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Page 56
'We've got a board-bill due in town, and you're leaving me without a
cent. Brace up and cut out the Neapolitan fisher-maiden, and let's go
back home.'
"But on the two goes; without looking once back until, as you might
say, the forest swallowed 'em up. And I never saw or heard of High
Jack Snakefeeder from that day to this. I don't know if the Cherokees
came from the Aspics; but if they did, one of 'em went back.
"All I could do was to hustle back to that Boca place and panhandle
Major Bing. He detached himself from enough of his winnings to buy me
a ticket home. And I'm back again on the job at Chubb's, sir, and I'm
going to hold it steady. Come round, and you'll find the steaks as
good as ever."
I wondered what Hunky Magee thought about his own story; so I asked
him if he had any theories about reincarnation and transmogrification
and such mysteries as he had touched upon.
"Nothing like that," said Hunky, positively. "What ailed High Jack
was too much booze and education. They'll do an Indian up every
time."
"But what about Miss Blue Feather?" I persisted.
"Say," said Hunky, with a grin, "that little lady that stole High Jack
certainly did give me a jar when I first took a look at her, but it
was only for a minute. You remember I told you High Jack said that
Miss Florence Blue Feather disappeared from home about a year ago?
Well, where she landed four days later was in as neat a five-room flat
on East Twenty-third Street as you ever walked sideways through--and
she's been Mrs. Magee ever since."
THE MOMENT OF VICTORY
Ben Granger is a war veteran aged twenty-nine--which should enable you
to guess the war. He is also principal merchant and postmaster of
Cadiz, a little town over which the breezes from the Gulf of Mexico
perpetually blow.
Ben helped to hurl the Don from his stronghold in the Greater
Antilles; and then, hiking across half the world, he marched as a
corporal-usher up and down the blazing tropic aisles of the open-air
college in which the Filipino was schooled. Now, with his bayonet
beaten into a cheese-slicer, he rallies his corporal's guard of
cronies in the shade of his well-whittled porch, instead of in the
matted jungles of Mindanao. Always have his interest and choice been
for deeds rather than for words; but the consideration and digestion
of motives is not beyond him, as this story, which is his, will
attest.
"What is it," he asked me one moonlit eve, as we sat among his boxes
and barrels, "that generally makes men go through dangers, and fire,
and trouble, and starvation, and battle, and such rucouses? What does
a man do it for? Why does he try to outdo his fellow-humans, and be
braver and stronger and more daring and showy than even his best
friends are? What's his game? What does he expect to get out of it?
He don't do it just for the fresh air and exercise. What would you
say, now, Bill, that an ordinary man expects, generally speaking, for
his efforts along the line of ambition and extraordinary hustling in
the marketplaces, forums, shooting-galleries, lyceums, battle-fields,
links, cinder-paths, and arenas of the civilized and vice versa places
of the world?"
"Well, Ben," said I, with judicial seriousness, "I think we might
safely limit the number of motives of a man who seeks fame to three-to
ambition, which is a desire for popular applause; to avarice, which
looks to the material side of success; and to love of some woman whom
he either possesses or desires to possess."
Ben pondered over my words while a mocking-bird on the top of a
mesquite by the porch trilled a dozen bars.
"I reckon," said he, "that your diagnosis about covers the case
according to the rules laid down in the copy-books and historical
readers. But what I had in my mind was the case of Willie Robbins, a
person I used to know. I'll tell you about him before I close up the
store, if you don't mind listening.
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