Where Your Treasure Is. Holman Day
I did not answer him.
It is my nature to take a big lot from all women, considerable from some men, and devilish little from most men. I had nothing at all to say to Celene Kingsley’s father, even though I was rubbing half a dozen swelling welts where his whip had connected with the back of my neck.
“You come of a tough family,” stated the judge.
Right then my uncle Deck arrived at the party; he had been watching the thing from the tavern porch.
“What’s that you say about our family?” he asked the judge.
“I don’t care to stand here and quarrel with you, Decker Sidney.”
“When you horsewhip my dead brother’s boy in the main street you’ll come pretty nigh to having a quarrel with me, seeing that his own father can’t protect him.”
“I merely came out here and stopped a fight which was disgracing our village.”
“It’s a nice thing for one of the ‘forty thieves’ to talk about disgracing a village,” said my uncle.
As young as I was I knew what was meant when folks called Judge Kinglsey one of the forty thieves. He belonged to the syndicate that had grabbed the State’s principal railroad away from the original shareholders; there was political shenanigan and a good deal of foreclosure trickery. I never understood the details, but the fact remained that the syndicate got the railroad.
“A cheap slur from a cheap man,” said the judge, walking away.
I can’t say that I resented that remark very deeply, though I suppose family loyalty should have prompted me to do so. I never in my life came close to my uncle Deck when he did not have the smell of liquor on his breath: On each side of his nose there was a patch of perfectly lurid crimson. He was a horse-trader and he made considerable money.
“That slur of yours is a high-priced one,” my uncle shouted. “I have my eye on you, you old hypocrite. There’ll come a day when that slur will cost you more than you can afford to pay. That’s how high-priced it is, Judge Kingsley.”
I didn’t know what my uncle meant then.
It was a wicked time for me when I did find out, a long while afterward.
II—ENDING WITH A MEETING ON PURGATORY HILL
MY mother was a good woman—a thrifty, kindly, helpful woman, a good neighbor, in spite of her poverty.
My short temper, my cheeky disposition, my generally ready impulse to grab in on short notice, all belong to the Sidney side, I guess. All we know of the family has come down by word of mouth, and I suspect that the first rovers who came over in the old days when New England was really new were pretty tough characters who had plenty of original nerve to start with and then developed more as occasion required. Well, some of that sort had to come on ahead and smooth things with the ax and crowbar—yes, and with the musket, so that the country could get a good running start.
My mother was a good neighbor, I repeat. Up in the attic, hanging in dried bunches from the beams, were spearmint, thoroughwort, hardback, mullein, pennyroyal, and other pasture herbs which she sent me forth to gather. Her thoroughwort syrup was guaranteed to cure any case of whooping-cough—and she gave freely to all who came to her.
My father was a helpful sort of a man in his own way. He used to volunteer as boss of all the barn-raising bees in our section—but his enemies, made up of a considerable army of the men whom he had licked in his life, said, behind his back, that the only reason he had for helping at a barn-raising was to show off by running the ridgepole first of all the crew, and then to start the regular free fight. He fell off a ridge-pole one day and my mother was widowed.
I take it that her chief ambition in life was to tame the Sidney disposition in me—that earnest desire explaining my involuntary investment in the catechism. My mother’s axioms and teachings would have made excellent addenda and foot-notes for any catechism. Always did she counsel me to count ten before speaking angry word or performing angry act; I don’t remember that I ever did as she told me, though the Lord Himself knows how much I have suffered in my life on account of that lack of self-restraint. Two days after I bought the catechism my good mother thought it was having its effect on my nature. She saw a boy heave a rock at me in our door-yard and I stood perfectly motionless and speechless.
“That’s right, my own son! Count your ten!” she called to me.
But just at that moment a bumblebee was crawling around over my bare foot and I was in no mind to disturb him. Therefore, my enemy was enabled to collect a full supply of rock ammunition and to defy and rout me when at last I was free from the restraint of the bumblebee. It would have been the same if I had waited to count ten. Somehow, as the world is constituted, I have never taken much stock in this watchful-waiting game while your enemy is hustling to pile up his ammunition and you know he is doing so. I may be wrong. Maybe this story of mine will show that I’m wrong. But I hear you say, let’s get on to the story!
I mean to do so at once; but if I have paused to pull the curtain aside from my family and my character a bit you may be able to understand some parts of the story a mite better, because, in spite of that catechism, in spite of mother-influence, and perhaps mother-goodness deep down in me, I have butted into adventures which you will not find set down in the volumes of any well-conducted Sunday-school library.
I didn’t have my mother long, after my fifteenth birthday.
I was her sole heir; five minutes before she closed her eyes she gave me all her little fortune—to wit, the sweetest smile good mother ever left to bless memory of her, a pat on my hand, a few whispered words in my ear.
And then Uncle Deck took me in hand to make a man of me, so he said.
He wasn’t all bad—don’t understand me as saying that. He would pass a sleepless night if he failed to cheat a man in a horse trade, but he would sell his shirt before he would allow any old folks in our town to go onto the poor-farm. He would sneak around with wood and groceries after dark, that big, red face of his like a harvest moon, and when they would start to thank him he would curse the miserable old creatures so horribly that my blood used to run cold. He prided himself on language which, so he said, “would break up a Sunday-school picnic if a little bird sat overhead and twittered it out of a tree.” He saved his choicest profanity for his comments on Judge Zebulon Kingsley. His hatred went far back. I don’t know what started it. Perhaps it began in the natural antipathy such a man as Uncle Deck would entertain for a cold, proud, punctilious, professedly religious man like the judge. Uncle Deck would have it that the judge was a hypocrite, a thief at heart, and my uncle’s constant boast was that some day he would show the judge up; but all that vaporing seemed to be silly spite, without foundation. Judge Kingsley was our rich man; he had been judge of probate, and after retiring from that office he was trusted with funds as a sort of private banker; folks whose estates he had handled as judge just naturally insisted on his keeping control; and he had been town treasurer of Levant for years.
I hated to hear my uncle rave on about such a man; it was as irritating as the barking of a cur.
I have said that my uncle was a horse-trader. Rather, he was a general country dickerer, if you know the kind. He dealt in everything from a sheet of fly-paper to a clap of thunder. He had car-loads of horses sent to him from the West and peddled those to farmers, taking cash or bills of sale or produce or second-hand furniture or anything else which he could turn in a trade. He set me to peddling and collecting, and it was a mean job. At first I used to believe everything which debtors or sellers would tell me, and the result was that Uncle Deck bawled me out most dreadfully; and thus being abused by both parties, I got so at last that I believed nobody.
Therefore I was in a fair way to be made just the sort of man