“I folded up the paper flat, put it into my inside pocket, and went to Rufe’s room. He was nearly dressed, and was feeding the pig the rest of the milk and some apple-peelings.
“ ‘Well, well, well, good-morning all,’ I says, hearty and amiable. ‘So we are up? And piggy is having his breakfast. What had you intended doing with that pig, Rufe?’
“ ‘I’m going to crate him up,’ says Rufe, ‘and express him to ma in Mount Nebo. He’ll be company for her while I am away.’
“ ‘He’s a mighty fine pig,’ says I, scratching him on the back.
“ ‘You called him a lot of names last night,’ says Rufe.
“ ‘Oh, well,’ says I, ‘he looks better to me this morning. I was raised on a farm, and I’m very fond of pigs. I used to go to bed at sundown, so I never saw one by lamplight before. Tell you what I’ll do, Rufe,’ I says. ‘I’ll give you ten dollars for that pig.’
“ ‘I reckon I wouldn’t sell this shoat,’ says he. ‘If it was any other one I might.’
“ ‘Why not this one?’ I asked, fearful that he might know something.
“ ‘Why, because,’ says he, ‘it was the grandest achievement of my life. There ain’t airy other man that could have done it. If I ever have a fireside and children, I’ll sit beside it and tell ’em how their daddy toted off a shoat from a whole circus full of people. And maybe my grandchildren, too. They’ll certainly be proud a whole passel. Why,’ says he, ‘there was two tents, one openin’ into the other. This shoat was on a platform, tied with a little chain. I seen a giant and a lady with a fine chance of bushy white hair in the other tent. I got the shoat and crawled out from under the canvas again without him squeakin’ as loud as a mouse. I put him under my coat, and I must have passed a hundred folks before I got out where the streets was dark. I reckon I wouldn’t sell that shoat, Jeff. I’d want ma to keep it, so there’d be a witness to what I done. ’
“ ‘The pig won’t live long enough,’ I says, ‘to use as an exhibit in your senile fireside mendacity. Your grandchildren will have to take your word for it. I’ll give you one hundred dollars for the animal.’
“Rufe looked at me astonished.
“ ‘The shoat can’t be worth anything like that to you,’ he says. ‘What do you want him for?’
“ ‘Viewing me casuistically,’ says I, with a rare smile, ‘you wouldn’t think that I’ve got an artistic side to my temper. But I have. I’m a collector of pigs. I’ve scoured the world of unusual pigs. Over in the Wabash Valley I’ve got a hog ranch with most every specimen on it, from a Merino to a Poland China. This looks like a blooded pig to me, Rufe,’ say 1. ‘I believe it’s a genuine Berkshire. That’s why I’d like to have it.’
“ ‘I’d shore like to accommodate you,’ says he, ‘but I’ve got the artistic tenement, too. I don’t see why it ain’t art when you can steal a shoat better than anybody else can. Shoats is a kind of inspiration and genius with me. Specially this one. I wouldn’t take two hundred and fifty for that animal.’
“ ‘Now, listen,’ says I, wiping off my forehead, it’s not so much a matter of business with me as it is art; and not so much art as it is philanthropy. Being a connoisseur and disseminator of pigs, I wouldn’t feel like I’d done my duty to the world unless I added that Berkshire to my collection. Not intrinsically, but according to the ethics of pigs as friends and coadjutors of mankind, I offer you five hundred dollars for the animal.’
“ ‘Jeff,’ says this pork esthete, ‘it ain’t money; it’s sentiment with me.’
“ ‘Seven hundred,’ says I.
“ ‘Make it eight hundred,’ says Rufe, ‘and I’ll crush the sentiment out of my heart.’
“I went under my clothes for my money-belt, and counted him out forty twenty-dollar gold certificates.
“ ‘I’ll just take him into my own room,’ says I, ‘and lock him up till after breakfast.’
“I took the pig by the hind leg. He turned on a squeal like the steam calliope at the circus.
“ ‘Let me tote him in for you,’ says Rufe; and he picks up the beast under one arm, holding his snout with the other hand, and packs him into my room like a sleeping baby.
“After breakfast Rufe, who had a chronic case of haberdashery ever since I got his trousseau, says he believes he will amble down to Misfitzky’s and look over some royal-purple socks. And then I got as busy as a one-armed man with the nettle-rash pasting on wall-paper. I found an old negro man with an express wagon to hire; and we tied the pig in a sack and drove down to the circus grounds.
“I found George B. Tapley in a little tent with a window flap open. He was a fattish man with an immediate eye, in a black skull-cap with a four-ounce diamond screwed into the bosom of his red sweater.
“ ‘Are you George B. Tapley?’ I asks.
“ ‘I swear it,’ says he.
“ ‘Well, I’ve got it,’ says I.
“ ‘Designate,’ says he. ‘Are you the guinea pigs for the Asiatic python or the alfalfa for the sacred buffalo?’
“ ‘Neither,’ says I. ‘I’ve got Beppo, the educated hog, in a sack in that wagon. I found him rooting up the flowers in my front yard this morning. I’ll take the five thousand in large bills, if it’s handy.’
“George B. hustles out of his tent, and asks me to follow. We went into one of the side-shows. In there was a jet black pig with a pink ribbon around his neck lying on some hay and eating carrots that a man was feeding him.
“ ‘Hey, Mac,’ calls G. B. ‘Nothing wrong with the world-wide this morning, is there?’
“ ‘Him? No,’ says the man. ‘He’s got an appetite like a chorus girl at 1 A. M.’
“ ‘How’d you get this pipe?’ says Tapley to me. ‘Eating too many pork chops last night?’
“I pulls out the paper and shows him the ad.
“ ‘Fake,’ says he. ‘Don’t know anything about it. You’ve beheld with your own eyes the marvelous, world-wide porcine wonder of the four-footed kingdom eating with preternatural sagacity his matutinal meal, unstrayed and unstole. Good-morning.’
“I was beginning to see. I got in the wagon and told Uncle Ned to drive to the most adjacent orifice of the nearest alley. There I took out my pig, got the range carefully for the other opening, set his sights, and gave him such a kick that he went out the other end of the alley twenty feet ahead of his squeal.
“Then I paid Uncle Ned his fifty cents, and walked down to the newspaper office. I wanted to hear it in cold syllables. I got the advertising man to his window.
“ ‘To decide a bet,’ says I, ‘wasn’t the man who had this ad. put in last night short and fat, with long black whiskers and a club-foot?’
“ ‘He was not,’ says the man. ‘He would measure about six feet by four and a half inches, with corn-silk hair, and dressed like the pansies of the conservatory.’
“At dinner time I went back to Mrs. Peevy’s.
“ ‘Shall I keep some soup hot for Mr. Tatum till he comes back?’ she asks.
“ ‘If you do, ma’am,’ says I, ‘you’ll more than exhaust for firewood all the coal in the bosom of the earth and all the forests on the outside of it. ’
“So there, you see,” said Jefferson Peters, in conclusion, “how hard it is ever to find a fair-minded and honest business-partner.”
“But,” I began, with the freedom of long acquaintance, “the rule should work both ways. If you had offered to divide the reward you would not have lost—”
Jeff’s look of dignified reproach stopped me.
“That don’t involve the same principles at all,” said he. “Mine was a legitimate and moral attempt at speculation. Buy low and sell high—don’t Wall Street indorse it? Bulls and bears and pigs—what’s the difference? Why not bristles as well as horns and fur?”
Jeff Peters as a Personal Magnet
Jeff Peters has been engaged in as many schemes for making money as there are recipes for cooking rice in Charleston, S.C.
Best of all I like to
hear him tell of his earlier days when he sold liniments and cough cures on street corners, living hand to mouth, heart to heart with the people, throwing heads or tails with fortune for his last coin.
“I struck Fisher Hill, Arkansaw,” said he, “in buckskin suit, moccasins, long hair and a thirty-carat diamond ring that I got from an actor in Texarkana. I don’t know what he ever did with the pocket knife I swapped him for it.
“I was Dr. Waugh-hoo, the celebrated Indian medicine man. I carried only one best bet just then, and that was Resurrection Bitters. It was made of life-giving plants and herbs accidentally discovered by Ta-qua-la, the beautiful wife of the chief of the Choctaw Nation, while gathering truck to garnish a platter of boiled dog for the annual corn dance.
“Business hadn’t been good at the last town, so I only had five dollars. I went to the Fisher Hill druggist and he credited me for a half gross of eight ounce bottles and corks. I had the labels and ingredients in my valise, left over from the last town. Life began to look rosy again after I got in my hotel room with the water running from the tap, and the Resurrection Bitters lining up on the table by the dozen.
“Fake? No, sir. There was two dollars’ worth of fluid extract of cinchona and a dime’s worth of aniline in that half-gross of bitters. I’ve gone through towns years afterwards and had folks ask for ‘em again.
“I hired a wagon that night and commenced selling the bitters on Main Street. Fisher Hill was a low, malarial town; and a compound hypothetical pneumo-cardiac anti-scorbutic tonic was just what I diagnosed the crowd as needing. The bitters started off like sweetbreads-on-toast at a vegetarian dinner. I had sold two dozen at fifty cents apiece when I felt somebody pull my coat tail. I knew what that meant; so I climbed down and sneaked a five-dollar bill into the hand of a man with a German silver star on his lapel.
“ ‘Constable,’ says I, ‘it’s a fine night.’
“ ‘Have you got a city license,’ he asks, ‘to sell this illegitimate essence of spooju that you flatter by the name of medicine?’
“ ‘I have not,’ says I. ‘I didn’t know you had a city. If I can find it to-morrow I’ll take one out if it’s necessary.’
“ ‘I’ll have to close you up till you.do,’ says the constable.
“I quit selling and went back to the hotel. I was talking to the landlord about it.
“ ‘Oh, you won’t stand no show in Fisher Hill,’ says he. ‘Dr. Hoskins, the only doctor here, is a brother-in-law of the Mayor, and they won’t allow no fake doctors to practice in town.’
“I don’t practice medicine,’ says I, ‘I’ve got a State peddler’s license, and I take out a city one wherever they demand it.’
“I went to the Mayor’s office the next morning and they told me he hadn’t showed up yet. They didn’t know when he’d be down. So Doc Waugh-hoo hunches down again in a hotel chair and lights a jimpson-weed regalia, and waits.
“By and by a young man in a blue necktie slips into the chair next to me and asks the time.
“ ‘Half-past ten,’ says I, ‘and you are Andy Tucker. I’ve seen you work. Wasn’t it you that put up the Great Cupid Combination package on the Southern States? Let’s see, it was a Chilian diamond engagement ring, a wedding ring, a potato masher, a bottle of soothing syrup and Dorothy Vemon—all for fifty cents.’
“Andy was pleased to hear that I remembered him. He was a good street man; and he was more than that—he respected his profession, and he was satisfied with 300 per cent. profit. He had plenty of offers to go into the illegitimate drug and garden seed business; but he was never to be tempted off of the straight path.
“I wanted a partner, so Andy and me agreed to go out together. I told him about the situation on Fisher Hill and how finances was low on account of the local mixture of politics and jalap. Andy had just got in on the train that morning. He was pretty low himself, and was going to canvass the town for a few dollars to build a new battleship by popular subscription at Eureka Springs. So we went out and sat on the porch and talked it over.
“The next morning at eleven o‘clock when I was sitting there alone, an Uncle Tom shuffles into the hotel and asked for the doctor to come and see Judge Banks, who, it seems, was the mayor and a mighty sick man.
“ ‘I’m no doctor,’ says I. ‘Why don’t you go and get the doctor?’
“ ‘Boss,’ says he. ‘Doc Hoskin am done gone twenty miles in the country to see some sick persons. He’s de only doctor in de town, and Massa Banks am powerful bad off. He sent me to ax you to please, suh, come.’
“ ‘As man to man,’ says I, ‘I’ll go and look him over.’ So I put a bottle of Resurrection Bitters in my pocket and goes up on the hill to the mayor’s mansion, the finest house in town, with a mansard roof and two cast-iron dogs on the lawn.
“This Mayor Banks was in bed all but his whiskers and feet. He was making internal noises that would have had everybody in San Francisco hiking for the parks. A young man was standing by the bed holding a cup of water.
“ ‘Doc,’ says the Mayor. ‘I’m awful sick. I’m about to die. Can’t you do nothing for me?’
“ ‘Mr. Mayor,’ says I, ‘I’m not a regular preordained disciple of S. Q. Lapius, I never took a course in a medical college,’ says I. ‘I’ve just come as a fellow man to see if I could be of any assistance.’
“ ‘I’m deeply obliged,’ says he. ‘Doc Waugh-hoo, this is my nephew, Mr. Biddle. He has tried to alleviate my distress, but without success. Oh, Lordy! Ow-ow-ow!!’ he sings out.
“I nods at Mr. Biddle and sets down by the bed and feels the mayor’s pulse. ‘Let me see your liver—your tongue, I mean,’ says 1. Then I turns up the lids of his eyes and looks close at the pupils of ‘em.
“ ‘How long have you been sick?’ I asked.
“ ‘I was taken down—ow-ouch—last night,’ says the Mayor. ‘Gimme something for it, Doc, won’t you?’
“ ‘Mr. Fiddle,’ says I, ‘raise the window shade a bit, will you?’
“ ‘Biddle,’ says the young man. ‘Do you feel like you could eat some ham and eggs, Uncle James?’
“ ‘Mr. Mayor,’ says I, after laying my ear to his right shoulder blade and listening, ‘you’ve got a bad attack of super-inflammation of the right clavicle of the harpsichord!’
“ ‘Good Lord!’ says he, with a groan. ‘Can’t you rub something on it, or set it or anything?’
“I picks up my hat and starts for the door.
“ ‘You ain’t going, Doc?’ says the Mayor with a howl. ‘You ain’t going away and leave me to die with this—superfluity of the clapboards, are you?’
“ ‘Common humanity, Dr. Whoa-ha,’ says Mr. Biddle, ‘ought to prevent your deserting a fellow-human in distress.’
“ ‘Dr. Waugh-hoo, when you get through plowing,’ says 1. And then I walks back to the bed and throws back my long hair.
“ ‘Mr. Mayor,’ says I, ‘there is only one hope for you. Drugs will do you no good. But there is another power higher yet, although drugs are high enough,’ says I.
“ ‘And what is that?’ says he.
“ ‘Scientific demonstrations,’ says I. ‘The triumph of mind over sarsaparilla. The belief that there is no pain and sickness except what is produced when we ain’t feeling well. Declare yourself in arrears. Demonstrate.’
“ ‘What is this paraphernalia you speak of, Doc?’ says the Mayor. ‘You ain’t a Socialist, are you?’
“ ‘I am speaking,’ says I, ‘of the great doctrine of psychic financiering—of the enlightened school of long-distance, sub-conscientious treatment of fallacies and meningitis—of that wonderful in-door sport known as personal magnetism.’
“ ‘Can you work it, Doc?’ asks the Mayor.
“ ‘I’m one of the Sole Sanhedrims and Ostensible Hooplas of the Inner Pulpit,’ says I. ‘The lame talk and the blind rubber whenever I make a pass at ’em. I am a medium, a coloratura hypnotist and a spirituous control. It was only through me at the recent seances at Ann Arbor that the
late president of the Vinegar Bitters Company could revisit the earth to communicate with his sister Jane. You see me peddling medicine on the streets,’ says I, ’to the poor. I don’t practice personal magnetism on them. I do not drag it in the dust,’ says I, ‘because they haven’t got the dust. ’
“ ‘Will you treat my case?’ asks the Mayor.
“ ‘Listen,’ says I. ‘I’ve had a good deal of trouble with medical societies everywhere I’ve been. I don’t practice medicine. But, to save your life, I’ll give you the psychic treatment if you’ll agree as mayor not to push the license question.’
“ ‘Of course I will,’ says he. ‘And now get to work, Doc, for them pains are coming on again.’
“ ‘My fee will be $250.00, cure guaranteed in two treatments,’ says I.
“ ‘All right,’ says the Mayor. ‘I’ll pay it. I guess my life’s worth that much.’
“I sat down by the bed and looked him straight in the eye.
“ ‘Now,’ says I, ‘get your mind off the disease. You ain’t sick. You haven’t got a heart or a clavicle or a funny bone or brains or anything. You haven’t got any pain. Declare error. Now you feel the pain that you didn’t have leaving, don’t you?’
“ ‘I do feel some little better, Doc,’ says the Mayor, ‘darned if I don’t. Now state a few lies about my not having this swelling in my left side, and I think I could be propped up and have some sausage and buckwheat cakes.’
“I made a few passes with my hands.
“ ‘Now,’ says I, ‘the inflammation’s gone. The right lobe of the perihelion has subsided. You’re getting sleepy. You can’t hold your eyes open any longer. For the present the disease is checked. Now, you are asleep.’
“The Mayor shut his eyes slowly and began to snore.
“ ‘You observe, Mr. Tiddle,’ says I, ‘the wonders of modern science.’
“ ‘Biddle,’ says he. ‘When will you give uncle the rest of the treatment, Dr. Pooh-pooh?’
“ ‘Waugh-hoo,’ says I. ‘I’ll come back at eleven to-morrow. When he wakes up give him eight drops of turpentine and three pounds of steak. Good morning.’