by Talbot Mundy
“Well, he come back; an’ he found the ol’ house up on the hill, where he used to live, all fallin’ to rack an’ ruin’ — win’ows busted in — no more taters in the tater-patch — rats runnin’ roun’ big as possums — place looked as if it wuz ha’nted; an’ Moses looks aroun’ an’ sees a lot o’ sheep on two laigs, workin’ for the ‘Gyptians. That started him off thinkin’.
“He went an’ sat up on top o’ the big Pyramid an’ figured it all out, watchin’ them Chillun of Isr’el workin’ so hard for the ‘Gyptians down below there; an’ finally he came to a conclusion, them bein’ things ‘at any feller comes to when he makes his ol’ bean work furious. An’ Moses, he wuz plum furious all through. He didn’t want to go back an’ live in that ole rack-an’-ruin shack of a place, full o’ rats an’ ha’nts an’ no tater-patch nor anything. So he come to a conclusion, Moses did, an’ him knowing what he did about sheep, he mighty soon got busy.
“Pretty soon he had all them Chillan o’ Isr’el chippin’ in to a fund, an’ him keepin’ the money, an’ he says to ’em, ‘What’s the use o’ you all makin’ bricks without straw, when Ah knows a place where yo’ kin all live easy without doin’ a stroke o’ work — an’ all the honey an’ milk yo’ wants? Supposin’ you-all down tools an’ come along o’ me,’ says Moses. An’ he shows ’em how to plunder the ‘Gyptians first, him havin’ no more feelin’ o’ pugnaciousness about p’licemen an’ rather they’d do it for him. An’ by-an’-by he has ’em comin’ after him like sheep, all carryin’ the brooches an’ the gold earrings, an’ they come to the Red Sea, an’ he gets ’em over, an’ the ‘Gyptians is drowned, and they’s all singin’ an’ lookin’ forward. An’ then he says to ’em, ‘March!’ says he, an’ bes’ foot forward, for you can’t go back or the cops’ll get yo’, so there’s nothin’ else for it!’ An’ he keep ’em paradin’ in the desert there for forty years.
“Walkin’ the ties in Arizona weren’t nothin’ to it, for there weren’t no ties nor yet no water-tanks. There weren’t nothin’, ‘cep’ jes desert, an’ mebbe sage-brush, an’ insec’s, an’ rattlers an’ all kinds o’ pizen snakes; an’ when they did come on water it was all full of alkali so they could hardly drink it. And there weren’t no bootleggers, chinks an’ dagoes, sellin’ ’em liquor to sweeten their stomachs. No, sir, them Chillan of Isr’el did their hikin’ bone-dry; an’ they plum wore out ole Moses wiv their complainin’ an’ all till he quit cold; an’ he was all that fed up wiv ’em ‘at he wouldn’t have no funeral or nothin’ but ‘lowed he’d find himself a cave somewheres an’ go an’ die in that.
“But ‘fore he died he took ’em up on Pisgah mountain, an’ he says to ’em, ‘Thar’s y’r promis’ lan’; go fight for it, yo’ suckers!’ An’ he shows ’em the promis’ lan’ a mighty long ways off, all full o’ folks they’d got to ‘xterminate. ‘Tweren’t no big lan’ neither. An’ they couldn’t see no honey ‘less they worked to git, same as they did in Egyp’.
“Now, here’s the point I’se comin’ to. ‘Tain’t no little lan’ we’re aimin’ for to git. We’se agwine git us a continent! When it comes to spoilin’ ‘Gyptians fust, we ain’t magpies pickin’ here an’ there an’ flittin’ off, we’s wholesalers! We’re chesty. We’re gwine he’p ourselves proper! They ain’t nothin’ we’s agwine leave behind! We’s agwine laff at ev’rybody, p’lice included! We’re the really true an’ only genuine P.O.P., which O stan’ for omnibus an’ means we’s agwine take ev’rything, an’ ride, not walk! The white folks in this lan’ o’ bondage is agwine sit still an’ lock the p’lice inside the station house, so’s we kin do it easy — jes’ as ea-easy, as sayin’ it!
“An’ hike? Say; who are yo’ kiddin’? We’se agwine ride the whole way! How come, you s’pose, that German fleet got sunk ‘way over thar in Europe? Did you folks never hear nothin’ ‘bout dispensations? That wuz one o’ them dispensations. We’se agwine lif’ that fleet o’ ships right up from th’ bottom o’ the North Sea, an’ use ’em. How come? How’s we agwine fer to do that? Eeasy! Jes’ as ee-asy! We’s agwine put tubes down under the sea an’ blow those ole ships fuller o’ hot air than a b’loon is o’ laughin’ gas, an’ they’ll come floatin’ up to the top jes’ like a lot o’ ducks. Then we’s agwine ride in ’em to Africa. That’s what! Them’s our omnibus.
“An’ Africa? Oh boy! That ain’t agwine turn out to be no delusion. We’s all agwine be kings an’ emp’rors when we gits there. Sure! Ev’ry lazy good-for-nothing black’ll have an elephant to ride on, an’ a big umbrella over his haid fer to keep the sun off’n him. There’ll be eats enough to go ‘round’, an’ no work to do but rollin’ bones jes’ to keep the money circulatin’. I ain’t foolin’ yo’! An’ that’s all gwine come about jes’ ‘cause o’ this heah pictchah on a gole plate what white folks had fetched f’m Egyp!”
By that time he had to keep pausing between sentences to let the howls of laughter die before he could get another word in. The whole hall seemed to be rocking to and fro with mirth, and about the only two people in the place who weren’t grinning from ear to ear were Allison and Mrs. Aintree. Allison could see no humor in it.
“Are they all dementit? Is the body makin’ jokes?” he asked me behind uplifted hand.
And Mrs. Aintree could see nothing in it all but gross indignity inflicted on herself; nor could I blame her, especially as she floundered straight into the mud-puddle that I half-feared she would see in time. She went in with a splash — all two hundred pounds of her, and the noise of it gave birth to silence for about ten seconds.
“Stop!” she thundered, with both fists raised. “I’ll not have another word of this! It’s bad enough to have to sit here breathing this atmosphere without being insulted as well! I’ll summon the police and have the hall cleared if I hear another word of sacrilege and treason!”
That turned the trick. The twenty or thirty “initiates” and “aspirants” who had seen their way clear to an easy living on the strength of her unusual doctrines, and who even yet had hopes, perhaps based on money unaccounted for, began to take Mrs. Aintree’s part noisily. About fifty men got to their feet. Allison whipped the plate off the tray and stowed it in his satchel.
“Take that precious plate out of here!” bawled Mrs Aintree.
“Take it away from their profane eyes!”
She was half-crazy with wounded vanity, but if she had been wholly mad she couldn’t have made a worse break from her own stand-point, or a better one from mine.
“It’s our gole plate! It’s the P.O.P. gole plate!” somebody bellowed, and there began a rush for it as sudden as those gusts of wind that pick up a dust-whorl in the desert. It was exactly simultaneous with a rush by our own men, who reached the platform first, and just about sixty seconds in advance of an invasion by the Appleton police, who kicked the locked door open and wasted no time on preliminaries.
It’s no use telling me there won’t be fights in heaven. ’Twouldn’t be heaven if that were so. Valhalla! We had to wade in! That crowd had had its laugh, and the laugh had kept it goodhumored. But you’ll find it safer to take a beef-bone from a wolfhound’s jaws than to disillusion any swarm of men, colored or otherwise. The more they have laughed while the disillusioning went on, the swifter and the fiercer the reaction afterwards. Half those fellows realized that they had been made fools of from the first by Mrs. Aintree; others didn’t know what to think, but decided to get the gold plate anyhow. The mob spirit accounts for the remainder. They all came on the run, some of them hurling chairs at us over the heads of the men in front.
It was one of the toughest jobs I ever faced, to get that gold plate and Mrs. Aintree out of Appleton town hall without injury to either. Sam was a wonder. He took the corner of the stage where the flight of steps led up from the floor, and none who saw him, or who met the calculated, swift ferocity of his attack, could ever more wonder why he wasn’t wanted in the ring that time when they pocketed his forfeit money and railroaded him to jail instead. But there wer
e too many of them, even for him; he got an ugly slash with a razor, and I had to leave Mrs. Aintree to the gang’s protection and go to his aid. Since they had drawn razors I had no compunction about using chair-legs, and I bucked the swarm, brandishing one after the style of Samson when he slew those thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. Only no ass’ jaw, nor chair-leg could break a black man’s skull, swat you never so emphatically.
The surprising part was that nobody pulled a gun on us. I had a pistol in my pocket, but didn’t propose to use it against our own invited guests, except perhaps as an absolutely last recourse; and there was never a moment’s real doubt of the outcome, with the police working their way toward the stage with the aid of nightsticks, going through their mob-drill like automatons, and turning suddenly at intervals to drive the rear of the mob out into the street. I dare say the whole business was over in five minutes, but it was a jewel of a fracas while it lasted; a jewel of a speech, too, that the chief of police, made from the front steps of the hall to the disgruntled remnants who remained to rub their heads and hear him.
“An’ that’s the last of this P.O.P. foolishness we’ll have in this town, if yez have any sinse at all! Wan more word about it, an’ I’ll P.O.P. pop the lot of yez into the coop, an’ what with foines an’ jailsintences ye’ll wish ye’d never heard o’ Moses, let alone seen his photograph! Get along home now, all of yez, an’ step smart! And as for you, ma’am,” he went on, turning on Mrs. Aintree, “I’m sorry to say I’m ashamed of ye! Ye ought to know better, for ye’ve lived here long enough. I knew y’r old dad an’ your husband, or I’d say more. Good night, ma’am!”
He turned to me last, accepted a cigar, cocked it upward at the stars between his teeth, and grinned.
“We’ll have peace here for a while,” he said; “but — that’s a wonderful pair o’ fists ye have. Where the divvle did yez learn to use ’em?”
CHAPTER XI. “Man, the plate’s gone!”
I WON’T go so far as to pretend that relations as between Mrs. Aintree and myself had been exactly cordial hitherto. They had not. But up to the point of that lodge meeting in Appleton we had been able to observe the amenities. We had presented to the world at large a reasonably amicable front. She detested and despised me, and while I did not overestimate her charms or her integrity I was rather sorry. for her, so we had managed to exist on the same Pullman car without exploding.
But to be made ridiculous was too much. I had committed the unforgivable offense. She hadn’t a forgiving disposition at the best of times, but I had passed the Rubicon. She could no longer look at me without glaring; could not even see me without muttering; could not frame polite words in answer to the customary social salutations; and, on top of all that, she was imbecile enough to suppose that I wasn’t alert for her vengeance.
It is only the secret enemy who is dangerous. The man or woman who makes faces at you, or defies you openly, is as easy as a rattler to contend with, for you have had notice. Her lust for revenge was as venomous as concentrated snake-juice, but she seemed to think herself possessed of a fairy-book cloak that rendered her hatred invisible.
A half-witted man would have realized the absurdity of her continuing another mile with us unless she were planning to upset my calculations.
When I canceled all arrangements next morning, and had to send sheaves of telegrams to shorten our itinerary and provide connections that would take us by the shortest route to Sparks, Nevada, it must have been obvious to her that I had some other motive than to break up a P.O.P. lodge meeting. The P.O.P. was done for. Ridicule would finish it. Sparks, according to our reports, was the center where the movement had made less progress than anywhere else. But such people as Mrs. Aintree — and there are lots of them — are more fatalistic than the Moslem, and ascribe every unexpected move to a calculating Destiny. She wanted to get to Sparks. I had changed all plans and decided to go to Sparks at once. Therefore, obviously, Destiny was playing her game, and in due course would deliver me to destruction, ably and vindictively assisted by herself. If you look around you’ll find any number of people who habitually argue with themselves in some such way as that.
There began to be a sort of surreptitious glee observable in Mrs. Aintree’s manner — a confident cocksureness blended with the hate, that would have forewarned an ostrich with its head stuck in the sand. She began to make an awful fuss over Sam, dressing his wound about three times as often as was necessary, and flattering him with honeyed words for having fought so nobly, as she expressed it, in defense of womanhood. Sam liked it. There never was a darky who didn’t enjoy that kind of treatment. But when she gave him a telegram to send to Sparks he brought it to me immediately, and I let him keep it in his pocket for several days before dispatching it.
ANTONIO VITTORI, LAKELOCK, CALIFORNIA. ALL ARRANGEMENTS SUDDENLY CHANGED. EXPECT WHOLE PARTY AT SPARKS EVENING OF THIRTEENTH. CONFIDENT IN YOUR ABILITY TO DEVISE AND ARRANGE SOLUTION. COUNT IMPLICITLY ON ME TO CARRY OUT INSTRUCTIONS, BUT WOULD LIKE THEM AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. YOUR PUPIL.
* * * * *
From the morning of our leaving Appleton until the thirteenth the railway people treated us to the loser’s end of every gamble on connections. But we reached Sparks at last after an almost endless crawl across sage-brush desert that lies waiting for nothing but pumps and persistence to make a new Garden of Eden of it, and almost before the train rolled to a standstill half-an-hour after sunset our game began again in earnest. They cut our car off, and bunted it in the direction of the engine sheds — then trundled it back into a bit of rusty siding, where we could stay until Sparks became paradise, if we happened to feel that way about it and for all that anybody cared.
A fellow with a neck like raw beefsteak cross-rabbeted into furrows allowed that that would do, and turned his back to superintend the moonrise, and there we were — plus the local sheriff, two Italians — one of whom looked like a bootlegger and the other like Dante come to life again — and, marvel of all marvels, Terence Casey stepping forward out of semi-darkness, like a ghost in an old-time play!
“Yes, me boy, the —— it’s me, an’ a fine fool’s errand ye’ve brought me on! Not send for me? I know ye didn’t! Did ye write to Meldrum Strange, though? Did he sind five-an’-twenty telegrams to Washington, until they transferred me to this job, or did he not? And did I take the Overland, an’ arrive here a day ahead av ye? I sure did. And of all the Devil’s own places to have to waste time in, this is the Devil’s choice, or my name’s Moses, same as so many o’ your friends! I’ll introduce ye now to Mr. Arthur Brandon, county sheriff. Maybe ye don’t know a man any longer when ye meet wan. This is him. Sheriff, this is Mr. Jeff Ramsden, elephant hunter and now lunatic at large; watch out f’r his grip, he’s hefty!”
I looked straight into the eyes of the real West, the quiet, all-observing eyes that are used to vastness and afraid of nothing. He was as big as I am, standing with two fingers of his left hand hitched into his trousers pocket. His right came forward slowly for me to shake, and I liked him, warts, freckles, wrinkles, old gray flannel shirt, and all.
Forty years old, or a little more, with eyes of twenty-five; skin like leather; a ready smile; and a way of standing that pretended nothing, asserted nothing, except his own faith in the universe and his permission to all concerned to share it with him if they chose. After the manner of his kind, he said nothing, conceding the first deal, or shot if you like, to the stranger.
“I’m watching those two whaps,” I said. “It may be one or other of them has a message for someone in the car; if so, I want to know it.”
Casey took that hint and drew apart to observe both car-ends from a point of vantage.
“I hope Casey has saved time by telling you most of the details of this business,” I said, and he nodded.
“Casey and I had a talk last night, Mr. Ramsden. He doesn’t seem to think much of your alarm.”
“Are you willing to look into it with me?”
“You bet.”
“Do you know a man named Antonio Vittori, a dago living just over the border at Lakelock?” He nodded again. “Yes. Quiet man. Great studyer. Eyetalian, not a dago. They say he’s all right.”
“He’s the man I’m after.”
“Hell and damnation! Supposed to have murdered a colored man, isn’t he? Do you figure that killing is always a crime, Mr. Ramsden?”
“I guess you and I would agree on most points, if we had time to discuss them,” I answered. “Antonio Vittori is an Indian.”
“Is that so?”
“I’m here to convince you. How far does your authority extend?”
“No further than the borders of this county. But there’ll be no difficulty about getting the California bunch to help us out. You expect this Antonio Vittori here tonight?”
“Maybe. I suspect those two Italians. Are you sure he’s not in Sparks this minute?”
“We can find out. Does he figure on killing a few more blacks? I notice you’ve brought along a lot of live-bait.”
“We’ve a gold plate with us that he’s nuts on. He killed that colored man to get the rest of the set — but the set’s worth not much more to him than bullion without the one we’ve got, and he knows where it is. I believe he’ll try to get it.”
“New York State warrant in order?”
“Sure. Federal warrant, too, I believe; ask Casey about that.”
“We’ll take him and see what’s in this. Well, Casey, what d’you make of it?”
“Ramsden’s right. That whap with a face like Montezuma passed a letter to Mrs. Aintree. She’s writing. He’s on the platform waiting for an answer. The other whap beat it; I guess he’s gone to tell someone that the letter was delivered.”