Ladies and Gentlemen

When he got so he could hobble around he joined an organization which up until then it’d only had one other charter member in good standing, the same being Whiz Bollinger, former owner and chief mourner of that there late-lamented buckboard. It was a club with just one by-law – which was entertaining a profound distrust for Samson Goodhue, Esquire – but there were quite a good many strong rich cuss-words in the ritual.

Still, any man who devotes himself to the public welfare is bound to accumulate a few detractors as he goes along. Good Sam went booming ahead like as if there wasn’t a private enemy on his list or a cloud in his sky. He’d do this or that or the other thing always, mind you, with the highest and the purest motives and every pop it would turn out wrong. Was he discouraged? Did he throw up his hands and quit in the face of accumulating ingratitude? Not so as to be visible to the naked eye. The milk of human kindness that was sloshing about inside of him appeared to be absolutely curdle-proof. I wish I knew his private formula – I could invent a dandy patent churn.

Let’s see, now, what was his next big outstanding failure? I’m passing over the little things such as him advising Timber-Line Hance about what was the best way to encourage a boil on his neck that wouldn’t come to a head and getting the medicines mixed in his mind and recommending turpentine instead of hog-lard. I’m trying to pick out the high points in his career. Let’s see? Now I’ve got it. Along toward spring, when the thaws set in, somebody told him how Boots Darnell and Babe Louder had been hived up all winter in a shanty up on the Blue Shell with nobody to keep them company except each other, and how Babe was laid up with a busted leg and Boots couldn’t leave him except to run their traps. So nothing would do Good Sam but what he must put out to stay a couple of days with that lonesome pair and give ’em the sunshine of his presence.

They welcomed him with open arms and made him right to home in their den, such as it was. I ought to tell you before we go any further that this here Babe and this here Boots were a couple of simple-minded, kind-hearted old coots that had been baching it together for going on fifteen or twenty years. It was share and share alike with those two. Living together so long, they got so they divided their thoughts. One would know what was on the other’s mind before he said it and would finish the sentence for him. They’d actually split a word when it was a word running into extra syllables. “Well, I’ll be dad – ” Boots would say; “ – gummed,” Babe would add, signifying that they were going partners even on the dad-gumming. Their conversation would put you in mind of one of these here anthems.

They certainly were glad to see Good Sam. In honor of the occasion Boots cooked up a muskrat stew and made a batch of sour-dough biscuits for supper and Babe sat up in his bunk and told his favorite story which Boots had already heard it probably two or three million times already but carried on like he enjoyed it. They showed him their catch of pelts and, taking turn and turn about, they told him how they’d been infested all winter by a worthless stray hound-dog. It seems this hound-dog happened along one day and adopted them and he’d been with ’em ever since and he’d just naturally made their life a burden to them – getting in the way and breeding twice as many fleas as he needed for his own use and letting them have the overflow; and so on.

But they said his worst habit was his appetite. He was organized inside like a bottomless pit, so they said. If they took him along with them he’d scare all the game out of the country by chasing it but never caught any; and if they left him behind locked up in the cabin he’d eat a side of meat or a pack-saddle or something before they got back. A set of rawhide harness was just a light snack to him, they said – sort of an appetizer. And his idea of a pleasant evening was to sit on his haunches and howl two or three hours on a stretch with a mournful enthusiasm and after he did go to sleep he’d have bad dreams and howl some more without waking up, but they did. Altogether, it seemed he had more things about him that you wouldn’t care for than a relative by marriage.

They said, speaking in that overlapping way of theirs, that they’d prayed to get shut of him but didn’t have any luck. So Good Sam asked them why somebody hadn’t just up and killed him. And they hastened to state that they were both too tender-hearted for that. But if he felt called upon to take the job of being executioner off their hands, the hound being a stranger to him and he not a member of the family as was the case with them, why, they’d be most everlastingly grateful. And he said he would do that very little trick first thing in the morning.

Now, of course, the simplest and the quickest and the easiest way would have been for Good Sam to toll the pup outdoors and bore him with Boots’ old rifle. But no, that wouldn’t do. As he explained to them, he was sort of tender himself when it came to taking life, but I judge the real underlying reason was that he liked to go to all sorts of pains and complicate the machinery when he was working at being a philanthropist. Soon as supper was over he reared back to figure on a plan and all at once his eye lit on a box of dynamite setting over in a corner. During the closed season on fur those two played at being miners.

“I’ve got it now,” he told them. “I’ll take a stick of that stuff there with me and I’ll lead this cussed dog along with me and take him half a mile up the bottoms and fasten him to a tree with a piece of line. Then I’ll hitch a time-fuse onto the dynamite and tie the dynamite around his neck with another piece of rope and leave him there. Pretty soon the fuse will burn down and the dynamite will go off —kerblooie!– and thus without pain or previous misgivings that unsuspecting canine will be totally abolished. But the most beautiful part of it is that nobody – you nor me neither – will be a witness to his last moments.”

So they complimented him on being so smart and so humane at the same time and said they ought to have thought up the idea themselves only they didn’t have the intellect for it – they admitted that, too – and after he’d sopped up their praise for a while and felt all warm and satisfied, they turned in, and peace and quiet reigned in that cabin until daylight, except for some far-and-wide snoring and the dog having a severe nightmare under the stove about two-thirty A. M.

Up to a certain point the scheme worked lovely. Having established the proper connections between the dog and the tree, the fuse and the dynamite, Good Sam is gamboling along through the slush on his way back and whistling a merry tune, when all of a sudden his guiding spirit makes him look back behind him – and here comes that pup! He’s either pulled loose from the rope or else he’s eaten it up – it would be more like him to eat it. But the stick of dynamite is dangling from his neck and the fuse is spitting little sparks.

Good Sam swings around and yells at the animal to go away and he grabs up a chunk of wood and heaves it at him. But the dog thinks that’s only play and he keeps right on coming, with his tail wagging in innocent amusement and his tongue hanging out like a pink plush necktie and his eyes shining with gratefulness for the kind gentleman who’s gone to all the trouble of thinking up this new kind of game especially on his account. So then Good Sam lights out, running for the cabin, and the dog, still entering heartily into the sport, takes after him and begins gaining at every jump. It’s a close race and getting closer all the time and no matter which one of ’em finishes first it looks like a mortal cinch that neither winner nor loser is going to be here to enjoy his little triumph afterwards.

Inside the cabin Boots and Babe hear the contestants drawing nearer. Mixed in with much happy frolicsome barking is a large volume of praying and yelling and calls for help, and along with all this a noise like a steam snow-plow being driven at a high rate of speed. Boots jumps for the door but before he can jerk it open, Good Sam busts in with his little playmate streaking along not ten feet behind him, and at that instant the blast goes off and the pup loses second money, as you might say, by about two lengths.

It’s a few minutes after that when Boots and Babe reach the unanimous conclusion that they’ve been pretty near ruined by too much benevolence. Boots is propping up the front side of the cabin, the explosion having jarred it loose, and Babe is still laying where he landed against the back wall and nursing his game leg. The visiting humanitarian has gone down the ridge to get his nerves ca’mmed.

“Babe,” says Boots, “you know what it looks like to me?”

“What it looks like to us two, you mean,” says Babe.

“Sure,” says Boots; “well, it looks like to both of us that we’ve been dern near killed with kindness.”

“As regards that there pup,” says Babe, continuing the clapboarded conversation, “we complained that he was all over the place and – ”

“Now he’s all over us,” states Boots, combing a few more fine fragments of dog-hash out of his hair.

“I’d say we’ve had about enough of being helped by this here obliging well-wisher, wouldn’t you?” says Babe.

“Abso – ” says Boots.

“ – lutely!” says Babe.

“I’ve run plum out of hospi – ” says Boots.

“ – tality!” says Babe. “What we ought to do is take a gun and kill him good – ”

“ – and dead!” says Boots.

But they didn’t go that far. They make it plain to him though, when he gets back, that the welcome is all petered out and he takes the hint and pikes out for town, leaving those two still sorting what’s left of their house-keeping junk out of the wreckage.

So it went and so it kept on going. Every time Good Sam set his willing hands to lifting some unfortunate fellow citizen out of a difficulty he won himself at least one more sincere critic before he was through. Even so, as long as he stuck to retailing it wasn’t so bad. Certain parts of town he was invited to stay out of but there were other neighborhoods that he could still piroot around in without much danger of being assassinated. It was only when he branched out as a jobber that his waning popularity soured in a single hour. That was when the entire community clabbered on him, as you might say, by acclamation.

It happened this way: Other towns east and west of us were having booms, but our town, seemed like, was being left out in the cold. She wasn’t growing a particle. So some of the leading people got up a mass-meeting to decide on ways and means of putting Triple Falls on the map. One fellow would rise up and suggest doing this and another fellow would rise up and suggest doing that; but every proposition called for money and about that time money was kind of a scarce article amongst us. So far as I was concerned, it was practically extinct.

Along toward the shank of the evening Good Sam took the floor.

“Gents,” he said, “I craves your attention. There’s just one sure way of boosting a town and that’s by advertising it. Get its name in print on all the front pages over the country. Get it talked about; stir up curiosity; arouse public interest. That brings new people in and they bring their loose coinage with ’em and next thing you know you’ve got prosperity by the tail with a down-hill pull. Now, I’ve got a simple little scheme of my own. I love this fair young city of ours and I’m aiming to help her out of the kinks and I ain’t asking assistance from anybody else neither. Don’t ask me how I’m going about it because in advance it’s a secret. I ain’t telling. You just leave it to me and I’ll guarantee that inside of one week or less this’ll be the most talked-about town of its size in the whole United States; with folks swarming in here by every train – why, they’ll be running special excursions on the railroad. And it’s not going to cost a single one of you a single red cent, neither.”

Of course his past record should have been a plentiful warning. Somebody ought to have headed him off and bent a six-gun over his skull. But no, like the misguided suckers that we were, we let him go off and cook up his surprise.

I will say this: He kept his promise – he got us talked about and he brought strangers in. Inside of forty-eight hours special writers from newspapers all over the Rocky Mountains were pouring in and strangers were dropping off of through trains with pleased, expectant looks on their faces; and Father Staples was getting rush telegrams from his bishop asking how about it, and the Reverend Claypool – he was the Methodist minister – was hurrying back from conference all of a tremble, and various others who’d been away were lathering back home as fast as they could get here.

What’d happened? I’m coming to that now. All that happened was that Good Sam got the local correspondent for the press association stewed, and seduced him into sending out a dispatch that he’d written out himself, which it stated that an East Indian sun worshiper had lighted in Triple Falls and started up a revival meeting, and such was his hypnotic charm and such was the spell of his compelling fiery eloquence that almost overnight he’d converted practically the entire population – men, women, children, half-breeds, full-bloods, Chinks and Mexies – to the practice of his strange Oriental doctrines, with the result that pretty near everybody was engaged in dancing in the public street – without any clothes on!

So it was shortly after that, when cooler heads had discouraged talk of a lynching, that Good Sam left us – by request. And I haven’t seen him since.

The Native Genius pointed up the trail. Toward us came Eagle Ribs, titular head of the resident group of members of the Blackfeet Confederacy, now under special retainers by the hotel management to furnish touches of true Western color to the adjacent landscape. The chief was in civilian garb; he was eating peanut brittle from a small paper bag.

“You’ll observe that old Ribs has shucked his dance clothes,” said my friend, “which means the official morning reception is over and the latest batch of sight-seers from all points East have scattered off or something. I guess it’ll be safe for us to go back.”

We fell into step; the path was wide enough for two going abreast.

“So you never heard anything more of the Good Samaritan?” I prompted, being greedy for the last tidbitty bite of this narrative.

“Nope. I judge somebody who couldn’t appreciate his talents must have beefed him. But I’m reasonably certain he left descendants to carry on the family inheritance. One of ’em is in this vicinity now, I think.”

“You’re referring to what’s-his-name who started the second fire last night – aren’t you?” I asked.

“Not him. If he’d had a single drop of the real Good Sam blood in him his fire would be raging yet and my camp would be only a recent site.

“No, the one I’ve got in mind is the party with the saxophone. Did you get some faint feeble notion of the nature of the tune he was trying to force out of that reluctant horn of his? Well, it would be just like Good Sam’s grandson to practice up on some such an air as that – and then play it as a serenade at midnight under the window of a sick friend.”

How to Choke a Cat Without Using Butter

This writer has always contended that the ability to make a great individual fortune is not necessarily an ability based on superior intelligence – that in the case of the average multi-millionaire it merely is a sort of sublimated instinct, in a way like the instinct of a rat-terrier for smelling out hidden rats. The ordinary dull-nosed dog goes past a wainscoting and never suspects a thing; then your terrier comes along and he takes one whiff at the bottom of that baseboard and immediately starts pawing for his prey. He knows. It’s his nature to know. Yet in other regards he may be rather an uninteresting creature, one without special gifts.

And so it is with many of our outstanding dollar-wizards, or at least so it would appear to those on the outside looking in. They differ from the commonplace run of mortals only in their ken for detecting opportunities to derive dividends from quarters which we cannot discern. Peel off their financial ratings from them and they’d be as the rest of us are – or even more so.

Now Mr. E. Randall Golightly, the pressed-brick magnate, would impress you as being like that. When it came to amassing wealth – ah, but there was where he could show you something! Otherwise he offered for the inspection of an envying planet the simple-minded easy-going unimportant personality of a middle-aged gentleman who was credulous, who was diffident in smart company, who was vastly ignorant of most matters excepting such matters as pertained to his particular specialty which, as just stated, was getting rich and richer. Out in the world away from his office and his plants, he had but little to say, thus partly concealing the fact that on the grammar side at least his original education wofully had been neglected. He was quiet and self-effacing, also he was decent and he was kindly.

But when a smart young man representing Achievements came by appointment, asking for an interview on the general subject of his early struggles, Mr. Golightly became properly flattered and suddenly vocal. Achievements was a monthly magazine devoted to purveying to the masses recipes for attaining success in business, the arts, the crafts, the sciences and the professions, the theory of its editors being that the youth of the land, reading therein how such-and-such leaders attained their present prominence, would be inspired to step forth and do likewise. Deservedly it had a large national circulation. Rotarians all over the country bought it regularly and efficiency experts prescribed it for their clients as doctors prescribe medicine for ailing patients.

Mr. Golightly was no bookworm, but he knew about Achievements, as what seasoned go-getter did not? The project outlined by the caller appealed to him. It resuscitated a drowned vanity in his inner being. So willingly enough he talked, giving dates and figures, and the young scribe took notes and still more notes and then went back to his desk and wrote and wrote and wrote. He wrote to the extent of several thousand words and his pen was tipped with flaming inspiration. He had such a congenial theme, such a typical Achievementalesque topic. Lord, how he ripped off the copy!

In due time a messenger brought to Mr. Golightly sundry long printed slips of an unfamiliar aspect called “galley proofs.” Mr. Golightly read these through, making a few minor corrections. He told nothing at home regarding what was afoot; he was saving it up as a pleasant surprise for Mrs. Golightly and the two Misses Golightly. Anyhow, he had got out of the habit of telling at home what happened at the office.

One day in advance of publication date he received a copy of the issue of the magazine containing the interview with him. It was more than a mere content. Practically it dominated the number; it led everything else. And it was more than an interview. It was a character study, a eulogy for honest endeavor, a tribute to outstanding performance, an example to oncoming generations – and fully illustrated with photographs and drawings by a staff artist. It was what they called in the Achievements shop a whiz and a wow.

A happy pride, almost a boyish pride, puffed up Mr. Golightly as he walked into his thirty-thousand-a-year apartment on upper Park Avenue that afternoon after business hours. A terrible and a devastating humility deflated him an hour later when, without waiting for dinner, he escaped thence to his club, there to sit through a grief-laden evening in a secluded corner of the reading-room. Regret filled him; elsewise he had a sort of punctured look as though all joy and all hope of future joy had seeped out of his body through many invisible leaks.

As for domestic peace, future fireside comfort, agreeable life in the collective bosom, if any, of his family – ha, ha! To himself within he laughed a hollow despairing laugh. He began to understand why strong men in their prime might look favorably upon suicide as an escape from it all.

In his ears, like demoniac echoes, rang the semi-hysterical laments of his womenfolk. There was, to begin with, the poignant memory of what that outraged woman, Mrs. Golightly, had cried out:

“Wouldn’t it be just like him to disgrace us this way? I ask you, wouldn’t it?” Ignoring his abased presence she was addressing her two daughters, her deep voice rising above their berating tones. “What else could we have expected from such a father and such a husband? Does he think of us? Does he give a thought to my efforts to be somebody ever since we moved here to New York? Does he care for all my scheming to get you girls into really exclusive society? Or to get you married off into the right set? Do our ambitions mean anything to him? No, no, NO! What does he do? To gratify his own cheap cravings for notoriety he lets this shameful detestable vulgar rag expose us before the whole world. We’ll be the laughing stock of everybody. Can you hear what the Hewitt Strykers will say when they read these awful admissions?”

In her agony, the poor mother waved aloft the clutched copy of Achievements and seared him with a devastating sidewise glare. “Can’t you hear the Pewter-Walsbergs gloating and snickering when they find out that your father’s first name is Ephraim and that he used to be called ‘Eph’ for short and that he started life as a day-laborer and that then he worked at the trade of a bricklayer and that secretly all these years he’s been paying his dues in a dirty old union and carrying a dirty old union card – a thing which even I, knowing his common tastes as I did, never suspected before! But here’s a picture of it printed in facsimile to prove it!” And now she beat with a frenzied forefinger on a certain page of the offending periodical. “And then he goes on to tell how with his own hands he made some of the very bricks that went into the office-building where his office is now! And then – then – then – oh, how can I ever hold up my head again? – then he says that when we were first married we had to live on twelve dollars a week and do all our own housework and that I even used to wash out his undershirts!”

“Oh, mommer!” This was the senior Miss Golightly, bemoaning their ruin.

“And well may you say ‘Oh, mommer’ – with the invitations out for your formal début next week!”

“Oh, popper!” exclaimed the stricken Miss Golightly. In the shock of the moment she had temporarily forgotten about her scheduled début. “Oh, popper, how could you do such a thing to me!”

“And Evelyn here expecting to join the Junior League – what chance has the poor child now? How can she ever forgive you?”

“Oh, oh, oh!” screamed the younger Miss Golightly, not addressing anyone in particular.

It was at this point that Mr. Golightly had grabbed his hat and clamped it on his degraded head and fled from this house of vain and utter repinings.

Late at night he crept in, almost as a burglar might creep in, and sought the seclusion of his room, not daring again to face his three women. Early next morning before any of them had risen to intercept him with her further lamentations, he crept out again and at his office spent a haunted forenoon. Every time his telephone buzzed he flinched. And when, following lunch for which he had absolutely no appetite, the girl on the private switchboard rang to tell him Mrs. Golightly herself was on the line he flinched more than ever as he told the exchange to plug in the connection, then braced himself for the worst. If his daughters were resolved never again to speak to him, so be it. At least he would take the blow standing. If it was to be a separation, a divorce even, so be that, too. He had only himself to blame.

“Hello,” he said, wanly; and awaited the explosion.

“Oh, Ephie!” Mrs. Golightly was calling him by an old pet name – a beloved, homely name he had not heard her speak for years – and over the singing wire her voice came to him flutingly, yes, actually with affectionate flutings and thrills in it. “Oh, Ephie, you’ll never guess what has happened! Oh, Ephie, Mrs. Pewter-Walsberg just called up! You know what she stands for in society? You know how I’ve worked and schemed to get in with her crowd and how I’ve subscribed for her pet charities and offered to serve on her tiresome committees and all? Well, she just called up. She’s going to let her daughter, Millicent, be on the receiving line for Harriet’s début. She’s going to see that Evelyn gets into the Junior League right away. Her word is just law there. And she’s invited you and me to dine with them next Thursday – one of those small intimate dinners that she’s so famous for. Isn’t it wonderful? And it’s all due to you, dear, and I’m so grateful and the girls are both so grateful that I just had to ring you up to tell you.”