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Page 35
One afternoon I dropped in and found Finch alone. He began to anoint
my headpiece de Panama with his mysterious fluid that attracted dust
and dirt like a magnet.
"They say the Indians weave 'em under water," said I, for a leader.
"Don't you believe it," said Finch. "No Indian or white man could
stay under water that long. Say, do you pay much attention to
politics? I see in the paper something about a law they've passed
called 'the law of supply and demand.'"
I explained to him as well as I could that the reference was to a
politico-economical law, and not to a legal statute.
"I didn't know," said Finch. "I heard a good deal about it a year or
so ago, but in a one-sided way."
"Yes," said I, "political orators use it a great deal. In fact, they
never give it a rest. I suppose you heard some of those cart-tail
fellows spouting on the subject over here on the east side."
"I heard it from a king," said Finch--"the white king of a tribe of
Indians in South America."
I was interested but not surprised. The big city is like a mother's
knee to many who have strayed far and found the roads rough beneath
their uncertain feet. At dusk they come home and sit upon the door-
step. I know a piano player in a cheap cafe who has shot lions in
Africa, a bell-boy who fought in the British army against the Zulus,
an express-driver whose left arm had been cracked like a lobster's
claw for a stew-pot of Patagonian cannibals when the boat of his
rescuers hove in sight. So a hat-cleaner who had been a friend of a
king did not oppress me.
"A new band ?" asked Finch, with his dry, barren smile.
"Yes," said I, "and half an inch wider." I had had a new band five
days before.
"I meets a man one night," said Finch, beginning his story--"a man
brown as snuff, with money in every pocket, eating schweinerknuckel in
Schlagel's. That was two years ago, when I was a hose-cart driver for
No. 98. His discourse runs to the subject of gold. He says that
certain mountains in a country down South that he calls Gaudymala is
full of it. He says the Indians wash it out of the streams in plural
quantities.
"'Oh, Geronimo!' says I. 'Indians! There's no Indians in the South,'
I tell him, 'except Elks, Maccabees, and the buyers for the fall dry-
goods trade. The Indians are all on the reservations,' says I.
"'I'm telling you this with reservations,' says he. 'They ain't
Buffalo Bill Indians; they're squattier and more pedigreed. They call
'em Inkers and Aspics, and they was old inhabitants when Mazuma was
King of Mexico. They wash the gold out of the mountain streams,' says
the brown man, 'and fill quills with it; and then they empty 'em into
red jars till they are full; and then they pack it in buckskin sacks
of one arroba each--an arroba is twenty-five pounds--and store it in a
stone house, with an engraving of a idol with marcelled hair, playing
a flute, over the door.'
"'how do they work off this unearth increment?' I asks.
"'They don't,' says the man. 'It's a case of "Ill fares the land with
the great deal of velocity where wealth accumulates and there ain't
any reciprocity."'
"After this man and me got through our conversation, which left him
dry of information, I shook hands with him and told him I was sorry I
couldn't believe him. And a month afterward I landed on the coast of
this Gaudymala with $1,300 that I had been saving up for five years.
I thought I knew what Indians liked, and I fixed myself accordingly.
I loaded down four pack-mules with red woollen blankets, wrought-iron
pails, jewelled side-combs for the ladies, glass necklaces, and
safety-razors. I hired a black mozo, who was supposed to be a mule-
driver and an interpreter too. It turned out that he could interpret
mules all right, but he drove the English language much too hard. His
name sounded like a Yale key when you push it in wrong side up, but I
called him McClintock, which was close to the noise.
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