The first little cloud in the sky came once when they passed a plowman in a field in the fat land of Belgium.
“Ah, there is a happy man,” said Mazuma. “Happy at work.”
“Happy at work? O my God, what did you say? What kind of words are these, my husband?”
But in the months and years that followed, this frightening incident was forgotten.
The couple became the pride of Wreckville when they returned as they did several times a year and told their stories. Like the time the state troopers ran them down and cornered them with drawn guns.
“O, we don’t want to take you in. We’ll report that we couldn’t catch you. Only tell us how you do it. We don’t want to be troopers all our lives.”
And the time they ran a little house in Faro Town itself. It was a small upstairs place and Katie played the piano, and they had only one bartender, a faded little blonde girl with a cast in one eye, and only one table where Mazuma presided. And this where all the other Casinos were palaces that would make Buckingham look like a chicken coop.
And the funny thing is that they took in no money at all. The barmaid would always say all drinks were ten dollars, or failing that they were on the house; as they used no coin and had trays in the register for only tens, fifties, hundreds and thousands. It was too much trouble to do business any other way.
Katie would bait her money jar with several hundred dollar bills and one or two larger, and demurely refuse anything smaller for selections as she didn’t want the jar filled up with wrapping paper. So she would tinkle along all night and all drinks were on the house, which was not too many as only three could sit at the bar at once.
And Mazuma never shook or dealt a game. He had only blue chips as he said any other color hurt his eyes. And no matter what the price of the chips, it was legendary and gained zeros as it was retold.
Several of the larger sports came up the stairs out of curiosity. And their feelings were hurt when they were told they were too little to play, for they weren’t little at all. So Mazuma sat all night Monday through Friday and never cut a hand or shook a bone.
Then on Saturday night the really big boys came upstairs to see what it was about. They were the owners of the nine big Casinos in town, and six of these gentlemen had to sit on boxes. Their aggregate worth would total out a dollar and thirteen cents to every inhabitant of the U.S.
Katie tinkled tunes all night for a hundred to five hundred dollars a selection, and Mazuma dealt on the little table. And when the sun came up they owned a share of all nine of the big Casinos, and had acquired other assets besides.
Of course these stories of Katie and Mazuma were topped, as about half the Wrecks went on the road, and they had some fancy narrations when they got back to Wreckville.
*
And then the bottom fell out of the world.
They had three beautiful children now. The oldest was three years old and he could already shake, deal, shuffle, and con with the best of them. He knew the Golden Gambit and the Four Quarters and the Nine Dollar Dog and Three Fish Out. And every evening he came in with a marble bag full of half dollars and quarters that he had taken from the children in the neighborhood. The middle child was two, but already she could calculate odds like lightning, and she picked track winners in her dreams. She ran sucker ads in the papers and had set up a remunerative mail-order business. The youngest was only one and could not yet talk. But he carried chalk and a slate and marked up odds and made book, and was really quite successful in a small way. He knew the Four Diamond trick and the Two Story Chicken Coop, the Thimbling Reverse and the Canal Boat Cut. They were intelligent children and theirs was a happy home.
*
One day Mazuma said, “We ought to get out of it, Kate.”
“Out of what?”
“Get out of the business. Raise the children in a more wholesome atmosphere. Buy a farm and settle down.”
“You mean the Blue Valley Farmer trick? Is it old enough to be new yet? And it takes nearly three weeks to set it up, and it never did pay too well for all the trouble.”
“No, I do not mean the Blue Valley Farmer trick. I don’t mean any trick, swindle, or con. I think we should get out of the whole grind and go to work like honest people.”
And when she heard these terrible words Katie fell into a dead faint.
*
That is all of it. He was not a Wreck. He was a common trickster and he had caught the sickness of repentance. The bottom had fallen out of the world indeed. The three unsolvable problems of the Greeks were squaring the circle, trisecting the angle, and re-bottoming the world. They cannot be done.
*
They have been separated for many years. The three children were reared by their father under the recension and curse of Adam. One is a professor of mathematics, but I doubt if he can figure odds as rapidly as he could when he was one year old. The middle one is now a grand lady, but she has lost the facility of picking track winners in her dreams and much else that made her charming. And the oldest one is a senator from a state that I despise.
And Katie is now the wisest old witch in Wreckville. But she has never quite been forgiven her youthful indiscretion when she married an Adamite who felt like his ancient father and deigned to work for a living.
Through Other Eyes
I
“I don’t think I can stand the dawn of another Great Day,” said Smirnov. “It always seems a muggy morning, a rainy afternoon and a dismal evening. You remember the Recapitulation Correlator?”
“Known popularly as the Tune Machine. But, Gregory, that was and is a success. All three of them are in constant use, and they will construct at least one more a decade. They are invaluable.”
“Yes. It was a dismal success. It has turned my whole life gray. You remember our trial run, the recapitulation of the Battle of Hastings?”
“It was a depressing three years we spent there. But how were we to know it was such a small affair—covering less than five acres of that damnable field and lasting less than twenty minutes? And how were we to know that an error of four years had been made in history even as recent as that? Yes, we scanned many depressing days and many muddy fields in that area before we recreated it.”
“And our qualified success at catching the wit of Voltaire at first hand?”
“Gad! That cackle! There can never be anything new in nausea to one who has sickened of that. What a perverted old woman he was!”
“And Nell Guinn?”
“There is no accounting for the taste of a king. What a completely tasteless morsel!”
“And the crowning of Charlemagne?”
“The king of chilblains. If you wanted a fire, you carried it with you in a basket. That was the coldest Christmas I ever knew. But the mead seemed to warm them; and we were the only ones present who could not touch it or taste it.”
“And when we went further back and heard the wonderful words of the divine poetess Sappho.”
“Yes, she had just decided that she would have her favorite cat spayed. We listened to her for three days and she talked of nothing else. How fortunate the world is that so few of her words have survived.”
“And watching the great Pythagoras at work.”
“And the long days he spent on that little surveying problem. How one longed to hand him a slide rule through the barrier and explain its workings.”
“And our eavesdropping on the great lovers