Chapter IV: Part 4

A new feeling takes possession of him. His nerves tighten like steel, and he pumps empty shells out of the rifle’s chamber and cartridges in with a fierce speed. Kill! kill! let him take one of those howling murderers with him, and he doesn’t care how soon after death comes. But what is the matter with his aim? He has not yet killed one, not even wounded one that he knows of. He refills the magazine of his rifle in nervous, feverish haste, and then peeps through the crevices of the boulders to see if there is an enemy in sight. None. They are there, though. They are waiting and he is dying. How hot it is! He is burning up with thirst and heat. How “it” hurts. He has got so that he thinks of his wound only as “it,” as if it were some terrible monster that he could not escape. The blood--small as the quantity--that flows from his wound has formed a pool, clotted and coagulated. It adds to his discomfort by its stickiness. He thinks, how strange that one’s own blood should annoy one so, and then wonders where so many flies could have come from, as he raises a swarm by the movement of his body. He looks across to where the burro has fallen with the canteen and sees that the vessel has been jammed by coming in contact with the boulder, and that the precious fluid has nearly all run out. How much he would give to have what little water remains! He feels almost tempted to try to reach it, but no; that would mean throwing his life away without a chance for revenge. Revenge. He will have it. Thirst is nothing; death is nothing now if he can only kill, kill!

If he could only kill them all, how happy he would die!

He looks over the boulder. Nothing in sight but boulders, lava, cacti, sand and gaete grass. “They are there, though.” He almost laughs in sarcasm as he catches himself scanning the horizon to see if any relief were in sight. Relief? For days he and the man that laid dead there had traveled without finding a trail made by a shod horse--without finding a trail of any kind. How childish to expect any help. Better brace up and die like a man.

He looked at the body of the dead man. How hideous the face looked with its swollen lips, open mouth, staring eyes. How black it had grown. What a vast quantity of blood had come from the wound in the head. His eye catches a movement in the tuft of grass to his left. Bang! bang! goes his rifle. “Nothing there,” he thinks, as he crouches closer to the ground to escape the shots that come in return.

So the hours go, but he hardly marks their flight. The sun is getting lower in the west, and the white heat of day gives way to the yellowish-purple haze that in Apache land is always the forerunner of night. How when he was first hit he had longed for night; how little he cared for it now. He could feel himself growing weaker. His Winchester was heavier than any he had ever before lifted. Even “it,” that terrible thing that chained him there, pained him less, but the thirst grew horrible. Anyhow night would give him a chance to reach the canteen. At times he felt almost drowsy, but fought off the feeling. He was merely waiting for the end. He thought it strange that he could face it so complacently. He hardly cared now how soon it came. Would he shoot all his cartridges away before it reached him? He would not waste them though. If he could only reach Tom’s gun and revolver and destroy them it would make those that killed him angry. It was for these things, worth perhaps $50, that he and Tom had been murdered. He was beginning to think of himself as already dead. At least how easy to ruin Tom’s rifle. It was only two or three paces away. He took his revolver and fired at it, aiming to hit it just in front and below the hammer, its most vulnerable part. Instead, the bullet hits the ground and ricocheting enters the breast of the dead man. He shudders as the body stirs from the force of the shot, although he knows that life has been gone for hours. Everything is plain to him now why his other shots had not taken effect. He was unnerved. How could a man with a hole through his body hope to hit anything. He had heard of men shot through the heart killing their assailants, and had often wondered if he could do it. Could Tom have done it? How far off and yet how short seemed the years that he and Tom had been together. How little there had been in them that seemed worth now recalling. Crack! a single shot off to the right, and he fires where he sees the smoke curling upward. Fires again. Nothing. He counts his cartridges and is astonished that he has fired so many. He must have lost some. No, there are the empty shells.

Another shot off to the right. One to the front. He fires at both. He feels that he is growing nervous, and brings all his remaining powers into play to secure better control of himself. He will put away the idea of death, of his wound, of everything but revenge. Only one and he will be satisfied, and for the first time in years he prays, prays without words though, that he may kill but one.

The sun is sinking lower, it has almost reached the far off western mountain tops. It would soon be night, and then what would “they” do? Steal up under cover of the darkness and shoot him from behind some boulder before he would be aware of it. He would keep a close lookout, and perhaps he might after all “get” one of them.

Crack! crack! to the right and left, and he glances in both directions, firing at each; and then right over him takes place a terrible explosion, and he feels as if something heavy and blunt had struck him in the back. He half raises himself, just enough to turn his face upward. Another explosion, another heavy, blunt blow, and through the smoke from a revolver he sees a dark young face, with black, glittering eyes, white teeth, across which the lips are tightly drawn. The face and the form of one almost a boy, and then he falls back while a dark hand and arm snatches his gun from his half-clinging clasp. He hears wild shouting and through his glazing eyes sees dark forms scrambling for his arms, for Tom’s. They are even quarreling in their eagerness to tear the pack from the dead burro, and then instinctively he sees one raise something in the air ... and when it falls there is no longer anything human in the face or the head of the man who has spent the afternoon in fight. Nothing but a bloody pulp of skull, hair, brains, broken teeth, crushed into a misshapen mass by the boulder cast upon it by an Apache.

* * * * *

Another afternoon, years after, a tall sergeant and his detail of cavalry escorting through the canyon a party locating a road, looks down on the whitened bones of two men and a burro scattered by coyotes and bleached by the winds and rains, and as he, with the toe of his boot, pushes to one side the ribs of one of the skeletons, his eyes mark the many empty cartridge shells. He looks up and sees that his comrades have already noted them, while some one remarks:

“By----, he stayed with them while he lasted.”

FOLLOWING THE SEA

(Ambrose Bierce: Collected Sketches.)

At the time of “the great earthquake of ’68,” said Mr. Swiddler--William Swiddler; of Calaveras--I was at Arica, Peru. I have not a map by me, and am not certain that Arica is not in Chili, but it can’t make much difference; there was earthquake all along there.

Sam Baxter was with us; I think he had gone from San Francisco to make a railway, or something. On the morning of the ’quake, Sam and I had gone down to the beach to bathe. We had shed our boots, and begun to moult, when there was a slight tremor of the earth, as if the elephant who supports it was pushing upward, or lying down and getting up again. Next, the surges, which were flattening themselves upon the sand and dragging away such small trifles as they could lay hold of, began racing out seaward, as if they had received a dispatch that somebody was not expected to live. This was needless, for _we_ did not expect to live.

When the sea had receded entirely out of sight, we started after it; for, it will be remembered, we had come to bathe; and bathing without some kind of water is not refreshing in a hot climate.

For the first four or five miles the walking was very difficult, although the grade was tolerably steep. The ground was soft, there were tangled forests of sea-weed, old rotten ships, rusty anchors, human skeletons, and a multitude of things to impede the pedestrian. The floundering sharks bit our legs as we toiled past them, and we were constantly slipping down upon the flat fish strewn about like orange peel on a sidewalk. Sam, too, had stuffed his shirt front with such a weight of doubloons from the wreck of an old galleon, that I had to help him across all the worst places. It was very dispiriting.

Presently, away on the western horizon, I saw the sea coming back. It occurred to me then that I did not wish it to come back. A tidal wave is nearly always wet, and I was now a good way from home, with no means of making a fire.

The same was true of Sam, but he did not appear to think of it in that way. He stood quite still a moment with his eyes fixed on the advancing line of water; then turned to me, saying, very earnestly:

“Tell you what, William; I never wanted a ship so bad from the cradle to the grave! I would give m-o-r-e for a ship!--More than for all the railways and turnpikes you could scare up! I’d give more than a hundred, thousand, million dollars! I would--I’d give all I’m worth, for--just--one--little--ship!”

To show how lightly he could part with his wealth, he lifted his shirt out of his trousers, unbosoming himself of his doubloons, which tumbled about his feet, a golden storm.

By this time the tidal wave was close upon us. Call _that_ a wave! It was one solid green wall of water, higher than Niagara Falls, stretching as far as we could see to right and left, without a break in its towering front! It was by no means clear what we ought to do. The moving wall showed no projections by means of which the most daring climber could hope to reach the top. There was no ivy; there were no window-ledges. Stay!--there was the lightning rod! No, there wasn’t any lightning rod. Of course, not!

Looking despairingly upward, I made a tolerably good beginning at thinking of all the mean actions I had wrought in the flesh, when I saw projecting beyond the crest of the wave a ship’s bowsprit, with a man sitting on it reading a newspaper! Thank fortune, we were saved!

Falling upon our knees with tearful gratitude, we got up again and ran--ran as fast as we could, I suspect; for now the whole fore-part of the ship budged through the water just above our heads, and might lose its balance any moment. If we had only brought along our umbrellas!

I shouted to the man on the bowsprit to drop us a line. He merely replied that his correspondence was already very onerous, and he hadn’t any pen and ink.

Then I told him I wanted to get aboard. He said I would find one on the beach, about three leagues to the south’ard, where the “Nancy Tucker” went ashore.

At these replies I was disheartened. It was not so much that the man withheld assistance, as that he made puns. Presently, however, he folded his newspaper, put it carefully away in his pocket, went and got a line, and let it down to us just as we were about to give up the race. Sam made a lunge at it, and got it. I laid hold of his legs, the end of the rope was passed about the capstan, and as soon as the men on board had had a little grog, we were hauled up. I can assure you that it was no fine experience to go up in that way, close to the smooth, vertical front of water, with the whales tumbling out all round and above us, and the sword-fishes nosing us pointedly with vulgar curiosity.

We had no sooner set foot on deck, and got Sam disengaged from the hook, than the purser stepped up with book and pencil--“Tickets, gentlemen.”

We told him we hadn’t any tickets, and he ordered us to be set ashore in a boat. It was represented to him that this was quite impossible under the circumstances; but he replied that he had nothing to do with circumstances--did not know anything about circumstances. Nothing would move him till the captain, who was really a kind-hearted man, came on deck and knocked him overboard. We were now stripped of our clothing, chafed all over with stiff brushes, rolled on our stomachs, wrapped in flannels, laid before a hot stove in the saloon, and strangled with scalding brandy. We had not been wet, nor had we swallowed any sea-water, but the surgeon said this was the proper treatment. It is uncertain what he might have done to us if the tender-hearted captain had not thrashed him into his cabin, and told us to go on deck.

By this time the ship was passing the town of Arica, and we were about to go astern and fish a little, when she grounded on a hill-top. The captain hove out all the anchors he had about him; and when the water went swirling back to its legal level, taking the town along for company, there we were, in the midst of a charming agricultural country, but at some distance from any seaport.

At sunrise next morning we were all on deck. Sam sauntered aft to the binnacle, cast his eye carelessly upon the compass, and uttered an ejaculation of astonishment.

“Tell _you_, captain,” he called out, “this has been a direr convulsion of nature than you have any idea. Everythin’s been screwed right round. Needle points due south!”

“Why, you lubber!” growled the skipper, taking a look, “it p’ints d’rectly to labbard, an’ there’s the sun, dead ahead!”

Sam turned and confronted him, with a steady gaze of ineffable contempt.

“Now, who said it wasn’t dead ahead?--tell me _that_. Shows how much _you_ know about earthquakes. ’Course, I didn’t mean just this continent, nor just this earth: I tell you, the _whole thing’s_ turned!”

ETCHINGS: JEANNETTE

(French of George Le Faure: I. S: For Short Stories.)

Every day there came down to the long stone wharf a smiling fair-haired girl of seven, followed by an old, old man.

The child carried a spy-glass, hugging it in her arms as if it were a doll, and she skipped along gaily till she reached the end of the pier. Then she handed the long glass to her companion, and resting her chubby little hands on the cold stone coping, looked wistfully out to sea.

With the soft breeze blowing her hair about her shoulders, and her eyes fixed searchingly on the horizon she stood perfectly silent until a tiny white speck appeared in the far distance where sea and sky seemed to mingle.

“A sail, a sail!” she cried, and the old man sat down and laid the spy-glass upon his arm.

Breathless and eager, the child grasped the brass tube with both hands and peered through it without speaking. After a few minutes, however, she said with a sigh of disappointment: “Not yet, grandpa,” and returning patiently to her post resumed the watch until another sail appeared.

This was kept up hour after hour, and when the sun, a golden ball, had slipped behind the rising billows, and a soft mist rose from the sea, the child turned round, her little face saddened, and walked away slowly at the old man’s side.

One day I spoke to an old sailor and asked about the child.

“That is Jeannette,” he said, taking his short clay pipe out of his mouth, “her father was killed eighteen months ago; the mast of his boat fell on him, and since the day his body was carried home, she has never been the same. She does not think that he is dead, and every afternoon her grandfather has to bring her down here to watch for him.”

He tapped his head expressively, and, as a merry laugh sounded, a smile of tenderness softened his rugged features.

I looked up and saw Jeannette coming as usual, carrying the telescope, and skipping gleefully before the old man.

“How sad, how sad!” I murmured with a sigh, but the old sailor shook his head; putting his pipe into his mouth hastily he puffed out a cloud of smoke to hide the tears that had gathered in his eyes, and answered softly--“God is good. She will never know, and so she will never cease to hope.”

IN THE HOUSE OF SUDDHOO

(Rudyard Kipling: Collected Sketches.)

A stone’s throw out on either hand
From that well-ordered road we tread,
And all the world is wild and strange;
Churel and ghoul and Djinn and sprite
Shall bear us company to-night,
Wherein the Powers of Darkness range,
--From the Dusk to the Dawn.

The house of Suddhoo, near the Taksali Gate, is two-storied, with four carved windows of old, brown wood, and a flat roof. You may recognize it by five red handprints arranged like the Five of Diamonds on the whitewash between the upper windows. Bhagwan Dass, the bunnia, and a man who says he gets his living by seal-cutting, live in the lower story with a troop of wives, servants, friends, and retainers. The two upper rooms used to be occupied by Janoo and Azizun and a little black-and-tan terrier that was stolen from an Englishman’s house and given to Janoo by a soldier. To-day, only Janoo lives in the upper rooms. Suddhoo sleeps on the roof generally, except when he sleeps in the street. He used to go to Peshawar in the cold weather to visit his son, who sells curiosities near the Edwards’ Gate, and then he slept under a real mud roof. Suddhoo is a great friend of mine, because his cousin had a son who secured, thanks to my recommendation, the post of head messenger to a big firm in the Station. Suddhoo says that God will make me a Lieutenant-Governor one of these days. I daresay his prophecy will come true. He is very, very old, with white hair and no teeth worth showing, and he has outlived his wits--outlived nearly everything except his fondness for his son at Peshawar. Janoo and Azizun are Kashmiris, Ladies of the City, and theirs was an ancient and more or less honorable profession; but Azizun has since married a medical student from the Northwest and has settled down to a most respectable life somewhere near Bareilly. Bhagwan Dass is an extortionate and an adulterator. He is very rich. The man who is supposed to get his living by seal-cutting pretends to be very poor. This lets you know as much as is necessary of the four principal tenants in the house of Suddhoo. Then there is Me, of course; but I am only the chorus that comes in at the end to explain things. So I do not count.

Suddhoo was not clever. The man who pretended to cut seals was the cleverest of them all--Bhagwan Dass only knew how to lie--except Janoo. She was also beautiful, but that was her own affair.

Suddhoo’s son at Peshawar was attacked by pleurisy, and old Suddhoo was troubled. The seal-cutter man heard of Suddhoo’s anxiety and made capital out of it. He was abreast of the times. He got a friend in Peshawar to telegraph daily accounts of the son’s health. And here the story begins.

Suddhoo’s cousin’s son told me, one evening, that Suddhoo wanted to see me; that he was too old and feeble to come personally, and that I should be conferring an everlasting honor on the House of Suddhoo if I went to him. I went; but I think, seeing how well-off Suddhoo was then, that he might have sent something better than an ekka, which jolted fearfully, to haul out a future Lieutenant-Governor to the City on a muggy April evening. The ekka did not run quickly. It was full dark when we pulled up opposite the door of Ranjit Singh’s Tomb near the main gate of the Fort. Here was Suddhoo and he said that, by reason of my condescension, it was absolutely certain that I should become a Lieutenant-Governor while my hair was yet black. Then we talked about the weather, and the state of my health, for fifteen minutes, in the Huzuri Bagh, under the stars.

Suddhoo came to the point at last. He said that Janoo had told him that there was an order of the Sirkar against magic, because it was feared that magic might one day kill the Empress of India. I didn’t know anything about the state of the law; but I fancied that something interesting was going to happen. I said that so far from magic being discouraged by the Government, it was highly commended. The greatest officials of the State practised it themselves. (If the Financial Statement isn’t magic, I don’t know what is.) Then, to encourage him further, I said that, if there was any jadoo afoot, I had not the least objection to giving it my countenance and sanction, and to seeing that it was clean jadoo--white magic, as distinguished from the unclean jadoo which kills folk. It took a long time before Suddhoo admitted that this was just what he had asked me to come for. Then he told me, in jerks and quavers, that the man who said he cut seals was a sorcerer of the cleanest kind; that every day he gave Suddhoo news of the sick son in Peshawar more quickly than the lightning could fly, and that this news was always corroborated by the letters. Further, that he had told Suddhoo how a great danger was threatening his son, which could be removed by clean jadoo; and, of course, heavy payment. I began to see exactly how the land lay, and told Suddhoo that I also understood a little jadoo in the Western line, and would go to his house to see that everything was done decently and in order. We set off together; and on the way Suddhoo told me that he had paid the seal-cutter between one hundred and two hundred rupees already; and the jadoo of that night would cost two hundred more, which was cheap, he said, considering the greatness of his son’s danger; but I do not think he meant it.

The lights were all cloaked in the front of the house when we arrived. I could hear awful noises from behind the seal-cutter’s shop-front, as if some one were groaning his soul out. Suddhoo shook all over, and while we groped our way up stairs told me that the jadoo had begun. Janoo and Azizun met us at the stair-head, and told us that the jadoo-work was coming off in their rooms, because there was more space there. Janoo is a lady of a freethinking turn of mind. She whispered that the jadoo was an invention to get money out of Suddhoo, and that the seal-cutter would go to a hot place when he died. Suddhoo was nearly crying with fear and old age. He kept walking up and down the room in the half light, repeating his son’s name over and over again, and asking Azizun if the seal-cutter ought not to make a reduction in the case of his own landlord. Janoo pulled me over to the shadow in the recess of the bow-windows. The boards were up, and the rooms were only lit by one tiny oil-lamp. There was no chance of my being seen if I stayed still.

Presently, the groans below ceased, and we heard steps on the staircase. That was the seal-cutter. He stopped outside the door as the terrier barked and Azizun fumbled at the chain, and he told Suddhoo to blow out the lamp. This left the place in jet darkness, except for the red glow from the two huqas that belonged to Janoo and Azizun. The seal-cutter came in, and I heard Suddhoo throw himself down on the floor and groan. Azizun caught her breath, and Janoo backed on to one of the beds with a shudder. There was a clink of something metallic, and then shot up a pale, blue-green flame near the ground. The light was just enough to show Azizun, pressed against one corner of the room with the terrier between her knees; Janoo, with her hands clasped, leaning forward as she sat on the bed; Suddhoo, face down, quivering--and the seal-cutter?

I hope I may never see another man like that seal-cutter. He was stripped to the waist, with a wreath of white jasmine as thick as my wrist around his forehead, a salmon colored loin-cloth round his middle, and a steel bangle on each ankle. This was not awe-inspiring. It was the face of the man that turned me cold. It was blue-gray in the first place. In the second, the eyes were rolled back till you could only see the whites of them; and, in the third, the face was the face of a demon--a ghoul--anything you please except of the sleek, oily old ruffian who sat in the day time over his turning lathe downstairs. He was lying on his stomach with his arms turned and crossed behind him, as if he had been thrown down pinioned. His head and neck were the only parts of him off the floor. They were nearly at right angles to the body, like the head of a cobra at spring. It was ghastly. In the center of the room, on the bare earth floor, stood a big, deep, brass basin, with a pale blue-green light floating in the center like a night light. Round that basin the man on the floor wriggled himself three times. How he did it I do not know. I could see the muscles ripple along his spine and fall smooth again; but I could not see any other motion. The head seemed the only thing alive about him, except that slow curl and uncurl of the laboring back muscles. Janoo from the bed was breathing seventy to the minute; Azizun held her hands before her eyes; and old Suddhoo, fingering at the dirt that had got into his white beard, was crying to himself. The horror of it was that the creeping, crawly thing made no sound--only crawled; and, remember, this lasted for ten minutes, while the terrier whined, and Azizun shuddered, and Janoo gasped, and Suddhoo cried.

I felt the hair lift at the back of my head, and my heart thump like a thermantidote paddle. Luckily, the seal-cutter betrayed himself by his most impressive trick and made me calm again. After he had finished that unspeakable crawl, he stretched his head away from the floor as high as he could, and sent out a jet of fire from his nostrils. Now I know how fire-spouting is done--I can do it myself--so I felt at ease. The business was a fraud. If he had only kept to that crawl without trying to raise the effect, goodness knows what I might not have thought. Both the girls shrieked at the jet of fire and the head dropped, chin down on the floor, with a thud; the whole body lying then like a corpse with its arms trussed. There was a pause of five full minutes after this, and the blue-green flame died down. Janoo stooped to settle one of her anklets, while Azizun turned her face to the wall and took the terrier in her arms. Suddhoo put out an arm mechanically to Janoo’s huqa, and she slid it across the floor with her foot. Directly above the body and on the wall, were a couple of flaming portraits, in stamped paper frames, of the Queen and the Prince of Wales. They looked down on the performance, and, to my thinking, seemed to heighten the grotesqueness of it all.

Just when the silence was getting unendurable, the body turned over and rolled away from the basin to the side of the room, where it lay stomach up. There was a faint “plop” from the basin--exactly like the noise a fish makes when it takes a fly--and the green light in the center revived.

I looked at the basin, and saw, bobbing in the water the dried, shrivelled, black head of a native baby--open eyes, open mouth and shaved scalp. It was worse, being so very sudden, than the crawling exhibition. We had no time to say anything before it began to speak.

Read Poe’s account of the voice that came from the mesmerized dying man, and you will realize less than one-half the horror of that head’s voice.

There was an interval of a second or two between each word, and a sort of “ring, ring, ring,” in the note of the voice like the timbre of a bell. It pealed slowly, as if talking to itself, for several minutes before I got rid of my cold sweat. Then the blessed solution struck me. I looked at the body lying near the doorway, and saw, just where the hollow of the throat joins on the shoulders, a muscle that had nothing to do with any man’s regular breathing, twitching away steadily. The whole thing was a careful reproduction of the Egyptian teraphim that one reads about sometimes; and the voice was as clever and as appalling a piece of ventriloquism as one could wish to hear. All this time the head was “lip-lip-lapping” against the side of the basin, and speaking. It told Suddhoo, on his face again whining, of his son’s illness, and of the state of the illness up to the evening of that very night. I always shall respect the seal-cutter for keeping so faithfully to the time of the Peshawar telegrams. It went on to say that skilled doctors were night and day watching over the man’s life, and that he would eventually recover if the fee to the potent sorcerer, whose servant was the head in the basin, was doubled.

Here the mistake from the artistic point of view came in. To ask for twice your stipulated fee in a voice that Lazarus might have used when he rose from the dead, is absurd. Janoo, who is really a woman of masculine intellect, saw this as quickly as I did. I heard her say “Asli nahin! Fareib!” scornfully under her breath; and just as she said so, the light in the basin died out, the head stopped talking, and we heard the room door creak on its hinges. Then Janoo struck a match, lit the lamp, and we saw that head, basin and seal-cutter were gone. Suddhoo was wringing his hands and explaining to anyone who cared to listen, that if his chances of eternal salvation depended on it, he could not raise another 200 rupees. Azizun was nearly in hysterics in the corner; while Janoo sat down on one of the beds to discuss the probabilities of the whole thing being a bunao, or “make-up.”

I explained as much as I knew of the seal-cutter’s way of jadoo; but her argument was much more simple: “The magic that is always demanding gifts is no true magic,” said she. “My mother told me that the only potent love-spells are those which are told you for love. This seal-cutter man is a liar and a devil. I dare not tell, do anything or get anything done, because I am in debt to Bhagwan Dass, the bunnia, for two gold rings and a heavy anklet. I must get my food from his shop. The seal-cutter is the friend of Bhagwan Dass, and he would poison my food. A fool’s jadoo has been going on for ten days, and has cost Suddhoo many rupees each night. The seal-cutter used black hens and lemons and mantras before. He never showed us anything like this till to-night. Azizun is a fool, and will be a purdahnashin soon. Suddhoo has lost his strength and his wits. See now! I had hoped to get from Suddhoo many rupees while he lived, and many more after his death; and behold, he is spending everything on that offspring of a devil and a she-ass, the seal-cutter!”

Here I said: “But what induced Suddhoo to drag me into the business? Of course I can speak to the seal-cutter, and he shall refund. The whole thing is child’s talk--shameful--senseless.”

“Suddhoo is an old child,” said Janoo. “He has lived on the roofs these seventy years and is as senseless as a milch-goat. He brought you here to assure himself that he was not breaking any law of Sirkar, whose salt he ate many years ago. He worships the dust off the feet of the seal-cutter, and that cow-devourer has forbidden him to go and see his son. What does Suddhoo know of your laws or the lightning-post? I have to watch his money going day by day to that lying beast below.”

Janoo stamped her foot and nearly cried with vexation; while Suddhoo was whimpering under a blanket, and Azizun was trying to guide the pipe-stem to his foolish old mouth.

* * * * *

Now the case stands thus. Unthinkingly, I have laid myself open to the charge of aiding and abetting the seal-cutter in obtaining money under false pretenses, which is forbidden by Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code. I am helpless in the matter for these reasons. I cannot inform the police. What witnesses would support my statement? Janoo refuses flatly, and Azizun is a veiled woman somewhere near Bareilly--lost in this big India of ours. I dare not again take the law into my own hands, and speak to the seal-cutter; for certain am I that not only would Suddhoo disbelieve me, but this step would end in the poisoning of Janoo, who is bound hand and foot by her debt to the bunnia. Suddhoo is an old dotard; and whenever we meet mumbles my idiotic joke that the Sirkar rather patronizes the Black Art than otherwise. His son is well now; but Suddhoo is completely under the influence of the seal-cutter, by whose advice he regulates the affairs of his life. Janoo watches daily the money that she hoped to weedle out of Suddhoo taken by the seal-cutter, and becomes daily more furious and sullen.

She will never tell, because she dare not; but I am afraid--unless something happens to prevent her--that the seal-cutter will die of cholera--the white arsenic kind--about the middle of May. And thus I shall have to be privy to a murder in the House of Suddhoo.

ETCHINGS: THE HUSKING BEE

(R. L. Ketchum: For Short Stories.)

The great farm-house is ablaze with lights twinkling from every room. Long tables groan beneath the loads of good things the busy housewife has been days preparing.

From the barn come merry voices; joyous laughter.

Let us stand, unobserved, in the open door.

What a happy, merry lot of young folks--stalwart, handsome young men and healthy maidens!

They are ranged around the walls with rapidly-diminishing piles of corn before them, which they husk and throw upon the golden heap which is growing up rapidly in the center.

Ah! That young man has found a red ear in his pile! He leaps to his feet and dashes at one of the prettiest girls! A short chase--a struggle--a resounding smack--and it is over. He has kissed her--maybe on her collar, or her back hair; but that doesn’t matter; she counts it all the same.

How happy they all seem.

But no. Over there in a dark corner sits a tall, powerful, handsome young fellow all alone. He speaks to nobody unless addressed, and then his answers are short and sullen.

Ever and anon he casts a piercing glance at a young man of about his own age who sits at the end of the row opposite, chatting with a pretty young girl. His face darkens. There is murder in his eye. He is in love, perhaps, and jealous.

The bell rings for supper just as the husking is done, and the huskers jump up and scamper pell-mell toward the house, but the tall, handsome young man remains seated and drops his face in his hands with something that sounds like a sob.

For a long time he sits thus alone, then a light, hurried step is heard and a sweet-voiced girl asks:

“Joe, what’s the matter? Had trouble with Mary? You haven’t spoken to her to-night, hardly. Sick? Better come into supper. It will do you good, maybe.”

“No, Sis, it ain’t that.”

“Tell me, Joe,” says his sister kindly.

“Well,” he answers, “I’ve got on my thin pants ... I rid Dobbin over ... thar wuz a nail or a chafe in th’ saddle....”

And the stalwart young hayseed Adonis broke down and shed a drenching shower of salt and bitter tears.

MY BABOON BEDFELLOW

(Belgravia.)

It has been said by the wise man of old that “there is no new thing under the sun.” If this means that the adventure I am about to relate was only a repetition of something that occurred to some other hapless damsel in the pre-historic ages, I herewith accord her my sincerest sympathies.

The intelligent reader must be kind enough to understand, as a preliminary, that I am impulsive, and apt to embrace opinions with a degree of enthusiasm and a total disregard of all adverse arguments, however weighty, that is truly feminine. When, therefore, shortly after leaving school, I, as my brother says, “took up” evolution, and read various abstruse treatises upon the “development of species” and the “descent of man,” it was in no half-hearted manner that I rode my hobby, but so thoroughly that I became a thorn in the flesh to most of my relations and friends, and my schoolboy brothers, denouncing the theory laconically, but forcibly, as “awful bosh,” bestowed upon me the contemptuous appellation of the “baboon,” and made unkind allusions to my frequent visits to the Regent’s Park Gardens as being paid to “next of kin.”

Certainly I did resort often, almost every day, to the monkey house to study the attributes of its interesting occupants. Perhaps some lingering, infatuated idea possessed me that it might be my brilliant mission to discover the “missing link;” at any rate, my note-book of that period contains many finely worded desires to “watch the agile monkey in its native habitat,” and to “trace the simian likeness to the human amid the primeval forests of another hemisphere.”

At length I was enabled to partially fulfill my dreams.

Having received a warm invitation from an old school friend to spend some weeks with her at her home in the West of Ireland, I started, with my maid as escort, for Ballynaghader. My friend, Marian Edwards, had married three years before, an Irish gentleman of some property, and I had never seen either her husband or herself since her marriage; so that it was with delightful anticipations of renewing an old friendship, and forming a new one, that I set out on my journey. My brothers accompanied me to the station, and sped me on my way with a unanimous wish that I might meet a gorilla or a chimpanze while taking my walks abroad in what they persisted in calling the “wilds.”

My maid, Hannah, was an estimable woman, very much privileged by reason of her long and faithful service; and as we neared our destination after a long and fatiguing journey, the details of which would be as tiresome as unnecessary, became overwhelmed with dismay, falling into tears, alleging between her sobs that P. C. B. 192 had told her the day before we started that Ireland was a country where nobody cared for the police. This was, in my worthy Hannah’s eyes, the climax of barbarism; and when she proceeded to state from “information received”--presumably from the same reliable source--“that being murdered in one’s bed” was considered in Ireland quite an ordinary and peaceful way of departing this life, I felt that it behooved me to assert myself, and, finding all soothing arguments of no avail, I administered a sharp scolding, which had the desired effect, and induced my abigail to dry her eyes, while she “hoped” with an incredulous snort and desponding shake of her head, “that things would turn out better than she expected.”

The prospective pleasure of my visit was largely enhanced by the discovery that Mr. Ardagh, whom I liked directly I saw him, was a great lover and student of zoölogy, and had quite a menagerie of tame and wild animals, to which he was constantly adding interesting specimens. I promised myself great pleasure in inspecting the animals and cultivating their acquaintance on the morrow, but was recalled from my pleasurable anticipations to devote all my attention to an account Marian was giving me of the mysterious loss of a very handsome and much-valued bracelet which had occurred that very day. Some hours before my arrival her maid had informed her that this bracelet, which had been recently under repair and had been returned that morning from the jeweler, was missing. It had been laid carelessly on the dressing-table when it arrived, and had disappeared. Search had been made in every likely and unlikely spot, servants had been questioned, and, as usual, under such circumstances, had all indignantly, and some tearfully, denied any knowledge of the missing trinket, which, apart from its intrinsic value, was dear to Marian from associations connected with it. I could suggest no steps for its recovery beyond the ordinary English alternative of communicating with the police. This, I found, had been already done, though evidently my friends had small hope of any good results following upon the exertions of that estimable force, of whom, according to Hannah, no one in Ireland stood in awe. Altogether it was an uncomfortable state of things; and although we discussed the subject in all its bearings, entering into the most minute details of any burglaries we had previously heard of or read about, we only succeeded in making ourselves distinctly uneasy, and had to decide at last, as at first, that it was most mysterious.

Directly after dinner I begged that I might be allowed to retire for the night, as my journey had thoroughly tired me. Marian took me to my room, and, wishing me a good night’s rest, left me to the ministrations of Hannah, whose equanimity was thoroughly restored, and who was in a state of discursive contentment, very trying to the patience of one whose eyes were closing fast under the soothing process of hair brushing, and whose sole idea was “bed,” and that speedily. But at last I got rid of my talkative attendant; and having as a last precaution looked under my bed (my constant practice, though if for one moment I had supposed there could be anything there, nothing would have induced me to look), I retired to rest, and was soon wrapped in dreamless slumber.

After, I suppose, some hours, I was awakened by a loud noise close to my bed, as of some heavy body falling on the floor from a height; but being only partially roused, I drowsily conjectured it was fancy on my part, and turned over on my side, preparatory to again composing myself to sleep. This movement brought my face opposite the window, the blind of which I had desired Hannah to draw up the last thing at night, that I might enjoy the sight of the sunrise, if by some untoward and unusual event I should not sleep as late as usual. The room was flooded with bright moonlight, and I had an uneasy feeling as I gazed at the white expanse of toilet-cover on the dressing-table before the window that there was something wrong about its appearance. Suddenly I remembered that I had certainly placed my watch and chain on the corner of the table after winding it up the night before. It was no longer there. Trying to persuade myself that I was mistaken, I raised myself on my elbow to look more carefully after my missing watch, when I distinctly felt the bed-clothes, which my movement had a little displaced, tugged toward the foot of the bed. Instinctively I clutched my retreating coverings, and in spite of some unseen opposing agency, succeeded in restoring them to their former position, only to feel them again slowly drawn away. Three times this agitating phenomenon occurred. At last I determined to abandon some portion of the bed-clothes, retaining only the sheet, in which I wrapped myself tightly, and watched the blankets, etc., pulled to the floor and slowly dragged under the bed. Motionless with terror, I lay scarcely daring to breathe, while numerous and dire possibilities occurred to my distracted imagination. Was my unseen visitor a moonlighter? Was this a preliminary measure to the “murdering in one’s bed,” so graphically quoted by Hannah from the P. C.--. 192, the well informed? Certainly I was not in favor of home rule. Could the Land League be about to make an example of so insignificant a unit as myself.

After a space which seemed to me interminable, although it could have been only of a few minutes’ duration, my nocturnal visitant, who had been emitting sundry very terrifying snorts and suppressed demoniacal cackles, put out a hairy hand, and grasped the edge of the bedstead furthest from me, slowly drawing to its full height the body of a large baboon, clad in a species of loose tunic. Round its neck was suspended my chain; while the watch, still attached to the chain, was held in its hand. I gazed horror-stricken upon this fearful sight, recalling in a kind of agony all the stories I had heard and read of the extreme ferocity of the baboon, remembering, too, that my door was locked, and that I was entirely at the mercy of a brute almost as large as, and infinitely more powerful than myself.

It was not in this way that I had so ardently desired to study the fascinating ways of the _Simiæ_, and as I thought of my brothers’ laughing wishes at parting with me. I was struck with a sense of the grim humor of the situation. But the humorous aspect did not appeal to me for long, as I watched with fascinating eagerness the movements of my terrible visitor. With uncouth, shambling steps the creature walked to the window, and by the light of the moon examined my unfortunate watch. Its glittering case evidently delighted the baboon, as it stroked it repeatedly with one finger; but the ticking, of which it could not discover the cause or the whereabouts, appeared to exasperate it, and it tossed the watch contemptuously aside, though it remained dangling from its chain down the animal’s back. Once I made a slight sound; but my undesirable visitor resented it by so savage a spring in my direction that I feigned profound slumber, and only ventured to open my eyes after several minutes of strained expectation that I was about to receive practical illustration of that which I had so often carelessly spoken about--the extraordinary physical force in the fore limbs of the _Quadrumana_. When I did dare to look again, I saw that the baboon had seated itself before the toilet glass, and, by the aid of my brushes and combs, was attempting to reduce its bushy locks to some order. Finding this task a fruitless one, it proceeded to ransack my jewel-case, which Hannah had carelessly left open, and one by one examined various articles it contained. Rings and brooches and bracelets the creature appeared to approve of, but a jewel comb for the hair and a diamond star it evidently did not at all appreciate, flinging them down and snarling at them savagely.

I dared not attract the creature’s attention to myself by making any sound, and had to watch in silent agony this rifling and appropriation of my most cherished possessions by an unappreciative baboon! At last it turned away from the window, and came in a leisurely manner toward the bed, eyeing me stealthily while it advanced; and having reached the bedside, stooped down and proceeded to draw out from under the bed the blankets of which it had despoiled me at a very early stage of the operations. Upon these blankets it tried to find a comfortable resting-place, but after turning and twisting uneasily for some minutes, emitting short grunts of ill-temper and dissatisfaction, it got up and, to my horror lay down on the bed across my feet! The discomfort and pain were almost unbearable; but fortunately after a short time the baboon rolled further down the bed, and lay at the very foot with its face turned in my direction. Its regular breathing soon showed if was asleep; but I remained in an agony of fear least some movement of mine should awaken the brute.

How the remaining hours of the night wore away I knew not--to me they seemed interminable. But when the sounds of the awakened household made themselves heard my terror increased, for I feared that the baboon would certainly be roused and attack me. Still it slept, and still I lay and watched it, until Hannah’s knock at my door awakened me to the consciousness that this could not go on forever.

In a very low voice I bade my maid call Mrs. Ardagh; and when Marian’s voice was heard outside demanding anxiously what had happened, I hurriedly explained the dreadful situation. To my surprise she exclaimed in what sounded almost a tone of relief, “Why, that must be Molly! Oh, how pleased Tom will be! Please lie quite still until I fetch him.” My feelings, while I lay and awaited the end of this most unpleasant adventure, may be better imagined than described, but at last Mr. Ardagh’s voice was heard outside the door calling in tones of authority, “Molly, Molly, come here!” The baboon sprang to her feet, gave a startled glance round the room, and, rushing to the fireplace, made its exit, as it had made its entrance, by the chimney. When the extreme tension was relaxed my nerves gave way and I fainted. Mrs. Ardagh and Hannah, having forced the lock off my door, applied restoratives, and, after some time, I regained consciousness, and was able to hear a detailed account of the capture of the baboon, which Mr. Ardagh accomplished with much difficulty. Her escape had not been discovered until late on the night of my arrival, and the idea of her being in the house had never occurred to him, as all the doors and windows were carefully fastened, and the chimney never suggested itself to him as a mode of ingress, though it had evidently appeared to the fancy of Molly.

Many of my possessions which had been appropriated by this kleptomaniac baboon were restored to me; but my watch was hopelessly damaged in Molly’s ascent of the chimney. In the pocket of her tunic was discovered with my trinkets Marian’s bracelet, which had so mysteriously disappeared, proving, beyond a doubt, that Molly had made her escape much earlier than was at first supposed.

I stayed at Ballynaghader only long enough to recruit my strength sufficiently to travel, and then started for home, accompanied by Marian. For a long while my nerves did not recover from the shock they had sustained. Every one was very considerate about it; even my brothers did not chaff me as I had dreaded they would, and made very few remarks anent my want of “philoprogenitiveness” when I begged to be excused from accompanying them to the Zoo.

PROFESSOR JOVANNY’S FUNERAL

(Edward Iraneus Stephenson: The Manhattan.)