“Well, I guess I can pick out my own clothes if I want to.”
“Fine things to call clothes, I must say. Well, go see if you can pick out that horse if you’re such a good picker-out.”
Again Gashwiler was pleased with himself. He could play venomously with words.
“Yes, sir,” said Merton, and plodded on up the alley, followed at a respectful distance by the Ransom kiddies, who at once resumed their vocal exercises.
“He throwed you off right into the dirt, didn’t he, Merton? Mer-tun, didn’t he throw you off right into the dirt?”
If it were inevitable he wished that they would come closer. He would even have taken little Woodrow by the hand. But they kept far enough back of him to require that their voices should be raised. Incessantly the pitiless rain fell upon him — “Mer-tun, he throwed you off right into the dirt, didn’t he, Merton?”
He turned out of the alley up Spruce Street. The Ransom children lawlessly followed, forgetting their good home, their poor, sick mother and the rules she had laid down for their Sabbath recreation. At every moment the shrill cry reached his burning ears, “Mer-tun, didn’t he throw you off?” The kiddies appeared to believe that Merton had not heard them, but they were patient. Presently he would hear and reassure them that he had, indeed, been thrown off right into the dirt.
Now he began to meet or pass early churchgoers who would gaze at him in wonder or in frank criticism. He left the sidewalk and sought the center of the road, pretending that out there he could better search for a valuable lost horse. The Ransom children were at first in two minds about following him, but they soon found it more interesting to stay on the sidewalk. They could pause to acquaint the churchgoers with a matter of common interest. “He throwed Merton off right into the dirt.”
If the people they addressed appeared to be doubting this, or to find it not specific enough, they would call ahead to Merton to confirm their simple tale. With rapt, shining faces, they spread the glad news, though hurrying always to keep pace with the figure in the road.
Spruce Street was vacant of Dexter, but up Elm Street, slowly cropping the wayside herbage as he went, was undoubtedly Merton’s good old pal. He quickened his pace. Dexter seemed to divine his coming and broke into a kittenish gallop until he reached the Methodist Church. Here, appearing to believe that he had again eluded pursuit, he stopped to graze on a carefully tended square of grass before the sacred edifice. He was at once shooed by two scandalized old ladies, but paid them no attention. They might perhaps even have tickled him, for this was the best grass he had found since leaving home. Other churchgoers paused in consternation, looking expectantly at the approaching Merton Gill. The three happy children who came up with him left no one in doubt of the late happening.
Merton was still the artist. He saw himself approach Dexter, vault into the saddle, put spurs to the beast, and swiftly disappear down the street. People would be saying that he should not be let to ride so fast through a city street. He was worse than Gus Giddings. But he saw this only with his artist’s eye. In sordid fact he went up to Dexter, seized the trailing bridle reins and jerked savagely upon them. Back over the trail he led his good old pal. And for other later churchgoers there were the shrill voices of friendly children to tell what had happened — to appeal confidently to Merton, vaguely ahead in the twilight, to confirm their interesting story.
Dexter, the anarchist, was put to bed without his goodnight kiss. Good old Pinto had done his pal dirt. Never again would he be given a part in Buck Benson’s company. Across the alley came the voices of tired, happy children, in the appeal for an encore. “Mer-tun, please let him do it to you again.” “Mer-tun, please let him do it to you again.”
And to the back porch came Mrs. Gashwiler to say it was a good thing he’d got that clothesline back, and came her husband wishing to be told what outlandish notion Merton Gill would next get into the thing he called his head. It was the beginning of the end.
Followed a week of strained relations with the Gashwiler household, including Dexter, and another week of relations hardly more cordial. But 30 dollars was added to the hoard which was now counted almost nightly. And the cruder wits of the village had made rather a joke of Merton’s adventure. Some were tasteless enough to rally him coarsely upon the crowded street or at the post office while he awaited his magazines.
And now there were 275 dollars to put him forever beyond their jibes. He carefully rehearsed a scathing speech for Gashwiler. He would tell him what he thought of him. That merchant would learn from it some things that would do him good if he believed them, but probably he wouldn’t believe them. He would also see that he had done his faithful employee grave injustices. And he would be left, in some humiliation, having found, as Merton Gill took himself forever out of retail trade, that two could play on words as well as one. It was a good warm speech, and its author knew every word of it from mumbled rehearsal during the two weeks, at times when Gashwiler merely thought he was being queer again.
At last came the day when he decided to recite it in full to the man for whom it had been composed. He confronted him, accordingly, at a dull moment on the third Monday morning, burning with his message.
He looked Gashwiler firmly in the eye and said in halting tones, “Mr. Gashwiler, now, I’ve been thinking I’d like to go West for a while — to California, if you could arrange to let me off, please.” And Mr. Gashwiler had replied, “Well, now, that is a surprise. When was you wishing to go, Merton?”
“Why, I would be much obliged if you’d let me get off tonight on No. 4, Mr. Gashwiler, and I know you can get Spencer Grant to take my place, because I asked him yesterday.”
“Very well, Merton. Send Spencer Grant in to see me, and you can get off tonight. I hope you’ll have a good time.”
“Of course, I don’t know how long I’ll be gone. I may locate out there. But then again —”
“That’s all right, Merton. Any time you come back you can have your same old job. You’ve been a good man, and they ain’t so plenty these days.”
“Thank you, Mr. Gashwiler.”
No. 4 was made to stop at Simsbury for a young man who was presently commanding a meal in the palatial diner, and who had, before this meal was eaten, looked out with compassion upon two Simsbury-like hamlets that the train rushed by, a blur of small-towners standing on their depot platforms to envy the inmates of that splendid structure.
At last it was Western Stuff and no fooling.
CHAPTER IV
THE WATCHER AT THE GATE
THE STREET LEADING to the Holden motion-picture studio, considered by itself, lacks beauty. Flanking it for most of the way from the boulevard to the studio gate are vacant lots labeled with their prices and appeals to the passer to buy them. Still their prices are high enough to mark the thoroughfare as one out of the common, and it is further distinguished by two rows of lofty eucalyptus trees. These have a real feathery beauty, and are perhaps a factor in the seemingly exorbitant prices demanded for the choice bungalow and home sites they shade. Save for a casual pioneer bungalow or two, there are no buildings to attract the notice until one reaches a high fence that marks the beginning of the Holden lot. Back of this fence is secreted a microcosmos, a world in little, where one may encounter strange races of people in their native dress and behold, by walking a block, cities actually apart by league upon league of the earth’s surface and separated by centuries of time.
To penetrate this city of many cities, and this actual present of the remote past, one must be of a certain inner elect. Hardly may one enter by assuming the disguise of a native, as daring explorers have sometimes overcome the difficulty of entering other strange cities. Its gate, reached after passing along an impressive expanse of the reticent fence, is watched by a guardian. He is a stoatish man of middle age, not neatly dressed, and of forbidding aspect. His face is ruthless, with a very knowing cynicism. He is