Aladdin & Co.: A Romance of Yankee Magic
must confess," said I, "that I'm a little hazy on the galleon question
yet. As to piracy, now, and robbers and robbery, actual life fills out
the gaps in the imagination of boyhood, doesn't it, Jim?"
"Apt to," he assented, "but specifically? As to which, you know?"
"Well, I've had my share of experience with them," I answered, "though
not so much in the line of rob-or, as we planned, but more as rob-ee."
Jim looked at me quizzically.
"Board of Trade, faro, or ... what?" he ventured.
"General business," I responded, "and ... politics."
"Local, state, or national?" he went on, craftily ignoring the general
business.
"A little national, some state, but the bulk of it local. I've been
elected County Treasurer, down where I live, for four successive terms."
"Good for you!" he responded. "But I don't see how that can be made to
harmonize with your remark about rob-or and rob-ee. It's been your own
fault, if you haven't been on the profitable side of the game, with the
dear people on the other. And I judge from your looks that you eat three
meals a day, right along, anyhow. Come, now, b'lay this rob-ee business
(as Sir Henry Morgan used to say) till you get back to Buncombe County.
As a former partner in crime, I won't squeal; and the next election is
some ways off, anyhow. No concealment among pals, now, Al, it's no fair,
you know, and it destroys confidence and breeds discord. Many a good,
honest, piratical enterprise has been busted up by concealment and lack
of confidence. Always trust your fellow pirates,--especially in things
they know all about by extrinsic evidence,--and keep concealment for the
great world of the unsophisticated and gullible, and to catch the
sucker vote with. But among ourselves, my beloved, fidelity to truth,
and openness of heart is the first rule, right out of Hoyle. With dry
powder, mutual confidence, and sharp cutlasses, we are invincible; and
as the poet saith,
"'Far as the tum-te-tum the billows foam
Survey our empire and behold our home,'
or words to that effect. And to think of your trying to deceive me, your
former chieftain, who doesn't even vote in your county or state, and
moreover always forgets election! Rob-ee indeed! rats! Al, I'm ashamed
of you, by George, I am!"
This speech he delivered with a ridiculous imitation of the tricks of
the elocutionist. It was worthy of the burlesque stage. The conductor,
passing through, was attracted by it, and notified us that the solitude
of the smoking-room had been invaded, by a slight burst of applause at
Jim's peroration, followed by the vanishing of the audience.
"No need for any further concealment on my part, so far as elections are
concerned," said I, when we had finished our laugh, "for I go out of
office January first, next."
"Oh, well, that accounts for it, then," said he. "I notice, say, three
kinds of retirement from office: voluntary (very rare), post-convention,
and post-election. Which is yours?"
"Post-convention, I'm sorry to say. I wish it had been voluntary."
"It _is_ the cheapest; but you're in great luck not to get licked at the
polls. Altogether, you're in great luck. You've been betting on a game
in which the percentage is mighty big in favor of the house, and you've
won three or four consecutive turns out of the box. You've got no kick
coming: you're in big luck. Don't you know you are?"
I did not feel called upon to commit myself; and we smoked on for some
time in silence.
"It strikes me, Jim," said I, at last, "that you've done all the
cross-examination, and that it is time to listen to your report. How
about you and your conduct?"
"As for my conduct," was the prompt answer, "it's away up in the
neighborhood of G. I've managed to hold the confounded world up for a
living, ever since I left Pleasant Valley Township. Some of the time the
picking has been better than at others; but my periods of starvation
have been brief. By practicing on the 'Veterinarians' Guide' and other
similar fakes, I learned how to talk to people so as to make them
believe what I said about things, with the result, usually, of wooing
the shrinking and cloistered dollar from its lair. When a fellow gets
this trick down fine, he can always find a market for his services. I
handled hotel registers, city directories, and like literature,
including county histories--"
"Sh-h-h!" said I, "somebody might hear you."
"--and at last, after a conference with my present employers, the error
of my way presented itself to me, and I felt called to a higher and
holier profession. I yielded to my good angel, turned my better nature
loose, and became a missionary."
"A what!" I exclaimed.
"A missionary," he responded soberly. "That is, you understand, not one
of these theological, India's-coral-strand guys; but one who goes about
the United States of America in a modest and unassuming way, doing good
so far as in him lies."
"I see," said I, punning horribly, "'in him lies.'"
"Eh?... Yes. Have another cigar. Well, now, you can't defend this
foreign-mission business to me for a minute. The hills, right in this
vicinity, are even now white to the harvest. Folks here want the light
just as bad as the foreign heathen; and so I took up my burden, and went
out to disseminate truth, as the soliciting agent of the Frugality and
Indemnity Life Association, which presented itself to me as the capacity
in which I could best combine repentance with its fruits."
"I perceive," said I.
"Perfectly plain, isn't it, to the seeing eye?" he went on. "You see it
was like this: Charley Harper and I had been together in the Garden City
Land Company, years ago, during the boom--by the way, I didn't mention
that in my report, did I? Well, of course, that company went up just as
they all did, and neither Charley nor I got to be receiver, as we'd sort
of laid out to do, and we separated. I went back to my literature--hotel
registers, with an advertising scheme, with headquarters at Cleveland.
That's how I happened to be an Ohio man at that national convention.
Charley always had a leaning toward insurance, and went down into
Illinois, and started a mutual-benefit organization, which he kept
going a few years down on the farm--Springfield, or Jacksonville, or
somewhere down there; and when I ketched up with him again, he was just
changing it to the old-line plan, and bringing it to the metropolis.
Well, I helped him some to enlist capital, and he offered me the
position of Superintendent of Agents. I accepted, and after serving
awhile in the ranks to sort of get onto the ropes, here I am, just
starting out on a trip which will take me through a number of states."
"How does it agree with you?" I inquired.
"Not well," said he, "but the good I accomplish is a great comfort to
me. On this trip, now, I expect to do much in the way of stimulating the
boys up to their great work of spreading the light of the gospel of true
insurance. Sometimes, in these days of apathy and error, I find my
burden a heavy one; and notwithstanding the quiet of conscience I gain,
if it weren't for the salary, I'd quit to-morrow, Al, danged if I
wouldn't. It makes me tired to have even you sort of hint that I'm
actuated by some selfish motive, when, in truth and in fact, I live but
to gather widows and orphans under my wing, so to speak, and give second
husbands a good start, by means of policies written on the only true
plan, combining participation in profits with pure mutuality, and--"
"Never mind!" said I with a silence-commanding gesture. "I've heard all
that before. You're onto the ropes thoroughly; but don't practice your
infernal arts on me! I hope the salary is satisfactory?"
"Fairish; but not high, considering what they get for it."
"You used to be more modest," said I. "I remember that you once nearly
broke your heart because you couldn't summon up courage to ask Creeshy
Hammond to go to the 'Fourth' with you; d'ye remember?"
"Well, I guess, yes!" he replied. "Wasn't I a miserable wretch for a few
days! And I've never been able to ask any woman I cared about, the
fateful question, yet."
We went into the parlor-car, and talked over old times and new for an
hour. I told him of my marriage and my home, and I studied him. I saw
that he still preserved his humorous, mock-serious style of
conversation, and that his hand-to-hand battle with the world had made
him good-humoredly cynical. He evinced a knowledge of more things than I
should have expected; and had somehow acquired an imposing manner, in
spite of his rather slangy, if expressive, vocabulary. He had the power
of making statements of mere opinion, which, from some vibration of
voice or trick of expression, struck the hearer as solid facts, thrice
buttressed by evidence. He bore no marks of dissipation, unless the
occasional use of terms traceable to the turf or the gaming-table might
be considered such; but these expressions, I considered, are so
constantly before every reader of the newspapers that the language of
the pulpit, even, is infected by them. Their evidential value being thus
destroyed, they ought not to be weighed at all, as against firm,
wholesome flesh, a good complexion, and a clear eye, all of which Mr.
Elkins possessed.
"It's funny," said I, "how seldom I meet any of the old neighbor-boys.
Do you see any of them in your travels?"
"Not often," he answered, "but you remember little Ed Smith, who lived
on the Hayes place for a while, and brought the streaked snake into the
schoolhouse while Julia Fanning was teaching? Well, he was an architect
at Garden City, and lives in Chicago now. We sort of chum together: saw
him yesterday. He left Garden City when the land company went up. I tell
you, that was a hot town for a while! Railroads, and factories, and
irrigation schemes, and prices scooting toward the zenith, till you
couldn't rest. If I'd got into that push soon enough, I shouldn't have
made a thing but money; as it was, I didn't lose only what I had. A good
many of the boys lost a lot more. But I tell you, Al, a boom properly
boomed is a sure thing."
"You're a constant source of surprise to me, Jim," said I. "I should
have thought them sure to lose."
"They're sure to win," said he earnestly.
I demurred. "I don't see how that can possibly be," said I, "for of all
things, booms seem to me the most fickle and incalculable."
"They seem so," said he, smiling, but still in earnest, "to your rustic
and untaught mind, and to most others, because they haven't been
studied. The comet, likewise, doesn't seem very stable or dependable;
but to the eye of the astronomer its orbit is plain, and the time of its
return engagement pretty certain. It's the same with seventeen-year
locusts--and booms; their visits are so far apart that the masses forget
their birthmarks and the W's on their backs. But if you'll follow their
appearances from place to place, as I've done, putting up my ante right
along for the privilege, you'll become an accomplished boomist; and from
the first gentle stirrings of boom-sprouts in the soil, so to speak, you
can forecast their growth, maturity, and collapse."
"I must be permitted to doubt it," said I.
"It's easy, my son," he resumed, "dead easy, and it's psychology on the
hugest scale; and among the results of its study is constant improvement
of the mind, going on coincidentally with the preparation of the way to
the ownership of steam-yachts and racing-stables, or any other similar
trifles you hanker for."
"Great brain, Jim! Massive intellect!" said I, laughing at the fantastic
absurdity of his assertion. "Why, such knowledge as you possess is
better than straight tips on all the races ever to be run. It's better
than our tropical island and Spanish galleons. You get richer, and you