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Page 9
Murray had dreamed the wrong dream.
A RULER of MEN
[Written at the prime of his popularity and power, this characteristic
and amusing story was published in Everybody's Magazine in August,
1906.]
I walked the streets of the City of Insolence, thirsting for the sight
of a stranger face. For the City is a desert of familiar types as thick
and alike as the grains in a sand-storm; and you grow to hate them as
you do a friend who is always by you, or one of your own kin.
And my desire was granted, for I saw near a corner of Broadway and
Twenty-ninth Street, a little flaxen-haired man with a face like a
scaly-bark hickory-nut, selling to a fast-gathering crowd a tool that
omnigeneously proclaimed itself a can-opener, a screw-driver, a
button-hook, a nail-file, a shoe-horn, a watch-guard, a potato-peeler;
and an ornament to any gentleman's key-ring.
And then a stall-fed cop shoved himself through the congregation of
customers. The vender, plainly used to having his seasons of trade thus
abruptly curtailed, closed his satchel and slipped like a weasel through
the opposite segment of the circle. The crowd scurried aimlessly away
like ants from a disturbed crumb. The cop, suddenly becoming oblivious
of the earth and its inhabitants, stood still, swelling his bulk and
putting his club through an intricate drill of twirls. I hurried after
Kansas Bill Bowers, and caught him by an arm.
Without his looking at me or slowing his pace, I found a five-dollar
bill crumpled neatly into my hand.
"I wouldn't have thought, Kansas Bill," I said, "that you'd hold an old
friend that cheap."
Then he turned his head, and the hickory-nut cracked into a wide smile.
"Give back the money," said he, "or I'll have the cop after you for
false pretenses. I thought you was the cop."
"I want to talk to you, Bill," I said. "When did you leave Oklahoma?
Where is Reddy McGill now? Why are you selling those impossible
contraptions on the street? How did your Big Horn gold-mine pan out? How
did you get so badly sunburned? What will you drink?"
"A year ago," answered Kansas Bill systematically. "Putting up windmills
in Arizona. For pin money to buy etceteras with. Salted. Been down in
the tropics. Beer."
We foregathered in a propitious place and became Elijahs while a waiter
of dark plumage played the raven to perfection. Reminiscence needs must
be had before I could steer Bill into his epic mood.
"Yes," said he, "I mind the time Timoteo's rope broke on that cow's
horns while the calf was chasing you. You and that cow! I'd never forget
it."
"The tropics," said I, "are a broad territory. What part of Cancer of
Capricorn have you been honoring with a visit?"
"Down along China or Peru--or maybe the Argentine Confederacy," said
Kansas Bill. "Anyway 'twas among a great race of people, off-colored but
progressive. I was there three months."
"No doubt you are glad to be back among the truly great race," I
surmised. "Especially among New Yorkers, the most progressive and
independent citizens of any country in the world," I continued, with the
fatuity of the provincial who has eaten the Broadway lotus.
"Do you want to start an argument?" asked Bill.
"Can there be one?" I answered.
"Has an Irishman humor, do you think?" asked he.
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