Short Sixes

The Doctor tolled his elephant around the block without further misadventure, and they started up the road toward Zenobia’s tent, Zenobia caressing her benefactor while shudders of antipathy ran over his frame. In a few minutes the keeper hove in sight. Zenobia saw him first, blew a shrill blast on her trumpet, close to the Doctor’s ear, bolted through a snake fence, lumbered across a turnip-field, and disappeared in a patch of woods, leaving the Doctor to quiet his excited horse and to face the keeper, who advanced with rage in his eye.

“What do you mean, you cuss,” he began, “weaning a man’s elephant’s affections away from him? You ain’t got no more morals than a Turk, you ain’t. That elephant an’ me has been side-partners for fourteen years, an’ here you come between us.”

“I don’t want your confounded elephant,” roared the Doctor; “why don’t you keep it chained up?”

“She busted her chain to git after you,” replied the keeper. “Oh, I seen you two lally-gaggin’ all along the road. I knowed you wa’n’t no good the first time I set eyes on yer, a-sayin’ hoodoo words over the poor dumb beast.”

The Doctor resolved to banish “analogy” from his vocabulary.

***

The next morning, about four o’clock, Dr. Tibbitt awoke with a troubled mind. He had driven home after midnight from a late call, and he had had an uneasy fancy that he saw a great shadowy bulk ambling along in the mist-hid fields by the roadside. He jumped out of bed and went to the window. Below him, completely covering Mrs. Pennypepper’s nasturtium bed, her prehensile trunk ravaging the early chrysanthemums, stood Zenobia, swaying to and fro, the dew glistening on her seamed sides beneath the early morning sunlight. The Doctor hastily dressed himself and slipped downstairs and out, to meet this Frankenstein’s-monster of affection.

There was but one thing to do. Zenobia would follow him wherever he went – she rushed madly through Mrs. Pennypepper’s roses to greet him – and his only course was to lead her out of the town before people began to get up, and to detain her in some remote meadow until he could get her keeper to come for her and secure her by force or stratagem. He set off by the least frequented streets, and he experienced a pang of horror as he remembered that his way led him past the house of his one professional rival in Sagawaug. Suppose Dr. Pettengill should be coming home or going out as he passed!

He did not meet Dr. Pettengill. He did meet Deacon Burgee, who stared at him with more of rage than of amazement in his wrinkled countenance. The Deacon was carrying a large bundle of embroidered linen and flannel, that must have been tied up in a hurry.

“Good morning, Deacon,” the Doctor hailed him, with as much ease of manner as he could assume. “How’s Mrs. Burgee?”

“She’s doin’ fust rate, no thanks to no circus doctors!” snorted the Deacon. “An’ if you want to know any thing further concernin’ her health, you ask Dr. Pettengill. He’s got more sense than to go trailin’ around the streets with a parboiled elephant behind him, a-frightening women-folks a hull month afore the’r time.”

“Why, Deacon!” cried the Doctor, “what – what is it?”

“It’s a boy,” responded the Deacon, sternly; “and it’s God’s own mercy that ’twa’n’t born with a trunk and a tail.”

***

The Doctor found a secluded pasture, near the woods that encircled the town, and there he sat him down, in the corner of a snake-fence, to wait until some farmer or market-gardener should pass by, to carry his message to the keeper. He had another message to send, too. He had several cases that must be attended to at once. Unless he could get away from his pachydermatous familiar, Pettengill must care for his cases that morning. It was hard – but what was he to do?

Zenobia stood by his side, dividing her attention between the caresses she bestowed on him and the care she was obliged to take of her red cap, which was not tightly strapped on, and slipped in various directions at every movement of her gigantic head. She was unmistakably happy. From time to time she trumpeted cheerily. She plucked up tufts of grass, and offered them to the Doctor. He refused them, and she ate them herself. Once he took a daisy from her, absent-mindedly, and she was so greatly pleased that she smashed his hat in her endeavors to pet him. The Doctor was a kind-hearted man. He had to admit that Zenobia meant well. He patted her trunk, and made matters worse. Her elephantine ecstasy came near being the death of him.

Still the farmer came not, nor the market-gardener. Dr. Tibbitt began to believe that he had chosen a meadow that was too secluded. At last two boys appeared. After they had stared at him and at Zenobia for half-an-hour, one of them agreed to produce Dr. Pettengill and Zenobia’s keeper for fifty cents. Dr. Pettengill was the first to arrive. He refused to come nearer than the furthest limit of the pasture.

“Hello, Doctor,” he called out, “hear you’ve been seeing elephants. Want me to take your cases? Guess I can. Got a half-hour free. Brought some bromide down for you, if you’d like to try it.”

To judge from his face, Zenobia was invisible. But his presence alarmed that sensitive animal. She crowded up close to the fence, and every time she flicked her skin to shake off the flies she endangered the equilibrium of the Doctor, who was sitting on the top rail, for dignity’s sake. He shouted his directions to his colleague, who shouted back professional criticisms.

“Salicylate of soda for that old woman? What’s the matter with salicylate of cinchonidia? Don’t want to kill her before you get out of this swamp, do you?”

Dr. Tibbitt was not a profane man; but at this moment he could not restrain himself.

“Damn you!” he said, with such vigor that the elephant gave a convulsive start. The Doctor felt his seat depart from under him – he was going – going into space for a brief moment, and then he scrambled up out of the soft mud of the cow-wallow back of the fence on which he had been sitting. Zenobia had backed against the fence.

The keeper arrived soon after. He had only reached the meadow when Zenobia lifted her trunk in the air, emitted a mirthful toot, and struck out for the woods with the picturesque and cumbersome gallop of a mastodon pup.

“Dern you,” said the keeper to Dr. Tibbitt, who was trying to fasten his collar, which had broken loose in his fall; “if the boys was here, and I hollered ‘Hey Rube!’ – there wouldn’t be enough left of yer to spread a plaster fer a baby’s bile!”

The Doctor made himself look as decent as the situation allowed, and then he marched toward the town with the light of a firm resolve illuminating his face. The literature of his childhood had come to his aid. He remembered the unkind tailor who pricked the elephant’s trunk. It seemed to him that the tailor was a rather good fellow.

“If that elephant’s disease is gratitude,” thought the Doctor, “I’ll give her an antidote.”

He went to the drug-store, and, as he went, he pulled out a blank pad and wrote down a prescription, from mere force of habit. It read thus:

When the druggist looked at it, he was taken short of breath.

“What’s this?” he asked – “a bombshell?”

“Put it up,” said the Doctor, “and don’t talk so much.” He lingered nervously on the druggist’s steps, looking up and down the street. He had sent a boy to order the stable-man to harness his gig. By-and-by, the druggist put his head out of the door.

“I’ve got some asafœtida pills,” he said, “that are kind o’ tired, and half a pound of whale-oil soap that’s higher’n Haman – “

“Put ’em in!” said the Doctor, grimly, as he saw Zenobia coming in sight far down the street.

She came up while the Doctor was waiting for the bolus. Twenty-three boys were watching them, although it was only seven o’clock in the morning.

“Down, Zenobia!” said the Doctor, thoughtlessly, as he might have addressed a dog. He was talking with the druggist, and Zenobia was patting his ear with her trunk. Zenobia sank to her knees. The Doctor did not notice her. She folded her trunk about him, lifted him to her back, rose, with a heave and a sway, to her feet, and started up the road. The boys cheered. The Doctor got off on the end of an elm-branch. His descent was watched from nineteen second-story windows.

His gig came to meet him at last, and he entered it and drove rapidly out of town, with Zenobia trotting contentedly behind him. As soon as he had passed Deacon Burgee’s house, he drew rein, and Zenobia approached, while his perspiring mare stood on her hind-legs.

“Zenobia – pill!” said the Doctor.

As she had often done in her late illness, Zenobia opened her mouth at the word of command, and swallowed the infernal bolus. Then they started up again, and the Doctor headed for Zenobia’s tent.

But Zenobia’s pace was sluggish. She had been dodging about the woods for two nights, and she was tired. When the Doctor whipped up, she seized the buggy by any convenient projection, and held it back. This damaged the buggy and frightened the horse; but it accomplished Zenobia’s end. It was eleven o’clock before Jake Bumgardner’s “Half-Way-House” loomed up white, afar down the dusty road, and the Doctor knew that his round-about way had at length brought him near to the field where the circus-tent had been pitched.

He drove on with a lighter heart in his bosom. He had not heard Zenobia behind him, for some time. He did not know what had become of her, or what she was doing, but he learned later.

The Doctor had compounded a pill well calculated to upset Zenobia’s stomach. That it would likewise give her a consuming thirst he had not considered. But chemistry was doing its duty without regard to him. A thirst like a furnace burned within Zenobia. Capsicum and chloride of lime were doing their work. She gasped and groaned. She searched for water. She filled her trunk at a wayside trough and poured the contents into her mouth. Then she sucked up a puddle or two. Then she came to Bumgardner’s, where a dozen kegs of lager-beer and a keg of what passed at Bumgardner’s for gin stood on the sidewalk. Zenobia’s circus experience had taught her what a water-barrel meant. She applied her knowledge. With her forefoot she deftly staved in the head of one keg after another, and with her trunk she drew up the beer and the gin, and delivered them to her stomach. If you think her taste at fault, remember the bolus.

Bumgardner rushed out and assailed her with a bung-starter. She turned upon him and squirted lager-beer over him until he was covered with an iridescent lather of foam from head to foot. Then she finished the kegs and went on her way, to overtake the Doctor.

***

The Doctor was speeding his mare merrily along, grateful for even a momentary relief from Zenobia’s attentions, when, at one and the same time, he heard a heavy, uncertain thumping on the road behind him, and the quick patter of a trotter’s hoofs on the road ahead of him. He glanced behind him first, and saw Zenobia. She swayed from side to side, more than was her wont. Her red cap was far down over her left eye. Her aspect was rakish, and her gait was unsteady. The Doctor did not know it, but Zenobia was drunk.

Zenobia was sick, but intoxication dominated her sickness. Even sulphide of calcium withdrew courteously before the might of beer and gin. Rocking from side to side, reeling across the road and back, trumpeting in imbecile inexpressive tones, Zenobia advanced.

The Doctor looked forward. Tom Matson sat in his dog-cart, with Miss Bunker by his side. His horse had caught sight of Zenobia, and he was rearing high in air, and whinnying in terror. Before Tom could pull him down, he made a sudden break, overturned the dog-cart, and flung Tom and Miss Minetta Bunker on a bank by the side of the road. It was a soft bank, well-grown with mint and stinging-nettles, just above a creek. Tom had scarce landed before he was up and off, running hard across the fields.

Miss Minetta rose and looked at him with fire in her eyes.

“Well!” she said aloud; “I’d like Mother to see you now!”

The Doctor had jumped out of his gig and let his little mare go galloping up the road. He had his arm about Miss Minetta’s waist when he turned to face his familiar demon – which may have accounted for the pluck in his face.

But Zenobia was a hundred yards down the road, and she was utterly incapable of getting any further. She trumpeted once or twice, then she wavered like a reed in the wind; her legs weakened under her, and she sank on her side. Her red cap had slipped down, and she picked it up with her trunk, broke its band in a reckless swing that resembled the wave of jovial farewell, gave one titanic hiccup, and fell asleep by the roadside.

***

An hour later, Dr. Tibbitt was driving toward Pelion, with Miss Bunker by his side. His horse had been stopped at the toll-gate. He was driving with one hand. Perhaps he needed the other to show how they could have a summer-house in the garden that ran down to the river.

***

But it was evening when Zenobia awoke to find her keeper sitting on her head. He jabbed a cotton-hook firmly and decisively into her ear, and led her homeward down the road lit by the golden sunset. That was the end of Zenobia’s infidelity.

THE NINE CENT-GIRLS

Miss Bessie Vaux, of Baltimore, paid a visit to her aunt, the wife of the Commandant at old Fort Starbuck, Montana. She had at her small feet all the garrison and some two dozen young ranch-owners, the flower of the younger sons of the best society of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Thirty-seven notches in the long handle of her parasol told the story of her three months’ stay. The thirty-seventh was final. She accepted a measly Second-Lieutenant, and left all the bachelors for thirty miles around the Fort to mourn her and to curse the United States Army. This is the proem.

***

Mr. John Winfield, proprietor of the Winfield Ranch, sat a-straddle a chair in front of the fire in his big living room, and tugged at his handsome black beard as he discussed the situation with his foreman, who was also his confidant, his best friend and his old college mate. Mr. Richard Cutter stood with his back to the fire, twirled a very blonde moustache and smoked cigarettes continually while he ministered to his suffering friend, who was sore wounded in his vanity, having been notch No. 36 on Miss Vaux’s parasol. Dick had been notch No. 1; but Dick was used to that sort of thing.

“By thunder,” said Mr. Winfield, “I’m going to get married this year, if I have to marry a widow with six children. And I guess I’ll have to. I’ve been ten years in this girlless wilderness, and I never did know any girls to speak of, at home. Now you, you always everlastingly knew girls. What’s that place you lived at in New York State – where there were so many girls?”

“Tusculum,” replied Mr. Cutter, in a tone of complacent reminiscence. “Nice old town, plastered so thick with mortgages that you can’t grow flowers in the front yard. All the fellows strike for New York as soon as they begin to shave. The crop of girls remains, and they wither on the stem. Why, one Winter they had a hump-backed man for their sole society star in the male line. Nice girls, too. Old families. Pretty, lots of them. Good form, too, for provincials.”

“Gad!” said Jack Winfield, “I’d like to live in Tusculum for a year or so.”

“No, you wouldn’t. It’s powerful dull. But the girls were nice. Now, there were the Nine Cent-Girls.”

“The Nine-cent Girls?”

“No, the Nine Cent-Girls. Catch the difference? They were the daughters of old Bailey, the civil engineer. Nine of ’em, ranging from twenty-two, when I was there – that’s ten years ago – down to – oh, I don’t know – a kid in a pinafore. All looked just alike, barring age, and every one had the face of the Indian lady on the little red cent. Do you remember the Indian lady on the little red cent?”

“Hold on,” suggested Jack, rising; “I’ve got one. I’ve had it ever since I came.” He unlocked his desk, rummaged about in its depths, and produced a specimen of the neatest and most artistic coin that the United States government has ever struck.

“That’s it,” said Dick, holding the coppery disk in his palm. “It would do for a picture of any one of ’em – only the Bailey girls didn’t wear feathers in their hair. But there they were, nine of ’em, nice girls, every way, and the whole lot named out of the classics. Old Bailey was strong on the classics. His great-grandfather named Tusculum, and Bailey’s own name was M. Cicero Bailey. So he called all his girls by heathen names, and had a row with the parson every christening. Let me see – there was Euphrosyne, and Clelia, and Lydia, and Flora and Aurora – those were the twins – I was sweet on one of the twins – and Una – and, oh, I can’t remember them all. But they were mighty nice girls.”

“Probably all married by this time,” Jack groaned. “Let me look at that cent.” He held it in the light of the fire, and gazed thoughtfully upon it.

“Not a one,” Dick assured him. “I met a chap from Tusculum last time I was in Butte City, and I asked him. He said there’d been only one wedding in Tusculum in three years, and then the local paper had a wire into the church and got out extras.”

“What sort of girls were they?” Winfield asked, still regarding the coin.

“Just about like that, for looks. Let me see it again.” Dick examined the cent critically, and slipped it into his pocket, in an absent-minded way. “Just about like that. First rate girls. Old man was as poor as a church mouse; but you would never have known it, the way that house was run. Bright girls, too – at least, my twin was. I’ve forgotten which twin it was; but she was too bright for me.”

“And how old did you say they were? How old was the youngest?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” replied Dick, with a bachelor’s vagueness on the question of a child’s age, “five – six – seven, may be. Ten years ago, you know.”

“Just coming in to grass,” observed Mr. Winfield, meditatively.

***

Two months after the evening on which this conversation took place, Mr. Richard Cutter walked up one of the quietest and most eminently respectable of the streets of Tusculum.

Mr. Cutter was nervous. He was, for the second time, making up his mind to attempt a difficult and delicate task. He had made up his mind to it, or had had it made up for him; but now he felt himself obliged to go over the whole process in his memory, in order to assure himself that the mind was really made up.

The suggestion had come from Winfield. He remembered with what a dazed incomprehension he had heard his chum’s proposition to induce Mr. Bailey and all his family to migrate to Montana and settle at Starbuck.

“We’ll give the old man all the surveying he wants. And he can have Ashford’s place on the big dam when Ashford goes East in August. Why, the finger of Providence is pointing Bailey straight for Starbuck.”

With a clearer remembrance of Eastern conventionalities than Mr. Winfield, Dick Cutter had suggested various obstacles in the way of this apparently simple scheme. But Winfield would hear of no opposition, and he joined with him eight other young ranchmen, who entered into the idea with wild Western enthusiasm and an Arcadian simplicity that could see no chance of failure. These energetic youths subscribed a generous fund to defray the expenses of Mr. Cutter as a missionary to Tusculum; and Mr. Cutter had found himself committed to the venture before he knew it.

Now, what had seemed quite feasible in Starbuck’s wilds wore a different face in prim and proper Tusculum. It dawned on Mr. Cutter that he was about to make a most radical and somewhat impudent proposition to a conservative old gentleman. The atmosphere of Tusculum weighed heavy on its spirits, which were light and careless enough in his adopted home in Montana.

Therefore Mr. Cutter found his voice very uncertain as he introduced himself to the young lady who opened, at his ring, the front door of one of the most respectable houses in that respectable street of Tusculum.

“Good morning,” he said, wondering which one of the Nine Cent-Girls he saw before him; and then, noting a few threads of gray in her hair, he ventured:

“It’s Miss – Miss Euphrosyne, isn’t it? You don’t remember me – Mr. Cutter, Dick Cutter? Used to live on Ovid Street. Can I see your father?”

“My father?” repeated Miss Euphrosyne, looking a little frightened.

“Yes – I just want – “

“Why, Mr. Cutter – I do remember you now – didn’t you know that Papa died nine years ago – the year after you left Tusculum?”

Dick Cutter leaned against the door-jamb and stared speechlessly at Euphrosyne. He noted vaguely that she looked much the same as when he had last seen her, except that she looked tired and just a shade sad. When he was able to think, he said that he begged her pardon. Then she smiled, faintly.

“We couldn’t expect you to know,” she said, simply. “Won’t you come in?”

“N-N-No,” stuttered Dick. “I-I-I’ll call later – this evening, if you don’t mind. Ah – ah – good day.” And he fled to his hotel, to pull himself together, leaving Miss Euphrosyne smiling.

He sat alone in his room all the afternoon, pondering over the shipwreck of his scheme. What should he tell the boys? What would the boys say? Why had he not thought to write before he came? Why on earth had Bailey taken it into his head to die?

After supper, he resolved to call as he had promised. Mrs. Bailey, he knew, had died a year after the appearance of her ninth daughter. But, he thought, with reviving hope, there might be a male head to the family – an uncle, perhaps.

The door was opened by Clytie, the youngest of the nine. She ushered him at once into a bright little parlor, hung around with dainty things in artistic needlework and decorative painting. A big lamp glowed on a centre-table, and around it sat seven of the sisters, each one engaged in some sort of work, sewing, embroidering or designing. Nearest, the lamp sat Euphrosyne, reading Macaulay aloud. She stopped as he entered, and welcomed him in a half-timid but wholly friendly fashion.

Dick sat down, very much embarrassed, in spite of the greeting. It was many years since he had talked to nine ladies at once. And, in truth, a much less embarrassed man might have found himself more or less troubled to carry on a conversation with nine young women who looked exactly like each other, except for the delicate distinctions of age which a masculine stranger might well be afraid to note. Dick looked from one to the other of the placid classic faces, and could not help having an uneasy idea that each new girl that he addressed was only the last one who had slipped around the table and made herself look a year or two older or younger.

But after a while the pleasant, genial, social atmosphere of the room, sweet with a delicate, winning virginity, thawed out his awkward reserve, and Dick began to talk of the West and Western life until the nine pairs of blue eyes, stretched to their widest, fixed upon him as a common focus. It was eleven when he left, with many apologies for his long call. He found the night and the street uncommonly dark, empty and depressing.

“Just the outfit!” he observed to himself. “And old Bailey dead and the whole scheme busted.”

For he had learned that the Nine Cent-Girls had not a relative in the world. Under these circumstances, it was clearly his duty to take the morning train for the West. And yet, the next evening, he presented himself, shamefaced and apologetic, at the Bailey’s door.

He thought that he wanted to make some sort of explanation to Miss Euphrosyne. But what explanation could he make? There was no earthly reason for his appearance in Tusculum. He talked of the West until eleven o’clock, and then he took a hesitating leave.

The next day he made a weak pretense of casually passing by when he knew that Miss Euphrosyne was working in the garden; but he found it no easier to explain across the front fence. The explanation never would have been made if it had not been for Miss Euphrosyne. A curious nervousness had come over her, too, and suddenly she spoke out.

“Mr. Cutter – excuse me – but what has brought you here? I mean is it any thing that concerns us – or – or – Papa’s affairs! I thought everything was settled – I had hoped – “

There was nothing for it now but to tell the whole story, and Dick told it.

“I suppose you’ll think we’re a pack of barbarians,” he said, when he had come to the end, “and, of course, it’s all impracticable now.”