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

The eyes of the old men softened with a glint of appreciation as they looked at each other.

“I don’t suppose you have to,” suggested Avery, with a glance at the store.

“Fifty thousand in the bank and the stand of buildings here,” replied Buck, with the careless ease of the “well-fixed.” “How do you get your three squares nowadays?”

“Lecture on Lost Arts and Free Love and cure stuttering in one secret lesson, pay in advance,” Avery replied, listlessly. “But there ain’t the three squares in it. I wish I’d been as sharp as you are, and never let a woman whiffle me into a scrape.”

“Nobody ever come it over me,” declared Buck, pride slowly replacing his ire, but he added, gloomily; “excepting her, and I’ve never stopped thinking about it, and I’ve never seen another woman worth looking at – not for me, even if she did come it over me.”

“But she didn’t come it over you,” insisted Avery. “I’m the one she come it over, and look at me!” He made a despairing gesture that embraced all his pathetic appanage. “You are the one that’s come out ‘unrivaled, stupendous and triumphant,’ as your full sheeters used to say. If I was any help in steering her away I’m humbly glad of it, for I always liked you, Ivory.”

This gradual shifting to the ground of the benefactor, even of the servile sort, was not entirely placating, as Ivory Buck’s corrugated brow still hinted, but the constant iteration of admiration for his marvelous shrewdness and good fortune was having its effect. The old grudge and sorrow that had gnawed at his heart during so many years suddenly shooed away. The pain was assuaged. It was like opodeldoc stuffed into an aching tooth. He felt as though he would like to listen to a lot more of that comforting talk.

“Avery,” he cried, with a heartiness that surprised even himself, “you’re a poor old devil that’s been abused, and you seem to be all in.” He surveyed the wheezing horse and kicked another spoke from the yawning wheel.

“Crack ’em down, crack ’em down, gents!” squalled the parrot.

“If it wasn’t for Elkanah, there, to holler that to me, with an occasional ‘Hey, Rube!’ I couldn’t stay in this Godforsaken place fifteen minutes. There’s no one here that can talk about anything except ensilage and new-milk cows. Now what say? Store your old traps along o’ mine, squat down and take it comfortable. I reckon that you and me can find a few things to talk about that really amount to something!”

“I should hate to feel I was a burden on you, Ivory,” stammered Avery, gasping at the amazing generosity of this invitation. “If there’s any stutterers around here I might earn a little something on the side, perhaps.”

“Me with fifty thousand in the bank and letting a guest of mine graft for a living? Not by a blame sight!” snorted Buck. “You just climb out and shut up and help me unharness old Pollyponeezus here.”

Ten minutes afterward they had the canvas off the chariots and were inspecting them by lantern light, chattering old reminiscences and seeming almost to hear the “roomp-roomp” of the elephant and the snap of the ringmaster’s whip.

To the astonishment of Smyrna Corner, two plug hats, around which wreaths of cigar smoke were cozily curling, blossomed on the platform of the emporium next morning, instead of one. The old men had thirty years of mutual confidences to impart, and set busily at it, the parrot waddling the monotonous round of his cage overhead and rasping:

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

In two weeks “Plug” Ivory and “Plug” Avery were as much fixtures in the Smyrna scenery as the town pump. Occasionally of an evening the wail of the snuffling accordion wavered out over the village. Buck, his head thrown back and his eyes closed, seemed to get consoling echoes of the past even from this lugubrious assault on Melody, and loungers hovered at a respectful distance. No one dared to ask questions, and in this respect the old men differed from the town pump as features in the scenery.

Before a month had passed the two had so thoroughly renewed their youth that they were discussing the expense of fitting out a “hit-the-grit” circus, and were writing to the big shows for prices on superannuated or “shopworn” animals.

It was voted that the dancing turkey and infant anaconda grafts were no longer feasible. Once on a time the crowds would watch a turkey hopping about on a hot tin to the rig-a-jig of a fiddle and would come out satisfied that they had received their money’s worth. A man could even exhibit an angleworm in a bottle and call it the infant anaconda, and escape being lynched. Brick Avery sadly testified to the passing of those glorious days.

However, it was decided that a cage of white leghorn fowls, colored with aniline dyes, could be shown even in these barren times as “Royal South American Witherlicks”; that Joachim could be converted into a passable zebra, and “Plug” Avery still had in his van the celluloid lemon peel as well as the glass cube that created the illusion of ice in the pink lemonade. The village painter was set at work on the new gilding of the chariots in the big barn.

“Even if we don’t really get away,” explained Buck, “it’s a good idea to keep the property from running down.”

But the appearance of the new gilt inflamed their showmen’s hearts. An irresistible hankering to get a nearer sniff of the sawdust, to mix with the old crowd, induced Buck to send a card to a sporting paper, advertising for correspondence from bareback riders, tumblers, specialty people and privilege speculators, who wanted to join a “one-ring, chase-the-fairs road show – no first-raters.” He emphasized the fact that all personal interviews would be arranged later in New York City.

“We don’t want anyone tracking down here,” he confided to Avery. “That would call the bluff. But we can get some letters that maybe will perk us up a little.”

The letters came in bundles – letters long, short, earnest and witty – whiffs from the good old world of the dressing tent. And they were read and discussed on the emporium’s platform, and some were answered in non-committal style so as to draw out further correspondence, and all in all it was voted by both “Plugs” that a small amount of money invested in advertising certainly did produce its full worth of entertainment.

But in the midst of these innocent attempts to alleviate ennui something else came along beside letters. It was a woman – a slim, wiry, alert woman. She clambered down from the stage one day, advanced trippingly to the platform and courtesied low before the two plug hats, her long, draggly plume bobbing against her rouged cheek. The two plug hats arose and were doffed. Then the three faced each other.

“You don’t hold your ages as well as I do, boys,” she commented, after her sharp scrutiny.

“It’s the old army game, gents!” screamed the parrot, excited by this new arrival, gay with her colors and her ribbons.

“It’s Her!” gasped Plug Avery.

“It’s Signory Rosy-elly!” choked Plug Avery.

She came up and sat down between them on one of the platform chairs.

“It was the longest time before I could place those names,” she chattered. “‘Buck & Avery, Consolidated Aggregation,’ says I to myself. ‘Buck & Avery,’ I says. And, thinks I, them two old codgers must have gone to Kingdom Come, for I’m – let’s see – I’m twenty, or something like that, years younger than either of you, as I remember.” She poked each one jovially with her parasol.

“‘Buck & Avery,’ says I,” she went on, cheerfully oblivious of their grimness. “‘It’s their boys,’ I says, and so I came right along, for I need the job, and I couldn’t explain the romantic part in a letter. I was thinking I’d surely be taken on when I told Buck and Avery’s sons the romance. But I don’t have to tell you, boys.”

She jocosely poked them again.

“‘A little old!’ you say?” – they hadn’t said anything, by the way, but stood there with gaping, toothless mouths. “Not a bit of it for a jay-town circuit. Of course, it isn’t a Forepaugh job for me now or else I wouldn’t be down here talking to Buck & Avery. But I’m still good for it all – rings, banners, hurdles, rump-cling gallop and the blazing hoop for the wind-up. You know what I can do, boys. Remember old times. Give me an engagement for old-times’ sake.” She flashed at them the arch looks of a faded coquette.

Buck, the poignancy of his ancient regret having been modified by his long course of consolation from the lips of Avery, was the first to recover. This faded woman, trying to stay time’s ravages by her rouge, displaced the beauteous image he had cherished so long in his memory.

“Ain’t you ashamed to face us two?” he demanded. “You that run away and broke your promise to me! You that ruined me!” He patted his breast dramatically and shot a thumb out at Avery.

“My sakes!” she cried. “You ain’t so unprofessional as to remember all that silliness against me, are you? I was only a girl, and you couldn’t expect me to love you – either of you. I’m a poor widow now,” she sighed, “and I need work. And here you have been laying up grudges against me – the two of you – all these years! What would your wives have said?”

“We never got married,” replied the two, in mournful duet.

But she wasn’t in a consoling mood. “You’re lucky!” she snapped. “I married a cheap, worthless renegade, who stole my money and ran away. He fell off a trapeze and broke his neck, and I was glad of it.”

The look that passed between Plug Ivory and Plug Avery carried all the pith of the quotation: “The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.”

“So am I,” grunted Buck, surlily. “No, I’m sorry he didn’t live to torment you. No, the only thing I’m really sorry about is that ’twas Brick Avery’s money he got away with.”

Avery sighed.

“But I want to say to you, Signory Rosy-elly,” continued Buck, with a burst of pride quite excusable, tipping his hat to one side and hooking his thumb into the armhole of his vest, “it wasn’t my money you got, and it never will be my money you’ll get. You just made the mistake of your life when you run away from me.”

“He’s got fifty thousand dollars in the bank,” hoarsely whispered Avery, vicariously sharing in this pride of prosperity – the prosperity beyond her reach.

“Uh-huh! Correct!” corroborated Buck, surveying her in increasing triumph. This moment was really worth waiting through the years for, he reflected.

“Twenty can play as well as one,” croaked the parrot, his beady eye pressed between the bars of his cage.

The signora glanced up at this new speaker, eyed Elkanah with a sage look that he returned, and then, after a moment’s reflection, said:

“Thanks for the suggestion, old chap. That is to say, three can play as well as two, when there’s fifty thousand in the bank. Buck, you know I’m always outspoken and straight to the point. No underhanded bluff for me. I’m going to sue you for ten thousand.”

“Crack ’em down, gents!” remarked Elkanah, grimly.

Buck cast a malevolent look at the bird, and then, his cigar tip-tilted and the corner of his mouth sarcastically askew, suggested with an air as though the idea were the limit of satiric impossibility:

“I want to know! Breach of promise, I per-sume!”