Where Your Treasure Is. Holman Day
hardened, he impressed on me that I mustn’t be bothering him all the time, asking this and that about running the business. I must act for myself and then report to him when he called for an accounting. You shall see how his trying to make a man of me in this fashion turned me into ways which neither he nor I could have forecast. Don’t tell me that the activities of this life are very much a matter of individual election, after all. To be sure, a man might elect to live a hermit and might get away with the job in good shape; but if a person throws himself into the ruck of the living, into the running of humanity, he’ll be apt to find himself leaping from crag to crag because he has been shooed or jarred.
I ran up against one Juvenal Bird, newly come to town from the rural fastnesses of Vienna plantation—plantation meaning an unorganized township. I had never heard of Mr. Bird, and when he came within range of my vision I rather wondered because I had not; he seemed to be a person of some importance. To be sure, his frock suit was rusty and his plug-hat was fuzzy, but the garb was distinctive.
Mr. Bird was in search of furniture and I showed him our second-hand stock; he ordered liberally and largely—especially largely. He took the biggest stove, the largest bedsteads, the most expansive tables, and bureaus of breadth. That plug-hat impressed me. When he told me to send the goods out to his house on the Tumble-dick Road, and to call for the pay at my convenience, I did not presume to ask for an advance instalment, after our usual custom.
I promptly found out that this was one affair of business with which I should have bothered my busy uncle, who knew all the cheats of the section.
Mr. Bird was one of the most notable cheats. His raiment was garb discarded by an up-country parson, who pitied Mr. Bird after the latter had been evicted from timber-lands as a dangerous squatter, careless of fire. Mr. Bird installed the furniture in a shack which he had hired, then acted as his own carpenter and narrowed all the doors and the windows. I went out after the money and learned that the law provides for the replevin of furniture, but does not allow a house to be mutilated in order to remove the furniture. Mr. Bird grinned at me through a cracked window and thumbed his nose.
When I reported to my uncle he told me to go and get it. I refrain from quoting the words in which he voiced that command.
“But the law says—” I ventured.
Again I suppress details. My uncle Deck’s opinion of the law would lack authority.
However, being a Sidney, and resenting Mr. Bird’s betrayal of my innocence, and needing a home and a job, I accepted my uncle’s opinion of the law for the time being. I collected a gang of my boy intimates. We went in the night and ripped the stuffing out of Mr. Bird’s nest.
There’s a queer kind of senseless and secret gratification in doing a mob job. The human animal has a lot of primeval instincts which need tickling once in a while. I reckon we boys gratified the wolf streak on that occasion, running in a pack in the night-time.
We enjoyed it so much that we held a meeting a night or so later and organized ourselves as the “Skokums.” I can’t remember how we happened to light on that name. I was chosen as leader.
That first sortie was a great success—Mr. Bird was not in a position to prosecute. We had had a wonderful night, had defied the law, and had escaped punishment.
Judge Kingsley was the only man in town who proclaimed indignation loudly and openly. He expressed himself before a crowd in the post-office and declared that hoodlums had disgraced the town of Levant. He looked straight at me and said he would give a reward of ten dollars for evidence on which the ringleader could be convicted.
“And I would give one thousand dollars to pay for law to set him free,” said my uncle.
“Some day the plug-uglies will be rooted out of this place—and good riddance to ’em,” snarled the judge.
“The snout that goes rooting into that business will get twisted off’n the face of the rooter,” retorted my uncle. He was never very choice in his language. How those crimson patches on his face did glow and how his eyes sparkled!
So, it will be seen, I was not getting on at all with my love-affair.
It is pretty presumptuous in me to refer to it as a love-affair. That would intimate—calling it that—a bit of reciprocation on the part of Celene Kingsley. But she never showed any visible interest in me, even to looking my way when she met me on the street. I would have liked to attract her attention, for at last I wore shoes and had clothes without patches on them.
The Skokums flourished under cover of the night.
There was Oramandel Bangs. He was rather simple, and always carried his mouth open, and nobody in Levant ever forgot that once a hornet flew in and stung his tongue and it swelled and stuck out of his mouth for days like the end of a bologna sausage.
Oramandel had a sneaking suspicion that witchcraft had never been wholly stamped out by his forefathers in New England.
We decided to convince him that he was right—there’s nothing like clinching a man’s faith in the good judgment of his ancestors.
We hoisted one of his calves into an apple-tree. He “unwitched” the animal by cutting off its ears and tail before taking it down from the tree.
We tied cords to his ox-chains and hid ourselves and slashed the chains about the dooryard; he ran to the neighbors and reported that the witches had changed his chains into big snakes. We did a lot more things, and then imagination began to do the rest for him. He said the witches wouldn’t allow him to do his farm-work, even though he had sumac-wood splinters in all his tools and stuck shears around his chum to make the butter come. Before we realized what mischief a lively imagination can do to a man, they were obliged to carry the old chap away to the asylum for the insane.
And again Judge Kingsley held forth in the post-office. I guess he did a lot of talking at home, too.
At any rate, Celene Kingsley was mighty well posted, so I discovered.
I met her on Purgatory Hill one day—and never did that name seem to apply so well! I had been out on my uncle’s business, and among other plunder in the beach-wagon were two shotes in a crate, and they certainly were taking on about leaving home and mother.
She was alone in her pony-chaise and the shaggy little brute she drove was frightened—and I didn’t blame him. I pulled as far into the gutter as I could and waited; I poked the butt of my whip into the crate and prodded those shotes, but that only made them screech the louder.
So she came leading her pony past me. I didn’t expect that she would stop and speak to me, but she did. I nearly fell off my seat. And she called me “Mr. Sidney.” It was the first time anybody had ever given me a handle to my name. I had pulled my hat off when I saw her coming; when she spoke to me I put it back on again and then took it off so that I could show her that I knew a little something about manners. However, I wasn’t at all sure just what I was doing; my head was in a whirl, and I was damning those pigs in my heart.
“I thank you, Mr. Sidney,” she said. “Pedro acts like a fool sometimes.”
Two hours afterward, I guess it was, I thought of just the right reply to that remark; as it was, I didn’t say anything to her. I couldn’t.
She started on and then stopped and looked at me.
Perhaps she guessed something—I don’t know. Girls can act as if they never notice anything and still they have an eye out all the time; and what they don’t see they know by instinct. At any rate, there was a lot of kindness in her face, and perhaps there was pity in her thoughts.
“I’m afraid I am very bold, Mr. Sidney. I hope you’ll forgive me for speaking to you.”
She hesitated. Right there was another beautiful chance for me to say the good thing which came to me that night after I was in bed. All I could do at the time was duck my head.
“I’d hate to have any of the boys who went to school with me get into trouble on account of their