Tales From Bohemia by Robert Neilson Stephens

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Somebody lived in that boarding-house who knew Busted Blake, and it was
through inquiries resulting from, this somebody's jocularly calling him
"papa" one night in a saloon that Busted was made aware of his accession to
the paternal relation.

When the poor wretch heard the news, he made a prodigious effort to keep
his face composed. But the muscles would not be resisted. He burst out
crying, and he laid his head upon his arm upon a beer-flooded table and
wept copiously, causing a sudden hush to fall upon the crowd of topers and
a group to gather around his table and stare at him,--some mystified, some
grinning, none understanding.

The next day he made a herculean effort to pull himself together. He
obtained a position as draughtsman from one who had known him in his
respectable period, and he went tremblingly and sheepishly to call upon his
wife and child.

The consequence of his visit was a reunion, which endured for two whole
weeks. At the end of that time she cast him off in utter scorn.

How he lived for the next two years can be only known to those who are
familiar through experience with the existence of people who ask other
people on the street for a few cents toward a night's lodging. By those
who knew him he was said to be "no good to himself or any one else." He
acquired the raggedness, the impudence, the phraseology of the vagabond
class. He would hang on the edge of a party of men drinking together in
front of a bar, on the slim chance of being "counted in" when the question
went round, "What'll you have?" He was perpetually being impelled out
of saloons at foot-race speed by the officials whose function it is, in
barrooms, to substitute an objectionable person's room for his company.

One winter Sunday morning he slept late on a bench in a public square.
Awakened by an officer, he arose to go. Hazy in head and stiff at joints,
he slightly staggered. He heard behind him the cooing laugh of a child. He
looked around. It was himself that had awakened the infant's mirth--or that
strange something which precedes the dawn of a sense of humour in children.
The smiling babe was in a child's carriage which a plainly dressed woman
was pushing. He looked at the woman. It was his wife and the pretty child
was his own.

He walked rapidly from the place, and on the same day he decided to leave
the city. He had herded with vagrants of the touring class. The methods of
free transportation by means of freight-trains and free living, by means
of beggary and small thievery in country towns, were no secret to him.
He walked to the suburbs, and at nightfall he scrambled up the side of a
coal-car in a train slowly moving westward.

What hunger he suffered, what cold he endured, what bread he begged, what
police station cells he passed nights in, what human scum he associated
with, what thirst he quenched, and with what incredibly bad whiskey, are
particulars not for this unobjectionable narrative, for do they not belong
to low life? And who nowadays can tolerate low life in print unless it be
redeemed by a rustic environment and a laboured exposition of clodhopper
English and primitive expletives? Low life outside of a dialect story and a
dreary village? Never!

Mrs. Blake and the child lived in a fair degree of comfort upon the
mother's wages, but often the mother shuddered at thought of what might
happen should she ever lose her position at the photographer's.

Consumption had its hold on Busted Blake when he arrived in the mining-town
called Get-there City, in Kansas, one evening. Get-there City had not
gotten there beyond a single straggling street of shanties. But it had
acquired a saloon, although liquor-selling had already been forbidden in
Kansas.

Busted Blake, with ten cents in his clothes, entered the saloon and asked
in an asthmatic voice for as much whiskey as that sum was good for.

While awaiting a response, his eyes turned toward the only other persons in
the saloon,--three burly, bearded miners of the conventional big-hatted,
big-booted, and big-voiced type. Above their heads and against the wall was
this sign, lettered roughly with charcoal, under a crudely drawn death's
head:

"Five thousand dollars will be paid by the undersigned to the widow of
the sneaking hound that informs on this saloon. This is no meer bluf. P.
GIBBS."

Blake, after a brief coughing fit, looked up at the man behind the bar,--a
great thick-necked fellow with a mien of authority, and yet with a certain
bluff honesty expressed about his eyes and lips. This man, whose air of
proprietorship convinced Blake that he could be none other than P. Gibbs,
had first looked sneeringly at the ten cents, but had shown some small sign
of pity on hearing the ominous cough of the attenuated vagrant. He set
forth a bottle and glass.

"Help yerself," said P. Gibbs. While Blake was doing so, Mr. Gibbs went on:

"Bad cough o' yourn. Y' mightn't guess it, but that same cough runs in my
fam'ly. It took off a brother, but it skipped me."

Here was a bond of sympathy between the big, law-defying saloon-keeper and
the frail toper from the East. Busted Blake drained his glass and presently
coughed again. P. Gibbs again set forth the bottle, and this time he drank
with Blake. Before long, by dint of repeated fits of coughing on the part
of Blake, the sympathy of P. Gibbs was so worked upon that he invited the
three miners in the saloon to join him and the stranger.

Blake slept in a corner of the saloon that night. He left the next morning,
a curious expression of resolution on his face.

During the next three weeks he was now and then alluded to in P. Gibbs's
saloon as the "coughing stranger."

In the middle of the third week, at nine o'clock in the evening, when the
lamps in P. Gibbs's saloon were exerting their smallest degree of dimness
and the bar was doing a good business, the door opened and in staggered
Busted Blake. His staggering on this occasion was manifestly not due to
drink. His face had the hideous concavities of a starved man and the
uncertainty of his gait was the token of a mortal feebleness. His
emaciation was painful to behold. His eyes glowed like huge gems.

The crowd of miners looked at him with surprise as he entered.

"The coughing stranger!" cried one.

"The coffin stranger, you mean," said another.

Busted Blake lurched over to the bar. His eyes met those of P. Gibbs on the
other side, and the latter reached for a whiskey-bottle.

Blake fumbled in his pocket and brought forth a piece of soiled paper,
which he laid on the bar under the glance of P. Gibbs.

"Keep that!" said Blake, in a husky voice, whose service he compelled with
much effort. "And keep your word, too! That's where you'll find her."

P. Gibbs picked up the paper.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"That woman's name there. It's the name of my widow; the address, too, of a
photograph man who will tell you where she is. Get the money to her quick,
before the governor and the troops comes down on you to close you up. And
don't let her know how it comes about. Pick a man to take it to her,--let
him pay his expenses out of it,--a man you can trust, and make him tell her
I made it somehow, mining or something, so she'll take it. You know."

P. Gibbs, who had listened with increasing amazement, opened wide his eyes
and drew his revolver. He spoke in a strangely low, repressed voice:

"Stranger, do you mean to say--"

"Yes, that's it," shrieked Busted Blake, turning toward the crowd of
intensely interested onlookers. "And I call on all you here to witness and
to hold him to his word. That's no mere bluff he says in his notice there,
and I'm the sneaking hound that informed. My widow is entitled to $5,000. I
did it in Topeka, and for proof, see this newspaper."

P. Gibbs fired a shot from his revolver through the newspaper that Blake
pulled from his shirt. Then the saloon-keeper brought his weapon on a level
with Blake's face.

"It's good your boots is on!" said P. Gibbs, ironically.

But he did not fire. Blake stood perfectly still, awaiting the shot, and
feebly laughing.

So the two remained for some moments, until Blake suddenly sank to the
floor, quite exhausted. He died within a half-hour on the saloon floor, his
head resting in the palm of P. Gibbs, who knelt by his side and tried to
revive him.

At the next dawn, a man whom they called Big Andy started East, and the
piece of paper that Blake handed to P. Gibbs was not all that he took with
him. The United States marshal arrived and duly closed Gibbs's saloon,
which reopened very shortly afterward, minus the $5,000 offer.

And Big Andy found the widow of Busted Blake, to whom he told a bit of
fiction in accounting for the legacy conveyed by him to her that would have
imposed upon the most incredulous legatee. When she had recovered from
the surprise of finding herself and her child provided with the means of
surviving the possible loss of her situation, she forgave the late Busted,
and there was a flow of tears unusual to a boarding-house parlour and
unnerving to Big Andy.

Presently she asked Andy whether he knew what her husband's last words had
been.

"Yep," said Andy. "I heard'm plain and clear. Pete Gibbs,--the other
executor of the will, you know,--Pete says, 'It's all right, pardner, me
and Andy'll see to it,' and then your husband says, 'Thank Gawd I've been
some good to her and the child at last.'"

Which account was entirely correct. When Big Andy had returned to Get-there
City, and related how he had performed his mission, he added:

"I'd been such a lovely liar all through, it's a shame I had to go an'
spoil the story by puttin' in some truth at the finish."

They put up a wooden grave-mark where Blake was buried, and after his name
they cut in the wood this testimonial:

"A tenderfoot that was some good to his folks at last."

XX

MR. THORNBERRY'S ELDORADO

Near the uneven road among the hills a small field of stony ground lay
between woods and cultivated land. Nothing grew upon it and no house could
be seen from it. The sun beat upon it and crows flew over it to and from
the woods.

Along the road trudged a thin old negro with stooping back and gray wool.
His knees were bent and his cumbrously shod feet pointed far outward from
his line of progress. He wore an aged frock coat and a battered stiff hat,
although the month was June. His small face, beginning with a smoothly
curved forehead and ending with a cleanly cut chin, was mild and
conciliating, shiny, and of the colour of light chocolate. He carried a tin
bucket full of cherries. Pop Thornberry was returning to the town.

Pop, whose proper name was Moses, and who was a deacon in the African
Methodist Church, made his living this way and that way. He did odd jobs
for people, and he fished and hunted when fishing and hunting were in
season.

On this June day he had risen early and walked three miles to pick cherries
"on shares." He had picked ten quarts and left four of them with the
farmer whose trees had produced them. At six cents a quart he would profit
thirty-six cents by his walk of six miles and his work of a half-day.

The sun was scorching and Pop was tired. He decided to rest in the barren
field, at its very edge in shade of the woods. He climbed the zigzag fence
with some labour and at the expense of a few of his cherries. He sat down
upon a little knob of earth, took off his hat, drew a red handkerchief from
the inside thereof, and slowly wiped his perspiring brow.

He looked up at the sky, which was so brightly blue that it made his eyes
blink. He sought optical relief in the dark green of the woods. Then, in
steadying his pail of cherries between his legs, he turned his glance to
the ground in front of him.

His attention was caught by a lump of earth that sparkled at points In the
sun's rays, a mere clod composed of clay and mica, lying In the dry bed of
a bygone streamlet. Because it glittered he picked it up and examined it.
After a time he bethought him that he was yet two and a half miles from
town and very hungry. He arose, somewhat stiff, and put the shining clod in
his coat-tail pocket. On his way back to the road he noticed other little
earth lumps that shone. He resumed his walk townward, his knees shaking
regularly at every step, as was their wont.

At three o'clock in the afternoon he had reached home, sold his cherries,
and dined on dried beef and bread in his little unpainted wooden house on
the edge of the creek at the back of the town.

He owned his house and a small lot upon which it stood. Near it was a
flour-mill, whose owner held a mortgage upon Pop's house and lot. The old
negro had been compelled to borrow $200 to pay bills incurred during the
illness and subsequent funeral of the late Mrs. Thornberry, and thus to
avoid a sheriff's sale. Hence came the mortgage. It would expire on the
10th of September. Pop was almost ready to meet that date. He already had
$192 hidden in his cellar, unknown to any one.

He had heard rumours of the mill-owner's desire to build an addition to his
mill. To do this would necessitate the acquisition of contiguous property.
But Pop had not suspected any ulterior motive when the miller had offered
to lend him the money.

"I kin soon lay by 'nuff t' pay off d' mohgage, w'en I ain't got no one but
m'se'f t' puvvide foh no moah," he had said, after the loan had been made.

And, having dined on this June day, he took twenty cents from the amount
received for cherries and placed it in a cigar-box to be added to the $192.
He kept that sixteen cents with which to purchase provisions for to-morrow,
and then he walked down the quiet street to the railway station. He often
made a dime by carrying some one's satchel from the station to the hotel.

The railroad division superintendent, a well-fed and easy-going man, came
down from his office on the second floor of the station building and saw
Pop sitting on a baggage-truck. The old negro, forgetful of the clod in his
coat-tail pocket, had felt it when he sat down. He had taken it out of his
pocket and was now casually looking at it as he held it in his hand.

"Hello, Pop!" said the division superintendent, upon whose hand time was
hanging heavily. "What have you there?"

"Doan' know, Mistah Monroe. Doan' know, sah. Looks like jes' a chunk o'
mud."

He held out the clod to Mr. Monroe.

The spectacle of the division superintendent talking to the old negro
attracted a group of lazy fellows,--the driver of an express wagon, the man
who hauls the mail to the post-office, a boy who sold fruit to passengers
on the train, two porters, with tin signs upon their hats, who solicited
patronage from the hotels.

"Why, Pop," said the superintendent, winking to the expressman, "this lump
looks as though it contained gold."

"Yes," put in the expressman, "that's how gold comes in a mine. I've often
handled it. That's the stuff, sure."

The fruit-selling boy and the mail-man grinned. Pop Thornberry opened wide
his mouth and eyes and softly repeated the word:

"Goal!"

"I'd be careful of it," advised Mr. Monroe, handing the clod back to the
negro.

Pop took it with a trembling hand and looked at it. Presently he asked:

"W'at'll you give me foh dat air goal, Mistah Monroe."

"Oh, a piece like that would be no use to me. It has to be washed and it
wouldn't be worth while putting just one piece through the whole process of
cleaning. Now. If you have a lot of it, we might go into partnership in the
gold business."

Before the old man could answer to this pleasantry a whistle was heard up
the track, and Pop was forgotten in the excitement attending the arrival of
the train.

Dislodged from the baggage-truck, the old man looked around for Mr. Monroe,
but the superintendent had disappeared. Pop did not seek to carry any
satchels that day. His mind was full of other matters. He went behind the
station and sat down beside the river.

"Goal!" That meant proper tombstones for the graves of his wife and
children, a new pulpit for the African Methodist Church, equal to that of
the African Baptist Church, future ease for his somewhat weary legs and
arms and back.

The next afternoon the division superintendent found himself awaited at his
office door by Pop Thornberry, who was very dusty and who carried a basket
heavy with clods of clay and mica. He had been out to the arid field that
morning.

"H-sh!" whispered Pop. "Doan' say a word, Mistah Monroe! Hyah's a lot o'
dem air goal lumps, and I know weah dey's bushels moah,--plenty 'nuff to go
into pahtnehship on."

The superintendent, looked bewildered, then amused, then ashamed.
Embarrassed for a reply, he finally said:

"I haven't time to talk to you now, Pop. Besides, I've made up my mind not
to go into the gold business. You see, I'm rich enough already. Good day."

Thereafter Pop lay in wait for Mr. Monroe daily, but the superintendent
always avoided him. Pop neglected to earn his living and spent his time
going about town with his basket of clods in search of the superintendent.
Finally being openly ignored by Mr. Monroe when the two met face to face,
Pop became angry and took his secret to a jeweller on Main Street. The
jeweller laughed and told Pop that the gold in the basket must be worth at
least a thousand dollars, but he was not in a position to buy crude gold.
Then the jeweller made known to many that Pop Thornberry was crazy over
some lumps of mud and mica that he mistook for gold.

After that, people would stop Pop on the street and say:

"Let's see a piece of the gold in your basket."

Pop, astonished that his secret was out, but somewhat proud at being
thought the possessor of a treasure, would hesitate and then comply. The
small boys soon recognized in Pop's delusion a new means of fun. Observing
the solicitude with which he watched his clod while out of his own hands,
they would innocently ask for a glimpse into his basket. This granted, they
would grasp a piece of his treasure and run away, greatly annoying the old
man, who was in a state of keen distress until he recovered the abstracted
clod. These affairs between Pop and the boys were of hourly recurrence.
They diverted barroom loungers and passers-by.

Pop called on one local capitalist after another, seeking one who would
buy his gold or aid into preparing it for the market. All laughed at
his delusion, deeming it harmless, and all gave him good reason for not
accepting his offer of business partnership. So he went from the bank
president to the baker, from the member of congress for whom he had voted
to the barber, from the hotel proprietor to the bartender. The negroes of
the town, feeling that their race was humiliated in Pop, began to hold
aloof from him. No serious-minded person who learned of his delusion gave
it a second thought.

"Say Pop, where do you get this gold, anyhow?" asked a tobacco-chewing
gamin at the railroad station one day.

"Dat's my business," replied Thornberry, with some dignity.

"Oh," said his questioner, "I know. Tobe McStenger followed you out the
other day and saw where you got it. He'd a brung some in hisself, but it
wasn't on his property."

"Yes, Pop, you better look out," put in a telegraph operator, "or you'll be
taken up for trespassing. 'Tisn't your land, you know, where you find your
gold."

There was no truth in the assertion of the gamin. No one had taken the
trouble to follow Pop in his semiweekly excursions to the barren field.
But the old man knew that the field was not his. A ludicrous expression of
overwhelming fright came over his face.

Three days afterward, the farmer who owned the worthless field was
astonished when Pop offered to buy it.

"But what on earth do you want that land fer?" asked the farmer, sitting on
his barnyard fence.

Pop made a guilty attempt to appear guileless, and told the farmer that he
wished to build a shanty and raise potatoes. He was tired of living in town
and sought the quietude of the hills.

"Bein' as dat ere fiel' ain't good foh much, I thought you might be willin'
to paht with it," explained Pop.

The farmer eventually agreed to build a shanty on the field and sell it to
Pop for $180. Pop desired immediate occupancy. There was a legal hitch,
owing to the badness of the land and the questionable condition of Pop's
mind. But the transfer of the property was finally recorded.

Pop no longer had to fear arrest for trespass. His gold field was now
legally his. But he was still kept uneasy by his inability to make his
gold marketable. His uneasiness increased as September approached. He had
applied to the purchase of the field the sum saved to cancel the mortgage
upon his house at the rear end of the town.

The three days before the foreclosure of the mortgage were days of
exquisite anguish to Pop. When the foreclosure came and he and his goods
were turned out on the banks of the creek to make room for the mill-owner's
improvements, his mental turmoil ended. He took the crisis calmly.

"Jes' wait," he said to a neighbour who had stopped at sight of the
moving-out. "Wait till I get dat ere goal on de mahket. I'll bull' a mill
dat'll drive dis yer mill out o' d' business. Den I'll done buy back dis
yer ol' home."

But the next day, when the unexpected happened,--when builders began to
tear down his house,--the enormity of his deed dawned upon him. After a day
of moaning and staring, as he sat amidst his household goods on the bank of
the creek, he became animated by a deep rage against the mill-owner. Now
more than ever had he a special purpose for enriching himself by means of
his treasure across the hill.

The coming of two circuses in succession had taken the interest of the boys
away from Pop during August and part of September. Now they turned again to
him for amusement. First they besieged the abandoned stable to which he had
conveyed his goods, and in which he slept,--for he had not found will to
betake himself from the town he had so long inhabited, and his shanty in
the field remained unoccupied. His purchase of the land had betrayed to
general knowledge the location of his treasure, of which he continued to
bring in new specimens.

One October day he had just come from vainly attempting to induce the
postmaster to join him in the enterprise of exploiting his gold-field.
In front of the post-office, he was met by some boys coming noisily from
school. They surrounded him and demanded to see the gold in his basket. As
the town policeman was sauntering up the street, Pop felt safe in refusing.
The boys, also observing the officer of the law, contented themselves with
retaliating in words only,

"Say, Pop," cried one of them, "you'd better keep an eye on your
gold-field. Nick Hennessey knows where it is, and he's gittin' up a diggin'
party to take a wagon out some night and bring away all your gold."

The boys, laughing at this quickly invented announcement, ran off after
a hand-organ. The old man stood perfectly still, or as nearly so as the
feebleness of his legs would permit.

That evening Pop was missing from the town. And when Abraham Wesley, who
had often lent his shotgun to the old man, went to look for that weapon,
intending to shoot glass balls in the fairgrounds across the river, the
fowling-piece too was missing.

Pop had gone out to protect his possession. Three nights passed and three
days. The few country folk and others who travelled that way during this
time saw the old man walking about in his field or sitting in front of his
shanty, his shotgun on his shoulders, his eyes fixed suspiciously on all
who might become intruders. Night and day he patrolled his little domain.

At dusk of the third day a lively party was returning to the town in a
wagon from a search for nuts. The full moon was rising and the merrymakers
were singing. One of the girls was thirsty. When she saw the shanty in the
rugged field, she asked a young man to get her a glass of water at the hut.
The wagon stopped and the youth climbed astride the rail fence. Suddenly an
unnaturally shrill and excited voice was heard:

"Hyah, you, doan' come no farder! Dese yer's my premises!"

From behind the empty shanty appeared the thin old negro, bareheaded, his
shotgun at his shoulder, a striking figure against the rising moon.

The young man descended from the fence into the field. There came a flash
and a crack from Pop Thornberry's gun. The youth felt the sting of a piece
of birdshot in his leg. Howling and limping, he turned quickly over the
fence into the wagon, which made a hasty flight.

The next morning some idlers went out from the town to the scene of the
adventure. They found the old man lying hatless in the middle of the field,
face downwards, upon the shotgun. He had died of sheer exhaustion, on
guard--and on his own land, as befit an honest citizen who had never
intruded upon the peace of other men.

XXI

AT THE STAGE DOOR [Footnote: Courtesy of _Lippincott's Magazine_.
Copyright, 1892, by J. B. Lippincott Company.]

First let me explain how I came to be sitting in so unsavoury a place as
Gorson's "fifteen cent oyster and chop house" that night. Most newspaper
men--the rank and file--receive remuneration by the week. Those not given
over to domesticity, those who enjoy that alluring regularity identical
with liberty, fare sumptuously, as a rule, on "pay-day." Thereafter the
quantity and quality of the good things of life that they enjoy diminish
daily until the next pay-day.

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