The Underdog.

by F. Hopkinson Smith.

_To my Readers_:

In the strife of life some men lose place through physical weakness or lost opportunities or impaired abilities; struggle on as they may, they must always be the Under Dog in the fight.

Others are misjudged--often by their fellows; sometimes by the law. If you are one of the fellows, you pa.s.s the man with a nod. If you are the law, you crush out his life with a sentence.

Still others lose place from being misunderstood; from being out of touch with their surroundings; out of reach of those who, if they knew, would help; men with hearts chilled by neglect, whose smouldering coals--coals deep hidden in their nature--need only the warm breath of some other man's sympathy to be fanned back into life.

Once in a while there can be met another kind, one whose poverty or uncouthness makes us shun him at sight; and yet one, if we did but know it, with a joyous melody in his heart, ofttimes in tune with our own harmonies. This kind is rare, and when found adds another ripple to our scanty stock of laughter.

These Under Dogs--grave and gay--have always appealed to me. Their stories are printed here in the hope that they may also appeal to you.

F.H.S.

NEW YORK.

NO RESPECTER OF PERSONS

I

THE CRIME OF SAMANTHY NORTH

I have been requested to tell this story, and exactly as it happened.

The moral any man may draw for himself. I only want to ask my readers the question I have been asking myself ever since I saw the girl: Why should such things be among us?

Marny's studio is over the Art Club.

He was at work on a picture of a canon with some Sioux Indians in the foreground, while I sat beside him, watching the play of his masterly brush.

Dear old Aunt Chloe, in white ap.r.o.n and red bandanna, her round black face dimpled with smiles, was busying herself about the room, straightening the rugs, puffing up the cushions of the divan, pushing back the easels to get at the burnt ends of abandoned cigarettes, doing her best, indeed, to bring some kind of domestic order out of Marny's Bohemian chaos.

Now and then she interpolated her efforts with such remarks as:

"No, doan' move. De Colonel"--her sobriquet for Marny--"doan' keer whar he drap his seegars. But doan' you move, honey"--sobriquet for me. "I kin git 'em." Or "Clar to goodness, you pillows look like a pa.s.sel o'

hogs done tromple ye, yo're dat mussed." Critical remarks like these last were given in a low tone, and, although addressed to the offending articles themselves, accompanied by sundry cuffs of her big hand, were really intended to convey Aunt Chloe's private opinion of the habits of her master and his friends.

The talk had drifted from men of the old frontier to border scouts, and then to the Kentucky mountaineers, whom Marny knows as thoroughly as he does the red men.

"They are a great race, these mountaineers," he said to me, as he tossed the end of another cigarette on Aunt Chloe's now clean-swept floor.

Marny spoke in crisp, detached sentences between the pats of his brush.

"Big, strong, whalebone-and-steel kind of fellows; rather fight than eat. Quick as lightning with a gun; dead shots. Built just like our border men. See that scout astride of his horse?"--and he pointed with his mahl-stick to a sketch on the wall behind him--"looks like the real thing, don't he? Well, I painted him from an up-country moonshiner.

Found him one morning across the river, leaning up against a telegraph pole, dead broke. Been arrested on a false charge of making whiskey without a license, and had just been discharged from the jail. Hadn't money enough to cross the bridge, and was half-starved. So I braced him up a little, and brought him here and painted him."

We all know with what heartiness Marny can "brace." It doubtless took three cups of coffee, half a ham, and a loaf of bread to get him on his feet, Marny watching him with the utmost satisfaction until the process was complete.

"You ought to look these fellows over; they're worth it. Savage lot, some of 'em. Remind me of the people who live about the foothills of the Balkans. Mountaineers are the same the world over, anyway. But you don't want to hunt for these Kentuckians in their own homes unless you send word you are coming, or you may run up against the end of a rifle before you know it. I don't blame them." Marny leaned back in his chair and turned toward me. "The Government is always hunting them as if they were wild beasts, instead of treating them as human beings. They can't understand why they shouldn't get the best prices they can for their corn. They work hard enough to get it to grow. Their theory is that the Illinois farmer feeds the corn to his hogs and sells the product as pork, while the mountaineer feeds it to his still and sells the product to his neighbors as whiskey. That a lot of Congressmen who never hoed a row of corn in their lives, nor ran a furrow, or knew what it was to starve on the proceeds, should make laws sending a man to jail because he wants to supply his friends with liquor, is what riles them, and I don't blame them for that, either."

I arose from my chair and examined the sketch of the starving mountaineer. It was a careful study of a man with clear-cut features, slim and of wiry build, and was painted with that mastery of detail which distinguishes Marny's work over that of every other figure-painter of his time.

The painter squeezed a tube of white on his palette, relit his cigarette, fumbled over his sheaf of brushes and continued:

"The first of every month--just about now, by the way--they bring twenty or thirty of these poor devils down from the mountains and lock them up in Covington jail. They pa.s.s Aunt Chloe's house. Oh, Aunt Chloe!"--and he turned to the old woman--"did you see any of those 'wild people' the last two or three days?--that's what she calls 'em," and he laughed.

"Dat I did, Colonel--hull drove on 'em. 'Nough to make a body sick to see 'em. Two on 'em was chained together. Dat ain't no way to treat people, if dey is ornery. I wouldn't treat a dog dat way."

Aunt Chloe, sole dependence of the Art Club below-stairs: day or night nurse--every student in the place knows the touch of her hand when his head splits with fever or his bones ache with cold; provider of b.u.t.tons, suspender loops and buckles; go-between in most secret and confidential affairs; mail-carrier--the dainty note wrapped up in her handkerchief so as not to "spile it!"--no, _she_ wouldn't treat a dog that way, nor anything else that lives and breathes or has feeling, human or brute.

"If there's a new 'drove' of them, as Aunt Chloe says," remarked Marny, tossing aside his brushes, "let's take a look at them. They are worth your study. You may never have another chance."

This was why it happened that within the hour Marny and I crossed the bridge and left his studio and the city behind us.

The river below was alive with boats, the clouds of steam from their funnels wreathed about the spans. Street-cars blocked the roadway; tugging horses, sweating under the lash of their drivers' whips, strained under heavy loads. The air was heavy with coal-smoke. Through the gloom of the haze, close to the opposite bank, rose a grim, square building of granite and brick, its grimy windows blinking through iron bars. Behind these, shut out from summer clouds and winter snows, bereft of air and sunshine, deaf to the song of happy birds and the low hum of wandering bees, languished the outcast and the innocent, the vicious and the cruel. h.e.l.ls like these are the infernos civilization builds in which to hide its mistakes.

Marny turned toward me as we reached the prison. "Keep close," he whispered. "I know the Warden and can get in without a permit," and he mounted the steps and entered a big door opening into a cold, bare hall with a sanded floor. To the right of the hall swung another door labelled "Chief of Police." Behind this door was a high railing closed with a wooden gate. Over this scowled an officer in uniform.

"My friend Sergeant Cram," said Marny, as he introduced us. The officer and I shook hands. The hand was thick and hard, the knotted knuckles leaving an unpleasant impression behind them as they fell from my fingers.

A second door immediately behind this one was now reached, the Sergeant acting as guide. This door was of solid wood, with a square panel cut from its centre, the opening barred like a birdcage. Peering through these bars was the face of another attendant. This third door, at a mumbled word from the Sergeant, was opened wide enough to admit us into a room in which half a dozen deputies were seated at cards. In the opposite wall hung a fourth door, of steel and heavily barred, through which, level with the eyes, was cut a peep-hole concealed by a swinging steel disk.

The Sergeant moved rapidly across the room, pushed aside the disk and brought to view the nose and eyes of a prison guard.

As our guide shot back a bolt, a click like the c.o.c.king of a gun sounded through the room, followed by the jangle of a huge iron ring strung with keys. Selecting one from the number, he pushed it into the key-hole and threw his weight against the door. At its touch the ma.s.s of steel swung inward noiselessly as the door of a bank-vault. With the swinging of the door there reached us the hot, stuffy smell of unwashed bodies under steam-heat--the unmistakable odor that one sometimes meets in a court-room.

Marny and I stepped inside. The Sergeant closed the slab of steel, locking us inside, and then, nodding to us through the peep-hole, returned to his post in the office.

We stood now on the rim of the crater, looking straight into the inferno. By means of the dull light that struggled through the grimy, grated windows, I discovered that we were in a corridor having an iron floor that sprang up and down under our feet. This was flanked by a line of steel cages--huge beast-dens really--reaching to the ceiling. In each of these cages was a small, double-barred gate.

These dens were filled with men and boys; some with faces thrust through the bars, some with hands and arms stretched out as if for air; one hung half-way up the bars, clinging with hands and feet apart, as if to get a better hold and better view. I had seen dens like these before: the man-eating Bengal tiger at the London Zoo lives in one of them.

The Warden, who was standing immediately behind the attendant, stepped forward and shook Marny's hand. I discharged my obligations with a nod.

I had never been in a place like this before, and the horror of its surroundings overcame me. I misjudged the Warden, no doubt. That this man might have a wife who loved him and little children who clung to his neck, and that underneath his hard, forbidding exterior a heart could beat with any tenderness, never occurred to me. As I looked him over with a half-shrinking glance, I became aware of a slash indenting his pock-marked cheek that might have been made by a sabre cut--was, probably, for it takes a brave man to be a warden; a ma.s.sive head set on big shoulders; a square chin, the jaw hinged like a burglar's jimmy; and two keen, restless, elephant eyes.

But it was his right ear that absorbed my attention--or rather, what was left of his right ear. Only the point of it stuck up; the rest was clipped as clean as a rat-terrier's. Some fight to a finish, I thought; some quick upper-cut of the razor of a frenzied negro writhing under the viselike grasp of this man-gorilla with arms and hands of steel; or some sudden whirl of a stiletto, perhaps, which had missed his heart and taken his ear. I did not ask then, and I do not know now. It was a badge of courage, whatever it was--a badge which thrilled and horrified me. As I looked at the terrible mutilation, I could but recall the hideous fascination that overcame Josiane, the heroine of Hugo's great novel, "The Man Who Laughs," when she first caught sight of Gwynplaine's mouth--slit from ear to ear by the Comprachicos. The outrage on the Warden was not so grotesque, but the effect was the same.

I moved along the corridor and stood before the beasts. One, an old man in a long white beard, leathery, sun-tanned face and hooked nose, clasped the bars with both hands, gazing at us intently. I recognized his kind the moment I looked at him. He was like my Jonathan Gordon, my old fisherman who lived up in the Franconia Notch. His coa.r.s.e, homespun clothes, dyed brown with walnut-sh.e.l.ls, slouch hat crowning his shock of gray hair, and hickory shirt open at the throat, only heightened the resemblance; especially the hat canted over one eye. Why he wore the hat in such a place I could not understand, unless to be ready for departure when his summons came.

There were eight other beasts besides this old man in the same cage, one a boy of twenty, who leaned against the iron wall with his hands in his pockets, his eyes following my every movement. I noticed a new blue patch on one of his knees, which his mother, doubtless, had sewn with her own hands, her big-rimmed spectacles on her nose, the tallow dip lighting the log cabin. I recognized the touch. And the boy. I used to go swimming with one just like him, forty years ago, in an old swimming-hole in the back pasture, and hunt for honey that the b.u.mblebees had stored under the bank.

The old man with the beard and the canting hat looked into my eyes keenly, but he did not speak. He had nothing to say, perhaps. Something human had moved before him, that was all; something that could come and go at its pleasure and break the monotony of endless hours.