Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man Part 11

At the large bare office in the mill he was easy of access, and would listen to what you had to say with flattering attention and sympathy.

But it was in his private office over the bank that this large spider really spun the web of our politics. Mills, banks, churches, schools, lights, railroads, stores, heating, water-power--all these juicy flies apparently walked into his parlor of their own accord. He had made and unmade governors; he had sent his men to Washington. How? We suspected; but held our peace. If our Bible had bidden us Americans to suffer rascals gladly--instead of mere fools--we couldn't be more obedient to a mandate.

Men like James Eustis and Judge Mayne despised Inglesby--but gave him a wide berth. They wouldn't be enmeshed. It was known that Major Appleby Cartwright had blackballed him.

"I can stand a man, suh, that likes to get along in this world--within proper bounds. But Inglesby hasn't got any proper bounds. He's a--a cross between a Republican mule and a party-bolting boa-constrictor, an' a hybrid like that hasn't got any place in nature. On top of that he drinks ten cents a bottle grape juice and smokes five cent cigars.

And he's got the brazen and offensive effrontery to offer 'em to self-respectin' men!"

And here was Laurence, our little Laurence, training himself to overthrow this overgrown Goliath! Well, if the boy could not bring this Philistine to the earth, he might yet manage to give him a few manful clumps on the head; perhaps enough to insure a chronic headache.

So thinking, I went in and watched John Flint finish a mounting-block from a plan in the book open upon the table, adding, however, certain improvements of his own.

He laid the block aside and then took a spray of fresh leaves and fed it to a horned and hungry caterpillar prowling on a bit of bare stem at the bottom of his cage.

"Get up there on those leaves, you horn-tailed horror! Move on,--you lepidopterous son of a wigglejoint, or I'll pull your real name on you in a minute and paralyze you stiff!" He drew a long breath. "You know how I'm beginning to remember their real names? I swear 'em half an hour a day. Next time you have trouble with those hickeys of yours, try swearing caterpillar at 'em, and you'll find out."

I laughed, and he grinned with me.

"Say," said he, abruptly. "I've been listening with both my ears to what that boy was talking to you about awhile ago. Thinks he can buck the Boss, does he?"

"Perhaps he may," I admitted.

"Nifty old bird, the Big Un," said Mr. Flint, squinting his eyes.

"And," he went on, reflectively, "he's sure got your number in this burg. Take you by and large, you lawabiders are a real funny sort, ain't you? Now, there's Inglesby, handing out the little kids their diplomas come school-closing, and telling 'em to be real good, and maybe when they grow up he'll have a job in pickle for 'em--work like a mule in a treadmill, twelve hours, no unions, _and_ the coroner to sit on the remains, free and gratis, for to ease the widow's mind.

Inglesby's got seats in all your churches--first-aid to the parson's pants-pockets.

"Inglesby's right there on the platform at all your spiel-fests, smirking at the women and telling 'em not to bother their nice little noddles about anything but holding down their natural jobs of being perfect ladies--ain't he and other gents just like him always right there holding down _their_ natural jobs of protecting 'em and being influenced to do what's right? Sure he is! And n.o.body howls for the hook! You let him be It--him with a fist in the state's jeans up to the armpit!

"Look here, that Mayne kid's dead right. It's you good guys that are to blame. We little bad ones see you kowtowing to the big worse ones, and we get to thinking _we_ can come in under the wires easy winners, too. However, let me tell you something while I'm in the humor to gas.

It's this: _sooner or later everybody gets theirs_. My sort and Inglesby's sort, we all get ours. Duck and twist and turn and sidestep all we want, at the end it's right there waiting for us, with a loaded billy up its sleeve: _Ours!_ Some fine day when we're looking the other way, thinking we've even got it on the annual turnout of the cops up Broadway for cla.s.s, why, Ours gets up easy on its hind legs, spits on its mitt, and hands us exactly what's coming to us, biff! and we wake up sitting on our necks in the middle of day-before-yesterday and year-after-next. I got mine. If I was you I wouldn't be too c.o.c.k-sure that kid don't give Inglesby his, some of these days, good and plenty."

"Maybe so," said I, cautiously.

"Gee, that'd be fly-time for all the good guys in this tank, wouldn't it?" he grinned. "Sure! I can see 'em now, patting the b.u.mp on their beams where they think the brain-patch sprouts, and handing out hunks of con to the Lord about his being right on his old-time job of swatting sinners in their dinners. Yet they'll all of them go right on leading themselves up to be trimmed by the very next holdup that's got the nerve to do them! Friend, believe a goat when he tells you that you stillwater-and-greenpasture sheep are some bag of nuts!"

"Thank you," said I, with due meekness.

"Keep the change," said he, unabashed. "I wasn't meaning _you_, anyhow. I've got more manners, I hope, than to do such. And, parson, you don't need to have cold feet about young Mayne. If you ask me, _I'd_ bet the limit on him. Why, I think so much of that boy that if he was a rooster I'd put the gaffs and my last dollar on him, and back him to whip everything in feathers clean up to baldheaded eagles.

Believe me, he'd do it!" he finished, with enthusiasm.

Bewildered by a mental picture of a Laurence with ruffled neck-feathers and steel spurs, I hurriedly changed the subject to the saner and safer one of our own immediate affairs.

"Yep, ten orders in to-day's mail and seven in yesterday's; and good orders for the wasp-moths, single or together, and that house in New York wants steady supplies from now on. And here's a fancy shop wants a dozen trays, like that last one I finished. We're looking up," said he, complacently.

The winter that followed was a trying one, and the Guest Rooms were never empty. I like to record that John Flint put his shoulder to the wheel and became Madame's right hand man and Westmoreland's faithful ally. His wooden leg made astonishingly little noise, and his entrance into a room never startled the most nervous patient. He went on innumerable errands, and he performed countless small services that in themselves do not seem to amount to much, but swell into a great total.

"He may have only one leg," said Westmoreland, when Flint had helped him all of one night with a desperately ill millworker, "but he certainly has two hands; he knows how to use his ears and eyes, he's dumb until he ought to speak, and then he speaks to the point. Father, Something knew what It was about when you and I were allowed to drag that tramp out of the teeth of death! Yes, yes, I'm certainly glad and grateful we were allowed to save John Flint."

From that time forth the big man gave his ex-patient a liking which grew with his years. Absent-minded as he was, he could thereafter always remember to find such things as he thought might interest him.

Appleboro laughs yet about the day Dr. Westmoreland got some small b.u.t.terflies for his friend, and having nowhere else to put them, clapped them under his hat, and then forgot all about them; until he lifted his hat to some ladies and the swarm of insects flew out.

Without being asked, and as unostentatiously as he did everything else, Flint had taken his place in church every Sunday.

"Because it'd sort of give you a black eye if I didn't," he explained.

"Skypiloting's your lay, father, and I'll see you through with it as far as I can. I couldn't fall down on any man that's been as white to me as you've been."

I must confess that his conception of religion was very, very hazy, and his notions of church services and customs barbarous. For instance, he disliked the statues of the saints exceedingly. They worried him.

"I can't seem to stand a man dolled-up in skirts," he confessed. "Any more than I'd be stuck on a dame with whiskers. It don't somehow look right to me. Put the he-saints in pants instead of those brown kimonas with gold crocheting and a rope sash, and I'd have more respect for 'em."

When I tried to give him some necessary instructions, and to penetrate the heathen darkness in which he seemed immersed, he listened with the utmost respect and attention--and wrinkled his brow painfully, and blinked, and licked his lips.

"That's all right, father, that's all right. If you say it's so, I guess it's so. I'll take your word for it. If it's good enough for you and Madame, there's got to be something in it, and it's sure good enough for me. Look here: the little girl and young Mayne have got a different brand from yours, haven't they?"

"Neither of them is of the Old Faith."

"Huh! Well, I tell you what you do: you just switch me in somewhere between you and Madame and him and her. That'll give me a line on all of you--and maybe it'll give all of you a line on me. See?"

I saw, but as through a gla.s.s darkly. So the matter rested. And I must in all humility set down that I have never yet been able to get at what John Flint really believes he believes.

CHAPTER VII

THE GOING OF SLIPPY MCGEE

Little by little, so quietly as to be unnoticeable in the working, but with, c.u.mulative effect; built under the surface like those coral reefs that finally rear themselves into palm-crowned peaks upon the Pacific, during the years' slow upward march had John Flint grown.

Nature had never meant him for a criminal. The evil conditions that society saddles upon the slums had set him wrong because they gave him no opportunity to be right. Now even among b.u.t.terflies there are occasional aberrants, but they are the rare exceptions. Give the grub his natural food, his chance to grow, protect him from parasites in the meanwhile, and he will presently become the normal b.u.t.terfly. That is the Law.

At a crucial phase in this man's career his true talisman--a gray moth--had been put into his hand; and thereby he came into his rightful heritage.

I count as one of my red-letter days that on which I found him brooding over the little gray-brown chrysalis of the Papilio Cresphontes, that splendid swallowtail whose hideous caterpillar we in the South call the orange puppy, from the fancied resemblance the hump upon it bears to the head of a young dog. Its chrysalis looks so much like a bit of snapped-off twig that the casual eye misses it, fastened to a stem by a girdle of silk or lying among fallen leaves.

"I watched it ooze out of an egg like a speck of dirty water. I watched it eat a thousand times its own weight and grow into the nastiest wretch that crawls. I saw it stop eating and spit its stomach out and shrivel up, and crawl out of its skin and pull its own head off, and bury itself alive in a coffin made out of itself, a coffin like a bit of rotting wood. Look at it! There it lies, stone-dead for all a man's eyes can see!

"And yet this thing will answer a call no ears can hear and crawl out of its coffin something entirely different from what went into it!

I've seen it with my own eyes, but how it's done I don't know; no, nor no man since the world was made knows, or could do it himself. What does it? What gives that call these dead-alive things hear in the dark? What makes a crawling ugliness get itself ready for what's coming--how does it _know_ there's ever going to be a call, or that it'll hear it without fail?"

"Some of us call it Nature: but others call it G.o.d," said I.

"Search me! I don't know what It is--but I do know there's got to be Something behind these things, anyhow," said he, and turned the chrysalis over and over in his palm, staring down at it thoughtfully.

He had used Westmoreland's words, once applied to his own case! "Oh, yes, there's Something, because I've watched It working with grubs, getting 'em ready for five-inch moths and hand-colored b.u.t.terflies, Something that's got the time and the patience and the know-how to build wings as well as worlds." He laid the little inanimate mystery aside.

"It's come to the point, parson, where I've just _got_ to know more. I know enough now to know how much I don't know, because I've got a peep at how much there is to know. There's a G.o.d's plenty to find out, and it's up to me to go out and find it."