The little man shriveled and crumpled as the dried leaf under the glass.
Finally, the recluse slowly, deeply spoke. It was a true voice from a cave, cold, solemn, and damp.
“It’s your ante,” he said.
“What?” said the little man.
The hermit tilted his beard and laughed a laugh that was either the chatter of a banshee in a storm or the rattle of pebbles in a tin box. His visitors’ flesh seemed ready to drop from their bones.
They huddled together and cast fearful eyes over their shoulders. They whispered.
“A vampire!” said one.
“A ghoul!” said another.
“A Druid before the sacrifice,” murmured another.
“The shade of an Aztec witch doctor,” said the little man.
As they looked, the inscrutable face underwent a change. It became a livid background for his eyes, which blazed at the little man like impassioned carbuncles. His voice arose to a howl of ferocity. “It’s your ante!” With a panther-like motion he drew a long, thin knife and advanced, stooping. Two cadaverous hounds came from nowhere and, scowling and growling, made desperate feints at the little man’s legs. His quaking companions pushed him forward.
Tremblingly he put his hand to his pocket.
“How much?” he said, with a shivering look at the knife that glittered.
The carbuncles faded.
“Three dollars,” said the hermit in sepulchral tones which rang against the walls and among the passages, awakening long-dead spirits with voices. The shaking little man took a roll of bills from a pocket and placed three ones upon the altar-like stone. The recluse looked at the little volume with reverence in his eyes. It was a pack of playing cards.
Under the three swinging candles, upon the altar-like stone, the gray beard and the agonized little man played at poker. The three other men crouched in a corner and stared with eyes that gleamed with terror. Before them sat the cadaverous hounds licking their red lips. The candles burned low and began to flicker. The fire in the corner expired.
Finally, the game came to a point where the little man laid down his hand and quavered: “I can’t call you this time, sir. I’m dead broke.”
“What?” shrieked the recluse. “Not call me? Villain! Dastard! Cur! I have four queens, miscreant!” His voice grew so mighty that it could not fit his throat. He choked, wrestling with his lungs for a moment. Then the power of his body was concentrated in a word: “Go!”
He pointed a quivering, yellow finger at a wide crack in the rock. The little man threw himself at it with a howl. His erstwhile frozen companions felt their blood throb again. With great bounds they plunged after the little man. A minute of scrambling, falling, and pushing brought them to open air. They climbed the distance to their camp in furious springs.
The sky in the east was a lurid yellow. In the west the footprints of departing night lay on the pine trees. In front of their replenished campfire sat John Willerkins, the guide.
“Hello!” he shouted at their approach. “Be you fellers ready to go deer-huntin’?”
Without replying, they stopped and debated among themselves in whispers.
Finally, the pudgy man came forward.
“John,” he inquired, “do you know anything peculiar about this cave below here?”
“Yes,” said Willerkins at once. “Tom Gardner.”
“What?” said the pudgy man.
“Tom Gardner.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, you see,” said Willerkins slowly, as he took dignified pulls at his pipe, “Tom Gardner was once a fambly man, who lived in these here parts on a nice leetle farm. He uster go away to the city orften, and one time he got a-gamblin’ in one of them there dens. He went ter the dickens right quick then. At last he kum home one time and tol’ his folks he had up and sold the farm and all he had in the worl’. His leetle wife, she died then. Tom, he went crazy, and soon after—”
The narrative was interrupted by the little man, who became possessed of devils.
“I wouldn’t give a cuss if he had left me ’nough money to get home on, the doggoned, gray-haired red pirate,” he shrilled, in a seething sentence. The pudgy man gazed at the little man calmly and sneeringly.
“Oh, well,” he said, “we can tell a great tale when we get back to the city after having investigated this thing.”
“Go to the devil!” replied the little man.
July 3, 1892
[New York Tribune, part 2, p. 14.]
* The Sullivan County Sketches.
TRAVELS IN NEW YORK:
THE BROKEN-DOWN VAN
The gas lamps had just been lit and the two great red furniture vans with impossible landscapes on their sides rolled and plunged slowly along the street. Each was drawn by four horses, and each almost touched the roaring elevated road above. They were on the uptown track of the surface road—indeed the street was so narrow that they must be on one track or the other.
They tossed and pitched and proceeded slowly, and a horse car with a red light came up behind. The car was red, and the bull’s-eye light was red, and the driver’s hair was red. He blew his whistle shrilly and slapped the horse’s lines impatiently. Then he whistled again. Then he pounded on the red dashboard with his car-hook till the red light trembled. Then a car with a green light crept up behind the car with the red light; and the green driver blew his whistle and pounded on his dashboard; and the conductor of the red car seized his strap from his position on the rear platform and rung such a rattling tattoo on the gong over the red driver’s head that the red driver became frantic and stood up on his toes and puffed out his cheeks as if he were playing the trombone in a German streetband and blew his whistle till an imaginative person could see slivers flying from it, and pounded his red dashboard till the metal was dented in and the car-hook was bent. And just as the driver of a newly-come car with a blue light began to blow his whistle and pound his dashboard, and the green conductor began to ring his bell like a demon, which drove the green driver mad and made him rise up and blow and pound as no man ever blew or pounded before, which made the red conductor lose the last vestige of control of himself and caused him to bounce up and down on his bell strap as he grasped it with both hands in a wild, maniacal dance, which of course served to drive uncertain Reason from her tottering throne in the red driver, who dropped his whistle and his hook and began to yell, and ki-yi, and whoop harder than the worst personal devil encountered by the sternest of Scotch Presbyterians ever yelled and ki-yied and whooped on the darkest night after the good men had drunk the most hot Scotch whiskey; just then the left-hand forward wheel on the rear van fell off and the axle went down. The van gave a mighty lurch and then swayed and rolled and rocked and stopped; the red driver applied his brake with a jerk and his horses turned out to keep from being crushed between car and van; the other drivers applied their brakes with a jerk and their horses turned out; the two cliff dwelling men on the shelf halfway up the front of the stranded van began to shout loudly to their brother cliff dwellers on the forward van; a girl, six years old, with a pail of beer crossed under the red car horses’ neck; a boy, eight years old, mounted the red car with the sporting extras of the evening papers; a girl, ten years old, went in front of the van horses with two pails of beer; an unclassified boy poked his finger in the black grease in the hub of the right-hand hind van wheel and began to print his name on the red landscape on the van’s side; a boy with a little head and big ears examined the white rings on the martingales of the van leaders with a view of stealing them in the confusion; a sixteen-year-old girl without any hat and with a roll of half-finished vests under her arm crossed the front platform of the green car. As she stepped up on to the sidewalk a barber from a ten-cent shop said “Ah! there!” and she answered “smarty!” with withering scorn and went down a side street. A few drops of warm summer rain began to fall.
Well, the van was wrecked and something had got to be done. It was on the busiest car track on Man
hattan Island. The cliff dwellers got down in some mysterious way—probably on a rope ladder. Their brethren drove their van down a side street and came back to see what was the matter.
“The nut is off,” said the captain of the wrecked van.
“Yes,” said the first mate, “the nut is off.”
“Hah,” said the captain of the other van, “the nut is off.”
“Yer right,” said his first mate, “the nut is off.”
The driver of the red car came up, hot and irritated. But he had regained his reason. “The nut is off,” he said.
The drivers of the green and of the blue car came along. “The nut,” they said in chorus, “is off.”
The red, green and blue conductors came forward. They examined the situation carefully as became men occupying a higher position. Then they made this report through the chairman, the red conductor:
“The nut is gone.”
“Yes,” said the driver of the crippled van, who had spoken first, “yes, the damned nut is lost.”
Then the driver of the other van swore, and the two assistants swore, and the three car drivers swore, and the three car conductors used some polite but profane expressions. Then a strange man, an unknown man and an outsider, with his trousers held up by a trunkstrap, who stood at hand, swore harder than any of the rest. The others turned and looked at him inquiringly and savagely. The man wriggled nervously.
“You wanter to tie it up,” he said at last.
“Wot yo’ goin’ to tie it to, you cussed fool?” asked the assistant of the head van scornfully, “a berloon?”
“Ha, ha!” laughed the others.
“Some folks make me tired,” said the second van driver.
“Go and lose yourself with the nut,” said the red conductor severely.
“That’s it,” said the others. “Git out, ’fore we t’row you out.”
The officiously profane stranger slunk away.
The crisis always produces the man.
In this crisis the man was the first van driver.
“Bill,” said the first van driver, “git some candles.” Bill vanished.
A car with a white light, a car with a white and red light, a car with a white light and a green bar across it, a car with a blue light and a white circle around it, another car with a red bull’s-eye light and one with a red flat light had come up and stopped. More are coming to extend the long line. The elevated trains thundered overhead, and made the street tremble. A dozen horse cars went down on the other track, and the drivers made derisive noises, rather than speaking derisive words at their brother vanbound drivers. Each delayed car was full of passengers, and they craned their necks and peppery old gentlemen inquired what the trouble was, and a happy individual who had been to Coney Island began to sing.
Trucks, mail-wagons, and evening paper carts crowded past. A jam was imminent. A Chatham Square cab fought its way along with a man inside wearing a diamond like an arc light. A hundred people stopped on either sidewalk; ten per cent of them whistled “Boom-de-ay.” A half dozen small boys managed to just miss being killed by passing teams. Four Jews looked out of four different pawnshops. Pullers-in for three clothing stores were alert. The ten-cent barber eyed a Division Street girl who was a millinery puller-in and who was chewing gum with an earnest, almost fierce, motion of the jaw. The ever-forward flowing tide of the growlers flowed on. The men searched under the slanting rays of the electric light for the lost nut, back past a dozen cars; scattering drops of rain continued to fall and a hand-organ came up and began an overture.
Just then Bill rose up from somewhere with four candles. The leader lit them and each van man took one and they continued the search for the nut. The humorous driver on a blue car asked them why they didn’t get a firefly; the equally playful driver of a white car advised them of the fact that the moon would be up in the course of two or three hours. Then a gust of wind came and blew out the candles. The hand-organ man played on. A dozen newsboys arrived with evening paper extras about the Presidential nomination. The passengers bought the extras and found that they contained nothing new. A man with a stock of suspenders on his arm began to look into the trade situation. He might have made a sale to the profane man with the trunkstrap but he had disappeared. The leader again asserted himself.
“Bill,” he shouted, “you git a lager beer-keg.” Bill was gone in an instant.
“Jim,” continued the leader, in a loud voice, as if Jim were up at the sharp end of the mainmast and the leader was on the deck, “Jim, unhitch them hosses and take out the pole.”
Jim started to obey orders. A policeman came and walked around the van, looked at the prostrated wheel, started to say something, concluded not to, made the hand-organ man move on, and then went to the edge of the sidewalk and began talking to the Division Street girl with the gum, to the infinite disgust of the cheap barber. The trunkstrap man came out of a restaurant with a sign of “Breakfast, 18 cents; Dinner, 15 cents,” where he had been hidden, and slunk into the liquor store next door with a sign of “Hot spiced rum, 6 cents; Sherry with a Big Egg in it, 5 cents.” At the door he almost stepped on a small boy with a pitcher of beer so big that he had to set it down and rest every half block.
Bill was now back with the keg. “Set it right there,” said the leader.
“Now you, Jim, sock that pole under the axle and we’ll h’ist ’er up and put the keg under.”
One of the horses began kicking the front of the van. “Here, there!” shouted the leader and the horse subsided. “Six or seven o’ you fellers git under that pole,” commanded the leader, and he was obeyed. “Now all together!” The axle slowly rose and Bill slipped under the chime of the keg. But it was not high enough to allow the wheel to go on. “Git a paving block,” commanded the leader to Bill. Just then a truck loaded with great, noisy straps of iron tried to pass. The wheels followed the car track too long, the truck struck the rear of the van and the axle went down with a crash while the keg rolled away into the gutter. Even great leaders lose their self-control sometimes; Washington swore at the Battle of Long Island; so this van leader now swore. His language was plain and scandalous. The truckman offered to lick the van man till he couldn’t walk. He stopped his horses to get down to do it. But the policeman left the girl and came and made the truckman give over his warlike movement, much to the disgust of the crowd. Then he punched the suspender man in the back with the end of his club and went back to the girl. But the second delay was too much for the driver of the green car, and he turned out his horses and threw his car from the track. It pitched like a skiff in the swell of a steamer. It staggered and rocked and as it went past the van plunged into the gutter and made the crowd stand back, but the horses strained themselves and finally brought it up and at last it blundered on to its track and rolled away at a furious rate with the faces of the passengers wreathed in smiles and the conductor looking proudly back. Two other cars followed the example of the green and went lumbering past on the stones.
“Tell them fellers we’ll be out of their way now in a minute,” said the leader to the red conductor. Bill had arrived with the paving block. “Up with ’er, now,” called the leader. The axle went up again and the keg with the stone on top of it went under. The leader seized the wheel himself and slipped it on. “Hitch on them hosses!” he commanded, and it was done. “Now, pull slow there, Bill,” and Bill pulled slow. The great red car with the impossible landscape gave a preliminary rock and roll, the wheel which had made the trouble dropped down an inch or two from the keg and the van moved slowly forward. There was nothing to hold the wheel on and the leader walked close to it and watched it anxiously. But it stayed on to the corner, and around the corner, and into the side street. The red driver gave a triumphant Ki-yi and his horses plunged forward in their collars eagerly. The other drivers gave glad Ki-yis and the other horses plunged ahead. Twenty cars rolled past at a fast gait. “Now, youse fellys, move on!” said the policeman, and the crowd broke up. The cheap barber wa
s talking to a girl with one black eye, but he retreated to his shop with the sign which promised “bay rum and a clean towel to every customer.” Inside the liquor store the trunkstrap man was telling a man with his sleeves rolled up how two good men could have put their shoulders under the van and h’isted it up while a ten-year-old boy put on the wheel.
July 10, 1892
[New York Tribune, part 1, p. 8.]
THE OCTOPUSH*
A SULLIVAN COUNTY NOCTURNE
[The Fishermen]
Four men once upon a time went into the wilderness seeking for pickerel. They proceeded to a pond which is different from all other sheets of water in the world, excepting the remaining ponds in Sullivan County. A scrawny stone dam, clinging in apparent desperation to its foundation, wandered across a wild valley. In the beginning, the baffled waters had retreated into a forest. In consequence, the four men confronted a sheet of water from which there upreared countless gray, haggard tree trunks. Squat stumps, in multitudes, stretched long, lazy roots over the surface of the water. Floating logs and sticks bumped gently against the dam. All manner of weeds throttled the lilies and dragged them down. Great pine trees came from all sides to the pond’s edge.
In their journey, the four men encountered a creature with a voice from a tomb. His person was concealed behind an enormous straw hat. In graveyard accents, he demanded that he be hired to assist them in their quest. They agreed. From a recess of the bank he produced a blunt-ended boat, painted a very light blue with yellow finishings, in accordance with Sullivan aesthetics. Two sculls, whittled from docile pine boards, lay under the seats. Pegs were driven into the boat’s side, at convenient rowlock intervals. In deep, impressive tones, the disguised individual told the four men that, to his knowledge, the best way to catch pickerel was to “kidder fur ’em from them there stumps.” The four men clambered into the beautiful boat, and the individual maneuvered his craft until he had dealt out to four low-spreading stumps, four fishers. He thereupon repaired to a fifth stump, where he tied his boat. Perching himself upon the stump-top, he valiantly grasped a mildewed corncob between his teeth, ladened with black, eloquent tobacco. At a distance it smote the senses of the four men.