'Do me the favor to accept this, anyhow,' he said. 'The time may come when it might be of use to you.'
'Thanks!' said the young man, pocketing it carelessly. 'My name is Simmons.'
* * * * * *
Shame to him who would hint that the reader's interest shall altogether pursue the Margrave August Michael von Paulsen Quigg. I am indeed astray if my hand fail in keeping the way where my peruser's heart would follow. Then let us, on the morrow, peep quickly in at the door of Hildebrant, harness maker.
Hildebrant's 200 pounds reposed on a bench, silverbuckling a raw leather martingale.
Bill Watson came in first.
'Vell,' said Hildebrant, shaking all over with the vile conceit of the joke-maker, 'haf you guessed him? 'Vat kind of a hen lays der longest?''
'Er--why, I think so,' said Bill, rubbing a servile chin. 'I think so, Mr. Hildebrant--the one that lives the longest-- Is that right?'
'Nein!' said Hildebrant, shaking his head violently. 'You haf not guessed der answer.'
Bill passed on and donned a bed-tick apron and bachelorhood.
In came the young man of the Arabian Night's fiasco--pale, melancholy, hopeless.
'Vell,' said Hildebrant, 'haf you guessed him? 'Vat kind of a hen lays der longest?''
Simmons regarded him with dull savagery in his eye. Should he curse this mountain of pernicious humor-- curse him and die? Why should-- But there was Laura.
Dogged, speechless, he thrust his hands into his coat pockets and stood. His hand encountered the strange touch of the Margrave's card. He drew it out and looked at it, as men about to be hanged look at a crawling fly. There was written on it in Quigg's bold, round hand: 'Good for one roast chicken to bearer.'
Simmons looked up with a flashing eye.
'A dead one!' said he.
'Goot!' roared Hildebrant, rocking the table with giant glee. 'Dot is right! You gome at mine house at 8 o'clock to der party.'
There are no more Christmas stories to write. Fiction is exhausted; and newspaper items, the next best, are manufactured by clever young journalists who have married early and have an engagingly pessimistic view of life. Therefore, for seasonable diversion, we are reduced to very questionable sources--facts and philosophy. We will begin with--whichever you choose to call it.
Children are pestilential little animals with which we have to cope under a bewildering variety of conditions. Especially when childish sorrows overwhelm them are we put to our wits' end. We exhaust our paltry store of consolation; and then beat them, sobbing, to sleep. Then we grovel in the dust of a million years, and ask God why. Thus we call out of the rat-trap. As for the children, no one understands them except old maids, hunchbacks, and shepherd dogs.
Now comes the facts in the case of the Rag-Doll, the Tatterdemalion, and the Twenty-fifth of December.
On the tenth of that month the Child of the Millionaire lost her rag-doll. There were many servants in the Millionaire's palace on the Hudson, and these ransacked the house and grounds, but without finding the lost treasure. The child was a girl of five, and one of those perverse little beasts that often wound the sensibilities of wealthy parents by fixing their affections upon some vulgar, inexpensive toy instead of upon diamond-studded automobiles and pony phaetons.
The Child grieved sorely and truly, a thing inexplicable to the Millionaire, to whom the rag-doll market was about as interesting as Bay State Gas; and to the Lady, the Child's mother, who was all form--that is, nearly all, as you shall see.
The Child cried inconsolably, and grew hollow-eyed, knock-kneed, spindling, and corykilverty in many other respects. The Millionaire smiled and tapped his coffers confidently. The pick of the output of the French and German toymakers was rushed by special delivery to the mansion; but Rachel refused to be comforted. She was weeping for her rag child, and was for a high protective tariff against all foreign foolishness. Then doctors with the finest bedside manners and stop-watches were called in. One by one they chattered futilely about peptomanganate of iron and sea voyages and hypophosphites until their stop-watches showed that Bill Rendered was under the wire for show or place. Then, as men, they advised that the rag-doll be found as soon as possible and restored to its mourning parent. The Child sniffed at therapeutics, chewed a thumb, and wailed for her Betsy. And all this time cablegrams were coming from Santa Claus saying that he would soon be here and enjoining us to show a true Christian spirit and let up on the pool-rooms and tontine policies and platoon systems long enough to give him a welcome. Everywhere the spirit of Christmas was diffusing itself. The banks were refusing loans, the pawn- brokers had doubled their gang of helpers, people bumped your shins on the streets with red sleds, Thomas and Jeremiah bubbled before you on the bars while you waited on one foot, holly-wreaths of hospitality were hung in windows of the stores, they who had 'em were getting their furs. You hardly knew which was the best bet in balls--three, high, moth, or snow. It was no time at which to lose the rag-doll or your heart.
If Doctor Watson's investigating friend had been called in to solve this mysterious disappearance he might have observed on the Millionaire's wall a copy of 'The Vampire.' That would have quickly suggested, by induction, 'A rag and a bone and a hank of hair.' 'Flip,' a Scotch terrier, next to the rag-doll in the Child's heart, frisked through the halls. The hank of hair! Aha! X, the unfound quantity, represented the rag-doll. But, the bone? Well, when dogs find bones they--Done! It were an easy and a fruitful task to examine Flip's forefeet. Look, Watson! Earth--dried earth between the toes. Of course, the dog--but Sherlock was not there. Therefore it devolves. But topography and architecture must intervene.
The Millionaire's palace occupied a lordly space. In front of it was a lawn close-mowed as a South Ireland man's face two days after a shave. At one side of it, and fronting on another street was a pleasuance trimmed to a leaf, and the garage and stables. The Scotch pup had ravished the rag-doll from the nursery, dragged it to a corner of the lawn, dug a hole, and buried it after the manner of careless undertakers. There you have the mystery solved, and no checks to write for the hypodermical wizard of fi'-pun notes to toss to the sergeant. Then let's get down to the heart of the thing, tiresome readers--the Christmas heart of the thing.
