Harle Oren Cummins

“ His illness was short, but long enough to ripen the acquaintance with the Doctor into a warm friendship, resulting in an invitation to the physician to visit the princely estate of Fabriano. In this Umbrian fastness, where his ancestors had exercised sovereign power, Fabriano was regarded as the lord of the soil, by all but a few adherents of a deposed house under the leadership of Luigi di Folengo. One evening, as Hardy went to the Prince’s rooms for their usual smoke and game of cards, he found the Prince sitting by the table, holding a bottle of amber-colored liquid. ”

“ He saw a tall clerical gentleman regarding him intently.
“Jean Lescaut,” began the stranger, stepping close to the prisoner, “I have come here to-day to offer you the only thing on earth which you care for—liberty.”
A quick flush of color dyed the prison pallor of the man in irons, then as quickly faded again.
“I am going to offer this to you,” the doctor continued, “not because I think you innocent of the crime of which you were convicted, not because I have any friendship for you, or because I desire to defeat justice. The proposition I make you is purely in the interest of science. ”

“ Rocking to and fro, Folengo threw himself upon the floor, where he lay writhing and twisting in his death agony. His face turned black, and his eyes started from his head, like those of a strangled man. ”

“ Now what I have to propose to you, Jean Lescaut, is this,—to-morrow at noon you are to go to the electric chair where 1800 volts of electricity will be sent through your body. At eleven o’clock to-morrow I will come to your cell and put you into an hypnotic sleep. You will go to the chair, show all the symptoms and effects of a person electrocuted, and you will apparently be dead. In reality, however, you will only be asleep. ”

“ Then taking the remaining stump, Bosko drew back the skin as if peeling a banana, and buried her teeth in the still quivering flesh.
Most of the spectators turned away at this point and left the platform. Several looked rather white and seemed not to feel particularly well. Others, however, of a stronger constitution, or of lesser sensibilities, stayed on, anxious to see if the show was a “fake,” and if the mouthful would be spit out.
Meanwhile Stetson at the foot of the platform, was shouting, “Go where they all go, see what they all see. ”

“ He forced himself back into the tomb, but his heart fluttered strangely, as he knelt beside the last box. He did not stop to remove the screws, but drove the hammer under the cover, and twisted and wrenched the boards off furiously. The coffin lid withstood his efforts for some time, for the fastenings were strong; but at last they, too, gave way. He reached down for the throat again, dreading lest he should find some new horror. His hand touched a moist face, and the man in the coffin stirred and groaned.
“Lie still, damn you!” he shrieked, and seized the man brutally by the throat. ”

“ I have doctored many men in my time, and I have seen some sights that are not nice to think about; but never have I seen such nameless horror, such uncontrollable fear, as looked at me from the eyes of that man.
He stood there for a minute gibbering and making strange noises like a beast; and then jumping from the bed, he ran to a piece of canvas standing against the wall and covered by a thick drapery. He pulled the cover aside a little way and peeped fearfully behind. Then, in a very paroxysm of terror, he ran shrieking and screaming to the bed. ”

“ Without a moment’s hesitation, Waters reached for his revolver, and leveling it at the moaning figure, fired full at its breast.
The Fool, chuckling to himself behind the sheet, thrust his hand upon his heart, and apparently plucking something from the folds of cloth, he tossed back toward the bed a bullet.
The Man Who Knew Not Fear reached for the heavy little object that he had felt strike the bed-clothes, and his hand touching the bit of lead, he picked it up curiously, then realizing what it was that he held, he sat up stiffly in bed, and tried to raise his arm again. ”

“ As Stetson said, though, the freaks were always complaining about one another, so little attention was paid to the grumbling in the side-show tent.
The management couldn’t afford to offend Bobo, for there was no denying that the wild man was the star attraction. He was doing better work than he ever had done before. He didn’t wait for the manager to come to him to begin acting; but as soon as the crowd appeared, he was growling and tearing away at the bars of his cage. ”

“ When I came to myself I was lying half across the slab of slate, and the room was filled with a sickening stench, an odor of burning flesh. I looked for the writhing form which I had last seen on the table; but those wires, with their deadly current, which I tried to tear away as I fainted, must have been directed back by a Higher Hand, for there remained on the slab only a charred and cinder-like mass.
And the man who had made a man could not explain, for he was crawling about on the floor, counting the nails in the boards and laughing wildly. ”

“ Then a strange thing happened. Into the disordered brain of the man, a short time before racked by fever, there came the thought that he had been chosen by God to be the instrument to punish the iniquity which had come to his knowledge.
He returned to the captain, and demanded a raise of fifteen dollars a month in his pay, claiming he did not know the kind of a job he was undertaking when he had signed. O, he was cunning, this fever stricken assistant engineer. He knew how to allay suspicion.
The raise of pay was granted, for Jenifer Vass did not like the look in the man’s eyes. ”

“ The next day Bosko was too ill to leave his bed, and a week later he died, still fighting his foes, and wailing piteously, “Take ’em away; I can’t eat ’em all. There’s too many of ’em, and they’re too big. There’s hundreds of ’em. Take ’em away, I say. They’re in my hair, they’re choking me.”
The snake-eating attraction had to be discontinued after that, for though Stetson made some very flattering offers to several of the colored cooks, hostlers, and helpers connected with the show, no one seemed to aspire to the position. ”

“ The Prophet was having an argument with the waiter over the payment of his bill. I saw him thrust his hand in his pockets, searching desperately for a coin, but in vain.
Hoping that perhaps I might learn something of the man’s story, I arose, and, sitting down opposite him, I threw out a few coins, telling the waiter to take out the payment of my friend’s bill, and to bring us a bottle of Vie de Anise.
Do you think he was offended? You do not know the action of that insidious poison. Honor, ambition, everything, are but as baubles to the devotee of absinthe. ”

“ The predictions of the sewing-club gossips were more than fulfilled, for La Petite Mabelle ran away one fine day before the year was up, leaving Sloan with a two-months-old baby boy, and a little note of farewell. La Petite Mabelle told him in melodramatic sentences, covering two sheets of note paper, that the attractions of the old life, with its cheap finery and grease paint, were too strong for her. She could never remain in Sioux City, where nobody called on her, Stewart himself seemed ashamed of her, and where there was nothing going on. ”

“ Bradley told me that it took him three years to determine the distances at which the wires had to be placed, and he alone knew the principle on which the whole mechanism depends.
“No one has ever been able to duplicate the diaphragm. It is a curious alloy of copper, zinc, and some other metal; but what that third metal is, no one can determine.”
Churchill had finished his strange story; and now he leaned back in his chair, his face gray and set. Outside the noise of a great city waking to another day’s life could be heard, and somewhere in the house I heard a clock slowly strike five. ”

“ His nerves were completely shattered. He could scarcely sit still for a minute; and his hand shook so, as he raised the glass to his lips, that the green liquor spilled and ran over on to the sawdust floor. At last, as it was nearly time for the place to close, I asked him point-blank to tell me the story of his life.
He looked at me strangely. I do not know, it may have been the drink, but someway he did not look like the man I had sat down with a few hours before. The tired, weary look had completely disappeared, his face was flushed, and his eyes were as bright as a child’s. ”

“ But the wild man never paid any attention to him; and when one day Poole Brothers tried to take him out of his cage by force, [42] one man was killed and Stetson himself seriously injured, so that had to be given up.
All that winter the side show connected with Poole Brothers’ Royal Roman Hippodrome and Three Ring Circus played to packed houses; and probably no one paid any particular attention to a sad-faced Irish woman of middle age who spent most of the time standing in front of the cage of Bobo, the wild man, weeping silently. ”

“ Fate has seemed to be against my getting any of that wine, until to-day. I have tried for years to get one small bottle, but never yet have tasted it. Pantinelli was a rich old banker in Genoa, who owned a vineyard on the sunny slopes of the Riviera di Ponente. He never sold his wine, but presented it to his friends; and as he was a cousin of Luigi di Folengo, of whose hatred for me I have already told you, he, naturally, never included me in his list of beneficiaries. ”

“ The public, however, clamored for a snake-eater. They had heard such blood-curdling reports of the freak which had passed through Vermont and New Hampshire, that many were the complaints made to the management for not bringing out their whole show.
The circus, being, above all things, an institution catering to the public’s wishes, made heroic efforts. Stetson was sent on a special trip to New York, and spent most of the time slumming. ”

“ Murphy was quickly dispatched to the little trap-door in the bottom of the cage, and the smoking immediately ceased.
To be sure, it took more and more whiskey every day to get Bosko “keyed up” to that state when he would consent to go on with the part; but whiskey was cheap, especially the brand furnished by Poole Brothers, so there was no kick from the powers above. They realized that this particular impersonator of Bosko couldn’t last very long—a quart of raw whiskey a day is a terrible strain for any man’s nerves, even a negro’s; so they “indulged” the snake-eater. ”

“ It is my hope, therefore, that the current which would destroy a living man will bring this thing to life.”
We bore that naked body, not a corpse, and yet so terribly like, into the electric laboratory, and laid it on a slab of slate. Just at the base of its brain we scraped a little bare spot not larger than a pea, and, as I live, a drop of blood oozed out. On the right wrist, just over the pulse, we made another abrasion, and to these spots we brought the positive and negative wires from off the mains of the street current outside. ”

“ Captain Van Patten, a West Point graduate, who had done some things worthy of mention, and won the bars on his shoulder straps at San Juan Hill, had just made a statement regarding the courage of a recent great naval commander.
“You may talk about the courage that prompts men to do bold deeds in the bright [154] sunshine, with hundreds of men cheering and fighting beside them, but the man who has the real courage, is the one who, on a dark night like this, dares to walk by himself into a lonely graveyard, and sit on a newly made grave.” ”

“ He was always glad when he came to Bobo, partly because he was the last freak to describe, and partly because the wild man always acted his part so well.
The crowd rushed from in front of the platform [35] on which the Ossified Man had been exhibited.
“Don’t get so near there, boy,” shouted one of the attendants to a venturesome youth; “the wild man is liable to grab you. He killed a man that way last week.”
Stetson began his lurid tale of the fierce struggle which had taken place when the wild man was captured, and the crowd of country people listened open mouthed. ”