‘Tell him he can go then. Tell him he had the wrong address. That there aint nothing on the books here against him. Tell him his note was lost—if there ever was one. Tell him we had a flood, even a freeze.’
?He wont go, not without his—’
‘Turn him out. Eject him.’
‘How?’ they says. ‘He’s got the law.’
‘Oho,’ the Prince says. ‘A sawmill advocate. I see. All right,’ he says. ‘Fix it. Why bother me?’ And he set back and raised his glass and Mowed the flames offen it like he thought they was already gone. Except they wasn’t gone.
‘Fix what?’ they says.
‘His bribe!’ the Prince hollers. ‘His bribe! Didn’t you just tell me he come in here with his mouth full of law? Did you expect him to hand you a wrote-out bill for it?’
‘We tried that,’ they says. ‘He wont bribe.’
Then the Prince set up there and sneered at them, with his sharp bitter tongue and no talkback, about how likely what they thought was a bribe would be a cash discount with maybe a trip to the Legislature throwed in, and them standing there and listening and taking it because he was the Prince. Only there was one of them that had been there in the time of the Prince’s pa. He used to dandle the Prince on his knee when the Prince was a boy; he even made the Prince a little pitchfork and learned him how to use it practising on Chinees and Dagoes and Polynesians, until his arms would get strong enough to handle his share of white folks. He didn’t appreciate this and he drawed hisself up and he looked at the Prince and he says,
‘Your father made, unreproved, a greater failure. Though maybe a greater man tempted a greater man.’
‘Or you have been reproved by a lesser,’ the Prince snaps back. But he remembered them old days too, when the old fellow was smiling fond and proud on his crude youth fid inventions with BB size lava and brimstone and such, and bragging to the old Prince at night about how the boy done that day, about what he invented to do to that little Dago or Chinee that even the grown folks hadn’t thought of yet. So he apologised and got the old fellow smoothed down, and says, ‘What did you offer him?’
‘The gratifications.’
‘And——?’
‘He has them. He says that for a man that only chews, any spittoon will do:
‘And then?’
‘The vanities. ‘
‘And——?’
‘He has them. He brought a gross with him in the suitcase, specially made up for him outen asbestos, with unmeltable snaps.’
‘Then what does he want?’ the Prince hollers. ‘What does he want? Paradise?’ And the old one looks at him and at first the Prince tle s it’s because he aint forgot that sneer. But he finds out different.
‘No,’ the old one says. ‘He wants hell.’
And now for a while there aint a sound in that magnificent kingly hall hung about with the proud battle-torn smokes of the old martyrs but the sound of frying and the faint constant screams of authentic Christians. But the Prince was the same stock and blood his pa was. in a flash the sybaritic indolence and the sneers was gone; it might have been the old Prince hisself that stood there. ‘Bring him to me,’ he says. ‘Then leave us.’
So they brought him in and went away and closed the door. His clothes was still smoking a little, though soon he had done brushed most of it off. He come up to the Throne, chewing, toting the straw suitcase.
‘Well?’ the Prince says.
He turned his head and spit, the spit fiying off the floor quick in a little blue ball of smoke. ‘I come about that soul,’ he says.
‘So they tell me,’ the Prince says. ‘But you have no soul.’
‘Is that my fault?’ he says.
‘Is it?nine?’ the Prince says. ‘Do you think I created you?’
‘Then who did?’ he says. And he had the Prince there and the Prince knowed it. So the Prince set out to bribe him hisself. He named over all the temptations, the gratifications, the satieties; it sounded sweeter than music the way the Prince fetched them up in detail. But he didnt even stop chewing, standing there holding the straw suitcase. Then the Prince said, ‘Look yonder, ‘pointing at the wall, and there they was, in order and rite for him to watch, watching hisself performing them all, even the ones he hadn’t even thought about inventing to hisself yet, until they was done, the last unimaginable one. And he just turned his head and spit another scorch of tobacco onto the floor and the Prince flung back on the Throne in very exasperation and baffled rage.
‘Then what do you want?’ the Prince says. ‘What do you want? Paradise?’
‘I hadn’t figured on it,’ he says. ‘Is it yours to offer?’
‘Then whose is it?’ the Prince says. And the Prince knowed he had him there. In fact, the Prince knowed he had him all the time, ever since they had told him how he had walked in the door with his mouth already full of law; he even leaned over and rung the fire-bell so the old one could be there to see and hear how it was done, then he leaned back on the Throne and looked down at him standing there with his straw suitcase, and says, ‘You have admitted and even argued that I created you. Therefore your soul was mine all the time. And therefore
