III
Nearly a year afterward--after many camping grounds and many hundreds of miles guarded and defended--Lieutenant Manning, with almost the same detachment of men, was sent to a point only a few miles below their old camp on the river to look after some smuggling there. One afternoon, while they were riding through a dense mesquite flat, they came upon a patch of open hog-wallow prairie. There they rode upon the scene of an unwritten tragedy.
In a big hog-wallow lay the skeletons of three Mexicans. Their clothing alone served to identify them. The largest of the figures had once been Sebastiano Saldar. His great, costly sombrero, heavy with gold ornamentation--a hat famous all along the Rio Grande--lay there pierced by three bullets. Along the ridge of the hog-wallow rested the rusting Winchesters of the Mexicans--all pointing in the same direction.
The rangers rode in that direction for fifty yards. There, in a little depression of the ground, with his rifle still bearing upon the three, lay another skeleton. It had been a battle of extermination. There was nothing to identify the solitary defender. His clothing--such as the elements had left distinguishable--seemed to be of the kind that any ranchman or cowboy might have worn.
"Some cow-puncher," said Manning, "that they caught out alone. Good boy! He put up a dandy sc.r.a.p before they got him. So that"s why we didn"t hear from Don Sebastiano any more!"
And then, from beneath the weather-beaten rags of the dead man, there wriggled out a horned frog with a faded red ribbon around its neck, and sat upon the shoulder of its long quiet master. Mutely it told the story of the untried youth and the swift "paint" pony--how they had outstripped all their comrades that day in the pursuit of the Mexican raiders, and how the boy had gone down upholding the honour of the company.
The ranger troop herded close, and a simultaneous wild yell arose from their lips. The outburst was at once a dirge, an apology, an epitaph, and a paean of triumph. A strange requiem, you may say, over the body of a fallen, comrade; but if Jimmy Hayes could have heard it he would have understood.
XII
THE DOOR OF UNREST
I sat an hour by sun, in the editor"s room of the Montopolis _Weekly Bugle_. I was the editor.
The saffron rays of the declining sunlight filtered through the cornstalks in Micajah Widdup"s garden-patch, and cast an amber glory upon my paste-pot. I sat at the editorial desk in my non-rotary revolving chair, and prepared my editorial against the oligarchies.
The room, with its one window, was already a prey to the twilight.
One by one, with my trenchant sentences, I lopped off the heads of the political hydra, while I listened, full of kindly peace, to the home-coming cow-bells and wondered what Mrs. Flanagan was going to have for supper.
Then in from the dusky, quiet street there drifted and perched himself upon a corner of my desk old Father Time"s younger brother. His face was beardless and as gnarled as an English walnut. I never saw clothes such as he wore. They would have reduced Joseph"s coat to a monochrome. But the colours were not the dyer"s. Stains and patches and the work of sun and rust were responsible for the diversity. On his coa.r.s.e shoes was the dust, conceivably, of a thousand leagues.
I can describe him no further, except to say that he was little and weird and old--old I began to estimate in centuries when I saw him.
Yes, and I remember that there was an odour, a faint odour like aloes, or possibly like myrrh or leather; and I thought of museums.
And then I reached for a pad and pencil, for business is business, and visits of the oldest inhabitants are sacred and honourable, requiring to be chronicled.
"I am glad to see you, sir," I said. "I would offer you a chair, but--you see, sir," I went on, "I have lived in Montopolis only three weeks, and I have not met many of our citizens." I turned a doubtful eye upon his dust-stained shoes, and concluded with a newspaper phrase, "I suppose that you reside in our midst?"
My visitor fumbled in his raiment, drew forth a soiled card, and handed it to me. Upon it was written, in plain but unsteadily formed characters, the name "Michob Ader."
"I am glad you called, Mr. Ader," I said. "As one of our older citizens, you must view with pride the recent growth and enterprise of Montopolis. Among other improvements, I think I can promise that the town will now be provided with a live, enterprising newspa--"
"Do ye know the name on that card?" asked my caller, interrupting me.
"It is not a familiar one to me," I said.
Again he visited the depths of his ancient vestments. This time he brought out a torn leaf of some book or journal, brown and flimsy with age. The heading of the page was the _Turkish Spy_ in old-style type; the printing upon it was this:
"There is a man come to Paris in this year 1643 who pretends to have lived these sixteen hundred years. He says of himself that he was a shoemaker in Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion; that his name is Michob Ader; and that when Jesus, the Christian Messias, was condemned by Pontius Pilate, the Roman president, he paused to rest while bearing his cross to the place of crucifixion before the door of Michob Ader. The shoemaker struck Jesus with his fist, saying: "Go; why tarriest thou?" The Messias answered him: "I indeed am going; but thou shalt tarry until I come"; thereby condemning him to live until the day of judgment. He lives forever, but at the end of every hundred years he falls into a fit or trance, on recovering from which he finds himself in the same state of youth in which he was when Jesus suffered, being then about thirty years of age.
"Such is the story of the Wandering Jew, as told by Michob Ader, who relates--" Here the printing ended.
I must have muttered aloud something to myself about the Wandering Jew, for the old man spake up, bitterly and loudly.
""Tis a lie," said he, "like nine tenths of what ye call history. "Tis a Gentile I am, and no Jew. I am after footing it out of Jerusalem, my son; but if that makes me a Jew, then everything that comes out of a bottle is babies" milk. Ye have my name on the card ye hold; and ye have read the bit of paper they call the _Turkish Spy_ that printed the news when I stepped into their office on the 12th day of June, in the year 1643, just as I have called upon ye to-day."
I laid down my pencil and pad. Clearly it would not do. Here was an item for the local column of the _Bugle_ that--but it would not do.
Still, fragments of the impossible "personal" began to flit through my conventionalized brain. "Uncle Michob is as spry on his legs as a young chap of only a thousand or so." "Our venerable caller relates with pride that George Wash--no, Ptolemy the Great--once dandled him on his knee at his father"s house." "Uncle Michob says that our wet spring was nothing in comparison with the dampness that ruined the crops around Mount Ararat when he was a boy--" But no, no--it would not do.
I was trying to think of some conversational subject with which to interest my visitor, and was hesitating between walking matches and the Pliocene age, when the old man suddenly began to weep poignantly and distressfully.
"Cheer up, Mr. Ader," I said, a little awkwardly; "this matter may blow over in a few hundred years more. There has already been a decided reaction in favour of Judas Iscariot and Colonel Burr and the celebrated violinist, Signor Nero. This is the age of whitewash. You must not allow yourself to become down-hearted."
Unknowingly, I had struck a chord. The old man blinked belligerently through his senile tears.
""Tis time," he said, "that the liars be doin" justice to somebody.
Yer historians are no more than a pack of old women gabblin" at a wake. A finer man than the Imperor Nero niver wore sandals. Man, I was at the burnin" of Rome. I knowed the Imperor well, for in them days I was a well-known char-acter. In thim days they had rayspect for a man that lived forever.
"But "twas of the Imperor Nero I was goin" to tell ye. I struck into Rome, up the Appian Way, on the night of July the 16th, the year 64. I had just stepped down by way of Siberia and Afghanistan; and one foot of me had a frost-bite, and the other a blister burned by the sand of the desert; and I was feelin" a bit blue from doin" patrol duty from the North Pole down to the Last Chance corner in Patagonia, and bein"
miscalled a Jew in the bargain. Well, I"m tellin" ye I was pa.s.sin"
the Circus Maximus, and it was dark as pitch over the way, and then I heard somebody sing out, "Is that you, Michob?"
"Over ag"inst the wall, hid out amongst a pile of barrels and old dry-goods boxes, was the Imperor Nero wid his togy wrapped around his toes, smokin" a long, black segar.
""Have one, Michob?" says he.
""None of the weeds for me," says I--"nayther pipe nor segar. What"s the use," says I, "of smokin" when ye"ve not got the ghost of a chance of killin" yeself by doin" it?"
""True for ye, Michob Ader, my perpetual Jew," says the Imperor; "ye"re not always wandering. Sure, "tis danger gives the spice of our pleasures--next to their bein" forbidden."
""And for what," says I, "do ye smoke be night in dark places widout even a cinturion in plain clothes to attend ye?"
""Have ye ever heard, Michob," says the Imperor, "of predestinarianism?"
""I"ve had the cousin of it," says I. "I"ve been on the trot with pedestrianism for many a year, and more to come, as ye well know."
""The longer word," says me friend Nero, "is the tachin" of this new sect of people they call the Christians. "Tis them that"s raysponsible for me smokin" be night in holes and corners of the dark."
"And then I sets down and takes off a shoe and rubs me foot that is frosted, and the Imperor tells me about it. It seems that since I pa.s.sed that way before, the Imperor had mandamused the Impress wid a divorce suit, and Misses Poppaea, a cilibrated lady, was ingaged, widout riferences, as housekeeper at the palace. "All in one day,"
says the Imperor, "she puts up new lace windy-curtains in the palace and joins the anti-tobacco society, and whin I feels the need of a smoke I must be after sneakin" out to these piles of lumber in the dark." So there in the dark me and the Imperor sat, and I told him of me travels. And when they say the Imperor was an incindiary, they lie.
"Twas that night the fire started that burnt the city. "Tis my opinion that it began from a stump of segar that he threw down among the boxes. And "tis a lie that he fiddled. He did all he could for six days to stop it, sir."
And now I detected a new flavour to Mr. Michob Ader. It had not been myrrh or balm or hyssop that I had smelled. The emanation was the odour of bad whiskey--and, worse still, of low comedy--the sort that small humorists manufacture by clothing the grave and reverend things of legend and history in the vulgar, topical frippery that pa.s.ses for a certain kind of wit. Michob Ader as an impostor, claiming nineteen hundred years, and playing his part with the decency of respectable lunacy, I could endure; but as a tedious wag, cheapening his egregious story with song-book levity, his importance as an entertainer grew less.
And then, as if he suspected my thoughts, he suddenly shifted his key.
"You"ll excuse me, sir," he whined, "but sometimes I get a little mixed in my head. I am a very old man; and it is hard to remember everything."
I knew that he was right, and that I should not try to reconcile him with Roman history; so I asked for news concerning other ancients with whom he had walked familiar.
Above my desk hung an engraving of Raphael"s cherubs. You could yet make out their forms, though the dust blurred their outlines strangely.