The Mysterious Stranger, and Other Stories
“The cat lied. There was nothing in that hole but an ass. There wasn't
a sign of a flat thing visible. It was a handsome ass, and friendly, but
just an ass, and nothing more.”
The elephant asked:
“Did you see it good and clear? Were you close to it?”
“I saw it good and clear, O Hathi, King of Beasts. I was so close that I
touched noses with it.”
“This is very strange,” said the elephant; “the cat was always truthful
before--as far as we could make out. Let another witness try. Go, Baloo,
look in the hole, and come and report.”
So the bear went. When he came back, he said:
“Both the cat and the ass have lied; there was nothing in the hole but a
bear.”
Great was the surprise and puzzlement of the animals. Each was now
anxious to make the test himself and get at the straight truth. The
elephant sent them one at a time.
First, the cow. She found nothing in the hole but a cow.
The tiger found nothing in it but a tiger.
The lion found nothing in it but a lion.
The leopard found nothing in it but a leopard.
The camel found a camel, and nothing more.
Then Hathi was wroth, and said he would have the truth, if he had to go
and fetch it himself. When he returned, he abused his whole subjectry
for liars, and was in an unappeasable fury with the moral and mental
blindness of the cat. He said that anybody but a near-sighted fool could
see that there was nothing in the hole but an elephant.
MORAL, BY THE CAT
You can find in a text whatever you bring, if you will stand between it
and the mirror of your imagination. You may not see your ears, but they
will be there.
HUNTING THE DECEITFUL TURKEY
When I was a boy my uncle and his big boys hunted with the rifle, the
youngest boy Fred and I with a shotgun--a small single-barrelled shotgun
which was properly suited to our size and strength; it was not much
heavier than a broom. We carried it turn about, half an hour at a time.
I was not able to hit anything with it, but I liked to try. Fred and
I hunted feathered small game, the others hunted deer, squirrels, wild
turkeys, and such things. My uncle and the big boys were good shots.
They killed hawks and wild geese and such like on the wing; and they
didn't wound or kill squirrels, they stunned them. When the dogs treed
a squirrel, the squirrel would scamper aloft and run out on a limb
and flatten himself along it, hoping to make himself invisible in
that way--and not quite succeeding. You could see his wee little ears
sticking up. You couldn't see his nose, but you knew where it was. Then
the hunter, despising a “rest” for his rifle, stood up and took
offhand aim at the limb and sent a bullet into it immediately under
the squirrel's nose, and down tumbled the animal, unwounded, but
unconscious; the dogs gave him a shake and he was dead. Sometimes when
the distance was great and the wind not accurately allowed for, the
bullet would hit the squirrel's head; the dogs could do as they pleased
with that one--the hunter's pride was hurt, and he wouldn't allow it to
go into the gamebag.
In the first faint gray of the dawn the stately wild turkeys would be
stalking around in great flocks, and ready to be sociable and answer
invitations to come and converse with other excursionists of their kind.
The hunter concealed himself and imitated the turkey-call by sucking
the air through the leg-bone of a turkey which had previously answered
a call like that and lived only just long enough to regret it. There is
nothing that furnishes a perfect turkey-call except that bone. Another
of Nature's treacheries, you see. She is full of them; half the time she
doesn't know which she likes best--to betray her child or protect it.
In the case of the turkey she is badly mixed: she gives it a bone to be
used in getting it into trouble, and she also furnishes it with a trick
for getting itself out of the trouble again. When a mamma-turkey answers
an invitation and finds she has made a mistake in accepting it, she does
as the mamma-partridge does--remembers a previous engagement--and goes
limping and scrambling away, pretending to be very lame; and at the same
time she is saying to her not-visible children, “Lie low, keep still,
don't expose yourselves; I shall be back as soon as I have beguiled this
shabby swindler out of the country.”
When a person is ignorant and confiding, this immoral device can
have tiresome results. I followed an ostensibly lame turkey over a
considerable part of the United States one morning, because I believed
in her and could not think she would deceive a mere boy, and one who
was trusting her and considering her honest. I had the single-barrelled
shotgun, but my idea was to catch her alive. I often got within rushing
distance of her, and then made my rush; but always, just as I made my
final plunge and put my hand down where her back had been, it wasn't
there; it was only two or three inches from there and I brushed the
tail-feathers as I landed on my stomach--a very close call, but still
not quite close enough; that is, not close enough for success, but just
close enough to convince me that I could do it next time. She always
waited for me, a little piece away, and let on to be resting and greatly
fatigued; which was a lie, but I believed it, for I still thought her
honest long after I ought to have begun to doubt her, suspecting that
this was no way for a high-minded bird to be acting. I followed, and
followed, and followed, making my periodical rushes, and getting up and
brushing the dust off, and resuming the voyage with patient confidence;
indeed, with a confidence which grew, for I could see by the change of
climate and vegetation that we were getting up into the high latitudes,
and as she always looked a little tireder and a little more discouraged
after each rush, I judged that I was safe to win, in the end, the
competition being purely a matter of staying power and the advantage
lying with me from the start because she was lame.
Along in the afternoon I began to feel fatigued myself. Neither of us
had had any rest since we first started on the excursion, which was
upwards of ten hours before, though latterly we had paused awhile after
rushes, I letting on to be thinking about something else; but neither of
us sincere, and both of us waiting for the other to call game but in no
real hurry about it, for indeed those little evanescent snatches of rest
were very grateful to the feelings of us both; it would naturally be
so, skirmishing along like that ever since dawn and not a bite in the
meantime; at least for me, though sometimes as she lay on her side
fanning herself with a wing and praying for strength to get out of this
difficulty a grasshopper happened along whose time had come, and that
was well for her, and fortunate, but I had nothing--nothing the whole
day.
More than once, after I was very tired, I gave up taking her alive, and
was going to shoot her, but I never did it, although it was my right,
for I did not believe I could hit her; and besides, she always stopped
and posed, when I raised the gun, and this made me suspicious that
she knew about me and my marksmanship, and so I did not care to expose
myself to remarks.
I did not get her, at all. When she got tired of the game at last, she
rose from almost under my hand and flew aloft with the rush and whir
of a shell and lit on the highest limb of a great tree and sat down and
crossed her legs and smiled down at me, and seemed gratified to see me
so astonished.
I was ashamed, and also lost; and it was while wandering the woods
hunting for myself that I found a deserted log cabin and had one of
the best meals there that in my life-days I have eaten. The weed-grown
garden was full of ripe tomatoes, and I ate them ravenously, though I
had never liked them before. Not more than two or three times since have
I tasted anything that was so delicious as those tomatoes. I surfeited
myself with them, and did not taste another one until I was in middle
life. I can eat them now, but I do not like the look of them. I suppose
we have all experienced a surfeit at one time or another. Once, in
stress of circumstances, I ate part of a barrel of sardines, there being
nothing else at hand, but since then I have always been able to get
along without sardines.
THE McWILLIAMSES AND THE BURGLAR ALARM
The conversation drifted smoothly and pleasantly along from weather
to crops, from crops to literature, from literature to scandal, from
scandal to religion; then took a random jump, and landed on the subject
of burglar alarms. And now for the first time Mr. McWilliams showed
feeling. Whenever I perceive this sign on this man's dial, I comprehend
it, and lapse into silence, and give him opportunity to unload his
heart. Said he, with but ill-controlled emotion:
“I do not go one single cent on burglar alarms, Mr. Twain--not a single
cent--and I will tell you why. When we were finishing our house, we
found we had a little cash left over, on account of the plumber not
knowing it. I was for enlightening the heathen with it, for I was always
unaccountably down on the heathen somehow; but Mrs. McWilliams said no,
let's have a burglar alarm. I agreed to this compromise. I will explain
that whenever I want a thing, and Mrs. McWilliams wants another thing,
and we decide upon the thing that Mrs. McWilliams wants--as we always
do--she calls that a compromise. Very well: the man came up from New
York and put in the alarm, and charged three hundred and twenty-five
dollars for it, and said we could sleep without uneasiness now. So we
did for awhile--say a month. Then one night we smelled smoke, and I
was advised to get up and see what the matter was. I lit a candle, and
started toward the stairs, and met a burglar coming out of a room with
a basket of tinware, which he had mistaken for solid silver in the dark.
He was smoking a pipe. I said, 'My friend, we do not allow smoking in
this room.' He said he was a stranger, and could not be expected to know
the rules of the house: said he had been in many houses just as good as
this one, and it had never been objected to before. He added that as far
as his experience went, such rules had never been considered to apply to
burglars, anyway.
“I said: 'Smoke along, then, if it is the custom, though I think that
the conceding of a privilege to a burglar which is denied to a bishop is
a conspicuous sign of the looseness of the times. But waiving all that,
what business have you to be entering this house in this furtive and
clandestine way, without ringing the burglar alarm?'
“He looked confused and ashamed, and said, with embarrassment: 'I beg a
thousand pardons. I did not know you had a burglar alarm, else I would
have rung it. I beg you will not mention it where my parents may hear of
it, for they are old and feeble, and such a seemingly wanton breach of
the hallowed conventionalities of our Christian civilization might all
too rudely sunder the frail bridge which hangs darkling between the pale
and evanescent present and the solemn great deeps of the eternities. May
I trouble you for a match?'
“I said: 'Your sentiments do you honor, but if you will allow me to say
it, metaphor is not your best hold. Spare your thigh; this kind light
only on the box, and seldom there, in fact, if my experience may be
trusted. But to return to business: how did you get in here?'
“'Through a second-story window.'
“It was even so. I redeemed the tinware at pawnbroker's rates, less cost
of advertising, bade the burglar good-night, closed the window after
him, and retired to headquarters to report. Next morning we sent for
the burglar-alarm man, and he came up and explained that the reason the