Irvin S. Cobb

“ If the attempt was a sorry failure he, for one, did not appreciate the completeness of the failure. He meant, anyhow, that his step no longer should be purposeless and mechanical; that his walk should hereafter have intent in it. And as he came down the porch steps he looked about him, not dully, with sick and uninforming eyes, but with a livened interest in all familiar homely things.
Coming to his gate he saw, near at hand, Squire Jonas, now a gnarled but still sprightly octogenarian, leaning upon a fence post surveying the universe at large, as was the squire's daily custom. ”

“ With murky twilight impending, it was not for Red Hoss Shackleford to linger for long in the vicinity of a burying ground. Already, in the gloaming, the white fence palings gleamed spectrally and the shadows were thickening in the honeysuckle jungles beyond them. Nor was it for him to think of eating the flesh of a [Pg 111] graveyard rabbit, even though it be plump and youthful, as this one was.
Graveyard rabbits, when indubitably known to be such, decorate no Afro-American skillet. Destiny has called them higher than frying pans. ”

“ You might have called Vincent C. Marr a self-made man and be making no mistake about it. For he was self-made; not merely self-assembled, as so many men are who attain distinction in this profession or that calling. Entirely through his own efforts, with only his native wit to light the way for him, he had pulled himself up, step by step, from the very bottom of his trade to the very top of it. His trade was the applied trade of crookedness; his pursuit the pursuit of other folks' cash resources. ”

“ Riley, armed with an iron bar held in one hand and a revolver loaded with blank cartridges in the other, stood poised and prepared to leap into the den at the ostensible peril of his life and put his ferocious charge through a repertoire of startling feats. His eye was set, his face determined; his lower jaw moved slowly. This steel-hearted man was chewing tobacco to hide any concern he might feel.
Red Hoss Shackleford, resplendent in his official trappings, made an elaborate ceremonial of undoing the pins and bolts which upheld the wooden panels across the front elevation of the cage. ”

“ Continued success for it as time should pass seemed assured and guaranteed, seeing that Vida Monte, beyond the studios and off the locations, had all her life walked a way so secluded, so inconspicuous and so utterly commonplace that no human being, whether an attaché of the company or an outsider, would be likely to miss her, or missing her, to pry deeply into the causes for her absence. ”

“ But nobody knows it only me and you, Quinlan, and you, Geltfin, and Appel in this next room here. Even the doctor up there at Hamletsburg he don't know it and his wife she don't know it and nobody in all that town knows it. And why don't they know? Because they think only it is a woman named Sarah Glassman that is dead. Actually that sickness no doubt changed her so that even if them rubes ever go to see high-class feature fillums there didn't nobody recognize her. If they didn't suspect nothing when she was alive, for why should they suspect something now she is dead? ”

“ Cephus Fringe, but not willingly and by no means blithely. He shed his high hat and with it all lingering essences of his dignity. One of Mittie May's feet squashed down on the high hat and it folded up like a condensed time-card. He lost the last vestige of his vanishing authority when he lost his saxophone. The Professor did not understate the case when he had intimated that he was somewhat out of practice at equestrian exercises. Stark terror convulsed his frame; instinct of self-preservation made him careless of the language he used. ”

“ As you may guess, Judge Priest, I am about to become a mother myself. If my baby lives—and my baby is going to live—that money will belong to my child should anything happen to me. I must think of what lies ahead of me, not of what has gone before. My mother owns the home where she lives; she will have her half of this sum of money; she is, I believe, in good health; she is amply able to go on, as she has in the past, adding to her income with her needle. ”

“ Quinlan seconded the demand.
"Because you wouldn't dare do it!" In his desire to make clear his point Mr. Geltfin fairly shoveled the words out of himself, bringing them forth overlapping one another like shingles on a roof. "Because the public wouldn't stand for it! Always you brag, Lobel, that you know what the public want! Well then, would the public stand for a picture where a good, decent, straight girl that's dead and will soon be in her grave is for six reels doing all them suggestive vampire stunts like what you yourself, Lobel, made her do? ”

“ Luther's only visible means of support, yet Luther waxed fat and shiny and larded the earth when he walked abroad. Neither had Red Hoss an indulgent and generous patron such as Judge Priest's Jeff—Jeff Poindexter—boasted in the person of his master. Neither was he gifted in the manipulation of the freckled bones as the late Smooth Crumbaugh had been; nor yet possessed he the skill of shadow boxing as that semiprofessional pugilist, Con Lake, possessed it. Con could lick any shadow that ever lived, and the punching bag that could stand up before his onslaughts was not manufactured yet ”

“ He would make you think of a man molded out of a fog; almost he was like a man made of smoke. His mode of living might testify that a gnawing remorse abode ever with him, but his hair had not turned white in a single night, as the heads of those suddenly stricken by a great shock or a great grief or any greatly upsetting and disordering emotion sometimes are reputed to turn. ”

“ Lobel has a figure excellently shaped for presenting the patternings of a fanciful stomacher to the world and up until a few years ago there were few occasions when he might hope to see the name Lobel in print. For, know you, Mr. Lobel has not always been in the moving-picture business. Nobody in the moving-picture business has always been in the moving-picture business—excepting some of the child wonders under ten years of age. And ten years ago our hero was the M. Lobel Company, cloak and suit jobbers in rather an inconspicuous Eastern town. ”

“ The world might have been excused for its failure to plumb the underlying causes which roiled the waters of his soul. Seemingly the currents of life ran for him in agreeable channels. He had an indulgent employer whose clothes fitted Jeff. Indeed, anybody's clothes fitted Jeff. He had one of those figures which seem to give and take. He was well nourished, gifted conversationally, of a nimble wit, resourceful, apt. Moreover, home-grown watermelons were ripe. The Eighth of August, celebrated in these parts by the race as Emancipation Day, impended. ”

“ The truth is what I want—the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God. And He'll need to help you if I catch you lying again! Get me?"
"Boss," said Red Hoss fervently, "I gits you." ”

“ The face of the cage was boarded halfway up, but above the top line of the planked cross panel Red Hoss could make out in the foreground of the dimmed interior a great tawny shape, and at the back, in one corner, an orderly clutter of objects painted a uniform circus blue. There was a barrel or two, an enormous wooden ball, a collapsible fold-up seesaw and other impedimenta of a trained-animal act. Red Hoss had heard that the lion was a noble brute—in short, was the king of beasts. ”

“ And Cheesy Zaugbaum has come clean. Oh, I guess it's curtains for you all right, all right."
"You don't exactly hate yourself, do you?" gibed Marr. "Sort of pleased with yourself?"
"Not so much pleased with myself as disappointed in you, Chappy," countered the exultant Brock. "I figured you were different from the rest of your crowd, maybe; but it turns out you're like all the others—you will do your thinking in a groove." ”

“ For so sensitive and so well-disposed a man as Dudley Stackpole to joy in his own deadly act, however justifiable in the sight of law and man that act might have been—why, the bare notion of it was preposterous! ”

“ To the physician who had ministered to her, to his good-hearted wife, to the official who issued the burial certificate, to the imported clergyman who held the service, to the few villagers who gathered for the funeral, drawn by the morbid lure which in isolated communities brings folk to any funeral—to all of these the dead woman merely was a stranger with a strange name who, temporarily abiding here, had fallen victim to the plague which filled the land. ”

“ But the white man, generally speaking, views the negro's private life only from the outside, and if he be a Southern-born white man, wise in his generation, seeks to look no further, for surface garrulity and surface exuberance do not deceive him, but serve only to make him realize all the more clearly that he is dealing with members of what at heart is one of the most secretive and sensitive of all the breeds of men. ”

“ So we pikes along, me frequently reproaching Sweet Caps for his precipitancy in spilling the beans. We passes through the village of Plentiful Valley without stopping and walks on and on and on some more, until we observes a large, prosperous-looking building of red brick, like a summer hotel with a lawn in front and a high stone wall in front of that. A large number of persons of both sexes, but mainly females, is wandering about over the front yard dressed in peculiar styles. ”

“ But—I ask you—how was Red Hoss to know that the chief bull handler for Powers Brothers was engaged in superintending the unloading of his large living charges from their traveling accommodations in the bull car?
There were three of these bulls, all of them being of the gentler sex. Perhaps it might be well to explain here that the word "bull," in the language of the white tops, means elephant. To a showman all cow elephants are bulls just as in a mid-Victorian day, more refined than this one, all authentic bulls were, to cultured people, cows. ”

“ Do you not think it a monstrous thing that two men even though they be of high standing in their profession as general practitioners, but without special acquaintance with mental derangements—I am not speaking of this particular case now but of hundreds of other cases—do you not think it a wrong thing that two such persons may pass upon a third person's sanity and upon the uncorroborated testimony of some fourth person recommend the confinement of the accused third person in an asylum for the insane? ”

“ Seeing him, Red Hoss promptly detached himself from the group he had just joined, and advanced, having it in mind to seek speech with this superior-appearing personage. The white man beat him to it.
"Say, boy, that's right, keep a-coming," he called. His experienced eye appraised Red Hoss' muscular proportions. "Do you want a job?"
"Whut kinder job, boss?"
"Best job you ever had in your life," declared the white man. "You get fourteen a week and cakes. Get me? Fourteen dollars just as regular as Saturday night comes, and your scoffing free—all the chow you can eat thrown in. ”

“ Gulwing and Hartridge were over there on the sofa, cheek by jowl, and all was going well.
Half aloud, to himself, he said, smiling in prime content: "Well, I guess I'm bad!"
"I guess you are!" said a voice right in his ear; "and you're due to be worse, Chappy, old boy—much worse!"
The smile slipped. He turned his head and looked into the complacent, chubby face and the pleased eyes of M. J. Brock, head of Brock's Detective Agency—the man of all men in this world he wished least to see. For once, anyhow, in his life Marr was shaken, and showed it. ”

“ Beforehand perhaps the Professor had had vague misgivings as to the part he was to play in the pageantry on the Eighth; perhaps in his mind he had forecast the probability that he might suffer eclipse—a temporary eclipse—but to an artiste none the less distasteful—in the shadow of the Sin Killer, for since the Sin Killer had originally promulgated the idea of the procession it was only natural and only human that the Sin Killer should devise to himself the outstanding place of honor in it. ”

“ It was one succession of thrilling, gripping, heart-lifting scenes set amid vividly contrasting surroundings—the lowest dive in all Paris; the citadel at Verdun; grand ballroom of the Schuyler mansion at Newport; the Place Vendôme on a day when it was entirely unoccupied except by moving-picture actors; Fifth Avenue on its most gala occasion—these were but a few samples. The subtitles fairly hissed to the sibilant swishing of such words as traitress, temptress, tigress [Pg 315] and sorceress. ”

“ Bad weather might kill his business for a week; a crop failure might lame it for a month; but the graft was as sure as anything graftified can be. When the runaway youth, Vince Marr, inserted himself beneath the protecting wing of this patron he knew exactly whither his ultimate ambitions tended. He had no vague boyish design to serve a 'prenticeship as stake driver or roustabout in the hope some day of graduating into a rider or a tumbler, a ringmaster or a clown. ”