Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905

Under the chaise top was hunched an old man, gaunt but huge of frame, his knees almost to his chin. Long, white hair fluffed over his bent shoulders, and little puffs of white whiskers stood out from his tanned cheeks. A fuzzy beaver hat barely covered the bald spot on his head. The reins were looped around his neck. Between his hands, huge as hams, moaned and sucked and suffled and droned a much-patched accordion. The instrument lamented like a tortured animal as he pulled it out and squatted it together. To its accompaniment, the old man sang over and over some words that he had fitted to the tune of “Old Dog Tray,”

“Plug” Ivory Buck sat outside the door of his “emporium” in Smyrna Corner, his chair tipped back comfortably, ankle roosting across his knee, his fuzzy stovepipe hat on the back of his head.

The end of his cigar, red in the May dusk, was cocked up close to his left eye with the arrogant tilt that signified the general temperament of “Plug” Ivory. For almost fifty years a circus man, he felt a bland and yet contemptuous superiority to those who had passed their lives in Smyrna Corner. However, when his father had died at the ripe age of ninety-three – died in the harness, even while gingerly and thriftily knuckling along a weight into the eighth notch of the bar of the scoop scales – Ivory had come back as sole heir to store, stock and stand, a seventy-two-year-old black sheep bringing a most amazing tail behind him – no less than a band chariot, a half dozen animal cages, a tent loaded on a great cart, and various impedimenta of “Buck’s Leviathan Circus and Menagerie.”

He trundled the array through the village’s single street, stored the gilded glories in the big barn on the old home place, with the euphemism of circus terminology changed the sign “A. Buck, General Store,” to “I. Buck, Commercial Emporium,” and there he had lived five years, keeping “bachelor’s hall” in the big house adjoining the store.

Sometimes he dropped vague hints that he might start on the road again, displaying as much assurance of long years ahead as though he were twenty-one. It was a general saying in Smyrna Corner that a Buck didn’t think he was getting old until after he had turned ninety. The townspeople accepted Ivory as a sort of a wild goose of passage, called him “Plug” on account of his never varying style of headgear, and deferred to him because he had fifty thousand dollars tucked away in the savings bank at the shire.

The May dusk became tawny in the west, and he gazed out into it discontentedly.

“I wish them blamenation tadpoles shed their voices along with their tails,” he grumbled, with an ear to the frogs in the marsh. “They ain’t quite so bad when they get big enough to trill, but that everlasting yipping makes me lonesome. I’m a good mind to toss up this tenpenny nail and salt codfish business and get back to the sawdust once more.”

There was a stir in a cage above his head, a parrot waddled down the bars, stood on his beak and yawped hoarsely:

“Crack ’em down, gents! The old army game!”

“If it wasn’t for you, Elkanah, I swear I should die of listening to nothing but frogs tuning up and swallows twittering and old fools swapping guff,” he went on, sourly, and then he suddenly cocked his ear, for a new note sounded faintly from the marsh.

“I never knew a bullfrog to get his bass as early as this,” he mused, and as he listened and peered, the old horse’s head came slowly bobbing around the alders at the bend of the road. Above the wailing of the distant accordion he caught a few words as the cart wabbled up the rise on its dished wheels:

Old horse Joe is ever faithful,
O-o-o, o-o-o – ever true.
We’ve been – o-o-o – wide world over,
O-o-o, o-o-o, toodle-oodle – through.

Then a medley of dronings, and finally these words were lustily trolled with the confidence of one who safely reaches the last line:

A bet-tur friend than old horse Joe.

“Whoa, there! Whup!” screamed the parrot, swinging by one foot.

“Ain’t you kind of working a friend to the limit and a little plus?” inquired Buck, sarcastically. The old horse had stopped before the emporium, legs spraddled, head down and sending the dust up in little puffs as he breathed.

“Joachim loves music,” replied the stranger, mildly. “He’ll travel all day if I’ll only play and sing to him.”

“Love of music will be the death of friend Joachim, then,” commented Buck.

“Is there a hostelry near by?” asked the other, lifting his old hat politely. With satirical courtesy Buck lifted his – and at that psychological moment the only plug hats in the whole town of Smyrna saluted each other.

“There’s a hossery down the road a ways, and a mannery, too, all run by old Sam Fyles.”

“Crack ’em down, gents,” rasped the parrot. “Twenty can play as well as one.”

The man under the chaise top pricked up his ears and cast a significant look at the plug hat on the platform. Plug hat on the platform seemed to recognize some affinity in plug hat on the van, and there was an acceleration of mutual interest when the parrot croaked his sentence again.

Buck tipped forward with a clatter of his chair legs and trudged down to the roadside. He walked around the outfit with an inquisitive sniffing of his nose and a crinkling of eyebrows, and at last set himself before the man of the chaise top, his knuckles on his hips.

“Who be I?” he demanded.

The stranger surveyed him for some time, huggling his head down in cowering fashion, so it seemed in the dusk.

“You,” he huskily ventured, “are Buck’s Leviathan Circus and Menagerie; Ivory Buck, Proprietor.”

“And you,” declared Buck, “are Brick Avery, inventor of the dancing turkey and captor of the celebrated infant anaconda – side-show graft with me for eight years.”

He put up his hand, and the stranger took it for a solemn shake, flinching at the same time.

“How long since?” pursued Buck.

“Thirty years for certain.”

“Yes, all of that. Let’s see! If I remember right, you threw up your side-show privilege with me pretty sudden, didn’t you?” His teeth were set hard into his cigar.

The man on the van scratched a trembling forefinger through a cheek tuft.

“I don’t exactly recollect how the – the change came about,” he faltered.

“Well, I do! You ducked out across country the night of the punkin freshet, when I was mud bound and the elephant was afraid of the bridges. You and your dancin’ turkey and infant anaconda and a cage of monkeys that wasn’t yours and —Her!” He shouted the word. “What become of Her, Brick Avery?”

He seized a spoke of the forewheel and shook the old vehicle angrily. The spoke came away in his hand.

“Never mind it,” quavered the man. “We’re all coming to pieces, me and the whole caboodle. Don’t hit me with it, though!”

He was eying the spoke in Buck’s clutch.

“What did you steal her for, Brick Avery?”

“There isn’t anything sure about her going away with me,” the other protested.

Buck yanked away another spoke in his vehemence.

“Don’t you lie to me,” he bawled. “There wasn’t telegraphs and telephones and railroads handy in them days, so that I could stop you or catch you, but I didn’t need any telegraphs to tell me she had gone away with handsome Mounseer Hercules, of the curly hair.” He snorted the sobriquet with bitter spite. “A girl I’d took off’n the streets and made the champion lady rider of – and was going to marry, and thought more of, damn yeh, than I did of all the rest of the world! What did ye do with her?”

“Well, she wanted to go along, and so I took her aboard. She seemed to want to get away from your show, near as I could find out.” The giant hugged his knees together and blinked appealingly.

“It must be a bang-up living you’re giving her,” sneered Buck, running his eye over the equipage. In his passion he forgot the lapse of the years and the possibility of changes.

“Seems as if you hadn’t heard the latest news,” broke in Avery, his face suddenly clearing of the puckers of apprehension. “She never stuck to me no time. She didn’t intend to. She just made believe that she was going to marry me so that I would take her along. She run away with the sixteen hundred dollars I had saved up and Signor Dellabunko – or something like that – who was waiting for her on the road, and I haven’t seen hide nor hair of ’em since, nor I don’t want to, and I’ve still got the letter that she left me, so that I can prove what I say. She was going to do the same thing to you, she said in it, but she had made up her mind that she couldn’t work you so easy. It’s all in that letter! Kind of a kick-you-and-run letter!”

In his agitation Buck broke another spoke from the crumbling wheel. The parrot cracked his beak against the cage’s bars and yawled:

“It’s the old army game, gents!”

“Hadn’t you just as soon tear pickets off’n the fence there, or something like that?” wistfully queried Avery. “This is all I’ve got left, and I haven’t any money, and I haven’t had very much courage to do anything since she took that sixteen hundred dollars away from me.” He scruffed his raspy palms on his upcocked knees. “I didn’t really want to run away with her, Ivory, but she bossed me into it. I never was no hand to stand up for my rights. Any one, almost, could talk me ’round. I wish she’d stuck to you and let me alone.” His big hands trembled on his knees, and his weak face, with its flabby chaps, had the wistful look one sees on a foxhound’s visage. “When did you give up the road?” he asked.

“Haven’t given it up!” The tone was curt and the scowl deepened. “I’ve stored my wagons and the round-top and the seats, but I’m liable to buy an elephant and a lemon and start out again ’most any time.”