The Ape, the Idiot & Other People Part 22

"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 game-c.o.c.k 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 Zoe'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. Zoe 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 Zoe 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 Zoe: 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.

Zoe was innocent, honest, and confiding. Innocence measures the strength of faith. The charm of faith is its absurdity. Zoe 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 bl.u.s.ter 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 Zoe and Sampey were enjoying a very choice meal. Zoe 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 gla.s.s, each marked in the centre with an annular band of color surrounding a centre of clear gla.s.s, the range of colors being great, and the trinkets arranged in pairs according to color. There were also a vial labelled "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 gla.s.s cups, and slipped them, one at a time, over his eyeb.a.l.l.s and under his eyelids, where they fitted snugly. They were artificial eyes which Sampey had had made to cover his natural eyeb.a.l.l.s on occasion. Bat struck a mock-tragic att.i.tude 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 att.i.tude, gave him an appearance so grotesque and hideous that Zoe, 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 Zoe 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 Zoe 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 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 superst.i.tious 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 circ.u.mstance 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 superst.i.tious, 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 to-day 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-shaved 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.