspaper that Blake pulled from his shirt. Then the saloon-keeper brought his weapon on a level with Blake's face.

“It's good your boots is on!” said P. Gibbs, ironically.

But he did not fire. Blake stood perfectly still, awaiting the shot, and feebly laughing.

So the two remained for some moments, until Blake suddenly sank to the floor, quite exhausted. He died within a half-hour on the saloon floor, his head resting in the palm of P. Gibbs, who knelt by his side and tried to revive him.

At the next dawn, a man whom they called Big Andy started East, and the piece of paper that Blake handed to P. Gibbs was not all that he took with him. The United States marshal arrived and duly closed Gibbs's saloon, which reopened very shortly afterward, minus the $5,000 offer.

And Big Andy found the widow of Busted Blake, to whom he told a bit of fiction in accounting for the legacy conveyed by him to her that would have imposed upon the most incredulous legatee. When she had recovered from the surprise of finding herself and her child provided with the means of surviving the possible loss of her situation, she forgave the late Busted, and there was a flow of tears unusual to a boarding-house parlour and unnerving to Big Andy.

Presently she asked Andy whether he knew what her husband's last words had been.

“Yep,” said Andy. “I heard'm plain and clear. Pete Gibbs,--the other executor of the will, you know,--Pete says, 'It's all right, pardner, me and Andy'll see to it,' and then your husband says, 'Thank Gawd I've been some good to her and the child at last.'”

Which account was entirely correct. When Big Andy had returned to Get-there City, and related how he had performed his mission, he added:

“I'd been such a lovely liar all through, it's a shame I had to go an' spoil the story by puttin' in some truth at the finish.”

They put up a wooden grave-mark where Blake was buried, and after his name they cut in the wood this testimonial:

“A tenderfoot that was some good to his folks at last.”

XX. -- MR. THORNBERRY'S ELDORADO

Near the uneven road among the hills a small field of stony ground lay between woods and cultivated land. Nothing grew upon it and no house could be seen from it. The sun beat upon it and crows flew over it to and from the woods.

Along the road trudged a thin old negro with stooping back and gray wool. His knees were bent and his cumbrously shod feet pointed far outward from his line of progress. He wore an aged frock coat and a battered stiff hat, although the month was June. His small face, beginning with a smoothly curved forehead and ending with a cleanly cut chin, was mild and conciliating, shiny, and of the colour of light chocolate. He carried a tin bucket full of cherries. Pop Thornberry was returning to the town.

Pop, whose proper name was Moses, and who was a deacon in the African Methodist Church, made his living this way and that way. He did odd jobs for people, and he fished and hunted when fishing and hunting were in season.

On this June day he had risen early and walked three miles to pick cherries “on shares.” He had picked ten quarts and left four of them with the farmer whose trees had produced them. At six cents a quart he would profit thirty-six cents by his walk of six miles and his work of a half-day.

The sun was scorching and Pop was tired. He decided to rest in the barren field, at its very edge in shade of the woods. He climbed the zigzag fence with some labour and at the expense of a few of his cherries. He sat down upon a little knob of earth, took off his hat, drew a red handkerchief from the inside thereof, and slowly wiped his perspiring brow.

He looked up at the sky, which was so brightly blue that it made his eyes blink. He sought optical relief in the dark green of the woods. Then, in steadying his pail of cherries between his legs, he turned his glance to the ground in front of him.

His attention was caught by a lump of earth that sparkled at points In the sun's rays, a mere clod composed of clay and mica, lying In the dry bed of a bygone streamlet. Because it glittered he picked it up and examined it. After a time he bethought him that he was yet two and a half miles from town and very hungry. He arose, somewhat stiff, and put the shining clod in his coat-tail pocket. On his way back to the road he noticed other little earth lumps that shone. He resumed his walk townward, his knees shaking regularly at every step, as was their wont.

At three o'clock in the afternoon he had reached home, sold his cherries, and dined on dried beef and bread in his little unpainted wooden house on the edge of the creek at the back of the town.

He owned his house and a small lot upon which it stood. Near it was a flour-mill, whose owner held a mortgage upon Pop's house and lot. The old negro had been compelled to borrow $200 to pay bills incurred during the illness and subsequent funeral of the late Mrs. Thornberry, and thus to avoid a sheriff's sale. Hence came the mortgage. It would expire on the 10th of September. Pop was almost ready to meet that date. He already had $192 hidden in his cellar, unknown to any one.

He had heard rumours of the mill-owner's desire to build an addition to his mill. To do this would necessitate the acquisition of contiguous property. But Pop had not suspected any ulterior motive when the miller had offered to lend him the money.

“I kin soon lay by 'nuff t' pay off d' mohgage, w'en I ain't got no one but m'se'f t' puvvide foh no moah,” he had said, after the loan had been made.

And, having dined on this June day, he took twenty cents from the amount received for cherries and placed it in a cigar-box to be added to the $192. He kept that sixteen cents with which to purchase provisions for to-morrow, and then he walked down the quiet street to the railway station. He often made a dime by carrying some one's satchel from the station to the hotel.