Sixes and Sevens

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I accepted the tip, and if you read further you will learn the facts
about the diamond of the goddess Kali as vouched for by one of the
most reliable reporters on the staff.

Gen. Marcellus B. Ludlow lives in one of those decaying but
venerated old red-brick mansions in the West Twenties. The General
is a member of an old New York family that does not advertise. He is
a globe-trotter by birth, a gentleman by predilection, a millionaire
by the mercy of Heaven, and a connoisseur of precious stones by
occupation.

The reporter was admitted promptly when he made himself known at the
General's residence at about eight thirty on the evening that he
received the assignment. In the magnificent library he was greeted by
the distinguished traveller and connoisseur, a tall, erect gentleman
in the early fifties, with a nearly white moustache, and a bearing so
soldierly that one perceived in him scarcely a trace of the National
Guardsman. His weather-beaten countenance lit up with a charming smile
of interest when the reporter made known his errand.

"Ah, you have heard of my latest find. I shall be glad to show you
what I conceive to be one of the six most valuable blue diamonds in
existence."

The General opened a small safe in a corner of the library and brought
forth a plush-covered box. Opening this, he exposed to the reporter's
bewildered gaze a huge and brilliant diamond--nearly as large as a
hailstone.

"This stone," said the General, "is something more than a mere jewel.
It once formed the central eye of the three-eyed goddess Kali, who is
worshipped by one of the fiercest and most fanatical tribes of India.
If you will arrange yourself comfortably I will give you a brief
history of it for your paper."

General Ludlow brought a decanter of whiskey and glasses from a
cabinet, and set a comfortable armchair for the lucky scribe.

"The Phansigars, or Thugs, of India," began the General, "are the
most dangerous and dreaded of the tribes of North India. They are
extremists in religion, and worship the horrid goddess Kali in the
form of images. Their rites are interesting and bloody. The robbing
and murdering of travellers are taught as a worthy and obligatory
deed by their strange religious code. Their worship of the three-eyed
goddess Kali is conducted so secretly that no traveller has ever
heretofore had the honour of witnessing the ceremonies. That
distinction was reserved for myself.

"While at Sakaranpur, between Delhi and Khelat, I used to explore the
jungle in every direction in the hope of learning something new about
these mysterious Phansigars.

"One evening at twilight I was making my way through a teakwood
forest, when I came upon a deep circular depression in an open space,
in the centre of which was a rude stone temple. I was sure that this
was one of the temples of the Thugs, so I concealed myself in the
undergrowth to watch.

"When the moon rose the depression in the clearing was suddenly filled
with hundreds of shadowy, swiftly gliding forms. Then a door opened in
the temple, exposing a brightly illuminated image of the goddess Kali,
before which a white-robed priest began a barbarous incantation, while
the tribe of worshippers prostrated themselves upon the earth.

"But what interested me most was the central eye of the huge wooden
idol. I could see by its flashing brilliancy that it was an immense
diamond of the purest water.

"After the rites were concluded the Thugs slipped away into the forest
as silently as they had come. The priest stood for a few minutes in
the door of the temple enjoying the cool of the night before closing
his rather warm quarters. Suddenly a dark, lithe shadow slipped down
into the hollow, leaped upon the priest; and struck him down with a
glittering knife. Then the murderer sprang at the image of the goddess
like a cat and pried out the glowing central eye of Kali with his
weapon. Straight toward me he ran with his royal prize. When he was
within two paces I rose to my feet and struck him with all my force
between the eyes. He rolled over senseless and the magnificent jewel
fell from his hand. That is the splendid blue diamond you have just
seen--a stone worthy of a monarch's crown."

"That's a corking story," said the reporter. "That decanter is exactly
like the one that John W. Gates always sets out during an interview."

"Pardon me," said General Ludlow, "for forgetting hospitality in the
excitement of my narrative. Help yourself."

"Here's looking at you," said the reporter.

"What I am afraid of now," said the General, lowering his voice, "is
that I may be robbed of the diamond. The jewel that formed an eye of
their goddess is their most sacred symbol. Somehow the tribe suspected
me of having it; and members of the band have followed me half around
the earth. They are the most cunning and cruel fanatics in the
world, and their religious vows would compel them to assassinate the
unbeliever who has desecrated their sacred treasure.

"Once in Lucknow three of their agents, disguised as servants in a
hotel, endeavoured to strangle me with a twisted cloth. Again, in
London, two Thugs, made up as street musicians, climbed into my window
at night and attacked me. They have even tracked me to this country.
My life is never safe. A month ago, while I was at a hotel in the
Berkshires, three of them sprang upon me from the roadside weeds. I
saved myself then by my knowledge of their customs."

"How was that, General?" asked the reporter.

"There was a cow grazing near by," said General Ludlow, "a gentle
Jersey cow. I ran to her side and stood. The three Thugs ceased their
attack, knelt and struck the ground thrice with their foreheads. Then,
after many respectful salaams, they departed."

"Afraid the cow would hook?" asked the reporter.

"No; the cow is a sacred animal to the Phansigars. Next to their
goddess they worship the cow. They have never been known to commit any
deed of violence in the presence of the animal they reverence."

"It's a mighty interesting story," said the reporter. "If you don't
mind I'll take another drink, and then a few notes."

"I will join you," said General Ludlow, with a courteous wave of his
hand.

"If I were you," advised the reporter, "I'd take that sparkler to
Texas. Get on a cow ranch there, and the Pharisees--"

"Phansigars," corrected the General.

"Oh, yes; the fancy guys would run up against a long horn every time
they made a break."

General Ludlow closed the diamond case and thrust it into his bosom.

"The spies of the tribe have found me out in New York," he said,
straightening his tall figure. "I'm familiar with the East Indian cast
of countenance, and I know that my every movement is watched. They
will undoubtedly attempt to rob and murder me here."

"Here?" exclaimed the reporter, seizing the decanter and pouring out a
liberal amount of its contents.

"At any moment," said the General. "But as a soldier and a connoisseur
I shall sell my life and my diamond as dearly as I can."

At this point of the reporter's story there is a certain vagueness,
but it can be gathered that there was a loud crashing noise at the
rear of the house they were in. General Ludlow buttoned his coat
closely and sprang for the door. But the reporter clutched him firmly
with one hand, while he held the decanter with the other.

"Tell me before we fly," he urged, in a voice thick with some inward
turmoil, "do any of your daughters contemplate going on the stage?"

"I have no daughters--fly for your life--the Phansigars are upon us!"
cried the General.

The two men dashed out of the front door of the house.

The hour was late. As their feet struck the side-walk strange men of
dark and forbidding appearance seemed to rise up out of the earth and
encompass them. One with Asiatic features pressed close to the General
and droned in a terrible voice:

"Buy cast clo'!"

Another, dark-whiskered and sinister, sped lithely to his side and
began in a whining voice:

"Say, mister, have yer got a dime fer a poor feller what--"

They hurried on, but only into the arms of a black-eyed, dusky-browed
being, who held out his hat under their noses, while a confederate of
Oriental hue turned the handle of a street organ near by.

Twenty steps farther on General Ludlow and the reporter found
themselves in the midst of half a dozen villainous-looking men with
high-turned coat collars and faces bristling with unshaven beards.

"Run for it!" hissed the General. "They have discovered the possessor
of the diamond of the goddess Kali."

The two men took to their heels. The avengers of the goddess pursued.

"Oh, Lordy!" groaned the reporter, "there isn't a cow this side of
Brooklyn. We're lost!"

When near the corner they both fell over an iron object that rose from
the sidewalk close to the gutter. Clinging to it desperately, they
awaited their fate.

"If I only had a cow!" moaned the reporter--"or another nip from that
decanter, General!"

As soon as the pursuers observed where their victims had found refuge
they suddenly fell back and retreated to a considerable distance.

"They are waiting for reinforcements in order to attack us," said
General Ludlow.

But the reporter emitted a ringing laugh, and hurled his hat
triumphantly into the air.

"Guess again," he shouted, and leaned heavily upon the iron object.
"Your old fancy guys or thugs, whatever you call 'em, are up to date.
Dear General, this is a pump we've stranded upon--same as a cow in New
York (hic!) see? Thas'h why the 'nfuriated smoked guys don't attack
us--see? Sacred an'mal, the pump in N' York, my dear General!"

But further down in the shadows of Twenty-eighth Street the marauders
were holding a parley.

"Come on, Reddy," said one. "Let's go frisk the old 'un. He's been
showin' a sparkler as big as a hen egg all around Eighth Avenue for
two weeks past."

"Not on your silhouette," decided Reddy. "You see 'em rallyin' round
The Pump? They're friends of Bill's. Bill won't stand for nothin' of
this kind in his district since he got that bid to Esopus."

This exhausts the facts concerning the Kali diamond. But it is deemed
not inconsequent to close with the following brief (paid) item that
appeared two days later in a morning paper.

"It is rumored that a niece of Gen. Marcellus B. Ludlow, of New York
City, will appear on the stage next season.

"Her diamonds are said to be extremely valuable and of much historic
interest."




XXV

THE DAY WE CELEBRATE


"In the tropics" ("Hop-along" Bibb, the bird fancier, was saying to
me) "the seasons, months, fortnights, week-ends, holidays, dog-days,
Sundays, and yesterdays get so jumbled together in the shuffle that
you never know when a year has gone by until you're in the middle of
the next one."

"Hop-along" Bibb kept his bird store on lower Fourth Avenue. He was an
ex-seaman and beachcomber who made regular voyages to southern ports
and imported personally conducted invoices of talking parrots and
dialectic paroquets. He had a stiff knee, neck, and nerve. I had gone
to him to buy a parrot to present, at Christmas, to my Aunt Joanna.

"This one," said I, disregarding his homily on the subdivisions of
time--"this one that seems all red, white, and blue--to what genus of
beasts does he belong? He appeals at once to my patriotism and to my
love of discord in colour schemes."

"That's a cockatoo from Ecuador," said Bibb. "All he has been taught
to say is 'Merry Christmas.' A seasonable bird. He's only seven
dollars; and I'll bet many a human has stuck you for more money by
making the same speech to you."

And then Bibb laughed suddenly and loudly.

"That bird," he explained, "reminds me. He's got his dates mixed.
He ought to be saying '_E pluribus unum_,' to match his feathers,
instead of trying to work the Santa Claus graft. It reminds me of the
time me and Liverpool Sam got our ideas of things tangled up on the
coast of Costa Rica on account of the weather and other phenomena to
be met with in the tropics.

"We were, as it were, stranded on that section of the Spanish main
with no money to speak of and no friends that should be talked about
either. We had stoked and second-cooked ourselves down there on a
fruit steamer from New Orleans to try our luck, which was discharged,
after we got there, for lack of evidence. There was no work suitable
to our instincts; so me and Liverpool began to subsist on the red rum
of the country and such fruit as we could reap where we had not sown.
It was an alluvial town, called Soledad, where there was no harbour
or future or recourse. Between steamers the town slept and drank rum.
It only woke up when there were bananas to ship. It was like a man
sleeping through dinner until the dessert.

"When me and Liverpool got so low down that the American consul
wouldn't speak to us we knew we'd struck bed rock.

"We boarded with a snuff-brown lady named Chica, who kept a rum-shop
and a ladies' and gents' restaurant in a street called the _calle
de los_ Forty-seven Inconsolable Saints. When our credit played
out there, Liverpool, whose stomach overshadowed his sensations of
_noblesse oblige_, married Chica. This kept us in rice and fried
plantain for a month; and then Chica pounded Liverpool one morning
sadly and earnestly for fifteen minutes with a casserole handed down
from the stone age, and we knew that we had out-welcomed our liver.
That night we signed an engagement with Don Jaime McSpinosa, a hybrid
banana fancier of the place, to work on his fruit preserves nine miles
out of town. We had to do it or be reduced to sea water and broken
doses of feed and slumber.

"Now, speaking of Liverpool Sam, I don't malign or inexculpate him
to you any more than I would to his face. But in my opinion, when an
Englishman gets as low as he can he's got to dodge so that the dregs
of other nations don't drop ballast on him out of their balloons. And
if he's a Liverpool Englishman, why, fire-damp is what he's got to
look out for. Being a natural American, that's my personal view. But
Liverpool and me had much in common. We were without decorous clothes
or ways and means of existence; and, as the saying goes, misery
certainly does enjoy the society of accomplices.

"Our job on old McSpinosa's plantation was chopping down banana stalks
and loading the bunches of fruit on the backs of horses. Then a native
dressed up in an alligator hide belt, a machete, and a pair of AA
sheeting pajamas, drives 'em over to the coast and piles 'em up on the
beach.

"You ever been in a banana grove? It's as solemn as a rathskeller at
seven A. M. It's like being lost behind the scenes at one of these
mushroom musical shows. You can't see the sky for the foliage above
you; and the ground is knee deep in rotten leaves; and it's so still
that you can hear the stalks growing again after you chop 'em down.

"At night me and Liverpool herded in a lot of grass huts on the edge
of a lagoon with the red, yellow, and black employes of Don Jaime.
There we lay fighting mosquitoes and listening to the monkeys
squalling and the alligators grunting and splashing in the lagoon
until daylight with only snatches of sleep between times.

"We soon lost all idea of what time of the year it was. It's just
about eighty degrees there in December and June and on Fridays and at
midnight and election day and any other old time. Sometimes it rains
more than at others, and that's all the difference you notice. A
man is liable to live along there without noticing any fugiting of
tempus until some day the undertaker calls in for him just when he's
beginning to think about cutting out the gang and saving up a little
to invest in real estate.

"I don't know how long we worked for Don Jaime; but it was through two
or three rainy spells, eight or ten hair cuts, and the life of three
pairs of sail-cloth trousers. All the money we earned went for rum and
tobacco; but we ate, and that was something.

"All of a sudden one day me and Liverpool find the trade of committing
surgical operations on banana stalks turning to aloes and quinine in
our mouths. It's a seizure that often comes upon white men in Latin
and geographical countries. We wanted to be addressed again in
language and see the smoke of a steamer and read the real estate
transfers and gents' outfitting ads in an old newspaper. Even Soledad
seemed like a centre of civilization to us, so that evening we put
our thumbs on our nose at Don Jaime's fruit stand and shook his grass
burrs off our feet.

"It was only twelve miles to Soledad, but it took me and Liverpool two
days to get there. It was banana grove nearly all the way; and we got
twisted time and again. It was like paging the palm room of a New York
hotel for a man named Smith.

"When we saw the houses of Soledad between the trees all my
disinclination toward this Liverpool Sam rose up in me. I stood him
while we were two white men against the banana brindles; but now, when
there were prospects of my exchanging even cuss words with an American
citizen, I put him back in his proper place. And he was a sight, too,
with his rum-painted nose and his red whiskers and elephant feet with
leather sandals strapped to them. I suppose I looked about the same.

"'It looks to me,' says I, 'like Great Britain ought to be made to
keep such gin-swilling, scurvy, unbecoming mud larks as you at home
instead of sending 'em over here to degrade and taint foreign lands.
We kicked you out of America once and we ought to put on rubber boots
and do it again.'

"'Oh, you go to 'ell,' says Liverpool, which was about all the
repartee he ever had.

"Well, Soledad, looked fine to me after Don Jaime 's plantation.
Liverpool and me walked into it side by side, from force of habit,
past the calabosa and the Hotel Grande, down across the plaza toward
Chica's hut, where we hoped that Liverpool, being a husband of hers,
might work his luck for a meal.

"As we passed the two-story little frame house occupied by the
American Club, we noticed that the balcony had been decorated all
around with wreaths of evergreens and flowers, and the flag was
flying from the pole on the roof. Stanzey, the consul, and Arkright,
a gold-mine owner, were smoking on the balcony. Me and Liverpool
waved our dirty hands toward 'em and smiled real society smiles; but
they turned their backs to us and went on talking. And we had played
whist once with the two of 'em up to the time when Liverpool held all
thirteen trumps for four hands in succession. It was some holiday, we
knew; but we didn't know the day nor the year.

"A little further along we saw a reverend man named Pendergast, who
had come to Soledad to build a church, standing under a cocoanut palm
with his little black alpaca coat and green umbrella.

"'Boys, boys!' says he, through his blue spectacles, 'is it as bad as
this? Are you so far reduced?'

"'We're reduced,' says I, 'to very vulgar fractions.'

"'It is indeed sad,' says Pendergast, 'to see my countrymen in such
circumstances.'

"'Cut 'arf of that out, old party,' says Liverpool. 'Cawn't you tell
a member of the British upper classes when you see one?'

"'Shut up,' I told Liverpool. 'You're on foreign soil now, or that
portion of it that's not on you.'

"'And on this day, too!' goes on Pendergast, grievous--'on this most
glorious day of the year when we should all be celebrating the dawn of
Christian civilization and the downfall of the wicked.'

"'I did notice bunting and bouquets decorating the town, reverend,'
says I, 'but I didn't know what it was for. We've been so long out of
touch with calendars that we didn't know whether it was summer time or
Saturday afternoon.'

"'Here is two dollars,' says Pendergast digging up two Chili silver
wheels and handing 'em to me. 'Go, my men, and observe the rest of the
day in a befitting manner.'

"Me and Liverpool thanked him kindly, and walked away.

"'Shall we eat?' I asks.

"'Oh, 'ell!' says Liverpool. 'What's money for?'

"'Very well, then,' I says, 'since you insist upon it, we'll drink.'

"So we pull up in a rum shop and get a quart of it and go down on the
beach under a cocoanut tree and celebrate.

"Not having eaten anything but oranges in two days, the rum has
immediate effect; and once more I conjure up great repugnance toward
the British nation.

"'Stand up here,' I says to Liverpool, 'you scum of a despot limited
monarchy, and have another dose of Bunker Hill. That good man, Mr.
Pendergast,' says I, 'said we were to observe the day in a befitting
manner, and I'm not going to see his money misapplied.'

"'Oh, you go to 'ell!' says Liverpool, and I started in with a fine
left-hander on his right eye.

"Liverpool had been a fighter once, but dissipation and bad company
had taken the nerve out of him. In ten minutes I had him lying on the
sand waving the white flag.

"'Get up,' says I, kicking him in the ribs, 'and come along with me.'

"Liverpool got up and followed behind me because it was his habit,
wiping the red off his face and nose. I led him to Reverend
Pendergast's shack and called him out.

"'Look at this, sir,' says I--'look at this thing that was once a
proud Britisher. You gave us two dollars and told us to celebrate the
day. The star-spangled banner still waves. Hurrah for the stars and
eagles!'

"'Dear me,' says Pendergast, holding up his hands. 'Fighting on this
day of all days! On Christmas day, when peace on--'

"'Christmas, hell!' says I. 'I thought it was the Fourth of July.'"



"Merry Christmas!" said the red, white, and blue cockatoo.

"Take him for six dollars," said Hop-along Bibb. "He's got his dates
and colours mixed."