The Cassowary; What Chanced in the Cleft Mountains

by Stanley Waterloo

  CHAPTER XX

  LOVE WILL FIND THE WAY

  The Colonel was royally in his element now. On no occasion before duringall the time of detention had he played with so free a hand or felthimself so much an element of good among his fellow creatures. Thepsychological hour had come for him.

  "We should congratulate ourselves," he resonantly declared. "Where elseor under what other circumstances could have been accidentally assembledsuch a number of people so qualified to minister mentally to each otherand make otherwise dead hours breathe as we who are here now lookinginto each other's eyes?" Then, very properly, feeling that he hadexpressed himself rather finely, he continued, "We will not waste theshining hour. We must have other stories. Mr. Showman, have you anythingto say?"

  Had the Colonel not known very well what he was about his last sentencewould have been as tactless as it seemed to everybody cruel, and evenhis trusting and admiring wife looked upon him in a startled way as hethus addressed himself to an exceedingly florid man in somewhat floridgarb, but with, nevertheless, an air of intelligence of the better sortand one of general understanding. He had been a not infrequent visitorand had listened quietly and with evident delight to what he had heard.The Colonel had not offended him in the least by the blunt applicationof the word "showman." The two knew each other and, besides, the titlebelonged to him properly and he was not at all ashamed of it. On thecontrary, he was rather proud of it. He looked at the Colonel in ameditative way and took his time. He had faced audiences--though,perhaps, none quite so select, before--and finally remarked, very simplyand to the admiration of everybody:

  "You can't expect much of a plain, uneducated showman, but I know of onestory, a sort of love story, too, which a friend of mine who owns a dimemuseum told me. I'm in the circus business myself, so do not know asmuch about what you might call family details as he would, but this iswhat he gave me. He was tickled and used some large words:

  LOVE WILL FIND THE WAY

  The Ossified Man was in love with the Fat Woman. Such things happen. Menare falling in love with women every day and apparent absurdities andincongruities do not count. Love asks no odds. The Ossified Man was inlove with the Fat Lady. She weighed six hundred and eighty-three pounds;he weighed just eighty-three. It may have been that this singularcoincidence, as shown on the billboards throughout the city, first drewthe two together. Who can tell? They became acquainted and then beganone of the love affairs of the thousand myriads, with which the world isat all times occupied.

  The Fat Lady was fair to look upon. She had the tremendous advantage ofbeing a landscape as well as a personality. She was, somehow, healthy,and her far-outstanding flesh was firm and white, despite hermountainous proportions. She rose and fell rythmatically as a mass witheach inhalation of her fortunately great lungs and reminded one, in away, of a volcano half quiescent. This, though, would be an utterlywrong simile. There was nothing fiery about her. Her round face showedbut a somewhat intensified benevolence. Upon second thought--because shehad what she deemed taste in dress and wore a variety of outside ribbonthings upon her looming corsage and vast flowers upon her hat--shereminded one, billowy and heaving and with green and flowery things atopher, of the ever soft and rolling and lifting Sargasso Sea. She was agood girl in her way and had come from Indiana.

  The Ossified man was nearly six feet in height, was one of the bestknown specimens in the show world of what may be called an animatedstalactite and could scarcely be called ungraceful though a slightly toorobust skeleton. His joints were singularly flexible yet and hisdigestion and his mind were active. "Stone walls do not a prison make,nor iron bars a cage." Thus he explained the quality of the personalityof the two.

  The wooing of the Ossified Man was in the nature of an innovation. Herecognized the attitude in the community occupied by his inamorata andhimself, not merely toward each other but with relation to all theoutside world, and he conducted himself accordingly.

  What the Ossified Man did--and it is greatly to his credit--was to dowhat any other man of his grade would do. Neither he nor the Fat Womanwere highly educated but each had been through a school and each hadread and could understand things and each had intelligence and no littlesentiment. As remarked, the Ossified Man made his advances as would anyother man of his degree. The two came to understand each other in a wayand the Fat Woman began to feel somewhere, far away in her system,something she had never felt before. In truth she was beginning to fallin love with the Ossified Man. Not being a fool, the Ossified Man knewit. He realized the fact that he had found another being of the othersex, of good sense, though out of the common in appearance, assentimental as he, the great heart once fairly stirred. Affairs drifted.He knew that he was going to propose to her and she knew that he wasgoing to ask her to be his wife. That reflection, somehow, startled herthroughout all her vast being, though a dim sub-consciousness told herthat she liked him much. As for him, he resolved to stake the futureupon a single poem he sent to her, confident that she would accept itgravely. And these are the few lines she received:

  "All flesh is grass, and grass must turn to clay; All bones must turn to dust, and we are they! Since thus we turn, my own, my Colleen Bawn, Why not unite before our breath is gone? It is the judgment ever of the sage That happiness is in the average; What better equipoise than you and I, What more assured? O, sweetheart, let us try!"

  The Fat Woman was impressed but, more than that, and better in tenthousand ways, she was delighted that the man she realized she loved hadfinally dared to express himself, though in this odd, sentimental way.She thought much and then--there is shade of correction added--she wrotethis letter:

  "Dear Jim:--I understand your poem. I won't fool a bit. I care for you, Jim, as you care for me. But we will be a joke if we get married now. Can't you see that, Jim? Can't we get more like each other before we get married? We have both saved quite a lot of money. Oh, Jim, if you'll try to get thicker, I'll try to get thinner.

  "Lovingly, "SARAH."

  The Ossified Man read that letter and went out and walked up and downthe streets for hours. He was the happiest and most perplexed man in allthe big city. His heart at least wasn't ossified.

  He remembered a professor who had studied him and whom he had heard sayto those about that there was no occasion for the continuedossification in such a subject, provided the stomach was all right."I'll go to that old professor," he said, "and I'll put the case to hisgiblets in a way to make him salty round the eyes. And I'll write allabout it to my little girl, God bless 'er!"

  So his "little girl" got the letter and cried largely and with vastresources and, as we say, "braced up." "He is good, my Jim," she said toherself; "and I'll meet him half way, God bless him! I know a professortoo, and I'll see him."

  So each went to a professor.

  Professor McFlush was the doctor whose portrait accompanied anadvertisement regularly in the Sunday papers, and whom the Ossified Manhad in mind. He didn't hesitate an instant after an examination of whatthere was of his patient. "I'll cure you in no time if you follow mydirections," he declared. "My Sulphuretted Tablets will knock out theossification and as for the rest it's all diet."

  "What diet?" asked the Ossified Man.

  "Hash!" roared the doctor. "Do you drink much?"

  "Naw," said the Ossified Man.

  "Well, you've got to--hash--hash and porter. Hash is fattening, thepotatoes in it does it. Porter is fattening, the malt in it does it.Them and my tablets together will do the business--seventeen tablets aday--dollar a bottle, thirty-four in a bottle. Five tablets beforebreakfast, and for breakfast hash and two bottles of porter. Dinner thesame; supper the same. Anything else you want eat or drink all day long.Last two tablets just before you go to bed. Get your prescriptionsfilled here. Get your porter over at Johnson's wholesale grocery, I'vemade an arrangement with him. Ten dollars. Report weekly. Good day."

  And the Ossified Man took up his task for Love's sake.
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br />   It was to Professor Slocum that the Fat Woman went. Professor Slocum wasbrisk and small but he had a way with the ladies.

  The Fat Woman believed in him implicitly from the moment they met.

  "Do you eat much?" was the first query of the Professor.

  "Yes sir, considerable."

  "Do you drink much?"

  "Yes sir, some ale, and water most all the time."

  "Madam, I am astonished! Keep on with that diet and you'll weigh half aton before you die, and you'll die within six months."

  The Fat Woman gasped and turned pallid. She was influenced not only bylove but by acute alarm.

  The Professor looked upon her benignly.

  "Madam," he said, "I can save you. My condensed Food Tablets and mySpirituelle Waters will do the business. The tablets will afford yousufficient sustenance for existence without affording any element forthe increase of adipose tissue, while my Spirituelle Waters will gratifyyour thirst--the more you drink of them the better--while, at the sametime, they will exercise an influence of their own. Get your tabletshere at this office--fifty cents a hundred--Spirituelle Waters heretoo--quart bottles, twenty-five cents a bottle. Prescription: tentablets and one bottle of the water to a meal; another bottle of theWaters before retiring. Drink all the Spirituelle Water you want duringthe day. Ten dollars. Report fortnightly. Good afternoon."

  The professors knew their business. There could be no doubt of that. Notwith any sunburst, so to speak, but steadily and day by day, theOssified Man increased in flexibility and tissue and the Fat Womandecreased in fat.

  There came a day when the Museum manager observed the change and sentfor the Ossified Man.

  "What's the matter, Jim?" asked the potentate.

  "Nothing that I know of," was the answer.

  "Do you weigh any more than you did, Jim?"

  "About twenty-five pounds, I believe," was the hesitating answer.

  "I'll see you in my Office at two o'clock this afternoon."

  Then the Fat Woman was sent for and questioned.

  "How much do you weigh, Sarah?" was the first query.

  "Six hundred and twenty-three pounds, sir," was the truthful answer.

  "Huh!" said the manager. "Sixty pounds gone Sarah! I'll see you in myOffice at two o'clock this afternoon."

  An hour later the Ossified Man and the Fat Woman were engaged in earnestconversation. After a pause the Fat Woman remarked thoughtfully:

  "Jim, we're going to get the g. b."

  "Looks that way," said the Ossified Man.

  "Do you care much?"

  "Nope," said the Ossified Man, "only I wish we each could have gatheredin our fifty per for another six months or so."

  "Well, I don't care!" said the Fat Woman, lovingly and desperately."I've saved up about six thousand and you've got about five, and thethree or so can go."

  "Suits me," said the Ossified Man.

  The meeting in the manager's office that afternoon was spirited butgood-natured.

  "Heard you'd got stuck on each other and were trying to size uptogether," said the manager.

  "About the size of it," said the Ossified Man.

  "Well, it strikes me that there are two sizes yet," said the manager,"but that doesn't matter. You are knocking out two of my attractions.I'll have to let you both go at the end of the week."

  "All right," said the Ossified Man, good-naturedly. "But," he added, asa second thought struck him, "say, Sarah is going one way and I'm goingthe other and there is no telling how far we may happen to pass. Itmight happen that we might want a job again. Now when I come back asthe Fat Man, and she as the Ossified Woman, will you take us on?"

  The manager roared: "Yes, when you come back weighing six hundred andeighty-three, and Sarah eighty-three, I'll engage you, you bet!"

  The Fat Woman listened approvingly.

  And now the two are on a fine farm in Indiana and are happy. She stilltakes Professor Slocum's Condensed Food Tablets and Spirituelle Waters,and he still takes Professor McFlush's Sulphuretted Tablets and porter,and they are growing more and more alike in appearance, as they are inthoughts and aims, and have the best and most comfortable understanding.But they'll never get back to the Museum. They wouldn't if they could.

  Isn't it wonderful what love can do!