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Thomas Jefferson Brown
by
Once the manager of a vaudeville house heard him on a street corner, and offered him a job at fifty a week if he’d sign a contract for a dozen weeks.
“Good Lord,” said Thomas Jefferson, “I wouldn’t know what to do with six hundred dollars!”
The next week he was cooking in a lumber-camp for his board. That’s Thomas Jefferson–or, rather, that’s what he was.
And now we’re coming to the girl who killed the bug in Thomas Jefferson–and rescued the king. She was born swell. She has blue eyes–the sort that can light up a dark day, and can make your head turn dizzy when they smile at you. And she’s got the right sort of hair to go with ’em–red and gold and brown all mixed up, until you can’t tell which is which; the sort that makes you wonder if some big artist hasn’t been painting a picture for you, when you see it out in the sunshine.
She comes of a titled family, but she’d want to die to-morrow if Thomas Jefferson Brown didn’t worship her from the tips of her little toes to the top of her pretty head. She thinks he’s a king. And he is–one of those great, big, healthy kings that nature sometimes grows when it has half a chance.
II
It’s curious how the whole thing happened. Thomas Jefferson wandered up to Portland at the time we were fitting out a ship for a whaling cruise. We saw him imitating a banjo for a lot of kids down on the wharf, and the minute our eyes lit on him–Tucker’s and mine–we liked him. It isn’t necessary to go into the details of what happened after that. Just a week later, when Thomas Jefferson and I were shaking hands for the last time, a queer sort of look came into his eyes, and he said:
“Bobby, you’re the first man I ever knew that makes me feel like crying when you leave me.”
He said it just like one of the kids he’d tickled half to death on the wharf. There was a little jerking in his throat, and there came into his face a look so gentle that it made me think of a girl.
“Why don’t you come along on this cruise with me?” I said.
Thomas Jefferson gave a sudden start, and a queer expression came into his eyes, as if he saw something out on the sea that had startled him. Then he laughed. You could hear that laugh of Thomas Jefferson’s three blocks away, and sunshine in winter couldn’t bring more cheer than the sound of it. He looked at me for a moment, and then said:
“Bobby, I’ll go!”
It wasn’t forty-eight hours before Thomas Jefferson had a first mortgage on every soul aboard the “Sleeping Sealer,” from the cap’n to the oiler down in the engine-room. He was able, all right, but you couldn’t have made an able seaman out of him in a hundred years. For all that, he did the work of three men. The first thing you heard when you woke up in the morning was his whistle, and the last thing you heard at night was his laugh or his song. He did everything, from cooking to telling us why Germany couldn’t lick England, and how the United States could clean up the map of the earth if Congress would spend less money on job-making bureaus and a little more on war-ships.
Then we discovered what was in the old alligator-skin valise he carried. It was books. Half the time he didn’t have to read to us, but just talked off the stuff he’d learned by heart. We got to know a lot before the trip was half begun, just by associating with Thomas Jefferson Brown–or Thomas Jefferson, as he was then.
We spent three months up about the Spicer Islands, and then came down toward Southampton Land. Thomas Jefferson was the happiest man aboard until we caught sight of a coast, and then the change began. After that he’d get restless whenever land hove in sight.