G ENERAL William Henry Harrison Belcher, member of Congress from the ninety-sixth Kansas district, sat in his room at his hotel one evening, with his feet upon the table, a cigar in his mouth, and a glass containing a mysterious liquid preparation beside him.
In appearance the General was a man of mark. His thick gray hair covered a noble head; his nose was large and curved in bold lines indicating strength; his face was closely shaven and rather inclined to pallor. He had eyes that seemed to pierce the person upon whom they rested, and when he used his feet to stand upon, instead of devoting them to purely ornamental purposes, as at present, his figure appeared tall and slender and comely. Those who did not know the General imagined, when they saw him in the Capitol, that he was some distinguished statesman upon whom rested the weight of a nation’s business. Those who knew him, on the contrary, were aware that he was a man of no education, no skill in higher politics, and no principles worth mentioning. He271 had begun life as a mule-driver on the plains, but one day he contrived to obtain a contract for supplying a certain Indian agency with cattle. The Government paid him for fat steers, and he furnished the oldest and leanest cows he could find west of the Mississippi, and when they were weighed in pairs, he and his drover stood on the scale each time so as to bring the aggregate weight up to a comfortable figure. He made a small fortune at this business, and then he bought his way into the Legislature, and subsequently into Congress, his purpose being not so much to give his suffering country the benefit of his skill as a legislator, as to open for himself larger opportunities to acquire wealth at his country’s expense. He had succeeded in several enterprises of the kind which had engaged his attention since he came to Washington, and now he was devoting attention to his great scheme for seizing the Pottawatomie Reservation as a matter of retributive justice to its savage owners. As he sat in his room, thinking upon the subject, he heard a knock at the door.
“Come in!” said the General.
Achilles Smith entered.
“Hello, Kill!” said the General, still keeping his feet upon the table. “Take a chair.”
Mr. Smith sat down.
“What’ll you have?” asked the General.
“Cocktail.”
272 “Mix one.”
Mr. Smith prepared the beverage, placed himself swiftly outside of it, elevated his feet until they rested close to those of the General, and said,—
“Well, how does the old thing work?”
“Oh, pretty well! tolerable! The Committee have promised to consider your case to-morrow, and I want you to be on hand, ready to tell your story. You’ve got it straight, I reckon?”
“Yes, I know it by heart.”
“Let’s see. Your theory is that you were scalped by a Pottawatomie Indian in 1862. Now, where is that scalp?”
“In my trunk. Between ourselves, you know, I bought it of an Indian in Laramie year before last.”
“Very well. Now, what is the name of the Indian who scalped you?”
“Jumping Antelope, a chief.”
“Under what circumstances?”
“I was trying to convert him by reading the Scriptures to him.”
“See here, Kill, isn’t that a little thin? He couldn’t understand the language, you know. I’m afraid that won’t wash.”
“I translated it as I went along.”
“S’pos’n’ the Committee ask you to prove that you know the language?”
“I’ll get off some gibberish, and you can assure273 them that you recognize it as pure Pottawatomie.”
“Very well. Now, what particular part of the—the—Scriptures were you reading to him?”
“I dunno. Let’s see; what are some of the books?”
“Don’t ask me; I’m not very well posted. We used to have a Bible out in the Kansas Legislature, to swear members on, but they always kept a string tied around it, and after it was stolen a rumor got around that the clerk swore a whole House of Representatives in on Kidderminster’s Digest of the State Laws.”
“Jonah’s the only book I recall very distinctly now.”
“That’ll do, if you can remember something in it. I connect it indistinctly with reminiscences of a whale.”
“Yes. Well, I was trying to convert that Indian by reading to him about Jonah and the whale, when he rose up suddenly and began fumbling about my hair with a carving-knife.”
“The Committee may go into detail. Now, why did he do this? Is the narrative calculated in any way to excite the nervous system of an untutored child of the forest?”
“No-no-no!”
“Nothing in it about depriving persons of their hair? Don’t say Jonah was scalped, hey?”
274 “No.”
“Did your assailant accompany the act with any conversation?”
“He merely remarked ‘How!’ and I thought I caught some rather indistinct reference to the Happy Hunting Grounds; but I’ll only swear to ‘How.’”
“‘How!’ They always say that. It indicates almost anything, from ferocious animosity to a desire to borrow plug tobacco. Then he took your hair, did he?”
“Sawed it right out, and would have murdered me if I had not fled.”
“You dropped the Bible when you ran?”
“Yes, after snatching my scalp from his hand.”
“Well, Kill, I think maybe that yarn’ll pass. It’s not first-rate, but there are three men in the Committee who want my vote for claims of theirs, and I have an idea they’ll back us through thick and thin. My boy, don’t call me a prophet if we don’t snatch that Reservation before the session’s out. It looks to me like a sure thing.”
“I’d like to be as sure of something else I’m after,” said Smith, rather sadly.
“What’s that?”
“The M’Duffy girl.”
“You shall have her, Kill, you shall have her. The old lady has promised me, positively.”
“I thought so myself at first, but there is another man in the way now.”
275 “Who is he?”
“Oh, a one-legged army man. She’s taken a fancy to him, her mother tells me. He has a leg up here in the Medical Museum, and she fell in love with that first and it spread to the rest of him afterwards, gradually.”
“That’s original, anyhow.”
“Wants to paint that preserved leg in her picture. Going to dovetail it on to Washington. If he can get the leg out of the Museum she promises to marry him.”
“Well, I’ll put a stop to that. I’ll introduce a bill forfeiting to the Government for ever all the odd legs in the Museum. Kill, you mind what I tell you, and Pandora shall make you her model instead of this military ruin who is sparking her.”
“I’d like to feel certain of that.”
“You may; depend on me. A man with my war record needn’t fear to offer himself to any—what is this fellow? Major, hey?—Well, I’ll risk offending any major in the service.”
“I didn’t know you had any war record.”
“Ain’t I a General?”
“Oh, I know, but you can’t throw a brick in the street without mowing down a couple of Generals—peace men from principle.”
“But I have seen war, my boy! I was in the army, only as a Captain, I admit. But I smelt powder. Kill, I was distinguished for one thing:276 other officers always lost their men, but I never had a fight that I didn’t bring out one-third more men than I took in.”
“You ought to have been promoted. Was it your war record that took you to Congress?”
“No, sir; it was brains—pure intellect—that did that. You know my district? Not a railroad in it. Not enough business to pay for the grease on the engines if there was a railroad. Of course, under such circumstances, the one thing all the people want worse than anything else is a railroad. People always want what they can’t get.”
“Of course.”
“So as soon as I was nominated I hired four hundred men, divided them into squads, fitted them out with rods and chains and theodolites and other surveying apparatus, and started them all over the district, pretending to run lines. A squad would burst into a man’s potato-patch and go to work. The owner would rush out and say, ‘What in thunder you fellows a-doin’ in that potato-patch?’ And they’d say, ‘We’re surveying the route for old Belcher’s railroad.’ Then the man would fly into the house and tell his wife that Belcher was going to run a railroad through his property, and they’d go wild with joy. Kill, I carried that district by fifteen hundred majority over a man who under other circumstances would have beaten me out of my boots.”
277 “That was genius, sir! nothing but pure genius.”
“I think so; genius for statesmanship; not such statesmanship as they have in the played-out despotisms of Europe, but the kind that is needed in a new country.”
“I say, Belcher, how would it do for you and me to go around and call on old Mrs. M’Duffy? I’ve a notion to go.”
“I’m willing. Maybe we can settle the case of that dilapidated Major.”
Mrs. M’Duffy was at home when the General and Mr. Smith called, and she received them with much cordiality.
The conversation naturally turned at an early moment to the subject of Smith’s claim.
“By the way, Mr. Smith,” said Mrs. M’Duffy, “your claim rests, I think you said, upon the fact that you were scalped? Your head has not that appearance.”
“Oh, no! You see, madam, that in the lapse of years the wound has healed; a new scalp has gradually formed, so that now I appear to be merely bald. I have the original scalp at home in my trunk.”
“How very interesting. Were you ever scalped, General?”
“N............