and put up a poor mouth and walk right into his heart with his boots on.'
'It must try your patience pretty sharply sometimes.'
'Oh, no, I'm used to it; and I'd rather have him so than the other way. When I call him a failure, I mean to the world he's a failure; he isn't to me. I don't know as I want him different much different, anyway. I have to scold him some, snarl at him, you might even call it, but I reckon I'd do that just the same, if he was different—it's my make. But I'm a good deal less snarly and more contented when he's a failure than I am when he isn't.'
'Then he isn't always a failure,' said Hawking, brightening.
'Him? Oh, bless you, no. He makes a strike, as he calls it, from time to time. Then's my time to fret and fuss. For the money just flies—first come first served. Straight off, he loads up the house with cripples and idiots and stray cats and all the different kinds of poor wrecks that other people don't want and he does, and then when the poverty comes again I've got to clear the most of them out or we'd starve; and that distresses him, and me the same, of course.
'Here's old Dan'l and old Jinny, that the sheriff sold south one of the times that we got bankrupted before the war—they came wandering back after the peace, worn out and used up on the cotton plantations, helpless, and not another lick of work left in their old hides for the rest of this earthly pilgrimage—and we so pinched, oh so pinched for the very crumbs to keep life in us, and he just flung the door wide, and the way he received them you'd have thought they had come straight down from heaven in answer to prayer. I took him one side and said, 'Mulberry we can't have them—we've nothing for ourselves—we can't feed them.' He looked at me kind of hurt, and said, 'Turn them out?—and they've come to me just as confident and trusting as—as—why Polly, I must have bought that confidence sometime or other a long time ago, and given my note, so to speak—you don't get such things as a gift—and how am I going to go back on a debt like that? And you see, they're so poor, and old, and friendless, and —' But I was ashamed by that time, and shut him off, and somehow felt a new courage in me, and so I said, softly, 'We'll keep them—the Lord will provide.' He was glad, and started to blurt out one of those over-confident speeches of his, but checked himself in time, and said humbly, 'I will, anyway.' It was years and years and years ago. Well, you see those old wrecks are here yet.'
'But don't they do your housework?'
'Laws! The idea. They would if they could, poor old things, and perhaps they think they do do some of it. But it's a superstition. Dan'l waits on the front door, and sometimes goes on an errand; and sometimes you'll see one or both of them letting on to dust around in here—but that's because there's something they want to hear about and mix their gabble into. And they're always around at meals, for the same reason. But the fact is, we have to keep a young negro girl just to take care of them, and a negro woman to do the housework and help take care of them.'
'Well, they ought to be tolerably happy, I should think.'
'It's no name for it. They quarrel together pretty much all the time—most always about religion, because Dan'l's a Dunker Baptist and Jinny's a shouting Methodist, and Jinny believes in special Providences and Dan'l don't, because he thinks he's a kind of a free-thinker—and they play and sing plantation hymns together, and talk and chatter just eternally and forever, and are sincerely fond of each other and think the world of Mulberry, and he puts up patiently with all their spoiled ways and foolishness, and so—ah, well, they're happy enough if it comes to that. And I don't mind—I've got used to it. I can get used to anything, with Mulberry to help; and the fact is, I don't much care what happens, so long as he's spared to me.'
'Well, here's to him, and hoping he'll make another strike soon.'
'And rake in the lame, the halt and the blind, and turn the house into a hospital again? It's what he would do. I've seen aplenty of that and more. No, Washington, I want his strikes to be mighty moderate ones the rest of the way down the vale.'
'Well, then, big strike or little strike, or no strike at all, here's hoping he'll never lack for friends—and I don't reckon he ever will while there's people around who know enough to—'
'Him lack for friends!' and she tilted her head up with a frank pride—'why, Washington, you can't name a man that's anybody that isn't fond of him. I'll tell you privately, that I've had Satan's own time to keep them from appointing him to some office or other. They knew he'd no business with an office, just as well as I did, but he's the hardest man to refuse anything to, a body ever saw. Mulberry Sellers with an office! laws goodness, you know what that would be like. Why, they'd come from the ends of the earth to see a circus like that. I'd just as lieves be married to Niagara Falls, and done with it.' After a reflective pause she added—having wandered back, in the interval, to the remark that had been her text: 'Friends?—oh, indeed, no man ever had more; and such friends: Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Johnston, Longstreet, Lee—many's the time they've sat in that chair you're sitting in—' Hawkins was out of it instantly, and contemplating it with a reverential surprise, and with the awed sense of having trodden shod upon holy ground—
'They!' he said.
'Oh, indeed, yes, a many and a many a time.'
He continued to gaze at the chair fascinated, magnetized; and for once in his life that continental stretch of dry prairie which stood for his imagination was afire, and across it was marching a slanting flamefront that joined its wide horizons together and smothered the skies with smoke. He was experiencing what one or another drowsing, geographically ignorant alien experiences every day in the year when he turns a dull and indifferent eye out of the car window and it falls upon a certain station-sign which reads 'Stratford-on-Avon!' Mrs. Sellers went gossiping comfortably along:
'Oh, they like to hear him talk, especially if their load is getting rather heavy on one shoulder and they want to shift it. He's all air, you know,—breeze, you may say—and he freshens them up; it's a trip to the country, they say. Many a time he's made General Grant laugh—and that's a tidy job, I can tell you, and as for Sheridan, his eye lights up and he listens to Mulberry Sellers the same as if he was artillery. You see, the charm about Mulberry is, he is so catholic and unprejudiced that he fits in anywhere and everywhere. It makes him powerful good company, and as popular as scandal. You go to the White House when the President's holding a general reception—sometime when Mulberry's there. Why, dear me, you can't tell which of them it is that's holding that reception.'
'Well, he certainly is a remarkable man—and he always was. Is he religious?'
'Clear to his marrow—does more thinking and reading on that subject than any other except Russia and Siberia: thrashes around over the whole field, too; nothing bigoted about him.'
'What is his religion?'
'He—' She stopped, and was lost for a moment or two in thinking, then she said, with simplicity, 'I think he was a Mohammedan or something last week.'
Washington started down town, now, to bring his trunk, for the hospitable Sellerses would listen to no excuses; their house must be his home during the session. The Colonel returned presently and resumed work upon his plaything. It was finished when Washington got back.
'There it is,' said the Colonel, 'all finished.'
'What is it for, Colonel?'
'Oh, it's just a trifle. Toy to amuse the children.'
Washington examined it.
'It seems to be a puzzle.'
'Yes, that's what it is. I call it Pigs in the Clover. Put them in—see if you can put them in the pen.'
After many failures Washington succeeded, and was as pleased as a child.
'It's wonderfully ingenious, Colonel, it's ever so clever and interesting—why, I could play with it all day. What are you going to do with it?'
'Oh, nothing. Patent it and throw it aside.'
'Don't you do anything of the kind. There's money in that thing.'
A compassionate look traveled over the Colonel's countenance, and he said:
'Money—yes; pin money: a couple of hundred thousand, perhaps. Not more.'
Washington's eyes blazed.
'A couple of hundred thousand dollars! do you call that pin money?'
The colonel rose and tip-toed his way across the room, closed a door that was slightly ajar, tip-toed his way to his seat again, and said, under his breath:
'You can keep a secret?'
