A knight in denim

Front matter

THE LIBRARY

OF

LOS ANGELES c-

Chapter I

" \\ 7Y ye ? Wy ye, anyhow ?" That was the T T form in which Bill invariably greeted a grown person, man or woman.

"Middlin , Bill, middlin . How s self?" rejoined Arndt. Though born a Dane, Arndt had become to all practical intents and purposes a Yankee. Nobody was shrewder.

" Pooty fair, consid rin*. Ain t thinkin of sellin yer place, be ye ?"

"Hadn t thought of it, Bill. Thinkin of buyin , be ye ?"

"F-m, yeah some! Whatcher take ?"

"What ll I take?"

"What ll ye take, anyhow?"

"How d about twenty-five hunderd strike ye?"

"Bout twenty-five hunderd ?"

"Say about twenty-five hunderd. Eighty acres, an the buildin s."

That s some money, I reckon."

"I ain t anxious to sell, as I knows on."

"Dunno s I m so dodrotted anxious to buy, nuther."

"Tell ye what I ll do, though, seein it s you I ll knock off an even five hunderd. That s reas nable."

"Five hunderd even five hunderd?"

"Makin* the figger jest twenty hunderd. Come now!"

Throw in hosses an tools, so s t I kin git right to work ?"

" Hosses an tools tail goes with the hide. You kin git to work to-day, if ye make up yer mind to buy."

"It s ago!"

Arndt knew which side of his bread was but tered, and from the moment that Bill Harbaugh came proposing to purchase his little farm, there wasn t a doubt about the outcome. Arndt would have sold for a dollar had Bill held out to haggle so far.

It was Bill s way of hiring himself out, and there was nothing to the business further. "A man s a fool to work for somebody else when he kin jes s well work for himself," he was wont to declare, and by way of conforming his practice to his precept, he would never bestow his services until he had gone through the form of bargain and sale. It was only a form, except in Bill s own mind, where it had peculiar validity. Never a penny of consid eration passed between the parties, for money and the value thereof lay altogether beyond the simple fellow s ken; but he deemed the property his henceforth, and always spoke of it as such.

The advantage to Arndt lay in the fact that Bill, since he was working for himself, worked hard and faithfully, and expected no wages. His keep he had to have, of course, but that wasn t much. His wants were few indeed. The clothes he wore were of the cheapest and commonest description, and not many there were days in summer, with the harvest pressing heavily, when he would go without a shirt even, bare to the waist, hairy as a cave man, brawny as a bison, void as either of all conscious ness of indecency; and if he had to have some thing warmer in winter, almost any old coat would serve. A very few dollars a year found him in clothes. For the rest, he ate a good deal inordi nately, in fact; but the plainest fare suited him best, and he made but slight expense on that score. The one luxury of which he had made a necessity was tobacco he had to be chewing pretty much all the time; but the cheapest plug captured his fancy as entirely as the choicest fine-cut, so that his luxury did not serve to swell his keep beyond a trifle. And his keep was all he cost. Really it was no wonder if Arndt, a shrewd man of affairs in his small way, took care to be only so reluctant about selling his place as to help rather than hinder the transaction. No doubt it affected Bill for the better where he was given to feel that he had beaten somebody down.

But in any exhaustive discussion of the subject of wages as it concerned Bill Harbaugh, there need be distinction made between wages of the material sort and wages which went more to the emolument of the spirit. To Bill the former signi fied very little he took it as a matter of course that when he was hungry he should be given to eat, and when nakedness proved inconvenient he should be clothed; and that was about all. As for money, the paper and metal counters whereby we pass value from hand to hand, it was a thing apart, a mystery he couldn t distinguish between a half-dollar piece and a quarter and a matter of no moment. But of the other kind of wages he was not less than covetous, and unless they were pretty lavishly forthcoming his discontent was instantly manifest.

Flattery, in a word, was what Bill had mostly to be paid off with. And there was no danger of over doing it, so to turn his stomach by surfeit. Nor had praise to be in anywise set off with the sauce of delicacy in order to induce him to swallow it. Like his tobacco and his meat, it need be plentifully furnished, but it might be very coarse and common withal.

Arndt understood about that, too, and was not lacking to the occasion. He had at the moment a field of barley white for the sickle, and during some days now he had been weighed down to the point of despair over it. The ground was too full of stumps to admit of a reaper and so grown up with wild vine that the tangled mass fairly defied a cradle to force a way through it. You will bear in mind that an enterprise had to be only moderately difficult in order to get itself given up as impracticable down there in the Valley, and Arndt s barley easily passed the limit. It stood, in other words, to be left where it was only for the new dispensation that is to say, Bill.

And once he had effected a purchase of the place to his satisfaction, Bill naturally looked about him with more particularity, and his eye fell upon the grain which already bowed down with its ripeness.

"Y gorry, have to git right into that there bar ley!" quoth he, and bustled like the busy bee.

"I was thinkin of lettin it go, it s so tangled up," rejoined Arndt artfully. " I don t believe no man kin swing a cradle through it, not without he s an almighty strong man."

That was only the first adroit instalment of Bill s wages Arndt would never be stingy with what cost him nothing and profited him so richly. He brought out the cradle, all rusty with desuetude, and blithely turned the grindstone while the new proprietor sharpened the blade; and wheresoever there offered the opportunity to pay a compliment, paid it.

"Takes a mighty good eye to grind a scythe right/* he remarked.

Bill swelled under the implication that his was that kind of an eye, and handed the steel over for inspection. Arndt ran his finger along it critically, and was forthwith unable to restrain his enthusi astic admiration.

"You ve hit it!" he loudly protested. "Skin me if that edge ain t jest on the turn the hull length. It s some fun bein a farmer where a man knows how to keep his tools up in shape like that."

The dexterity with which Bill rigged the fingers of the cradle brought down upon him a shower of laudatory comment, but it was as the merest sprinkling in comparison with the flood which his manner of striking into the barley presently evoked. And of a truth he did the thing remark ably well, and he looked a splendid fellow doing it, with his massive, shapely shoulders swinging rythmically, graceful in the surpassing strength which made little of the tough task. Perhaps his motions were a trifle over-elaborate you would suspect that it was hardly necessary so to toss the cradle aloft in preparation for the sweep; but when was merit, humanly speaking, ever wholly free from affectation ? If Bill was showing off a bit, that made him out no less than a man, and surely it counted in no derogation of the lordliness of his march to and fro across the field. He was a species of conqueror, and a very good species, too, since he left behind him no destruction, but a swath of golden grain laid as straight as you could draw a string and a stubble cut square as square could be.

"Always tell a bang-up good cradler by his stub ble!" gushed Arndt. "Most of em leaves a ridge twixt the swaths, but I don t see no ridges along here."

That wasn t strictly flattery, since it was fact, but it passed for wages none the less. Bill glowed as much with exaltation and uplift of the spirit as with the effort of his sinewy body. For the mo ment his countenance wore a bright, alert look, till you could almost forget the telltale angles which all too plainly revealed his mental deficiency.

"Want me to bind up for ye, Bill ?" asked Arndt after a little.

"No," replied Bill gravely. "I can t be hirin help. Hired help s what eats up the profits."

And he bound up the barley himself, while Arndt had nothing to do but stand by and spout praises.

Such were the unusual terms of Bill Harbaugh s service. On the face of it he was a hewer of wood

ii and a drawer of water of the most hopeless char acter, but he made his lot luminous in his own view by means of the harmless fiction unless it should work harm to himself which he never suffered to lapse. But if he regarded himself as the owner of the property, he chose not to be exacting in no narrow sense did he stand on his rights. Every thing went on about as before, except that there was another hand in the work, and a hand abundantly strong and willing and loyal. Arndt made himself as much at home as ever, and he sold off produce quite as before, pocketing the proceeds without a word of objection from Bill. So long as the toil ing and moiling were left to him, to be managed in his own way, Bill cared not a fig about the rest.

He was a sunny fellow, of a cheerfulness which no stress could exhaust. Nobody ever heard a crabbed word out of his mouth; never was he seen sullen and out of sorts. Even the weather, let it be howsoever sultry and sticky on the one hand, or rough and blustery on the other, could not ruffle Bill, for all that these details of material environ ment mean so much in the economy of him who has no intellectual resources to fall back on, and whose sense of well-being is almost wholly a matter of physical conditions. No doubt there were times when Bill felt the discomfort, but he sang his song notwithstanding. His song, by the way, was famous a tuneless thing with all the words lost to him but a single line. His voice hadn t a trace of musical quality, and his singing was no more than a thickly aspirated, monotonous groan, until he deemed it time for the refrain to be coming in, whereupon he would burst forth tremendously and bellow:

"And roam no more in proud despair!"

Apparently he had no inkling of what the words signified, and if there lay any connection between them and his former life, he remained unaware of it. His health was magnificent. Others all about him were forever falling ill, but there was none of that for him. Of infection he was absolutely un afraid, and to his lack of fear his immunity may have been in a measure due certainly he was im mune. And perhaps the strangest thing about him was his aptitude for nursing the sick. He liked nothing better than to be sent for to come and sit up with somebody who needed to be administered to during the night. He never fell asleep when such a charge lay upon him, and though he couldn t tell time by the clock, never a doctor who had experi ence of his fidelity but would trust him to give medicines at proper intervals. Among these scien tific men, indeed, there had been broached and discussed the possibility of Bill being gifted with a sixth sense, a power of perception beyond that of ordinary mortals.

Truly he was wise in unexpected ways. In sud den emergencies especially he would display a re sourcefulness that was very astonishing. A certain butcherman in Atro City could testify to that, since he owed his life to it. He had come down into the Valley after hogs one day, and for the reason that these beasts were likely to be wild he brought his gun along to shoot them. But instead of shooting hogs he managed by some mishap to shoot himself straight through the leg, just above the knee, and the torrent of red blood that came spurting out was very terrifying indeed. The butcherman must have bled to death in a few minutes if it hadn t been for Bill, who alone of the considerable company present knew what to do.

A new doctor, as it happened, was called to dress the wound, and he regarded the rude but effective tourniquet with curiosity. "Who taught you to do that ?" he asked.

The inquiry plainly implied commendation, and Bill did not fail to respond as usual, swelling greatly; and when he was in that mood there wasn t much but foolishness to be got out of him. He gibbered some silly, inconsequential reply, with a look in tended to be crafty, as if he didn t care to reveal all he knew.

The doctor persisted, however. "Who told you the thing had to be put on above the wound ?"

Somebody whispered that Bill wasn t supposed to be altogether there with respect of his wits, whereupon the doctor s interest was freshly moved. " Does it argue an intuitive knowledge of the cir culation of the blood ?" he mused aloud.

"That s it!" Bill broke out with a vacuous laugh. "Cultivation of the blood I cal late that s what s ailin of him."

At times it would almost seem as if Bill s fool ishness were in some degree put on, so exceed ingly foolish was it.

His strength was that of a giant. For instance, he could take a moderately heavy man by the strap of his trousers and hold him out at arm s-length. Nor was he any of your stolid, clumsy titans on the contrary, his agility was something to startle you. When first he let it be known, by actual demonstration, that he could turn a somersault, slap and clean without touching his hands to the ground, the belief sprang up that he had been a performer in a circus. Plenty of young fellows threw hand-spring and cart-wheels, but not an other could achieve the somersault.

With all his exceeding prowess, he could be drawn into no contest, not even by dint of flattery he was a man of peace first, last, and all the time.

There were wrestlers about, and the evidences of his strength and dexterity were a species of chal lenge in their eyes, so that they were wishful to have it out with him; but Bill always dodged. It came to be thought of him that he was a coward. That he couldn t be kicked into a fight grew to be a common opinion.

It was an opinion not destined to endure, how ever the day arrived when it had to modify itself materially. No rural free delivery had come to bless the farmers as yet, and one winter when work was slack Bill took it upon himself to tramp off to Atro City every day and fetch the letters for all the neighbors. The task was not slight, but he derived great satisfaction from it a letter was a sacred thing to him, and to be allowed to constitute him self a link in the chain whereby it was transmitted made him very proud and happy. And he felt the responsibility, as the prankish boys learned who conceived a plot to waylay him, just for a joke, as he came along with his precious charge. The joke failed to develop. What developed was rather that Bill could not only be kicked into a fight, but that once in he could fight like a lion. Only that the boys made haste to disclose their identity and the innocence of their purpose, the results might have been serious for them.

Kindness to dumb animals was another of his 16 traits his patience with them was a proverb. Some slightingly attributed the quality to the feebleness of his intellect simpletons were always patient, and where one had trials to undergo there was nothing so helpful as being an idiot. Others, more considerately, put forward the theory of a kind of instinctive free-masonry between the beasts and the simple man, and in truth there was much to bear out the view. Especially noteworthy in that connection was Bill s success with balky horses, probably the most finished specimen of obstinacy afforded by animals not endowed with reason. No horse ever balked with him, and no horse which had balked with another refused to start when he gave the word. Significantly, the word was never harshly given, and with never a blow even of the softest.

He had withal a notion of manners and amenities and a taste for society. Often, as the spirit took him, he would spend a Sunday making" short calls up and down the Valley, and on these occasions he conducted himself with considerable formality. In spite of the hunger for compliments which pos sessed him, you wouldn t catch him fishing for them when he was making calls. He made a particular point of steering the conversation to subjects most likely to interest the other parties to it their ex ploits rather than his own came in for attention if

1 7 he had his way; and what made him quite singu lar among the men of those regions, he could meet women-folks without blenching. Others might hang their heads bashfully and stammer and shift in fact, they usually did but not Bill. Yet his ease was not the ease of indifference nobody could be more deferential and truly courteous to the sex. Women-folks were cast in a coarse mould thereabouts, and they made plenty of fun of Bill, even of his deference to themselves; yet they un deniably liked to have him call, if only because the young children were so pleased to see him. These latter hailed with boisterous acclamations the com ing of the only grown man they knew who would cheerfully and without mockery unbend and play with them at their own games.

But why had he chosen to go to Arndt s to work ? Be it known that there wasn t a farmer from one end of the Valley to the other who wouldn t jump at the chance to sell out to him at his own figure; and if it had been known that he was in the market, he would have been offered no end of tempting bargains. That was another peculiarity of his, the manner in which he left one place to take up with another, the sum of it being that he kept his own counsel absolutely. Just now he had tarried for upward of a year with Jenkins, the Welshman, seemingly satisfied and full of the belief that everything in sight was his, to have and to hold. But all at once he was gone, without a word of warning; his sense of proprietorship had broken down be fore some stronger feeling, and he had abandoned his property incontinently.

How came it about ?

You should be made aware that there existed at Arndt s certain uncommon conditions of a domes tic nature. Arndt was a man devoid of romance, and when, some years previous, he had deemed it meet to marry, he went about the business in an unromantic way. A family in Atro City had a sister back in Denmark, and the sister was so fallen into misfortune that she stood ready to take any body for a husband, and she it was who, after sun dry negotiations of a purely financial character, be came Mrs. Arndt. It was an inauspicious match, and as the auspices were so the event proved the wife was as wretched as a dull, spiritless woman could be. She bore no children, and by that deeply disappointed her husband, who wanted boys io do the drudgery of the farm and girls who might be sent out to service and thus afford a revenue. Perhaps, on the whole, and in view of the ideals which prevailed in their home, it was just as well that their marriage had no issue; but babies would have been a consolation to the woman, and they would have made the man kinder.

When Bill came into the house for dinner, after a strenuous forenoon in the barley field, he asked Mrs. Arndt what her first name was. "I always like to call folks by their first name, specially women-folks," he explained.

It was long since any one had taken so much in terest in her, and the poor drudge, neglected by her husband and shunned by her neighbors, responded as a dog hungry for affection might respond to a caress. Her name was Olga, and when Bill spoke it over after her, as to try its quality, her face lighted up with an unwonted smile. Possibly in the manner of the dumb beasts she caught the note of kindness and fellowship in his voice. Anyway, that was a day of happy augury for Olga, and she and Bill became such friends that Arndt s jealousy might have been moved only that he was too base to be jealous. Henceforth the woman s heavy toil was vastly lightened by the strong man s helpful hand. Bill s duties out-of-doors were never so pressing that he couldn t stop and give Olga a lift.

Arndt had a fancy for coming home drunk at no very infrequent intervals; and as often as he came home drunk it was his further fancy to beat his wife cruelly, so that she screamed in agony. But there was no more of it after the advent of the new proprietor. Arndt was going on with the usual order one evening, and had his fist up to strike, when Bill interposed.

"Now don t do that!" he coaxed, in soft accents, but holding Arndt s arm the while in a grip that there was no escaping from. " It don t do no good. It don t do no more good to strike a woman than it does to club a hoss, not a mite."

It was a curious situation intolerable, no doubt, only that Arndt so well knew, when he was sober at least, which side of his bread was buttered.

Chapter II

WHEN a republic more grateful than the prov erb has called its kind enacted the Invalid Pension Law, by the provisions of which every veteran of the war who could show a disability due to his service was entitled to pay from the day of his discharge, not unnaturally there ensued an overhauling of disabilities throughout the land.

Now Bill Harbaugh, as it happened, had not about him a scrap of documentary proof that he had been in the army. Furthermore, he couldn t recall the number of his regiment or the letter of his company, or the name of a single officer of either; nor could he describe any engagement in which he had participated in such wise as to identify it. As for the leaders whom fame had made immortal, he thought he had heard of Grant, though he wasn t sure, and if hard pressed he recalled a Pap Thompson who might have been Pap Thomas; but Lincoln was no more to him than Leonidas, and Sherman likewise, and all the rest none was so illustrious as to have found even a precarious lodge ment in his memory. Bill s memory, to tell the truth, was far and away the weakest of his weak faculties pretty much a blank under any test. He could tell two war stories, and only two; ramblingly enough, yet with sufficient uniformity to vouch for their substantial verity. One was about his detachment having been loaded into cattlecars for transportation he couldn t say where, or whither they were going whereby they were af fronted and cut up, and by way of manifesting their disapproval pulled out the coupling-pins so that the train couldn t start.

"Cap n he was bilin mad, but jes s soon s he d open his head we d all blat like cattle!" related Bill, and that was the point and culmination of the tale. Asked how the difficulty was adjusted, or whether the train ever succeeded in starting, he couldn t say, but the recollection of what they did just as soon as the captain opened his head, that remained vividly with him, and he found it so amusing that he would almost strangle with laugh ter marking in what a humorous light he beheld the incident, you could understand why he remem bered it.

The other story discovered him in a more mar tial attitude, taking his place in the skirmish line and firing what he described as the signal gun. The palpable distinction had touched his vanity, and once more you could understand why he had remembered. How the skirmish had resulted, whether in defeat or victory, was a detail wholly forgotten.

In fine, Bill s war record, as he knew it himself, was a hazy affair indeed.

To be sure, a veteran hadn t to be so very much of an invalid in order to secure a pension. Take Dan Linton, for instance a Lily of Lilies, by the way. Though Dan served three years in the cav alry arm and saw plenty of real fighting, he came off without a scratch except for having the tip of his ear clipped away by the sabre of a clumsy comrade as the troop were drilling. The injury was of the most trivial character, a laughing matter and no more till the pension law went into effect, where upon Dan had the front to go before the examiner with an unheard-of tale of deafness; and whether because he was so plausible or the authorities were so complacent, he presently found himself in the enjoyment of an assured income of four dollars a month, with so pretty a lump of back pay that he was forthwith rated a rich man in the Valley.

If Dan Linton might have a pension, why not almost any one ? And particularly, why not Bill Harbaugh ?

Not that the question was raised by Bill himself, If the initiative had been left to him, there would probably never have been a move in the business certainly not so long as a pension meant nothing to him but mere money, for which he had no use what soever. But if he hadn t an atom of avarice in him, Arndt could easily make up the deficiency out of his plentiful supply. Arndt scented cash, and the smell of it was sweet in his nostrils. If Bill didn t care for the stuff, that circumstance made pretty certain of his willingness to let it pass from him, and Arndt clearly foresaw himself spending the back pay and the monthly allowance as it came to hand. Very shrewdly he laid his plans, and so cleverly did he play his cards that Bill was shortly made conscious of a wound to his pride he was given to perceive that whoever got a pension was thereby distinguished, that there was not only money in it, but a vindication of his personal worth. Should he stand by and let the world say that Dan Linton was a better man than he ? Never Bill could endure nothing so derogatory as that.

Arndt was well aware that at least some pretence of a disability would have to be put forward the machinery was pretty loose and accommodating, no doubt, but it was apt to balk at the physical per fection of a Hercules; and the physical perfection of a Hercules was about what Bill presented for inspection. Arndt was aware of this, and rose to the occasion in his best style of craft. He coached the candidate in the simulation of a delicacy of the lungs, contracted by sleeping on the bare ground

2 5 in cold weather; he even taught Bill to cough a little; and he went along to see the thing through.

The examiner was an old soldier himself, with a strong prejudice of sympathy in favor of almost any applicant. An eye less skilled than his could see at a glance how it lay with Bill, and his heart went out especially to the simple fellow.

"Well, comrade," said he, with a friendly nudge, "what appears to be the trouble with you ?"

"One lung gone and the other partly!" vocifer ated Bill, in tremendous tones, as if by the very weight of sound to carry conviction.

Arndt was dumfounded and stared with dropped jaw of course he was too shrewd ever to have prompted Bill to claim so absurdly much. How had that singular individual come by the concep tion of symptoms so advanced and alarming ?