"'Good morning, Mr. Constrictor,' said she.

"'Good afternoon, Mrs. Witch,' said the Constrictor.

"'Have you seen my children?' asked the lady.

"'I have not', said the Constrictor.

"The Witch was about to depart when a thought seemed to seize her and she turned just about half way, a.s.suming what may be designated as a suddenly reflective att.i.tude;

"'Are you sure, Mr. Constrictor?' said she.

"'I am sure,' said he.

"Only a person with nerves under absolute control could have been present on that occasion and considered unmoved the changes in the Witch's face. The acc.u.mulative grimness of her countenance became something startling. She spoke slowly but her voice had that hard, low, even tone which we read about in novels.

"'What is the reason that you are so big in the middle?' said she.

"'I am not big in the middle, your eyes deceive you,' said he.

"'You are lying, Mr. Constrictor,' said she, 'and I'm going to make you tell the truth. I am going to make an Incantation over and around and all about you that will give you some idea of what forces are at work in the universe.'

"Then from somewhere about her skirt, she pulled out a broomstick, and waved it five times, and said; 'Abracadabra, Pentagon' and some other things, and, of course, the performance had its effect and the Constrictor had to tell the truth. He simply had to! He admitted the consumption of the three children.

"Imagine the demeanor of the Witch when she learned that her three children had been devoured by the Constrictor! For a little time she was speechless and white in the face, then, as reason and the control of her powers returned, the malignant look which came was something that simply defies description. Her voice, as she spoke to the Constrictor this time, was shrill and raucous.

"'I am going to p.r.o.nounce an Anathema upon you,' she said, 'and I'm going to do it now. I am going to make you the same at both ends.'

"A very adroit and clever Constrictor was this, and he said nothing. But he chuckled to himself: 'If she makes me the same at both ends, I will have more fun than ever. With a mouth at each end, I can eat twice as many wild boars and be twice as happy.' He coiled closer to the ground with a look of affected submission, and the Witch went on with her Anathema.

"It was a fine anathema, there was no question about it. Even the leaves on the trees about first turned brown, then crackled and then smoked, as she was making her few remarks. She completed the formula and departed, leaving the Constrictor to become the same at both ends, and he lay there, still chuckling, waiting for his double-headedness and double enjoyment in the future.

"Then came to him a sort of quivery feeling, and he knew that he was changing. It did not take more than an hour at the utmost, when that Constrictor suddenly realized that he was the same at both ends, but--he did not have two heads! He had two tails! There he was, a great Boa Constrictor, sixty feet long, with a tail at each end. Of course only one thing could happen to a Boa Constrictor with a tail at each end. He must starve to death, simply because he could not eat. Day after day pa.s.sed, and the Constrictor grew less and less in dimensions, and, finally, the day came when there was only a little worm, smaller than an angle-worm. Then the day came when there was no worm at all.

"And that is the end of the story, because there isn't any more worm!"

The last sentence of the tale was concluded. Silence prevailed for a moment or two, and then there was a gasp of delight and approval from Erastus.

"That's bully!" he said. "Will you tell me some more, some other time, Mr. Abercrombie?"

"Certainly, my boy," said Abercrombie. "It is well that we should become acquainted with natural history, and in the simple tales I tell you I shall endeavor at all times to introduce such information as will increase your store of knowledge. Above all, we must get acquainted with natural history."

He paused. The boy had nothing to say. Unfortunately, n.o.body else had anything to say. To Abercrombie the silence seemed, in a vague way that he could not fully comprehend, destructive. There was something the matter with the atmosphere and he knew it. The gloaming had drifted into darkness, and he could no longer see either his prospective father-in-law or mother-in-law or his sweetheart. He knew only that, as an adviser of parents of the younger male offspring of the two who were also parents of his one object in life, he had flashed presumptuously in the pan, that, too, in the dimness of the gathering darkness, when people are most reflective and that he had accomplished the possibility irretrievable.

The silence was broken at last by the voice of Mrs. Dobson. The voice was thin and didn't seem to really "break" the silence. It seemed to split it neatly.

"Are those your ideas, Mr. Abercrombie, as to the sort of knowledge of natural history which should be conveyed to young children?"

"Yes, I'd like to know, myself," added Mr. Dobson.

Not a laugh, not a comment, not a sound came from the corner where sat Miss Frances Dobson. She was strictly an aside.

Abercrombie pondered through swift seconds. He was in what, in his own mind--so much are we addicted to the pernicious habit of thinking in the vernacular--'in a hole'. But, the man at bay has frequently proved a hero in a plain North American way. Abercrombie arose to the occasion!

"It may be," he said, "that in the telling to Erastus of these simple tales, I have not followed precisely the practices of those generally engaged in the teaching of youth. It may be that I have not instructed him in the manner in which I might have done had I allowed a few years to lapse and my beard to grow longer and had shaved my upper lip. It may be that in the tales I have told Erastus there are certain discrepancies, synchronisms, and anachronisms. My pictures may have possessed a shade too much of the impressionist character. But what of it? What I wanted to do was to give Erastus a general idea of Black Forests, Witches, and Boa Constrictors."

Silence reigned again, and reigned very thoroughly for some time. Then up rose the modern young woman.

No one in the room could see any one else, but all could hear. What the parents heard was the sound of light footsteps along the porch and then, after a pause;

"You're a ridiculous gentleman,--Don't pull me so!"

What they heard also was a thoughtful and generally commendatory remark from Erastus:

"Say, old man, you're all right. You're the stuff!"

They heard no more at the time. The next morning was a fine morning--there have been lots of them--and, as breakfast was about ending, there took place a conversation between her parents and Miss Dobson--a conversation inaugurated by them but ended, decidedly, by her.

Given a young woman, the only one in the family and possessed of character, she can usually make her parents "know their place," though doing all this, of course, with kindness and consideration. Miss Dobson and Abercrombie are formally engaged. The fortunate but alarmed young man had not realized what would happen when the reinforcements came up.

CHAPTER XXIII

EVAN c.u.mMINGS' COURTSHIP

There was frivolous talk and disputation and some serious reasoning, as the necessary sequence of what had been told. There was discussion as to what excuse there had been for the demeanor of Mr. Abercrombie, and even some quiet suggestion to the Banker that, very much to his credit, he could, himself, imagine things, upon occasions such as this, and that, possibly, he might have risen somewhat to the emergency, but the chaffing was of the listless sort. The sun was not visible save from the rear end of the rear car of the train, but its rays deflected, slanted, yellow-red, along the sides of the pa.s.s calling the attention of all to the fact that it was almost supper-time. More hanging together in a Wayside Tales companionship? Hardly! They had appet.i.tes and they dissolved as dissolve the vapors, or the friends made by letters of introduction, or snow on the top of a distillery, or your dreams, or Mary when you need her, or anything else. Similes are the cheapest thing on the market! The sum of it was that an afternoon had been killed without undue atrocity and now all scattered and prepared themselves and went in to supper. They enjoyed themselves together and then the ladies drifted back to the talking habitat, while the men, or at least a number of them, found the smoking compartments, either the big one of the Ca.s.sowary or one of those in other coaches.

There are all kinds of traveling men. This is not generally understood, but it is a fact. The impression has, somehow, obtained that a traveling man or "Drummer," or whatever we should call d.i.c.kens' "Bagman" in the western Hemisphere, is a person who is careless of the conventionalities, who relies upon a certain hardihood in thrusting himself anywhere into the place of immediate consequence or convenience.

Never was a greater mistake in popular opinion. There are blatant commercial travelers, of course. There will be fools in any part of the world's work. It is a matter of fact, though, that the man whose business it is to influence mentally other men and women must, necessarily, have tact and understanding and that he must be often more quick of conception and more readily responsive to the proper demand of his fellow-creatures than one less extremely educated in certain ways of the vagrant world.

The man called upon was one of the greater type. He laughingly accepted the situation:

"Yes," he said, "I'll tell you a story, but it is so foolish that I can hardly expect you to believe it. It is merely the story of one man I knew and of how he got his wife. He did not get her in quite the ordinary way. I'll tell you all I know about him, and I've known him almost from boyhood. I'll tell you everything as it was."

EVAN c.u.mMINGS' COURTSHIP

I think Evan c.u.mmings had the most remarkable personality of any traveling man I ever met, a personality which indicated itself especially in the closing incident of his love affair. He was a good-looking fellow, of Scotch descent, with all the tenacity of purpose of his race. He was a good man to meet upon the train. When we were gathered in the smoking compartment Evan was as full of spirits as the rest, but I noticed that, while taking an active part in the conversation, he never told any of the somewhat risque stories that the air of the smoking compartment too often breeds. Instead, he would tell uncanny tales of Scotland in the old days, tales of wizards and warlocks, and of the strange things to be seen at night on ancient battle-fields, and we always listened to him with interest. He was mightily fixed in his views and many a good-natured dispute we had with him over this or that. Eh, but he was stubborn!

Evan was a good man of business, though, and had a host of friends.

Among these was the conductor of a train on which he often traveled and the friendship developed into such a degree of intimacy that one day the conductor, Luke Johnson, invited him out to dinner with him. Evan, having no particular business on hand that evening, accepted the invitation.

Johnson's house was in the suburbs, decidedly. It was on the very picket line of the army of houses of the ever-marching city, out on the prairie at least a couple of blocks distant from any other house. A plank sidewalk extended to it from the more settled district near and, with its barns and sheds and vine-covered front, it did not have a lonesome look. Inside Evan found the house quite as prepossessing as its exterior and he found something else there more prepossessing still.

Johnson's family consisted of himself, his wife, his child, little Gabriel, about four years old, and his sister-in-law, a Miss Salome Hinman. Evan found Mrs. Johnson a pleasant sort of a woman and found in Miss Hinman his undeniable affinity. Stolid as he usually was in the presence of femininity, he felt, in the very marrow of his bones, that he was a lost man. That he succ.u.mbed so quickly was not altogether to be wondered at. Miss Hinman was pretty, was very slender--what a school-girl writer would call willowy or lissom or, possibly, svelte--and was wildly devoted to her little nephew, of whom she had the chief care.

Well, Evan didn't waste any time. He contrived it so that he was in the city often and, as often, was at Johnson's house, making vigorous love to Miss Salome. Finally, he accepted a good city position with his firm and abandoned the road, just for the sake of being near his sweetheart, though he liked the road better. All would have gone well now, but for the young lady. He knew she cared for him, for she had admitted it, but she was a bit of a coquette and couldn't resist the temptation of playing a fish so firmly hooked. Urge as Evan might, he could not persuade her to fix a date for their marriage. She would not absolutely deny him, but she was elusive. He became desperate. Something must be done. It was.