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XV
"And Yet a Fool"

The exchanges that come to a country newspaper like ours become familiar friends as the years pass. One who reads these papers regularly comes to know them even in their wrappers, though to an unpracticed eye the wrappers seem much alike. But when he has been poking his thumb through the paper husks in a certain pile every morning for a score of years, he knows by some sort of prescience when a new paper appears; and, when the pile looks odd to him, he goes hunting for the stranger and is not happy until he has found it.

One morning this spring the stranger stuck its head from the bottom of the exchange pile, and when we had glanced at the handwriting of the address and at the one-cent stamp on the cover we knew it had been mailed to us by someone besides the publisher. For the newspaper "hand" is as definite a form of writing as the legal hand or the doctor's. The paper proved to be an Arizona newspaper full of saloon advertising, restaurant cards, church and school meeting notices, local items about the sawmill and the woman's club, land notices and paid items from wool dealers. On the local page in the midst of a circle of red ink was the announcement of the death of Horace P. Sampson. Every month we get notices like this, of the deaths of old settlers who have gone to the ends of the earth, but this notice was peculiar in that it said:

"One year ago our lamented townsman deposited with the firm of Cross & Kurtz, the popular undertakers and dealers in Indian goods and general merchandise, $100 to cover his funeral expenses, and another hundred to provide that a huge boulder be rolled over his grave on which he desired the following unusual inscription: 'Horace P. Sampson, Born Dec. 6, 1840, and died –." And is not this a rare fellow, my lord? He's good at anything and yet a fool."'"

We handed the paper to Alphabetical Morrison, who happened to be in the office at the time, pawing through the discarded exchanges in the waste-basket, looking for his New York Sun, and, after Colonel Morrison had read the item, he began drumming with his finger-nails on the chair-seat between his knees. His eyes were full of dreams and no one disturbed him as he looked off into space. Finally he sighed:

"And yet a fool—a motley fool! Poor old Samp—kept it up to the end! I take it from the guarded way the paper refers to his faults, 'as who of us have not,' that he died of the tremens or something like that." The Colonel paused and smiled just perceptibly, and went on: "Yet I see that he was a good fellow to the end. I notice that the Shriners and the Elks and the Eagles and the Hoo-hoos buried him. Nary an insurance order in his! Poor old Samp; he certainly went all the gaits!"

We suggested that Colonel Morrison write something about the deceased for the paper, but though the Colonel admitted that he knew Sampson "like a book," there was no persuading Morrison to write the obituary.

"After some urging and by way of compromise," he said, "I'm perfectly willing to give you fellows the facts and let you fix up what you please."

Because the reporters were both busy we called the stenographer, and had the Colonel's story taken down as he told it—to be rewritten into an obituary later. And it is what he said and not what we printed about Sampson that is worth putting down here. The Colonel took the big leather chair, locked his hands behind his head, and began:

"Let me see. Samp was born, as he says, December 6, 1840, in Wisconsin, and came out to Kansas right after the war closed. He was going to college up there, and at the second call for troops he led the whole senior class into forming a company, and enlisted before graduation and fought from that time on till the close of the war. He was a captain, I think, but you never heard him called that. When he came here he'd been admitted to the bar and was a good lawyer—a mighty good lawyer for that time—and had more business 'n a bird pup with a gum-shoe. He was just a boy then, and, like all boys, he enjoyed a good time. He drank more or less in the army—they all did 's far as that goes—but he kept it up in a desultory way after he came here, as a sort of accessory to his main business of life, which was being a good fellow.

"And he was a good fellow—an awful good fellow. We were all young then; there wasn't an old man on the town-site as I remember it. We use to load up the whole bunch and go hunting—closing up the stores and taking the girls along—and did not show up till midnight. Samp would always have a little something to take under his buggy-seat, and we would wet up and sing coming home, with the beds of the spring-wagons so full of prairie chickens and quail that they jolted out at every rut. Samp would always lead the singing—being just a mite more lubricated than the rest of us, and the girls thought he was all hunkey dorey—as they used to say.

"He made a lot of money and blew it in"

"He made a lot of money and blew it in at Jim Thomas's saloon, buying drinks, playing stud poker, betting on quarter horses, and lending it out to fellows who helped him forget they'd borrowed it. And—say in two or three years, after the chicken-hunting set had married off, and begun in a way to settle down—Samp took up with the next set coming on; he married and got the prettiest girl in town. We always thought that he married only because he wanted to be a good fellow and did not wish to be impolite to the girl he'd paired off with in the first crowd. Still he didn't stay home nights, and once or twice a year—say, election or Fourth of July—he and a lot of other young fellows would go out and tip over all the board sidewalks in town, and paint funny signs on the store buildings and stack beer bottles on the preacher's front porch, and raise Ned generally. And the fellows of his age, who owned the stores and were in nights, would say to Samp when they saw him coming down about noon the next day:

"'Go it when you're young Samp, for when you're old you can't.' And he would wink at 'em, give 'em ten dollars apiece for their damages and jolly his way down the street to his office.

"Now, you mustn't get the idea that Samp was the town drunkard, for he never was. He was just a good fellow. When the second set of young fellows outgrew him and settled down, he picked up with the third, and his wife's brown alpaca began to be noticed more or less among the women. But Samp's practice didn't seem to fall off—it only changed. He didn't have so much real estate lawing and got more criminal practice. Gradually he became a criminal lawyer, and his fame for wit and eloquence extended over all the State. When a cowpuncher got in trouble his folks in the East always gave Samp a big fee to get the boy out, and he did it. When he went to any other county-seat besides our own to try a case, the fellows—and you know who the fellows are in a town—the fellows knew that while Samp was in town there would be something going on with 'fireworks in the evening.' For he was a great fellow for a good time, and the dining-room girls at the hotel used to giggle in the kitchen for a week after he was gone at the awful things he would say to 'em. He knew more girls by their first names than a drummer."

Colonel Morrison chuckled and crossed his fat legs at the ankles as he continued, after lighting the cigar we gave him:

"Well, along in the late seventies we fellows that he started out with got to owning our own homes and getting on in the world. That was the time when Samp should have been grubbing at his law books, but nary a grub for him. He was playing horse for dear life. And right there the fellows all left him behind. Some were buying real estate for speculation; some running for office; some starting a bank; and others lending money at two per cent. a month, and leading in the prayer-meeting. So Samp kind of hitched up his ambition and took the slack out of his habits for a few months and went to the legislature. They say that he certainly did have a good time, though, when he got there. They remember that session yet up there, and call it the year of the great flood, for the nights they were filled with music, as the poet says, and from the best accounts we could get the days were devoid of ease also, and how Mrs. Sampson stood it the women never could find out, for, of course, she must have known all about it, though he wouldn't let her come near Topeka. He began to get pursy and red-faced, and was clicking it off with his fifth set of young fellows. It took a big slug of whisky to set off his oratory, but when he got it wound up he surely could pull the feathers out of the bird of freedom to beat scandalous. But as a stump speaker you weren't always sure he'd fill the engagement. He could make a jury blubber and clench its fists at the prosecuting attorney, yet he didn't claim to know much law, and he did turn over all the work in the Supreme Court to his partner, Charley Hedrick. Then, when Charley was practising before the Supreme Court and wasn't here to hold him down, Samp would get out and whoop it up with the boys, quote Shakespeare and make stump speeches on dry-goods boxes at midnight, and put his arms around old Marshal Furgeson's neck and tell him he was the blooming flower of chivalry. Also women made a fool of him—more or less.

"Where was I?" asked Colonel Morrison of the stenographer when she had finished sharpening her pencil. "Oh, yes, along in the eighties came the boom, and Samp tried to get in it and make some money. He seems to have tried to catch up with us fellows of his age, and he began to plunge. He got in debt, and, when the boom broke, he was still living in a rented house with the rent ten months behind; his partnership was gone and his practice was cut down to joint-keepers, gamblers, and the farmers who hadn't heard the stories of his financial irregularities that were floating around town.

"Yet his wife stuck to him, forever explaining to my wife that he would be all right when he settled down. But he continued to soak up a little—not much, but a little. He never was drunk in the daytime, but I remember there used to be mornings when his office smelled pretty sour. I had an office next to his for a while and he used to come in and talk to me a good deal. The young fellows around town whom he would like to run with were beginning to find him stupid, and the old fellows—except me—were busy and he had no one to loaf with. He decided, I remember, several times to brace up, and once he kept white shirts, cuffs and collars on for nearly a year. But when Harrison was elected, he filled up from his shoes to his hat and didn't go home for three days. One day after that, when he had gone back to his flannel shirts and dirty collars, he was sitting in my office looking at the fire in the big box stove when he broke out with:

"'Alphabetical—what's the matter with me, anyway? This town sends men to Congress; it makes Supreme Court judges of others. It sends fellows to Kansas City as rich bankers. It makes big merchants out of grocery clerks. Fortune just naturally flirts with everyone in town—but never a wink do I get. I know and you know I'm smarter than those jays. I can teach your Congressman economics, and your Supreme judge law. I can think up more schemes than the banker, and can beat the merchant in any kind of a game he'll name. I don't lie and I don't steal and I ain't stuck up. What's the matter with me, anyway?'

"And of course," mused Colonel Morrison as he relighted the butt of his cigar, "of course I had to lie to him and say I didn't know. But I did. We all knew. He was too much of a good fellow. His failure to get on bothered him a good deal, and one day he got roaring full and went up and down town telling people how smart he was. Then his pride left him, and he let his whiskers grow frowsy and used his vest for a spittoon, and his eyes watered too easily for a man still in his forties.

"He went West a dozen years ago, about the time of Cleveland's second election, expecting to get a job in Arizona and grow up with the country. His wife was mighty happy, and she told our folks and the rest of the women that when Horace got away from his old associates in this town she knew that he would be all right. Poor Myrtle Kenwick, the prettiest girl you ever saw along in the sixties—and she was through here not long ago and stayed with my wife and the girls—a broken old woman, going back to her kinfolk in Iowa after she left him. Poor Myrtle! I wonder where she is. I see this Arizona paper doesn't say anything about her."

Colonel Morrison read over the item again, and smiled as he proceeded:

"But it does say that he occupied many places of honour and trust in his former home in Kansas, which seems to indicate that whisky made old Samp a liar as well as a loafer at last. My, my!" sighed the Colonel as he rose and put the paper on the desk. "My, my! What a treacherous serpent it is! It gave him a good time—literally a hell of a good time. And he was a good fellow—literally a damned good fellow—'damned from here to eternity,' as your man Kipling says. God gave him every talent. He might have been a respected, useful citizen; no honour was beyond him; but he put aside fame and worth and happiness to play with whisky. My Lord, just think of it!" exclaimed the Colonel as he reached for his hat and put up his glasses. "And this is how whisky served him: brought him to shame, wrecked his home, made his name a by-word, and lured him on and on to utter ruin by holding before him the phantom of a good time. What a pitiful, heart-breaking mocker it is!" He sighed a long sigh as he stood in the door looking up at the sky with his hands clasped behind him, and said half audibly as he went down the steps: "And whoso is deceived thereby is not wise—not wise. 'He's good at anything—and yet a fool'!"

That was what Colonel Morrison gave the stenographer. What we made for the paper is entirely uninteresting and need not be printed here.

XVI
A Kansas "Childe Roland"

One of the wisest things ever said about the newspaper business was said by the late J. Sterling Morton, of Nebraska. He declared that a newspaper's enemies were its assets, and the newspaper's liabilities its friends. This is particularly true of a country newspaper. For instance, witness the ten-years' struggle of our own little paper to get rid of the word "Hon." as a prefix to the names of politicians. Everyone in town used to laugh at us for referring to whippersnapper statesmen as "Honourable"; because everyone in town knew that for the most part these whippersnappers were entirely dishonourable. It was easy enough to stop calling our enemies "Hon.," for they didn't dare to complain; but if we dropped the title even from so mangy a man as Abner Handy, within a week Charley Hedrick would happen into the office with twenty or thirty dollars' worth of legal printing, and after doing us so important a favour would pause before going out to say:

"Boys, what you fellows got against Ab Handy?" And the ensuing dialogue would conclude from old Charley: "Well, I know—I know—but Ab likes it, and it really isn't much, and I know he's a fool about it; I don't care in my own case, but if you can do it I kind of wish you would. Ab's funny that way; he's never given up. He's like the fellow old Browning tells about who has 'august anticipations, of a dim splendour ever on before,' and when you fellows quit calling him 'Hon.' it makes him blue."

And old Charley would grow purple with a big, wheezy, asthmatic laugh, and shake his great six-foot hulk and toddle out leaving us vanquished. For though the whole town reviles Abner Handy, Charley Hedrick still looks after him.

It was said for thirty years that Handy did old Charley's dirty work in politics, but we knew many of the mean things that Handy did were unjustly charged to Hedrick. People in a small community are apt to put two and two together and make five. Much of the talk about the alliance between Hedrick and Handy is, of course, down-right slander; every lawyer who tries lawsuits for forty years in a country town is bound to make enemies of small-minded people, many of whom occupy large places in the community, and a small-minded man, believing that his enemy is a villain, makes up his facts to suit his belief, and then peddles his story. It is always just as well to discount the home stories on an old lawyer ninety-five per cent. if they are bad; and seventy per cent. if they are good—for he may have saved the fellow who is telling them from the penitentiary. But Abner Handy was never enough of a lawyer to come within this rule. Indeed they used to say that he was not admitted to the bar, at all, but that when he came to town, in 1871, he erased his dead brother's name on a law diploma and substituted his own. Still, he practised on the law—as Simon Mehronay used to say of Handy—and for twenty years carried an advertisement in Eastern farm journals proclaiming that his specialty was Kansas collections. He never took as a fee less than ninety-five per cent. of the amount he collected. That was the advantage which he had as a lawyer, which advantage inspired Colonel Alphabetical Morrison to proclaim that a lawyer's diploma is nothing but a license to steal; upon hearing which Charley Hedrick sent back to the Colonel the retort that it would take two legal diplomas working day and night to keep up with the Colonel's more or less honest endeavours.

Now Ab Handy was a lean coyote, who was forever licking his bruises, and some ten years later he tried to run for the school board solely to get the Colonel's daughters dismissed as school-teachers. It was his boast that he never forgot a foe; and for twenty years after Hedrick saved Handy from going to jail for robbing a cattleman of a thousand dollars in "Red" Martin's gambling-room, the only good thing the town knew of Handy was that he never forgot a friend.

During that twenty years whenever, to further his ends in a primary or in an election, Charley Hedrick needed the votes of the rough element that gathered about our little town, Abner Handy, card-sharper and jack-leg lawyer, would go forth into the byways and alleys and gather them in. For this service, when Hedrick carried the county—which was about four times out of five—Handy was rewarded by being put on the delegation to the State convention. Thus he made his beginning in State politics. The second time that he attended a State convention Handy swelled up in his Sunday clothes, and by reason of his slight acquaintance with the manipulators of State politics, began to patronise the other members of our delegation—good, honest men, whose contempt for him at home was unspeakable; but when they huddled like sheep in the strange crowd at the convention they often accepted Handy as a guide in important matters. In talking with the home delegation Handy very soon began speaking of the convention leaders familiarly as "Jim" and "Dick" and "Tawm" and "Bill," and sometimes Handy brought one of these dignitaries to the rooms of our delegation and introduced him to our people with a grand flourish. Every time the legislature met, Ab Handy was a clerk in it, and, if he was a clerk of an important committee like the railroad committee or the committee on the calendar, he invariably came home with a few hundred dollars, three suits of clothes and a railroad pass. No one but Charley Hedrick could live with him for six months afterward.

It was when he returned from one of these profitable sessions that Abner Handy and Nora Sinclair were married. The affinity between them was this: his good clothes and proud manner caught her; and her social position caught him. Everyone in town knew, however, that Nora Sinclair had been too smart for Handy. She had him hooked through the gills before he knew that he was more than nibbling at the bait. The town concurred with Colonel Morrison—our only townsman who travelled widely in those days—when he put it succinctly: "Ab Handy is Nora Sinclair's last call for the dining-car."

Her influence on Abner Handy and his life was such that it is necessary to record something of the kind of a woman she was before he met her. A woman of the right sort might have made a man of Handy, even that late in life. Strong, good women have made weak men fairly strong, but such women were never girls like Nora. She was a nice enough little girl until she became boy-struck—as our vernacular puts it. Her mother thought this development of the child was "so cute," and told callers about the boys who came to see Nora—before she was twelve. In those days, and in some old-fashioned families in our town, little girls were asked to run out to play when the neighbours had to be discussed. But Mrs. Sinclair claimed Nora was "neither sugar nor salt nor anybody's honey," and everything was talked over before the child. We knew at the office from Colonel Morrison that his little girls did not play at the Sinclairs'. Her mother put long dresses and picture hats upon her and pushed her out into society, and the whole town knew that Nora was a mature woman, in all her instincts, by the time she was sixteen. Her mother, moreover, was manifestly proud that the child wasn't "one of those long-legged, gangling tom-boy girls, who seem so backward" and wear pigtails and chew slate pencils and dream.

The gilded youths who boarded at the Hotel Metropole began to notice her. That pleased her mother also, and she said to the mothers of other little girls of Nora's age who were climbing fences and wiping dishes: "You know Nora is so popular with the gentlemen." When the girl was seventeen she was engaged. She kept a town fellow and had a college fellow. She acquired a "gentleman friend" in Kansas City who gave her expensive presents. These her mother took great joy in displaying, and never objected when he stayed after eleven o'clock; for she thought he was "such a good catch" and such a "swell young man." But Nora shooed him off the front porch in the summer following, because he objected to her having two or three other eleven o'clock fellows. She said he was "selfish, and would not let her have a good time." At nineteen she knew more about matters that were none of her business than most women know on their wedding day, and the boys said that she was soft. Every time that Nora left town she came back with two or three correspondents. She perfumed her stationery, used a seal, adopted all the latest frills, and learned to write an angular hand. At twenty she was going with the young married set, and was invited out to the afternoon card clubs. She was known as a dashing girl at this time, and travelling men in three States knew about her. Her mother used to send personal items to our office telling of their exalted business positions and announcing their visits to the Sinclair home. There was more or less talk about Nora in a quiet way, but her mother said that "it is because the other girls don't know how to wear their clothes as well as Nora does," and that "when a girl has a fine figure—which few enough girls in this town have, Heaven knows—why, she is a fool if she doesn't make the most of herself."

Then, gradually, Nora went to seed. She became a faded, hard-faced woman, and all the sisters in town warned their brothers against her. She was invited out only when there was a crowd. She took up with the boys of the younger set, and the married women of her own age called her the kidnapper. She was a social joke. About once a year a strange man would show up in her parlour, and she kept up the illusion about being engaged. But in the office we shared the town's knowledge that her harp was on the willows. She was massaging her face at twenty-six and her mother was sniffing at the town and saying that there were no social advantages to be had here. She and the girl went to the Lakes every summer, and Nora always came home declaring that she had had the time of her life, and that she met so many lovely gentlemen. But that was all there was to it, and in the end it was Abner Handy or no one.

After their wedding, Nora and Abner Handy set about the business of making politics pay. That is a difficult thing to do in a country town, where every voter is a watchdog of the county and city treasuries. Abner gave up his gambling, he and his wife joined all the lodges in town, and she dragged him into that coterie of people known as Society. She joined a woman's club, and was always anxious to be appointed on the soliciting committee when the women had any public work to do; so when the library needed books, or the trash cans at the street corners needed paint, or the park trees needed trimming, or the new hospital needed an additional bed, or the band needed new uniforms, Mrs. Handy might be seen on the streets with two or three women of a much better social status than she had, making it clear that she was a public-spirited woman and that she moved in the best circles. Whereupon Abner Handy got work in the court-house—as a deputy, or as a clerk, or as an under-sheriff, or as a juror—and when the legislature met he went to Topeka as a clerk.

No one knew how they lived, but they did live. Every two years they gave a series of parties, and the splendour of these festivals made the town exclaim in one voice: "Well, how do they do it?" But Mrs. Handy, who was steaming the wrinkles out of her face, and assuming more or less kittenish airs in her late thirties, never offered the town an explanation. "Hers not to answer why, hers not to make reply, hers but to do and dye" was the way Colonel Morrison put it the day after Mrs. Handy swooped down into Main Street with a golden yellow finish on her hair. She walked serenely between Mrs. Frelinghuysen and Mrs. Priscilla Winthrop Conklin. They were begging for funds with which to furnish a rest room for farmers' wives. And when they bore down on our office, Colonel Morrison folded his papers in his bosom and passed them on the threshold as one hurrying to a fire in the roof of his own house. It was interesting to observe, when the Federation Committee called on us that day, that Mrs. Handy did all the talking. She was as full of airs and graces as an actress, and ogled with her glassy eyes, and put on a sweet babyish innocence of the ways of business and of men—as though men were a race apart, greatly to be feared because they ate up little girls. But she got her dollar before she left the office, and George Kirwin, who happened to be in the front room at the time waiting for a proof, said he thought that the performance and the new hair were worth the price.

Five years passed and in each year Mrs. Handy had found some artificial way of deluding herself that she was cheating time. Then Charley Hedrick, who needed a vote in the legislature, and was too busy to go there himself, nominated Abner Handy and elected him to a seat in the lower house. The thing that Hedrick needed was not important—merely the creation of a new judicial district which would remove an obnoxious district judge in an adjoining county from our district, and leave our county in a district by itself. Hedrick hated the judge, and Hedrick used Handy's vote for trading purposes with other statesmen desiring similar small matters and got the district remade as he desired it.

When the Handys started to Topeka for the opening of the session, they began to inflame with importance as the train whistled for the junction east of town, and by the time they actually arrived at Topeka they were so highly swollen that they could not get into a boarding-house door, but went to the best hotel, and engaged rooms at seven dollars a day. The town gasped for two days and then began to laugh and wink. Two weeks after their arrival at the State capital, Abner Handy had been made chairman of the joint committee on the calendar, second member of the judiciary committee and member of the railroad committee, and Mrs. Handy had established credit at a Topeka dry-goods store and was going it blind. She gave her hair an extra dip, and used to come sailing down the corridors of the hotel in gorgeous silk house-gowns with ridiculous trains, and never appeared at breakfast without her diamonds. Before the session was well under way she had been to Kansas City to have her face enameled and had told the other "ladies of the hotel," as the wives of members of the legislature stopping at the hotel were called, that Topeka stores offered such a poor selection; she confided to them that Mr. Handy always wore silk nightshirts, and that she was unable to find anything in town that he would put on. She regarded herself as a charmer, and made great eyes at all the important lobbyists, to whom she put on her baby voice and manner and said that she thought politics were just simply awful, and added that if she were a man she would show them how honest a politician could be, but she wasn't, and when Abner tried to explain it to her it made her head ache, and all she wanted him to do was to help his friends, and she would add coyly: "I'm going to see that he helps you—whatever he does."

Every bill that had a dollar in it was held at the bottom of the calendar until satisfactory arrangements were made with Abner Handy and his friends. When the legislative buccaneers under the black flag, sailed after an insurance company, their bill remained at the bottom of the calendar in one house or the other until Ab Handy had been seen, and no one could find out why. And so, in spite of our dislike of the man, our paper was forced to acknowledge that Handy was a house leader. Although he had never had a dozen cases above the police court, he came back at the end of the session with the local attorneyship of two railroads, and was chairman of a house committee to investigate the taxes paid by the railroads in the various counties. This gave him a year's work, so he rented an office in the Worthington block and hired a stenographer. Of course, we knew in town how Ab Handy had made his money. But he paid so many of his old debts, and dispensed so many favours with such a lordly hand, that it was hard to stir local sentiment against him. He donned the clothes of a "prominent citizen," and in discussing public affairs assumed an owlish manner that impressed his former associates, and fooled stupid people, who began to believe that they had been harbouring a statesman unawares. But Charley Hedrick only grinned when men talked to him of the rise of Handy, and replied to the complaints of the scrupulous that Ab was no worse than he had always been, and if he was making it pay better, no one was poorer for his prosperity but Ab himself, and added: "Certainly he is a sincere spender." One day when Handy appeared on the street in a particularly fiery red necktie, Hedrick got him in a crowd, and began: "Just for a handful of silver he left us—just for a riband to stick in his coat." And when the crowd laughed with the joker, Hedrick continued in his thick, gravy-coated voice: "Old Browning's the boy. You fellows that want Shakespeare can have him; but Ab here knows that I take a little dash of Browning in mine. Since Ab's got to be a statesman, he's bought all of Webster's works and is learning 'em by heart. But"—and here Hedrick chuckled and shook his fat sides before letting out the joke which he enjoyed so much—"I says to Ab: as old Browning says, what does 'the fine felicity and flower of wickedness' like you need with Webster; what you want to commit to memory is the penal statutes." And he threw back his head and gurgled down in his abdomen, while the crowd roared and Handy showed the wool in his teeth with a dog-like grin.