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Page 51
HE ALSO SERVES
If I could have a thousand years--just one little thousand years--more
of life, I might, in that time, draw near enough to true Romance to
touch the hem of her robe.
Up from ships men come, and from waste places and forest and road and
garret and cellar to maunder to me in strangely distributed words of
the things they have seen and considered. The recording of their
tales is no more than a matter of ears and fingers. There are only
two fates I dread--deafness and writer's cramp. The hand is yet
steady; let the ear bear the blame if these printed words be not in
the order they were delivered to me by Hunky Magee, true camp-follower
of fortune.
Biography shall claim you but an instant--I first knew Hunky when he
was head-waiter at Chubb's little beefsteak restaurant and cafe on
Third Avenue. There was only one waiter besides.
Then, successively, I caromed against him in the little streets of the
Big City after his trip to Alaska, his voyage as cook with a treasure-
seeking expedition to the Caribbean, and his failure as a pearl-fisher
in the Arkansas River. Between these dashes into the land of
adventure he usually came back to Chubb's for a while. Chubb's was a
port for him when gales blew too high; but when you dined there and
Hunky went for your steak you never knew whether he would come to
anchor in the kitchen or in the Malayan Archipelago. You wouldn't
care for his description--he was soft of voice and hard of face, and
rarely had to use more than one eye to quell any approach to a
disturbance among Chubb's customers.
One night I found Hunky standing at a corner of Twenty-third Street
and Third Avenue after an absence of several months. In ten minutes
we had a little round table between us in a quiet corner, and my ears
began to get busy. I leave out my sly ruses and feints to draw
Hunky's word-of-mouth blows--it all came to something like this:
"Speaking of the next election," said Hunky, "did you ever know much
about Indians? No? I don't mean the Cooper, Beadle, cigar-store, or
Laughing Water kind-I mean the modern Indian--the kind that takes
Greek prizes in colleges and scalps the half-back on the other side in
football games. The kind that eats macaroons and tea in the
afternoons with the daughter of the professor of biology, and fills up
on grasshoppers and fried rattlesnake when they get back to the
ancestral wickiup.
"Well, they ain't so bad. I like 'em better than most foreigners that
have come over in the last few hundred years. One thing about the
Indian is this: when he mixes with the white race he swaps all his own
vices for them of the pale-faces--and he retains all his own virtues.
Well, his virtues are enough to call out the reserves whenever he lets
'em loose. But the imported foreigners adopt our virtues and keep
their own vices--and it's going to take our whole standing army some
day to police that gang.
"But let me tell you about the trip I took to Mexico with High jack
Snakefeeder, a Cherokee twice removed, a graduate of a Pennsylvania
college and the latest thing in pointed-toed, rubber-heeled, patent
kid moccasins and Madras hunting-shirt with turned-back cuffs. He was
a friend of mine. I met him in Tahlequah when I was out there during
the land boom, and we got thick. He had got all there was out of
colleges and had come back to lead his people out of Egypt. He was a
man of first-class style and wrote essays, and had been invited to
visit rich guys' houses in Boston and such places.
"There was a Cherokee girl in Muscogee that High Jack was foolish
about. He took me to see her a few times. Her name was Florence Blue
Feather--but you want to clear your mind of all ideas of squaws with
nose-rings and army blankets. This young lady was whiter than you
are, and better educated than I ever was. You couldn't have told her
from any of the girls shopping in the swell Third Avenue stores. I
liked her so well that, I got to calling on her now and then when High
Jack wasn't along, which is the way of friends in such matters. She
was educated at the Muscogee College, and was making a specialty of--
let's see--eth--yes, ethnology. That's the art that goes back and
traces the descent of different races of people, leading up from
jelly-fish through monkeys and to the O'Briens. High Jack had took up
that line too, and had read papers about it before all kinds of
riotous assemblies--Chautauquas and Choctaws and chowder-parties, and
such. Having a mutual taste for musty information like that was what
made 'em like each other, I suppose. But I don't know! What they
call congeniality of tastes ain't always it. Now, when Miss Blue
Feather and me was talking together, I listened to her affidavits
about the first families of the Land of Nod being cousins german
(well, if the Germans don't nod, who does?) to the mound-builders of
Ohio with incomprehension and respect. And when I'd tell her about
the Bowery and Coney Island, and sing her a few songs that I'd heard
the Jamaica niggers sing at their church lawn-parties, she didn't look
much less interested than she did when High Jack would tell her that
he had a pipe that the first inhabitants of America originally arrived
here on stilts after a freshet at Tenafly, New Jersey.
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