Part 13

Jake thumped his hairy chest proudly.

"I'm a griller," he explained.

"Oh," said Mr. Epps, satisfied. "A griller. Of course! Is it hard work?"

"Work?" cried Jake. "Say, this ain't my real skin. It's a 'sguise."

"Oh," said Mr. Epps. "So you're 'sguised? Wad did you do?"

"Careful, Jake," the organ grinder or pirate warned. "He may be a revnoo officer."

The gorilla turned on him angrily.

"Lookahere, Ed Peterson, how dare you pass remarks like that about my ole friend, Mr. ---- What is your name, anyhow? Of course he ain't no revnofficer? Are you?"

"I'll fight anybody who says I am," declared Tidbury Epps, glaring fiercely around at the empty chairs and tables.

"You a fighter?" inquired the gorilla, in a voice in which awe, admiration and alcohol mingled.

Mr. Epps contracted his brow and narrowed his eyes.

"Yep," he said impressively. "I'm Terrible Battling Epps. I'd rather fight than eat." He turned sternly to the gorilla. "Why are you 'sguised? Wad did you do?"

"Why, you poor nut," put in the girl in the beads, "we're going to the Pagan Rout."

"Sure, that's it," chimed in Jake. "Goin' to the Pagan Row. Come on along, Terrible."

"Aw, I'm tired of Pagan Routs," said Mr. Epps loftily. But the suggestion speeded up the pumpings of his heart.

"Oh, do come!" urged the girl in the beads.

"Ain't got no 'sguise," said Mr. Epps. He was wavering.

"Aw, come on!" cried the gorilla, clapping him on the shoulder till his teeth rattled. "Proud to have you with us, Terrible. I know a live one when I see one. Come on along. You'll see a lot of your friends there."

His friends? Tidbury thought of Martha.

"If I only had a 'sguise----" he began.

"You can get one round at Steinbock's, on Seventh Avenue," promptly informed the organ grinder-pirate. "That is," he added with sudden suspicion, "if you ain't one of these here revnofficers."

"S-s-s-s-sh, Ed," cautioned Jake, the gorilla. "Do you want Terrible Battling Epps to take a poke at you?"

Tidbury had made up his mind.

"I'll go," he announced.

"Good!" exclaimed the gorilla delightedly. "Atta boy! Glad to have a real N'Yawk sport with us. Meet you at Webber Hall, Terrible."

"Webber Hall? Wherezat?" inquired Tidbury as he sought to negotiate the door.

"Well," confessed the gorilla, "I dunno 'zactly m'sef. Y'see, I'm from Kansas City m'sef. In the lid game, I am. Biggest firm west of the Mizzizippi. Last year we sold----"

"Aw, stop selling and tell Terrible how to get to Webber Hall," put in the girl in the beads; she appeared to be the gorilla's wife.

"Well," said Jake, thoughtfully rubbing his fuzzy head, "far as I remember, you go out to the square and you go straight along till you get to the L and you turn to the right----"

"Left!" interjected the organ grinder-pirate.

"Right," repeated the gorilla firmly. "And then you turn down another street--no, you don't--you go straight on till you see a dentist's sign, a big gold tooth, with 'Gee, it didn't hurt a bit at Dr. B. Schmuck's Parlors,' painted on it, and you turn to your right----"

"Left," corrected the pirate-organ grinder sternly.

"Waz difference?" went on the gorilla blandly. "Well, as I was saying, you turn to the right or left and then you go along three or four blocks, and then you turn to your left----"

"Right, I tell you!" roared the man in velvet.

"Oh, well, you go along until you come to a corner and you turn it and go down a little bit, and there you are!"

"Where am I?" Mr. Epps, posing against the door, asked.

"Webber Hall," said Jake. "Pagan Row."

"Oh," said Mr. Epps.

"Didn't you follow me?"

"Of course I followed you."

"Good. See you at the party, Terrible. You're hot stuff."

"I'll be there. G'night."

"G'night, Terrible, old scout."

§3

Mr. Epps emerged from Ye Amiable Oyster, walking with elaborate but difficult dignity. He had only a remote idea where he was, but he knew where he wanted to go--Steinbock's on Seventh Avenue. So with a temerity quite foreign to him he stepped up briskly to the first passing pedestrian and asked, "Say, frien', where's Sebble Abloo?"

The man accosted puckered a puzzled brow.

"I don't get you, frien'," he said.

"Sebble Abloo!" repeated Mr. Epps loudly, thinking the stranger's hearing might be defective.

"What?"

"Sebble Abloo!" roared Mr. Epps.

The man shook his head as one giving up a conundrum.

"Sebble Abloo," repeated Mr. Epps at the top of his voice "Look." He held up his fingers and counted them off. "One, two, sree, four, fi', sizz, sebble. Sebble Abloo!"

"Oh, Seventh Avenue. Why didn't you say so in the first place?"

"I did."

"I'm going that way. I'll show you."

The stranger steered Tidbury through a rabbit warren of streets--the Greenwich Village streets never have made up their minds where they are going--and started him, with a gentle push, up Seventh Avenue.

Presently by some miracle Tidbury stumbled upon Steinbock's, and pushed his way into a jumble of masks, wigs, helmets and assorted junk, till he approached a patriarch in a skullcap, hidden behind a Niagara of white beard.

"'Lo, ole fel'," said Mr. Epps affably. "What are you 'sguised as? Sandy Claws or a cough drop?"

"Did you wish something?" inquired the patriarch coldly.

"Sure," said Tidbury. "Gimme 'sguise for Pagon Row."

"Cash in advance," said the patriarch. "What sort of costume?"

Tidbury considered.

"Wadjuh got?"

The venerable Steinbock enumerated rapidly, "Bear, bandit, policeman, Turk, golliwog, ballet girl, kewpie, pantaloon, Uncle Sam, tramp, diver, Lord Fauntleroy, devil----"

The ears of Mr. Epps twitched at the last word.

"Devil?"

"Yes," said Mr. Steinbock; "a swell rig; nice red suit; hasn't been worn a dozen times." He leaned forward toward Tidbury and whispered, "And I'll throw in a brand-new pair of horns and a tail!"

"I'll take it!" cried Tidbury. "Where can I hang my pants?"

After an interval there emerged from the depths of the Steinbock establishment a small uncertain figure muffled in an old raincoat. The coat was short and from beneath it protruded bright red legs and a generous length of red tail, with a spike on the end of it that gave forth sharp metallic sounds as it bumped along the pavement. A derby hat concealed one horn, but the other was visible; the face was Mephistophelian in its general character, but softened and rounded--the countenance of a rather amiable minor devil.

Tidbury Epps paused on a street corner to get his bearings. He had read somewhere that woodsmen, lost in the forest, can find the points of the compass because moss always grows on the north side of trees. He was carefully investigating a lamp-post for a trace of moss when a beady-eyed urchin approached him with outthrust hand.

"Give us one, mister?"

"One what?"

"A sample."

"Sample of what?"

"Ain't you advertising something?"

Tidbury drew himself up.

"No," he said with dignity. "How do I get to Wazzington Square?"

"Aw, chee," the urchin said in disgust, "you're one of them artist guys! Washington Square is two blocks south and three blocks west."

With every corpuscle in his small frame aglow with an excitement he had never before experienced Tidbury Epps started in determined search of the Pagan Rout. A grim purpose had been forming in his brain. So Martha Ritter thought he was quiet, eh? Hydeman had sniggered at him, had he? Just wait till Terrible Battling Epps reached the ball and discovered the well-fed person of Mr. Hydeman in clerical garb. There would be fireworks, he promised himself. No one was going to steal the girl of Terrible Epps and get away with it.

These, and thoughts of a similar trend, reeled through the brain of Tidbury as he hurried with a series of skips and now and then a short sprint along the curbstone.

So busy did he become planning a dramatic descent on Hydeman that he forgot the directions of the urchin, and soon found himself hopelessly astray in an eel tangle of streets, as he repeated, "Two blocks wes' and three blocks souse. Or was it three blocks souse and two blocks wes'?"

Gripping his tail firmly in his hand he tried both plans. Passers-by eyed him with the blasé curiosity of New Yorkers, as he passed at a dog trot.

Sometimes they nudged each other and remarked, "Artist. Goin' to this here Pagan Rout. Pretty snootful, too. Lucky stiff."

No one ventured to impede his slightly erratic progress; after half an hour of wandering he stopped, mopped his brow and observed, "Ought to be there by now."

As he said this he saw two figures across the street, two ladies of mature mold, picking their way along. It was their garb which made him give a shout of triumph and follow them. For one, who was fat, was dressed as a colonial dame with powdered hair, and the other, who was fatter, was a forty-year-old edition of Little Red Riding Hood; her hair was in pigtails, but she was discreetly skirted to the ankle bones. He followed these masqueraders with the wary steps of an Indian stalking a moose, until they turned into the basement of a towering building of brick, from which issued the melodic scraping of fiddles and the pleasing bleating of horns. His heart skipped a beat. The Pagan Rout! The devil's doorway.

Tidbury Epps shucked off his raincoat and derby hat, tossed them at a fire hydrant, put on his mask, dropped his tail, squared his red shoulders, knotted up his small fists, drew in a deep breath and plunged into the hall. So engrossed was he in these preparations that he failed to note a home-made poster nailed outside the door. It read:

COME ONE, COME ALL THE LADIES' AID SOCIETY WILL GIVE A COSTUME PARTY IN THE CHURCH BASEMENT TO-NIGHT

With a rolling gait Tidbury Epps entered the hall. Figures eddied about him in a dance, and, somewhat surprised, Tidbury noted that it was very like the old-fashioned waltzes he had seen in Calais, Maine. The waltzers evidently regarded dancing as a business of the utmost seriousness; their lips, beneath their dominoes, were rigid and severe, save when they counted softly but audibly, "One, two, three, turn. One, two, three, turn." In vain Tidbury searched the room for Jake the gorilla, the beaded lady, the organ-grinding pirate and the bimbo from the bamboo isle. He concluded that Jake's flasks had been too much for them. And he saw no gypsy or Hydeman. Indeed, as he watched the restrained and sober waltzers he could not escape the conviction that the Pagan Rout, for an institution so widely known for impropriety, was singularly decent in the matter of costume. There were Priscillas in ample skirts, farmerettes in baggy overalls, milkmaids in Mother Hubbards, Pilgrim fathers, sailors, and Chinese in voluminous kimonos. Tidbury, a little dazed in a corner, began to think that he had overestimated the glamour of sin.

He perceived that the obese Red Riding Hood was standing at his elbow, gazing at him with some curiosity.

He lurched toward her, and administered a slap of good-fellowship on her plump shoulder.

"'Lo, cutie," he remarked in accents slightly blurred. "Where's Cleopotter?"

The lady gave vent to a squeal of surprise.

"Sir," she said, "I do not know Miss Potter."

She sniffed the atmosphere in the vicinity of Mr. Epps, gave a little cluck of horror, and scurried away like a duck from a hawk.

The eyes of Mr. Epps followed her flight and he saw that she headed straight for a man who sat in a distant corner of the hall; the man was masked, but Tidbury felt every muscle in his five feet three inches of body stiffen as he saw that the man in the corner wore the garb of the clergy. Hydeman!

Red Riding Hood whispered in his ear and pointed an accusing finger toward Tidbury; the man in the corner gazed earnestly at the diminutive red devil teetering on red hoofs. By now Tidbury had spied another figure, sitting next to the masked preacher. She was a gypsy. And as she gazed at her companion she cocked her head to one side.

With tail bouncing along the floor after him Tidbury started briskly in their direction at a lope. Within a yard of them he reined himself down, and stood, with a hand on either hip, glaring at the cleric and the gypsy.

Hydeman stood up. He seemed larger, rounder than the assistant to the sales manager known to Tidbury in business hours, but the fierce fire of jealousy burned within Mr. Epps--and he was not to be daunted by size.

"So it's you, is it?" he remarked with biting emphasis.

"Naturally," said the man. "Whom did you expect it to be?"

His voice had a soft sweet note in it, not at all like the sharp staccato of Hydeman's crisp business New Yorkese.

"He's making fun of me," said Tidbury, and the spirit of Terrible Battling Epps wholly possessed him.

"You thought I was a dead one, eh?" remarked Mr. Epps. "Well, I'm going to show you that sometimes the quiet ones come to life and----"

The other eyed him sternly.

"Young man," he said, "I fear that you are er--a bit--er--under the weather. I fear you are not one of us."

"Not one of you?" roared Tidbury with passion mounting. "You're darn right I'm not one of you--you low, immoral Greenwich Villagers, leading innocent girls astray." He waved a thin red arm toward the gypsy.

The music had stopped in the midst of a bar; the masqueraders were crowding about. The accused ecclesiastic glared down at the small devil before him.

"How dare you say such a thing of me?" he demanded. "Who are you?"

"You know well enough who I am, Milt Hydeman," cried Tidbury, breathing jerkily. "I'm Terrible Battling Epps, and----"

"Leave our hall at once!" the other returned. "You are plainly under the influence of----"

He stretched out a hand to grasp Tidbury Epps by the shoulder, and as he did so Tidbury brought a small but angry fist into swift contact with the clerical waist-line.

"Oof!" grunted the man.

"Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" screamed the Red Riding Hood. "The devil has struck the Reverend Doctor Bewley. Help! Help!"

But Tidbury, deaf to all things but battle, had buried his other fist so violently in his opponent's soft center that the mask popped from the man's face. It was the round, pink, frightened face of a total stranger.

With a yelp of dismay Tidbury turned to flee, but the outraged parishioners had pounced on him, torn off his mask, and were proving, at his expense, that there is still such a thing as militant, muscular Christianity in the world. As they bore him, kicking and struggling, to the door, he saw in all the blur of excited faces one face with staring, unbelieving eyes. The gypsy had removed her mask, and she was Martha Ritter. In all the babble of voices hers was the only one he heard.

"Oh, Mr. Epps! Oh, Mr. Epps!" she was sobbing. "I didn't think it of you! I didn't think it of you!"

From the gutter in front of the church Tidbury after a while picked himself, felt tenderly of his red-clad limbs, found them whole but painful, applied a bit of cold paving brick to his swelling eye, and started slowly and thoughtfully down the street, his tail, broken in the fracas, hanging limply between his legs. Despite all, the potent stimulus of Jake's concoction lingered with him, and there was a comforting buzzing in his head which all but offset the feeling of dank despair that was crowding in upon him. He had lost Martha. That was sure. He--he was a failure. He couldn't even go to the devil.

How he got back to his own room in Mrs. Kelty's boarding house he never knew, but that was where the brazen voice of the alarm clock summoned him sharply from deep slumber. His head felt like a bass drum full of bumblebees. But it was his heart, as he buttoned his pepper-and-salt vest over it, that hurt him most. He tried to drive from him the aching thoughts of the lost Martha, but the only thought he could substitute was the scarcely more cheerful one that he'd probably be cast incontinently from the hat company when news of his brawl reached the alert ears of Messrs. Spingle and Blatter.

Spurning breakfast he hurried to his office, and before Martha or the rest arrived he had climbed wearily to the pinnacle of his high stool, and had hunched himself over his figures. He was struggling to distinguish between the dancing nines and sixes when he heard a voice--an oddly familiar voice--booming out from the doorway that led to the presidential sanctum.

"Well," said the voice, "it looks to me just now, Spingle, as if we could use about ten thousand dozen of your Number 1A hats out in Kansas City this year. Of course I'll have to shop around a bit to see what the others can offer----"

"Of course, Jake, of course," replied Mr. Spingle, in the satin voice Tidbury knew he reserved for the very largest buyers. "But say, Jake, wouldn't you and your wife like to be our guests at a little party to-night? Dinner and then the Winter Garden? Our Mr. Hydeman will be delighted to take you out."

The person addressed as Jake lowered his voice, but not so low that the avid ears of Tidbury Epps missed a syllable.

"Between you and me, Spingle," said Jake, "I wouldn't care to at all."

"Why, Jake," expostulated Mr. Spingle, "I thought you and the wife always liked to whoop it up a bit when you came to the big town."

"So we do," admitted Jake, "but not with him."

"What's wrong with Hydeman?" demanded the Napoleon of Hatdom, and Tidbury read anxiety in his tone.

"Everything," replied Jake succinctly.

"You know him, then?"

"Yep, ran into him last night at the Pagan Rout," said Jake. "He didn't make much of a hit with me or the missus. Too fresh. Treated us as if we were rubes. Out in Kansas City we know a good fellow when we see one----Why, what the devil----"

Jake had chopped his sentence off short, and with a whoop of joy had bounded across the room.

"Well, if it isn't Terrible Epps!" he bellowed heartily. "How's the head, old sport? Say, Terrible, why didn't you join us at the Pagan Rout?"

"I--I couldn't find you there," said Tidbury, trembling.

"Oh, yes," remarked Jake thoughtfully. "You must have got there after they put us out."

"They put me out too," said Tidbury.

Jake's roar of laughter made the straw hats quiver on the heads of the dummies in the show cases. He turned a beaming face to Mr. Spingle.

"Say, Spingle," he cried, "what do you mean by trying to palm off a tin-horn like Hydeman on me when you've got the best little fellow, the warmest little entertainer east of the Mississippi, right here?"

To this Mr. Spingle was totally unable to make any reply. But after a minute his brain functioned sufficiently for him to say, "About that order of yours, Jake----"

"Oh," said Jake reassuringly. "I'll talk to Terrible Epps about it at dinner to-night."

* * * * *

"And to think," repeated Mr. Spingle for the third or fourth time to Mr. Blatter, "that Tidbury is a man-about-town who goes to Pagan Routs and everything! You'll give him Hydeman's job, won't you, Otto?"

"I already have," said Mr. Blatter.

"Good!" exclaimed the Napoleon of Hatdom. "Didn't I always say that Tidbury Epps was a live one, underneath?"

* * * * *

The round cheek of Martha Ritter was in immediate contact with the pepper-and-salt shoulder of Tidbury Epps.

"And you tried to make me think," he repeated in a tone of wonder, "that you liked Hydeman and were going to the Pagan Rout with him? Oh, Martha dear, why did you do it?"

She hid her eyes from his.

"I did it," she murmured, "because I wanted to make you jealous."

The clock ticked many ticks.

"But, Tidbury, if I marry you," she said anxiously, "you'll reform, won't you? You'll promise me you'll give up Greenwich Village and drinking, won't you, Tidbury?"

"If you'll help me, dearest," promised Tidbury Epps, "I'll try."

XI: _Honor Among Sportsmen_

Each with his favorite hunting pig on a stout string, a band of the leading citizens of Montpont moved in dignified procession down the Rue Victor Hugo in the direction of the hunting preserve.

It was a mild, delicious Sunday, cool and tranquil as a pool in a woodland glade. To Perigord alone come such days. Peace was in the air, and the murmur of voices of men intent on a mission of moment. The men of Montpont were going forth to hunt truffles.

As Brillat-Savarin points out in his "Physiology of Taste"--"All France is inordinately truffliferous, and the province of Perigord particularly so." On week-days the hunting of that succulent subterranean fungus was a business, indeed, a vast commercial enterprise, for were there not thousands of Perigord pies to be made, and uncounted tins of _pâté de foie gras_ to be given the last exquisite touch by the addition of a bit of truffle?

But on Sunday it became a sport, the chief, the only sport of the citizens of Montpont. A preserve, rich in beech, oak and chestnut trees in whose shade the shy truffle thrives, had been set apart and here the truffle was never hunted for mercenary motives but for sport and sport alone. On week-days truffle hunting was confined to professionals; on Sunday, after church, all Montpont hunted truffles. Even the sub-prefect maintained a stable of notable pigs for the purpose. For the pig is as necessary to truffle-hunting as the beagle is to beagling.

A pig, by dint of patient training, can be taught to scent the buried truffle with his sensitive snout, and to point to its hiding place, as immobile as a cast-iron setter on a profiteer's lawn, until its proud owner exhumes the prize. An experienced pointing pig, with a creditable record, brings an enormous price in the markets of Montpont.

At the head of the procession that kindly Sunday marched Monsieur Bonticu and Monsieur Pantan, with the decisive but leisurely tread of men of affairs. They spoke to each other with an elaborate, ceremonial politeness, for on this day, at least, they were rivals. On other days they were bosom friends. To-day was the last of the fall hunting season, and they were tied, with a score of some two hundred truffles each, for the championship of Montpont, an honor beside which winning the Derby is nothing and the _Grand Prix de Rome_ a mere bauble in the eyes of all Perigord. To-day was to tell whether the laurels would rest on the round pink brow of Monsieur Bonticu or the oval olive brow of Monsieur Pantan.

Monsieur Bonticu was the leading undertaker of Montpont, and in his stately appearance he satisfied the traditions of his calling. He was a large man of forty or so, and in his special hunting suit of jade-hued cloth he looked, from a distance, to be an enormous green pepper. His face was vast and many chinned and his eyes had been set at the bottom of wells sunk deep in his pink face; it was said that even on a bright noon he could see the stars, as ordinary folk can by peering up from the bottom of a mine-shaft. They were small and cunning, his eyes, and a little diffident. In Montpont, he was popular. Even had his heart not been as large as it undoubtedly was, his prowess as a hunter of truffles and his complete devotion to that art--he insisted it was an art--would have endeared him to all right-thinking Montpontians. He was a bachelor, and said, more than once, as he sipped his old Anjou in the Café de l'Univers, "I marry? Bonticu marry? That is a cause of laughter, my friends. I have my little house, a good cook, and my Anastasie. What more could mortal ask? Certainly not an Eve in his paradise. I marry? I be dad to a collection of squealing, wiggling cabbages? I laugh at the idea."

Anastasie was his pig, a prodigy at detecting truffles, and his most priceless treasure. He once said, at a truffle-hunters' dinner, "I have but two passions, my comrades. The pursuit of the truffle and the flight from the female."