Aladdin & Co. Quick Herbert
of her. I bitterly wished that he, if he had a heart, might see her there, bruised in spirit, her little ignorant white soul, searching itself for smutches of the uncleanness it feared. I wished that Alice might be there to go to her and comfort her without a word. I paid her fare, and the conductor seemed to understand that she was not to be disturbed. A drunken man in rough clothes came into the car, walked forward and looked at her a moment, and as I was about to go to him and make him sit elsewhere, he turned away and came back to the rear, as if he had some sort of maudlin realization that the front of the train was sacred ground.
At last she looked about, signalled for the car to stop, and alighted. I followed, rather suspecting that she did not know her way. She walked steadily on, however, to a big, dark house with a vine-covered porch, close to the sidewalk. A stout man, coatless, and in a white shirt, stood at the gate. He wore a slouch hat, and I knew him, even in that dim light, for a farmer. She stopped for a moment, and without a word, sprang into his arms.
“Wal, little gal, ain’t yeh out purty late?” I heard him say, as I walked past. “Didn’t expect yer dad to see yeh, did yeh? Why, yeh ain’t a-cryin’, be yeh?”
“O pa! O pa!” was all I heard her say; but it was enough. I walked to the corner, and sat down on the curbstone, dead tired, but happy. In a little while I went back toward the street-car line, and as I passed the vine-clad porch, heard the farmer’s bass voice, and stopped to listen, frankly an eavesdropper, and feeling, somehow, that I had earned the right to hear.
“Why, o’ course, I’ll take yeh away, ef yeh don’t like it here, little gal,” he was saying. “Yes, we’ll go right in an’ pack up now, if yeh say so. Only it’s a little suddent, and may hurt the Madame’s feelin’s, y’ know—”
At the hotel I was forced by the crowded state of the city to share the bed of one of my fellow delegates. He was a judge from down the state, and awoke as I lay down.
“That you, Barslow?” said he. “Do you know a fellow by the name of Elkins, of Cleveland?”
“No,” said I, “why?”
“He was here to see you, or rather to inquire if you were Al Barslow who used to live in Pleasant Valley Township,” the Judge went on. “He’s the fellow who organized the Ohio flambeau brigade. Seems smart.”
“Pleasant Valley Township, did he say? Yes, I know him. It’s Jimmie Elkins.”
And I sank to sleep and to dreams, in which Jimmie Elkins, the Empress, Sir John, Alice, and myself acted in a spectacular drama, like that at McVicker’s. And yet there are those who say there is nothing in dreams!
CHAPTER III.
Reminiscentially Autobiographical.
This Jimmie Elkins was several years older than I; but that did not prevent us, as boys, from being fast friends. At seventeen he had a coterie of followers among the smaller fry of ten and twelve, his tastes clinging long to the things of boyhood. He and I played together, after the darkening of his lip suggested the razor, and when the youths of his age were most of them acquiring top buggies, and thinking of the long Sunday-night drives with their girls. Jim preferred the boys, and the trade of the fisher and huntsman.
Why, in spite of parental opposition, I loved Jimmie, is not hard to guess. He had an odd and freakish humor, and talked more of Indian-fighting, filibustering in gold-bearing regions, and of moving accidents by flood and field, than of crops, live-stock, or bowery dances. He liked me just as did the older men who sent me to the National Convention—in spite of my youth. He was a ne’er-do-weel, said my father, but I snared gophers and hunted and fished with him, and we loved each other as brothers seldom do.
At last, I began teaching school, and working my way to a better education than our local standard accepted as either useful or necessary, and Jim and I drifted apart. He had always kept up a voluminous correspondence with that class of advertisers whose black-letter “Agents Wanted” is so attractive to the farmer-boy; and he was usually agent for some of their wares. Finally, I heard of him as a canvasser for a book sold by subscription—a “Veterinarians’ Guide,” I believe it was—and report said that he was “making money.” Again I learned that he had established a publishing business of some kind; and, later, that reverses had forced him to discontinue it—the old farmer who told me said he had “failed up.” Then I heard no more of him until that night of the convention, when I had the adventure with the Empress and Sir John, all unknown to them; and Jim made the ineffectual attempt to find me. His family had left the old neighborhood, and so had mine; and the chances of our ever meeting seemed very slight. In fact it was some years later and after many of the brave dreams of the youthful publicist had passed away, that I casually stumbled upon him in the smoking-room of a parlor-car, coming out of Chicago.
I did not know him at first. He came forward, and, extending his hand, said, “How are you, Al?” and paused, holding the hand I gave him, evidently expecting to enjoy a period of perplexity on my part. But with one good look in his eyes I knew him. I made him sit down by me, and for half an hour we were too much engrossed in reminiscences to ask after such small matters as business, residence, and general welfare.
“Where all have you been, Jim, and what have you been doing, since you followed off the ‘Veterinarians’ Guide,’ and I lost you?” I inquired at last.
“I’ve been everywhere, and I’ve done everything, almost,” said he. “Put it in the ‘negative case,’ and my history’ll be briefer.”
“I should regard organizing a flambeau brigade,” said I, “as about the last thing you would engage in.”
“Ah!” he replied, “His Whiskers at the hotel told you I called that time, did he? Well, I didn’t think he had the sense. And I doubted the memory on your part, and I wasn’t at all sure you were the real Barslow. But about the flambeaux. The fact is, I had some stock in the flambeau factory, and I was a rabid partisan of flambeaux. They seemed so patriotic, you know, so sort of ennobling, and so convincing, as to the merits of the tariff controversy!”
It was the same old Jim, I thought.
“We used to have a scheme,” I remarked, “our favorite one, of occupying an island in the Pacific—or was it somewhere in the vicinity of the Spanish Main—”
“If it was the place where we were to make slaves of all the natives, and I was to be king, and you Grand Vizier,” he answered, as if it were a weighty matter, and he on the witness-stand, “it was in the Pacific—the South Pacific, where the whale-oil comes from. A coral atoll, with a crystal lagoon in the middle for our ships, and a fringe of palms along the margin—coco-palms, you remember; and the lagoon was green, sometimes, and sometimes blue; and the sharks never came over the bar, but the porpoises came in and played for us, and made fireworks in the phosphorescent waves. …”
His eyes grew almost tender, as he gazed out of the window, and ceased to speak without finishing the sentence—which it took me some minutes to follow out to the end, in my mind. I was delighted and touched to find these foolish things so green in his memory.
“The plan involved,” said I soberly, “capturing a Spanish galleon filled with treasure, finding two lovely ladies in the cabin, and offering them their liberty. And we sailed with them for a port; and, as I remember it, their tears at parting conquered us, and we married them; and lived richer than oil magnates, and grander than Monte Cristos forever after: do you remember?”
“Remember! Well, I should smile!”—he had been laughing like a boy, with his old frank laugh. “Them’s the things we don’t forget. … Did you ever gather any information as to what a galleon really was? I never did.”
“I had no more idea than I now have of the Rosicrucian Mysteries; and I must confess,” said I, “that I’m a little hazy on the galleon question yet. As to piracy, now, and robbers and robbery, actual life fills out the gaps in the imagination of boyhood, doesn’t it, Jim?”
“Apt to,” he assented, “but specifically? As to which, you know?”
“Well,