Chapter II: Part 2

Of course Billings was making a fortune out of it. But as it would take six or eight years to touch the figure he had set for himself, and as he had no special guarantee of an immortal youth on this earth, and as, until the fortune was made, he had to live all the year around in that god-forsaken spot, and to live with Big Mitch, moreover, I looked upon him as a man in uncommonly hard luck. And he was.

I had been visiting friends in a town some miles inland, and it had occurred to me that it would be an act of Christian charity to drive over the hills to Billings’s place of servitude, and to condole with my old friend. I had nothing else to do--a circumstance always favorable to the perpetration of acts of Christian charity--and I went. He was enthusiastically glad to see me--I was the first visitor he had ever had--and he left his office at once, and led me up the burning hot sand-hill to his house, which was a very comfortable sort of place when you got there. It was an old-fashioned Southern house, small but stately, with a Grecian portico in front, supported by two-story wooden pillars. Here he was established in lonely luxury, with no one to love, none to caress, swarms of darkeys, and a cellar full of wines that would have tempted the Dying Anchorite to swill. Casually dispatching half a dozen niggers after as many bottles of champagne as they thought we might need to whet our appetites for luncheon, Billings bade me welcome again, and we fell to friendly talk.

He began with that kind of apology for his condition that speaks its own futility, and its despair of any credence. Of course, he said, it was not a very cheerful sort of life, but it had its compensations--quiet, good for the nerves, opportunity for study and all that sort of thing, self-improvement. And then, of course, there was society, such as it was--mainly, he had to admit, the superannuated bachelors and worn-out old maids who clung to those decaying Southern plantations--for, it is hardly necessary to say, not an acre of property in that forlorn region, save only Billings’s mud-bank, had yielded a cent of revenue since the war. And, of course, the unpleasant part of it was that none of them lived less than ten or fifteen miles away, and were only to be reached by a long ride, and as he--Billings--was never at ease in the saddle, on account of his liver, this practically shut him out. But then, of course, Mitch went everywhere, and enjoyed it very much.

“Oh, yes!” said I, reminded of the most unpleasant part of my duty; “and how is Mitch?”

“He’s dirty well, and it’s devilish little you care!” brayed out an incredibly brazen

voice just behind my ear, and a big red hand snatched the bottle of champagne from my grasp, while a laugh, that sounded like a hyena trying to bellow, rang in my ears. A great, big, raw-boned youngster, dressed in clothes of an ingenious vulgarity, dropped heavily into a chair by my side and laid a knobby broad red hand on my knee, where it closed with a brutal grip. That was Big Mitch, whose real name was Randolph Mitchel, and who being by birth a distant connection of dear old Billings, might reasonably have been expected to be some sort or variety of gentleman. Yet, if you wanted to sum up Big Mitch, his ways, manners, tastes, ideas and spiritual make-up generally,--if he could be said to have any spiritual make-up--you had only to say that he was all that a gentleman is not, and you had a better descriptive characterization of the man than you could have got in a volume telling just what he was. This was not by any means my first acquaintance with Mr. Randolph Mitchel. When I was a young man his father had stood my friend, and though he had dropped out of my sight when he went, a hopeless consumptive, to vegetate in some Western sanitarium, it was natural enough that he should send to me to use my good offices in behalf of his son, who had been expelled from a well-known fresh-water college of the Atlantic slope, very shortly after he had entered it.

Now I am not a hard-hearted man, and a boy with a reasonable, rational, normal amount of devil in him can do pretty nearly anything he wants to with me; therefore it signifies something when I say that after giving up a week to the business, I had to write to poor old Mr. Mitchel, at the Consumptives’ Home, Bilhi, Colorado, not only that was it impossible to get his son Randolph reinstated at that particular college, but that I did not believe that there was any college ever made where the boy had a prospect of staying even one term out. It was not that he was vicious; he was no worse on the purely moral side than scores of wild boys. But he was the most hopelessly, irreclaimably turbulent, riotous, unruly, insolent, brutal, irreverent, unmannerly and generally blackguardly young devil that I had ever encountered; and the entire faculty of the college said, in their own scholastic way, that he beat _their_ time. He had not even the saving graces of good-nature, thoughtlessness and mirthful good-fellowship, which may serve as excuse for much youthful waywardness. The students disliked him as thoroughly as their professors did, and although he was smart as a steel trap and capable of any amount of work when he wanted to do it, nobody in that college wanted him,--_not even the captain of the foot-ball team_.

Was I right? Had I wronged the boy? I asked that captain, and he said No.

Big Mitch was only twenty-three or so, but he had been many things in his young life. He had run away and traveled with a circus. He had been a helper in a racing stable. I don’t know what he was when his father made a last desperate appeal to poor Billings, and Billings, who did not know what he was letting himself in for, sent him down to start up work on the recently purchased mud-pit. There Mitch found his billet, and he led a life of absolute happiness, domineering over a horde of helpless, ignorant negros, and white men of an even lower grade who sought work in that wretched place. And what a life he led the dear, gentle, kindly old fellow who had sold himself to fortune-getting in that little Inferno! I knew how Billings must loathe him; I knew, indeed, how he did loathe him, though he was too gentle to say it, but I knew that the burden my poor old friend had put upon himself would not soon be shifted. For Big Mitch was useful, nay, indispensable, for the first time in his life. He was as honest as he was tough, and he could handle that low grade of human material as few others could have done. The speculation would have been a failure without him. “In fact,” Billings told me afterward with a sad smile, “it is not only that he raises the efficient of the works; he _is_ the efficient of the works.”

Big Mitch never bore me the slightest ill-will for the report I had made to his father. He was too indurated an Ishmael for that. He knew everybody disliked him, but he did not care a cent for that. When he wanted other people’s company, he _took_ it. The question of their enjoyment was one that never entered his mind. It was in pure delight in seeing me that he grabbed my knee, pinched my knee-cap until it sent a qualm to my stomach, and told me that he had ordered my driver to go home, and that I had got to stay and see the country. Things came pretty near to a lively squall when I got the impudence of this through my head; but when Billings joined his frightened, anxious pleadings to the youth’s brutalities, and I saw his humbled, troubled, mortified face, I yielded.

We were free from Mitch after luncheon, and poor Billings began to make a pitiful little apology; but I stopped him.

“I don’t mind,” I said; “I was only thinking of _you_.”

“Oh, I’ve got accustomed to it,” he said, trying to smile; “and it’s really more tolerable than you would think, when you get to know him. And when he is too--too trying--why, there is one place that he understands he must respect. Come to my library. You are the first person who has ever entered it except myself.”

He led me to the door of a room at the end of a dark passage-way. As he put the key in the lock I noticed a curious smell.

“I want you to see,” said he, “the sort of thing I’m interested in.”

I had not been five seconds in the room before I knew what it was--the sort of thing he was interested in. Loneliness breeds strange maggots in the brain of a New Yorker temporarily engaged in the mud-mining business. My old friend Billings was now a full-blown Theosophist, and he had that little room stuffed full of more Mahatma-literature and faquir trumpery than you could shake a stick at. There were skulls and fans and grass-cloth things and heathen gods till--literally--your eyes couldn’t rest. There were four-legged gods and eight-legged gods, and gods with their legs where their arms ought to be, and gods who were of the gentleman-god and lady-god sex at one and the same time, and gods with horns and miscellaneous gods, and a few other gods. In odd places here and there, where he had not had time to arrange them properly, there were a few more gods.

And then my poor old friend sat down and tried to put me through the whole business, and tell me what a great and mysterious thing it was, and what a splendid scheme it would be to get into the two-hundred and ninety-seventh state or the thirtieth dilution or the thirty-third degree, or something, for when you got there you were nothing, don’t you know?

I was short on Vishnu and I didn’t know beans about Buddha, and for a long time, I am afraid, I gave dear old Billings a great deal of grief. But finally I began to get a new light, and Billings convinced me that there was something in it, and we had some more champagne.

That evening Mitch came for us with a carryall, and said he was going to drive us twenty miles inland to a “dancing-in-the-barn” function on somebody’s plantation. I proved to him then and there that he was not. Billings nearly melted into a puddle while the operation was going on. He could scarcely believe his eyes when he saw Big Mitch drive off alone, and I think he had a slight chill. At any rate, he had the champagne brought to the library, and there he told me that he had not believed such a thing to be possible; that he looked upon me in a new light, and that he thought my _Ghoollah_ must be stronger than Mitch’s _Ghoollah_. I told him that I should be ashamed of myself if it wasn’t; and then I asked him what a _Ghoollah_ was. Please do not ask me if I have spelled that word right. I am spelling it by ear, and if my ear for Hindoo is as bad as my ear for music, I have probably got it wrong. It sounded something like the noise that pigeons make, and that is as near as I can get to it. According to Billings, it was Hindoo for my vital essence and my will power and my conscience and my immortal soul and pretty nearly every other spiritual property that I carried around in my clothes. Everyone, it appeared, had a _Ghoollah_. If your Ghoollah was stronger than the other man’s Ghoollah, you bossed the other man. If you had a good and happy Ghoollah, you were good and happy. If you had a bad Ghoollah, you were bilious. If my Theosophy is wrong, please do not correct it. I prefer it wrong. I told him that I did not see that having a Ghoollah was anything more than being yourself, but he said it was; that folks could swap Ghoollahs, or lend them out on call loans.

Then it all came out. That was the reason that he was driving deeper and deeper into Theosophy. He had got so sick of Mitch that, feeling it impossible to shake off his burden, he had seized upon this Ghoollah idea as offering a ray of hope. He was now trying to learn how to get into spiritual communication with somebody--_anybody_--else, who would swap Ghoollahs with him after business hours, so that they could ride-and-tie, as it were, and give his own weary Ghoollah a rest.

“Look here, Billings,” I said, “this is all rubbish. Now, I’m not dealing in Ghoollahs, but I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You can find some sort of a job here for a decent young fellow, and I’ll send one down who’ll be grateful for the place and who will be a companion to you. It’s Arthur Penrhyn, Dr. Penrhyn’s boy; a nice, pleasant young fellow--just what his father used to be, you remember? He was to have graduated at Union this year, but he broke down from over-study. That’s the kind of Ghoollah _you_ want, and he’ll do you no end of good.”

* * * * *

This happened in June. I had never expected to see Billings’s mud-heap again, but I saw it before the end of July. I went there because Billings had written me that if I cared for him and our life-long friendship, and for poor Penrhyn’s boy I must come at once. He could not explain by letter what the matter was.

It added to my natural concern when, on my arrival, Billings hurried me into the library and I found it as theosophic as ever. I had hoped that that nonsense was ended. But worse was to come.

“When you were here before,” said Billings, impressively, without having once mentioned champagne, “you scoffed at a light which you couldn’t see. Now, my friend, I am going to let you see it with your own eyes, and you shall tell me whether or no you are convinced that it is possible for one human being to exchange his entity with another. If I have brought you here on a wild goose chase, I am willing to have you procure a judicial examination into my sanity, and I will abide the issue.”

He spoke with so much quiet gravity that he made me feel creepy.

“See here, old man,” I said; “do you mean to tell me that you have succeeded in pairing off with any other fellow’s Ghoollah, or Woollah, or whatever it is?”

“No,” he said, coloring a little; “it’s not I. It’s--it’s--it’s--in fact, it’s that boy Penrhyn.”

“What the deuce do you mean?” I demanded.

“I mean that Arthur Penrhyn has changed, or, rather, is changing his spiritual essence with another man.”

“Indeed,” said I; “and who’s the other man?”

“Randolph Mitchel,” said Billings.

“Mitch?”

“Mitch!”

There is no need of describing the rest of that interview. You have probably met the man who believes that the spirit of his grandmother came out of the cabinet and shook hands with him. You can probably imagine how you would talk to that man if he had brought you eight hundred miles to tell you about it. That is what happened in Billings’s library that afternoon, and it ended, of course, in our calling each other “old man” a great many times over, and in my agreeing to stay to the end of the week, and in Billings giving me his word of honor not to open his mouth on the subject unless at the end of that time I asked him to and admitted that he was right in sending for me. And then Billings did something that knocked my consciousness of superiority clean out of me, and gave a severe shock to my confidence. He offered to bet me five hundred dollars to anything that would make it interesting on that contingency, and he called me down and down till I had to compromise on a bet of fifty dollars even. I have met many men in the course of my life who believed in various spook-religions, but that was the first and only time that I ever met a man who would back his faith with a cold money bet.

* * * * *

By way of changing the subject, we strolled down to the quarry. It was even hotter than before, and it smelt worse, and I did not wonder that it had driven poor old Billings to Theosophy. It was a scene of interesting activity, but it could not be called pleasant. I have a great respect for the dignity of labor, but I think labor looks more dignified with its shirt on than when reduced to a lone pair of breeches.

I was about to make a motion to return to the house, when suddenly a string of peculiarly offensive oaths, uttered in a shrill angry voice, drew my attention to a heavy wire rope which a gang of men were hauling across my path. Looking up I saw, as well as I could see anything, against the dazzling background of the hill, a short, insignificant-looking figure perched on a rock, from whence it directed, with many gesticulations and an abounding stream of profanity, the operations of the toiling, grunting, straining creatures who dragged at the ponderous cable. Its operations seemed to be conducted with more vehemence than judgement, and two or three times the rope was on the edge of slipping back into the pit behind, when it was saved by the men’s quick response to some directions given in a low, strong voice by a man who stood in my rear. Some little hitch occurred after a minute or two, and the small figure, in an access of rage, rushed down from the rock, and, showering imprecations all around, leaped in among the workmen, pushing, shoving and cuffing, and after considerable trouble finally got them to doing what he wanted. I heard the heavier voice behind me utter half-aloud an expression of annoyance and disgust. Then the little figure passed me, running back to its rock, and hailed me as it passed.

“Hello, Governor!” it said; “you here? See you when I get this job done!”

“Billings,” said I, “who on earth is that?”

“Arthur Penrhyn,” said Billings. I looked again and saw that it was. Then I turned round and saw behind me the gigantic form of Mitch. He, too, spoke to me as I passed, and with a look of simple pleasure in his face that made it seem absolutely strange to me.

“Glad to see you, Sir,” he said.

_Sir!_

* * * * *

“It’s a most remarkable case altogether,” said Billings, who had got back to his normal self, and had brought out the champagne. “When that boy came here he was just as you described him--just like his poor father in the days when we first knew each other. He brooded a little too much, and seemed discontented; but, considering his disappointment at college, that was natural enough. Well, do you know, I believe it’s he that’s doing the whole thing, and that he is effecting the substitution for his own ends, though I don’t know what they are.”

“Perhaps,” I suggested, “he wants his Ghoollah to get the job away from Mitch’s Ghoollah.”

“Ahem!” said Billings, looking a little embarrassed; “I--in fact, I’ve discovered that the best Pundits do not use that word. It ought to be--”

Here Billings gave me the correct word; but I draw the line at Ghoollah, and Ghoollah it stays while I am telling this story.

“He hadn’t been here a week before I noticed that he kept his eyes fixed on Mitch all the time they were together. He looked at him as though he were actually trying to absorb him. Before long, I saw that Mitch began to be troubled under that steady gaze. He seemed at first angry, then distressed, and he had long fits of silence. His boisterousness has been vanishing steadily; but it is not sullenness that he displays--on the contrary, I have never known him so gentle. He is just as efficient in his duties, without being so extremely--demonstrative as he used to be. And as for that other boy, who probably had never uttered a profane word in his life, or spoken rudely to any human being--well, you heard him to-day!”

I made up my mind to try to drink fifty dollars’ worth of Billings’s champagne before the end of the week to even up on my bet; and, as the days went on, each new development only served to urge me to greater assiduity in the task. The spirit of Big Mitch looked out of little Arthur Penrhyn’s insolent eyes, spoke out of his foul mouth, and showed itself even in tricks of gesture and carriage, and in lines of facial expression. And Big Mitch, though his huge, uncouth frame and coarse lineaments lent themselves but ill to the showing of it, carried within him a new spirit of gentleness and humility. We saw little of him, for after work hours he kept persistently to his room. But once, late at night, seeing him, through his open door, asleep over a book, I stepped softly in and looked over his big shoulders at the half-dozen volumes that littered his table. They were college text-books, and on the fly-leaf of each one was the name of Arthur Penrhyn.

* * * * *

I had packed my valise, and was looking for Billings to pay him his fifty dollars, when Big Mitch came out of his room--it was the noon hour--and he asked me for the favor of a few words.

“I am ashamed to trouble you, sir,” he said, “but if you could help me to get any sort of a job in New York, or anywhere else, I’d be more thankful than I could tell you. I can afford to take almost any sort of a place where there’s a future, for I am pretty well ahead of the game financially, and I’ve earned my interest in this concern. And it’s in such shape now that Mr. Billings can get along without me.”

“But, my dear boy,” I said, “why do you _want_ to go?”

Big Mitch frowned and fidgeted nervously; then he exploded.

“I’ll give it to you straight,” he said. “It’s that Penrhyn pup. When he first came here I thought I was just about the nicest little man on God’s footstool. I was as contented with myself as a basket of eggs. I knew it all. I was so sharp you could cut glass with me. I was the only real sport in the outfit. See? And I’d got a roving commission to jump on people’s necks. Well, _you_ know what I was. And I liked myself. See?”

“But?” I began. “Arthur Penrhyn--”

“_So did he!_ I don’t believe any one in the world was ever stuck on me before, but _he_ was. That little ape hadn’t been here a week before he began to do everything he saw me do, and pretty soon he had me down so fine that he might have been my twin-brother, if we ever had such runts in our family. Well, I began to sour on the show. Understand? I could see for myself it wasn’t pretty. Well, one day I came around a corner, and there was that baboon sassing back to old man Billings. I was just going to pick him up and break his neck, when I felt kind of sick at my stomach, and I says to myself, ‘You swine! that’s the way _you_’ve been treating that white man! How do you like yourself now?’”

Big Mitch clutched desperately at his rumpled hair.

“I’m going to be a gentleman,” he grunted, “if I have to chew gravel to do it. I’ll do it, though, and I’ll show up some day and surprise the old man before he cashes in his last lung. But if I don’t get a fresh start pretty soon, I’ll do something to that Penrhyn monkey that won’t be any young lady’s dancing-class, you bet your boots!

* * * * *

I told Billings. First he paid me fifty dollars. Then he made a bonfire of all his theosophic outfit. Then he went down to the quarry and announced that he was his own boss from that time on; and by way of a sample demonstration he called up Arthur Penrhyn and knocked the everlasting Ghoollah out of him. Then he came back to the house and looked at the thermometer.

To this day, I never see champagne without thinking of drinking some.

CUTWATER OF SENECA.

The story I am about to tell is hardly a story at all. Perhaps I had better call it a report, and let it go at that, with a word of explanation as to how I came to report it.

In 1884 a new state survey and a new re-districting act between them cut off about one-quarter of a northern timber county close to the Canada border, and delivered over the severed portion to its neighbor on the southerly side, a thickly settled county with several large towns and with important manufacturing interests. This division left the backwoods county temporarily without a judiciary or a place of holding court. But the act provided for the transfer of all pending cases to the courts of the more fortunate county down below, and gave the backwoods District Attorney the privilege of trying in the said courts such cases as might arise in his own bailiwick during his term of office then current.

No such cases occurred, however, until the period stated by the act was nearly at an end, when the District Attorney of the mutilated county came down to Metropole, our County Seat, to try a murder case. As our backwoods neighbors were a somewhat untrammelled, uncouth and free-and-easy folk at their quietest, his coming naturally attracted some curious interest, especially after it became known that he had come into town sitting side by side with the prisoner in the smoking-car, and discussing politics with him. His name was Judge Cutwater, and he was generally spoken of as Cutwater of Seneca--perhaps because he had at some time been a Judge in Seneca, New York; perhaps because there was no comprehensible reason for so calling him, any more than there was comprehensible reason for various and sundry other things about him.

He was a man who might have been sixty or seventy or eighty. Indeed, he might have been a hundred, and he may be now, for all I know. But he was lean, wiry, agile, supple and full of eternal youth. He might have been good-looking if he had cared to be, for he had a fine old-fashioned eagle face, and a handsome, flowing gray moustache, the grace of which was spoiled by a straggling thin wisp of chin whiskers, and a patch of gray stubble on each cheek. And, of course, he chewed tobacco profusely and diffusely, and in his long, grease-stained, shiny broadcloth coat, his knee-bagged breeches, his big slouch hat, and his eye-glasses with heavy black horn rims, suspended from his neck by a combination of black ribbon and pink string, he looked what he was, as clearly as though he had been labelled--the representative of the Majesty of the Law among a backwoods people out of odds with fortune, desperate, disheartened, down on their luck, and lost to self-respect.

He said he was a good Democrat, and I think he was. He saw the prisoner locked up, bade him a kindly “Good night, Jim,” and ordered the jailer to let him have all the whiskey he wanted. Then Judge Cutwater called on his brother of the local bench, greeting him with a ceremonious and stately dignity that absolutely awed the excellent old gentleman, and dropping an enormous Latin quotation on him as he departed, just by way of utterly flattening him out. After that he strolled over to the hotel, grasped the landlord warmly by the hand, and in the space of half an hour told him a string of stories of such startling novelty, humor and unfitness for publication that, as the landlord enthusiastically declared, the recent Drummers’ Convention could not be said to be “in it” with the old man.

The next day the case of Jim Adsum for the murder of his mate in a logging camp was called in court; and District Attorney Cutwater’s trying of it was a circus that nearly drove old Judge Potter into an apoplectic fit, and kept the whole court room in what both those eminent jurists united--it was the only thing they _did_ unite in--in characterizing as a disgraceful uproar.

And yet, somehow, by four o’clock he had evidence enough in to convict the prisoner; the defence had not a single exception worth the noting, and was rattled as to its state of mind; and that weird old prosecutor, who repeatedly spoke of the prisoner at the bar as “Jim,” and made no secret of the fact that they had been bosom friends and companions in the forest, had worked up a case that made the best lawyers in the room stare at him with looks of puzzled surprise and amazed respect.

When he rose to sum up, he slowly and thoughtfully drew a tin tobacco-box from his trousers’ pocket, opened it and deposited therein his quid, after passing his right hand, with a rapid and skillful motion, across his gray moustache. This feat he performed with a dignity that at once fascinated and awed the beholder. Then he began:

“Your Honor _and_ Gentlemen of the Jury: It is a rare and a seldom occurrence that a prosecuting official, sworn to exert his utmost energies to further the execution of the law, is called upon to invoke the awful vengeance of that law, and the retribution demanded by outraged humanity, upon the head of one under whose blanket he has lain within the cold hollows of the snow-clad woods; with whom he has shared the meagre food of the pioneer; side by side with whom he has struggled for his rights and his liberties, at the daily and hourly risk of his life, with half-breed Injuns and with half-breeder Kanucks. Sech, gentlemen, is the duty that lies before this servant of the Law to-day; and sech, gentlemen, is the duty that will be done, without fear or favor, without consideration of friendship or hallowed association; and this man, Jim Adsum, knows it, knowing me, as well as he ever knew anything in the fool life that is now drawing to a close.

“You have heard, Gentlemen of the Jury, the evidence that has been laid before you on the part of the prosecution, and you have heard the attempt made by the learned counsel for the defence to discredit that evidence in his eloquent but frivolous opening on behalf of his unfortunate client. I trust that you have given to the one the appreciative attention which it deserves, and that you have let the other slip, naked and shivering, into the boundless oblivion of your utter contempt.

“What, Gentlemen of the Jury, are the circumstances of this case? We learn by the testimony for the people that on the twenty-seventh of November a party of seven men started off for the upper waters of the Sagus River, some to join a lumber camp, and others, among them this defendant, James Adsum, and his victim, Peter Biaux, a Frenchman, in the pursuit of their usual vocation--which may be said to be hunting for fur-skins, on general principles. This party of seven men is snowed up, and goes into camp at the junction of Sagus and First Rivers, and for eleven days remains thus snow-bound in that icy solitude, the only human beings within hundreds of miles.

“There has been, Gentlemen of the Jury, as has been shown to you, an old grudge between the prisoner at the bar and the deceased; a grudge of many years standing. There is no use of going into the origin of that grudge. Some says it was cards; some, business; some, drink; and I personally know that it was a woman; but that makes no difference before this present tribunal. Let it be enough that there was bad blood between the men; that it broke forth, as two witnesses have told you, day

after day, within the confines of that little camp crowded within its snow-bound arena in the heart of the immeasurable solitudes of the wintry forest. Again and again the other members of the party intervened to make peace between them. At last, upon the eighth day of December, matters come to a crisis, and a personal encounter ensued between the two men, in the course of which the deceased, being a Frenchman, is badly mauled, and Jim, here, being without his knife, through carelessness, is correspondingly cut. The two are separated; and, for fear of further mischief, the Frenchman is sent down the river to fish through the ice, and the prisoner is kept in the camp. That night, by order of the head of the party, he sleeps between two men. These two men have told you their story--how one of them woke in the night at the sound, as he thought, of a distant shot, and became aware that Adsum was no longer at his side--how, reaching out his hand, he grasped another hand, and taking it for the prisoner’s, was reassured and fell asleep again--and how, weeks afterward, he first found out that that hand was the hand of the man who had been detailed to sleep on the other side of the prisoner. You have heard, gentlemen, how these two men awoke in the morning to find Adsum lying between them, shaking and shivering with a chill under his heavy blanket. You have heard of the long and unsuccessful search for Peter Biaux, and of the accidental discovery of his mangled body three months later, under the ice of the Sagus River, at a point ten miles below the camp. You have heard how each of these witnesses was haunted by a suspicion that he had unwittingly betrayed the trust reposed in him, and how, at last, when they spoke together of their watch on that fatal night, their suspicion flashed, illumined with the fire of heaven’s truth, into a hijjus certainty.

“You have been told, gentlemen, that the case of the people rests upon circumstantial evidence. It does, gentlemen; it does; and the circumstances are all there. You have heard how when these two witnesses exchanged notes, they came to one conclusion, and that is the conclusion to which I shall bring your minds. The witness Duncan said to the witness Atwood: ‘Jim done it!’ The witness Atwood replied to him: ‘Jim done it!’ And I say to you, Gentlemen of the Jury: ‘Jim _done_ it!’ And you done it, Jim; you know you did!

“And now, gentlemen, what sort of a man is this prisoner at the bar? We must consider him for the purposes of this trial as two men--on the one hand, as the brave, upright and courageous trapper which he has on numberless occasions, to my personal knowledge, shown himself to be--and I may say to you, Gentlemen of the Jury, that I would not be here talking to you now if he had not a-been on one or two occasions. And on the other hand, Gentlemen of the Jury, I am going to show him to you as the red-handed murderer I always told him he would be if he gave the rein to his violent passions. Besides, the darn fool’s drunk half the time.

“You have been told, gentlemen, by the learned counsel for the defence, that this crime was committed in a rough country, where deeds of violence are so common that it is possible that this man may have died by another hand, murdered by a totally different person, for totally different causes and reasons, and under circumstances totally unconnected with the circumstances set forth in this case. Gentlemen, it _is_ a rough country--rough as the speech of its children, rough as their food and fare, rough as the storms they face, and nigh as rough as the whiskey they drink. But it is a country, gentlemen, where every man knows his neighbor’s face and his neighbor’s heart, where the dangers and privations of life draw men closer together than they are drawn in great cities like this beautiful town of yours, which is honored by the citizens I see sot before me in this jury box. In that great snow-clad wilderness, on that bitter eighth of December, with the thermometer thirty degrees below zero, I can assure you, gentlemen, that there was no casual, accidental, extemporaneous murderer lilly-twiddling around that chilly solitude, sauntering among twenty-foot snowdrifts for the purpose of striking down a total stranger with nineteen distinct and separate cuts, and then fading away into nothingness like the airy fabric of a vision. And Jim doing nothing all that time? Gentlemen, the contention of the counsel ain’t _sense_!

“Gentlemen, I wish I could tell you that it was so. I wish I could tell you so for Jim’s sake. I wish I could tell you so for your own sakes, for on you is soon to rest the awful yet proud responsibility of deciding that a fellow human being’s life is forfeit to his blood-guiltiness. I wish I could tell you so for my own sake, regarding myself as a friend of Jim’s. But it is the District Attorney, the Prosecutor for the People, that you must listen to while he tells you the story of what happened that night.

“It was half-past eleven of that night when this man Adsum arose. How do I know? Look in the almanac and see where the moon stood at half-past eleven! It was then that he slipped from between his two guards and drew back to where the flickering camp-fire cast the shadow of a pine tree on the wall of snow that shut in their little resting-place. There he stood in that shadow--a shadow that laid on his soul and on his face--and waited to see if one of his comrades stirred. At his feet lay the two men that had been set to guard him, Jared Duncan and Bill Atwood. Eb Spence laid over the way with his feet to the fire. By him laid Sol Geary and Kentucky Wilson. Why, Jim, I can see it all just as if I was there! And then you--he--then, Gentlemen of the Jury, this prisoner at the bar, slipped from that camp where his companions lay, bound to him as he was bound to them, in the faith of comradeship; and, as he left that little circle, that spot trodden out of the virgin snow, he left behind him his fidelity, his self-respect and his manhood; his mind and soul and heart full of the black and devilish thought of taking by treacherous surprise the life of a comrade. Up

to that hour, his spirit had harbored no sech evil thought. The men he had theretofore killed--and I am not saying, gentlemen, that he had not killed enough--had been killed in fair and open fight, and there is not a one of them all but will be glad and proud to meet him as gentleman to gentleman at the Judgement Day. But now it was with _murder_ in his heart--base, cowardly, faithless murder--that he left that camp; it was with murder in his heart that he sneaked, crouching low, down where the heavy shadows hid the margin of the ice-bound stream. It was with murder in his heart that he laid himself flat upon his belly on the ice when he came within two rod of the Beaver Dam, and worked along, keeping ever in the shadow till he come down to where that Frenchman, who, six hours before, had et out of the same pan with him, stood with his light by his side, gazing down into the black hole in the ice that was to be the mouth of his grave and the portal of his entrance into eternity. Murder, gentlemen, murder nerved his arm when he struck out that light with the fur cap you see now in his hand; and murder’s self filled him with a maniac’s rage as he rose to his feet and shot and stabbed the defenceless back of his unsuspecting comrade. This, gentlemen, this--and no tale of a prowling stranger--this, gentlemen, is the _truth_; and I will appeal to the prisoner, himself, gentlemen, to bear me out. Jim Adsum, you can lie to this Judge and you can lie to this Jury; you can lie to your neighbors and you can lie to your own conscience; but you can’t lie to old man Cutwater, and you know it. Now, Jim, was not that just about the way you done it?”

And Jim nodded his head, turned the fur cap over in his hands, and assented quietly:

“Just about.”

Twenty-five minutes later the Jury went out, and Judge Cutwater stalked slowly and thoughtfully over to the prisoner, and touched him on the shoulder.

“Jim,” he said, meditatively, “if I know anything about juries, and I think I do, I’ve hanged you on that talk as sure as guns. Your man’s summing-up didn’t amount to pea-soup. I’m sorry, of course; but there wasn’t no way out of it for either you or me. However, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. My term as District Attorney expires to-morrow at twelve; and, if you’ll send that fool counsel of yours round to me at the tahvern, I’ll show him how to drive a horse and cart through the law in this case and get you a new trial, like rolling off a log.”

And as Mr. Adsum got not only one but three new trials during the time that I kept track of him, I have every reason to believe that Judge Cutwater of Seneca kept his promise as a man, as faithfully as he performed his duty as a prosecutor for the people.

MR. WICK’S AUNT.

The Wick family had run the usual course of families for many, many years, and was quite old and respectable when causes, natural and extraordinary, none of them being pertinent to this statement, reduced said family to three members, viz:

MISS ANGELICA SUDBURY WICK, of the Boston branch of the family, who lived in the house of her guardian, old Jonas Thatcher, with whom we have no further concern, and who is therefore to be considered as turned down, although in his day he was a highly respected leather merchant. MISS ANGELICA WICK was fair and sweet and good up to the last requirement of young womanhood.

MR. WINKELMAN HEMPSTEAD WICK, of the Long Island branch of the family, a distant cousin of the young lady, and a young man of conscientious mind, an accountant by profession, and very nearly ready to buy out his employer.

MR. AARON BUSHWICK WICK, also of the Long Island branch of the family, the grand-uncle of young Winkelman, who had brought up the young man in his own house, and who loved him more than anything else in the world, until, in the sixty-ninth year of his age, he fell in love with, and married a lady named Louisa Nasmyth Pine, whom we will dismiss from consideration as we dismissed the old leather merchant, although she was a most estimable and attractive lady, and did fancy embroidery extremely well. Her only concern with this story is that she bore the elder Mr. Wick a baby, and died three or four months subsequently. But that was enough; plenty; as much as was necessary.

The way that marriage came about was this: old Mr. Wick wanted to see the Wick family perpetuated, but young Mr. Wick was one of those cautious, careful, particular men who get to be old bachelors before they know it. No girl whom he knew was quite exactly what he wanted. If she had been, she would have been too good for any man on earth. In fact, it took young Mr. Wick a number of years to realize that any way he could marry, he could only marry a human being like himself. In the meanwhile his grand-uncle grew impatient; and finally he said that if Winkelman didn’t fix on a girl and get her to agree to marry him by the first of next January, he, Aaron Bushwick Wick, would marry somebody himself. Miss Louisa Nasmyth Pine, being then close on to forty, helped him to get under the line just in time to save his grand-nephew from engaging himself to an ill-tempered widow with five children--which is the kind of woman that those particular men generally pick up in the end. And it serves them right.

And so this marriage brought into existence the baby--BEATRICE BRIGHTON WICK.

Old Mr. Wick’s endeavors to hand the name of Wick down to posterity were crowned, as you see, with only partial success. He had a Wick, it was true, but it was a Wick that would be put out by marriage. He found himself obliged to fall back on young Winkelman, and he bethought himself of the distant cousin in Boston. He knew nothing of her, but he reasoned that if she were a Wick, she must be everything that was lovely and desirable; and so he said to his grand-nephew:

“Wink, you know that I am a man of my word. If you will go and marry that girl, and if the two of you will take care of that confounded baby, who is crying again, while I put in three or four years in Europe till it gets to some sort of a rational age, I will buy your employer out, guarantee you what is necessary for you to live on in some healthy country place--no city air for that child, do you understand!--and when I die you’ll be her guardian and have the usufruct of her estate and be residuary legatee and all that sort of thing.”

Winkelman Wick knew that his grand-uncle was a man of his word, and that “all that sort of thing” meant a very, very comfortable sort of thing, for the old gentleman was rich and had liberal ideas, and drank more port than was good for him. He had no fancy for marrying a strange girl, but he thought there could be no harm in going out to Boston and taking a look at his, so far, distant cousin. Under pretense of wanting to write up the Wick genealogy, he went to Boston, and passed some time under Mr. Thatcher’s hospitable roof. He found Angelica Wick all that his fancy might have painted her but hadn’t; and, as Mr. Thatcher had six daughters of his own, all of them older than Angelica, and none so good-looking, he did not find any difficulty in inducing his pretty cousin to marry him--and she did not back out even when he sprung the baby contract on her. She said that she was a true woman and that she would stand by him, but that she thought it might be a little awkward. Feminine intuition is a wonderful thing. When it is right, it is apt to be right.

The elder Mr. Wick was as good as his word,--only, as is often the case with people who pride themselves upon being as good as their word, he took his own word too seriously. He died of apoplexy shortly after landing at Liverpool. His will, however, was probated in New York, and thus escaped a legacy tax. The will fully carried out every promise he had made to his young kinsman, but he had drawn it to follow absolutely the terms of his proposition. He had never for an instant contemplated the possibility of his dying before he wanted to--people who make their wills very rarely do--and he had so drawn the document that Mr. and Mrs. Winkelman Wick could come into their inheritance only after carrying out their part of the contract, which was to take care of their aunt, baby Beatrice Brighton Wick, for the space of four years, during which Mr. Aaron Bushwick Wick had intended, without consideration of the designs of Divine Providence, to sojourn in Europe.

This brings the situation exactly down to bed-rock. On the tenth of April, eighteen hundred and tumty-tum, Mr. Winkelman Wick and Miss Angelica Wick were married in the old Wick house on Montague Street, Brooklyn. On the twenty-fifth of April Mr. Aaron Bushwick Wick ended his journey across the Atlantic at the Port of Liverpool, England. On the twenty-seventh of April he started on that other journey for which your heirs pay your passage money--and he certainly was not happy in his starting place. On the twenty-eighth of the same month young Mr. and Mrs. Wick knew the terms of their grand-uncle’s will; and on the thirtieth the old Wick mansion was in the hands of the trustees, and the young Wicks were in a hotel in charge of their baby-aunt, Beatrice, who was herself in charge of an aged Irishwoman, whose feet were decidedly more intelligent than her brain. That is one of the beauties of Ireland. You can get every variety of human being there from a cherub to a chimpanzee.

They were very comfortable in the hotel, and would have liked to stay there, but that awful contract had as many ways of making itself disagreeable as an octopus has. They had pledged themselves, with and for the benefit of the baby, to provide a suitable place in the country without unreasonable delay. Their lawyer informed them that reasonable delay meant three weeks and not one day more. As their contract began on the tenth of April, they had, therefore, one day left to them to carry out this provision. Moreover, the contract, after defining the phrase “a suitable country place” in terms that would have fitted a selling advertisement of the Garden of Eden, went on to specify that no place should be considered suitable that was not at least forty miles from any city of twenty thousand inhabitants, or upward. When Mr. Aaron Bushwick Wick wanted pure country air for a baby, he wanted it _pure_. If he could, he would probably have had it brought in sealed bottles.

Picking a place of residence for four long years is not an agreeable task under conditions such as these, especially to a young couple prematurely saddled with parental cares, and equipped with only twenty days of experience in the matrimonial state. They discussed the situation for hours on end. Mrs. Wick wept, and Mr. Wick contributed more profanity than is generally used by a green husband. They even asked the Irish nurse if she could not suggest some suitable place, and they stated the whole situation to her very clearly and carefully. She thought a while, and then suggested Ballymahon, County Longford, Ireland. However, indirectly, she assisted them to solve the problem. Mr. Wick told her to go to Jericho; and Mrs. Wick suddenly brightened up and said:

“Why, that’s so, Winkelman!”

Mr. Wick stared in horror at his wife. Was the sweet young thing going crazy under the strain? But no; Mrs. Wick was looking as bright as a rose after an April shower, and she grew brighter and brighter as she stood thinking in silence, nodding her pretty head affirmatively, pursing her lips, and checking off the various stages of her thought with her finger tip on her cheek. Finally she said:

“And you could use the little room for a dressing room. Yes, dear, I’m quite certain it will do beautifully.”

After a while Mr. Wick convinced his wife that he was not a mind-reader, and then he got some information. Of course she did not stay convinced--no woman ever did. All women think that the mechanism of their thought is visible like a model in a glass case.