Moon-Face and Other Stories
by Jack London
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

CONTENTS

MOON-FACE
THE LEOPARD MAN'S STORY
LOCAL COLOR
AMATEUR NIGHT
THE MINIONS OF MIDAS
THE SHADOW AND THE FLASH
ALL GOLD CANYON
PLANCHETTE

MOON-FACE

John Claverhouse was a moon-faced man. You know the kind, cheek-bones wide
apart, chin and forehead melting into the cheeks to complete the perfect
round, and the nose, broad and pudgy, equidistant from the circumference,
flattened against the very centre of the face like a dough-ball upon the
ceiling. Perhaps that is why I hated him, for truly he had become an offense
to my eyes, and I believed the earth to be cumbered with his presence. Perhaps
my mother may have been superstitious of the moon and looked upon it over the
wrong shoulder at the wrong time.

Be that as it may, I hated John Claverhouse. Not that he had done me what
society would consider a wrong or an ill turn. Far from it. The evil was of a
deeper, subtler sort; so elusive, so intangible, as to defy clear, definite
analysis in words. We all experience such things at some period in our lives.
For the first time we see a certain individual, one who the very instant
before we did not dream existed; and yet, at the first moment of meeting, we
say: "I do not like that man." Why do we not like him? Ah, we do not know why;
we know only that we do not. We have taken a dislike, that is all. And so I
with John Claverhouse.

What right had such a man to be happy? Yet he was an optimist. He was always
gleeful and laughing. All things were always all right, curse him! Ah I how it
grated on my soul that he should be so happy! Other men could laugh, and it
did not bother me. I even used to laugh myself--before I met John Claverhouse.

But his laugh! It irritated me, maddened me, as nothing else under the sun
could irritate or madden me. It haunted me, gripped hold of me, and would not
let me go. It was a huge, Gargantuan laugh. Waking or sleeping it was always
with me, whirring and jarring across my heart-strings like an enormous rasp.
At break of day it came whooping across the fields to spoil my pleasant
morning revery. Under the aching noonday glare, when the green things drooped
and the birds withdrew to the depths of the forest, and all nature drowsed,
his great "Ha! ha!" and "Ho! ho!" rose up to the sky and challenged the sun.
And at black midnight, from the lonely cross-roads where he turned from town
into his own place, came his plaguey cachinnations to rouse me from my sleep
and make me writhe and clench my nails into my palms.

I went forth privily in the night-time, and turned his cattle into his fields,
and in the morning heard his whooping laugh as he drove them out again. "It is
nothing," he said; "the poor, dumb beasties are not to be blamed for straying
into fatter pastures."

He had a dog he called "Mars," a big, splendid brute, part deer-hound and part
blood-hound, and resembling both. Mars was a great delight to him, and they
were always together. But I bided my time, and one day, when opportunity was
ripe, lured the animal away and settled for him with strychnine and beefsteak.
It made positively no impression on John Claverhouse. His laugh was as hearty
and frequent as ever, and his face as much like the full moon as it always had
been.

Then I set fire to his haystacks and his barn. But the next morning, being
Sunday, he went forth blithe and cheerful.

"Where are you going?" I asked him, as he went by the cross-roads.

"Trout," he said, and his face beamed like a full moon. "I just dote on
trout."

Was there ever such an impossible man! His whole harvest had gone up in his
haystacks and barn. It was uninsured, I knew. And yet, in the face of famine
and the rigorous winter, he went out gayly in quest of a mess of trout,
forsooth, because he "doted" on them! Had gloom but rested, no matter how
lightly, on his brow, or had his bovine countenance grown long and serious and
less like the moon, or had he removed that smile but once from off his face, I
am sure I could have forgiven him for existing. But no. he grew only more
cheerful under misfortune.

I insulted him. He looked at me in slow and smiling surprise.

"I fight you? Why?" he asked slowly. And then he laughed. "You are so funny!
Ho! ho! You'll be the death of me! He! he! he! Oh! Ho! ho! ho!

What would you? It was past endurance. By the blood of Judas, how I hated him!
Then there was that name--Claverhouse! What a name! Wasn't it absurd?
Claverhouse! Merciful heaven, WHY Claverhouse? Again and again I asked myself
that question. I should not have minded Smith, or Brown, or Jones--but
CLAVERHOUSE! I leave it to you. Repeat it to yourself--Claverhouse. Just
listen to the ridiculous sound of it--Claverhouse! Should a man live with such
a name? I ask of you. "No," you say. And "No" said I.

But I bethought me of his mortgage. What of his crops and barn destroyed, I
knew he would be unable to meet it. So I got a shrewd, close-mouthed,
tight-fisted money-lender to get the mortgage transferred to him. I did not
appear but through this agent I forced the foreclosure, and but few days (no
more, believe me, than the law allowed) were given John Claverhouse to remove
his goods and chattels from the premises. Then I strolled down to see how he
took it, for he had lived there upward of twenty years. But he met me with his
saucer-eyes twinkling, and the light glowing and spreading in his face till it
was as a full-risen moon.

"Ha! ha! ha!" he laughed. "The funniest tike, that youngster of mine! Did you
ever hear the like? Let me tell you. He was down playing by the edge of the
river when a piece of the bank caved in and splashed him. 'O papa!' he cried;
'a great big puddle flewed up and hit me.'"

He stopped and waited for me to join him in his infernal glee.

"I don't see any laugh in it," I said shortly, and I know my face went sour.

He regarded me with wonderment, and then came the damnable light, glowing and
spreading, as I have described it, till his face shone soft and warm, like the
summer moon, and then the laugh--"Ha! ha! That's funny! You don't see it, eh?
He! he! Ho! ho! ho! He doesn't see it! Why, look here. You know a puddle--"

But I turned on my heel and left him. That was the last. I could stand it no
longer. The thing must end right there, I thought, curse him! The earth should
be quit of him. And as I went over the hill, I could hear his monstrous laugh
reverberating against the sky.

Now, I pride myself on doing things neatly, and when I resolved to kill John
Claverhouse I had it in mind to do so in such fashion that I should not look
back upon it and feel ashamed. I hate bungling, and I hate brutality. To me
there is something repugnant in merely striking a man with one's naked
fist--faugh! it is sickening! So, to shoot, or stab, or club John Claverhouse
(oh, that name!) did not appeal to me. And not only was I impelled to do it
neatly and artistically, but also in such manner that not the slightest
possible suspicion could be directed against me.

To this end I bent my intellect, and, after a week of profound incubation, I
hatched the scheme. Then I set to work. I bought a water spaniel bitch, five
months old, and devoted my whole attention to her training. Had any one spied
upon me, they would have remarked that this training consisted entirely of one
thing--RETRIEVING. I taught the dog, which I called "Bellona," to fetch sticks
I threw into the water, and not only to fetch, but to fetch at once, without
mouthing or playing with them. The point was that she was to stop for nothing,
but to deliver the stick in all haste. I made a practice of running away and
leaving her to chase me, with the stick in her mouth, till she caught me. She
was a bright animal, and took to the game with such eagerness that I was soon
content.

After that, at the first casual opportunity, I presented Bellona to John
Claverhouse. I knew what I was about, for I was aware of a little weakness of
his, and of a little private sinning of which he was regularly and
inveterately guilty.

"No," he said, when I placed the end of the rope in his hand. "No, you don't
mean it." And his mouth opened wide and he grinned all over his damnable
moon-face.

"I--I kind of thought, somehow, you didn't like me," he explained. "Wasn't it
funny for me to make such a mistake?" And at the thought he held his sides
with laughter.

"What is her name?" he managed to ask between paroxysms.

"Bellona," I said.

"He! he!" he tittered. "What a funny name."

I gritted my teeth, for his mirth put them on edge, and snapped out between
them, "She was the wife of Mars, you know."

Then the light of the full moon began to suffuse his face, until he exploded
with: "That was my other dog. Well, I guess she's a widow now. Oh! Ho! ho! E!
he! he! Ho!" he whooped after me, and I turned and fled swiftly over the hill.

The week passed by, and on Saturday evening I said to him, "You go away
Monday, don't you?"

He nodded his head and grinned.

"Then you won't have another chance to get a mess of those trout you just
'dote' on."

But he did not notice the sneer. "Oh, I don't know," he chuckled. "I'm going
up to-morrow to try pretty hard."

Thus was assurance made doubly sure, and I went back to my house hugging
myself with rapture.

Early next morning I saw him go by with a dip-net and gunnysack, and Bellona
trotting at his heels. I knew where he was bound, and cut out by the back
pasture and climbed through the underbrush to the top of the mountain. Keeping
carefully out of sight, I followed the crest along for a couple of miles to a
natural amphitheatre in the hills, where the little river raced down out of a
gorge and stopped for breath in a large and placid rock-bound pool. That was
the spot! I sat down on the croup of the mountain, where I could see all that
occurred, and lighted my pipe.

Ere many minutes had passed, John Claverhouse came plodding up the bed of the
stream. Bellona was ambling about him, and they were in high feather, her
short, snappy barks mingling with his deeper chest-notes. Arrived at the pool,
he threw down the dip-net and sack, and drew from his hip-pocket what looked
like a large, fat candle. But I knew it to be a stick of "giant"; for such was
his method of catching trout. He dynamited them. He attached the fuse by
wrapping the "giant" tightly in a piece of cotton. Then he ignited the fuse
and tossed the explosive into the pool.

Like a flash, Bellona was into the pool after it. I could have shrieked aloud
for joy. Claverhouse yelled at her, but without avail. He pelted her with
clods and rocks, but she swam steadily on till she got the stick of "giant" in
her mouth, when she whirled about and headed for shore. Then, for the first
time, he realized his danger, and started to run. As foreseen and planned by
me, she made the bank and took out after him. Oh, I tell you, it was great! As
I have said, the pool lay in a sort of amphitheatre. Above and below, the
stream could be crossed on stepping-stones. And around and around, up and down
and across the stones, raced Claverhouse and Bellona. I could never have
believed that such an ungainly man could run so fast. But run he did, Bellona
hot-footed after him, and gaining. And then, just as she caught up, he in full
stride, and she leaping with nose at his knee, there was a sudden flash, a
burst of smoke, a terrific detonation, and where man and dog had been the
instant before there was naught to be seen but a big hole in the ground.

"Death from accident while engaged in illegal fishing." That was the verdict
of the coroner's jury; and that is why I pride myself on the neat and artistic
way in which I finished off John Claverhouse. There was no bungling, no
brutality; nothing of which to be ashamed in the whole transaction, as I am
sure you will agree. No more does his infernal laugh go echoing among the
hills, and no more does his fat moon-face rise up to vex me. My days are
peaceful now, and my night's sleep deep.

THE LEOPARD MAN'S STORY

HE had a dreamy, far-away look in his eyes, and his sad, insistent voice,
gentle-spoken as a maid's, seemed the placid embodiment of some deep-seated
melancholy. He was the Leopard Man, but he did not look it. His business in
life, whereby he lived, was to appear in a cage of performing leopards before
vast audiences, and to thrill those audiences by certain exhibitions of nerve
for which his employers rewarded him on a scale commensurate with the thrills
he produced.

As I say, he did not look it. He was narrow-hipped, narrow-shouldered, and
anaemic, while he seemed not so much oppressed by gloom as by a sweet and
gentle sadness, the weight of which was as sweetly and gently borne. For an
hour I had been trying to get a story out of him, but he appeared to lack
imagination. To him there was no romance in his gorgeous career, no deeds of
daring, no thrills--nothing but a gray sameness and infinite boredom.

Lions? Oh, yes! he had fought with them. It was nothing. All you had to do was
to stay sober. Anybody could whip a lion to a standstill with an ordinary
stick. He had fought one for half an hour once. Just hit him on the nose every
time he rushed, and when he got artful and rushed with his head down, why, the
thing to do was to stick out your leg. When he grabbed at the leg you drew it
back and hit hint on the nose again. That was all.

With the far-away look in his eyes and his soft flow of words he showed me his
scars. There were many of them, and one recent one where a tigress had reached
for his shoulder and gone down to the bone. I could see the neatly mended
rents in the coat he had on. His right arm, from the elbow down, looked as
though it had gone through a threshing machine, what of the ravage wrought by
claws and fangs. But it was nothing, he said, only the old wounds bothered him
somewhat when rainy weather came on.

Suddenly his face brightened with a recollection, for he was really as anxious
to give me a story as I was to get it.

"I suppose you've heard of the lion-tamer who was hated by another man?" he
asked.

He paused and looked pensively at a sick lion in the cage opposite.

"Got the toothache," he explained. "Well, the lion-tamer's big play to the
audience was putting his head in a lion's mouth. The man who hated him
attended every performance in the hope sometime of seeing that lion crunch
down. He followed the show about all over the country. The years went by and
he grew old, and the lion-tamer grew old, and the lion grew old. And at last
one day, sitting in a front seat, he saw what he had waited for. The lion
crunched down, and there wasn't any need to call a doctor."

The Leopard Man glanced casually over his finger nails in a manner which would
have been critical had it not been so sad.

"Now, that's what I call patience," he continued, "and it's my style. But it
was not the style of a fellow I knew. He was a little, thin, sawed-off,
sword-swallowing and juggling Frenchman. De Ville, he called himself, and he
had a nice wife. She did trapeze work and used to dive from under the roof
into a net, turning over once on the way as nice as you please.

"De Ville had a quick temper, as quick as his hand, and his hand was as quick
as the paw of a tiger. One day, because the ring-master called him a
frog-eater, or something like that and maybe a little worse, he shoved him
against the soft pine background he used in his knife-throwing act, so quick
the ring-master didn't have time to think, and there, before the audience, De
Ville kept the air on fire with his knives, sinking them into the wood all
around the ring-master so close that they passed through his clothes and most
of them bit into his skin.

"The clowns had to pull the knives out to get him loose, for he was pinned
fast. So the word went around to watch out for De Ville, and no one dared be
more than barely civil to his wife. And she was a sly bit of baggage, too,
only all hands were afraid of De Ville.

"But there was one man, Wallace, who was afraid of nothing. He was the
lion-tamer, and he had the self-same trick of putting his head into the lion's
mouth. He'd put it into the mouths of any of them, though he preferred
Augustus, a big, good-natured beast who could always be depended upon.

"As I was saying, Wallace--'King' Wallace we called him--was afraid of nothing
alive or dead. He was a king and no mistake. I've seen him drunk, and on a
wager go into the cage of a lion that'd turned nasty, and without a stick beat
him to a finish. Just did it with his fist on the nose.

"Madame de Ville--"

At an uproar behind us the Leopard Man turned quietly around. It was a divided
cage, and a monkey, poking through the bars and around the partition, had had
its paw seized by a big gray wolf who was trying to pull it off by main
strength. The arm seemed stretching out longer end longer like a thick
elastic, and the unfortunate monkey's mates were raising a terrible din. No
keeper was at hand, so the Leopard Man stepped over a couple of paces, dealt
the wolf a sharp blow on the nose with the light cane he carried, and returned
with a sadly apologetic smile to take up his unfinished sentence as though
there had been no interruption.

"--looked at King Wallace and King Wallace looked at her, while De Ville
looked black. We warned Wallace, but it was no use. He laughed at us, as he
laughed at De Ville one day when he shoved De Ville's head into a bucket of
paste because he wanted to fight.

"De Ville was in a pretty mess--I helped to scrape him off; but he was cool as
a cucumber and made no threats at all. But I saw a glitter in his eyes which I
had seen often in the eyes of wild beasts, and I went out of my way to give
Wallace a final warning. He laughed, but he did not look so much in Madame de
Ville's direction after that.

"Several months passed by. Nothing had happened and I was beginning to think
it all a scare over nothing. We were West by that time, showing in 'Frisco. It
was during the afternoon performance, and the big tent was filled with women
and children, when I went looking for Red Denny, the head canvas-man, who had
walked off with my pocket-knife.

"Passing by one of the dressing tents I glanced in through a hole in the
canvas to see if I could locate him. He wasn't there, but directly in front of
me was King Wallace, in tights, waiting for his turn to go on with his cage of
performing lions. He was watching with much amusement a quarrel between a
couple of trapeze artists. All the rest of the people in the dressing tent
were watching the same thing, with the exception of De Ville whom I noticed
staring at Wallace with undisguised hatred. Wallace and the rest were all too
busy following the quarrel to notice this or what followed.

"But I saw it through the hole in the canvas. De Ville drew his handkerchief
from his pocket, made as though to mop the sweat from his face with it (it was
a hot day), and at the same time walked past Wallace's back. The look troubled
me at the time, for not only did I see hatred in it, but I saw triumph as
well.

"'De Ville will bear watching,' I said to myself, and I really breathed easier
when I saw him go out the entrance to the circus grounds and board an electric
car for down town. A few minutes later I was in the big tent, where I had
overhauled Red Denny. King Wallace was doing his turn and holding the audience
spellbound. He was in a particularly vicious mood, and he kept the lions
stirred up till they were all snarling, that is, all of them except old
Augustus, and he was just too fat and lazy and old to get stirred up over
anything.

"Finally Wallace cracked the old lion's knees with his whip and got him into
position. Old Augustus, blinking good-naturedly, opened his mouth and in
popped Wallace's head. Then the jaws came together, CRUNCH, just like that."

The Leopard Man smiled in a sweetly wistful fashion, and the far-away look
came into his eyes.

"And that was the end of King Wallace," he went on in his sad, low voice.
"After the excitement cooled down I watched my chance and bent over and
smelled Wallace's head. Then I sneezed."

"It . . . it was . . .?" I queried with halting eagerness.

"Snuff--that De Ville dropped on his hair in the dressing tent. Old Augustus
never meant to do it. He only sneezed."

LOCAL COLOR

"I DO not see why you should not turn this immense amount of unusual
information to account," I told him. "Unlike most men equipped with similar
knowledge, YOU have expression. Your style is--"

"Is sufficiently--er--journalese?" he interrupted suavely.

"Precisely! You could turn a pretty penny."

But he interlocked his fingers meditatively, shrugged his shoulders, and
dismissed the subject.

"I trave tried it. It does not pay."

"It was paid for and published," he added, after a pause. "And I was also
honored with sixty days in the Hobo."

"The Hobo?" I ventured.

"The Hobo--" He fixed his eyes on my Spencer and ran along the titles while he
cast his definition. "The Hobo, my dear fellow, is the name for that
particular place of detention in city and county jails wherein are assembled
tramps, drunks, beggars, and the riff-raff of petty offenders. The word itself
is a pretty one, and it has a history. Hautbois--there's the French of it.
haut, meaning high, and bois, wood. In English it becomes hautboy, a wooden
musical instrument of two-foot tone, I believe, played with a double reed, an
oboe, in fact. You remember in 'Henry IV'--

"'The case of a treble hautboy
Was a mansion for him, a court.'

From this to ho-boy is but a step, and for that matter the English used the
terms interchangeably. But--and mark you, the leap paralyzes one--crossing the
Western Ocean, in New York City, hautboy, or ho-boy, becomes the name by which
the night-scavenger is known. In a way one understands its being born of the
contempt for wandering players and musical fellows. But see the beauty of it!
the burn and the brand! The night-scavenger, the pariah, the miserable, the
despised, the man without caste! And in its next incarnation, consistently and
logically, it attaches itself to the American outcast, namely, the tramp.
Then, as others have mutilated its sense, the tramp mutilates its form, and
ho-boy becomes exultantly hobo. Wherefore, the large stone and brick cells,
lined with double and triple-tiered bunks, in which the Law is wont to
incarcerate him, he calls the Hobo. Interesting, isn't it?"

And I sat back and marvelled secretly at this encyclopaedic-minded man, this
Leith Clay-Randolph, this common tramp who made himself at home in my den,
charmed such friends as gathered at my small table, outshone me with his
brilliance and his manners, spent my spending money, smoked my best cigars,
and selected from my ties and studs with a cultivated and discriminating eye.

He absently walked over to the shelves and looked into Loria's "Economic
Foundation of Society."

"I like to talk with you," he remarked. "You are not indifferently schooled.
You've read the books, and your economic interpretation of history, as you
choose to call it" (this with a sneer), "eminently fits you for an
intellectual outlook on life. But your sociologic judgments are vitiated by
your lack of practical knowledge. Now I, who know the books, pardon me,
somewhat better than you, know life, too. I have lived it, naked, taken it up
in both my hands and looked at it, and tasted it, the flesh and the blood of
it, and, being purely an intellectual, I have been biased by neither passion
nor prejudice. All of which is necessary for clear concepts, and all of which
you lack. Ah! a really clever passage. Listen!"

And he read aloud to me in his remarkable style, paralleling the text with a
running criticism and commentary, lucidly wording involved and lumbering
periods, casting side and cross lights upon the subject, introducing points
the author had blundered past and objections he had ignored, catching up lost
ends, flinging a contrast into a paradox and reducing it to a coherent and
succinctly stated truth--in short, flashing his luminous genius in a blaze of
fire over pages erstwhile dull and heavy and lifeless.

It is long since that Leith Clay-Randolph (note the hyphenated surname)
knocked at the back door of Idlewild and melted the heart of Gunda. Now Gunda
was cold as her Norway hills, though in her least frigid moods she was capable
of permitting especially nice-looking tramps to sit on the back stoop and
devour lone crusts and forlorn and forsaken chops. But that a tatterdemalion
out of the night should invade the sanctity of her kitchen-kingdom and delay
dinner while she set a place for him in the warmest corner, was a matter of
such moment that the Sunflower went to see. Ah, the Sunflower, of the soft
heart and swift sympathy! Leith Clay-Randolph threw his glamour over her for
fifteen long minutes, whilst I brooded with my cigar, and then she fluttered
back with vague words and the suggestion of a cast-off suit I would never
miss.

"Surely I shall never miss it," I said, and I had in mind the dark gray suit
with the pockets draggled from the freightage of many books--books that had
spoiled more than one day's fishing sport.

"I should advise you, however," I added, "to mend the pockets first."

But the Sunflower's face clouded. "N--o," she said, "the black one."

"The black one!" This explosively, incredulously. "I wear it quite often. I--I
intended wearing it to-night."

"You have two better ones, and you know I never liked it, dear," the Sunflower
hurried on. "Besides, it's shiny--"

"Shiny!"

"It--it soon will be, which is just the same, and the man is really estimable.
He is nice and refined, and I am sure he--"

"Has seen better days."

"Yes, and the weather is raw and beastly, and his clothes are threadbare. And
you have many suits--"

"Five," I corrected, "counting in the dark gray fishing outfit with the
draggled pockets."

"And he has none, no home, nothing--"

"Not even a Sunflower,"--putting my arm around her,--"wherefore he is
deserving of all things. Give him the black suit, dear--nay, the best one, the
very best one. Under high heaven for such lack there must be compensation!"

"You ARE a dear!" And the Sunflower moved to the door and looked back
alluringly. "You are a PERFECT dear."

And this after seven years, I marvelled, till she was back again, timid and
apologetic.

"I--I gave him one of your white shirts. He wore a cheap horrid cotton thing,
and I knew it would look ridiculous. And then his shoes were so slipshod, I
let him have a pair of yours, the old ones with the narrow caps--"

"Old ones!"

"Well, they pinched horribly, and you know they did."

It was ever thus the Sunflower vindicated things.

And so Leith Clay-Randolph came to Idlewild to stay, how long I did not dream.
Nor did I dream how often he was to come, for he was like an erratic comet.
Fresh he would arrive, and cleanly clad, from grand folk who were his friends
as I was his friend, and again, weary and worn, he would creep up the
brier-rose path from the Montanas or Mexico. And without a word, when his
WANDERLUST gripped him, he was off and away into that great mysterious
underworld he called "The Road."

"I could not bring myself to leave until I had thanked you, you of the open
hand and heart," he said, on the night he donned my good black suit.

And I confess I was startled when I glanced over the top of my paper and saw a
lofty-browed and eminently respectable-looking gentleman, boldly and
carelessly at ease. The Sunflower was right. He must have known better days
for the black suit and white shirt to have effected such a transformation.
Involuntarily I rose to my feet, prompted to meet him on equal ground. And
then it was that the Clay-Randolph glamour descended upon me. He slept at
Idlewild that night, and the next night, and for many nights. And he was a man
to love. The Son of Anak, otherwise Rufus the Blue-Eyed, and also plebeianly
known as Tots, rioted with him from brier-rose path to farthest orchard,
scalped him in the haymow with barbaric yells, and once, with pharisaic zeal,
was near to crucifying him under the attic roof beams. The Sunflower would
have loved him for the Son of Anak's sake, had she not loved him for his own.
As for myself, let the Sunflower tell, in the times he elected to be gone, of
how often I wondered when Leith would come back again, Leith the Lovable. Yet
he was a man of whom we knew nothing. Beyond the fact that he was
Kentucky-born, his past was a blank. He never spoke of it. And he was a man
who prided himself upon his utter divorce of reason from emotion. To him the
world spelled itself out in problems. I charged him once with being guilty of
emotion when roaring round the den with the Son of Anak pickaback. Not so, he
held. Could he not cuddle a sense-delight for the problem's sake?

He was elusive. A man who intermingled nameless argot with polysyllabic and
technical terms, he would seem sometimes the veriest criminal, in speech,
face, expression, everything; at other times the cultured and polished
gentleman, and again, the philosopher and scientist. But there was something
glimmering; there which I never caught--flashes of sincerity, of real feeling,
I imagined, which were sped ere I could grasp; echoes of the man he once was,
possibly, or hints of the man behind the mask. But the mask he never lifted,
and the real man we never knew.

"But the sixty days with which you were rewarded for your journalism?" I
asked. "Never mind Loria. Tell me."

"Well, if I must." He flung one knee over the other with a short laugh.

"In a town that shall be nameless," he began, "in fact, a city of fifty
thousand, a fair and beautiful city wherein men slave for dollars and women
for dress, an idea came to me. My front was prepossessing, as fronts go, and
my pockets empty. I had in recollection a thought I once entertained of
writing a reconciliation of Kant and Spencer. Not that they are reconcilable,
of course, but the room offered for scientific satire--"

I waved my hand impatiently, and he broke off.

"I was just tracing my mental states for you, in order to show the genesis of
the action," he explained. "However, the idea came. What was the matter with a
tramp sketch for the daily press? The Irreconcilability of the Constable and
the Tramp, for instance? So I hit the DRAG (the drag, my dear fellow, is
merely the street), or the high places, if you will, for a newspaper office.
The elevator whisked me into the sky, and Cerberus, in the guise of an anaemic
office boy, guarded the door. Consumption, one could see it at a glance;
nerve, Irish, colossal; tenacity, undoubted; dead inside the year.

"'Pale youth,' quoth I, 'I pray thee the way to the sanctum-sanctorum, to the
Most High Cock-a-lorum.'

"He deigned to look at me, scornfully, with infinite weariness.

"'G'wan an' see the janitor. I don't know nothin' about the gas.'

"'Nay, my lily-white, the editor.'

"'Wich editor?' he snapped like a young bullterrier. 'Dramatic? Sportin'?
Society? Sunday? Weekly? Daily? Telegraph? Local? News? Editorial? Wich?'

"Which, I did not know. 'THE Editor,' I proclaimed stoutly. 'The ONLY Editor.'

"'Aw, Spargo!' he sniffed.

"'Of course, Spargo,' I answered. 'Who else?'

"'Gimme yer card,' says he.

"'My what?'

"'Yer card--Say! Wot's yer business, anyway?'

"And the anaemic Cerberus sized me up with so insolent an eye that I reached
over and took him out of his chair. I knocked on his meagre chest with my fore
knuckle, and fetched forth a weak, gaspy cough; but he looked at me
unflinchingly, much like a defiant sparrow held in the hand.

"'I am the census-taker Time,' I boomed in sepulchral tones. 'Beware lest I
knock too loud.'

"'Oh, I don't know,' he sneered.

"Whereupon I rapped him smartly, and he choked and turned purplish.

"'Well, whatcher want?' he wheezed with returning breath.

"'I want Spargo, the only Spargo.'

"'Then leave go, an' I'll glide an' see.'

"'No you don't, my lily-white.' And I took a tighter grip on his collar. 'No
bouncers in mine, understand! I'll go along.'"

Leith dreamily surveyed the long ash of his cigar and turned to me. "Do you
know, Anak, you can't appreciate the joy of being the buffoon, playing the
clown. You couldn't do it if you wished. Your pitiful little conventions and
smug assumptions of decency would prevent. But simply to turn loose your soul
to every whimsicality, to play the fool unafraid of any possible result, why,
that requires a man other than a householder and law-respecting citizen.

"However, as I was saying, I saw the only Spargo. He was a big, beefy,
red-faced personage, full-jowled and double-chinned, sweating at his desk in
his shirt-sleeves. It was August, you know. He was talking into a telephone
when I entered, or swearing rather, I should say, and the while studying me
with his eyes. When he hung up, he turned to me expectantly.

"'You are a very busy man,' I said.

"He jerked a nod with his head, and waited.

"'And after all, is it worth it?' I went on. 'What does life mean that it
should make you sweat? What justification do you find in sweat? Now look at
me. I toil not, neither do I spin--'

"'Who are you? What are you?' he bellowed with a suddenness that was, well,
rude, tearing the words out as a dog does a bone.

"'A very pertinent question, sir,' I acknowledged. 'First, I am a man; next, a
down-trodden American citizen. I am cursed with neither profession, trade, nor
expectations. Like Esau, I am pottageless. My residence is everywhere; the sky
is my coverlet. I am one of the dispossessed, a sansculotte, a proletarian,
or, in simpler phraseology addressed to your understanding, a tramp.'

"'What the hell--?'

"'Nay, fair sir, a tramp, a man of devious ways and strange lodgements and
multifarious--'

"'Quit it!' he shouted. 'What do you want?'

"'I want money.'

"He started and half reached for an open drawer where must have reposed a
revolver, then bethought himself and growled, 'This is no bank.'

"'Nor have I checks to cash. But I have, sir, an idea, which, by your leave
and kind assistance, I shall transmute into cash. In short, how does a tramp
sketch, done by a tramp to the life, strike you? Are you open to it? Do your
readers hunger for it? Do they crave after it? Can they be happy without it?'

"I thought for a moment that he would have apoplexy, but he quelled the unruly
blood and said he liked my nerve. I thanked him and assured him I liked it
myself. Then he offered me a cigar and said he thought he'd do business with
me.

"'But mind you,' he said, when he had jabbed a bunch of copy paper into my
hand and given me a pencil from his vest pocket, 'mind you, I won't stand for
the high and flighty philosophical, and I perceive you have a tendency that
way. Throw in the local color, wads of it, and a bit of sentiment perhaps, but
no slumgullion about political economy nor social strata or such stuff. Make
it concrete, to the point, with snap and go and life, crisp and crackling and
interesting--tumble?'

"And I tumbled and borrowed a dollar.

"'Don't forget the local color!' he shouted after me through the door.

"And, Anak, it was the local color that did for me.

"The anaemic Cerberus grinned when I took the elevator. 'Got the bounce, eh?'

"'Nay, pale youth, so lily-white,' I chortled, waving the copy paper; 'not the
bounce, but a detail. I'll be City Editor in three months, and then I'll make
you jump.'

"And as the elevator stopped at the next floor down to take on a pair of
maids, he strolled over to the shaft, and without frills or verbiage consigned
me and my detail to perdition. But I liked him. He had pluck and was unafraid,
and he knew, as well as I, that death clutched him close."

"But how could you, Leith," I cried, the picture of the consumptive lad strong
before me, "how could you treat him so barbarously?"

Leith laughed dryly. "My dear fellow, how often must I explain to you your
confusions? Orthodox sentiment and stereotyped emotion master you. And then
your temperament! You are really incapable of rational judgments. Cerberus?
Pshaw! A flash expiring, a mote of fading sparkle, a dim-pulsing and dying
organism--pouf! a snap of the fingers, a puff of breath, what would you? A
pawn in the game of life. Not even a problem. There is no problem in a
stillborn babe, nor in a dead child. They never arrived. Nor did Cerberus. Now
for a really pretty problem--"

"But the local color?" I prodded him.

"That's right," he replied. "Keep me in the running. Well, I took my handful
of copy paper down to the railroad yards (for local color), dangled my legs
from a side-door Pullman, which is another name for a box-car, and ran off the
stuff. Of course I made it clever and brilliant and all that, with my little
unanswerable slings at the state and my social paradoxes, and withal made it
concrete enough to dissatisfy the average citizen.

"From the tramp standpoint, the constabulary of the township was particularly
rotten, and I proceeded to open the eyes of the good people. It is a
proposition, mathematically demonstrable, that it costs the community more to
arrest, convict, and confine its tramps in jail, than to send them as guests,
for like periods of time, to the best hotel. And this I developed, giving the
facts and figures, the constable fees and the mileage, and the court and jail
expenses. Oh, it was convincing, and it was true; and I did it in a lightly
humorous fashion which fetched the laugh and left the sting. The main
objection to the system, I contended, was the defraudment and robbery of the
tramp. The good money which the community paid out for him should enable him
to riot in luxury instead of rotting in dungeons. I even drew the figures so
fine as to permit him not only to live in the best hotel but to smoke two
twenty-five-cent cigars and indulge in a ten-cent shine each day, and still
not cost the taxpayers so much as they were accustomed to pay for his
conviction and jail entertainment. And, as subsequent events proved, it made
the taxpayers wince.

"One of the constables I drew to the life; nor did I forget a certain Sol
Glenhart, as rotten a police judge as was to be found between the seas. And
this I say out of a vast experience. While he was notorious in local trampdom,
his civic sins were not only not unknown but a crying reproach to the
townspeople. Of course I refrained from mentioning name or habitat, drawing
the picture in an impersonal, composite sort of way, which none the less
blinded no one to the faithfulness of the local color.

"Naturally, myself a tramp, the tenor of the article was a protest against the
maltreatment of the tramp. Cutting the taxpayers to the pits of their purses
threw them open to sentiment, and then in I tossed the sentiment, lumps and
chunks of it. Trust me, it was excellently done, and the rhetoric--say I Just
listen to the tail of my peroration:

"'So, as we go mooching along the drag, with a sharp lamp out for John Law, we
cannot help remembering that we are beyond the pale; that our ways are not
their ways; and that the ways of John Law with us are different from his ways
with other men. Poor lost souls, wailing for a crust in the dark, we know full
well our helplessness and ignominy. And well may we repeat after a stricken
brother over-seas: "Our pride it is to know no spur of pride." Man has
forgotten us; God has forgotten us; only are we remembered by the harpies of
justice, who prey upon our distress and coin our sighs and tears into bright
shining dollars.'

"Incidentally, my picture of Sol Glenhart, the police judge, was good. A
striking likeness, and unmistakable, with phrases tripping along like this:
'This crook-nosed, gross-bodied harpy'; 'this civic sinner, this judicial
highwayman'; 'possessing the morals of the Tenderloin and an honor which
thieves' honor puts to shame'; 'who compounds criminality with shyster-sharks,
and in atonement railroads the unfortunate and impecunious to rotting
cells,'--and so forth and so forth, style sophomoric and devoid of the dignity
and tone one would employ in a dissertation on 'Surplus Value,' or 'The
Fallacies of Marxism,' but just the stuff the dear public likes.

"'Humph!' grunted Spargo when I put the copy in his fist. 'Swift gait you
strike, my man.'

"I fixed a hypnotic eye on his vest pocket, and he passed out one of his
superior cigars, which I burned while he ran through the stuff. Twice or
thrice he looked over the top of the paper at me, searchingly, but said
nothing till he had finished.

"'Where'd you work, you pencil-pusher?' he asked.

"'My maiden effort,' I simpered modestly, scraping one foot and faintly
simulating embarrassment.

"'Maiden hell! What salary do you want?'

"'Nay, nay,' I answered. 'No salary in mine, thank you most to death. I am a
free down-trodden American citizen, and no man shall say my time is his.'

"'Save John Law,' he chuckled.

"'Save John Law,' said I.

"'How did you know I was bucking the police department?' he demanded abruptly.

"'I didn't know, but I knew you were in training,' I answered. 'Yesterday
morning a charitably inclined female presented me with three biscuits, a piece
of cheese, and a funereal slab of chocolate cake, all wrapped in the current
CLARION, wherein I noted an unholy glee because the COWBELL's candidate for
chief of police had been turned down. Likewise I learned the municipal
election was at hand, and put two and two together. Another mayor, and the
right kind, means new police commissioners; new police commissioners means new
chief of police; new chief of police. means COWBELL's candidate; ergo, your
turn to play.'

"He stood up, shook my hand, and emptied his plethoric vest pocket. I put them
away and puffed on the old one.

"'You'll do,' he jubilated. 'This stuff' (patting my copy) 'is the first gun
of the campaign. You'll touch off many another before we're done. I've been
looking for you for years. Come on in on the editorial.'

"But I shook my head.

"'Come, now!' he admonished sharply. 'No shenanagan! The COWBELL must have
you. It hungers for you, craves after you, won't be happy till it gets you.
What say?'

"In short, he wrestled with me, but I was bricks, and at the end of half an
hour the only Spargo gave it up.

"'Remember,' he said, 'any time you reconsider, I'm open. No matter where you
are, wire me and I'll send the ducats to come on at once.'

"I thanked him, and asked the pay for my copy--DOPE, he called it.

"'Oh, regular routine,' he said. 'Get it the first Thursday after
publication.'

"'Then I'll have to trouble you for a few scad until--'

"He looked at me and smiled. 'Better cough up, eh?'

"'Sure,' I said. 'Nobody to identify me, so make it cash.'

"And cash it was made, thirty PLUNKS (a plunk is a dollar, my dear Anak), and
I pulled my freight . . . eh?--oh, departed.

"'Pale youth,' I said to Cerberus, 'I am bounced.' (He grinned with pallid
joy.) 'And in token of the sincere esteem I bear you, receive this little--'
(His eyes flushed and he threw up one hand, swiftly, to guard his head from
the expected blow)--'this little memento.'

"I had intended to slip a fiver into his hand, but for all his surprise, he
was too quick for me.

"'Aw, keep yer dirt,' he snarled.

"'I like you still better,' I said, adding a second fiver. 'You grow perfect.
But you must take it.'

"He backed away growling, but I caught him round the neck, roughed what little
wind he had out of him, and left him doubled up with the two fives in his
pocket. But hardly had the elevator started, when the two coins tinkled on the
roof and fell down between the car and the shaft. As luck had it, the door was
not closed, and I put out my hand and caught them. The elevator boy's eyes
bulged.

"'It's a way I have,' I said, pocketing them.

"'Some bloke's dropped 'em down the shaft,' he whispered, awed by the
circumstance.

"'It stands to reason,' said I.

"'I'll take charge of 'em,' he volunteered.

"'Nonsense!'

"'You'd better turn 'em over,' he threatened, 'or I stop the works.'

"'Pshaw!'

"And stop he did, between floors.

"'Young man,' I said, 'have you a mother?' (He looked serious, as though
regretting his act! and further to impress him I rolled up my right sleeve
with greatest care.) 'Are you prepared to die?' (I got a stealthy crouch on,
and put a cat-foot forward.) 'But a minute, a brief minute, stands between you
and eternity.' (Here I crooked my right hand into a claw and slid the other
foot up.) 'Young man, young man,' I trumpeted, 'in thirty seconds I shall tear
your heart dripping from your bosom and stoop to hear you shriek in hell.'

"It fetched him. He gave one whoop, the car shot down, and I was on the drag.
You see, Anak, it's a habit I can't shake off of leaving vivid memories
behind. No one ever forgets me.

"I had not got to the corner when I heard a familiar voice at my shoulder:

"'Hello, Cinders! Which way?'

"It was Chi Slim, who had been with me once when I was thrown off a freight in
Jacksonville. 'Couldn't see 'em fer cinders,' he described it, and the MONICA
stuck by me.... Monica? From MONOS. The tramp nickname.

"'Bound south,' I answered. 'And how's Slim?'

"'Bum. Bulls is horstile.'

"'Where's the push?'

"'At the hang-out. I'll put you wise.'

"'Who's the main guy?'

"'Me, and don't yer ferget it.'"

The lingo was rippling from Leith's lips, but perforce I stopped him. "Pray
translate. Remember, I am a foreigner."

"Certainly," he answered cheerfully. "Slim is in poor luck. BULL means
policeman. He tells me the bulls are hostile. I ask where the PUSH is, the
gang he travels with. By PUTTING ME WISE he will direct me to where the gang
is hanging out. The MAIN GUY is the leader. Slim claims that distinction.

"Slim and I hiked out to a neck of woods just beyond town, and there was the
push, a score of husky hobos, charmingly located on the bank of a little
purling stream.

"'Come on, you mugs!' Slim addressed them. 'Throw yer feet! Here's Cinders,
an' we must do 'em proud.'

"All of which signifies that the hobos had better strike out and do some
lively begging in order to get the wherewithal to celebrate my return to the
fold after a year's separation. But I flashed my dough and Slim sent several
of the younger men off to buy the booze. Take my word for it, Anak, it was a
blow-out memorable in Trampdom to this day. It's amazing the quantity of booze
thirty plunks will buy, and it is equally amazing the quantity of booze
outside of which twenty stiffs will get. Beer and cheap wine made up the card,
with alcohol thrown in for the BLOWD-IN-THE-GLASS stiffs. It was great--an
orgy under the sky, a contest of beaker-men, a study in primitive beastliness.
To me there is something fascinating in a drunken man, and were I a college
president I should institute P.G. psychology courses in practical drunkenness.
It would beat the books and compete with the laboratory.

"All of which is neither here nor there, for after sixteen hours of it, early
next morning, the whole push was COPPED by an overwhelming array of constables
and carted off to jail. After breakfast, about ten o'clock, we were lined
upstairs into court, limp and spiritless, the twenty of us. And there, under
his purple panoply, nose crooked like a Napoleonic eagle and eyes glittering
and beady, sat Sol Glenhart.

"'John Ambrose!' the clerk called out, and Chi Slim, with the ease of long
practice, stood up.

"'Vagrant, your Honor,' the bailiff volunteered, and his Honor, not deigning
to look at the prisoner, snapped,'Ten days,' and Chi Slim sat down.

"And so it went, with the monotony of clockwork, fifteen seconds to the man,
four men to the minute, the mugs bobbing up and down in turn like marionettes.
The clerk called the name, the bailiff the offence, the judge the sentence,
and the man sat down. That was all. Simple, eh? Superb!

"Chi Slim nudged me. 'Give'm a SPIEL, Cinders. You kin do it.'

"I shook my head.

"'G'wan,' he urged. 'Give 'm a ghost story The mugs'll take it all right. And
you kin throw yer feet fer tobacco for us till we get out.'

"'L. C. Randolph!' the clerk called.

"I stood up, but a hitch came in the proceedings. The clerk whispered to the
judge, and the bailiff smiled.

"'You are a newspaper man, I understand, Mr. Randolph?' his Honor remarked
sweetly.

"It took me by surprise, for I had forgotten the COWBELL in the excitement of
succeeding events, and I now saw myself on the edge of the pit I had digged.

"'That's yer GRAFT. Work it,' Slim prompted.

"'It's all over but the shouting,' I groaned back, but Slim, unaware of the
article, was puzzled.

"'Your Honor,' I answered, 'when I can get work, that is my occupation.'

"'You take quite an interest in local affairs, I see.' (Here his Honor took up
the morning's COWBELL and ran his eye up and down a column I knew was mine.)
'Color is good,' he commented, an appreciative twinkle in his eyes; 'pictures
excellent, characterized by broad, Sargent-like effects. Now this  . . . this
judge you have depicted  . . . you, ah, draw from life, I presume?'

"'Rarely, your I Honor,' I answered. 'Composites, ideals, rather  . . . er,
types, I may say.'

"'But you have color, sir, unmistakable color,' he continued.

"'That is splashed on afterward,' I explained.

"'This judge, then, is not modelled from life, as one might be led to
believe?'

"'No, your Honor.'

"'Ah, I see, merely a type of judicial wickedness?'

"'Nay, more, your Honor,' I said boldly, 'an ideal.'

"'Splashed with local color afterward? Ha! Good! And may I venture to ask how
much you received for this bit of work?'

"'Thirty dollars, your Honor.'

"'Hum, good!' And his tone abruptly changed. 'Young man, local color is a bad
thing. I find you guilty of it and sentence you to thirty days' imprisonment,
or, at your pleasure, impose a fine of thirty dollars.'

"'Alas!' said I, 'I spent the thirty dollars in riotous living.'

"'And thirty days more for wasting your substance.'

"'Next case!' said his Honor to the clerk.

"Slim was stunned. 'Gee!' he whispered. 'Gee the push gets ten days and you
get sixty. Gee!'"

Leith struck a match, lighted his dead cigar, and opened the book on his
knees. "Returning to the original conversation, don't you find, Anak, that
though Loria handles the bipartition of the revenues with scrupulous care, he
yet omits one important factor, namely--"

"Yes," I said absently; "yes."

AMATEUR NIGHT

THE elevator boy smiled knowingly to him self. When he took her up, he had
noted the sparkle in her eyes, the color in her cheeks. His little cage had
quite warmed with the glow of her repressed eagerness. And now, on the down
trip, it was glacier-like. The sparkle and the color were gone. She was
frowning, and what little he could see of her eyes was cold and steel-gray.
Oh, he knew the symptoms, he did. He was an observer, and he knew it, too, and
some day, when he was big enough, he was going to be a reporter, sure. And in
the meantime he studied the procession of life as it streamed up and down
eighteen sky-scraper floors in his elevator car. He slid the door open for her
sympathetically and watched her trip determinedly out into the street.

There was a robustness in her carriage which came of the soil rather than of
the city pavement. But it was a robustness in a finer than the wonted sense, a
vigorous daintiness, it might be called, which gave an impression of virility
with none of the womanly left out. It told of a heredity of seekers and
fighters, of people that worked stoutly with head and hand, of ghosts that
reached down out of the misty past and moulded and made her to be a doer of
things.

But she was a little angry, and a great deal hurt. "I can guess what you would
tell me," the editor had kindly but firmly interrupted her lengthy preamble in
the long-looked-forward-to interview just ended. "And you have told me
enough," he had gone on (heartlessly, she was sure, as she went over the
conversation in its freshness). "You have done no newspaper work. You are
undrilled, undisciplined, unhammered into shape. You have received a
high-school education, and possibly topped it off with normal school or
college. You have stood well in English. Your friends have all told you how
cleverly you write, and how beautifully, and so forth and so forth. You think
you can do newspaper work, and you want me to put you on. Well, I am sorry,
but there are no openings. If you knew how crowded--"

"But if there are no openings," she had interrupted, in turn, "how did those
who are in, get in? How am I to show that I am eligible to get in?"

"They made themselves indispensable," was the terse response. "Make yourself
indispensable."

"But how can I, if I do not get the chance?"

"Make your chance."

"But how?" she had insisted, at the same time privately deeming him a most
unreasonable man.

"How? That is your business, not mine," he said conclusively, rising in token
that the interview was at an end. "I must inform you, my dear young lady, that
there have been at least eighteen other aspiring young ladies here this week,
and that I have not the time to tell each and every one of them how. The
function I perform on this paper is hardly that of instructor in a school of
journalism."

She caught an outbound car, and ere she descended from it she had conned the
conversation over and over again. "But how?" she repeated to herself, as she
climbed the three flights of stairs to the rooms where she and her sister
"bach'ed." "But how?" And so she continued to put the interrogation, for the
stubborn Scotch blood, though many times removed from Scottish soil, was still
strong in her. And, further, there was need that she should learn how. Her
sister Letty and she had come up from an interior town to the city to make
their way in the world. John Wyman was land-poor. Disastrous business
enterprises had burdened his acres and forced his two girls, Edna and Letty,
into doing something for themselves. A year of school-teaching and of
night-study of shorthand and typewriting had capitalized their city project
and fitted them for the venture, which same venture was turning out anything
but successful. The city seemed crowded with inexperienced stenographers and
typewriters, and they had nothing but their own inexperience to offer. Edna's
secret ambition had been journalism; but she had planned a clerical position
first, so that she might have time and space in which to determine where and
on what line of journalism she would embark. But the clerical position had not
been forthcoming, either for Letty or her, and day by day their little hoard
dwindled, though the room rent remained normal and the stove consumed coal
with undiminished voracity. And it was a slim little hoard by now.

"There's Max Irwin," Letty said, talking it over. "He's a journalist with a
national reputation. Go and see him, Ed. He knows how, and he should be able
to tell you how."

"But I don't know him," Edna objected.

"No more than you knew the editor you saw to-day."

"Y-e-s," (long and judicially), "but that's different."

"Not a bit different from the strange men and women you'll interview when
you've learned how," Letty encouraged.

"I hadn't looked at it in that light," Edna conceded. "After all, where's the
difference between, interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for some paper, or interviewing
Mr. Max Irwin for myself? It will be practice, too. I'll go and look him up in
the directory."

"Letty, I know I can write if I get the chance," she announced decisively a
moment later. "I just FEEL that I have the feel of it, if you know what I
mean."

And Letty knew and nodded. "I wonder what he is like?" she asked softly.

"I'll make it my business to find out," Edna assured her; "and I'll let you
know inside forty-eight hours."

Letty clapped her hands. "Good! That's the newspaper spirit! Make it
twenty-four hours and you are perfect!"

"--and I am very sorry to trouble you," she concluded the statement of her
case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist.

"Not at all," he answered, with a deprecatory wave of the hand. "If you don't
do your own talking, who's to do it for you? Now I understand your predicament
precisely. You want to get on the INTELLIGENCER, you want to get in at once,
and you have had no previous experience. In the first place, then, have you
any pull? There are a dozen men in the city, a line from whom would be an
open-sesame. After that you would stand or fall by your own ability. There's
Senator Longbridge, for instance, and Claus Inskeep the street-car magnate,
and Lane, and McChesney--" He paused, with voice suspended.

"I am sure I know none of them," she answered despondently.

"It's not necessary. Do you know any one that knows them? or any one that
knows any one else that knows them?"

Edna shook her head.

"Then we must think of something else," he went on, cheerfully. "You'll have
to do something yourself. Let me see."

He stopped and thought for a moment, with closed eyes and wrinkled forehead.
She was watching him, studying him intently, when his blue eyes opened with a
snap and his face suddenly brightened.

"I have it! But no, wait a minute."

And for a minute it was his turn to study her. And study her he did, till she
could feel her cheeks flushing under his gaze.

"You'll do, I think, though it remains to be seen," he said enigmatically. "It
will show the stuff that's in you, besides, and it will be a better claim upon
the INTELLIGENCER people than all the lines from all the senators and magnates
in the world. The thing for you is to do Amateur Night at the Loops."

"I--I hardly understand," Edna said, for his suggestion conveyed no meaning to
her. "What are the 'Loops'? and what is 'Amateur Night'?"

"I forgot you said you were from the interior. But so much the better, if
you've only got the journalistic grip. It will be a first impression, and
first impressions are always unbiased, unprejudiced, fresh, vivid. The Loops
are out on the rim of the city, near the Park,--a place of diversion. There's
a scenic railway, a water toboggan slide, a concert band, a theatre, wild
animals, moving pictures, and so forth and so forth. The common people go
there to look at the animals and enjoy themselves, and the other people go
there to enjoy themselves by watching the common people enjoy themselves. A
democratic, fresh-air-breathing, frolicking affair, that's what the Loops are.

"But the theatre is what concerns you. It's vaudeville. One turn follows
another--jugglers, acrobats, rubber-jointed wonders, fire-dancers, coon-song
artists, singers, players, female impersonators, sentimental soloists, and so
forth and so forth. These people are professional vaudevillists. They make
their living that way. Many are excellently paid. Some are free rovers, doing
a turn wherever they can get an opening, at the Obermann, the Orpheus, the
Alcatraz, the Louvre, and so forth and so forth. Others cover circuit pretty
well all over the country. An interesting phase of life, and the pay is big
enough to attract many aspirants.

"Now the management of the Loops, in its bid for popularity, instituted what
is called 'Amateur Night'; that is to say, twice a week, after the
professionals have done their turns, the stage is given over to the aspiring
amateurs. The audience remains to criticise. The populace becomes the arbiter
of art--or it thinks it does, which is the same thing; and it pays its money
and is well pleased with itself, and Amateur Night is a paying proposition to
the management.

"But the point of Amateur Night, and it is well to note it, is that these
amateurs are not really amateurs. They are paid for doing their turn. At the
best, they may be termed 'professional amateurs.' It stands to reason that the
management could not get people to face a rampant audience for nothing, and on
such occasions the audience certainly goes mad. It's great fun--for the
audience. But the thing for you to do, and it requires nerve, I assure you, is
to go out, make arrangements for two turns, (Wednesday and Saturday nights, I
believe), do your two turns, and write it up for the SUNDAY INTELLIGENCER."

"But--but," she quavered, "I--I--" and there was a suggestion of
disappointment and tears in her voice.

"I see," he said kindly. "You were expecting something else, something
different, something better. We all do at first. But remember the admiral of
the Queen's Na-vee, who swept the floor and polished up the handle of the big
front door. You must face the drudgery of apprenticeship or quit right now.
What do you say?"

The abruptness with which he demanded her decision startled her. As she
faltered, she could see a shade of disappointment beginning to darken his
face.

"In a way it must be considered a test," he added encouragingly. "A severe
one, but so much the better. Now is the time. Are you game?"

"I'll try," she said faintly, at the same time making a note of the
directness, abruptness, and haste of these city men with whom she was coming
in contact.

"Good! Why, when I started in, I had the dreariest, deadliest details
imaginable. And after that, for a weary time, I did the police and divorce
courts. But it all came well in the end and did me good. You are luckier in
making your start with Sunday work. It's not particularly great. What of it?
Do it. Show the stuff you're made of, and you'll get a call for better
work--better class and better pay. Now you go out this afternoon to the Loops,
and engage to do two turns."

"But what kind of turns can I do?" Edna asked dubiously.

"Do? That's easy. Can you sing? Never mind, don't need to sing. Screech, do
anything--that's what you're paid for, to afford amusement, to give bad art
for the populace to howl down. And when you do your turn, take some one along
for chaperon. Be afraid of no one. Talk up. Move about among the amateurs
waiting their turn, pump them, study them, photograph them in your brain. Get
the atmosphere, the color, strong color, lots of it. Dig right in with both
hands, and get the essence of it, the spirit, the significance. What does it
mean? Find out what it means. That's what you're there for. That's what the
readers of the SUNDAY INTELLIGENCER want to know.

"Be terse in style, vigorous of phrase, apt, concretely apt, in similitude.
Avoid platitudes and commonplaces. Exercise selection. Seize upon things
salient, eliminate the rest, and you have pictures. Paint those pictures in
words and the INTELLIGENCER will have you. Get hold of a few back numbers, and
study the SUNDAY INTELLIGENCER feature story. Tell it all in the opening
paragraph as advertisement of contents, and in the contents tell it all over
again. Then put a snapper at the end, so if they're crowded for space they can
cut off your contents anywhere, reattach the snapper, and the story will still
retain form. There, that's enough. Study the rest out for yourself."

They both rose to their feet, Edna quite carried away by his enthusiasm and
his quick, jerky sentences, bristling with the things she wanted to know.

"And remember, Miss Wyman, if you're ambitious, that the aim and end of
journalism is not the feature article. Avoid the rut. The feature is a trick.
Master it, but don't let it master you. But master it you must; for if you
can't learn to do a feature well, you can never expect to do anything better.
In short, put your whole self into it, and yet, outside of it, above it,
remain yourself, if you follow me. And now good luck to you."

They had reached the door and were shaking hands.

"And one thing more," he interrupted her thanks, "let me see your copy before
you turn it in. I may be able to put you straight here and there."

Edna found the manager of the Loops a full-fleshed, heavy-jowled man, bushy of
eyebrow and generally belligerent of aspect, with an absent-minded scowl on
his face and a black cigar stuck in the midst thereof. Symes was his name, she
had learned, Ernst Symes.

"Whatcher turn?" he demanded, ere half her brief application had left her
lips.

"Sentimental soloist, soprano," she answered promptly, remembering Irwin's
advice to talk up.

"Whatcher name?" Mr. Symes asked, scarcely deigning to glance at her.

She hesitated. So rapidly had she been rushed into the adventure that she had
not considered the question of a name at all.

"Any name? Stage name?" he bellowed impatiently.

"Nan Bellayne," she invented on the spur of the moment. "B-e-l-l-a-y-n-e. Yes,
that's it."

He scribbled it into a notebook. "All right. Take your turn Wednesday and
Saturday."

"How much do I get?" Edna demanded.

"Two-an'-a-half a turn. Two turns, five. Getcher pay first Monday after second
turn."

And without the simple courtesy of "Good day," he turned his back on her and
plunged into the newspaper he had been reading when she entered.

Edna came early on Wednesday evening, Letty with her, and in a telescope
basket her costume--a simple affair. A plaid shawl borrowed from the
washerwoman, a ragged scrubbing skirt borrowed from the charwoman, and a gray
wig rented from a costumer for twenty-five cents a night, completed the
outfit; for Edna had elected to be an old Irishwoman singing broken-heartedly
after her wandering boy.

Though they had come early, she found everything in uproar. The main
performance was under way, the orchestra was playing and the audience
intermittently applauding. The infusion of the amateurs clogged the working of
things behind the stage, crowded the passages, dressing rooms, and wings, and
forced everybody into everybody else's way. This was particularly distasteful
to the professionals, who carried themselves as befitted those of a higher
caste, and whose behavior toward the pariah amateurs was marked by hauteur and
even brutality. And Edna, bullied and elbowed and shoved about, clinging
desperately to her basket and seeking a dressing room, took note of it all.

A dressing room she finally found, jammed with three other amateur "ladies,"
who were "making up" with much noise, high-pitched voices, and squabbling over
a lone mirror. Her own make-up was so simple that it was quickly accomplished,
and she left the trio of ladies holding an armed truce while they passed
judgment upon her. Letty was close at her shoulder, and with patience and
persistence they managed to get a nook in one of the wings which commanded a
view of the stage.

A small, dark man, dapper and debonair, swallow-tailed and top-hatted, was
waltzing about the stage with dainty, mincing steps, and in a thin little
voice singing something or other about somebody or something evidently
pathetic. As his waning voice neared the end of the lines, a large woman,
crowned with an amazing wealth of blond hair, thrust rudely past Edna, trod
heavily on her toes, and shoved her contemptuously to the side. "Bloomin'
hamateur!" she hissed as she went past, and the next instant she was on the
stage, graciously bowing to the audience, while the small, dark man twirled
extravagantly about on his tiptoes.

"Hello, girls!"

This greeting, drawled with an inimitable vocal caress in every syllable,
close in her ear, caused Edna to give a startled little jump. A smooth-faced,
moon-faced young man was smiling at her good-naturedly. His "make-up" was
plainly that of the stock tramp of the stage, though the inevitable whiskers
were lacking.

"Oh, it don't take a minute to slap'm on," he explained, divining the search
in her eyes and waving in his hand the adornment in question. "They make a
feller sweat," he explained further. And then, "What's yer turn?"

"Soprano--sentimental," she answered, trying to be offhand and at ease.

"Whata you doin' it for?" he demanded directly.

"For fun; what else?" she countered.

"I just sized you up for that as soon as I put eyes on you. You ain't graftin'
for a paper, are you?"

"I never met but one editor in my life," she replied evasively, "and I,
he--well, we didn't get on very well together."

"Hittin' 'm for a job?"

Edna nodded carelessly, though inwardly anxious and cudgelling her brains for
something to turn the conversation.

"What'd he say?"

"That eighteen other girls had already been there that week."

"Gave you the icy mit, eh?" The moon-faced young man laughed and slapped his
thighs. "You see, we're kind of suspicious. The Sunday papers 'd like to get
Amateur Night done up brown in a nice little package, and the manager don't
see it that way. Gets wild-eyed at the thought of it."

"And what's your turn?" she asked.

"Who? me? Oh, I'm doin' the tramp act tonight. I'm Charley Welsh, you know."

She felt that by the mention of his name he intended to convey to her complete
enlightenment, but the best she could do was to say politely, "Oh, is that
so?"

She wanted to laugh at the hurt disappointment which came into his face, but
concealed her amusement.

"Come, now," he said brusquely, "you can't stand there and tell me you've
never heard of Charley Welsh? Well, you must be young. Why, I'm an Only, the
Only amateur at that. Sure, you must have seen me. I'm everywhere. I could be
a professional, but I get more dough out of it by doin' the amateur."

"But what's an 'Only'?" she queried. "I want to learn."

"Sure," Charley Welsh said gallantly. "I'll put you wise. An 'Only' is a
nonpareil, the feller that does one kind of a turn better'n any other feller.
He's the Only, see?"

And Edna saw.

"To get a line on the biz," he continued, "throw yer lamps on me. I'm the Only
all-round amateur. To-night I make a bluff at the tramp act. It's harder to
bluff it than to really do it, but then it's acting, it's amateur, it's art.
See? I do everything, from Sheeny monologue to team song and dance and Dutch
comedian. Sure, I'm Charley Welsh, the Only Charley Welsh."

And in this fashion, while the thin, dark man and the large, blond woman
warbled dulcetly out on the stage and the other professionals followed in
their turns, did Charley Welsh put Edna wise, giving her much miscellaneous
and superfluous information and much that she stored away for the SUNDAY
INTELLIGENCER.

"Well, tra la loo," he said suddenly. "There's his highness chasin' you up.
Yer first on the bill. Never mind the row when you go on. Just finish yer turn
like a lady."

It was at that moment that Edna felt her journalistic ambition departing from
her, and was aware of an overmastering desire to be somewhere else. But the
stage manager, like an ogre, barred her retreat. She could hear the opening
bars of her song going up from the orchestra and the noises of the house dying
away to the silence of anticipation.

"Go ahead," Letty whispered, pressing her hand; and from the other side came
the peremptory "Don't flunk!" of Charley Welsh.

But her feet seemed rooted to the floor, and she leaned weakly against a shift
scene. The orchestra was beginning over again, and a lone voice from the house
piped with startling distinctness:

"Puzzle picture! Find Nannie!"

A roar of laughter greeted the sally, and Edna shrank back. But the strong
hand of the manager descended on her shoulder, and with a quick, powerful
shove propelled her out on to the stage. His hand and arm had flashed into
full view, and the audience, grasping the situation, thundered its
appreciation. The orchestra was drowned out by the terrible din, and Edna
could see the bows scraping away across the violins, apparently without sound.
It was impossible for her to begin in time, and as she patiently waited, arms
akimbo and ears straining for the music, the house let loose again (a favorite
trick, she afterward learned, of confusing the amateur by preventing him or
her from hearing the orchestra).

But Edna was recovering her presence of mind. She became aware, pit to dome,
of a vast sea of smiling and fun-distorted faces, of vast roars of laughter,
rising wave on wave, and then her Scotch blood went cold and angry. The
hard-working but silent orchestra gave her the cue, and, without making a
sound, she began to move her lips, stretch forth her arms, and sway her body,
as though she were really singing. The noise in the house redoubled in the
attempt to drown her voice, but she serenely went on with her pantomime. This
seemed to continue an interminable time, when the audience, tiring of its
prank and in order to hear, suddenly stilled its clamor, and discovered the
dumb show she had been making. For a moment all was silent, save for the
orchestra, her lips moving on without a sound, and then the audience realized
that it had been sold, and broke out afresh, this time with genuine applause
in acknowledgment of her victory. She chose this as the happy moment for her
exit, and with a bow and a backward retreat, she was off the stage in Letty's
arms.

The worst was past, and for the rest of the evening she moved about among the
amateurs and professionals, talking, listening, observing, finding out what it
meant and taking mental notes of it all. Charley Welsh constituted himself her
preceptor and guardian angel, and so well did he perform the self-allotted
task that when it was all over she felt fully prepared to write her article.
But the proposition had been to do two turns, and her native pluck forced her
to live up to it. Also, in the course of the intervening days, she discovered
fleeting impressions that required verification; so, on Saturday, she was back
again, with her telescope basket and Letty.

The manager seemed looking for her, and she caught an expression of relief in
his eyes when he first saw her. He hurried up, greeted her, and bowed with a
respect ludicrously at variance with his previous ogre-like behavior. And as
he bowed, across his shoulders she saw Charley Welsh deliberately wink.

But the surprise had just begun. The manager begged to be introduced to her
sister, chatted entertainingly with the pair of them, and strove greatly and
anxiously to be agreeable. He even went so far as to give Edna a dressing room
to herself, to the unspeakable envy of the three other amateur ladies of
previous acquaintance. Edna was nonplussed, and it was not till she met
Charley Welsh in the passage that light was thrown on the mystery.

"Hello!" he greeted her. "On Easy Street, eh? Everything slidin' your way."

She smiled brightly.

"Thinks yer a female reporter, sure. I almost split when I saw'm layin'
himself out sweet an' pleasin'. Honest, now, that ain't yer graft, is it?"

"I told you my experience with editors," she parried. "And honest now, it was
honest, too."

But the Only Charley Welsh shook his head dubiously. "Not that I care a rap,"
he declared. "And if you are, just gimme a couple of lines of notice, the
right kind, good ad, you know. And if yer not, why yer all right anyway. Yer
not our class, that's straight."

After her turn, which she did this time with the nerve of an old campaigner,
the manager returned to the charge; and after saying nice things and being
generally nice himself, he came to the point.

"You'll treat us well, I hope," he said insinuatingly. "Do the right thing by
us, and all that?"

"Oh," she answered innocently, "you couldn't persuade me to do another turn; I
know I seemed to take and that you'd like to have me, but I really, really
can't."

"You know what I mean," he said, with a touch of his old bulldozing manner.

"No, I really won't," she persisted. "Vaudeville's too--too wearing on the
nerves, my nerves, at any rate."

Whereat he looked puzzled and doubtful, and forbore to press the point
further.

But on Monday morning, when she came to his office to get her pay for the two
turns, it was he who puzzled her.

"You surely must have mistaken me," he lied glibly. "I remember saying
something about paying your car fare. We always do this, you know, but we
never, never pay amateurs. That would take the life and sparkle out of the
whole thing. No, Charley Welsh was stringing you. He gets paid nothing for his
turns. No amateur gets paid. The idea is ridiculous. However, here's fifty
cents. It will pay your sister's car fare also. And,"--very
suavely,--"speaking for the Loops, permit me to thank you for the kind and
successful contribution of your services."

That afternoon, true to her promise to Max Irwin, she placed her typewritten
copy into his hands. And while he ran over it, he nodded his head from time to
time, and maintained a running fire of commendatory remarks: "Good!--that's
it!--that's the stuff!--psychology's all right!--the very idea!--you've caught
it!--excellent!--missed it a bit here, but it'll go--that's vigorous!
--strong!--vivid!--pictures! pictures!--excellent!--most excellent!"

And when he had run down to the bottom of the last page, holding out his hand:
"My dear Miss Wyman, I congratulate you. I must say you have exceeded my
expectations, which, to say the least, were large. You are a journalist, a
natural journalist. You've got the grip, and you're sure to get on. The
INTELLIGENCER will take it, without doubt, and take you too. They'll have to
take you. If they don't, some of the other papers will get you."

"But what's this?" he queried, the next instant, his face going serious.
"You've said nothing about receiving the pay for your turns, and that's one of
the points of the feature. I expressly mentioned it, if you'll remember."

"It will never do," he said, shaking his head ominously, when she had
explained. "You simply must collect that money somehow. Let me see. Let me
think a moment."

"Never mind, Mr. Irwin," she said. "I've bothered you enough. Let me use your
'phone, please, and I'll try Mr. Ernst Symes again."

He vacated his chair by the desk, and Edna took down the receiver.

"Charley Welsh is sick," she began, when the connection had been made. "What?
No I'm not Charley Welsh. Charley Welsh is sick, and his sister wants to know
if she can come out this afternoon and draw his pay for him?"

"Tell Charley Welsh's sister that Charley Welsh was out this morning, and drew
his own pay," came back the manager's familiar tones, crisp with asperity.

"All right," Edna went on. "And now Nan Bellayne wants to know if she and her
sister can come out this afternoon and draw Nan Bellayne's pay?"

"What'd he say? What'd he say?" Max Irwin cried excitedly, as she hung up.

"That Nan Bellayne was too much for him, and that she and her sister could
come out and get her pay and the freedom of the Loops, to boot."

"One thing, more," he interrupted her thanks at the door, as on her previous
visit. "Now that you've shown the stuff you're made of, I should esteem it,
ahem, a privilege to give you a line myself to the INTELLIGENCER people."

THE MINIONS OF MIDAS (1901, By Pearson Publishing Company)

WADE ATSHELER is dead--dead by his own hand. To say that this was entirely
unexpected by the small coterie which knew him, would be to say an untruth;
and yet never once had we, his intimates, ever canvassed the idea. Rather had
we been prepared for it in some incomprehensible subconscious way. Before the
perpetration of the deed, its possibility is remotest from our thoughts; but
when we did know that he was dead, it seemed, somehow, that we had understood
and looked forward to it all the time. This, by retrospective analysis, we
could easily explain by the fact of his great trouble. I use "great trouble"
advisedly. Young, handsome, with an assured position as the right-hand man of
Eben Hale, the great street-railway magnate, there could be no reason for him
to complain of fortune's favors. Yet we had watched his smooth brow furrow and
corrugate as under some carking care or devouring sorrow. We had watched his
thick, black hair thin and silver as green grain under brazen skies and
parching drought. Who can forget, in the midst of the hilarious scenes he
toward the last sought with greater and greater avidity--who can forget, I
say, the deep abstractions and black moods into which he fell? At such times,
when the fun rippled and soared from height to height, suddenly, without rhyme
or reason, his eyes would turn lacklustre, his brows knit, as with clenched
hands and face overshot with spasms of mental pain he wrestled on the edge of
the abyss with some unknown danger.

He never spoke of his trouble, nor were we indiscreet enough to ask. But it
was just as well; for had we, and had he spoken, our help and strength could
have availed nothing. When Eben Hale died, whose confidential secretary he
was--nay, well-nigh adopted son and full business partner--he no longer came
among us. Not, as I now know, that our company was distasteful to him, but
because his trouble had so grown that he could not respond to our happiness
nor find surcease with us. Why this should be so we could not at the time
understand, for when Eben Hale's will was probated, the world learned that he
was sole heir to his employer's many millions, and it was expressly stipulated
that this great inheritance was given to him without qualification, hitch, or
hindrance in the exercise thereof. Not a share of stock, not a penny of cash,
was bequeathed to the dead man's relatives. As for his direct family, one
astounding clause expressly stated that Wade Atsheler was to dispense to Eben
Hale's wife and sons and daughters whatever moneys his judgement dictated, at
whatever times he deemed advisable. Had there been any scandal in the dead
man's family, or had his sons been wild or undutiful, then there might have
been a glimmering of reason in this most unusual action; but Eben Hale's
domestic happiness had been proverbial in the community, and one would have to
travel far and wide to discover a cleaner, saner, wholesomer progeny of sons
and daughters. While his wife--well, by those who knew her best she was
endearingly termed "The Mother of the Gracchi." Needless to state, this
inexplicable will was a nine day's wonder; but the expectant public was
disappointed in that no contest was made.

It was only the other day that Eben Hale was laid away in his stately marble
mausoleum. And now Wade Atsheler is dead. The news was printed in this
morning's paper. I have just received through the mail a Ietter from him,
posted, evidently, but a short hour before he hurled himself into eternity.
This letter, which lies before me, is a narrative in his own handwriting,
linking together numerous newspaper clippings and facsimiles of letters. The
original correspondence, he has told me, is in the hands of the police. He has
begged me, also, as a warning to society against a most frightful and
diabolical danger which threatens its very existence, to make public the
terrible series of tragedies in which he has been innocently concerned. I
herewith append the text in full:

It was in August, 1899, just after my return from my summer vacation, that the
blow fell. We did not know it at the time; we had not yet learned to school
our minds to such awful possibilities. Mr. Hale opened the letter, read it,
and tossed it upon my desk with a laugh. When I had looked it over, I also
laughed, saying, "Some ghastly joke, Mr. Hale, and one in very poor taste."
Find here, my dear John, an exact duplicate of the letter in question.

OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. August 17, 1899.

MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:

Dear Sir,--We desire you to realize upon whatever portion of your vast
holdings is necessary to obtain, IN CASH, twenty millions of dollars. This sum
we require you to pay over to us, or to our agents. You will note we do not
specify any given time, for it is not our wish to hurry you in this matter.
You may even, if it be easier for you, pay us in ten, fifteen, or twenty
instalments; but we will accept no single instalment of less than a million.

Believe us, dear Mr. Hale, when we say that we embark upon this course of
action utterly devoid of animus. We are members of that intellectual
proletariat, the increasing numbers of which mark in red lettering the last
days of the nineteenth century. We have, from a thorough study of economics,
decided to enter upon this business. It has many merits, chief among which may
be noted that we can indulge in large and lucrative operations without
capital. So far, we have been fairly successful, and we hope our dealings with
you may be pleasant and satisfactory.

Pray attend while we explain our views more fully. At the base of the present
system of society is to be found the property right. And this right of the
individual to hold property is demonstrated, in the last analysis, to rest
solely and wholly upon MIGHT. The mailed gentlemen of William the Conqueror
divided and apportioned England amongst themselves with the naked sword. This,
we are sure you will grant, is true of all feudal possessions. With the
invention of steam and the Industrial Revolution there came into existence the
Capitalist Class, in the modern sense of the word. These capitalists quickly
towered above the ancient nobility. The captains of industry have virtually
dispossessed the descendants of the captains of war. Mind, and not muscle,
wins in to-day's struggle for existence. But this state of affairs is none the
less based upon might. The change has been qualitative. The old-time Feudal
Baronage ravaged the world with fire and sword; the modern Money Baronage
exploits the world by mastering and applying the world's economic forces.
Brain, and not brawn, endures; and those best fitted to survive are the
intellectually and commercially powerful.

We, the M. of M., are not content to become wage slaves. The great trusts and
business combinations (with which you have your rating) prevent us from rising
to the place among you which our intellects qualify us to occupy. Why? Because
we are without capital. We are of the unwashed, but with this difference: our
brains are of the best, and we have no foolish ethical nor social scruples. As
wage slaves, toiling early and late, and living abstemiously, we could not
save in threescore years--nor in twenty times threescore years--a sum of money
sufficient successfully to cope with the great aggregations of massed capital
which now exist. Nevertheless, we have entered the arena. We now throw down
the gage to the capital of the world. Whether it wishes to fight or not, it
shall have to fight.

Mr. Hale, our interests dictate us to demand of you twenty millions of
dollars. While we are considerate enough to give you reasonable time in which
to carry out your share of the transaction, please do not delay too long. When
you have agreed to our terms, insert a suitable notice in the agony column of
the "Morning Blazer." We shall then acquaint you with our plan for
transferring the sum mentioned. You had better do this some time prior to
October 1st. If you do not, in order to show that we are in earnest we shall
on that date kill a man on East Thirty-ninth Street. He will be a workingman.
This man you do not know; nor do we. You represent a force in modern society;
we also represent a force--a new force. Without anger or malice, we have
closed in battle. As you will readily discern, we are simply a business
proposition. You are the upper, and we the nether, millstone; this man's life
shall be ground out between. You may save him if you agree to our conditions
and act in time.

There was once a king cursed with a golden touch. His name we have taken to do
duty as our official seal. Some day, to protect ourselves against competitors,
we shall right it.

We beg to remain,

THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.

I leave it to you, dear John, why should we not have laughed over such a
preposterous communication? The idea, we could not but grant, was well
conceived, but it was too grotesque to be taken seriously. Mr. Hale said he
would preserve it as a literary curiosity, and shoved it away in a pigeonhole.
Then we promptly forgot its existence. And as promptly, on the 1st of October,
going over the morning mail, we read the following:

OFFICE OF THE M. OF M., October 1, 1899.

MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:

Dear Sir,--Your victim has met his fate. An hour ago, on East Thirty-ninth
Street, a workingman was thrust through the heart with a knife. Ere you read
this his body will be lying at the Morgue. Go and look upon your handiwork.

On October 14th, in token of our earnestness in this matter, and in case you
do not relent, we shall kill a policeman on or near the corner of Polk Street
and Clermont Avenue.

Very cordially,

THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.

Again Mr. Hale laughed. His mind was full of a prospective deal with a Chicago
syndicate for the sale of all his street railways in that city, and so he went
on dictating to the stenographer, never giving it a second thought. But
somehow, I know not why, a heavy depression fell upon me. What if it were not
a joke, I asked myself, and turned involuntarily to the morning paper. There
it was, as befitted an obscure person of the lower classes, a paltry
half-dozen lines tucked away in a corner, next a patent medicine
advertisement:

Shortly after five o'clock this morning, on East Thirty-ninth Street, a
laborer named Pete Lascalle, while on his way to work, was stabbed to the
heart by an unknown assailant, who escaped by running. The police have been
unable to discover any motive for the murder.

"Impossible!" was Mr. Hale's rejoinder, when I had read the item aloud; but
the incident evidently weighed upon his mind, for late in the afternoon, with
many epithets denunciatory of his foolishness, he asked me to acquaint the
police with the affair. I had the pleasure of being laughed at in the
Inspector's private office, although I went away with the assurance that they
would look into it and that the vicinity of Polk and Clermont would be doubly
patrolled on the night mentioned. There it dropped, till the two weeks had
sped by, when the following note came to us through the mail:

OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. October 15, 1899.

MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:

Dear Sir,--Your second victim has fallen on schedule time. We are in no hurry;
but to increase the pressure we shall henceforth kill weekly. To protect
ourselves against police interference we shall hereafter inform you of the
event but a little prior to or simultaneously with the deed. Trusting this
finds you in good health,

We are,

THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.

This time Mr. Hale took up the paper, and after a brief search, read to me
this account:

A DASTARDLY CRIME

Joseph Donahue, assigned only last night to special patrol duty in the
Eleventh Ward, at midnight was shot through the brain and instantly killed.
The tragedy was enacted in the full glare of the street lights on the corner
of Polk Street and Clermont Avenue. Our society is indeed unstable when the
custodians of its peace are thus openly and wantonly shot down. The police
have so far been unable to obtain the slightest clue.

Barely had he finished this when the police arrived--the Inspector <a hr