perfect dummy; just a stupid ass, as you may say.
Everybody knew it, and everybody said it. Well, if that very
boy isn’t the first lawyer in the State of Missouri to-day,
I’m a Democrat!’
‘Is that so?’
‘It’s actually so. I’m telling you the truth.’
‘How do you account for it?’
‘Account for it? There ain’t any accounting for it,
except that if you send a damned fool to St. Louis, and you
don’t tell them he’s a damned fool they’ll never find it out.
There’s one thing sure–if I had a damned fool I should know
what to do with him: ship him to St. Louis–it’s the noblest
market in the world for that kind of property. Well, when you
come to look at it all around, and chew at it and think it over,
don’t it just bang anything you ever heard of?’
‘Well, yes, it does seem to. But don’t you think maybe it
was the Hannibal people who were mistaken about the boy,
and not the St. Louis people’
‘Oh, nonsense! The people here have known him from the very cradle–
they knew him a hundred times better than the St. Louis idiots could
have known him. No, if you have got any damned fools that you want
to realize on, take my advice–send them to St. Louis.’
I mentioned a great number of people whom I had formerly known.
Some were dead, some were gone away, some had prospered,
some had come to naught; but as regarded a dozen or so of the lot,
the answer was comforting:
‘Prosperous–live here yet–town littered with their children.’
I asked about Miss —-
Died in the insane asylum three or four years ago–never was out of it
from the time she went in; and was always suffering, too; never got
a shred of her mind back.’
If he spoke the truth, here was a heavy tragedy, indeed.
Thirty-six years in a madhouse, that some young fools might have some fun!
I was a small boy, at the time; and I saw those giddy young ladies come
tiptoeing into the room where Miss —- sat reading at midnight by a lamp.
The girl at the head of the file wore a shroud and a doughface,
she crept behind the victim, touched her on the shoulder,
and she looked up and screamed, and then fell into convulsions.
She did not recover from the fright, but went mad. In these days it
seems incredible that people believed in ghosts so short a time ago.
But they did.
After asking after such other folk as I could call to mind,
I finally inquired about MYSELF:
‘Oh, he succeeded well enough–another case of damned fool.
If they’d sent him to St. Louis, he’d have succeeded sooner.’
It was with much satisfaction that I recognized the wisdom
of having told this candid gentleman, in the beginning,
that my name was Smith.
Chapter 54
Past and Present
Being left to myself, up there, I went on picking out old houses in the
distant town, and calling back their former inmates out of the moldy past.
Among them I presently recognized the house of the father of Lem Hackett
(fictitious name). It carried me back more than a generation in a moment,
and landed me in the midst of a time when the happenings of life were not
the natural and logical results of great general laws, but of special orders,
and were freighted with very precise and distinct purposes–partly punitive
in intent, partly admonitory; and usually local in application.
When I was a small boy, Lem Hackett was drowned–on a Sunday.
He fell out of an empty flat-boat, where he was playing.
Being loaded with sin, he went to the bottom like an anvil.
He was the only boy in the village who slept that night.
We others all lay awake, repenting. We had not needed the information,
delivered from the pulpit that evening, that Lem’s was a case
of special judgment–we knew that, already. There was a ferocious
thunder-storm, that night, and it raged continuously until near dawn.
The winds blew, the windows rattled, the rain swept along the roof
in pelting sheets, and at the briefest of intervals the inky blackness