"Pottle the barber," answered a voice in the gallery.
Mr. Pottle paused, fastened an awful eye on the owner of the voice, and, stepping out of character, remarked, succinctly:
"If you interrupt me again, Charlie Meacham, I"ll come up there and knock your block off." He swept the house with a ferocious glance. "And that goes for the rest of you," he added. The intimidated audience went "ssssssh" at each other; Pottle was popular in Granville. He launched himself again.
"_Who am I, oh list"ning peoples?
Hist"ry"s spirit, stern and truthful!
Come I here to give you an earful, Of our city"s inside history, How the Gulicks grabbed the real estate, By foreclosing poor folk"s mortgages._"
He did not have to ask for silence now. The hush of death was on the house, and the audience bent its ears toward him; even old Felix Winterbottom, on the edge of his chair, cupped a gnarled, attentive ear.
Mr. Pottle went on,
"_You have heard the Gulick"s blowing, Of their wonderful relations._
_Lend an ear, and I will slip you, What the real, true, red-hot dope is._"
He gave his toga a hitch, advanced to the foot-lights, and continued,
"_Old Saul Gulick was a drinker, Always full of home-made liquor, And he got the town of Granville, From the Indians, by cheating, Got "em drunk, the records tell us, Got "em boiled and stewed and gla.s.sy; Ere they sobered up, they sold him, All the land in this fair county, For a dollar and a quarter, Which, my friends, he never paid them._"
The audience held its breath; Felix Winterbottom cupped both ears.
Pottle hurried on,
"_Now we come to "Lijah Gulick, Him that lent the n.o.ble stallion To Revere, the midnight rider.
Honest, folks, you"ll bust out laughing, When I tell you "Lijah stole him.
For Elijah was a horsethief, And, as such, was hanged near Boston.
"Patriot, scholar, king of hors.e.m.e.n"-- Honest, folks, that makes me snicker.
Yes, he let Paul ride his stallion-- And charged him seven bucks an hour!
If you think that I am lying, You will find all this in writing, In the library in the state house._"
Sensation! Gasps in the audience. Commotion in the wings. Felix Winterbottom made no attempt to conceal the fact that he was chuckling.
Pottle drew in a deep breath, and spoke again.
"_Then you"ve heard of Noah Gulick, Him that won the Revolution.
If he ever was a major, George J. Washington never knew it.
When they charged at Saratoga, He was hiding in a cellar.
Was he on the staff of Washington?
Sure he was--but in the kitchen.
I"ll admit he made good coffee-- But a soldier? Quit your kidding.
Now I"ll take up Nathan Gulick, His descendants never mention That he spent a month in prison More than once, for stealing chickens----_"
Here Mr. Pottle abruptly stopped. The curtain had been dropped with a crashing bang by unseen hands in the wings.
As it fell, there was a curious, cackling noise in one of the boxes, the like of which had never before been heard in Granville. It was Felix Winterbottom laughing as if he were being paid a dollar a guffaw.
--4
Mr. Pottle sat beside the bedside of Mrs. Pottle, sadly going over a column of figures, as she lay there, wan, weak, tear-marred, sipping pale tea.
He cleared his throat.
"As retiring treasurer of the Granville Pageant," he announced, "I regret to report as follows:
Receipts from tickets $1,250.00 Expenses, including rent, music, scenery, costumes, and damages, $1,249.17
"This leaves a total net profit of eighty-three cents."
Mrs. Pottle wept softly into her pillow. A whistle outside caused her to lift a woeful head.
"There"s the postman," she said, feebly. "Another bill, I suppose. We won"t even make eighty-three cents."
Mr. Pottle returned with the letter; he opened it; he read it; he whistled; he read it again; then he read it aloud.
"Dear Mrs. Pottle:
"I never laughed at anything in my life till I saw your pageant. I pay for what I get.
"Yours,
"FELIX WINTERBOTTOM.
"P. S. Inclosed is my check for one thousand dollars for the Day Nursery."
Mrs. Pottle sat up in bed. She smiled.
VI: _The Cage Man_
All day long they kept Horace Nimms in a steel-barred cage. For twenty-one years he had perched on a tall stool in that cage, while various persons at various times poked things at him through a hole about big enough to admit an adult guinea pig.
Every evening round five-thirty they let Horace out and permitted him to go over to his half of a double-barreled house in Flatbush to sleep. At eight-thirty the next morning he returned to his cage, hung his two-dollar-and-eighty-nine-cent approximately Panama hat on a peg and changed his blue-serge-suit coat for a still more shiny alpaca. Then he sharpened two pencils to needle-point sharpness, tested his pen by writing "H. Nimms, Esq.," in a small precise hand, gave his adding machine a few preparatory pokes and was ready for the day"s work.
Horace was proud, in his mild way, of being shut up in the cage with all that money. It carried the suggestion that he was a dangerous man of a possibly predatory nature. He wasn"t. A more patient and docile five feet and two inches of cashier was not to be found between Spuyten Duyvil and Tottenville, Staten Island. Cashiers are mostly crabbed. It sours them somehow to hand out all that money and retain so little for their own personal use. But Horace was not of this ilk.
The timidest stenographer did not hesitate to take the pettiest petty-cash slip to his little window and twitter, according to custom: "Forty cents for carbon paper, and let me have it in large bills, please, Uncle Horace."
He would peer at the slip, pretend it was for forty dollars, smile a friendly smile that made little ripples round his eyes and--according to custom--reply: "Here you be. Now don"t be buying yourself a flivver with it."
When the office force in a large corporation calls the office cashier "uncle" it is a pretty good indication of the sort of man he is.
For the rest, Horace Nimms was slightly bald, wore convict eye-gla.s.ses--the sort you shackle to your head with a chain--kept his cuffs up with lavender sleeve garters, carried a change purse, kept a small red pocket expense book, thought his company the greatest in the world and its president, Oren Hammer, the greatest man, was devoted to a wife and two growing daughters, dreamed of a cottage on Long Island with a few square yards of beets and beans and, finally, earned forty dollars a week.
Horace Nimms had a figuring mind. Those ten little Arabic symbols and their combinations and permutations held a fascination for him. To his ears six times six is thirty-six was as perfect a poem as ever a master bard penned. When on muggy Flatbush nights he tossed in his bra.s.s bed he lulled himself to sleep by dividing 695,481,239 by 433. At other and more wakeful moments he amused himself by planning an elaborate cost-accounting system for his firm, the Amalgamated Soap Corporation, known to the ends of the earth as the Suds Trust. Sometimes he went so far as to play the entertaining game of imaginary conversations. He pictured himself sitting in one of the fat chairs in the office of President Hammer and saying between puffs on one of the presidential perfectos: "Now, looky here, Mr. Hammer. My plan for a cost-accounting system is----"