Part 28 (2/2)
”He pulled the new gun out and patted it tenderly in the sight of old Timmins. 'Ain't it a cunning little implement?' he says; 'I tried it out coming up this afternoon. I could split a hair with it as far, say, as from that clump of buck-brush over to your barn. And by the way, Mr.
Timmins,' he says, 'I got some more stuff for you here from the Square Deal Grocery--stuff all gummed up with postage stamps.' He leans his new toy against the seat and dumps out a sack of flour and a sack of dried fruit and one or two other things. 'This parcels post is a grand thing, ain't it?' says he.
”'Well--yes and no, now that you speak of it,' says old Safety First.
'The fact is I'm kind of prejudiced against it; I ain't going to have things come to me any more all stuck over with them trifling little postage stamps. It don't look dignified.' 'No?' says Harvey. 'No,' says Safety First in a firm tone. 'I won't ever have another single thing come by mail if I can help it.' 'I bet you're superst.i.tious,' says Harvey, climbing back to his seat and petting the new gun again. 'I bet you're so superst.i.tious you'd take this here s.h.i.+ny new implement off my hands at cost if I hinted I'd part with it.' 'I almost believe I would,'
says Safety First. 'Well, it don't seem like I'd have much use for it after all,' says Harvey. 'Of course I can always get a new one if my fancy happens to run that way again.'
”So old Safety First buys a new loaded rifle that he ain't got a use on earth for. It would of looked to outsiders like he was throwing his money away on fripperies, but he knew it was a prime necessity of life all right. The parcels post ain't done him a bit of good since, though I send him marked pieces in the papers every now and then telling how the postmaster general thinks it's a great boon to the ultimate consumer.
And I mustn't forget to send Harvey six bits for them three packages that come to-night. That's what we do. Otherwise, him being morose and turbulent, he'd get a new gun and make ultimate consumers out of all of us. Darned ultimate! I reckon we got a glorious Government, like candidates always tell us, but a postmaster general that expected stage drivers to do three times the hauling they had been doing with no extra pay wouldn't last long out at the tail of an ... route. There'd be pieces in the paper telling about how he rose to prominence from the time he got a lot of delegates sewed up for the people's choice and how his place will be hard to fill. It certainly would be hard to fill out here. Old Timmins, for one, would turn a deaf ear to his country's call.”
Lew Wee having now cleared the table of all but coffee, we lingered for a leisurely overhauling of the mail sack. Ma Pettengill slit envelopes and read letters to an accompanying rumble of protest. She several times wished to know what certain parties took her for--and they'd be fooled if they did; and now and again she dwelt upon the insoluble mystery of her not being in the poorhouse at that moment; yes, and she'd of been there long ago if she had let these parties run her business like they thought they could. But what could a lone defenceless woman expect?
She'd show them, though! Been showing 'em for thirty years now, and still had her health, hadn't she?
Letters and bills were at last neatly stacked and the poor weak woman fell upon the newspapers. The Red Gap Recorder was shorn of its wrapper.
Being first a woman she turned to the fourth page to flash a practised eye over that department which is headed ”Life's Stages--At the Altar--In the Cradle!--To the Tomb.” Having gleaned recent vital statistics she turned next to the column carrying the market quotations on beef cattle, for after being a woman she is a rancher. Prices for that day must have pleased her immensely for she grudgingly mumbled that they were less ruinous than she had expected. In the elation of which this admission was a sign she next refreshed me with various personal items from a column headed ”Social Gleanings--by Madame On Dit.”
I learned that at the last regular meeting of the Ladies' Friday Afternoon Shakespeare Club, Mrs. Dr. Percy Hailey Martingale had read a paper ent.i.tled ”My Trip to the Panama-Pacific Exposition,” after which a dainty collation was served by mine hostess Mrs. Judge Ballard; that Miss Beryl Mae Macomber, the well-known young society heiress, was visiting friends in Spokane where rumour hath it that she would take a course of lessons in elocution; and that Mrs. Cora Hartwick Wales, prominent society matron and leader of the ultra smart set of Price's Addition, had on Thursday afternoon at her charming new bungalow, corner of Bella Vista Street and Prospect Avenue, entertained a number of her inmates at tea. Ma Pettengill and I here quickly agreed that the proofreading on the Recorder was not all it should be. Then she unctuously read me a longer item from another column which was signed ”The Lounger in the Lobby”:
”Mr. Benjamin P. Sutton, the wealthy capitalist of Nome, Alaska, and a prince of good fellows, is again in our midst for his annual visit to His Honour Alonzo Price, Red Gap's present mayor, of whom he is an old-time friend and a.s.sociate. Mr. Sutton, who is the picture of health, brings glowing reports from the North and is firm in his belief that Alaska will at no distant day become the garden spot of the world. In the course of a brief interview he confided to ye scribe that on his present trip to the outside he would not again revisit his birthplace, the city of New York, as he did last year. 'Once was enough, for many reasons,' said Mr. Sutton grimly. 'They call it ”Little old New York,”
but it isn't little and it isn't old. It's big and it's new--we have older buildings right in Nome than any you can find on Broadway. Since my brief sojourn there last year I have decided that our people before going to New York should see America first.”
”Now what do you think of that?” demanded the lady. I said I would be able to think little of it unless I were told the precise reasons for this rather brutal abuse of a great city. What, indeed, were the ”many reasons” that Mr. Sutton had grimly not confided to ye scribe?
Ma Pettengill chuckled and reread parts of the indictment. Thereafter she again chuckled fluently and uttered broken phrases to herself.
”Horse-car” was one; ”the only born New Yorker alive” was another. It became necessary for me to remind the woman that a guest was present. I did this by s.h.i.+fting my chair to face the stone fireplace in which a pine chunk glowed, and by coughing in a delicate and expectant manner.
”Poor Ben!” she murmured--”going all the day down there just to get one romantic look at his old home after being gone twenty-five years. I don't blame him for talking rough about the town, nor for his criminal act--stealing a street-car track.”
It sounded piquant--a n.o.ble theft indeed! I now murmured a bit myself, striving to convey an active incredulity that yet might be vanquished by facts. The lady quite ignored this, diverging to her own opinion of New York. She tore the wrapper from a Sunday issue of a famous metropolitan daily and flaunted its comic supplement at me. ”That's how I always think of New York,” said she--”a kind of a comic supplement to the rest of this great country. Here--see these two comical little tots standing on their uncle's stomach and chopping his heart out with their axes--after you got the town sized up it's just that funny and horrible.
It's like the music I heard that time at a higher concert I was drug to in Boston--ingenious but unpleasant.”
But this was not what I would sit up for after a hard day's fis.h.i.+ng--this coa.r.s.e disparagement of something the poor creature was unfitted to comprehend.
”Ben Sutton,” I remarked firmly.
”The inhabitants of New York are divided fifty-fifty between them that are trying to get what you got and them that think you're trying to get what they got.”
”Ben Sutton,” I repeated, trying to make it sullen.
”Ask a man on the street in New York where such and such a building is and he'll edge out of reaching distance, with his hand on his watch, before he tells you he don't know. In Denver, or San Francisco now, the man will most likely walk a block or two with you just to make sure you get the directions right.”
”Ben Sutton!”
”They'll fall for raw stuff, though. I know a slick mining promoter from Arizona that stops at the biggest hotel on Fifth Avenue and has himself paged by the boys about twenty times a day so folks will know how important he is. He'll get up from his table in the restaurant and follow the boy out in a way to make 'em think that nine million dollars is at stake. He tells me it helps him a lot in landing the wise ones.”
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