>>>  YOU ARE VIEWING A 200 LINE SAMPLE OF EBOOK# E06330  <<<

TITLE: THE UNDERDOG
AUTHOR: F. HOPKINSON SMITH
EBOOK: E06330 (O'Briens Book Cellar)
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

[Illustration: During the trip he sat in the far corner of the car.]

THE UNDER DOG

BY

F. HOPKINSON SMITH

ILLUSTRATED

1903

_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 pass 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.

CONTENTS

_No Respecter of Persons
  I. The Crime of Samanthy North
  II. Bud Tilden, Mail-Thief
  III. "Eleven Months and Ten Days"
Cap'n Bob of the Screamer
A Procession of Umbrellas
"Doc" Shipman's Fee
Plain Fin--Paper-Hanger
Long Jim
Compartment Number Four--Cologne to Paris
Sammy
Marny's Shadow
Muffles--The Bar-Keep
His Last Cent_

ILLUSTRATIONS

_During the trip he sat in the far corner of the car

"I threw him in the bushes and got the letter"

"I git so tired, so tired; please let me go"

I saw the point of a tiny shoe

Everybody was excited and everybody was mad

I hardly knew him, he was so changed_

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 apron 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 passel 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 pass 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 buttons,
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. Hells like these are the infernos civilization builds in
which to hide its mistakes.


<<<  END OF SAMPLE... (THE FULL EBOOK HAS 400222 TOTAL CHARACTERS)  >>>