Achmed Abdullah

“ At night, when we turn in, we’re going to hog tie you. And during the day, well”—he chuckled disagreeably and patted his rifle—“we got our little persuaders all cocked and primed. We aren’t going to kill you, and I hope it won’t be necessary to cripple you for life. But if ever you attempt to skip we’re going to pump you so full o’ holes that people behind you’ll complain of the draft. I give you fair warning, and I just go you a little bet—let’s say”—with a grandiose gesture—“twenty thousand dollars!”
“What is the bet?” inquired the professor gently. ”

“ There wouldn’t be nothing at all this side of the Divide, if it wasn’t for the number forty-eight chest measures of guys like myself.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” the professor had replied in his carefully punctuated voice, looking, for all his white hair and wrinkled face, like a precocious child. “Of course, civilization needs brawn—to mulch the ground, so to speak.”
“Mulch?” The agricultural allusion had touched Mr. Harrington on the raw. ”

“ We know that it is there, that we can use it when we need it.”
“Who’s we?”
“Men like myself, scientifically educated and trained. To-day brawn is the slave of brain.”
Mr. Harrington had snickered. He had poked a stumpy thumb at the professor’s thin chest. ”

“ He sat down with a sigh of tired satisfaction.
His feet were sore, his shoulders stiff and galled through the rubbing of the knapsack straps, his eyes smarted with the wind that had blown all day; but he was happy and contented. ”

“ Harrington. “All right!”
And, quoting the professor’s words of ten days earlier with more or less fidelity, he said, “I shall put it more simply. You’re going to find out in your own shriveled-up person if it’s us guys with the forty-eight chest measure that are needed by civilization to—what did you allow civilization needs us for?” ”

“ He took the professor by the neck, shook him, then sent him sprawling into the thick undergrowth that surrounded the camp. “Get out and keep away!” he shouted. “We don’t want anything to do with people who cheat at cards!”
He picked up his rifle.
The professor ran down the trail toward the Elk River as fast as his thin legs would let him.
Six days afterward, a telegram dated from Boston was delivered into the hands of Mr. Harrington at the Seattle Civic Club. It read as follows:
Kindly deposit bet wagered to my account Boston National Bank. Take off amount of last pot. ⁠Giddens. ”

“ That such a fellow doesn’t need anything else. Got my goat good and plenty, he did.”
“Mine, too!” from Mr. Harrington.
“And mine!” Clyde Humphreys commented. “Well—let’s forget him. He’s off to Harvard end of the week. I was at the C.P.R. office when he got his ticket.”
“Why don’t he take the U.P.?” demanded Mr. Harrington to whom, by this time, the professor’s most harmless action was suspicious. “Roundabout way of going to Boston—over the C.P.”
“He’s going to break his journey at Nelson and go up the Elk River for a week or two. Just to get a bit of mountain air, he says.”
“Up the Elk?” Mr. ”

“ And be it said, in justice to Mr. Harrington, that he laughed and paid—and telephoned to the nearest bookstore for whatever tomes on applied psychology by Professor Herschel W. Giddens they kept in stock. ”