Part 11

When the room had resumed its normal conditions, all three Englishmen having disappeared, the Doctor, whose enthusiasm over the incident had somehow paved the way for closer acquaintance, introduced me in the same informal way both to the baron and to the hero of the occasion, as "a brother American," and we all sat down beside the old man, his face lighting up with a smile as he made room for us. Then laying his hand on my knee, with the manner of an older man, he said: "I ought not to have given way, perhaps; but the truth is, I'm not accustomed to hear such things at home. I did not know until I got close to him that he had been drinking, or I might have let it pass. I suppose this kind of talk may always go on in the smoking-room of these steamers. I don't know, for it's my first trip abroad, and on the way out I was too ill to leave my berth. To-night is the first time I've been in here. It was bad for me, I suppose. I've been ill all"----

He stopped suddenly, caught his breath quickly, and his hand fell from my knee. For a moment he sat leaning forward, breathing heavily.

I sprang up, thinking he was about to faint. The baron started for a glass of water. The old man raised his hand.

"No, don't be alarmed, gentlemen; it is nothing. I am subject to these attacks; it will pass off in a moment," and he glanced around the room as if to assure himself that no one but ourselves had noticed it.

"The excitement was too much for you," the Doctor said gravely, in an undertone. His trained eye had caught the peculiar pallor of the face. "You must not excite yourself so."

"Yes, I know,--the heart," he said after a pause, speaking with short, indrawn breaths, and straightening himself slowly and painfully until he had regained his old erect position. After a little while he put his hand again on my knee, with an added graciousness in his manner, as if in apology for the shock he had given me. "It's passing off,--yes, I'm better now." Then, in a more cheerful tone, as if to change the subject, he added: "My steward tells me that we made four hundred and fifty-two miles yesterday. This makes my little girl happy. She's had an anxious summer, and I'm glad this part of it is over. Yes, she's _very_ happy to-day."

"You mean on account of your health?" I asked sympathetically; although I remembered afterward that I had not caught his meaning.

"Well, not so much that, for that can never be any better, but on account of our being so near home,--only two days more. I couldn't bear to leave her alone on ship-board, but it's all right now. You see, there are only two of us since her mother died." His voice fell, and for the first time I saw a shade of sadness cross his face. The Doctor saw it too, for there was a slight quaver in his voice when he said, as he rose, that his stateroom was No. 13, and he would be happy to be called upon at any time, day or night, whenever he could be of service; then he resumed his former seat under the light, and apparently his pamphlet, although I could see his eyes were constantly fixed on the pallid face.

The baron and I kept our seats, and I ordered three of something from Fritz, as further excuse for tarrying beside the invalid. I wanted to know something more of a man who was willing to fight the universe with one arm in defense of his country's good name, though I was still in the dark as to what had been the provocation. All I could gather from the young baron, in his broken English, was that the Englishman had maligned the motives of our government in helping the Cubans, and that the old man had flamed out, astounding the room with the power of his invective and thorough mastery of the subject, and compelling their admiration by the genuineness of his outburst.

"I see you have lost your arm," I began, hoping to get some further facts regarding himself.

"Yes, some years ago," he answered simply, but with a tone that implied he did not care to discuss either the cause or the incidents connected with its loss.

"An accident?" I asked. The empty sleeve seemed suddenly to have a peculiar fascination for me.

"Yes, partly," and, smiling gravely, he rose from his seat, saying that he must rejoin his daughter, who might be worrying. He bade the occupants of the room good-night, many of whom, including the baron and the Doctor, rose to their feet,--the baron saluting, and following the old man out, as if he had been his superior officer.

With the closing of the smoking-room door, P. Wooverman Shaw Todd, Esquire, roused himself from his chair, walked toward the Doctor, and sat down beside him.

"Well! I must say that I'm glad that man's gone!" he burst out. "I have never seen anything more outrageous than this whole performance. This fire eater ought to travel about with a guardian. Suppose, now, my dear Doctor, that everybody went about with these absurd ideas,--what a place the world would be to live in! This is the worst American I have met yet. And see what an example; even the young baron lost his head, I am sorry to say. I heard the young Englishman's remark. It was, I admit, indiscreet, but no part of it was addressed to this very peculiar person; and it is just like that kind of an American, full of bombast and bluster, to feel offended. Besides, every word the young man said was true. There is a great deal of politics in this Cuban business,--you know it, and I know it. We have no men trained for colonial life, and we never shall have, so long as our better class keep aloof from politics. The island will be made a camping-ground for vulgar politicians--no question about it. Think, now, of sending that firebrand among those people. You can see by his very appearance that he has never done anything better than astonish the loungers about a country stove. As for all this fuss about his empty sleeve, no doubt some other fire eater put a bullet through it in defense of what such kind of people call their honor. It is too farcical for words, my dear Doctor,--too farcical for words," and P. Wooverman Shaw Todd, Esquire, pulled his steamer cap over his eyes, jumped to his feet, and stalked out of the room.

The Doctor looked after Todd until he had disappeared. Then he turned to his pamphlet again. There was evidently no composite, explosive epithet deadly enough within reach at the moment, or there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that he would have demolished Todd with it.

Todd's departure made another vacancy at our table, and a tall man, who had applauded the loudest at the apology of the Englishman, dropped into Todd's empty chair, addressing the Doctor as representing our party.

"I suppose you know who the old man is, don't you?"

"No."

"That's John Stedman, manager of the Union Iron Works of Parkinton, a manufacturing town in my State. He's one of the best iron men in the country. Fine old fellow, isn't he? He's been ill ever since his wife died, and I don't think he'll ever get over it. She had been sick for years, and he nursed her day and night. He wouldn't go to Congress, preferring to stay by her, and it almost broke his heart when she died. Poor old man,--don't look as if he was long for this world. I expected him to mop up the floor with that Englishman, sick as he is; and he would, if he hadn't apologized. I heard, too, what your friend who has just gone out said about Stedman not being the kind of a man to send to Cuba. I tell you, they might look the country over, and they couldn't find a better. That's been his strong hold, straightening out troubles of one kind or another. Everybody believes in him, and anybody takes his word. He's done a power of good in our State."

"In what way?" asked the Doctor.

"Oh, in settling strikes, for one thing. You see, he started from the scrap pile, and he knows the laboring man down to a dot, for he carried a dinner pail himself for ten years of his life. When the men are imposed upon he stands by 'em, and compels the manufacturers to deal square; and if they don't, he joins the men and fights it out with the bosses. If the men are wrong, and want what the furnaces can't give 'em,--and there's been a good deal of that lately,--he sails into the gangs, and, if nothing else will do, he gets a gun and joins the sheriffs. He was all through that last strike we had, three years ago, and it would be going on now but for John Stedman."

"But he seems to be a man of fine education," interrupted the Doctor, who was listening attentively.

"Yes, so he is,--learned it all at night schools. When he was a boy he used to fire the kilns, and they say you could always find him with a spelling-book in one hand and a chunk of wood in the other, reading nights by the light of the kiln fires."

"You say he went to Congress?" The Doctor's eyes were now fixed on the speaker.

"No, I said he _would_n't go. His wife was taken sick about that time, and when he found she wasn't going to get well,--she had lung trouble,--he told the committee that he wouldn't accept the nomination; and of course nomination meant election for him. He told 'em his wife had stuck by him all her life, had washed his flannel shirts for him and cooked his dinner, and that he was going to stick by her now she was down. But I tell you what he did do: he stumped the district for his opponent, because he said he was a better man than his own party put up,--and elected him, too. That was just like John Stedman. The heelers were pretty savage, but that made no difference to him.

"He's never recovered from his wife's death. That daughter with him is the only child he's got. She's been so afraid he'd die on board and have to be buried at sea that he's kept his berth just to please her. The doctor at home told him Carlsbad was his only chance, and the daughter begged so he made the trip. He was so sick when he went out that he took a coffin with him,--it's in the hold now. I heard him tell his daughter this morning that it was all right now, and he thought he'd get up. You see, there are only two days more, and the captain promised the daughter not to bury her father at sea when we were that close to land. Stedman smiled when he told me, but that's just like him; he's always been cool as a cucumber."

"How did he lose his arm?" I inquired. I had been strangely absorbed in what he had told me. "In the war?"

"No. He served two years, but that's not how he lost his arm. He lost it saving the lives of some of his men. I happened to be up at Parkinton at the time, buying some coke, and I saw him carried out. It was about ten years ago. He had invented a new furnace; 'most all the new wrinkles they've got at the Union Company Stedman made for 'em. When they got ready to draw the charge,--that's when the red-hot iron is about to flow out of the furnace, you know, the outlet got clogged. That's a bad thing to happen to a furnace; for if a chill should set in, the whole plant would be ruined. Then, again, it might explode and tear everything to pieces. Some of the men jumped into the pit with their crowbars, and began to jab away at the opening in the wrong place, and the metal started with a rush. Stedman hollered to 'em to stop; but they either didn't hear him or wouldn't mind. Then he jumped in among them, threw them out of the way, grabbed a crowbar, and fought the flow until they all got out safe. But the hot metal had about cooked his arm clear to the elbow before he let go."

The Doctor, with hands deep in his pockets, began pacing the floor. Then he stopped, and, looking down at me, said slowly, pointing off his fingers one after the other to keep count as he talked:--

"Tender and loyal to his wife--thoughtful of his child--facing death like a hero--a soldier and patriot. What is there in the make-up of a gentleman that this man hasn't got?

"Come! Let's go out and find that high-collared, silk-stockinged, sweet-scented Anglomaniac from Salem! By the Eternal, Todd's got to apologize!"

"TINCTER OV IRON"

It was in an old town in Connecticut. Marbles kept the shop. "Joseph Marbles, Shipwright and Blacksmith," the sign read.

I knew Joe. He had repaired one of the lighters used in carrying materials for the foundation of the lighthouse I was building. The town lay in the barren end of the State, where they raised rocks enough to make four stone fences to the acre. Joe always looked to me as if he had lived off the crop. The diet never affected his temper nor hardened his heart, so far as I could see. It was his body, his long, lean, lank body, that suggested the stone diet.

In his early days Joe had married a helpmate. She had lasted until the beginning of the third year, and then she had been carried to the cemetery on the hill, and another stone, and a new one, added to the general assortment. This matrimonial episode was his last.

This wife was a constant topic with Marbles. He would never speak of her as a part of his life, one who had shared his bed and board, and therefore entitled to his love and reverent remembrance. It was rather as an appendage to his household, a curiosity, a natural freak, as one would discuss the habits of a chimpanzee, and with a certain pity, too, for the poor creature whom he had housed, fed, poked at, humored, and then buried.

And yet with it all I could always see that nothing else in his life had made so profound an impression upon him as the companionship of this "poor creeter," and that underneath his sparsely covered ribs there still glowed a spot for the woman who had given him her youth.

He would say, "It wuz one ov them days when she wouldn't eat, or it was kind o' cur'us to watch her go on when she had one ov them tantrums." Sometimes he would recount some joke he had played upon her, rubbing his ribs in glee--holding his sides would have been a superfluous act and the statement here erroneous.

"That wuz when she fust come, yer know," he said to me one day, leaning against an old boat, his adze in his hand. "Her folks belonged over to Westerly. I never had seen much ov wimmen, and didn't know their ways. But I tell yer she wuz a queer 'un, allers imaginin' she wuz ailin', er had heart disease when she got out er breath runnin' upstairs, er as'mer, er lumbago, er somethin' else dreadful. She wuz the cur'usest critter too to take medicin' ye ever see. She never ailed none really 'cept when she broke her coller bone a-fallin' downstairs, and in the last sickness, the one that killed her, but she believed all the time she wuz, which was wuss. Every time the druggist would git out a new red card and stick it in his winder, with a cure fer cold, or chilblains, er croup, er e'sipelas, she'd go and buy it, an' out 'd cum ther cork, and she a-tastin' ov it 'fore she got hum. She used ter rub herself with St. Jiminy's intment, and soak her feet in sea-salt, and cover herself with plasters till yer couldn't rest. Why, ther cum a feller once who painted a yaller sign on ther whole side ov Buckley's barn--cure fer spiral meningeetius,--and she wuz nigh crazy till she had found out where ther pain ought ter be, and had clapped er plaster on her back and front, persuadin' herself she had it. That's how she bruk her coller bone, a-runnin' fer hot water to soak 'em off, they burnt so, and stumblin' over a kit ov tools I had brung hum to do a job around the house. After this she begun ter run down so, and git so thin and peaked, I begun to think she really wuz goin' ter be sick, after all, jest fer a change.

"When ther doctor come he sed it warn't nothin' but druggist's truck that ailed her, and he throwed what there wuz out er ther winder, and give her a tonic--Tincter ov Iron he called it. Well, yer never see a woman hug a thing as she did that bottle. It was a spoonful three times a day, and then she'd reach out fer it in ther night, vowin' it was doin' her a heap er good, and I a-gettin' ther bottle filled at Sarcy's ther druggist's, and payin' fifty cents every time he put er new cork in it. I tried ter reason with her, but it warn't no use; she would have it, and if she could have got outer bed and looked round at the spring crop of advertisements on ther fences, she would hev struck somethin' worse. So I let her run on until she tuk about seven dollars' wuth of Tincter, and then I dropped in ter Sarcy's. 'Sarcy,' sez I, 'can't ye wholesale this, er sell it by the quart? If the ole woman's coller bone don't get ter runnin' easy purty soon I'll be broke.'

"'Well,' he said, 'if I bought a dozen it might come cheaper, but it wuz a mighty pertic'ler medicine, and had ter be fixed jest so.'

"''Taint pizen, is it?' I sez, 'thet's got ter be fixed so all-fired kerful?' He 'lowed it warn't, and thet ye might take er barrel of it and it wouldn't kill yer, but all ther same it has ter be made mighty pertic'ler.

"'Well, iron's cheap enough,' I sez, 'and strengthenin' too. If it's ther Tincter thet costs so, don't put so much in.' Well, he laffed, and said ther warn't no real iron in it, only Tincter, kinder iron soakage like, same es er drawin' ov tea.

"Goin' home thet night I got ter thinkin'. I'd been round iron all my life and knowed its ways, but I hadn't struck no Tincter as I knowed ov. When she fell asleep I poured out a leetle in another bottle and slid it in my trousers pocket, an' next day, down ter ther shop, I tasted ov it and held it up ter ther light. It was kind er persimmony and dark-lookin', ez if it had rusty nails in it; and so thet night when I goes hum I sez ter her, 'Down ter ther other druggist's I kin git twice as much Tincter fer fifty cents as I kin at Sarcy's, and if yer don't mind I'll git it filled there.' Well, she never kicked a stroke, 'cept to say I'd better hurry, fer she hadn't had a spoonful sence daylight, and she wuz beginnin' ter feel faint. When the whistle blew I cum hum ter dinner, and sot the new bottle, about twice as big as the other one, beside her bed.

"'How's that?' I sez. 'It's a leetle grain darker and more muddy like, but the new druggist sez thet's the Tincter, and thet's what's doin' ov yer good.' Well, she never suspicioned; jest kept on, night and day, wrappin' herself round it every two er three hours, I gettin' it filled regerlar and she a-empt'in' ov it.

"'Bout four weeks arter that she begun to git around, and then she'd walk out ez fur ez ther shipyard fence, and then, begosh, she begun to flesh up so as you wouldn't know her. Now an' then she'd meet the doctor, and she'd say how she'd never a-lived but fer ther Tincter, and he'd laff and drive on. When she got real peart I brought her down to the shop one day, and I shows her an old paint keg thet I kep' rusty bolts in, and half full ov water.

"'Smell that,' I sez, and she smells it and cocks her eye.

"'Taste it,' I sez, and she tasted it, and give me a look. Then I dips a spoonful out in a glass, and I sez: 'It's most time to take yer medicine. I kin beat Gus Sarcy all holler makin' Tincter; every drop yer drunk fer a month come out er thet keg.'"

"FIVE MEALS FOR A DOLLAR"

The Literary Society of West Norrington, Vt., had invited me to lecture on a certain Tuesday night in February.

The Tuesday night had arrived. So had the train. So had the knock-kneed, bandy-legged hack--two front wheels bowed in, two hind wheels bowed out--and so had the lecturer.

West Norrington is built on a hill. At the foot are the station, a saw-mill, and a glue factory. On the top is a flat plateau holding the principal residences, printing-office, opera-house, confectionery store, druggist's, and hotel. Up the incline is a scattering of cigar-stores, butcher shops, real-estate agencies, and one lone restaurant. You know it is a restaurant by the pile of extra-dry oyster-shells in the window--oysterless for months--and the four oranges bunched together in a wire basket like a nest of pool balls. You know it also from the sign--

"Five meals for a dollar."

I saw this sign on my way up the hill, but it made no impression on my mind. I was bound for the hotel--the West Norrington Arms, the conductor called it; and as I had eaten nothing since seven o'clock, and it was then four, I was absorbed mentally in arranging a bill of fare. Broiled chicken, of course, I said to myself--always get delicious broiled chicken in the country--and a salad, and perhaps--you can't always tell, of course, what the cellars of these old New England taverns may contain--yes, perhaps a pint of any really good Burgundy, Pommard, or Beaune.

"West Norrington Arms" sounded well. There was a distinct flavor of exclusiveness and comfort about it, suggesting old side-boards, hand-polished tables, small bar with cut-glass decanters, Franklin stoves in the bedrooms, and the like. I could already see the luncheon served in my room, the bright wood fire lighting up the dimity curtains draping the high-post bedstead. Yes, I would order Pommard.

Here the front knees came together with a jerk. Then the driver pulled his legs out of a buffalo-robe, opened the door with a twist, and called out,--

"Nor'n't'n Arms."

I got out.