Part 14 (1/2)
”Scalp him!” shrieked the Boy Chief; ”this is no time for diplomatic trifling.”
”We have, but he still insists upon seeing you, and has sent in his card.”
The Boy Chief took it, and read aloud, in agonized accents:--
”Charles F. Hall Golightly, late Page in United States Senate, and Acting Commissioner of United States.”
In another moment, Golightly, pale, bleeding, and, as it were, prematurely bald, but still cold and intellectual, entered the wigwam.
They fell upon his neck and begged his forgiveness.
”Don't mention it,” he said, quietly; ”these things must and will happen under our present system of government. My story is brief.
Obtaining political influence through caucuses, I became at last Page in the Senate. Through the exertions of political friends I was appointed clerk to the commissioner whose functions I now represent.
Knowing through political spies in your own camp who you were, I acted upon the physical fears of the commissioner, who was an ex-clergyman, and easily induced him to deputize me to consult with you. In doing so, I have lost my scalp, but as the hirsute signs of juvenility have worked against my political progress I do not regret it. As a partially bald young man I shall have more power. The terms that I have to offer are simply this: you can do everything you want, go anywhere you choose, if you will only leave this place. I have a hundred thousand-dollar draft on the United States Treasury in my pocket at your immediate disposal.”
”But what's to become of me?” asked Chitterlings.
”Your case has already been under advis.e.m.e.nt. The Secretary of State, who is an intelligent man, is determined to recognize you as de jure and de facto the only loyal representative of the Patagonian government. You may safely proceed to Was.h.i.+ngton as its envoy extraordinary. I dine with the secretary next week.”
”And yourself, old fellow?”
”I only wish that twenty years from now you will recognize by your influence and votes the rights of C. F. H. Golightly to the presidency.”
And here ends our story. Trusting that my dear young friends may take whatever example or moral their respective parents and guardians may deem fittest from these pages, I hope in future years to portray further the career of those three young heroes I have already introduced in the spring-time of life to their charitable consideration.
THE MAN WHOSE YOKE WAS NOT EASY
He was a spare man, and, physically, an ill-conditioned man, but at first glance scarcely a seedy man. The indications of reduced circ.u.mstances in the male of the better cla.s.s are, I fancy, first visible in the boots and s.h.i.+rt; the boots offensively exhibiting a degree of polish inconsistent with their dilapidated condition, and the s.h.i.+rt showing an extent of ostentatious surface that is invariably fatal to the threadbare waist-coat that it partially covers. He was a pale man, and, I fancied, still paler from his black clothes.
He handed me a note.
It was from a certain physician; a man of broad culture and broader experience; a man who had devoted the greater part of his active life to the alleviation of sorrow and suffering; a man who had lived up to the n.o.ble vows of a n.o.ble profession; a man who locked in his honorable breast the secrets of a hundred families, whose face was as kindly, whose touch was as gentle, in the wards of the great public hospitals as it was beside the laced curtains of the dying Narcissa; a man who, through long contact with suffering, had acquired a universal tenderness and breadth of kindly philosophy; a man who, day and night, was at the beck and call of anguish; a man who never asked the creed, belief, moral or worldly standing of the sufferer, or even his ability to pay the few coins that enabled him (the physician) to exist and practice his calling; in brief, a man who so nearly lived up to the example of the Great Master that it seems strange I am writing of him as a doctor of medicine and not of divinity.
The note was in pencil, characteristically brief, and ran thus:--
”Here is the man I spoke of. He ought to be good material for you.”
For a moment I sat looking from the note to the man, and sounding the ”dim perilous depths” of my memory for the meaning of this mysterious communication. The good ”material,” however, soon relieved my embarra.s.sment by putting his hand on his waistcoat, coming toward me, and saying, ”It is just here, you can feel it.”
It was not necessary for me to do so. In a flash I remembered that my medical friend had told me of a certain poor patient, once a soldier, who, among his other trials and uncertainties, was afflicted with an aneurism caused by the buckle of his knapsack pressing upon the arch of the aorta. It was liable to burst at any shock or any moment. The poor fellow's yoke had indeed been too heavy.
In the presence of such a tremendous possibility I think for an instant I felt anxious only about myself. What I should do; how dispose of the body; how explain the circ.u.mstance of his taking off; how evade the ubiquitous reporter and the coroner's inquest; how a suspicion might arise that I had in some way, through negligence or for some dark purpose, unknown to the jury, precipitated the catastrophe, all flashed before me. Even the note, with its darkly suggestive offer of ”good material” for me, looked diabolically significant. What might not an intelligent lawyer make of it?
I tore it up instantly, and with feverish courtesy begged him to be seated.
”You don't care to feel it?” he asked, a little anxiously.
”No.”
”Nor see it?”