Son of Power Part 1

Son of Power.

by Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost.

CHAPTER I

_The Good Grey Nerve_

His name was Sanford Hantee, but you will hear that only occasionally, for the boys of the back streets called him Skag, which "got" him somewhere at once. That was in Chicago. He was eleven years old, when he wandered quite alone to Lincoln Park Zoo, and the madness took him.

A silent madness. It flooded over him like a river. If any one had noticed, it would have appeared that Skag's eyes changed. Always he quite contained himself, but his lips stirred to speech even less after that. He didn't pretend to go to school the next day; in fact, the spell wasn't broken until nearly a week afterward, when the keeper of the Monkey House pointed Skag out to a policeman, saying the boy had been on the grounds the full seven open hours for four straight days that he knew of.

Skag wasn't a liar. He had never "skipped" school before, but the Zoo had him utterly. He was powerless against himself. Some bigger force, represented by a truant officer, was necessary to keep him away from those cages. His father got down to business and gave him a beating--much against that good man's heart. (Skag's father was a Northern European who kept a fruit-store down on Waspen street--a mildly-flavoured man and rotund. His mother was a Mediterranean woman, who loved and clung.)

But Skag went back to the Zoo. For three days more he went, remained from opening to closing time. He seemed to fall into deep absorptions--before tigers and monkeys especially. He didn't hear what went on around him. He did not appear to miss his lunch. You had to touch his shoulder to get his attention. The truant officer did this.

It all led dismally to the Reform School from which Skag ran away.

He was gone three weeks and wouldn't have come back then, except his heart hurt about his mother. He felt the truth--that she was slowly dying without him. After that for awhile he kept away from the animals, because his mother loved and clung and cried, when he grew silently cold with revolt against a life not at all for him, or hot with hatred against the Reform School. Those were ragged months in which a less rubbery spirit might have been maimed, but the mother died before that actually happened. Skag was free--free the same night.

The father's real relation to him had ended with the beating. It was too bad, for there might have been a decent memory to build on. The fruit-dealer, however, had been badly frightened by the truant-officer (in the uniform of a patrolman), and he was just civilised enough to be a little ashamed that his boy could so far forget the world and all refined and mild-flavoured things, as to stare through bars at animals for seven hours a day. In the process of that beating, h.e.l.l had opened for Skag. It was a.s.sociated with the raw smell of blood and a thin red steam, a little hotter than blood-heat. It always came when he remembered his father. . . . But his mother meant lilacs. The top drawer of her dresser had been faintly magic of her. The smell came when he remembered her. It was like the first rains in the Lake Country.

But that was all put back. Skag was out in the world now, making it exactly to suit himself. He was in charge of himself in many ways. A gla.s.s of water and a sandwich would do for a long time, if necessary. . . . The West pulled him. Awhile in the mountains, he lived with a prospector; there was a period in the desert when he came to know lizards; then there were years of the circus, when he was out with the Cloud Brothers, animal men of the commercial type. Ten queer, hard years for the boy--as hard almost as for the animals.

Back in Chicago the caged creatures had been kept better--as well as beasts belonging to the outdoors could be imprisoned, but the Cloud Brothers didn't have fine senses like their charges. They tried to make wild animals live in a place ventilated for men. There was a bad death-percentage and none of the big cats were in show form, until the Clouds began to take Skag's word for the main thing wrong. It wasn't the hard life, nor the coops, nor the travel, but the steady day in and day out lack of fresh air. Skag knew what the animals suffered, because it all but murdered him on hot nights. Of course, there are tainted-flesh things like hyenas that live best on foul air, foul everything, but "white" animals of jungle and forest are high and cleanly beasts. When well and in their prime, even their coats are incapable of most kinds of dirt, because of a natural oily gloss.

At nineteen, Skag was in charge of the packing, moving and feeding of all the big cats, including pumas, panthers, leopards. He was in and out of the cages possibly more than was necessary. He learned that there are two ways to manage a wild animal--the "rough-neck" way with a club, and the fancy way with your own equilibrium; all of which comes in more to the point later.

He was interested at the time, but not really acquainted with the camels and elephants. He often chatted with Prussak, the Arab, who loathed camels to the shallow depths of his soul, but got as much out of them as most men could. Skag dreamed of a better way still, even with camels. Often on train-trips, at first, he talked with old Alec Binz, whose characteristic task was to chain and unchain the hind leg of the old "gunmetal" elephant, Phedra, who bossed her sire and the little Cloud herd, as much with the flap of an ear as anything else. . . .

No, old Alec must not be forgotten, nor his sandalwood chest with its little rose-jar in the corner, making everything smell so strangely sweet that it hurt. A girl of India had given Alec the jar twenty years before. The spirit of a real rose-jar never dies; and something of the girl's spirit was around it, too, as Alec talked softly. All this was unreservedly good to Skag--thrilling as certain few books and the top drawer that had been his mother's. . . . But something way back of that, utterly his own deep heart-business, was connected with the rose-jar. It was breathless like opening a telegram--its first scent after days or weeks. If you find any meaning to the way Skag expressed it, you are welcome:

"It makes you think of things you don't know--"

"But you will," Alec had once answered.

The more you knew, the more you favoured that old man of the circus company,--little gold ring in his ear and such tales of India!

It was Alec who led Skag into the fancy way of dealing with animals, but of course the boy was peculiar, inasmuch as he believed it all at once. Skag never ceased to think of it until it was his; he actually put it into practice. Alec might have told a dozen American trainers and have gotten no more than a yawp for his pains. This is one of the things Alec said:

"If you can get on top of the menagerie in your own insides, Skagee--the tigers and apes, the serpents and monkeys, in your own insides--you'll never get in bad with the Cloud Brothers wild animal show."

There wasn't a day or night for years that Skag didn't think of that saying. It was his secret theme. So far as he could see, it worked out. Of course, he found out many things for himself--one of which was that there is a smell about a man who is afraid, that the animals get it and become afraid, too. Alec agreed to this, but added that there is a smell about most men, when they are not afraid.

For hours they talked together about India--tiger hunts and the big Gra.s.s Jungle country in the Bund el Khand, until Skag couldn't wait any longer. He had to go to India. He told Alec, who wanted to go along, but couldn't leave old Phedra.

"I've been with her too long," he said. "She's delicate, Skagee. I'm young, but she couldn't stand it for me to go. Times are hard for her on the road, and the little herd needs her as she needs me. . . ."

Skag understood that. In fact, he loved it well. It belonged to his world--to be straight with the animals. Gradually as the distance increased between them, the memory of old Alec began to smell as sweet as the sandal-wood chest in Skag's nostrils--the chest and the rose-jar that never could die and the old friend became one ident.i.ty. . . .

India didn't excite Skag, who was twenty-five by this time. In fact, some aspects of India were more natural to him than his own country.

Many people did a lot of walking and they lived while they walked, instead of pushing forward in a tension to get somewhere. Skag approved emphatically of the Now. The present moving point was the best he had at any given time. He thought a man should forget himself in the Now like the animals.

Besides they didn't regulate dress in India; in fact, they dressed in so many different ways that a man could wear what he pleased without being stared at. Skag hated to be stared at above all things. You are beginning to get a picture of him now--un.o.btrusive, silent, strong in understanding, swift, actually in pain as the point of many eyes, altogether interested in his own unheard-of things.

Alec told him how to reach the jungle of all jungles, ever old, ever new, ever innocent on the outside, ever deadly within--the Gra.s.s Jungle country around Hattah and Bigawar--the Bund el Khand. The Cloud Brothers had paid him well for his years; there was still script in his clothes for travel, but Skag had a queer relation to money, only using it when the law required. Not a tight-wad, far from that, though he preferred to work for a meal than pay for it; much preferred to walk or ride than to purchase other people's energy, having much of his own.

He came at last to a village called b.u.t.thighur, near Makrai, north of the Mahadeo Mountains in the Central Provinces. On the first day, on the main road near the rest-house, there pa.s.sed him on the street, a slim, slightly-stooped and spectacled young white man. The face under the huge cork helmet, Skag looked at twice, not knowing why altogether; then he followed leisurely to a bungalow, walked up the path to the steps and knocked. The stranger himself answered, before the servant could come. He looked Skag over, through spectacles that made his eyes appear insane, at times, and sometimes merely absurd. Finally he questioned with soft cheer:

"And what sort of a highbinder are you?"

Skag answered that he was an American, acquainted with wild animals in captivity, and that he had come to this place to know wild animals in the open.

"But why to me?" the white man asked.

"It seemed well. I have looked into many faces without asking anyone.

There is no chance of working for the native people here. They are too many, and too poor."

"You do not talk like an American--"

"I do not like to talk."

The white man was puzzled by Skag's careful and exact statements and remarked presently:

"An American asking for work would say that he knew about everything, instead of just animals in captivity."

"I have not asked for work before. I can do without it. I like it here near the forests."

"You mean the jungles--"

"I thought jungles were wet."

"In the wet season."

"Thank you--"

The slim one suddenly laughed aloud though not off-key:

"But I haven't any wild animals in captivity for you--"

Skag did not mind the mirth. He appreciated the smell of the house.

It was like a hot earthen tea-pot that had been well-used.

"I will come again?" he asked tentatively.

"Just do that--at the rest-house. I drop in there after dinner--about nine."

That afternoon Skag went into the edge of the jungle. It was a breath of promised land to him. He was almost frightened with the joy of it--the deep leaf-etched shadows, the separate, almost reverent bird-notes; all s.p.a.ciousness and age and dignity; leaves strange, dry paths, scents new to his nostrils, but having to do with joys and fears and restlessness his brain didn't know. Skag was glad deep. He took off his boots and then strode in deeper and deeper past the maze of paths. He stayed there until the yellow light was out of the sky. At the clearing again, he laughed--looked down at the turf and laughed.

He had come out to the paths again at the exact point of his entry.