Sundry Accounts Part 17

Jeff knew a good deal--at second hand. Didn't the object of his deepest aversions persist in almost nightly calls upon the object of his deepest affections? Paying such calls, didn't the enemy spend hours--hours upon hours doubtless--pouring into Ophelia's ear accounts of his recent triumphs as an uplifter in other towns and other states?

Didn't the fascinated and flattered Ophelia in turn recount these tales to one whose opportunities for traveling and seeing the great world had been more circ.u.mscribed? Had not Jeff writhed in jealous misery the while he heard the annals of a rival's successes? So Jeff made prompt answer.

"Yas, suh, I suttinly does. Ise heared a right smart 'bout dis yere Duvall's past life frum--frum somebody. 'Cordin' to the way he norrates it, he wuz in Nashville, Tennessee 'fore he come yere; an' 'fore dat in Mobile, Alabama; an' 'fore dat in Little Rock, Arkansaw. Seem lak w'en he ain't organizin' or speechifyin' he ain't got nothin' better to do den run round amongst young cullid gals braggin' 'bout the places he's been an' the things he done whilst in 'em."

Jeff spoke with an enhanced bitterness.

"I see. Then I take it ef he spends so much time in seekin' out female society that he's not a married man?"

"So he say--so he say! But, Jedge Priest, ef ever I looked on the spittin'-image of a natchel-born marryin' n.i.g.g.e.r, dat ver' same Duvall is de one."

Judge Priest seemed not to have heard this last. He sat for a bit apparently studying the tips of his square-toed, low-quarter shoes.

"Jeff," he said when he had given his feet a long half minute of seeming consideration, "I would like to know some facts about the previous life and general history of the individual we've been discussin'--I really would. In fact my curiosity is sech that I might even be willin' to spend a little money out of my own pocket, ef needs be, in order to find out. So I was jest wonderin' whether you wouldn't like to take a little trip, with all expenses paid, and tour round through some of our sister states and make a few private inquiries. It occurs to me that everything considered you might make a better job of it as an amateur investigator than a regular professional detective of a different color might. Do you know where by any chance you could git hold of a good photograph of this here individual--I mean without lettin' him know anything about it?"

"Yas, suh, dat I does," stated Jeff briskly.

The conference between master and man lasted perhaps fifteen minutes longer before Jeff was dismissed for the night. Mainly it dealt with ways, means and purposes. Upon the heels of it, within forty-eight hours two events--seemingly nowise related or bearing one upon the other--occurred. An ornately framed photograph lately bestowed as a gift and treasured as a trophy of sentimental value mysteriously vanished from the mantelpiece of the front room of Ophelia Stubblefield's pa's house; and Jefferson Poindexter, carrying a new and very s.h.i.+ny suitcase, unostentatiously left town late at night on a southbound train.

Darktown in Nashville knew him for a brief s.p.a.ce as a visiting n.o.bleman with money in all his pockets and apparently nothing of importance to do except to spend it in divertis.e.m.e.nts suitable to the social instincts of a capitalist of leisure. In Mobile at the Elite Colored Beauty Parlors for the first time in his life he tendered his finger nails for ministrations at the hands of a das.h.i.+ng chocolate-ice-cream-colored manicurist and spent the remainder of that same afternoon in a sunny spot, glistening pleasantly.

If in both these cities and likewise in Little Rock, which next he favored with his presence, he made himself known to brothers of his particular lodge--the Afro-American Order of Supreme Kings of the Universe has a large and a widely distributed members.h.i.+p--and if under the sacred pledge of secrecy which only may be broken on pain of mutilation and death by torture he--with the aid of these fraternal allies of his--conducted certain discreet inquiries, why, that was his own private business. a.s.suredly, so far as surface indications counted, he appeared to have no business other than pleasurable pursuits. From Little Rock he turned his face southeastward, landing at Macon, Georgia, where he lingered on for upward of a week, breaking his visit only by a day's side trip to a smaller town south of Macon. Altogether Jeff was an absentee from his favorite haunts back home for the greater part of a month.

He reached town on a Monday. Betimes Tuesday morning, inspired outwardly by the zeal of one just won over from skepticism to the immediate advisability of following a sapient course, he sought opportunity to become a member in good standing of the s.h.i.+ning Star Colored Uplift and Progress League, a simple ceremony and a brief, since it involved merely the signing of one's name on Dotted Line A of a printed form card and the paying of a dollar into the hand of Dr. J. Talbott Duvall. On Tuesday evening the league met in stated session at Hillman's Hall on Yazoo Street and Jeff was early on hand, visibly enthusiastic and professedly ready to do all within his power to further the aims and intents of the organization. As a brand s.n.a.t.c.hed from the burning he was elevated before the eyes of the a.s.semblage so that all might see him and mark his mien of newborn fervor, for Doctor Duvall, following his custom, called to places upon the platform the proselytes enrolled since the previous meeting, to the end that older members might observe the physical proof of a steady and a healthful growth.

So there sat Jefferson in the very front row of wooden chairs, where all might behold him and he might behold all and sundry. About him were his recent fellow converts. Almost directly behind him was a door giving upon a side entrance; there was another door serving similar purposes upon the opposite side of the stage. Beyond him to the left in the center of the stage were grouped the honorary officers of the league, flanking and supporting their chief.

Being an honorary officer carried with it, as the t.i.tle might imply, honor and prominence second only to that enjoyed by the president-organizer, but it entailed no great weight of responsibility, since practically all the actual work of the league had from the very outset been generously a.s.sumed by Doctor Duvall. It was he who cared for the funds, he who handled disburs.e.m.e.nts, he who conducted the proceedings, he who made the princ.i.p.al addresses on meeting nights, he who between meetings labored without cessation to spread educational propaganda. That he found time for all these purposeful endeavors and yet crowded in such frequent opportunity for mingling socially among the lambs of his flock--notably the ewe lambs--was but evidence, acc.u.mulating daily, of his genius for leaders.h.i.+p and direction.

This night the session opened with a prayer--by Doctor Duvall; an eloquent and a moving prayer indeed, its sonorous periods set off and adorned with n.o.ble big words and quotations in foreign tongues. The prayer would be followed, it had been announced, by the reading of the minutes of the previous session, after which Doctor Duvall would speak at length with particular reference to things lately accomplished and the even more important things in contemplation for the near future.

Standing for the prayer, Jeff could look out over what a master of words before now has fitly described as a sea of upturned faces--faces black, brown and yellow. Had he been minded to give thought to details he might have noted how at every polysyllabic outburst from the inspired invocationist old Uncle Ike Fauntleroy, himself accounted a powerful hand at wrestling with sinners in prayer, was visibly jolted by admiration; might, if he had had a head for figures, have kept count of the hearty amens with which Sister Eldora Menifee punctuated each pause when Doctor Duvall was taking a fresh breath; might have cast a side glance upon Ophelia Stubblefield in a new and most becoming hat with ostrich plumage grandly surmounting it. But under the hand which he held reverently cupped over his brow Jeff's eyes were fixed upon a certain focal point,--to wit, the door of the main entrance at the length of the hall from him. It was as though Jeff waited for something or somebody he was expecting.

Nor did he have so very long to wait. The prayer was done and well done.

In its wake, so to speak, there spouted up from every side veritable geysers of hallelujahs and amens. The honorary secretary, Brother Lemuel Diuguid, smelling grandly of expensive hair ointments--Brother Diuguid being by calling a head barber--stood up to read the minutes of the preceding regular session, and having read them sat down again. A friendly and flattering bustle of antic.i.p.ation filled the body of the hall as Doctor Duvall rose and moved one pace forward and--raising a hand for silence--began to speak. But he had no more than begun, had progressed no farther than part way of his first smoothly launched sentence, when he was made to break off by an unseemly interruption at the rear. The honorary grand inner guard on duty at the far street door, after a brief and unsuccessful struggle with unseen forces, was observed to be shoved violently aside from his post. Bursting in together there entered two strangers--a tall yellow woman and a short black man, and both of them of a most grim and determined aspect. He moved fast, this man, but even so his companion moved faster still. She was three paces ahead of him when, bulging impetuously past those who sprang into the center aisle as though to halt her onward rush--all others present being likewise up on their feet--she came to a halt near the middle of the hall and, glaring about her defiantly, just double-dog-dared any present to lay so much as the weight of one detaining finger upon her. There was something about her calculated to daunt the most willing of volunteer opponents, and so while those at a safe distance demanded the ejection of the intruders, those nearer her hesitated.

"Th'ow me out?" she whooped, echoing the words of outraged and startled members of the s.h.i.+ning Star. "I'd lak to see de one dat's gwine try it!

An' 'fo' anybody talk 'bout th'owin' out lettum heah me whilst I sez my say!"

Towering until she seemed to increase in stature by inches, she aimed a long and bony finger dead ahead.

"Ax dat slinky yaller man up yonder on dat flatfo'm ef he gwine give de order to th'ow me out!" she clarioned in a voice which rose to a compelling shriek. "But fust off ax him whut he meant--marryin' me in Mobile, Alabama, an' den runnin' 'way frum his lawful wedded wife under cover of de night! Ax him--dat's all, ax him!"

"An' ax him one thing mo'!" It was the voice of her short companion rising above the tumult. "Ax him whut he done wid de funds of de s'ciety he 'stablished at Little Rock, Arkansaw, all of w'ich he absconded wid dis last spring!"

As though the same set of muscles controlled every neck the heads of all swung about, their eyes following where the accusers pointed, their ears twitching for the expected blast of denial and denunciation which would wither these mad and scandalous detractors in their tracks.

Alas and alackaday! With his splendid figure suddenly all diminished and shrunken, with distress writ large and plain upon his features, the popular idol was step by step flinching backward from the edge of the platform--was step by step inching, edging toward the side door in the right-hand wall.

And in this same instant the stunned a.s.semblage realized that Jeff Poindexter, by nimble maneuvering, had thrust himself between the retreating figure and the exit, and Jeff was crying out: "Not dis way out, Doct' Duvall. Not dis way! The one you married down below Macon is waitin' fur you behin' dis do'!"

The doctor stopped in midflight and swung about and his eye fell upon the right-hand door and he moved a yard or two in that direction; but no more than a yard or two, for again Jeff spoke in warning, halting him short:

"Not dat way neither! The one frum dat other town whar you uster live is waitin' outside dat do'--wid a pistil! Seems lak you's entirely s'rounded by wives dis evenin'!"

To the verge of the footlights the beset man darted, and like a desperate swimmer plunging from a foundering bark into a stormy sea he leaped far out and projected himself, a living catapult, along the middle aisle. He struck the tall yellow woman as the irresistible force strikes the supposedly immovable object of the scientists' age-old riddle, but on his side was impetus and on hers surprise. She was bowled over flat and her hands, clutching as she went down, closed, but on empty and unresisting air. Literally he hurdled over the stocky form of the little black man behind her, but as the other flitted by him the fists of the stranger knotted firmly into the skirts of its wearer's long black frock coat and held on. There was a rending, tearing sound and as the back breadth of the garment ripped bodily away from the waistband there flew forth from the capsized tail pockets a veritable cloudburst of currency--floating, fluttering green and yellow bills and with them pattering showers of dollars and halves and dimes and quarters and nickels.

That canny instinct which had led the fugitive apostle of the uplift to hide the collected funds of the league upon his person rather than trust to banks and strong boxes was to prove his ruination financially but his salvation physically. While those who had believed in him, now forgetting all else, scrambled for the scattered money--their money--he fled out of the unguarded door and was instantly gone into the s.h.i.+elding night--a sorry shape in a bob-tailed garment.

At a somewhat later hour Judge Priest in his living room was receiving from Jefferson Poindexter a much lengthier and more elaborated account of the main occurrences of the evening at Hillman's Hall than has here been presented. Speaking as he did in the dual role of spectator and of an actuating force in the events of that crowded and exciting night, Jeff spared no details. He had come to the big scene of his narrative when his master interrupted him:

"Hold on a minute, Jeff! I don't know ez I get the straight of it all yit. I rather gathered frum whut you told me yesterday when you landed back home and made your report that you'd only been able to dig up one certain-sure wife of this feller's--the one that came along with you and that little Arkansaw darky. You didn't say anything then about bein'

able to prove he wuz a bigamist."

"Huh, jedge, I didn't have to prove it! Dat man wuz more'n jes' a plain bigamist. He sho' wuz a trigamist, an' ef the full truth wuz knowed I 'spects he wuz a quadrupler at the very least. He proved it hisself--way he act' w'en the big 'splosion come."

"But the two women you told him were waitin' behind those side doors for him--how about them?"

"Law, jedge, dey wuzn't dere--neither one of 'em wuzn't. Jes' lak I told you yistiddy, I couldn't find only jest one woman dat n.i.g.g.e.r'd married an' run off frum, an' her I fetched 'long wid me. But lak I also told you, I got kind of traces of one dat uster live below Macon but w'ich is now vanished, an' ever'whar else I went whar he'd lived befo' he come yere de signs wuz manifold dat he wuz a natchel-born marryin' fool, jes'

lak I 'spicioned fust time ever I see him. So w'en he started fur dat fust do' I taken a chancet on him an' w'en I seen how he cringed an'

ducked back I taken another chancet on him, an' the subsequent evidences offers testimony dat both times I reckined right. Jedge, the late Doct'

Duvall muster married some powerful rough-actin' gals in his time ef he thought the Mobile one wuz the gentlest out of three. Well, anyway, suh, the ravelin' wolf is gone frum us, an' fur one I ain't 'spectin' him back never no mo'. An' I reckin dat's the main pint wid you an' me both."

"The ravelin' whut?"

"Dat's whut Aunt Dilsey called him oncet, speechifyin' to me 'bout him--the ravelin' wolf. Only he suttinly did look he wuz comin'

unraveled mighty fast the last I seen of him."

CHAPTER VI

"WORTH 10,000"

You might have called Vincent C. Marr a self-made man and be making no mistake about it. For he was self-made; not merely self-a.s.sembled, as so many men are who attain distinction in this profession or that calling.

Entirely through his own efforts, with only his native wit to light the way for him, he had pulled himself up, step by step, from the very bottom of his trade to the very top of it. His trade was the applied trade of crookedness; his pursuit the pursuit of other folks' cash resources. He had the envy and admiration of his friends in allied branches of the same general industry; he had the begrudged respect of his official enemies, the police; while his accomplishments--the tricks he pulled, the coups he scored, the purses he garnered--were discussed and praised by the human nits and lice of the Seamy Side, just as the achievements in a legitimate field of a Hill or a Schwab or a Rockefeller might be talked of among petty shopkeepers and little business men. He had, as the phrase goes, everything--imagination, resource, ingenuity, audacity, utter ruthlessness.

Yet it would seem hard to conceive a more humble beginning than his had been. His father was a cobbler in a little West Virginia coal town. At sixteen he ran away from home to go with a small circus. This circus was a traveling s.h.i.+eld for all manner of rough extortioners. Card sharps, sh.e.l.l workers, petermen, sneak thieves, pickpockets, even burglars rode its train. They had a saying that the owner of this show sold the safe-blowing privileges outright but retained a one-third interest in the hold-up concession. That was a whimsical exaggeration of what perhaps had a kern of truth in it. Certainly it was the fact of the case that the owner depended more upon his lion's cut of the swag which the trailing jackals ama.s.sed than upon the intake at the ticket windows. Bad weather might kill his business for a week; a crop failure might lame it for a month; but the graft was as sure as anything graftified can be.

When the runaway youth, Vince Marr, inserted himself beneath the protecting wing of this patron he knew exactly whither his ultimate ambitions tended. He had no vague boyish design to serve a 'prentices.h.i.+p as stake driver or roustabout in the hope some day of graduating into a rider or a tumbler, a ringmaster or a clown. He joined out in order that among these congenial influences he might the quicker become an accomplished thief.

Starting as a novice he had to carve out his own little niche in company where the compet.i.tion already was fierce. His rise, though, was rapid. So far as the records show he was the first of the Monday guys.

He developed the line himself and gave to it its name. A Monday guy was a plunderer of clotheslines. He followed the route of the daily street parade; rather he followed a route running roughly parallel to it. He set out coincidentally with it and he aimed to have his pilfering stint finished when the parade was over. He prowled in alleys and skinned over back fences, progressing from house yard to house yard while the parade pa.s.sed through the streets upon which the houses faced. From kitchen boilers and laundry heaps, from wash baskets and drying ropes, he skimmed the pick of what was offered--silk s.h.i.+rts, fancy hose, women's embroidered blouses, women's belaced under-things. His work was made comparatively easy for him, since the dwellers of the houses would be watching the parade.

His strippings he carried to the show lot and there he hid them away.

That night in the privilege car the collections of the day would be disposed of by sale or trade to members of the troupe and the affiliated rogues. Especially desirable pieces might be reserved to be s.h.i.+pped on to a professional receiver of stolen goods in a certain city. Naturally, pickings were at their best on a Monday, for since Mother Eve on the first Monday hanged her fig leaf out to dry, Monday has been wash day the world over. Hence the name for the pract.i.tioner of the business.

Vince Marr did not very long remain a Monday guy. The risks were not very great, everything considered. Suppose detection did come; suppose the cry of "Stop thief!" was raised. Who would quit watching a circus parade to join in a hunt for a marauder already vanished in a maze of outbuildings and alleyways? Still there were risks to be taken, and the rewards on the whole were small and uncertain. Before he reached his nineteenth year young Marr was the manager of a weighing pitch.

Apparently he had but one a.s.sociate in the enterprise; as a matter of fact he had four. In the place where holidaying crowds gathered--on a circus lot, at a street carnival, outside the gates of a county fair--he and his visible partner would set up his weighing device, and then stationing himself near it he would beseech you to let him guess your correct weight. If he guessed within three pounds of it, as recorded by the machine, you owed him a nickel; if he failed to guess within three pounds of it you owed him nothing. "Take a chance, brother!" he would entreat you with friendly jovial banter. "Be a sport--take a chance!"