H. C. Bunner

“ Spaulding nodded grimly.
“Well, all I’ve got to say, Samantha,” remarked Reuben Pett, as he straightened himself up and started out to bring their chariot to the door; “all I’ve got to say, and all I want to say, is that she must be a mighty fine figure of a woman, and that you’re busting her seams.”
Down the old dusty road the old calash jiggled and juggled, “weaving” most of the way in easy tacks down the sharp declivities. ”

“ Samantha Spaulding executed with lightning rapidity and with the precision of perfect and confident knowledge, a dancing-step which for scientific complexity and daring originality had been twenty years before the surprise, the delight, the tingling, shocking, tempting nine-days’-wonder of the country-side.
“Whee-ee-ee, ee-ee, ee ee, ee ee ee, whee, ee, ee ee, ee ee!” Reuben Pett’s whistle died away from sheer lack of breath as Samantha came to the end of her dance.
* * *
There is nothing that hath a more heavy and leaden cold than a chilled enthusiasm. ”

“ So heartily did the whole population throw itself into the work of preparing to receive the distinguished visitor, that everything had been in readiness a full hour, when, in the early afternoon, the fishing-smack finally made her landing. During this long hour, the whole town watched the struggles of the little boat with the baffling wind and waves. Everybody was in a state of delighted expectancy. An Emperor’s Envoy does not call on one every day, and his coming offered an excuse for merry-making such as the prosperous and easy-going people of Ausserland were only too willing to seize. ”

“ Doctor, I have often thought what a hard life those poor devils on the mainland must have with their impassable mountains, and their railroads that kill and mangle you if they get a millionth part of a cube root out of the way, and the boundary-lines they are everlastingly quarreling about. Why, here in Ausserland, see how simple it all is! We never have any trouble about our boundary-lines. ”

“ Early one Midsummer morning a strange fishing-smack was sighted from the Ausserland wharves far out at sea, beating up against an obstinate wind, and coming from the direction of the mainland. This in itself was enough to cause general comment and to stir the whole village with a thrill of interest; for strange vessels rarely came that way, except under stress of storm ”

“ If you asked her to take a piece of pie, it was not enough for her to want the pie, and to tell you so, and to take the pie; she had to act out the whole dramatic business of the situation—her passion for pie, her eager craving and anxious expectation, her incredulous delight when she actually got the pie, and her tender, brooding thankfulness and gratitude when she had got outside of the pie, and put it where it couldn’t be taken away from her. No; there wasn’t the least bit of humbug in it all. She did want the pie; but she wanted to act, too.{113} ”

“ How much of an expert in human nature are you? If I tell you that Mr. Silo insisted on having every first impression of an edition of the Echo sent to his house by special messenger the instant it was printed, whether he was at home or not, and that he did this just to make Meecham feel the bitterness of the servitude of debt, what do you deduce or infer from that? That somebody else was tyrannizing over Silo? Quite right! Mrs. Silo was a woman who opened all of her husband’s letters—that came to the house. And she looked at Silo’s paper before he saw it himself. ”

“ This, gentlemen, this—and no tale of a prowling stranger—this, gentlemen, is the truth; and I will appeal to the prisoner, himself, gentlemen, to bear me out. Jim Adsum, you can lie to this Judge and you can lie to this Jury; you can lie to your neighbors and you can lie to your own conscience; but you can’t lie to old man Cutwater, and you know it. ”

“ All the other old ladies said that Mrs. Fortescue was a daughter of Belial, a play actress, and no old lady, anyway. I know nothing about her ancestry—and I don’t believe that she did, either; but as to the other two counts in the indictment I am afraid I must plead guilty for Mrs. Fortescue. An actress she was, to the tips of her fingers, an unconscious, involuntary, dyed-in-the-wool actress. She acted because she could not help it, not from any wish to deceive or mislead, but just because it came as natural to her as breathing. ”

“ Most hopelessly shabby men cling to some standard of taste in dress that was the standard in their last-remembered days of prosperity. That coat—if it were one coat and not only one of a long-lived family—marked the fact that the last season of prosperity Mr. Egg had enjoyed was a season, now some twenty years gone, when the London “swells” or “nobs,” or whatever they called them then, wore frock-coats of certain fashionable light shades of fawn and mouse-color, then known, I believe, as “London Smoke” and “French Gray.” ”

“ And Canada Pete led the way through the underbrush to a bit of a clearing near his house, where were accumulated many years’ deposits of household rubbish; and here, in a desert of tin-cans and broken bottles and crockery, stood the oldest of all old calashes.
There are calashes and calashes, but the calash or calèche of Canada is practically of one type. It is a high-hung, tilting chaise, with a commodious back seat and a capacious hood, and with an absurd, narrow, cushioned bar in front for the driver to sit on. ”

“ Filley had bought a thousand-mile ticket, and that they would have to hunt up the conductors who took up her coupons on the next division of the road, if they wanted to find out. (A thousand-mile ticket, gentle reader, is a delightful device by means of which you can buy a lot of travel in one big chunk, and work it out in little bits whenever you want to. Next to a sure and certain consciousness of salvation, it gives its possessor more of a feeling of pride and independence than anything else this life has to offer.) ”

“ He found Angelica Wick all that his fancy might have painted her but hadn’t; and, as Mr. Thatcher had six daughters of his own, all of them older than Angelica, and none so good-looking, he did not find any difficulty in inducing his pretty cousin to marry him—and she did not back out even when he sprung the baby contract on her. She said that she was a true woman and that she would stand by him, but that she thought it might be a little awkward. Feminine intuition is a wonderful thing. When it is right, it is apt to be right. ”

“ To mention the town of Los Brazos to any capitalist in the land was to call up the name of Billington, the brilliant speculator who, ruined on the Boston stock-market, went to Texas and absolutely created a town which for wealth, beauty and social distinction had not its equal in the great South-West. It was colonized with college graduates from New York, Boston and Philadelphia; and, in Los Brazos, boys who had left cane-rushes and campus choruses scarce ten years behind them had fortunes in the hundred thousands, and stood high in public places. ”

“ Wick a baby, and died three or four months subsequently. But that was enough; plenty; as much as was necessary.
The way that marriage came about was this: old Mr. Wick wanted to see the Wick family perpetuated, but young Mr. Wick was one of those cautious, careful, particular men who get to be old bachelors before they know it. No girl whom he knew was quite exactly what he wanted. If she had been, she would have been too good for any man on earth. In fact, it took young Mr. Wick a number of years to realize that any way he could marry, he could only marry a human being like himself. ”

“ One pleasant Spring day, a portly gentleman of powerful frame, with ruddy cheeks and short, steel-gray hair—a man whose sturdy physique hardly suited with his absent-minded, unbusiness-like expression of countenance—ascended the terraces in front of the Old Ladies’ Home. ”

“ My drive took me to a spot a few miles back of a Southern sea-coast, where, in a cup-like hollow of the low, rocky hills, treeless save for stunted and distorted firs and pines, six or eight score of perspiring laborers, attired in low-necked costumes consisting exclusively of a pair of linen trousers a-piece, toil all day in the blazing sun to dig out some kind of clay of which I know nothing, except that it looks mean, smells worse, has a name ending in ite, and is of great value in the arts and sciences. ”

“ He might have been good-looking if he had cared to be, for he had a fine old-fashioned eagle face, and a handsome, flowing gray moustache, the grace of which was spoiled by a straggling thin wisp of chin whiskers, and a patch of gray stubble on each cheek. ”

“ As the daughter of the founder of Los Brazos, Miss Billington’s fortunes were allied, she could not but feel, to the place of her birth. There must she marry, there must she continue the social leadership which her mother was only too ready to lay down. The Mayor of the town, the District Attorney, the Supreme Court Judge and the Bishop were all among her many suitors; and six months before she had wished, being a natural-born sport, if she was a girl, that they would only get together and shake dice to see which of them should have her. But then she hadn’t come East and met Jack Hatterly. ”

“ They don’t seem to mind it at all; it does not weigh upon their spirits; they will pass over a growing child to anybody who happens to be handy, to be taken care of for life, just as easily as you would hand a towel over to the next man at the wash-basin, as soon as you are done with it. Mr. Filley’s half-brother may have died easily, and probably did, but he could not possibly have made such a simple job of it as he did of turning over Etta Adelina, his daughter, to the care of the half-brother whom he hardly knew well enough to borrow money from oftener than once a year. ”

“ Pett and Canada Pete had got this animal harnessed up with odds and ends of rope and leather, they sat down and wiped their brows. Then Mr. Pett started off to notify Mrs. Samantha Spaulding.
Mr. Pett was a man unused to feminine society, except such as he had grown up with from early childhood, and he was of a naturally modest, even bashful disposition. It is not surprising, therefore, that he was startled when, on re-entering the living-room of Canada Pete’s camp, he found himself face to face with a strange lady, and a lady, at that, of a strangeness that he had never conceived of before. ”

“ I had packed my valise, and was looking for Billings to pay him his fifty dollars, when Big Mitch came out of his room—it was the noon hour—and he asked me for the favor of a few words.
“I am ashamed to trouble you, sir,” he said, “but if you could help me to get any sort of a job in New York, or anywhere else, I’d be more thankful than I could tell you. I can afford to take almost any sort of a place where there’s a future, for I am pretty well ahead of the game financially, and I’ve earned my interest in this concern. ”

“ It was purely a question of veracity between the two, and Silo pointed out that, as against him, nobody would take the stranger’s word. That was true; but, good Lord! Silo himself told me subsequently that it was the meanest thing, under the circumstances, that he ever heard one man say to another. He always maintained that he was right about the sale; but he admitted that his roughing of the poor fellow was inexcusable; and the thing that graveled him most and frightened him most in the end was that he had called the poor man “Mr. Thingumajig.” ”

“ Wick knew the terms of their grand-uncle’s will; and on the thirtieth the old Wick mansion was in the hands of the trustees, and the young Wicks were in a hotel in charge of their baby-aunt, Beatrice, who was herself in charge of an aged Irishwoman, whose feet were decidedly more intelligent than her brain.{89} That is one of the beauties of Ireland. You can get every variety of human being there from a cherub to a chimpanzee. ”

“ Silo in our city. He has been a large and enterprising investor. He has built up the town in many ways. He has been charitable and patriotic. He was a good man; but he was not a saint. And a man has to be a saint to boom town lots and keep straight. No; I’ll go further than that—it can’t be done! George Washington couldn’t have boomed town lots and kept straight. And Silo, as you can see by those whiskers, was no George Washington. Real estate isn’t sold on the Golden Rule, you know. There were times when it was mighty lucky for Silo that he was six feet high and weighed two hundred pounds. ”

“ I was about to make a motion to return to the house, when suddenly a string of peculiarly offensive oaths, uttered in a shrill angry voice, drew my attention to a heavy wire rope which a gang of men were hauling across my path. Looking up I saw, as well as I could see anything, against the dazzling background of the hill, a short, insignificant-looking figure perched on a rock, from whence it directed, with many gesticulations and an abounding stream of profanity, the operations of the toiling, grunting, straining creatures who dragged at the ponderous cable. ”

“ So it is not remarkable that the new Emperor had been several months on his throne before the good people of Ausserland learned that he was a very peculiar young man, with a character of his own, and with a passion, that almost amounted to a mania, for re-establishing an ancient order of things that had well-nigh perished from the face of the earth. ”

“ Although it was a ground-floor room, damp, dark and old, it was clean with a curious sort of cleanness that seems to belong to the Latin races—a cleanness that gives one the impression of having been achieved without the use of soap and water: as if everything had been scraped clean instead of being washed clean. ”

“ They call a comfortable club-house a “box” or a “bungalow” or a “shack,” and they make nothing of calling a costly hotel a “camp.” Indeed, they seem to try to impart a factitious flavor of profanity by christening such structures, whenever they can, “Middle Dam Camp” or “Upper Dam Camp.” And since Mrs. Wick’s father’s club had died out, the further side of Jericho Pond had become a fashionable resort, maintaining two or three Winter and Summer Sanitariums.
Thanks to the contract, they made an excellent breakfast, and their praises of the fare mollified Miss Hipsy to some slight extent. ”

“ And then Billings did something that knocked my consciousness of superiority clean out of me, and gave a severe shock to my confidence. He offered to bet me five hundred dollars to anything that would make it interesting on that contingency, and he called me down and down till I had to compromise on a bet of fifty dollars even. I have met many men in the course of my life who believed in various spook-religions, but that was the first and only time that I ever met a man who would back his faith with a cold money bet. ”