 CHAPTER VIII. The next day we broke camp and was gone from that place, and I took away with me the half of a ring me and Martha had chopped in too. We kept on going, and by the time pumpkins and county fairs was getting ripe, we was into the upper left-hand corner of Ohio, and there Louie left us. One day Dr. Kirby and me was walking along the main street of a little town, and we seen a bang-up funeral procession coming. It must have been one of the Grand Army of the Republicans, for they was some of the old soldiers in buggies riding along behind, and a big string of people following in more buggies and some on foot. Everybody was looking mighty solemn, but they was one man sitting beside the undertaker on the seat of the hearse that was looking solemner than them all. It was Louie, and I'll bet the corpse himself would have felt proud and happy and contented if he could have known the style Louie was giving that funeral. It wasn't nothing Louie done, for he didn't do nothing but just sit there with his arms folded onto his bosom and look sad. But he'd done that better than anyone else. He'd done it so well that you forgot the corpse was the chief party to that funeral. Louie took all the glory from him. He had just naturally stole that funeral away from its rightful owner with his enjoyment of it. He's seen the doctor in me as the hearse went by our corner, but he never let on. A couple of hours later Louie comes into camp and says he is going to quit. The doctor asks him if he has inherited money. No, says Louie, but my aunt has given me a chance to go into business. Louie says he was born nigh there and was prowling around town the day before and run across an old aunt of his and he had forgot all about. She is awful respectable and religious and ashamed of him being into a travelling show, and she has offered to lend him enough to buy a half share in a business. Well, says the doctor, I hope it will be something you are fitted for and will enjoy, but I've noticed that after a man gets the habit of roaming around this terrestrial ball it's mighty hard to settle down and watch his vine and fig tree grow. Louie smiles in a sad sort of way, which he seldom smiled for anything, and says he guesses he'll like the business. He says they ain't many businesses he could take to. Most of them makes you forget this world is but a fleeting show. But he has found a business which keeps you reminded all the time that the dust is dust and ash to ashes shall return. When he first went into the medicine business he said, he was drawed to it by the diseases and the sudden dying's off had always kept him in mind of. He thought they wasn't no other business could lay over it for that kind of comfort, but he has found out his mistake. What kind of business are you going into? asks the doctor. I'm going to be an undertaker, says Louie. My aunt says this town needs the right kind of an undertaker bad. Mr. Wilcox, the undertaker that town has, is getting pretty old and shaky, Louie says, and young Mr. Wilcox, his son, is too light-minded and goes at things too brisk and airy to give it the right kind of a send-off. People don't want him joking around their corpses, and he is a fat young man and can't help making puns even in the presence of the departed. Old Mr. Wilcox's eyesight is getting so poor he made a scandal in that town only the week before. He was composing a departed's face into a last smile, but he went too fur with it, and give the departed one of them awful mean devilish kind of grins, like he had died with a bad temper on. By the time the departed's family had found it out, things had went too fur, and the face had set that away, so it wasn't safe to try to change it any. Old Mr. Wilcox had several brands of last looks. One was called, Bear up, for we will meet again. The one that had went wrong was his favorite look named, O death, where is thy victory? Louie's aunt says she will buy him a partnership if she is satisfied he can fill the town's needs. They have a talk with the Wilcox's, and he rides on the hearse that day for a try out. His aunt peeks out behind her bedroom curtains as the procession goes by her house, and when she sees the style Louie's giving to that funeral and how easy it comes to him that settles it with her on the spot. And it seems the whole Dern town liked it too, including the departed's family. Louie says they is a lot of chance for improvements in the undertaking game by one whose heart is in his work, and he is going into that business to make a success of it and try and get all the funeral trade for miles around. He reads us an advertisement of the new firm he has been figuring out for that town's weekly paper. I cut a copy out when it was printed, and it is about the gentilist thing like that I have even seen as followers. Wilcox and Sims invite your patronage. This earth is but a fleeting show, and the blank-winged angels wait for all. It is always a satisfaction to remember that all possible has been done for the deceased. See our new line of coffins, lined caskets of specialty, lodge work solicited. Time and tide wait for no man, and his days are few and full of troubles. The paths of glory lead but to the grave, and none can tell when mortal feet may stumble. When in town, drop in and inspect our new embalming outfit. It is a pleasure to show goods and tools, even if your family needs no work done just yet. Outfits for mourners who have been bereaved on short notice, a specialty. We take orders for tombstones. Look at our line of shrouds, robes, and black suits for either sex and any age. Give us just one call, and you will entrust future embalmings and obsequies in your family to no other firm. Wilcox and Sims, Main Street, near Depot. The doctor, he reads it over careful, and says she ordered drum-up trade all right. Louis tells us that maybe, if he can get that town educated up to it, he will put in a crematory where he will burn them too, but will go slow for that their solemn and beautiful way of returning ash to ashes might make some prejudice in such a religious town. The last we seen of Louis was a couple of days later when we told him goodbye in his shop. Old Mr. Wilcox was explaining to him the science of them last looks he was so famous at when he was a younger man. Young Mr. Wilcox was lying on a table for Louis to practice on, and Louis was learning fast, but he nearly broke down when he said goodbye, for he liked the doctor. Doc, he says, you've been a good friend, and I won't never forget you. There ain't so much I can do, and in this deceitful world words is less than actions. But if you ever was to die within a hundred miles of me, I'd go, he says, and no other hands but mine should lay you out, and it wouldn't cost you a cent, either, nor you neither, Danny. We thanked him kindly for the offer and went. The next town we come to, there was a county fair, and the doctor run across an old pal of hisen, who had a show on the grounds and wanted to hire him for what he called a ballyhoo man, which was the first I ever herned them called that, but I got better acquainted with them since. They are the fellers that stands out in front and gets you all excited about the Siamese twins, or the bearded lady, or the snake-charmer, or the Circassian beauties, or whatever is inside the tent, as represented upon the canvas. The doctor says he will do it for a week, just for fun, and maybe pick up another fellow to take Louis' place out there. This fellow's name is Wadi Sanders, and his wife is a fat lady in his own show, very good-natured, when not intoxicated or mad at Wadi. She was billed on the curtains outside for five hundred and fifty pounds, and Wadi says she really does weigh nigh on to four hundred. But being a fat lady's husband ain't no bet of rosy ease at that, Wadi tells the doctor. It's like every other trait. It has its own particular responsibilities and troubles. She is a terrible expense to Wadi on account of eating so much. The tales that fellow told of how hard he has to hustle, showing her off, in order to support her appetite, would have drawn tears from upon broker's sign, as Dr. Kirby says, which he found it cheaper for his whole show to board and sleep in the tent, and we'd done likewise. Well, I got a job with that show myself. Wadi had a wild man canvas, but no wild man, so he made me an offer, and I took him up. I was from Borneo, where they're all supposed to be captured. Just as Dr. Kirby would get to his talk about how the wild man had been catched after a great struggle and expense, with four men killed and another crippled, there would be an awful rumpus on the inside of the tent, with wild howlings and the sound of revolvers shot off and a woman screaming. Then I would come busting out all blacked up from head to heel, with no more clothes on than what the law provided for, yipping loud and shaking a big spear and rolling my eyes, and Wadi would come rushing after me, firing his revolver. I would make for the doctor, and draw my spear back to jab it clean through him, and Wadi would grab my arm, and the doctor would whirl round, and they would wrestle me to the ground, and I would be handcuffed and dragged back into the tent, still howling and struggling to break loose. On the inside my part of the show was to be wild in a cage. I would be chained to the floor, and every now and then I would get wilder, and rattle my chains, and shake the bars, and make jumps at the crowd, and carry on and make believe I was too mad to eat the pieces of raw meat Wadi throwed into the cage. Wadi had a snake-charmer woman, with an awful long bony kind of neck, working for him, and another feller that was her husband, and eat glass. The show opened up with them, too, doing what they said was a comic turn. Then the fat lady came on. Whilst everybody was admiring her size, and looking at the number of pounds on them big cheat scales Wadi weighed her on. The long-necked one would be changing to her snake clothes, which she only had one snake, and he had been in the business so long, and was so kind of worn out and tired with being charmed so much, it always seemed like a pity to me the way she would take and twist him around. I guess they never was a snake was worked harder for the little bit he got to eat, nor got no sicker of a woman's society than poor old Reginald did. After Reginald had been charmed a while, it would be the glass-eaters turn, which he really ate it, and the doctor says that kind always dies before they is fifty. I never knowed his right name, but what he went by was the human ostrich. Wadi's wife was awful jealous of Mrs. Ostrich, for she got the idea she was carrying on with Wadi. One night I heard an argument from the fenced-off part of the tent Wadi and his wife slept in. She was setting on Wadi's chest, and he was gasping for mercy. You know it ain't true, says Wadi, kind of smothered like. It is, says she, you own up it is! And she give him a jounce. No, darling, he gets out of him. You know I never could bear with them thin, scrawny kind of women. And he begins to call her pet names of all kinds, and beg her please, if she won't get off complete, to set somewhere as else a minute, for his chest he can feel giving way, and his ribs caving in. He called her his plump little woman three or four times, and she must have softened up some, for she moved and his voice came stronger, but not less meek and lowly. And he follows it up. Dolly, darling, he says, I bet I know something my little woman don't know. What is it, the fat lady asks him. You don't know what a cruel, weak stomach your hubby has got, Wadi says, awful coaxing like. Or you wouldn't bear down quite so hard into it. Please, Dolly! She begins to blubber and say he is making fun of her big size, and if he is mean to her any more, or ever looks at another woman again, she will take anti-fat and fade away to nothing and ruin his show. And it is awful hard to be made a joke of all her life, and not have no steady home, nor nothing like other women does. You know I worship every pound of you little woman, says Wadi, still coaxing. Why can't you trust me? You know, Dolly, darling, I wouldn't take your weight in gold for you. And he tells her they never was, but once in all his life he has so much as turned his head to look at another woman. And that was by way of a plutonic admiration, and no flirting intended, he says. And even then it was before he had met his own little woman. And that other woman, he says, was plump too, for he wouldn't never look at none but a plump woman. What did she weigh, asks Wadi's wife. He tells her a measly little three hundred pound. But she wasn't refined like my little woman, says Wadi, and when I seen that I passed her up. And inch by inch Wadi coaxed her clean off of him. But the next day she herned him and Mrs. Ostrich giggling about something, and she was a regular tantrum, and just for her meanness goes out and falls down on the racetrack, pretending she has fainted. And they can't move her no ways, not even roll her. But finally they rousted her out of that by one of these here sprinkling carts backing up again her and turning loose. But aside from them occasional mean streaks, Dolly was real nice, and I kind of got to liking her. She tells me that because she is so fat no one won't take her serious like a human being, and she wished she was like other woman and had a family. That woman wanted a baby, too, and I bet she would have been good to it, for she was awful good to animals. She had been big from a little girl, and never got no sympathy when sick nor nothing, and even whilst she played with dolls as a kid, she knowed she looked ridiculous, and was laughed at. And by jings they was the funniest thing come to light before we left that crowd. That poor, dirnd old fat fool had a doll yet, all hid away, and when she was alone she used to take it out and cuddle it. Well, Dolly never had many friends, and you couldn't blame her much if she did drink a little too much now and then, or get mad at Wattie for his goings on, and kneel down on him whilst he was asleep. Them was her only faults, and I liked the old girl, yet I could see Wattie had his troubles, too. That show busted up before the fair closed. For one day Wattie's wife gets mad at Mrs. Ostrich and tries to set on her. And then Mrs. Ostrich gets mad, too, and sicks Reginald on to her. Wattie's wife is awful scared of Reginald, who don't really have ambition enough to bite no one, let alone a lady built so round everywhere he couldn't get a grip on her. And as Fur is wrapping himself around her and squashing her to death, Reginald never seen the day he could reach that Fur. Reginald's feelings is plum-friendly toward Dolly when he is turned loose, but she don't know that, and she has some hysterics and feints in earnest this time. Well, there was an awful hullabaloo when she come, too, and for the sake of peace in the family Wattie has to fire Mr. and Mrs. Ostrich and poor Reginald out of their jobs, and the show is busted. So Dr. Kirby and me lit out for other parts again. We was jogging along one afternoon, not Fur from a good-sized town at the top of Ohio, right on the lake, when we run across some remainders of a busted circus riding in a staken chain wagon. They was two fellers, both jugglers, acrobats, and tumblers, and a balloon. The circus had busted without paying them nothing but promises for months and months, and they had took the team in wagon and balloon by attachment, they said. They was carting her from the little burg the show busted in to that good-sized town on the lake. They would sell the team in wagon there and get money enough to put an advertisement in the billboard, which is like a Bible to them showmen, that they had a balloon to sell and was at liberty. One of them was the slimmest, light-footed, quickest fella you ever seen, with a big nose and dark-complected, and his name was Tobias. The other was heavier and blond-complected. His name was Dobbs, he said, and they was the Blanchett Brothers. Dr. Kirby and them got real well acquainted in about three minutes. We drove on ahead and got into the town first. The doctor says that balloon is just wasted on them fellers. They can't go up in her not knowing that trade, but still they ought to be some way for them to make a little stake out of it before it was sold. The next evening we run across to them fellers on the street, and they was feeling pretty blue. They hadn't been able to sell that team in wagon, which it was eating its meals regular in a livery stable, and they had been doing stunts in the street that day and passing around the hat, but not getting enough for it to pay expenses. Where's the balloon? asks the doctor, and I've seen he was sickening his intellects into the job of making her pay. In the livery stable with the wagon, they tells him. He says he is going to figure out a way to help them boys. They is like all circus performers, he says. They just knows their own acts and talks about them all the time, and studies up ways to make them better, and has got no more idea of business outside of that than a rabbit. We all went to the livery stable and overhauled that balloon. It was an awful job too, but they wasn't a rip in her, and the parachute was just as good as new. There's no reason why we can't give a show of our own, says Dr. Kirby, with you boys and Danny and me and that balloon. What we want is a lot with a high board fence around it, like a baseball grounds, and the chance to tap a gas main. He says he'll be willing to take a chance on it, even paying the gas company real money to fill her up. What the doctor didn't know about starting shows wasn't worth knowing. He had even went in for the real drama in his younger days now and then. One of my theatrical productions came very near succeeding too, he says. It was a play, he says, in which the hero falls in love with a pair of Siamese twins, and commits suicide because he can't make a choice between them. We played it as a comedy in the big towns, and a tragedy in the little ones, he says, but like a fool I booked it for two weeks of middle-sized towns, and it broke us. The next day he finds a lot that will do just fine. It has been used for a school playgrounds, but the school has been moved and the old building is to be tore down. He hired the place cheap. And he goes and talks the gas company into giving him credit to fill that balloon. Which I kept wondering what was the use of filling her, for none of the four of us had ever went up in one. And when I seen the hand-bills he had printed, I wondered all the more. They read as follers. He's comedy company and open-air circus, presenting a peerless personnel of artistic attractions. Greatest in the galaxy of gaiety is Hartley L. Kirby, monologist and minstrel, dancer and vaudevillian in his Terpsichorian travesties, buoyant burlesques, inimitable imitations, screaming impersonations, refined comedy sketches, and popular song hits of the day. The Blanchett brothers, daring, dazzling, danger-loving, death-defying demons, joyous jugglers, acrobatic artists, constrictorial contortionists, exquisite equilibrists in their marvelous, mysterious, unparalleled performances, whom sloppagus the Patagonian chieftain, the lowest type of human intellect. This formerly ferocious fiend has so far succumbed to the softer wiles of civilization that he is no longer a cannibal, and it is now safe to put him on exhibition. But to prevent accidents, he is heavily manacled, and the public is warned not to come too near. Balloon, balloon, balloon! The management also presents the balloon of Professor Alonzo Ackerman, the famous Aeronaut, in which he has made his wonderful ascension and parachute drop many times, reaching remarkable altitudes. Balloon, balloon, balloon! Saturday, 3 p.m., Old Vandegrift school lot, admission fifty cents. Well, for a writer he certainly laid over Louie, Dr. Kirby did, more cheerful like you might say. I seen right off I was to be the Patagonian chieftain. I was getting more and more of an actor right along, first an engine, then a wild Borneo, and now a Patagonian. But who is this Alonzo Ackerman, I asked him. Celebrated balloonist, says he, and the man that invented parachutes, they eat out of his hand. Where is he, asked Psy. How should I know, he says. How is he going up, then, I asks. The doctor chuckles and says it is a good bill, a better bill than he thought, that it is getting in its work already. He says to me to read it careful and see if it says Alonzo Ackerman is going up. Well it don't, but anyone would have thought so at first look. I reckon that bill was some of a liar herself, not lying outright, but just hinting a lie. They as a lot of mean, stingy sold kind of people, wouldn't never lie to help a friend. But Dr. Kirby wasn't one of them. But, I says, when that crowd finds out Alonzo ain't going up, they will be pretty mad. Oh, says he, I don't think so. The American public are a good-natured sort of chuckle-heads mostly. If they get sore I'll talk them out of it. If he had any faults at all, and mind you I ain't saying Dr. Kirby had any, the one he had hardest was the belief he could tuck any crowd into any notion, or out of it, either. And he loved to do it just for the fun of it. He'd rather have the feeling that he was doing that than the money any day. He was powerful vain about that garb of his and Dr. Kirby was. The four of us took round about five thousand bills. The doctor says they is nothing like giving yourself a chance. And Saturday morning we got the balloon filled up, so she showed handsome, tugging away there at her ropes. But we had a darn mean time with that balloon, too. The doctor says if we have good luck there may be as many as three, four hundred people. But Jerusalem! They was two, three times that many. By the time the show started I reckon they was now a thousand there. The doctor and the Blanchet Brothers was tickled. When they quit coming fast the doctor left the gate and made a little speech, telling all about the wonderful show and the great expense it was to get it together and all that. They was a rope stretched between the crowd and us. Back of that was the Blanchet Brothers' wagon and our wagon and our little tent. I was just inside the tent with chains on. Back of everything else was the balloon. Well the doctor he done a lot of songs and things as advertised. Then the Blanchet Brothers done some of their acts. They was really fine acts, too. Then comes some more of Dr. Kirby's refined comedy as advertised. Next more Blanchet. Then a lecture about me by the doctor. All in all it takes up about an hour and a half. Then the doctor makes a mighty nice little talk and wishes them all good afternoon, thanking them for their kind intentions and liberal patronage, one and all. But when will the balloon go up? asks half a dozen at once. The balloon asks Dr. Kirby, surprised. Balloon! Balloon! yells a kid. And the whole crowd took it up and yelled, balloon! Balloon! Balloon! And they crowded up close to that rope. Dr. Kirby has been getting off the wagon, but he gets back on her and stretches his arms wide and motions of amal to come close. Ladies and gentlemen, he says, pleased to gather near, up here good people, and listen, listen to what I have to say, harken to the utterings of my voice. There has been a misunderstanding here. There has been a misconstruction. There has been, ladies and gentlemen, a woeful lack of comprehension here. It looked to me like they was beginning to understand more than he meant them to. I was wondering how it would all come out, but he never lost his nerve. Listen, he says, very earnest. Listen to me. Somehow the idea seems to have gone forth that there would be a balloon ascension here this afternoon. How I do not know, for what we advertised, ladies and gentlemen, was that the balloon used by Professor Alonso Ackerman, the illustrious aeronaut, would be upon exhibition. Then there she is, ladies and gentlemen, there she is for every eye to see and gladden with the sight of. Right before you, ladies and gentlemen, the balloon of Alonso Ackerman, the wonderful Voyager of the Air, exactly as represented. During their long career, Kirby and Company have never deceived the public. Others may, but Kirby and Company are like Caesar's wife. Kirby and Company are above suspicion. It is the province of Kirby's Comedy Company, ladies and gentlemen, to spread the glad tidings of innocent amusement throughout the length and breadth of this fair land of ours. And there she is before you, the balloon as advertised, the gallant ship of the air in which the illustrious Ackerman made so many voyages before he sailed at last into the great beyond. You can see her, ladies and gentlemen, straining at her cords, anxious to mount into the heavens and be gone. It is an education in itself, ladies and gentlemen, a moral education, and well worth coming miles to see. Think of it, think of it, the Ackerman balloon, and then think that the illustrious Ackerman himself, he was my personal friend, ladies and gentlemen, and a true friend, sticketh closer than a brother, the illustrious Ackerman is dead. The balloon, ladies and gentlemen, is there, but Ackerman is gone to his reward. Look at that balloon, ladies and gentlemen, and tell me if you can, why should the spirit of mortals be proud? For the man that rode her like a master, and tamed her like she was a dove, lies cold and dead in a western graveyard, ladies and gentlemen, and she is here, a useless and an idle vanity, without the mind that made her go. Well he went on and he told a funny story about Alonzo, which I don't believe they ever was know Alonzo Ackerman, and a lot of them laughed, and he told a pitiful story and they got solemn again, and then another funny story. Well he had them listening, and pretty soon most of the crowd is feeling in a good humor toward him, and one feller yells out, Go it! You're a whole show yourself! And some joshes him, but they don't seem to be no trouble in the air. When they all look to be in a good humor he holds up a bill and asks how many has them. Many has. He says that as well, and then he starts to telling another story. But in the middle of the story that whole darn crowd is took with a fit of laughing. They has looked at the bill closed, and seen they is sold, and is taking it good-natured. And still shouting and laughing most of them begins to start a long off, and I thought all chance of trouble was over with, but it wasn't. For they is always a natural-born kicker everywhere, and they is one here too. He was a lean feller with a sticking-out jaw, and one of his eyes was in a kind of a black pocket, and he was just naturally laying it off to about a dozen fellers that was in a little knot around him. The doctor sees the main part of the crowd going, and climbs down off in the wagon. As he does so, that whole bunch of about a dozen moves in under the rope, and some more that was going out seen it and stopped and come back. Another says the man with the patch over his eye to Dr. Kirby. You say this man Ackerman is dead? Yes, says the doctor, eyeing him over. He's dead. How did he die? asks the feller. He died hard, I understand, says the doctor, careless like. Fell out of his balloon? Yes. This era knot trade is a dangerous trade-eye here, says the feller with the patch on his eye. They say so, says Dr. Kirby, easy like. Was you ever an era knot yourself, asks the feller. No, says the doctor. Never been up in a balloon? No. Well, you're going up in one this afternoon. What do you mean, asks Dr. Kirby? We've come out to see a balloon ascension, and we're going to see it, too. And with that the whole crowd made a rush at the doctor. Well, I've been in fights before that, and I've been in fights since then, but I've never been in no harder one. The doctor and the two Blanchett brothers and me managed to get backed up again the fence in a row when the rush come. I guess I done my share, and I guess the Blanchett brothers done theirn, too. But they was too many of them for us, too darn many. It wouldn't have ended as quick as it did if Dr. Kirby hadn't gone clean crazy. His back was to the fence, and he cleaned out everything in front of him. And then he give a wild roar just like a bull and rushed that whole gang, twenty men they was, with his head down. He caught two fellers, one in each hand, and he cracked their heads together, and he caught two more and done the same. But he order never took his back away from that fence. The whole gang closed in on him, and down he went at the bottom of a pile. I was awful busy myself, but I seen that pile moving and churning. Then I make a big mistake myself. I kicked a feller in the stomach, and another feller caught my leg, and down I went. For a half a minute I never knowed nothing, and when I come to I was all mashed about the face, and two fellers was sitting on me. The crowd was tying Dr. Kirby to that parachute. They straddled legs over the parachute bar and tied his feet below it. He was still fighting, but they was too many for him. They left his arms untied, but they held him and then they cut her loose. She went up like she was shot from a gun, and as she did Dr. Kirby took a grip on a feller's arm that hadn't let loose quick enough and lifted him plum off in the ground. He slewed around on the trap he's bar with the feller's weight, and slipped head downward. And as he slipped he gave that feller a swing and let loose of him, and then catched himself by the crook of one knee. The feller turned over twice in the air and landed in a little crumpled-up pile on the ground, and never made a sound. The feller's that had hold of me forgot me and stood up, and I stood up too, and looked. The balloon was rising fast. Dr. Kirby was trying to pull himself up to the trap he's bar, twisting in squirming and having a hard time of it, and shooting higher every second. I reckoned he couldn't fall complete, for where his feet was tied would likely hold even if his knee came straight. But he would die maybe with his head filling up with blood. But finally he made a squirm and raised himself a lot and grabbed the rope at one side of the bar. And then he reached and got the rope on the other side and set straddle of her. And just as he'd done that the wind catched the balloon good and hard, and she turned out toward Lake Erie. It was too late for him to pull the rope that sets the parachute loose then and drop onto the land. I rushed out of that schoolhouse-yard and down the street toward the lakefront and run, stumbling along and looking up. She was getting smaller every minute, and with my head in the air looking up I was running plumb to the edge of the water before I noted. She was away out over the lake now and awful high and going fast before the wind, and the doctor was only a speck. And as I stared at that speck away up in the sky I thought this was a mean world to live in, for there was the only real friend I ever had, and no way for me to help him. He had learned me to read and bought me good clothes and made me know they was things in the world worth traveling around to see, and made me feel like I was something more than just old Hank Walters's dog. And I guessed he would be drowned in it, and I would never see him again now. And all of a sudden something busted loose inside of me, and I sunk down there at the edge of the water, sick at my stomach, and weak and shivering. CHAPTER 10 I didn't exactly faint there, but things got all mixed up for me. And when they were straightened out again I was in a hospital. Seems I had been considerable stepped on in that fight, and three ribs both broke. I know that I was hurting, but I was so interested in what was happening to the doctor, the whole hurt never come to me till the balloon was way out over the lake. Now I was in a plaster cast, and before I got out of that I was in a fever. I was some weeks getting out of there. I tried to get some word of Dr. Kirby, but couldn't. Nothing had been heard of him or the balloon. The newspapers had had stuff about it for a day or two, and they guessed the body might come to light some time, but that was all. And I didn't know where to hunt nor how. The horses and wagon and tent and things worried me some too. They wasn't mine, because I couldn't sell them, and they wasn't no good to me without Dr. Kirby, so I tell the man that owns the livery stable to use the team for its board and keep it till Dr. Kirby calls for it. And if he never does, maybe I will some time. I didn't want to stay in that town, or I could have got a job in the livery stable, they offered me one, but I hated that town, and I wanted to light out. I didn't much care where to. Them blanchard brothers had left a good share of the money we took in at the balloon ascension with a hospital people from me, before they cleared out, but before I left that their town I seen they was one thing I had to do to make myself easy in my mind, so I done her. And that was to hunt up that feller with his eye in the patch. It took me a week to find him. He lived down near some railroad yards. I might have soaked him with a coupling link, and felt a whole lot better, but I didn't guess it would do to pet and pamper my feelings too much, so I does it with my fists in a quiet place, and does it very complete, and leaves that town in a cattle car, feeling a whole lot more contented in my mind. Then there was a whole darn year I didn't stay nowhere very long, nor work at any one job too long neither. I just worked from place to place seeing things, big towns and rivers and mountains, working here and there and loafing, and riding blind baggages and freight trains between jobs. I covered a lot of ground that year, and made some pretty big jumps, and got acquainted with some awful queer folks, first and last. But the worst of that is lots of people got the thinking I am a hobo. Even one or two judges in police courts I got acquainted with had that their idea of me. I always explains that I am not one, and am just traveling around to see things and working when I feels like it and ain't no bum, but frequent I am not believed, and two, three different times I get to places where I couldn't hardly have told myself from a hobo if I hadn't have known I wasn't one. I got right well acquainted with some of them hobos too, as far as I can see there is as much difference in them as in other humans. Some travels because they like to see things, and some because they hate to work, and some because they is in the habit and can't stop it. Well, I know myself it's pretty hard after a while to stop it, for where would you stop at? What excuse is there to stop one place more than another? I made all kinds of them, and once I got in for a week with a couple of real Johnny Yeggs that is both in the pen now, I hear in a fellow say one time there is some good in every man. I went the same way as them two Yeggmen. A whole darn week to try and find out where the good in them was. I guess there must be some mistake somewheres, for I looked hard, and I watched close, and I never found it. There is many kinds of hobos and tramps, professional and amateur, and lots of kinds of bums, and lots of young fellows working their way around to see things like I was, and lots of working men in hard luck going from place to place, and all of them kind as humans. But the real Yeggman ain't even a dog. And once I went all the way from Chicago to Baltimore, with a serious dirn fool, that said he was a sociologist, whatever them is, and was going to put her all into a book about the criminal classes. He worked hard trying to get at a reason I was a hobo, which there wasn't no reason for I wasn't no hobo, but I didn't want to disappoint that fellow, and spoil his book for him, so I tells him things, things not overly truthful, but very full of crime. About a year afterward I was in one of these here Andrew Carnegie libraries, with the names of the old time presidents all chiseled along the top, and I seen the whole darn thing in print. He said of me the same thing I have said about them, Yeggman. If all he met Josh that fellow the same as me, that book must have been what you might call misleading in spots. One morning I woke up in a good-sized town in Illinois, not a hundred miles from where I was raised, without no money, and my clothes not much to look at, and no job. I had been with a railroad show for about two weeks, driving stakes and other rough work, and it had went off and left me sleeping on the ground. Circuses never waits for nothing, no cares, a durn for no one. I tried all day around town to get some kind of job, but I was looking pretty rough and I couldn't land nothing. Along in the afternoon I was awful hungry. I was feeling pretty low down to have to ask for a meal, and finally I'd done it. I don't know how I ever came to pick out such a swell looking house, but I makes a little talk at the back door, and the Irish girl she says, come in, and into the kitchen I goes. It's Minnesota you're working toward, asked she, pouring me out a cup of coffee. She's thinking of the wheat harvest where there's thousands makes fur every fall, but none of them for me, that their country is full of them, Scandinavian Swedes and Norwegians, and they gets into the field before daylight, and stays there so long the hired man's got to milk the cows by moonlight. I've been across the river into Iway, I says, working at my trade, and now I'm going back to Chicago to work at it some more. What might your trade be? She asks, sizing me up careful, and I think I'll hand her one to Chewon. She ain't never here and tell of before. I'm a agnostic by trade, I says. I spotted that their word in a religious book one time, and that's the first chance I ever has to try it on any one. You can't never tell what them regular, sock-dollagers is going to do till you tries them. I see, says she, but I see and she didn't see, and I didn't help her none. She would have rather died than let on that she didn't see. The Irish is like that. Pretty soon she says, ain't that the dangerous kind of work, though? It is, I says, and says nothing further. She sets down and folds her arms like she was thinking of it, watching my hands close to all the time I was eating, like she's looking for scars, whereas something slipped when I'd done that agnostic work. Pretty soon she says, me brother Michael was killed at it in the old country. He was the most venturesome lad of them all. Did it fly up and hit him? I asked, sir. I was wondering whether she is making fun of me, or am I making fun of her? Them Irish is like that. You can never tell which. No, says she. She fell off of it. And I'm thinking you don't know what it is yourself. And the next thing I know I meeseed out the back door, and she's grinning at me scornful through the crack of it. So I was walking slow around toward the front of the house thinking how the Irish was a great nation, and what shall I do now anyhow? And I says to myself, Danny, you was a fool to let that circus walk off and leave you asleep in this here town, with nothing over you but a barbed wire fence this morning. Sir, what are you going to do next? First thing you know you will be a regular tramp, which some folks can't be made to see you ain't now. And just when I was thinking that, a fella comes down the front steps of that house on the jump and nabs me by the coat collar. Did you come out of this house? He asks. I did, I says, wondering what next. Back in you go then, he says, marching me forward toward them front steps, they've got smallpox in there. I like to have jumped loose when he said that. Smallpox ain't no inducement to me, Mr., I tells him. But he twisted my coat collar tight and dug his thumbs into my neck all the time helping me onward, with his knee from behind, and I seen they wasn't no use pulling back. I could probable have licked that man, but there's no system in mixing up with them well-dressed men in towns where they think you are a tramp. The judge will give you the worst of it. He rung the doorbell, and the girl that opened the door, she looked kind of surprised when she seen me, and in we went. Tell Professor Booth that Dr. Wilkins wants to see him again, says the man, ahold to me, not letting loose none. And we says nothing further till the Professor comes, which he does, slow and absent-minded. When he sees me, he took off his glasses so he could see me better, and he says, what is that you have there, Dr. Wilkins? A guest for you, says Dr. Wilkins, grinning all over his self. I found him leaving your house, and you being in the quarantine, and me being secretary to the Board of Health, and the City Pest House being crowded too full already, I'll have to ask you to keep him here till we get Miss Marjorie onto her feet again, he says, or they was words to that effect as the lawyers asked you. Dear me, says Professor Booth, kind of helpless like, and he comes over close to me, and he looks me all over like I was one of them, am his surium lizards in a free museum, and then he goes to the foot of the stairs and sings out in a voice that was so bleached out and flat-chested it would have looked just like himself, if you could have saw it. Estelle, he sings out, oh Estelle, Estelle, she comes downstairs looking like she was the Professor's big brother. I found out later she was his old maid sister. She wasn't no spring-chicken, Estelle wasn't, and there was a continuous grin on her face. I figured it must have froze there years and years ago, but there was a kid about ten or eleven years old come along down with her, that had hair down to its shoulders, and didn't look like it knowed whether it was a girl or a boy. Miss Estelle, she looks me over in a way that makes me shiver, while the Doctor and the Professor jaws about whose fault it is the smallpox sign ain't been hung out, and when she was done listening she says to the Professor, you had better go back to your laboratory, and the Professor he went along out and the Doctor with him. What are you going to do with him, and Estelle, the kid asks her? What would you suggest, William, dear, asks his aunt? I ain't feeling very comfortable, and I was getting already just to naturally bolt out the front door now the Doctor was gone, then I thinks it might be no bad place to stay in for a couple of days, even risking the smallpox, for I had recollected I couldn't catch it know-how, having been vaccinated a few months before in Terry Hutt by compulsive medical advice, me being for a while doing some work on the city pavements through a mistake about me in the police court. William, dear, looks at me like it was the day of judgment, and his job was to keep the fatted calves separate from the goats and protocols, and he says, if I were you, and Estelle, the first thing would be to get his hair cut, and his face washed, and then get him some clothes. William, dear, is my friend, thinks I. She calls James, which was a butler. James he buttles me into a bathroom the like of which I never seen before, and then he buttles me into a suit of somebody's clothes and into a room at the top of the house next to hisen, and then he comes back and buttles a comb and brush at me. James was the most mournful-looking fat man I ever seen, and he says that account of me not being respectable I will have my meals alone in the kitchen after the servants has eaten. The first thing I know I've been in that house mourn a week. I eat, and I slept, and I smoked, and I kind of enjoyed not worrying about things for a while. The only uncomfortable thing about being the professor's guest was Mrs. Estelle. Soon she found out I was a agnostic. She took charge of my intellectuals and what went into him, and she makes me read things and asks me about them, and she says she is going for to reform me, and whatever brand or disgrace them their agnostics really is, I ain't found out to this day, having come across the word accidental. Biddy Malone, which was the kitchen mechanic, she says the professor's wife has been over to her mother's while this smallpox has been going on, and they is a nurse in the house looking after Miss Marjorie, the little kid that's sick. And Biddy she says if she was Mrs. Booth she'd stay there too. There's been some talk anyhow about Mrs. Booth and the musician fell around that their town, but Biddy she likes Mrs. Booth, and even if it was true which it ain't, Biddy says, who could have blamed her, for things ain't joyous around that house the last year since Mrs. Stells come there to live. The professor, he's so full of scientifics he don't know nothing with no sense to it, Biddy says. He's got more money and you can shake a stick at, and he don't have to do no work nor never has, and his scientifics gets worse and worse every year, but while scientifics is worrying to the nerves of a family, and while his laboratory often makes the house smell like a sick drugstore has crawled into it and died there, they wouldn't have been no serious row on between the professor and his wife, not all the time if it hadn't been for Mrs. Stell. She has just naturally made herself boss of that their house, Biddy says, and she's a she devil. Between all them scientifics and Mrs. Stell things has got where Mrs. Booth can't stand them much longer. I didn't blame her none for getting sore on her job neither. You can't expect a woman that's purdy and knows it and ain't no more than thirty-two or three and don't look it, to be serious entrusted in mummies and pickle snakes and chemical perfusions, not all the time. Maybe when Mrs. Booth would ask him if he was going to take her to the opera that night, the professor would look up in an absent-minded sort of way and ask her, did she know them Germans had invented a new germ? They wouldn't have been so bad if the professor had picked out just one brand of scientifics and stuck to that regular. Mrs. Booth could have got used to any one kind, but maybe this week the professor would be took hard with ornithography and he'd go chasing hummingbirds all over the front yard and the next he'd be putting gastronomy into William's breakfast feed. There was always a row on over them kids, which they hadn't been till Mrs. Stell come. Mrs. Booth, she said she could kill their own selves if they wanted to, him and Mrs. Stell, but she had more right than anyone else to say what went into William's and Marjorie's digestive ornaments, and she didn't want him brung up scientific know-how, but just human. But Mrs. Stell's got so she runs the whole house now, and the professor too. But he don't know it, bid he says, and her are saying every now and then it was too bad Frederick couldn't have married a noble woman who would have took a serious interest in his work. The kids don't hardly dare to kiss their ma in front of Mrs. Stell no more on account of germs and things, and with Mrs. Stell taking care of their religious organs and their intellectuals and the things like that, and the professor filling them up on new invented feeds, I guess they never was, two kids got more education to the square inch outside and in. It hadn't worked none on Miss Marjorie yet, her being younger, but William dear, he took it hard and serious, and it made bumps all over his head, and he was kind of pale and spindly. Every time that kid cut his finger, he just naturally bled scientifics. One day I says to Mrs. Stell, says I, it looks to me like William dear is kind of peaked. She looks worried, and she looks mad for me lippin' in, and then she says, maybe it's true, but she don't see why. Because he's being brung up like he ought to be in every way, and no expense nor trouble spared. Well says I, what a kid about that size wants to do, is get out and roll around in the dirt some and yell and holler. She sniffs like I wasn't worth taking no notice of, but it kind of soaked in too. She and the professor must have talked it over. For the next day I seen her spreading a oil cloth on the whole floor, and then James comes a-buttling in with a lot of sand what the professor had baked, and made all scientific down in his laboratory. James he pours all that nice clean dirt onto the oil cloth, and then Mrs. Stell sends for William dear. William dear, she says, we have decided, your papa and I, that what you need is more rumping around than playing along with your studies. You ought to get closer to the soil and to nature, as is more healthy for a youth of your age. So for an hour each day between your studies you will romp and play in this sand. You may begin to frolic now, William dear, and then James will sweep up the dirt again for tomorrow's frolic. But William didn't frolic none. He just looked at that dirt in a sad kind of way, and he says very serious but very decided, Aunt Estelle, I shall not frolic. And they had to let it go at that, for he never would frolic none, neither, and all that nice clean dirt was throwed out in the back yard along with the unscientific dirt. CHAPTER XI One night when I've been there more than a week, and I'm getting kind of tired staying in one place so long, I don't want to go to bed after I eat, and I get a hold of some of the Professor's cigars and goes into the library to see if he got anything fit to read. Set in their thinking of the awful remarkable people they is in this world, I must have went to sleep. Pretty soon in my sleep I hear in two voices. Then I wake up sudden, and still hear in them, low in quick light in the room that opens right off of the library, with a couple of them sliding doors like his onto a boxcar. One voice was a woman's voice, and it wasn't Mrs. Stells. But I must see them before we go, Henry, she says, and the other was a man's voice, and it wasn't no one around our house. But my God, he says, suppose you get it yourself, Jane. I set up straight, then, for Jane was the Professor's wife's first name. You mean, suppose you get it, she says, I like to have seen the look she must have given to fit in with the way she says that you. He didn't say nothing, the man didn't, and then her voice softens down some, and she says low and slow, Henry, wouldn't you love me if I did get it? Suppose it marked and pitted me all up. Oh, of course, he says, of course I would. Nothing can change the way I feel, you know that. He said it quick enough, all right, just the way they does in a show. But it sounded too much like it does on the stage, to have suited me, if I'd been her. I seen folks overdo them little talks before this. I listen some more, and then I see how it is. This is that musician, fella, Biddy Malone's been talking about. Jane's going to run off with him all right, but she's got to kiss the kids first. Women is like that. They may hate the kids' pa all right, but they dad burn few of them, don't like the kids. I think to myself, it must be late. I bet they was already started, already to start, and she made him bring her here first so she could sneak in and see the kids. She just simply couldn't get by, but she's taken a full risk, too. Or how's she going to see Marjorie with that nurse coming and going and hanging around all night? And even if she tries just to see William Deere? It's a tender one, shan't he'll wake up and she'll be catched at it. And then I think, suppose she is catched at it. What of it? Ain't a woman got her right to come into her own house with her own door key? Even if there is a quarantine on to it and see her kids? And if she is catched seeing them, how would anyone know she was going to run off? And ain't she got a right to have a friend of her and her husbands bring her over from her mother's house, even if it is a little late? Then I seen she wasn't taking no great risks, neither. And I think maybe I better go and tell that professor what is going on, for he has treated me pretty white. And then I think, I'll be gosh-durned if I'm metal, so far as I can see that their professor ain't getting fur from what's coming to him, know how? And it's for her, you've got to let some people find out what they want for themselves, anyhow. Where do I come in at? But I want to get a look at her and Henry, anyhow, so I eases off my shoes, careful like, and I eases across the floor to them sliding doors, and I puts my eye down to the little crack. The talk is going backward and forward between them two, him wanting her to come away quick, and her undecided whether to risk seeing the kids, and all the time she's kind of hoping maybe she will be catched if she tries to see the kids, and she's begging off for more time generally. Well, sir, I didn't blame that musician fellow none when I seen her. She was a peach. And I couldn't blame her so much, neither, when I thought of Mrs. Stell and all them scientifics of the professors strung out for years and years, world without end. Yet when I seen the man, I sort of wished she wouldn't. I seen right off that Henry wouldn't do. It takes a man with a lot of gumption to keep a woman feeling good and not sorry for doing it when he's married to her. But it takes a man with twice as much to make her feel right when they ain't married. This fellow wears one of them little brown pointed beards for to hide where his chin ain't, and his eyes is too much like a woman's, which is the kind that gets the biggest piece of pie at the lunch counter and forgets to thank the girl as cuts it big. She was sitting in front of a table, twisting her fingers together, and he was walking up and down. I seen he was mad and trying not to show it. And I seen he was scared of the smallpox and trying not to show that, too. And just about that time something happened that kind of jolted me. There was one of them big chairs in the room where they was that has got a high back and spins around on itself. It was right across from me and on the other side of the room, and it was facing the front window, which was a bow window, and that their chair begins to turn slow and easy. First I thought she wasn't turning, and then I seen she was, but Jane and Henry didn't. They was all took up with each other in the middle of the room with their backs to it. Mary is a begging of Jane, and she turns a little more. That chair does. Will she squeak, I wonders? Don't you be a fool, Jane, says the Henry fella. Around she comes three whole inches at their chair and nary a squeak. A fool asked Jane and laughs, and I'm not a fool to think of going with you at all, then. That chair she moved six inches more, and I seen the calf of a leg and part of a crumpled up coat tail. But I am going with you, Henry, says Jane, and she gets up just like she is going to put her arms around him. But Jane don't. For that chair swings clear around and there sets the professor. He's all hunched up and caved in, and he's rubbing his eyes like he just woke up recent, and he's got a grin onto his face that makes him look like his sister Estelle looks all the time. Excuse me, says the professor. They both swings around and faces him. I can hear my heart bumping. Jane never says a word. The man with a brown beard never says a word. But if they felt like me, they both felt like laying right down there and having a fit. They looks at him, and he just sits there and grins at them. But after a while Jane, she says, Well, now you know. What are you going to do about it? Henry, he starts to say something too, but don't start anything, says the professor to him. You aren't going to do anything, or there was words to that effect. Professor Abuth, he says, seeing he has got to say something, or else Jane will think the worst of him. I am keep still, says the professor, real quiet. I'll tend to you in a minute or two. You don't count for much. This thing is mostly between me and my wife. When he talks so decided, I think maybe the professor has got something into him besides science after all. Jane, she looks kind of surprised herself, but she says nothing except, What are you going to do, Frederick? And she laughs, one of them mean kind of laughs, and looks at Henry like she wanted him to spunk up a little more, and says, What can you do, Frederick? Frederick, he says, not excited a bit. There's quite a number of things I could do that would look bad when they got into the newspapers, but it's none of them unless one of you forces me to it. Then he says, You did want to see the children, Jane? She nodded. Jane, he says, Can't you see I'm the better man? The professor, he was woke up after all them years of scientifics, and he didn't want to see her go. Look at him, he says, pointing to the fellow with a brown beard. He's scared stiff right now. Which I would have been scared myself if I'd have been a catch that away like Henry was, and the professor's voice sounding like you was chopping ice every time he spoke. I seen the professor didn't want to have no blood on the carpet without he had to have it, but I seen he was making up his mind about something too. Jane, she says, You, a better man, you? You think you've been a model husband just because you've never beaten me, don't you? No, says the professor, I've been a blame fool, all right. I've been a worse fool, maybe, than if I had beaten you. And then he turns to Henry, and he says, Duels are out of fashion, aren't they? And the plain killing looks bad in the papers, doesn't it? Well, you just wait for me. With which he gets up, and trots out, and I hear him running downstairs to his laboratory. Henry, he'd rather go now. He don't want to wait. But with Jane or looking at him, he shamed not to wait. It's his place to make some kind of a strong action now, to show Jane he is a great man, but he don't do it. And Jane is too much of a thoroughbred to show him she expects it. And me? I'm getting the fidgets and wondering to myself, what is that there professor up to now? Whatever it is, it ain't like no one else. He is loony, that professor is, and she is kind of loony, too. I wonder if there is any one that ain't loony sometimes. I've been around the country a good eel, too, and seen and hear of some awful, remarkable things, and I never seen no one that wasn't more or less loony when the search-us-the-fem comes into the case, which is a day-go-word I got out in the newspaper, and it means who was the dead-gents-lady-friend? And we all set and sweat and got the fidgets, waiting for that professor to come back, which he done with that sister Estelle grin onto his face and the pill-box in his hand. There was two pills in the box, he says, placid and chilly. Yes, sir, duels are out of fashion. This is the age of science. All the same the one that gets her has got to fight for her. If she isn't worth fighting for her, she isn't worth having. Here are two pills, I made them myself. One has enough poison in it to kill a regiment when it gets to working well, which it does fifteen minutes after it is taken. The other one has got nothing harmful in it. If you get the poison one, I keep her. If I get it, you can have her. Only I hope you will wait long enough after I'm dead, so there won't be any scandal around town. Henry, he never said a word. He opened his mouth, but nothing came of it. When he'd done that, I thought I'd hear in his tongue scrape again his cheek on the inside like a piece of sandpaper. He was scared, Henry was. But you know which is which, Jane sings out, the thing's not fair. That is the reason my dear Jane is going to shuffle these pills around each other by herself, says the professor, and then pick out one for him and one for me. You don't know which is which, Jane, and as he is the favourite, he is going to get the first chance. If he gets the one I want him to get, he will have just fifteen minutes to live after taking it. In that fifteen minutes he will please to walk so far from my house that he won't die near it and make a scandal. I won't have a scandal without I have to. Nothing is going to be nice and quiet and respectable. The effect of the poison is similar to heart failure. No one can tell the difference on the corpse. There's going to be no blood anywhere. I will be found dead in my house in the morning with heart failure or else he will be picked up dead in the street far enough away so as to make no talk. Or there was words to that effect. He is rubbing it in considerable, I think, that professor is. I wonder if I better jump in and stop the whole thing. And then I think, no, it's between them three. Besides I want to see which one is going to get that player loaded pill. I always been entrusted in games of chance of all kinds and when I seen the professor was such a sport I'm sorry I've been misjudging him all this time. Jane, she looks at the box and she breathes hard and quick. I won't touch him, she says. I refuse to be a party to any murder of that kind. Hmm, you do, says the professor. But the time when you might have refused has gone by. You have made yourself a party to it already. You're really the main party to it. But do as you like, he goes on. I'm giving him more chance than I ought to with these pills. I might shoot him, and I would, and then face the music. If it wasn't for mixing the children up in the scandal, Jane, if you want to see him get a fair chance, Jane, you've got to hand out those pills. One to him, and then one to me. You must kill one or the other of us, or else I'll kill him the other way. And you had better pick one out for him, because I know which is which. Or else let him pick one out for himself, he says. Henry, he wasn't saying nothing. I thought he had fainted. But he hadn't. I seen him licking his lips. I bet Henry's mouth was all dry inside. Jane, she took the box, and she went round in front of Henry, and she looked at him hard. She looked at him like she was thinking, for God's sakes, punk up some and take one if it does kill you. And then she says out loud, Henry, if you die, I will die, too. And Henry, he took one. His hand shook. But he took it out in the box. If she had looked like that at me, maybe I would have took one myself. For Jane, she was a peach, she was. But I don't know whether I would have or not. When she makes that brag about dying, I looked at the professor. What she said never phased him. And I think again, maybe I'd better jump in now and stop this thing. And then I think again, no, it is between them three and Providence. Besides, I'm anxious to see who is going to get that pill with the science in it. I get the feeling just like Providence, his self, was in that their room, picking out them pills with his own hands. And I was anxious to see what Providence's idea of right and wrong was like. So for as I could see, they was all three in the wrong. But if I had been in there running them pills in Providence's place, I would have let them all off kind of easy. Henry, he ain't eat his pill yet. He's just looking at it and shaking. The professor pulls out his watch and lays it on the table. It's a quarter past eleven, he says. Mr. Murray, are you going to make me shoot you, after all? I didn't want a scandal, he says. It's for you to say whether you want to eat that pill and get your even chance, or whether you want to get shot. The shooting method is sure, but it causes talk. These pills won't which. And he pulls a revolver, which I suppose he had got that to when he went down after them pills. Henry, he looks at the gun. Then he looks at the pill. Then he swallows the pill. The professor puts his gun back into his pocket. And then he puts his pill into his mouth. He don't swallow it. He looks at the watch, and he looks at Henry. Sixteen minutes past eleven, he says. At exactly twenty-nine minutes to twelve, Mr. Murray will be dead. I got the harmless one. I can tell by the taste. And he put the pieces out into his hand to show that he has chewed his end up, not being willing to wait fifteen minutes for a verdict from his digestive ornaments. And then he put them pieces back into his mouth, and chewed them up, and swallowed them down like he was eating cough drops. Henry has got sweat breaking out all over his face, and he tries to make for the door, but he falls down onto a sofa. This is murder, he says, weak-like. And then he tries to get up again. But this time he falls to the floor in a dead faint. It's a darn short fifteen minutes, I think, to myself that Professor must have put more science in the Henry's pill than he thought he did for it to knock him out that quick. It ain't skircely three minutes. When Henry falls, the woman staggers, and tries to throw herself on top of him. The corners of her mouth were all drawed down, and her eyes was turned up. But she don't yell none. She can't. She tries, but she just gurgles in her throat. The Professor won't let her fall across Henry. He catches her. Sit up, Jane, he says, without a still look onto his face, and let's have a talk. She looks at him with no more sense in her face than a piece of putty has got. But she can't look away from him. And I'm kind of paralyzed, too. If that fellow laying on the floor had only just kicked once, or grunted, or done something, I could have loosened up and yelled, and I would have. I just needed to fetch a yell. But Henry ain't more and dropped down there till I'm feeling just like he'd always been there. And I'd always been staring into that room, and the last word any one spoke was said hundreds and hundreds of years ago. You're a murderer, says Jane, in a whisper, looking at the Professor in that stare-eyed way. You're a murderer, she says, saying like she was trying to make herself feel sure he really was one. Murder, says the Professor. Did you think I was going to run any chances for a pup like him? He's scared, that's all. He's just fainted through fright. He's a coward. Those pills were both just bread and sugar. He'll be all right in a minute or two. I've just been showing you that that fellow hasn't got nerve enough nor brains enough for a fine woman like you, Jane, he says. Then Jane begins to sob and laugh, both two once kind of wild-like, her voice clucking like a hen does, and she says, It's worse, then. It's worse. It's worse for me than if it were a murder. Some farces can be more tragic than any tragedy ever was, she says, or they was words to that effect. And of Henry, had it really been dead, she couldn't have took it no harder than she begun to take it now when she saw he was alive, but just wasn't no good. But I seen she was taking on for herself now, mourn for Henry. Dr. Kirby always used to say women is made unlike most other animals in many ways. When they as foolish about a man they can stand to have that man killed a good ill better than to have him showed up ridiculous right in front of them. They will still be crazy about the man that is dead, even if he was crooked, but they don't never forgive the fellow that lets himself be made a fool and lets them look foolish too. And when the professor kicks Henry in the ribs, and Henry comes too and sneaks out, Jane, she never even turns her head and looks at him. Jane, says the professor when she quiets down some, you have a lot of things to forgive me, but do you suppose I have learned enough so that we can make a go of it if we start all over again? But Jane, she never said nothing. Jane, he said, Estelle is going back to New England as soon as Marjorie gets well, and she will stay there for good. Jane, she begins to take a little entrust then. Did Estelle tell you so, she asks. No, says the professor, Estelle doesn't know it yet. I'm going to break the news to her in the morning. But Jane still hates him. She's making herself hate him hard. She wouldn't have been a human woman if she had let herself be coaxed up all too once. Pretty soon she says, I'm tired, and she went out looking like the professor was a perfect stranger. She was a piece, Jane was. After she left, the professor sat there quite a spell and smoked, and he was looking tired out too. There wasn't no mistake about me. I was just dead all through my legs. End of Chapter 11 CHAPTER 12 I was down in the professor's laboratory one day, and that was a queer place. There was every kind of scientific that has ever been discovered in it. Some was pickled in bottles, and some was stuffed, and some was pinned to the walls, with a wing spread out. If you took hold of anything it was likely to be a skull, and give you the shivers, or some electric contraption, and shock you. And if you tipped over a jar and it broke, enough germs might get loose to slaughter a whole town. I was helping the professor to unpack a lot of stuff some friends had sent him, and I noticed a bottle that had onto it, blowed in the glass. Daniel Dunn and Company. Well, that's funny, says I out loud. What is, asked the professor. I showed him the bottle and told him I was named after the company that made him. He says to look around me. There's all kinds of glassware in that room. Bottles and jars and queer shaped things with crooked tails and noses. And now every piece of glass the professor owns is made by that company. Why, says the professor, their factory is in this very town. And nothing would do for me, but I must go and see that factory. I couldn't, till the quarantine was pried loose from our house. But when it was, I went downtown, and hunted up the place, and looked her over. It was a big factory, and I was kind of proud of that. I was glad she wasn't no measly little old fashioned rundown concern. Of course, I wasn't really no relation to it, and it wasn't none to me. But I was named for it, too, and it come about as near to being a family as anything I had ever or was likely to find. So I was proud it seemed to be doing well. I think as I looked at her of the thousands and thousands of bottles that has been coming out of there for years and years, and will be for years and years to come. And one bottle not so much different from another one. And all that was really known about me was just the name on one out of them millions and millions of bottles. It made me feel kind of queer when I thought of that, as if I didn't have no separate place in the world any more than one of them millions of bottles. If anyone will shut his eyes and say his own name over and over again for quite a spell, he will get a kind of wonderised and mesmerised at doing it. He will begin to wonder who the dickens he is anyhow, and what he is, and what the difference between him and the next fella is. He will wonder why he happens to be himself, and the next fella himself. He wonders where himself leaves off and the rest of the world begins. I'd been that way myself, all wonderised, so that I felt just like I was a melting piece of the whole creation, and it was all shifting and drifting and changing and flowing, and not solid anywhere. And I could hardly keep myself from flowing into it. It makes a person feel awfully queer, like seeing a ghost world. It makes him feel like he wasn't no solider than a ghost himself. Well, if you ever done that and got that feeling, you know what I mean. All of a sudden, when I'm trying to take in all them millions and millions of bottles, it rushed on to me, that feeling, strong. Thinking of them bottles had somehow brung it on. The bigness of the whole creation, and the smallness of me, and the gait at which everything was racing and rushing ahead, made me want to grab hold of something solid and hang on. I reached out my hand, and it hit something solid all right. It was a fella who was wheeling out a hand truck, loaded with boxes from the shipping department. I had been standing by the shipping department door, and I reached right again him. He wants to know if I'm drunk or a blind fool. So after some talk of that kind, I borrowed a chew of tobacco from him, and we get right well acquainted. I helped him finish loading his wagon, and rode over to the freight depot with him, and helped him unload her. Lifting one of them boxes down from the wagon, I got such a shock I'd like to have dropped her. Her she was marked, so many dozen, glass, handle with care, and she was addressed to Dr. Hartley L. Kirby at Latha, Georgia. I managed to get that box onto the platform without busting her, and then I sat down on top of her, awful weak. What's the matter?" asked the fella I was with. Nothing, says I. You look sick, he says. And I was feeling that away. Maybe I do, says I, and it's enough to shake a fella up to find a dead man come to life sudden like this. Great snakes, no, he says, looking all around, where? But I didn't stop to chew the rag-none. I left him right there, with his mouth wide open, staring after me like I was crazy. Life a block away I looked back, and I seen him double over, and slap his knee and laugh loud, like he had here in a big joke. But what was he laughing at I never knew? I was tickled, tickled, just so tickled I was plum foolish with it. The doctor was alive after all. I kept saying it over and over to myself. He hadn't rounded, nor blowed away, and I was going to hunt him up. I had a little money. The professor had paid it to me. He had given me a job helping take care of the horses and things like that, and wanted me to stay. And I had been thinking maybe I would for a while, but not now. I calculated I could grab a ride that very night that would put me into Evansville the next morning. I figured if I catched a through freight from there on the next night I might get where he was almost as quick as them bottles did. I didn't think it was no use writing out my resignation for the professor, but I got quite a bit of grub from Biddy Malone to make a start on, for I didn't figure on spending no more money than I had to on grub. She asked me a lot of questions, and I had to lie to her a good deal, but I got the grub, and at ten that night I was in an empty, bumping along south along with a cross-eyed fella named Looney Hogan who happened to be travelling the same way. Driving on trains without paying fare ain't always the easy way it sounds. It's like a trade that has got to be learned. There is different ways of doing it. I have done every way frequent except one, that I give up after trying her two or three times, that is riding the rods down underneath the cars with a piece of board put across them to lay yourself on. I never want to go anywheres again bad enough to ride the rods, because sometimes you arrive where you're going to partly smeared over the trucks, and in no condition for it to be made welcome to our city, as Dr. Kirby would say. Sometimes you don't arrive. Every once in a while you read a little piece in a newspaper about a man being found alongside the tracks, considerable cut up, or laying right across them, maybe. He is held in the morgue a while, and no one knows who he is, and none of the train crew knows they has run over a man, and the engineer says there wasn't none on the track. More than likely that fella had been riding the rods along about the middle of the train. Maybe he let himself go to sleep and just rolled off. Maybe his piece of board slipped, and he fell when the train jolted, or maybe he just naturally made up his mind he rather let loose and get squashed, than get any more cinders into his eyes. Riding the blind baggage, or the bumpers, gives me all the excitement I want, or all the gambling chants, either. Others can have the rods for all of me, and there is some people actually says they like some best. A good place, if it's wintertime, is the feed rack over a cattle car. For the heat and steam from all them steers in there will keep you warm. But don't crawl in no lumber car that is only loaded about half full, and short lengths and bundles of laths and shingles in there, for they is likely to get the shifting and bumping. Bailed hay is pretty good sometimes. Myself not being like those bums that is too proud to work, I have often helped the fireman shovel coal, and paid for my ride that away. But an empty, for general purposes, will do about as well as anything. This fellow, Looney Hagen, that was with me, was of kind of harmless critter, and he didn't know just where he was going, no why. He was mostly scared of things, and if you spoke to him quick he shivered first and then grinned idiotic so you wouldn't kick him. And when he talked he had a silly little giggle. He had been made that away at a reform school where they took him young and tried to work the cussedness out of him by batting him around. They worked it out, and pretty nigh everything else along with it, I guess. Looney had had a partner whose name was Slim, he said, but a couple of years before Slim had fell overboard off in a barge up to Duluth, and never come up again. Looney knows Slim was grounded all right, but he was always travelling around looking at tanks and freight depots and switch shanties for Slim's mark to be cut fresh with a knife, so he would know where to follow and catch up with him again. He know'd he would never find Slim's mark, he said, but he kept a looking, and he guessed that was the way he got the name of Looney. Looney left me at Evansville, he said he was going east from there, he guessed, and I went along south, but I was hindered considerable, being put off the trains three or four times, and having to grab these here slow local freight between towns all the way down through Kentucky. Anywhere south of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River, trainmen is grouchier to them, they thinks, his bums, then north of it anyhow, and in some parts of it, if a real bum gets pinched, heaven help him, for nothing else won't. One night between twelve and one o'clock, I was put off a free train for the second time in a place in the northern part of Tennessee, right near the Kentucky line. I sat down in a lumberyard near the railroad track, and when she started up again, I grabbed on to the iron ladder and swung myself aboard. But the breakman was watching for me, and clummed down the ladder and stamped on my fingers, so I dropped off with one finger considerable mashed, and sat down in that lumberyard, wondering what next. It was a dark night, and so fur as I could see there wasn't much moving in that town. Only a few places was lit up. One was way across town square from me, and it was the telephone exchange with a man-operator reading a book in there. The other was the telegraph room in the depot about a hundred yards from me, and there was only two fellas in it both smoking. The main business part of the town was built up around the square, like lots of old-fashioned towns is, and there was just enough brightness from four, five electric lights to show the shape of the square, and be reflected from the windows of the closed up stores. I know there was likely a watchman somewheres about two. I guess I wouldn't wander around none and run no chances of getting took up by him, so I was getting ready to lay down on top of a level pile of boards and go to sleep, when I hear an curious kind of noise away off, like it must be at the edge of town. It sounded like quite a bunch of cattle might be shuffling along a dusty road. The night was so quiet you could hear things plain from a long ways off. It growed a little louder and a little nearer, and then it struck a plank bridge somewheres and come across it with a clatter. Then I noted it was in cattle. Cows and steers don't make that cantering kind of noise as a rule they trot. It was horses crossing that bridge, and they was quite a lot of them. As they struck the dirt road again I hear in a shot, and then another, and another, and then a dozen all to once, and away through the night a woman screamed. I seen the man on the telephone place fling down his book and grab a pistol from I don't know where. He stepped out into the street and fired three shots into the air as fast as he could pull the trigger, and as he done so there was a light flashed out in a building way down the railroad track, and shots came answering from there. Men's voices began to yell out, and there was a noise of people running along plank sidewalks and windows opening in the dark, and then with a rush the galloping noise came nearer, came closer, raced by the place where I was hiding, and nigh on a hundred men with guns swept right into the middle of that square and pulled their horses up. CHAPTER XIII. I seen the fella from the telephone exchange run down the street a little ways as the first rush hit the square and fire his pistol twice. Then he turned and made for an alleyway, but as he turned they let him have it. He throwed up his arms and made one long stagger right across the bar of light that streamed out of the windows and he fell into the shadow out of sight just like a scorched moth drops dead in the darkness from a torch. Out of the middle of that bunch of riders comes a big voice yelling numbers instead of men's names, and then different crowds lit out in all directions, some on foot, others held their horses, for they seemed to have a plan laid ahead. And then things began to happen. They happened so quick and with such a whirl it was all unreal to me, shots and shouts and windows breaking as they blazed away at the storefronts all around the square, and orders and cuss words ringing out between the noise of shooting, and those electric lights shining on them as they tossed and trampled and showing up massed faces here and there, and pounding hooves and horses, scream like humans with excitement, and spurts of flame squirted sudden out of the ring of darkness round about the open place, and a bulldog shot up in a store somewhere as howling himself hoarse, and white puffs of powder smoke like ghosts that went adrift by the lights. It was all unreal to me as if I had a fever and was dreaming it. That square was like a great big stage in front of me, and I laid in the darkness on my lumber pile and watched things like a show. Not much scared because it was so dirnd unreal. From way down along the railroad track they come a sort of blunted roar like blasting big stumps out, and then another and another, and pretty soon down that way a slim flame licked up the side of a big building there and crooked its tongue over the top. Then a second big building right beside it catched a fire, and they both showed up in their own light, big and angry and handsome, and the light showed up the men in front of them too, guarding them, I guess, for fear the town would get its nerve and make a fight to put them out. They begun to light the whole town up as light as day and paint a red patch into the sky, and that must have been noticed for miles around. It was a mighty purdy sight to see him burn. The smoke was rolling high too, and the sparks flying and other things in danger of catching, and after a while a lick of smoke come drifting up my way. I smelt her. It was tobacco burning in them warehouses. But that town had some fight in her, in spite of being took unexpected that away. It wasn't no coward town. The light from the burning buildings made all the shatters around about seem all the darker, and every once in a while after the surprise of the first rush they would come thin little streaks of fire out of the darkness somewheres and the sound of shots, and then a gang of riders would gallop in that direction shooting up all creation. But by the time the warehouses was all lit up, so that you can see there was no hope of putting them out, the shooting from the darkness had just about stopped. It looked like them big tobacco warehouses was the main object of the raid, for when they was burning past all chance of saving, with walls and floors tumbling and crashing down, and sending up great gouts of fresh flame as they fell, the leader sings out an order, and all that is not on their horses jumps on, and they rides away from the blaze. They come across the square, not galloping now, but taking it easy, laughing and talking and cussing and joking at each other, and passing right by my lumber pile again, and down the street they had come. You bet I laid low on them boards while they was going by, and flattened myself out till I felt like a shingle. As I hear in their hoof sounds getting farther off, I lifts up my head again, but they wasn't all gone either. Three that must have been up to some particular deviltry of their own came galloping across the square to catch up with the main bunch. Two was quite a bit ahead of the third one, and yelled to them to wait, but they only laughed and rode harder. And then for some full reason that last fella pulled up his horse and stopped. He stopped in the road right in front of me, and wheeled his horse across the road, and stood up in his stirrups and took a long look at that blaze. You'd have said he'd done it all himself and was mighty proud of it, but he raised his head and looked back at that town. He was so near that I hear in him draw in a slow, deep breath. He stood still for most of a minute like that, black against the red sky, and then he turned his horse's head and jabbed him with a stirrup edge, and just as the horse started they come a shot from somewhere behind me. I suppose they were someone hidden in the lumberpiles with a street across the railway beside myself. The horse jumped forward at the shot, and the fella swayed sideways and dropped his gun and lost his stirrups and came down heavy on the ground. His horse galloped off. I heard the noise of someone running off through the dark and stumbling again the lumber. It was the fella who had fired the shot running away. I suppose he thought the rest of them riders would come back when they heard that shot and hunt him down. I thought they might myself, but I laid there and just waited. If they come I didn't want to be found running, but they didn't come. The two last ones had caught up with the main gang, I guess, but pretty soon I hear in them all crossing that plank bridge again and knowed they was gone. At first I guess the fella on the ground must be dead, but he wasn't. For pretty soon I heard him groan. He had maybe been stunned by his fall and was coming too enough to feel his pain. I didn't feel like he ought to be left there, so I clumped down and went over to him. He was lying on one side all kind of huddled up, there had been a mast on his face like the rest of them, with some hair on to the bottom of it to look like a beard, and now it had slipped down till it hung loose around his neck by the string. There was enough light to see he wasn't nothing but a young fella. He raised himself slow as I come near him, leaning on one arm and trying to set up. The other arm hung loose and helpless. Half setting up that way he made a feel at his belt with his good hand as I come near. But that good hand was his prop, and when he took it off the ground he fell back. His hand come away empty from his belt. The big sick shooter he had been feeling for wasn't in its holster anyhow, it had fell out when he tumbled. I picked it up in the road just a few feet down from his shotgun and stood there with it in my hand looking down at him. Well, he says in a drawly kind of voice, slow and feeble, but looking at me steady and trying to raise himself again, you can finish your little job now, you shot me from the darkness and now you've done got my pistol. I reckon you'll better shoot again. I don't want to rub it in on, I says, with you down and out, but from what I've seen around this town tonight I guess you and your own gang got no great objections to shooting from the dark yourselves. Why don't you shoot then, he says, it most certainly is your turn now, and he never battered an eye. Bo, I says, you got nerve. I like you, Bo. I didn't shoot you, and I ain't going to. That fella that did it has went. I'm going to get you out of this where you hurt. Hip, he says, but that ain't much. The thing that bothers me is this arm is done busted, I fell on it. I drug him out of the road and back of a lumber pile I had been laying on and hurt him considerable at doing it. Now, I says, what can I do for you? I reckon you'll better leave me, he says, without you want to get yourself mixed up in all this. If I do, I says you may bleed to death here or any way you would get found in the mornin' and be run in. You're mighty good to me, says he considering you are no kin to this here part of the country at all. I reckon by your talk you're one of them damn Yankees, ain't you? In Illinois a Yankee is someone from the east or down south. He's anybody from north of the Ohio, and though that their war was fought forty years ago, some of them fellows down there don't know damn and Yankee is two words yet, but shucks. They don't mean no harm by it. So I tells him I am a damn Yankee and asks him again if I can do anything for him. Yes, he says, you can tell a friend of mine, but Davis has happened to an accident and get him over here quick with his wagon to tote me home. I was to go down the railroad track past them burning warehouses till I come to the third street and then turn to my left. The third house from the track has got an iron picket fence in front of it, says Bud, and it's the only house in that part of town which has. Beauregard, people, lived there. He's a kin to me. Yes, I says, and Beauregard is just as likely as not to take a shot out the front window at me for a look before I can tell him what I want. It seems to be a kind of habit in these here parts tonight. I'm getting homesick for Illinois, but I'll take a chance. He won't shoot, says Bud. If you go about it right, Beauregard ain't going to be asleep with all this going on in town tonight. You rattle on the iron gate and he'll holler to know what you all want. If he don't shoot first, I says. When he hollers, you'll cry back at him that you found his old dead horse in the road. It won't hurt to holler that loud, and that will make him let you within talk in distance. His old dead horse? You don't need to know what that is. He will. And then Bud told me enough of the signs and words to say and things to do to keep Beauregard from shooting. And he said he reckoned he had trusted me so much he might as well go the whole hog. Beauregard, he says, belongs to them riders, too. They have friends in all the towns that watches the lay of the land for them, he says. I made a long half-circle around them burning buildings, keeping in the dark, for people were coming out in bunches now that it was all over with, watching them fires burning and talking excited and saying the riders should be followed only not following. I found the house Bud meant, and there was a light in the second-story window. I rattled on the gate. A dog barked somewhere as near, but I hear in his chain jangle and knowed he was fast, and I rattled on the gate again. The light moved away from the window. Then another front window opened quiet and a voice says, Doctor, is that you back again? No, I says I ain't a doctor. Stay where you are, then. I got you covered. I am staying, I says. Don't shoot. Who are you? A feller, I says, kind of sensing his gun through the darkness as I spoke, who has found your old dead horse in the road. He didn't answer for several minutes, and then he says using the words dead horse as Bud has said he would. A dead horse is fitting for nothing but the skin. Well, I says using the words for the third time as instructed, it is a dead horse, all right. I hear in the window shut, and pretty soon the front door opened. Come up here, he says. I come. Who rode that horse you've been talking about, he asks. One of the silent brigade, I tells him, as Bud had told me to say. I give him the grip Bud had showed me with his good hand. Come on in, he says. He shut the door behind us and lighted a lamp again, and we looked each other over. He was a scrawny little feller, with little gray eyes set near together and some sandy-complected whiskers on his chin. I told him about Bud and what his fix was. Damn it, oh, damn it all! He says, rubbing the bridge of his nose. I don't see how on earth I can do it. My wife's just had a baby. Do you hear that? And I did hear a sound like kittens mewing somewhere as upstairs. Beauregard he grinned and rubbed his nose some more, and looked at me like he thought that mewing noise was the smartest sound that ever was made. Boy, he says, grinning, born five hours ago, I've done named him Burley after the Tobacco Association, you'll know. Yes, sir, Burley's people is his name, and he sure can squal that darn little cuss. Yes, I says, you better stay with Burley, lend me a rig of some sort and I'll take Bud home. So we went out to Beauregard stable with a lantern and hitched up one of his houses to a light-road wagon. He went into the house and come back again with a mattress for Bud de Lyon and a part of a bottle of whiskey. And I drove back to that lumber pile. I guess I nearly killed Bud getting him into there, but he wasn't bleeding much from his hip. It was his arm was giving him fits. We went slow, and the dawn broke with us four miles out of town. It was broad daylight and early morning noises stirring everywhere when we drove up in front of an old farmhouse with big brick chimblays built on the outside of it a couple of miles farther on. CHAPTER XIV As I drove into the yard, a bare-headed old nigger with a game leg threw down an arm full of wood he was gathering and went limping up to the veranda as fast as he could. He opened the door and bawled out pointing to us before he had it fairly open. Oh, Marceau William, oh, Miss Lucy, they've wrung him home, dahi! A little bright black-eyed old lady like a wren comes running out of the house in chirps. Oh, Bud, oh, my honey boy, is he dead? I reckon not, Miss Lucy, says Bud, raising himself up on the mattress as she runs up to the wagon and trying to act like everything was all a joke. She was just high enough to kiss him over the edge of the wagon box. A worried-looking old gentleman came out the door, seen Bud and his mother kissing each other, and then says to the old nigger man, George, you old fool, what do you mean by shouting out like that? Marceau William begins George, explaining, Shut up, says the old gentleman, very quiet. Take the bay-mayor and go for Dr. Potter. Then he comes to the wagon and says, So they got you, Bud. You would go night-riding like a rowdy and a thug, are you much hurt? He said it easy and gentle, more than mad, but Bud, he flushed up pale as he was, and didn't answer his dad direct. He turned to his mother and said, Miss Lucy, dear, it would have done your heart good to see the way them trust warehouses blazed up. And the old lady, smiling and crying both to once, says, God bless her brave boy. But the old gentleman looked mighty serious, and his worry settled into a frown between his eyes, and he turns to me and says, You must pardon us, sir, for neglecting to thank you sooner. I told him that would be all right for him not to worry none, and him and me and Mandy, which was the nigger cook, got Bud into the house and into his bed. And his mother gets that busy-ordering Mandy and the old gentleman around to get things and fix things and make Bud as easy as she could, that you could see she was one of them kind of women that gets a lot of satisfaction out of having someone sick to fuss over. And after quite a while George gets back with Dr. Porter. He sets Bud's arm, and he locates the bullet in him, and he says he guesses he'll do in a few weeks if nothing like blood poisoning, nor gangrene, nor inflammation sets in. Only the doctor says he reckons, instead of he guesses, which they all do down there, and they all had them easygoing, wait-a-bit kind of voices, and didn't see no particular importance in their ares. It wasn't that you could spell it no different when they talked, but it sounded different. I eat my breakfast with the old gentleman, and then I took a sleep until time for dinner. They wouldn't hear of me leaving that night. I fully intended to go on the next day, but before I noted I had been there a couple of days and have got very well acquainted with that family. Well, that was a house divided again itself. Miss Lucy, she is awful favourable to all this night-rider business. She spunks up and her eyes sparkles whenever she thinks about that there to back a trust. She would have liked to have been a night-rider herself, but the old man, he says, law and order is the main point. What the country needs, he says, ain't burnin' down to backer warehouses and shooting your neighbours and licking them with switches for no wrong done, never righted another wrong. But you were in the Ku Klux Klan yourself, said Miss Lucy. The old man says the Ku Kluxes was workin' for a principle. The principle of keeping the white supremacy on top of the nigger race, for if you let him quit work and go around balloting and voting it won't do, it makes him bigotty. And a bigotty nigger is laying up trouble for himself. Because sooner or later he'll get the thinking he is as good as one of these here angle saxetons you're always hearing so much about down south. And if the angle saxetons was to stand for that, pretty soon they would be sociable equality, and next the whole darned country would be niggerised, then they're angle saxetons that came over from Ireland and Scotland and France, and the great British islands and settled up the south just simply couldn't afford to let that happen, he says, and so they Ku Klux the niggers to make him quit voting. It was their job to make law and order, he says, which they couldn't be with niggers getting the idea they had a right to govern. So they Ku Klux them like gentlemen, but these here night writers, he says, is again law and order. They can shoot up more law and order in one night than can be manufactured again in ten years. He was a very quiet, peaceable old man, Mr. Davis was, and Bud says he was so darn foolish about law and order, he had to up and shoot a man about fifteen years ago, who hearing him talking that away and said he reminded him of a Boston school teacher. But Miss Lucy and Bud, they tells me what all them night writings is for. It seems this here tobacco trust is just as mean and low down and unprincipled as all the rest of them trusts. The farmers around there raise considerable tobacco, more than they did of anything else. The trust had shoved the price so low they couldn't hardly make a living, so they organized and said they would all hold their tobacco for a fair price. But some of the farmers wouldn't organize, said they had a right to do what they pleased with their own tobacco. So the night writers was formed to burn their barns and ruin their crops and whip them and shoot them and make them jine, and also to burn a few trust warehouses now and then and show them this free American people composed mainly out of the Anglo-Saxon reases wasn't going to take no sass from anybody. An old fellow by the name of Roof Daniels, who wouldn't jine the night writers, had been shot to death on his own doorstep just about a mile away, only a week or so before. The night writers mostly used them here automatic shotguns, but they didn't bother with bird shot, they mostly loaded their shells with buck shot. A few bicycle ball bearings dropped out of old Roof when they gathered him up and got him into shape to plant. There is always some low down cuss in every crowd that carries things to the point where they get brutal, Bud says, and he feels like them bicycle bearings was going a little too fur, though he wouldn't let on to his dad that he felt that away. So far as I could see they hadn't hurt the trust none to speak of, them night writers, but they had done considerable damage to their own county, for folks was moving away and the price of land had fell. Still I guess they must have got considerable satisfaction out of raising the deuce nights that away, and sometimes that is worth a whole lot to a fellow. As fur as I could make out both the trust and the night writers was in the wrong, would you take them one at a time personal like and not into a gang, and most of them night writers is good disposition folks. I never knowed any trusts personal, but maybe if you could catch them in the same way they would be similar. I asked George one day what he thought about it. George he got mighty serious right off like he felt his answer was going to be used to decide the whole thing by. He was carrying a lot of scraps on a plate to a hound dog that had a kennel out near George's cavern, and he walled his eyes right thoughtful and scratched his head with a fork he'd been scraping the plate with, but for a while nothing come of it. Finally George says, Aspect by judgment there's about the same as Master Williams and Miss Lucy's, I's noted hit most ingenly empty same. That can't be George says I for they think different ways. Then if that empty case says George, they no one can settle it well it settles itself. I's most ingenly notice a thing do settle itself a while. Yes, I's noticed that. Long time ago they was considerable going on here in this here county, Mars Daniel. I don't know if you'll ever hear about that or not Mars Daniel, but there was a war fit right here in this here county. Such goings on as never was. Them dark Yankees are riding around and eating up the face of the earth like the plagues of Fajero. Mars Daniel and rippin' and rare and enraisin' and stealin' everything they could lay their hands on Mars Daniel and our folks are ridin' and enraisin' and projectin' around in the same unsettled way. Mars William, he lo he guine settled that door war his self. Yes, sir. And they got on he horse and he ride away and join Mars Jeb Stuart. But they don't settle it. Mars Abraham Lincoln, he lo he guine settle it and send millions and millions of more of them Yankees down here Mars Daniel. But they does unsettle it was ever. But after a while it does settle itself and them freedom broke out among the niggers and there was more goings on and talkin' and some of them they lo they was going to be no more work Mars Daniel but after a while that settled itself and they all went back to work again. Then some of the niggers gets the notion Mars Daniel they going vote to vote and there was more goings on and the cool clucks is karma projectin' around nights like the graveyards done been resurrected Mars Daniel and then after a while that trouble settle itself. Then after the cool clucks' day was the time Miss Lucy Buckner going to marry Mars Print MacMacon and she don't want to marry him if they give her her drovers about it but all Mars Colonel Hampton her grandpa and her aunt, my Miss Lucy here they ain't going to give her no drovers and there was more goings on but that settle itself too. George he begins to chuckle and I asked him how? Yes sir that settle itself but I expect Miss Lucy Buckner done help some in that de-settlement. For the day before the wedding was going to be she ups and she runs off with a Yankee friend of her brother Colonel Tom Buckner and I expect Colonel Tom and Mars Print MacMacon would oh settle him if they ever had a catch him that darn David Armstrong. Who says I? David Armstrong was his entitlement says George and he'd been going to the same college as Mars Tom Buckner up North somewhere. That's how come he's been visiting Mars Tom days before the wedding trouble done settle itself that away. Will it give me quite a turn to run on to the mention of that there David Armstrong again in this part of the country? Here he had been jilting, Miss Hampton way up in Indiana and running away with another girl down here in Tennessee and then it struck me maybe it is just different parts of the same story I've been hearing of and Martha had got her part a little wrong. George I says what did you say Miss Lucy Buckner's granddad's name was Colonel Hampton. That's the same as my Miss Lucy before she done made Marsa William. That made me sure of it. It was the same woman. She had run away with David Armstrong from this here same neighborhood. Then after he got her up North he had left her or her left him and then she wasn't Miss Buckner no longer and she was mad and wouldn't call herself Mrs. Armstrong. So she moved away from where anyone was liable to trace her to and took her mother's maiden name which was Hampton. Well I says whatever became of him after they run off George. But George has told me about all he knows. They went North according to what everybody thinks he says. Brent MacMacon he followed and hunted and Colonel Tom Buckner he done the same for about a year. Colonel Tom he was always making trips away from there to the North. But whether he ever got on any track of his sister and that David Armstrong nobody knowed. Nobody never asked him. The old Colonel Hampton he grieved and he grieved and not long after the run away he up and died. And Tom Buckner he finally sold all he owned in that part of the country and moved further South. George said he didn't rightly know whether it was Alabama or Florida or it might have been Georgia. I thinks to myself that maybe Mrs. Davis would like to know where her niece is and that I better tell her about Miss Hampton being in that their little Indiana town and where it is. And then I thinks to myself I better not blood in for Miss Hampton has likely got her own reasons for keeping away from her folks or else she wouldn't do it. Anyhow it's none of my affair to bring the subject up to him. It looks to me like one of them things George has been gassing about. One of them things that has settled itself and it ain't from me to meddle and unsettle it. It set me thinking about Martha too. Not that I hadn't thought of her lots of times. I had often thought I would write her but I kept putting it off and pretty soon I kind of forgot Martha. I had seen a lot of different girls of all kinds since I had seen Martha. Yet whenever I happen to think of Martha I had always liked her best. Only moving around the country so much makes it kind of hard to keep thinking steady of the same girl. Besides I had lost that there half of a ring too. But knowing what I did now about Miss Hampton being Miss Butner or Mrs. Armstrong and related to these Davises made me want to get away from there for that secret made me feel kind of sneaking like I wasn't being frank and open with them. Yet if I had told them I would have felt sneaking her yet for giving Miss Hampton away. I never got into a mix up that away and maybe twixed my conscience and my duty but what had made me feel awful uncomfortable. So I guess I would light out of there. There wasn't never no kinder better people than them Davises either. They were so pleased with my bringing but home the night he was shot they would have just naturally give me half their farm if I had asked them for it. They wanted me to stay there. They didn't say for how long and I guess they didn't give a dirn. But I was in a sweat to catch up with Dr. Kirby again. End of chapter 14.