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

“Good aim! You’ve rung the bell,” rejoined the lady, coolly.

The unconscionable impudence of the bare suggestion fetched a gasp from both men. Plug Ivory’s assumption of dignity crumbled immediately. The years rolled back. He felt one of those old-time fits of rage come bristling up the back of his head, the fury of old when he had tried to wither that giddy creature in his spasms of jealousy. But now, as in the past, her calm assurance put him out of countenance and his wild anathemas died away in sputterings.

“I know all that, Ivory Buck,” she said, icily. “But how are you going to prove I was married? Where are you going to hunt for witnesses? Professional people are like wild geese – roosting on air and moulting their names like feathers. What proof of anything are you going to find after all these thirty years? While I – I’ve got your letters, every one – all your promises. Observe how I take my cue! Jury a-listening! I’ve been hunting the world over for you. You hid here. Here I find you – this poor, deserted woman, whose life has been wrecked by your faithlessness, finds you. Me, with a crape veil, a sniff in my nose, a crushed-creature face make-up, a tremolo in my voice and a smart lawyer such as I know about! What can you two old fools say to a country jury to block my bluff? Why, you can save money by handing me your bank book!”

In his fury Buck grabbed her chair and tipped it forward violently in order to dump her off his sacred platform. She fled out into space with a flutter of skirts, landed lightly as a cat and pirouetted on one toe, crooking her arms in the professional pose that appeals for applause.

“This is the first time Signora Rosyelli, champion bareback rider, ever tried to ride a mule,” she chirped, “but you see she can do it and make her graceful dismount to the music of the band.”

Several villagers across the road were gaping at the scene. She inquired the way to the tavern, one of them took her valise, and she went down the road, tossing a kiss from her finger tips toward the two plug hats. Plug hats watched her out of sight and then turned toward each other with simultaneous jerk.

“Don’t that beat tophet and repeat?” they inquired, in exact unison.

“What are you going to do?” asked Plug Avery.

“Fight her! Fight her clear to the high, consolidated supreme court aggregation of the United States, or whatever they call it!” roared Plug Ivory.

“Nobody has ever beat her yet, except Dellybunko, and we ain’t in his class,” sighed Avery, despondently.

“You don’t think, do you, that I’m going to lap my thumb and finger and peel her off ten thousand dollars?”

“Why don’t you and she get married and we’ll all live here, happy, hereafter?” wistfully suggested Avery. “If it was in a book it would end off like that – sure pop.”

“This ain’t no book,” replied Buck, elbows on his knees, eyes moodily on the dusty planks.

“So you’re bound to go to court?”

“Low court – high court – clear to the ridgepole – clear to the cupoly, and then I’ll shin the weather vane with the star spangled banner of justice between my teeth.”

“I heard a breach of promise trial once,” related Avery, half closing his eyes in reminiscence, “and it was the funniest thing I ever listened to. ‘Twas twenty years ago, and I’ll bet that the people down there laugh yet when they see that fellow walk along the street. Them letters he wrote was certainly the squashiest – why, every one of them seemed to woggle like a tumbler of jelly – sweet and sloppy, as you might say! It being so long ago, when you was having your spell, I don’t suppose you remember just what you wrote to her, do you?”

Avery still gazed at the same knothole, but a hot flush was crawling up from under his collar. He took off his plug hat and scuffed his wrist across his steaming forehead.

“I remember that he called her ‘Ittikins, Pittikins, Popsy-sweet.’ Thought I’d die laughing at that trial! Did you sling in any names like that, Ivory? You being so prominent now and settled down and having money in the bank, them kind of names, if you wrote mushy like that, will certainly tickle folks something tremendous.”

A student in physiognomy might have read that memory was playing havoc with Buck’s resolution. Avery was knitting his brows in deep reflection, knuckling his forehead.

“Seems as if,” he went on, slowly, “she told me you called her something like ‘Sweety-tweety,’ or ‘Tweeny-weeny Girlikins’ – something like that. How them newspapers do like to string out things – funny kind of things, when a man is prominent and well known, and has got money in the bank! Folks can’t help laughing – they just naturally can’t, Ive! You’ll be setting there in court, looking ugly as a gibcat and her lawyer reading them things out. Them cussed lawyers have a sassy way of – ”

Buck got up, kicked his chair off onto the ground, and in choler uncontrollable, clacked his fists under Avery’s nose and barked:

“Twit me another word – just one other word – and I’ll drive that old nose of yourn clear up into the roof of your head!”

Then he locked his store door and stumped away across the field to the big barn, where the remains of Buck’s Leviathan Circus reposed in isolated state.

No one knows by just what course of agonized reasoning he arrived at his final decision, but at dusk he came back to the store. With the dumb placidity of some ruminant, Avery was sitting in his same place on the platform of the emporium.

“Brick,” said Ivory, humbly, “I’ve been thinking back and remembering what I wrote to her – and it’s all of it pretty clear in my mind, ’cause I never wrote love letters to anyone else. And I can’t face it. I couldn’t sit in court and hear it. I couldn’t sit here on this platform in my own home place and face the people afterward. I couldn’t start on the road with a circus and have the face to stand before the big tent after it and bark like I used to. They’d grin me out of business. I’d be backed into the stall. No, I can’t do it. Go down and see what she’ll compromise on.”

Avery came back after two hours and loomed in the dusk before the platform. He fixed his eyes on the plug hat that was still lowered in the attitude of despondency.

“I wrassled with her, Ivory, just the same as if I was handling my own money, and I beat her down to sixty-six hundred. She won’t take a cent less.”

“I’ll tell you what that sounds like to me,” snarled Buck, after a moment of meditation. “It sounds as if she was going to get five thousand and you was looking after your little old sixteen hundred.”

A couple of tears squeezed out and down over Avery’s flabby cheeks.

“This ain’t the first time you’ve misjudged me, when I’ve been doing you a favor,” said he. “And it’s all on account of the same mis’able woman that I’m misjudged – and we was living so happy here, me and you. I wish she was in – ” His voice broke.

“I ain’t responsible for what I’m saying, Avery,” pleaded Buck, contritely. “You know what things have happened to stir me up the last few hours – yes, all my life, for that matter. I ain’t been comfortable in mind for thirty years till you come here and cheered me up and showed me what’s what. I appreciate it and I’ll prove that to you before we’re done. We’ll get along together all right after this. All is, you must see me through.”

Then the two plug hats bent together in earnest conference.

The next morning Avery, armed with an order on the savings bank at the shire for six thousand six hundred dollars, and with Buck’s bank book in his inside pocket, drove up to the door of Fyles’ tavern in Buck’s best carriage, and Signora Rosyelli flipped lightly up beside the peace commissioner.

He was to pay over the money on the neutral ground at the shire, receive the letters, put her aboard a train and then come back triumphantly into that interrupted otium cum dignitate of Smyrna Corner.

For two days a solitary and bereaved plug hat on the emporium’s platform turned its fuzzy gloss toward the bend in the road at the clump of alders. But the sleek black nose of Buck’s “reader” did not appear.

On the third day the bank book arrived by mail, its account minus six thousand six hundred dollars, and between its leaves a letter. It was an apologetic letter, and yet it was flavored with a note of complaint. Brick Avery stated that after thinking it all over he felt that, having been misjudged cruelly twice, it might happen again, and being old, he could not endure griefs of that kind. He had supported the first two, but being naturally tender-hearted and easily influenced, the third might be fatal. Moreover, the conscience of Signora Rosyelli had troubled her, so he believed, ever since the affair of the one thousand six hundred dollars. So he had decided that he would quiet her remorse by marrying her and taking entire charge of her improved finances. In fact, so certain was he that she would waste the money – being a woman fickle and vain – that he had insisted on the marriage, and she, realizing her dependence on his aid in cashing in, assented, and now he assured her that as her husband he was entitled to full control of their affairs – all of which, so the letter delicately hinted, was serving as retribution and bringing her into a proper frame of mind to realize her past enormities. The writer hoped that his own personal self-sacrifice in thus becoming the instrument of flagellation would be appreciated by one whom he esteemed highly.

They would be known at the fairs as Moseer and Madame Bottotte, and would do the genteel and compact gift-sale graft from the buggy – having the necessary capital now – and would accept the buggy and horse as a wedding present, knowing that an old friend with forty-three thousand four hundred dollars still left in the bank would not begrudge this small gift to a couple just starting out in life, and with deep regard for him and all inquiring friends, they were, etc.

In the more crucial moments of his life Buck had frequently refrained from anathema as a method of relief. Some situations were made vulgar and matter-of-fact by sulphurous ejaculation. It dulled the edge of rancor brutally, as a rock dulls a razor.

Now he merely turned the paper over, took out a stubby lead pencil, licked it and began to write on the blank side, flattening the paper on his bank book.

FOR SALE – 1 Band Wagon, 1 Swan Chariot, 3 Lion Cages.

He paused here in his laborious scrawl and, despite his resolution of silence, muttered:

“It’s going to be a clean sale. I don’t never in all my life want to hear of a circus, see a circus, talk circus, see a circus man – ”

“Crack ’em down, gents!” squalled the parrot. It was the first time for many hours that he had heard his master’s voice, and the sound cheered him. He hooked his beak around a wire and rattled away jovially. He seemed to be relieved by the absence of the other plug hat that had been absorbing so much of the familiar, beloved and original plug hat’s attention.

Ivory looked up at Elkanah vindictively and then resumed his soliloquy.

“No, sir, never! Half of circusing is a skin game all through – and I’ve done my share of the skinning. But to be skinned twice – me, I. Buck, proprietor – and the last time the worst, but – ”

“Twenty can play it as well as one!” the parrot yelled, cocking his eye over the edge of the cage.

It was an evil scowl that flashed up from under the plug hat, but Elkanah in his new joy was oblivious.

“Me a man that’s been all through it from A to Z – my affections trod on, all confidence in females destroyed and nothing ahead of me all the rest of my life! No, sir, I never want to hear of a circus again. Bit by the mouths I fed – and they thumbing their noses at me. That trick – ”

“It’s the old army game!” squealed the parrot, in nerve-racking rasp.

Ivory Buck arose, yanked the bottom off the cage, caught the squawking bird, wrung his neck, tossed him into the middle of the road, and then, sucking his bleeding finger, went on writing the copy for his advertisement.