Our hero smiled cooly at this No I am not any such thing said he but you are a double — because I just said so Well I will not stand this said the scondrel He took a whistle out of his pocket and blew on it, there was another detective hiding behind some bushs and more were also hid around there somwheres and all of a suden they jumped out Soon our hero was fighting for his very life He had left all his wapons in the house when he came away on the cars He hardly knew what he better do so he took the foul Jasbers old pistol away from him and shot it off three of the scondrels went to meet their maker but now he did not have any more cartridges There was one scondrel left besides Jashber and these two scondrels bit him till thier teeth met in the flech makin flech wonds which he would soon get well from He stabed the other one and now his emeny Jashber the detective was the only one left I guess your sorry you began it now said Ramorez Soon hunting around he found a long peice of rope and he fixed it arond the scondrels neck I am going to fix you sos you quit foiling me when I go on the cars said he The scondrel began to cry and our hero gave him a kick and tanted him O yes you wold folow me but I guess I’ll show you this time said he Jashber went on crying some more he got down on his knees and begged and begged but after all his persetcums Harold was not going to do anything such a scondrel so he fixed the rope the right way to hang poeple Soon he tied it up in the tree The scondrel holowed loud as he could but soon he was dead Soon Harold walked on off and fond a good place to sleep and made a fire to cook some bacon because he was tired now.
At this point, work upon the manuscript was interrupted, and not resumed until a Saturday morning four weeks later.
Soon after this some man came along and tacked up a sign that said $500000 reward paid to anybody for geting this crook Harold Ramorez put in the pentenartyry So Jashber the detective thougt he wold go upon the trail once more On the door of his ofice it read George B Jasber detective ofice on a sign because his first name was George B Well said George I would like to have $5000 Reward he is at his old tricks again and I better go after him Jashber the detective went on out of his ofice and the first thing he knew a young lady in an automobile wanted him to go with her so he got in and they went a long ways What do you want of me now that I have come out ridding with you said Jashber The young lady got to crying and all and took on Soon she said well I will tell you.
It is about the crooks is not your name George B Jashber the notted detective So George said yes he was and ask her what did she want of him besides Soon the young lady kept on crying and all and she said probaly he had heard the name of Harold Ramorez Yes I have heard the name of Harold Ramorez said George and he is a — and I am after him because I will get a reward of $50000 for killin him How do you hapen to know the name of Harold Ramorez That scondrel has riuned the lifes of pretty near everybody Well said this young lady now I will now tell you because my father is an old bank and Harold Ramorez has got this poor old man in his pouer sos he can get all the money that people have put in the bank and uless you will save my poor old father Harold Ramorez will proaly kill him and get the money and I will have to mary him If you will save this poor old man you can have the money and I will mary you Soon they went in the house and the old bank said if George would save him he could mary the young lady and have the money himself Soon Harold Ramorez came in there because he had been looking through a hole in the cieling Yes sneered he you are a nice one coming arond here this way Ill just show you O no you dont sneered our Hero yes I will to sneered Harold and he began to shoot at George with his ottomatick Soon six more crooks ran on in because they had been lookin through the hole and wish to kill George B Jasber the notted detective but the young lady got a dager off the wall and pretty soon the old bank got killed by Harold Ramorez and Jashber killed the crooks by stabbing them in their abodmen Look what you have been doing here sneered Ramorez and there folowed a deep curse You just wait said George and you will see what you get your vile oths are not doing me any harm and he went on and tanted some more with a smile The scondrel called him names a while but George cooly lit a ciggrett and was going to put his arms over the young lady but soon Ramorez grabed her and pushed her out of a window where she fell in a mortarboat the rest of the crooks put there Soon Ramorez jumped after her and George had to go on back to his ofice Soon a secert mesage came on the wall like this it said this young lady was in the pouer of the scondrel Harold Ramorez and the gang of crooks under the east peir of the river Wenever our hero wish to know about anything a secert mesage would come on the wall of his ofice printed in large letters and then it would fad out Sometimes it said different things and all such.
Jashber decied he would have to shadow some man he saw when he looked out the window. He shadowed this crook day and night till the scondrel went to the secret den of the conterfiters under the east peir First he was shadowing the crook night and day before he went to the den George took some sailor cloths and put them on and fixed himself all up sos nobody would know him in disguise and when he got to the den the scondrel Harold Ramorez was twising the young lady’s arm and starting to whip her. She was mad but she did not want to fight Our hero told him he better not do any more like that but the scondrel went on ahead pushing her all around because he did not know it was Jashber the detective but soon the scondrel had to go out a minute and George told the young lady who he was Now I will tell you what we better do said the detective Well what said the young lady Well you put my sailor suit on and I will put yours on and you can go on out and go to my ofce and when he comes back he will think I am the young lady and try to whip me but I am lots stronger than and he will see what he gets So they changed thier clothes and the young lady went on out because the crooks thought she was a sailor and she went up to George B Jasbers ofice and sat there while our hero was wating in the conterfiters den Soon the scondrel Ramorez came back so he thought George was the young lady and began again but soon Jashber got him down on the floor and choked him till his hands met in the flech Yes you try to whip me said he I could whip you any day in the week because you are mistaken and I am not any young lady Well who are you you talk so much sneered Harold I will show you who I am said he I am Jashber the detective I guess you know who I am now Soon they were fightin for thier very life Soon some more crooks came in and he had to let him up and went on back to his ofice So ther the young lady asked him if he arested Harold Ramorez No I did not yet said our hero but I am going to the next time because I want to have $500000 Reward.
So he put on some better clothes and they decided they would go to a party that Harold Ramorez was going to be at
CHAPITER XIIIII THIS party was a party at some poeples house a band was playing and all and soon our hero and the young lady —
Here the manuscript was again buried beneath the surface of the sawdust, upon a peremptory summons from the back porch, and Penrod repaired to the house for lunch. He was thoughtful during the meal, ate absently and did not return to the sawdust-box afterwards. Instead, he wandered about the yard for a time, then sat upon the steps of the back porch, his elbows on his knees, his cheeks in the palms of his hands, and gazed unseeingly at the empty stable.
His thoughts were those that such a manuscript as “Harold Ramorez” might be expected to stimulate in its producer; but they so far outran the speed of a writing hand that he had no desire to return to the composition. All his old ambitions had faded. He no longer cared to play the biggest horn in the band; no more did he picture himself in flashing uniform — not even as a General on a white horse. No; through tortuous adventures in his vivid mind’s eye he wandered, cool, expressionless, resourceful, always turning up at the theatrical moment, shadowing male and female crooks night and day, a soft hat pulled low over steely eyes that nothing escaped, his coat collar pulled up to disguise the back of his head. A cigarette was ever ready to his hand (to be smoked for the purpose of concealing watchfulness of expression) and an automatic pistol always lay in his pocket (to be glanced at before he left his office or entered any door whatsoever).
Yes; Penrod’s childish ideals of circuses and bands and tinsel Generals were now discarded pinchbeck indeed, ignominious and almost incredible. He had decided to be a detective.
So far as facts go — and they do not go very far at Penrod’s age — he had never seen an actual detective; but he did not realize that. If you had asked him, he would have said that he had seen hundreds, and he would have been conscious of no untruth in the reply. In the theatre, it was the day of “crooks” and detectives. Our plot-playwrights, being driven out of the “costume” centuries, yet being as ever dependent for thrill upon weapons, and the imminence of death and prison, had discovered with joy and gratitude that stage criminals can be made so virtuous in certain respects that audiences will love them, and wherever there is a criminal in a play, there must, of course, be a detective, sometimes many detectives. At this same time, there was a revival of detective plays — old-fashioned ones and new-fashioned ones, for many new kinds of detectives were invented. Not only upon the stage were detectives ubiquitous; many magazines ran overflowing with detectives; the Sunday newspapers were always an ounce or so heavier with detectives; they had daily serials about detectives; the billboards everywhere shouted with posters of detectives, and, above all, the “movies” filled the land, up and down, and sideways and across, with detectives and detectives and detectives — they could live no hour of the day or night without detectives. So what wonder that Penrod would have said he had seen great numbers of detectives?
And considering the nature of the most powerful influences under which he came (at his age, those that affect the imagination being always the most powerful) it is not inconsiderably to his credit that he decided to be a detective and not a “crook”. Perhaps — especially at the matinées — perhaps he wavered; for, on the stage, in many of these plays, the criminals were incomparably more attractive than the law-abiding people, who naturally must appear as persecutors and take the place formerly filled by villains in tan coats. But the “movies” (which nearly always punish or kill the “crooks”) and the stories and plays wherein detectives were the heroes — these wen the day, and Penrod’s decision was upon the side of the law.
Now, as Penrod sat on the steps of the back porch, his imagined self — the Penrod in his mind — began to shift and alter. By the very act of writing (which is an act comparable to the changing of plaster-of-Paris from a plastic to a fixed state) Penrod had solidified his nebulous studies of the notted detective, George B. Jashber, into a fixed contour, and, by the same process, the more he thought of Jashber, the more he miraculously forgot himself. He became less and less conscious of the actual Penrod, and, when his far-away eye glanced downward, what it physically saw — his knickerbockers and stockings and stubby shoes — bore no meaning. Penrod thought that he was wearing long trousers, rubber-soled shoes, a soft hat with the brim turned down, a long overcoat with the collar turned up, and that he had an automatic pistol in one of the outer pockets of that coat always ready to be taken forth and levelled at (or pressed against) a crook’s abodmen. During this long, mystic sitting upon the back steps, the individuality of Penrod and the individuality of the notted detective were merging. Penrod was becoming George B. Jashber, or Jasber.
After a while he rose, glanced sharply over his shoulder, then, his right hand in the right pocket of his jacket, walked with affected carelessness as far as the door of the stable. Here he paused, looked right and left quickly, drew forth his hand from his pocket, glanced at it vigilantly, then, not in conscious imitation at all but by inspiration, gave the abrupt sag and heave to his shoulders of a “movie” actor about to make an exit. Penrod had not the slightest idea why he did this, and indeed, in the truest sense, it was not Penrod but George B. Jashber who did it. George B. having done it, Penrod passed determinedly into the stable.
He sat upon a box, facing the wheelbarrow; but the box was a swivel-chair and the wheelbarrow a large and polished desk, while the battered old door of the disused harness-closet gleamed mahogany and opaque glass with a sign upon it. This sign, in fact, became actual, for there was paint in a can in the woodshed, and the harness-closet door bore this rubric:
GEORGE B. JASHBER DETECTIVE OFICE WALK IN
CHAPTER IV
JASHBEE DEVELOPS
IN HIS DAY-DREAMS and his night-dreams, more and more, Penrod merged into the character of George B. Even when he played or romped in ordinary pastimes with comrade Sam Williams or Herman and Verman, or with Roddy Bitts and Georgie Bassett, he did not entirely forget his new significance; there was about him the superiority of one possessing a fateful secret, and there were times, when (perhaps offended by some action of his playmates) he would mutter inaudibly, “I bet they better not do that if they knew who I was!” And once Margaret overheard him communing with himself as he slowly dressed for school.
“Well, George, you got your eyes open all right? Yes, sir; I guess I have! Well, George, we got to watch out! Oh, we’ll watch out, all right!”
Margaret laughed and called to him. “Who’s George, Penrod?” she asked.
There was a silence, and then his voice came indistinctly, “Nothin’.”
Now befell one of those coincidences in which life abounds, though we are beginning to be cynical about them when we see them on the stage or read of them in fiction. Thus it happened: Della, the cook, had an appanage of some vagueness, though definitely known as “Jarge”. Jarge was a golden-haired, pale-eyed, strangely freckled young man, whose chin and Adam’s apple knew but one difference, and that was merely geographical. On Sundays, Jarge wore a blue-satin tie, manufactured in the permanent estate of a tiny flat bow-knot, and, as the newspapers are so fond of pointing out, he wore more than this tie — but nothing else so noticeable. The tie and Jarge’s chin and Adam’s apple had a strong fascination for Penrod; he thought Jarge a remarkable person, and felt favoured by Jarge’s conversations with him. Jarge came for Della every Sunday afternoon and was not infrequently to be discovered at other times, sitting solemn and non-committal in the kitchen, when some member of the Schofield family had occasion to go there. To this family he was known, through Della’s reserved account of him, as “Jarge”, simply; and, as he was evidently much younger than Della, he was accepted by the Schofields as her nephew — or something; for so they alluded to him upon occasion.
Jarge was waiting on the back porch for his presumable aunt, on a fair Sunday afternoon in May, when Penrod approached him and in a rather guarded manner opened a conversation upon the subject of detectives. Jarge proved congenial, and presently informed Penrod that he, Jarge, himself, was a detective no less. However, he stated that the experience had proved disappointing and of no financial benefit whatever. He added that for three dollars anybody could be a detective. It was only necessary to send three dollars to an address in Wisconsin, and a badge, a certificate and a book of instructions would be the certain result, unless the United States mail-car ran off the track. Jarge had proved this to be the fact, more than a year ago, by responding with three dollars to an advertisement; but now he wished he had his three dollars back. His gloom in the matter had anything but a discouraging effect on Penrod; on the contrary, an electric opportunity sparkled before him.
“Look here!” he said solemnly, his eyes grown abnormally large. “What’ll you take for those things?”
Jarge had lost the book, and the certificate had been accidentally used by his landlady to start a fire in the stove; but he believed that the” badge was somewhere in his trunk. It passed into Penrod’s possession the following Thursday evening, the exchange being thirty-five cents in the form of two dimes, two nickels and five pennies. Jarge had polished the badge for good measure, and it was as bright as quicksilver. It was shaped like an ornamental shield and here in black intaglio the awing device:
MEM
GRAY BROS PVT
DETEC AGCY NO
From that moment, Penrod believed that he was Detec’ tive No. 103. That was as far as he went, and it was sufficient — the r
est of the organization remained in his mind as something powerful behind a curtain of Wisconsin mist; it was enough for him that he was Detective No. 103. And yet, in spite of the fact that he did not at all question his official rank as Detective No. 103, he did not think of himself as Penrod Schofield, No. 103; he thought of himself as George B. Jashber — George B. Jashber, No. 103. None of his family saw the badge, and, for a time, neither did any of his comrades — not even Sam Williams. He wore it under his jacket, near his left armpit, and kept it beneath his pillow at night — to be handy, perhaps, in case of burglars.
There was one person, however, who was granted, not precisely a look at the portent but at least a glimpse of it. This was Marjorie Jones, and the glimpse came at the end of a short interview across Marjorie’s picket fence, Penrod lingering upon the sidewalk there, in the course of a detour he made on his way home from school. He was so preoccupied — or, at least, he appeared to be so preoccupied — that Marjorie inquired about it.
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 436