Chapter XII: A Narrow Escape in Arkansas

“Are you going over to Hot Springs?”

It was decidedly the most civilized-looking man in the car who sat down beside Dick and asked the question. He was a young man of twenty-eight or thirty, who proved afterward to be a cotton planter from Georgia.

“Can you tell me of a good place to stay there?” the stranger went on, after Dick had answered his question in the affirmative. “I have never been there and know nothing about the place.”

“I have never been there either,” Dick answered. “I only know that the Arlington is the largest hotel, and I shall go there for a few days at any rate, till I can look about.”

He was glad for the company of the young cotton planter, for the only drawback to the journey so far had been want of suitable companionship. The captain and clerk of the boat and some of the swampers were good fellows in their way, but they and Dick had few interests in common.

“If only I could have Darling or Jack Randall or some of the other fellows with me!” he often said to himself. “There are so many odd things to see; but it half-spoils the pleasure to have to see them alone.”

Late in the afternoon Dick and the cotton planter were settled in good rooms in the Arlington Hotel, and before supper they went out to the broad front piazza together to see what they could of the town. While they sat there a brass band marched down the street, playing lively airs.

“I wish they’d keep Mose Harrison in jail all the time,” one of the other guests said to Dick, “so the music would last.”

“Who is Mose Harrison?” Dick asked; “and what has his being in jail to do with the music?”

“Oh, you’ve just come, have you?” the man answered. “Well, you see Mose Harrison is the editor of The Daily Horseshoe, and he’s in jail for thirty days for libel. The jail’s down at the other end of town, and Mose’s friends have hired the band to go down there every evening and give him a serenade. He’ll be out in two or three days now.”

“I think Mose Harrison is a man for me to meet!” Dick said to himself. Then turning to the planter he asked:--

“What do you think of Hot Springs, so far? Rather a lively place, isn’t it, where a prisoner in jail is serenaded every evening? There are more cowboys and sombreros and spurs in the streets than I ever saw before.”

“It’s wonderful what a newspaper head Mr. Harding has!” he could not help thinking. “It looked to me like a dry subject, coming down the river into Arkansas to write letters. But the old man knew what he was about. This place alone is worth making the journey for. It is full of queer people from all over the Southwest, and it is sure to give me some good stories. The situation of the town is a novelty itself, lying here in a deep valley between two high mountains, the valley hardly five hundred feet wide. Then the hot springs boiling out of one of the mountains and the steaming water running off in a steaming creek through the main street.”

The way good subjects were coming to him lifted a little weight from Dick’s mind, for he had not felt altogether sure about his letters. He had written two sets of very successful letters over his signature, and so established a standard that he must maintain. If these articles from the Southwest fell flat, the newspaper world would say: “Oh, it was only a spurt. Sumner did some good things once, but he has written himself out.” The subjects were too good, however; he had no fear now of making a failure.

As he intended to make something of a stay in Hot Springs, to become familiar with the place and its people, Dick soon began to look about for a more retired place than the hotel. He found it in a large brick and iron building called the Douglas and Johnson block, fronting upon the main street. There were stores underneath, and up one flight of broad iron stairs were large and comfortable rooms to let. Two of the rooms were vacant, and Dick took one and the cotton planter the other. Several good restaurants in the neighborhood were open at all hours.

On the second day after he was settled in his new quarters Dick took a walk up the main street, past the stores and saloons and gambling houses, to inspect a new quarter of the city. Immediately behind him as he walked was a large, handsomely dressed man, so close that he might easily have touched Dick’s back. The man was taking slightly longer steps than Dick, and so was gaining upon him; and when they were directly opposite the Arlington Hotel he stepped a little to one side, intending to pass Dick.

Dick would have sprung forward in haste if he had been able to see even five seconds into the future. But not having that faculty, and paying no attention to the man who was almost by his side, he went quietly on.

Crash! There came the crack of a rifle, the whiz of a bullet within six inches of Dick’s head, the crash of broken glass, and the man by his side fell heavily against Dick and dropped to the pavement.

Instantly there was a rush of men from the neighboring stores, and the prostrate man was picked up and carried into a drug store, Dick helping.

“It’s no use,” said the druggist after making a hasty examination. “The bullet has gone through his brain, and he’s dead as a door-nail. What he needs is a coroner, gentlemen; a doctor’s no use now.”

The murder caused very little excitement, but everybody in the city knew what it meant, and everybody was willing to tell Dick all about it. The murdered man was a gambler who a few days before had had an altercation with another gambler named Tom Davis. Tom Davis had sworn to have revenge, and to bring it about he had taken a room in the Arlington Hotel--a front room--and stationed himself in it with a rifle and waited patiently for the other man to pass. When the man passed on the opposite side of the street he had fired and killed him, and then disappeared, without stopping to inquire what damage might have been done to Dick’s head, only six inches away.

“I suppose it’s lucky for me that Tom Davis is a dead shot!” Dick reflected. “That bullet certainly was not a foot from my ear.”

That night he sat in his room writing, as he did every night, when he heard a heavy thud, thud, thud on the iron stairs that made him pause and listen.

“There must be a troop of cavalry coming upstairs!” he exclaimed.

Tramp, tramp! If they were men, there were many of them, and all in heavy boots.

The sound came nearer and nearer; up the stairs, into the wide hall floored with iron and glass, and stopped, as it seemed to Dick, directly in front of his door. All was still for a moment, and he heard a whispered consultation outside; then came a heavy knock upon the door.

Wondering what it could all mean, Dick stepped to the door and opened it; and in a second he found himself looking into the barrel of a cocked revolver.

It was the first time he had ever had a revolver pointed directly at his head; and it was not six inches away. Before he had time to feel alarmed he saw that the man who held it was in uniform, and that six men who stood in line behind him with rifles in their hands were also in uniform. They were policemen.

There was security in those blue uniforms; such security that Dick, with the revolver still in his face, began to smile at the ludicrous situation.

“You have the drop on me!” he exclaimed. “Here, take my watch and pocketbook. It’s all I have.”

The man in front did not answer, but began to look past Dick into the room, as though searching for some one.

“Walk in, gentlemen,” Dick said; “just keep your thumb on the hammer of that pistol, will you? those things sometimes go off. Perhaps he’s here, whoever you are looking for. If he is, I’ll be obliged to you if you’ll take him out.”

He was so cool about it that the officer in advance, who proved to be the chief of police, could not help smiling. He lowered his revolver and stepped inside.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” he said; “but it is necessary to search this building. I have reason to believe that Tom Davis, the gambler, who murdered a man this afternoon, is in hiding in some of these rooms.”

The chief went on to ask Dick questions about the occupants of the other rooms, all of which Dick answered as well as he could; and for the next half-hour he heard the chief and his men tramping through the halls and knocking at doors. It was a false alarm, however; the gambler was not there.

Dick was destined to meet the chief of police a few nights later under more pleasant circumstances. Stopping to take breath about midnight, an hour when the editor of The Daily Horseshoe was reasonably sure to be in his office, he stepped down into the next block to make the acquaintance of Mr. Mose Harrison, the man who was serenaded every evening in jail.

“I’m glad to meet you,” Mr. Harrison said with great cordiality when Dick introduced himself. “I wish you had come in sooner. It will seem natural to you to be in a newspaper office and see the emblems of the profession about you;” and he waved his hand toward a rosette of rifles, swords, bowie-knives, and revolvers fastened to the wall behind his desk.

“We don’t have quite so much ornamentation in our New York offices,” Dick laughed. “But perhaps you need them here more than we do.”

“Yes, we do!” was the reply. “But things ain’t what they used to be. Why, I’ve seen the time-- Hold on though, I didn’t mean to be so inhospitable. There’s a saloon right next door; come and have a smile.”

“Thank you; I never smile--not in that way,” Dick answered. And Mr. Harrison proceeded to finish his sentence.

“I’ve seen the time when there was a man lookin’ for me in the next block below, and another in the block above; and it was sure death if I let ’em get the drop on me. And same to them--yes, hang it, Sumner, I meant just as well by them. We all meant business. Good-evenin’, chief; walk in and take a chair.”

The chief of police walked in while the editor spoke.

“Chief,” he went on, “this is Mr. Sumner of The New York Transport. Sumner, Mr. Gardner, our chief of police.”

Dick and the chief both smiled as they looked at each other.

“I have had the pleasure of meeting the chief before,” Dick said. “He brought six men and a revolver to my room to introduce him a night or two ago.”

“Well, accidents will happen,” the chief laughed. “The joke was on me that time, I’ll admit. There’s a saloon right next do’, gentlemen; will you step out and take something?”

“Wait until the paper goes to press, chief,” Harrison said, “and I’ll join you. Sumner don’t drink.”

The chief had an item to give about some police case, and he soon went out.

“Hang it, Sumner!” Harrison exclaimed, “I’ve got to have six or eight more paragraphs. I’ll put you in for one; you and your experience with the police. But I want somebody to turn down. I wish you’d tell me who else I can turn down to-night.”

“What do you mean by ‘turn down’?” Dick asked; “I don’t quite understand you.”

“Oh, somebody to ‘go for,’” Mr. Harrison answered; “somebody to give a black eye to. To say that the sheriff’s about to seize his property, or that his son’s in jail in Chicago, or some pleasant little news like that. If I don’t have a few such items, people will say the Horseshoe’s growing dull.”

Dick protested that he was not well enough acquainted in Hot Springs to give advice on so important a matter; and while he was speaking the door opened and a short, chunky young man walked in.

“Well, what luck, Howell?” Harrison asked.

“Not a line,” the newcomer replied. “Everything’s too quiet.”

“That’s so,” said Harrison. “Everything’s too quiet to live. Come here till I introduce you to another newspaper man, Howell. This is Mr. Sumner, of The New York Transport. Our reporter, Mr. Sumner; Mr. Howell, from Waco, Texas.”

Mr. Howell, of Waco, Texas, was delighted to meet a newspaper man from New York, and said so. The honor so weighed upon him that in a minute or two he suggested:--

“There’s a saloon right next do’, gentlemen. Will you take a little walk?”

Once more Dick had to decline either to walk or smile. But Mr. Howell was not to be put off so easily.

“You must find things pretty stupid down here,” he said, “after New York. This town’s growin’ stupider every day. But if you’ll wait till the paper goes to press, at three o’clock, I’ll take you to a neat little dollar limit game up in the Burnt Rag. We have a game there every night. It’ll make a night’s sport for you.”

“Much obliged,” Dick laughed, “but I have a night’s sport waiting for me in my room. I have about two more columns of solid nonpareil to write before breakfast time.”

As he walked back to his room Dick was in an unhappy frame of mind.

“I’ve read of such newspaper offices as that,” he said to himself, “but I had no idea they really existed. The trouble is that when people read about such a place, they imagine that all newspaper offices are the same. If I only had Darling or Dr. Goode here to talk to Mose Harrison and Mr. Howell, of Waco, Texas! And to see the revolvers and bowie knives, and hear about the ‘turning down’ and ‘the saloon next do’’! Darling would laugh at it; but, on the whole, I shouldn’t like Dr. Goode to see it. He has such a high idea of the profession that it would make him feel very sore.”

Dick’s days in Hot Springs were given to sight-seeing, and his nights to writing, and when at the end of several weeks he started for Texas and New Orleans, he had written a large number of letters. He had had the satisfaction of seeing many of them in print, too; for the New York papers came rapidly by rail, and he found that the letters were being copied as widely as the others had been.

After a brief stay in the northeast part of Texas, that was not very fertile in material, he went by rail to Shreveport and took passage on the Red River boat Argosy for New Orleans. The boat was to start at six o’clock in the evening; but she had a great quantity of cotton to load, and the weather was so cold that it was hard to get negroes to do the loading, so she was delayed till nearly nine. The worst part of the waiting was that supper was not served till the boat started; but Dick amused himself by watching his fellow-passengers. In one party there were five or six young ladies and as many young gentlemen, very lively young folks, and some of the ladies very pretty; but before the boat started the party dwindled to three young ladies, the others having come on board merely to see them off.

“Now if I had only had more experience with young ladies,” Dick said to himself, “I’d manage somehow to make the acquaintance of those three. They seem to be very nice ladies, and it would make the time pass pleasantly.” Almost for the first time he regretted that his work had made it impossible for him to enjoy ladies’ society as most young men do. Indeed he had hardly thought of it before; but now he realized that he was sadly lacking in experience as a gallant. “However,” he consoled himself, “very likely I couldn’t manage to be introduced to them, anyhow.”

What he desired was destined to be managed for him better than he could have arranged it himself. Soon after the boat started, the clerk, who knew his name because he had written it in the register, stepped up to him and said:--

“There are three young ladies on board without any escort, Mr. Sumner; very fine young ladies, daughters of a cotton planter down the river. I should like to introduce you to them, so that you can escort them to supper.”

Of course they were the very young ladies he had been desirous of meeting; and he blessed the good old-fashioned custom of the southern steamboats that makes it the duty of the clerk to see that all unprotected ladies are provided with escorts to take them properly to the table.

“It would be a long time, I’m afraid,” he said to himself, “before an escort would be found for a lady on one of our Hudson River or Sound boats.”

Dick was surprised at his success in making himself agreeable to his new companions. If one of his articles had been reprinted by fifty different papers, it would not have pleased him more than to find that the young ladies enjoyed his company.

“But it’s only because I have a lot of amusing things to tell them,” he modestly thought. “I’m glad they’re not the kind of young ladies who would want to flirt. I can turn my hand to almost anything, but that’s one of the things I certainly could not do.” He had not at that time made a study of any young lady for use in his projected novel.

Somehow the first three days of the voyage, when the young ladies were on board, passed very quickly and pleasantly; and the last three, after they had landed at their father’s plantation, rather seemed to drag. Perhaps it was because the scenery grew somewhat monotonous. Dick helped the three ladies up the steep gangway at the plantation; and when he returned to the boat and left them standing on the bluff, the clerk said to him:--

“Now wave to them; wave your handkerchief. They’ll expect you to wave good-by to them.”

Dick waved with a will, and they returned the compliment quite as heartily. The boat swung around a bend, and the three pleasant young ladies became only a memory.

When he arrived in New Orleans Dick had a self-conscious feeling that troubled him at first. He felt that he had become somewhat countrified in appearance; that people were looking at him; that he needed brushing up. It was the natural result of spending so many weeks on the river and among the mountains, and it soon wore off. Another trouble was that he was running short of funds. So much travel had exhausted most of the money that had been furnished him, and it was necessary to send for more.

“It won’t do to run out of money here,” he thought, “where nobody knows me. Of course I have only to send to the office for more, but there might be some delay about its getting here.”

For economy’s sake he stayed only a day in the famous St. Charles Hotel, and then moved into a furnished room in a comfortable old-fashioned house facing Lafayette Square, two or three blocks up St. Charles Street. This was a mistake that Dick would not have made a year later on. As the correspondent of a great New York newspaper his credit would have been good to any reasonable amount in a first-rate hotel till his funds arrived; whereas the private landlady would need her money, and would most likely exact it in advance; and in a restaurant expected funds are not as good as cash in the pocket.

Though he knew that his money was sure to arrive, the depleted state of his purse worried Dick, for he had only a few dollars left. On his first day in New Orleans he wrote to the Transport office for a check for three hundred dollars, and it would take, as he reckoned it, at least five days to receive an answer--perhaps six.

“The letter might miscarry,” he said to himself a dozen times; “and if it should, another week would be lost, and I have not enough for two weeks. I should have sent for the check sooner.”

There were enough sights in New Orleans to occupy his time. The strange cemeteries, with their brick graves built above ground; the French quarter and French market; the old Spanish fort; the lake and its beach and its Coney-Island-like attractions; the river front,--all these things made material for letters. The steamer for Key West was to sail on Thursday morning at eight o’clock, and Wednesday was the sixth day from the date of his letter to the Transport; but no check had arrived.

There were two mail deliveries in St. Charles Street every day, one at nine o’clock in the morning and the other at noon. The postman made his nine o’clock visit, but there was no letter for Richard Sumner, Esquire. He began to feel that he really had cause for anxiety; no check, hardly any money, and his steamer to sail early the next morning.

When the time for the noon delivery came, Dick was sitting on a sunny bench in Lafayette Square, directly opposite his house, where he could watch the door, waiting impatiently for the arrival of the very last mail that could bring him a check in time for the next day’s steamer. He saw the postman walking rapidly up the street, ringing doorbells and handing in letters. He saw him stop at the house next door to his and hand in a letter there. He saw him go on a few steps and pause a moment, then go on again, on past his house without ringing the bell! Dick could hardly believe his eyes; hardly realize that there was no possible chance of getting his check in time.

“Well,” he said to himself, “I’ve done my best to get money by mail, and I’ve failed. Now we’ll see what the telegraph will do. I don’t intend to lose that boat.”

As he got up from the bench to go to the telegraph office a hundred factory bells and whistles were sounding for noon. He walked down St. Charles Street to the main telegraph office, under the St. Charles Hotel, and wrote his dispatch:--

Daily Transport, New York:--
No check received. Please telegraph me three hundred dollars
immediately. SUMNER.

He actually grudged the fifty cents for sending the dispatch, his money was so low. But after sending it he walked back to his old seat in the square. With all his tribulation he was thinking out the next article he was to write; and he thought and thought, sometimes about the money and sometimes about the article, till suddenly he clapped his hand down upon his knee.

“There’s another complication!” he exclaimed. “They won’t pay a telegraphic money order before nine in the morning, nor after five in the afternoon. It’s almost certain that my money won’t get here before five o’clock, and I’ll not be able to get it to-night. By the time that I can get it in the morning my steamer will be gone!

“Now there’s a way out of every difficulty,” he continued, “and there’s a way out of this. What I must do is go back to the telegraph office, introduce myself to the manager, explain the case to him, and arrange to get the money this evening whenever it arrives. I think that will do it.”

For this purpose he walked back to the telegraph office and sent in his card to the manager. He was shown into a handsome private office, where he soon made known what he wanted.

“I suppose you have some papers that will identify you, Mr. Sumner,” the manager said when Dick concluded; “letters in your pocket or something of that sort?”

“Oh, yes, I have plenty of letters,” Dick answered as he drew out a handful and showed them.

“That’s all right,” the manager said. “Your money is here, Mr. Sumner. Just show these letters to the cashier, and he will pay it over to you.”

His money there! why, it was less than an hour since he had telegraphed for it! But it was a fact nevertheless; and within three minutes he had the three hundred dollars in his pocket, in good crisp notes, and was walking back toward his old seat in the square. The ringing of the bells and blowing of the whistles for one o’clock, just as he sat down, reminded him that exactly an hour had passed since he first started for the telegraph office; and now the money was in his pocket.

“That is almost worth making an article of,” he reflected; “sending from New Orleans to New York for money and having it here within an hour. An outsider would hardly believe it possible, but I can see exactly how it was done. When my telegram reached New York it was sent right up in the pneumatic tube that runs from the Western Union office to the Transport office, so no time was lost in the delivery. The office boy handed it at once to the city editor, and his reply to it was something like this, written on one of the office noteheads:--

Western Union:--
Please send three hundred dollars immediately to Richard
Sumner, New Orleans, and charge to account of Daily Transport.
J. H. BROWN, _City Editor_.

“That went right down to the telegraph office in the pneumatic tube, and the next minute they were telegraphing the manager here to pay me three hundred dollars. And here’s the money in my pocket, and I take to-morrow’s steamer for Key West.”