“I do not see why you should not turn this immense amount of unusual
information to account,” I told him. “Unlike most men equipped with
similar knowledge, YOU have expression. Your style is—”
“Is sufficiently—er—journalese?” he interrupted suavely.
“Precisely! You could turn a pretty penny.”
But he interlocked his fingers meditatively, shrugged his shoulders, and
dismissed the subject.
“I have tried it. It does not pay.”
“It was paid for and published,” he added, after a pause. “And I was also
honored with sixty days in the Hobo.”
“The Hobo?” I ventured.
“The Hobo—” He fixed his eyes on my Spencer and ran along the titles
while he cast his definition. “The Hobo, my dear fellow, is the name for
that particular place of detention in city and county jails wherein are
assembled tramps, drunks, beggars, and the riff-raff of petty offenders.
The word itself is a pretty one, and it has a history. Hautbois—there’s
the French of it. Haut, meaning high, and bois, wood. In English it
becomes hautboy, a wooden musical instrument of two-foot tone, I believe,
played with a double reed, an oboe, in fact. You remember in ‘Henry IV’—
“From this to ho-boy is but a step, and for that matter the English used
the terms interchangeably. But—and mark you, the leap paralyzes one—crossing
the Western Ocean, in New York City, hautboy, or ho-boy, becomes the name
by which the night-scavenger is known. In a way one understands its being
born of the contempt for wandering players and musical fellows. But see
the beauty of it! the burn and the brand! The night-scavenger, the pariah,
the miserable, the despised, the man without caste! And in its next
incarnation, consistently and logically, it attaches itself to the
American outcast, namely, the tramp. Then, as others have mutilated its
sense, the tramp mutilates its form, and ho-boy becomes exultantly hobo.
Wherefore, the large stone and brick cells, lined with double and
triple-tiered bunks, in which the Law is wont to incarcerate him, he calls
the Hobo. Interesting, isn’t it?”
And I sat back and marvelled secretly at this encyclopaedic-minded man,
this Leith Clay-Randolph, this common tramp who made himself at home in my
den, charmed such friends as gathered at my small table, outshone me with
his brilliance and his manners, spent my spending money, smoked my best
cigars, and selected from my ties and studs with a cultivated and
discriminating eye.
He absently walked over to the shelves and looked into Loria’s “Economic
Foundation of Society.”
“I like to talk with you,” he remarked. “You are not indifferently
schooled. You’ve read the books, and your economic interpretation of
history, as you choose to call it” (this with a sneer), “eminently fits
you for an intellectual outlook on life. But your sociologic judgments are
vitiated by your lack of practical knowledge. Now I, who know the books,
pardon me, somewhat better than you, know life, too. I have lived it,
naked, taken it up in both my hands and looked at it, and tasted it, the
flesh and the blood of it, and, being purely an intellectual, I have been
biased by neither passion nor prejudice. All of which is necessary for
clear concepts, and all of which you lack. Ah! a really clever passage.
Listen!”
And he read aloud to me in his remarkable style, paralleling the text with
a running criticism and commentary, lucidly wording involved and lumbering
periods, casting side and cross lights upon the subject, introducing
points the author had blundered past and objections he had ignored,
catching up lost ends, flinging a contrast into a paradox and reducing it
to a coherent and succinctly stated truth—in short, flashing his
luminous genius in a blaze of fire over pages erstwhile dull and heavy and
lifeless.
It is long since that Leith Clay-Randolph (note the hyphenated surname)
knocked at the back door of Idlewild and melted the heart of Gunda. Now
Gunda was cold as her Norway hills, though in her least frigid moods she
was capable of permitting especially nice-looking tramps to sit on the
back stoop and devour lone crusts and forlorn and forsaken chops. But that
a tatterdemalion out of the night should invade the sanctity of her
kitchen-kingdom and delay dinner while she set a place for him in the
warmest corner, was a matter of such moment that the Sunflower went to
see. Ah, the Sunflower, of the soft heart and swift sympathy! Leith
Clay-Randolph threw his glamour over her for fifteen long minutes, whilst
I brooded with my cigar, and then she fluttered back with vague words and
the suggestion of a cast-off suit I would never miss.
“Surely I shall never miss it,” I said, and I had in mind the dark gray
suit with the pockets draggled from the freightage of many books—books
that had spoiled more than one day’s fishing sport.
“I should advise you, however,” I added, “to mend the pockets first.”
But the Sunflower’s face clouded. “N—o,” she said, “the black one.”
“The black one!” This explosively, incredulously. “I wear it quite often.
I—I intended wearing it to-night.”
“You have two better ones, and you know I never liked it, dear,” the
Sunflower hurried on. “Besides, it’s shiny—”
“Shiny!”
“It—it soon will be, which is just the same, and the man is really
estimable. He is nice and refined, and I am sure he—”
“Has seen better days.”
“Yes, and the weather is raw and beastly, and his clothes are threadbare.
And you have many suits—”
“Five,” I corrected, “counting in the dark gray fishing outfit with the
draggled pockets.”
“And he has none, no home, nothing—”
“Not even a Sunflower,”—putting my arm around her,—“wherefore
he is deserving of all things. Give him the black suit, dear—nay,
the best one, the very best one. Under high heaven for such lack there
must be compensation!”
“You ARE a dear!” And the Sunflower moved to the door and looked back
alluringly. “You are a PERFECT dear.”
And this after seven years, I marvelled, till she was back again, timid
and apologetic.
“I—I gave him one of your white shirts. He wore a cheap horrid
cotton thing, and I knew it would look ridiculous. And then his shoes were
so slipshod, I let him have a pair of yours, the old ones with the narrow
caps—”
“Old ones!”
“Well, they pinched horribly, and you know they did.”
It was ever thus the Sunflower vindicated things.
And so Leith Clay-Randolph came to Idlewild to stay, how long I did not
dream. Nor did I dream how often he was to come, for he was like an
erratic comet. Fresh he would arrive, and cleanly clad, from grand folk
who were his friends as I was his friend, and again, weary and worn, he
would creep up the brier-rose path from the Montanas or Mexico. And
without a word, when his wanderlust gripped him, he was off and away into
that great mysterious underworld he called “The Road.”
“I could not bring myself to leave until I had thanked you, you of the
open hand and heart,” he said, on the night he donned my good black suit.
And I confess I was startled when I glanced over the top of my paper and
saw a lofty-browed and eminently respectable-looking gentleman, boldly and
carelessly at ease. The Sunflower was right. He must have known better
days for the black suit and white shirt to have effected such a
transformation. Involuntarily I rose to my feet, prompted to meet him on
equal ground. And then it was that the Clay-Randolph glamour descended
upon me. He slept at Idlewild that night, and the next night, and for many
nights. And he was a man to love. The Son of Anak, otherwise Rufus the
Blue-Eyed, and also plebeianly known as Tots, rioted with him from
brier-rose path to farthest orchard, scalped him in the haymow with
barbaric yells, and once, with pharisaic zeal, was near to crucifying him
under the attic roof beams. The Sunflower would have loved him for the Son
of Anak’s sake, had she not loved him for his own. As for myself, let the
Sunflower tell, in the times he elected to be gone, of how often I
wondered when Leith would come back again, Leith the Lovable. Yet he was a
man of whom we knew nothing. Beyond the fact that he was Kentucky-born,
his past was a blank. He never spoke of it. And he was a man who prided
himself upon his utter divorce of reason from emotion. To him the world
spelled itself out in problems. I charged him once with being guilty of
emotion when roaring round the den with the Son of Anak pickaback. Not so,
he held. Could he not cuddle a sense-delight for the problem’s sake?
He was elusive. A man who intermingled nameless argot with polysyllabic
and technical terms, he would seem sometimes the veriest criminal, in
speech, face, expression, everything; at other times the cultured and
polished gentleman, and again, the philosopher and scientist. But there
was something glimmering; there which I never caught—flashes of
sincerity, of real feeling, I imagined, which were sped ere I could grasp;
echoes of the man he once was, possibly, or hints of the man behind the
mask. But the mask he never lifted, and the real man we never knew.
“But the sixty days with which you were rewarded for your journalism?” I
asked. “Never mind Loria. Tell me.”
“Well, if I must.” He flung one knee over the other with a short laugh.
“In a town that shall be nameless,” he began, “in fact, a city of fifty
thousand, a fair and beautiful city wherein men slave for dollars and
women for dress, an idea came to me. My front was prepossessing, as fronts
go, and my pockets empty. I had in recollection a thought I once
entertained of writing a reconciliation of Kant and Spencer. Not that they
are reconcilable, of course, but the room offered for scientific satire—”
I waved my hand impatiently, and he broke off.
“I was just tracing my mental states for you, in order to show the genesis
of the action,” he explained. “However, the idea came. What was the matter
with a tramp sketch for the daily press? The Irreconcilability of the
Constable and the Tramp, for instance? So I hit the drag (the drag, my
dear fellow, is merely the street), or the high places, if you will, for a
newspaper office. The elevator whisked me into the sky, and Cerberus, in
the guise of an anaemic office boy, guarded the door. Consumption, one
could see it at a glance; nerve, Irish, colossal; tenacity, undoubted;
dead inside the year.
“‘Pale youth,’ quoth I, ‘I pray thee the way to the sanctum-sanctorum, to
the Most High Cock-a-lorum.’
“He deigned to look at me, scornfully, with infinite weariness.
“‘G’wan an’ see the janitor. I don’t know nothin’ about the gas.’
“‘Nay, my lily-white, the editor.’
“‘Wich editor?’ he snapped like a young bullterrier. ‘Dramatic? Sportin’?
Society? Sunday? Weekly? Daily? Telegraph? Local? News? Editorial? Wich?’
“Which, I did not know. ‘THE Editor,’ I proclaimed stoutly. ‘The ONLY
Editor.’
“‘Aw, Spargo!’ he sniffed.
“‘Of course, Spargo,’ I answered. ‘Who else?’
“‘Gimme yer card,’ says he.
“‘My what?’
“‘Yer card—Say! Wot’s yer business, anyway?’
“And the anaemic Cerberus sized me up with so insolent an eye that I
reached over and took him out of his chair. I knocked on his meagre chest
with my fore knuckle, and fetched forth a weak, gaspy cough; but he looked
at me unflinchingly, much like a defiant sparrow held in the hand.
“‘I am the census-taker Time,’ I boomed in sepulchral tones. ‘Beware lest
I knock too loud.’
“‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he sneered.
“Whereupon I rapped him smartly, and he choked and turned purplish.
“‘Well, whatcher want?’ he wheezed with returning breath.
“‘I want Spargo, the only Spargo.’
“‘Then leave go, an’ I’ll glide an’ see.’
“‘No you don’t, my lily-white.’ And I took a tighter grip on his collar.
‘No bouncers in mine, understand! I’ll go along.’”
Leith dreamily surveyed the long ash of his cigar and turned to me. “Do
you know, Anak, you can’t appreciate the joy of being the buffoon, playing
the clown. You couldn’t do it if you wished. Your pitiful little
conventions and smug assumptions of decency would prevent. But simply to
turn loose your soul to every whimsicality, to play the fool unafraid of
any possible result, why, that requires a man other than a householder and
law-respecting citizen.
“However, as I was saying, I saw the only Spargo. He was a big, beefy,
red-faced personage, full-jowled and double-chinned, sweating at his desk
in his shirt-sleeves. It was August, you know. He was talking into a
telephone when I entered, or swearing rather, I should say, and the while
studying me with his eyes. When he hung up, he turned to me expectantly.
“‘You are a very busy man,’ I said.
“He jerked a nod with his head, and waited.
“‘And after all, is it worth it?’ I went on. ‘What does life mean that it
should make you sweat? What justification do you find in sweat? Now look
at me. I toil not, neither do I spin—’
“‘Who are you? What are you?’ he bellowed with a suddenness that was,
well, rude, tearing the words out as a dog does a bone.
“‘A very pertinent question, sir,’ I acknowledged. ‘First, I am a man;
next, a down-trodden American citizen. I am cursed with neither
profession, trade, nor expectations. Like Esau, I am pottageless. My
residence is everywhere; the sky is my coverlet. I am one of the
dispossessed, a sansculotte, a proletarian, or, in simpler phraseology
addressed to your understanding, a tramp.’
“‘What the hell—?’
“‘Nay, fair sir, a tramp, a man of devious ways and strange lodgements and
multifarious—’
“‘Quit it!’ he shouted. ‘What do you want?’
“‘I want money.’
“He started and half reached for an open drawer where must have reposed a
revolver, then bethought himself and growled, ‘This is no bank.’
“‘Nor have I checks to cash. But I have, sir, an idea, which, by your
leave and kind assistance, I shall transmute into cash. In short, how does
a tramp sketch, done by a tramp to the life, strike you? Are you open to
it? Do your readers hunger for it? Do they crave after it? Can they be
happy without it?’
“I thought for a moment that he would have apoplexy, but he quelled the
unruly blood and said he liked my nerve. I thanked him and assured him I
liked it myself. Then he offered me a cigar and said he thought he’d do
business with me.
“‘But mind you,’ he said, when he had jabbed a bunch of copy paper into my
hand and given me a pencil from his vest pocket, ‘mind you, I won’t stand
for the high and flighty philosophical, and I perceive you have a tendency
that way. Throw in the local color, wads of it, and a bit of sentiment
perhaps, but no slumgullion about political economy nor social strata or
such stuff. Make it concrete, to the point, with snap and go and life,
crisp and crackling and interesting—tumble?’
“And I tumbled and borrowed a dollar.
“‘Don’t forget the local color!’ he shouted after me through the door.
“And, Anak, it was the local color that did for me.
“The anaemic Cerberus grinned when I took the elevator. ‘Got the bounce,
eh?’
“‘Nay, pale youth, so lily-white,’ I chortled, waving the copy paper; ‘not
the bounce, but a detail. I’ll be City Editor in three months, and then
I’ll make you jump.’
“And as the elevator stopped at the next floor down to take on a pair of
maids, he strolled over to the shaft, and without frills or verbiage
consigned me and my detail to perdition. But I liked him. He had pluck and
was unafraid, and he knew, as well as I, that death clutched him close.”
“But how could you, Leith,” I cried, the picture of the consumptive lad
strong before me, “how could you treat him so barbarously?”
Leith laughed dryly. “My dear fellow, how often must I explain to you your
confusions? Orthodox sentiment and stereotyped emotion master you. And
then your temperament! You are really incapable of rational judgments.
Cerberus? Pshaw! A flash expiring, a mote of fading sparkle, a dim-pulsing
and dying organism—pouf! a snap of the fingers, a puff of breath,
what would you? A pawn in the game of life. Not even a problem. There is
no problem in a stillborn babe, nor in a dead child. They never arrived.
Nor did Cerberus. Now for a really pretty problem—”
“But the local color?” I prodded him.
“That’s right,” he replied. “Keep me in the running. Well, I took my
handful of copy paper down to the railroad yards (for local color),
dangled my legs from a side-door Pullman, which is another name for a
box-car, and ran off the stuff. Of course I made it clever and brilliant
and all that, with my little unanswerable slings at the state and my
social paradoxes, and withal made it concrete enough to dissatisfy the
average citizen.
“From the tramp standpoint, the constabulary of the township was
particularly rotten, and I proceeded to open the eyes of the good people.
It is a proposition, mathematically demonstrable, that it costs the
community more to arrest, convict, and confine its tramps in jail, than to
send them as guests, for like periods of time, to the best hotel. And this
I developed, giving the facts and figures, the constable fees and the
mileage, and the court and jail expenses. Oh, it was convincing, and it
was true; and I did it in a lightly humorous fashion which fetched the
laugh and left the sting. The main objection to the system, I contended,
was the defraudment and robbery of the tramp. The good money which the
community paid out for him should enable him to riot in luxury instead of
rotting in dungeons. I even drew the figures so fine as to permit him not
only to live in the best hotel but to smoke two twenty-five-cent cigars
and indulge in a ten-cent shine each day, and still not cost the taxpayers
so much as they were accustomed to pay for his conviction and jail
entertainment. And, as subsequent events proved, it made the taxpayers
wince.
“One of the constables I drew to the life; nor did I forget a certain Sol
Glenhart, as rotten a police judge as was to be found between the seas.
And this I say out of a vast experience. While he was notorious in local
trampdom, his civic sins were not only not unknown but a crying reproach
to the townspeople. Of course I refrained from mentioning name or habitat,
drawing the picture in an impersonal, composite sort of way, which none
the less blinded no one to the faithfulness of the local color.
“Naturally, myself a tramp, the tenor of the article was a protest against
the maltreatment of the tramp. Cutting the taxpayers to the pits of their
purses threw them open to sentiment, and then in I tossed the sentiment,
lumps and chunks of it. Trust me, it was excellently done, and the
rhetoric—say! Just listen to the tail of my peroration:
“‘So, as we go mooching along the drag, with a sharp lamp out for John
Law, we cannot help remembering that we are beyond the pale; that our ways
are not their ways; and that the ways of John Law with us are different
from his ways with other men. Poor lost souls, wailing for a crust in the
dark, we know full well our helplessness and ignominy. And well may we
repeat after a stricken brother over-seas: “Our pride it is to know no
spur of pride.” Man has forgotten us; God has forgotten us; only are we
remembered by the harpies of justice, who prey upon our distress and coin
our sighs and tears into bright shining dollars.’
“Incidentally, my picture of Sol Glenhart, the police judge, was good. A
striking likeness, and unmistakable, with phrases tripping along like
this: ‘This crook-nosed, gross-bodied harpy’; ‘this civic sinner, this
judicial highwayman’; ‘possessing the morals of the Tenderloin and an
honor which thieves’ honor puts to shame’; ‘who compounds criminality with
shyster-sharks, and in atonement railroads the unfortunate and impecunious
to rotting cells,’—and so forth and so forth, style sophomoric and
devoid of the dignity and tone one would employ in a dissertation on
‘Surplus Value,’ or ‘The Fallacies of Marxism,’ but just the stuff the
dear public likes.
“‘Humph!’ grunted Spargo when I put the copy in his fist. ‘Swift gait you
strike, my man.’
“I fixed a hypnotic eye on his vest pocket, and he passed out one of his
superior cigars, which I burned while he ran through the stuff. Twice or
thrice he looked over the top of the paper at me, searchingly, but said
nothing till he had finished.
“‘Where’d you work, you pencil-pusher?’ he asked.
“‘My maiden effort,’ I simpered modestly, scraping one foot and faintly
simulating embarrassment.
“‘Maiden hell! What salary do you want?’
“‘Nay, nay,’ I answered. ‘No salary in mine, thank you most to death. I am
a free down-trodden American citizen, and no man shall say my time is
his.’
“‘Save John Law,’ he chuckled.
“‘Save John Law,’ said I.
“‘How did you know I was bucking the police department?’ he demanded
abruptly.
“‘I didn’t know, but I knew you were in training,’ I answered. ‘Yesterday
morning a charitably inclined female presented me with three biscuits, a
piece of cheese, and a funereal slab of chocolate cake, all wrapped in the
current Clarion, wherein I noted an unholy glee because the Cowbell’s
candidate for chief of police had been turned down. Likewise I learned the
municipal election was at hand, and put two and two together. Another
mayor, and the right kind, means new police commissioners; new police
commissioners means new chief of police; new chief of police means
Cowbell’s candidate; ergo, your turn to play.’
“He stood up, shook my hand, and emptied his plethoric vest pocket. I put
them away and puffed on the old one.
“‘You’ll do,’ he jubilated. ‘This stuff’ (patting my copy) ‘is the first
gun of the campaign. You’ll touch off many another before we’re done. I’ve
been looking for you for years. Come on in on the editorial.’
“But I shook my head.
“‘Come, now!’ he admonished sharply. ‘No shenanagan! The Cowbell must have
you. It hungers for you, craves after you, won’t be happy till it gets
you. What say?’
“In short, he wrestled with me, but I was bricks, and at the end of half
an hour the only Spargo gave it up.
“‘Remember,’ he said, ‘any time you reconsider, I’m open. No matter where
you are, wire me and I’ll send the ducats to come on at once.’
“I thanked him, and asked the pay for my copy—dope, he called it.
“‘Oh, regular routine,’ he said. ‘Get it the first Thursday after
publication.’
“‘Then I’ll have to trouble you for a few scad until—’
“He looked at me and smiled. ‘Better cough up, eh?’
“‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Nobody to identify me, so make it cash.’
“And cash it was made, thirty plunks (a plunk is a dollar, my dear Anak),
and I pulled my freight... eh?—oh, departed.
“‘Pale youth,’ I said to Cerberus, ‘I am bounced.’ (He grinned with pallid
joy.) ‘And in token of the sincere esteem I bear you, receive this little—’
(His eyes flushed and he threw up one hand, swiftly, to guard his head
from the expected blow)—‘this little memento.’
“I had intended to slip a fiver into his hand, but for all his surprise,
he was too quick for me.
“‘Aw, keep yer dirt,’ he snarled.
“‘I like you still better,’ I said, adding a second fiver. ‘You grow
perfect. But you must take it.’
“He backed away growling, but I caught him round the neck, roughed what
little wind he had out of him, and left him doubled up with the two fives
in his pocket. But hardly had the elevator started, when the two coins
tinkled on the roof and fell down between the car and the shaft. As luck
had it, the door was not closed, and I put out my hand and caught them.
The elevator boy’s eyes bulged.
“‘It’s a way I have,’ I said, pocketing them.
“‘Some bloke’s dropped ‘em down the shaft,’ he whispered, awed by the
circumstance.
“‘It stands to reason,’ said I.
“‘I’ll take charge of ‘em,’ he volunteered.
“‘Nonsense!’
“‘You’d better turn ‘em over,’ he threatened, ‘or I stop the works.’
“‘Pshaw!’
“And stop he did, between floors.
“‘Young man,’ I said, ‘have you a mother?’ (He looked serious, as though
regretting his act! and further to impress him I rolled up my right sleeve
with greatest care.) ‘Are you prepared to die?’ (I got a stealthy crouch
on, and put a cat-foot forward.) ‘But a minute, a brief minute, stands
between you and eternity.’ (Here I crooked my right hand into a claw and
slid the other foot up.) ‘Young man, young man,’ I trumpeted, ‘in thirty
seconds I shall tear your heart dripping from your bosom and stoop to hear
you shriek in hell.’
“It fetched him. He gave one whoop, the car shot down, and I was on the
drag. You see, Anak, it’s a habit I can’t shake off of leaving vivid
memories behind. No one ever forgets me.
“I had not got to the corner when I heard a familiar voice at my shoulder:
“‘Hello, Cinders! Which way?’
“It was Chi Slim, who had been with me once when I was thrown off a
freight in Jacksonville. ‘Couldn’t see ‘em fer cinders,’ he described it,
and the monica stuck by me.... Monica? From monos. The tramp nickname.
“‘Bound south,’ I answered. ‘And how’s Slim?’
“‘Bum. Bulls is horstile.’
“‘Where’s the push?’
“‘At the hang-out. I’ll put you wise.’
“‘Who’s the main guy?’
“‘Me, and don’t yer ferget it.’”
The lingo was rippling from Leith’s lips, but perforce I stopped him.
“Pray translate. Remember, I am a foreigner.”
“Certainly,” he answered cheerfully. “Slim is in poor luck. Bull means
policeman. He tells me the bulls are hostile. I ask where the push is, the
gang he travels with. By putting me wise he will direct me to where the
gang is hanging out. The main guy is the leader. Slim claims that
distinction.
“Slim and I hiked out to a neck of woods just beyond town, and there was
the push, a score of husky hobos, charmingly located on the bank of a
little purling stream.
“‘Come on, you mugs!’ Slim addressed them. ‘Throw yer feet! Here’s
Cinders, an’ we must do ‘em proud.’
“All of which signifies that the hobos had better strike out and do some
lively begging in order to get the wherewithal to celebrate my return to
the fold after a year’s separation. But I flashed my dough and Slim sent
several of the younger men off to buy the booze. Take my word for it,
Anak, it was a blow-out memorable in Trampdom to this day. It’s amazing
the quantity of booze thirty plunks will buy, and it is equally amazing
the quantity of booze outside of which twenty stiffs will get. Beer and
cheap wine made up the card, with alcohol thrown in for the
blowd-in-the-glass stiffs. It was great—an orgy under the sky, a
contest of beaker-men, a study in primitive beastliness. To me there is
something fascinating in a drunken man, and were I a college president I
should institute P.G. psychology courses in practical drunkenness. It
would beat the books and compete with the laboratory.
“All of which is neither here nor there, for after sixteen hours of it,
early next morning, the whole push was copped by an overwhelming array of
constables and carted off to jail. After breakfast, about ten o’clock, we
were lined upstairs into court, limp and spiritless, the twenty of us. And
there, under his purple panoply, nose crooked like a Napoleonic eagle and
eyes glittering and beady, sat Sol Glenhart.
“‘John Ambrose!’ the clerk called out, and Chi Slim, with the ease of long
practice, stood up.
“‘Vagrant, your Honor,’ the bailiff volunteered, and his Honor, not
deigning to look at the prisoner, snapped, ‘Ten days,’ and Chi Slim sat
down.
“And so it went, with the monotony of clockwork, fifteen seconds to the
man, four men to the minute, the mugs bobbing up and down in turn like
marionettes. The clerk called the name, the bailiff the offence, the judge
the sentence, and the man sat down. That was all. Simple, eh? Superb!
“Chi Slim nudged me. ‘Give’m a spiel, Cinders. You kin do it.’
“I shook my head.
“‘G’wan,’ he urged. ‘Give ‘m a ghost story The mugs’ll take it all right.
And you kin throw yer feet fer tobacco for us till we get out.’
“‘L. C. Randolph!’ the clerk called.
“I stood up, but a hitch came in the proceedings. The clerk whispered to
the judge, and the bailiff smiled.
“‘You are a newspaper man, I understand, Mr. Randolph?’ his Honor remarked
sweetly.
“It took me by surprise, for I had forgotten the Cowbell in the excitement
of succeeding events, and I now saw myself on the edge of the pit I had
digged.
“‘That’s yer graft. Work it,’ Slim prompted.
“‘It’s all over but the shouting,’ I groaned back, but Slim, unaware of
the article, was puzzled.
“‘Your Honor,’ I answered, ‘when I can get work, that is my occupation.’
“‘You take quite an interest in local affairs, I see.’ (Here his Honor
took up the morning’s Cowbell and ran his eye up and down a column I knew
was mine.) ‘Color is good,’ he commented, an appreciative twinkle in his
eyes; ‘pictures excellent, characterized by broad, Sargent-like effects.
Now this ... this judge you have depicted ... you, ah, draw from life, I
presume?’
“‘Rarely, your I Honor,’ I answered. ‘Composites, ideals, rather ... er,
types, I may say.’
“‘But you have color, sir, unmistakable color,’ he continued.
“‘That is splashed on afterward,’ I explained.
“‘This judge, then, is not modelled from life, as one might be led to
believe?’
“‘No, your Honor.’
“‘Ah, I see, merely a type of judicial wickedness?’
“‘Nay, more, your Honor,’ I said boldly, ‘an ideal.’
“‘Splashed with local color afterward? Ha! Good! And may I venture to ask
how much you received for this bit of work?’
“‘Thirty dollars, your Honor.’
“‘Hum, good!’ And his tone abruptly changed. ‘Young man, local color is a
bad thing. I find you guilty of it and sentence you to thirty days’
imprisonment, or, at your pleasure, impose a fine of thirty dollars.’
“‘Alas!’ said I, ‘I spent the thirty dollars in riotous living.’
“‘And thirty days more for wasting your substance.’
“‘Next case!’ said his Honor to the clerk.
“Slim was stunned. ‘Gee!’ he whispered. ‘Gee the push gets ten days and
you get sixty. Gee!’”
Leith struck a match, lighted his dead cigar, and opened the book on his
knees. “Returning to the original conversation, don’t you find, Anak, that
though Loria handles the bipartition of the revenues with scrupulous care,
he yet omits one important factor, namely—”
“Yes,” I said absently; “yes.”
