Tales from Bohemia Part 24

"I haven't time to talk to you now, Pop. Besides, I've made up my mind not to go into the gold business. You see, I'm rich enough already. Good day."

Thereafter Pop lay in wait for Mr. Monroe daily, but the superintendent always avoided him. Pop neglected to earn his living and spent his time going about town with his basket of clods in search of the superintendent. Finally being openly ignored by Mr. Monroe when the two met face to face, Pop became angry and took his secret to a jeweller on Main Street. The jeweller laughed and told Pop that the gold in the basket must be worth at least a thousand dollars, but he was not in a position to buy crude gold. Then the jeweller made known to many that Pop Thornberry was crazy over some lumps of mud and mica that he mistook for gold.

After that, people would stop Pop on the street and say:

"Let's see a piece of the gold in your basket."

Pop, astonished that his secret was out, but somewhat proud at being thought the possessor of a treasure, would hesitate and then comply.

The small boys soon recognized in Pop's delusion a new means of fun.

Observing the solicitude with which he watched his clod while out of his own hands, they would innocently ask for a glimpse into his basket. This granted, they would grasp a piece of his treasure and run away, greatly annoying the old man, who was in a state of keen distress until he recovered the abstracted clod. These affairs between Pop and the boys were of hourly recurrence. They diverted barroom loungers and pa.s.sers-by.

Pop called on one local capitalist after another, seeking one who would buy his gold or aid into preparing it for the market. All laughed at his delusion, deeming it harmless, and all gave him good reason for not accepting his offer of business partnership. So he went from the bank president to the baker, from the member of congress for whom he had voted to the barber, from the hotel proprietor to the bartender. The negroes of the town, feeling that their race was humiliated in Pop, began to hold aloof from him. No serious-minded person who learned of his delusion gave it a second thought.

"Say Pop, where do you get this gold, anyhow?" asked a tobacco-chewing gamin at the railroad station one day.

"Dat's my business," replied Thornberry, with some dignity.

"Oh," said his questioner, "I know. Tobe McStenger followed you out the other day and saw where you got it. He'd a brung some in hisself, but it wasn't on his property."

"Yes, Pop, you better look out," put in a telegraph operator, "or you'll be taken up for trespa.s.sing. 'Tisn't your land, you know, where you find your gold."

There was no truth in the a.s.sertion of the gamin. No one had taken the trouble to follow Pop in his semiweekly excursions to the barren field.

But the old man knew that the field was not his. A ludicrous expression of overwhelming fright came over his face.

Three days afterward, the farmer who owned the worthless field was astonished when Pop offered to buy it.

"But what on earth do you want that land fer?" asked the farmer, sitting on his barnyard fence.

Pop made a guilty attempt to appear guileless, and told the farmer that he wished to build a shanty and raise potatoes. He was tired of living in town and sought the quietude of the hills.

"Bein' as dat ere fiel' ain't good foh much, I thought you might be willin' to paht with it," explained Pop.

The farmer eventually agreed to build a shanty on the field and sell it to Pop for $180. Pop desired immediate occupancy. There was a legal hitch, owing to the badness of the land and the questionable condition of Pop's mind. But the transfer of the property was finally recorded.

Pop no longer had to fear arrest for trespa.s.s. His gold field was now legally his. But he was still kept uneasy by his inability to make his gold marketable. His uneasiness increased as September approached. He had applied to the purchase of the field the sum saved to cancel the mortgage upon his house at the rear end of the town.

The three days before the foreclosure of the mortgage were days of exquisite anguish to Pop. When the foreclosure came and he and his goods were turned out on the banks of the creek to make room for the mill-owner's improvements, his mental turmoil ended. He took the crisis calmly.

"Jes' wait," he said to a neighbour who had stopped at sight of the moving-out. "Wait till I get dat ere goal on de mahket. I'll bull' a mill dat'll drive dis yer mill out o' d' business. Den I'll done buy back dis yer ol' home."

But the next day, when the unexpected happened,--when builders began to tear down his house,--the enormity of his deed dawned upon him. After a day of moaning and staring, as he sat amidst his household goods on the bank of the creek, he became animated by a deep rage against the mill-owner. Now more than ever had he a special purpose for enriching himself by means of his treasure across the hill.

The coming of two circuses in succession had taken the interest of the boys away from Pop during August and part of September. Now they turned again to him for amus.e.m.e.nt. First they besieged the abandoned stable to which he had conveyed his goods, and in which he slept,--for he had not found will to betake himself from the town he had so long inhabited, and his shanty in the field remained unoccupied. His purchase of the land had betrayed to general knowledge the location of his treasure, of which he continued to bring in new specimens.

One October day he had just come from vainly attempting to induce the postmaster to join him in the enterprise of exploiting his gold-field.

In front of the post-office, he was met by some boys coming noisily from school. They surrounded him and demanded to see the gold in his basket.

As the town policeman was sauntering up the street, Pop felt safe in refusing. The boys, also observing the officer of the law, contented themselves with retaliating in words only,

"Say, Pop," cried one of them, "you'd better keep an eye on your gold-field. Nick Hennessey knows where it is, and he's gittin' up a diggin' party to take a wagon out some night and bring away all your gold."

The boys, laughing at this quickly invented announcement, ran off after a hand-organ. The old man stood perfectly still, or as nearly so as the feebleness of his legs would permit.

That evening Pop was missing from the town. And when Abraham Wesley, who had often lent his shotgun to the old man, went to look for that weapon, intending to shoot gla.s.s b.a.l.l.s in the fairgrounds across the river, the fowling-piece too was missing.

Pop had gone out to protect his possession. Three nights pa.s.sed and three days. The few country folk and others who travelled that way during this time saw the old man walking about in his field or sitting in front of his shanty, his shotgun on his shoulders, his eyes fixed suspiciously on all who might become intruders. Night and day he patrolled his little domain.

At dusk of the third day a lively party was returning to the town in a wagon from a search for nuts. The full moon was rising and the merrymakers were singing. One of the girls was thirsty. When she saw the shanty in the rugged field, she asked a young man to get her a gla.s.s of water at the hut. The wagon stopped and the youth climbed astride the rail fence. Suddenly an unnaturally shrill and excited voice was heard:

"Hyah, you, doan' come no farder! Dese yer's my premises!"

From behind the empty shanty appeared the thin old negro, bareheaded, his shotgun at his shoulder, a striking figure against the rising moon.

The young man descended from the fence into the field. There came a flash and a crack from Pop Thornberry's gun. The youth felt the sting of a piece of birdshot in his leg. Howling and limping, he turned quickly over the fence into the wagon, which made a hasty flight.

The next morning some idlers went out from the town to the scene of the adventure. They found the old man lying hatless in the middle of the field, face downwards, upon the shotgun. He had died of sheer exhaustion, on guard--and on his own land, as befit an honest citizen who had never intruded upon the peace of other men.

XXI. -- AT THE STAGE DOOR

[Footnote: Courtesy of _Lippincott's Magazine_.Copyright, 1892, by J. B.

Lippincott Company.]

First let me explain how I came to be sitting in so unsavoury a place as Gorson's "fifteen cent oyster and chop house" that night. Most newspaper men--the rank and file--receive remuneration by the week. Those not given over to domesticity, those who enjoy that alluring regularity identical with liberty, fare sumptuously, as a rule, on "pay-day."

Thereafter the quant.i.ty and quality of the good things of life that they enjoy diminish daily until the next pay-day.

Pay-day with us was Friday. This was Thursday night. I having gone to unusual lengths of good cheer in the early part of that week, had now fallen low, and was duly thankful for what I could get--even at Gorson's.

As my glance wandered over my table, over the beer-bottles and the oysters, beyond the crowd of ravenous and vulgar eaters and hurrying waiters, to the street door, some one opened that door from the outside and entered. An odd looking personage this some one.

A person very tall and conspicuously thin. These peculiarities were accentuated by the dilapidated frock coat that reached to his knees, and thus concealed the greater portion of his gray summer trousers, which "bagged" exceedingly and were picturesquely frayed at the bottom edges, as I could see when he came nearer to me. He wore a faded straw hat, which looked forlorn, as the month was January. His face, despite its angularity of outline and its wanness, had that expression of complacency which often relieves from pathos the countenances of harmlessly demented people. His hair was gray, but his somewhat formidable looking moustache was still dark. He carried an unadorned walking-stick and under his left arm was what a journalistic eye immediately recognized as ma.n.u.script. From the man's aspect of extreme poverty, I deduced that his ma.n.u.scripts were never accepted.

As he pa.s.sed the cashier's desk, he stopped, lowered his body, not by stooping in the usual way, but by bending his knees, and with a quick sweep of his eyes by way of informing himself whether or not he was observed, he picked up a cigar stump that some one had dropped there.

Then he walked with a rather shambling but self-important gait to the table next mine, carefully placed his ma.n.u.script upon a chair, and sat down upon it. He was soon lost in a prolonged contemplation of the limited bill of fare posted on the wall, a study which resulted in his ordering, through a hustling, pugnacious-looking waiter, a bowl of oatmeal.

A bowl of oatmeal is the least expensive item on the bill of fare at Gorson's. When I hear a man ordering oatmeal in a cheap eating-house, my heart aches for him. I had just the money and the intention to procure another bottle of beer and another box of cigarettes. The sum required to obtain these necessaries of life is exactly the price of a bowl of oatmeal and a steak at Gorson's. So I hastily arose to go, and on my way out I had a brief conversation with the bellicose-appearing waiter, which resulted in my unknown friend's being overwhelmed with amazement later when the waiter brought him a warm steak with his oatmeal and said that some one else had already paid his bill. I did not wait to witness this result, for the man looked one of the sort to put forth a show of indignation at being made an object of charity.

An hour later I saw him walking with an air of consequence up Broadway, smoking what was probably the bit of cigar he had picked up in the restaurant. He still carried his ma.n.u.script, which was wrapped in a soiled blue paper. As I was hurrying up-town on an a.s.signment for the newspaper, I could not observe his movements further than to see that when he reached Fourteenth Street he made for one of the benches in Union Square.

It was by the size, shape, and blue cover that I recognized that ma.n.u.script two days later upon the desk of the editor of the Sunday supplementary pages of the paper, as I was submitting to that personage a "special" I had written upon the fertile theme, "Producing a Burlesque."

"May I ask what that stuff is wrapped in blue?"

"Certainly. A crank in the last stages of alcoholism and mental depression brought it in yesterday. It's an idiotic jumble about Beautiful Women of History, part in prose and part in doggerel."