Playing the mischief :: :: University of Virginia Library

Close upon the betrothal followed a
blessing: that is to say, a lucky circumstance
which had nothing to do with it in
the way of cause and effect; and which
therefore a certain class of reasoners would
inevitably set down as providential.

On the very subsequent morning the missing
Drinkwater turned up, just as dry as if
he had never been reported drowned, and
just as lively as if his works had been constructed
to run two centuries. Having
learned from his great-grandson that somebody
at the hotel wanted to see him, this
survivor of at least two thousand millions of
human beings put on his box-coat without
assistance, and stumped half a mile through
the snow to find out what was stirring.

When Josie and her affianced entered the
parlor after breakfast, they beheld a roughly-clad,
heavily-limbed, huge-chested, harsh-featured,
Roman-nosed man, who did not
look to be above seventy-five, but who really
was near twenty years older. His long and
still fairly abundant tousled hair was hardly
lighter than iron-gray, and his grim visage,
although deeply wrinkled, had an air
of permanent solidity as if it were carved in
oak. Instead of sitting to rest, as most men
of his age would have done, he was tramp
ing up and down the room with strong, noisy
steps, meanwhile swinging a hickory cane
thicker than a policeman's bludgeon.

Having already inquired the names of his
visitors, and had them pointed out to him
through a crack of the dining-room door, he
recognized them at once on their appearance.

“Sarvent, sir!” he shouted at Mr. Hollowbread
in a voice loud enough to be heard at
the top of the chimney. “I am Jeremiah
Drinkwater. I heerd you wanted to see
me.”

“Oh!” exclaimed the delighted Josie, dashing
forward and grasping one of the old
fellow's enormous horny hands. “Oh, Mr.
Drinkwater, I am so perfectly overjoyed to
meet you! You don't know me, of course.
I am Mrs. Augustus Murray—one of the Murrays
that used to live here—one of the Murray
Hill Murrays. Of course you remember
them.”

“I remember 'em!” roared Mr. Drinkwater,
as if he meant that the deaf and dead
should hear him.

What a voice the man must have had even
in his mewling infancy! Forty years of
sea-going, of howling commands and responses
amidst the turmoil of tempests, had
only increased his pneumonic bore and sonorousness.
Thirty subsequent years of agricultural
swearing at horses and oxen had
but kept him in first-rate trumpeting condition.

“Sit down, my dear sir,” begged Mr. Hollowbread,
after he had taken his turn at the
nearly centenarian fist. “You must be still
suffering somewhat from your late exposure.
We heard that you were shipwrecked. How
did you escape?”

“I didn't go to sea!” bawled and “hollered”
Mr. Drinkwater, without seeming to
know that he was uttering a joke, and one
as old as himself at that.

Josie giggled in her gayest and most musical
fashion. The hale ancient diverted
her, and she liked him immensely. He was
so rough and tough, so burly and blustering,
such a truly masculine old male, that all the
womanishness in her went out toward him,
and, to use her own tongue, she thought him
“splendid.” Indeed, he was little less than
sublime. He reminded her of a he-lion, or a
buffalo bull, or a mad elephant, and when he
roared she felt as if she were in a storm at
sea, with breakers all around her.

“My uncles remember you perfectly,” she
prattled on, stating what might be, rather
than what she knew. “You must recollect
them—the Reverend John Murray—Colonel
Julian Murray.”

“I've heerd of the colonel,” admitted Mr.
Drinkwater, in tones of thunder. “He became
an officer, and fit well. That's right.
I done my fightin' when he was a baby.”

“You look as if you could fight now, sir,”

118

said Josie, surveying him with approval—an
amused approval.

So he did. If I were on a helpless merchantman,
which should be boarded by capering,
yelling, slashing pirates, I should not
be a bit surprised to see the blood-thirsty
assailants headed by such a figure as old
Jeremiah Drinkwater, and I can imagine myself
as jumping overboard to escape his
deafening charge. In very fact, he had diversified
an existence which might otherwise
have been stupid with a considerable
amount of sanguinary adventure.

Driven from the seas in 1812 by the Britannia
which then ruled them, he had enlisted
in the army which defended his native
border-land, playing a part, for instance, in
the battle of Murray Hill, and thereby witnessing
the conflagration of Josie's barn.
Subsequently he had taken service in some
South American warfare, and pirated about
the Pacific or Atlantic in a free, impartial
style, which brought him much profit, not to
mention honor.

Of these filibustering feats, by-the-way,
he was not disposed to talk, except to intimate
acquaintance. This reticence, however,
proceeded from old habits of caution, and
not from any weak-minded sentiment, such
as remorse. As we shall presently discover,
the antique hero's manliness was adulterated
with but a small dose of conscience,
not enough to do Satan himself any harm.
With regard to the world of final judgment,
that solemn world which to many people
seemed so alarmingly near him, it is doubtful
whether he bestowed any more thought
upon it than would a hearty rhinoceros of
the same age.

“Yes, you look as if you could whip an
Englishman yet,” declared Mr. Hollowbread.
“I wish I had half your health and strength,”
he added, with a vague idea that he was
himself a youngster, though a weakly one.

It was well, of course, to say this sort of
thing, if he wanted a favor out of Mr. Drinkwater.
An old gent in good repair is usually
as proud of his excellent digestion and
circulation as a young athlete is of his biceps;
furthermore, he is always, or nearly
always, fond of life, and likes to be told that
many years still remain to him. But our
partially dilapidated Congressman spoke
from honest impulse, as well as from policy.
He fervently admired the stalwart patriarch;
he regarded him with that wondering
respect which we accord, for instance, to a
Roman bridge two thousand years old and
still traversable; he almost obsequiously
contrasted this noisy vigor with the wheezy
flabbiness which he himself exhibited, though
in the heyday of sixty.

“I am pretty chirk for ninety-three,” was
the clamorous admission of the ancient mariner.

“I should really like to learn your secret
of life,” continued Hollowbread, eager to
know how to keep young, so that he might
be worthy of a youthful wife. “You are
attentive to the laws of health, I suppose?
Very careful as to your diet. Allow me to
ask what you eat?”

“Eat! I eat any thing I want to.”

“Indeed!” stared the Congressman, who
could not eat every thing he wanted to, not
by a considerable bill of fare. “But what
do you take at breakfast, for instance?”

“Ham an' eggs generally, or whatever
there is on the table,” was the valuable response.
“I'm very fond of fried hasty puddin'
an' molasses. And always my good coffee!”
concluded Mr. Drinkwater, smacking
his lips.

“Bless me!” commented Mr. Hollowbread.
“But no stimulants, I presume?” he inquired,
remembering that he himself had
been obliged to diminish his potations of late
years. “No ardent spirits or other strong
drinks, I mean. You are correctly named
Drinkwater, no doubt,” he smiled, with that
readiness and originality of wit for which
Congressmen are famous.

“I give up rum about forty year ago,”
bellowed Mr. Drinkwater.

As this left half a century or so during
which rum had not been given up, the statement
did not seem to throw much light on
the temperance question.

“I drink ale,” continued the old fellow.

“Oh, you do? But how about tobacco?
Do you ever smoke?”

“No. Never did.”

“Ah!” said Mr. Hollowbread, with the
tone of a man who is coming to the facts at
last. Here was something for his guidance;
he would see if he could not quit his cigars.

“Always chawed!” shouted and hurraed
Mr. Drinkwater.

Josie burst into a laugh; she heartily admired
the stormy old animal of a reprobate;
she liked him all the better for his ham and
fried pudding, his drinking and chawing.
What she really fancied in him, as philosophical
people will understand, was sturdiness—force—virility—the
extreme of unwomanliness.

“Good heavens! I begin to believe there
are no laws of health, after all,” observed
Hollowbread, with a sigh and a smile. “I
presume, however, that you have led an active
life, and given yourself plenty of air.”

“Born hearty an' lived outdoors,” answered
the old man, stating one of the greatest
of the laws of health, though without in
the least knowing it.

Next our Congressman inquired whether
the patriarch had any brothers or sisters still
living.

“I have one sister,” he replied, with a
grimace of dislike. “I haven't seen her
but once in ten years.”

“Why, Mr. Drinkwater!” began Josie.

119

“She's an old Jezebel,” continued Drinkwater.
“She come up to me in Lockport
yesterday. I heerd a voice behind me that
I thought I knew. `Why, is this you, Jeremiah?'
says somebody, all so smoothly. I
turned round, an' there was Sallie. `Hullo,
you old Jezebel!' says I, an' went about my
business.”

As this was clearly a subject which riled
the venerable man's temper, it did not seem
judicious to keep him on it, and nothing
more was said about Sallie.

This caution, by-the-way, is another proof
of Josie Murray's cleverness, for her curiosity
as to the cause, nature, and duration of
the family quarrel was very great.

“Oh dear!” she said, for days afterward,
“I wish I knew why his sister was an old
Jezebel.”

But at the time more soothing matters
were broached, and Mr. Drinkwater was laboriously
stroked back to amiability.

At last Mr. Hollowbread opened business;
they had come about the Murray barn, etc.,
which was destroyed, etc.; what might be
the approximate value of the same?

“I swore to that once,” thundered Drinkwater,
without hesitation, his memory evidently
as sound as his voice. “It was worth
a thousand dollars!”

Mr. Hollowbread hastened to the door,
opened it, and sent away a boy who was
lounging in the passage.

“Oh, Mr. Drinkwater! was that all?”
pleaded Josie. “Surely it must have been
more than that. Only think of it! A large,
fine barn, full of hay, with carts and carriages
and tools! Why, Mr. Drinkwater, do
think again. All those things only worth a
thousand dollars!”

“They was all lumped together,” he asserted,
though he glanced at her in a puzzled
way. “They come to that.”

“But, my dear sir!” interposed Hollowbread,
“there must certainly be some mistake
in this calculation. Please to remember
that the Murrays were the wealthiest
people of this region, and lived in a generous
style corresponding to their abundant
means. One could hardly suppose that they
would have mediocre outbuildings. I venture
to think it probable that this barn alone
—the mere, simple, solid edifice of the barn
—was worth a thousand dollars. The other
articles named should have been paid for—
were doubtless intended to be included in
the payment—but were not. Now, according
to the best of your recollection, is it not
so?”

“What do you want?” boomed Mr. Drinkwater,
after a prolonged stare at the Congressman.

Mr. Hollowbread, raising his voice to match
a supposed deafness, began to repeat his suppositions.

“I hear you well enough,” interrupted the
old man, fairly bawling him down. “What
I want to know is what you're drivin' at.”

A qualm of conscience and of shame caused
the legislator to hesitate over the avowal of
his fraudulent purpose.

But Josie Murray (that surely irresponsible
agent, so innocent did she look in her
immorality)—Josie Murray had no scruples
and no sense of dishonor.

“We are driving at money, Mr. Drinkwater,”
she said, smiling like a seraph, and
flashing her eyes at him as brightly as if he
were a marriageable youngster.

“Gov'ment money?” was the next shout.

“Yes, Government money,” avowed Josie,
never ceasing to smile. “That is, money
that the Government owes me. My money.”

Mr. Hollowbread had been aghast at these
bold confessions; but he saw now that his
Josie had rightly divined the moral nature
of Drinkwater; that the old fellow had not
the least objection to fleecing his native
country, and only wanted to be told how to
do it.

“Yes, it is a claim,” he bolstered up his
courage to add. “It was paid once in 1820
to the amount of one thousand and interest.”

“I recollect it,” interjected the ancient,
coolly, as if it were a common thing to remember
what passed half a century ago.

“But that seems a mere trifle,” continned
Hollowbread, urged on by a coquettish
glance and a roguish grimace from his betrothed.
“It would seem as if it must have
been simply the value of the mere barn.”

“Barn, horses, oxen, carts, hay, an' every
thing,” fulminated the old carronade, with a
violence which made Hollowbread feel as if
he were being blown from the mouth of a
cannon. “Money was money in them days.
It wasn't paper rags.”

“Oh dear! you must be mistaken, Mr.
Drinkwater,” protested Josie. “You didn't
swear to that. Barn and appurtenances,
you said. Those were your very words.”

“Was them the words? I didn't read it
myself,” confessed Drinkwater.

“And so you see?” continued Josie, argumentatively—“you
see that we can put in
another claim for all these separate things.
They must have been worth a great deal
more than the mere barn and appurtenances.
Of course they ought to be paid
for. And, if you will swear to them as having
been destroyed, then I can get my money.
Don't you see, Mr. Drinkwater?”

“Yes, I see,” admitted the veteran of 1812,
with a promptitude which did his intellect
great credit, and with an expenditure of
racket which testified anew to the soundness
of his wind. “So you want another
affidavy? There's something for witnesses,
I s'pose?”

“One hundred dollars down is the usual
fee,” suggested Hollowbread, with a crimson
face.

120

“And two hundred more when I get my
money,” added Josie, trembling all over in
her eagerness.

“All right,” said Drinkwater.

He was perfectly willing—the venerable
freebooter, the unconscionable patriarch—
to swear to any thing profitable. If he had
been a child of this century, instead of the
last, he could not have been more naturally
a lobbyist, nor shown himself better suited
for a career inside politics.

“You are fit to go to Congress, Mr. Drinkwater,”
laughed Josie; and Hollowbread
made not even an inward protest against
the remark, merely wincing under it in silence.

Then writing materials were produced,
and an affidavit of painstaking minuteness
was drawn up, the lovely claimant suggesting
as many carriages, carts, steeds, and
horned cattle as she deemed necessary to
give her bill a respectable outfit, the heretofore
patriot and pirate acceding to as many
items as he judged credible, and the Congressman
herding the whole multitude on
foolscap.

Next the two men went to the office of
a notary-public, and there Mr. Drinkwater
s'helped him God in due form, subsequently
receiving a roll of bills from Mr. Hollowbread,
and tramping homeward well content.

Our Congressional lover now returned to
his affianced with a guilt on his conscience
proportioned to the joy in his heart; but
whatever may have been his qualms, they
were dissipated by the reception which she
gave him as he panted into the tavern-parlor,
holding out the affidavit.

With a little scream of gladness, she bounded
into his arms, kissed his crimson and purple-veined
cheek, and dropped her head on
his shoulder.

Never, perhaps, was a sinful and remorseful
legislator happier than Hollowbread was
in that palpitating moment. Not for thirty
years had he put so much heart into a kiss
as went into the one which he laid on those
rosy young lips.

The embrace, though fervent, was brief,
for Josie soon had enough of it. She drew
herself away from his protuberant advances
with the somewhat frigid words, applicable,
not to the hugging, but to the affidavit:
“Oh, what a piece of luck!”

“To think that this good fortune should
follow immediately upon our engagement!”
said Hollowbread, whom love and happiness
had made temporarily religious, or, rather,
superstitious. It did not occur to him to
suspect that, had the good fortune come
first, Providence might have used it to prevent
the engagement.

“How quick he was to agree to the right
thing!” answered Josie, who could hardly
have been in a pious frame. “It was I who
brought him to it,” she crowed, gleefully,
ignoring her advocate's part in the transaction.
“It takes a woman to manage a man,
even when he is as old as Methuselah.”

“Yes, it was you who brought him to it,”
conceded Hollowbread, quite willing that
she should have the whole of that woeful
honor, but at the same time caressing her
glossy locks with an approving and petting
hand.

“There!” said Josie, drawing still farther
away. “I mustn't let you muss my hair;
somebody might come in. Now do sit down
and cipher up what it will come to.”

Somewhat hurt by this mercenary haste
and coldness, Mr. Hollowbread took out a
gold pencil, which had come to him from
the cornucopia of Congressional stationery
—a pencil which had often served him to
scribble projects of laws and of amendments
to our venerated Constitution—and proceeded
to figure up the probable profits of Mr.
Drinkwater's false swearing.