A Night With Death and Other Tales of the Macabre
Date: 1878-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Weird Fiction; Supernatural Fiction; Horror
Description: An extensive collection of stories from a dark imagination… A few are touched with the supernatural, some cross into weird fiction, but even the non-genre tales are imbued with grisly ghastliness to make your flesh creep.
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain where copyright is “Life+90” or less, and in the USA.

A  NIGHT  WITH   DEATH

AND OTHER TALES
OF THE MACABRE

W.  C.  MORROW

MobileRead Edition
2021

An extensive collection of stories from a dark imagination… A few are touched with the supernatural, some cross into weird fiction, but even the non-genre tales are imbued with grisly ghastliness to make your flesh creep.

– – –

William Chambers Morrow (7 July 1854 – 3 April 1923) was an American writer, now noted mainly for his short stories of horror and suspense. He is probably best known for the much-anthologized story “His Unconquerable Enemy” (1889), about the implacable revenge of a servant whose limbs have been amputated on the orders of a cruel rajah. Ambrose Bierce was an enthusiast of Morrow’s stories.

Compilation by ECM. Contents were originally published 1879 ~ 1906. This book is in the public domain where copyright is ‘Life+90’ or less, and in the USA.

CONTENTS

… Cover

… Titlepage

A NIGHT WITH DEATH

Awful Shadows
The Bloodhounds
After the Hanging
A Glimpse of the Unusual
The Hero of the Plague
A Night with Death
The Monster-Maker
The Gloomy Shadow
The Permanent Stiletto
His Unconquerable Enemy
A Story Told by the Sea
An Uncommon View of It
The Wrong Door
The Woman of the Inner Room
The Resurrection of Little Wang Tai
The Removal Company
Some Queer Experiences
In a Dark Room
Treacherous Velasco
Madame Forrestier
Over an Absinthe Bottle
The Unfaithful Clock
A Game of Honor
An Original Revenge
The Faithful Amulet
The Inmate of the Dungeon
Two Singular Men
The Haunted Burglar
A Golden Sepulchre
Breaking Through
The Haunted Automaton

A NIGHT
WITH DEATH

AWFUL SHADOWS

THE VISION
THAT FRIGHTENED BOB ANGEL

A crime had been committed in Mississippi. One lovely evening in May, as a rosy twilight was stealing on, a little girl dragged herself to her mother’s door. She had been gathering wild violets and yellow jasmine along the brook – a favorite pastime – and intended to decorate her mother’s humble mantelshelf, but she had been gone a long time. Her large blue eyes were blood-shot, and a dark shadow appeared beneath them; her flaxen hair was disheveled, and the marks of brutal fingers stood out with inflamed prominence on her tender throat. She could not climb the steps, and called, faintly and piteously:

“Mother!”

The woman rose from her chair, dropped her scissors and spools, threw her work on the floor, and gazed at her child, stupefied and horror-stricken. She caught her up and pressed her to her heart, moaning:

“My poor baby! my poor baby! O my God! my God!”

That night the child died – as dies a tender flower that has been plucked and crushed in a strong, cruel hand and thrown aside to perish. Lying there on the couch, she seemed as pure as a hope of heaven, as beautiful as a dream.

A chilling horror fell like a pall upon the people for miles around. Women, pale and frightened, left their homes to find better security in a neighbor’s house, and they huddled together like sheep that know a wolf is near. Mounted men, and men on foot, were scouring the forests all night, and toward morning they brought in a negro. He was the criminal.

There is a crime that in the South ranks side by side with the foulest murder, both in the meaning of the law and in the hearts of the people. Female security is as powerful a principle as human life. But there is a difference. In the latter case it sometimes happens that a man escapes the gallows for a life-term in the penitentiary; in the former, there is the gallows at the hands of a jury, or the rope, knife, or pistol at the hands of a mob. There is no escape – death follows in the footsteps of transgression.

The younger and more hot-blooded men insisted on a speedy termination of the tragedy, but other counsels prevailed. Here was a rare opportunity for a display of devilish skill, horrible ingenuity, and cruel refinement. To hang the wretch would be commonplace and vulgar; to cut his throat would be butchery. These were threatening sentiments, and showed a feeling unyielding, unrelenting, and dark and unfathomable as perdition.

“Bob Angel goes down tonight, don’t he?”

“Yes – on the 93.”

“At 11:45?”

“At 11:45.”

“I think we had better send him down on Bob’s engine.”

“Why?”

“’Tain’t worth while to palaver. You know Bob? He’s very keerful.”

The prisoner was held until the freight train pulled up at the station. When Bob Angel descended from the engine-cab he was followed by his negro fireman. The latter had evidently just finished his supper, for he was wiping the grease from his shining lips and chin with the back of his hand, which he in turn wiped on his hips. He procured the oilcan and torch and was “oiling up,” as a long run between stations was ahead. This negro had a neck like a bull’s; he was somewhat knock-kneed, and had splay feet of enormous size; he was large and strong, and could crack hickory-nut between his teeth like a hog. His name was “Ole Bony,” which, however, was not an abbreviation of Bonaparte. He was thus called because he disdained to eat the meat only of chickens surreptitiously obtained. He ate bones and all.

“I’ll turn him over to Bony,” said Angel; “not that I mind doing it myself, but Bony will enjoy it so much.”

“Is he safe?”

“Safe! why he’d rather do it than play his old fiddle or dance all night with his Dinah.”

Bony was called aside and the crime revealed to him.

“An’ dat’s de nigger dar what tuck an’ went an’ done it, eh?”

“Yes.”

“Wotcher gwine ter do wid ’im?”

“Well, you see, Bony, we’re going to take him down on the engine, and I reckon you might let him get away, you know.”

“Git erway! Whof-faw?”

“You infernal thick-headed ape! I’ve a good mind to brain you with the monkey-wrench!”

“Oh! Oh! Hya – hya!” ejaculated and chuckled Ole Bony. “Jess lemme ’lone now ’bout er minute. Hit’s mighty suddent, an’ I wants ter stedy de sitiwation. Oh! but awn de Mis’sippi ’fo’ de wah we use ter do hit elegant,” and Bony’s right hand came out of his pocket, his head went a little backward and to one side; the gesture was made with the palm outward, and expressed the most crushing and overpowering superiority. “Pulled out de stow-er-ways from de holes ’twix de cotton-bales, tored dey shirts open ter-fore, an’ ef de smallpox wuz er-showin’ up fine on dey bresses, w’y dey’d git er bath.”

“Get a bath! How’s that?”

“Now, jess lis’n at ’im – an you tole me I is er thick-headed ape! You dunner how ter foller de ’cusations uv my observations.”

Bony went to one side and “studied the situation,” pondering deeply. Angel eyed him closely, endeavoring to decipher every expression as an index of the thoughts that gathered under the woolly pate of the negro. Bony was sitting on the end of a cross-tie, his elbows resting on his knees, and his grimy fingers interlocked. He was bare-headed, and he softly tapped the ground with his long feet, slowly and alternately. His head was bent and his eyes were half closed. After sitting a few minutes he arose and shook himself like a dog that has been asleep. He looked grave, but as he had solved a difficult problem, he could not resist the temptation to “cut the pigeon wing” for a few seconds on the platform alongside the track. After this he went to a telegraph pole and rubbed his back against it to disturb the operations of a flea between his shoulders.

“Hyar’s me!” he said.

They gave him a bottle of whiskey. He took out the cork, smelled the liquor, climbed into the cab, opened the locker on the left side – his seat while on duty – extracted a small parcel containing brown sugar, and poured a considerable quantity into the bottle. He shook the mixture vigorously, and finally held it up to examine the “bead.” The inspection seemed to satisfy him, for he drank deeply and smacked his lips with profound satisfaction. He then placed the bottle carefully in the locker.

The prisoner was placed in the tender in a sitting posture, his back against the pile of wood, and his face turned toward the locomotive. His hands were tied behind him, and his legs were bound together at the knees and ankles. A gag was in his mouth. Bob Angel pulled open the throttle-valve, and the train slowly dragged its length into the night; and all that could be seen by those left behind were two eyes that stared back at them from the last car. One of these eyes was green, the other red. They were the rear signal lights.

“I b’lieve I’s de boss o’ dis yer shop fur er-while, ain’t I, Cap’n?”

“Yes, I believe so,” replied Angel.

Without another word Ole Bony went to the woodpile and commenced to pitch the fuel to the front of the tender. Having done this, he began to pile it up on the foot-board in two separate heaps. One contained the rich, resinous pine, and the other the oak and hickory. He then opened the fire-door, and was throwing in the pine rapidly, as if his life depended on it.

“You had better mix it, Bony,” suggested Angel.

“Ain’t I er-chunkin’ o’ dis yer ingine?” retorted Bony, somewhat testily. “Ain’t I de boss, anyhow? You jess keep yer eye in front, an’ ten’ ter yer own bizness.”

When he had filled the firebox he rested, and amused himself by singing snatches of old plantation songs and break-downs, as visions of the dear old fiddle arose in his memory; and at length sang melodiously:

“Chicken in de bread tray,

Scratchin’ out dough.

Granny, will yer dog bite?

‘No, chile, no!’”

He ceased, anxiously watched the steam gauge, and then said:

“Golly! she’s er-crawlin’ up. Set dat air reverse lever back er couple o’ notches. Hundred ’n forty an’ ain’t blowin’ off? Set de pop-valve at er hundred ’n fifty, an’ let ’er rip.! Shove in de throttle a little bit – we’s gwine down hill lack er cullud sister gittin’ ’ligion.”

He again opened the fire-door, and found the pine being rapidly consumed, the flames seething and roaring. He threw in the oak and hickory, the pine having sunk to give it room, and resumed his sear, remarking:

“Hot ’nough d’reckly ter roast er hog purty quick.”

In a few minutes the train was approaching Chickasawhay swamp. Ole Bony said:

“I spec’ she’s gitt’n dry forred – kin feel ’er er-bumpin’ er little. Take de can an’ go outside ’n tech up dem steam-box valves. Drap er bit on de piston rods ’n slid’n rods, an’ – an’ – ’fore you go, dough, I wants you ter help me tie ’im ter dat boa’d, kaze he’s gitt’n resty, ’n mout git er-way. De boa’d ’ll keep ’m straight, you see, an’ he won’t double hissef up ’n torment hissef ef he tries ter git er-way. Hit ’ll make ’im stiff like; you onderstan’. Keep a pert look-out on de track, an’ – you kin come back – in er-bout – five minnits.”

The helpless prisoner was secured to the board as Bony directed, and Angel crawled through the window, neglecting, however, to take the oil can – but that was no matter. Ole Bony had thrown in more pine, and the locomotive was belching forth a cloud of black smoke, which trailed out over the train like the tail of an inky comet. The glaring, staring, Cyclopean eye of the engine was boring and tunneling the darkness, plowing a path through the night for the passage of the head and body to which it belonged. Looking backward, Bob Angel saw a vision that made his heart stand still, and he grasped the hand-rail more firmly, that a sudden sickness might not cause him to fall.

This is what he saw: The fire-door had been thrown open, and the intense light therefrom streamed upon the black cloud of smoke, and upon the dense foliage by the wayside, as upon a screen on which would be projected the shadows of interposing bodies. And he did see strange shadows, magnified into gigantic proportions – frightful shadows they were, that surged through the forest or were suspended in the smoke. It seemed to Angel that the gate of hell was open, and that the shadows he saw were made by demons dancing before the sulfurous flames and reveling in a saturnalia of blood. One demon, larger and more frightful than the others, ten times as ferocious, a thousand times as hideous, with short legs and gigantic body, with a round head, and neck like a bull’s, with arms as long as the wings of a windmill; this monster, this king among demons, seemed to have just returned from earth, for he bore in his arms what might have been a human soul, lashed to a board. It seemed from the shadows that he laid his helpless victim at the edge of the opening through which issued the blinding rays from the unquenchable fire, and that he raised his arms in wild exultation, as though invoking the blessing of Satan for having performed his work so faithfully. This monster, while every muscle and bone seemed to expand into distended proportions, grasped his burden and raised it aloft – the flames seemed to roar and crackle hungrily, and gape longingly for the soul they were to devour. The brilliancy of the light was suddenly obscured. Something must have been thrown through the orifice – through the gate of hell – but the intensity was immediately resumed, displaying the demon bending over, his great, naked arm stretched across the opening, as if reaching to close the gate; then suddenly the shadows became confused – some toppling and falling to the ground, others chasing each other beyond the vision, into the forest – and all was darkness again.

“The Argonaut” 19 Jul 1879

THE BLOODHOUNDS

A SOMBRE INCIDENT
OF THE CIVIL WAR

In 1864 the horrors of war spread over the South like a pall of death. Not only did they stalk among the soldiers to strip the rags from their backs; to starve them or to feed them rotten meat; to place them in the deadly path of the Minié or the murderous grape; to mow them down with foul disease and loathsome suffering, but they sent conscription, to feed mothers on despair and children on stones, and hunger to take up its abode at the fireside of the poor. The facilities of the transitory and feeble government for supplying means of sustenance to poor families were inadequate in remote and sparsely settled communities; and now that the husband, on whom had depended the livelihood of his family, had been armed with a musket and ordered to the front, there was no lack of anguish and the distressing cry of children for bread. The despairing mother wrote to her husband on paper that was blotted with tears, and from every word there stared at him the suffering faces of his children and the imploring look that no parent can withstand. So the stanch soldier, who could unflinchingly storm a rampart or face a cannon, and who looked upon death as his companion and honor as his future shroud, employed his affections as his grave-digger, and sneaked away in the darkness like a thief. Desertion and death were synonymous terms, and the man sacrificed his life to feed his children. Depletion of the ranks by desertion assumed such alarming proportions that the War Department stretched forth its relentless arm and stained its sword with the blood of its own men. It was not a question of bread for children, but of men for the vanguard. Desertion was, in point of numbers, equivalent to death on the battlefield, so far as it affected the strength of the line; in point of discipline it was a thousand times worse. A man’s life was worth nothing unless it served to check the career of a rifle-ball directed at the vitals of the government. To such a desperate straight had the war policy of the Confederate Government been reduced, that, in order to discourage a defection that was becoming epidemic, a patrol was employed, which, with the assistance of hounds in rare instances, hunted the deserters down and hanged them in chains, or shot them, blindfolded, with their faces to the wall.

One day a deserter named Martin was at work in a cornfield attached to his humble dwelling. Four or five pale, ragged, emaciated children were amusing themselves in the yard, and a homely, careworn woman was bending over a washtub, while her infant, with hollowed eyes and wasted limbs, was playing in the dirt at her side. The man had been at home unmolested for two months, and had come, to experience a faint sense of security. When darkness came on, he shouldered his hoe and trudged to the house, taking in his arms a few pine knots which were to furnish light for the evening. The family sat down to a supper of cornbread, which they washed down with a disgusting drink, too familiar in those days to nearly all classes, and especially to those on whom the finger of war pressed most heavily. It was made from corn, roasted until it was black; it was called “coffee,” and was drunk without sugar.

“Well, Mary,” said the husband, “the corn will be in roasting-ear in two weeks, and we will have something fit to eat.”

“Yes,” said the woman.

“And then, you know, the birds will begin to flock in, and I can trap a few of them and get meat.”

“Yes.”

“I think we’re going to get along first rate. I don’t believe the war will last three months longer. You know one reason for so much desertion is that a great many soldiers have no idea now that we can ever whip the North, and they think that if they desert the Confederacy will go under before the patrol can catch them. I’m thinking that I am almost out of danger.”

“I hope so, William; but there’s no telling.”

“All right, Mary; but they can’t take me alive.”

This declaration was made with such a calm and quiet determination that the poor woman looked anxiously at the hard lines about his eyes and mouth. She knew that he meant it, and that the loaded revolver he always carried would never hesitate a moment.

In striking contrast to the woman, the man was of powerful build. His hardships in the army had toughened his muscles and strengthened his large bones and supple joints. In a simple measure of strength he would have been a match for two ordinary men. His shoulders were broad and erect, and his arms and legs large and full of power.

They sat silently watching the blazing knots in the broad fireplace, the woman wearily engaged with some coarse knitting and the man smoking home-made tobacco in an old clay pipe. On a sudden the man took the pipe from his mouth, straightened his shoulders, and listened attentively. His wife noticed the movement, and hurriedly whispered:

“What is it, William?”

“Sh-h-h.”

They listened a moment longer, and the man stealthily rose to his feet and gazed steadily at the door, which was barred on the inside.

“What is it, William?” the woman again whispered, having strained her hearing in vain to catch any unusual sound.

“Horses.”

“Where?”

He answered by pointing in the direction of the road. The truth flashed upon the woman’s mind that, beyond a doubt, a hunting party was abroad, and that their game was a deserter. She rose to her feet, very pale, and regarded her husband with an anxious look. The man glanced at his children, lying asleep on their cots, cast a loving look at his wife, stepped softly to a shelf on which was a bucket of water, and dashed its contents upon the fire. The blaze was extinguished, and the room was in profound darkness.

“Run, William!” whispered the woman in a quavering voice.

He silently clasped her in his arms, and said: “Keep a brave heart, Mary. They can’t take me alive.”

He pushed her away, although she unconsciously clung to him, pulled out his revolver, cocked it, and let the hammer down softly. He then put on his hat, quietly unbarred the door, and slipped out in the dark.

The sound of the horses’ hoofs had ceased. The woman staggered to the open door, and saw several dark forms hurrying around the cottage. They must have seen her husband, for a stern voice called “Halt!” and she heard the click of a carbine. A shadowy figure stole crouching alongside a fence, and on hearing the command it suddenly straightened, and bounded forward like a frightened deer. There was a vivid flash and a report from the carbine, and the stealthy figure halted a moment, and returned the fire. The soldier fell as a pistol-ball crashed through his shoulder; the fugitive ran with redoubled speed, and disappeared in the darkness. There was a rapid discharge of carbines, but Martin had gained the swamp, and further pursuit was out of the question.

The hunters returned and bore the wounded man into the woman’s cottage. She rekindled the fire, and assisted with trembling hands in dressing the wound.

“How long has your husband been here?” asked the captain.

“Two months.”

“Where will he go?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do know!”

The woman made no reply.

“Do you know that you are guilty of harboring a deserter?”

“Yes,” she said, firmly and proudly, looking him full in the face.

“Do you know what can be done with you?”

She said nothing.

“You can be arrested and punished for a crime.”

She regarded him with intense scorn, and remained silent.

“I’m glad he got away,” she said, at length, quietly.

“Did you assist him in escaping?”

“He needed no help.”

“He surely told you where he was going?”

She shook her head.

“Did he say when he will come back?”

“No.”

“Now, I see that you are a woman of sense and courage. If you will tell me where I can find him I will not arrest you.”

She treated the proposition with contemptuous silence.

“You would not like to be handcuffed and carried to prison?”

“I wouldn’t care.”

“What would become of your children?”

The woman became pale, her eyes flashed, and she stammered:

“You would not leave them here to starve, would you?”

“Certainly,” said the officer, as he laughed at her agony.

The mother was transformed into a tigress. She sprang across the room, seized a carbine that leaned against the wall, and leveled it at his head.

“You would! you cowardly, inhuman brute!” She screamed as she pulled the trigger.

There was a deafening report, and she fell fainting to the floor.

“Simply sheared me a little,” remarked the officer, as with a certain degree of interest he felt a narrow white streak that the ball had cut through his hair. “‘An inch lower, and’ – what was is it old Nap said at Austerlitz? She’s game, though, and quick as lightning. No use trying to get anything out of her. I just wanted to scare her a little, and she took it in dead earnest.”

“What are you going to do now, Captain?” asked one of the men.

“Oh, I’ll put Walker’s dogs after him. They’ll fetch him.”

“The bloodhounds?”

“Yes.”

“Will you follow them up?”

“I don’t know.”

“They’ll never leave him alive if you don’t.”

“I know it.”

“That would be terrible.”

“Why?”

“They got that fellow, Rutherford, down, and tore him to pieces.”

“Well, what’s the difference? Is that any worse than calling the dogs off, and bringing him back alive to be shot?”

“But he’s armed and will kill the hounds.”

“Twelve dogs? Don’t be uneasy. He will finish two or three of the younger dogs until his pistol is empty, and the rest will manage him. Old Tiger will be there at the finish, and will make all the final arrangements for the funeral. He hangs on closer than death, and they’ve never got a square blow nor a safe shot at him yet.”

At daybreak the next morning an old man, smooth-shaved and stoop-shouldered, was riding in the direction of the woman’s cottage. The cavalry captain accompanied him, and eleven bloodhounds – magnificent dogs – trotted along, some ahead and others on either side of the horsemen, while two hundred yards in the rear a solitary old dog jogged along as if already weary of the enterprise and disgusted with the life he was called upon to lead. This was none other than the famous Tiger, more generally called “Old Tige,” the dog that never lost a trail, and never failed to run his game to earth.

“Walker,” said the officer, “I think we bad better skirt the woods, and not let the woman know that we’ve got the dogs out. She might give us trouble.”

They entered the swamp in the direction the man had taken, and Walker called the dogs about him. Tiger walked leisurely up, and lay down near his master’s horse.

“Heigho! get up, sir!”

The old dog slowly obeyed the command, and stood blinking and staring stupidly at his master. Walker descended from his horse, and pointing to the ground, said:

“Hie on!”

The other dogs were already scouring the ground in all directions. Old Tige put his nose to the grass, and began to hunt the scent, by systematically describing a circle which he continually widened, his master watching him closely the meanwhile, and paying no attention to the other dogs. A young hound soon sent up the well-known howl, and the other dogs chased eagerly around him, Old Tige trotting to the scene behind all the others. The dogs were greatly excited. The old dog unceremoniously pushed his way through the crowd, and sniffed the ground. The young hound, impatient that no command was given, and satisfied that he had found the trail, slowly advanced into the swamp, his nose all the time to the ground. Soon he set off on a full run, the other dogs following with yelps. Old Tige examined the spot indicated by the young hound, but was entirely unconcerned, and proceeded to smell the ground for a few yards around. Walker called the other dogs back, and Old Tige sullenly shook his head until his ragged ears flapped against his jowls, and lay down again.

“He’s not satisfied,” said Walker. “I will have to show him the track. He’s in doubt.”

Walker crept away along the fence, followed by the old dog, and when he had reached the spot opposite where the man was last seen, he saw through the fence a track indented in the soft earth, and ordered the dog to climb over. Old Tige clambered laboriously over the rails, and scented the track. He regained his masters side, and trudged with him back to the swamp.

“I think the woman heard the dogs,” said Walker. “I saw her looking through the door and listening. Tiger’s got the scent. Hie away, sir!”

The dog hunted for a few moments, and found the trail. With a single yelp he disappeared in the thicker part of the underbrush, and the whole pack bounded yelping after him. They pursued the trail for a mile through the swamp, and mounted a hill on the opposite side. They disappeared over the summit, and Old Tige, already far behind, reached the highest point and came to a standstill. He remained for one or two minutes surveying the surrounding country, and then struck off at a right angle from the trail, with his nose high in the air and his tail straight with his back. He went in the direction of a large plateau covered with tall pines and salamander hills. Occasionally he would stop, as if listening to the yelping of the hounds as it rapidly grew fainter in the distance. Having traversed the plateau, which was five miles in width, he came to the outskirts of a canebrake, and bent his nose to the ground. He proceeded two miles along the edge of the dense growth of cane until he found a path which led through. The traveler would be compelled to pick his way through the mud and water by stepping carefully upon poles and cypress roots. The dog sniffed the ground attentively at the entrance to the swamp, and a sudden swishing of the tail and a loud snorting showed that he had found the trail. Before entering he looked behind him and listened for the dogs, standing the meanwhile on three legs and as still as a statue. No sound could be heard. They had followed the trail and had gone fifteen miles, while the old dog had cut across the country and headed them off.

He pulled through the mire, clambered over the slippery poles, jumped from root to root and from tuft to tuft, until he gained the opposite side. Here he found a fence that was decayed and tumbling down. It inclosed a field that had been in disuse for several years, and that was overgrown with young pines and dewberry vines. Near the opposite side of the field was an abandoned log cabin. The mud had long ago dropped from the cracks between the logs, the roof was partly gone, the chimney had fallen and was a pile of mud and sticks, the windows had lost their shutters years ago, and the hewn slabs, with which the floor was laid were disarranged and decayed. The berries in the field were ripe, and the dog consumed considerable time in wandering around among the pines, his nose all the while close to the ground and his tail whisking fiercely. The cause is easily explained: the man had picked the berries and breakfasted in the field. The trail was hot, but the dog remained silent, every now and then raising his head and peering about him. The old house was almost hidden by young mulberries and China trees. The dog left the trail finally and trotted to the door of the cabin. He placed his forefeet upon the block that served as a step, and looked cautiously around the interior.

His victim lay upon his face in a corner, sound asleep, his forehead resting upon his right arm, and the pistol clasped in his right hand. The dog pricked up his drooping ears and eyed him curiously. He noiselessly gained the door-sill, still keeping his eyes cautiously on the sleeping man. He advanced one foot upon a slab to the right, but it rocked and made a slight noise. He withdrew his foot, and tried another slab on the left. This was steadier, and bore his weight firmly. He put out his foot to try the next slab, but it was unsteady; he tried another, and it rattled. He waited a few moments, and then backed noiselessly through the door and regained the ground.

Another method of approach was left. The wily old dog crept under the sill and proceeded under the house toward the corner in which the deserter slumbered. About three feet from where he lay, a slab had been displaced, leaving an opening six feet long and twelve inches wide. The dog cautiously poked his head through the hole, planted his fore paws upon a beam, and gradually brought his shoulders upward until he stood almost erect upon his hind legs. With a dextrous, noiseless spring, he brought his hind feet upon the beam, and stood a moment in this cramped position. Finding the sleeping man still undisturbed, he approached him carefully, taking his steps slowly. He smelled the man’s muddy boots, drawing deep and silent inspirations, and sniffed along his entire person until he reached his head, and here he breathed with much greater caution. The man was in his shirt sleeves, and his large, strong neck presented a tempting field for attack. But the dog was old and his fangs were worn with age. He regarded the exposed neck so eagerly, and his whole frame was so rigid, that it seemed he was on the point of taking a desperate step. Had the man lain with his throat uppermost perhaps the dog would not have hesitated. As it was, while he was regarding the bait that tempted him he suddenly pricked up his ears and listened attentively: He heard the yelping of the hounds as they emerged from the canebrake. Stepping cautiously backward he disappeared through the hole, slunk into a dark corner under the cabin, and lay down.

The hounds crossed the fence, noisy, furious, and bloodthirsty. They tore wildly through the patch of berries, and their noise awakened the man. He listened, and then sprang to his feet. In a moment he realized his horrible position – alone, in a vast wilderness, with no human being to assist him in battling with a terrible death, and with a pack of infuriated bloodhounds, trained in the love of human gore, to tear out his heart and strew his entrails upon the earth. His first feeling was one of overpowering terror. He trembled in every joint and his teeth chattered with fear. He looked around wildly and despairingly, and discovered a joist above his head. Securing the pistol in his belt, he sprang upward and caught the joist with his hands. It was old and rotten, and swayed under his weight, but he pulled himself upon it and awaited the dogs.

They rushed blindly into the cabin, foaming and yelping, eagerly smelled the slabs on which the man had slept, ran around the cabin barking and hungry for blood, crawled under the house, scoured the shrubbery, went over the field again, and rushed madly back into the cabin. Knowing that they would find him sooner or later, and that every moment he lost lessened the distance between himself and the human bloodhounds, the man selected the largest and finest looking dog and sent a bullet between his eyes. The hound rolled over with quivering limbs and stiffening muscles. The dogs were thunderstruck, but not dismayed. One strong young hound made a desperate spring and fastened his fangs in the man’s heel. He fell with a shot through the brain. The man had three shots left, and he must reserve at least one for a last extremity. He had killed two dogs, and counted nine remaining. With two more well-directed shots he reduced the number to seven.

By this time the fugitive had warmed to his work. The blood tingled in his hands and arms, and he felt his great strength bulging and swelling his muscles. No time was to be lost. He replaced the pistol, stood upon the joist, and pushed a few boards from the roof. Grasping the rotten rafters, he pulled himself upon the roof, and sought a bludgeon. The boards were of oak, and were weighted down with logs, which ran transversely, and which he easily pushed off with his feet. With little difficulty he secured a worm-eaten, partially decayed hoard, four feet long and an inch thick. By striking it over the end of a log he split it, and was thus armed with a powerful weapon. The man was naturally brave, and at this moment his strength seemed so enormous that he felt himself a match for a hundred hounds. The dogs were still in the house, howling and baffled.

Martin crawled carefully to the eaves, and prepared to give battle to the deadly enemy. He looked upon the ground, but the dogs were not visible; and, steadying himself, he dropped heavily and caught nimbly on his feet. He felt that he must finish the fight within half an hour, or he would be confronted with carbines and pistols. The dogs heard him drop, and sprang through the door. The man turned quickly and raised his weapon; the seven dogs made a furious onslaught, but a powerful blow upon the head sent the leader rolling dead upon the ground. The rotten board was strained by the blow, and he must use it more carefully. Six ferocious dogs still confronted him, and two eyes that he did not see blinked at him from under the cabin. The vigor with which the deserter met the attacks, and the threatening attitude that he maintained, disconcerted the dogs, and they ran around him at a safe distance, their teeth glistening, their tails whisking, their heads bent to the ground, the froth dripping from their protruding tongues.

The man suddenly dashed at a dog, and mortally wounded him with a heavy blow on the back of the neck. While he was in the act of striking, and before he could regain his defensive attitude, an active young dog, with fangs as sharp as knives, sprang upon his shoulders and fastened his teeth in the back of the man’s neck. The other dogs, emboldened by the success of their companion, made a furious attack from behind. The man faced about, with the fangs of the hound still imbedded in his neck and his back ripped and lacerated with the sharp claws of the suspended dog, and struck about wildly and desperately, breaking the jaw of one and the leg of another. He made one terrible blow, that, in his agony, missed the mark, and his noble bludgeon was shattered against the ground.

The dog gnawed at his neck, and imbedded his fangs still deeper in the flesh, causing the blood to pour down the man’s back and breast. At this moment, when the man was paralyzed with pain and frantic at the loss of his weapon, the two dogs still unhurt that confronted him sprang upon him, buried their teeth in his flesh, and bore him to the ground. He sank upon his knees, threw off the two dogs with a mighty effort, and defended his throat with all the desperation and strength that roused his every energy and sustained his failing hopes. They snapped at his hands and tore them, and completely stripped the shirt from his body. They plowed his skin with their claws, and the blood gushed from a hundred wounds. One of the dogs allowed the strong hand of the man to close upon his throat, and then he was flung stunned to the ground. Catching an idea from this maneuver, the man allowed the other hound to seize his arm, then took him by the leg and dashed him against the house.

The deserter was growing faint; but he staggered to his feet, grasped the hind legs of the dog that clung so tenaciously to his neck, snapped the bones as though they were reeds, and jerked him from his hold, tearing the flesh horribly.

By one of those curious eccentricities of fortuitous chance, the man found a weapon in his hands in the dog that he held by the legs, and that snapped at his legs, and writhed and squirmed and howled. The two hounds that he had succeeded in throwing off rallied their strength and returned to the attack cooler and wiser, but none the less terrible. The man backed against the wall, and met the charge by knocking down a dog with the one he held in his hands. Finding that he could not advantageously wield his heavy weapon in such close proximity to the wall, he suddenly advanced and knocked over the other dog in the act. The blows, heavy as they were, did not disable his two antagonists. Every time that he swung down his living bludgeon it became weaker and its struggles more faint. He struck rapidly and carefully, husbanding his strength, yet every now and then missing his object, as it would adroitly evade the blow, and bringing down his heavy club against the ground with a dull thud, crushing its bones and dislocating its vertebrae. In a short while it was but a lifeless mass of broken bones and bruised flesh. The wounded hounds had hidden in the thicket, and the two that remained had become bruised and crippled, and had changed their tactics into harassing their enemy until he had expended all his strength.

The man felt himself growing sick and faint, and he recognized the necessity of immediately bringing the fight to a close by capturing his enemies with strategy. He threw aside his weapon, but the dogs simply glared at him. If he could only get them in his clutches again he would be saved, but experience had made them cunning. So he suddenly threw up his hands and fell, and they sprang for his throat. Quick as a cat be seized a throat in each hand, turned them over upon the ground with great difficulty, planted his great knees upon their breasts, and, crushing their ribs with his remaining strength, choked them until their eyes almost burst from their sockets, until their tongues swelled and hung from their mouths, and until life was extinct.

The terrible fight had lasted two hours. The man staggered to his feet and looked around. Not a soul was in sight. He drew a deep breath, and his naked, bloody chest swelled with triumph. But the loss of blood and the extreme pain of his wounds had so exhausted him that he felt the ground rising to strike him in the face, and, with a heavy lunge, he lay extended upon the ground.

Two glittering eyes, followed by the neck and shoulders of a hound, emerged from under the cabin. The Tiger crept forward softly, but darted back as the man with a desperate effort rose to his hands and knees. The deserter battled bravely with unconsciousness, but was dying of thirst. He crawled painfully along a disused path leading to a spring, while the blood streamed upon the ground. On reaching the spring he drank greedily, and bathed his face and head. The blood poured from his wounds and changed to the color of wine the little stream that flowed from the spring. The dog had followed him unseen, and was crouching behind a thick clump of shrubbery. The man, refreshed by the water, again staggered to his feet, but the pines swam before his eyes and he fell unconscious to the ground. The old dog approached cautiously, and, when within a few feet of his prey, sprang forward and closed his powerful jaws upon the throat of the fainting man.

•   •   •   •   •

A woman, pale and haggard, and with the wild light of insanity in her eyes, sat on the ground and held the head of her husband in her lap, and rocked, and moaned, and sang, and cried, and called him vainly. The eyes that stared at the sky were so terribly bloodshot, and the face was so black, and the features so distorted, that it is strange she recognized as her husband the disfigured, lifeless body of Martin, the deserter.

“The Argonaut” 13 Dec 1879

AFTER THE HANGING

THE GHASTLY AFTERMATH
OF A PUBLIC EXECUTION

At eleven o’clock on a certain June day a great crowd of gaping Mississippi country folk thronged the sloping sides of a hollow that, with the exception of a natural outlet on one side, converged to a small circular plat in the center. Upon this spot had been erected a framework of beams, posts, braces, a platform, and a trapdoor. It was the gallows – that grim monument to the majesty of the law. The hollow was a vast earthen bowl; the gallows, a lump of sugar in the bottom; the crowd, a swarm of prowling ants that crawled around like a pestilence.

For be it known that this was the first execution that had ever occurred in Kemper County.

If there is one thing more entertaining than a hanging per se, it is the variety of effect produced by the ghastly spectacle upon the faces and manner of the assembled witnesses. The majority were present because they had never seen a hanging; others went to gratify the natural vengeance of outraged humanity; a moiety went in the interest of “science,” hoping to hear the snapping caused by the sundering of the spinal ligament.

They assisted the trembling, faltering footsteps of the victim up a ladder constructed with the finest ingenuity of awkwardness; stood him on the trap like a wooden soldier that was to be shot down with tin cannon and cork ball; and with exquisitely polite condescension, invited him to feed the assembled multitude on the philosophic loaves and fishes of the hangman’s prestidigitation. And yet no tickets had been sold to that rare banquet.

A pretty, dimpled, rosy lass from the country – barefoot, and arrayed in a yellow calico dress and a white sunbonnet, and pervaded by an odor of fresh butter and milk, and wild violets and innocence – stared horror-stricken at the awful preparations. The bright roses soon fled, and refused longer to play hide-and-seek with the dimples; and the large blue eyes overflowed with tears.

The cap was drawn; the loop was adjusted. The girl buried her face in her gaunt old mother’s bosom, and gasped:

“Are they nearly ready?”

“Very nearly.”

“Who is that talking?”

“The priest.”

“Praying?”

“Yes.”

There was a pause.

“What are they doing now, mother?”

“They are tying the man’s feet and hands.”

“Do they tie his hands before or behind?”

“Neither; to his sides.”

“Oh, mother, mother!”

“What, my child?” and the older voice began to quaver.

“Poor fellow! poor fellow!”

The girl sobbed pitifully. She buried her face deeper, and clung closer to her mother’s neck.

“What are they doing now, mother?”

“The sheriff is getting down.”

“Oh, me! Can I hear it, mother?”

“What, my dear?”

“When it drops.”

“I think you can;” and the older heart throbbed wildly.

“What are they doing now, mother?”

“The sheriff has a long, bright knife.”

“What for?”

“To cut the string;” so faintly that it is a whisper.

“And now, mother?”

“My – God! my – child! I don’t know – I can’t – look any – longer!”

(They say that in the course of events the girl married and became a mother. Quite natural. They further assert that her first-born came into the world dead, with its neck unnaturally stretched, and its head bent far to one side.)

There was another interesting group, composed of boys between the ages of four-and-a-half and seven years. One was a negro named Tony, six years old, black as tar, homely as an ape. The others were all white. One of these, “Buck,” was a chubby boy of five, with freckled face, red cheeks, and white hair. These two and the five or six others were standing or sitting in every imaginable posture indicative of awe, interest, and fear.. Tony was dressed simply in a pair of his father’s pantaloons cut off at the knees. Consequently the waistband came quite under his arms, dispensing with the necessity of a shirt; and the buttons in front were connected with those behind by short strings, that served as suspenders. He was quite small and weazened. Buck, on the contrary, was large and strong; his general manner was nearly like that belonging to the advanced years of a patriarch.

Alter the body had been placed in a coffin, Tony wriggled to his feet and swaggered pompously up to Buck, and burying his skinny arms deep in his vest pockets, demanded:

“Wn-what yer suckin yer thumb fer?”

Buck snatched the thumb from his mouth, and looked ashamed. Tony pursued his advantage by remarking, tauntingly:

“You was skyerd, too!”

“I wasn’t,” protested Buck.

“Yas you wuz, wh-when he chopped de string!”

“I wasn’t; but you was, though.”

“H-how?”

“Seen you.”

“Seed me?”

The white boy nodded. He never wasted words.

“Seed me, did yer?”

Buck did not deign a second nod.

“Wnat yer see?” persisted Tony.

The white boy took the thumb from his mouth – it had again found its way there – and answered:

“You got pale.”

The absurdity of the idea was so apparent that even the slow penetration of the little black imp was not long in detecting it.

“Me – got pale?”

Again the thumb prevented utterance.

“How you knows?”

“Seen you.”

“Seed me?”

A nod.

“H-h-how kin yer see me git pale wh-wh-when I’s black? Now, kin yer answer dat?”

Another nod.

“Y’ ever seed er nigger git pale?”

Nod.

“H-how?”

“You know them little red streaks in the white o’ your eyes?”

“Yas.”

“That’s how you tell when a nigger’s pale.”

“H-how?”

“’Cause the streaks turns white, an’ you can’t see ’em.”

Having delivered himself of this startling physiological truth, the young man rose to his feet, and he and the negro trotted off to regain their companions, who were already several rods away, deep in a discussion of the scene they had just witnessed.

“I wonder if it hurt him.”

“Course it did!”

“How do you know?”

“Didn’t you see him doin’ his shoulders this way, and sorter reachin’ out his feet before him?”

“Why, I’ve seen ’em do like that in the circus.”

“What do you think about it, Buck?”

“Nothin’.”

“Would you like to be hung?”

Buck shook his head.

“Why?”

“Hurts.”

“How do you know?”

“Dunno.”

“I wouldn’t mind it!” exclaimed the boastful Tony.

A peculiar and mischievous look came into Buck’s face. He asked Tony:

“You wouldn’t?”

“No! Shaw! why, doan my daddy heff me up by my hade clar off de groun’ mos’ ev’ry day, to see London?”

“Don’t it hurt?”

“No!”

“What does they hang people for, Tony?” queried a cross-eyed little wretch.

“Wh-why, ter see London, ’course!”

“What, with a rope?”

“Oh, er rope!”

“Yes.”

“Waal, doan yer know?”

“No.”

“Den I ain’t er-gwine to tell yer’”

Buck had developed an idea.

“Le’s hang Tony,” he said.

The proposition was hailed with delight.

But numerous obstacles presented themselves – there was no material for building a scaffold, no carpenters’ tools: Buck solved the problem by suggesting a tree. There was no rope: Buck stole an old, partially decayed clothesline. They soon found an appropriate spot for the execution. It was at the head of a de?p and shady ravine, walled in on three sides by precipitous bluffs. Ascent or descent was extremely perilous, as it could be accomplished only by clinging to the stems and roots of bushes that lined the walls in many places. The boys clambered down, and discovered a tree on which could be successfully tested the efficacy of capital punishment. It was a stunted, crooked magnolia, leaning far to one side, and having a branch that ran out horizontally, about eight feet from the ground. They danced around the tree in the highest enjoyment of the delightful preparations, which were conducted by Buck, Tony, and two or three others – none more happy than Tony himself. They tied one end of the rope to the limb, and secured the other around Tony’s neck.

A tremendous obstacle now obtruded itself. They had no trap. The improvised gallows was a failure.

“Now, look-a-hyar,” said Tony, “I don’t want ter be h-hung in dis hyar style. Ef I ain’t er-gwine ter drap, dey ain’t no fun.”

“You can jump off’n the limb,” suggested Buck.

This solution of the difficulty was received with the most demonstrative joy. Tony sat upon the limb, the rope around his neck.

“All right, Tony,” said one of the leaders; “but wait till you say everything. Now, make a speech, you know.”

Tony grinned and cleared his throat.

“Ladies ’n gemblem!”

“There ain’t no ladies, Tony.”

“Waal, doan I has ter say h-hit anyway? Ladies ’n gemblem! I wants ter ’dress yer wid er few las’ words. I’s er mighty big sinner. A-hem! Wh-what did he say?”

“Talked about his mother.”

“Oh, yas! An, wh-when I was er little bit o’ chile, dest about so high, an’ use ter go an’ git de ole ’oman switches—”

“No; when she used to pray with you.”

“Yas. An’ she would tol’ me ter be er mighty good chile, an’ min’ her wh-when she holler at me; an’ ef I didn’t git down awn dem marrer-bones ’n say dem prayers quick, she’d make er flo’-cloth out’n me, an’ tie me ter de well-bucket fer er sinker; an’ – an’—”

“Advisin’ ’em, you know.”

“An’ ef yer ever does anything wrong, an’ dey cotches yer ’n hung yer, wh-why, den, look out! Now, wh-who’s er-gwine ter pray?”

But the prayer was dispensed with, as was also the blind-folding and the tying. One boy armed himself with a stick, which he made believe was a knife, and gave Tony particular instructions to drop at the moment the knife struck the imaginary cord that held the imaginary trigger. The boy then looked around solemnly, made a grand sweep with his arm, and, with a strong blow upon the trunk of the tree, sprung the trap.

True to the working perfection of the machinery, Tony was launched into space.

A strange and unaccountable thing had happened. Tony found himself sprawling upon the ground. He scrambled to his feet with a look of triumph that ill-accorded with the astonishment visible in the faces of the spectators. They had committed the error of allowing too much rope for the distance.

“H-hit doan hurt!” exclaimed Tony.

“Cause you ain’t hung,” Buck quietly remarked.

This abashed Tony, when he had realized the situation. He crawled upon the limb again, and they contracted the length of the rope.

All ready again. The knife fell.

Tony slipped from the tree; the rope tightened, stopped the upper part of his body with a jerk, and then snapped and threw him violently upon the ground. He slowly and with difficulty raised his head and looked around, as though his neck was stiffened painfully with a cold, his eyes staring as if he had seen a hideous spectre, his mouth drawn with pain, and the tears trickling down his cheeks.

“Confound that rope!” exclaimed a boy.

Buck regarded Tony silently.

“What’s the matter, Tony?” asked another boy, as he noticed the remarkable expression in the negro’s face.

Tony was sitting on the ground, carefully feeling his neck all around, and was unable to speak for the suppressed sobs that choked him. He rose to his feet, looking ruefully about, the boys enjoying his discomfiture immoderately.

“Le’s try it again,” said Buck.

“No, you don’t!” screamed the colored boy, with a determination the firmness of which could not be doubted. He was as fierce as he was frightened, and occupied himself with rearranging his suspenders, which were on the point of slipping from his shoulders.

“Why, Tony?”

“Yer plays too rough. Dat’s why, now!”’

“Did it hurt?”

“Course it did!” he said, with a look of contempt.

They insisted; Tony refused. One little fellow caught forcible hold, but Tony threw him off and bounded into the brush. They pursued him, captured him, and brought him back, crying and struggling fiercely. Finally they succeeded, after the greatest difficulty, in lifting him from the ground, while Buck could climb the tree and tie the rope. There was no ceremony about the affair then. The work was done silently and in dead earnest. The unfortunate victim yelled, but the boys were not to be cheated out of the fruits of the first grand lesson they had learned in the economy of government, the protection of society. They had seen a thing about which a great popular commotion had been raised – a simple thing: a beam, a rope, and a man. What prevents a frequent repetition of this phantasmagoria from the magic-lantern of the law? Surely not the popular taste. It is true that the magic-lantern is, as it were, a species of reserved and exalted privilege; but the slide on which the ghastly picture is painted can be removed, and utilized in an improvised magic-lantern sometimes vulgarly called a mob. But this, also, has a flame, a reflector, and a magnifying lens. It answers for all practical purposes. It is an offspring of necessity.

The rope was at length securely tied. The cries of the unwilling victim were suddenly checked, as his weight was gradually allowed to fall upon the rope, strangling him. They were determined that a sudden jerk should not again frustrate their plans. Throwing his liberated hands wildly about, he clutched a boy by the hair, and made him yell with pain. It required strong efforts to release him. Then they all withdrew to a short distance.

Not a sound of any kind escaped the hanging child. The boys looked on silently, and with grim satisfaction. He vainly endeavored to reach up and catch the rope that was choking out his life; but there seemed to be a weight upon his arms, and be could raise them no higher than his shoulders. He kicked to the right and to the left, and squirmed and twisted. The knot was behind his neck, and the rope fell directly across the windpipe and great arteries. The boys watched the contortions of his face with absorbed interest, and a few became somewhat pale with an excitement tinctured with anxiety; but they possessed too much stoicism to betray their feelings by any overt act, while the younger boys – and especially Buck – looked on with such calm courage.

“I wonder if it hurts him much?” queried a boy. There was no reply.

Buck, on being asked the question, nodded; and, with his thumb in his mouth, never removed his gaze from the suspended Tony.

“Well, we’ll take him down after awhile. I wonder why he don’t say something, Buck?”

“Can’t.”

“Why?”

But Buck merely shook his head, and said nothing. The poor little hanging wretch grew more and more quiet as the moments flew by. His teeth were shut close, but his lips were slightly parted, and his eyes stared with a dumb, beseeching, horrifying agony. After the lapse of a few minutes his struggles ceased, and the body turned slowly from side to side. Then there was a slight shivering; the eyes rolled upward, and became fixed.

Said a boy: “I’ll bet you he won’t go around any more, blowing about it’s not hurting him.”

Buck looked at the speaker, and then at the swinging body. He told them to hold Tony while he climbed the tree to untie the knot. They did so; but through a little carelessness and ignorance they allowed the body to lunge to one side, and it fell to the ground like a log. They stared at it, and a boy asked:

“Why don’t you get up, Tony?”

“What are you doing your eyes that way for?” asked another.

“Ain’t he still?” remarked a third, “Do you think he is putting on?”

“I don’t know. Here, you take hold of that other arm, and help me pull him up. Tony!”

He was lying on his back. They raised him by the arms to a sitting posture; but as soon as they released him he toppled to one side and forward, and one of the eyes was buried in the dirt. The boys were thoroughly alarmed. They felt that something awful had happened, but they were ignorant of its nature.

“What’s the matter with him?”

No answer.

“Does anybody know?”

Still no answer.

“Do you, Buck?”

A quiet nod.

“What is it?”

“Dead.”

“The Argonaut” 20 Mar 1880

A GLIMPSE OF THE UNUSUAL

The office-boy approached my desk, and said:

“The city editor wants you.”

I entered the private office of that gentleman.

“Sit down,” he said.

I obeyed.

“Read that.”

He handed me a note, which ran thus:

City Editor ‘Fog Horn’: – I shall take one of your reporters with me next Sunday, if agreeable.

J. H. Whitesides

“Well?” I interrogated.

“Will you go?” he asked, with a fixed look.

“Certainly.”

“You are not afraid?”

I smiled.

“I knew it,” he said.

I blushed.

“That will do.”

I left the office. There must have been an unusual expression on my face, for a reporter asked me:

“What did he want?”

“Oh, nothing,” I replied, carelessly; but my face evidently belied my words.

“I believe it was—”

“What?”

“The balloon.”

“Yes.”

“And he selected you?”

“Of course.”

There was doubtless an accent in my tone that conveyed an idea of my importance; for several, who had overheard the conversation, gathered around me in a state of excitement tinctured with envy. I was calm, proud, superior; which proves that some reporters have sensibilities – of certain kinds. Two of our corps had already made ascensions.

“Bah!” they exclaimed, disdainfully, “it is nothing.”

Nevertheless, I had a triumph. The news soon spread. I was overwhelmed with congratulations, condolence, pity, praise, adjurations, advice, solicitations, warnings, dire forebodings. I was called brave; several persons took the liberty of saying I was a fool. Some predicted that my heart would fail at the last moment; others contested the point, and bets were made, with the odds against my nerve. Why should I fail? it was argued. Had I not frequently concealed myself under the table at a caucus – been shot at – gone disguised into gambling hells – tied the knot at hangings – had my nose smashed and my jaw broken? Oh, yes, it was answered; but those adventures proved merely the fact that I was endowed with physical courage. I was sadly lacking in moral courage; for instance – but I decline to publish others’ opinions of my depravity. I was the egg in this boiling pot, and was hardened.

There were but three incidents connected with the ascension that are worthy of mention.

The first incident: I was introduced to Professor Whitesides, late of Chicago, now of San Francisco. He grasped my hand and remarked:

“I am glad to meet you.”

“Thanks.”

“What do you weigh?”

“Hundred and twenty-five.”

“Good.”

We were standing under the balloon, which had been inflated, and which the high wind caused to tug at its fastenings. The professor asked:

“Ever been up before?”

“No.”

“We shall start in thirty minutes.”

“All right.”

He looked me straight in the face and asked:

“How do you feel?”

I experienced a feeling of shame in admitting that the question seemed strange. I reflected that it is customary to ask questions concerning health at the commencement of a conversation. I had no idea that he meant anything else. Furthermore, the form of the question seemed irregular. Why had he not asked me, in the usual way, if I were well? Still, I reflected that perhaps the method he had chosen was current in Chicago, so I answered:

“Very well, thanks.”

He actually stared at me. I saw I had committed a blunder, and, to repair the damage, added:

“How are you?”

This made matters worse.

“Oh, never better.”

As he said this he turned away to conceal a smile. When he had recovered his composure he again looked me full in the face, and said:

“You’ll do.”

The second incident: I was chatting with a reporter for a rival paper. He had made an ascension. In the course of conversation I asked him quite naturally, quite idly, and for no reason whatever, that I can imagine:

“How did it feel?”

A strange look came into his eyes, his under lip quivered, and he did not answer the question, pretending not to have heard it. This conduct, more than anything else, involved the science of ballooning in a profound mystery.

The third incident: We were sailing along bravely at an altitude of five thousand feet. The professor pointed out familiar landmarks. Suddenly he regarded me with a degree of interest, and repeated this remarkable question:

“How do you feel?”

I was confused. He was shaking the curtain behind which was concealed the mystery. I remembered that I had committed a grave indiscretion on the former occasion, doubtless through misunderstanding him. In the latter instance, with that self-complacency that characterizes reporters, I made the unpardonable mistake of neglecting to inquire of him his meaning. Many thoughts flashed through my mind. It was a supreme moment. I became desperate, and answered in one word –

“Dry.”

He stared more fixedly than in the first case, then burst into laughter. I was offended. He noticed it, and made the same remark as before:

“You’ll do.”

I mention only these three incidents, as they all touched on something which I could not comprehend, and which has affected my whole life – even though I came afterward to understand its purport and its frightful consequences. I may here write that there is nothing remarkable in a balloon ascension per se, unless it produces results more terrible than death itself. I do not mean such results as having a fight with a crazed aeronaut, being dropped into the ocean, or torn through mud, or beaten against the ground until few sound bones remain. I consider such contingencies absolutely trifling. As to the sensation experienced by a novice, there is more of that in hasheesh or an opium pipe. I cared nothing for the waving of handkerchiefs, and the shouts of the multitude, and the band music, as the aeronaut cut the guy-rope; nothing for an encounter with trees, as we cleared the ground; nothing for our having been practiced upon with a Winchester rifle, while we were not three thousand feet in the air; nothing for having sighted the balloon containing Professor Colgrove and Miss Allison, hovering over the Bay of San Francisco, nor for the racy experience they had; nothing for sundry adventures, nor for having been dragged through the trees, knocked about, torn through the branches, as we were landing; nothing for the quiet remark of Professor Whitesides, after we had housed the balloon, that he believed he had two or three bottles somewhere in the bottom of the basket – all trivial. I shall explain. No sooner had I regained the city, than a host of friends, acquaintances, and strangers surrounded me. They welcomed me as one returned from the tomb, and showered attentions upon me. I was polite, condescending – even majestic. Strangers sought introductions; some grasped my hand without one. Fond mothers pointed me out to their children, and said:

“That’s him – look at him.”

Some said: “Remember him.”

A friend requested me: “Tell us about it.”

“Oh,” I replied, “the earth presented the appearance of a beautiful panorama – a perfect work of French topographical art. The ground was carpeted with brown velvet, green satin, and gray silk. San Francisco was a vast pile of crystallized alum, dazzling and grotesque. Oakland was a partridge’s nest, filled with eggs.”

“How did it feel?”

I felt myself choking. The old horror – for it had become a horror – confronted me. I would be discreet this time. I asked him:

“What do you mean?”

“The sensation.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Were you frightened?”

“No.”

“Did the ground seem to drop from under you?”

“No.”

“Felt no desire to jump out?”

“Assuredly not. Do you think I am insane?”

“Were you dizzy?”

“No.”

And then a great light dawned upon me. I remembered then of having read that people had been affected in those ways. A weight was lifted from my breast. The question of the professor was understood; the quivering lip of the reporter still remained a mystery. I immediately sought the professor, and apologized for my stupidity. He laughed, said I was the best he ever saw, and engaged me for the next ascension.

The days passed by, and I had explained a number of times in what a balloon ascension consists. It was not unpleasant at first – it rather flattered me; but it soon became wearisome. People would stop me on the street, and ask:

“Went up in the balloon, didn’t you? Saw it in the paper.”

“Yes.”

“How did it feel?”

For several hundreds of times I courteously answered the questions as best I could. It may be inferred that it was particularly obnoxious to me, who had felt nothing. A few asked me how it looked. My politeness never deserted me in such cases, though I made the same answer that I did to the other question. I did not know, before this, that I had so many friends, so many acquaintances. At first, I was naturally proud to discover that hundreds, whom I did not know, knew me. The number swelled; it multiplied enormously. Men, women, and children appeared before me, as if by magic, and asked:

“Been up in a balloon?”

“Yes.”

“How did it feel?”

The number soon ran up into the thousands. My patience was exhausted, and I wrote out a short statement and committed it to memory. This afforded temporary relief, as it required little mental exertion; but it was a tax on my nerves, and eventually became wearisome. I condensed it one-half. They met me on the highway like brigands; they made me stand and deliver:

“Been up in a balloon?”

“Yes.”

“How did it feel?”

I delivered, bowed, and passed on. Matters daily became worse – hourly became desperate. The thing spread like a contagion. I went, in order to secure comfort, consolation, and rest, to one being who was more sacred to me than life, dearer than my happiness – in whom my soul was absorbed – whose pale, thoughtful, girlish face was more holy than a hope of heaven, more enchanting than a vision of paradise – who held my heart in her slender hand, and who, I believe, loved me dearly. She met me at the door. I shall never forget the wistful expression of her beautiful eyes, as she asked, tenderly:

“You come at last? How rash you were! How did it feel?”

I stammered out something, for this blow had nearly broken my heart, and then I left her. I see her now, standing at the door, surprised at my sudden departure; a tear upon her cheek, and a great anxiety in her lovely eyes; but I went away, and did not visit her again.

I became morose, made short and surly answers, and avoided the more public streets as much as my business as a reporter would allow. The bells became infected, their sonorous tongues clanging out:

“How did it feel? How did it feel?”

Mysterious whispers from unseen persons asked me:

“Been up in a balloon?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

“How did it feel?”

The whole world was against me, and I became timid, thoughtful. I shuddered to meet anyone, and abandoned them all, and became a recluse. I could not sleep. Strange and ghostly shadows appeared at my bedside. Some asked me the terrible question in a kindly way, while others grasped me by the throat and demanded:

“How did it feel?”

I told them that the ground was a panorama, a piece of French topographical art. I explained it all, but they came again the next night. After a few days, they no longer confined their incursions to darkness. They met me in the street; they lurked behind corners, and darted out at me; they crouched on piles of grindstones and grinned. I became pale; my strength and youth departed; my eyes had a hollow, anxious, dreading look. Matters soon came to this pass: when the terrible question was put to me, I swore and raved; I dashed my hat on the ground, and walked back and forth, entwining my fingers, or pulling my hair; I yelled at the phantoms, and hurled stones at them.

The mystery of the quivering lip was laid open to view, and it confronted me now, a horrible reality.

The city editor of the Fog Horn told me I was overworked; that I was broken down, and must have a vacation.

To escape the more violent depredations of the phantoms, I was compelled to resort to the thronged streets. I soon noticed a man watching me. He was a detective, and I had known him long. He followed me two days. On the third, I suddenly collared him, and demanded to know his intentions. He trembled, and used persuasive language. I cursed him, and threatened to kill him. He left me.

About two hours afterward, he approached me in company with another detective. They got on either side of me, and asked me to go with them – each taking an arm. I indignantly refused, then resisted. They threatened handcuffs. I yielded, cursing. They conducted me to the city prison, and led me to the register.

“What is this for?” I demanded. This text was illegally taken from H M . C O M.

They said it was all right: that I had committed no crime, but they required me for something. They endeavored to pacify me; I called them horrible names. The clerk stood behind the register, writing. I said to him:

“If you ask me that question, I will brain you!”

He turned pale, and, after writing my name, hesitated to write the cause of arrest. He then made a sign to the officers, and handed them a bunch of keys, remarking:

“Forty-three.”

The detectives took my arms, and were leading me toward a corridor. I suddenly sprung from their grasp, and ran back to the prison register. The clerk had written opposite my name that most fearful of all words:

“INSANE.”

The detectives seized me; I fought like a madman. They handcuffed me, dragged me to a cell, and locked me in.

That night a million spectres visited me. They crept through the bars, small as pigmies, and dilated to enormous proportions. They sat upon me, pulled my hair, overpowered me, pressed me against the wall, dashed me violently upon the floor. I struggled fiercely, yelling and screaming with all my strength, waking the echoes in the lonely corridors. Every moment the demons hissed into my ear:

“How did it feel?”

Occasionally I would tell them that it was a beautiful panorama, French topographical art, velvet, satin, silk, crystallized alum, a bird’s nest. But this never satisfied them; they shrieked:

“How did it feel?”

Then I cursed them.

Presently one demon, gigantic and hideous, with eyes of fire and a skin of scales, emitting a stifling stench from his nostrils, seized me in his grasp and pressed his iron thumbs into my temples. The blood spurted from my ears and eyes. His other hand grasped me by the throat; he threw me down and crushed his knees into my breast. I remember that his hot breath poured into my ear this question, burning as molten lead:

“How did it feel?”

My struggles became more faint; they ceased; I slept heavily without dreaming.

I awoke, and found the warm sunshine streaming through the bars. I was exceedingly weak, but my mind was clear. My hands trembled; I was bloody. When the keeper appeared at the grating I begged him to give me a basin of water and a cup of strong coffee. I washed, drank the coffee, and was refreshed.

The detective appeared, and regarded me closely. I looked at him calmly, bade him good morning, apologized for my conduct of the evening before. He looked gloomy, and asked me to follow him.

“To the Insanity Commission?” I asked, with a feeble smile.

He made no reply.

“Very well,” I continued, “I am ready.”

On leaving the cell I found two men outside, waiting. They followed us to a carriage the detective had procured, and entered it behind us, taking the rear seat. They were the guard.

“I am dangerous, then?” I asked the detective.

“I believe not,” he stammered.

A tremendous task confronted me. I must outwit those shrewd, cool, deep, penetrating men composing the Insanity Commission. I must be daring, yet always on my guard; patient, self-possessed, watchful; grasping at every straw; attentive; concealing under the mask of ingenuousness the profoundest cunning; alert; not over-learned; evincing no anxiety; irascible, if I could turn it to account; desperate, if driven to a last extremity; caring nothing for my life, everything for my freedom; dreading the insane asylum more than death; and, above all, grandly unscrupulous.

There were three physicians and a judge, the latter holding the examination in chambers. They asked me to take a seat. I obeyed, saying:

“Gentlemen, I know that my appearances are against me; I am pale and haggard. Yet I have a powerful will. The examination will be long and tedious. My will shall sustain me through it all, however much I may be humiliated or exasperated. But it may also prove an obstacle to even your creating in my conduct the least semblance of insanity. So I thus disarm myself by placing you on your guard. Remember that I can direct my thoughts, purposes, actions, desires, as well as I can control my muscles. I can restrain impulses, padlock fancy, bury inclinations under a mountain of reason; I can burn the decrees of Destiny, and strangle Fate. Proceed.”

They asked me a thousand questions concerning my birth, life, education, habits; examined into minute details, and then led back to them. I readily confessed my ignorance of that which I did not know, and never became entangled in that which I did know. I astonished them with my knowledge of human nature and the world, and explained that my journalistic education had made me acquainted with so wide a range of topics. They were perplexed. One physician whispered to the other:

“This is the profoundest cunning of insanity.”

“You are mistaken.”

I overheard them, alert as a fox.

“What do you think, gentlemen?” asked the judge.

“A spark may explode a mine, sir.”

“Very true.”

The detective whispered something in the ear of the physician who conducted the examination. His face brightened, and he asked me:

“Did you ever make a balloon ascension?”

“No,” I replied, with a shade of anxiety in my voice.

A quick look of intelligence passed between the physician and the detective. I understood it. I was treading on hidden mines.

“Positively you have not?”

“Yes,” with the least hesitation.

“Tax your memory; search it thoroughly.”

“I have.”

“And you find there is no trace of the event?”

“None.”

The physician said to the judge:

“I have found the spark.”

“And applied it?”

“Yes.”

“And the mine?”

“Has exploded.”

“Then you think—”

“He is perfectly conscientious; he has forgotten.”

I conscientious! Now I knew the temper of my antagonists’ steel. They had exploded one mine, but I was wandering amid others. Perhaps this catastrophe had ruined me; but I waited patiently, reserving my strength.

“Still, that is not sufficient,” said the judge.

I thought not. The detective again whispered something in the physician’s ear, and, after asking me a few desultory questions, he came to this one:

“In the prosecution of your business as a reporter, no doubt you are frequently thrown in contact with persons who charge you with misrepresenting them in your report of an interview had with them, are you not?”

“Yes.”

“Well, does it not sometimes happen that these persons assume a brusque or threatening attitude, ascribe dishonest motives, throw out unpleasant insinuations, even in some cases openly insulting you?”

“Yes.”

“On such occasions your manhood and inherent dignity rebel, do they not?”

“Always.”

“If I am any judge of human nature, you cannot brook an insult – am I right?”

“Perfectly.”

“You would strike a man for calling you a liar.”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Or asserting that you are not a gentleman?”

“I would break his neck!”

“Certainly! I admire you; but suppose that he should evince a disposition to resist?”

“Then there would be a fight.”

“Precisely, precisely! Of course there would be a fight. Have you ever had a rencounter of that nature?”

“Several.”

“With deadly implements?”

“Pistols, knives.”

“Indeed?”

“Yes.”

“Were you ever shot?”

“Twice.”

“How did it feel?”

At that question something seemed to strike me a heavy blow on the head, sending a flood of boiling poison through my veins. I looked toward the ceiling, and there discovered a narrow piece of stucco that ran around the room at the juncture of the walls and ceiling. My eyes slowly traversed the entire length until they reached the starting point. Then I answered:

“Well, it was a beautiful panorama, an exquisite piece of French topographical art. There was brown velvet, gray satin, green silk. San Francisco was an elaborate rosette of crystallized alum; Oakland—”

Great God! it had stolen on me unawares. I checked myself and blushed deeply; then I became ghastly pale. The judge looked thoughtful; the physicians contented; the detective triumphant. I had been led degradingly by the nose into a shallow, pitiful trap. The last extremity was surely near at hand, yet I would make one more effort, into which would be concentrated all that remained of shattered strength and dying hope; the fear of the asylum, the presence of death by suicide.

I rose to my feet, folded my arms, and bowed my head.

“Gentlemen,” I said, “I have in reality made a balloon ascension; the memory of that disastrous event has never escaped me for a moment.”

The commissioners looked somewhat puzzled, but paid the closest attention. I continued:

“I denied the fact a moment ago, and I dreaded the question that I knew would follow.”

“Does it always follow?”

“Invariably. Knowing that the answer which an almost invincible habit might wring from me would surely establish a presumption of my insanity, and having a nameless horror – as all persons have – of the insane asylum, I endeavored, by a denial, to change the current of the investigation into another channel.”

“I see, I see.”

“The answer to that question is stereotyped in my brain; it has become part of my nature; it is the one rock on which my will may be driven. It has harassed me, lacerated my nerves, driven me to desperation. You may imagine that I am acquainted with a greater number of persons than any but a reporter would know, and that this number is quadrupled by those who know me, and with whom I am not acquainted.”

“That is perfectly reasonable; and they—”

“All ask the same question.”

“Ah! Yes, yes.”

“That is all.”

There was a pause. It was evident that their former suspicions were shaken to their foundation.

“But,” said I, remembering, “I neglected to answer your question – I will not repeat it. Here is the scar on my wrist. I shall simply answer that a gunshot wound is not pleasant.”

There still seemed to be a lingering doubt. The detective and physician again whispered together, and the latter asked:

“Can you explain your conduct of last night?”

“Certainly. Nothing is more simple. My conduct was the culmination of exasperation, the triumph of anger over will. I was humiliated, degraded, and in a condition to commit murder as well as suicide. I would have hesitated at nothing.”

“But your conduct for several days has created a universal conviction of your – your—”

“Insanity,” I suggested.

“Thank you. Yes – insanity”

I smiled, and answered:

“It was the very impression I wished to create, so that no one would have the nerve to harass me. I am somewhat surprised that I should have succeeded so well as to mislead the detective.”

I made this explanation with an open countenance, and a twinkle of the eye that indicated immense self-satisfaction. It had a powerful effect, and might have cleared me; but at this moment the detective requested that I should enter the anteroom for a moment. My heart sank at this; they would have me at a great disadvantage. Nevertheless, I obeyed cheerfully, and they locked the door upon me. I then heard the detective making an earnest explanation. After the lapse of a few minutes, they unlocked the door, and I immediately saw in their faces that my doom was sealed.

They had summoned a deputy sheriff, who stood in the room, waiting. The judge was writing – a commitment. The physicians endeavored to avoid my looks, and were preparing to leave.

“Gentlemen,” I said quietly, “I see your decision in your faces. This compels me to do that which I earnestly hoped I might avoid. You force me now to place you in a strange position – I shall not say a ludicrous one.”

With that they all regarded me half-wonderingly, half-pityingly. The judge continued to write; then signed his name, and pressed a blotting-pad upon the paper.

“Well, what is it?” inquired the interrogating physician, in what seemed to be an impatient tone.

“But it might anger you.”

“Not at all; we would like to know.”

“I beg you, then, to accept my apologies in advance. I warn you that it will be unpleasant news to you.”

“Tell us, by all means.”

“Remember that I am forced to say it as a last resort. I can not go to the insane asylum. I must protect myself, however disagreeable to you may be my plan.”

They looked at me with considerable curiosity. Then the judge remarked, as he handed the commitment to the deputy sheriff:

“Let us hear it.”

“Well, you know that, as the examination of a candidate for insane honors is held with closed doors, it is impossible for persons who wish to utilize, in a literary way, the peculiar methods of procedure in vogue with an insanity commission, to produce a pen-picture, as it were, of such procedure, and of the principal characters connected with it.”

Their eyes began to open. They were almost stupefied. I continued:

“It has long been my desire to write a sketch portraying an examination, and I could gain entrance only by feigning insanity. My wish is now gratified.”

I laughed as I finished. It fell like a bombshell among them; it annihilated them; they could not find utterance.

“I must admit,” I continued, “that I am greatly flattered at having succeeded in deceiving you into a belief of my insanity. As to the detective, I am not surprised at his stupidity, for the ignorance and blunders of detectives are proverbial. I must further add that the gratification I experience at this moment, in having so successfully assumed the cunning of an insane man, is almost unbounded. I allude, as you may imagine, to those palpably weak assertions I have made as to my desire to appear insane for the purpose of frightening people out of an inclination to ask me a very silly question.”

“Then all this you told us before—”

“Proceeded from a desire to shield myself from the displeasure, and you from the mortification I was sure would result if I had stated facts.”

They were completely paralyzed – then angry. Presently, however, mirth succeeded anger, and there was a general laugh.

“I ask your pardon,” said the physician, “for now making the remark that I consider you profoundly skilled in hypocrisy.”

“I take it as a compliment, sir,” I replied, laughing, “but you must remember that I am a reporter.”

“I think it is time the farce should end,” said the judge, as he reached for the commitment and tore it up. “We can hardly forgive you for trifling with us in this manner.”

I picked up my hat, bowed, and left the room As I reached the hall the physician tapped me on the shoulder, and whispered:

“My dear sir, you know it was all our own fault – but you did it well, surely! Now for God’s sake don’t say anything about it, and, above everything else, don’t put our names in your sketch, nor write anything that may fasten ridicule upon us. Will you promise that? Here – take this Havana.”

“I promise faithfully,” I replied, laughing at him.

I overtook the detective on the steps. He looked quite sheepish and dejected.

“You are a fool,” I said.

He replied:

“And you are the Devil!”

“The Californian” Apr 1880

THE HERO OF THE PLAGUE

— I —
SHADOWS AND MEMORIES

On a sweltering July day a long and ungainly shadow, stretching thirty feet upon the ground, crept noiselessly up an avenue leading to a fashionable hotel at a great summer resort. The sun was setting, and its slanting rays caused the shadow to assume the appearance of an anamorphosis of ludicrous proportions. It was a timid shadow – perhaps a shadow of strange and unnerving experiences.

The original of it was worthy of study. He was a short, stout, stoop-shouldered man; his hair was ragged and dusty, his beard straggling and scant. His visible clothing consisted of a slouch hat, torn around the rim and covered with dust; a woolen shirt; a pair of very badly soiled cotton trousers; suspenders made of rawhide strips, fastened to his trousers with wooden pins, and the strangest of old boots, which turned high up at the toes like canoes (being much too long for his feet), and which had a rakish aspect.

The man’s face was a protest against hilarity. Apparently he had all the appurtenances of natural manhood, yet his whole expression would have at once aroused sympathy, for it was a mixture of childishness, confidence, timidity, humility, and honesty. His look was vague and uncertain, and seemed to be searching hopelessly for a friend – for the guidance of natures that were stronger and minds that were clearer. He could not have been older than thirty-five years, and yet his hair and beard were gray, and his face was lined with wrinkles. Occasionally he would make a movement as if to ward off a sudden and vicious blow.

He carried a knotty stick, and his ample trousers-pockets were filled to such an extent that they made him appear very wide in the hips and very narrow in the shoulders. Their contents were a mystery. The pockets at least produced the good effect of toning down the marvellous ellipticity of his legs, and in doing this they performed a valuable service.

“Hullo! who are you?” gruffly demanded a porter employed in the hotel, as the disreputable-looking man was picking his way with great nicety up the broad interior stairs, afraid that his dusty boots would deface the polished brasses under foot.

“Baker,” promptly replied the man, in a small, timid voice, coming to a halt and humbly touching his hat.

“Baker? Well, what’s your other name?”

“Mine?”

“Yes, yours.”

The stranger was evidently puzzled by the question. He looked vacantly around the ceiling until his gaze rested upon a glass chandelier above him; but, finding no assistance there, his glance wandered to an oriel, in which there was a caged mockingbird.

“Jess Baker – that’s all,” he answered at last, in his thin voice and slow, earnest manner.

“What! don’t know your other name?”

“No, I reckin not,” said Baker, after a thoughtful pause. “I reckin it’s jess Baker – that’s all.”

“Didn’t they ever call you anything else?”

“Me?”

“Yes, you.”

Again Baker looked helplessly around until he found the chandelier, and then his eyes sought the oriel. Then he started as if he had received a blow, and immediately reached down and felt his ankles.

“Yes, sir,” he answered.

“What was it?”

“Hunder’d’n One,” he quietly said, looking at his questioner with a shade of fear and suspicion in his face.

The porter believed that a lunatic stood before him. He asked:

“Where are you from?”

“Georgy.”

“What part of Georgia?”

Again was Baker at sea, and again did his glance seek the chandelier and the oriel.

“Me?” he asked.

“Yes, you. What part of Georgia are you from?”

“Jess Georgy,” he finally said.

“What do you want here?”

“Well, I’ll tell you. I want you to hire me,” he replied, with a faint look of expectancy.

“What can you do?”

“Me?”

“Yes, you.”

“Oh, well, I’ll tell you. Most everything.”

“What salary do you want?”

“Me?”

“Of course you.”

“Want?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, well, about five dollars a day, I reckin.”

The porter laughed coarsely. “You needn’t talk to me about it,” he said; “I’m not the proprietor.”

“The which?” asked Baker.

“The boss.”

“Oh, ain’t you?” and then he looked very much puzzled indeed.

The porter had had sufficient amusement, and so he demanded, in a brusque and menacing tone, “Now, say – you get away from here quick! We don’t want no crazy tramps around here. You understand?”

Baker did not stir, but stood looking helplessly at the porter, surprised and grieved.

“Get out, I say, or I’ll set the dogs on you!”

A look of deep mortification settled on Baker’s face, but he was not frightened; he did not move a muscle, except to glance quickly around for the dogs.

“Ain’t you going, you crazy old tramp? If you don’t I’ll lock you up and send for the sheriff;” and the porter rattled some keys in his pocket.

Instantly a great horror overspread the countenance of Baker from Georgia. He looked wildly about and seemed ready to run, and labored with an imaginary weight that clung to his ankles. He took a single step in his agitation, and suddenly realized that no such encumbrance detained him. He shook off the delusion and sprang to the bottom of the stairs. His whole appearance had changed. Humility had given way to uncontrollable fear, and he had become a fleeing wild beast that was hunted for its life. He sprang through the outer door and reached the ground in another bound, and gathered his strength for immediate flight from terrors without a name.

“Stop, there!” called a stern, full voice.

Baker obeyed instantly; obeyed as might a man long accustomed to the most servile obedience; as might a dog that has been beaten until his spirit is broken. He bared his head, and stood in the warm glow of the fading light, meek and submissive. All signs of fear had disappeared from his face; but he was no longer the Baker from Georgia who, a few minutes ago, had trudged along the graveled walk after the ungainly shadow. He had sought a thing and had not found it – had bitten a rosy apple and was choked with dust. Even the rakish boots looked submissive, and showed their brass teeth in solemn acquiescence to an inevitability; and somehow they looked not nearly so rakish as formerly.

The voice that had checked Baker had not a kindly tone; it was that of a suspicious man, who believed that he had detected a thief in the act of making off with dishonest booty stored in ample pockets. Yet his face had a generous look, though anger made his eyes harsh. The two men surveyed each other, anger disappearing from the face of one to give place to pity, the other regarding him with mild docility.

“Come along with me,” said the gentleman to Baker.

Evidently Baker had heard those words before, for he followed quietly and tamely, with his dusty old hat in his left hand and his head bowed upon his breast. He walked so slowly that the gentleman turned to observe him, and found him moving laboriously, with his feet wide apart and his right hand grasping an invisible something that weighted down his ankles. They were now passing the end of the hotel on their way to the rear, when they came near a hitching-post, to which rings were affixed with staples. Baker had been looking around for something, and, as the gentleman (who was Mr. Clayton, the proprietor of the hotel) stopped near the post, Baker walked straight up to it, without having looked to the left or the right. Upon reaching it he dropped the invisible something that he carried in his right hand, laid his hat on the ground, slipped the rawhide suspenders from his shoulders, unbuttoned his shirt, pulled it over his head, and laid it on the grass alongside his hat. He then humbly embraced the post and crossed his hands over a ring to which a chain was attached. He laid his cheek against his bare right arm and waited patiently, without having uttered a protest or made an appeal. The old boots looked up wistfully into his sorrowing face.

His naked back glistened white. It was a map on which were traced a record of the bloody cruelties of many years; it was a fine piece of mosaic – human flesh inlaid with the venom of the lash. There were scars, and seams, and ridges, and cuts that crossed and recrossed each other in all possible directions. Thus stood Baker for some time, until Mr. Clayton kindly called to him:

“Put on your shirt.”

He proceeded to obey silently, but was confused and embarrassed at this unexpected turn of events. He hesitated at first, however, for he evidently did not understand how he could put on his shirt until his hands had been released.

“Your hands are not chained,” explained Mr. Clayton.

The revelation was so unexpected that it almost startled the man from Georgia. He pulled out one hand slowly, that a sudden jerk might not lacerate his wrist. Then he pulled out the other, resumed his shirt and hat, picked up the imaginary weight, and shuffled along slowly after his leader.

“What is your name?” asked the gentleman.

“Hunder’d’n One.”

They were soon traversing the corridor in the servants’ quarter of the hotel, when Baker halted and ventured to say:

“I reckin you’r in the wrong curryder.” He was examining the ceiling, the floor, and the numbers on the doors.

“No, this is right,” said the gentleman.

Again Baker hobbled along, never releasing his hold on the invisible weight. They halted at No. 13. Said Baker, with a shade of pity in his voice—

“’Taint right. Wrong curryder. Cell hunder’d’n one’s mine.”

“Yes, yes; but we’ll put you in this one for the present,” replied the gentleman, as he opened the door and ushered Baker within. The room was comfortably furnished, and this perplexed Baker more and more.

“Hain’t you got it wrong?” he persisted. “Lifer, you know. Hunder’d’n One – lifer – plays off crazy – forty lashes every Monday. Don’t you know?”

“Yes, yes, I know; but we’ll not talk about that now.”

They brought a good supper to his room, and he ate ravenously. They persuaded him to wash in a basin in the room, though he begged hard to be permitted to go to the pump. Later that night the gentleman went to his room and asked him if he wanted anything.

“Well, I’ll tell you. You forgot to take it off,” Baker replied, pointing to his ankles.

The gentleman was perplexed for a moment, and then he stooped and unlocked and removed an imaginary ball and chain. Baker seemed relieved. Said the gentleman, as Baker was preparing for bed:

“This is not a penitentiary. It is my house, and I do not whip anybody. I will give you all you want to eat, and good clothes, and you may go wherever you please. Do you understand?”

Baker looked at him with vacant eyes and made no reply. He undressed, lay down, sighed wearily, and fell asleep.

— II —
THE PLAGUE

A stifling Southern September sun beat down upon the mountains and valleys. The thrush and the mockingbird had been driven to cool places, and their songs were not heard in the trees. The hotel was crowded with refugees from Memphis. A terrible scourge was sweeping through Tennessee, and its black shadow was creeping down to the Gulf of Mexico; and as it crept it mowed down young and old in its path.

“Well, Baker, how are you getting along?” It was the round, cheerful voice of Mr. Clayton.

The man from Georgia was stooping over a pail, scouring it with sand and a cloth. Upon hearing the greeting he hung the cloth over the pail and came slowly to the perpendicular, putting his hands, during the operation, upon the small of his back, as if the hinges in that region were old and rusty and needed care.

“Oh, well, now, I’ll tell you. Nothin’ pertickler to complain on, excep’—”

“Well?”

“I don’t believe it’s quite exactly right.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Well, now, you see – there ain’t nobody a-listenin’, is there?”

“No.”

“I think they ought to give me one more piece, any way.”

“Piece of what?”

“Mebbe two more pieces.”

“Of what?”

“Pie. It was pie I was a-talkin’ about all the time.”

“Don’t they give you sufficient?”

“Pie?”

“Yes.”

“No, sir; not nigh enough. An’ – an’ – come here closter. I’m a-gittin’ weak – I’m a-starvin’!” he whispered.

“You shall not starve. What do you want?”

“Well, now, I was jess a-thinkin’ that one or two more pieces fur dinner every day – every day—”

“Pie?”

“Yes, sir; pie. I was a-talkin’ about pie.”

“You shall certainly have it; but don’t they give you any?”

“What? Pie?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, well, they do give me some.”

“Every day?”

“Yes, sir; every day.”

“How much do they give you?”

“Pie?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ll tell you. About two pieces, I believe.”

“Aren’t you afraid that much more than that would make you sick?”

“Oh, well, now, I’m a-goin’ to tell you about that, too, ’cause you don’t know about it. You see, I’m mostly used to gittin’ sick, an’ I ain’t mostly used to eatin’ of pie.” He spoke then, as he always spoke, with the most impressive earnestness.

Baker had undergone a great change within the two months that had passed over him at the hotel. Kindness had driven away the vacant look in his eyes and his mind was stronger. He had found that for which his meager soul had yearned – a sympathizing heart and a friend. He was fat, sleek, and strong. His old boots – the same as of yore, for he would not abandon them – looked less foolish and seemed almost cheerful. Were they not always in an atmosphere of gentleness and refinement, and did they not daily tread the very ground pressed by the bravest and richest boots in the land? It is true that they were often covered with slops and chickens’ feathers, but this served only to bring out in bolder relief the elevating influences of a healthy morality and a generous prosperity that environed them. There are many boots that would have been spoiled by so sudden an elevation into a higher sphere of life; but the good traits of Baker’s boots were strengthened not only by a rooting up of certain weaknesses, but also by the gaining of many good qualities which proved beneficial; and to the full extent of their limited capability did they appreciate the advantages which their surroundings afforded, and looked up with humble gratitude whenever they would meet a friend.

There were six hundred guests at the hotel, and they all knew Baker and had a kind word to give him. But they could never learn anything about him other than that his name was Baker – “jess Baker, that’s all” – and that he came from Georgia – “jess Georgy.” Occasionally a stranger would ask him with urgent particularity concerning his past history, but he then would merely look helpless and puzzled and would say nothing. As to his name, it was “jess Baker;” but on rare occasions, when pressed with hard cruelty, his lips could be seen to form the words, “Hunder’d’n One,” as though wondering how they would sound if he should utter them, and then the old blank, suffering look would come into his face. It had become quite seldom that he dodged an imaginary blow, and the memory of the ball and chain was buried with other bitter recollections of the past. He had free access to every part of the house, and was discreet, diligent, faithful, and honest. Sometimes the porters would impose upon his unfailing willingness and great strength by making him carry the heaviest trunks up three or four flights of stairs.

One day the shadow of death that was stealing southward passed over the house containing so much life, and happiness, and wealth, and beauty. The train passed as usual, and among the passengers who alighted was a man who walked to the counter in a weary, uncertain manner. One or two persons were present who knew him, and upon grasping his hand they found that it was cold. This was strange, for the day was very hot. In his eyes was a look of restlessness and anxiety, but he said that he had only a pain across the forehead, and that after needed rest it would pass away. He was conducted to a room, and there he fell across the bed, quite worn out, he said. He complained of slight cramps in the legs and thought that they had been caused by climbing the stairs. After a half-hour had passed he rang his bell violently and sent for the resident physician. That gentleman went to see him, and after remaining a few minutes went to the office, looking anxious and pale. He was a tall, quiet man, with white hair. He asked for Mr. Clayton, but when he was informed that that gentleman was temporarily absent he asked for Baker.

“Is your patient very ill, doctor?” inquired the cashier, privately and with a certain dread.

“I want Baker,” said the doctor, somewhat shortly.

“Nothing serious, I hope.”

“Send me Baker instantly.”

The physician had a secret of life and death. To treat it wisely he required confidants of courage, sagacity, patience, tact, and prompt action. There were only two to whom he should impart it – one was the proprietor and the other the man from Georgia.

When Baker had come the physician led him upstairs to the floor which held the patient’s room, brought him to the window at the end of the corridor and turned him so that the light fell full upon his face.

“Baker, can you keep a secret?”

“Me?”

“Yes; can you keep a secret?”

“Well, let me tell you about it; I don’t know; mebbe I can.”

“Have you ever seen people die?”

“Oh, yes, sir!”

“A great many in the same house?”

“Yes, sir; yes, sir.”

“Baker,” said the physician, placing his hand gently on the broad shoulder before him, and looking the man earnestly in the eyes, and speaking very impressively – “Baker, are you afraid to die?”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“Die?”

“Yes.”

There was no expression whatever upon his patient, gentle face. He gazed past the physician through the window and made no reply.

“Are you afraid of death, Baker?”

“Who? Me?”

“Yes.”

There was no sign that he would answer the question or even that he comprehended it. He shifted his gaze to his upturned boot-toes and communed with them, but still kept silence.

“There is a man here, Baker, who is very ill, and I think that he will die. I want someone to help me take care of him. If you go into his room, perhaps you, too, will die. Are you afraid to go?”

“Was you a-talkin’ ’bout wantin’ me to wait on him?”

“Yes.”

A brighter look came into Baker’s face and he said:

“Oh, now, I’ll tell you; I’ll go.”

They entered the stranger’s room and found him suffering terribly. The physician already had put him under vigorous treatment, but he was rapidly growing worse. Baker regarded him attentively a moment, and then felt his pulse and put his hand on the sufferer’s forehead. A look of intelligence came into his sad, earnest face, but there was not a trace of pallor or fear. He beckoned the physician to follow him out to the passage, and the two went aside, closing the door.

“He’s a-goin’ to die,” said Baker, simply and quietly.

“Yes; but how do you know?”

“Well, I’ll tell you about that; I know.”

“Have you seen it before?”

“Hunderds.”

“Are you afraid of it?”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, well, they all ought to know it,” he said, with a sweep of his hand towards the corridors.

“Hurry and find Mr. Clayton first and bring him to me.”

Baker met Mr. Clayton at the main entrance below and beckoned him to follow. He led the way into a dark room stored with boxes and then into the farther corner of it. There he stood Mr. Clayton with his back against the wall and looked straight into his face. His manner was so mysterious, and there was so strange an expression in his face – a kind of empty exaltation it seemed – and his familiarity in touching Mr. Clayton’s person was so extraordinary, that that gentleman was alarmed for Baker’s sanity. Then Baker leaned forward and whispered one terrible word—

“Cholery!”

Cholera! Great God! No wonder that Mr. Clayton turned deathly pale and leaned heavily against the wall.

At midnight the stranger died, and none in the house had heard of the frightful danger which had come to assail them. The physician and Baker had been with him constantly, but their efforts had availed nothing; and after preparing him for the grave they went out and locked the door. Mr. Clayton was waiting for them. The anxious look in the faces of the two gentlemen was intensified; Baker’s evinced nothing but calm consciousness of responsibility. The guests were slumbering.

“We must alarm the house,” whispered Mr. Clayton.

The doctor shook his head sadly. “If we do,” he said, “there will be a panic; and, besides, the night air of these mountains is very cool, and if they go from their warm beds into it, likely without taking time to dress, the danger will be great.”

They both seemed helpless and undecided, and in need of someone to choose between two evils for them. They turned to Baker in silence and for his decision. He seemed to have expected it, for without a word, without submitting it for their concurrence, he went to the end of that passage and rapped upon a door. There was an answer, Baker mentioned his name, the door was opened, and the dreadful news was quietly imparted. The guest was terror-stricken, but a word from Baker gave him heart, and he hastily but quietly began preparations to leave the house. Thus went Baker from one door to another, imposing silence and care and careful dressing, and advising the people to take with them such bedding as they could. Mr. Clayton and the physician, observing the remarkable success of Baker’s method, adopted it, and soon the three men had the great house swarming. It was done swiftly, quietly, and without panic, and the house became empty.

But selfishness appeared without shame or covering. Everyone in the house wanted Baker’s assistance, for all the porters had fled, and there was none other than he to work. So he staggered and toiled under the weight of enormous trunks; listened to a hundred orders at once; bore frightened children and fainting women in his strong, sure arms; labored until his face was haggard and his knees trembled from exhaustion. He did the work of fifty men – a hundred men.

The seeds of the plague had been sown. Towards morning the physician retired to his room, stricken down. Baker administered to his needs, and discovered a surprising knowledge of the malady and its treatment. A few of those who had scattered about in the surrounding hills were taken down and brought to the house moaning with fear and pain. Baker treated them all. Mr. Clayton and a few other stout hearts provided him with whatever he ordered, and assisted in watching and in administering the simple remedies under his direction. These were such as the resources of the hotel permitted – warm blankets, hot brandy, with water and sugar, or pepper and salt in hot water, heated bricks at the feet, and rubbing the body with spirits of camphor. Many recovered, others grew worse; the physician was saved.

At sunrise, while Baker was working vigorously on a patient, he suddenly straightened himself, looked around somewhat anxiously, and reeled backward to the wall. The strong man had collapsed at last. Leaning against the partition, and spreading out his arms against it to keep from falling, he worked his way a few feet to the door, and when he turned to go out his hand slipped on the door-facing and he fell heavily upon his face in the passage. He lay still for a moment, and then crawled slowly to the end of the passage and lay down. He had not said a word nor uttered a groan. It was there, silent, alone, and uncomplaining, that Mr. Clayton found this last victim of the plague waiting patiently for death. Others were hastily summoned. They put him upon a bed, and were going to undress him and treat him, but he firmly stopped them with uplifted hand, and his sunken eyes and anxious face implored more eloquently than his words, when he said:

“No, no! Now, let me tell you: Go an’ take care of ’em.”

Mr. Clayton sent them away, he alone remaining.

“Here, Baker; take this,” he gently urged.

But the man from Georgia knew better. “No, no,” he said; “it won’t do no good.” His speech was faint and labored. “I’ll tell you: I’m struck too hard. It won’t do no good. I’m so tired…. I’ll go quick … ’cause I’m … so tired.”

His extreme exhaustion made him an easy prey. Death sat upon his face, and was reflected from his hollow, suffering, mournful eyes. In an hour they were dimmer; then he became cold and purple. In another hour his pulse was not perceptible. After two more hours his agony had passed.

“Baker, do you want anything?” asked Mr. Clayton, trying to rouse him.

“Me?” very faintly came the response.

“Yes. Do you want anything?”

“Oh, … I’ll tell you: The governor … he found out my brother … done it … an’ … an’ he’s goin’ to … pardon me…. Fifteen years, an’ played off … played off crazy…. Forty lashes every Monday … mornin’…. Cell hunder’d’n one’s mine…. Well, I’ll tell you: Governor’s goin’ to … pardon me out.”

He ceased his struggling to speak. A half-hour passed in silence, and then he roused himself feebly and whispered:

“He’ll … pardon … me.”

The old boots stared blankly and coldly at the ceiling; their patient expression no longer bore a trace of life or suffering, and their calm repose was undisturbed by the song of the mockingbird in the oriel.

aka The Man from Georgia

“The Californian” Jan 1880

The Ape, The Idiot, & Other People (1897)

A NIGHT WITH DEATH

It is midnight. I have just left his bedside; it is in the adjoining room. For four days and nights I have watched unceasingly – watched for Death, who lurks behind the door; for they say my friend will die. But I will, single-handed, meet Death, and beat him back. I have had one struggle with him; it was about two hours ago. He thinks I am worn out; that my strength is failing with the prolonged vigil; that I may fall asleep at any moment, when he can seize his prey, and strangle him in the dark. About two hours ago, as I have just said, he quietly left his position behind the door, and stood at the bedside, ready to begin his dreadful work. I must have dozed in my extreme weariness – what a crime! I rose, startled violently, and confronted him. There was a deadly leer on his sinister face. I sprang at his throat, and grappled with him madly. There was a fierce struggle, and I conquered. I knew I would. I thrust him out, and locked the door.

My friend regarded me strangely, evidently not recognizing me.

“You are Death!” he exclaimed, his eyes staring wildly, and his hands clutching the bed-clothing.

“No; I am your friend.”

I took his hand in mine; I placed the other hand on his burning forehead.

“I have driven him away,” I said. “He cannot touch you while I am alive.”

“But if you should sleep?”

“I shall not sleep.”

He, as well as I, knew that Death feared me, and that Death only awaited the moment when my strength should fail, and I should succumb to exhaustion.

That reminds me: I wonder that the physician looked strangely at me tonight, and felt my pulse, and examined .my tongue. I wonder that he shook his head, and said that I must watch no longer, and that if I did the result might be disastrous. I laughed at him. What! leave my dearest friend when I alone could keep Death away? This, my friend, I say, also knows; and he will let none other watch beside him. What if he will not? Will I? No.

He has been very patient. I shall not say he is selfish for keeping me, though this long and anxious watching is killing me, for he is not himself, He is the Fever, beset by its companion, Delirium. And then I love him; that is sufficient.

Half an hour ago he awoke with a start, and called out to me aloud:

“Where are you?”

“Here,” I replied, taking his hand.

Delirium looked from his eyes and said – my friend thus never would have accused me:

“You were asleep.” His tone was querulous and complaining.

“No.”

“Yes; you don’t care if he strangles me!”

“He shall not touch you.”

“Yes; you are not watching! See, there he is!”

My eyes followed his horrified gaze to the door. There, sure enough, stood Death. I moved toward him threateningly, and he vanished. I came back to my friend. His words had gone into my heart like a knife. I gave him a soothing medicine, and he soon fell asleep, struggling, too, against sleep, and regarding me with suspicion, as if he feared I would abandon him.

Thus has this hand-to-hand struggle with Death, this ceaseless watching, racked me for four long days and nights – days and nights that, compared with the past years of my life, seem longer by a thousand years.

I must admit it: my nerves are shattered. I start at imaginary things. Some things are not imaginary. I have seen Death and fought with him. Of the shadows and forms that steal about through the quiet house – some making strange grimaces, some dancing, others threatening – a few are the creation of my distempered imagination. I say, I admit it, and it alarms me.

I have just left my friend asleep. It is midnight. Death does not hover over a sleeping man; and so I have come into this room to write while I feel so strange; to write something horrible and ghastly, that will conjure up demons, and cause shadows to emerge from the darkness; that will cause the reader to wake at night with a scream, and trembling with terror, search his bed for the mangled corpse of a human being, staring and grinning there in the dark, with the hands clenched like claws, and the features set by death in a horrible grimace.

For in all the world the most awful thing is a corpse; the most revolting thing a mangled corpse.

A subject! I have a number of them here. I think of none other at this moment. They crowd upon me – all the ghastly pictures that have, through the sense of vision, become stamped upon my brain, now spring to view, each and all a living reality.

Here is a frightful explosion of a powder mill. I search in the rubbish with a lantern. A hand. I place it in a basket on my arm. A dislodged eyeball, naked, round, and glistening. I place it in the basket. A face and skull, with the brain blown out. I lift it by the hair, shake the dirt from it, and place it in the basket. An arm here, a leg there. Tame subject! There is no suffering!

Well, then, here is another. It is better: A train runs over a man – no matter how. The resistless wheel crushes the strong breast. A short, smothered scream. His heart bounds from his mangled body as though expelled from a popgun, and alights upon the planking, where, still retaining that secret and mysterious principle of life that sends the blood surging through the arteries, it springs from side to side for a few seconds, determined not to die. Two dogs, seeing it thus bounding, pounce upon it to kill and devour it, and then fight for its possession. Too tame! The heart did not suffer!

For, though death is awful, and a mangled corpse is revolting, to see suffering and torture that make life a living death, is agonizing. I select such a subject. Wait.

I have just returned from a search in the bottom of my trunk. I found it. Here it is, on the table before me, open. Letters; a faded photograph; a little wisp of beautiful hair: a few violets that crumble as I touch them. I must handle them carefully, for they are precious, very precious. This, despite the gloomy picture they recall – a picture darker than death. Must I part with this secret of life and death? – of death, I should say? Is it right? Will she rise up from an untimely grave, and, in addition to charging me with murder, denounce me also as a betrayer of secrets, a slanderer, who is worse than a murderer? No; I shall not. To think of it! I entertained the idea for a moment! Am I insane? I shall bundle them up again.

Great God! what is this? It lies there on the table, with the palm turned toward me, as though beseeching me. Only a glove – a woman’s glove. It leans against the letters, shriveled and crumpled. Merciful heaven! how that rent gapes, recalling a picture not connected with the history of the glove or the bundle, but one equally as horrible. In the palm of the glove are two rents that form a cross. What is there in this that makes my nerves tingle, every hair stand on end, and my heart beat with a thick, dull, sickening pulsation? I shall write it. I shall place the bundle again in the bottom of my trunk, and forget it. How cold my feet, and how hot my head! How the phantoms multiply in number, and boldly prick me with sharp needles, and grin at me through the blinds!

•   •   •   •   •

Tom Burkett was the engineer of No. 3, a passenger train. He was a skillful engineer, sober and reliable. An accident had happened to his locomotive, and he had taken a freight engine, which was headed in the opposite direction. The nearest turn-table was several miles ahead. Consequently, Burkett was compelled to run the engine backward.

The rules required that a locomotive should not be run backward at a higher speed than six miles per hour, as the tender-trucks are liable to leave the track. To learn this fact has cost many lives. One human life is of more value than countless railroads.

I am very calm as I write this. I have gathered up all the ends and fragments of my shattered strength. I know the value of life. It is not capable of estimation; it is priceless.

Burkett came upon a long and level stretch of road; and, knowing it to be in excellent condition, he disobeyed his instructions by more than doubling the speed of the train.

The crash came – no one knew how. No one ever does know how. The only difference between expected death and unexpected death is in cause, and not in reason. From the time we come into the world to the time we leave it, we stand on the trapdoor of a gallows, with a rope around our neck. Presently something comes along and removes the prop. We can not help it; our hands and feet are tied, and, moreover, we are blindfold. This is the crime – a sufficient one – for which we are executed: We were born.

The crash came. The train was upon a high embankment. There was a sudden and violent jerking, when the tender, which was in front, swung to one side, and dragged the engine down the embankment, overturning it. The baggage-car and the express-car came crashing down, and were wrecked. The passenger cars were uninjured. One man was killed – the fireman. He was caught under the engine, and crushed.

The locomotive, in falling, turned upon its side, the nozzle surmounting the dome being broken off. Through the opening thus made a powerful stream of hot water and steam issued. It seemed as though this gigantic monster of fiendish cruelty sought to expend its venomous wrath by crushing one man, and belching forth upon another an irresistible stream of death.

The baggage-master sprang from his car, and ran to the assistance of the engineer and fireman. A cruel sight confronted him and sickened him. Tom Burkett was desperately struggling to get beyond the reach of the stream of steam, which struck him full in the face and breast. It was all done in a few seconds. He threw up his hands; madly he fought this terrible thing that was boiling him alive. At last he succeeded in getting to one side, and then he attempted to rise. He failed. His muscles were cooked. He sank upon his knees.

“Tom,” exclaimed the baggage-master, running down the embankment, “are you hurt?”

“I am killed,” replied Tom, very quietly, and without a groan.

The baggage-master had reached him.

“Let me help you up, Tom. Give me your hand.”

“Where are you?” asked Tom, holding out his hand in an uncertain way.

“Here, Tom. Can’t you see me?”

“No; I’m blind.”

The baggage-master saw that Tom’s eyes were whitish, and that a white, sunken place appeared where the pupil should have been. His eyes were cooked. He could not close the eyelids. They, too, were cooked. The white eyes could only stare pitifully.

By this time the baggage-master had taken Tom’s hand, to assist him to rise. Then a revolting and sickening thing occurred The hand, being exposed, had been thoroughly boiled, so that when the baggage-master grasped it the skin broke a little below the wrist-joint – broke evenly around, as though cut with a knife – and the skin slipped from the hand, entire. The baggage-master gazed at it, horror-stricken, as it lay in his palm. It looked like a glove of a ghastly grayish color, slightly wrinkled. The only break in it was across in the palm. It was the glove that recalled this horrible occurrence so strikingly to my mind. Tom did not groan as he thus parted with a portion of himself; it did not seem to cause him pain. The baggage-master uttered an exclamation of horror and despair, and then gingerly laid the strange thing he held on an old cross-tie. He turned to Tom, who still held out his hand, and was about to take it, in his anguish and excitement; but the sight that met his eyes was more sickening than the other. The hand, stripped of its natural covering, presented to view the tendons on the back, and the bone at some of the joints. The hand was damp, sticky, of an indescribable pale color, and streaked with dull red. The nails had adhered to the skin, and that portion of the fingers from which they had slipped was bright red.

The baggage-master started back, and almost shrieked:

“Take down your hand, Tom!”

Tom meekly obeyed. He seemed to understand his condition, for he asked, quite pitifully:

“What will become of my wife and babies?”

“They will be taken care of, Tom – poor fellow!”

Tears were streaming down the baggage-master’s face. Several others arrived. They picked Tom tenderly up, and laid him in a car.

It was some time before the ordeal of death commenced. When it did, it was horrible; and even in my present condition I tremble to write it.

A locomotive and flatcar were dispatched from the nearest station, and Tom was placed upon the car, and taken to a house. It was then that his agony came on. His system recovered from the temporary shock, and nature cried out. There was a medical attendant. He administered an anesthetic, as Tom begged for it, but said it might, in Tom’s condition, produce a kind of nervous irritation. Tom called for water. It was poured down his throat. Next he wanted ice. At this the physician shook his head, for a reason which will soon appear.

Tom fought the pain manfully – he was a noble, strong-hearted fellow – but it increased every moment, and minute by minute became more maddening. At length Tom began to moan pitifully; later, he cried out in anguish; he screamed and writhed under the horrible torture. He begged for ice, and cursed them because they refused him. At length the physician yielded.

“Pound the ice,” he said. “He will not know—”

Know what? He did not finish the sentence. We shall soon discover his meaning.

In the meantime Tom made a violent movement, and the whole of his full whiskers were pulled out by the roots. It was very easily done. His face then appeared grayish, with small wrinkles abounding.

The pounded ice was given him. An experienced person might have foreseen the result – the physician alone did. The ice, coming in contact with the lips, caused them at first to curl outward, and then they split and cracked, and fell away by piecemeal, leaving the front teeth exposed. He appeared to grin horribly.

At length Tom’s reason was shaken. He thought he was burning alive. He begged them to pull him out of the flames.

His hair slipped off. The skin on the face broke in many places. The more tender parts of the ears fell away. The nose was ragged, as though it had been hacked with a knife. There was no blood. He presented much the appearance of a man dead two weeks, and nibbled by crabs.

Tom raved in delirium. He thought himself engineer of a train that was running to hell. Already the intense heat reached him, burning him up. The opiate worked poorly. Having lost his lips, his ravings were indistinct.

“Shut off the steam!” he shouted. “My hands are burned, and I can’t reach the throttle. Shut her off, John! we are plunging into hell! See how the smoke rises! Here are the occupants of hell! We run over them – nothing hinders us! Shut off the steam! Oh, if I was not burned to a crisp I would rip you open, John, take out your entrails, put a candle inside you, and hang you out for a red lantern! O God! how it burns!”

The ice continued its ghastly work. The cheeks fell away, and the horrible grin extended from ear to ear, showing the rows of teeth entire.

“Great God!” he screamed, “what have I done? I had rather go to heaven than this burning hell, where already I am roasting in the fires of the damned. Shut off the steam, John! or I will roast your heart! We are plunging into hell! If I escape this, I shall build a church. I can get to heaven then. God? There is no God! Hot? It is burning me alive! … Ah! … It is not so hot … It is getting cooler … I am passing hell … That is heaven, there … They are flagging me down … Ah! thank God! I burn no longer! I am cool … and the air is filled … with perfume … and music … Ah! this is heaven!… Ah! this is—”

Death.

•   •   •   •   •

So late? Sunrise. I feel a strange reaction. My friend!

I have returned from the bedside of my friend. Others had come in, but they could not keep back the dread spectre behind the door. None could but me! They did not let me know. O God, forgive me! They say I could not have kept Death away, but I could. He strangled my friend just before I reached his bedside. They have acted very strangely toward me, and are watching me. The physician has given me a powerful opiate. My heart is broken. I am a murderer! My hand is very unsteady. I can see with difficulty – it is strange – a great – calm – is coming – over – me – a strange – drowsiness –

“The Argonaut” 05 Feb 1881

THE MONSTER-MAKER

A young man of refined appearance, but evidently suffering great mental distress, presented himself one morning at the residence of a singular old man, who was known as a surgeon of remarkable skill. The house was a queer and primitive brick affair, entirely out of date, and tolerable only in the decayed part of the city in which it stood. It was large, gloomy, and dark, and had long corridors and dismal rooms; and it was absurdly large for the small family – man and wife – that occupied it. The house described, the man is portrayed – but not the woman. He could be agreeable on occasion, but, for all that, he was but animated mystery. His wife was weak, wan, reticent, evidently miserable, and possibly living a life of dread or horror – perhaps witness of repulsive things, subject of anxieties, and victim of fear and tyranny; but there is a great deal of guessing in these assumptions. He was about sixty-five years of age and she about forty. He was lean, tall, and bald, with thin, smooth-shaven face, and very keen eyes; kept always at home, and was slovenly. The man was strong, the woman weak; he dominated, she suffered.

Although he was a surgeon of rare skill, his practice was almost nothing, for it was a rare occurrence that the few who knew of his great ability were brave enough to penetrate the gloom of his house, and when they did so it was with deaf ear turned to sundry ghoulish stories that were whispered concerning him. These were, in great part, but exaggerations of his experiments in vivisection; he was devoted to the science of surgery.

The young man who presented himself on the morning just mentioned was a handsome fellow, yet of evident weak character and unhealthy temperament – sensitive, and easily exalted or depressed. A single glance convinced the surgeon that his visitor was seriously affected in mind, for there was never bolder skull-grin of melancholia, fixed and irremediable.

A stranger would not have suspected any occupancy of the house. The street door – old, warped, and blistered by the sun – was locked, and the small, faded-green window-blinds were closed. The young man rapped at the door. No answer. He rapped again. Still no sign. He examined a slip of paper, glanced at the number on the house, and then, with the impatience of a child, he furiously kicked the door. There were signs of numerous other such kicks. A response came in the shape of a shuffling footstep in the hall, a turning of the rusty key, and a sharp face that peered through a cautious opening in the door.

“Are you the doctor?” asked the young man.

“Yes, yes! Come in,” briskly replied the master of the house.

The young man entered. The old surgeon closed the door and carefully locked it. “This way,” he said, advancing to a rickety flight of stairs. The young man followed. The surgeon led the way up the stairs, turned into a narrow, musty-smelling corridor at the left, traversed it, rattling the loose boards under his feet, at the farther end opened a door at the right, and beckoned his visitor to enter. The young man found himself in a pleasant room, furnished in antique fashion and with hard simplicity.

“Sit down,” said the old man, placing a chair so that its occupant should face a window that looked out upon a dead wall about six feet from the house. He threw open the blind, and a pale light entered. He then seated himself near his visitor and directly facing him, and with a searching look, that had all the power of a microscope, he proceeded to diagnosticate the case.

“Well?” he presently asked.

The young man shifted uneasily in his seat.

“I – I have come to see you,” he finally stammered, “because I’m in trouble.”

“Ah!”

“Yes; you see, I – that is – I have given it up.”

“Ah!” There was pity added to sympathy in the ejaculation.

“That’s it. Given it up,” added the visitor. He took from his pocket a roll of banknotes, and with the utmost deliberation he counted them out upon his knee. “Five thousand dollars,” he calmly remarked. “That is for you. It’s all I have; but I presume – I imagine – no; that is not the word – assume – yes; that’s the word – assume that five thousand – is it really that much? Let me count.” He counted again. “That five thousand dollars is a sufficient fee for what I want you to do.”

The surgeon’s lips curled pityingly – perhaps disdainfully also. “What do you want me to do?” he carelessly inquired.

The young man rose, looked around with a mysterious air, approached the surgeon, and laid the money across his knee. Then he stooped and whispered two words in the surgeon’s ear.

These words produced an electric effect. The old man started violently; then, springing to his feet, he caught his visitor angrily, and transfixed him with a look that was as sharp as a knife. His eyes flashed, and he opened his mouth to give utterance to some harsh imprecation, when he suddenly checked himself. The anger left his face, and only pity remained. He relinquished his grasp, picked up the scattered notes, and, offering them to the visitor, slowly said:

“I do not want your money. You are simply foolish. You think you are in trouble. Well, you do not know what trouble is. Your only trouble is that you have not a trace of manhood in your nature. You are merely insane – I shall not say pusillanimous. You should surrender yourself to the authorities, and be sent to a lunatic asylum for proper treatment.”

The young man keenly felt the intended insult, and his eyes flashed dangerously.

“You old dog – you insult me thus!” he cried. “Grand airs, these, you give yourself! Virtuously indignant, old murderer, you! Don’t want my money, eh? When a man comes to you himself and wants it done, you fly into a passion and spurn his money; but let an enemy of his come and pay you, and you are only too willing. How many such jobs have you done in this miserable old hole? It is a good thing for you that the police have not run you down, and brought spade and shovel with them. Do you know what is said of you? Do you think you have kept your windows so closely shut that no sound has ever penetrated beyond them? Where do you keep your infernal implements?”

He had worked himself into a high passion. His voice was hoarse, loud, and rasping. His eyes, bloodshot, started from their sockets. His whole frame twitched, and his fingers writhed. But he was in the presence of a man infinitely his superior. Two eyes, like those of a snake, burned two holes through him. An overmastering, inflexible presence confronted one weak and passionate. The result came.

“Sit down,” commanded the stern voice of the surgeon.

It was the voice of father to child, of master to slave. The fury left the visitor, who, weak and overcome, fell upon a chair.

Meanwhile, a peculiar light had appeared in the old surgeon’s face, the dawn of a strange idea; a gloomy ray, strayed from the fires of the bottomless pit; the baleful light that illumines the way of the enthusiast. The old man remained a moment in profound abstraction, gleams of eager intelligence bursting momentarily through the cloud of sombre meditation that covered his face. Then broke the broad light of a deep, impenetrable determination. There was something sinister in it, suggesting the sacrifice of something held sacred. After a struggle, mind had vanquished conscience.

Taking a piece of paper and a pencil, the surgeon carefully wrote answers to questions which he peremptorily addressed to his visitor, such as his name, age, place of residence, occupation, and the like, and the same inquiries concerning his parents, together with other particular matters.

“Does anyone know you came to this house?” he asked.

“No.”

“You swear it?”

“Yes.”

“But your prolonged absence will cause alarm and lead to search.”

“I have provided against that.”

“How?”

“By depositing a note in the post, as I came along, announcing my intention to drown myself.”

“The river will be dragged.”

“What then?” asked the young man, shrugging his shoulders with careless indifference. “Rapid undercurrent, you know. A good many are never found.”

There was a pause.

“Are you ready?” finally asked the surgeon.

“Perfectly.” The answer was cool and determined.

The manner of the surgeon, however, showed much perturbation. The pallor that had come into his face at the moment his decision was formed became intense. A nervous tremulousness came over his frame. Above it all shone the light of enthusiasm.

“Have you a choice in the method?” he asked.

“Yes; extreme anesthesia.”

“With what agent?”

“The surest and quickest.”

“Do you desire any – any subsequent disposition?”

“No; only nullification; simply a blowing out, as of a candle in the wind; a puff – then darkness, without a trace. A sense of your own safety may suggest the method. I leave it to you.”

“No delivery to your friends?”

“None whatever.”

Another pause.

“Did you say you are quite ready?” asked the surgeon.

“Quite ready.”

“And perfectly willing?”

“Anxious.”

“Then wait a moment.”

With this request the old surgeon rose to his feet and stretched himself. Then with the stealthiness of a cat he opened the door and peered into the hall, listening intently. There was no sound. He softly closed the door and locked it. Then he closed the window-blinds and locked them. This done, he opened a door leading into an adjoining room, which, though it had no window, was lighted by means of a small skylight. The young man watched closely. A strange change had come over him. While his determination had not one whit lessened, a look of great relief came into his face, displacing the haggard, despairing look of a half-hour before. Melancholic then, he was ecstatic now.

The opening of the second door disclosed a curious sight. In the center of the room, directly under the skylight, was an operating-table, such as is used by demonstrators of anatomy. A glass case against the wall held surgical instruments of every kind. Hanging in another case were human skeletons of various sizes. In sealed jars, arranged on shelves, were monstrosities of divers kinds preserved in alcohol. There were also, among innumerable other articles scattered about the room, a manikin, a stuffed cat, a desiccated human heart, plaster casts of various parts of the body, numerous charts, and a large assortment of drugs and chemicals. There was also a lounge, which could be opened to form a couch. The surgeon opened it and moved the operating-table aside, giving its place to the lounge.

“Come in,” he called to his visitor.

The young man obeyed without the least hesitation.

“Take off your coat.”

He complied.

“Lie down on that lounge.”

In a moment the young man was stretched at full length, eyeing the surgeon. The latter undoubtedly was suffering under great excitement, but he did not waver; his movements were sure and quick. Selecting a bottle containing a liquid, he carefully measured out a certain quantity. While doing this he asked:

“Have you ever had any irregularity of the heart?”

“No.”

The answer was prompt, but it was immediately followed by a quizzical look in the speaker’s face.

“I presume,” he added, “you mean by your question that it might be dangerous to give me a certain drug. Under the circumstances, however, I fail to see any relevancy in your question.”

This took the surgeon aback; but he hastened to explain that he did not wish to inflict unnecessary pain, and hence his question.

He placed the glass on a stand, approached his visitor, and carefully examined his pulse.

“Wonderful!” he exclaimed.

“Why?”

“It is perfectly normal.”

“Because I am wholly resigned. Indeed, it has been long since I knew such happiness. It is not active, but infinitely sweet.”

“You have no lingering desire to retract?”

“None whatever.”

The surgeon went to the stand and returned with the draught.

“Take this,” he said, kindly.

The young man partially raised himself and took the glass in his hand. He did not show the vibration of a single nerve. He drank the liquid, draining the last drop. Then he returned the glass with a smile.

“Thank you,” he said; “you are the noblest man that lives. May you always prosper and be happy! You are my benefactor, my liberator. Bless you, bless you! You reach down from your seat with the gods and lift me up into glorious peace and rest. I love you – I love you with all my heart!”

These words, spoken earnestly, in a musical, low voice, and accompanied with a smile of ineffable tenderness, pierced the old man’s heart. A suppressed convulsion swept over him; intense anguish wrung his vitals; perspiration trickled down his face. The young man continued to smile.

“Ah, it does me good!” said he.

The surgeon, with a strong effort to control himself, sat down upon the edge of the lounge and took his visitor’s wrist, counting the pulse.

“How long will it take?” the young man asked.

“Ten minutes. Two have passed.” The voice was hoarse.

“Ah, only eight minutes more!… Delicious, delicious! I feel it coming…. What was that?… Ah, I understand. Music…. Beautiful!… Coming, coming…. Is that – that – water?… Trickling? Dripping? Doctor!”

“Well?”

“Thank you,… thank you…. Noble man,… my savior,… my bene … bene … factor…. Trickling,… trickling…. Dripping, dripping…. Doctor!”

“Well?”

“Doctor!”

“Past hearing,” muttered the surgeon.

“Doctor!”

“And blind.”

Response was made by a firm grasp of the hand.

“Doctor!”

“And numb.”

“Doctor!”

The old man watched and waited.

“Dripping, … dripping.”

The last drop had run. There was a sigh, and nothing more.

The surgeon laid down the hand.

“The first step,” he groaned, rising to his feet; then his whole frame dilated. “The first step – the most difficult, yet the simplest. A providential delivery into my hands of that for which I have hungered for forty years. No withdrawal now! It is possible, because scientific; rational, but perilous. If I succeed – if? I shall succeed. I will succeed…. And after success – what?… Yes; what? Publish the plan and the result? The gallows…. So long as it shall exist, … and I exist, the gallows. That much…. But how account for its presence? Ah, that pinches hard! I must trust to the future.”

He tore himself from the revery and started.

“I wonder if she heard or saw anything.”

With that reflection he cast a glance upon the form on the lounge, and then left the room, locked the door, locked also the door of the outer room, walked down two or three corridors, penetrated to a remote part of the house, and rapped at a door. It was opened by his wife. He, by this time, had regained complete mastery over himself.

“I thought I heard someone in the house just now,” he said, “but I can find no one.”

“I heard nothing.”

He was greatly relieved.

“I did hear someone knock at the door less than an hour ago,” she resumed, “and heard you speak, I think. Did he come in?”

“No.”

The woman glanced at his feet and seemed perplexed.

“I am almost certain,” she said, “that I heard foot-falls in the house, and yet I see that you are wearing slippers.”

“Oh, I had on my shoes then!”

“That explains it,” said the woman, satisfied; “I think the sound you heard must have been caused by rats.”

“Ah, that was it!” exclaimed the surgeon. Leaving, he closed the door, reopened it, and said, “I do not wish to be disturbed today.” He said to himself, as he went down the hall, “All is clear there.”

He returned to the room in which his visitor lay, and made a careful examination.

“Splendid specimen!” he softly exclaimed; “every organ sound, every function perfect; fine, large frame; well-shaped muscles, strong and sinewy; capable of wonderful development – if given opportunity…. I have no doubt it can be done. Already I have succeeded with a dog – a task less difficult than this, for in a man the cerebrum overlaps the cerebellum, which is not the case with a dog. This gives a wide range for accident, with but one opportunity in a lifetime! In the cerebrum, the intellect and the affections; in the cerebellum, the senses and the motor forces; in the medulla oblongata, control of the diaphragm. In these two latter lie all the essentials of simple existence. The cerebrum is merely an adornment; that is to say, reason and the affections are almost purely ornamental. I have already proved it. My dog, with its cerebrum removed, was idiotic, but it retained its physical senses to a certain degree.”

While thus ruminating he made careful preparations. He moved the couch, replaced the operating-table under the skylight, selected a number of surgical instruments, prepared certain drug-mixtures, and arranged water, towels, and all the accessories of a tedious surgical operation. Suddenly he burst into laughter.

“Poor fool!” he exclaimed. “Paid me five thousand dollars to kill him! Didn’t have the courage to snuff his own candle! Singular, singular, the queer freaks these madmen have! You thought you were dying, poor idiot! Allow me to inform you, sir, that you are as much alive at this moment as ever you were in your life. But it will be all the same to you. You shall never be more conscious than you are now; and for all practical purposes, so far as they concern you, you are dead henceforth, though you shall live. By the way, how should you feel without a head? Ha, ha, ha!… But that’s a sorry joke.”

He lifted the unconscious form from the lounge and laid it upon the operating-table.

•   •   •   •   •

About three years afterwards the following conversation was held between a captain of police and a detective:

“She may be insane,” suggested the captain.

“I think she is.”

“And yet you credit her story!”

“I do.”

“Singular!”

“Not at all. I myself have learned something.”

“What!”

“Much, in one sense; little, in another. You have heard those queer stories of her husband. Well, they are all nonsensical – probably with one exception. He is generally a harmless old fellow, but peculiar. He has performed some wonderful surgical operations. The people in his neighborhood are ignorant, and they fear him and wish to be rid of him; hence they tell a great many lies about him, and they come to believe their own stories. The one important thing that I have learned is that he is almost insanely enthusiastic on the subject of surgery – especially experimental surgery; and with an enthusiast there is hardly such a thing as a scruple. It is this that gives me confidence in the woman’s story.”

“You say she appeared to be frightened?”

“Doubly so – first, she feared that her husband would learn of her betrayal of him; second, the discovery itself had terrified her.”

“But her report of this discovery is very vague,” argued the captain. “He conceals everything from her. She is merely guessing.”

“In part – yes; in other part – no. She heard the sounds distinctly, though she did not see clearly. Horror closed her eyes. What she thinks she saw is, I admit, preposterous; but she undoubtedly saw something extremely frightful. There are many peculiar little circumstances. He has eaten with her but few times during the last three years, and nearly always carries his food to his private rooms. She says that he either consumes an enormous quantity, throws much away, or is feeding something that eats prodigiously. He explains this to her by saying that he has animals with which he experiments. This is not true. Again, he always keeps the door to these rooms carefully locked; and not only that, but he has had the doors doubled and otherwise strengthened, and has heavily barred a window that looks from one of the rooms upon a dead wall a few feet distant.”

“What does it mean?” asked the captain.

“A prison.”

“For animals, perhaps.”

“Certainly not.”

“Why!”

“Because, in the first place, cages would have been better; in the second place, the security that he has provided is infinitely greater than that required for the confinement of ordinary animals.”

“All this is easily explained: he has a violent lunatic under treatment.”

“I had thought of that, but such is not the fact.”

“How do you know?”

“By reasoning thus: He has always refused to treat cases of lunacy; he confines himself to surgery; the walls are not padded, for the woman has heard sharp blows upon them; no human strength, however morbid, could possibly require such resisting strength as has been provided; he would not be likely to conceal a lunatic’s confinement from the woman; no lunatic could consume all the food that he provides; so extremely violent mania as these precautions indicate could not continue three years; if there is a lunatic in the case it is very probable that there should have been communication with someone outside concerning the patient, and there has been none; the woman has listened at the keyhole and has heard no human voice within; and last, we have heard the woman’s vague description of what she saw.”

“You have destroyed every possible theory,” said the captain, deeply interested, “and have suggested nothing new.”

“Unfortunately, I cannot; but the truth may be very simple, after all. The old surgeon is so peculiar that I am prepared to discover something remarkable.”

“Have you suspicions?”

“I have.”

“Of what?”

“A crime. The woman suspects it.”

“And betrays it?”

“Certainly, because it is so horrible that her humanity revolts; so terrible that her whole nature demands of her that she hand over the criminal to the law; so frightful that she is in mortal terror; so awful that it has shaken her mind.”

“What do you propose to do?” asked the captain.

“Secure evidence. I may need help.”

“You shall have all the men you require. Go ahead, but be careful. You are on dangerous ground. You would be a mere plaything in the hands of that man.”

Two days afterwards the detective again sought the captain.

“I have a queer document,” he said, exhibiting torn fragments of paper, on which there was writing. “The woman stole it and brought it to me. She snatched a handful out of a book, getting only a part of each of a few leaves.”

These fragments, which the men arranged as best they could, were (the detective explained) torn by the surgeon’s wife from the first volume of a number of manuscript books which her husband had written on one subject – the very one that was the cause of her excitement. “About the time that he began a certain experiment three years ago,” continued the detective, “he removed everything from the suite of two rooms containing his study and his operating-room. In one of the bookcases that he removed to a room across the passage was a drawer, which he kept locked, but which he opened from time to time. As is quite common with such pieces of furniture, the lock of the drawer is a very poor one; and so the woman, while making a thorough search yesterday, found a key on her bunch that fitted this lock. She opened the drawer, drew out the bottom book of a pile (so that its mutilation would more likely escape discovery), saw that it might contain a clew, and tore out a handful of the leaves. She had barely replaced the book, locked the drawer, and made her escape when her husband appeared. He hardly ever allows her to be out of his sight when she is in that part of the house.”

The fragments read as follows: “… the motory nerves. I had hardly dared to hope for such a result, although inductive reasoning had convinced me of its possibility, my only doubt having been on the score of my lack of skill. Their operation has been only slightly impaired, and even this would not have been the case had the operation been performed in infancy, before the intellect had sought and obtained recognition as an essential part of the whole. Therefore I state, as a proved fact, that the cells of the motory nerves have inherent forces sufficient to the purposes of those nerves. But hardly so with the sensory nerves. These latter are, in fact, an offshoot of the former, evolved from them by natural (though not essential) heterogeneity, and to a certain extent are dependent on the evolution and expansion of a contemporaneous tendency, that developed into mentality, or mental function. Both of these latter tendencies, these evolvements, are merely refinements of the motory system, and not independent entities; that is to say, they are the blossoms of a plant that propagates from its roots. The motory system is the first … nor am I surprised that such prodigious muscular energy is developing. It promises yet to surpass the wildest dreams of human strength. I account for it thus: The powers of assimilation had reached their full development. They had formed the habit of doing a certain amount of work. They sent their products to all parts of the system. As a result of my operation the consumption of these products was reduced fully one-half; that is to say, about one-half of the demand for them was withdrawn. But force of habit required the production to proceed. This production was strength, vitality, energy. Thus double the usual quantity of this strength, this energy, was stored in the remaining … developed a tendency that did surprise me. Nature, no longer suffering the distraction of extraneous interferences, and at the same time being cut in two (as it were), with reference to this case, did not fully adjust herself to the new situation, as does a magnet, which, when divided at the point of equilibrium, renews itself in its two fragments by investing each with opposite poles; but, on the contrary, being severed from laws that theretofore had controlled her, and possessing still that mysterious tendency to develop into something more potential and complex, she blindly (having lost her lantern) pushed her demands for material that would secure this development, and as blindly used it when it was given her. Hence this marvellous voracity, this insatiable hunger, this wonderful ravenousness; and hence also (there being nothing but the physical part to receive this vast storing of energy) this strength that is becoming almost hourly herculean, almost daily appalling. It is becoming a serious … narrow escape today. By some means, while I was absent, it unscrewed the stopper of the silver feeding-pipe (which I have already herein termed ‘the artificial mouth’), and, in one of its curious antics, allowed all the chyle to escape from its stomach through the tube. Its hunger then became intense – I may say furious. I placed my hands upon it to push it into a chair, when, feeling my touch, it caught me, clasped me around the neck, and would have crushed me to death instantly had I not slipped from its powerful grasp. Thus I always had to be on my guard. I have provided the screw stopper with a spring catch, and … usually docile when not hungry; slow and heavy in its movements, which are, of course, purely unconscious; any apparent excitement in movement being due to local irregularities in the blood-supply of the cerebellum, which, if I did not have it enclosed in a silver case that is immovable, I should expose and …”

The captain looked at the detective with a puzzled air.

“I don’t understand it at all,” said he.

“Nor I,” agreed the detective.

“What do you propose to do?”

“Make a raid.”

“Do you want a man?”

“Three. The strongest men in your district.”

“Why, the surgeon is old and weak!”

“Nevertheless, I want three strong men; and for that matter, prudence really advises me to take twenty.”

•   •   •   •   •

At one o’clock the next morning a cautious, scratching sound might have been heard in the ceiling of the surgeon’s operating-room. Shortly afterwards the skylight sash was carefully raised and laid aside. A man peered into the opening. Nothing could be heard.

“That is singular,” thought the detective.

He cautiously lowered himself to the floor by a rope, and then stood for some moments listening intently. There was a dead silence. He shot the slide of a dark-lantern, and rapidly swept the room with the light. It was bare, with the exception of a strong iron staple and ring, screwed to the floor in the center of the room, with a heavy chain attached. The detective then turned his attention to the outer room; it was perfectly bare. He was deeply perplexed. Returning to the inner room, he called softly to the men to descend. While they were thus occupied he re-entered the outer room and examined the door. A glance sufficed. It was kept closed by a spring attachment, and was locked with a strong spring-lock that could be drawn from the inside.

“The bird has just flown,” mused the detective. “A singular accident! The discovery and proper use of this thumb-bolt might not have happened once in fifty years, if my theory is correct.”

By this time the men were behind him. He noiselessly drew the spring-bolt, opened the door, and looked out into the hall. He heard a peculiar sound. It was as though a gigantic lobster was floundering and scrambling in some distant part of the old house. Accompanying this sound was a loud, whistling breathing, and frequent rasping gasps.

These sounds were heard by still another person – the surgeon’s wife; for they originated very near her rooms, which were a considerable distance from her husband’s. She had been sleeping lightly, tortured by fear and harassed by frightful dreams. The conspiracy into which she had recently entered, for the destruction of her husband, was a source of great anxiety. She constantly suffered from the most gloomy forebodings, and lived in an atmosphere of terror. Added to the natural horror of her situation were those countless sources of fear which a fright-shaken mind creates and then magnifies. She was, indeed, in a pitiable state, having been driven first by terror to desperation, and then to madness.

Startled thus out of fitful slumber by the noise at her door, she sprang from her bed to the floor, every terror that lurked in her acutely tense mind and diseased imagination starting up and almost overwhelming her. The idea of flight – one of the strongest of all instincts – seized upon her, and she ran to the door, beyond all control of reason. She drew the bolt and flung the door wide open, and then fled wildly down the passage, the appalling hissing and rasping gurgle ringing in her ears apparently with a thousandfold intensity. But the passage was in absolute darkness, and she had not taken a half-dozen steps when she tripped upon an unseen object on the floor. She fell headlong upon it, encountering in it a large, soft, warm substance that writhed and squirmed, and from which came the sounds that had awakened her. Instantly realizing her situation, she uttered a shriek such as only an unnamable terror can inspire. But hardly had her cry started the echoes in the empty corridor when it was suddenly stifled. Two prodigious arms had closed upon her and crushed the life out of her.

The cry performed the office of directing the detective and his assistants, and it also aroused the old surgeon, who occupied rooms between the officers and the object of their search. The cry of agony pierced him to the marrow, and a realization of the cause of it burst upon him with frightful force.

“It has come at last!” he gasped, springing from his bed.

Snatching from a table a dimly-burning lamp and a long knife which he had kept at hand for three years, he dashed into the corridor. The four officers had already started forward, but when they saw him emerge they halted in silence. In that moment of stillness the surgeon paused to listen. He heard the hissing sound and the clumsy floundering of a bulky, living object in the direction of his wife’s apartments. It evidently was advancing towards him. A turn in the corridor shut out the view. He turned up the light, which revealed a ghastly pallor in his face.

“Wife!” he called.

There was no response. He hurriedly advanced, the four men following quietly. He turned the angle of the corridor, and ran so rapidly that by the time the officers had come in sight of him again he was twenty steps away. He ran past a huge, shapeless object, sprawling, crawling, and floundering along, and arrived at the body of his wife.

He gave one horrified glance at her face, and staggered away. Then a fury seized him. Clutching the knife firmly, and holding the lamp aloft, he sprang toward the ungainly object in the corridor. It was then that the officers, still advancing cautiously, saw a little more clearly, though still indistinctly, the object of the surgeon’s fury, and the cause of the look of unutterable anguish in his face. The hideous sight caused them to pause. They saw what appeared to be a man, yet evidently was not a man; huge, awkward, shapeless; a squirming, lurching, stumbling mass, completely naked. It raised its broad shoulders. It had no head, but instead of it a small metallic ball surmounting its massive neck.

“Devil!” exclaimed the surgeon, raising the knife.

“Hold, there!” commanded a stern voice.

The surgeon quickly raised his eyes and saw the four officers, and for a moment fear paralyzed his arm.

“The police!” he gasped.

Then, with a look of redoubled fury, he sent the knife to the hilt into the squirming mass before him. The wounded monster sprang to its feet and wildly threw its arms about, meanwhile emitting fearful sounds from a silver tube through which it breathed. The surgeon aimed another blow, but never gave it. In his blind fury he lost his caution, and was caught in an iron grasp. The struggling threw the lamp some feet toward the officers, and it fell to the floor, shattered to pieces. Simultaneously with the crash the oil took fire, and the corridor was filled with flame. The officers could not approach. Before them was the spreading blaze, and secure behind it were two forms struggling in a fearful embrace. They heard cries and gasps, and saw the gleaming of a knife.

The wood in the house was old and dry. It took fire at once, and the flames spread with great rapidity. The four officers turned and fled, barely escaping with their lives. In an hour nothing remained of the mysterious old house and its inmates but a blackened ruin.

aka “The Surgeon’s Experiment”

“The Argonaut” Oct 15 1887

The Ape, The Idiot, & Other People (1897)

THE GLOOMY SHADOW

My father enjoyed, among his other scientific attainments, a large family and an intimate acquaintance with the mysteries of phrenology. He was likewise an extremely methodical man, which is tantamount to saying that he was a conscientious man. There can be no conception of duty without a matured and coherent plan for its performance.

My father’s principal idea of duty to his children found expression in the choice of proper vocations for them, and he based this choice upon careful phrenological analysis of their several heads. It is no small trick to be a good phrenologist. It involves intimate knowledge of cranial anatomy coupled with vast experience and intelligent observation. My father took his children in hand when they were yet of a very tender age and from a survey of their brain conformations he plotted their lives. Thus, to my eldest sister (next to whom I came in the order of introduction to life), he allotted the life pastime of teacher. For the brother who came next to me, both in sex and succession, he chose the distinction of the whistle and billy. To the next, a sister, he assigned the disagreeable task of a dutiful wife, and so on down to the very last chapter of this long reiteration of his personal heredity, with one exception, and that was I.

He had never diagnosticated my particular brain disease.

Why was it? I had asked myself that question a million times. I had asked my mother also, but she was a timid woman and contented herself with putting her arms around me and kissing me, and telling me that my father knew best, that I, being his first male offspring, probably was reserved for some very high walk in life. These puttings-off only half reassured me, for I knew that my father was a hard, though righteous, master in his own house, and that not a member of the family, from my mother down to the little two-year-old, whom my father already had set apart to disgrace the family as a politician, dared question his motives or suggest his policy.

Time passed, and yet my career had not been chosen. Of all the children I was the only one who had not been made up into a firecracker to explode at the proper time. I was becoming a big boy, with a violent tendency to legs. A white down was beginning to form upon my upper lip, and by this and other indications I knew that soon I should be a Man.

Why had my father neglected me? The more I thought about it the more mysterious his neglect became. I had arrived at an age when the human mind begins to operate of its own volition; when fancy runs riot and imagination is opening its eyes; when collar and cravat are ceasing to be nuisances, and the ripe sunset falls upon the willing eye; when the plaint of the whippoorwill in the twilight sets the soul a-dreaming, and the twinkling firefly kindles a spark of unrest; when Nature, after yawns interminable, rouses at last into wakefulness and folds us lovingly and caressingly in her warm embrace.

With adolescence comes, in a boy, strength; in a girl, tenderness. I feared my father, but I loved him. Did he despise me? I knew an old lighting-blasted tree that always reminded me of my father. Tall and gaunt and thin it stood, and one gnarled branch remained; and if I looked at it from a certain point of view it seemed to be my father standing there in awful solitude, and with uplifted hand calling down the curse of heaven upon me; but if I got on the other side the expression changed entirely, and the tree looked like my father invoking heaven’s blessing upon me. Which point of view was it that marked my destiny? With boyish adolescence comes strength, and with strength independence. Why should I fear my father? He was a man – was not I also nearly a man? He had been kind to me all my life. He had laid violent hands upon me only once, and that was a long time ago, when he caught me trying to brain one of the little slaves with a heavy piece of iron; and then he whipped me till I was ill, and my mother cried a whole day because I was delirious and with a fever from the punishment. But I was a small boy then – what had I to fear now? I would go to my father and ask him to do for me what he had done for his other children.

Yet I hesitated. In the sharpened condition of my mental faculties I reflected upon some strange things I had seen and not understood. I had often detected my father watching me closely and with what I believed was a troubled look. When he would find that I had discovered him he would appear ashamed and more troubled yet. What did it mean? Had the gaunt old tree in the meadow cast its shadow upon me? Was it curses, or was it blessings? There must be light in order that shadows may exist. The gnarled branch pointed to heaven, whence light comes – and also curses.

Thus was I torn and racked. Discontent took up its habitation with me. Could not my father see that the flower was fading and the seed-pod ripening? He had dug the ground for the sowing, or would the seed be scattered among brambles and briars and strangled in the germination? I blamed my father – blamed him aloud to my mother; and I wish now that my tongue had been cut out for doing it.

There came the time when I could wait no longer. I went to my father and demanded, firmly but respectfully, as a duty from a father to a son, that he apply science to the laying out of a plan for my future conduct.

I shall never forget the profound astonishment, pain, anxiety and embarrassment that my father manifested when I made my demand. At first he showed anger, impatience and contempt, but these were succeeded by a pity that transfixed me, and then by a horror that drove me mad, my brain awhirl and ugly itching and turmoil rattling through my nerves. Quick and intelligent, he saw my rebellion, my exasperation, my wounded self-esteem, my turbulent blood surging, my jerking biceps, my grinding teeth, my rambling, unconscious and predatory finger-grasp, and then he was frightened and pale. I saw it plainly. Try as much as he would to conceal it, I saw it, I saw it! My father afraid of me! My father cowering before me, white and trembling! My father, a great, strong man, standing aghast before his puny son! My father, who had faced death with Scott in Mexico and who had fought like a tiger by Stonewall Jackson’s side – this old soldier of a hundred battles, with a saber cut across his cheek, a man who could face the leveled pistol of an opposing duelist without the tremor of a nerve – this strong man, towering in manly strength and dignity and pride, stood a-bashed and fear-stricken before a miserable boy, his own son, whom a word or a blow would have sent cowering and howling away like a whipped dog!

What did it mean?

“Father,” I demanded, “tell me what you mean.”

“My son,” said he, weakly and tremulously, “listen to your father. You are my eldest son. The honor of my name will rest upon your shoulders. Be content. Be manly. Respect your mother. Take life as you find it, and do the best you can for yourself and your mother and me. Be just to all. And mark you, my son: If ever temptation should assail you; if ever reason should feel inclined to succumb to passion; if ever the chains of wholesome restraint should be tugged at by the rash hand of Desire, then remember your mother – a good and gentle mother, who prays for you oftener than you dream of, who watches over you and loves you and imbues your circumstances with the tender essence of her sweet presence. Be her stay and comfort in her declining years. Let your arm gather the strength of trusty manhood, to be expended in shielding her from rough buffetings; and do not thus early in life permit Discontent to whisper in your ear vague longings that, being resonant, are empty, hollow and delusive. Go, my son.”

It was the strangest speech I had heard in all my life. I left him, chilled to the marrow, sick at heart, touched by his appeal, but bewildered by the occasion of its delivery, numb of intellect, sore with puzzlings, and above all aching with a terror that, refusing to take shape and be torn out like an affronting eye, worked gnawingly at my vitals and stabbed me with invisible daggers.

What should I do? My mother was left to me – always a good mother, patient, kind and attentive. Did my father regard me as a monster? If so, did my mother also? She had given no sign of it – she had always been the same mother to me. Had she ever stood at the edge of the meadow and seen the riven tree calling down curses upon me, or had she ever gone to the other side where stood the giant old oak with the muscadine vine climbing to its summit and trying to strangle the very angel that bore it heavenward and seen the other and gender aspect?

I sought my mother without delay. Why did I? What was there in common between her sweet gentleness and my tumultuous unrest? Who can measure the strength of that mysterious and invisible cord which binds mother and son, though different as heaven and hell – this attenuated link, invisible as truth, impalpable as purity, inconceivable as right, impotent as strength, unimaginable as eternity? Can you weigh the odor of a rose? Would you measure off into rods, perches or poles the efficacy of a sigh, the aching of unsatisfied desire, the hope that feeds upon faith, the fondness that abides with possession, the longing of love, the grasping of affection, the tenderness born of fear, and, greater and grander than all, the community of hereditary instincts?

Where was my mother? I had lost no time in seeking her. But where was she? She was not where I expected to find her – where I had been sure of finding her. She ought to have been sitting in her low wicker chair in the bay window of the family room, sewing, and now and then looking up at the clock to see if it was time to order dinner. The little table, with innumerable and not understandable compartments, and mysterious nooks and corners, ought to have been just at her right elbow. Her embroidered footstool should have been in front of her chair, and her daintily slippered feet should have been resting upon it. The old Maltese cat, gray, wise and wicked, should have been curled up on the rug that the ottoman rested upon, utterly unconcerned over the ferocious aspect of the tiger’s head on that end of the rug which was nearest the grate.

When I burst into the room my mother was not there!

What is superstition? What mean those whispered and unconscious deductions from the unusual? Snap a single cog in the machinery of life, and there ensue a bursting and a rattling and a banging that wake us up to the realization of living! Enjoyment is disturbance. There is life only in turmoil, in derangement of ordered things, in perversions of law. Hunt no further for the secret of the anarchist’s existence, the scrambling of the politician, the source of ambition’s whispering and sighing and wrangling down all the life-lighted avenues of human existence.

Where would be the pleasure of living were it not for the novelty of expected death?

She was not there. Then where was she? The old cat, warped with sin, obsequious as a Pharisee, patient as time, blinked at me – and kept a wary eye on my uncertain boot. The tiger’s head yawned sleepily and impudently. The clock lacked thirty seconds of the time for ordering dinner.

My mother suddenly emerged from the parlor, the tall form of my father following. I saw the gaunt tree in the meadow calling down curses upon me. My mother was very pale. Her eyes wandered and her lips were white. She walked as in a dream – as in a nightmare, wherein skeletons and bloody flesh were busy disemboweling the repose of wistful sleep. She saw me… Had I gone to her and struck her in the face (God forgive the thought!) or stabbed her to the heart with a knife (Heaven blast me for the sacrilegious imagining!) she could not have been more sorely stricken than she was at beholding me. She looked at me in horror. Her eyes stared wildly.

Her lips, becoming purple, parted in desperate agony and fear; and, with upthrown hands and a cry that rang all the way down from destiny to death, she fell senseless to the floor.

She was my mother, and I loved her; but that unconscious glance of horror, that look of repulsion – blacker than night and deeper than hell – whence came it? The shadow of the tree had fallen upon her.

In what was I horrible? Was all repulsion centered in me, and did it blaze from my eyes, dribble from my fingertips and exude from the pores of my skin? The tree came from the meadow into the room. With outstretched arm it pointed to the door and said:

“You have frightened your mother; go!”

The cat leered at me as I slunk away, and the tiger’s head yawned with ineffable relief.

This mystery, this awful shadow, this impenetrable darkness, this enshrouding mist that enveloped me – whence came it? Whither would it lead me? Into what devious paths should I wander in its enfolding obscurity?

Science remained. Through the mist it beckoned dimly, beyond the darkness it faintly shone, above the shadow it loomed grim and immovable. Faith is the perverted longing for knowledge.

Learning is the cradle of despair. I would be rocked to sleep.

I knew a phrenologist who, like my father, was an able man. He did not know me – so much the better. I sought that man. It is a strange tale, my friends.

He was a professional phrenologist, and kept a shop where he examined heads for a moderate charge. He glanced at me only casually when I entered the room, because I was only a boy. (I have since learned that his principal business was the determination of occupations for those who already had chosen the course of their lives.) He was quite indifferent to me, but I am certain he was polite when he asked me to be seated.

I told him what I wanted. He laid his hands carelessly upon my head, but he had hardly done more than that when he sprang back and his face was livid with terror.

Here we were – we two – I a youth, he a man. It was not a large room. I was a strong lad. I walked to the door, locked it and put the key into my pocket.

There were only two of us – he and I. The blinding mist had come with me into the room, the shadow also was there and the darkness. I believe that through it all I saw the tall, lightning-blasted tree in the meadow. Only two of us and a mystery between us, the truth in his consciousness. I had strong arms. My fingers had a firm grasp and, no doubt, they could span the neck of an ordinary man. In my time I had squeezed the juice out of grapes and from the juice I had made wine and upon drinking the wine I had seen marvelous and enchanting visions that were sweeter than my hope of heaven.

I was calm about it at first, but I was bound to know what he knew – determined he should tell me what horrible thing my cranium revealed. I once had strangled a vicious dog – choked him till his tongue hung out and his eyes were ready to burst from their sockets, and then threw his carcass aside. I repeat that I was calm at first; but when he flatly refused to tell me, there came a strange kind of creeping into my arms – an intense accumulation of nervous force that clamored for exercise.

“Tell me!” I demanded, softly it is true, but the tone made him cower.

“I cannot,” he cried.

“Tell me!”.That creeping feeling in my arms was getting beyond control.

“Impossible!” he implored.

“It is too horrible!”

“Tell me!”

My hands had a peculiar way of opening and closing, and they felt desperate, hungry, empty.

“What do you wish to know?” asked the man, trying to put me off.

“I wish to know,” I answered, still calmly, “what vocation I am suited for.”

The creeping feeling in my arms was steadily assuming the more decided form of outreaching, and my fingers itched amazingly. He saw it.

“There is only one thing in life that you are fitted to be,” he finally said, “and it pains me infinitely to add that it is the only thing which Nature in her inscrutable wisdom has decided that you cannot avoid being.”

“And what is that?”

“A murderer!”

•   •   •   •   •

My friends, what is destiny? For one, honor; for another, a rope. I do not complain. I love and respect Nature too much to whimper at her decrees. A gaunt lightning-stripped tree in a meadow, the plaint of a whippoorwill in the twilight, a Maltese cat sodden with crime, a sweet face blanched with horror – these are the microscopes with which gentle Nature provides us. (My dear sir, you are pulling that strap too hard – it hurts.) I am not talking for mercy or pity. Behold in me the infinite faith of one who loves Nature and bows to her law. (Keep the cap a moment longer, and then you may put it on me.) She marked out my life; I followed her inclination.

Farewell; may you all be happy as I am now in having fulfilled the destiny under which I was born! (Will that knot slip easily? There – but don’t draw it too tight; my head won’t slip through!)

1887

THE PERMANENT STILETTO

I had sent in all haste for Dr. Rowell, but as yet he had not arrived, and the strain was terrible. There lay my young friend upon his bed in the hotel, and I believed that he was dying. Only the jeweled handle of the knife was visible at his breast; the blade was wholly sheathed in his body.

“Pull it out, old fellow,” begged the sufferer through white, drawn lips, his gasping voice being hardly less distressing than the unearthly look in his eyes.

“No, Arnold,” said I, as I held his hand and gently stroked his forehead. It may have been instinct, it may have been a certain knowledge of anatomy that made me refuse.

“Why not? It hurts,” he gasped. It was pitiful to see him suffer, this strong, healthy, daring, reckless young fellow.

Dr. Rowell walked in – a tall, grave man, with gray hair. He went to the bed and I pointed to the knife-handle, with its great, bold ruby in the end and its diamonds and emeralds alternating in quaint designs in the sides. The physician started. He felt Arnold’s pulse and looked puzzled.

“When was this done?” he asked.

“About twenty minutes ago,” I answered.

The physician started out, beckoning me to follow.

“Stop!” said Arnold. We obeyed. “Do you wish to speak of me?” he asked.

“Yes,” replied the physician, hesitating.

“Speak in my presence then,” said my friend; “I fear nothing.” It was said in his old, imperious way, although his suffering must have been great.

“If you insist—”

“I do.”

“Then,” said the physician, “if you have any matters to adjust they should be attended to at once. I can do nothing for you.”

“How long can I live?” asked Arnold.

The physician thoughtfully stroked his gray beard. “It depends,” he finally said; “if the knife be withdrawn you may live three minutes; if it be allowed to remain you may possibly live an hour or two – not longer.”

Arnold never flinched.

“Thank you,” he said, smiling faintly through his pain; “my friend here will pay you. I have some things to do. Let the knife remain.” He turned his eyes to mine, and, pressing my hand, said, affectionately, “And I thank you, too, old fellow, for not pulling it out.”

The physician, moved by a sense of delicacy, left the room, saying, “Ring if there is a change. I will be in the hotel office.” He had not gone far when he turned and came back. “Pardon me,” said he, “but there is a young surgeon in the hotel who is said to be a very skilful man. My specialty is not surgery, but medicine. May I call him?”

“Yes,” said I, eagerly; but Arnold smiled and shook his head. “I fear there will not be time,” he said. But I refused to heed him and directed that the surgeon be called immediately. I was writing at Arnold’s dictation when the two men entered the room.

There was something of nerve and assurance in the young surgeon that struck my attention. His manner, though quiet, was bold and straightforward and his movements sure and quick. This young man had already distinguished himself in the performance of some difficult hospital laparotomies, and he was at that sanguine age when ambition looks through the spectacles of experiment. Dr. Raoul Entrefort was the newcomer’s name. He was a Creole, small and dark, and he had traveled and studied in Europe.

“Speak freely,” gasped Arnold, after Dr. Entrefort had made an examination.

“What think you, doctor?” asked Entrefort of the older man.

“I think,” was the reply, “that the knife-blade has penetrated the ascending aorta, about two inches above the heart. So long as the blade remains in the wound the escape of blood is comparatively small, though certain; were the blade withdrawn the heart would almost instantly empty itself through the aortal wound.”

Meanwhile, Entrefort was deftly cutting away the white shirt and the undershirt, and soon had the breast exposed. He examined the gem-studded hilt with the keenest interest.

“You are proceeding on the assumption, doctor,” he said, “that this weapon is a knife.”

“Certainly,” answered Dr. Rowell, smiling; “what else can it be?”

“It is a knife,” faintly interposed Arnold.

“Did you see the blade?” Entrefort asked him, quickly.

“I did – for a moment.”

Entrefort shot a quick look at Dr. Rowell and whispered, “Then it is not suicide.” Dr. Rowell looked puzzled and said nothing.

“I must disagree with you, gentlemen,” quietly remarked Entrefort; “this is not a knife.” He examined the handle very narrowly. Not only was the blade entirely concealed from view within Arnold’s body, but the blow had been so strongly delivered that the skin was depressed by the guard. “The fact that it is not a knife presents a very curious series of facts and contingencies,” pursued Entrefort, with amazing coolness, “some of which are, so far as I am informed, entirely novel in the history of surgery.”

A quizzical expression, faintly amused and manifestly interested, was upon Dr. Rowell’s face. “What is the weapon, doctor?” he asked.

“A stiletto.”

Arnold started. Dr. Rowell appeared confused. “I must confess,” he said, “my ignorance of the differences among these penetrating weapons, whether dirks, daggers, stilettos, poniards, or bowie-knives.”

“With the exception of the stiletto,” explained Entrefort, “all the weapons you mention have one or two edges, so that in penetrating they cut their way. A stiletto is round, is ordinarily about half an inch or less in diameter at the guard, and tapers to a sharp point. It penetrates solely by pushing the tissues aside in all directions. You will understand the importance of that point.”

Dr. Rowell nodded, more deeply interested than ever.

“How do you know it is a stiletto, Dr. Entrefort?” I asked.

“The cutting of these stones is the work of Italian lapidaries,” he said, “and they were set in Genoa. Notice, too, the guard. It is much broader and shorter than the guard of an edged weapon; in fact, it is nearly round. This weapon is about four hundred years old, and would be cheap at twenty thousand florins. Observe, also, the darkening color of your friend’s breast in the immediate vicinity of the guard; this indicates that the tissues have been bruised by the crowding of the ‘blade,’ if I may use the term.”

“What has all this to do with me?” asked the dying man.

“Perhaps a great deal, perhaps nothing. It brings a single ray of hope into your desperate condition.”

Arnold’s eyes sparkled and he caught his breath. A tremor passed all through him, and I felt it in the hand I was holding. Life was sweet to him, then, after all – sweet to this wild dare-devil who had just faced death with such calmness! Dr. Rowell, though showing no sign of jealousy, could not conceal a look of incredulity.

“With your permission,” said Entrefort, addressing Arnold, “I will do what I can to save your life.”

“You may,” said the poor boy.

“But I shall have to hurt you.”

“Well.”

“Perhaps very much.”

“Well.”

“And even if I succeed (the chance is one in a thousand) you will never be a sound man, and a constant and terrible danger will always be present.”

“Well.”

Entrefort wrote a note and sent it away in haste by a bell-boy.

“Meanwhile,” he resumed, “your life is in imminent danger from shock, and the end may come in a few minutes or hours from that cause. Attend without delay to whatever matters may require settling, and Dr. Rowell,” glancing at that gentleman, “will give you something to brace you up. I speak frankly, for I see that you are a man of extraordinary nerve. Am I right?”

“Be perfectly candid,” said Arnold.

Dr. Rowell, evidently bewildered by his cyclonic young associate, wrote a prescription, which I sent by a boy to be filled. With unwise zeal I asked Entrefort—

“Is there not danger of lockjaw?”

“No,” he replied; “there is not a sufficiently extensive injury to peripheral nerves to induce traumatic tetanus.”

I subsided. Dr. Rowell’s medicine came and I administered a dose. The physician and the surgeon then retired. The poor sufferer straightened up his business. When it was done he asked me—

“What is that crazy Frenchman going to do to me?”

“I have no idea; be patient.”

In less than an hour they returned, bringing with them a keen-eyed, tall young man, who had a number of tools wrapped in an apron. Evidently he was unused to such scenes, for he became deathly pale upon seeing the ghastly spectacle on my bed. With staring eyes and open mouth he began to retreat towards the door, stammering—

“I – I can’t do it.”

“Nonsense, Hippolyte! Don’t be a baby. Why, man, it is a case of life and death!”

“But – look at his eyes! he is dying!”

Arnold smiled. “I am not dead, though,” he gasped.

“I – I beg your pardon,” said Hippolyte.

Dr. Entrefort gave the nervous man a drink of brandy and then said—

“No more nonsense, my boy; it must be done. Gentlemen, allow me to introduce Mr. Hippolyte, one of the most original, ingenious, and skilful machinists in the country.”

Hippolyte, being modest, blushed as he bowed. In order to conceal his confusion he unrolled his apron on the table with considerable noise of rattling tools.

“I have to make some preparations before you may begin, Hippolyte, and I want you to observe me that you may become used not only to the sight of fresh blood, but also, what is more trying, the odor of it.”

Hippolyte shivered. Entrefort opened a case of surgical instruments.

“Now, doctor, the chloroform,” he said, to Dr. Rowell.

“I will not take it,” promptly interposed the sufferer; “I want to know when I die.”

“Very well,” said Entrefort; “but you have little nerve now to spare. We may try it without chloroform, however. It will be better if you can do without. Try your best to lie still while I cut.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Arnold.

“Save your life, if possible.”

“How? Tell me all about it.”

“Must you know?”

“Yes.”

“Very well, then. The point of the stiletto has passed entirely through the aorta, which is the great vessel rising out of the heart and carrying the aerated blood to the arteries. If I should withdraw the weapon the blood would rush from the two holes in the aorta and you would soon be dead. If the weapon had been a knife, the parted tissue would have yielded, and the blood would have been forced out on either side of the blade and would have caused death. As it is, not a drop of blood has escaped from the aorta into the thoracic cavity. All that is left for us to do, then, is to allow the stiletto to remain permanently in the aorta. Many difficulties at once present themselves, and I do not wonder at Dr. Rowell’s look of surprise and incredulity.”

That gentleman smiled and shook his head.

“It is a desperate chance,” continued Entrefort, “and is a novel case in surgery; but it is the only chance. The fact that the weapon is a stiletto is the important point – a stupid weapon, but a blessing to us now. If the assassin had known more she would have used—”

Upon his employment of the noun “assassin” and the feminine pronoun “she,” both Arnold and I started violently, and I cried out to the man to stop.

“Let him proceed,” said Arnold, who, by a remarkable effort, had calmed himself.

“Not if the subject is painful,” Entrefort said.

“It is not,” protested Arnold; “why do you think the blow was struck by a woman?”

“Because, first, no man capable of being an assassin would use so gaudy and valuable a weapon; second, no man would be so stupid as to carry so antiquated and inadequate a thing as a stiletto, when that most murderous and satisfactory of all penetrating and cutting weapons, the bowie-knife, is available. She was a strong woman, too, for it requires a good hand to drive a stiletto to the guard, even though it miss the sternum by a hair’s breadth and slip between the ribs, for the muscles here are hard and the intercostal spaces narrow. She was not only a strong woman, but a desperate one also.”

“That will do,” said Arnold. He beckoned me to bend closer. “You must watch this man; he is too sharp; he is dangerous.”

“Then,” resumed Entrefort, “I shall tell you what I intend to do. There will undoubtedly be inflammation of the aorta, which, if it persist, will cause a fatal aneurism by a breaking down of the aortal walls; but we hope, with the help of your youth and health, to check it.

“Another serious difficulty is this: With every inhalation, the entire thorax (or bony structure of the chest) considerably expands. The aorta remains stationary. You will see, therefore, that as your aorta and your breast are now held in rigid relation to each other by the stiletto, the chest, with every inhalation, pulls the aorta forward out of place about half an inch. I am certain that it is doing this, because there is no indication of an escape of arterial blood into the thoracic cavity; in other words, the mouths of the two aortal wounds have seized upon the blade with a firm hold and thus prevent it from slipping in and out. This is a very fortunate occurrence, but one which will cause pain for some time. The aorta, you may understand, being made by the stiletto to move with the breathing, pulls the heart backward and forward with every breath you take; but that organ, though now undoubtedly much surprised, will accustom itself to its new condition.

“What I fear most, however, is the formation of a clot around the blade. You see, the presence of the blade in the aorta has already reduced the blood-carrying capacity of that vessel; a clot, therefore, need not be very large to stop up the aorta, and, of course, if that should occur death would ensue. But the clot, if one form, may be dislodged and driven forward, in which event it may lodge in any one of the numerous branches from the aorta and produce results more or less serious, possibly fatal. If, for instance, it should choke either the right or the left carotid, there would ensue atrophy of one side of the brain, and consequently paralysis of half the entire body; but it is possible that in time there would come about a secondary circulation from the other side of the brain, and thus restore a healthy condition. Or the clot (which, in passing always from larger arteries to smaller, must unavoidably find one not sufficiently large to carry it, and must lodge somewhere) may either necessitate amputation of one of the four limbs or lodge itself so deep within the body that it cannot be reached with the knife. You are beginning to realize some of the dangers which await you.”

Arnold smiled faintly.

“But we shall do our best to prevent the formation of a clot,” continued Entrefort; “there are drugs which may be used with effect.”

“Are there more dangers?”

“Many more; some of the more serious have not been mentioned. One of these is the probability of the aortal tissues pressing upon the weapon relaxing their hold and allowing the blade to slip. That would let out the blood and cause death. I am uncertain whether the hold is now maintained by the pressure of the tissues or the adhesive quality of the serum which was set free by the puncture. I am convinced, though, that in either event the hold is easily broken and that it may give way at any moment, for it is under several kinds of strains. Every time the heart contracts and crowds the blood into the aorta, the latter expands a little, and then contracts when the pressure is removed. Any unusual exercise or excitement produces stronger and quicker heartbeats, and increases the strain on the adhesion of the aorta to the weapon. A fright, fall, a jump, a blow on the chest – any of these might so jar the heart and aorta as to break the hold.”

Entrefort stopped.

“Is that all?” asked Arnold.

“No; but is not that enough?”

“More than enough,” said Arnold, with a sudden and dangerous sparkle in his eyes. Before any of us could think, the desperate fellow had seized the handle of the stiletto with both hands in a determined effort to withdraw it and die. I had had no time to order my faculties to the movement of a muscle, when Entrefort, with incredible alertness and swiftness, had Arnold’s wrists. Slowly Arnold relaxed his hold.

“There, now!” said Entrefort, soothingly; “that was a careless act and might have broken the adhesion! You’ll have to be careful.”

Arnold looked at him with a curious combination of expressions.

“Dr. Entrefort,” he quietly remarked, “you are the devil.”

Bowing profoundly, Entrefort replied: “You do me too great honor;” then he whispered to his patient: “If you do that” – with a motion towards the hilt – “I will have her hanged for murder.”

Arnold started and choked, and a look of horror overspread his face. He withdrew his hands, took one of mine in both of his, threw his arms upon the pillow above his head, and, holding my hand, firmly said to Entrefort—

“Proceed with your work.”

“Come closer, Hippolyte,” said Entrefort, “and observe narrowly. Will you kindly assist me, Dr. Rowell?” That gentleman had sat in wondering silence.

Entrefort’s hand was quick and sure, and he used the knife with marvellous dexterity. First he made four equidistant incisions outward from the guard and just through the skin. Arnold held his breath and ground his teeth at the first cut, but soon regained command of himself. Each incision was about two inches long. Hippolyte shuddered and turned his head aside. Entrefort, whom nothing escaped, exclaimed—

“Steady, Hippolyte! Observe!”

Quickly was the skin peeled back to the limit of the incisions. This must have been excruciatingly painful. Arnold groaned, and his hands were moist and cold. Down sank the knife into the flesh from which the skin had been raised, and blood flowed freely; Dr. Rowell handled the sponge. The keen knife worked rapidly. Arnold’s marvellous nerve was breaking down. He clutched my hand fiercely; his eyes danced; his mind was weakening. Almost in a moment the flesh had been cut away to the bones, which were now exposed – two ribs and the sternum. A few quick cuts cleared the weapon between the guard and the ribs.

“To work, Hippolyte – be quick!”

The machinist had evidently been coached before he came. With slender, long-fingered hands, which trembled at first, he selected certain tools with nice precision, made some rapid measurements of the weapon and of the cleared space around it, and began to adjust the parts of a queer little machine. Arnold watched him curiously.

“What—” he began to say; but he ceased; a deeper pallor set on his face, his hands relaxed, and his eyelids fell.

“Thank God!” exclaimed Entrefort; “he has fainted – he can’t stop us now. Quick, Hippolyte!”

The machinist attached the queer little machine to the handle of the weapon, seized the stiletto in his left hand, and with his right began a series of sharp, rapid movements backward and forward.

“Hurry, Hippolyte!” urged Entrefort.

“The metal is very hard.”

“Is it cutting?”

“I can’t see for the blood.”

In another moment something snapped. Hippolyte started; he was very nervous. He removed the little machine.

“The metal is very hard,” he said; “it breaks the saws.”

He adjusted another tiny saw and resumed work. After a little while he picked up the handle of the stiletto and laid it on the table. He had cut it off, leaving the blade inside Arnold’s body.

“Good, Hippolyte!” exclaimed Entrefort. In a minute he had closed the bright end of the blade from view by drawing together the skin-flaps and sewing them firmly.

Arnold returned to consciousness and glanced down at his breast. He seemed puzzled. “Where is the weapon?” he asked.

“Here is part of it,” answered Entrefort, holding up the handle.

“And the blade—”

“That is an irremovable part of your internal machinery.” Arnold was silent. “It had to be cut off,” pursued Entrefort, “not only because it would be troublesome and an undesirable ornament, but also because it was advisable to remove every possibility of its withdrawal.” Arnold said nothing. “Here is a prescription,” said Entrefort; “take the medicine as directed for the next five years without fail.”

“What for? I see that it contains muriatic acid.”

“If necessary I will explain five years from now.”

“If I live.”

“If you live.”

Arnold drew me down to him and whispered, “Tell her to fly at once; this man may make trouble for her.”

Was there ever a more generous fellow?

•   •   •   •   •

I thought that I recognized a thin, pale, bright face among the passengers who were leaving an Australian steamer which had just arrived at San Francisco.

“Dr. Entrefort!” I cried.

“Ah!” he said, peering up into my face and grasping my hand; “I know you now, but you have changed. You remember that I was called away immediately after I had performed that crazy operation on your friend. I have spent the intervening four years in India, China, Tibet, Siberia, the South Seas, and God knows where not. But wasn’t that a most absurd, hare-brained experiment that I tried on your friend! Still, it was all that could have been done. I have dropped all that nonsense long ago. It is better, for more reasons than one, to let them die at once. Poor fellow! he bore it so bravely! Did he suffer much afterwards? How long did he live? A week – perhaps a month?”

“He is alive yet.”

“What!” exclaimed Entrefort, startled.

“He is, indeed, and is in this city.”

“Incredible!”

“It is true; you shall see him.”

“But tell me about him now!” cried the surgeon, his eager eyes glittering with the peculiar light which I had seen in them on the night of the operation. “Has he regularly taken the medicine which I prescribed?”

“He has. Well, the change in him, from what he was before the operation, is shocking. Imagine a young dare-devil of twenty-two, who had no greater fear of danger or death than of a cold, now a cringing, cowering fellow; apparently an old man, nursing his life with pitiful tenderness, fearful that at any moment something may happen to break the hold of his aorta-walls on the stiletto-blade; a confirmed hypochondriac, peevish, melancholic, unhappy in the extreme. He keeps himself confined as closely as possible, avoiding all excitement and exercise, and even reads nothing exciting. The constant danger has worn out the last shred of his manhood and left him a pitiful wreck. Can nothing be done for him?”

“Possibly. But has he consulted no physician?”

“None whatever; he has been afraid that he might learn the worst.”

“Let us find him at once. Ah, here comes my wife to meet me! She arrived by the other steamer.”

I recognized her immediately and was overcome with astonishment.

“Charming woman,” said Entrefort; “you’ll like her. We were married three years ago at Bombay. She belongs to a noble Italian family and has travelled a great deal.”

He introduced us. To my unspeakable relief she remembered neither my name nor my face. I must have appeared odd to her, but it was impossible for me to be perfectly unconcerned. We went to Arnold’s rooms, I with much dread. I left her in the reception-room and took Entrefort within. Arnold was too greatly absorbed in his own troubles to be dangerously excited by meeting Entrefort, whom he greeted with indifferent hospitality.

“But I heard a woman’s voice,” he said. “It sounds—” He checked himself, and before I could intercept him he had gone to the reception-room; and there he stood face to face with the beautiful adventuress – none other than Entrefort’s wife now – who, wickedly desperate, had driven a stiletto into Arnold’s vitals in a hotel four years before because he had refused to marry her. They recognized each other instantly and both grew pale; but she, quicker witted, recovered her composure at once and advanced towards him with a smile and an extended hand. He stepped back, his face ghastly with fear.

“Oh!” he gasped, “the excitement, the shock – it has made the blade slip out! The blood is pouring from the opening – it burns – I am dying!” and he fell into my arms and instantly expired.

The autopsy revealed the surprising fact that there was no blade in his thorax at all; it had been gradually consumed by the muriatic acid which Entrefort had prescribed for that very purpose, and the perforations in the aorta had closed up gradually with the wasting of the blade and had been perfectly healed for a long time. All his vital organs were sound. My poor friend, once so reckless and brave, had died simply of a childish and groundless fear, and the woman unwittingly had accomplished her revenge.

aka “A Peculiar Case of Surgery”

“The Argonaut” Feb 4 1889

The Ape, The Idiot, & Other People (1897)

HIS UNCONQUERABLE ENEMY

I was summoned from Calcutta to the heart of India to perform a difficult surgical operation on one of the women of a great rajah’s household. I found the rajah a man of a noble character, but possessed, as I afterwards discovered, of a sense of cruelty purely Oriental and in contrast to the indolence of his disposition. He was so grateful for the success that attended my mission that he urged me to remain a guest at the palace as long as it might please me to stay, and I thankfully accepted the invitation.

One of the male servants early attracted my notice for his marvellous capacity of malice. His name was Neranya, and I am certain that there must have been a large proportion of Malay blood in his veins, for, unlike the Indians (from whom he differed also in complexion), he was extremely alert, active, nervous, and sensitive. A redeeming circumstance was his love for his master. Once his violent temper led him to the commission of an atrocious crime – the fatal stabbing of a dwarf. In punishment for this the rajah ordered that Neranya’s right arm (the offending one) be severed from his body. The sentence was executed in a bungling fashion by a stupid fellow armed with an axe, and I, being a surgeon, was compelled, in order to save Neranya’s life, to perform an amputation of the stump, leaving not a vestige of the limb remaining.

After this he developed an augmented fiendishness. His love for the rajah was changed to hate, and in his mad anger he flung discretion to the winds. Driven once to frenzy by the rajah’s scornful treatment, he sprang upon the rajah with a knife, but, fortunately, was seized and disarmed. To his unspeakable dismay the rajah sentenced him for this offense to suffer amputation of the remaining arm. It was done as in the former instance. This had the effect of putting a temporary curb on Neranya’s spirit, or, rather, of changing the outward manifestations of his diabolism. Being armless, he was at first largely at the mercy of those who ministered to his needs – a duty which I undertook to see was properly discharged, for I felt an interest in this strangely distorted nature. His sense of helplessness, combined with a damnable scheme for revenge which he had secretly formed, caused Neranya to change his fierce, impetuous, and unruly conduct into a smooth, quiet, insinuating bearing, which he carried so artfully as to deceive those with whom he was brought in contact, including the rajah himself.

Neranya, being exceedingly quick, intelligent, and dexterous, and having an unconquerable will, turned his attention to the cultivating of an enlarged usefulness of his legs, feet, and toes, with so excellent effect that in time he was able to perform wonderful feats with those members. Thus his capability, especially for destructive mischief, was considerably restored.

One morning the rajah’s only son, a young man of an uncommonly amiable and noble disposition, was found dead in bed. His murder was a most atrocious one, his body being mutilated in a shocking manner, but in my eyes the most significant of all the mutilations was the entire removal and disappearance of the young prince’s arms.

The death of the young man nearly brought the rajah to the grave. It was not, therefore, until I had nursed him back to health that I began a systematic inquiry into the murder. I said nothing of my own discoveries and conclusions until after the rajah and his officers had failed and my work had been done; then I submitted to him a written report, making a close analysis of all the circumstances and closing by charging the crime to Neranya. The rajah, convinced by my proof and argument, at once ordered Neranya to be put to death, this to be accomplished slowly and with frightful tortures. The sentence was so cruel and revolting that it filled me with horror, and I implored that the wretch be shot. Finally, through a sense of gratitude to me, the rajah relaxed. When Neranya was charged with the crime he denied it, of course, but, seeing that the rajah was convinced, he threw aside all restraint, and, dancing, laughing, and shrieking in the most horrible manner, confessed his guilt, gloated over it, and reviled the rajah to his teeth – this, knowing that some fearful death awaited him.

The rajah decided upon the details of the matter that night, and in the morning he informed me of his decision. It was that Neranya’s life should be spared, but that both of his legs should be broken with hammers, and that then I should amputate the limbs at the trunk! Appended to this horrible sentence was a provision that the maimed wretch should be kept and tortured at regular intervals by such means as afterwards might be devised.

Sickened to the heart by the awful duty set out for me, I nevertheless performed it with success, and I care to say nothing more about that part of the tragedy. Neranya escaped death very narrowly and was a long time in recovering his wonted vitality. During all these weeks the rajah neither saw him nor made inquiries concerning him, but when, as in duty bound, I made official report that the man had recovered his strength, the rajah’s eyes brightened, and he emerged with deadly activity from the stupor into which he so long had been plunged.

The rajah’s palace was a noble structure, but it is necessary here to describe only the grand hall. It was an immense chamber, with a floor of polished, inlaid stone and a lofty, arched ceiling. A soft light stole into it through stained glass set in the roof and in high windows on one side. In the middle of the room was a rich fountain, which threw up a tall, slender column of water, with smaller and shorter jets grouped around it. Across one end of the hall, halfway to the ceiling, was a balcony, which communicated with the upper story of a wing, and from which a flight of stone stairs descended to the floor of the hall. During the hot summers this room was delightfully cool; it was the rajah’s favorite lounging-place, and when the nights were hot he had his cot taken thither, and there he slept.

This hall was chosen for Neranya’s permanent prison; here was he to stay so long as he might live, with never a glimpse of the shining world or the glorious heavens. To one of his nervous, discontented nature such confinement was worse than death. At the rajah’s order there was constructed for him a small pen of open ironwork, circular, and about four feet in diameter, elevated on four slender iron posts, ten feet above the floor, and placed between the balcony and the fountain. Such was Neranya’s prison. The pen was about four feet in depth, and the pen-top was left open for the convenience of the servants whose duty it should be to care for him. These precautions for his safe confinement were taken at my suggestion, for, although the man was now deprived of all four of his limbs, I still feared that he might develop some extraordinary, unheard-of power for mischief. It was provided that the attendants should reach his cage by means of a movable ladder.

All these arrangements having been made and Neranya hoisted into his cage, the rajah emerged upon the balcony to see him for the first time since the last amputation. Neranya had been lying panting and helpless on the floor of his cage, but when his quick ear caught the sound of the rajah’s footfall he squirmed about until he had brought the back of his head against the railing, elevating his eyes above his chest, and enabling him to peer through the open-work of the cage. Thus the two deadly enemies faced each other. The rajah’s stern face paled at sight of the hideous, shapeless thing which met his gaze; but he soon recovered, and the old hard, cruel, sinister look returned. Neranya’s black hair and beard had grown long, and they added to the natural ferocity of his aspect. His eyes blazed upon the rajah with a terrible light, his lips parted, and he gasped for breath; his face was ashen with rage and despair, and his thin, distended nostrils quivered.

The rajah folded his arms and gazed down from the balcony upon the frightful wreck that he had made. Oh, the dreadful pathos of that picture; the inhumanity of it; the deep and dismal tragedy of it! Who might look into the wild, despairing heart of the prisoner and see and understand the frightful turmoil there; the surging, choking passion; unbridled but impotent ferocity; frantic thirst for a vengeance that should be deeper than hell! Neranya gazed, his shapeless body heaving, his eyes aflame; and then, in a strong, clear voice, which rang throughout the great hall, with rapid speech he hurled at the rajah the most insulting defiance, the most awful curses. He cursed the womb that had conceived him, the food that should nourish him, the wealth that had brought him power; cursed him in the name of Buddha and all the wise men; cursed by the sun, the moon, and the stars; by the continents, mountains, oceans, and rivers; by all things living; cursed his head, his heart, his entrails; cursed in a whirlwind of unmentionable words; heaped unimaginable insults and contumely upon him; called him a knave, a beast, a fool, a liar, an infamous and unspeakable coward.

The rajah heard it all calmly, without the movement of a muscle, without the slightest change of countenance; and when the poor wretch had exhausted his strength and fallen helpless and silent to the floor, the rajah, with a grim, cold smile, turned and strode away.

The days passed. The rajah, not deterred by Neranya’s curses often heaped upon him, spent even more time than formerly in the great hall, and slept there oftener at night; and finally Neranya wearied of cursing and defying him, and fell into a sullen silence. The man was a study for me, and I observed every change in his fleeting moods. Generally his condition was that of miserable despair, which he attempted bravely to conceal. Even the boon of suicide had been denied him, for when he would wriggle into an erect position the rail of his pen was a foot above his head, so that he could not clamber over and break his skull on the stone floor beneath; and when he had tried to starve himself the attendants forced food down his throat; so that he abandoned such attempts. At times his eyes would blaze and his breath would come in gasps, for imaginary vengeance was working within him; but steadily he became quieter and more tractable, and was pleasant and responsive when I would converse with him. Whatever might have been the tortures which the rajah had decided on, none as yet had been ordered; and although Neranya knew that they were in contemplation, he never referred to them or complained of his lot.

The awful climax of this situation was reached one night, and even after this lapse of years I cannot approach its description without a shudder.

It was a hot night, and the rajah had gone to sleep in the great hall, lying on a high cot placed on the main floor just underneath the edge of the balcony. I had been unable to sleep in my own apartment, and so I had stolen into the great hall through the heavily curtained entrance at the end farthest from the balcony. As I entered I heard a peculiar, soft sound above the patter of the fountain. Neranya’s cage was partly concealed from my view by the spraying water, but I suspected that the unusual sound came from him. Stealing a little to one side, and crouching against the dark hangings of the wall, I could see him in the faint light which dimly illuminated the hall, and then I discovered that my surmise was correct – Neranya was quietly at work. Curious to learn more, and knowing that only mischief could have been inspiring him, I sank into a thick robe on the floor and watched him.

To my great astonishment Neranya was tearing off with his teeth the bag which served as his outer garment. He did it cautiously, casting sharp glances frequently at the rajah, who, sleeping soundly on his cot below, breathed heavily. After starting a strip with his teeth, Neranya, by the same means, would attach it to the railing of his cage and then wriggle away, much after the manner of a caterpillar’s crawling, and this would cause the strip to be torn out the full length of his garment. He repeated this operation with incredible patience and skill until his entire garment had been torn into strips. Two or three of these he tied end to end with his teeth, lips, and tongue, tightening the knots by placing one end of the strip under his body and drawing the other taut with his teeth. In this way he made a line several feet long, one end of which he made fast to the rail with his mouth. It then began to dawn upon me that he was going to make an insane attempt – impossible of achievement without hands, feet, arms, or legs – to escape from his cage! For what purpose? The rajah was asleep in the hall – ah! I caught my breath. Oh, the desperate, insane thirst for revenge which could have unhinged so clear and firm a mind! Even though he should accomplish the impossible feat of climbing over the railing of his cage that he might fall to the floor below (for how could he slide down the rope?), he would be in all probability killed or stunned; and even if he should escape these dangers it would be impossible for him to clamber upon the cot without rousing the rajah, and impossible even though the rajah were dead! Amazed at the man’s daring, and convinced that his sufferings and brooding had destroyed his reason, nevertheless I watched him with breathless interest.

With other strips tied together he made a short swing across one side of his cage. He caught the long line in his teeth at a point not far from the rail; then, wriggling with great effort to an upright position, his back braced against the rail, he put his chin over the swing and worked toward one end. He tightened the grasp of his chin on the swing, and with tremendous exertion, working the lower end of his spine against the railing, he began gradually to ascend the side of his cage. The labor was so great that he was compelled to pause at intervals, and his breathing was hard and painful; and even while thus resting he was in a position of terrible strain, and his pushing against the swing caused it to press hard against his windpipe and nearly strangle him.

After amazing effort he had elevated the lower end of his body until it protruded above the railing, the top of which was now across the lower end of his abdomen. Gradually he worked his body over, going backward, until there was sufficient excess of weight on the outer side of the rail; and then, with a quick lurch, he raised his head and shoulders and swung into a horizontal position on top of the rail. Of course, he would have fallen to the floor below had it not been for the line which he held in his teeth. With so great nicety had he estimated the distance between his mouth and the point where the rope was fastened to the rail, that the line tightened and checked him just as he reached the horizontal position on the rail. If one had told me beforehand that such a feat as I had just seen this man accomplish was possible, I should have thought him a fool.

Neranya was now balanced on his stomach across the top of the rail, and he eased his position by bending his spine and hanging down on either side as much as possible. Having rested thus for some minutes, he began cautiously to slide off backward, slowly paying out the line through his teeth, finding almost a fatal difficulty in passing the knots. Now, it is quite possible that the line would have escaped altogether from his teeth laterally when he would slightly relax his hold to let it slip, had it not been for a very ingenious plan to which he had resorted. This consisted in his having made a turn of the line around his neck before he attacked the swing, thus securing a threefold control of the line – one by his teeth, another by friction against his neck, and a third by his ability to compress it between his cheek and shoulder. It was quite evident now that the minutest details of a most elaborate plan had been carefully worked out by him before beginning the task, and that possibly weeks of difficult theoretical study had been consumed in the mental preparation. As I observed him I was reminded of certain hitherto unaccountable things which he had been doing for some weeks past – going through certain hitherto inexplicable motions, undoubtedly for the purpose of training his muscles for the immeasurably arduous labor which he was now performing.

A stupendous and seemingly impossible part of his task had been accomplished. Could he reach the floor in safety? Gradually he worked himself backward over the rail, in imminent danger of falling; but his nerve never wavered, and I could see a wonderful light in his eyes. With something of a lurch, his body fell against the outer side of the railing, to which he was hanging by his chin, the line still held firmly in his teeth. Slowly he slipped his chin from the rail, and then hung suspended by the line in his teeth. By almost imperceptible degrees, with infinite caution, he descended the line, and, finally, his unwieldy body rolled upon the floor, safe and unhurt!

What miracle would this superhuman monster next accomplish? I was quick and strong, and was ready and able to intercept any dangerous act; but not until danger appeared would I interfere with this extraordinary scene.

I must confess to astonishment upon having observed that Neranya, instead of proceeding directly toward the sleeping rajah, took quite another direction. Then it was only escape, after all, that the wretch contemplated, and not the murder of the rajah. But how could he escape? The only possible way to reach the outer air without great risk was by ascending the stairs to the balcony and leaving by the corridor which opened upon it, and thus fall into the hands of some British soldiers quartered thereabout, who might conceive the idea of hiding him; but surely it was impossible for Neranya to ascend that long flight of stairs! Nevertheless, he made directly for them, his method of progression this: He lay upon his back, with the lower end of his body toward the stairs; then bowed his spine upward, thus drawing his head and shoulders a little forward; straightened, and then pushed the lower end of his body forward a space equal to that through which he had drawn his head; repeating this again and again, each time, while bending his spine, preventing his head from slipping by pressing it against the floor. His progress was laborious and slow, but sensible; and, finally, he arrived at the foot of the stairs.

It was manifest that his insane purpose was to ascend them. The desire for freedom must have been strong within him! Wriggling to an upright position against the newel-post, he looked up at the great height which he had to climb and sighed; but there was no dimming of the light in his eyes. How could he accomplish the impossible task?

His solution of the problem was very simple, though daring and perilous as all the rest. While leaning against the newel-post he let himself fall diagonally upon the bottom step, where he lay partly hanging over, but safe, on his side. Turning upon his back, he wriggled forward along the step to the rail and raised himself to an upright position against it as he had against the newel-post, fell as before, and landed on the second step. In this manner, with inconceivable labor, he accomplished the ascent of the entire flight of stairs.

It being apparent to me that the rajah was not the object of Neranya’s movements, the anxiety which I had felt on that account was now entirely dissipated. The things which already he had accomplished were entirely beyond the nimblest imagination. The sympathy which I had always felt for the wretched man was now greatly quickened; and as infinitesimally small as I knew his chances for escape to be, I nevertheless hoped that he would succeed. Any assistance from me, however, was out of the question; and it never should be known that I had witnessed the escape.

Neranya was now upon the balcony, and I could dimly see him wriggling along toward the door which led out upon the balcony. Finally he stopped and wriggled to an upright position against the rail, which had wide openings between the balusters. His back was toward me, but he slowly turned and faced me and the hall. At that great distance I could not distinguish his features, but the slowness with which he had worked, even before he had fully accomplished the ascent of the stairs, was evidence all too eloquent of his extreme exhaustion. Nothing but a most desperate resolution could have sustained him thus far, but he had drawn upon the last remnant of his strength. He looked around the hall with a sweeping glance, and then down upon the rajah, who was sleeping immediately beneath him, over twenty feet below. He looked long and earnestly, sinking lower, and lower, and lower upon the rail. Suddenly, to my inconceivable astonishment and dismay, he toppled through and shot downward from his lofty height! I held my breath, expecting to see him crushed upon the stone floor beneath; but instead of that he fell full upon the rajah’s breast, driving him through the cot to the floor. I sprang forward with a loud cry for help, and was instantly at the scene of the catastrophe. With indescribable horror I saw that Neranya’s teeth were buried in the rajah’s throat! I tore the wretch away, but the blood was pouring from the rajah’s arteries, his chest was crushed in, and he was gasping in the agony of death. People came running in, terrified. I turned to Neranya. He lay upon his back, his face hideously smeared with blood. Murder, and not escape, had been his intentions from the beginning; and he had employed the only method by which there was ever a possibility of accomplishing it. I knelt beside him, and saw that he too was dying; his back had been broken by the fall. He smiled sweetly into my face, and a triumphant look of accomplished revenge sat upon his face even in death.

aka “The Rajah’s Nemesis”

“The Argonaut” Mar 11 1889

The Ape, The Idiot, & Other People (1897)

A STORY TOLD BY THE SEA

One night, when the storm had come up from the south, apparently for the sole purpose of renewing war with its old enemy, the Peninsula of Monterey, I left the ancient town, crossed the neck of the peninsula, and descended on the other side of the Santa Lucia slope to see the mighty battle on Carmel Bay. The tearing wind, which, charged with needles of rain, assailed me sharply, did nobler work with the ocean and the cypresses, sending the one upon a riotous course and rending the other with groans. I arrived upon a cliff just beyond a pebbly beach, and with bared head and my waistcoat open, stood facing the ocean and the storm. It was not a cold night, though a winter storm was at large; but it was a night of blind agonies and struggles, in which a mad wind lashed the sea and a maddened sea assailed the shore, while a flying rain and a drenching spray dimmed the sombre colors of the scene. It was a night for the sea to talk in its travail and yield up some of its mysteries.

I left the cliff and went a little distance to the neighborhood of a Chinese fishing-station, where there was a sand-beach; and here, after throwing off my coat and waistcoat, I went down to have a closer touch with my treacherous friend. The surf sprang at me, and the waves, retreating gently, beckoned me to further ventures, which I made with a knowledge of my ground, but with a love of this sweet danger also. A strong breaker lifted me from my footing, but I outwitted it and pursued it in retreat; there came another afterwards, and it was armed, for, towering above me, it came down upon me with a bludgeon, which fell heavily upon me. I seized it, but there my command upon my powers ceased; and the wave, returning, bore me out. A blindness, a vague sense of suffocation, an uncertain effort of instinct to regain my hold upon the ground, a flight through the air, a soft fall upon the sand – it was thus that I was saved; and I still held in my hand the weapon with which my old friend had dealt me the blow.

It was a bottle. Afterwards, in my room at Monterey, I broke it and found within it a writing of uncommon interest. After weeks of study and deciphering (for age and imperfect execution made the task serious and the result uncertain), I put together such fragments of it as had the semblance of coherence; and I found that the sea in its travail had yielded up one of its strangest mysteries. No hope of a profitable answer to this earnest cry for help prompts its publication; it is brought forth rather to show a novel and fearful form of human suffering, and also to give knowledge possibly to some who, if they be yet alive, would rather know the worst than nothing. The following is what my labor has accomplished:

I am Amasa D. Keating, an unhappy wretch, who, with many others, am suffering an extraordinary kind of torture; and so great is the mental disturbance which I suffer, that I fear I shall not be able to make an intelligent report. I am but just from a scene of inconceivable terrors, and, although I am a man of some education and usually equal to the task of intelligent expression, I am now in a condition of violent mental disturbance, and of great physical suffering as well, which I fear will prove a hindrance to the understanding of him who may find this report. At the outset, I most earnestly beg such one to use the swiftest diligence in publishing the matter of this writing, to the end that haply an expedition for our relief may be outfitted without delay; for, if the present state of affairs continue much longer with those whom I have left behind, any measure taken for their relief will be useless. As for myself and my companion, we expect nothing but death.

I will hasten to the material part of my narrative, with the relation only of so much of the beginning as may serve for our identification.

On the 14th of October, 1852, we sailed from Boston in the brig “Hopewell,” Captain Campbell, bound for the islands of the South Pacific Ocean. We carried a cargo of general merchandise, with the purpose of trading with the natives; but we desired also to find some suitable island which we might take possession of in the name of the United States and settle upon for our permanent home. With this end in view, we had formed a company and bought the brig, so that it might remain our property and be used as a means of communication between us and the civilized world. These facts and many others are so familiar to our friends in Boston, that I deem it wholly unnecessary to set them forth in fuller detail. The names of all our passengers and crew stand upon record in Boston, and are not needed to be written here for ampler identification.

No ill-fortune assailed us until we arrived in the neighborhood of the Falkland Islands. Cape Horn wore its ugliest aspect (for the brig was a slow sailer, and the Antarctic summer was well gone before we had encountered bad weather) – an unusual thing, Captain Campbell assured us; from that time forward we had a series of misfortunes, which ended finally, after two or three months, in a fearful gale, which not only cost some of the crew their lives, but dismasted our vessel. The storm continued, and, the brig being wholly at the mercy of the wind and the sea, we saw that she must founder. We therefore took to the boats with what provisions and other necessary things we could stow away. With no land in sight, and in the midst of a boiling sea, which appeared every moment to be on the eve of swamping us, we bent to our oars and headed for the northwest. It is hardly necessary to say that we had lost our reckoning; but, after a manner, we made out that we were nearly in longitude 136.30 west, and about upon the Tropic of Capricorn. This would have made our situation about a hundred and seventy miles from a number of small islands lying to the eastward of the one hundred and fortieth meridian. The prospect was discouraging, as there was hardly a sound person in the boats to pull an oar, so badly had the weather used us; and besides that, the ship’s instruments had been lost and our provisions were badly damaged.

Nevertheless, we made some headway. The poor abandoned brig, seemingly conscious of our desertion, behaved in a very singular fashion; urged doubtless by the wind, she pursued us with pathetic struggles – now beam on, again stern foremost, and still again plunging forward with her nose under the water. Her pitching and lurching were straining her heavily, and, with her hold full of water, she evidently could live but a few minutes longer. Meanwhile, it was no small matter for us to keep clear of her, for whether we would pull to this side or that she followed us, and sometimes we were in danger. There came an end, however, for the brig, now heavily water-logged, rose majestically on a great wave and came down side on into the trough; she made a brave struggle to right herself, but in another moment she went over upon her beam, settled, steadied herself a moment, and then sank straight down like a mass of lead. This brought upon us a peculiar sense of desolation; for, so far as we knew (and Captain Campbell had sailed these seas before), there was hardly a chance of our gaining land alive.

Much to our surprise, we had not rowed more than twenty knots when (it being about midnight) a fire was sighted off our port bow – that is to say, due west. This gave us so great courage that we rowed heartily towards it, and at three in the morning, to our unspeakable happiness, we dragged our boats upon a beautiful sand-beach. So exhausted were we that with small loss of time we made ourselves comfortable and soon were sound asleep upon firm ground.

The next sun had done more than half its work before any of us were awake. Excepting some birds of lively plumage, there was not a living thing in sight; but no sooner had we begun to stir about than a number of fine brown men approached us simultaneously from different directions. A belt was around their waists, and from it hung a short garment, made of bark woven into a coarse fabric; and also hanging from the belt was a heavy sword of metal. Undoubtedly the men were savages; but there was a dignity in their manner which set them wholly apart from the known inhabitants of these South Sea Islands. Our captain, who understood many of the languages and dialects of the sub-tropical islanders, found himself at fault in attempting verbal intercourse with these visitors, but it was not long before we found them exceedingly apt in understanding signs. They showed much commiseration for us, and with manifestations of friendship invited us to follow them and test their hospitality. This we were not slow in doing.

The island – we were made to know on the way – was a journey of ten hours long and seven wide, and our eyes gave us proof of its wonderful fecundity of soil, for there were great banana plantations and others of curious kinds of grain. The narrowness of the roads convinced us that there were no wagons or beasts of burden, but there were many evidences of a civilization which, for these parts, was of extraordinary development; such, for instance, as finely cultivated fields and good houses of stone, with such evidences of an esthetic taste as found expression in the domestic cultivation of many of the beautiful flowers which grew upon the island. These matters I mention with some particularity, in order that the island may be recognized by the rescuers for whom we are eagerly praying.

The town to which we were led is a place of singular beauty. While there is no orderly arrangement of streets (the houses being scattered about confusedly), there is a large sense of comfort and room and a fine character of neatness. The buildings are all of rough stone and are not divided into apartments; the windows and doors are hung with matting, giving testimony of an absence of thieves. A little to one side, upon a knoll, is the house of the king, or chief. It is much like the others, except that it is larger, a chamber in front serving as an executive-room, where the king disposes of the business of his rulership.

Into this audience-room we were led, and presently the king himself appeared. He was dressed with more barbaric profusion than his subjects; about his neck and in his ears were many fine pieces of jewelry of gold and silver, evidently the work of European artisans, but worn with a complete disregard of their original purpose. The king, a large, strong, and handsome man, received us with a kindly smile; if ever a human face showed kindness of heart, it was his. He had us to understand at once that we were most welcome, that he sympathized with us in our distress, and that all our wants should be attended to until means should be found for restoring us to our country, or sending us whithersoever else we might desire to go.

It was not at all likely, he said (for he spoke German a little), that any vessel from the outside world would ever visit the island, as it appeared to be unknown to navigators, and it was a law upon the island that the inhabitants of no other islands should approach. At certain times of the moon, however, he sent a boat to an island, many leagues away, to bear some rare products of his people in exchange for other commodities, and, should we so desire, we might be taken, one at a time, in the boat, and thus eventually be put in the way of passing vessels. With what appeared to be an embarrassed hesitation, he informed us that he was compelled to impose a certain mild restraint upon us – one which, he hurried to add, would in no way interfere with our comfort or pleasure. This was that we be kept apart from his people, as they were simple and happy, and he feared that association with us would bring discontent among them. Their present condition had come about solely through the policy of complete isolation which had been followed in the past.

We received this communication with a delight which we took no pains to conceal; and the king seemed touched by our expressions of gratitude. So in a little while we were established as a colony about three miles from the town, the quick hands of the natives having made for us, out of poles, matting, and thatch, a sufficient number of houses for our comfort; and the king placed at our disposal a large acreage for our use, if we should desire to help ourselves with farming; for which purpose an intelligent native was sent to instruct us. It was on the 10th day of May, 1853, that we went upon the island, and the 14th when we went into colony.

I cannot pause to give any further description of this beautiful island and our delightful surroundings, but must hasten away to a relation of the terrible things which presently befell us. We had been upon the island about a month, when the king (who had been to visit us twice) sent a messenger to say that a boat would leave on the morrow, and that if any one of us wished to go he could be taken. The messenger said that the king’s best judgment was that the sickly ones ought to go first, as, in the event of serious illness, it would be better that they should die at home. We overlooked this singular and savage way of stating the case, for our sense of gratitude to the king was so great that the expression of a slight wish from him was as binding upon us as law. Hence from our number we selected John Foley, a carpenter, of Boston, as the hardships of the voyage had developed in him a quick consumption, and he had no family or relatives in the colony, as many others of us had. The poor fellow was overcome with gratitude, and he left us the happiest man I ever saw.

I must now mention a very singular thing, which upon the departure of Foley was given a conspicuous place in our attention. We were in a roomy valley, which was nearly surrounded by perpendicular walls of great height, and from no accessible point was the sea visible. On several occasions some of the younger men had sought to leave the valley for the shore, but at each attempt the native guards set over us had suddenly appeared at the few passes which nature had left in the wall, and kindly but firmly had turned our young men back, saying that it was the king’s wish we should not leave the valley. The older heads among us discouraged these attempts to escape, holding them to be breaches of faith and hospitality; but the knowledge of being absolute prisoners weighed upon us nevertheless, and became more and more irksome. When, therefore, our companion was taken away, an organized movement was made among the young men to gain an elevated position commanding a view of the sea, in order to observe the direction taken by Foley’s boat. The plan was to divide into bodies and move simultaneously in force upon all the points of egress, and overcome, without any resort to dangerous violence, the two or three guards who had been seen at those points. When our men arrived at these places they encountered the small number it was customary to see, and were pushing their way through, when suddenly there appeared a strong body of natives, who drew their heavy swords and assumed so threatening an attitude that our men lost no time in retreating. A report of this occurrence was made to the colony, each of the parties of young men having had an exactly similar experience. While there appeared to be no good ground for the feeling of uneasiness which spread throughout the colony, a sense of oppression came over the stronger ones and of fear over the weaker; and, a council having been held, it was decided to ask an explanation of the king.

Other things of some interest had happened; among them, a surreptitious acquiring of considerable knowledge of the island language by me. For this reason I was chosen as ambassador to the king. My mission was a failure, as the king, though gracious, informed me that this plan was necessary in securing complete isolation from his people; and he instructed me to tell my people that any member of our colony found beyond the lines would be punished with death. In addition to this, the king, seemingly hurt that we should have questioned the propriety of his actions, said that thenceforward he himself would make the selections of our people for deportation. The man’s evident superiority of character impressed me with no little effect, and the sincerity with which he regarded us as belonging to a race inferior to his in mental and moral strength confounded me and placed me at a disadvantage.

When I took the news to the colony, a mood bordering upon hopelessness came upon our people. The ones of hastier temper suggested a revolt and a seizure of the island; but this was so insane an idea that it was put away at once.

Not long afterwards the king sent for Absalom Maywood, one of our young men, unmarried, but with a mother among us. Maywood, at first very low with scurvy on the brig, had drifted into other ailments, and was now an invalid and much wasted. I will not dwell upon the pathetic parting between him and his aged mother, nor upon the deeper gloom that fell upon the colony. What was becoming of these men? None might know whither they were taken and none could guess their after-fate. Behind our efforts to be cheerful and industrious there were heavy hearts, and possibly thoughts and fears that dared not seek expression.

The third man was taken – again a sickly one – this time a consumptive farmer, named Jackson; and some time afterward a fourth, an elderly woman, with a cancer; she was Mrs. Lyons, formerly a milliner in South Boston. Then the patience and hope which had sustained us gave way, and we were in a condition close upon despair. The cooler ones among the men assembled quietly apart and debated what to do. Our captain, a man quiet and brave, still the leader in our councils, and always advising patience and obedience, presided at this meeting. There was one dreadful thought upon every mind, but no man had the courage to bring it forth; but after there had been some discussion without any profit, Captain Campbell made this speech:

“My friends, it does not become us longer to seek to conceal the thought which all of us have, and which, sooner or later, must be spoken. It is a matter of common knowledge that upon many of the islands of these seas there exists the horrible practice of cannibalism.”

Not a word was spoken for a long time, and all were glad that it had come out at last. Not one man looked at his neighbor or dared raise his glance from the ground, and there was a weight upon the hearts of all.

“Nevertheless,” resumed the captain, “it is extremely difficult to believe that this evil is upon us, for you must have noticed that only the lean and sickly ones have been taken, and surely this cannot mean cannibalism.”

Some had not thought of this, and they looked up quickly, with brighter faces; whereupon Captain Campbell proceeded:

“You must have observed, however, that all of the sick and weakly have gone, and this brings a new situation upon us. I have an idea, which I will not give expression to now, and my desire in calling you together was to determine its correctness or falsity. For this purpose, some man of daring and agility must risk his life.”

Nearly every man present made offer of his services, but the captain shook his head and begged them all to remain quiet.

“It is necessary,” he added, “that this man understand the language, and I fear there is not one among you.”

Each man, taken aback, looked at his neighbor and then all at me, as I stepped forward. The captain regarded me gratefully and said:

“Let there now be a binding secrecy among us, for the others of the colony must not know now, and perhaps never. If our fear find a ground in truth, there is all the greater reason for keeping these matters secret among ourselves. Is that well understood? Then, Mr. Keating, the plan is this: When the next one of us is taken, you are by strategy, but in no event by violence, to escape from this imprisonment and discover the fate of that one and make report to us.”

A week afterwards (these things occurring now with greater frequency) Lemuel Arthur, a young man of twenty-two, was taken away about one o’clock in the afternoon. My whole plan having been studied out, I arrayed myself in the style of the natives, stained my skin with ochre, blackened my eyebrows and hair with a mixture of soot and tallow, and without difficulty slipped by the guards and found myself at large and free upon the island. I gained a high point and saw no sign of a boat making ready to put off with Arthur. When darkness had come I descended to the village. I kept upon the outskirts and remained as much as possible in shadow. I dared not talk with anyone, but I could listen; and presently I learned something that made my heart stand still.

“It has been so long since we had one,” said a native to his fellow.

“Yes; and this one will be delicious. They say he is young and fat. Why, we have not touched any since the four men and their woman with the jewelry came upon the island from a wreck.”

“True; but this one will not go around among so many of us – many must go without.”

“What of that? Those not supplied now will have all the keener relish when their turn comes. All that are left now are good and fat, as the king has taken away all the lean and sickly ones. He would not allow the people to touch them, although some of them begged very hard. So, to make sure, they were placed in the kiln.”

So heavy a sickness fell upon me when I heard this that I was near upon a betrayal of my presence; and certainly I lost some of the talk which these men were having. Presently I realized that nothing indicating a horrible fate for my friends had been said; my own fears were sufficient to give a frightful color to their language. When I looked about me again they were gone, and so with much caution I moved to another part of the town, keeping always in shadow. At a certain place I heard another conversation, as follows:

“Does he know what they will do with him?”

“No; but he fears something. He does not understand the language. He tried to get away this afternoon to go to the seashore, where he thought the boat was waiting, and when they made an effort to keep him quiet he became very angry.”

“What did they do then?”

“They took him to the king, who was so kind that the young man became quiet. Our king is so gentle, and they always believe what he tells them,” – whereupon the fellow broke into a hearty laugh.

“And do the others suspect nothing?”

“There is doubt about that. Kololu, the farmer, has reported that they appear uneasy and disturbed, and hold secret meetings.”

“What do you think they would do if they should discover everything?”

“Revolt, I think, for they appear to be fighters.”

“But they have no arms, and we are more than a hundred to one.”

“That is true, and so no lives would be lost on either side. After the revolt they would merely be kept in closer confinement, and no harm would come in the end. They could be taken one at a time, as is the present intention.”

“They might refuse to eat sufficient, and hence become lean.”

“That would come about surely, but it would last only for a time; for you have noticed that even our own people, when condemned, though they lose flesh at first, invariably become reconciled to their end, and at last become fatter than ever.”

The words of this man, who was evidently a functionary of the king, inspired me with so great a horror that I could bear to hear no more; so I moved away, considering whether I should return to the colony and report what I had heard already or remain to see this ghastly tragedy to the end. As there was nothing to be gained by returning at once, I decided to stay, for through the horror of it all might come some suggestion of a means of deliverance.

I soon became aware, by the making of all the people towards a certain quarter, that something of unusual importance was afoot; so as best I could I worked my way around to the point of convergence, which was in the neighborhood of the king’s house, and there I saw an extraordinary preparation under way. A large bonfire was burning in an open place; standing around it, in a circle having a generous radius, were hundreds of the strange half-savages of the island, kept at their proper distance by an armed patrol; in a clear space at one side, on higher ground, was an elevated seat, which I surmised was reserved for the king. Manifestly a matter of some moment was to be attended to, having likely a ceremonious character. The most curious feature of all this affair was the activity of a number of workers engaged in dragging large, hot stones from the fire and arranging them in the form of an oblong mound. This mound had one peculiar feature: a hollow space, about six feet long and two feet wide, was left within it, and the men, under the instructions of a leader, were fashioning it to a depth approaching two feet, all the stones being very hot and difficult to handle, even with the aid of barrows.

While they were still at work, the great repressed excitement under which the people labored found an excuse for expression in the arrival of the king, who, tricked out in unusual finery, walked solemnly ahead of his attendants to his elevated seat. Then he gave an order which, from my distance, I could not hear. I pushed a little closer under the safety which the occasion lent, and overheard this conversation:

“How many will get some of it?”

“Only forty, I hear. You know the women are not allowed to have it.”

“Yes.”

“The leading men will be supplied. It makes them strong and wise. The next one will be given to sixty of the men who carry swords.”

“And the next after that?”

“To more of the swordsmen; and so on until they all have had some, and then the common people will be taken in like rotation, but given a smaller allowance.”

At this juncture, a strange procession moved from the king’s house. It was led by two priests chanting dolefully; behind them walked four men, armed with curious implements – flails, no doubt. Then came four warriors, and behind them, firmly bound and completely naked, walked my young friend, Arthur; after him came six warriors. Arthur’s white skin showed in strong contrast to that of the brown men around him. His face was very pale, and his eyes, staring wide, swept a quick glance around for a stray hope.

The group stopped in front of the king; the natives faced and made an obeisance and awaited further orders. Before all this had been done, a man in front of me said to another:

“Those hot stones will cool, I fear.”

“There is no danger; they will keep their heat a long time. If they were too hot, they would burn it.”

“True.”

“They are much too hot now, but it will be some time before they will be needed.”

“Will they use the sword first, as they did with those who had the jewelry?”

“No; the best part then was spilled. This is a new idea of the king’s. The flails will do just as well and will make it very tender besides. Our king is a wise man.”

By this time young Arthur (the king having given his order) was surrounded by the armed men, and between him and them were the four who carried flails. His hands had been bound to a strong post sunk in the ground. The king raised his hand as a signal, and the four men brought down their flails with moderate force upon Arthur’s naked body. These implements were heavy, and evidently care was taken not to break the skin. When the poor fellow felt the blows, he shrank and quivered, but uttered no sound. They fell again.

What was I doing all this time? What was I thinking? I do not know; but when the second blows had been delivered and Arthur had cried out in his agony, I sprang through the encircling line of savages, dashed into the midst of the group surrounding the prisoner, snatched a sword from a warrior, leaped upon the king and split his head in twain, turned, cut Arthur’s bonds, caught him by the hand, and fled at full speed with him into the darkness. Never had been a surprise more complete – the people had seen one of their own number, as they supposed, free the prisoner and murder their king. Soon there came a howl, and some started in pursuit; but – there was the body of the king, and the stones were hot and waiting! There was no longer authority! Our pursuers fell off, one by one, and the others, thus discouraged, gave up the chase. We ran to the shore, found a boat, and put out to sea.

We are free – we two; but to what purpose? We have no idea of the direction of the land; we are without food; we dare not return to our friends, for only in the desperate hope of our finding land can there be the least encouragement for their rescue. We have rowed all night; it is now well into the following afternoon; we have had nothing to eat or drink, and we are beginning to suffer; we both are naked and the sun seemingly will burn us up. I therefore make this record with material which I had been prudent to provide for such an emergency, and I shall now give it to the sea, with such earnest prayers for its discovery as can come only from a most unhappy human being in a desperate extremity.

aka “A Cry for Help”

“The Argonaut” May 10 1890;

The Ape, The Idiot, & Other People (1897)

AN UNCOMMON VIEW OF IT

Mr. Clarke Randolph was stupefied by a discovery which he had just made – his wife had proved unfaithful, and the betrayer was his nearest friend, Henry Stockton. If there had been the least chance for a doubt, the unhappy husband would have seized upon it, but there was none whatever.

Let us try to understand what this meant to such a man as Randolph. He was a high-bred, high-spirited man of thirty, descended from a long line of proud and chivalrous men; educated, refined, sensitive, generous, and brave. His fine talents, his dash, his polished manner, his industry, his integrity, his loftiness of character, had lifted him upon the shoulders of popularity and prosperity; so that, in the city of his home, there was not another man of his age, a member of his profession, the law, who was so well known, so well liked, or wielded such a power.

He had been married four years. His wife was beautiful, winning, and intelligent; and she had always had from him the best devotion that a husband could give his wife. He and Stockton had been friends for many years. Next to his wife, Randolph had loved and trusted him above all others.

Such was the situation. At one stroke he had lost his wife, his home, his best friend, his confidence in human nature, his spirit, his ambition. These – and essentially they were all that made up his life, except the operation of purely animal functions – had gone all at once without a moment’s warning.

Well, there was something to be done. A keen sense of the betrayal, a smarting under the gross humiliation, urged him to the natural course of revenge. This, as he sat crouched down in a chair in his locked office, he began systematically to prepare. The first idea – always first in such cases – was to kill. That, in the case of a man of his spirit and temperament, was a matter of course. Fear of the legal consequences found no place within him. Besides, suicide after the killing would settle that exceedingly small part of the difficulty.

So it was first decided that as the result of this discovery three persons had to die – his wife, his friend, and himself. Very well; that took a load from his mind. An orderly and intelligent arrangement of details now had to be worked out. A plan which would bring the largest results in the satisfaction of a desire for revenge must be chosen. The simple death of those two, the bare stoppage of breath, would be wholly inadequate. First, the manner of taking their lives must have the quality of strength and a force which in itself would have a large element of satisfaction; hence it must be striking, deliberate, brutal if you wish, revolting if you are particular. Second, it must be preceded by exposure, denunciation, publication, scorn, contempt, and terror.

That much was good – what next? There were various available means for taking life. A revolver suggested itself. It makes a dark, red spot; the very sight of the weapon, held steadily and longer than necessary, leveled at the place where the spot is to appear, is terrifying; there is a look of fright; then uplifted arms, an appeal for mercy, a protest of innocence, a cry to God; after that the crash, a white face, a toppling to the floor, eyes rolled upward, bluish lips apart, a dark pool on the carpet – all that was very good. The wretched man felt better now that he was beginning to think so clearly.

But there was poison also – poison in variety: arsenic, which burns and corrodes, causing great pain, often for hours; strychnine, which acts through the nerves, producing convulsions and sometimes a fixed distortion of the features, which even the relaxation of death cannot remove; corrosive sublimate, prussic acid, cyanide of potassium – too quick and deadly. It must be a poison, if poison at all, which will bring about a sensible progression through perceptible stages of suffering, so that during this time the efficiency of physical pain may be raised by the addition of mental suffering.

Were these all the methods? Yes – enough for this purpose. Then, which should it be – revolver or poison? It was a difficult problem. Let it first be settled that the three should be together, locked in a room, and that the two guilty ones should suffer first, one at a time.

The revolver won.

Randolph was in the act of leaving his office to go and buy the weapon, when he was startled by what he saw in his office-mirror. It required a moment for him to recognize his own reflection. His face was unnaturally white; a discoloration was under his eyes, which had a glassy appearance; his lips were pressed tightly together, the corners of his mouth drawn down, large dark veins standing out on his temples. Fearing that if, while in this condition, he should apply to a gunsmith for a revolver he would be refused, he stood for some time before the mirror trying to restore the natural expression of his face. He kneaded his lips to remove their stiffness, pinched his cheeks to bring back their color, rubbed down the ridged veins, and scraped a little of the white plaster from the wall and with it concealed the dark color under his eyes. Then he went forth with a firm step, bought the revolver without difficulty, tried it, satisfied himself that it was reliable, loaded it, put it into his pocket, and returned to his office.

For there were certain matters of property to be attended to. He had a considerable fortune, all his separate possession; his wife had brought him nothing. He now felt sufficiently clear-minded to dispose of his estate intelligently. He drew his will – a holographic instrument – devising his wealth to various persons and benevolent societies.

He glanced at his office-clock. There would be four long hours yet before the time for going home to dinner. Fortunately for his plans, Stockton was to dine with them that evening, and neither of the guilty ones knew that they had been discovered. How should Randolph employ these weary hours? There was nothing to do, nothing even to think of. He tried to read a newspaper, then a book, and failed; looked out upon the crowds which thronged the street; counted the passing cars awhile; tried other things, failed at everything, and then sat down.

Something was beginning to work in the wretched man. Let us see: his wife, while pretending the warmest affection for him, was receiving the guilty attentions of a traitor in the house; she had betrayed her husband, had wrecked his life, had driven him to his death. Really, therefore, she had swept aside all the obligations which the marriage relation imposed. In essence she was no longer his wife, but a criminal enemy who, with deliberate and abounding malice, had destroyed him. He could go to the grave with a willing heart, but he could not permit her to live and enjoy his downfall and gloat over his destruction.

But would she really do that? And, then – God! – she was a woman! In spite of all that she had done, she was a woman! A strong man, his strength reinforced by a revolver, employs deception to bring a woman into a room, locks the door, insults, humiliates, and terrifies her, brandishes a revolver, and then kills her like a rat in its hole. Can a brave man, of mature judgment and in possession of his faculties, do such a thing? Why, it would be not only murder, but cowardice as well! No; it could not be done. She was still a woman, with all the weakness, all the frailty which her sex imposed. It could not be done.

After all, it would be far sweeter revenge to let her live, bearing through life a brand of infamy. That would be much better. She would lose her high position and the respect of her friends; the newspapers would publish her shame to the world, pointing her out by name as the depraved woman who had betrayed her husband and driven him to murder and suicide; they would have her portrait in their columns; her name and crime would be hawked upon the street by loud-crying newsboys; sermons denouncing her would be preached in all the churches; her shame would be discussed everywhere – in homes, shops, hotels, and bar-rooms in many cities.

Not only that, but she would be stripped of all the property which she had enjoyed so much. She would be turned adrift upon the streets, for no one would help her, none have a kind word for her, none give her even the respect which money might command. Being thus turned out upon the world all friendless and alone, and being naturally depraved, she would seek the protection of fast and shady men. Thus started, and soon taking to drink, as such women always do, down she would plunge into a reckless and shameless career, sinking lower and lower, losing her beauty; becoming coarse, loud, and vulgar; then, arriving at that stage when her beauty no longer could be a source of revenue, drifting into vile dens, consorting with the lowest and most brutal blackguards, finding herself dragged often before police-magistrates, first for drunkenness and then for theft, serving short terms in prison with others as low; finally, one night brought shrieking with delirium tremens to the police-station, bundled out to the hospital, strapped firmly to an iron bed, and then dying with foul oaths on her lips – such a life would be infinitely worse than death; such revenge immeasurably vaster than that of the pistol. Then it was finally decided that she must live and suffer.

As to the friend – as to Stockton, the betrayer, the sneak, the coward – he should die like a dog. That decision could not be reconsidered. He should not be granted the privilege of a duel, for not only was he wholly undeserving of such consideration, but by such means his life might be spared. Undoubtedly she loved him; perhaps he loved her. He living and the husband killed in a duel, their satisfaction would be doubled – having wrecked and humiliated him and driven him to despair, they then killed him. After that they could enjoy each other’s society openly, unmolested, and without fear of detection or punishment. Besides, they might marry and both be happy. This was unthinkable. He must be killed, he must die like a dog, and he must go to his death with a foul stain on his name.

These things being settled, the wretched man reread the will. As the woman was to live, she must be mentioned in the document. He tore up the will and wrote another, in which he bequeathed her one dollar, setting forth her shame as the reason for so small a bequest. Then he wrote out a separate statement of the whole affair, sealed it, addressed it to the coroner, and placed it in his pocket. It would be found there after awhile.

Well, why this trembling in every member, this unaccountable nausea, this unconquerable feeling of horror and repugnance as the draft of the picture was contemplated? Did instinct arise and dumbly plead for mercy? What mercy had been shown that mercy could be expected? None whatever. There was not only revenge to be satisfied, but justice also. Still, it was horrible! Admit that she deserved it all, deserved even more, she was a woman! No act of hers could deprive her of her natural claims upon the stronger sex. As a woman she had inalienable rights which even she could not forfeit, which men may not withhold. And then, where could be the benefit of adding physical suffering to mental? One surely would weaken the force of the other. The lower she should fall and the deeper her degradation, the smaller would become the efficiency of her mental agony; and yet mental suffering was the kind which it was desired should fall upon her.

It would be well, therefore, to leave her some money – a considerable amount of money – in order that, holding herself above the want which, in her case, would lead to degradation and a blunting of the sensibilities, she might suffer all the more keenly; in order that the memory of her shame might be forever poignant, forever a cause for the sharpest regrets. This would be better in other ways: her shame published, she could never associate with those fine characters who had been her friends; her lover dead and his memory disgraced, he could not be present to console her; for society she would have only those whom her fortune would attract, and they were not of a kind to satisfy such a woman as she; she would always be within sight of the old life and its pleasures, but just beyond the pale – sufficiently near to see and long for, but too far to reach, and forever kept back by the cold glance of contempt and disdain from the high circle in which she had been reared.

Therefore, it were better to leave her the bulk of his fortune. So he tore up the second will and wrote a third, in which, while naming her as his principal legatee, he incorporated the story of her shame. He felt better now than at any other time since his discovery. He walked about the room, looked out the window, then fell into his chair again.

How strangely alike in many respects are all animals, including man! he thought. There are qualities and passions common to them all – hate, fear, anger, revenge, love, fondness for offspring. In what is man superior to the others? Manifestly in self-control, a sense of justice, the attribute of mercy, the quality of charity, the power to forgive, the force of benevolence, the operation of gratitude; an appreciation of abstractions; an ability to compare, contrast, and adjust; consciousness of an inherent tendency to higher and better achievements. To the extent that he lacks these does he approach more closely to the lower orders. To the degree that the passions common to all have mastery over him does he lack the finer qualities which distinguish his species. The desire to kill when hurt, angered, or threatened is the stronger the lower we descend in the scale of the orders – the lower we descend even among the members of the same order. The least developed men are the most brutal. Revenge is the malice of anger.

It is strange that his thoughts should have taken such a turn!

And then, the fundamental instinct which guards the perpetuation of the species is common to all, and its manifestations are controlled by a universal law, whose simple variations do not impair its integrity. Love and mating – these are the broad lines upon which the perpetuation of the species starts. What possible abstractions are there in them? Is not their character concrete and visible? Whatever fine sentiments are evolved, we know their source and comprehend their function. There is no mystery here.

What is this jealousy, which all animals may have? It is an instinctive resentment, by one of a mated pair, of something which interferes with a pleasant established system, the basis of which is perpetuation of the species. Higher mankind has the ability to dissect it, analyze it, understand it, and guard against its harmful operation; herein lie distinguishing qualities of superiority. If, when his jealousy is roused, he is unable to act any differently from the lion, the horse, or the dog, then, in that regard, he is not superior to them. Man, being an eater of meat, is a savage animal, like the dog, the tiger, the panther, the lion. His passions are strong, as are theirs; but he has qualities which enable him to hold them in check. If an animal have a strong attachment for his mate, he will fight if she be taken from him; this is the operation of jealousy. If he be a savage animal, he will kill if he can or dare. Few males among the animals will kill their deserting mates; that is left for man, the noblest of the animals. The others are content to kill the seducer. What thankfulness there is for escape from an act, so recently contemplated, which would have placed its perpetrator below the level of the most savage of the brutes! In what, of all that was now proposed to be done, was there any quality to distinguish the acts from those of the most savage brute, except a more elaborate detail, the work of superior malice and ferocity? Is it a wonder that Randolph shuddered when he thought of it?

The broadest characteristic of all animals, including man, is selfishness. In man it reaches its highest form and becomes vanity, pride, and a ridiculous sense of self-importance. But man alone is conscious of its existence, character, and purpose; he alone encourages its rational development and suppresses the most evil of its abuses. The animal which would fight or kill from jealousy is moved by a selfish motive only. It proceeds to satisfy its anger or gratify its revenge without any regard to the ethics, without any thought of its obligations to nature, without the slightest wish to inquire whether there may not be in the cause of its jealousy a natural purpose which is proceeding upon the very lines that led to its mating. A man, however, can think of these things, weigh them carefully, understand them approximately, and then advance in the light of wisdom. If not, he is no better, in this regard, than the animal which cannot so reason and understand.

This manner of thinking was bringing the unhappy man closer to himself.

Then, having faced the proposition that he had been considering his own case all along, he found the situation to be somewhat like this: He had a certain understanding which should operate to remove him from influences which with men of inferior conceptions would be more powerful; not being a brute, he should rise above impulses which a brute is constrained by its nature to obey. So much was clear. Then what should he do? He pondered this long and seriously.

Was it possible to wipe out the past with exposure, humiliation, shame, and blood? He had been proud of her; he had loved her; he had been very, very happy with her. She had been his inspiration; a part of his hopes, ambition, life. True, she had undone all this, but the memory of it remained. Until this recent act of shame, she had been kind, unselfish, gentle, and faithful. Who knows why she fell? Who could sound the depths of this strange mystery; who measure the capacity of her resistance; who judge her frailty with a righteous mind; who say that at that very moment she was not suffering unspeakable things? And then, was there anyone so noble of character, with integrity so unfailing and so far beyond temptation, that he might say he was better than she? Her weakness – should we presume to call it depravity when we cannot know, and might we with intelligent knowledge of our own conduct lay the whole responsibility upon her, and none upon that which made her? If we are human, let us seek wherein we may convince ourselves that we are not brutes. Compassion is an attribute of a noble character. The test of manhood is the exercise of manly qualities.

What good would come from this revenge of humiliation and exposure? It would not mend the wrong; it would not save life; it would be only proof of the vanity, the sense of self-importance, of the injured one. Would it be possible to spare her? Yes. That finally was settled. She should live; she should have the property; she should be left to enjoy life as best she could without the shadow of a stain upon her name. That were the nobler part, the test of manhood. And then, the past could not be forgotten!

Randolph felt so much better after arriving at this decision that he marveled at himself. He walked about the room feeling strong and elastic. He tore up the will because it charged her crime upon her; tore up the letter to the coroner; collected all the scraps of paper and carefully burned them. Then he drew a new will, free from stain, leaving all his property to his wife. He did not only that, but he wrote her a letter – formal, of course – merely saying that he had found his life a mistake; this he sealed, addressed, and placed in his pocket.

Stockton – the false friend, the betrayer and destroyer – he should die, he should die like a dog. But not with a stain on his name – that were impossible, because it would reflect upon her.

Here was a new situation. The two men would be found dead, likely in the same room – the friend and the husband. What would people think? A duel? For what reason? Murder and suicide? Who had handled the weapon, and for what possible cause? The road which suspicion would travel was too short and wide. The fair name of the wife was to be guarded – that had been decided upon, and now it was the first consideration.

There were other matters to be thought of. Suppose that Stockton had been the husband and Randolph the friend. God! let us think. Have brutes, frenzied with rage and jealousy, the power to hold nature’s mirror before the heart, to feel compassion, to exercise charity, to weigh with a steady hand the weaknesses and frailties of their kind, to feel humility, to bow the head before the inscrutable ways of nature? Have they not? No? Well, then, have men? If they have not, they are no better in that regard than brutes. Besides, would it punish Stockton to kill him? There can be no punishment in death; it can be only in dying; but even dying is not unpleasant, and death is the absence of suffering. There was no way under heaven to give him adequate punishment.

Nor was that all. She loved him – that must be so. What would be the benefit of removing him from her life? It would be merely revenge – revenge upon both of them; and where lies the nobility of such revenge? If they both should live, both go unexposed, they might be happy together.

After all, whom would that disturb, with whose pleasure interfere? Surely no sound of their happiness could penetrate the grave; violence would be done to none of nature’s laws. Why should they not be happy? If they could, why should they not? Was there any reason under the sun that wisdom, charity, compassion, and a high manhood could give why they should not be happy?

But suppose that she should suspect the cause of her husband’s suicide; this would likely poison her life, for the consciousness of guilt would give substance to suspicion. The result would be an abhorrence of self, a detestation of the participant in her sin, a belief that the blood of her husband was upon her head, and a long train of evils which would seriously impair, if not wholly destroy, the desired serenity of her life. Was there any way to prevent the birth of such a suspicion?

Yes; there was a way. As soon as Randolph had worked it out he felt as if an enormous load had been removed from him. His eyes shone brightly, his cheeks were flushed, and a look of pride and triumph lighted up his face.

He returned to his chair, removed the revolver from his pocket, and laid it on the table; wrote his wife an affectionate letter, in which he told her that he had just become aware of an incurable ailment which he had not the courage to face through months or years of suffering, and begged her to look to Stockton for friendship and advice; wrote to Stockton, charging him with her protection; burned the last will that he had made and drew a new one, in which he left them the property jointly, on condition that they marry within two years. Then, with a perfectly clear head, he laid down his pen and sighed, but his face was bright and tranquil. He picked up the revolver, cocked it, placed the muzzle against his temple, and without the tremor of a nerve he pressed the trigger.

aka An Unusual Conclusion (1890)
“The Sydney Bulletin” 27 Sep 1890

The Ape, The Idiot, & Other People (1897)

THE WRONG DOOR

My condition, at last, became alarming, and I was afraid of myself The cause of it – ah, that was something! Had it been a matter which an honorable man might discuss with a friend, I could have had the healing consolation of sympathy; but at the very core of my affliction lay the obligation of silence. Let us suppose a case:

Once there was a very beautiful woman, married happily, and a mother. Her husband had a friend, a man of the world. This man discovered in his friend’s wife an accumulation of all womanly graces; he saw in her the ideal woman, in all the world the only one he could have loved and courted, fought for and died for. Yet she was wholly inaccessible, even in dreams! She was as good as she was beautiful, as true as she was winsome. Even had she not been so, his hands were tied by loyalty to his friend. Some of you will laugh at that. Well, if a man’s honor fails him in one direction, I will not trust it in another; for a man is a whole remainder after subtracting all his evil from his good. But “the flesh is weak.” That is the villain’s only plea for mercy.

The friend could not conceal it from the wife. Could not? I must be careful in my choice of words. Is there anything in the line of right that a man can not do in such a case? The world is wide – he could have gone away – but she was so beautiful and winsome! Nor, as he had not declared himself, could she presume to send him away. He thought he saw in her eyes something of pity, something of warning, something of everything. The suffering wore him out.

But I must return to the beginning and resume my story. I was much prostrated in mind and flesh, and the services of a skillful physician were imminently needed. With that idea, I went to see a famous man, Dr. Brownell, a specialist in matters of the nerves. It may be thought a little peculiar that I went to consult this particular man, but it must be considered that besides being a very skillful physician, he was my friend. There might have been certain reasons why I should not consult him, but we need not discuss them now. His wife was a beautiful woman, and I knew her well – but what in the world has this to do with my visit to her husband?

Brownell was a peculiar man. Though he was the best friend I ever had, there was not a very close intimacy between us, and yet I was nearer to him than was any other of his friends. He was much older than his wife. A kind heart, given force and direction by great wealth, had been exercised by him in my behalf with so intelligent purpose that I was become a man of a little importance in the community.

The physician lived in a fine old house of great size. Not all of it was occupied. He was a tireless collector of curiosities, and had expended a fortune in that pursuit. Few of these were ever shown to his friends, and he never spoke of them, but kept them in out-of-the-way places in the great establishment. He was a reticent man, and many feared him; but I saw in him nothing but goodness and a marvelous skill.

So it was upon Dr. Brownell that I called formally as a patient. His office was on the main floor of the house, and consisted of two rooms – a handsomely fitted reception-room, and back of it one in which his patients consulted him. Both were very large. Although I had called and visited very often at his house, I had never been in his office before.

When I entered he was just ready to go out, but he welcomed me with his old-time cordiality.

“Why, I am glad to see you,” he said, taking my hand; “this is the first time you have honored my office with a call. Come in and rest awhile. You surely haven’t come to see me professionally?” He looked closely at me as he asked the question.

“Yes,” I replied; “I fear I am in rather a bad way.”

His face showed much concern.

“You do look a little shaken,” said he, removing one of his gloves. Then he began, in a deliberate fashion, to make a scientific inquiry into my case. While he was occupied thus, a messenger, all out of breath, arrived to call him to a case of great urgency. Dr. Brownell, seeing the need to hurry, asked me if I could come as well on the following day. Of course I released him. He hurried away, saying:

“I am very sorry to leave you, but it can’t be helped. Step into the house and see Mrs. Brownell. I am sure she will be glad to see you. Go through that door – it is the nearest way. You will find the hall a little dark, but go straight ahead, and you will be all right.” Then he hurried away, and in a moment was gone.

I went to the door, which I understood him to have pointed out. It was in the consultation-room. I discovered that there were two doors, close together. I selected the left-hand one. I turned the knob and pulled the door open. The hall beyond appeared to be quite dark, but I remembered what he had said about that, and I felt safe. I stepped into the hall, and instantly the door, which was a heavy affair, made of oak, closed upon me, pushing me out of its way into the hall. Then I discovered that I was in absolute darkness, although there was a bright day without. Nevertheless, recalling Brownell’s instruction, I went ahead with much confidence. Suddenly, to my infinite amazement, the ground seemed to open, and I plunged headlong downward into a suffocating darkness, at every instant striking cruelly upon hidden obstacles along the way. At last, after having taken what seemed to be a great flight, I came heavily to a stone floor, where the darkness was as dense as ever before I fell. Fright was my first sensation and indignation my next; for was it not likely that Brownell had played some ugly trick upon me? I sat perfectly still for a little while, doing much wondering. There was nowhere the smallest glimmer of light; the darkness was ponderable and terrifying. With it was a silence so vast that the ordinary roaring in my ears became an obtrusive presence.

A little reason at last found exercise in my disordered faculties. I reflected that the abyss into which I had fallen was an unguarded flight of stairs, into which I had walked in the darkness. A cautious hand-survey verified the belief, for there I lay at the bottom of the stairs. A moment later I remembered that I had noticed two doors, one beside the other. It was very clear that I had made a mistake by choosing a door leading to the cellar. It then was no serious matter at all, and I laughed at myself for my terror. All that was necessary was to ascend the flight, open the door, and emerge by the other. Without any waste of time I went about putting this plan into use; but when I had clambered up the stairs and found the door, I discovered that I was securely locked within this dismal place! There was no knob on the inside at all. My first intention was to get relief by knocking on the door; but there quickly arose two reasons why I should not – no one was within, and, besides, even if I should summon attention, how could I explain my ridiculous plight? My clothing had been torn by my fall, and I knew by the token of a warm, sticky sensation about my face and neck that I had been hurt and was bleeding freely. I was satisfied there must be some way of escape from the cellar without alarming the household, and, though my prison was darker than night, I determined to exhaust this resource before trying the other.

Accordingly I descended the stairs, and, by keeping my hands on one of the walls, began to creep forward, with a careful guard upon the possibility of another flight of stairs. Presently I found a turn in the passage, and followed it on. Then I came to a transverse passage, and was in doubt which way to turn. Meanwhile, the darkness did not relax in the smallest way, and absolute silence packed my environment. I turned to the right, and in that direction, not far away, I saw an exceedingly thin line of light, which I surmised issued from the bottom of a door. I went toward this, and was about to put my hand upon the door, when it occurred to me that caution sometimes was a valuable exercise. Thereupon, I knelt and examined the line of light more closely; and it was somewhat disheartening to discover that the light, instead of being white, was yellow. In other words, it was gaslight, and not daylight, that shone beyond the door.

While thus I knelt, I thought I heard a certain scurrying within. It was a sound not very unlike that which I had heard in the dark passage, and which I had mistaken for automatic aberrations of my hearing sense. Now, the same sound gave me a certain depressing feeling of insecurity, as though a malign mystery, suited to this uncanny place, was preparing a grotesque, and perhaps dangerous, reception for me. Should I abandon this enterprise and seek another door? There was danger that I might not find this one again. Indeed, was there anything to fear? Surely my conscience – I gently pushed open the door. It did not open. I found a keyhole, and peered through it. A curious large hall seemed to be beyond, lighted faintly, and I thought I saw the shadowy form of a woman float across the field of vision. Just above the keyhole I found a knob, I turned it, and instantly the door flew open, pulling me violently with it; and, before the instinctive movement to seize upon a support and hold it securely permitted me to take my grasp from the knob, I found myself wholly at the mercy of unresisted gravitation, flying undoubtedly downward, if reason is to be accepted, but in all other directions as well, if my feelings had been the ground of judgment. But this time, instead of falling upon a cold, stone floor, I alighted on a deliciously soft carpet, of the thickest and finest rugs; and, for that matter, the distance which I had fallen was in reality quite small.

Upon looking about I found myself in the strangest place it was ever my fortune to see; but, before I describe it, I must say something in explanation of my unaccountable flight through the air. The floor of this hall was sunk a few feet below the level of the passage by which I had approached, and down from the floor led a flight of stone steps, which the pulling of the door had made me to clear as I fell. I had thought that someone was concealed behind the door and pulled it open quickly when I turned the knob; but, upon looking, I saw no one, and I must believe that, for some reason which I shall not attempt to explore, the conduct of the door was guided by a powerful spring.

There was no time for any intelligent kind of thinking, for, besides being in a large hall of extraordinary appearance. I found myself in a company of the most astonishing people. The walls were covered with curious things from every corner of the world. The roof was perforated with openings, representing stars, animals, angels, demons, and other things. These openings were covered with colored glass of every shade, and above all was the light, which shone through the grotesque openings, and filled the room with a soft, yellow radiance.

The light was too faint for a fine definition of features, and so I could not then have said that I knew any of the persons present. They were all on the opposite side of the room, and every one of them was looking at me. Some were sitting, others standing, and all were upon an elevated platform which ran around the room. This platform was raised not more than eight inches above the floor.

I scrambled to my feet and looked around upon them, of course expecting that I should be spoken to. But not a word was said and not a movement was made. The whole circumstance was so extraordinary, and the silence and immovability of the assembled people so impressive, that a strange tingling feeling, which all who have been frightened know the nature of, crept up my face and into my hair, and my heart beat with what seemed to be so strong a torsional force that it twisted a sharp pain out of its function. I made an essay of speech.

“This,” I said (indignation arising with the emergence of courage), “may be a very amusing pastime for you, but I have it that you are putting a very gross indignity upon me. If Dr. Brownell is in this distinguished company, I would like him to hear me say that I resent being made the victim of this boyish prank for the edification of spectators invited to enjoy my discomfiture, and that I propose, without any loss of time, to give my resentment such form and character as will cause it to have a disagreeable permanency in his recollection.”

This wide-winged and rather silly threat might as well have been spoken to the red dragons and green angels in the ceiling, for not a word or movement did it elicit. I found it easy to speak, but my voice sounded as though it had come from someone else to me alone, and that made me uncertain that I had spoken at all. But a quickening anger was straining its leash within me, and I made no effort to control it. A sense of outrage, shame, and indignation swept over me; there were things I would not bear. At this moment, Brownell’s individuality emerged from the dim shadows of the company, and I walked straight up to him. He looked at me steadily as I approached, the old, good-natured, half-quizzical expression that I knew so well sitting upon his face. I had approached him very near, when an indefinable, violent sensation seized upon me and held me from further advance. Likely it was as much dread as terror; but, whatever it was, there I stood grown to the floor, staring in dismay at this silent and motionless man with the quizzical expression. Quite near me was an old man sitting on a chair, his hand resting on a heavy stick. I seized the stick and tried to wrench it from his grasp, intending to brain Brownell with it; but think what must have been my horror to see the old man’s arm come away from his body with the stick, the hand still retaining its hold! I threw the stick away with a shudder, and went up closer to Brownell. I caught him by the shoulders, and shook him with such violence that his head rolled on the floor at my feet. Then the truth burst through the envelope of my vast and inconceivable stupidity – not all stupidity, for another affliction beset me – these were all wax-figures! I had stumbled into one of those queer nooks in Brownell’s house where some of his treasures were stored, and where, in these uncanny ways, he enjoyed himself alone.

The reaction from this discovery was peculiar. At first I laughed, but my laughter became so loud and furious that I saw it was hysteria, and then I had trouble to check it. My head was splitting, and my throat was cracked and burning. Pains of various kinds found employment in torturing me, and they were pains to which I was in nowise accustomed. Therefore, it was necessary that I make haste to escape from this almost unearthly place. The silence and apparent intelligent immobility of the wax-figures were more than depressing. I began to fear, indeed, that, after all, they would take on life and present some new form of suffering for my torture.

At the end of the hall was a wide door draped with a portiere. From where I stood, I could see the white satin of a woman’s skirt just behind the portière on one side. Evidently no light entered that room, except the weak, diffused light of the demons and angels in the room where I was standing, and, hence, it was much darker beyond the portières; but, after looking around, I saw that if there was any escape except by the way I had come, it must be through the room in which stood the woman in satin. Yet I feared to enter that room. The dim light, the woman behind the portière – it all looked mysterious and dread-lurking. It was evident that the woman stood, as did the others, on a platform; but was that sufficient upon which to construct a belief that she, too, was wax? And would it not be all the better if she were flesh and blood? Assuredly, for that meant deliverance.

I went, without further thinking, to the portière, and passed within the room, having an unaccountable care that I did not pass too near the woman in satin. I went into the room and looked around for a door. None could I find. My gaze fell upon the woman whose skirt I had seen, and then came upon me the very heaviest blow of all in that day of miseries; for there, before me, beautiful and radiant, embodiment of all the finest graces of womankind, unspeakably winsome, and in all possible ways the loveliest woman under the sun, stood the physician’s wife. If only it had been she, indeed, instead of an artful wax counterfeit! I stood and admired her to my heart’s content, and then I looked another way and continued my search for the door.

In what way soever I turned, I felt that the soft, blue eyes of this enchanting figure were upon me. This gave me a certain fear, the meaning of which, beyond a consciousness of extreme nervous irritation, I was not able to understand. My disorder began to take on an exhilaration much like that which comes from hashish, imparting a quickening power to my senses and a keen edge to my imagination. A feeling of happy confidence and lively enthusiasm struck off the angles of the fear which formerly had depressed me, and I became bold, valiant, and adventurous. What an inspiring effect even the wax-image of a beautiful woman may have on a man! I again looked at the figure in satin. Could I have been in error? Was it possible that a wax-figure could be caught stealing a quick glance at me and suppressing a delicious smile? Was this a new Galatea, ready to step from her pedestal and be my devoted slave?

A great hope, so wild that I dared not give it too generous entertainment, leaped up from my heart. Fool or madman – which was I? Though the whole world might be consumed with love of her, she would remain steadfast in the way of a wife forever. It was wholly impossible that she should choose this astounding way of letting me know that the one secret of my life had slipped away from me and had been welcomed into her own life. I gazed upon her, filled with awe.... Her head slowly turned, her glorious eyes rested full upon my face, and the sweetest smile that I had ever seen on her beautiful face saturated all my sensibilities with inconceivable delights. There was a meaning in that look and smile that I had never seen before, and the light that shone through it was a welcome to me!

I went closer to her, my feet winged with joy. The smile beckoned, the glance was a reassurance.

“Alice!” I cried.

“I have waited for you long,” she answered; and there can be no music on earth so sweet as those words.

I caught her in my arms and drew her to my breast, nearly crushing her. I looked up into her face and she looked down into mine. I drew her from the pedestal. All at once a look of horror came into her face.

“You are bloody!” she cried.

“It is nothing,” I protested.

The look of horror became one of terror. “Oh,” she said, “there is blood on your face and villainy in your heart! So, this is how you would betray your best friend, and wreck my life. I will save him and you.” With that I saw something bright and keen glitter a moment in her hand, and in an instant a thing cold and sharp slipped between the ribs of my breast. I choked; a blindness assailed me, and I felt myself going all at large to the floor.

•   •   •   •   •

Dr. Brownell was sitting beside me in a room of his house, and I was lying in bed, with a feeling of great weakness. He saw that I was watching him. He arose and stood over me, and his face showed much relief.

“You are all right now, aren’t you, old fellow?” How kind his voice was!

“Yes.”

I felt no pain in my breast, but feebly I put up my hand. “Is the wound dangerous?” I asked.

“What wound?”

I made no reply.

“The only wound you had was a slight abrasion of the scalp, and that has been cured a week.”

I dared not ask any more questions.

“Alice came in to see you this morning and left these flowers for you. I told her I thought you would be all right today, and she will come to see you as soon as I send her word. By the way, old man, that was a curious mistake you made in getting among my wax-figures. We found you unconscious there. In your delirium you must have developed a strong dislike of the figures of Alice and me, as you completely demolished them.”

“The Argonaut” 09 Feb 1891

“Romance” Jul 1891

THE WOMAN
OF THE INNER ROOM

Dr. Osborne, hastily summoned to the receiving hospital, found there a handsome, well-dressed young man with an ugly hole in his skull about an inch and a half above the left ear. The injured man evidently was not suffering, but the desperate nature of his hurt was seen in the deep pallor of his face. His expression was placid, unintelligent, and absolutely silly. Yet he was freely alive – his breathing was good, his heart observed its functions, his temperature was normal, and his skin was warm and moist. Dr. Osborne cleared the wound with a sponge.

“How was the lad hurt?” he asked of the officers who were standing about.

No one could tell. A few minutes ago someone had seen him staggering along the street, clinging to the house-walls to keep from falling, a thin stream of blood trickling down his face, and had pointed him out to a policeman.

Dr. Osborne looked closely at the wound. Then he tried to insert a finger in the opening, but failed. He looked around upon the men, and asked them to show him their hands.

“No,” he said, after examining them; “your fingers are all too blunt Farley, go and call my daughter – she is sitting in my buggy at the door.”

Before she came, Dr. Osborne asked:

“Do you know who he is?”

None could inform him. Not a scrap of paper by which he might be identified could be found upon him.

The surgeon’s daughter entered. She was an attractive girl – rather tall and slight, had brown eyes and hair, and carried herself with a fine unconscious grace. She glanced at the man lying on the operating-table, suddenly checked her advance, and became pale. Her father, with a reassuring manner, took her by the arm, and led her forward.

“Don’t be alarmed, Agnes,” he said; “I have tested your nerve before, and have never seen it fail. Let me see your hand.” He took it in his and examined it closely. “That is just what I need,” he resumed; “long, slender fingers – you have a beautiful hand, Agnes.”

This embarrassed her, but she became stronger.

“Now, my child, I must learn the nature of the wound in this young man’s head. Come a little closer, my dear; he does not know what is going on. Have you ever seen him before?”

“No,” she replied, approaching nearer and regarding his face steadily; “but he appears to be a man of means and refinement.”

“Yes; that is clear. But come closer, Agnes. Why, you are all right! You see, it is a small hole, and that probably accounts for the fact that he is still alive; but it has penetrated the skull, and that makes the case a very serious one. It is necessary that I know what made the wound, in order to determine what to do; and the quickest way in the world is to let the wound tell its own story. My fingers are so thick that I can do nothing. Yours are exactly suited.”

“My fingers? What do you want me to do, father?”

“I want you to insert a finger in the wound and tell me what you find, after a careful examination of the edges of the bone.”

The girl hesitated. “But – why?” she asked.

“So that I may know what instrument was employed, if the hole is round and has rather clean edges, it was made by a bullet – in which event, there is no reasonable hope of recovery, If, however, it is three-cornered, or otherwise angular, or in any great degree ragged, then something else made it – a pick-axe or some other instrument; and in that case there is a bare chance of saving his life. Besides, the knowledge will be very useful to the officers in digging up what appears to be a mysterious crime. You can ascertain that, can’t you?”

“I will try.”

Under her father’s direction, but in a gingerly manner, she stood behind the young man’s head, her face close above his, and put the fine, long forefinger of her left hand into the wound. As she did so, her eyes met the empty stare of his. Very slowly and carefully, watching his face all the time, she felt the edges of the bone and then withdrew her finger.

“It is smooth and round,” she said.

“Ah!” exclaimed her father; “then there is no hope, poor fellow! But let us try a little further Agnes, my dear, you did that bravely, as I knew you would: but now I want you to put your finger in again, and push it very slowly and carefully as far as you can. The bullet may not have gone far.”

The girl, again looking down upon the calm, peaceful face, with its blank stare and senseless smile, explored the wound with her finger. Her touch was sure and gentle, but as her finger came in contact with the brain, and she felt its warmth and the regular and smooth pressure of the pulsations, her nerves went upon a strain. Still she looked down into the handsome young face, but she was growing pale. All of a sudden, for some wholly unaccountable reason, the young man’s blank expression and silly smile passed away, and a certain intelligence sat upon his fare.

The surgeon saw this, and it appeared to him to be a matter of uncommon importance. At the same moment, a peculiar look came into his daughter’s face. She had begun to relax in the course of fainting, but instantly she swung back upon a nervous balance which was so prominent as to suggest a strong stimulation. The young man looked up into her eyes with a vague interest; she looked down into his with fear and horror. Then she suddenly withdrew her finger and stepped back beyond the range of his vision. The look of vacuity again took a hold upon him.

The girl, without addressing anyone particularly, said, nervously and hurriedly; “You had better send to the bank and tell his father.”

“What bank?” asked her father, in surprise.

“The Citizens’ Bank.”

“Who is his father?”

“Mr. Blanchard, the president of the bank. This is his son, Charles.”

Her father regarded her with amazement, but he refrained from asking her questions. He merely remarked; “But you said just now that you did not know him.”

The girl looked confused and made no reply.

The surgeon sent an officer to the bank. His attention returned to the patient, and as his daughter had not made as thorough an examination as he desired, he asked her if she felt strong enough to make another attempt. She complied, but with much hesitation. Again did a sickness and weakness assail her as her finger slipped into the wound, and again did the young man’s face brighten. He fixed his eyes on her face, seemingly in recognition, and in a thick, stammering voice, he said:

“Why, Agnes, is it you? So, you are the one – this is what jealousy has done. This is what I get for being his friend.”

“Do you blame me, Charles?”

“Why should I? It is too late for that now.”

“Does Frank know?”

“He does not; but she is madly in love with him.”

“And she is a stranger to you?”

“Absolutely. I never saw her before. I believe he has her in hiding, and that he will shield her.”

“But he is not a traitor.”

“She may have some unaccountable hold upon him.”

“He would not deceive me so.”

“Who can tell?”

The excitement which had kept back the encroachment of weakness now failed of purpose.

The girl withdrew her finger, and the young man sank back into his former lethargic condition.

All color fled the girl’s face; her eyes were fixed vacantly in a stare of horror.

“Agnes,” said her father, approaching her hastily, “what is the matter? Are you faint?”

“I – I don’t know, father.” She trembled, as though with apoplexy.

“What is all this he has been telling you?” he asked.

She was too far gone to reply, but her father mistook her weakness for hesitation.

“Come into the open air, my child. This repulsive ordeal and the ravings of that delirious man have borne too heavily upon your nerves. Come, my daughter.”

Those were his words, but a great dread had arisen within him. As soon as they had stepped without, he pressed the question upon her with a certain hardness which came from his anxiety:

“What does all this mean? What do you know about the shooting?”

Her voice was kept back by a gasp, and with a lurch she slipped from her father’s grasp and went all disorganized down to the ground before he could save her. He picked her up, placed her in the buggy, and drove rapidly to his home. When she recovered she found her mother in anxious watch upon her, for her father had gone to see what could be done for the wounded man.

Mrs. Osborne had been informed by her husband of the singular occurrence at the receiving hospital, and the good woman was unhappy over it. But with her usual fair tact she asked no questions, believing that the close understanding between her and her daughter would bring forth an explanation in safe time. She was disappointed, therefore, when Agnes, upon coming into consciousness, spoke no word of the most important matter. More than that, she said she had a grievous headache and desired to be left alone, that she might sleep. Mrs. Osborne withdrew, and immediately the girl went about the task of slipping away from the house unseen. She did this with whole success. In a few minutes she was in the office of a young physician named Frank Armour.

There was nothing commonplace in this young man’s appearance. He was tall, slender, and pale, and to the manifest effects of rigorous study were added evidences of some kind of trouble that was wearing him out. He occupied two rooms – a reception-room and, behind it, a consultation-room. She found him sitting in the front room; the door leading into the other was closed. His face brightened greatly when he saw her standing before him.

“Agnes’” he cried; “I am very glad to see you. All loads drop from my shoulders when your sweet face appears. You said the other day that you were not coming to the office any more, for fear people would talk about you – as though that should make any difference, seeing that we are soon to be married!”

His manner was so gentle, so full of evidences of genuine affection, that her suspicions concerning him were much weakened. But she had come to make sure of her position, and the mysteries of the wounded man’s speech had to be cleared up.

“Frank,” she asked, “have you seen your friend Charles Blanchard today?”

“No; I haven’t seen him since last night. By the way, he scolded me again for not taking him around to your house and introducing him to you. Now, really, Agnes, I don’t think you ought to keep putting me off about bringing him, as he is really a very delightful man, and I am sure you will like him.”

“We will talk about that some other time, Frank. There is something else I want to ask you now. Do you really think you love me and me alone?”

“I am very certain of it, Agnes; but I don’t see any reason for such a question.”

“I know that you never go into society, and you have told me that you pay attentions to no one except me.”

“That is the truth, Agnes; but to save my life I don’t understand you. You are pale and ill. Something has happened to give you trouble and you have suddenly become suspicious of me.”

Should she tell him of the fatal wounding of his best friend? Was it not possible first to extort from him some explanation of that friend’s singular disclosures? The fact that she had received this knowledge from him – if, indeed, knowledge it was – troubled her greatly. The man had sown distrust in her mind, and it was like poison.

“Frank,” she said, presently, unable to see him longer in ignorance of his friend’s condition, “Charles Blanchard has been seriously hurt, and I came to tell you so.”

“Seriously hurt?” asked Armour, in alarm; “when and how?”

“He was found less than two hours ago and taken to the receiving hospital, where my father is attending him now.”

The young physician was now upon his feet, nervous and excited.

“How was he hurt, Agnes? Tell me all about it.”

“Nothing is known except that he was found staggering along the street with a pistol wound in the head.”

Armour’s face was livid, and his trembling legs nearly failed to support his weight.

“He was not killed instantly?” he asked.

“No; but he is unconscious.”

“Certainly.”

“The bullet must have been a small one.”

“No doubt, no doubt!” cried the unhappy man; “I must go to see him at once.”

He picked up his hat and was starting away, expecting her to leave the room with him. But she sat still, remarking:

“I will wait until you return, if you promise to come back soon.”

Armour’s disappointment and annoyance were visibly manifest. He shot a quick glance toward the door of the adjoining room, and then walked over to it and cautiously tried the knob. The door was locked. He made a show of feeling in his pocket for the key, but his whole manner was so openly embarrassed that the sharp-sighted girl noticed it.

“Agnes,” said he, turning upon her somewhat impatiently, “there is no doubt I shall be gone a long time, and it would be unreasonable for me to ask you to wait.”

“Nevertheless,” she said, in rather a hard tone, looking him steadily in the eyes, “I will stay here and wait for you. If you stay away long I will turn on the spring-latch and thus lock the door when I leave.”

An evident fear seized upon the young physician. He was anxious to go to his suffering friend, and was unwilling to leave Agnes in his office. She saw all this very plainly.

“And, by the way, Frank,” she resumed, “as I am very tired, I will go into the back room and rest on the lounge.”.She started toward the door, pretending not to have noticed that it was locked, and tried to open it.

“Why, it is locked!” she exclaimed.

Armour’s uneasiness had increased to positive suffering.

“Y-yes—” he stammered.

“Is anyone in there?”

“Agnes – Well?”

“You are acting in a strange and unaccountable way today.”

“I?” she asked, in great astonishment; “I don’t understand you, Frank.” Then she walked straight up to him, and, placing her hands on his shoulders, said, with dignity and tenderness: “I merely asked you if there was anyone in the room, and you are offended. Let us be candid with each other, Frank. What does it mean?”

“I may have a patient in that room, and—”

A low moaning in a woman’s voice, indistinctly heard from the inner room, interrupted him. His face turned scarlet and then pale, and all the time the steady gaze of the surgeon’s daughter was upon him. She took her hands from his shoulders, looking much humiliated; and, with a painful sadness which he had never before seen in her conduct, she simply said:

“I don’t think it is customary for physicians to lock their patients up; but if I have been rude I beg you to forgive me. I will not annoy you by staying. Good-bye, Frank.”

She extended her hand, which he seized eagerly; but she quickly withdrew it and left the room.

He followed her into the passageway.

“Agnes,” he said “you surely don’t suspect that” – but she was fleeing down the stairs so rapidly that he could not finish the foolish sentence.

The girl went so quickly along the crowded street that people turned in wonder to look at her.

Her eyes were filled with tears, her face was very pale, and her lips were tightly caught between her teeth. “I never would have dreamed it,” she said to herself, over and over; “never, never, never! Oh, it will kill me, it will kill me!” She reentered her home as secretly as she had left it, flung herself wearily upon her bed, and cried as though her heart was broken.

The police had gone intelligently to work upon the mystery of the shooting. Mr. Blanchard, the father of the wounded man, had arrived, overcome with grief and horror. Dr. Armour, he said, was the only intimate friend his son had. He was entirely unable to suggest any cause for the shooting, which undoubtedly had not been done with a suicidal hand. The police repeated to him all that they could remember of the disjointed and unintelligible conversation between his son and Agnes Osborne, and this account puzzled him sorely. What mysterious blind was there between his son and this young woman? She had denied all knowledge of him, and yet she gave the information of his identity. When and how had he been her friend, not knowing her? Why had she discovered an anxiety that he should not blame her for the deed that would cost him his life? Why was she desirous of learning from him whether Frank Armour knew anything about the tragedy? Who was this that was madly in love with Armour, and what possible connection could there be between this fact and that of the shooting? Who was the woman referred to in their conversation, and why should Armour keep her in hiding? How could her jealousy of young Blanchard be the moving cause of the desperate assault?

Mr. Blanchard was not the only one who tried to bring some light out of the darkness of all this singular and deplorable transaction. A broken-hearted girl, tossing and weeping on her bed, asked herself these questions, or some of them, many times, and the police were weighing them with all the care and precision of trained hunters of crime, With Dr. Osborne the matter was far more serious than with the police. Lacking his knowledge that the young man’s temporary restoration to a state of consciousness was not explainable on ordinary grounds, they did not see the true value of the fact Dr. Osborne reasoned that a wound of that character must necessarily produce a disorganization of the mental functions and present a condition of unconsciousness This had been the case until his daughter had inserted her finger far into the wound, when at once the sufferer’s face brightened and a condition resembling consciousness ensued. Dr. Osborne was too wise to assume that young Blanchard’s ability to speak and apparently carry forward a conversation was positive evidence of consciousness, for he knew that the vagaries of a disorganized mind are of unimaginable variety. But this case was unqiue – nothing in the books or his experience had a suggestion of its form or color. The whole case was this: His daughter had betrayed fright upon seeing the wounded man at the station, but had recovered from that; and, indeed, her condition might have been construed as one of natural repugnance, overcome by an intelligent direction of the will. It was clear enough so far. When she placed her finger in the edge of the wound there was sign neither of recognition on her part nor consciousness on his; it was only when she had pushed her finger into the brain that those two facts came into existence.

This appeared to the surgeon to be a very strange coincidence. Not only was the young man apparently restored to consciousness, but the two, supposed to have been strangers, recognized each other, and, worse than all else, betrayed a certain ill-defined common knowledge of the crime. All these things threw Dr. Osborne into the most conflicting surmises and brought him into a condition of positive unhappiness. The extraordinary scientific features of the case were overshadowed by his anxieties, His daughter had engaged herself, with his assent, to marry Dr.

Armour, and yet this young physician had been placed in a peculiar light by the words of the dying man. Prolonged thinking brought only wider distraction, and the unhappy father determined to question his daughter, depending on the close sympathy between them to bring the whole truth from her.

It was some time, however, before he could find the opportunity. Mr. Blanchard had removed his son to his home and had retained Dr. Osborne to attend him. When the surgeon had done all that was possible, he went to his home and sought his daughter. But she could not be found.

After nearly crying her heart out upon her return from Armour’s office, she got up, brought herself under control, and then realized that she had been treated shamefully by the man whom she loved above all others in the world. It was easy for her grief to become shame and her shame anger. It was not possible for her yet to think seriously upon any plan that might bring suffering or ruin to her lover; but it was within her power to work serious mischief to some mysterious woman who had come between her and him, and this was a matter to be attended to. Accordingly she cleared up her face, made herself very bright and pretty, and went at once to consult the chief of police.

That functionary was vastly surprised so see her. He had been given a full report of the scene at the receiving hospital, and when he saw the girl enter his office looking so bright, confident, and handsome, and announce her name and mission, he was sorely perplexed. In truth, Chief Holloway had certain ideas which would have given Miss Agnes discomfort if she had known of their existence.

“I have come to ask you, Mr. Holloway,” she said, “if you have made any discoveries concerning the shooting of Mr. Blanchard.”

The officer, somewhat taken aback by her directness, tried, after a heavy fashion, to cover his position under some remarks in which discretion was outlined as a duty. “But this is rather a singular question from you, Miss Osborne, considering that you yourself are supposed to know all about the matter.”

The very boldness and brutality of the assault served an excellent purpose; for the girl, not dreaming that her talk with young Blanchard had taken wings, or that anyone suspected her of knowledge, was shocked with surprise.

“What makes you think that?” she quickly asked.

This put him in command of the situation, for he felt his power.

“Your conversation with young Blanchard showed that both you and he know all about it, and then, after you left him you went to see Dr. Armour, who also appears to be pretty badly mixed up in the whole affair.”

All this came like a whirlwind, and badly frightened the girl.

“Now,” resumed Holloway, “although you have come ostensibly to make inquiries, I think your ultimate purpose was to give some very important information. I should be pleased to hear it.”

Agnes caught her breath. “How can I know anything?” she asked, realizing that her time had come, but with a rush that unnerved her; “Mr. Blanchard spoke in a rambling way.”

“But he was not as evasive as you are at this moment.”

“Evasive? Really, sir—”

“This is no time for by-play.” sternly interrupted the officer; “no doubt you understand that you yourself are in a very peculiar position. If what you know would endanger your own safety by your telling it, I can easily understand your feelings.”

The sting was felt, but the girl rallied and gave this opinion:

“You said something just now that makes me think you suspect Dr. Armour of having a guilty knowledge of the affair. If you mean by that to charge him with the crime, you are entirely in error.”

“But you are careful not to deny that he knows something of importance. Why do you not say openly that you and Armour know who fired the shot, and that you two, possibly for prudential reasons, are doing all you can to conceal your knowledge and shield the criminal?”

The very brutality and directness of the question roused the inmost nature of the girl. With scarlet face and flashing eyes she said:

“If you will come with me, I will show you the murderer.”

This was a windfall that Holloway had not dared to hope for. He promptly followed Agnes.

When they had reached the street, she said:

“It will be necessary to see Dr. Armour first, and I think he is at Mr. Blanchard’s. We will go there first.”

“As you please.”

They found both Dr. Amour and Dr. Osborne at the young man’s house. The two physicians – the father and the lover – were vastly surprised so see Agnes and the chief of police walk in together. For her part, Agnes felt so guilty that she could not bear to look Armour full in the face.

She felt that a wild jealousy had led her so take a desperate and dangerous step, the end of which she could not foresee. But did her lover really deserve to be spared? Had he not deceived her shamefully? The young man felt that a high barrier had come between him and Agnes, and hence he had nothing to say to her. Holloway readily saw that a heavy constraint rested upon them both, and it appeared, in his eyes, an important affair.

“Agnes,” said her father, taking her by the hand, and looking her anxiously in the eyes, “where have you been?”

“To see Mr. Holloway, father.”

“For what purpose?”

“To learn if he had discovered anything.”

This was not the place for pressing the matter, and so her father asked her no more questions.

There was a moment of general embarrassment among the four persons in the room, and it was broken by the chief, who asked that in the cause of justice Miss Osborne be permitted to repeat the experiment of inserting her finger in the wound. With surprising alacrity both the physicians objected, saying that the wound had been dressed, that the sufferer was then very low from shock, and that such an experiment would likely have a fatal issue. Holloway smiled in a peculiar manner, and, looking steadily at Armour, added:

“I hardly expected that you would consent.”

This thrust cut the young man to the quick, and he shot a look at Agnes that revealed his suspicion of her hand in the policy of the officer.

“Of course I have no desire to increase the young man’s danger,” remarked Holloway; “but the result of the former experiment was so important that I deemed it advisable to repeat it if possible. However, I think it is hardly necessary. As soon as I had learned all the particulars of that experiment, I laid them before a prominent physician of this city, and requested his written opinion concerning them. I think this is the proper time to inform you concerning it, for several reasons, which will appear later.”

Thereupon Holloway read an ingenious paper, only a short extract from which can be set forth here. It is as follows:

“Admitting a wide latitude for deception on the part of the young woman, and the possibility of error in your account, the whole affair seems preposterous and not worthy of serious attention. But we shall treat it, not as a fact, but as a hypothetical case.” (The hypothesis was here stated in agreement with the reported facts, and this explanation followed:) “The bullet was small, and hence the laceration of the brain matter was not extensive nor the primary shock very great. The unconsciousness observed apparently resulted from the severing of the nerves ramifying throughout the brain and from the rupturing of the innumerable chains of brain-cells in the path of the bullet. These lacerations, by destroying the continuity of the brain texture, disorganized the mind by interrupting the coordination of its functions.

“If, now, some plan could have been devised for bringing together the severed ends of tissue in such a manner as would permit of their resuming theft normal occupation of transmitting molecular activity, there is a rare possibility that its employment would have restored consciousness. By a very singular accident, the young woman may have performed that service when she inserted her finger deep into the brain; but, in order for this result to have been accomplished, a most extraordinary series of events must have occurred.”

“The finger is a sensitive member, from the fact that it contains so large a number of nerves.”

“These nerves, called peripheral, terminate under a thin cuticle, through which sensation is easily experienced. When her finger was inserted in the brain tissue, her nerve-ends came approximately in contact with the severed nerves of the brain over the entire field of laceration.”

“Thus the mechanical condition of nerve-continuity was restored in the brain of the wounded man, and consciousness was the result.”

“But it is evident that the molecular transmission did not occur directly through her finger.”

“That was not possible, for the reason that her nerves do not run straight through her finger from one side to the other. If we should trace one of these nerves, we should find that, starting at the termination in the finger, it runs up the arm into the brain. A sensation, starting from the end and going to the brain, would there meet and be assimilated by a large number of other sensations, this being the result of coordination. The brain would then decide what action to take, and then would direct the efferent, or outrunning, nerves to move the muscles with a definite purpose. It is clear, then, that the movement of sensation through the wounded man’s brain tissue, after the restoration of continuity, must have become communicated to the nervous system of the woman.”

“In other words, no sensation could pass through his brain without passing through hers also. In this way, their two brains would act largely as one, and the active thoughts of one would be known to the other. By this sort of reasoning we may account for the fact that, although the two persons were strangers to each other, mutual recognition came when the knowledge of both became the possession of each. Hence we must infer that the young woman knows as much concerning the person who did the shooting as does the wounded man himself?”

The effect of this extraordinary document can hardly be imagined. From Dr. Osborne it lifted a load that was likely to crush him. But why had not his daughter been candid with him? Now that there no longer could be a fair suspicion that she had any criminal association with the crime, why had she acted in so strange a manner?

Armour’s thoughts took a very different turn. His pallor increased until it became alarming, and his knees were unsteady from weakness. The man’s agony was so painfully visible that Agnes felt a fearful dread for the end that must come.

The immediate result of all this was that the three men fixed a steady gaze upon her, in which was a commingling of peculiar motives and sensations.

“Miss Osborne,” finally said Holloway, “this scientific report leads us to believe that you are fully aware of the identity of the one who fired the shot. In corroboration of these conclusions, you have confessed your knowledge by offering your services to point out the murderer to me. Will you be so kind as to keep your promise?”

All that was womanly in the girl found cause both for alarm and encouragement in this situation. Against her sense of wrong weighed that of tenderness and affection. She found courage to look Armour squarely in the face, hoping to receive some sign that might guide her; but she found – as she read his expression – only contempt and defiance struggling through the cloud of anguish which sat upon him.

“I will keep my promise,” she said, with much firmness; “we will now go to Dr. Armour’s office.”

Besides becoming somewhat more rigid, as though bracing himself to meet some fearful ordeal, Armour betrayed no emotion. Dr. Osborne appeared to be overcome with astonishment and anxiety. Chief Holloway only smiled.

These four went at once to Armour’s office in utter silence, each feeling the imminence of a catastrophe. The young physician admitted them into the outer room, and then closed the door.

With great abruptness, he then asked this question:

“Will someone be kind enough to explain the object of this visitation?”

Holloway was on the point of speaking, but Agnes stepped before him, and, looking Armour firmly in the face, said:

“I believe that the person who committed this crime is concealed in your consultation-room. If I am wrong, heaven will punish me as I deserve. So far as I am able to discover, no reason exists why I should pretend to deny the knowledge which I have. The murderer is a woman, and you are concealing and shielding her in that room.”

Armour, though pale as death, did not flinch before this accusation. On the contrary, his chest expanded, his eyes flashed, and, with head thrown back, he said: “It was a woman who did the shooting, as I now believe, and it is true that she at this moment is kept in concealment by me in my inner office. I had hoped to be able to conceal her act from the world, for if ever there was an occasion for the exercise of the noblest human traits, it is in the case before us. Let me tell you something – you who mistake suspicion for skill in unearthing crime, and you who are moved by even less worthy motives – crime can not exist in the absence of accountability. Has it occurred to you to imagine that this woman may not have been responsible for her act? Do you know what an epileptic fit is? Surely you do, Dr. Osborne. You are familiar with the strange forms which this disease may take. You know that the sweetest natures are at times wholly perverted by it; that its manifestations are complex and obscure; that sometimes, instead of the violent spasms with which we are all familiar the malady takes the form of mental and physical activity, in which we find an impulse to commit extraordinary acts as the result of monstrous misconceptions. When this condition occurs, all the principles of the victim’s nature may be wholly eclipsed, conscience entirely suppressed, and the power to discriminate between right and wrong completely lost. After the attack has passed, there remains no recollection of what was done during its continuance.

“I inform you – and I am able to prove my assertion – that the woman who shot my dearest friend is now in my inner office; that she came to me from a distant city only yesterday to be treated for this very malady; that very soon after her arrival, I informed her, as was my duty and pleasure, that I was engaged to marry a very charming and kind-hearted young lady. It is a breach of delicate confidence on my part to inform you that, in spite of a brave effort to appear glad for my good fortune, she could not conceal a certain unhappiness which I know was perfectly natural, but it is my duty now to tell you everything. I now know that the sorrow which my news caused her brought on an attack of what is known as masked epilepsy, to which she is subject. The thing uppermost in her mind was that someone was dearer to me than she was; although normally a woman of unexampled sweetness and goodness, she determined, in her condition of temporary insanity, to kill that person. I need not inform you that she most have started out with the clear purpose of killing the young lady to whom I was affianced. But she knew, also, that young Blanchard was my dearest friend, and, in her wild mental condition, she happened to find him fast, and she fired into his brain the bullet that was intended for another.”

The young man paused awhile, but he did not cast a glance at Agnes, who, feeling unaccountably faint as these strange revelations were made, had sunk helpless upon a chair “Ms. Holloway,” resumed Armour, “I ask your promise that you will not arrest this woman now, but that you take proper steps to verify my assertions; and as she has recovered from her attack, and has no recollection whatever of the tragedy, you say nothing to her about it now, and that you never mention it to a soul if you find that what I have told you is true.”

“I cheerfully give those two promises,” said Holloway.

“Then,” said Armour, “I will present the lady to you.”

With that he went to the door of the inner room, unlocked it, and stepped within. In the next moment he returned, supporting on his arm a pale, sweet-faced, beautiful woman of fifty, in whose sad and gentle face was no trace of the fearful thing she had done. Armour, with his head thrown hack and glowing with all the pride of a gentleman, thus presented her:

“Miss Osborne and gentlemen, I have the honor to make you acquainted with my mother.”

“Romance” Mar 1891

THE RESURRECTION
OF LITTLE WANG TAI

A train of circus-wagons, strung along a dusty road, in the Santa Clara Valley, crept slowly under the beating heat of a July sun. The dust rolled in clouds over the gaudy wagons of the menagerie. The outer doors of the cages had been opened to give access of air to the panting animals, but with the air came the dust, and the dust annoyed Romulus greatly. Never before had he longed for freedom so intensely. Ever since he could remember he had been in a cage like this; it had been so all through his childhood and youth. There was no trace in his memory of days when he of a time had been free. Not the faintest recollection existed of the time when he might have swung in the branches of equatorial forests. To him life was a desolation and a despair, and the poignancy of it all was sharpened by the clouds of dust which rolled through the grated door.

Romulus, thereupon, sought means of escape. Nimble, deft, sharp-sighted, he found a weak place in his prison, worked it open, and leaped forth upon the highway a free anthropoid ape. None of the sleepy, weary drivers noticed his escape, and a proper sense of caution caused him to seek security under a wayside shrub until the procession had safely passed. Then the whole world lay before him.

His freedom was large and sweet, but, for a while, perplexing. An almost instinctive leap to catch the trapeze-bar that had hung in his cage brought his hands in contact with only unresisting air. This confused and somewhat frightened him. The world seemed much broader and brighter since the black bars of his prison no longer striped his vision. And then, to his amazement, in place of the dingy covering of his cage appeared a vast and awful expanse of blue heaven, the tremendous depth and distance of which terrified him.

The scampering of a ground-squirrel seeking its burrow soon caught his notice, and he watched the little animal with great curiosity. Then he ran to the burrow, and hurt his feet on the sharp wheat-stubble. This made him more cautious. Not finding the squirrel, he looked about and discovered two owls sitting on a little mound not far away. Their solemn gaze fastened upon him inspired him with awe, but his curiosity would not permit him to forego a closer view. He cautiously crept towards them; then he stopped, sat down, and made grotesque faces at them. This had no effect. He scratched his head and thought. Then he made a feint as though he would pounce upon them, and they flew. Romulus gazed at them with the greatest amazement, for never before had he seen anything skim through the air. But the world was so wide and freedom so large that surely everything free ought to fly; so Romulus sprang into the air and made motions with his arms like to those the owls had made with their wings; and the first grievous disappointment which his freedom brought came when he found himself sprawling on the field.

His alert mind sought other exercise. Some distance away stood a house, and at the front gate was a man, and Romulus knew man to be the meanest and most cruel of all living things and the conscienceless taskmaster of weaker creatures. So Romulus avoided the house and struck out across the fields. Presently he came upon a very large thing which awed him. It was a live-oak, and the birds were singing in the foliage. But his persistent curiosity put a curb upon his fears, and he crept closer and closer. The kindly aspect of the tree, the sweetness of the shade which it cast, the cool depths of its foliage, the gentle swaying of the boughs in the soft north wind – all invited him to approach. This he did, until he arrived at the gnarled old bole, and then he leaped into the branches and was filled with delight. The little birds took flight. Romulus sat upon a limb, and then stretched himself at full length upon it and enjoyed the peace and comfort of the moment. But he was an ape and had to be employed, and so he ran out upon the smaller branches and shook them after the manner of his parents before him.

These delights all exploited, Romulus dropped to the ground and began to explore the world again; but the world was wide and its loneliness oppressed him. Presently he saw a dog and made quickly for him. The dog, seeing the strange creature approach, sought to frighten it by barking; but Romulus had seen similar animals before and had heard similar sounds; he could not be frightened by them. He went boldly towards the dog by long leaps on all fours. The dog, terrified by the strange-looking creature, ran away yelping and left Romulus with freedom and the world again.

On went Romulus over the fields, crossing a road now and then, and keeping clear of all living things that he found. Presently he came to a high picket-fence, surrounding a great inclosure, in which sat a large house in a grove of eucalyptus-trees. Romulus was thirsty, and the playing of a fountain among the trees tempted him sorely. He might have found courage to venture within had he not at that moment discovered a human being, not ten feet away, on the other side of the fence. Romulus sprang back with a cry of terror, and then stopped, and in a crouching attitude, ready to fly for his life and freedom, gazed at the enemy of all creation.

But the look he received in return was so kindly, and withal so peculiar and so unlike any that he had ever seen before, that his instinct to fly yielded to his curiosity to discover. Romulus did not know that the great house in the grove was an idiot-asylum, nor that the lad with the strange but kindly expression was one of the inmates. He knew only that kindness was there. The look which he saw was not the hard and cruel one of the menagerie-keeper, nor the empty, idle, curious one of the spectators, countenancing by their presence and supporting with their money the infamous and exclusively human practice of capturing wild animals and keeping them all their lives in the torture of captivity. So deeply interested was Romulus in what he saw that he forgot his fear and cocked his head on one side and made a queer grimace; and his motions and attitude were so comical that Moses, the idiot, grinned at him through the pickets. But the grin was not the only manifestation of pleasure that Moses gave. A peculiar vermicular movement, beginning at his feet and ending at his head, was the precursor of a slow, vacant guffaw that expressed the most intense delight of which he was capable. Moses never before had seen so queer a creature as this little brown man all covered with hair; he never before had seen even a monkey, that common joy of ordinary childhood, and remoter from resemblance to human kind than was Romulus. Moses was nineteen; but, although his voice was childlike no longer and his face was covered with unsightly short hair, and he was large and strong, running mostly to legs and arms, he was simple and innocent. His clothes were much too small, and a thick growth of wild hair topped his poll, otherwise innocent of covering.

Thus gazed these two strange beings at each other, held by sympathy and curiosity. Neither had the power of speech, and hence neither could lie to the other. Was it instinct which made Romulus believe that of all the bipedal devils which infested the face of the earth there was one of so gentle spirit that it could love him? And was it by instinct that Romulus, ignorant as he was of the larger ways of the world, discovered that his own mind was the firmer and cleverer of the two? And, feeling the hitherto unimaginable sweetness of freedom, did there come to him a knowledge that this fellow-being was a prisoner, as he himself had been, and longed for a taste of the open fields? And if Romulus so had reasoned, was it a sense of chivalry or a desire for companionship that led him to the rescue of this one weaker and more unfortunate than he?

He went cautiously to the fence, and put through his hand and touched Moses. The lad, much pleased, took the hand of the ape in his, and at once there was a good understanding between them. Romulus teased the boy to follow him, by going away a few steps and looking back, and then going and pulling his hand through the fence – doing this repeatedly – until his intention worked its way into the idiot’s mind. The fence was too high to be scaled; but now that the desire for freedom had invaded his being, Moses crushed the pickets with his huge feet and emerged from his prison.

These two, then, were at large. The heavens were lifted higher and the horizon was extended. At a convenient ditch they slaked their thirst, and in an orchard they found ripe apricots; but what can satisfy the hunger of an ape or an idiot? The world was wide and sweet and beautiful, and the exquisite sense of boundless freedom worked like rich old wine in unaccustomed veins. These all brought infinite delight to Romulus and his charge as over the fields they went.

I will not tell particularly of all they did that wild, mad, happy afternoon, while drunk and reeling with freedom. I might say in passing that at one place they tore open the cage of a canary-bird swinging in a cherry-tree out of sight of the house, and at another they unbuckled the straps which bound a baby in a cart, and might have made off with it but for fear of arrest; but these things have no relation to the climax of their adventures, now hastening to accomplishment.

When the sun had sunk lower in the yellow splendor of the west and the great nickel dome of the observatory on Mount Hamilton had changed from silver to copper, the two revelers, weary and now hungry again, came upon a strange and perplexing place. It was a great oak with its long, cone-shaped shadow pointed towards the east and the cool depths of its foliage that first attracted them. About the tree were mounds with wooden head-boards, which wiser ones would have known the meaning of. But how could an ape or an idiot know of a freedom so sweet and silent and unencompassed and unconditional as death? And how could they know that the winners of so rich a prize should be mourned, should be wetted with tears, should be placed in the ground with the strutting pomp of grief? Knowing nothing at all of things like this, how could they know that this shabby burying-ground upon which they had strayed was so unlike that one which, in clear sight some distance away, was ordered in walks and driveways and ornamented with hedges, and fountains, and statues, and rare plants, and costly monuments – ah, my friends, how, without money, may we give adequate expression to grief? And surely grief without evidence of its existence is the idlest of indulgences!

But there was no pomp in the shadow of the oak, for the broken fence setting apart this place from the influence of Christian civilization enclosed graves holding only such bones as could not rest easy in soil across which was flung the shadow of the cross. Romulus and Moses knew nothing of these things; knew nothing of laws prohibiting disinterment within two years; knew nothing of a strange, far-away people from Asia, who, scorning the foreign Christian soil upon which they walked, despising the civilization out of which they wrung money, buried their dead in obedience to law which they had not the strength to resist, and two years afterwards dug up the bones and sent them to the old home to be interred for everlasting rest in the soil made and nourished by a god of their own.

Should either Romulus or Moses judge between these peoples? They were in better business than that.

Their examination of a strange brick furnace in which printed prayers were burned, and of a low brick altar covered with the grease of used-up tapers, had hardly been finished when an approaching cloud of dust along the broken fence warned them to the exercise of caution. Romulus was the quicker to escape, for a circus-train makes a trail of dust along the road, and with swift alacrity he sprang into the boughs of the oak, the heavy Moses clambering laboriously after, emitting guffaws in praise of the superior agility of his guardian. It made Moses laugh again to see the little hairy man stretch himself on a branch and sigh with the luxurious comfort of repose, and he nearly had fallen in trying to imitate the nimble Romulus. But they were still and silent when the cloud of dust, parting at a gate, gave forth into the enclosure a small cavalcade of carriages and wagons.

There was a grave newly dug, and towards this came the procession – a shallow grave, for one must not lie too deep in the Christian soil of the white barbarian – but it was so small a grave! Even Romulus could have filled it, and, as for Moses, it was hardly too large for his feet.

For little Wang Tai was dead, and in this small grave were her fragile bones to rest for twenty-four months under three feet of Christian law. Interest tempered the fright which Romulus and Moses felt when from the forward carriage came the sound of rasping oboes, belly-less fiddles, brazen tom-toms, and harsh cymbals, playing a dirge for little Wang Tai; playing less for godly protection of her tiny soul than for its exemption from the torture of devils.

With the others there came forth a little woman all bent with grief and weeping, for little Wang Tai had a mother, and every mother has a mother’s heart. She was only a little yellow woman from Asia, with queer wide trousers for skirts and rocker-soled shoes that flapped against her heels. Her uncovered black hair was firmly knotted and securely pinned, and her eyes were black of color and soft of look, and her face, likely blank in content, was wet with tears and drawn with suffering. And there sat upon her, like a radiance from heaven, the sweetest, the saddest, the deepest, the tenderest of all human afflictions – the one and the only one that time can never heal.

So they interred little Wang Tai, and Romulus and Moses saw it all, and paper prayers were burned in the oven, and tapers were lighted at the altar; and for the refreshment of the angels that should come to bear little Wang Tai’s soul to the farther depths of blue heaven some savory viands were spread upon the grave. The grave filled, the diggers hid their spades behind the oven, Romulus watching them narrowly. The little bent woman gathered her grief to her heart and bore it away; and a cloud of dust, widening away alongside the broken fence, disappeared in the distance. The dome of Mount Hamilton had changed from copper to gold; the purple canyons of the Santa Cruz Mountains looked cold against the blazing orange of the western sky; the crickets set up their cheerful notes in the great old oak, and night fell softly as a dream.

Four hungry eyes saw the viands of the grave, and four greedy nostrils inhaled the aroma. Down dropped Romulus, and with less skill down fell Moses. Little Wang Tai’s angels must go supperless to heaven this night – and it is a very long road from Christendom to heaven! The two outlaws snatched, and scrambled, and fought, and when all of this little was eaten they set their minds to other enterprises. Romulus fetched the spades and industriously began to dig into Wang Tai’s grave, and Moses, crowing and laughing, fell to as assistant, and as the result of their labor the earth flew to either side. Only three feet of loose Christian law covered little Wang Tai!

•   •   •   •   •

A small yellow woman, moaning with grief, had tossed all night on her hard bed of matting and her harder pillow of hollowed wood. Even the familiar raucous sounds of early morning in the Chinese quarter of San Jose, remindful of that far-distant country which held all of her heart not lying dead under Christian sod, failed to lighten the burden which sat upon her. She saw the morning sun push its way through a sea of amber and the nickel dome of the great observatory on Mount Hamilton standing ebony against the radiant East. She heard the Oriental jargon of the early hucksters who cried their wares in the ill-smelling alleys, and with tears she added to the number of pearls which the dew had strewn upon the porch. She was only a small yellow woman from Asia, all bent with grief; and what of happiness could there be for her in the broad sunshine which poured forth from the windows of heaven, inviting the living babies of all present mankind to find life and health in its luxurious enfolding? She saw the sun climb the skies with imperious magnificence, and whispering voices from remote Cathay tempered the radiance of the day with memories of the past.

Could you, had your hearts been breaking and your eyes blinded with tears, have seen with proper definition the figures of a strange procession which made its way along the alley under the porch? There were white men with three prisoners – three who so recently had tested the sweets of freedom, and they had been dragged back to servitude. Two of these had been haled from the freedom of life and one from the freedom of death, and all three had been found fast asleep in the early morning beside the open grave and empty coffin of little Wang Tai. There were wise men abroad, and they said that little Wang Tai, through imperfect medical skill, had been interred alive, and that Romulus and Moses, by means of their impish pranks, had brought her to life after raising her from the grave. But wherefore the need of all this talk? Is it not enough that these two brigands were whipped and sent back into servitude, and that when the little yellow woman from Asia had gathered her baby to her breast the windows of her soul were opened to receive the warmth of the yellow sunshine that poured in a flood from heaven?

aka “The Ape and the Idiot”

“The Argonaut” 14 Sep 1891

The Ape, The Idiot, & Other People (1897)

THE REMOVAL COMPANY

It is hardly strange that my best and oldest friend, widowed and dying, should have given into my charge her little daughter, Annette, for there was none other so strongly bound to this obligation, none toward whom that gratitude which lives beyond the grave extended a hand of gentler appealing. Nor did it seem at that time so serious an undertaking. Annette was sweet and gentle and quiet and obedient, studying my wishes and trying to follow their course, seemingly putting aside her own great sorrow in my presence and investing her demeanor with the full strength of her brave young heart. I knew little about children then, or I should not have been blind to the womanly conduct of this strange child. Now I have some idea of her suffering, which she kept so bravely from me, of that consuming yearning with all her childish heart for the touch of a mother’s hand and the music of a mother’s voice; and I know now how greatly she needed the kindly guidance of a level purpose and an even heart.

I thought I was doing the best I could. I imagined that the responsibility of the charge found proper estimation in my plans, in my conduct, and in my wishes. If there was a sense of oppression under it my gratitude would have masked it. So, being too young and unsettled to establish a household with Annette as my family, I put her in a convent. It never occurred to me to imagine that this sharp separation contained any element of a riddance, nor did there come up any formed hope that Annette, so desolate and lonely, so gentle, unselfish and retiring, might choose to become a conventual, upon which consummation my responsibility would cease, of course. When I spoke to her of going to school in a convent her sad face brightened, and then instantly it fell.

“What is it, Annette?” I asked.

“I can never see you then.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, “for I shall go to see you every week.”

She looked up at me quickly. “You will come every week?” she asked.

“Yes; every week.”

“Because,” she added – but why did she use that word “because?” of what was it an explanation and for what a reason? – “because,” she said in her sweet, low, childish voice, slightly tremulous, “you are all I have in the world.”

I caught her up in my arms and kissed her for that, and this surprised her very much, for it was the first time I had ever caressed her, but that was because I knew so little about children. She went to the convent, and the years of her life began their steady course – with what loneliness, with what suffering, with what longings, with what numberless little cares and anxieties, with what email pleasures and diversions I did not know, for Annette was reticent, and it never occurred to me to inquire. My promise of visits suffered many violations, but my brave little girl never complained. There was always the same quick but transitory happiness which lighted up her pretty face when I would visit her; but there was otherwise a habitual sadness, growing deeper and surely merging into melancholy. And to my surprise she refused religious comforting – not that I was religious, but – I really did not know why her refusal troubled me. At times she talked sparingly but fearlessly a philosophy which made the good women there despair; these things they told me with concern.

The time came when I awaited with anxiety the day of her graduation, now close at hand, for responsibility at last had laid a hand upon me; its effect upon an erratic bachelor, not old enough to be Annette’s father, was disquieting. Was there any element of selfishness in this feeling? Had I been a churl in failing often to visit Annette? – for when I did go I always took her some little present, and she was grateful for it. Could I not have gone oftener and taken her more presents? Could I not have staid longer and been gentler and kinder to her, and told her things of the outside world to cheer her? Thus ran my thoughts, quickened possibly by conscience, as I sat in the very rear of the great room on graduation day, well concealed, I thought, by the large crowd present. Thus ran my mind as I sat and gazed in wonder at ray Annette (for was she not my ward?) as she sat upon the platform with other girls. Could this beautiful girl be Annette? It must be, for she was so small, so fragile, so pale, so invested with an atmosphere of loneliness.

In all that great room filled with people I saw only my little Annette; and never had I seen so pretty, so dainty, so exquisite a picture. I was glad she did not Bee me; I would let her know afterward that I had been there, and this would prove that I had not neglected her. She held the flowers which fortunately I had thought to send her, and her manner showed that by some accident I must have sent the kind she liked best; for in very truth I had ransacked San Francisco before I found any that I thought were good enough for Annette. But what meant this new look of trouble in her face? It appeared to be evidence of a tangible pain. A fear that the excitement had proved too great for her possessed me, and a strong pity was aroused. There was a strained expression in her eyes, whose glance wandered unceasingly over the vast audience, up and down, row by row, face by face, until the radiance from their unfathomable blue depths fell full upon me; and then instantly a bright flash of recognition, followed by a soft pink flush which rivaled the dainty coloring of her roses, swept over her face, and then a faint smile of pride and happiness, and her glance fell to the floor. At that moment there burst upon me unaccountably, with so fierce assailing that it stunned, the realization, all unexpected, all unguarded against, that my little Annette was a woman.

It was some days before I could recover full possession of myself, for by some unexplained means I had been thrown into a condition of wilder disorder than was customary even with me. Vaguely was Annette associated with this condition, and with a certain impatience I felt a resentment toward her – toward innocent, unhappy, unselfish Annette; and it added somewhat to my resentment to reflect that she was now eighteen, and beyond the legal reach of my protecting guardianship. It is true, she had no means for her maintenance, but I should not grudge her that from my modest earnings. This charge upon my income doubtless would keep me from marrying and having a home with all its sweet comforts, but was Annette to blame for that? and did this weaken the force of my obligation? And then, she might marry or become self-sustaining—. But at that moment the following note was brought to me:

My Dear Guardian: You have not been to see me since the day of my graduation, but I am glad to know that you have not been ill. Perhaps it is better that you did not come, for I know that I should not have had the courage to thank you for all that you have done for me. How can I thank you now? Every word, look, and act of kindness from you through all these past years will remain a precious recollection.

Pardon me, my friend; but I can live no longer upon your bounty. I am a woman and of legal age, and my first right and duty are to maintain myself. Knowing your generosity and unselfishness, I must not let you know whither I go, but if all goes well with me you shall know.

Farewell, by best, my dearest friend.

Annette.”

The blow was swift and cruel, but above all other feelings there struggled to the front one of bitter chagrin. So Annette had run away from me; so, after all, it was proved that I was nothing to her, and that now, when she was armed to make her own fight for life, she had no further use for me; so, she believed that my friendship was worthless, my guidance and assistance useless; and thus Annette had shaken me off as an ugly dream, leaving me bruised, humiliated, cut to the heart.

As the days passed by my resentment softened, and then there came upon me a fear that Annette’s mind was deranged. Sometimes long ago I feared it, but not expected it. If I should find her with her mind awry, my duty would be clear; but if it should be otherwise how could I thrust my presence and friendship upon her? Her conduct had been a sufficient hint. The weeks passed, and my fear for her safety grew steadily. It looked bad that not a word had come from her. San Francisco was hardly large enough to afford absolute concealment, but it was largo enough to starve in. How could Annette, with her dainty tastes, shrinking disposition and fragile body earn a livelihood there? Would she rather starve than be near me?

My fears finally impelled me to make a search, and for this purpose I employed a man named Greatwood. “I do not wish to see her,” I instructed him, “nor does she wish to see me. If you find her, tell her nothing, but report to me.”

It was a harder task than I had imagined, but one day Greatwood came to me with a strange expression on his face. “I have found her,” he said, “and she is in a very bad situation.”

“Tell me about it, Greatwood,” I begged, for his words gave me a quick, measurable pain and a great eagerness.

“Well,” he said, “she has been sewing and trying to teach, but she was not strong enough, and her health broke down. It is a wonder she has lived so long. The people in the house have been kind to her, but she refuses to accept food from them, protesting that she is not in need of it. Matters reached a climax only last night. Someone heard a strange noise in the room – a very slight sound, but sufficient to attract the attention of a nervous woman in an adjoining room. She roused her husband, and they went to the girl’s room. The door was locked; there was no answer to their calls and rapping. They burst open the door—”

“Is she still alive, Greatwood?” I gasped, springing to my feet.

“Yes; but they found something worse than her attempt.”

“What was it, man?”

“She was starving.”

“Come, Greatwood,” I cried, “take me to her.”

“But you said—”

“Come – there is not a moment to lose.”

We went as fast as horses driven furiously could take us. Oh, what a shabby, wretched place for Annette, and the poor, bare room in which she lived ( I went straight to the bedside and gently raised the slight, emaciated form of my poor Annette – my Annette, I say – and pressed her to my heart. She knew me, and feebly put her arms around my neck – the first time she had done this in all her life.

“I didn’t think you would care to see me,” she faintly said, and tears of happiness streamed down her wan cheeks; and there came into her beautiful blue eyes just such a look as that which lighted them up on the day when she found me in the great crowd at the convent. The doctor who had been summoned that night to attend her had left an injunction that she be given a broth; but the women there told me that she had refused to take it. I ordered another at once. Annette watched me all the time, but said nothing, and her tears continued to How. I was sure that I tried very hard to be kind and gentle with her. I said little, because she was very weak. I gave issue to not a word of chiding – how could I? But for all that there must have been something in my manner that disturbed her, for she soon became restless. What was there lacking in my conduct? Was it sympathy? Surely I felt it with all my heart. It is true, I could not forget Annette’s past treatment of me – not that it should affect either my sympathy or my sense of duty, but that it indicated her dislike of my care and attention. I felt that I was guilty of a rude intrusion upon her now; for I was interfering in a matter that lay wholly between her and her Maker; and I found in her desolate condition a sufficient explanation of the fleeting happiness which she felt upon seeing me. This had worn off quickly enough, but not sooner than I had expected. Even before the broth arrived my presence had apparently become a positive annoyance to her. I offered her the broth. She shook her head.

I pleaded earnestly with her. Her look hardened all the more.

“But you must, Annette,” I said.

Her eyes flashed with a quick look of defiance.

“No – come closer. Send the others away; I want to tell you something…. You are and always have been very kind to me … much kinder than I deserve or have ever deserved … I can never repay you, because … I shall not live long enough.”

“Annette!”

Her eyes brightened and a flush came into her deathly pale cheeks.

“It is true,” she said, speaking more rapidly – “it is true. I am determined to go.”

“What do you mean, Annette?”

“You know what I mean,” she gasped, struggling to raise herself upon her elbow. “You know what I mean.”

I knew then, for even if her words had failed to convey her dreadful meaning, the resolution in her beautiful eyes would have been sufficient information.

“You know what I mean,” she repeated, “and it will be worse than cruel in you to interfere.”

In spite of my philosophy; in spite of my belief in those unhappy days that the right to take one’s own life was inherent, sacred, and inalienable; in spite of my conviction that none had the right to interfere and that all would better be dead than living; in spite of my opinion that among all those whom I knew – the sore afflicted, the deranged, the unhappy, the abandoned and desolate – none could find a happier release in death than my poor Annette – in spite of all these things my heart seemed to die within me when a full realization of her terrible determination broke upon me. For my conscience was alarmed, and the memory of neglected visits and other attentions and kindnesses was aroused into unhappy activity. Possibly I could have made her life brighter and kept at bay the gloom and sense of loneliness that had become despair.

But what could be done? I knew that Annette was proud, and that the end of all things with her had come. Despite her generous effort to 6how appreciation of the little that I had done for her so meanly, I saw that my presence was irksome and my influence an evil. What could I do?

“Annette, do you not think it is wrong to do what you contemplate?”

“Ah, yes,” she replied, sinking back upon her pillow and covering her face with her hands.

“Then,” said I, “you know you should not do it. I don’t wish to dictate to you or preach a sermon, but let me assure you, Annette, that violence to conscience is unnatural and unholy, and that it is unworthy of you. Think well, my child… And if I do not seem indelicate – how can I say without wounding you, Annette, that you need not fear the lack of such friendship in substantial form as I am able to give you?”

There was a long silence, and I knew that she was sobbing. Hope quickened within me, only to be strangled at once, for Annette brokenly said this:

“I appreciate your kindness and thank you with all my heart, but – but – I am determined.”

Should I resort to harsh measures to restrain her? That would be mean and cowardly… Annette must go… That deadening realization forced itself upon me… I would not interfere with the exercise of a right which I considered sacred … Only one thing was left for me to do – I must be a friend now.

“Annette,” said I, “if you have the strength to listen to me I will tell you something very strange, and suitable only for the ears of those who contemplate the end with the willing mind of one anxious to accomplish it. It will not save you to me, but it will save your conscience to you, and your wish will be gratified without outrage to your sense of right.”

Annette fixed a very earnest look upon me.

“I don’t understand how that can be,” she said.

“You are too weak. Take some of this broth, and then I will tell you a thing exceedingly strange and of the deepest interest to you.”

With surprising confidence in me, she swallowed the broth, and its good effect soon became manifest; and when a little color had come to her cheeks and a healthier brightness to her eyes, I told her substantially the following:

“I have a friend named Reiferth, a German of about my own age, and he and I have the same ideas concerning the matter that is in your mind. Now, as a fear of punishment in a future life deters many from committing the act who would be better off if not so restrained, Reiferth conceived the idea of forming a company which would undertake, for an ample consideration, to remove from this life, without inflicting pain, those who earnestly wish to go but fear to take the step for one reason or another, and who will submit themselves to the company to do for them what they fear to do for themselves. I refused, much to Reiferth’s surprise, to become a member of the company; whereupon he charged me with inconsistency, and maintained that the purpose of the company was wholly noble and humane. I believed that it was, but I did nor desire to embark in such an enterprise. Reiferth then declared that, knowing the scheme to be unlawful and its practice attended with the gravest dangers, with the penitentiary or the scaffold a constant menace to its success, I was afraid to become his associate. I made no rejoinder to that charge. Then Reiferth asked me to help him if it should come in my way, and I promised that I would. Reiferth put his plan in operation in the very heart of San Francisco, and there is evidence that he has prospered amazingly.

“Annette,” I said in conclusion, “I offer you this opportunity for accomplishing your purpose without doing violence to your conscience. What do you think of it?”

[I have no desire to justify myself in this matter, nor to deny the right of criticism which the unusual position here advanced may invite; but while I know that the scheme here proposed may be denounced as but a form of suicide, and that its acceptance would bring all the penalties supposed to attach to that act, I have to say that I see little difference between its essence and that of knowingly acquiring habits and following practices which lead to the same result. It was important in this case that I impress upon Annette the idea of avoiding outrage to her conscience.]

Annette had listened with an interest that absorbed every faculty; and when I had finished she sat upright in great excitement, and somewhat to my dismay she said:

“Do you know where the place is?”

“Yes.”

“What is it called?”

“The Removal Company.”

“Will you take me to it?”

“Annette—”

“Will you?”

“Immediately?”

“Yes; now.”

“You are not strong enough, Annette.”

“I am perfectly well.” she responded, springing to her feet and commencing a few preparations.

With a heart so heavy that it almost dragged me to the floor, I left the room and found my carriage still waiting. T went upstairs again, and Annette at once took my arm and walked firmly down to the street. So strange a numbness possessed me that I hardly believed I was in my right mind. In the carriage Annette, who was now all eagerness and activity, saw that something was wrong with me.

“Why,” she cried, “you are ill!”

“I think not. Annette.”

“I am taxing you too greatly – I am asking too much of you… but it will soon be over.”

We arrived at the quarters of the Removal Company – a silent old brick house, with little exterior sign of occupancy. It was not far from the long warehouses that lie under the afternoon shadow of Telegraph Hill, and was in one of those districts which a vagrant fashion of migration had left a mere trace of former enterprise. Within the house all was brightness and modest luxury. Reiferth was a man of taste. He welcomed us very cheerfully. “I am sorry to see you ill, though,” he said to me. He had a kind and gentle manner, and he handled with the utmost tact and delicacy the business in hand. I was hardly able to stand when Annette ad vs need to bid me farewell. Tears were in her eyes and she was pale, but her determination was firm and her courage unflinching. 6he took my band and looked up into my face long and searchingly. What sought she there, if anything?

“Farewell, my friend,” she said in a clear voice and with infinite tenderness.

“Annette—”

But she stopped my words by throwing her arms around my neck, and before I could realize anything she had fled my presence, going with Reiferth to another part of the house. As soon as I could order my understanding I followed, but the door by which they had left was locked. No longer could I stand; an unaccountable weakness seized me, and I sank into a chair. There I sat an indefinite time in a stupor, and was thus sitting when Reiferth returned.

“Well?” I gasped.

“It is all over,” he said kindly. Then he quickly brought me some brandy, which he made me drink.

“Where is she?” I asked.

“Upstairs.”

“May I see her?”

“Why – no. I – I – don’t think you ought.”

“But I wish to.”

After some further demur he yielded. He supported me up the stairs and into a room. On a lounge lay Annette. At the door my heart had bounded with gladness, for she appeared to be only sleeping; but when I had come nearer – I cannot write of all these terrible things even at this great distance of time. I had come to bid my poor Annette farewell now, for I could not. I could not in life.

“Please leave me, Reiferth,” I begged.

When he was gone I took the slight body in my arms and pressed it close, very close to my heart. I covered the white, dead face with kisses. I kissed her hair and her sightless eyes, once so beautiful, and caressed the poor sunken cheeks.

“Ah, Annette,” I cried, “my own little Annette, my Annette, I can tell you now what I have learned this day – that I love you; that I love you with all my heart and rout, and have loved you thus since the day when you sought and found me in the great crowd at the convent. How blind and foolish I was, Annette! And now you are gone, and my heart is broken.”

Reiferth came and took the poor dead body out of my arms and kindly led me away. My poor Annette!

•   •   •   •   •

More than a year had passed, and I was standing listlessly on a street corner in Philadelphia. I could not live in Son Francisco, for everything there was eloquent with the memory of Annette. Darkness was approaching rapidly. I still stood, with that same dull pain which came upon me when Annette started downstairs with me to the carriage. The night was coming on cool wings, but its presence was soft and gentle. There was a shy touch on my elbow, and when I looked around I saw a beggar. She was small and slight, and was dressed in faded black. A black straw hat, with poor, cheap, faded lace, shaded her face from the street-lamp.

“Will you please give me a little money, sir?” she pleaded. “My husband has gone away, and I have nothing to eat, and my poor baby is starving.”

It was not the voice alone that came to me out of infinite distance; there came crowding with it a thousand memories and all the anguish of a blasted life. I was a broken man, carrying existence heavily, but the eagerness which surged up within me swept aside all the torpor of my being. Some strange movement must have alarmed the woman, for she quickly raised her face – and there was not a trace of recognition in her eyes.

“Annette!” I cried. “You know me – your guardian – your old friend, who reared you from infancy – Annette!”

“I – I don’t know you,” she replied, with pitiful fright. “I am not Annette – I never had a guardian”; and honesty shone luminous in every word.

“But you are Annette,” I protested, aghast, “and you must come with me.”

“No, no!” she cried, with worse fright still; and then she turned and ran away.

I would not let her go so easily. I sprang forward and caught her, and held her firmly.

“Do you hate me so much as this, Annette?” I asked with angry and unreasoning bitterness. “Tell me so, and I will let you go.”

“I don’t hate you – I don’t know you – you are mistaken. Let me go. I am afraid of you. I will cry out, and you shall be arrested.”

I released her, and she hurried away. Was there really some dreadful mistake? Was it possible not to be certain of that low, sweet voice, those beautiful eyes (now strangely dull), that look of indescribable sadness, that small frail form, those exquisite graces of pose and movement? But if it were she, how could she, so honest and innocent, so much a stranger to deceit, conceal her surprise upon encountering me, and how assume entire ignorance of me? Here was a strange mystery – or – had I gone mad and taken to finding Annette in shadows? I glanced after her, and in the distance saw her hurrying along, fear lending fleetness to her step. Had I forgotten that Annette was dead? – but would not even her spirit know me? Wit bout a thought of what I did I hurried after the flying form, which distance and darkness were absorbing – I would not lose Annette again. I went forthwith in pursuit, holding my pace within the necessities of its mission, getting a firmer hand upon my eagerness, and looking to the ordering of my purpose; for if ever a man needed to be bold yet cautious, firm yet gentle, fearless in strange, dark perils and reliant upon the evidence of his senses, that man was I. Enough had come forth already to distract my faculties; but Annette, dead or alive, had stood before me, and I would follow her now whithersoever the love which bound me to her might lead.

Without once having looked back, Annette arrived in a dark street, slipped quickly into a door, and in a moment a tall, ugly house had swallowed her up. I was now close behind her. I tried the door. She had bolted it. I rushed upon it madly, burst it open, and sent it flying against the wall with a crash that resounded throughout the depths of the house; and as I did so I saw Annette – for I must call her so – clearing the top step. She turned and saw me, and fled with a cry. Never bounded a deer with swifter leaps than mine. I was close upon her in a dimly lighted hail, when she flung open a door, cried “Mother!” in a choking fright, and as I pushed into the room threw herself into the arms of a strange, sinister woman, wrinkled and bent with age. There the poor girl, her face buried in the woman’s shoulder, sobbed and gasped and trembled in a very agony of fear. In a moment a powerful man of middle age came hastily into the room behind me, and stepped to one side to see me bettor. Other men followed him – men with dull, vacant faces, whose blankness would have impressed me at another time; but through all these faces and circumstances, through the turbulence of my emotions and the fierce energy of my purpose, there arose and stood forth the fact that this strong man and I were enemies – that between us two lay the settlement of this affair, and a dark pit yawned for him who should fall. He was the old woman’s son; thus spoke his sharp eyes, somewhat dulled with drink, and his high cheek bones, like hers; the pose of his head and certain tokens of manner – all a copy of his mother’s; but where coarse and brutal in him, sharp and cruel in her. Upon his body he wore only a woolen shirt, open at the breast, the sleeves rolled up, and upon his lower limbs coarse trousers.

“Well,” said the man, his voice deep and his manner menacing, though betraying a puzzled mind, “who are you an’ what yer tryin’ to skeer them women to death fer?”

Annette, controlling a sob, raised her face upon hearing his voice, and looked at him gratefully.

“Joe,” she said faintly, “I’m so glad you are here. You won’t let him hurt me, will you, Joe?”

“Not as long as them hands kin close up a windpipe,” responded the man, making a significant prehensile movement with his fingers; “but I don’t think nobody wants to hurt yer, Bess. Now go to the baby.”

Annette started and her lips opened. With a little cry she ran to a cradle in the corner – a very poor and shabby cradle – and tenderly lifted a sleeping infant. “Poor little angel,” she crooned. “Did you think your mother had forgotten you?”

Its mother?

“Whose child is that?” I asked the man, and he noted the threat and challenge in my voice.

“I don’t know what right you have—”

“I have a right, and we will not discuss it,” I peremptorily interrupted.

“— to come here an’ raise this rumpus an’ skeer a couple o’ women, but if you’ll be decent an’ kind, like, about it, you kin ax my sister herself.”

“Who is your sister?”

“Bess, there.” He motioned toward Annette – Annette, gentle, dainty, refined; full of the softest graces – Annette the sister of this ruffian! “Come, Bess,” said he, “brace up an’ answer this man’s questions. I won’t let him hurt yer. You’re jest as safe as you ever wuz in yer life. Tell him what he wants ter know, and tell it straight up and down.”

Thus encouraged – and, I could see, half commanded also – Annette (for I must call her that yet) turned and looked at me for the first time since I had entered the room. All hope that she might recognize me in the stronger light was dissipated instantly; she regarded me only with fear and uneasiness. I approached her closer.

“Annette,” I said, removing my hat and looking down into her face as she sat holding the child—

“My name is not Annette,” she hastily interjected.

“What is your name, then?”

“Elizabeth. My mother and my brother Joe call me Bess.” This, looking up at me in the fullness of honesty, but perplexed and fearful.

“What is your other name?”

“Hartly. That is my husband’s name.”

I staggered under that blow, and the sharp eyes of the old woman and her son were fastened upon me with a steady gleam that burned.

“Whose child is that?” The words came with effort from a great depth within me.

“She is mine. Her name is Pearl. I am her mother.”

Thereupon I went all astray from myself, and looked around with helpless dismay. The four sharp eyes were consuming me. Annette – may I so call her yet? – gazed steadily up at me with all her old gentleness and sweetness, but still with fear and anxiety. Beyond the four burning eyes were the faces of men who stared in blank stupidity. I looked down at Annette, and there too I saw now, not clearly, if at all, something of the stamp of vacuity which was upon the faces of these ragged men grouped near the door. I was groping in a gloomy path beset with deep pita, and I breathed uncertain dangers. The four eyes burned me with a glowing heat. In a tangle of betrayed senses I essayed a persistence which I hoped would drag Annette forth from what I conceived to be some grim and overmastering constraint.

“Where is your husband?” I asked.

Annette was puzzled or cautious, for her glance flew for help to the man Joe.

“Where is your husband?” I pressed it upon her, feeling that I possibly had touched a spring. The man’s sharp gaze was transferred from me to her.

“Answer him fair, Bess,” he said, not unkindly; “give him the straight truth.”

“He has gone to sea,” answered Annette, looking up at me in a wondering and troubled manner.

“When did he go?”

She appeared to be thinking very hard and sounding her memory for an honest answer.

“It was while I was ill,” she finally said with some suddenness, and with much pride in her victory of recollection.

“You have been very ill?”

“Oh, yes; very ill indeed.”

“When was it?”

“It was when my baby was born.” (Here she began to speak with a quick, nervous energy.) “I didn’t know it until a long time afterward – I was so very ill – and my husband was not with me. When I recovered I had forgotten I was married. I was in a strange—”

“Stop there, Bess,” fiercely cried the man. She obeyed instantly and trembled. “You’ve got one o’ them spells o’ your’n agin, an’ yer tellin’ what yer don’t know, an’ yer lett’n’ yer tongue run away with yer senses. Forgot yer husband! Forgot yer was married! Maybe you’ve forgot I’m yer brother.”

“No,” faintly protested the girl, regarding him with wide eyes; “no, Joe; I haven’t forgotten that, but I forget so many—”

“Who’s this woman here?” demanded the man, indicating his mother.

“My mother. But, Joe—”

“Shut up! You’ve got one o’ them crazy spells agin. Now, mister,” added he, turning angrily upon me, “it’s about time yer cleared out o’ here, ain’t it?” With increasing anger he continued: “You chased this here girl to her house, an’ smashed in the door like a wild beast, and tore in here like as if you was goin’ to murder the poor thing, an’ now you’ve set her wits loose an’ brung on another o’ them wanderin’ an’ fergettin’ spells. That’s why I say you’d jist better clear out.”

The man was in a rage; and, seeing that I did not move, he stepped to the chimney and took an axe-handle from the corner. At this juncture the old woman came out of her silence.

“No, Joe,” she said with a strong, quiet firmness; “don’t lose yer head, my son, for yer need a cool brain an’ a stiddy nerve right here and right now. There’s jist a misunderstandin’ summers, an’ it’ll come out all right.” Joe became quiet, and his mother turned to me and said: “You look lack a gentlemun, sir, an’ no doubt you air; an’ yer don’t look lack you’d been a-drinkin’; but you’ll allow you’ve acted very queer – I might say outrageous-like – an’ my son ain’t to be blamed for gittin’ mad at yer. Now, to save my blessed life I don’t know what yer drivin’ at, but I b’lieve yer actin’ on good principles and have mistook this girl fer summon else, ’cause you’ve been callin’ her Ninette, or somethin’. You suspec’ there’s somethin’ wrong, an’ yer think yer know the girl, an’ want ter get her out o’ this scrape.” And so the woman talked on, reviewing the whole situation with uncommon skill, reminding me that the girl did not know me, that in all her answers she had tried to tell the truth so far as a shattered mind would permit. The woman closed a long speech by going into a tedious history of the girl’s life and assuring me that unrestricted opportunity would be given for an official investigation on the morrow. But the whole of this fine effort passed without effect upon me.

“No!” I exclaimed. “I will not trust her another night in your devilish hands. There is some crime here of so damnable a character that it overwhelms your lies. I will spare you the law on condition that you stand aside and let me take away this girl in peace.”

Upon saying that I picked up Annette and her child and advanced toward the crowd that held the passage to the door, but the fury of the man Joe escaped restraint, and he sprang before me with his weapon aloft.

“No!” he cried with an oath; “not while I’m alive.”

In an instant I had put Annette aside and sent a chair flying through the glass window. I leaped to the opening it made and cried out with all my strength. The call for help went bounding up and down the street from other throats, and swift feet were set in motion. I glanced back upon my enemies. The furious ruffian, taken unaware, had stood a moment in a stupor; but now, having roused himself, he came upon me with the one purpose of killing me. At that moment the shrill whistle of a policeman, always a thing which strikes upon one’s sensibilities much as a physical blow, went at large upon the night and thrilled all the ruffian’s nerves and drew the sap from his purpose; pallor swept over his face, his hand dropped.

“Joe,” called his mother, in sharp anxiety, “git them fellers away quick an’ come back here. We’ll see yit.”

The man, quickened by a sense of danger, hustled away the dumb blank creatures and returned simultaneously with two officers, who headed a procession of frightened and curious people.

“Shut the door,” I called out. The officers came within and the door was closed upon the crowd.

“Who was it called for help? What is the matter?” asked one of the officers.

“It was I who called,” I answered.

“Oho, Simpson!” said the same officer, addressing Joe. “Trying to do this man, eh? You’ve been quiet so long that I thought you had given up that sort of thing and was sticking to the begging business…. Well, what has he been trying on you, sir?” concluded the officer, addressing me.

“Nothing, I assure you,” I replied, “but this girl, whom I have known from her infancy – I found her here and would have taken her away, but this man tried to kill me. I want you to help me rescue her from this fearful den.”

“That girl with the child? Oh, she’s one of Simpson’s best beggars!”

Upon his requesting it, I gave a relation of all that had happened since I first saw Annette on the street. “She is one of his beggars, you say,” I added; “there is yet a deeper and more damnable infamy. They say she is married. It is a lie; but see, she is a mother!”

“Ah!” exclaimed the officer, fixing a hard look upon Simpson, who, encaged within grave suspicions, appealed with his eyes to his mother. She thereupon said:

“I’d lack ter speak a word private to this gentlemun.”

I went with her into a corner of the room, and we whispered.

“What yer want ter do, sir?” she asked.

“I intend to take this girl to the police station.”

“Ah, well! She’s dementy, like; an’, ’twixt you an’ me, I ain’t sorry ter git rid of her.”

“You and your son also will go to the station, but as prisoners, to be tried and punished for your crimes.”

This to her was not unexpected; but she fastened her gaze upon me with a penetrating, sinister, unwavering manner, and it hurt.

“I don’t think you’d better do that,” she said, not relaxing her gaze, and speaking very slowly. “Once there was a man what connivered in schemes fer to remove people what didn’t have the sand for to kill theirselves, an’ when some folkses found it out they blowed on him, an’ he spent the rest of his life in the state’s prison…. Me ’n’ my son don’t want no trouble with you, an’ you don’t look lack a gentlemen what’s got a wobbly tongue.”

I left her and returned to the officers. Annette sat holding her child tenderly, but with a look so pathetic and helpless, so confused with fright and a shaken consciousness, that while I yearned to comfort her I could see that whatever little mind she had was drifting away. I said to the officers:

“I wish to take this girl and her child to Dr. Arnold’s hospital. Will you kindly help me?”

“And Simpson goes to the station?” I heard the sharp clinking of handcuffs.

“So – not tonight; there in time for that. Help me in the present urgency.”

Annette’s resistance was slight, and there was no other. She sobbed all the way in the carriage, and talked incoherently to her fretting child. She was made comfortable at the hospital, but she sobbed continuously. “Her dementia,” said Dr. Arnold, “is almost complete. The shock has been too great.” I took him wholly into my confidence, omitting not even the Removal Company and Annette’s experience there. He asked me many questions; his mind was quicker and deeper and shrewder than mine. “Without knowing it,” he said, after a long silence spent in pacing the floor, “you have unearthed a singular and original form of crime. The Removal Company has never killed anyone.”

I looked at him, amazed and incredulous.

“Not one.” he continued. “The victims were simply treated with a drug which destroyed their minds partly and their memory wholly. Are you so confiding as to believe that Reiferth would have dared take anyone’s life? The risk was too great, and the plan lacked that merit of continued profit which distinguishes the one in actual operation.”

I did not understand him.

“With wrecked minds the victims would make good beggars,” explained the doctor. “The wretches are sent from San Francisco to Philadelphia, where the danger of recognition is small, and are kept as beggars under the reliable agency of Mr. Joe Simpson and his mother; and your Removal Company has a steady income through their zeal. The blank-faced men whom you saw at Simpson’s, as well as this poor girl, have been subjected to the peculiar treatment of the Removal Company, and are employed as beggars.”

I think I hardly understood all of this at the time, for I was weak from a great strain, and nervously awry from a certain strange, wild joy for having Annette alive and under my care once more.

“Can you restore her to her former condition of mind?” I asked.

Gravely and slowly he made answer: “There is a bare possibility…. The plan must be heroic and desperate…. If it fails – death or complete dementia.”

It came out afterward, in an investigation of Simpson’s methods, that my poor Annette, whose innocence and sweetness must have been her guard against even the lowest brutality, had never been a mother; that was a deception practiced upon her to make her captivity surer.

“Ah,” exclaimed Annette, upon emerging, after many days, from those great depths, “I am still alive! Why did not Mr. Reiferth keep his promise? Have I been asleep long?”

Ay, more than a year, Annette; but the hideous dreams of that black and terrible time have left no stamp upon your memory!

The sweet, cool western wind and the generous sunshine come to California, bringing their blessings to the rich and the poor, the prosperous and the unfortunate, the happy and the despairing; but I think that the gentle winds and the shining years bless with a special grace one happy home, which, born of suffering, of strange misunderstandings, of crime, of darkness, has issued forth into the broad yellow light that heaven sends, grateful, humble, inexpressibly content. That home is ours – Annette’s and mine; for not alone have the church and the law made us man and wife.

“The Californian” Oct 1891

SOME QUEER EXPERIENCES

In the following group of strange incidents, I relate only a few of the many extraordinary experiences of my life, and, in doing so, I make no attempt to explain them. For some, I have never found a satisfactory explanation, and for others, I have solutions, which, however, are so uncertain that I deem it unwise to introduce them. Each reader will probably amuse himself with speculations; this one will say the experiences were delusions or hallucinations; another will say they are pure fiction, the work of a story-writer. I shall not complain of these. But I do wish to say (and these are facts with which many are familiar) that I was a sickly, nervous child from infancy; that, having been reared in the South, my earliest mental development was largely the work of intelligent but highly superstitious negro women – slaves – serving as nurses and housekeepers; that they filled my keenly sensitive mind with the most dreadful stories of ghosts, witches, devils, and the like, so that my childhood was passed in terror, my youth in morbid fancies, and my manhood, down to the present time, under the control of a gloomy and almost unmanageable imagination.

In my boyhood, the most terrifying dreams would disturb my sleep; from these, I would often wake with paroxysms of screaming that my parents could not check in an hour. Somnambulism was a common experience, leading me into perilous situations, and giving concern to those charged with my safety. The slightest fever would invariably send me into delirium, when the most grotesque and horrifying hallucinations – which would require a book to describe in detail – would haunt me.

From all this, it may be judged that my temperament is abnormal, and that perhaps I have nervous peculiarities not common to the race; and that, this being so, I have certain – permit me to say – faculties which possibly give me capacity to see and hear things not seen and heard by all. In order that I might the better understand my own condition, I have made such study as I could of the human body and mind, giving much attention to obscure mental functions as analyzed and set forth by able writers; and, while I have learned little with regard to myself, I am convinced that there are extraordinary things often happening and not at all understood, and that upon the imperfect glimpses which we have of them are based those natural (and, in the case of some persons, absolutely necessary) beliefs having spiritualism, theosophy, and some others as their basis.

I shall now proceed with these short narratives.

The Angel on the House-Top

One night, when I was about seven years old, I sat with my nurse beside the big, open fireplace, in the family sitting-room. My parents and the others of the household had gone to my father’s study, which was in a smaller house removed a hundred yards from the “big house.” I had been sleepy, but my nurse had roused me with a terrifying tale of a mother who had killed and boiled her little daughter during the husband’s absence at work, and had served him the dish for his supper, when he came home that night. He asked for his little girl, and his wife said she had gone to bed; but just then an angel began to sing on the house-top. It was the spirit of the little girl. The woman went out to see, as the angel promised to drop a bag of gold to the ground; but as soon as she emerged into the garden, the angel dropped a bag of stones upon her head, and killed her. The man, hearing the sound, then went out, and a bag of gold fell at his feet.

This story had been told me by the nurse with great elaboration, and I was desperately frightened, and begged her to sit up with me till my parents should return. While we were thus sitting, there came a rap at the hall door. The nurse went to open it (I following closely), and found a stranger standing there. He wanted to see my father, and the nurse asked him to wait till she could summon him. She went away, and the man walked into the sitting-room, and he and I sat down before the big fireplace. He was pale, and his eyes were those of a fearful, hunted man. He looked at me in a manner that frightened me, but I dared not move. His shoes were dusty and his clothing torn, and I saw a dark-red stain on his hand. He saw it too, and shuddered and closed his eyes.

He had sat thus a short time, when I heard a strange voice singing, as though high in the air. It was a sweet, musical voice, and I felt, I knew, it was the voice of an angel. (I am writing now of what I felt then. I have other views of angels now.) These words – or words meaning the same thing – the angel chanted:

“He will not save you – save you – from the gallows; so run away, now – run away, now – for he is coming – coming – run away, now, and save your life.” But I felt that the angel meant to slay him by dropping something from the roof.

I made a mental picture of a white-winged angel standing on the scaffolding, where some workmen that day had been making repairs on the part of the roof overhanging the front entrance, and I wondered if it shivered in the cold wind which swept over the house, and howled, and shrieked around the comers. In a condition of helpless terror, I watched the stranger, knowing that the warning was for him. He did not seem to have heard the voice, but suddenly he rose, and, saying, “I will be back in a minute,” started hastily for the door. He seemed to be anxious to get away before my father could come. He hastily threw open the door and was running down the stairs, when a piece of the scaffolding (which my father afterward explained had been wrenched loose by the wind) fell upon his head and killed him instantly. The next day, it was learned that he had committed a murder some miles away, and it is supposed that he had come to my father, who before had befriended him, to get his assistance in escaping.

The Gigantic Katydid

In those days, I believed that cottontail rabbits had the power of turning themselves into griffins and devouring children who asked for something to eat too often, and that katydids, upon some similar provocation, could suddenly become the devil’s horses and hear children away to the infernal regions.

The head-woman of the house-servants was a handsome mulatto, with two children, a boy and a girl. These children had unusual privileges for slaves, and, in a large sense, were companions of my parents’ children. Henry, the boy, was just of my age, and we were much together.

Late one summer afternoon we went down the lane and crossed the main road to see some young birds that we knew were in a nest near the “Big Spring.” We had just time to make the trip and return for supper. We turned out of the spring path and came to a little glade. Henry stopped and seemed to be in great trouble. I asked him what the matter was, and he explained that his mother had promised him a whipping for stealing some molasses that day. I felt sorry for him, but I knew the whipping was inevitable; still, it made me feel so sad that I lost all interest in the birds, and refused to cross the glade to see them. He tried to persuade me to go, and assured me that he did not care for a little whipping; but all the heart was gone out of me, and I stood still. He went on.

I saw him cross the glade. The nest was a very short distance in the bushes beyond. Just as he disappeared in the brush, I noticed a katydid in the grass at my feet. In an instant it began to grow larger. Then it made a bound in the direction of my companion, and then another, with every leap increasing in size, until, by the time it had crossed the glade, it was a very large horse, red as blood, with a white tail terminating in a glittering barb. I was so choked with fright that I could not give my friend a warning cry. The devil’s horse (for such I knew it to be) dashed into the brush, snorting and breathing smoke. It disappeared, but I distinctly heard the boy cry out; then came a crashing noise as the horse tore away through the brush, and then a dead silence.

I remembered no more. Some days had passed, when I found my mother anxiously watching over me in bed. As soon as I was strong enough, they asked me what had become of the boy. The recalling of that frightful scene sent me into wild delirium, and there was trouble to save my life. The subject was not mentioned to me again for a long time after I had recovered; but, in the meantime, I learned that from the time the boy was known to start down the lane in my company, he was never seen; and if he has been heard of to this day, I am not informed of the fact.

An Extraordinary Duel

While at college, in my nineteenth year, two of my classmates had a quarrel. The old spirit of chivalry was not yet dead – at least, not in the hearts of those who had been too young to serve in the war. Between my friends the challenge was passed, and a duel had to be fought.

I was fondly attached to both, and, although I had not been chosen as a second, I felt a close personal interest in the affair, and employed my efforts ineffectually to stop it. The meeting was to occur on a certain morning at sunrise. On the night preceding it, I found myself unable to sleep, so deep was the sorrow that beset me. Accordingly, about eleven o’clock, I left my bed, dressed myself, and went out for a walk.

It was in May. The wild plums were in bloom, and the clear sky was filled with the soft radiance of a full moon; a sweeter night never was sent upon the earth. I walked for miles along the beautiful and lonely lanes, noting the banks of Cherokee roses making ready to burst into blossom in the hedges.

But I could think clearly of nothing but duels – and out of the list which memory spread before me was one which encompassed me fully. Years ago, when I was a child, there lived with us a handsome, dashing young man – my mother’s brother – whom we children idolized. In the neighborhood was another young man – his friend; and by some unhappy fatality these two untamed spirits fell apart, and a duel came of it. My uncle was the victor, for his antagonist fell, with a bullet in his heart; but what a fearful victory was that! It had been kept a secret till all was over; and then my father was bowed with shame and my mother with grief. Upon the whole community rested a dark cloud, and at the funeral many an unaccustomed tear was shed. My uncle left the country and had a strange history – but that is irrelevant here.

All the details of this terrible tragedy passed in review before me. I was thinking upon it, and grieving dumbly over it, when—

“Stop, there!” quietly and firmly commanded a voice before me.

I halted; and there, in the full light of the moon, stood the cloaked figure of a man. His attitude was menacing. His slouch-hat was drawn low down over his face, and his long cloak covered his form completely. Still, there was something in his pose and in the tone of his voice that recalled almost forgotten memories.

“What do you want?” I asked. “I have very little money, but—”

He made a gesture of scorn. “It is not money I want,” he answered; “it is a duel with you.”

I was not so badly frightened as I would have expected myself to be; and, not being much afraid, I had my wits at command.

“A duel?” I asked, smiling. “Men fight only after a quarrel and to avenge an insult. I am not aware that there has been any trouble between you and me.”

“Not directly,” he replied; “hut remotely there has been.”

“Explain yourself.”

“Eleven years ago, your uncle killed me in a duel. I want satisfaction from you for that.”

The substance of the challenge was so absurd that I could only laugh, and then give vent to a little raillery.

“It seems to me,” I said, “that my uncle himself would be the proper person to challenge.”

(His answer to this I must decline to print. It is sufficient to say that it was satisfactory explanation of my antagonist’s course in declining to challenge him. It was clear enough that I was the only male relative of my uncle who could stand in his place in this particular emergency.)

Strange to say, I regarded the affair as serious. Even though the stranger might not be the ghost of the dead man (and I did not believe he was), but was taking this way to frighten me, and perhaps have some sport out of me for the amusement of companions he might have in hiding close at hand, I felt that in any event I must fight him. A spirit of recklessness came upon me, and yet the absurdity of it all was apparent.

“I am willing to fight you,” I said; “but you must reflect that a duel with pistols can not be fought without seconds.”

“I am so well aware of the fact,” he replied, with a smile, “that I have brought swords.” Upon that, he produced from underneath his cloak a bag, from which protruded two sword-handles.

All difficulties being cleared away, he slipped the bag from the weapons and exposed two beautiful rapiers. It so happened that I was something of an expert in the handling of this weapon, for from the foil to the rapier is an easy step.

Before accepting one of the proffered weapons, I threw off my coat and my antagonist dropped his cloak. Then a very strange spectacle fell upon my vision; for whereas the man had been all black before, he was white now, and a faint luminosity was emitted from him. We threw aside our hats, and there, in the full moonlight, I recognized him distinctly as the man whom my uncle had killed eleven years ago, grown not a day older, but youthful and virile, and yet unearthly of aspect, but apparently ponderable. For a moment, I was helpless with dismay, and my sword-arm hung limp. He went upon guard, and waited for me to do the same. I delayed – I think it was fear that took the nerve from my arm.

“Guard,” he cried, impatiently, “or I’ll kill you!” With that, he made a straight and vicious thrust at my breast. A quick retreat saved me. Realizing that my life was certainly in the issue, my old cunning returned, and, before he could recover to send home another lunge, I was on guard and had his rapier aloft. With that one touch, the devil awoke in me, and the spirit of desperate combat worked in my veins. And what a splendid weapon I felt was in my hand! Never had I handled steel so lithe and responsive, and never was music sweeter than that I heard when our blades, flashing in the moonlight, slipped upon each other and rang upon the guards. We stood thus a moment; then he made a furious onslaught, doubtless intended to turn my nerve; but I was ready for him, and, after a few passes, during which I had been solely upon the defensive, I discovered that I had a serious advantage in skill.

In other words, unless an accident should happen, I held my man’s life on the point of my rapier; but I did not want to kill him, nor even hurt him; so I called for a parley, and begged him to stop the silly encounter. He shook his head, and a malignant light shone in his eyes.

“But I am the more expert; I can kill you,” I protested.

“Guard, damn you!” he cried, as his weapon came up.

I was ready for him; and, seeing that he was determined to have my life if he could, I went in to wing him. He was furious, and I was cool. He gave me an opening, and I ran my rapier through his jugular. I saw the point of my weapon enter his neck; but imagine my dismay when I felt no resistance at all, and had drawn out a blade as bright as ever! What could I think? He paid no attention, and yet I knew that I could not have been mistaken. But, though much confused, I determined to carry the contest to the end. We had hot and close fighting. Soon I had another opening, and ran him clear through the body.

Again I felt no resistance; again I drew out an unstained blade. What would anyone have felt in so extraordinary a situation? I gasped and staggered hack, dismayed and terrified. He came upon me furiously; the next moment I felt his rapier in my side. A blindness and a sickness assailed me. The moon swung across the sky and turned black, and darkness and obliteration overcame all my faculties.

When next I knew anything, I was lying in the shade of a tree at midday. The weather was far too hot for spring. The place was strange to me. I remembered the duel, and put my hand to my side. There was neither pain nor soreness. Then I discovered that there was no puncture in my shirt, and, what puzzled me more, I saw that the clothes which I wore were entirely unfamiliar to me. I got to my feet, feeling weak; but I went along a road, which was near, until i met a horseman. In reply to my questions, he made it clear that I was at least two hundred miles distant from the spot on which the duel had been fought, and that two months had passed since that strange event. Confused and ashamed, I went from the road and examined my side, and there I found an ugly scar, such only as a rapier could have made, and it was still red from recent healing. This scar is in my body now. Upon returning to my family (the college session having closed long since), I was welcomed as one returned from the grave, for the whole country had been searched for me. Afterward, I myself made a long and tedious search for some clew to my whereabouts during those blank weeks, but nothing whatever could I find, and there I was compelled to let the matter rest.

My Invisible Partner

Upon arriving at legal age, I found myself reduced, by a sudden disastrous turn of fortune, from the possession of a comfortable property to absolute poverty. I was in a strange city, had no friends within a thousand miles, and was almost without a dollar. My despair was great; for although, by reason of a fair education, I was competent to earn a livelihood in divers capacities, I felt helpless, and knew the difficulties which he set a young man unaccustomed to make his way.

I walked the streets for many hours, trying to work out some plan with which to meet the emergency; but, finally worn out with worry and physical fatigue, I went to my room, flung myself across my bed, and soon was in a heavy slumber. Late the next morning I awoke with a painful headache. While engaged in bathing my head, I heard a sound behind me, and, on looking around, I saw that a letter had been slipped under the door. I picked up the letter, tore it open, and was astonished to see with what incredible patience it had been compiled. It was made (as others have been) by cutting letters out of a newspaper and pasting them upon a sheet of paper, in proper order to make words and sentences. The letter ran as follows:

“I am pained to learn of your trouble, but I am glad of an opportunity to be of service to you. I do not consider it advisable to explain my interest in you, nor even to reveal my identity at present; and lest this caution should have the effect of creating doubt in your mind as to the worthiness of my motives. I propose a plan which, if you will put it into operation, will convince you of the fidelity of my purpose and the confidence which I have in your integrity and ability. If you will go tonight, after dark, to the north-east corner of” (here were mentioned the names of two streets) “you will find an opening leading from the gutter into the sewer. Run your hand into the opening ten inches and you will find a package. Withdraw it, place it in your pocket, go to your room, lock the door, and open the parcel. Say nothing to anyone at all about the matter, and wait for further news from me.”

This peculiar letter disturbed and excited me, To have written it must have consumed a number of hours – possibly nearly as many as covered the time in which I had known of my poverty. But who could have known of my misfortune, and who could have taken an interest in me?

I instantly decided to follow the directions given, for the affair did not have the form of sport, and I could not afford to let pass any opportunity that might relieve the pressure of my necessities.

I was fairly familiar with the place to which the letter directed me, and so after dark I sought it, found the opening without difficulty, extracted a soft-feeling package, hurried to my room, and found myself in possession of banknotes of the National Treasury at Washington, aggregating fifty thousand dollars.

This seemed so large a fortune that it is small matter of wonder that I was elated beyond the limit of reasonable self-control; but, despite my elation, I realized that I had no immediate use for money, as my luggage was good for a few days more of credit; accordingly, I concealed the money, and awaited instructions from my unknown benefactor.

These came the next day, written as was the first letter: I was to consider the giver of the money as my partner, with a half-interest in the business which I was directed to undertake – namely, the publication of a weekly paper; all the details of the management of which were left to me. Now, it so happened that this was the very enterprise upon which I had set my heart; so, without delay, I made the necessary arrangements, employing a staff of bright writers and engaging a printing house to do the mechanical work. Believing that my backer was a person who knew something of my capacity as a writer, and that he would be satisfied with any arrangements I might make, I went forward with perfect unconcern, and, in a few days, I issued the first number. I am proud to say that the news-companies found a quick sale for all the copies I issued, and that the future appeared bright.

The trouble began with the second issue. Certain things appeared in the columns which I should have considered scandalous. At the same time, I saw that they had been written by a master hand, far excelling my small capacity. They were paragraphs attacking certain persons and movements which then were taking much popular attention, and they were written in sharp prose and excruciatingly witty rhyme. The second number of the paper was sold immediately, and my printers had to keep their presses active a whole day to supply the extra demand.

I supposed that someone had played a trick upon the foreman of the printing-office; hence I demanded that he show me the “copy” of the extraordinary paragraphs. He went to the “dead-book” and turned out all the manuscripts. Then I saw that all these bright but scandalous paragraphs were in my own handwriting! It was useless for me to protest to the foreman that he had been imposed upon. “You wrote these and turned them in yourself,” he said. How could I deny it?

But trouble came from the publication of the second issue, as I knew it would. People came around who wanted to thrash or kill me, and some exercise of caution was needed to keep myself whole.

The next week even more startling paragraphs appeared, and I had a hard task to keep clear of a number of serious personal encounters. I made it a rule with the foreman that he print nothing that had not my private stamp. He promised to obey this instruction; but try to imagine my dismay when the succeeding issue was worse than the others! It was small comfort to me that the sales and advertisements already had given a large profit to the undertaking; the policy of the paper was altogether distasteful to me; and when I had assured myself that all the objectionable paragraphs carried my private stamp, besides bearing the appearance of having been written by me, it is not difficult to imagine that I was angry and resentful; for it was clear that, by some means which I could not understand, someone was imposing on me, and I could think of no one in that relation except the unknown benefactor.

It might have been that the financial success of the undertaking would have made me contented with the uncomfortable features of the partnership, had not a number of unreasonable tasks been imposed upon me. Among these, was a direction from my partner (conveyed in a pasted letter) to go to the waterfront and stand upon a certain pile for half an hour. I simply ignored orders so ridiculous; but I always had reason to repent of it; for in the next issue of my paper there would appear certain things which pointed directly to me in a most scandalous manner, and by many who knew me, were taken as confessions, It was useless for me to expostulate with the foreman or undertake to read all the proofs – in spite of all that, these things, apparently written by me and bearing my private mark, appeared on the “dead-book.”

I next tried the plan of denying, over my signature, the authorship of the objectionable paragraphs; but this only made matters worse; for beside them appeared paragraphs which not only burlesqued them but stated the matter in exactly contrary terms, undoing all that I bad tried to accomplish, and making matters infinitely worse. It was useless for me to resort to the expedient of standing over the stone while the forms were being made up; certainly a spell was upon me, for although the foreman (an honest man) would point out certain things that might make trouble, I was unable to see the harm of them until the paper appeared on the street.

After many (and a few successful) attempts to balk the policy of my strange backer, I abandoned the task; but by this time the paper had been running for two years and had earned a small fortune. My indebtedness to my partner, therefore, had become unnecessary, and I was anxious to buy his interest; but, strange as it may appear, in all this time I had not learned his address, and had not the least idea of the proper way to summon him; all the letters had been from him to me – none from me to him; and he often had written that it would be useless to make any attempt to reach him by letter or otherwise, and that the only business that could possibly arise from my side of the partnership was to take care of the profits until he should make a demand for his share. It can readily be understood that I was in a condition of great exasperation; so I published a paragraph in the paper, informing my partner (in terms that only he could understand) that I was so utterly miserable and dissatisfied that I was determined to abandon the enterprise, sacrifice all that had been earned (together with the large sum he had invested), and let the property go to the dogs; or, as an alternative, I would repay him his investment, turn over to him his share of the profits, and continue the publication on my own account.

I took this extreme measure only after long deliberation, and after having suffered untold agony from the extraordinary conduct of my partner. In reality, he had controlled the policy of the paper; and, although I am willing to confess that much of the prosperity of the concern was due to his extraordinary daring, excruciating wit, and sharp understanding of current affairs, all the disagreeable results had fallen upon me alone; various personal encounters, wholly repugnant to my nature, had ensued, with the outcome not only of broken bones to me, but also of incidents concerning the mental quiet of women and children dependent upon certain citizens for a livelihood; and, besides all that, several times I nearly had been sent to the insane asylum.

This announcement had a prompt issue, for my partner must have realized that I was desperately in earnest. Therefore, I received a letter from him (written as had been the others) accepting the situation, apologizing humbly for the personal inconvenience to which I had been put, declaring that only his original investment would be accepted, and appointing a time and place of meeting for the purpose of settling the business and allowing me to proceed alone with the publication of the paper. The tone of the letter was so gentle (and even sorrowful and pathetic), that it disarmed me.

My nerve nearly failed me when I read when and where I was to meet my partner – namely, in a certain upper back room of a tall house which recently had been nearly destroyed by fire – I to be there exactly at midnight.

I had never seen my partner; I was to meet him now; but it was stipulated that I should not attempt to discover his identity. I was simply to place fifty thousand dollars in banknotes in an outstretched hand in the dark, in the back room of the fourth story of a house, and then retire.

This was a test of nerve; and so I went to the rendezvous without a weapon – without even a match. With the package of money in my pocket, I clambered up the littered stairs and found the room. The closed door was blistered and blackened. I pushed it open and found that it had been kept shut by the original spring placed for that purpose, I stepped within; the door closed noisily, and I found myself in a room of good size, with a window opening upon a rear court. The lower sash was raised, but all the glass had been broken out by the firemen. In one comer, very dimly seen in the faint, refracted light of the electric lamps in the street below, was a badly damaged Japanese screen. The room otherwise was empty, though a nervous person might have seen forms in the irregular blotches on the fire-blackened walls. In an instant I felt that my partner stood behind the screen.

“I have what you asked me to bring,” I said; “will you step forward and take it?”

In spite of the loud beating of my heart, I beard a faint rustle behind the screen. Then a white hand was thrust out at the side, and fingers were snapped. I took the parcel out of my pocket and advanced closer, and was just ready to place it in the outstretched palm, when a wave of recollections overwhelmed me; I thought of my distress a long time ago, of the unknown friend who had saved me from God knows what disaster, of the splendid gift of money, and all that. The tenderness of the moment made me forget all that I had suffered – I now wanted to see and speak to my invisible partner, and have a human, manly understanding with him. Perhaps everything might be arranged to suit us both.

“I have the package,” said I; “but, as a matter of reasonable precaution, I must be satisfied that you are the one to whom it belongs.”

For reply there was only an impatient movement of the hand – which, I imagined, was much smaller than a man’s ought to be.

“I have a right to ask an acquaintance,” said I. “Step forth, if you are not afraid, and we shall become friends.”

There was not a sound in reply, except the impatient snapping of the fingers and an eager outreaching for the money.

“Do you refuse to reveal yourself?” I asked.

The movement of the hand was more impatient than ever, but no word came.

Acting upon a sudden impulse, I did a very rash thing – first, I placed the parcel in the outstretched hand; then I threw the screen aside, and found a crouching, cloaked figure before me. I took a step forward and seized my partner. Upon that there came forth a frightful scream – unmistakably a woman’s. Once I saw a man crushed in an elevator; at another time I saw a woman mangled by a cable-car; long before that I witnessed the disemboweling of a file of men by a bursting shell in battle; and I have seen people overtaken by other frightful calamities. Very often there comes from them a cry that one who has heard it never forgets; it is different from that of ordinary suffering – it is a cry that means terror, and despair, and death. But the one that filled the room when I seized my partner was immeasurably weirder, and shriller, and more terrifying than any I had ever heard before – it was a cry, a wail, and a shriek; and although I knew that I held a woman in my grasp, that frightful scream wholly paralyzed my arms. The hooded figure slipped from my nerveless hands, sprang to the window, leaped out into the area, and, with a swishing sound, shot down to the stone floor far below, falling with a heavy, crushing sound that stopped the beating of my heart.

As soon as I could recover myself, I ran from the building down to the street. A restaurant that I knew of had a rear opening into the court. I rushed wildly through it, calling to the people there: “Help me; a woman has fallen from the top-floor into the area!”

All excited, they followed me; but when we had brought a light and made a careful search of the whole place, we could find no trace of anyone, and even the package of money was never discovered.

I have only to add that I did not hear again from my invisible partner, and that my paper quickly declined, and in two months had suspended publication.

“The Argonaut” 28 Dec 1891

IN A DARK ROOM

There was much rejoicing in Sheriff Kingman’s county when the news came by telegraph that he had found and arrested Ben Allison, the most dangerous outlaw, in the country. Kingman had staked everything on this capture. The man who had been hunted down was one of those abnormal creations in the compilation of whose wickedness is found a reason for the existence of good in other men. There was nothing chivalrous about him. With the caution of a cat he combined the ferocity of a wolf and the intrepidity of a bull. Kingman had just been elected to office. Hardly had there been time for him to look about when a stage robbery and the killing of a resisting passenger blanched the faces of all the people with the knowledge that Ben Allison was abroad among them. Kingman summoned a posse and took the outlaw’s trail, but after a week had passed without issue he dismissed his men and pursued his purpose without help. The capture was a stroke of exceptional boldness and genuine courage.

The two men were alone in the mountains and no help could be summoned. Kingman, happy to feel that fear had not assailed him, went about the task of securing his man. There was but one horse, that ridden by the officer, and Kingman made his prisoner mount. He then bound him securely to the animal, and led the horse away to a crossroads store, where he knew he could keep him safe till the next day. It was nearly midnight when the two, exceedingly weary, arrived at the store.

The Sheriff had worked out rather an ingenious plan for the safe care of his charge that night. The problem had been a difficult one. Even if he should find men at the store and they should prove willing to stand guard and let him rest, there was the risk of his prisoner’s escape from them; for Allison had played such a trick once or twice already on other guards, and the belief had taken a certain hold that he could not he held in captivity. Kingman had determined that he would take no risk whatever; he himself would keep sole charge of the outlaw, and he would have his rest and sleep as well. His plan was presently revealed to the storekeeper. It was very simple.

The storekeeper happened to be the only man on the premises besides the Sheriff and his prisoner, and he was glad enough to be rid of any share in the watch. Kingman took Allison to the room that had been assigned them, assisted him to undress and get into bed, undressed himself and then made the final preparations in the manner following: He directed Allison to get on the side of the bed next the wall. Then he locked the door and placed the key beneath the sheet on the outer side of the bed directly under the middle of his own body. He did not attempt to make the window very secure, as the room was in the second story. With the shackles he secured his left ankle to Allison’s right, and in a similar fashion, with the handcuffs, he attached his left wrist to Allison’s right. He put the keys of these two locks in a pocket of his trousers and then tossed the garment to the opposite end of the room. Thus the prisoner was free in his left arm and leg, while his own right arm and leg were free. It was quite evident, he reasoned, that Allison was perfectly helpless, for he could make no effort at escape without rousing his keeper. Even the possibility of strangulation was removed, for a man can do nothing with his left hand alone against his opponent’s right; and the officer had satisfied himself that his prisoner was not left-handed.

Allison appeared to be amused by these precautions, and he indulged in a little good-natured raillery. Indeed, the man seemed to he unaccountably cheerful, though no other punishment than the noose could be expected for the murders which he had done. The sharp, cynical tongue that was known to be in his head found none of its meaner exercise, but, on the contrary, was more happily employed in harmless wit and the relation of amusing stories, and frequently his laugh, round and hearty, was caught by his captor. It had happened that the prisoner, before the preparations for bed were made, was suddenly checked in the height of a laugh by a catching of the breath, which was followed by a hard look of pain and a deep pallor. Kingman turned quickly and asked:

“What is the matter, Allison?”

It was with evident effort that the man got his breath to answer:

“Oh, merely a little pain. It is gone now.”

“Did you ever have it before?”

“Often; but it passes away in a moment.”

“Do you know what causes it?”

“Yes; some trouble with the heart. But it is a small matter.”

“Do you consider it so small a matter to be brought up with a pain in the heart so violent as that?”

“Under the circumstances I do. It is true that the attack just now was severe – unusually so – and may recur at any moment with even greater severity; but that is because I am so greatly fatigued. You pushed me so sorely that for a week past I have had hardly any sleep. I had but just fallen asleep from complete exhaustion when you overhauled me. I have walked continually for two weeks and have not had enough to eat. In consequence of all this I am very weak, and, really, this makes my condition more serious – if we may describe it with so earnest a word – than it has ever been before.”

“And you are not at all uneasy?”

This made the prisoner laugh heartily. “Uneasy!” he cried. “How humorously you state it! Why, man, is that form of death so much more ghastly and horrible than the one which you hope to bring me?”

Kingman felt a little ashamed of his stupidity. Did the prisoner really know that he might fall dead at any moment, and for that reason was he trying to belittle the serious nature of his ailment? Was there not here a reasonable explanation of that extraordinary lightness of heart which the prisoner’s conduct betrayed?

The Sheriff said nothing more, but composed himself on his pillow and blew out his candle. Both men were very tired. Had Kingman not been in so peculiar a situation he could have fallen asleep in a moment; but there were three unusual circumstances that kept sleep at bay. One of them was the tact that he was chained to a very desperate criminal; another, that the limited number of positions in which he was constrained to lie prevented that free tossing on the bed which brings so much relief to muscles aching with over-weariness; a third, that the dangerous affliction with which his prisoner suffered might precipitate at any moment an extremely uncomfortable happening. He imagined that Allison had much better mental ease, for the time for a steady contemplation of a ghastly end had not yet arrived. On the contrary, Allison was in the usual position of the criminal who, no longer hunted, is in that blank position where the mind, free from one great anxiety, has not yet opened for another. Kingman lay still and listened to the breathing of his bedfellow, and in it he detected without any difficulty those distressing irregularities which result from a disorganized action of the heart. There were other evidences. The prisoner, without doubt, was suffering and was trying bravely to conceal the fact. He would make those slow movements of the body which indicate a battle with some pain in the chest. He knew that Allison must be a man of incredible fortitude, and that the escape from him of any sign of pain was evidence of a suffering that would make many another man groan.

While Kingman was thus listening he discovered that his prisoner was falling asleep in spite of his pain. This fact found expression in a surer and more regular breathing. But full sleep could not yet have come in hand when the prisoner gave a slight start, such as those which often come when we are falling asleep. Allison was instantly quiet again, and Kingman’s momentary alarm had passed; but in the next instant he discovered that Allison’s breathing had stopped. The Sheriff waited a few seconds (which to him seemed minutes), and then hastily took a match from the candlestick and lighted it. He then saw that Allison’s eves were wide open and staring blankly at the ceiling, and that his face was purple. Kingman lighted the candlewick and set about to rouse the prisoner. Allison caught his breath with a gasp, the glassy appearance of his eyes passed away, and in a minute his capacities were under control again. He regarded Kingman a little quizzically.

“Ah, you have lighted the candle. Had I disturbed you? I had just fallen asleep, and at once I had a strange and terrifying dream.”

“Have you any pain now?”

“Pain? No, I have had no pain – that is, no real pain. It was merely a dream.”

“What was your dream?”

“Men were pursuing me through the woods; they were horseback, I afoot; they carried rifles, and were trying to shoot me, but I dodged in and out among the trees and baffled their aim. They called to me to halt, but I flew like the wind, and skimmed along with the greatest ease, sometimes running, at other times darting through the air close to the ground. The men were hindered by the trees and could not gain upon me. But after a while I began to feel heavier, and soon could skim no longer through the air. This made me afraid, but I kept on as well as I could. The men brought their rifles into play, and the bullets began to dash through the shrubbery all around me. Still I pressed on, growing heavier all the time. A soft milky light began to fill the air, and I found it difficult to breathe. Suddenly there appeared before me a strange and horrible specter. It was a man of great size riding a monstrous horse. The horse had red eves and its breath was a spray of blood. The man’s whiskers were long and slender snakes; his eyes were a brilliant green and his voice shriller than the cry of a panther. He carried a rifle, from the muzzle of which came almost a continuous roar as it discharged its bullets without its owner’s help. He cried to me to surrender, and then I saw that this specter was you. I threw up my bands and began to beg for mercy, but with a frightful yell you brought the weapon to bear upon me and one of your bullets came tearing through my breast. Oh, the pain was frightful! Had I suffered such a pain awake I know I should have cried out in agony; but I was only dreaming, and the pain was not real. Bullet after bullet crashed through my vitals; I was dying; I sank to the ground; a brilliant flash of light overspread the heavens; the specter sprang upon me and wrenched me in his fearful grasp – and then I woke and found you bending over me and the candle lighted.”

The prisoner was much excited during his relation of this dream, and when it was finished he closed his eyes and sighed wearily. “I am very tired,” he said; “I hope I shall have no more such dreams, for if I do not sleep tonight you will have a different kind of care to take of me tomorrow.”

After making sure that the candle, with the matches lying on the stick, was in position to be reached with the greatest ease if he should need them during the night, Kingman put out the light, took as easy a position as possible, and again lay listening.

The prisoner’s dream bore with disquieting effect upon the Sheriffs attempt to sleep. Not only was the human sense aroused in pity for a man thus hunted down and shot while he pleaded for mercy, but it had a separate and more disturbing character – there was terror in it; and the officer’s nerves, put upon a strain by overwork and the singular bodily affliction of his prisoner, kept sleep at a distance. It was not long, however, before Kingman brought himself to think that after all it would be better for him to keep awake; and when he had reasoned himself into this decision the new composure of his mind (now that an earnest desire for sleep was gone) was soothing to the pains of his body. He then found that his wish to toss about in his bed was no more, and that the steel which bound him to his prisoner was no longer galling. This condition of comfort was deepened by notice that Allison had passed in safety over the dangerous point of falling asleep, and was now sleeping with gentle ease. The longer Kingman thus lay wide awake the more comfortable he felt. None need ever know that he had not slept, and the wonder that would be aroused by his coolness and courage in putting so novel a plan in operation would not be lessened at all by the fact that he kept awake. The sense of comfort and ease grew upon him. His mind went back over all the terrible hardships of the pursuit, and then to his novel experiences in the office of Sheriff, and then back of that to his life on the farm. He again heard his father quietly advise him to let politics alone and remain contented and industrious on the old farm; heard again the gentle words of his mother as she told him that the life of a Sheriff was filled with dangers, and that she could not bear to think of her boy hanging a man upon a gallows. From that he drifted further back, and recalled his light-hearted boyhood – his going to school, his loving so deeply the little black-eyed girl who wore the bewitching red jacket, his afternoons of hunting rabbits in the thicket beyond the old mill, or swimming in the pond with the other boys, his wanderings over the hills gathering chestnuts in the autumn, his climbing slender saplings and swinging gleefully in their tops as he bent them toward the ground with his weight.

Suddenly he waked with a violent start from the heaviest slumber that had ever bound his senses. It was not an ordinary awakening, not even one like those caused by the presence of a serious anxiety. There was something vastly more in it, which he did not understand. The only sensation that held him was an overmastering terror. His heart was bounding furiously, and a spasmodic contraction of the throat muscles changed his breathing into gasps. With a masterly effort he brought himself to a sense of his position, and remained quiet lest he should disturb the man who slept so quietly at his side and thus betray his weakness. He tried bravely to conquer the rebellion that raged with so blind fury within him, for he knew it was dangerous both to his body and his mind. Never had he seen darkness so palpable and profound as that which filled the room, and never before had he so fully realized how terrible is the total absence of light. In a moment he found himself in a rigor – not a severe one, but one that brought cold with it; and yet the night was not cold. Should he light the candle? Was it not possible for him to get a rein upon himself without that? What would the prisoner think, when upon waking, he should see his captor so pale and trembling? No; he would wait a while – surely this condition could not last long. He would wait a few minutes longer.

How quiet the prisoner was! Why, his breathing was inaudible, and yet Kingman reflected that he had heard the breathing before. He moved slightly, in order to rouse the prisoner, but his effort had no effect. He touched the prisoner’s hand. It was cold! Kingman’s heart redoubled the fury of its bounding. He raised himself to a rest upon his elbow and leaned closer to the sleeping man. There was not a sound. With a grand effort, he overcame an unspeakable repugnance and touched the prisoner’s face. It, too, was cold, and the eyes were open!

“He is dead!” gasped the Sheriff.

His first instinct was to cry out. He made the effort and failed, for his throat remained dumb. A moment afterward he was glad that he had not succeeded, for was not the door locked and would not such a summons show cowardice? Surely he ought to be able to take care of this situation. What was there to fear? There was only a dead man present, and he could harm no one. Nevertheless, it was advisable to have a light, it was necessary to have a light. Kingman steadied himself to reach for the matches; the rigor was upon him with increased severity, and he knew that caution was required, for he trembled fearfully. He laid his head again on his pillow and reached forth his shaking right hand to secure the matches. To his dismay an unexpected jerk of the arm sent the matches and candlestick flying across the room.

Finally he realized that he was wholly unable to force calmness upon himself. In addition to the wild beating of his heart, which brought him distress, shooting pains were flying through his head, and there lay upon his forehead an oppressive cold weight, as though a heavy iron bar had been laid there. The rigor was increasing and was getting a change of character, the former quick jerkings giving way to rolling vibrations that swept slowly throughout his length, and a severer coldness was settling upon him. His feet were very cold and were becoming numb. He knew that his situation was so serious as to demand release. Still, he would not call for help – that would put an ineffaceable brand of cowardice upon him, and he knew that under ordinary circumstances he was not a coward. He must get up without alarming the house, and must find the matches, light the candle, secure the keys from his trousers pocket, and liberate himself. But how could he do it with that fastened to him? He would do it.

He threw back the light covering and dragged the body, without touching it, to the edge of the bed. Then he saw that the most difficult part of the task would be to get upon the floor. This he accomplished by sitting up, when he had got as near to the edge as possible, and pulling the legs over the side until the feet touched the floor. Then he tried to slip his left arm under the body and raise it to a sitting posture, but an unexpected difficulty here intruded itself: as his hand was bound to the dead man’s both had to be pushed under the back, and the prisoner’s refused to be so manipulated. Kingman experimented with his own right arm and found that it could be done. In this way he learned the trick of the joints, pushed his arm underneath, and raised the body. But it was necessary that he carry it with him, and how could he do so?

It was useless to attempt a search for the matches. Kingman remembered where he had thrown his trousers, and his intention now was to find them and secure the keys. Near them was the window. This was furnished with a wooden shutter instead of glass, and the shutter was closed, thus keeping out of the room whatever starlight there might be. If he should fail to find the trousers in the dense blackness which encompassed him he could easily find the window, open it, and possibly admit a little light if there should happen to be any. He took his bearings with the utmost caution, and then went about his laborious task.

Forcing the prisoner’s right arm behind his back as far as possible, the Sheriff caught a fair but uncertain hold upon the prisoner’s left side. Then, with his right hand, he seized the prisoner’s left forearm, and, drawing it hard toward himself, had complete control of the upper part of the body. He straightened himself, lifting the body with him, and began to walk very cautiously across the room, keeping the direction of his trousers secure in his memory. He stepped away on his right foot. This was very good for one step; but when be came to move forward his left foot he encountered trouble. If there had been no play of chain between his left foot and the prisoner’s right the matter would not have been troublesome; but the moving forward of his foot and its sudden check as the chain caught the weight of the inanimate leg was embarrassing – indeed, it was a tripping, which was near to throwing the Sheriff. It had another effect – that of withdrawing immediate attention from the more important duty of keeping control of the body. Kingman was not long in mastering all these difficulties, but new ones were constantly arising, the most serious of which was the unaccountable failing of his strength. The body seemed incredibly heavy. Not only that, but its state of complete disorganization made it difficult to handle. It would make the most extraordinary lunges, and its joints bent with the most astonishing ease. At every stride it was upon the point of slipping from his grasp.

It may be inferred that all these things were so distracting as to bring confusion upon Kingman’s idea of the direction of the trousers. The wretched man was in a bad way mentally and physically. His chill had become so violent and the pain in his head so great that presently he found it difficult to keep his feet. It now required his very strongest exertion to manage the thing to which he was chained. Finally he reached that part of the room in which he supposed his trousers were lying on the floor. He found some clothing and seized it, but instead of the trousers he discovered in his hand some of the bedclothes which he had left hanging from the bedstead. He had made a circuit of the room and returned to the starting point.

This discovery started some flashes of light before his eyes. They troubled him a great deal, for he was wholly at a loss to account for them. Soon afterward he thought he heard firing and shouts, but he was not at all certain, and was somewhat surprised to discover that the sounds did not excite him. Bravely enough he started again to find the trousers, but after he had taken a step the body slipped from his grasp and fell in a lumbering fashion to the floor, dragging him with it. He fell so heavily upon it that he feared he had hurt it; and, being rather a kind-hearted man, he was sorry. He went so far, indeed, as to beg his prisoner’s pardon.

“I never could throw Dick Telford,” he mused aloud. “He’s the best wrestler in school. He simply has a way of falling against the boys, and they go down. Well, Dick, let me loose, now; I’m tired playing. You have worn me out – I never was so tired in all my life before. Oh, my head is bursting and my bones ache terribly!”

While he was sitting thus his hand wandered over the carpet in a circle about him and accidentally came upon the matches. He listlessly picked them up, not knowing what they were, and began to examine them aimlessly with his fingers. They were a block of sulfur matches and, as his thumb passed over the tips, they gave out a soft, pale light and a thin, bluish smoke. This attracted his attention at once, so that he forgot the presence of the thing to which he was chained. The plaything gave him much entertainment. He rubbed his thumb over it again and watched the pale light and the thin blue smoke. When it had died out he tried it again, with a similar result; then again, but this time the whole batch ignited with a flash, and began to bum with a sputtering sound, the flame being bright. He started to bring his left hand around, and finding its progress checked, he looked to his left to see the cause. His glance fell full upon a livid face with eyes staring blankly at the ceiling. Instinctively he put out the light. Fear without bounds and a nameless horror overcame all the remainder of his strength, and with a gasp he sank to the floor unconscious.

Two weeks thereafter Ben Allison, the noted highwayman, taking his ease in a place of safety far away, read in an old newspaper an account of his escape from Sheriff Kingman, and seemed touched when he read that the brave officer had been sent to an insane asylum.

“Poor fellow!” he said. “It was mean to play such a trick upon him, but it had to be done.”

1891

TREACHEROUS VELASCO

Sitting at the open window of her room in the upper story of the farmhouse, on the Rancho San Gregorio, Señora Violante Ovando de McPherson watched, with the deepest interest, a cloud of dust which rose in the still May air far down the valley; for it was evident that the color in her cheeks and the sparkle in her violet-black eyes spoke a language of devotion and happiness. Her husband was coming home, and with him his vaqueros, after a tedious drive of cattle to San Francisco. He had been gone but a month; but what an interminable absence that is to a wife of a year! She had watched the fading of the wild golden poppies; she had seen the busy workers of the beehives laying up their stores of honey culled from the myriads of flowers which carpeted the valley; and she had ridden over the Gabilan Hills to see the thousands of her husband’s cattle which dotted them. She had been respectful of her housekeeping duties, and had directed Alice, the sewing-girl, in the making of garments for the approaching hot season. Yet, busy as she thought she was, and important as she imagined herself to be in the management of the great ranch, time had dragged itself by in manacles. But now was coming the cloud of dust to lift the cloud of loneliness; and if ever a young wife’s heart quickened with gladness, it was hers.

Presently the fine young Scotchman leaped from his horse, clasped his wife in his arms, asked a few hurried questions concerning her welfare during his absence, untied a small buckskin bag which depended from the pommel of his saddle, and, remarking, “I thought you might need some spending-money, Violante,” held up the bag containing gold, containing a hundred times more gold than her simple tastes and restricted opportunities would permit her to employ. But was not her Robert the most generous of men? Other eyes than hers saw it – those of Basilio Velasco, one of the vaqueros; a small, swarthy man, with the blackest and sharpest of eyes, in which just then was a strange glitter.

What a handsome couple were the young husband and wife, as, arm-in-arm, they entered the house – he so large, and red, and masculine; she so dark, and reliant, and feminine! Beautiful Spanish girls were plentiful in those youthful days of California; but Violante had been known as the most beautiful of all the maidens between the Santa Barbara Channel and the Bay of Monterey. Hard-headed and fiery-tempered Scotch Presbyterian; gentle, patient, and faithful Catholic; they were the happiest and most devoted of couples.

“Well, little Violante,” he said, “take the bag up to your room, and give us dinner; for before we rest we must ride over to the range and look after the cattle, and after that you and I shall have a good, long visit.”

These pleasant duties were quickly dispatched, and the dusty men, led by her husband, galloped away. From the open window of her room she saw the receding cloud of dust, wondering at that urgent sense of duty which could make so fond a husband leave her, even though for a short time, after so long a separation. Thus she sat, dreamily thinking of her great happiness in having him once again at home, and drinking in the rich perfume of the racemes of wisteria-blossoms which covered the massive vine against the house. This old vine, springing from the ground beneath the window at which she sat, spread its long arms almost completely over that part of the wall, divided on either side for the window, and hung gracefully from beneath the eaves, embowering their lovely owner in a tangled mass of purple blossoms. It was an exquisite picture – the pretty wife sitting there, in the whitest of lawns, looking out over the hills from this frame of gorgeous flowers – all the more charming from her unconsciousness of its beauty. Behind her, at the opposite side of the room, sat her maid, Alice, sewing in silence.

As the señora looked dreamily over the hills, she became aware of the peculiar actions of a man on horseback, who was approaching the house from the direction in which her husband and the vaqueros had disappeared. That which summoned her attention was the fact that the man was approaching by an irregular route, which no ordinary circumstance would have required. He had such a way of keeping behind the trees that she could not determine his identity. It looked strange and mysterious, and something impelled her to drop the lace curtain over the window, for behind it she could watch without danger of being seen.

The horseman disappeared, and this made her uneasiness all the greater, but she said nothing to Alice. Soon she noticed the man on foot approaching the house, in a watchful, skulking fashion, slipping from one tree or one bit of shrubbery to another. Then, with a swift run, he came near, and, stealthily and noiselessly as a cat, began to ascend to her window by clambering up the wisteria-vine. Her spirit quailed and her cheeks blanched when she saw the naked blade of a dagger held between his teeth. She understood his mission – it was her life and the gold; and the glittering eyes of the robber she recognized as those of Basilio Velasco. After a moment of nerveless terror the ancient resisting blood of the Ovandos sprang into alert activity, and this gentlest and sweetest of young women armed her soul to meet Death on his own ground and his own terms, and try the issue with him.

She gave no alarm, for there was none in the house except herself and Alice. To have given way to fear would have destroyed her only hope of life. Quietly, in a low tone, she said—

“Alice, listen, but do not say a word.” There was an impressiveness in her manner that startled the nervous, timid girl; but there were also in it a strength and a self-reliance that reassured her. She dropped her work and regarded her mistress with wonder. “Look in the second drawer of the bureau. You will find a pistol there. Bring it to me quickly, without a word, for a man is clambering up the vine under my window to rob me, and if we make any outcry or lose our heads we are dead. Place full confidence in me, and it will be all right.”

Alice, numb and nervous with fear, found the pistol and brought it to her mistress.

“Go and sit down and keep quiet,” she was told; and this she did.

Violante, seeing that the weapon was loaded, cocked it, and glanced out the window. Basilio was climbing very slowly and carefully, fearing that the least disturbance of the vine would alarm the señora. When he had come sufficiently near to make her aim sure, Violante suddenly thrust aside the curtain, leaned out the window, and brought the barrel of the weapon in line with Velasco’s head.

“What do you want, Basilio?” she asked.

Hearing the musical voice, the Spaniard quickly looked up. Had the bullet then imprisoned in the weapon been sent crashing through his vitals, he would have received hardly a greater shock than that which quivered through his nerves when he saw the black barrel of the pistol, the small but steady hand which held it aimed at his brain, and the pale and beautiful face above it. Thus holding the robber at her mercy, she said firmly to the girl—

“Alice, there is nothing to fear now. Run as fast as you can to the west end of the house, about a hundred yards away, and you will find this man’s horse tied there somewhere in the shrubbery. Mount it, and ride as fast as God will let you. Find my husband, and tell him I have a robber as prisoner.”

The girl, almost fainting, passed out of the room, found the horse, and galloped away, leaving these two mortal enemies facing each other.

Velasco had heard all this, and he heard the horse clattering up the road to the range beyond the hills of Gabilan. The picture of a fierce and angry young Scotchman dashing up to the house and slaying him without a parley needed no elaboration in his dazed imagination. He gazed steadily at the señora and she at him; and, while he saw a strange pity and a sorrow in her glance, he saw also an unyielding determination. He could not speak, for the knife between his teeth held his tongue a prisoner. If only he could plead with her and beg for his life!

“Basilio,” she quietly said, seeing that he was preparing to release one hand by finding a firmer hold for the other, “if you take either of your hands away from the vine I will shoot you. Keep perfectly still. If you make the least movement, I will shoot. You have seen me throw apples in the air and send a bullet through every one with this pistol.”

There was no boastfulness in this, and Velasco knew it to be true.

“I would have given you money, Basilio, if you had asked me for it; but to come thus with a knife! You would have killed me, Basilio, and I have never been unkind to you.”

If he could only remove the dagger from his mouth! Surely one so kind and gentle as she would let him go in peace if he could only plead with her! But to let the dagger fall from his teeth would be to disarm himself, and he was hardly ready for that; and there was much thinking and planning to be done within a very few minutes.

Velasco, still with his gaze on the black hole in the pistol-barrel, soon made a discouraging discovery; the position in which he had been arrested was insecure and uncomfortable, and the unusual strain that it brought upon his muscles became painful and exhausting. To shift his position even in the smallest way would be to invite the bullet. As the moments flew the strain upon particular sets of muscles increased his pain with alarming rapidity, and unconsciously he began to speculate upon the length of time that remained before his suffering would lead him into recklessness and death. While he was thus approaching a very agony of pain, with the end of all human endurance not far away, another was suffering in a different manner, but hardly less severely.

The beautiful señora held the choice of two lives in the barrel of her pistol; but that she should thus hold any life at all was a matter that astounded, perplexed, and agonized her; that she had the courage to be in so extraordinary a position amazed her beyond estimation. Now, when one reflects that one is courageous, one’s courage is questionable. And then, she was really so tender-hearted that she wondered if she could make good her threat to shoot if the murderer should move. That he believed she would was sufficient.

But after the arrival of her husband – what then? With his passionate nature could he resist the temptation to cut the fellow’s throat before her very eyes? That was too horrible to think of. But – God! – the robber himself had a knife! By thus summoning her husband was she not inviting him to a mortal struggle with a desperate man better armed than he? It would have been easy to liberate Basilio and let him go his way; but she knew that her husband would follow and find him. Now that the mischief of notifying him had been done, it was best to keep the prisoner with her, that she might plead for his life. Therein lay her hope that she could avert the shedding of blood by either of the men. Her suspense; her self-questionings; her dread of a terrible termination to an incident which already had assumed the shape of a tragedy; her fearful responsibility; the menacing possibility that she herself, in simple defense of her life, might have to kill Basilio; her trepidation on the score of her aim and the reliability of the pistol – all these things and others were wearing her out; and at last she, too, began to wonder how long she could bear the strain, and whether or not her husband would arrive in time to save her.

Meanwhile, Velasco, racked to the marrow by the pains which tortured him, and driven by a desire to drop the dagger and plead for his life and by fear of parting with his weapon, was urged to despair, and finally to desperation. All the supplication that his face and eyes could show pleaded eloquently for him, and with this silent pleading came evidence of his physical agony. The muscles of his arms and legs twitched and trembled, and his labored breathing hissed as it split upon the edge of the knife. He was unable longer to control the muscles of his lips; the keen edge of his weapon found a way into the flesh at either side of his mouth, and two small streams of blood trickled down his chin and fell upon his breast. Not for a moment did he take his gaze from her eyes; and thus these two regarded each other in a silence and a stillness that were terrible. A crisis had to come. Here was a test of nerve that inevitably would make a victim of one or the other. The spectacle of the man’s agony, the pitiful sight of his imploring look, were more than the feminine flesh of which Violante was composed could bear.

The crash came – Basilio was the first to break down. Whether voluntarily or not, he released his hold upon the knife, which went clattering through the vine-branches to the ground. In another instant his tongue, now free, began pouring forth a supplication in the Spanish language with an eloquence which Violante had never heard equaled.

“Oh, señora!” he said, “who but an angel could show a mercy tenderer than human? And yet, as I hope for the mercy of the Holy Virgin, there are a sweetness and a kindness in your face that belong to an angel of mercy. Oh, Mother of God! surely thy unworthy son has been brought into this strait for the trying of his soul, and for its chastisement and purification at the hands of thy sweetest and gentlest of daughters; for thou hast put it into her heart – which is as pure as her face is beautiful – to spare me from a most horrible end. Thou hast whispered into her mother-soul that one of thy sons, however base and undeserving, should not be sent unshriven to the judgment-seat of the most Holy Christ, thy son. Through the holy church thou hast enlightened her soul to the duties of a Christian, for in her beautiful face shines the radiance of heaven. – Ah, señora! see me plead for mercy! Behold the agonies which beset me, and let my sufferings unlock the door of your heart. Let me go in peace, señora; and you shall find in me a slave all the days of my life – the humblest and most devoted of slaves, happy if you beat me, glorying in my slavery if you starve me, and giving praise to Almighty God if you trample me under your feet. Señora, señora, release me, for time is pressing – I can barely escape if you let me go this instant. Would you have my blood on your hands? Can you face the Virgin with that? Oh, señora – señora—”

Her head swam, and all her senses were afloat in a sea of agonies. Still she looked down into his eyes as he continued his pleadings, but the outlines of his body were wavering and uncertain, and inexpressible suffering numbed her faculties. Still she listened vaguely to his outpouring of speech; and it was not until her husband, with two of his vaqueros, dashed up on horseback that either of these two strangely situated sufferers was aware of his approach. Seeing him, Violante threw her arms abroad, and the pistol went flying to the ground; and then she sank down to the floor, and the brilliant sunshine became night and the shining glories of the day all nothingness.

•   •   •   •   •

She awoke and found herself lying on her bed, with her husband sitting beside her, caressing her hands and watching her anxiously. It was a little time before she could summon her faculties to exercise and to an understanding of her husband’s endearing words; but, seeing him safe with her, her next thought was of Velasco.

“Where is Basilio?” she asked, starting up and looking fearfully about.

“He is safe, my dear one. Think no more of Basilio, who would have harmed my Violante. Be calm, for my sake, sweet wife.”

“Oh, I can’t, I can’t! You must tell me about Basilio.” And, in a frightened whisper, she asked, “Did you kill him?”

“No, loved one; Basilio is alive.”

She sank back upon her pillow. “God be praised!” she whispered.

Suddenly she started again and looked keenly into her husband’s eyes. “You have never deceived me,” she hurriedly said; “but, Robert, I must know the truth. Have no fear – I can bear it. For God’s sake, my husband, tell me the truth!”

Alarmed, he took her in his arms, and said, “Be calm, my Violante; for as the Almighty is my witness, Basilio is alive.”

“Alive! alive!” she cried; “what does that mean? You are keeping something back, my husband. I know your passionate nature too well – you could not let him off so easily. Tell me the whole truth, Robert, or I shall go mad!”

There was a frantic earnestness in this that would have made evasion unwise.

“I will, Violante; I will. Listen – for upon my soul, this is the whole truth: When I saw you drop the pistol and sink back upon the floor, I knew that you had fainted. I ordered the vaqueros to secure the weapon and make Basilio descend to the ground. Then I ran upstairs, placed you on the bed, loosened your clothing, and did what I could to restore you. But you remained unconscious—”

“Basilio! Basilio! tell me about him.”

“I went to the window and sent one of the men to the hacienda for a doctor for you, and told the other to bring Basilio to this room. He came in very weak and trembling, for he had fallen from the vine and was slightly stunned, but not much hurt. He expected me to kill him here in this room, but I could not do that – I was afraid on your account, Violante. He was very quiet and ill—”

“Hurry, Robert, hurry!”

“He said nothing. I spoke to him. He hung his head and asked me if I would let him pray. I told him I would not kill him. A great light broke over his face. He fell at my feet and clasped my knees and kissed my boots and wept like a child. It was pitiful, Violante.”

“Poor Basilio!”

“He begged me to punish him. He removed his shirt and implored me to beat him. I told him I would not touch him. He said he would be your slave and mine all his life; but he insisted that he must make some physical atonement – he must be punished. ‘Very well,’ I said. Then I turned to Nicolas and told him to give Basilio some light punishment, as that would relieve his mind. Nicolas took him down and lashed him to the back of a horse, and turned the animal into the horse-corral. Then Nicolas came back and told me what he had done. I replied that it was all right, and that as soon as I could leave you I would go and release Basilio. And then I told Nicolas to go to the range and look up Alice and bring her home, for she was too weak to come back with me.”

“And Basilio is in the corral now?”

“Yes.”

“How was he lashed to the horse?”

“I don’t know – Nicolas didn’t tell me; but you may be sure that he is all right.”

She threw her arms around her husband’s neck and kissed him again and again, saying, “My noble, generous husband! I love you a thousand times more than ever. Now go, Robert, at once, and release Basilio.”

“I can’t leave you, dear.”

“You must – you shall! I am fully recovered. If you don’t go, I will.”

“Very well.”

No sooner had he left the room than she sprang out of the bed, caught up a penknife, and noiselessly followed him; he did not suspect her presence close behind him as he went towards the corral. When they had gone thus a short distance from the house her alert ear caught a peculiar sound that sent icicles through her body. They were feeble cries of human agony, and they came from a direction other than that of the corral. Heedlessly, and therefore unwisely, she ran towards their source, without having summoned her husband, and soon she came upon a fearful spectacle.

McPherson pursued his way to the corral; but when he arrived there he was surprised not to find Basilio in the enclosure. The gate was closed – the horse to which he was lashed could not have escaped through it. Looking about, he read the signs of a commotion that must have occurred among the horses, caused, undoubtedly, by the strange sight of a man lashed in some peculiar way to the back of one of their number. The ground was torn by flying hoofs in all directions; there had been a wild stampede among the animals. Even when he entered, possibly more than a half-hour after Basilio was introduced among them, they were huddled in a corner, and snorted in alarm when he approached them. The horse to which Nicolas had lashed Basilio was not to be seen. Annoyed at the stupidity of Nicolas, McPherson looked about until he found the place in the fence through which Basilio’s horse had broken; only two of the rails had been thrown down. Alarmed and distressed, McPherson leaped over the fence, took up the trail of the horse, and followed it, running. Presently he discovered that the horse, in his mad flight, had broken through the fence enclosing the apiary, and had played havoc among the twenty or more beehives therein. Then McPherson saw a spectacle that for a little while took all the strength out of his body.

The señora, guided by a quicker sense than that of her husband, had gone straight to the apiary. There she saw the horse, with Basilio, naked to the waist, strapped upon his back, the animal plunging madly among the beehives, kicking them to fragments as the vicious insects plied him with their stings. Basilio was tied with his face to the sun, which poured its fierce rays into his eyes; for Nicolas was devoted to the señora, and he had been determined to make matters as uncomfortable for the ingrate as possible. Upon Basilio’s unprotected body the bees swarmed by hundreds, giving him a score of stings to one for the horse, and he was utterly helpless to protect himself. Already the poison of a thousand stings had been poured into his face and body; his features were hideously swollen and distorted, and his chest was puffed out of resemblance to a human shape, and was livid and ghastly.

Without a moment’s hesitation, the señora flew through the gate and went to the deliverance of Basilio, praying to God with every breath. His cries were feeble, for his strength was nearly gone, and his incredible agony, aided by the poison of the bees, had sent his wits astray. For Violante to approach the maddened horse and the swarming bees was to offer herself to death; but what cared she for that, when another’s life was at stake? Into this desperate situation she threw herself. With the coolness of a trained horsewoman, she finally twisted the fingers of one hand into the frantic horse’s nostrils, bringing him instantly under control. In another moment, unmindful of the stings which the bees inflicted upon her face and hands, she had cut Basilio’s lashings and caught his shapeless body in her arms as it slipped to the ground. Then, taking him under the arms, she dragged him, with uncommon strength, from the enclosure and away from the murderous assaults of the bees.

He moaned; his head rolled from one side to the other. His eyes were closed by the swelling of the lids, and he could not see her; but even had this not been so, he was past knowing her. She laid him down in the shade of a great oak, and she saw from his faint and interrupted gasps that in another moment all would be over with him. Unconscious of the presence of her husband, who now stood reverently, with uncovered head, behind her, she raised to heaven her blanched face and beautiful eyes, and softly prayed, “Holy mother of Jesus, hear the prayer of thy wretched daughter, and intercede for this unshriven spirit.” She glanced down at Basilio, and saw that he was dead. Feebly she staggered to her feet, and, seeing her husband, cried out his name, stretched out her arms towards him, and sank unconscious into his strong grasp; and thus he bore her to the house, kissing her face, while tears streamed down his cheeks.

aka “A Tragedy on the Ranch

“The Argonaut” 25 May 1892

The Ape, The Idiot, & Other People (1897)

MADAME FORRESTIER

Of Dr. Entrefort’s daring in surgical enterprises I could never weary of making report; for surely his conceptions, achievements – even his very existence – were all peculiar and mysterious. Small, dark, sharp, quick, learned, skillful, fearless – really I have not language at command to describe adequately this inscrutable Creole. He was an unaccountable mixture of gentleness and ferocity, of insight and blindness, of wisdom and folly; and, above all, the most lovable of men. But I must now proceed to the telling of a very strange story concerning him.

It was clear to all of us that Félice would die, and it was into Entrefort’s hands that her life had been placed. Having been called to see her, a stranger then, he had said that she would not likely survive the desperate surgical operation which presented the only hope of her recovery. After a long and careful study of her case, he fell so deeply in love with her that he could not bear to see her die without an effort to save her; and it was his knife, wielded with all the old-time skill and daring and with all the cruelty of science, that released her sweet spirit from its incumbering clay. And thus, sadly enough, opens one of the strangest chapters in the life of one of the most remarkable of men.

He begged that he be given the poor body for a time – to embalm it permanently, he explained; and as Félice had been a charity patient in the great public hospital in Baronne Street, his request was easily granted. Nor, considering his popularity there and in the medical college hard by, is there any reason to wonder why he was never called upon to return it….

Dr. Entrefort, ever since the death of his wife, had lived with his widowed sister, Mme. Forrestier, in one of the quaint old brick houses that line St. Philip Street. Besides him and his sister there was another inmate of the house – Adèle Forrestier – for Mme. Forrestier, the widow, having borne her husband no children, had taken Adèle from an orphan asylum after his death, and had adopted her and given her the name Forrestier. She was about seventeen or eighteen; she and Félice were nearly of an age. But what a difference between them! While Félice had been sweet, and gentle, and patient through all her suffering, Adèle was the most impatient and willful of mortals, ruling the house with an iron rod, and making loud lamentation over the most trivial ills. It is not a matter for wonder that no love was at large between her and Entrefort, or that she flung through the window the very bitter boluses that he prescribed when she was ill – bitterer and stronger than he might have made them, and ordered in generous doses; for he had mild little quarrels with his sister for his declaring that the girl was only lazy and perverse, and not ill at all.

His sister, knowing nothing of his fondness for the dead Félice, or even of her existence, was not able to account for the extraordinary mental state into which he fell after the girl’s death. She saw that some very great trouble beset him, and that a strange excitement was at work within him. Accustomed to all his moods, she now discovered one new and peculiar; and the very fact that it persisted for a long time was sufficient to make her watchful and anxious.

What was strangest of all, he began to take an interest in Adèle’s health. Now, Adèle was a hearty, robust girl, and was seldom in need of medical attention; but Entrefort began to drop hints about her complexion, her gait, her spirits, her appetite, and other external evidences of health conditions. He made many inquiries concerning her food, her sleep, the ventilation of her bed-chamber, her work and studies, and the quality of her clothing. More than that, he brought her a tonic one day, after she had made a slight complaint, and required her to take a dose from his hand. In spite of the petty tyrannies which she was accustomed to practice upon him, there were times when he assumed a quiet manner that disclosed his superior will; and although this had happened but rarely, she knew what it meant, and yielded with a bad grace. It was so when he offered her a dose of the tonic; but what was her astonishment to discover that the medicine, instead of being bitter and nauseating, was sweet and aromatic!

“Why, uncle,” she declared in astonishment, “it is good!”

“It may prove as good for your tongue as for your health,” he answered.

At first she took the tonic at the regular intervals prescribed; but it was so pleasant to the taste, and, more than that, gave her (as she permitted herself to believe) so great benefit, that she took it oftener, and finally it was gone. Then she asked for more.

Ordinarily it was a difficult matter to surprise Entrefort; and even when surprised, he had a quiet stare at command that served as a mask. But when Adèle, without a blush, asked for more of the medicine before more was due, he went from his self-control so far as to catch her in his arms and kiss her, saying: “Yes, my dear niece; you shall have all you want;” and then it was Adèle’s turn to be surprised.

It happened that Mme. Forrestier witnessed this performance. It would have delighted her had she not made certain discoveries; and, even in view of them, it merely disconcerted and puzzled her. In her brother’s integrity, and in the safety of her adopted daughter in his society, she had a whole confidence; but in the way peculiar to women, she began to feel uneasiness.

She rarely visited her brother’s office, and she knew nothing of what went forward there. The facts that lay before her perception were these: That he had suffered unusually; that he had taken an unaccustomed interest in a most uninteresting girl; that he had brought strange bottles to the house and had set up a small laboratory; and that he had begun to give Adèle medicines that apparently had a manifold strange effect upon her. Being very much with these, my friends, I saw that Adèle and Entrefort were approaching a better mutual understanding; but at that time I knew nothing of the medical regime under which he had placed her. I was concerned only to observe that Entrefort could take any interest in so unlovable a girl, further than that which a sense of duty might suggest. It was idle to wonder over anything that Entrefort might do, not even excepting his possible love for a girl totally different from one who so recently had held control over all his best impulses.

I could bring myself to imagine, in a vague, unhappy way, his possible marriage to Adèle, and to see beyond that event two wretchedly inharmonious lives.

About this time I discovered Mme. Forrestier, moved by a motive which I did not then understand, resorting to certain practices which, under other circumstances, would have been beneath her sweet and gentle dignity – I surprised her in the act of reading her brother’s diary. She made a bungling attempt to divert my attention from her conduct, and I assumed blindness to guard her sensibilities. Nevertheless, it was apparent that what she had read puzzled her exceedingly and threw her far away from her self-command. When she had gone I took advantage of my position as Entrefort’s confidential friend and (in a measure) guardian, and was filled with amazement to discover the extraordinary thing he was doing. If I had read further I would have learned more, and might have taken steps to avoid a dreadful catastrophe; but I read only as far as Mme. Forrestier had gone, and then stopped, feeling that the matter was sacred and peculiar, and that I had no right to proceed further. I doubted that Mme. Forrestier understood what she read, for it was of a highly scientific character, set out in a style involved and obscure. I shall not introduce it here; it will be sufficient to give a very scant idea of its purport.

It was a discussion of the problem of death and of the persistence of the consciousness beyond this life. By a very elaborate argument, Entrefort sought to prove that death is merely a disorganization of innumerable “life principles” which are assembled in the human body, and which belong, inseparably and forever, to the matter with which they are associated. Consciousness is merely an incident of their harmonious working together; hence when death disorganizes them, consciousness must cease. Therefore, the immortality of the consciousness – the ego – is impossible; the life principles, however, live always; they are part of God himself.

If, now, they can be reassembled and reorganized after death, we reproduce the identity of the person who, before his death, represented the original organization. “This can be done,” he wrote, “and in many ways; and I now see its successful operation proceeding under my very eyes. So sure as I live, my Félice shall stand in flesh and spirit before me. In these bottles, ranged upon my shelves, Félice reposes. The life principles which composed her ineffable sweetness are here under my band, to be slowly reassembled.” Here I stopped, for just beyond I saw Adèle’s name, and I closed the book and returned it to the secret place where he intended it should be kept from human eyes.

I reflected that Mme. Forrestier must have been puzzled. What could she have thought of this Félice, and of any possible bearing of these disclosures upon the events of her life? The good woman inflicted a grievous headache upon herself with thinking over it. I know now that something deep and fearful had a finger in her anxiety – something that gave her a very sharp fear; but I shall explain all that at the proper time in this narration.

Of the strange happenings that made progress I can do nothing but give a record. Adèle’s manner changed slowly but steadily for the better. Her selfishness, petulance, and hardness became modified into forms suggesting sweetness of character; the roundness and fullness of a wholesome womanhood were springing up within her. As she became gentler, Entrefort grew more cheerful. His bearing toward her was less masculine than paternal. His solicitude for her, without being in any sense obtrusive, was none the less vigilant and persistent.

In this wise passed many months, during which time I was tramping through Yucatan. It was upon my return that I noticed a striking change in Entrefort, in Mme. Forrestier, and most particularly in Adèle. I had always been fond of the widow, for she was one of the sweetest, gentlest, and most lovable of women; of the flouting, spoiled, unruly girl, I had cherished nothing but a hearty dislike; toward Entrefort – the craziest, the most brilliant, the most adorable of men – l had ever felt drawn by the closest of human ties. Now what did I find? Entrefort wholly recovered from his despair following the death of Félice; bright, cheerful, elastic, buoyant, brimming with wit, soaring on the wings of speculative science, and outreaching with both hands for the incredible in surgery; Mme. Forrestier, pale, haggard, worn, nervous, crouching under the walls of a tumbling house; Adèle – oh, but I could not believe my eyes! – Adèle transformed into an angel! Those demure little coquetries, that ready rippling of ruby lips into smiles, that velvety voice and low, musical laugh, that grace of manner, that putting away of self, that matchless graciousness manifest in kindly solicitude for others – surely this pearl could not have been dragged forth from so uncouth a shell except by a master hand!

And yet – and yet – it all brought a certain pain to me, and in that pain lurked a laggard recollection. That night I dreamed of the poor charity patient in the hospital – Félice – whose sweetness had been too precious to risk with earthly contamination. Again I sat beside her cot in the long ward, and held her thin hand, and talked to her of Entrefort, and of the bright days to come, when they would be married and have a pretty home, and Entrefort and I would be tamed, and held under the thralldom of the sweet domestic spell she would breathe upon us, and of the cozy room that would always be mine, and mine only – ah, those were sad, sweet hours, I living and talking a lie with an aching heart, and Félice building a home whose foundations rested not upon the earth! And so I sat holding her hand in the golden twilight, waiting for Entrefort to come; and as we talked, behold! it was not Félice at all, but Adèle – Adèle, so different from and yet so strangely like Félice! The rosy lips, the rippling smile, the plump hand and rounded features, a woman not less feminine than Félice, and, therefore, not less charming – Adèle was shamming illness and poverty, and through a whim lay as a patient in a charity hospital!

“Adèle!” I cried, aloud, and that waked me.

This dream clung to me with pertinacity. It was easy for me to reason that Adèle had fallen in love with Entrefort, and that unconsciously she had been molded to his ideal of feminine loveliness, and it was plain as noonday light that Entrefort loved her with equal tenderness. It was a pretty spectacle; but there was a touch of pain in it for me, for I could not help transposing and exchanging Félice and Adèle in the most confusing manner.

I expected that some one of the three (though likely not modest Adèle) would tell me of the approaching marriage. Mme. Forrestier – surely she might have mentioned it to me; but when I would glance at her, she would drop her eyes, arid her face would harden and her pallor come deeper. I saw her quake in agony under my glance, and I wondered in the very soul of me. I saw her writhe with anguish when unspoken interchanges of affection would pass between her brother and Adèle. An incredible suffering was dragging her to the grave before our very eyes, while Entrefort, the alertest of all possible physicians, sat blind and indifferent in his absorbing love for Adèle, expressing empty solicitude for her failing health, prescribing foolish remedies for maladies which did not exist, and swimming heedlessly among life-seeking monsters which thronged his small sea of happiness.

And there was Adèle, less blind than he, but blind sufficiently, and superior in perception only through a tenderer compassion – there Adèle, whose every word and act of gentle solicitude and sympathy sank loaded with poison into the wretched woman’s heart. And there sat I, amazed, bewildered, and helpless.

I brought myself nearer to Mme. Forrestier by every possible device. I accepted her invitation to make my home at her house. My presence and sympathy seemed to help her, and my watchfulness over her was a shield. It seemed clear to her that I alone knew that some dreadful mystery was gnawing the thread of her life, that I was anxious to be of service to her, and that I patiently awaited her confidence. I listened at her chamber-door in the dead of night, and heard her moan: “Poor child, poor child! God help me!” One night, while somnambulic, she went into Adèle’s room, threw her arms around the sleeping girl’s neck, and awoke her, moaning: “Poor child, poor child! God help me!”

The strangest part of it all was that no word of marriage had ever been spoken. Of innocence and purity in Entrefort’s mind I could form no conception, for I knew the man; and yet I now saw both these things with my own eyes. These two lived in an atmosphere of a deep, blind, and strange affection.

Mme. Forrestier would not, or could not, confide in me. Several times she tried to speak, but her words shrank back overcome and confused. Her hair was whitening rapidly, and, what was worse, her mind was drifting from its moorings. I could bear it no longer; so I went to Entrefort and told him, solemnly and emphatically, that some grievous wrong lay at the bottom of his sister’s suffering, and that soon, unless relief should come, she would be a maniac and die in her madness.

This seemed to make him unhappy, and be said that he had noticed the change and was doing all in his power to assist her. “It is a gradual decay and breaking down of the nervous forces,” he explained; “and no human skill could do more than ease the fall.”

“Raoul,” said I, after a long silence, during which I was studying how best to strike a worse blow, “Adèle reminds me strangely of someone I used to know.”

He started, and that surprised me. So he, too, had seen the resemblance.

“Yes?” he said, with a show of indifference. “And who could that most fortunate person have been?”

“It is difficult for me to say,” I answered; “but there is something – there is something – I think, perhaps, in Adèle’s walk, or the little pain-drawn twitchings that flit across her face, or her habit of putting her hand upon a certain place in her side—”

A startled look in Entrefort’s face arrested my speech, and the whiteness of his face showed me that I had started the blade aright.

“What are you talking about, man?” he cried.

“Only a recollection – only something that reminds of a thing far away that was very sad. I think it was the case of a sweet girl in a hospital; I believe she died under the surgeon’s knife. And the strangest part of it is that Adèle reminds me so much of her in many ways – particularly in her many unconscious little hints that she is afflicted with the same fatal malady that made the equally fatal operation necessary.” It was brutal, but necessary; and, above that, it was true.

Entrefort sprang to his feet, white with rage.

“It is a damnable falsehood!” he cried; “you are a liar!” and he looked as though he would spring at my throat.

Had the situation not been so tragic, it would have been ludicrous – he a small, weak, nervous Creole, I a big-boned Scotchman, heavy muscled, a head taller, and weighing nearly a hundred pounds more; he insane with passion, I stolid and pitying.

“Sit down, Raoul,” said I; “we still are friends; for if ever in your life you needed a friend it is now.”

The brilliant gleam of anger in his face faded slowly; but the lines deepened and the hardness and pallor increased. I had wounded the man in his very soul, and the pain of ii was more than he could bear. He tried to speak, but choked; fiercely he tore away his collar, for his breathing was like that of one strangling. He reeled, I caught him in my arms; and when I had laid him on a couch, he took my hand and gasped: “I – I didn’t mean to say that, old man, for I love you; and – O God! – you have told me the truth! I have been bli—” and his eyes rolled, and he was unconscious.

•   •   •   •   •

It was a hard task for me to inform Mme. Forrestier that the operation on Adèle had to be performed, and that Entrefort himself was determined to undertake it; for Mme. Forrestier had not yet explained the mystery of her suffering, and I did not know how to approach her on this dreadful topic. I feared that the effect of my news would be disastrous, but there was no avoiding its delivery. Very great, therefore, was my surprise when, after recovering from the shock which it gave her, she visibly brightened under its effect! This was a strange thing, indeed; for I could not bring it into any other form than that the probably fatal issue of the operation would clear her spirit of its agony, Her step grew lighter, she shed quiet tears, and yet she had wept none in her suffering.

I had to be content with that; it was pleasant to see her steady emergence from despair, her quickened perceptions, her touching gentleness with Adèle, her tender care of her brother, and her quickly returning strength and repose. I had to be content with it, though it gave me a certain dread.

Entrefort himself had undergone a striking change. It was but slowly that he recovered from the illness which the frightful shock I gave him precipitated. In the delirium of his fever, I noted with wonder that, although he talked frequently of Adèle, and knew her when she would visit him, he never called her anything but Félice. “You are Félice,” he would say, “returned to me – brought back by my own hand – the soul and body of Félice, and – God pardon me! – her fatality!” It was well that Adèle knew nothing of the dead Félice, and that she took his words for empty ravings. Slowly Entrefort came out of his despair; and then all the fine manliness in him shone forth luminous and conspicuous. Sturdily he faced about, and saw and contemplated the great evil which had obtruded itself before him. All prospects were dismal, but they were but a spur to the outcoming of his strength. I never saw him look nobler than in those dark days, when he was preparing himself for the ordeal; and hard preparation of spirit was needed. But out of it all he stepped forth in the radiance of perfect manhood.

Adèle was told that the operation must be performed, but its dreadful possibilities were kept from her knowledge. With a smile, she agreed. “I shall be safe,” she said, “if Raoul perform it.”

The day came. Entrefort was on hand, with sharp young assistants. “There is a hope of saving her,” he said to me, with a hard smile, “for she is stronger than Félice.” I believed she was, but Entrefort could be so blind!

Mme. Forrestier and I were in another room, awaiting the issue, while the operation was proceeding. She was upon a frightful strain; every nerve was in violent commotion, each counteracting the activity of some other; so that, without strength or purpose, she lay helpless on a lounge, while I sat beside her and held her hand, and spoke kindly words that bad no listener.

It seemed to take a very long time, but presently it was over, and Raoul came in to give the news. He need not have, spoken, for the light in his face told the story.

“She will live!” be exclaimed, triumphantly; “and then we will marry.”

It was like a death-wound to Mme. Forrestier. With blanched face, in which evidences of the old suffering had returned with manifold intensity, she rose slowly and painfully to her feet, and, standing with a kind of awful majesty, she exclaimed:

“Marry! Never, so long as I can stand between life and death, between heaven and hell!”

We were amazed, and Entrefort gazed at her stupidly. Then he threw a significant glance at me, as much as to say that her mind was wrong; but I knew better than that, and I felt that at last we bad been brought to face a tragic mystery.

“Dear sister,” said Entrefort, approaching her, “pray try to be calm. The good news has broken your self-command.”

“Stand hack, Raoul!” she cried. “Never was my mind clearer nor my purpose of better strength. I am facing sin and damnation, and the duty of a daughter of the holy church of God must be done. I will stop this marriage, and, more than that, if need be I will flaunt my shame before the world to accomplish that end. But it will be sufficient to tell you, for you are a man of honor…. Raoul, I sinned before my marriage…. As God is my witness, Adèle is my natural daughter – a man may not marry his niece!”

Entrefort was surprised, but not dismayed. Pity and shame for his sister for this, her degradation, were all that appeared in his face; there was no incredulity, no shock to his purpose.

“Well, Raoul, what say you now?” she demanded.

After a long pause, he made answer:

“My dear sister, I pity you from the bottom of my heart that you mistakenly have thought it necessary to make this humiliating confession. But it alters my purpose not in the least; Adèle and I will marry.”

She caught her breath and staggered back to her couch, falling heavily upon it.

“But, Raoul,” she gasped weakly, “that is crime; it is violation of the law of God and man; it is suicide in this world and damnation in the world to come.”

“It would be all that, sister dear, if Adèle were Adèle; for if she were Adèle she would be your daughter and my niece. But she is not Adèle.”

“Who is she, pray?” asked his sister, suspecting his sanity.

“She is Félice, a totally different person, related neither to you nor me.”

“Raoul, what do you mean, in God’s name?”

Then he told her the sad story of Félice, and added:

“I saved her sweet body from the grave, and transformed it completely into medicaments, with which I have ever since treated Adèle. By a fine, elaborate, and intricate process, which I can not explain to you now, I caused all the substance and essence of Adèle to be dissipated and those of Félice to take their place. Have you not noticed the remarkable change? My friend here has seen it, but did not understand it. It is clear to him now. Why, the introduction of Félice in the place of Adèle was so complete that she even brought back with her the dreadful malady!”

Mme. Forrestier smiled pityingly and somewhat scornfully, and her excitement again rose to a dangerous pitch.

“Raoul,” she said, “if you are talking seriously, as I believe you are, and not trying to lead a weak woman to countenance an awful sin, then I must say that you are frightfully deceived. Adèle’s character has developed through love for you, and all unconsciously you have led her to fit herself to the semblance of your ideal. Her malady is one to which women are liable, and, being a physician, you know that well.”

“Ah, sweet sister! I know what I have been doing and what I have accomplished. You are incredulous, simply because this thing has never been done before. But, in good time, I will make it all clear to you…. Adele and I will marry.”

Mme. Forrestier now was in a fearful state. Her excitement was wild and menacing.

“I had prayed to heaven and hoped that she would die under the operation, and this hope has given me strength. But now that your honor is obscured by your madness, I will adopt other means.”

She started tottering for the door, evidently to publish her shame and invoke a wide knowledge and opposition to avert an unthinkable happening; but her strength gave way, and with a groan she began to sink. I caught her and laid her on the couch. Entrefort sprang forward, and we both saw that death had laid a hand upon her.

“Raoul,” she gasped, her eyes starting wide and fearful, “you have broken my heart – I feel a warm suffusion in my chest Raoul – Raoul – dear brother – promise me – promise me – Raoul—” and that was all, and soon, thereafter, her sweet spirit went peacefully forth forever. Then I went softly out, leaving the weeping brother with his dead.

“The Argonaut” 05 Sep 1892

OVER AN ABSINTHE BOTTLE

Arthur Kimberlin, a young man of very high spirit, found himself a total stranger in San Francisco one rainy evening, at a time when his heart was breaking; for his hunger was of that most poignant kind in which physical suffering is forced to the highest point without impairment of the mental functions. There remained in his possession not a thing that he might have pawned for a morsel to eat; and even as it was, he had stripped his body of all articles of clothing except those which a remaining sense of decency compelled him to retain. Hence it was that cold assailed him and conspired with hunger to complete his misery. Having been brought into the world and reared a gentleman, he lacked the courage to beg and the skill to steal. Had not an extraordinary thing occurred to him, he either would have drowned himself in the bay within twenty-four hours or died of pneumonia in the street. He had been seventy hours without food, and his mental desperation had driven him far in its race with his physical needs to consume the strength within him; so that now, pale, weak, and tottering, he took what comfort he could find in the savory odors which came steaming up from the basement kitchens of the restaurants in Market Street, caring more to gain them than to avoid the rain. His teeth chattered; he shambled, stooped, and gasped. He was too desperate to curse his fate – he could only long for food. He could not reason; he could not understand that ten thousand hands might gladly have fed him; he could think only of the hunger which consumed him, and of food that could give him warmth and happiness.

When he had arrived at Mason Street, he saw a restaurant a little way up that thoroughfare, and for that he headed, crossing the street diagonally. He stopped before the window and ogled the steaks, thick and lined with fat; big oysters lying on ice; slices of ham as large as his hat; whole roasted chickens, brown and juicy. He ground his teeth, groaned, and staggered on.

A few steps beyond was a drinking-saloon, which had a private door at one side, with the words “Family Entrance” painted thereon. In the recess of the door (which was closed) stood a man. In spite of his agony, Kimberlin saw something in this man’s face that appalled and fascinated him. Night was on, and the light in the vicinity was dim; but it was apparent that the stranger had an appearance of whose character he himself must have been ignorant. Perhaps it was the unspeakable anguish of it that struck through Kimberlin’s sympathies. The young man came to an uncertain halt and stared at the stranger. At first he was unseen, for the stranger looked straight out into the street with singular fixity, and the death-like pallor of his face added a weirdness to the immobility of his gaze. Then he took notice of the young man.

“Ah,” he said, slowly and with peculiar distinctness, “the rain has caught you, too, without overcoat or umbrella! Stand in this doorway – there is room for two.”

The voice was not unkind, though it had an alarming hardness. It was the first word that had been addressed to the sufferer since hunger had seized him, and to be spoken to at all, and have his comfort regarded in the slightest way, gave him cheer. He entered the embrasure and stood beside the stranger, who at once relapsed into his fixed gaze at nothing across the street. But presently the stranger stirred himself again.

“It may rain a long time,” said he; “I am cold, and I observe that you tremble. Let us step inside and get a drink.”

He opened the door and Kimberlin followed, hope beginning to lay a warm hand upon his heart. The pale stranger led the way into one of the little private booths with which the place was furnished. Before sitting down he put his hand into his pocket and drew forth a roll of bank-bills.

“You are younger than I,” he said; “won’t you go to the bar and buy a bottle of absinthe, and bring a pitcher of water and some glasses? I don’t like for the waiters to come around. Here is a twenty-dollar bill.”

Kimberlin took the bill and started down through the corridor towards the bar. He clutched the money tightly in his palm; it felt warm and comfortable, and sent a delicious tingling through his arm. How many glorious hot meals did that bill represent? He clutched it tighter and hesitated. He thought he smelled a broiled steak, with fat little mushrooms and melted butter in the steaming dish. He stopped and looked back towards the door of the booth. He saw that the stranger had closed it. He could pass it, slip out the door, and buy something to eat. He turned and started, but the coward in him (there are other names for this) tripped his resolution; so he went straight to the bar and made the purchase. This was so unusual that the man who served him looked sharply at him.

“Ain’t goin’ to drink all o’ that, are you?” he asked.

“I have friends in the box,” replied Kimberlin, “and we want to drink quietly and without interruption. We are in Number 7.”

“Oh, beg pardon. That’s all right,” said the man.

Kimberlin’s step was very much stronger and steadier as he returned with the liquor. He opened the door of the booth. The stranger sat at the side of the little table, staring at the opposite wall just as he had stared across the street. He wore a wide-brimmed, slouch hat, drawn well down. It was only after Kimberlin had set the bottle, pitcher, and glasses on the table, and seated himself opposite the stranger and within his range of vision, that the pale man noticed him.

“Oh! you have brought it? How kind of you! Now please lock the door.”

Kimberlin had slipped the change into his pocket, and was in the act of bringing it out when the stranger said—

“Keep the change. You will need it, for I am going to get it back in a way that may interest you. Let us first drink, and then I will explain.”

The pale man mixed two drinks of absinthe and water, and the two drank. Kimberlin, unsophisticated, had never tasted the liquor before, and he found it harsh and offensive; but no sooner had it reached his stomach than it began to warm him, and sent the most delicious thrill through his frame.

“It will do us good,” said the stranger; “presently we shall have more. Meanwhile, do you know how to throw dice?”

Kimberlin weakly confessed that he did not.

“I thought not. Well, please go to the bar and bring a dice-box. I would ring for it, but I don’t want the waiters to be coming in.”

Kimberlin fetched the box, again locked the door, and the game began. It was not one of the simple old games, but had complications, in which judgment, as well as chance, played a part. After a game or two without stakes, the stranger said—

“You now seem to understand it. Very well – I will show you that you do not. We will now throw for a dollar a game, and in that way I shall win the money that you received in change. Otherwise I should be robbing you, and I imagine you cannot afford to lose. I mean no offense. I am a plain-spoken man, but I believe in honesty before politeness. I merely want a little diversion, and you are so kind-natured that I am sure you will not object.”

“On the contrary,” replied Kimberlin, “I shall enjoy it.”

“Very well; but let us have another drink before we start. I believe I am growing colder.”

They drank again, and this time the starving man took his liquor with relish – at least, it was something in his stomach, and it warmed and delighted him.

The stake was a dollar a side. Kimberlin won. The pale stranger smiled grimly, and opened another game. Again Kimberlin won. Then the stranger pushed back his hat and fixed that still gaze upon his opponent, smiling yet. With this full view of the pale stranger’s face, Kimberlin was more appalled than ever. He had begun to acquire a certain self-possession and ease, and his marveling at the singular character of the adventure had begun to weaken, when this new incident threw him back into confusion. It was the extraordinary expression of the stranger’s face that alarmed him. Never upon the face of a living being had he seen a pallor so death-like and chilling. The face was more than pale; it was white. Kimberlin’s observing faculty had been sharpened by the absinthe, and, after having detected the stranger in an absent-minded effort two or three times to stroke a beard which had no existence, he reflected that some of the whiteness of the face might be due to the recent removal of a full beard. Besides the pallor, there were deep and sharp lines upon the face, which the electric light brought out very distinctly. With the exception of the steady glance of the eyes and an occasional hard smile, that seemed out of place upon such a face, the expression was that of stone inartistically cut. The eyes were black, but of heavy expression; the lower lip was purple; the hands were fine, white, and thin, and dark veins bulged out upon them. The stranger pulled down his hat.

“You are lucky,” he said. “Suppose we try another drink. There is nothing like absinthe to sharpen one’s wits, and I see that you and I are going to have a delightful game.”

After the drink the game proceeded. Kimberlin won from the very first, rarely losing a game. He became greatly excited. His eyes shone; color came to his cheeks. The stranger, having exhausted the roll of bills which he first produced, drew forth another, much larger and of higher denominations. There were several thousand dollars in the roll. At Kimberlin’s right hand were his winnings – something like two hundred dollars. The stakes were raised, and the game went rapidly on. Another drink was taken. Then fortune turned the stranger’s way, and he won easily. It went back to Kimberlin, for he was now playing with all the judgment and skill he could command. Once only did it occur to him to wonder what he should do with the money if he should quit winner; but a sense of honor decided him that it would belong to the stranger.

By this time the absinthe had so sharpened Kimberlin’s faculties that, the temporary satisfaction which it had brought to his hunger having passed, his physical suffering returned with increased aggressiveness. Could he not order a supper with his earnings? No; that was out of the question, and the stranger said nothing about eating. Kimberlin continued to play, while the manifestations of hunger took the form of sharp pains, which darted through him viciously, causing him to writhe and grind his teeth. The stranger paid no attention, for he was now wholly absorbed in the game. He seemed puzzled and disconcerted. He played with great care, studying each throw minutely. No conversation passed between them now. They drank occasionally, the dice continued to rattle, the money kept piling up at Kimberlin’s hand.

The pale man began to behave strangely. At times he would start and throw back his head, as though he were listening. For a moment his eyes would sharpen and flash, and then sink into heaviness again. More than once Kimberlin, who had now begun to suspect that his antagonist was some kind of monster, saw a frightfully ghastly expression sweep over his face, and his features would become fixed for a very short time in a peculiar grimace. It was noticeable, however, that he was steadily sinking deeper and deeper into a condition of apathy. Occasionally he would raise his eyes to Kimberlin’s face after the young man had made an astonishingly lucky throw, and keep them fixed there with a steadiness that made the young man quail.

The stranger produced another roll of bills when the second was gone, and this had a value many times as great as the others together. The stakes were raised to a thousand dollars a game, and still Kimberlin won. At last the time came when the stranger braced himself for a final effort. With speech somewhat thick, but very deliberate and quiet, he said—

“You have won seventy-four thousand dollars, which is exactly the amount I have remaining. We have been playing for several hours. I am tired, and I suppose you are. Let us finish the game. Each will now stake his all and throw a final game for it.”

Without hesitation, Kimberlin agreed. The bills made a considerable pile on the table. Kimberlin threw, and the box held but one combination that could possibly beat him; this combination might be thrown once in ten thousand times. The starving man’s heart beat violently as the stranger picked up the box with exasperating deliberation. It was a long time before he threw. He made his combinations and ended by defeating his opponent. He sat looking at the dice a long time, and then he slowly leaned back in his chair, settled himself comfortably, raised his eyes to Kimberlin’s, and fixed that unearthly stare upon him. He said not a word; his face contained not a trace of emotion or intelligence. He simply looked. One cannot keep one’s eyes open very long without winking, but the stranger did. He sat so motionless that Kimberlin began to be tortured.

“I will go now,” he said to the stranger – said that when he had not a cent and was starving.

The stranger made no reply, but did not relax his gaze; and under that gaze the young man shrank back in his own chair, terrified. He became aware that two men were cautiously talking in an adjoining booth. As there was now a deathly silence in his own, he listened, and this is what he heard:

“Yes; he was seen to turn into this street about three hours ago.”

“And he had shaved?”

“He must have done so; and to remove a full beard would naturally make a great change in a man.”

“But it may not have been he.”

“True enough; but his extreme pallor attracted attention. You know that he has been troubled with heart-disease lately, and it has affected him seriously.”

“Yes, but his old skill remains. Why, this is the most daring bank-robbery we ever had here. A hundred and forty-eight thousand dollars – think of it! How long has it been since he was let out of Joliet?”

“Eight years. In that time he has grown a beard, and lived by dice-throwing with men who thought they could detect him if he should swindle them; but that is impossible. No human being can come winner out of a game with him. He is evidently not here; let us look farther.”

Then the two men clinked glasses and passed out.

The dice-players – the pale one and the starving one – sat gazing at each other, with a hundred and forty-eight thousand dollars piled up between them. The winner made no move to take in the money; he merely sat and stared at Kimberlin, wholly unmoved by the conversation in the adjoining room. His imperturbability was amazing, his absolute stillness terrifying.

Kimberlin began to shake with an ague. The cold, steady gaze of the stranger sent ice into his marrow. Unable to bear longer this unwavering look, Kimberlin moved to one side, and then he was amazed to discover that the eyes of the pale man, instead of following him, remained fixed upon the spot where he had sat, or, rather, upon the wall behind it. A great dread beset the young man. He feared to make the slightest sound. Voices of men in the bar-room were audible, and the sufferer imagined that he heard others whispering and tiptoeing in the passage outside his booth. He poured out some absinthe, watching his strange companion all the while, and drank alone and unnoticed. He took a heavy drink, and it had a peculiar effect upon him: he felt his heart bounding with alarming force and rapidity, and breathing was difficult. Still his hunger remained, and that and the absinthe gave him an idea that the gastric acids were destroying him by digesting his stomach. He leaned forward and whispered to the stranger, but was given no attention. One of the man’s hands lay upon the table; Kimberlin placed his upon it, and then drew back in terror – the hand was as cold as a stone.

The money must not lie there exposed. Kimberlin arranged it into neat parcels, looking furtively every moment at his immovable companion, and in mortal fear that he would stir! Then he sat back and waited. A deadly fascination impelled him to move back into his former position, so as to bring his face directly before the gaze of the stranger. And so the two sat and stared at each other.

Kimberlin felt his breath coming heavier and his heartbeats growing weaker, but these conditions gave him comfort by reducing his anxiety and softening the pangs of hunger. He was growing more and more comfortable and yawned. If he had dared he might have gone to sleep.

Suddenly a fierce light flooded his vision and sent him with a bound to his feet. Had he been struck upon the head or stabbed to the heart? No; he was sound and alive. The pale stranger still sat there staring at nothing and immovable; but Kimberlin was no longer afraid of him. On the contrary, an extraordinary buoyancy of spirit and elasticity of body made him feel reckless and daring. His former timidity and scruples vanished, and he felt equal to any adventure. Without hesitation he gathered up the money and bestowed it in his several pockets.

“I am a fool to starve,” he said to himself, “with all this money ready to my hand.”

As cautiously as a thief he unlocked the door, stepped out, re-closed it, and boldly and with head erect stalked out upon the street. Much to his astonishment, he found the city in the bustle of the early evening, yet the sky was clear. It was evident to him that he had not been in the saloon as long as he had supposed. He walked along the street with the utmost unconcern of the dangers that beset him, and laughed softly but gleefully. Would he not eat now – ah, would he not? Why, he could buy a dozen restaurants! Not only that, but he would hunt the city up and down for hungry men and feed them with the fattest steaks, the juiciest roasts, and the biggest oysters that the town could supply. As for himself, he must eat first; after that he would set up a great establishment for feeding other hungry mortals without charge. Yes, he would eat first; if he pleased, he would eat till he should burst. In what single place could he find sufficient to satisfy his hunger? Could he live sufficiently long to have an ox killed and roasted whole for his supper? Besides an ox he would order two dozen broiled chickens, fifty dozen oysters, a dozen crabs, ten dozen eggs, ten hams, eight young pigs, twenty wild ducks, fifteen fish of four different kinds, eight salads, four dozen bottles each of claret, burgundy, and champagne; for pastry, eight plum-puddings, and for dessert, bushels of nuts, ices, and confections. It would require time to prepare such a meal, and if he could only live until it could be made ready it would be infinitely better than to spoil his appetite with a dozen or two meals of ordinary size. He thought he could live that long, for he felt amazingly strong and bright. Never in his life before had he walked with so great ease and lightness; his feet hardly touched the ground – he ran and leaped. It did him good to tantalize his hunger, for that would make his relish of the feast all the keener. Oh, but how they would stare when he would give his order, and how comically they would hang back, and how amazed they would be when he would throw a few thousands of dollars on the counter and tell them to take their money out of it and keep the change! Really, it was worth while to be so hungry as that, for then eating became an unspeakable luxury. And one must not be in too great a hurry to eat when one is so hungry – that is beastly. How much of the joy of living do rich people miss from eating before they are hungry – before they have gone three days and nights without food! And how manly it is, and how great self-control it shows, to dally with starvation when one has a dazzling fortune in one’s pocket and every restaurant has an open door! To be hungry without money – that is despair; to be starving with a bursting pocket – that is sublime! Surely the only true heaven is that in which one famishes in the presence of abundant food, which he might have for the taking, and then a gorged stomach and a long sleep.

The starving wretch, speculating thus, still kept from food. He felt himself growing in stature, and the people whom he met became pygmies. The streets widened, the stars became suns and dimmed the electric lights, and the most intoxicating odors and the sweetest music filled the air. Shouting, laughing, and singing, Kimberlin joined in a great chorus—

•   •   •   •   •

The two detectives who had traced the famous bank-robber to the saloon in Mason Street, where Kimberlin had encountered the stranger of the pallid face, left the saloon; but, unable to pursue the trail farther, had finally returned. They found the door of booth No. 7 locked. After rapping and calling and receiving no answer, they burst open the door, and there they saw two men – one of middle age and the other very young – sitting perfectly still, and in the strangest manner imaginable staring at each other across the table. Between them was a great pile of money, arranged neatly in parcels. Near at hand were an empty absinthe bottle, a water-pitcher, glasses, and a dice-box, with the dice lying before the elder man as he had thrown them last. One of the detectives covered the elder man with a revolver and commanded—

“Throw up your hands!”

But the dice-thrower paid no attention. The detectives exchanged startled glances. They looked closer into the faces of the two men, and then they discovered that both were dead.

aka “The Pale Dice Thrower”

“The Argonaut” Jan 2 1893

The Ape, The Idiot, & Other People (1897)

THE UNFAITHFUL CLOCK

Mr. Austin Wheeler was startled out of his ten-o’clock nap by a peculiar cry of distress from Theophilus, his cat. Wise in the ways of cats, and experienced in all the vocal expressions of Theophilus, Mr. Wheeler had cause to feel alarm when, upon opening his eyes, he saw the cat staring straight past him, every nerve in the large brindled animal’s body on a strain, the hair along his spine upright, his tail slowly swinging to and fro, his ears rigidly fixed in listening, his eyes glowing with an unwonted light, and that low note of alarm caution, or distress – perhaps all three in one – filling the chamber with its uncanny effect It was such a sound as you may have heard cats give when worried by dogs.

Mr. Wheeler was wide awake in a moment At first he supposed that the cat was looking at him; but when, in straightening himself from a reclining position, he had brought his face some two feet out of the cat’s line of vision, and observed that Theophilus kept his gaze steadily as before, and, moreover, gave no heed to a call, Mr. Wheeler sent his glance in the direction of his cat’s, and, as nearly as he could judge, found it to rest upon the clock. Instantly he made the startling discovery that instead of sleeping ten minutes, as had been his unbroken custom for years, he had really slept two hours, for the hands of the clock indicated midnight. More than that, he noticed that the little artificial figure of a man which hung by the neck just below the clock was still quivering, as though it had but that moment dropped to the end of its string, whereas it should have been perfectly still.

That the nature of the shock which these discoveries gave Mr. Wheeler may be understood, it is necessary to explain some things.

To begin, Mr. Wheeler was an elderly widower, rather small and thin, highly nervous, somewhat feeble, and possessed of means sufficient for him to live in modest comfort without work. He was conspicuously – indeed painfully – methodical, as Jenny, the girl who took care of his two rooms, had reason to know. Everything had to be in the place he had set apart for it; he went to bed, arose, had his meals, took his strolls and naps, and ordered everything else precisely to the minute, one day’s routine being just like that of all other days. He had explained all this on the score of his health.

Jenny declared to her friends that he was the worst kind of “crank”; but she would add that so long as she did exactly as he directed, he was very kind to her, paid her well, and made her numerous presents. Unfortunately, she had never mentioned to her acquaintances the only serious misunderstanding that had ever arisen between her and her employer; but there will be no better place than this to insert it in the narrative. It was thus:

The small figure of a man, to which reference already has been made, was a perfect representation of a criminal being hanged. The clock, a large, old-fashioned affair, had been let into the wall above the mantel, bricks having been removed in number sufficient to make the face of the clock flush with the wall. The ragged edges of the mural incision had been smoothed with plaster, which made a neat juncture with the wooden frame of the clock. The excavation had been extended below the clock, forming a narrow niche for the reception of the figure. In this niche, attached to the bottom of the clock, was a miniature gallows with beam, trapdoor, cord, trigger, and the other essential mechanical devices employed in executions, everything being concealed by doors. At half-past eleven o’clock every night, the mechanism of the clock would open the doors and spring the trigger, whereupon the trapdoor would fly open and the little figure would fall through and hang suspended by the neck. The figure was neatly dressed in black, with a white shirt; its arms were strapped to its sides, its hands to its thighs, and its knees and also its feet together. To complete the picture, a hangman’s black cap was drawn over the head, concealing the face.

Having accidentally opened the doors and seen the figure one day, Jenny cherished an uncontrollable curiosity to see the face. It so happened that she had never seen the figure hanging, for that was always at half-past eleven at night. For that matter, she did not know that the trap ever opened. All that she had ever seen was the figure standing rigidly on the gallows waiting to be hanged. But the gruesome picture of the little man standing there had always fascinated her, even after her original sentiment of horror and repulsion had passed. Accordingly, one day, when she knew that Mr. Wheeler had left for a stroll and to give her opportunity to put his rooms in order, and when experience with his ways made her sure that he would not return for two hours, she cautiously began an investigation.

Finding that the figure stood squarely upon its feet, without lateral support, she gently lifted it from the trapdoor and drew it out as far as the cord would permit. She carefully loosened the noose, which was outside the cap and which pressed it closely against the neck, and then slipped off the cap. That which she then saw gave her so terrible a fright that she dropped the figure, screamed with all her might, and fell in a senseless heap to the floor. There she lay unconscious for two hours, and there her master found her. Upon seeing at a glance what had happened, he became pale, and a look of singular ferocity and malignity distorted his features. With his foot he contemptuously turned the girl over, in order to get her out of his way, re-adjusted the cap and noose, and restored the figure to its original position, and then picked up Jenny, laid her on a lounge, loosened her clothing, sprinkled water in her face, and brought her back to consciousness.

After she had remembered what had happened, and had seen the hard, reproachful glance with which Mr. Wheeler was regarding her, she began to cry and to plead for forgiveness.

“Had you forgotten,” he asked, “that I had particularly cautioned you never to touch that figure?”

“Oh, sir,” she sobbed, “I am so sorry! It was very wrong of me, sir. You have been so good to me! Won’t you forgive me, sir?”

The end of it was that he did forgive her, and that she promised faithfully never to tell anyone what she had seen. But it was many a day before she could again enter that room without fear and shudderings. The slow, measured ticking of the clock was terrible, and the little figure standing behind its closed doors was a silent and formidable mystery. A thousand times did she wonder what it all meant – what dreadful history it illustrated. For months all her dreams were haunted by that terribly realistic little face, every detail of its strangely handsome features, distorted and discolored though they were by death from strangulation, being impressed ineffaceably on her memory. In a vague fashion, there had come to her certain stories of a strange tragedy far back in the life of her master – something about a beautiful young wife many years ago, and her death, and her husband’s terrible revenge; but what all that had to do with the ghastly little figure in the clock, if anything at all, Jenny could not imagine.

When Mr. Wheeler, after having been awakened by Theophilus, saw that he had slept two hours instead of ten minutes, and that the body of the little figure was still quivering, as though it had but just fallen through the trap, he was thrown into alarm and consternation. He had never overslept a moment before. Exactly at ten o’clock every night he had taken a nap of ten minutes in his chair, had read till eleven, and then had turned to face the clock and steadily watch the hands as they slowly went around to thirty minutes past eleven, when the little doors would swing open and the figure would drop to the end of its cord, and there sway awhile, turn slowly about as a man would in its place, and finally come to rest; then Mr. Wheeler would replace the figure, close the doors, and go to bed. If one had been present from eleven o’clock till the doors swung open, one might have made a study of Mr. Wheeler’s face; for it gradually darkened and hardened, became firmer, more haggard, more deeply lined, more and more filled with hate and implacable vindictiveness; one might have observed him becoming rigid and breathless on the eve of the mock execution, the glowing look of triumph which illuminated his face when the trap was sprung, a writhing of the body and a rubbing of the hands as the figure slowly swung about, and complete relaxation and peace when it had finally come to rest

On this night of his great surprise, Mr. Wheeler, at first unable to trust the evidence of his senses, felt his pulse, and, finding it bounding with alarming violence, concluded that he was ill, and that his illness had caused him to oversleep. But what explanation could be found for the singular conduct of the cat and the swaying of the figure? Mr. Wheeler examined the doors of his rooms and found them locked – no one could have entered. No draft which might have made the body sway after it should have been still nearly half an hour was discoverable. Nothing that might have caused the cat’s uneasiness was visible. Could it be possible that some supernatural agency was at work? Mr. Wheeler was too hard-headed a man to entertain that idea for a moment. So he finally tried to satisfy himself with the explanation that he had been taken ill in the first minutes of his slumber; that Theophilus had become uneasy at his long sleep and this violent breach of his habits, and, associating the clock with his master’s movements, had regarded it as the cause of the irregularity; and that as for the swaying of the figure, it might have been caused by a fly or some other insect, and that this untimely swaying alone might have accounted for the cat’s uneasiness. Mr. Wheeler, forced to take that explanation to bed with him, had an uneasy night in its company.

He was so full of the affair the next morning that he made a close examination of the clock, and found it in perfect order. Although he had no watch, he observed that his clock was exactly in time with the tower-clock which he could see from his window; and that was as it should have been. After puzzling over the whole problem some time, he decided that he could only go on as formerly, depending upon the future to solve the puzzle.

That day he went about matters as usual. Loss of sleep and the shock to his nerves had been injurious, but he might retrieve all that. Everything proceeded in the old orderly way until the time came for him to take his ten-o’clock nap in the evening. At first he had thought of dispensing with it for a night or two, that he might watch for a repetition of the strange occurrences; but after reflecting that it would be unwise to break into the regularity of his habits he decided to take his nap. Accordingly, he composed himself in his chair, saw that Theophilus was sound asleep on the rug, and in a moment (being very tired) he was slumbering.

It seemed to him that he had not been asleep a minute when the same distressful cry from Theophilus roused him into alarmed wakefulness. Again was Theophilus gazing strangely at the clock. Quickly turning his glance in that quarter, Mr. Wheeler saw that the hands again pointed to midnight, and that the little figure was swaying as though it had but just fallen through the trap! This was more than the wretched man’s nerves could bear quietly. He trembled, and a perspiration dampened his forehead. These things, happening once, made a situation strange enough; a repetition of exactly the same kind – three extraordinary elements entering into it – made a coincidence which was terrible. Mr. Wheeler found his pulse bounding as before; he examined the clock and saw that it was in perfect order. He felt that he had not slept two hours, but on a matter of that kind he knew that no man’s judgment is reliable. He replaced the figure and sat for a long time in deep thought and anxiety; at the end of everything he went to bed. His sleep again was uncertain; but if he had slept two hours how could he expect sound slumber? Still, it seemed to him that if he had slept two hours in a cramped position in a chair, he would have felt the strain on his muscles, and yet there was none whatever.

Mr. Wheeler’s two rooms were in a large apartment-house of the better, though not the more expensive, kind. It was an uncommonly well-built house, the partitions separating the suites being of brick, those between the rooms of a suite, lath and plaster affixed to studding. The floors were deadened with plaster. Hence when the doors were closed, no sounds could penetrate the walls separating the suites or the floors below and above. Mr. Wheeler’s suite being in a corner of the house, he had neighbors only on one side and at the rear of his rooms. He had never seen them, and knew nothing about them. Being something of a solitary, he had made the acquaintance of but one family in the house – a widow with two children. The woman was French, and as she was poor and he had once relieved her distress when informed by Jenny that she was ill, and besides was a dainty cook, he had arranged with her to take his meals at her table, paying her so generously that she regarded him as a benefactor.

Should he confide in her? She was bright and shrewd, and she might help him – he could not bear to think of bringing a detective into the case. While he refused to believe it possible that any of his neighbors could have a hand in the occurrences which disturbed him, he thought it might at least be well to know who they were. Should he employ the Frenchwoman to learn all that she could about them? It looked silly and undignified. Should he himself spy upon them, and thus keep his troubles to himself? That was inconceivable. He would wait awhile. As for Jenny, he could not bring himself to consult her, and by that means establish confidential relations with her. He determined to fight it out alone.

On the third night he threw aside his custom of taking a nap, and decided to watch the cat and the clock. At ten o’clock, anxious though he was, the habit of falling asleep came upon him so strongly that he had to resort to various artifices to keep awake. Ten minutes later he had lost his drowsiness. The cat slumbered quietly on the rug, and the clock and the figure gave no sign of irregular behavior. Eleven o’clock arrived. He took up his familiar position facing the clock. Slowly he came under the influence of the old spell; his face paled and hardened; he became rigid. In two seconds more the doors would fly open and the execution would occur. A second passed. Then the clock stopped. At the same moment the cat, which had been asleep on the rug, sprang to his feet; the hair rose along his spine, his tail swung to and fro; his eyes, glowing with a strange light, were fixed on the clock, and he gave a cry of distress and alarm.

That any clock should stop is not an extraordinary thing; but that this clock should have stopped at that particular moment, and that simultaneously the cat should have manifested so great uneasiness, constituted, with the strange occurrences of the two last preceding nights, a coincidence which could not be ignored and which brought terror with it Mr. Wheeler sat white and aghast He spoke softly to the cat, hoping thus to find some clew; but Theophilus paid no attention for a full minute or two; and though even after that he noticed his master, he would suddenly turn every few seconds and fix his anxious gaze on the clock. Very soon, however, he was quiet again.

It was some time before Mr. Wheeler could get his courage in hand. When he had done so he went to the clock, opened it, found it properly wound up and otherwise apparently in order, and then started it again. The pendulum swung easily, the little doors opened, the execution went forward with the accustomed precision, and the clock attended to its business without any further ado. Mr. Wheeler pushed forward the hands seven minutes, after consulting the illuminated dial of the tower-clock, and then sat down, weak and ill, and watched the clock from his chair all during the night. Nothing further went amiss.

In the morning his hands trembled, his knees were unsteady, his eyes were bloodshot, and his face was haggard and white. Theophilus behaved strangely. This wisest, most complacent, most decorous of cats exhibited an unusual conduct in divers ways, all ascribable undoubtedly to apprehension. Although he no longer paid attention to the clock, he strode about the room stealthily, his tail swinging, his ears erect, and his whole bearing indicating the presence of strange sounds. Mr. Wheeler himself, attentively as he listened, could hear nothing peculiar. Yet the conduct of the cat alarmed him. He strained every sense to catch the least uncommon happening. He examined the walls inch by inch, puffing an ear to them now and then, watching Theophilus and the clock meanwhile.

Presently the time arrived for him to take his breakfast; but, as he was ill and had no hunger, he fell into a chair and groaned. In a little while the Frenchwoman came in, and started in fright when she saw his face.

“Oh, monsieur!” she exclaimed; “you eel! Ah, what a peety! I bring you some coffee quick, monsieur.”

“If you please, madame,” weakly responded the wretched man.

Afterward he felt a little better; but a violent headache came on, and it seemed as though his temples would burst He forgot all about his morning walk, and, lying back in his chair, could only watch Theophilus. He had not let any light into the room, and that which was strained through the oil shades, though to him seemingly so brilliant that it burned him, was insufficient for Jenny, who, a few minutes before her accustomed time, burst into the room, in extraordinary excitement.

“I’m sure it was the same,” she gasped breathlessly, speaking to herself, and supposing that her master was away; “but I’ll see.”

Not observing him crouching in his chair, she hastily threw up the shades, went straight to the clock, and pulled open the little doors. Then she drew the figure from the trap, with fierce eagerness loosened the noose and removed the black cap, and then, letting the figure fall to the end of its cord, she staggered back to the mantel, clutched her throat, and panted, her wide-staring eyes fixed on the distorted features of the figure.

“Jenny!” called her master.

She screamed and sprang away. Her excitement must have been great, for she exhibited neither shame nor contrition for being caught in the act of violating her master’s orders. On the contrary, as soon as she could realize that it was he who was present, and not some dreadful thing that evidently she feared, she ran to him and threw herself on her knees at his feet, seizing his hands and clinging to him for protection. Every one of her features and movements expressed terror. Her throat was filled with sobs and gasps. She swayed and writhed in an effort to speak.

“Oh, Mr. Wheeler,” she finally found voice to say, “I’ve seen him – the same as that!” pointing to the figure.

Mr. Wheeler’s face became livid, and his eyes seemed to sink back into his skull.

“Where?” he whispered.

“Out there. He was slipping away from your door. His face frightened me so that I ran, and he caught me, and twisted my wrist, and asked me what I was afraid of. He is a young man. I don’t know what I said – it was something about a rope around his neck. He cursed me, and said that if I said a word about having seen him he would kill me. And there was murder in his face!”

Mr. Wheeler shrank deeper into his chair; and there he sat in complete collapse, his jaw hanging, his eyes rolled up and half-closed, and his breathing hardly perceptible. His appearance alarmed the girl, who feared that he had died. She shook him and called him by name, but his response was only a faint and petulant groan. She ran and brought the Frenchwoman, and together they chafed his hands, placed him on a lounge, and covered him heavily, for he was very cold. Sooner than might have been expected, and before the arrival of a physician who had been summoned, Mr. Wheeler’s cheeks began to flush, his eyes to brighten, and his pulse and breathing to become strong. He sat up and curtly dismissed the physician when he arrived. He refused to eat anything, and directed the women to leave him alone, taking occasion to whisper to Jenny a request that she say nothing to anyone about what she had seen.

He got to his feet and looked around anxiously for the cat; Theophilus was sleeping peacefully on his rug. Then he staggered to the clock and carefully readjusted the figure on the trap, taking a great deal of time, for his hands were extremely weak and uncertain. Then he sat down, trembling. The Frenchwoman presently brought him a tempting little meal.

“Thank you,” he said; “that is just what I need – I am very hungry.”

But as soon as she was gone he gave Theophilus the food, to pretend that he himself had eaten. Meanwhile, the color in his cheeks deepened and the light in his eyes became brighter; worse than that, he began to talk; and as Theophilus, to whom he had often talked before, was his sole audience, Theophilus had to hear what he said.

“Theophilus,” he said, “it is a lie – the girl is mad! Do you understand that? How could he come back, when I myself hounded him to the gallows; when I myself had the last glimpse of his living face when the black cap was drawn over it; when I myself, after it all was over, saw that same devilishly handsome face all swollen and purple – just as I afterward reproduced it there, Theophilus?” pointing toward the clock with a meager, trembling hand. “And yet, Theophilus, she saw something, and that something has come back to life and has taken up its abode in my clock.”

Theophilus, each time that his name was called, blinkingly opened his eyes and then drowsily closed them again.

“Thirty years ago, Theophilus. Let me say twenty-nine years, four months, and eleven days. Three hundred and sixty-five times twenty-nine – but where do the leap-years come in? Nine times five, forty-five, eight, thirty-two, seven thirty – ten thousand five hundred and something; hundred and twenty, eleven; ten thousand and – ten thousand and – ten thousand and – more than ten thousand times, Theophilus! He’s been hanged by the neck till he was dead ten thousand and something times, Theophilus! Think of that! Isn’t that sufficient to kill a man? . . . What a fool that Jenny is!”

The feeble man rose in his excitement and reeled around the room, his face crimson and his eyes aflame.

“When, thirty years ago, she listened to his smooth voice and lying tongue, and he stole her away from me – oh, Theophilus, had I been born a cat! And in less than a year, when she was in that condition in which a woman appeals to every sense of tenderness and consideration in a man, he was beating her like a dog, Theophilus – beating her like a dog.”

By this time the poor man was reeling wildly about the chamber, stumbling over chairs and tripping on rugs.

“Beat her like a dog, and I knew nothing of it! Like a dog, Theophilus. Do you understand that? And that wasn’t all.”

His husky voice fell to a whisper. Half-stooping, half-crouching, he halted in front of the cat, and, with outstretched arm and a finger pointed at the cat, he hissed:

“He murdered her one day. . . murdered her! . . . And for that, Theophilus” – he straightened, threw back his head and shoulders, raised both arms triumphantly above his head, and passionately exclaimed in a loud voice – “for that I drove him to the gallows; and I saw him fall through the trap, and I saw his purple face when the cap had been lifted.”

He slowly drooped after that outburst, gradually settled into himself, and then sank groaning into his easy chair, where he sat staring vaguely at the clock.

The two women looked in once or twice during the day, but he told them firmly at last that he desired to be left alone. Jenny went to her own home, which was in another street, and thenceforward the suffering man had only Theophilus for company. He talked now and then to the cat, whose peaceful attitude remained undisturbed.

At eleven o’clock that night, Mr. Wheeler, so weak that he could barely move, composed himself as usual to watch the execution. Had not his senses become so dull, and had it not happened that Theophilus was without the range of his vision, he certainly would have noticed that strange occurrences were on the march. It is true that about twenty minutes past eleven he heard Theophilus give voice to alarm and distress; but he only laughed foolishly at that, and in a thick, maudlin fashion tried to reassure the animal, knowing nothing of the stealthy entrance of a man through the door.

“That’s right, Theoph – Theoph – Theoph – what’s your name, Theophilus? What’s your name, hey? He’s all around here, old fellow – all around here. Can feel him – smell him. You afraid, Theophilus? Don’t be afraid. I’m not afraid. Ha! Don’t do that, Theoph – Theoph – Theoph – what’s your name, Theophilus? What’s your name? Six minutes more. Keep an eye on the doors up there. Theoph – Th – Th – ophilus. Gracious me! what a name for a cat! Ha, ha! What a name for a cat! Theos – Theos – ophy! Oh, what a name for a cat! Four minutes more. Keep an eye on the doors up there – doors up there.”

And thus he rambled on until the little doors flew open. One more swing of the pendulum, and then the execution; Mr. Wheeler had nerved himself to witness it – to drink in the sweetness of it His dull eyes and deathly pallid cheeks had taken on new life, and with suppressed respiration he had leaned lurchingly forward, his mouth drooling and his head nodding as with a heavy palsy. But before the pendulum could swing once more and release the trigger, the dark form of a young man uprose between him and the clock and shut off his view.

For a while Mr. Wheeler could not understand what had happened. The stranger had brought his face directly before Mr. Wheeler’s, and the wretched man stared helpless and speechless at the apparition.

“Well,” said the stranger, his hard voice comporting well with the sinister cruelty of his face – “well, I have brought you to this much sooner than I expected. You are more nervous than I thought. And now, after torturing you thus far, I dare carry it no further, for fear that I shall not leave sufficient life in your miserable body to treat you as my father treated your wife and as you treated him. It is all a delicious revenge. You had forgotten all about me, eh? Perhaps you did not know that she gave birth to me before my father put an end to her. Well, I am his son and your wife’s son, and I inherit my father’s spirit. Do you understand all that?”

It was not clear that Mr. Wheeler did. He still stared in that hopeless way, not knowing that the execution had regularly occurred, or, perhaps, believing that the figure had stepped forth from the clock to punish him. For in his eyes was a new and deeper horror, coming seemingly from an immeasurable distance; but there it was, and his head continued to nod as with a palsy. He tried to mumble something. The stranger roughly seized him by the shoulder, and that roused the sinking man. With a tremendous effort, Mr. Wheeler staggered to his feet, pitifully weak. Then in a burst of life, he threw his arms aloft and cried:

“He was a coward and a murderer, and I hanged him nine times five, forty-five, eight, ten thousand—”

•   •   •   •   •

The stranger, once again in his own room (which adjoined that of Mr. Wheeler), looked up at the wall.

“I don’t think that they will ever find that opening behind his clock,” he ruminated, as he made final preparations at midnight to leave, “for I have closed it as carefully as possible.” He regarded his hands, which appeared to have been badly scratched. “Damn the brute!” he exclaimed. “Who ever heard of a cat fighting for its master’s life?” He drew on a pair of gloves and quietly slipped away.

For a while Mr. Wheeler could not understand what had happened. The stranger had brought his face directly before Mr. Wheeler’s, and the wretched man stared helpless and speechless at the apparition. “Well,” said the stranger, his hard voice comporting well with the sinister cruelty of his face – “well, I have brought you to this much sooner than I expected. You are more nervous than I thought. And now, after torturing you thus far, I dare carry it no further, for fear that I shall not leave sufficient life in your miserable body to treat you as my father treated your wife and as you treated him. It is all a delicious revenge. You had forgotten all about me, eh? Perhaps you did not know that she gave birth to me before my father put an end to her. Well, I am his son and your wife’s son, and I inherit my father’s spirit. Do you understand all that?”

“The Argonaut” 16 Oct 1893

THE HAUNTED BURGLAR

Anthony Ross doubtless had the oddest and most complex temperament that ever assured the success of burglary as a business. This fact is mentioned in order that those who choose may employ it as an explanation of the extraordinary ideas that entered his head and gave a strangely tragic character to his career.

Though ignorant, the man had an uncommonly fine mind in certain aspect. Thus it happened that, while lacking moral perception, he cherished an artistic pride in the smooth, elegant, and finished conduct of his work. Hence a blunder on his part invariably filled him with grief and humiliation; and it was the steadily increasing recurrence of these errors that finally impelled him to make a deliberate analysis of his case.

Among the stupid acts with which he charged himself was the murder of the banker Uriah Mattson, a feeble old man whom a simple choking or a sufficient tap on the skull would have rendered helpless. Instead of that, he had choked his victim to death in the most brutal and unnecessary manner, and in doing so had used the fingers of his left hand in a singularly sprawled and awkward fashion. The whole act was utterly unlike him; it appalled and horrified him – not for the sin of taking human life, but because it was unnecessary, dangerous, subversive of the principles of skilled burglary, and monstrously inartistic.

A similar mishap had occurred in the case of Miss Jellison, a wealthy spinster, merely because she was in the act of waking, which meant an ensuing scream. In this case, as in the other, he was unspeakably shocked to discover that the fatal choking had been done by the left hand, with sprawled and awkward fingers, and with a savage ferocity entirely uncalled for by his peril.

In setting himself to analyze these incongruous and revolting things he dragged forth from his memory numerous other acts, unlike those two in detail, but similar to them in spirit. Thus, in a fit of passionate anger at the whimpering of an infant, he had flung it brutally against the wall.

Another time he was nearly discovered through the needless torturing of a cat, whose cries set pursuers at his heels. These and other insane, inartistic, and ferocious acts he arrayed for serious analysis.

Finally the realization burst upon him that all his aberrations of conduct had proceeded from his left hand and arm. Search his recollection ever so diligently, he could not recall a single instance wherein his right hand had failed to proceed on perfectly fine, sure, and artistic lines.

When he made this discovery he realized that he had brought himself face to face with a terrifying mystery; and its horrors were increased when he reflected that while his left hand had committed acts of stupid atrocity in the pursuit of his burglarious enterprises, on many occasions when he was not so engaged it had acted with a less harmful but none the less coarse, irrational, and inartistic purpose.

It was not difficult for such a man to arrive at strange conclusions. The explanation that promptly suggested itself, and that his coolest and shrewdest wisdom could not shake, was that his left arm was under the dominion of a perverse and malicious spirit, that it was an entity apart from his own spirit, and that it had fastened itself upon that part of his body to produce his ruin.

It were useless, however inviting, to speculate upon the order of mind capable of arriving at such a conclusion; it is more to the point to narrate the terrible happenings to which it gave rise.

About a month after the burglar’s mental struggle a strange-looking man applied for a situation at a sawmill a hundred miles away. His appearance was exceedingly distressing. Either a grievous bodily illness or fearful mental anguish had made his face wan and haggard and filled his eyes with the light of a hard desperation that gave promise of dire results. There were no marks of a vagabond on his clothing or in his manner. He did not seem to be suffering for physical necessities. He held his head aloft and walked like a man, and an understanding glance would have seen that his look of determination meant something profounder and more far-reaching than the ordinary business concerns of life.

He gave the name of Hope. His manner was so engaging, yet withal so firm and abstracted, that he secured a position without difficulty; and so faithfully did he work, and so quick was his intelligence, that in good time his request to be given the management of a saw was granted. It might have been noticed that his face thereupon wore a deeper and more haggard look, but that its rigors were softened by a light of happy expectancy. As he cultivated no friendships among the men, he had no confidants; he went his dark way alone to the end.

He seemed to take more than the pleasure of an efficient workman in observing the products of his skill. He would stealthily hug the big brown logs as they approached the saw, and his eyes would blaze when the great tool went singing and roaring at its work. The foreman, mistaking this eagerness for carelessness, quietly cautioned him to beware; but when the next log was mounted for the saw the stranger appeared to slip and fall. He clasped the moving log in his arms, and the next moment the insatiable teeth had severed his left arm near the shoulder, and the stranger sank with a groan into the soft sawdust that filled the pit.

There was the usual commotion attending such accidents, for the faces of the workmen turn white when they see one of their number thus maimed for life. But Hope received good surgical care, and in due time was able to be abroad. Then the men observed that a remarkable change had come over him. His moroseness had disappeared, and in its stead was a hearty cheer of manner that amazed them. Was the losing of a precious arm a thing to make a wretched man happy? Hope was given light work in the office, and might have remained to the end of his days a competent and prosperous man; but one day he left, and was never seen thereabout again.

Then Anthony Ross, the burglar, reappeared upon the scenes of his former exploits. The police were dismayed to note the arrival of a man whom all their skill had been unable to convict of terrible crimes which they were certain he had committed, and they questioned him about the loss of his arm; but he laughed them away with the fine old sangfroid with which they were familiar, and soon his handiwork appeared in reports of daring burglaries.

A watch of extraordinary care and minuteness was set upon him, but that availed nothing until a singular thing occurred to baffle the officers beyond measure: Ross had suddenly become wildly reckless and walked red-handed into the mouth of the law. By evidence that seemed indisputable a burglary and atrocious murder were traced to him. Stranger than all else, he made no effort to escape, though leaving a hanging trail behind him. When the officers overhauled him, they found him in a state of utter dejection, wholly different from the lighthearted bearing that had characterized him ever since he had returned without his left arm. Neither admitting nor denying his guilt, he bore himself with the hopelessness of a man already condemned to the gallows.

Even when he was brought before a jury and placed on trial, he made no fight for his life.

Although possessed of abundant means, he refused to employ an attorney, and treated with scant courtesy the one assigned him by the judge. He betrayed irritation at the slow dragging of the case as the prosecution piled up its evidence against him. His whole manner indicated that he wished the trial to end as soon as possible and hoped for a verdict of guilty.

This incomprehensible behavior placed the voting and ambitious attorney on his mettle. He realized that some inexplicable mystery lay behind the matter, and this sharpened his zeal to find it. He plied his client with all manner of questions, and tried in all way to secure his confidence:

Ross remained sullen, morose, and wholly given over to despairing resignation. The young lawyer had made a wonderful discovery, which he at first felt confident would clear the prisoner, but any mention of it to Ross would only throw him into a violent passion and cause him to tremble as with a palsy. His conduct on such occasions was terrible beyond measure. He seemed utterly beside himself, and thus his attorney had become convinced of the man’s insanity. The trouble in proving it was that he dared not mention his discovery to others, and that Ross exhibited no signs of mania unless that one subject was broached.

The prosecution made out a case that looked impregnable, and this fact seemed to fill the prisoner with peace. The young lawyer for the defense had summoned a number of witnesses, but in the end he used only one. His opening statement to the jury was merely that it was a physical impossibility for the prisoner to have committed the murder – which was done by choking. Ross made a frantic attempt to stop him from putting forth that defense, and from the dock wildly denounced it as a lie.

The young lawyer nevertheless proceeded with what he deemed his duty to his unwilling client. He called a photographer and had him produce a large picture of the murdered man’s face and neck. He proved that the portrait was that of the person whom Ross was charged with having killed. As he approached the climax of the scene, Ross became entirety ungovernable in his frantic efforts to stop the introduction of the evidence, and so it became necessary to bind and gag him and strap him to the chair.

When quiet was restored, the lawyer handed the photograph to the jury and quietly remarked:

“You may see for yourselves that the choking was done with the left hand, and you have observed that my client has no such member.”

He was unmistakably right. The imprint of the thumb and fingers, forced into the flesh in a singularly ferocious, sprawling, and awkward manner, was shown in the photograph with absolute clearness. The prosecution, taken wholly by surprise, blustered and made attempts to assail the evidence, but without success. The jury returned a verdict of not guilty.

Meanwhile the prisoner had fainted, and his gag and bonds had been removed; but he recovered at the moment when the verdict was announced. He staggered to his feet, and his eyes rolled; then with a thick tongue he exclaimed:

“It was the left arm that did it! This one” – holding his right arm as high as he could reach – “never made a mistake. It was always the left one. A spirit of mischief and murder was in it. I cut it off in a sawmill, but the spirit stayed where the arm used to be, and it choked this man to death. I didn’t want you to acquit me. I wanted you to hang me. I can’t go through life having this thing haunting me and spoiling my business and making a murderer of me. It tries to choke me while I sleep. There it is! Can’t you see it?” And he looked with wide-staring eves at his left side.

“Mr. Sheriff,” gravely said the judge, “take this man before the Commissioners of Lunacy tomorrow.”

“Lippincott’s Magazine” Jul 1897

A GAME OF HONOR

Four of the five men who sat around the card-table in the cabin of the “Merry Witch” regarded the fifth man with a steady, implacable look of scorn. The solitary one could not face that terrible glance. His head drooped, and his gaze rested upon some cards which he idly fumbled as he waited, numbed and listless, to hear his sentence.

The more masterful one of the four made a disdainful gesture towards the craven one, and thus addressed the others:

“Gentlemen, none of us can have forgotten the terms of our compact. It was agreed at the beginning of this expedition that only men of unflinching integrity should be permitted to participate in its known dangers and possible rewards. To find and secure the magnificent treasure which we are seeking with a sure prospect of discovering it, we must run the risk of encounters with savage Mexican soldiers and marines, and take all the other dangerous chances of which you are aware. As the charterer of this vessel and the leader of the expedition I have exercised extraordinary care in selecting my associates. We have been and still are equals, and my leadership as the outfitter of the expedition gives me no advantage in the sharing of the treasure. As such leader, however, I am in authority, and have employed, unsuspected by you, many devices to test the manhood of each of you. Were it not for the fact that I have exhausted all reasonable resources to this end, and have found all of you trustworthy except one, I would not now be disclosing the plan which I have been pursuing.”

The three others, who had been gazing at the crestfallen one, now stared at their leader with a startled interest.

“The final test of a man’s character,” calmly pursued the leader, “is the card-table. Whatever there may be in him of weakness, whether it be a mean avarice, cowardice, or a deceitful disposition, will there inevitably appear. If I were the president of a bank, the general of an army, or the leader of any other great enterprise I would make it a point to test the character of my subordinates in a series of games at cards, preferably played for money. It is the only sure test of character that the wisdom of the ages has been able to devise.”

He paused, and then turned his scornful glance upon the cringing man, who meanwhile had mustered courage to look up, and was employing his eyes as well as his ears to comprehend the strange philosophy of his judge. Terror and dismay were elements of the expression which curiously wrinkled his white face, as though he found himself standing before a court of inscrutable wisdom and relentless justice. But his glance fell instantly when it encountered that of his judge, and his weak lower lip hung trembling.

“We have all agreed,” impressively continued the leader, “that the one found guilty of deceiving or betraying the others to the very smallest extent should pay the penalty which we are all sworn to exact. A part of this agreement, as we all remember, is that the one found derelict shall be the first to insist on the visitation of the penalty, and that should he fail to do so – but I trust that it is unnecessary to mention the alternative.”

There was another pause, and the culprit sat still, hardly breathing, and permitting the cards to slip from his fingers to the floor.

“Mr. Rossiter,” said the leader, addressing the hapless man in a tone so hard and cold that it congealed the marrow which it pierced, “have you any suggestion to make?”

The doomed man made such a pitiful struggle for self-mastery as the gallows often reveals. If there was a momentary flash of hope based on a transient determination to plead, it faded instantly before the stern and implacable eyes that greeted him from all sides of the table. Certainly there was a fierce struggle under which his soul writhed, and which showed in a passing flush that crimsoned his face. That went by, and an acceptance of doom sat upon him. He raised his head and looked firmly at the leader, and as he did so his chest expanded and his shoulders squared bravely.

“Captain,” said he, with a very good voice, “whatever else I may be, I am not a coward. I have cheated. In doing so I have betrayed the confidence of all. I remember the terms of the compact. Will you kindly summon the skipper?”

Without any change of countenance, the leader complied.

“Mr. Rossiter,” he said to the skipper, “has a request to make of you, and whatever it may be I authorize you to comply with it.”

“I wish,” asked Mr. Rossiter of the skipper, “that you would lower a boat and put me aboard, and that you would furnish the boat with one oar and nothing else whatever.”

“Why,” exclaimed the skipper, aghast, looking in dismay from one to another of the men, “the man is insane! There is no land within five hundred miles. We are in the tropics, and a man couldn’t live four days without food or water, and the sea is alive with sharks. Why, this is suicide!”

The leader’s face darkened, but before he could speak Mr. Rossiter calmly remarked—

“That is my own affair, sir;” and there was a fine ring in his voice.

•   •   •   •   •

The man in the boat, bareheaded and stripped nearly naked in the broiling sun, was thus addressing something which he saw close at hand in the water:

“Let me see. Yes, I think it is about four days now that we have travelled together, but I am not very positive about that. You see, if it hadn’t been for you I should have died of loneliness…. Say! aren’t you hungry, too? I was a few days ago, but I’m only thirsty now. You’ve got the advantage of me, because you don’t get thirsty. As for your being hungry – ha, ha, ha! Who ever heard of a shark that wasn’t always hungry? Oh, I know well enough what’s in your mind, companion mine, but there’s time enough for that. I hate to disturb the pleasant relation which exists between us at present. That is to say – now, here is a witticism – I prefer the outside relation to the inside intimacy. Ha, ha, ha! I knew you’d laugh at that, you sly old rogue! What a very sly, patient old shark you are! Don’t you know that if you didn’t have those clumsy fins, and that dreadfully homely mouth away down somewhere on the under side of your body, and eyes so grotesquely wide apart, and should go on land and match your wit against the various and amusing species of sharks which abound there, your patience in pursuing a manifest advantage would make you a millionaire in a year? Can you get that philosophy through your thick skull, my friend?

“There, there, there! Don’t turn over like that and make a fool of yourself by opening your pretty mouth and dazzling the midday sun with the gleam of your white belly. I’m not ready yet. God! how thirsty I am! Say, did you ever feel like that? Did you ever see blinding flashes that tear through your brain and turn the sun black?

“You haven’t answered my question yet. It’s a hypothetical question – yes, hypothetical. I’m sure that’s what I want to say. Hypo – hypothetical question. Question; yes, that’s right. Now, suppose you’d been a pretty wild young shark, and had kept your mother anxious and miserable, and had drifted into gambling and had gone pretty well to the dogs. Do sharks ever go to the dogs? Now, that’s a poser. Sharks; dogs. Oh, what a very ridiculously, sublimely amusing old shark! Dreadfully discreet you are. Never disclose your hand except on a showdown. What a glum old villain you are!

“Pretty well to the dogs, and then braced up and left home to make a man of yourself. Think of a shark making a man of himself! And then – easy there! Don’t get excited. I only staggered that time and didn’t quite go overboard. And don’t let my gesticulations excite you. Keep your mouth shut, my friend; you’re not pretty when you smile like that. As I was saying – oh!…

“How long was I that way, old fellow? Good thing for me that you don’t know how to climb into a boat when a fellow is that way. Were you ever that way, partner? Come on like this: Biff! Big blaze of red fire in your head. Then – then – well, after awhile you come out of it, with the queerest and crookedest of augers boring through your head, and a million tadpoles of white fire darting in every direction through the air. Don’t ever get that way, my friend, if you can possibly keep out of it. But then, you never get thirsty. Let me see. The sun was over there when the red fire struck, and it’s over here now. Shifted about thirty degrees. Then, I was that way about two hours.

“Where are those dogs? Do they come to you or do you go to them? That depends. Now, say you had some friends that wanted to do you a good turn; wanted to straighten you up and make a man of you. They had ascertained the exact situation of a wonderful treasure buried in an island of the Pacific. All right. They knew you had some of the qualities useful for such an expedition – reckless dare-devil, afraid of nothing – things like that. Understand, my friend? Well, all swore oaths as long as your leg – as long as your – oh, my! Think of a shark having a leg! Ha, ha, ha! Long as your leg! Oh, my! Pardon my levity, old man, but I must laugh. Ha, ha, ha! Oh, my!

“All of you swore – you and the other sharks. No lying; no deceit; no swindling. First shark that makes a slip is to call the skipper and be sent adrift with one oar and nothing else. And all, my friend, after you had pledged your honor to your mother, your God, yourself, and your friends, to be a true and honorable shark. It isn’t the hot sun broiling you and covering you with bursting blisters, and changing the marrow of your bones to melted iron and your blood to hissing lava – it isn’t the sun that hurts; and the hunger that gnaws your intestines to rags, and the thirst that changes your throat into a funnel of hot brass, and blinding bursts of red fire in your head, and lying dead in the waist of the boat while the sun steals thirty degrees of time out the sky, and a million fiery tadpoles darting through the air – none of them hurts so much as something infinitely deeper and more cruel – your broken pledge of honor to your mother, your God, yourself, and your friends. That is what hurts, my friend.

“It is late, old man, to begin life all over again while you are in the article of death, and resolve to be good when it is no longer possible to be bad. But that is our affair, yours and mine; and just at this time we are not choosing to discuss the utility of goodness. But I don’t like that sneer in your glance. I have only one oar, and I will cheerfully break it over your wretched head if you come a yard nearer….

“Aha! Thought I was going over, eh? See; I can stand steady when I try. But I don’t like that sneer in your eyes. You don’t believe in the reformation of the dying, eh? You are a contemptible dog; a low, mean, outcast dog. You sneer at the declaration of a man that he can and will be honest at last and face his Maker humbly, but still as a man. Come, then, my friend, and let us see which of us two is the decent and honorable one. Stake your manhood against mine, and stake your life with your manhood. We’ll see which is the more honorable of the two; for I tell you now, Mr. Shark, that we are going to gamble for our lives and our honor.

“Come up closer and watch the throw. No? Afraid of the oar? You sneaking coward! You would be a decent shark at last did the oar but split your skull. See this visiting card, you villain? Look at it as I hold it up. There is printing on one side; that is my name; it is I. The other side is blank; that is you. Now, I am going to throw this into the water. If it falls name up, I win; if blank side up, you win. If I win, I eat you; if you win, you eat me. Is that a go?

“Hold on. You see, I can throw a card so as to bring uppermost either side I please. That wouldn’t be fair. For this, the last game of my life, is to be square. So I fold one end down on this side, and the other down on that side. When you throw a card folded like that no living shark, whether he have legs or only a tail, can know which side will fall uppermost. That is a square game, old man, and it will settle the little difference that has existed between you and me for four days past – a difference of ten or fifteen feet.

“Mind you, if I win, you are to come alongside the boat and I am to kill you and eat you. That may sustain my life until I am picked up. If you win, over I go and you eat me. Are you in the game? Well, here goes, then, for life or death…. Ah! you have won! And this is a game of honor!”

•   •   •   •   •

A black-smoking steamer was steadily approaching the drifting boat, for the lookout had reported the discovery, and the steamer was bearing down to lend succor. The captain, standing on the bridge, saw through his glass a wild and nearly naked man making the most extraordinary signs and gestures, staggering and lurching in imminent danger of falling overboard. When the ship had approached quite near the captain saw the man toss a card into the water, and then stand with an ominous rigidity, the meaning of which was unmistakable. He sounded a blast from the whistle, and the drifting man started violently and turned to see the steamer approaching, and observed hasty preparations for the lowering of a boat. The outcast stood immovable, watching the strange apparition, which seemed to have sprung out of the ocean.

The boat touched the water and shot lustily forward.

“Pull with all your might, lads, for the man is insane, and is preparing to leap overboard. A big shark is lying in wait for him, and the moment he touches the water he is gone.”

The men did pull with all their might and hallooed to the drifting one and warned him of the shark.

“Wait a minute,” they cried, “and we’ll take you on the ship!”

The purpose of the men seemed at last to have dawned upon the understanding of the outcast. He straightened himself as well as he could into a wretched semblance of dignity, and hoarsely replied—

“No; I have played a game and lost; an honest man will pay a debt of honor.”

And with such a light in his eyes as comes only into those whose vision has penetrated the most wonderful of all mysteries, he leaped forth into the sea.

The Ape, The Idiot, & Other People (1897)

AN ORIGINAL REVENGE

On a certain day I received a letter from a private soldier, named Gratmar, attached to the garrison of San Francisco. I had known him but slightly, the acquaintance having come about through his interest in some stories which I had published, and which he had a way of calling “psychological studies.” He was a dreamy, romantic, fine-grained lad, proud as a tiger-lily and sensitive as a blue-bell. What mad caprice led him to join the army I never knew; but I did know that there he was wretchedly out of place, and I foresaw that his rude and repellant environment would make of him in time a deserter, or a suicide, or a murderer. The letter at first seemed a wild outpouring of despair, for it informed me that before it should reach me its author would be dead by his own hand. But when I had read farther I understood its spirit, and realized how coolly formed a scheme it disclosed and how terrible its purport was intended to be. The worst of the contents was the information that a certain officer (whom he named) had driven him to the deed, and that he was committing suicide for the sole purpose of gaining thereby the power to revenge himself upon his enemy! I learned afterward that the officer had received a similar letter.

This was so puzzling that I sat down to reflect upon the young man’s peculiarities. He had always seemed somewhat uncanny, and had I proved more sympathetic he doubtless would have gone farther and told me of certain problems which he professed to have solved concerning the life beyond this. One thing that he had said came back vividly: “If I could only overcome that purely gross and animal love of life that makes us all shun death, I would kill myself, for I know how far more powerful I could be in spirit than in flesh.”

The manner of the suicide was startling, and that was what might have been expected from this odd character. Evidently scorning the flummery of funerals, he had gone into a little canyon near the military reservation and blown himself into a million fragments with dynamite, so that all of him that was ever found was some minute particles of flesh and bone.

I kept the letter a secret, for I desired to observe the officer without rousing his suspicion of my purpose; it would be an admirable test of a dead man’s power and deliberate intention to haunt the living, for so I interpreted the letter. The officer thus to be punished was an oldish man, short, apoplectic, overbearing, and irascible. Generally he was kind to most of the men in a way; but he was gross and mean, and that explained sufficiently his harsh treatment of young Gratmar, whom he could not understand, and his efforts to break that flighty young man’s spirit.

Not very long after the suicide certain modifications in the officer’s conduct became apparent to my watchful oversight. His choler, though none the less sporadic, developed a quality which had some of the characteristics of senility; and yet he was still in his prime, and passed for a sound man. He was a bachelor, and had lived always alone; but presently he began to shirk solitude at night and court it in daylight. His brother-officers chaffed him, and thereupon he would laugh in rather a forced and silly fashion, quite different from the ordinary way with him, and would sometimes, on these occasions, blush so violently that his face would become almost purple. His soldierly alertness and sternness relaxed surprisingly at some times and at others were exaggerated into unnecessary acerbity, his conduct in this regard suggesting that of a drunken man who knows that he is drunk and who now and then makes a brave effort to appear sober. All these things, and more, indicating some mental strain, or some dreadful apprehension, or perhaps something worse than either, were observed partly by me and partly by an intelligent officer whose watch upon the man had been secured by me.

To be more particular, the afflicted man was observed often to start suddenly and in alarm, look quickly round, and make some unintelligent monosyllabic answer, seemingly to an inaudible question that no visible person had asked. He acquired the reputation, too, of having taken lately to nightmares, for in the middle of the night he would shriek in the most dreadful fashion, alarming his roommates prodigiously. After these attacks he would sit up in bed, his ruddy face devoid of color, his eyes glassy and shining, his breathing broken with gasps, and his body wet with a cold perspiration.

Knowledge of these developments and transformations spread throughout the garrison; but the few (mostly women) who dared to express sympathy or suggest a tonic encountered so violent rebuffs that they blessed Heaven for escaping alive from his word-volleys. Even the garrison surgeon, who had a kindly manner, and the commanding general, who was constructed on dignified and impressive lines, received little thanks for their solicitude. Clearly the doughty old officer, who had fought like a bulldog in two wars and a hundred battles, was suffering deeply from some undiscoverable malady.

The next extraordinary thing which he did was to visit one evening (not so clandestinely as to escape my watch) a spirit medium – extraordinary, because he always had scoffed at the idea of spirit communications. I saw him as he was leaving the medium’s rooms. His face was purple, his eyes were bulging and terrified, and he tottered in his walk. A policeman, seeing his distress, advanced to assist him; whereupon the soldier hoarsely begged—

“Call a hack.”

Into it he fell, and asked to be driven to his quarters. I hastily ascended to the medium’s rooms, and found her lying unconscious on the floor. Soon, with my aid, she recalled her wits, but her conscious state was even more alarming than the other. At first she regarded me with terror, and cried—

“It is horrible for you to hound him so!”

I assured her that I was hounding no one.

“Oh, I thought you were the spir – I mean – I – oh, but it was standing exactly where you are!” she exclaimed.

“I suppose so,” I agreed, “but you can see that I am not the young man’s spirit. However, I am familiar with this whole case, madam, and if I can be of any service in the matter I should be glad if you would inform me. I am aware that our friend is persecuted by a spirit, which visits him frequently, and I am positive that through you it has informed him that the end is not far away, and that our elderly friend’s death will assume some terrible form. Is there anything that I can do to avert the tragedy?”

The woman stared at me in a horrified silence. “How did you know these things?” she gasped.

“That is immaterial. When will the tragedy occur? Can I prevent it?”

“Yes, yes!” she exclaimed. “It will happen this very night! But no earthly power can prevent it!”

She came close to me and looked at me with an expression of the most acute terror.

“Merciful God! what will become of me? He is to be murdered, you understand – murdered in cold blood by a spirit – and he knows it and I know it! If he is spared long enough he will tell them at the garrison, and they will all think that I had something to do with it! Oh, this is terrible, terrible, and yet I dare not say a word in advance – nobody there would believe in what the spirits say, and they will think that I had a hand in the murder!” The woman’s agony was pitiful.

“Be assured that he will say nothing about it,” I said; “and if you keep your tongue from wagging you need fear nothing.”

With this and a few other hurried words of comfort, I soothed her and hastened away.

For I had interesting work on hand: it is not often that one may be in at such a murder as that! I ran to a livery stable, secured a swift horse, mounted him, and spurred furiously for the reservation. The hack, with its generous start, had gone far on its way, but my horse was nimble, and his legs felt the pricking of my eagerness. A few miles of this furious pursuit brought me within sight of the hack just as it was crossing a dark ravine near the reservation. As I came nearer I imagined that the hack swayed somewhat, and that a fleeing shadow escaped from it into the tree-banked further wall of the ravine. I certainly was not in error with regard to the swaying, for it had roused the dull notice of the driver. I saw him turn, with an air of alarm in his action, and then pull up with a heavy swing upon the reins. At this moment I dashed up and halted.

“Anything the matter?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he answered, getting down. “I felt the carriage sway, and I see that the door’s wide open. Guess my load thought he’d sobered up enough to get out and walk, without troubling me or his pocketbook.”

Meanwhile I too had alighted; then struck a match, and by its light we discovered, through the open door, the “load” huddled confusedly on the floor of the hack, face upward, his chin compressed upon his breast by his leaning against the further door, and looking altogether vulgar, misshapen, and miserably unlike a soldier. He neither moved nor spoke when we called. We hastily clambered within and lifted him upon the seat, but his head rolled about with an awful looseness and freedom, and another match disclosed a ghastly dead face and wide eyes that stared horribly at nothing.

“You would better drive the body to headquarters,” I said.

Instead of following, I cantered back to town, housed my horse, and went straightway to bed; and this will prove to be the first information that I was the “mysterious man on a horse,” whom the coroner could never find.

About a year afterwards I received the following letter (which is observed to be in fair English) from Stockholm, Sweden:

“Dear Sir – For some years I have been reading your remarkable psychological studies with great interest, and I take the liberty to suggest a theme for your able pen. I have just found in a library here a newspaper, dated about a year ago, in which is an account of the mysterious death of a military officer in a hack.”

Then followed the particulars, as I have already detailed them, and the very theme of post-mortem revenge which I have adopted in this setting out of facts. Some persons may regard the coincidence between my correspondent’s suggestion and my private and exclusive knowledge as being a very remarkable thing; but there are likely even more wonderful things in the world, and at none of them do I longer marvel. More extraordinary still is his suggestion that in the dynamite explosion a dog or a quarter of beef might as well have been employed as a suicide-minded man; that, in short, the man may not have killed himself at all, but might have employed a presumption of such an occurrence to render more effective a physical persecution ending in murder by the living man who had posed as a spirit. The letter even suggested an arrangement with a spirit medium, and I regard that also as a queer thing.

The declared purpose of this letter was to suggest material for another of my “psychological studies;” but I submit that the whole affair is of too grave a character for treatment in the levity of fiction. And if the facts and coincidences should prove less puzzling to others than to me, a praiseworthy service might be done to humanity by the presentation of whatever solution a better understanding than mine might evolve.

The only remaining disclosure which I am prepared now to make is that my correspondent signed himself “Ramtarg,” – an odd-sounding name, but for all I know it may be respectable in Sweden. And yet there is something about the name that haunts me unceasingly, much as does some strange dream which we know we have dreamt and yet which it is impossible to remember.

The Ape, The Idiot, & Other People (1897)

THE FAITHFUL AMULET

A quaint old rogue, who called himself Rabaya, the Mystic, was one of the many extraordinary characters of that odd corner of San Francisco known as the Latin Quarter. His business was the selling of charms and amulets, and his generally harmless practices received an impressive aspect from his Hindu parentage, his great age, his small, wizened frame, his deeply wrinkled face, his outlandish dress, and the barbaric fittings of his den.

One of his most constant customers was James Freeman, the half-piratical owner and skipper of the “Blue Crane.” This queer little barkentine, of light tonnage but wonderful sailing qualities, is remembered in every port between Sitka and Callao. All sorts of strange stories are told of her exploits, but these mostly were manufactured by superstitious and highly imaginative sailors, who commonly demonstrate the natural affinity existing between idleness and lying. It has been said not only that she engaged in smuggling, piracy, and “blackbirding” (which is kidnapping Gilbert Islanders and selling them to the coffee-planters of Central America), but that she maintained special relations with Satan, founded on the power of mysterious charms which her skipper was supposed to have procured from some mysterious source and was known to employ on occasion. Beyond the information which his manifests and clearance papers divulged, nothing of his supposed shady operations could be learned either from him or his crew; for his sailors, like him, were a strangely silent lot – all sharp, keen-eyed young fellows who never drank and who kept to themselves when in port. An uncommon circumstance was that there were never any vacancies in the crew, except one that happened as the result of Freeman’s last visit to Rabaya, and it came about in the following remarkable manner:

Freeman, like most other men who follow the sea, was superstitious, and he ascribed his fair luck to the charms which he secretly procured from Rabaya. It is now known that he visited the mystic whenever he came to the port of San Francisco, and there are some today who believe that Rabaya had an interest in the supposed buccaneering enterprises of the “Blue Crane.”

Among the most intelligent and active of the “Blue Crane’s” crew was a Malay known to his mates as the Flying Devil. This had come to him by reason of his extraordinary agility. No monkey could have been more active than he in the rigging; he could make flying leaps with astonishing ease. He could not have been more than twenty-five years old, but he had the shrivelled appearance of an old man, and was small and lean. His face was smooth-shaven and wrinkled, his eyes deep-set and intensely black and brilliant. His mouth was his most forbidding feature. It was large, and the thin lips were drawn tightly over large and protruding teeth, its aspect being prognathous and menacing. Although quiet and not given to laughter, at times he would smile, and then the expression of his face was such as to give even Freeman a sensation of impending danger.

It was never clearly known what was the real mission of the “Blue Crane” when she sailed the last time from San Francisco. Some supposed that she intended to loot a sunken vessel of her treasure; others that the enterprise was one of simple piracy, involving the killing of the crew and the scuttling of the ship in mid-ocean; others that a certain large consignment of opium, for which the customs authorities were on the lookout, was likely about to be smuggled into some port of Puget Sound. In any event, the business ahead must have been important, for it is now known that in order to ensure its success Freeman bought an uncommonly expensive and potent charm from Rabaya.

When Freeman went to buy this charm he failed to notice that the Flying Devil was slyly following him; neither he nor the half-blind charm-seller observed the Malay slip into Rabaya’s den and witness the matter that there went forward. The intruder must have heard something that stirred every evil instinct in him. Rabaya (whom I could hardly be persuaded to believe under oath) years afterwards told me that the charm which he sold to Freeman was one of extraordinary virtue. For many generations it had been in the family of one of India’s proudest rajahs, and until it was stolen the arms of England could not prevail over that part of the far East. If borne by a person of lofty character (as he solemnly informed me he believed Freeman to be) it would never fail to bring the highest good fortune; for, although the amulet was laden with evil powers as well as good, a worthy person could resist the evil and employ only the good. Contrariwise, the amulet in the hands of an evil person would be a most potent and dangerous engine of harm.

It was a small and very old trinket, made of copper and representing a serpent twined grotesquely about a human heart; through the heart a dagger was thrust, and the loop for holding the suspending string was formed by one of the coils of the snake. The charm had a wonderful history, which must be reserved for a future story; the sum of it being that as it had been as often in the hands of bad men as of good, it had wrought as many calamities as blessings. It was perfectly safe and useful – so Rabaya soberly told me – in the hands of such a man as Freeman.

Now, as no one knows the soundings and breadth of his own wickedness, the Flying Devil (who, Rabaya explained, must have overheard the conversation attending its transference to Freeman) reflected only that if he could secure possession of the charm his fortune would be made; as he could not procure it by other means, he must steal it. Moreover, he must have seen the price – five thousand dollars in gold – which Freeman paid for the trinket; and that alone was sufficient to move the Malay’s cupidity. At all events, it is known that he set himself to steal the charm and desert from the barkentine.

From this point on to the catastrophe my information is somewhat hazy. I cannot say, for instance, just how the theft was committed, but it is certain that Freeman was not aware of it until a considerable time had passed. What did concern him particularly was the absence of the Malay when the barkentine was weighing anchor and giving a line for a tow out to sea. The Malay was a valuable sailor; to replace him adequately was clearly so impossible a task that Freeman decided, after a profitless and delaying search of hours, to leave port without him or another in his place. It was with a heavy heart, somewhat lightened by a confident assumption that the amulet was safe in his possession, that Freeman headed down the channel for the Golden Gate.

Meanwhile, the Flying Devil was having strange adventures. In a hastily arranged disguise, the principal feature of which was a gentleman’s street dress, in which he might pass careless scrutiny as a thrifty Japanese awkwardly trying to adapt himself to the customs of his environment, he emerged from a water-front lodging-house of the poorer sort, and ascended leisurely to the summit of Telegraph Hill, in order to make a careful survey of the city from that prominent height; for it was needful that he know how best to escape. From that alluring eminence he saw not only a great part of the city, but also nearly the whole of the bay of San Francisco and the shores, towns, and mountains lying beyond. His first particular attention was given to the “Blue Crane,” upon which he looked nearly straight down as she rolled gently at her moorings at the foot of Lombard Street. Two miles to the west he saw the trees which conceal the soldiers’ barracks, and the commanding general’s residence on the high promontory known as Black Point, and these invited him to seek concealment in their shadows until the advent of night would enable him to work his way down the peninsula of San Francisco to the distant blue mountains of San Mateo. Surmising that Freeman would make a search for him, and that it would be confined to the docks and their near vicinity, he imagined that it would not be a difficult matter to escape.

After getting his bearings the Malay was in the act of descending the hill by its northern flank, when he observed a stranger leaning against the parapet crowning the hill. The man seemed to be watching him. Not reflecting that his somewhat singular appearance might have accounted for the scrutiny, his suspicions were roused; he feared, albeit wrongly, that he was followed, for the stranger had come up soon after him. Assuming an air of indifference, he strolled about until he was very near the stranger, and then with the swiftness and ferocity of a tiger he sprang and slipped a knife-blade between the man’s ribs. The stranger sank with a groan, and the Malay fled down the hill.

It was a curious circumstance that the man fell in front of one of the openings which neglect had permitted the rains to wash underneath the parapet. He floundered as some dying men will, and these movements caused him to work his body through the opening. That done, he started rolling down the steep eastern declivity, the speed of his flight increasing with every bound. Many cottages are perched precariously on this precipitous slope. Mrs. Armour, a resident of one of them, was sitting in a rear room near the window, sewing, when she was amazed to see a man flying through the sash close beside her. He came with so great violence that he tore through a thin partition into an adjoining room and landed in a shapeless heap against the opposite wall. Mrs. Armour screamed for help. A great commotion ensued, but it was some time before the flight of the body was connected with a murder on the parapet. Nevertheless, the police were active, and presently a dozen of them were upon the broad trail which the murderer had left in his flight down the hill.

In a short time the Malay found himself in the lumber-piles of the northern water-front. Thence, after gathering himself together, he walked leisurely westward in the rear of the wire-works, and traversed a little sand-beach where mothers and nurses had children out for an airing. The desperate spirit of perversity which possessed the man (and which Rabaya afterwards explained by the possession of the amulet), made reckless by a belief that the charm which he carried would preserve him from all menaces, led him to steal a small hand-satchel that lay on the beach near a well-dressed woman. He walked away with it, and then opened it and was rejoiced to find that it contained some money and fine jewelry. At this juncture one of the children, who had observed the Malay’s theft, called the woman’s attention to him. She started in pursuit, raising a loud outcry, which emptied the adjacent drinking-saloons of a pursuing crowd.

The Malay leaped forward with ample ability to outstrip all his pursuers, but just as he arrived in front of a large swimming establishment a bullet from a policeman’s pistol brought him to his knees. The crowd quickly pressed around him. The criminal staggered to his feet, made a fierce dash at a man who stood in his way, and sank a good knife into his body. Then he bounded away, fled swiftly past a narrow beach where swimming-clubs have their houses, and disappeared in the ruins of a large old building that lay at the foot of a sandy bluff on the water’s edge. He was trailed a short distance within the ruins by a thin stream of blood which he left, and there he was lost. It was supposed that he had escaped to the old woolen-mill on Black Point.

As in all other cases where a mob pursues a fleeing criminal, the search was wild and disorderly, so that if the Malay had left any trail beyond the ruins it would have been obliterated by trampling feet. Only one policeman was in the crowd, but others, summoned by telephone, were rapidly approaching from all directions. Unintelligent and contradictory rumors bewildered the police for a time, but they formed a long picket line covering an arc which stretched from North Beach to the new gas-works far beyond Black Point.

It was about this time that Captain Freeman cast off and started out to sea.

The summit of Black Point is crowned with the tall eucalyptus-trees which the Flying Devil had seen from Telegraph Hill. A high fence, which encloses the general’s house, extends along the bluff of Black Point, near the edge. A sentry paced in front of the gate to the grounds, keeping out all who had not provided themselves with a pass. The sentry had seen the crowd gathering towards the east, and in the distance he noticed the brass buttons of the police glistening in the western sunlight. He wondered what could be afoot.

While he was thus engaged he observed a small, dark, wiry man emerging upon the bluff from the direction of the woolen-mill at its eastern base. The stranger made straight for the gate.

“You can’t go in there,” said the soldier, “unless you have a pass.”

“Da w’at?” asked the stranger.

“A pass,” repeated the sentry; and then, seeing that the man was a foreigner and imperfectly acquainted with English, he made signs to explain his remark, still carrying his bayonet-tipped rifle at shoulder-arms. The stranger, whose sharp gleam of eye gave the soldier an odd sensation, nodded and smiled.

“Oh!” said he; “I have.”

He thrust his hand into his side-pocket, advancing meanwhile, and sending a swift glance about. In the next moment the soldier found himself sinking to the ground with an open jugular.

The Malay slipped within the grounds and disappeared in the shrubbery. It was nearly an hour afterwards that the soldier’s body was discovered, and, the crowd of police and citizens arriving, it became known to the garrison that the desperate criminal was immediately at hand. The bugle sounded and the soldiers came tumbling out of barracks. Then began a search of every corner of the post.

It is likely that a feeling of relief came to many a stout heart when it was announced that the man had escaped by water, and was now being swiftly carried down the channel towards the Golden Gate by the ebb tide. He was clearly seen in a small boat, keeping such a course as was possible by means of a rude board in place of oars. His escape had occurred thus: Upon entering the grounds he ran along the eastern fence, behind the shrubbery, to a transverse fence separating the garden from the rear premises. He leaped the fence, and then found himself face to face with a large and formidable mastiff. He killed the brute in a strange and bold manner – by choking. There was evidence of a long and fearful struggle between man and brute. The apparent reason for the man’s failure to use the knife was the first necessity of choking the dog into silence and the subsequent need of employing both hands to maintain that advantage.

After disposing of the dog the Flying Devil, wounded though he was, performed a feat worthy of his sobriquet; he leaped the rear fence. At the foot of the bluff he found a boat chained to a post sunk into the sand. There was no way to release the boat except by digging up the post. This the Malay did with his hands for tools, and then threw the post into the boat, and pushed off with a board that he found on the beach. Then he swung out into the tide, and it was some minutes afterwards that he was discovered from the fort; and then he was so far away, and there was so much doubt of his identity, that the gunners hesitated for a time to fire upon him. Then two dramatic things occurred.

Meeting the drifting boat was a heavy bank of fog which was rolling in through the Golden Gate. The murderer was heading straight for it, paddling vigorously with the tide. If once the fog should enfold him he would be lost in the Pacific or killed on the rocks almost beyond a peradventure, and yet he was heading for such a fate with all the strength that he possessed. This was what first convinced his pursuers that he was the man whom they sought – none other would have pursued so desperate a course. At the same time a marine glass brought conviction, and the order was given to open fire.

A six-pound brass cannon roared, and splinters flew from the boat; but its occupant, with tantalizing bravado, rose and waved his hand defiantly. The six-pounder then sent out a percussion shell, and just as the frail boat was entering the fog it was blown into a thousand fragments. Some of the observers swore positively that they saw the Malay floundering in the water a moment after the boat was destroyed and before he was engulfed by the fog, but this was deemed incredible. In a short time the order of the post had been restored and the police had taken themselves away.

The other dramatic occurrence must remain largely a matter of surmise, but only because the evidence is so strange.

The great steel gun employed at the fort to announce the setting of the sun thrust its black muzzle into the fog. Had it been fired with shot or shell its missile would have struck the hills on the opposite side of the channel. But the gun was never so loaded; blank cartridges were sufficient for its function. The bore of the piece was of so generous a diameter that a child or small man might have crept into it had such a feat ever been thought of or dared.

There are three circumstances indicating that the fleeing man escaped alive from the wreck of his boat, and that he made a safe landing in the fog on the treacherous rocks at the foot of the bluff crowned by the guns. The first of these was suggested by the gunner who fired the piece that day, two or three hours after the destruction of the fleeing man’s boat; and even that would have received no attention under ordinary circumstances, and, in fact, did receive none at all until long afterwards, when Rabaya reported that he had been visited by Freeman, who told him of the two other strange circumstances. The gunner related that when he fired the cannon that day he discovered that it recoiled in a most unaccountable manner, as though it had been loaded with something in addition to a blank cartridge. But he had loaded the gun himself, and was positive that he had placed no shot in the barrel. At that time he was utterly unable to account for the recoil.

The second strange occurrence came to my knowledge through Rabaya. Freeman told him that as he was towing out to sea that afternoon he encountered a heavy fog immediately after turning from the bay into the channel. The tow-boat had to proceed very slowly. When his vessel had arrived at a point opposite Black Point he heard the sunset gun, and immediately afterwards strange particles began to fall upon the barkentine, which was exactly in the vertical plane of the gun’s range. He had sailed many waters and had seen many kinds of showers, but this was different from all others. Fragments of a sticky substance fell all over the deck, and clung to the sails and spars where they touched them. They seemed to be finely shredded flesh, mixed with particles of shattered bone, with a strip of cloth here and there; and the particles that looked like flesh were of a blackish red and smelled of powder. The visitation gave the skipper and his crew a “creepy” sensation, and awed them somewhat – in short, they were depressed by the strange circumstance to such an extent that Captain Freeman had to employ stern measures to keep down a mutiny, so fearful were the men of going to sea under that terrible omen.

The third circumstance is equally singular. As Freeman was pacing the deck and talking reassuringly to his crew his foot struck a small, grimy, metallic object lying on the deck. He picked it up and discovered that it, too, bore the odor of burned powder. When he had cleaned it he was amazed to discover that it was the amulet which he had bought that very day from Rabaya. He could not believe it was the same until he had made a search and found that it had been stolen from his pocket.

It needs only to be added that the Flying Devil was never seen afterwards.

The Ape, The Idiot, & Other People (1897)

THE INMATE OF THE DUNGEON

After the Board of State Prison Directors, sitting in session at the prison, had heard and disposed of the complaints and petitions of a number of convicts, the warden announced that all who wished to appear had been heard. Thereupon a certain uneasy and apprehensive expression, which all along had sat upon the faces of the directors, became visibly deeper. The chairman – a nervous, energetic, abrupt, incisive man – glanced at a slip of paper in his hand, and said to the warden—

“Send a guard for convict No. 14,208.”

The warden started and became slightly pale. Somewhat confused, he haltingly replied, “Why, he has expressed no desire to appear before you.”

“Nevertheless, you will send for him at once,” responded the chairman.

The warden bowed stiffly and directed a guard to produce the convict. Then, turning to the chairman, he said—

“I am ignorant of your purpose in summoning this man, but of course I have no objection. I desire, however, to make a statement concerning him before he appears.”

“When we shall have called for a statement from you,” coldly responded the chairman, “you may make one.”

The warden sank back into his seat. He was a tall, fine-looking man, well-bred and intelligent, and had a kindly face. Though ordinarily cool, courageous, and self-possessed, he was unable to conceal a strong emotion, which looked much like fear. A heavy silence fell upon the room, disturbed only by the official stenographer, who was sharpening his pencils. A stray beam of light from the westering sun slipped into the room between the edge of the window-shade and the sash, and fell across the chair reserved for the convict. The uneasy eyes of the warden finally fell upon this beam and there his glance rested. The chairman, without addressing anyone particularly, remarked—

“There are ways of learning what occurs in a prison without the assistance of either the warden or the convicts.”

Just then the guard appeared with the convict, who shambled in painfully and laboriously, as with a string he held up from the floor the heavy iron ball which was chained to his ankles. He was about forty-five years old. Undoubtedly he once had been a man of uncommon physical strength, for a powerful skeleton showed underneath the sallow skin which covered his emaciated frame. His sallowness was peculiar and ghastly. It was partly that of disease, and partly of something worse; and it was this something that accounted also for his shrunken muscles and manifest feebleness.

There had been no time to prepare him for presentation to the board. As a consequence, his unstockinged toes showed through his gaping shoes; the dingy suit of prison stripes which covered his gaunt frame was frayed and tattered; his hair had not been recently cut to the prison fashion, and, being rebellious, stood out upon his head like bristles; and his beard, which, like his hair, was heavily dashed with gray, had not been shaved for weeks. These incidents of his appearance combined with a very peculiar expression of his face to make an extraordinary picture. It is difficult to describe this almost unearthly expression. With a certain suppressed ferocity it combined an inflexibility of purpose that sat like an iron mask upon him. His eyes were hungry and eager; they were the living part of him, and they shone luminous from beneath shaggy brows. His forehead was massive, his head of fine proportions, his jaw square and strong, and his thin, high nose showed traces of an ancestry that must have made a mark in some corner of the world at some time in history. He was prematurely old; this was seen in his gray hair and in the uncommonly deep wrinkles which lined his forehead and the corners of his eyes and of his mouth.

Upon stumbling weakly into the room, faint with the labor of walking and of carrying the iron ball, he looked around eagerly, like a bear driven to his haunches by the hounds. His glance passed so rapidly and unintelligently from one face to another that he could not have had time to form a conception of the persons present, until his swift eyes encountered the face of the warden. Instantly they flashed; he craned his neck forward; his lips opened and became blue; the wrinkles deepened about his mouth and eyes; his form grew rigid, and his breathing stopped. This sinister and terrible attitude – all the more so because he was wholly unconscious of it – was disturbed only when the chairman sharply commanded, “Take that seat.”

The convict started as though he had been struck, and turned his eyes upon the chairman. He drew a deep inspiration, which wheezed and rattled as it passed into his chest. An expression of excruciating pain swept over his face. He dropped the ball, which struck the floor with a loud sound, and his long, bony fingers tore at the striped shirt over his breast. A groan escaped him, and he would have sunk to the floor had not the guard caught him and held him upright. In a moment it was over, and then, collapsing with exhaustion, he sank into the chair. There he sat, conscious and intelligent, but slouching, disorganized, and indifferent.

The chairman turned sharply to the guard. “Why did you manacle this man,” he demanded, “when he is evidently so weak, and when none of the others were manacled?”

“Why, sir,” stammered the guard, “surely you know who this man is: he is the most dangerous and desperate—”

“We know all about that. Remove his manacles.”

The guard obeyed. The chairman turned to the convict, and in a kindly manner said, “Do you know who we are?”

The convict got himself together a little and looked steadily at the chairman. “No,” he replied, after a pause. His manner was direct, and his voice was deep, though hoarse.

“We are the State Prison Directors. We have heard of your case, and we want you to tell us the whole truth about it.”

The convict’s mind worked slowly, and it was some time before he could comprehend the explanation and request. When he had accomplished that task he said, very slowly, “I suppose you want me to make a complaint, sir.”

“Yes – if you have any to make.”

The convict was getting himself in hand. He straightened up, and gazed at the chairman with a peculiar intensity. Then firmly and clearly he answered, “I’ve no complaint to make.”

The two men sat looking at each other in silence, and as they looked a bridge of human sympathy was slowly reared between them. The chairman rose, passed around an intervening table, went up to the convict, and laid a hand on his gaunt shoulder. There was a tenderness in his voice that few men had ever heard there.

“I know,” said he, “that you are a patient and uncomplaining man, or we should have heard from you long ago. In asking you to make a statement I am merely asking for your help to right a wrong, if a wrong has been done. Leave your own wishes entirely out of consideration, if you prefer. Assume, if you will, that it is not our intention or desire either to give you relief or to make your case harder for you. There are fifteen hundred human beings in this prison, and they are under the absolute control of one man. If a serious wrong is practiced upon one, it may be upon others. I ask you in the name of common humanity, and as one man of another, to put us in the way of working justice in this prison. If you have the instincts of a man within you, you will comply with my request. Speak out, therefore, like a man, and have no fear of anything.”

The convict was touched and stung. He looked up steadily into the chairman’s face, and firmly said, “There is nothing in this world that I fear.” Then he hung his head, and presently he raised it and added, “I will tell you all about it.”

At that moment he shifted his position so as to bring the beam of light perpendicularly across his face and chest, and it seemed to split him in twain. He saw it, and feasted his gaze upon it as it lay upon his breast. After a time he thus proceeded, speaking very slowly, and in a strangely monotonous voice:

“I was sent up for twenty years for killing a man. I hadn’t been a criminal: I killed him without thinking, for he had robbed me and wronged me. I came here thirteen years ago. I had trouble at first – it galled me to be a convict; but I got over that, because the warden that was here then understood me and was kind to me, and he made me one of the best men in the prison. I don’t say this to make you think I’m complaining about the present warden, or that he didn’t treat me kindly: I can take care of myself with him. I am not making any complaint. I ask no man’s favor, and I fear no man’s power.”

“That is all right. Proceed.”

“After the warden had made a good man out of me I worked faithfully, sir; I did everything they told me to do; I worked willingly and like a slave. It did me good to work, and I worked hard. I never violated any of the rules after I was broken in. And then the law was passed giving credits to the men for good conduct. My term was twenty years, but I did so well that my credits piled up, and after I had been here ten years I could begin to see my way out. There were only about three years left. And, sir, I worked faithfully to make those years good. I knew that if I did anything against the rules I should lose my credits and have to stay nearly ten years longer. I knew all about that, sir: I never forgot it. I wanted to be a free man again, and I planned to go away somewhere and make the fight all over – to be a man in the world once more.”

“We know all about your record in the prison. Proceed.”

“Well, it was this way. You know they were doing some heavy work in the quarries and on the grades, and they wanted the strongest men in the prison. There weren’t very many: there never are very many strong men in a prison. And I was one of ’em that they put on the heavy work, and I did it faithfully. They used to pay the men for extra work – not pay ’em money, but the value of the money in candles, tobacco, extra clothes, and things like that. I loved to work, and I loved to work extra, and so did some of the other men. On Saturdays the men who had done extra work would fall in and go up to the captain of the guard, and he would give to each man what was coming to him. He had it all down in a book, and when a man would come up and call for what was due him the captain would give it to him, whatever he wanted that the rules allowed.

“One Saturday I fell in with the others. A good many were ahead of me in the line, and when they got what they wanted they fell into a new line, waiting to be marched to the cells. When my turn in the line came I went up to the captain and said I would take mine in tobacco. He looked at me pretty sharply, and said, ‘How did you get back in that line?’ I told him I belonged there – that I had come to get my extra. He looked at his book, and he said, ‘You’ve had your extra: you got tobacco.’ And he told me to fall into the new line. I told him I hadn’t received any tobacco; I said I hadn’t got my extra, and hadn’t been up before. He said, ‘Don’t spoil your record by trying to steal a little tobacco. Fall in.’ … It hurt me, sir. I hadn’t been up; I hadn’t got my extra; and I wasn’t a thief, and I never had been a thief, and no living man had a right to call me a thief. I said to him, straight, ‘I won’t fall in till I get my extra, and I’m not a thief, and no man can call me one, and no man can rob me of my just dues.’ He turned pale, and said, ‘Fall in, there.’ I said, ‘I won’t fall in till I get my dues.’

“With that he raised his hand as a signal, and the two guards behind him covered me with their rifles, and a guard on the west wall, and one on the north wall, and one on the portico in front of the arsenal, all covered me with rifles. The captain turned to a trusty and told him to call the warden. The warden came out, and the captain told him I was trying to run double on my extra, and said I was impudent and insubordinate and refused to fall in. The warden said, ‘Drop that and fall in.’ I told him I wouldn’t fall in. I said I hadn’t run double, that I hadn’t got my extra, and that I would stay there till I died before I would be robbed of it. He asked the captain if there wasn’t some mistake, and the captain looked at his book and said there was no mistake; he said he remembered me when I came up and got the tobacco and he saw me fall into the new line, but he didn’t see me get back in the old line. The warden didn’t ask the other men if they saw me get my tobacco and slip back into the old line. He just ordered me to fall in. I told him I would die before I would do that. I said I wanted my just dues and no more, and I asked him to call on the other men in line to prove that I hadn’t been up.

“He said, ‘That’s enough of this.’ He sent all the other men to the cells, and left me standing there. Then he told two guards to take me to the cells. They came and took hold of me, and I threw them off as if they were babies. Then more guards came up, and one of them hit me over the head with a club, and I fell. And then, sir,” – here the convict’s voice fell to a whisper – “and then he told them to take me to the dungeon.”

The sharp, steady glitter of the convict’s eyes failed, and he hung his head and looked despairingly at the floor.

“Go on,” said the chairman.

“They took me to the dungeon, sir. Did you ever see the dungeon?”

“Perhaps; but you may tell us about it.”

The cold, steady gleam returned to the convict’s eyes, as he fixed them again upon the chairman.

“There are several little rooms in the dungeon. The one they put me in was about five by eight. It has steel walls and ceiling, and a granite floor. The only light that comes in passes through a slit in the door. The slit is an inch wide and five inches long. It doesn’t give much light, because the door is thick. It’s about four inches thick, and is made of oak and sheet-steel, bolted through. The slit runs this way,” – making a horizontal motion in the air – “and it is four inches above my eyes when I stand on tiptoe. And I can’t look out at the factory-wall forty feet away unless I hook my fingers in the slit and pull myself up.”

He stopped and regarded his hands, the peculiar appearance of which we all had observed. The ends of the fingers were uncommonly thick; they were red and swollen, and the knuckles were curiously marked with deep white scars.

“Well, sir, there wasn’t anything at all in the dungeon, but they gave me a blanket, and they put me on bread and water. That’s all they ever give you in the dungeon. They bring the bread and water once a day, and that is at night, because if they come in the daytime it lets in the light.

“The next night after they put me in – it was Sunday night – the warden came with the guard and asked me if I was all right. I said I was. He said, ‘Will you behave yourself and go to work tomorrow?’ I said, ‘No, sir; I won’t go to work till I get what is due me.’ He shrugged his shoulders, and said, ‘Very well: maybe you’ll change your mind after you have been in here a week.’

“They kept me there a week. The next Sunday night the warden came and said, ‘Are you ready to go to work tomorrow?’ and I said, ‘No; I will not go to work till I get what is due me.’ He called me hard names. I said it was a man’s duty to demand his rights, and that a man who would stand to be treated like a dog was no man at all.”

The chairman interrupted. “Did you not reflect,” he asked, “that these officers would not have stooped to rob you? – that it was through some mistake they withheld your tobacco, and that in any event you had a choice of two things to lose – one a plug of tobacco, and the other seven years of freedom?”

“But they angered me and hurt me, sir, by calling me a thief, and they threw me in the dungeon like a beast…. I was standing for my rights, and my rights were my manhood; and that is something a man can carry sound to the grave, whether he’s bond or free, weak or powerful, rich or poor.”

“Well, after you refused to go to work what did the warden do?”

The convict, although tremendous excitement must have surged and boiled within him, slowly, deliberately, and weakly came to his feet. He placed his right foot on the chair, and rested his right elbow on the raised knee. The index finger of his right hand, pointing to the chairman and moving slightly to lend emphasis to his narrative, was the only thing that modified the rigid immobility of his figure. Without a single change in the pitch or modulation of his voice, never hurrying, but speaking with the slow and dreary monotony with which he had begun, he nevertheless – partly by reason of these evidences of his incredible self-control – made a formidable picture as he proceeded:

“When I told him that, sir, he said he’d take me to the ladder and see if he couldn’t make me change my mind…. Yes, sir; he said he’d take me to the ladder.” (Here there was a long pause.) “And I a human being, with flesh on my bones and the heart of a man in my body. The other warden hadn’t tried to break my spirit on the ladder. He did break it, though; he broke it clear to the bottom of the man inside of me; but he did it with a human word, and not with the dungeon and the ladder. I didn’t believe the warden when he said he would take me to the ladder. I couldn’t imagine myself alive and put through at the ladder, and I couldn’t imagine any human being who could find the heart to put me through. If I had believed him I would have strangled him then and there, and got my body full of lead while doing it. No, sir; I could not believe it.

“And then he told me to come on. I went with him and the guards. He brought me to the ladder. I had never seen it before. It was a heavy wooden ladder, leaned against the wall, and the bottom was bolted to the floor and the top to the wall. A whip was on the floor.” (Again there was a pause.) “The warden told me to strip, sir, and I stripped…. And still I didn’t believe he would whip me. I thought he just wanted to scare me.

“Then he told me to face up to the ladder. I did so, and reached my arms up to the straps. They strapped my arms to the ladder, and stretched so hard that they pulled me up clear of the floor. Then they strapped my legs to the ladder. The warden then picked up the whip. He said to me, ‘I’ll give you one more chance: will you go to work tomorrow?’ I said, ‘No; I won’t go to work till I get my dues.’ ‘Very well,’ said he, ‘you’ll get your dues now.’ And then he stepped back and raised the whip. I turned my head and looked at him, and I could see it in his eyes that he meant to strike…. And when I saw that, sir, I felt that something inside of me was about to burst.”

The convict paused to gather up his strength for the crisis of his story, yet not in the least particular did he change his position, the slight movement of his pointing finger, the steady gleam of his eye, or the slow monotony of his speech. I had never witnessed any scene so dramatic as this, and yet all was absolutely simple and unintentional. I had been thrilled by the greatest actors, as with matchless skill they gave rein to their genius in tragic situations; but how inconceivably tawdry and cheap such pictures seemed in comparison with this! The claptrap of the music, the lights, the posing, the wry faces, the gasps, lunges, staggerings, rolling eyes – how flimsy and colorless, how mocking and grotesque, they all appeared beside this simple, uncouth, but genuine expression of immeasurable agony!

The stenographer held his pencil poised above the paper, and wrote no more.

“And then the whip came down across my back. The something inside of me twisted hard and then broke wide open, and went pouring all through me like melted iron. It was a hard fight to keep my head clear, but I did it. And then I said to the warden this: ‘You’ve struck me with a whip, in cold blood. You’ve tied me up hand and foot, to whip me like a dog. Well, whip me, then, till you fill your belly with it. You are a coward. You are lower, and meaner, and cowardlier than the lowest and meanest dog that ever yelped when his master kicked him. You were born a coward. Cowards will lie and steal, and you are the same as a thief and liar. No hound would own you for a friend. Whip me hard and long, you coward. Whip me, I say. See how good a coward feels when he ties up a man and whips him like a dog. Whip me till the last breath quits my body; if you leave me alive I will kill you for this.’

“His face got white. He asked me if I meant that, and I said, ‘Yes; before God I do.’ Then he took the whip in both hands and came down with all his might.”

“That was nearly two years ago,” said the chairman. “You would not kill him now, would you?”

“Yes. I will kill him if I get a chance; and I feel it in me that the chance will come.”

“Well, proceed.”

“He kept on whipping me. He whipped me with all the strength of both hands. I could feel the broken skin curl up on my back, and when my head got too heavy to hold it straight it hung down, and I saw the blood on my legs and dripping off my toes into a pool of it on the floor. Something was straining and twisting inside of me again. My back didn’t hurt much; it was the thing twisting inside of me that hurt. I counted the lashes, and when I counted to twenty-eight the twisting got so hard that it choked me and blinded me; … and when I woke up I was in the dungeon again, and the doctor had my back all plastered up, and he was kneeling beside me, feeling my pulse.”

The prisoner had finished. He looked around vaguely, as though he wanted to go.

“And you have been in the dungeon ever since?”

“Yes, sir; but I don’t mind that.”

“How long?”

“Twenty-three months.”

“On bread and water?”

“Yes; but that was all I wanted.”

“Have you reflected that so long as you harbor a determination to kill the warden you may be kept in the dungeon? You can’t live much longer there, and if you die there you will never find the chance you want. If you say you will not kill the warden he may return you to the cells.”

“But that would be a lie, sir; I will get a chance to kill him if I go to the cells. I would rather die in the dungeon than be a liar and sneak. If you send me to the cells I will kill him. But I will kill him without that. I will kill him, sir…. And he knows it.”

Without concealment, but open, deliberate, and implacable, thus in the wrecked frame of a man, so close that we could have touched it, stood Murder – not boastful, but relentless as death.

“Apart from weakness, is your health good?” asked the chairman.

“Oh, it’s good enough,” wearily answered the convict. “Sometimes the twisting comes on, but when I wake up after it I’m all right.”

The prison surgeon, under the chairman’s direction, put his ear to the convict’s chest, and then went over and whispered to the chairman.

“I thought so,” said that gentleman. “Now, take this man to the hospital. Put him to bed where the sun will shine on him, and give him the most nourishing food.”

The convict, giving no heed to this, shambled out with a guard and the surgeon.

•   •   •   •   •

The warden sat alone in the prison office with No. 14,208. That he at last should have been brought face to face, and alone, with the man whom he had determined to kill, perplexed the convict. He was not manacled; the door was locked, and the key lay on the table between the two men. Three weeks in the hospital had proved beneficial, but a deathly pallor was still in his face.

“The action of the directors three weeks ago,” said the warden, “made my resignation necessary. I have awaited the appointment of my successor, who is now in charge. I leave the prison today. In the mean time, I have something to tell you that will interest you. A few days ago a man who was discharged from the prison last year read what the papers have published recently about your case, and he has written to me confessing that it was he who got your tobacco from the captain of the guard. His name is Salter, and he looks very much like you. He had got his own extra, and when he came up again and called for yours the captain, thinking it was you, gave it to him. There was no intention on the captain’s part to rob you.”

The convict gasped and leaned forward eagerly.

“Until the receipt of this letter,” resumed the warden, “I had opposed the movement which had been started for your pardon; but when this letter came I recommended your pardon, and it has been granted. Besides, you have a serious heart trouble. So you are now discharged from the prison.”

The convict stared and leaned back speechless. His eyes shone with a strange, glassy expression, and his white teeth glistened ominously between his parted lips. Yet a certain painful softness tempered the iron in his face.

“The stage will leave for the station in four hours,” continued the warden. “You have made certain threats against my life.” The warden paused; then, in a voice that slightly wavered from emotion, he continued: “I shall not permit your intentions in that regard – for I care nothing about them – to prevent me from discharging a duty which, as from one man to another, I owe you. I have treated you with a cruelty the enormity of which I now comprehend. I thought I was right. My fatal mistake was in not understanding your nature. I misconstrued your conduct from the beginning, and in doing so I have laid upon my conscience a burden which will embitter the remaining years of my life. I would do anything in my power, if it were not too late, to atone for the wrong I have done you. If, before I sent you to the dungeon, I could have understood the wrong and foreseen its consequences, I would cheerfully have taken my own life rather than raised a hand against you. The lives of us both have been wrecked; but your suffering is in the past – mine is present, and will cease only with my life. For my life is a curse, and I prefer not to keep it.”

With that the warden, very pale, but with a clear purpose in his face, took a loaded revolver from a drawer and laid it before the convict.

“Now is your chance,” he said, quietly: “no one can hinder you.”

The convict gasped and shrank away from the weapon as from a viper.

“Not yet – not yet,” he whispered, in agony.

The two men sat and regarded each other without the movement of a muscle.

“Are you afraid to do it?” asked the warden.

A momentary light flashed in the convict’s eyes.

“No!” he gasped; “you know I am not. But I can’t – not yet – not yet.”

The convict, whose ghastly pallor, glassy eyes, and gleaming teeth sat like a mask of death upon his face, staggered to his feet.

“You have done it at last! you have broken my spirit. A human word has done what the dungeon and the whip could not do…. It twists inside of me now…. I could be your slave for that human word.” Tears streamed from his eyes. “I can’t help crying. I’m only a baby, after all – and I thought I was a man.”

He reeled, and the warden caught him and seated him in the chair. He took the convict’s hand in his and felt a firm, true pressure there. The convict’s eyes rolled vacantly. A spasm of pain caused him to raise his free hand to his chest; his thin, gnarled fingers – made shapeless by long use in the slit of the dungeon-door – clutched automatically at his shirt. A faint, hard smile wrinkled his wan face, displaying the gleaming teeth more freely.

“That human word,” he whispered – “if you had spoken it long ago – if – but it’s all – it’s all right – now. I’ll go – I’ll go to work – tomorrow.”

There was a slightly firmer pressure of the hand that held the warden’s; then it relaxed. The fingers which clutched the shirt slipped away, and the hand dropped to his side. The weary head sank back and rested on the chair; the strange, hard smile still sat upon the marble face, and a dead man’s glassy eyes and gleaming teeth were upturned towards the ceiling.

The Ape, The Idiot, & Other People (1897)

TWO SINGULAR MEN

The first of these was a powerful Italian, topped with a dense brush of rebellious black hair. The circumstances leading up to his employment in the Great Oriental Dime Museum as the “Marvelous Tuft-nosed Wild Man, Hoolagaloo, captured on the Island of Milo, in the Aegean Sea, after a desperate struggle,” were these:

He had been a wood-chopper, possessed of prodigious strength and a violent temper. One day he and a companion in the mountains fell out and fought. The Italian then had to walk twenty miles to find a surgeon, being in great need of his services. When he presented himself to the surgeon his face was heavily bandaged with blood-soaked cloths. He began to fumble in his pockets, and his face betrayed deep anxiety when he failed to find what he sought.

“What is the matter?” asked the surgeon, “and what are you seeking?”

The man uncovered his mouth and in a voice like the sound of an ophicleide, answered:

“Mina nosa.”

“Your nose!”

“Aha. T’ought I bring ’im, butta no find.”

“Brought your nose in your pocket!”

“Dunno – may be losta. Fella fighta me; cut offa da nose.”

The surgeon assured him that the severed nose would have been useless.

“But I wanta da nose!” exclaimed the man, in despair.

The surgeon said that he could make a new one, and the man appeared greatly relieved in mind. A removal of the bandages disclosed the fact that a considerable part of the nose was gone. The surgeon then proceeded to perform the familiar rhinoplastic operation, which consists in making a V-shaped incision through the skin of the forehead immediately above the nose, loosening it, and bringing it down with a half-turn, to keep the cuticle outward, and covering the nose-stump with it. In preparing for this he made an interesting discovery. The place for the man’s nose was long and his forehead low, so that in order to secure sufficient length for the flap he had to encroach on the hair-covered scalp. There was no help for it. With some misgivings the surgeon shaved the hair and then performed the operation with admirable success.

His fears, however, in time were realized. All around the end of the nose there appeared a broad line of black hair. When the skin was in its normal position above the forehead the hair on the upper edge of it had grown downward; but as the skin was inverted in its new position the hair, of course, grew upward, curving towards the eyes. It gave the man a grotesque and hideous appearance, and this made him furious. The surgeon, having a quick wit and a regard for the integrity of his bones, introduced him to Signor Castellani, proprietor of the Great Oriental Dime Museum, and that enterprising worthy immediately engaged him. And thus it was that the man became the greatest curiosity in the world.

Among his companions in the museum were the Severed Lady, who apparently was nonexistent below the waist; the Remarkable Tattooed Lady, who had been rescued from Chinese pirates in the Coral Sea, and some others. To them the tuft-nosed man was known as Bat – surmised to be a contraction of Bartolommeo.

The other singular man with which this narrative is concerned was a small, delicate, mild-mannered, impecunious fellow, who made a living by writing for the press. He and Castellani were friends, and he was on excellent terms with the “freaks.” But as this narrative is to tell the little secrets of the museum, it should be explained that the real object of the young man’s deepest admiration was Mademoiselle Zoë, the Severed Lady, billed also as the Wonderful French Phenomenon. She was known in private life as Muggie (formerly Muggy, and probably originally Margaret), and she was the only daughter and special pride of Castellani. Zoë was rosy-cheeked, pretty, and had a freckled nose. The impecunious writer was named Sampey. Sampey secretly loved Zoë.

As the Severed Lady, Mademoiselle Zoë’s professional duties were monotonous. They gave her abundant opportunities for observation and reflection, and, being young and of the feminine sex, she dreamed.

What she observed most was eyes. These were the eyes that looked at her as she rested in her little swing when on exhibition. Her gilt booth was very popular, for she was pretty, and some kind-hearted visitors at the show pitied the poor thing because she ended at the waist! But far from being depressed by the apparent absence of all below the lower edge of her gold belt with its glittering diamond buckle, she was cheerful, and now and then would sing a little song. Her sweetness of manner and voice and the plumpness of her rounded arms and shoulders were what had won Sampey’s heart and made him all the more zealous in his useful occupation of devising the names which Castellani bestowed on his freaks.

Hoolagaloo had suffered a turning of the head by his good fortune. He imagined that because he was monstrous he was great. That made him arrogant and presumptuous. He, too, loved Zoë. Thus it came about that a rivalry was established between Sampey and the Wild Man of Milo. How was it with Zoë? Which loved she? – or loved she either? Observing and reflecting, she dreamed. As it was eyes only that she saw, it was of eyes only that she dreamed.

“Ah,” sighed this innocent girl, “that I could see in reality the eyes of my dreams! So many, many eyes stare at me in my booth, and yet the eyes of my dreams come not! Blue eyes, brown eyes, black eyes, hazel eyes, gray eyes, all of every shade, but not yet have come the eyes I so long to see! Those which do come are commonplace; their owners are commonplace – just ordinary mortals. I’m sure that princes, knights, and heroes must have the eyes that beam on me as I sleep. I’m sure, indeed, that such eyes will come in time, and that by such a sign I shall know my hero, my master, my love!”

She cautiously asked the Wild Man of Milo about it one day, but his answer was a coarse guffaw; then, seeing that he had made a mistake, he kissed her. The hair of his tufted nose thus got into her pretty blue eyes, and she shuddered.

Then she went to Sampey, who was wise, cool, and politic. He listened, amazed, but attentive. The opportunity of his life had come. When he had gathered up his dismayed and scattered wits, he gravely answered:

“Muggie, these eyes that appear in your dreams – is it a particular color or a certain expression which they have?”

“Color,” she answered.

“What color?”

“A soft, pale, limpid amber.”

She said it so innocently, so earnestly, so sweetly, that he could doubt neither her sincerity nor her sanity. Thus the crisis had fallen upon him and had nearly crushed him.

Nevertheless, he set his wits at work. Pondering, analyzing, ransacking every nook in the warehouse of his mental resources, he fought bravely with despair. Presently a bright ray of intelligence, descended Heaven knows whence, swept across his thought-pinched face. This bright beam, growing more and more effulgent, mounting higher and higher till it illuminated all his faculties, finally lighted up his way to become one of the two singular men of this narrative.

“I see,” he said, trying to veil the glow of triumph in his face, “that you have not wholly mastered the problem of the eyes. True, it is only heroes that have amber eyes. But such eyes are a badge of heroism sent by heaven; and, though a man may not have been heroic in any outward sense, when the essence of true heroism is breathed into him his eyes, without his knowledge of the fact, may assume the amber hue of your dreams. Sometimes, in the development of the spirit of heroism, this color is only transient; in time it may become permanent. Muggie, these dreams indicate your destiny. You should marry none but a hero, and when he comes you will know him by his amber eyes.” With this Sampey sighed, for Muggie was looking earnestly into his gray eyes.

Had he thus, in blind self-sacrifice to the whim of a foolish girl, cast himself into a pit? If so, what meant his light step and cheerful smile as soon as she was out of sight?

Mademoiselle Zoë, the Severed Lady, swung in half-person and sang her little song on a night a week or two afterwards, just as she had sung and swung many a night before. Wondering eyes of every kind were staring at her, and presently her foolish little heart gave a great bound. There before her, regarding her with infinite tenderness, was a divine pair of soft, pale, limpid amber eyes! (A woman in the audience happened also to see this extraordinary spectacle, and it frightened her so badly that she fainted, thinking she had seen a corpse.)

The amber eyes instantly disappeared, along with their owner, one Sampey. A thumpy little heart in a round, plump body knew that it was he; knew, therefore, that her destiny was come, and, most extraordinary of all, in the shape of her good father’s literary bureau! Yet what shock there was next day, when the hero of her dreams came to her with his ordinary pale-gray eyes, blurred somewhat and inclined to humidity!

“Sampey!” she exclaimed in dismay, tumbled thus rudely from the clouds.

“Muggie!”

“Your eyes last night – then you were a hero; but today—”

“A hero!” innocently echoed Sampey.

“Why, yes! Last night you had amber eyes – such beautiful eyes – the hero-eyes of my dreams!”

“My dear child, you certainly were dreaming.”

“Oh, no! I saw them! My heart jumped so! I knew you – I knew you – and your eyes were amber!”

Sampey smiled sadly and a little complacently, and with great modesty said:

“I can’t doubt you, my dear child, but I assure you that I was unconscious of my amber eyes. I wish that I could feel at liberty to confess to you that lately I have had strange whisperings of heroism in my soul – but that would be boasting, and true heroism is always modest. Still, I ought not to be surprised that you discovered the actual presence before I was aware even of its existence; but such, indeed, my dear, is the peculiarity of the true hero – he is ever unaware of his own heroism.” He took her hand languishingly and squeezed it. She blushed and fled.

Signor Castellani, besides being wealthy, was a man of business. His daughter should marry a man who had money sufficient to insure his worth. With perspicacity rare in a man, he had observed that the two singular men of this narrative admired his daughter. Now, Bat, being a freak, was making money rapidly, while Sampey was only a poor literary bureau! Castellani felt the need of a partner. Why should not a partner be a son-in-law? Surely Bat was much more desirable than Sampey!

Sampey was wise and Bat was foolish. On the other hand, Bat was courageous and Sampey was timid. Bat had the courage of a brute. Sampey knew that there were certain ways of frightening brave brutes – he had even seen a prize-fighter join a church. He prepared for Bat.

One day he entered the museum between exhibitions and sought the Wild Man of Milo. That worthy was leisurely smoking a cigarette in a quiet corner, and was making the smoke curl up gracefully over the hairy tuft on his nose. Sampey was paler than usual and a little nervous, for the business of his visit was tinged with hazard. Bat, who happened to feel good-natured, gave the first greeting.

“Hey!” he called out.

Sampey went straight to him.

“You lika da show, ha, Samp? You come effery day. Gooda place, ha, Samp?”

“A very good place, Bat,” quietly answered Sampey, who tried hard to appear indifferent as he fumbled nervously in his pocket.

“Signor Castellani, he biga mon, reecha mon, gooda mon. You like ’im?”

“Very much.” Sampey was acting strangely.

Bat’s eyes twinkled a little dangerously.

“You lika da gal, too, ha, Samp?”

“The – ah – the tattooed woman? Yes, very well, indeed.”

“Ha, you sly Samp! I spik about da leetle ploompa gal – da Mug.”

“Oh! Muggie? Castellani’s daughter?”

“Ha.”

“Well, I don’t know her so very well.”

“You don’ know da Mugga?” Bat’s look was becoming dangerously fierce. He straightened himself up from his lounging posture, and his big muscles swelled. “You don’ know da Mugga! You tink I no see. You loafa da Mugga! You wanta marry her! You tink ’er reecha, pooty. You miseraba sneaka!” Here Bat, who had worked himself into a fury, swore an eloquent Italian oath.

Sampey’s time had come. The two men were alone – Bat furious and desperate with jealousy; Sampey fearful, but determined; brutality against wit, strength against cunning, fury against patience, a bulldog matched with a mink, a gamecock pitted against an owl.

Sampey pretended to have dropped something accidentally. He stooped to pick it up, and some seconds elapsed before he pretended to have found it. While he was searching for it he approached nearer to Bat, and when he straightened up he brought his face very close to Bat’s, and suddenly raised his eyes and stared steadily into those of the Wild Man of Milo.

Bat meanwhile had kept up an insulting tirade, his evident purpose being to force the gentle writer into a fight. But when Sampey raised his eyes and fixed them in a peculiar stare, Bat regarded him a moment in speechless wonder, and then sprang back with a livid face, and in terror cried out:

“Santa Maria!”

For half a minute he gazed, horrified, at the sight which confronted him, his mouth open, his eyes staring – fascinated, terror-stricken, and aghast. Sampey, the gentle, usually dove-eyed, was now transformed. Those were not the accustomed gray eyes with which Bat was familiar, nor yet the limpid, amber eyes which had set poor Zoë’s heart bounding; Sampey gazed upon his victim with eyes that were a fierce and insurrectionary scarlet!

Bat, contumelious now no longer, dashed wildly away. He spread his wonderful tale. Castellani, whom it finally reached, frowned, thinking that Bat was drunk. The Tattooed Lady laughed outright. Zoë wondered and was troubled; but that night, just before the curtain of her gilt booth was drawn at the close of the exhibition, there stood her hero Sampey, gazing tenderly at her with eyes of a soft, pale, limpid amber. And she slept soundly after that.

When Sampey visited the museum next day, he was eyed with considerable curiosity by the freaks. Castellani asked him directly what Bat meant by his stories. Sampey had expected this question, and was ready for it. After binding the showman to everlasting secrecy, he said:

“I have made a great discovery, but it is impossible for me to go into all its details. It must be sufficient at present for me to say that after many years of scientific experiment I have learned the secret of changing the color of my eyes at will.”

He said this very simply, as though unconscious of announcing one of the most extraordinary things to which the ages have given birth.

But Castellani was a study. Some great shock, resembling apoplexy, seemed to have invaded his system. Being a shrewd business man, he presently recovered his composure, and then in the most indifferent manner remarked that a person who could change the color of his eyes at will ought to be able, perhaps, if he should get started right, to make a little money, possibly, out of the accomplishment; and then he offered Sampey forty dollars a week to pose as a freak in the Great Oriental Dime Museum. Sampey, who knew that the Wild Man of Milo’s salary was two hundred dollars a week (which, although large, was well earned, seeing that everybody had to pull the tuft on his nose to be sure that it grew there), asked time to consider the splendid offer, which to him was a fortune.

There was the certainty of losing Zoë when she should learn that his amber eyes were not really heroic. He went to a retired showman and asked him what salaries might be commanded by a man with a hair-tufted nose and a man who could change the color of his eyes to any other color at will. This showman answered:

“I’ve seen Castellani’s man with the tuft. He gets two hundred dollars a week. That is pretty high. If you can bring me a man who can change the color of his eyes at will to any other color, I will pay him a thousand dollars a week and start in the business again.”

Sampey slept not a wink that night.

Meanwhile a change had taken place in Zoë: she had suddenly become more charming than ever. Her gentleness and sweetness had become conspicuously augmented, and she was so kind and sweet-mannered to all, including the Wild Man of Milo (whom she had formerly avoided through instinctive fear), that Bat took greater heart and swore to win her, though he might have to wade through oceans of Sampey blood. Mark this: Stake not too much on a woman’s condescension to you; it may come through love for another.

Zoë was innocent, honest, and confiding. Innocence measures the strength of faith. The charm of faith is its absurdity. Zoë believed in Sampey.

Sampey, grown surprisingly bold and self-reliant, named his terms to Castellani – a half-interest in the business – and Castellani, swear and bully and bluster as he might, must accept. This made Sampey a rich man at once. Castellani, exceedingly gracious and friendly after the signing of the compact, proposed a quiet supper in his private apartments in celebration of the new arrangement, and presently he and Zoë and Sampey were enjoying a very choice meal. Zoë was dazzlingly radiant and pretty, but a certain strange constraint sat between her and Sampey. Once, when she dropped her napkin and Sampey picked it up, his hand accidentally touched one of her daintily slippered feet, and his blushes were painful to see.

While they were thus engaged, Bat, without ceremony, burst in upon them, his face aglow and his eyes flashing triumph. He carried in his hand a small box, which he rudely thrust under their noses. When Sampey saw it he turned deathly pale and shrank back, powerless to move or speak.

“I ketcha da scound!” exclaimed Bat, shaking his finger in the cowering Sampey’s face. “I watch ’im; I ketcha da scound! He play you da dirtee tr-r-icks!”

The Wild Man of Milo placed the box on the table and raised the lid. Within appeared a number of curious, small, cup-shaped trinkets of opaque white glass, each marked in the center with an annular band of color surrounding a center of clear glass, the range of colors being great, and the trinkets arranged in pairs according to color. There were also a vial labeled “cocaine” and a small camel’s-hair brush.

“You looka me,” resumed Hoolagaloo, greatly excited. “I maka mine eye changa colah, lika da scounda Samp.”

With that he dipped the brush into the vial and applied it to his eyes. Then he picked up two of the curious little glass cups, and slipped them, one at a time, over his eyeballs and under his eyelids, where they fitted snugly. They were artificial eyes which Sampey had had made to cover his natural eyeballs on occasion. Bat struck a mock-tragic attitude and hissed:

“Diavolo!”

By a strange accident he had picked out two which were not mates. One of his eyes was a soft, pale, limpid amber and the other a fierce and insurrectionary red. These, with his tufted nose and his tragic attitude, gave him an appearance so grotesque and hideous that Zoë, after springing to her feet and throwing her arms wildly aloft, fell in a dead faint into Sampey’s arms.

Bat gloated over his rival; Castellani was dumfounded. Presently Sampey’s nerve returned with his wits.

“Well,” he remarked, contemptuously, drawing Zoë closer and holding her with a tender solicitude – “well, what of it?”

His insolence enraged Hoolagaloo. “H – hwat of eet! Santa Maria! Da scound! Ha, ha! Da gal no marry you now!”

Sampey deliberately moved Zoë so that he might reach his watch, and after looking calmly at it a moment he said:

“Muggie and I have been married just thirty hours.”

The announcement stunned the Wild Man. Castellani himself had a hard mental struggle to realize the situation, and then, with his accustomed equanimity and his old-time air of authority, he said:

“Well, phat is oll the row aboot, annyhow? D’ye want to shpile th’ mon’s thrick, Misther Bat? An’ thin, Misther Bat, it’s a domned gude wan, it is; an’ more’n thot, me gintlemanly son-in-law is me partner, too, Misther Bat, I’d have ye know, an’ he’s got aut’ority in this show.”

That finished the Wild Man of Milo. He staggered out, shaved his nose, bought an axe, and fled to the mountains to chop wood again, leaving the Mysterious Man with the Spectre Eyes to become the happiest husband and the most prosperous freak and showman in the world.

The Ape, The Idiot, & Other People (1897)

A GOLDEN SEPULCHRE

It gave me genuine pleasure to receive at last a long letter from dear old Robert, imploring me to make him a visit. Since he had gone on his mad gold-hunting career years ago he had passed from view. True, he had written glowing letters at first, never falling in efforts to infuse into my blood the heat and eagerness with which his continually boiled, and forever seeking to sting me with veiled sneers for the quieter and more peaceful life that I had chosen to lead; but his letters had ceased long ago, no doubt from disgust for my lack of spirit and enterprise. Therefore his cordial letter came as a welcome surprise.

He must have been keenly anxious for me to come, for his letter was exceedingly nervous and impressive. He painted the glowing marvels of the desert with his old-time fervid skill, and told of the exhilarating earthquakes that lent a zest to his desolate environment. It happened that I had long desired to visit that strange wild corner in the southern end of California.

It was a brilliant July morning when I left San Diego and headed across the mesa for the Volcan Mountains, north-eastwardly about eighty miles away. There, on the summit, in a gray mining town set like a pearl in the midst of an emerald forest, dear old Robert met me. I was glad to see him, and his manifestly uncontrollable delight upon seeing me was infinitely touching. He embraced me again and again; he shed tears; he danced about in childish delight; he called me all manner of ridiculous names.

We started early the next morning, for he was “working,” he said, on the very edge of the Colorado Desert, fifty miles further away. It was evident that he was under a heavy tension which he tried hard to conceal, and that he had something in store for me which he was not ready to divulge. He had already told me that he had sent for me to make me rich; but I had paid little attention to that, knowing too well the visionary ways and dazzling hopes that forever keep the blood of the gold-hunter aboil. No doubt he was sincere, but I surmised that the gold had not yet been found. He talked of everything but his “work.” He dwelt fondly upon the happy college days, only ten years past. He listened eagerly to my account of my struggles and small triumphs. Indeed, but for the shadowy weight that hung about him, the moments of profound abstraction that came over him, he seemed the dear old Robert of old – buoyant, elastic, full of jest and quip, but in some ways sadly deteriorated. Not much past thirty, he seemed past forty. His face was deeply wrinkled, his shoulders had a perceptible stoop.

Down the eastern slope of the wooded Volcan range we plunged by an intricate winding road into the shining San Felipe valley, whose eastern boundary was the dreariest of naked rocky mountains, forecast and guardian of the drearier desert that stretched away from their eastern base. Down the San Felipe valley we drove to its debouchure upon the vast desert, and entered upon the forbidding billowy ocean of burning sand. But we did not strike boldly out into the wilderness. Instead, we hugged the Cuyamaca Mountains to the southward.

It was in the beginning of a brilliant starry night when we reached what he called his “place.” It was the oddest little house of adobes, with massive walls. “We need shelter only from the sun,” he explained; “it rarely rains here.” He attended deftly to his domestic work, including the care of his horses and the preparation of supper; and all the while an uncommon silence sat upon him. I wondered whether the great dumb spirit of the desert had settled down irremediably upon him, or whether something heavier crowded against his soul.

After supper we went out and sat under the stars. I observed that the house was planted at the base of a remarkable symmetrical mountain of a parabolic contour that rose black and bold against the sky. I had noticed it as we approached, but a whirling dust had obscured it and withdrawn my attention. Now, the wind having fallen, a perfect stillness filled the air – a palpitating, ponderable stillness – and with it a vast and inconceivable silence. No chirp of a cricket was to be heard, no cry of a night-bird. Impenetrable solitude, immeasurable desolation invested this bleached skeleton of the world; and in the deepest soul of me I wondered how a human being reared as dear old Robert had been could spend more than a few curious days in this dead and silent loneliness. Here must the soul shrink under the tremendous and implacable pressure of emptiness, this huge, overwhelming vacuum of terrors. In my heart I pitied the fine, strong man who was giving his life for whatever of treasure this desolation might yield.

I called his attention to the singular mountain upreared beside us. Instantly he was transfigured. He sat bareheaded in the warm, wine-laden air, and in the light of the stars I could see the perpetual tension of his body drawn tighter and his eyes kindle with the familiar madness of the gold-hunter.

“That,” he cried, rising and extending his arms as though to embrace the giant black dome, “that is my treasure, that is my mountain of gold.” Then, his excitement increasing, he turned upon me, and with the fierceness that I had already seen, continued: “My mountain of gold! Do you understand? It is part yours and part mine; but—” He looked suspiciously about, as though there were the remotest possibility of his secret’s being learned from his indiscretion, and then, drawing closer to mo, he half whispered: “Did you see those poor fools working at the mines that we passed on our way from the summit? What are they doing? Moiling in slates and schists: moiling and sweating to drag out gross earth and rock that is stitched here and there with a tiny shining thread of gold; crushing and grinding and amalgamating this stupendous mass for the trifling treasure that steam and mercury drag from its unwilling bowels – bah! Here, in my splendid mountain is a mass of solid virgin gold, held fast in its sheath of honest stone, awaiting brains and hands to lay its glories open to the sun!”

Thus, in breathless eloquence, he continued, giving me a wonderful account of the obscure natural agencies that had been storing this mineral in the heart of his mountain for uncountable aeons. Swinging into another tack, he went on:

“And the earthquakes! You have never felt one. In your snug cramped rookery which you call a city, your pusillanimous blood sucking San Francisco, you have had what you call earthquakes, puny quiverings lasting a few seconds and sending your women night-gowned into hotel corridors.” He interrupted himself to laugh with mocking glee. “And you call those earthquakes – little shiverings that do not loosen a brick! You shall see what an earthquake is – right here, where you sit. For you are in the heart of giant forces whose splendor you cannot comprehend. And what are they doing? They are making gold! – gold by the ton, not by the thread! Where the earthquake is, there also is gold; it is the throb of the mighty loom that weaves this glorious fabric. Here are the most violent, the most splendid earthquakes in North America. Hardly a day passes but that you find yourself swaying and tripped on the desert, and sprawling in foolish helplessness. That is the earthquake, and it is here that you learn to grasp its majesty. Observe the walls of this house – low, a yard thick, and half straw, to secure lightness and elasticity. And observe that, safe as the walls are, I deem it wiser always to sleep outdoors. Ah, that is the glory of an earthquake!”

I had been so overwhelmed by the fiery eloquence of my old friend, so swept along by his impetuosity, that I had forgotten the earthquakes until he mentioned them now; and since silence had suddenly fallen upon him as though he were exhausted, I presently asked him how he knew that the mountain contained a mass of gold – if he had seen indications of it.

“Indications!” he cried. “By indications you mean the paltry shallow devices of the mining prospector, who digs for gold only when he sees it on the surface. Bah! Indications! It has been the pleasure of the great God not to limit my sense to my eyes!”

That was the last flurry. It was evident that he had quite worn himself out; for presently he wearily observed that I must be tired and that I had better go to sleep. He fetched cots from the house and set them on the sand, and there we composed ourselves for the night. It was all strange, weird, unwholesome, As I lay looking up at the stars and enjoying their friendly, knowing twinkle, the events of the day and evening swept before me as a curiously distorted phantasmagoria. Dear old Robert’s secret had come out at last – his poor strained wits pictured a mass of gold in the heart of the mountain! But why had he sent for me? Of what use could I be? What plans had he, if any, for disemboweling the earth-giant? Perhaps, after all, he wanted me merely because his sense of desolation had become insupportable.

The hut was close to the base of the mountain. As I lay looking at the stars in the barren desolation that lay upon the place like a pall I could hear the water of Robert’s spring trickling from the base of the mountain. He had already told me something about it, and hinted mysteriously at things associated with it. I knew that the water was boiling hot and that he had ollas for cooling it.

An unaccountable sense of danger began to oppress me. A distant rumbling, not greatly unlike the approach of a hurricane, stole gradually upon the stillness of the night. The gurgling of the spring changed in character, slowly becoming more vociferous. Although I could not see it in the darkness, I turned my face in its direction, for it was not more than forty yards away. In a few minutes I beheld a curious spectacle. Simultaneously with a slight jolt that barely shook my cot came an explosive puff of steam from the spring, shooting straight into the air. Then all was silence and stillness again. Assuming that this was an ordinary occurrence, and that the spring had an occasional geyser-like character, I felt no increased uneasiness.

Then came another and severer jolt of my couch, and with it a tremendous explosion from the spring, sending up a high column of steam, water and mud, some of which fell upon us. Robert waked with a start and bounded from his cot. He stood perfectly still for a moment. Surely something extraordinary must have happened, for, accustomed as he was to the earthquakes of the region, and there having been as yet but two slight shocks, here he was standing as a petrifaction of awe, his unwilling gaze fixed immovable upon the mountain.

I rose to a sitting posture upon the edge of my cot; that drew his notice. He sprang at me, gripped my shoulder, and wildly said, with loud exultation;

“It has come at last, sooner than I had thought. Warnings of it have been coming. Thank God that you are here in time to behold it, to enjoy it with me! Come back out of danger!”

He jerked me to my feet and dragged me away toward the open desert. I disengaged his clutch, passed my arm about him and said calmly;

“Robert, I am surprised that you have so little self-control – that you are so easily alarmed.”

“Bah! man, don’t be a fool!” he exclaimed. “Do you understand what is going on? Does the transformation of the spring into a geyser carry no hint to your dull mind? Why, man, we are in the beginning of one of those mighty convulsions that rend worlds. This is more than an earthquake – it is a cataclysm. Can’t you picture those splendid imprisoned Titans in their subterranean dungeons massing their strength to rend the roof that holds them down?”

“Be rational, Robert,” I interrupted, as we still hurried on into the desert. “Tell me what you mean – a volcanic eruption?”

“No, no! – an upheaval, a giant uplifting, the crashing and splitting open of great mountains of solid stone. And – mark me – my mountain will be rended and its dazzling treasures of gold laid open to our hands!”

What more he might have said was cut short by a tremendous earth-surge that sent us to the ground as ninepins. We scrambled for a footing, digging our hands into the yielding sand, and were thrown again. There we lay helpless, while the mighty forces of the temblor were abroad in the depths. Deep hoarse rumblings started heavy palpitations in the air, and vast heaving billows of sand swept over the desert.

Following Robert’s example, I had turned to face the mountain; thus we lay rocking, our chins propped in our hands, while every moment brought augmented fury to the tumult. The stars danced wildly to and fro; the whole brilliant firmament swung, swayed and quivered. From the spring came loud roars, accompanied with outbursts of steam and boiling mud. A wall of the hut came down with a crash, sending up a cloud of dust; the horses, tethered in the open, plunged, reared, fell, and screamed.

“It is glorious!” cried Robert.

A series of noises unlike the others now began to pack the air. Seemingly mountains of stone were being ground to powder in the hands of the subterranean gods. Momentarily the deafening crunching increased. Then came the awful end – a stupendous, inconceivable crash, as though the world were split in twain, and—

I was the first to regain consciousness. A frightful pain racked my head; my face was covered with coagulated blood mixed with sand; my mouth and nostrils were filled with sand; harsh pains darted through my frame when I moved. I crawled to Robert as he lay motionless, and found him insensible and breathing heavily.

The desert had resumed its awful silence and stillness, for the convulsion was wholly spent. I staggered to the ruined hut, not a wall of which was left standing, found water, carried it to Robert, bathed his face, chafed his wrists, and presently was gratified to see his eyes open wide, stare at the quiet stars for a moment, and then turn their gaze upon me.

“Robert,” I said softly.

He sighed, clasped his bursting head in his hands, and with my aid sat up, and let his face sink between his upraised knees. I gave him water to drink, and this refreshed him wonderfully; the old fire returned to his eyes, the old eager virility to his muscles. Clinging to me, he staggered to his feet, and then slowly and fearfully turned to face the mountain. Instantly a wild exultation filled him. He threw his arms aloft and shouted;

“The Titans have opened the door of the treasure-house – see! the mountain is split from dome to base!”

Sure enough, a wide crevice, through which some western stars shone at the mountain’s crest, and which looked a black streak below the skyline, widened from the base to the summit; it was the opening of this that had crushed us with its din.

“The eggshell is cracked!” Robert almost screamed; “we will now dig out the beautiful rich yolk!”

Day was dawning. I insisted that we have breakfast before making an exploration, and it was hard to hold the dear madman down to it. At sunrise we started.

For the first time I saw clearly the singular mountain. It was a vast dome of solid rock, polished by ages of exposure to the wind-driven sand. Only in a very few places had irregularities been left sufficient to afford a footing. From the ruins of the hut Robert dug a small hatchet and a leather hunting-bag, the strap of which he slung over his shoulder.

“You may go with me and see the gold if you like,” said he; “and you might be of help to me; but it will be too dangerous for your inexperienced legs and feet to enter the chasm. I alone will do that for the present.” A wonderful – I feared an ominous – calm had fallen upon him. He seemed too cool, confident, deliberate, preoccupied. A momentary burst of fire welled up when he added, as he clutched my arm; “Old man, we are going to quarry the gold – not mine it.” Instantly he was quiet again – evidence of his knowledge that supreme self-command was required.

I felt apprehensive. “Robert,” I suggested, “would it not be best to wait a few days – at least a day – to be sure that the earthquake has entirely passed?”

He looked at me calmly and pityingly, and replied: “The earthquake never passes here;” and then we assailed the mountain.

Up we clambered, breasting the clean, steep, slippery slope. Robert was very patient with my slower progress, and gave me a hand in difficult places. Hours of laborious and exhausting work were consumed in bringing us to the summit. “The crust above the gold is very thin there,” explained Robert calmly, as though every secret of the dome were revealed to him.

At last we stood upon the summit, and Robert ran to the brink of the chasm ahead of me and peered down; then he dropped to his stomach and gazed so long that I wondered. Soon I was beside him, following his example. And there, not ten feet below the surface, was a glittering yellow mass, polished to a glowing burning by the attrition of the walls, and lighted up into a glorious mellow blaze by the rays of the morning sun. So intently was I feasting my eyes on this marvelous spectacle that for a moment my attention strayed from Robert. A gurgling laugh from him startled me.

“Robert!” I called.

He turned upon me the strangest face that I have ever seen lighting up the soul of a mortal. It seemed of an incredible age. His eyes were sunk deep in their sockets, and volcanic fires burned in their depths; his cheeks showed extreme emaciation; his whole face was marbled with the ultimate hardness and coldness of greed.

“At last!” he gasped, a tremor of fire and ice racking his every member.

At this point the rent was about three feet wide – a comfortable width in which to quarry the metal. The opposing faces of the walls carried numerous jagged projections, which afforded reasonably safe footing to a nimble climber.

Robert was sating his senses as he lay gazing down upon his treasure. “We are rich, old man,” he said, again turning his face toward me – that terrible, hideous face. “Rich!” he went on. “This is not a poor man’s world. In comparison with us, Monte Cristo was a beggar. Ah, rich – rich!”

A little longer he lay thus, and then cautiously swung over the edge of the abyss, planted his feet wisely, worked slowly and cautiously down, and stood abreast of the treasure. He passed his hand caressingly over its burnished surface; he kissed it – he would have hugged the mountain. Then, chopping, prying, digging with his hatchet, he worked slowly, quarrying out the gold. Thick jagged lumps came away in his hand, and each one he would hold exultingly up for me to see.

A strange sickness assailed me. Something within me revolted.

“Robert,” I said, “it makes me sick to look into the chasm. I will go a little distance away and wait for you.”

“That is well, old man,” he replied, bestowing another nugget in his leather bag.

I withdrew and lay down a few yards away, where I found a level spot. A choking dizziness came upon me. I fought against it, but could not conquer it. A brilliant mirage painted on the face of the desert seemed so vivid that I accepted it as a reality, and wondered that I was not surprised to see a beautiful island covered with rich verdure and towered castles, and encompassed by a shoreless green sea, where before the blazing dead desert had stretched in forbidding majesty to the horizon. An oppressive, stifling numbness crept over me. Other visions appeared. A battle of the gods was being fought in the sky; I could dimly see the charging hosts, and faintly hear the sounds of the onslaught. Nearer they came and louder grew the tumult. The earth shook with the trampling of the hosts.

Above the din rose a fearful cry, as though there were concentrated in it all the agonies of the dying and frenzied hosts in battle. It was so terrible, so penetrating that it sent a shock through every fiber of my body. I leaped to my feet, and instantly fell. For a moment I thought that dizziness accounted for my helplessness, out when my senses had more fully returned I realized that an earthquake was tossing the mountain. In that horrible realization I had forgotten the cry that had roused me. I thought of dear old Robert. On my hands and knees I crept to the edge of the chasm, and there the most dreadful of all the happenings of that wild time unfolded its tragedy before me.

In the trembling of the earth Robert was finding it almost impossible to keep his place. A foot would be shaken off; he would cling to the opposing walls with his hands. Once or twice he made a desperate effort to ascend, but he needed all his strength and wits to guard his safety where he stood. Beneath him yawned the chasm.

It was his cry that had roused me. I called reassuringly to him, and that seemed to give him strength. He was not far below my reach, but, stretch and strain as I might, it was impossible for us to bring our hands together. I began to enter the chasm, but he called to me with an agonized protest to refrain.

The trembling of the mountain was growing in intensity. Then a vast new danger presented itself – the width of the chasm was changing! At one moment it would narrow, at another widen. Robert looked up into my face. For the first time since our boyhood there sat upon him the sweet old expression of happy days. He smiled faintly and calmly. I covered my eyes and drew back. At that moment, with one mighty convulsion, the chasm closed tight from the bottom of the mountain to the top, and all that was left was a snugly fitted seam.

And there I left my dear old Robert entombed in the everlasting rock, held forever in the golden sepulcher that the great Mother had devised. Only the vast silent spirit of the desert piloted me thence, and set a seal upon my return that nothing but death can break.

“The Overland Monthly” Nov 1900

BREAKING THROUGH

“Ray,” said his mother, whom he shyly and secretly worshipped, without her ever suspecting the least of it beneath his cautious reserve and occasional outbursts of temper, “my son, I hope you will remember, tonight. You are nearly a man.”

She was a wise woman, and said it kindly and meant it well; but his face flamed, his eyes hardened, and he sullenly walked away. Mrs. Gilbert sighed, and went about the preparations for the young people’s party which her daughters, aged sixteen and eighteen, were to give that evening. She could not foresee what her son would do. Would her gentle warning, filled with the tender pride of a mother’s love for her one man-child, drive him with his dog to the woods, whither many a time before this day a word less pointed had sent him, there to live for a week or longer at a time, in a manner that he had never disclosed? – or would the disjointed thing within him which harried his somber, lonely life force him in a blind moment to make a disgraceful scene at the gathering? She prayed that neither would happen, and that the sunshine fighting for egress through his darkness would come forth soft and genial and very fine and sweet, as it did sometimes, and always unaccountably. . . .

The worst had happened at the party. No doubt it was intolerable, but not so bad as when (he was then only four) he had tried to kill a boy for lying about him and was whipped mercilessly by his father – for here, in the library, he was sitting before Mr. Gilbert, who was pale and whose eyes had a deep, inscrutable look. He was a large and powerful man, and had a genial nature, with force and sternness. The lad had never seen him looking thus, and so evidently guarding a prisoner, and the boy felt a strange weight within.

Whatever had happened must have left a shadow on the assemblage, for, though faint sounds came through the closed doors, they were somewhat lacking in the robustness of youth. Ray did not deign an effort to remember. More than that, he hoped that it never would come back, for it might be disturbing to his solitudes. Of his attempts to remember the attack on the boy ten years ago, there had never come any result but the recollection of a wholly disconnected event, when he was enveloped in a swirl of flame and smoke from a fierce grass fire, and had to fight his way through to life. He did not try to think what his father’s purpose was in holding him a prisoner tonight. Was it to give him a lecture? Pshaw! The beautiful, peaceful woods would make him forget that child’s-play, and he would steal away to them with Cap this very night, as soon as all were asleep.

Thus, motionless and in silence, sat he and his father, seemingly through an endless, aching time. After a while the guests quietly left. His sisters omitted their customary good night to their father. All sounds from the servants ended. Then entered his mother, uncommonly pale, and in silence looked from her son to her husband. She was small and dainty, and very, very pretty, the boy reflected. It was a pity that her bright eyes should be dim tonight and her sweet mouth drawn. She looked worn and as though she dreaded something.

“Are you ready?” Mr. Gilbert asked, regarding her fixedly.

Her lip trembled, but there came a flash from her eyes. “Do you really mean it?” she asked.

“Certainly. It must be done.”

“My dear, dear, he’s too large for—”

“He’ll never be too large for it so long as he is a boor and coward, insults our guests, scandalizes us all, shames his sisters, and treats his parents with open scorn. He won’t try to be like other people and accept his world as he finds it. His inordinate conceit is a disease. It is eating up his own life and making our lives miserable. We will cure it.”

He had spoken calmly, but with a low vibration of tone; and as he came to his feet he looked very tall and terrible. Ray’s blood began to rise, and as he looked about for something undefined he felt the heat and smelled the smoke of the grass fire of ten years ago.

He knew he was a coward. That was the shame and the curse of his life. He did not think it had always been so, but believed it had come about gradually. At first he had not minded the whippings that other boys gave him because of his temper and his physical inadequacy, for he had invited the punishment; but when they all learned that his fighting spirit had weakened, that they could whip him easily, that they need not wait for provocation, and that he would never tell, they bullied and hounded and beat him until he had come to know a craven, sordid fear, which spread from the boys to the whole terrible world in which the masculine entity must fight for a place.

“I am ready,” said Mrs. Gilbert, trying to hide a sigh.

“Come,” Mr. Gilbert ordered the boy, looking at him for the first time in two hours.

The boy quailed before that look, the most dreadful thing he had ever seen. It made him numb and sick, and when he rose he staggered; for, though tall, he was slender and had little strength. The weight on his chest became a pain and fixed on his throat, to choke and torment him.

His mother had gone out. He followed his father, and the three went out into the back yard, the boy bareheaded. The night was sharp and the moon very bright. All the boy’s power of thought was suspended.

In silence they walked down the terraces of the park-like yard in the rear. Cap, Ray’s dog, his only intimate, came bounding forward for his young master’s unfailing good night, but Mr. Gilbert angrily ordered him away. The animal, astonished and hurt, slunk away, keeping a watchful view of the group, and sat down at a distance and gazed in wonder. They passed through a gate into an orchard, and shut the dog out.

Mr. Gilbert selected an apple tree, because the wood was tougher than that of a peach. From it he cut two switches a yard long, and carefully pared the knots, his wife observing without a word or a movement, and the boy looking away into the distance. When Mr. Gilbert had done, he ordered his son to prepare.

The lad numbly, dumbly removed his coat and waistcoat, slipped his suspenders down, tightened the strap at the back of his trousers, clasped his hands in front, and bowed his head. The dog, which had crept to the fence and was peering through the pickets, whined anxiously and was quivering. When roughly ordered away by Mr. Gilbert, he went upon a terrace that overlooked the fence, and trembled as he watched. The boy did not once look toward him. He was struggling with the pain in his throat.

Mr. Gilbert offered one of the switches to his wife.

“Oh, how can you!” she pleaded.

“You must,” he firmly said. “I’ll relieve you when you are tired.”

The boy’s mind suddenly cleared, and he comprehended. A whipping from his father would be frightful enough – not for the blows; they were nothing. The plan was not alone to humiliate him beyond all measure, but to scourge his soul, ravage the sanctuary of his mother there, rend him asunder, and cast him into an unthinkable hell of isolation; for she was the bond that held him to the world, she was the human comfort and sweetness of his life.

Since his tenth year his discipline had been solely in her hands, his father having given him up as worthless, hopeless. She had whipped him many a time, but not for two years; and he had felt no pain, no shame, no outrage, no resentment. The case of the teacher was different. Ray had solemnly sworn, renewing the oath every day, that when he came to manhood he would beat his teacher to death for whipping him so often and severely because of his dulness, his apathy, or his rebellion; the whippings from his mother had only increased his tenderness for her, and, in some way that he could not understand, his pity also. Perhaps it was because he vaguely felt that she was impairing something in herself that was precious to him. Never had she conquered him; never had he cried out in pain, never pleaded for mercy, never confessed penitence nor promised reform.

Mrs. Gilbert shut her teeth hard, and, deathly white in the moonlight, raised the switch. It was poised a moment, and then her arm fell limp to her side; but the look that her son had seen in his father’s eyes held her and steeled her with a sort of desperate madness, and her arm again rose.

A long cry, an anguished wail, almost superhuman in its power to shatter the silence of the night, and more startling than any human cry could be, struck disorganizingly through the drama. It may have hastened the catastrophe. Mr. Gilbert was unnerved for a moment, and in exasperation picked up a clod and threw it at the offending dog trembling on the terrace. When he turned again, his son was kneeling beside his unconscious mother, peering anxiously into her pallid face, and calling her softly.

In a stride Mr. Gilbert was upon him. A hand armed with strength and fury caught up the shirt on the lad’s shoulder, raised him, and flung him away with so great violence that the slender body struck the ground as a log. Mr. Gilbert tenderly picked up his wife and bore her into the house.

The fall had half stunned the boy. As he slowly struggled to a sitting posture the moon danced fantastically, and some black trees crowning a near hill bowed and rose, and walked sidewise to and fro. A whine, low, cautious, packed with sympathy and solicitude, pleaded at the pickets, but the boy gave it no attention. He sat for a time, rose giddily, swayed as he dressed himself, and with deliberation walked to the gate. The dog, whining, trembling, crawled to meet him; but the boy, instead of caressing him, ordered him quietly but firmly to the kennel. Obedience was slow, and the animal looked up incredulous, wondering. The order had to be repeated. Finally the dog obeyed, frequently pausing to look back, but his master stood inflexible.

Passing round the house, and without thinking or caring about hat and overcoat, he noiselessly passed out the front gate, for a moment studied the big house that had cradled him, bred much of his anguish, and held all of his love, and firmly stepped out into the road. There was a gnawing ache somewhere. Assuredly that one blow – and from her – could not have caused it. After finding it in his throat, he was much relieved, and struck out on secure legs.

It did not occur to him that he was an outlaw and outcast. He did not think at all. Hence there was no plan in his going. He did not even understand that something deeper within him than had ever operated before had assumed, in the disqualification of his ordinary ruling powers, an imperious regency, and that it was infinitely greater or infinitely less than his usual intelligence. He simply invent on, thinking nothing, remembering nothing. The beautiful highway, arched by great trees, above which rode the moon in keeping pace with him, was a tunnel under a luminous sea; he half walked, half floated, in the crystal water, and had no wonder that he breathed it. The houses along the way were the palaces of lordly gnomes that inhabited the deep.

Whatever was leading him turned him out of the avenue at last and drifted him along a winding road that was as beautiful in its less conventional way. He did not reflect that all of this was familiar, shamefully familiar. It was the road to his grandmother’s, but he had not visited her for a year.

Her great wisdom and tact had gone to a study of the strange, unhappy child; she had been kind to him in every cautious, delicate fashion that she could devise; but he had ceased coming, and avoided her when she visited his home, and she had never known why. She was a patient woman and good; she knew prayer, and in her peaceful twilight she walked with God; yet no revelation had come at her appeals, for the times were not ready; and the boy went his way alone and silent, forever alone and silent, and unhappy, unhappy!

A white picket fence was presently marching with him alongside the shining road. He did not consciously recognize it, and it brought no rekindling of an old terror, an old shame; but soon, on the other side of it, a distance away, there broke on the stillness a challenge that he remembered, and its tone was contempt. He understood it, and woke with a start, because of a sudden fluff of flame and a whiff of smoke from the grass fire of ten years ago, and the ache in his throat gave him a strangling wrench. His head rolled; the moon swung through an arc of alarming length. That call beyond the fence struck the dominant note of his life, and it was Fear. Yet it came from a mere animal – his grandmother’s old buckskin horse, the most docile of creatures.

Ray had never feared the wild things of the woods. The cry of the panther in the dead of night is dreadful, but it had no terrors for the boy in the forest solitude. Other fierce pad-footed members of the cat tribe had come and sniffed him as he lay under the stars, and experience had taught him to feign sleep, for a suspicion of his wakefulness would send them bounding away, and he was lonely, always lonely. One night, roused from slumber, he sleepily put his hand on the shaggy head of a bear that was curiously rummaging him, and he was sorry that the beast took alarm and trotted away – he would have been comfortable to hug. That was before the dog had come into his life. He could never understand why he was not afraid of anything whatever – not even of the terrific lightning and thunder that sometimes flamed and crashed and bellowed all about him – except human beings and the forces that they controlled; and at times he wondered why Cap loved him and the buckskin horse would kill him from hate if he could.

Here, then, beyond the picket fence, was the proclamation of his shame – coming from a gentle, superannuated horse with no more spirit than a snail’s. By some means, perhaps instinctive – for all the world, when it finds out, will hunt down and destroy whatsoever fears it (although the boy had not reasoned it out thus) – the beast had learned that the boy was afraid, and had then found an interest in life. Let him but have a glimpse of Ray, and, ears back, lips drawn from hideous yellow teeth, and head thrust horribly forward, he would snort, charge – and the boy would run abjectly. The horse had never thus treated another living thing. So the boy had stayed away from his grandmother’s, and she had never suspected, and her love and prayers had brought no revelation.

As the fence intervened, the horse knew that a charge would be useless; but when, with a neat leap, the boy nimbly caught his feet on the ground within the pasture, the buckskin advanced in his minatory way. Ray did not know why he had leaped the fence, unless the wrench in his throat had hurled him over or the flame and smoke of the grass fire had driven him; nor did he know why he went steadily to meet the horse, nor why his nostrils stretched and his arms strained and his hands clenched, nor why there was a fierce eagerness in him; a rasping thirst for something dried his tongue. The horse came on, and the boy, perfectly calm, as fatally went to meet him. There was no calculation of results, yet the lad knew that a horse’s teeth and hoofs may be deadly. He knew only that he was not going forward to end all his wretchedness, as, last year, the shoemaker who drank had done with a shotgun, and young Corson, the thieving clerk, with poison. It occurred to the boy that he cared nothing about the teeth and hoofs of any horse, and nothing about what they might do.

So ridiculous was the fiasco that he would have laughed had he not been sorry for the beast; for to see any rampant thing so suddenly stricken with fear, when there was not the least danger nor any intent of harm, was pitiful to see. He wished to assure the buckskin that he was only a boy, a frail boy at that, and not what the animal had apparently taken him to be – a spawn of Darkness and Terror. He followed up the trembling beast, trying to reassure him and to get near and pet him; but the creature fled wildly at every advance, and when not pursued stood with head aloft, ears cocked, and nostrils vibrant, quivering in fear.

Seeing the uselessness of further pacific effort, the boy sprang over the fence, went back to the main highway, and by the unseen Hand was led into the short cut past Mr. Elderby’s house, where the greatest terror of his life – human excepted – had months ago driven him to use the long way round. He did not know, nor for a moment consider, why he chose the short cut tonight. He turned into it, walking free and strong.

Girls had meant nothing in the boy’s life. That was because they did not seem members of his species, but something fragile, mysterious, and ranking somewhere between flowers and angels. Thus his feeling for them was composed of a little awe, more reverence, and a sense of great remoteness. Never had he observed them thoughtfully without reflecting that they were, in a general way, much like his mother, or at least of her species; therefore they must be sweet and dainty and gentle and kind. His only large swellings of the heart had come from his thinking about them, particularly Grace Elderby, now twelve years old. Nothing could have been so grand, for instance, as an opportunity to rescue her, single-handed, from wild savages that had her tied to a tree and were piling fagots about her; then to dance in fiendish glee about her as the flames rose. He would dash up on a splendid charger, his sword flashing in the sun; savage heads would roll in the dust, or fall open, cleaved in twain; there would be wild yells of fright and a wilder flight for life; he would leap from his horse, speak reassuring words while he severed her bonds, mount with her in his arms, and fly away, away, away.

Twice had Grace seen his shame. She had seen him pale, and run when her father’s big, noisy dog had made a flamboyant show of rage, and she had seen him stand mute and white when Andy Carmichael, older and larger and much stronger than Ray, grossly insulted him in her presence. The Elderby dog was the terror that had closed the short cut, closed it to Ray alone.

Thus into the short cut swung Ray, walking strong and free, the ache in his throat not so painful as before. The dog would be on guard, and the boy was empty-handed.

The shadows were deep under the trees, or possibly the dog’s hate and rage blinded him to what the buckskin had seen, or perhaps he was of a different metal. Near the rear of the premises the big brute came in so great a fury that he broke through the palings. The ensuing collision – for the boy stood his ground – was so violent that Ray went down underneath, and an ecstasy thrilled him when the flame swished and the smoke stung, and he felt something sink into his shoulder and a stifle of hot, foamy breath in his face.

It seemed to have been easily and quickly done. True, when he came erect he was weak and tired, and swayed dizzily, and wondered why. As, without the least exultation, or even triumph, or even gratification, he looked down at his work, and saw with surprise how deeply the ground had been torn up, two men with sticks came running out – evidently there had been some noise, despite all his care for silence. One was Mr. Elderby, the other his coachman. The gentleman stood in astonishment as the boy, controlling his heavy breathing, stepped into the moonlight and calmly faced him.

“Ray Gilbert! What are you doing here, at this time of night?”

“I was walking in the path. Your dog attacked me.”

“What did you kill him with?”

“My hands.”

Mr. Elderby stood in wonder as he studied the lad. “I’m thankful to God that you are alive. It’s a miracle.” He noticed that Ray’s clothing was torn nearly to rags. In compassion he laid a hand on Ray’s shoulder, quickly withdrew it, and examined it in the moonlight. “You are hurt, my son. Come into the house. I’ll put you to bed and send for the doctor and your parents.”

“Thank you, sir; I have something to do.”

“But you must have attention. – Jake, hitch up the bay to the light buggy – quick – and drive him home.”

“No, sir; but I’m much obliged. I have something to do. Good night.” The shadows enveloped him.

The short cut led him over a sharp hill and into the road again, and there he sat on the bank till his strength came back. Then he went on till he arrived at a gate leading into a private avenue. The ache in his throat was nearly gone. Passing quietly up the driveway and round to the rear of the house, he came to a window, which was open at the top, and sharply tapped on the glass.

“Who’s that?” came a voice.

“Dress and come out, Andy Carmichael. I’m Ray Gilbert.”

The sash was thrown up and the boy glowered in the opening. “Ray Gilbert! you cowardly, sneaking puppy! What do you want?”

“I want to see you. Dress and come out. Don’t wake anybody.”

He spoke quietly, trying to appear his usual self lest this monster, this overshadowing terror of his life, should see whatever it was that had frightened the horse and slain the dog. This was the boy who had beaten him so often and with such merciless, sodden, gluttonous enjoyment; the boy who, when he did not care to give the beatings himself no provocation was ever needed – would stand threateningly by and let the smaller boys, even to the little ones with soft, puny fists, beat the coward as long as they wished, merely for the love of beating what did not resist; the boy whose lies had brought undeserved whippings from the teacher; the boy who openly insulted him whenever he pleased, and, worst of all, had humiliated him before Grace Elderby. It was the presence of this boy at the party that evening, and the looks that he gave Ray, and the sly tortures he inflicted, that had sent up the curtain on the night’s drama.

In wondering surprise Andy studied the bareheaded, ragged, dirty figure standing in the moonlight; and as crimson looks a muddy brown in such a light, he mistook the smears on the other’s face and the dark splotches on his clothing. What could the creature want of him at this time of night and with that extraordinary appearance? Likely Ray had been set upon and was seeking any refuge. It would be joyous to complete the work that the others had begun. Andy soon emerged from the house.

“Come this way,” said his mysterious visitant, and perplexed Andy followed him to the rear of the fowl-house, where the light was clear. The flame and smoke of the old grass fire were strong in the air.

Ray halted, and faced him.

“Take off your coat,” he quietly said, removing his own tattered garment.

“What for?” with a slight quaver composed of anger and something else; for there was a touch of the uncanny here.

“We are going to fight.”

“Fight, eh! What put that into your fool head?” Under the initial impulse from the challenge, Andy was all heat and eagerness, and he bristled and swelled; but though, in some vital ways, human sense is less acute than brute sense, Andy did feel something of what the buckskin had felt, something of what had slain the dog, and his heart thumped with a strange heaviness. “What do you want to fight for? I’d beat the life out of you.”

It failed of the effect intended, and Andy found his head suddenly twisted to one side by a slap of the cheek. He stepped back, white with fury, tossed his coat aside, and hurled himself upon the slender figure waiting with such unearthly composure.

•   •   •   •   •

Dawn was flooding the east, and still the boy lurched and floundered on and on, keeping to the road that led into the wilderness. Occasionally he would stop for a minute’s rest and to listen for the baying of Frazier’s bloodhound; and he wondered, in a purely detached and scientific way, whether he had sufficient strength and acuteness left for another such grapple. It was merely an engaging speculation, and was complicated with his determination to perform another task before his work was done. It would nearly break his heart to be stopped now. Likely the dog would not attack him, but merely hold him at bay until the pursuers came to his summons; but if the dog would not attack, then the boy must. Would strength or even life be left for the last and most important of all the tasks to which the Hand was leading him? – for there was a good distance yet to be covered, and work to be done at the end of it. He was thankful that the ache had entirely left his throat and that a strange warmth had kindled in his breast.

Perhaps they had not really meant what they said about setting Frazier’s bloodhound to run him down. The remark had come from the yardman, not Mr. Carmichael himself, who had appeared too stunned to think of anything but his son. If they had wished to kill the outlaw, or take him and send him to jail, why had they not seized and bound him instead of staring at him so queerly, and then the yardman foolishly saying, as Ray staggered away and they picked up the limp figure, that they would get Frazier’s bloodhound and set him on the trail? They were two strong men against a mere boy, who was so exhausted that only with a mighty effort could he stand. It was Andy’s final despairing cry that had waked them.

Without either triumph or regret the boy struggled on. The broadening of day made him partly aware of the savage presence that he made and of the likelihood that traffic might open on the road at any time. Some of his clothing was gone, and he had bound the remaining strips and rags about him as best he could. He did not know about the aspect of his face and hair, but he realized that should anyone encounter him in the road he might be forced to do something distasteful, and that the urgent task ahead might be interrupted.

A horseman and two market wagons passed at intervals, but the boy was hidden at the roadside. So he reeled on and on, and so he came at last to the great pine. There he turned out and crawled as much as walked through the trees and undergrowth to the summit of a low ridge, where he felt the sunshine fall on his half-naked back. It was so luxurious that he paused in the full glare of it, and slowly turned, as one very cold before a warming fire, and reveled in it. With every moment he felt it pouring into him, tingling softly as it ran. It was odd with what cheerful industry it hunted out the coldest places in him and kindled snug little fires under them. Most of all, it gave attention to the warm place that had already started in the center, and that one woke to a wonderful glow. Thus refreshed, he descended the slope on the farther side and came to a morass threaded by a friendly stream. At the edge of the bog he halted and looked keenly about. It had been two years since his last visit to this spot, and, though his memory of the woods was excellent, he now found himself dull and his vision bad. Ordinarily he would have found at once what he was seeking. Up and down along the margin he stumbled, straining his dim eyes, crawling sometimes and using groping hands in the search. Surely no one else could have come upon this remote spot, found the treasure, and taken it away!

At last! It had seemed to him a very long time; but all else was submerged in the joy of the first triumph, the first elation, that the lad had felt in many, many a day. Every shadow that had lain on his conscience vanished, every shame that had cursed his years was swept away, all bitterness took flight, and something fine and sweet raced through him deliciously.

There was no waste of precious time in hunting for something with which to dig. Then, too, the glorious sun had mounted, and was pouring its flood of light and warmth on his work and him. Like the tines of a digging-fork, his fingers sank into the ground.

The precious treasure, hugged gently, reverently, with a fierce sense of protection, was balm to every hurt. With it thus clasped, the boy laboriously made the ascent of the ridge on his return, and paused on the summit. There was something strange in the distance with which the descending slope to the road stretched so far, so bewilderingly far. He contemplated it, and wondered if he could compass it in a lifetime. The impulse to go on – for this last task was only half done – overcame the check from the illusion, and he started down. His knees developed a foolish way of suddenly flexing and seating him hard on the ground. At first if was annoying, but when it happened the second time the absurdity of it, and the ridiculous suddenness of the surprise that it caused, made the boy laugh aloud. It astonished him to hear himself laugh, for that was very unusual, and he wondered. But he rose, staggered on, and found himself chuckling inside, a most astonishing thing! He could not imagine why he was doing it. When he dropped the third time his voice rang in so loud and merry a laugh that two blue jays came and scolded him terrifically, and he laughed at them till his tears ran. He was so absurdly happy that he feared he would hug his treasure too hard.

If only his mother were with him, that she might see how funny it all was, and laugh and be happy with him, and then walk with him hand in hand through the beautiful woods, while he showed her all the wonderful things that he knew! But no; his sisters and his father must be with them, and Grace, and Andy, too, and the teacher and dear old grandmother. What a glorious time they would have!

The boy started, for a sweet, coaxing smother had suddenly fallen on him. He fought it away and rose with great difficulty and in some alarm lest he should not reach the road. On he lurched, clinging to the bushes as he swayed, trying not to laugh, for he had an idea that he was very crass and silly. He saw the road, only a rod away, and suddenly reflected that he was not presentable. Though staying till night would delay the completion of his task, there was no help for it, and he was content, and laughed because he was. And he knew that he really needed rest; for suppose his legs should practice those grotesque eccentricities in the road, and somebody should see! He sat down, carefully guarding his treasure, to wait in happy patience. He would not sleep, and so lose something of his conscious peace, something of thinking about what was going to happen at the end. No, he must not sleep.

The frantically joyous barking of a dog standing over him – not at all like the deep baying of Frazier’s bloodhound, woke the boy, and he tried to raise his head, but it fell back like lead. He laughed drowsily in quiet happiness, as he feebly patted the devoted head.

“Dear old Cap,” he said. “You came, didn’t you?”

Messengers from Elderby’s and Carmichael’s had brought strange news to the boy’s parents. In alarm they had started out in the surrey, taking Cap, in the sure faith that he would find their son. They had seen that Andy was recovering, he had been much more frightened than hurt. It was they whose crashing through the bushes the boy heard after Cap had announced his find. They halted and paled when they saw the torn, bruised, helpless figure smiling at them from the ground, and so full of loving gladness merely to see them that there was no room for surprise at their being there. The mother was quicker than the father; she ran forward and fell on her knees beside her son.

“My boy!” she cried in a choke.

He took her hand and smiled into her face. In all her life she had never seen a smile so sweet, so happy. With his free hand he lifted his treasure.

“Mother,” radiantly, “here it is!”

“What, my poor dear?”’

“Don’t you remember? I told you two years ago that I’d found it, and you said you’d be very glad if I’d bring it to you when I came this way again.”

She opened the parcel, wrapped with so fond care in leaves and damp moss.

“Why, it’s the rare and beautiful fern, and you were taking it to me! Bless your dear heart!” and, much to his surprise, she began to cry.

“Success” Magazine Sep 1906

THE HAUNTED AUTOMATON

Old man Erkins had three principal faults: he was rich, stingy, and a hard drinker. For the first of these he was to blame; for the second, pitied; for the third – but wait and read further before you express an opinion. At all events, by reason of these things and of others that I shall now write concerning him, I say and you will say that he should have been killed; which I am restrained from doing in this very line by the necessities of this story and not at all by fear either of the law or of punishment in the world to come.

Upon recovering from a hard spree, toward the end of which he would begin to see strange things, Erkins would not touch a drop for several days; then, recovering his nerve, he would laugh at his past timidity and – take a drink; the next day one, the next three, the next four, and so on, until snakes and other queer things would creep out of dark places.

There was an old servant, named Sarah, that kept his large prison (for such was his house) in order; and the one green spot in her shaky old life was a pretty girl, old Erkins’ niece, ward and prisoner combined – Alice by name, and the prettiest girl in all the country thereabout, though a very unhappy one, to be sure. Alice had inherited Sarah, who was Alice’s mother’s trusted servant, and who vowed that she never, never would leave the poor young orphan, though the old house should swarm with snakes and things.

Now, the old miser loved his niece in a certain way. There are persons who love others so deeply that they murder them. There are various ways of committing murder, and one of the cruelest is to shut up a pretty girl in a big house and never let a young fellow even look at her.

Merely because she accidentally – entirely accidentally – fell in love with a poor but good-looking young machinist whom she met at church, her old guardian, in a spirit of mean tyranny, forbade her ever going out again, and in a most insulting and overbearing manner told this young man, Howard Rankin, that the girl should never see him again, and that any mendicant fortune-hunter who should ever present himself at the house or seek to capture her for her quarter of a million would be riddled with buckshot.

Old Erkins had a mania for curious mechanisms. He had clocks that did all manner of wonderful things, and hundreds of other ingenious contrivances of various kinds. Whenever he read of some curious invention he would have it. He never tired of amusing himself with these things. There was one thing that Erkins needed to complete his happiness as well as his collection, and that was an automaton – a working counterfeit man. He had read everything that had ever been written on the subject of such automata. He had visited museums and waxworks shows, and had seen gladiators and Zouaves dying their several deaths again and again; but they were all too suggestive, for there were times when old Erkins’ nerves were weak. Once he did buy a dying gladiator at enormous expense, but on the occasion of his next bad spell that gladiator’s departing life seemed to take the form of numberless snakes and monkeys; and, frantic with fright, its owner chopped it to pieces with a hatchet.

Howard Rankin had a certain inventive genius. Knowing the old mans weakness, he conceived the idea of constructing an automaton, with which he hoped, he told a friend, to reinstate himself in the old man’s good graces. However, this was a secret. All that he gave out was that he was going to construct an automaton – he knew what would result. He really did think that he loved Alice very, very deeply. Why shouldn’t he? He promptly began to put his idea into execution, and selected the back room of his workshop.

Very soon the project caused such talk that old Erkins heard of it. As the work progressed and favored bends were permitted to see the wonderful automaton as it grew under its author’s hands, old Erkins, hearing the stories, became more and more interested. When a few months had passed he heard that the automaton was nearly finished.

Erkins could restrain himself no longer – he must see that automaton and must secure it. But how should he proceed? He had grossly insulted the inventor. This was a serious difficulty. He pondered over it a few days, and then boldly sent a polite note, asking permission to see the automaton. A formal note, granting the request, came in reply. The old man went at once.

The young man received him with polite condescension. Erkins’ keen old eyes glittered eagerly; and Howard, noticing it, was secretly elated accordingly. Outwardly he was stiff and cold.

“And so you are at work on an automaton?” Erkins asked, as he was ushered into the back room.

“Yes,” deliberately responded the young mechanic, as he quietly proceeded with his work.

“Cheerful one?”

“What?”

“Cheerful?”

“What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t die, or anything of that sort, does it?”

“Oh, no!”

“’Cause I had a dying gladiator once, and it died so hard that sna – that – that it was unpleasant.”

He stepped closer to the half finished automaton. It sat in an easy-chair. “So I killed it,” he said.

“Killed what?”

“Gladiator.”

He was devoured with curiosity concerning Howard’s automaton, and yet felt such timidity that he hesitated about asking questions. Howard, volunteering no information, continued his work. Presently Erkins mustered up courage.

“I see you haven’t put on its head yet,” he essayed.

“No.”

“Haven’t got it ready?”

“No.”

There was a pause.

“What will it do?”

“A good many things.”

The old man went round it and examined it narrowly. It was the figure of a fop, dressed in the extreme of fashion, sitting in an indolent posture.

“Everything finished except the head, eh?”

“Yes,” answered Howard; who seeing that he had carried his indifference far enough, left off his work, and said: “The head is to be the main part, because the more important work is to be done by it, and great care is required in making its wax face, its eyes, and so forth. Here is the block of it, with the machinery inside. That blonde wig will be its hair. As the automaton now is, however, it can give all the limb motions, though they are comparatively insignificant.”.Howard inserted a key in a hole in the back of the chair and wound up the automaton. The slight clicking of machinery was audible. Old Erkins trembled with excitement as he saw the automaton begin to move. It brought its right hand to the place where its mouth would be, then lowered it; brought up its left hand, and then crossed its legs.

“The right hand,” explained Howard, “will carry a cigar, for the automaton will smoke. See – it will take a few puffs and then withdraw the cigar. The other hand is now taking up an eye-glass. I must now stop the machinery, as other attachments, not yet supplied, will have to be added, and still other machinery, the most intricate of all, is contained within the head.”

“What will you do with the automaton?” asked Erkins, feeling his way.

“Don’t know – probably keep it for my own amusement.”

“Wouldn’t you sell it?”

“Sell it! why, who is rich enough to buy it!”

Erkins’ heart sank.

“What shall you ask for it?” he inquired in sheer desperation.

“A thousand dollars.”

Erkins’ heart leaped with joy.

“I’ll take it,” he eagerly said. He had expected to hear five-thousand. “It’s a go,” quietly responded Howard.

Then Erkins began to reflect that possibly he had been too hasty.

“I may be giving you too much,” he said.

“Don’t take it if you don’t want it,” coolly answered the young man.

“Will you give me a written guaranty of what it will do?” he asked.

Howard pondered a moment. “I will do not only that,” he said, “but more; for I have great confidence in the automaton. Let me see. This is the 12th of November. I will be married on Wednesday, the 24th of next month, the day before Christmas. I shall want eight hundred dollars for my wedding and to start in life. I—”

“Married!” exclaimed old Erkins in astonishment.

“Yes. I will take eight hundred dollars down. If the automaton please you, you are to pay the balance; if in any particular it fall below your expectations, you may keep the two hundred. I will give you a written guaranty that the automaton shall cross and uncross its legs, smoke cigars, adjust its eye-glass, incline its head, open and close its eyes, wink and talk – speak two or three words.”

“Good!” cried the old man. “It’s a bargain.” Erkins was very happy when he left. He had had two triumphs – secured the automaton and learned that Alice and her fortune were no longer in danger.

According to agreement the automaton was delivered on Saturday, December 20th, by a friend of Howard’s, the inventor sending word that under the circumstances he had no desire to enter Mr. Erkins’ house. The automaton was encased in a large box provided with handles, and four men were brought to carry it into the house. Old Erkins danced about in great excitement and high glee. It was a time of such rejoicing with him that he called Alice and Old Sarah to share his happiness and see the wonderful automaton. Much of his exhilaration was due to drink, for the old man was rapidly reaching the limit, and in two or three days his old wriggling friends would surely be upon him.

“How’s Rankin getting along with his wedding?” asked Erkins of the friend.

The latter gave some offhand reply, and as he did so he saw Alice stagger backward to the wall and her face blanch..“By the way, Alice,” said wicked old Erkins, delighting in the cruel stab he was giving, “Howard Rankin is to be married next Wednesday.”

The poor girl could say nothing, for her heart was broken; but old Erkins did not notice her strange conduct nor see the agony of shame, humiliation and despair she suffered. Sarah saw it all, and it wrung her faithful old heart. She slipped her arm around the young girl’s waist and would have led her away; but Erkins commanded them to remain, and Erkins’ word was law.

The men set down the big box in the hall.

“Mr. Erkins,” said the friend, “here are certain instructions that Howard sent for the management of the automaton. He insists that they be carried out to the letter, or he will not be responsible for failure.”

The old man hastily read the instructions. Among them there was this one: “The automaton must be kept in a room with a temperature not below 65 degrees Fahrenheit nor above 75 degrees, otherwise the springs, catgut strings, the wax of the face and of the head, and the glue of the various parts will be ruined.” Here was another: “There must be little light in the room, or the delicate colors in the face and hands will fade; and the automaton must not be placed with its face to the light” Another instruction made careful provision for ventilation, thus: “Exterior air, which at this time of year is either damp or frosty, must be excluded, and hence the window should never be opened; but as fresh air is necessary, the door must always be left slightly ajar – say six inches – and it must not open into any other room, but into a hall.” Winding at night or more than once a day was forbidden. There were also minute instructions for preparing and lighting the cigars that the automaton should smoke.

Erkins reflected. There was only one room in the house which permitted of compliance with these instructions, and that was upstairs. He slept downstairs, and he had intended to place it in a room adjoining his bedroom; but as he used that one for an office and kept a hot fire in it, the automaton would be ruined there. The only objection he had to its going upstairs was upon account of his fear that Sarah or Alice, who occupied rooms near the one that must receive the automaton, would surreptitiously wind up the treasure at unseasonable times and thus ruin it. But had he been shrewd enough to guess at the loathing they had for a thing that came from Howard’s hands, he would have felt no uneasiness.

“Sarah,” he sternly said, “I must put the automaton in the southwest room upstairs; but if either you or Alice dare to touch it or enter the room where it is, I’ll murder you. Do you understand that? I’ll murder you both.”

The four men carried the big box to the southwest room upstairs and set it just where it should be, according to the instructions. Old Erkins, gleeful and brutal, forced Sarah and Alice to accompany it, and compelled them to stand and see it uncovered. This was done by removing the top, ends, and sides of the box and lifting a cloth that covered the figure. The wonderful automaton sat revealed.

Alice had secretly hoped that Howard had made the automaton to resemble himself, though ever so slightly; but when she saw the figure, with flaxen hair and mustache, so different from his, which were black; and the broad black eyebrows; and the painted cheeks, so different from his own pale face; and the foppish costume; and the effeminately curled hair; and the general air of impudence that pervaded the whole figure, her last hope departed. There was not a shadow of Howard’s quiet manliness in anything about this mimic man.

Old Erkins regarded it otherwise. He saw only a wonderful mechanism, finished and decked out with fine art; and that was all he cared for. The artificial fop reclined indolently in an easy-.chair. Its head hung upon its breast and its eyes were closed, its appearance being that of a slumbering man.

The four carriers were dismissed, and the friend produced a key, inserted it in a hole in the back of the chair, and wound up the automaton. It raised its head, opened its eyes sleepily, and with the greatest dignity it slowly turned its head as though regarding each member of the company, and then it smiled and very graciously bowed. Howard’s friend produced a cigar and carefully prepared it, as a lesson to Erkins, the automaton meanwhile continuing to bow and smile. Following the instructions, the friend laid the cigar on a little stand convenient to the automaton’s right hand, and the automaton with absolutely accurate movement brought the cigar to its mouth and with great deliberation took several puffs. Then it removed the cigar, and with its left hand adjusted an eyeglass, with which it gravely regarded the company; then puffed at the cigar again, and then crossed its legs.

“I must go now,” said the friend. “The automaton will keep this up thirty minutes longer, and then it will have run down; but it must not be wound again till tomorrow. Remember the instructions”; and he left.

Alice then begged to be allowed to go, as she was dying with a headache, she said, and had seen enough of the automaton; and so old Erkins, deeply disgusted, dismissed them.

He remained alone with the automaton, sitting directly in front of it and eagerly drinking with his eyes every one of the slow, dignified, accurate motions that it made. The only sound audible was a faint ticking, a very soft creaking, of the intricate machinery. This comparative silence, and the subtle wisdom that the automaton seemed to have and its deliberate manner, and its impudence, began to work upon Erkins’ diseased imagination. As the thing continued to smoke, and adjust its eyeglass, and cross its legs, and open and close its eyes and bow so gravely, it took on, in Erkins’ opinion, a kind of uncanny, supernatural air that disturbed its owner. Erkins’ mind was not exactly right, and he knew it; but even making due allowance for it he was positive the thing was acting strangely. It seemed to be trying to exasperate him. This feeling was steadily growing upon Erkins; so that when there came a sharp little click in the machinery and the automaton dropped the cigar to the floor and boldly winked at Erkins, the old man began to experience downright fright. Yet he reflected that the guaranty called for winks. Still, this wink was too knowing. It was an insidious, wise, searching wink, that seemed to show cognizance of every sin that Erkins had ever committed. It was a leering, impudent wink; such a wink as innocence would be incapable of; a dangerous, mocking wink. It winked not only once, but twice, thrice, four times; taking a long time between winks, and accompanying each with a sinister leer. It did nothing but wink. Everything about it was perfectly still with the exception of that one eyelid, and the stare that it kept fastened upon Erkins was a cold and deadly stare; a stare that saw through and through him, he thought, and that acted upon him with such strange effect that it held him bound, cold with terror, to his seat.

It was also in the guaranty that the automaton should speak. As yet it had not spoken. When it had winked several times there came another sharp little click, which startled Erkins. The old man had forgotten all about the speaking, but that little click warned him that something else was coming. What would it be? Something awful, he instinctively felt.

The automaton sat still for five long seconds, and then very slowly, very cautiously, very mysteriously, it leaned forward and said in a hollow, ghostly voice, that seemed to come up from the bowels of the earth:

“I’m haunted!”.Erkins shivered, and he thought his heart had ceased beating. The automaton slowly resumed its former posture and fixed its dead stare upon its owner. It sat thus for what seemed to Erkins an age, and then again as before it leaned forward and in sepulchral tones it said:

“I’m haunted!”

Erkins could hear it no longer. White and trembling with fright, he backed out of the room, carefully left the door as the specifications required, and went out into the garden and shook himself like a dog.

“That thing,” he muttered, “is worse than a sna – than the dying gladiator. But it’s a beautiful piece of work,” he presently added, when he had somewhat recovered his nerve; “and of course I shall get used to it. Of course.”

Nevertheless, he needed something to help him in this and he sought it in his liquor. He drank frightfully all that day, and toward evening his old unwelcome visitors began to show themselves. And they were unusually bold. He went early to bed, and actually one hideous old monkey had the effrontery to pretend he was a dying gladiator. A young monkey assumed all the airs of a fop, and smoked a cigar, adjusted an eyeglass, crossed its legs, smiled and bowed, and then winked at the miserable old man in the most impudent and insulting manner; and, not satisfied with that, it leaned forward mysteriously from its perch on the foot-board of the bed, and in a rasping, sepulchral whisper, said:

“I’m haunted!”

Thus passed this hideous night – one of snakes, monkeys, dying gladiators, fops who declared they were haunted, and horrible nightmares.

But Sunday morning came at last, and old Erkins ushered in the new day with deep draughts of brandy. He was trying to steady himself for a second interview with the automaton.

At last he entered the automaton’s room. There sat the ingeniously constructed thing, sound asleep in its chair. Erkins approached it gingerly, but it sat so quiet and harmless, and looked so weak and effeminate, and so unlike the ghostly thing that leered and winked at him the day before, declaring it was haunted, that his courage revived and he laughed at his fright. The old fellow was badly shattered from drinking, and his old knees tottered and his bony hands trembled as he went to the mantel and returned with the key to wind the automaton. He was very nervous and jerky about the winding; but he managed to get through with it in a fashion, and then he sat down in front of the automaton and awaited developments. The same old motions were exactly repeated, although the automaton had to puff an imaginary cigar, as Erkins was too badly shaken up to remember it. But the oversight soon began to trouble him. In his befogged condition of mind he imagined that the automaton laid it up against him. He was positive that under the smile lurked a wicked look, and he was thoroughly convinced of this when the first click came and the winking and leering commenced. There was then exhibited by that soft-appearing automaton a diabolical deviltry and a deeply mysterious cunning that no mechanical thing – so Erkins thought – could show; and when it came to the second click, and began slowly to lean forward, the horrible thought stole into the old man’s mind that the devil himself sat before him.

“I’m haunted!”

Erkins’ blood ran cold. He suffered an agony of fright. Every nerve quivered, and he gasped for breath. A deathly perspiration exuded from his face and trickled down his cheeks. With hands upraised and fingers outspread, with gaping mouth and wide-staring eyes, he gazed with a terrible, tragic fascination at the awful thing before him.

“I’m haunted!”.The blind yet ever-watchful instinct of self-preservation dragged the old man tottering from his seat and thrust him out. Stumbling, staggering, mumbling, he found his way to his own room, and fell headlong upon the floor, and passed into grateful unconsciousness.

He lay thus an hour or more, and recovering, crawled to his bed. There he remained all day, discussing in his mind the ways and means for executing a design that he had conceived.

“He didn’t exactly say it would be a cheerful one,” he mused. “He said merely that it wouldn’t die. But it does worse than that. The gladiator wasn’t haunted. It was simply dying – dying all the time. Well, I put it out of its misery. I’ll have to do another thing like that. I’m going to kill that haunted automaton if I die in the attempt.”

Such was his design. But he was not yet able to put it into execution. He tried his strength; he could hardly stand. The day wore away, and still he was too weak. He drank more brandy. Night finally came, and then he dreaded the undertaking in the dark.

Finally twelve o’clock struck; then one o’clock. The frightful visitors had quit creeping about the halls, and all had congregated in his room. He drank more. He became stronger, and there came to him a boldness born of desperation. Not another minute would he delay the annihilation of the haunted automaton. He got out of bed and lighted a candle. He knew where to find the hatchet with which he had put a stop to the sufferings of the dying gladiator, and he desired to use that particular hatchet in the deadly work that lay before him. It was in the rear part of the house. He found it. He went cautiously upstairs and approached the room of the haunted automaton. As he drew near to it he became more and more violently agitated – so much so, in fact, that when he pushed the door to enter the room the candle fell from his trembling hand and was instantly extinguished. He nerved himself with all his might, for he was determined to accomplish the work.

As he approached stealthily, step by step, he imagined he felt that maddening wink, and momentarily he expected to hear that unearthly voice declare, “I’m haunted.” So, he decided to strike from the rear. He crept around and got behind the chair. He took one step forward, and that brought him just close enough. He raised the heavy hatchet in both hands, and with all the strength of a madman brought down its keen edge upon the head of his unconscious victim.

The automaton must have turned to air, for the blow fell upon empty space; and the strength that he had thrown into it precipitated him headlong into the automatons chair. But the haunted automaton was gone!

The old man, mad with terror and raving in delirium tremens, ran from the room, shrieking for help. He burst into Sarah’s room. She was gone. He tore into Alice’s room. She too was gone.

Yelling, screaming, raving, pursued by a thousand demons, desperately mad, he flew out of the house and down the street, shrieking “I’m haunted! I’m haunted! Help! Help!”

A policeman caught him and took him to prison. On Wednesday he was calm and rational, though somewhat ill and weak. A lawyer visited him at the hospital, whither he had been taken from jail, and handed him the following note, which the old man read several times before he could fully grasp its meaning:

My Dear Sir: I told you a few weeks ago that I should be married today, Wednesday, the 24th December. I have kept my word, as I was married an hour ago. If you want an automaton you may have that dummy that you saw in the back room of my workshop; for in reality that was the one you bought, and it has never left my shop. The money you paid me on account was just what I wanted to marry on. It is a little singular that when I told you I should marry today I had not even asked the girl! She never dreamed that such was my intention until last Saturday night, when I presented myself to her old servant, whose scream when she discovered me I greatly feared would betray my presence to a certain person who did not want me there. But the girl I wanted was sensible, and we made all necessary preparations and left the house Sunday. I feared that a certain person would hear our foot-falls, though we went on tiptoes and as softly as possible.

That certain person was the girl’s uncle. He had done me a bad turn, and I am now even with him; for not only did I frighten him out of his wits but I stole his niece from under his very nose and made him pay all the expenses of the wedding.

She is an excellent girl and is rich besides. By the way, her name is Alice and she is your niece; and as I am now her legal guardian, I desire that you should make to Mr – , the bearer of this, my attorney, a full accounting of all her property.

And by the way, further, we are to have a little dinner at our hotel this evening, at which our friends are expected. Can’t you come? Do so, and let’s be friends; for Christmas is a time when we should all make up. Hope you are better.

Howard Rankin, alias The Haunted Automaton.

The old man thought it all over – and went; and I am happy to add that he never drank another drop.