Various - McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908

V >> Various >> McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908

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[Transcriber's Note: The Table of Contents and the list of illustrations
were added by the transcriber.]

McCLURE'S MAGAZINE

VOL. XXXI MAY, 1908 No. 1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS.
THE MISADVENTURES OF CASSIDY. By Edward S. Moffat.
MARY BAKER G. EDDY. By Georgine Milmine.
IN CHARGE OF TRUSTY. By Lucy Pratt.
FIRST DAYS OF THE RECONSTRUCTION. By Carl Schurz.
Restless Foot-loose Negroes.
The Freedmen's Bureau.
Pickles and Patriotism.
The South's Hopeless Poverty.
Johnson's Haste for Reconstruction.
Arming the Young Men of the South.
The President Defends Southern Militia.
Criticism and Personal Discomfort.
The End of an Aristocracy.
An Ungracious Reception.
Why the President Reversed his Policy.
Congress and General Grant's Report.
THE FLOWER FACTORY. By Florence Wilkinson.
THE SILLY ASS. By James Barnes.
WAR ON THE TIGER. By W. G. Fitz-gerald.
THE RADICAL JUDGE. By Anita Fitch.
POVERTY AND DISCONTENT IN RUSSIA. By George Kennan.
"THE HEART KNOWETH." By Charlotte Wilson.
IN THE DARK HOUR. By Perceval Gibbon.
"OLIVIA" and "FAUST" AT THE LYCEUM. By Ellen Terry.
"Olivia" a Family Play.
Ellen Terry and Eleanora Duse.
"Faust."
George Alexander and the Barmaids.
"Faust" a Paradoxical Success.
Irving on Long Runs.
Irving's Mephistopheles.
"Faust's" Four Hundred Ropes.
THE LIE DIRECT. By Caroline Duer.
THE WAYFARERS. By Mary Stewart Cutting.
XV.
XVI.
XVII.
XVIII.

ILLUSTRATIONS

"FOR FOUR LONG SUMMER MONTHS OF DUST AND HEAT CASSIDY HAD BEEN A
FREIGHTER."
"'I'VE SOLD THEM WHEELERS!'"
"NEAREST TO THE ROUGH PINE BOX STOOD THE WIDOW, WITH LOWERED EYES"
"'I HEREBY PRONOUNCE YUH MAN AND WIFE!'"
GREETING THE PILGRIMS.
GEORGE WASHINGTON GLOVER.
THE MOTHER CHURCH IN BOSTON.
"'I'SE JUS 'BLIGE WHUP 'IM ALL DE WAY TER SCHOOL'"
"I KIN GET 'EM YERE, EF YER WANTS."
"TWO SMALL FIGURES PUSHED THEIR WAY INTO THE ROOM"
"THAT LITTLE BOY, SMILED THE ROSY-CHEEKED GENTLEMAN"
MAJOR-GENERAL O. O. HOWARD.
A PHOTOGRAPH OF GENERAL HOWARD.
MAJOR-GENERAL H. W. SLOCUM FROM A WAR-TIME PHOTOGRAPH.
MAJOR-GENERAL H. W. SLOCUM BEFORE HIS DEATH IN 1894.
MAJOR-GENERAL E. R. S. CANBY.
SENATOR WILLIAM LEWIS SHARKEY.
"HE COULD HEAR THE CRASH, SEE THE GREAT BOW SINKING"
"FIRST A MAGNIFICENT YELLOW HEAD EMERGES, THEN THE LONG, LITHE BODY"
HOWDAH ELEPHANT TRAINING MADE EASY.
LAST WALL OF DEFENSE.
SLAYER OF SEVENTY-SIX NATIVES LAID LOW AT LAST.
TIGRESS ALSO IS SLAIN.
"'WADICAL!'"
"AN UNTIDY MIDGET FOLLOWING CLOSELY AT HIS HEELS"
"HOPE CAROLINA, FROM HER MARVELOUS BED, COULD SEE EVERYTHING."
"FOREVER TURNING BACK TO KISS HIM...."
"IT WAS THE QUAINT CUSTOM ... TO FOLLOW MOURNERS ... FROM THE GRAVE"
PAUL MILYUKOV.
P. A. STOLYPIN.
THE AUDREY ARMS, OXBRIDGE, MIDDLESEX.
ELLEN TERRY AS "OLIVIA."
ELLEN TERRY AS OLIVIA.
HENRY IRVING AS THE VICAR.
H. BEERBOHM TREE.
ELEANORA DUSE WITH LENBACH'S CHILD.
ELLEN TERRY AS ELLALINE IN "THE AMBER HEART."
HENRY IRVING AS MEPHISTOPHELES IN "FAUST."
ELLEN TERRY.
ELLEN TERRY'S FAVOURITE PHOTOGRAPH AS OLIVIA.
ELLEN TERRY AS OLIVIA AND HENRY IRVING AS THE VICAR.
ELLEN TERRY AS MARGUERITE IN "FAUST."
"MRS. LEVERICH BOWED INCIDENTALLY"
"WITH EYES FOR NOBODY ELSE"
"FLOWERS AND CHILDREN--CHILDREN AND FLOWERS!"
"'THE LITTLE SPIDER WON'T HURT YOU'"
"'NEVER LET HIM COME HERE AGAIN--NEVER, NEVER!'"

[Illustration: "FOR FOUR LONG SUMMER MONTHS OF DUST AND HEAT CASSIDY
HAD BEEN A FREIGHTER."]

McCLURE'S MAGAZINE

VOL. XXXI MAY, 1908 No. 1

THE MISADVENTURES OF CASSIDY

BY EDWARD S. MOFFAT

ILLUSTRATIONS BY N.C. WYETH

Cassidy gazed long and blankly across the desert. "Wot a life!" he
muttered grimly. "Say, _wot_ a life this is!" Cassidy made the words
by putting his tongue against his set teeth and forcibly wrenching the
sounds out by the roots. The words had been a long time in the making,
but now, because of the infinite sourness of their birth and because
of the acrid grinding and gritting that had been going on in the dark
recesses of his soul, Cassidy was forced at last to listen. Rudely and
forever they dispelled Cassidy's dull impression that things were well
with Cassidy, and in so doing tore away the veil and revealed Truth
standing before him, naked, yet gloriously unashamed. But the general
outlines of the goddess had not been entirely unfamiliar to him.
Although his previous skull-gropings had brought forth neither a cause
nor a remedy, he had so long felt that things were far from
satisfactory that when at last she fronted him brazenly, eye to eye,
he only sighed heavily, spat twice in sad reflection, and----nodded
for her to pass on; she had been accepted.

"Gosh, wot a thirst I got!" he pondered, and kicked the empty canteen
at his feet. "Wot a simply horrible thirst! Say, pardner, I wonder did
a feller _ever_ have a thirst like this?" Luckily for Cassidy, his
throat was not yet so dry but that he could amuse himself by
fancifully measuring his thirst, first by pints, then by quarts.

"A quart would never do it, though," he meditated whimsically. "It
would be a mean, low trick to make it think so. This yere job rightly
belongs to a water-tank. Oh, gosh! And ten miles yet, across that
darned dry lake, tuh Ochre. Gid-ap, Tawmm!"

In slow response, the four blacks settled into their sweaty collars,
and the big Bain freighter, with its tugging trailer, heaved up the
swale and lurched drunkenly down the other side to the glittering
mesa.

For four long summer months of dust and heat Cassidy had been a
freighter. From sun-up to sun-down he had dragged with snail-like
progress up and down the canons, through the rocky washes and crooked
draws; and now that the road had dropped into the Southwestern Basin
it was sickening mesa work, with the fine dust running like water
ahead of his wheels or whirling up in fantastic, dancing pillars of
grit that drove spitefully into his slack, parched mouth and sleepy
eyes.

"It's the goll-dinged monotonosity of it I cain't stand!" he whined,
as he drove his boot-heel down on the rasping brake-lever and waited
sullenly for the inevitable bump from the trailer. "Gawd never meant
fer a feller tuh do this work. I don't know Him very good," wailed
Cassidy, "but I bet He wouldn't deal no such a raw hand. It ain't
_human!_"

He frowned heavily at the sky-line of jagged mountains blued with
haze. "They look like a lot of big old alligators--just as if they was
asleep and lyin' with their shoulders half out of water," he murmured
in gentle, subdued reminiscence. "The darned old no-good things!"

Then, as the bitterness of his lonely life rose up and dulled his mind
and soured his tongue, "Why don't yuh get some mineral into yuh?" he
yelled with abrupt ferocity. "Why ain't yuh some good tuh a feller?
_Zing, zing, zing_--I _hate_ your old heat a-singin' in my ears all
the gosh-blamed time! Why don't yuh _do_ something? Huh? Yuh don't
make it so's anything kin live. Yuh don't give no water, yuh don't
give no grass, yuh don't do nothin'! Yuh jest lay there and make
_heat!_"

[Illustration: "'I'VE SOLD THEM WHEELERS!'"]

[Illustration: "NEAREST TO THE ROUGH PINE BOX STOOD THE WIDOW, WITH
LOWERED EYES"]

Across the mesa the shimmering white surface of a dry lake caught his
angry eye. As he looked, it began to rock gently from side to side.
Presently, in a freakish spirit of its own, it curled up at the edges.
Later, it seemed to turn into a dimpling sheet of water, cool, sweet,
and alluring.

Cassidy burst into a howl of derision that startled his blacks into a
jogging trot: "Oh, yuh cain't fool me, yuh darned old fake!" He shook
a huge red fist in defiance of his ancient foe. "I'll beat yuh
yet--darn yuh!"

Late that night, a large man with a red face and a sunburned neck on
which the skin lay in little cobwebs, stumbled in under the lights of
Number One Commissary Tent.

"I want my time and I want my money. I ain't a-goin' tuh work _no
more!_ he announced with a displeased frown.

"Going back home tuh Coloraydo?" asked the youthful clerk.

"Back home?" repeated Cassidy mechanically. "How--how's that, young
feller?"

"I asked yuh if yuh were going tuh hit the grit fer home?" the boy
repeated.

"Aoh!" said Cassidy, and a blank look spread across his countenance.
He spoke as if he did not understand. For a while he stood quite
still, unknowingly twiddling the time-check in his thick,
fat-cushioned fingers into a moist pink ball. His face grew heavy and
dull. It seemed to have been robbed, with a surprising suddenness, of
all the good spirits, all the abounding, virile life, of the moment
before. It grew to look old and lined under the flickering lamplight,
and this was odd, because Cassidy was not by any means an old man.

For a time the only sound he made was a queer little ejaculation of
surprise, the only movement a bewildered stare at the boy. Together
they were the actions of a child who, in the first numbing moments of
a gashed finger, only gazes at the wound in round-eyed wonder. Cassidy
had begun to remember.

He remembered that "back home" a man didn't have to live _all_ the
time on sour bread and canned tomatoes; "back home" you didn't have to
die of thirst, coming in with day-empty water-barrels to find the
spring dried up; "back home" the mountains didn't jiggle up and down
in front of you, through glassy waves of heat that rightfully
belonged in a blast-furnace. Things were different--and better--"back
home."

Cassidy lifted his head and listened. He had heard the sound of water.
Half hidden in the brush, a little brook was running by him down a
dark ravine. Joyously, tumultuously, it churked and gurgled over the
smooth green stones and moss down to the level, and then slipped away,
with low, contented murmurings, among the cottonwoods and willows.
Cassidy found himself following that brook. It took him down through
fields of dark lucerne. It led him through yellow pasturage, deep with
stubble and wild oats. It showed him long-aisled orchards glinting
with fruit in the sunlight. It ushered him into a wide and pleasant
valley. In the distance Cassidy saw a ranch. Near by, with blowsy
forelock and careless mane, a shaggy pony stood knee-deep in the
river-sedge.

"Why, hello, hossy!" whispered Cassidy, with soft surprise. "Why, say!
I know yuh!"

A full, warm wind began to sough through the pines on the hillside. He
could hear it blowing, blowing unendingly, from across the hills. His
ears rang with the whirring sound, as it came singing along with the
vox humana chords of a great 'cello, streaming down from the heights,
gentle-fingered, but wondrously vast-bodied--booming along with half a
world behind it. Fair in the face it smote him with its resinous
breath, and he felt his lips parting to inhale its fiery tonic--felt,
as he used to feel, the magic glow tingling in his veins again and
brightening his eyes with the pure pagan glory of his living.

And then, very sadly indeed for Cassidy, and in much the same way that
whisky and he had let it all slip through their fingers long ago, the
sound of the brook stilled. The valley, the meadows, the ranch, and
the kind, warm wind faded, one by one. In their stead came the creak
and shock of a belated wagon-train pulling into camp. He heard the
panting of laboring horses. He caught the salt reek of sweaty harness.
He heard the drivers curse querulously as they jammed down the
brake-levers, tossed the reins away, and clambered stiffly down.

Cassidy turned a strained, hard face on the boy. "I reckon not," he
said sadly, grimly. "I ain't a-goin' home. Nope; I ain't a-goin' no
place that's good. Yuh kin always be sure of that, kid."

"Oh, now, that's all right. Don't get sore," soothed the boy. "That's
all right, Cassidy."

"No, it ain't!" roared Cassidy, angry with the long, hot days and
stifling nights, angry with the work and the scanty pay, angry most
of all with himself. "No, it _ain't_ all right!"

[Illustration: "'I HEREBY PRONOUNCE YUH MAN AND WIFE!'"]

As a previously concealed resolve crystallized at last somewhere in
his brain, his voice rasped up a whole octave.

"Nothin's all right, pardner!" he yelled. "Yuh hear me? Yuh know what
I'm goin' tuh do?" He waved the time-check defiantly above his head
and let go one last howl of sardonic self-derision:

"I'm goin' down tuh the Bucket of Blood _tuh get drunk_!"

* * * * *

The desert town of Ochre, in its more salient points, was not unlike a
desert flower, although its makers were far from desiring it to blush
unseen. Yesterday it had slept unborn in a nook of the sand-hills, the
abiding-place of cat's-claw, mesquit, and flickering lizards.

To-day it burst, with an almost tropic vigor, into riotous growth.
Flamboyant youth, calculating middle age, doddering senility, all
these were there, all treading on one another's heels, to reap and be
reaped. To-day a scene of marvelous activity, a maelstrom of bustling
commissariat and fretting supply-trains, cut by never-ending
counter-currents of hoboes to and from the front, to-morrow it would
simmer down into the desuetude of a siding. Thus is vanity repaid.

Although Cassidy had begun at the "Bucket," he soon discovered that it
possessed no phonograph, and, possessing a craving for music, he had
removed himself and the remains of the pink check to where an aged
instrument in "Red Eye Mike's" guttered forth a doubtful plea for one
"Bill Bailey" to come home.

Here he had remained for five fateful, forgetting days. What Mike and
Mike's friends did to him in that space of time cannot be dwelt upon.
Suffice it to say that on the morning of the sixth day the bleary
semblance of a man who had slept all night in the sand, alongside of a
saloon, awoke to the daylight and a hell of pain.

By dint of soul-racking exertions it managed to roll to its hands and
knees. Then, by slow stages, it pulled itself together, and after
several unsuccessful attempts, tottering, stood on its feet. Tents,
horses, sky, desert, and sun revolved in a bewildering kaleidoscope
before his eyes. In the vastness of his skull a point of pain darted
agonizingly back and forth. In his mouth was a taste like unto nothing
known on this earth or in either bourn.

"I got money yet," he mumbled dazedly to himself, as was his
conversational wont. "Say! I'm tellin' yuh, I got money yet!"
Fumbling, he searched his pockets, but quite to no avail. Sadder yet,
a repetition of the search, even to turning his clothes inside out and
then looking anxiously on the sand, produced nothing. With a puzzled
look on his haggard face, he stumbled into Mike's saloon.

Not at all disconcerted by the bedraggled form that leaned on his bar
and mouthed disconnectedly, the worthy keeper of the hostel proceeded
to produce a sheet of paper from the till.

"I don't savvy what you're talking about at all," he remarked
ingenuously; "but seein' as you've been spendin' a few bucks amongst
your friends here, I'll tell you how you stand."

"How do I stand?" asked Cassidy thickly.

Mike laughed in his face. "You don't stand, pardner. You're all in."

A moment necessarily had to be allowed Cassidy to fathom this
catastrophe. When the agony had come and passed, he was heard to sigh
heavily and remark: "Well, I reckon it'll be the old job again. I got
the outfit yet."

"Have you, indeed?" mocked Mike, well up to his lay. "I'm glad to have
you mention it. See here, pardner." He slapped the sheet of paper flat
on the bar, under Cassidy's astonished eyes. "Do you figure this is
your name at the bottom, or don't you?" he demanded in peremptory
tones.

Cassidy frowned and regarded the paper. Then, as the words swam and
blurred together in one long, discouraging line, he weakly gave it up.

"Wot's it say, Mike?" he asked feebly.

"This here paper says," responded the other, with the cold, forceful
air of one well within his rights, "that last night you sold me your
teams and your outfit--fer a consideration. Of course, now, I ain't
sayin' just what you done with the consideration I give you. Mebbe you
spent it like a gent fer booze, mebbe you was foolish and went to some
strong-arm shack and got rolled. I dunno; I can't say. All I know is
that you got your money and I got the outfit. Savvy?"

Cassidy's face took on a queer, pasty white. His hands clawed
ineffectively at the bar.

"Sold you my _outfit_?" he quavered, with an awful break in his voice.
"_Sold it_, Mike? Why, how do you figure that?"

"Is that your name?" barked Mike in answer. He thrust the paper out at
arm's length and shook it under Cassidy's nose with astonishing
ferocity. "Just you say one little short word, friend. Is that your
name, or isn't it?"

Cassidy wavered. It was unquestionably his name; whether _he_ had
written it there or not was yet to be decided.

If psychological moments come to the Cassidys, this one felt such a
thing near him. _Now_ was the time for him to leap in the air and
pound wrathfully upon the bar. _Now_ was the instant for him to rush
into the open and call vociferously on his friends. _Now_ was the
fraction of a second left for him to reach out his hard knuckles and
pin Mike to the wall and tear the paper from his hands. But instead,
and with a queer feeling of aloofness from it all, much as if he were
the helpless spectator of activities proceeding in some fantastic
dream, he felt the moment thrilling up to him; felt it stand
obediently waiting; felt himself slowly gathering in response to its
mute query; then felt himself drop helplessly back into a stupid coma
of whisky fumes and sodden inertia.

When he came to, Mike had put the paper back in his till and was
assiduously cleaning up his bar. It was all over.

Cassidy shifted irresolutely from one foot to the other. A sickening
feeling of hollowness within him was crying aloud to be appeased by
either food or drink, and his shaking body begged for a place to rest
itself into tranquillity; but still for a while he stood there,
fighting off these yearnings while he gathered his far-strayed wits.
Now and then he weakly attempted to catch the other's eye, but as Mike
studiously refused to be caught, Cassidy could only blink owlishly and
fumble again with the tangled ends of the skein. Finally, abandoning
it all as useless, he turned toward the door, yet arrested his dazed
shambling to ask one last question.

"How's that?" Mike responded vaguely over his shoulder. "Still harping
on that, are you?"

"Did I really sell you them blacks?" ventured Cassidy quaveringly,
controlling his voice only with a tremendous effort. "Reelly,
truly--did I sell 'em?"

Mike rolled a cigar over in his mouth, with a complacent lick of his
tongue. "That's what," he replied laconically.

Cassidy gulped down something in his throat. He leaned for a moment
against the door-jamb; his gaunt, hollow-cheeked face quivered with
misery.

"I mean them black wheelers, Mike. Just them two--them wheelers," he
pleaded. Hesitating a little, as the other deigned no response, he
ventured weakly on:

"I was figurin', now--of course, I don't mean nothin' by it, Mike,
only yuh see how a feller _c'u'd_ figger it--that mebbe--mebbe you
made some mistake in readin' that paper. Yuh see how it could happen.
A feller _c'u'd_ make a mistake in readin', now, c'u'dn't he?" With
this flimsy appeal Cassidy played his last and poorest card.

In answer the other snapped some ashes from his sleeve, turned his
back, slapped the cash-register shut, and strode masterfully down the
room. "Not this time, pardner."

Cassidy stumbled out.

"I've sold them wheelers!" he sobbed under his breath. "Why, it seems
like I was just this minute thinkin' I'd get tuh go and water 'em, and
rub 'em down a bit. _Now_ it ain't no use thinkin' about it--not any
more. It ain't me that's goin' tuh do that. I cain't water 'em. I
ain't got rights to even lay my hands on 'em! O-h-h!" he shuddered,
and agonizedly pulled taut on every tired, aching muscle. "Yuh oughter
be beat up with a club. Yuh oughter get pounded with a rawk. You're a
rotten, whisky-soaked bum, that's all yuh are now, and yuh oughter be
killed and kicked out in the street!"

Half whining, half crying miserably, he drove himself out of the town,
for a mile or more, on the desert, then plodded painfully back again,
mauling and beating himself with the bludgeon of his awful self-pity.

At the foot of a fast-rising "grade" he halted wearily and watched the
work. It was well on toward noon by this time, and the sun was blazing
down through a choking pall of dust that hung in the lifeless air. Men
were driving horses to and fro. They were men with weak, deeply lined
faces and shambling gaits. They broke into querulous curses and beat
their animals savagely on ridiculously small pretexts. They handled
their reins with a uniformly betraying awkwardness.

Cassidy sized them up and sniffed contemptuously to himself. _He_
knew. "That's wot _you_'ll be doing to-morrow," he muttered. "Durn
your hide, that's all you're good for. That's yuh to-morrow, yuh and
the rest of the 'boes."

Not knowing what to do with himself now, he drifted back to the town
and sat in the scanty shade of a joshua, prepared to commune further
with himself. Looking up after a time, his eyes descried in the
distance the figures of two men who were walking toward him.

"I bet that's Con Maguire," he murmured. "Yep--him and that old
'Arkinsaw.' They've got their time-checks, tuh; I kin tell the way
they walk. I bet I know wot they're sayin'. Con, he's got a little
ranch up tuh Provo, and he's fer makin' right up the line and gettin'
that old no-good Arkinsaw to go along and pass up the booze.

"Poor old Arkinsaw!" mused Cassidy shrewdly. "He's worked three months
steady for Donovans', drivin' scraper, the poor old slob, and their
chuck is rotten. I'll bet he's terrible glad to get back tuh Number
One. He's got forty dollars now. I bet he's near crazy. He allers
looks that way when he's got forty dollars," said Cassidy.

"Sure I'll go with you, Con," Arkinsaw was saying. "I always meant to
go, reelly, truly I did. You ask any of the fellers back to Donovans'.
I was allers savin', 'I'm goin' out home when Con Maguire goes'--and,
sure enough, here I am. I'll be to the train the same time as you.
We'll go home on the same train, Con; sure we will." The old man
laughed nervously. His eyes were bright with some strange
excitement--but half of it was fear.

"Say, Con," he whispered hoarsely, "I'll be all right. You jest ketch
holt of my arm when we go by; I'll be all right then. Say, Con," he
guttered, in an agony of fear and desperation, "you hear me? Only git
me by that first saloon."

But the approaching twain had been seen by other eyes than Cassidy's.
By some odd fortuity, a phonograph broke into wheezy song as the
wayfarers swung down the street. Dice began to roll invitingly across
the bars, and from a distant spot came the hollow sound of the
roulette-ball. Quite by chance, a man appeared in a doorway, holding a
glass of beer. He was seen to drain it, just as they passed. Then he
noticed them for the first time.

"Come in and cool off, boys," he suggested cordially. "It's all on
ice. Good, cold lager, boys!"

Under its mask of dust, Arkinsaw's face worked horribly. He stumbled,
loitered along the way to fix his shoe, zigzagged from one side to the
other, fumbled at his pack, and finally stopped.

"Say, Con," he rasped feebly. "Oh, Con! Say, I gotter see a feller
here. Say!" as his friend looked back at him with disconcerting doubt
written on every feature. "Say, Con!--reelly, truly I have!"

"Well, hurry up, then," replied the other, and went on his dogged way.

The instant his back was turned, the old man obliqued crabwise to the
side of the road. Fumbling nervously at his roll of bedding, he threw
it off and darted for the saloon, running and stumbling in his haste.
But at this point a large, gaunt, red-faced man, bearing a club in one
hand, appeared from nowhere in particular and fronted him.

"G'wan down the road!" said the red-faced man harshly.

"Why--why, _Cass_!" Arkinsaw bleated surprisedly. "How you did startle
me! Why, where did you come from? Yessir!" and he deftly manoeuvered
so as to catch a glimpse of the bar over Cassidy's shoulder. "You
surely startled me bad. Excuse _me_," he murmured absently; "I gotter
see a feller----"

"G'wan down the road!"

"No, no, Cass!" the old man begged, hopping frantically on one foot.
"Just a minute. It'll only take me a minute, I tell you. I gotter see
a feller."

"G'wan down the road!"

"Say, Cass! _don't_ treat a feller that way----"

Arkinsaw retreated. Cassidy and the club advanced. Arkinsaw craftily
side-stepped. So did Cassidy. They paused.

Cassidy leaned on his stick and centered the old man's wavering gaze.
"Don't lie," he said softly. "If yuh lie tuh me, yuh feather-brained
old cockroach, I'll just natch'lly beat your face off! I want yuh tuh
go home; just clamp your mind on that, Sam Meeker! If yuh think you're
goin' tuh throw your money away over that bar, yuh want tuh separate
yourself from the idea mighty quick. I won't stand fer foolishness. Go
over there and git your bed!"

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