He Also Serves
by
If I could have a thousand years–just one little thousand years–more of life, I might, in that time, draw near enough to true Romance to touch the hem of her robe.
Up from ships men come, and from waste places and forest and road and garret and cellar to maunder to me in strangely distributed words of the things they have seen and considered. The recording of their tales is no more than a matter of ears and fingers. There are only two fates I dread–deafness and writer’s cramp. The hand is yet steady; let the ear bear the blame if these printed words be not in the order they were delivered to me by Hunky Magee, true camp-follower of fortune.
Biography shall claim you but an instant–I first knew Hunky when he was head-waiter at Chubb’s little beefsteak restaurant and cafe on Third Avenue. There was only one waiter besides.
Then, successively, I caromed against him in the little streets of the Big City after his trip to Alaska, his voyage as cook with a treasure- seeking expedition to the Caribbean, and his failure as a pearl-fisher in the Arkansas River. Between these dashes into the land of adventure he usually came back to Chubb’s for a while. Chubb’s was a port for him when gales blew too high; but when you dined there and Hunky went for your steak you never knew whether he would come to anchor in the kitchen or in the Malayan Archipelago. You wouldn’t care for his description–he was soft of voice and hard of face, and rarely had to use more than one eye to quell any approach to a disturbance among Chubb’s customers.
One night I found Hunky standing at a corner of Twenty-third Street and Third Avenue after an absence of several months. In ten minutes we had a little round table between us in a quiet corner, and my ears began to get busy. I leave out my sly ruses and feints to draw Hunky’s word-of-mouth blows–it all came to something like this:
“Speaking of the next election,” said Hunky, “did you ever know much about Indians? No? I don’t mean the Cooper, Beadle, cigar-store, or Laughing Water kind-I mean the modern Indian–the kind that takes Greek prizes in colleges and scalps the half-back on the other side in football games. The kind that eats macaroons and tea in the afternoons with the daughter of the professor of biology, and fills up on grasshoppers and fried rattlesnake when they get back to the ancestral wickiup.
“Well, they ain’t so bad. I like ’em better than most foreigners that have come over in the last few hundred years. One thing about the Indian is this: when he mixes with the white race he swaps all his own vices for them of the pale-faces–and he retains all his own virtues. Well, his virtues are enough to call out the reserves whenever he lets ’em loose. But the imported foreigners adopt our virtues and keep their own vices–and it’s going to take our whole standing army some day to police that gang.
“But let me tell you about the trip I took to Mexico with High jack Snakefeeder, a Cherokee twice removed, a graduate of a Pennsylvania college and the latest thing in pointed-toed, rubber-heeled, patent kid moccasins and Madras hunting-shirt with turned-back cuffs. He was a friend of mine. I met him in Tahlequah when I was out there during the land boom, and we got thick. He had got all there was out of colleges and had come back to lead his people out of Egypt. He was a man of first-class style and wrote essays, and had been invited to visit rich guys’ houses in Boston and such places.