Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  They followed him across the building, and looked down on an agitated swarm of faces. Five men were standing on the entrance steps to the door below, and the crowd was thickly massed beyond, leaving a little semicircle clear about the steps. Those behind struggled to get closer, and leaped in the air to catch a glimpse of what was going on. Harkless stood alone on the top step, his hand resting on the shoulder of the pale and contrite and sobered Hartley. In the clear space, Jim Bardlock was standing with sheepishly hanging head, and between him and Harkless were the two gamblers of the walnut shells. The journalist held in his hand the implements of their profession.

  “Give it all up,” he was saying in his steady voice. “You’ve taken eighty-six dollars from this boy. Hand it over.”

  The men began to edge closer to the crowd, giving little, swift, desperate, searching looks from left to right, and right to left, moving nervously about, like weasels in a trap. “Close up there tight,” said Harkless, sharply. “Don’t let them out.”

  “W’y can’t we git no square treatment here?” one of the gamblers whined; but his eyes, blazing with rage, belied the plaintive passivity of his tone. “We been running no skin. Wy d’ye say we gotter give up our own money? You gotter prove it was a skin. We risked our money fair.”

  “Prove it! Come up here, Eph Watts. Friends,” the editor turned to the crowd, smiling, “friends, here’s a man we ran out of town once, because he knew too much about things of this sort. He’s come back to us again and he’s here to stay. He’ll give us an object-lesson on the shell game.”

  “It’s pretty simple,” remarked Mr. Watts. “The best way is to pick up the ball with your second finger and the back part of your thumb as you pretend to lay the shell down over it: this way.” He illustrated, and showed several methods of manipulation, with professional sang-froid; and as he made plain the easy swindle by which many had been duped that morning, there arose an angry and threatening murmur.

  “You all see,” said Harkless, raising his voice a little, “what a simple cheat it is — and old as Pharaoh. Yet a lot of you stood around and lost your own money, and stared like idiots, and let Hartley Bowlder lose eighty-odd dollars on a shell racket, and not one of you lifted a hand. How hard did you work for what these two cheap crooks took from you? Ah!” he cried, “it is because you were greedy that they robbed you so easily. You know it’s true. It’s when you want to get something for nothing that the ‘confidence men’ steal the money you sweat for and make the farmer a laughing stock. And you, Jim Bardlock, Town Marshal! — you, who confess that you ‘went in the game sixty cents’ worth, yourself—” His eyes were lit with wrath as he raised his accusing hand and levelled it at the unhappy municipal.

  The Town Marshal smiled uneasily and deprecatingly about him, and, meeting only angry glances, hearing only words of condemnation, he passed his hand unsteadily over his fat mustache, shifted from one leg to the other and back again, looked up, looked down, and then, an amiable and pleasure-loving man, beholding nothing but accusation and anger in heaven and earth, and wishing nothing more than to sink into the waters under the earth, but having no way of reaching them, finding his troubles quite unbearable, and unable to meet the manifold eye of man, he sought relief after the unsagacious fashion of a larger bird than he. His burly form underwent a series of convulsions not unlike sobs, and he shut his eyes tightly and held them so, presenting a picture of misery unequalled in the memory of any spectator. Harkless’s outstretched hand began to shake. “You!” he tried to continue— “you, a man elected to — —”

  There came from the crowd the sound of a sad, high-keyed voice, drawling: “That’s a nice vest Jim’s got on, but it ain’t hardly the feathers fitten for an ostrich, is it?”

  The editor’s gravity gave way; he broke into a ringing laugh and turned again to the shell-men. “Give up the boy’s money. Hurry.”

  “Step down here and git it,” said the one who had spoken.

  There was a turbulent motion in the crowd, and a cry arose, “Run ’em out! Ride ’em on a rail! Tar and feathers! Run ’em out o’ town!”

  “I wouldn’t dilly-dally long if I were you,” said Harkless, and his advice seemed good to the shell-men. A roll of bills, which he counted and turned over to the elder Bowlder, was sullenly placed in his hand. The fellow who had not yet spoken clutched the journalist’s sleeve with his dirty hand.

  “We hain’t done wit’ youse,” he said, hoarsely. “Don’t belief it, not fer a minute, see?”

  The Town Marshal opened his eyes briskly, and placing a hand on each of the gamblers, said: “I hereby do arrest your said persons, and declare you my prisoners.” The cry rose again, louder: “Run ’em out! String ’em up! Hang them! Hang them!” and a forward rush was made.

  “This way, Jim. Be quick,” said Harkless, quietly, bending down and jerking one of the gamblers half-way up the steps. “Get through the hall to the other side and then run them to the lock-up. No one will stop you that way. Watts and I will hold this door.” Bardlock hustled his prisoners through the doorway, and the crowd pushed up the steps, while Harkless struggled to keep the vestibule clear until Watts got the double doors closed. “Stand back, here!” he cried; “it’s all over. Don’t be foolish. The law is good enough for us. Stand back, will you!”

  He was laughing a little, shoving them back with open hand and elbow, when a small, compact group of men suddenly dashed up the steps together, and a heavy stick swung out over their heads. A straw hat with a gay ribbon sailed through the air. The journalist’s long arms went out swiftly from his body in several directions, the hands not open, but clenched and hard. The next instant he and Mr. Watts stood alone on the steps, and a man with a bleeding, blaspheming mouth dropped his stick and tried to lose himself in the crowd. Mr. Watts was returning something he had not used to his hip-pocket.

  “Prophets of Israel!” exclaimed William Todd, ruefully, “it wasn’t Eph Watts’s pistol. Did you see Mr. Harkless? I was up on them steps when he begun. I don’t believe he needs as much takin’ care of as we think.”

  “Wasn’t it one of them Cross-Roads devils that knocked his hat off?” asked Judd Bennett. “I thought I see Bob Skillett run up with a club.”

  Harkless threw open the doors behind him; the hall was empty. “You may come in now,” he said. “This isn’t my court-house.”

  CHAPTER VIII. GLAD AFTERNOON: THE GIRL BY THE BLUE TENT-POLE

  THEY WALKED SLOWLY back along the pike toward the brick house. The white-ruffed fennel reached up its dusty yellow heads to touch her skirts as she passed, and then drooped, satisfied, against the purple iron-weed at the roadside. In the noonday silence no cricket chirped nor locust raised its lorn monotone; the tree shadows mottled the road with blue, and the level fields seemed to pant out a dazzling breath, the transparent “heat-waves” that danced above the low corn and green wheat.

  He was stooping very much as they walked; he wanted to be told that he could look at her for a thousand years. Her face was rarely and exquisitely modelled, but, perhaps, just now the salient characteristic of her beauty (for the salient characteristic seemed to be a different thing at different times) was the coloring, a delicate glow under the white skin, that bewitched him in its seeming a reflection of the rich benediction of the noonday sun that blazed overhead.

  Once he had thought the way to the Briscoe homestead rather a long walk; but now the distance sped malignantly; and strolled they never so slow, it was less than a “young bird’s flutter from a wood.” With her acquiescence he rolled a cigarette, and she began to hum lightly the air of a song, a song of an ineffably gentle, slow movement.

  That, and a reference of the morning, and, perhaps, the smell of his tobacco mingling with the fragrance of her roses, awoke again the keen reminiscence of the previous night within him. Clearly outlined before him rose the high, green slopes and cool cliff-walls of the coast of Maine, while his old self lazily watched the sharp little waves through half-closed lids, the pale smok
e of his cigarette blowing out under the rail of a waxen deck where he lay cushioned. And again a woman pelted his face with handfuls of rose-petals and cried: “Up lad and at ’em! Yonder is Winter Harbor.” Again he sat in the oak-raftered Casino, breathless with pleasure, and heard a young girl sing the “Angel’s Serenade,” a young girl who looked so bravely unconscious of the big, hushed crowd that listened, looked so pure and bright and gentle and good, that he had spoken of her as “Sir Galahad’s little sister.” He recollected he had been much taken with this child; but he had not thought of her from that time to this, he supposed; had almost forgotten her. No! Her face suddenly stood out to his view as though he saw her with his physical eye — a sweet and vivacious child’s face with light-brown hair and gray eyes and a short upper lip. ... And the voice....

  He stopped short and struck his palms together. “You are Tom Meredith’s little cousin!”

  “The Great Harkless!” she answered, and stretched out her hand to him.

  “I remember you!”

  “Isn’t it time?”

  “Ah, but I never forgot you,” he cried. “I thought I had. I didn’t know who it was I was remembering. I thought it was fancy, and it was memory. I never forgot your voice, singing — and I remembered your face too; though I thought I didn’t.” He drew a deep breath. “That was why — —”

  “Tom Meredith has not forgotten you,” she said, as he paused.

  “Would you mind shaking hands once more?” he asked. She gave him her hand again. “With all my heart. Why?”

  “I’m making a record at it. Thank you.”

  “They called me ‘Sir Galahad’s little sister’ all one summer because the Great John Harkless called me that. You danced with me in the evening.”

  “Did I?”

  “Ah,” she said, shaking her head, “you were too busy being in love with Mrs. Van Skuyt to remember a waltz with only me! I was allowed to meet you as a reward for singing my very best, and you — you bowed with the indulgence of a grandfather, and asked me to dance.”

  “Like a grandfather? How young I was then! How time changes us!”

  “I’m afraid my conversation did not make a great impression upon you,” she continued.

  “But it did. I am remembering very fast. If you will wait a moment, I will tell you some of the things you said.”

  The girl laughed merrily. Whenever she laughed he realized that it was becoming terribly difficult not to tell her how adorable she was. “I wouldn’t risk it, if I were you,” she warned him, “because I didn’t speak to you at all. I shut my lips tight and trembled all over every bit of the time I was dancing with you. I did not sleep that night, because I was so unhappy, wondering what the Great Harkless would think of me. I knew he thought me unutterably stupid because I couldn’t talk to him. I wanted to send him word that I knew I had bored him. I couldn’t bear for him not to know that I knew I had. But he was not thinking of me in any way. He had gone to sea again in a big boat, the ungrateful pirate, cruising with Mrs. Van Skuyt.”

  “How time does change us!” said John. “You are wrong, though; I did think of you; I have al — —”

  “Yes,” she interrupted, tossing her head in airy travesty of the stage coquette, “you think so — I mean you say so — now. Away with you and your blarneying!”

  And so they went through the warm noontide, and little he cared for the heat that wilted the fat mullein leaves and made the barefoot boy, who passed by, skip gingerly through the burning dust with anguished mouth and watery eye. Little he knew of the locust that suddenly whirred his mills of shrillness in the maple-tree, and sounded so hot, hot, hot; or those others that railed at the country quiet from the dim shade around the brick house; or even the rain-crow that sat on the fence and swore to them in the face of a sunny sky that they should see rain ere the day were done.

  Little the young man recked of what he ate at Judge Briscoe’s good noon dinner: chicken wing and young roas’n’-ear; hot rolls as light as the fluff of a summer cloudlet; and honey and milk; and apple-butter flavored like spices of Arabia; and fragrant, flaky cherry-pie; and cool, rich, yellow cream. Lige Willetts was a lover, yet he said he asked no better than to Just go on eating that cherry-pie till a sweet death overtook him; but railroad sandwiches and restaurant chops might have been set before Harkless for all the difference it would have made to him.

  At no other time is a man’s feeling of companionship with a woman so strong as when he sits at table with her-not at a “decorated” and becatered and bewaitered table, but at a homely, appetizing, wholesome home table like old Judge Briscoe’s. The very essence of the thing is domesticity, and the implication is utter confidence and liking. There are few greater dangers for a bachelor. An insinuating imp perches on his shoulder, and, softly tickling the bachelor’s ear with the feathers of an arrow-shaft, whispers: “Pretty nice, isn’t it, eh? Rather pleasant to have that girl sitting there, don’t you think? Enjoy having her notice your butter-plate was empty? Think it exhilarating to hand her those rolls? Looks nice, doesn’t she? Says ‘Thank you’ rather prettily? Makes your lonely breakfast seem mighty dull, doesn’t it? How would you like to have her pour your coffee for you to-morrow, my boy? How would it seem to have such pleasant company all the rest of your life? Pretty cheerful, eh?”

  When Miss Sherwood passed the editor the apple-butter, the casual, matter-of-course way she did it entranced him in a strange, exquisite wonderment. He did not set the dish down when she put it in his hand, but held it straight out before him, just looking at it, until Mr. Willetts had a dangerous choking fit, for which Minnie was very proud of Lige; no one could have suspected that it was the veil of laughter. When Helen told John he really must squeeze a lemon into his iced tea, he felt that his one need in life was to catch her up in his arms and run away with her, not anywhere in particular, but just run and run and run away.

  After dinner they went out to the veranda and the gentlemen smoked. The judge set his chair down on the ground, tilted back in it with his feet on the steps, and blew a wavery domed city up in the air. He called it solid comfort. He liked to sit out from under the porch roof, he said; he wanted to see more of the sky. The others moved their chairs down to join him in the celestial vision. There had blown across the heaven a feathery, thin cloud or two, but save for these, there was nothing but glorious and tender, brilliant blue. It seemed so clear and close one marvelled the little church spire in the distance did not pierce it; yet, at the same time, the eye ascended miles and miles into warm, shimmering ether. Far away two buzzards swung slowly at anchor, half-way to the sun.

  “‘O bright, translucent, cerulean hue,

  Let my wide wings drift on in you,’”

  said Harkless, pointing them out to Helen.

  “You seem to get a good deal of fun out of this kind of weather,” observed Lige, as he wiped his brow and shifted his chair out of the sun.

  “I expect you don’t get such skies as this up in Rouen,” said the judge, looking at the girl from between half-closed eyelids.

  “It’s the same Indiana sky, I think,” she answered.

  “I guess maybe in the city you don’t see as much of it, or think as much about it. Yes, they’re the Indiana skies,” the old man went on.

  Skies as blue

  As the eyes of children when they smile at you.’

  “There aren’t any others anywhere that ever seemed much like them to me. They’ve been company for me all my life. I don’t think there are any others half as beautiful, and I know there aren’t any as sociable. They were always so.” He sighed gently, and Miss Sherwood fancied his wife must have found the Indiana skies as lovely as he had, in the days of long ago. “Seems to me they are the softest and bluest and kindest in the world.”

  “I think they are,” said Helen, “and they are more beautiful than the ‘Italian skies,’ though I doubt if many of us Hoosiers realize it; and — certainly no one else does.”

  The old man leaned over and pat
ted her hand. Harkless gasped. “‘Us Hoosiers!’” chuckled the judge. “You’re a great Hoosier, young lady! How much of your life have you spent in the State? ‘Us Hoosiers!’”

  “But I’m going to be a good one,” she answered, gaily, “and if I’m good enough, when I grow up maybe I’ll be a great one.”

  The buckboard had been brought around, and the four young people climbed in, Harkless driving. Before they started, the judge, standing on the horse-block in front of the gate, leaned over and patted Miss Sherwood’s hand again. Harkless gathered up the reins.

  “You’ll make a great Hoosier, all right,” said the old man, beaming upon the girl. “You needn’t worry about that, I guess, my dear.”

  When he said “my dear,” Harkless spoke to the horses.

  “Wait,” said the judge, still holding the girl’s hand. “You’ll make a great Hoosier, some day; don’t fret. You’re already a very beautiful one.” Then he bent his white head and kissed her, gallantly. John said: “Good afternoon, judge”; the whip cracked like a pistol-shot, and the buckboard dashed off in a cloud of dust.

  “Every once in a while, Harkless,” the old fellow called after them, “you must remember to look at the team.”

  The enormous white tent was filled with a hazy yellow light, the warm, dusty, mellow light that thrills the rejoicing heart because it is found nowhere in the world except in the tents of a circus — the canvas-filtered sunshine and sawdust atmosphere of show day. Through the entrance the crowd poured steadily, coming from the absorptions of the wild-animal tent to feast upon greater wonders; passing around the sawdust ellipse that contained two soul-cloying rings, to find seats whence they might behold the splendors so soon to be unfolded. Every one who was not buying the eternal lemonade was eating something; and the faces of children shone with gourmand rapture; indeed, very often the eyes of them were all you saw, half-closed in palate-gloating over a huge apple, or a bulky oblong of popcorn, partly unwrapped from its blue tissue-paper cover; or else it might be a luscious pink crescent of watermelon, that left its ravisher stained and dripping to the brow.