Kitabı oku: «In Our Town», sayfa 7

XI
The Casting Out of Jimmy Myers

It seemed a cruel thing to do, but we had to do it. For ours is ordinarily a quiet office. We have never had a libel suit. We have had fewer fights than most newspaper offices have, and while it hardly may be said that we strive to please, still in the main we try to get on with the people, and tell them as much truth as they are entitled to for ten cents a week. Naturally, we do our best to get up a sprightly paper, and in that the Myers boy had our idea exactly. He was industrious; more than that, he tried with all his might to exercise his best judgment, and no one could say that he was careless; yet everyone around the office admitted that he was unlucky. He was one of those persons who always have slivers on their doors, or tar on the knocker, when opportunity comes their way; so his stay in the office was marked by a series of seismic disturbances in the paper that came from under his desk, and yet he was in no way to blame for them.

We took him from the college at the edge of town. He had been running the college paper for a year, and knew the merchants around town fairly well; and, since he was equipped as far as education went, he seemed to be a likely sort of a boy for reporter and advertising solicitor.

One of the first things that happened to him was a mistake in an item about the opera house. He said that a syndicate had taken a lien on it. What he meant was a lease, and as he got the item from a man who didn't know the difference, and as the boy stuck to it that the man had said lien and not lease, we did not charge that up to him. A few days later he wrote for a town photographer a paid local criticising someone who was going around the county peddling picture-frames and taking orders for enlarged pictures. That was not so bad, but it turned out that the pedlar was a woman, and she came with a rawhide and camped in the office for two days waiting for Jimmy, while he came in and out of the back door, stuck his copy on the hook by stealth, and travelled only in the alleys to get his news. One could hardly say that he was to blame for that, either, as the photographer who paid for the item didn't say the pedlar was a woman, and the boy was no clairvoyant.

And camped in the office for two days, looking for Jimmy

One dull day he wrote a piece about the gang who played poker at night in Red Martin's room. Jimmy said he wasn't afraid of Red, and he wasn't. The item was popular enough, and led to a raid on the place, which disclosed our best advertiser sitting in the game. To suppress his name meant our shame before the town; to print it meant his—at our expense. It was embarrassing, but it wasn't exactly the boy's fault. It was just one of those unfortunate circumstances that come up in life. However, the advertiser aforesaid began to hate the boy.

He must have been used to injustice all his life, for there was a vertical line between his eyes that marked trouble. The line deepened as he went further and further into the newspaper business; for, generally speaking, a person who is unlucky has less to fear handling dynamite than he has writing local items on a country paper.

A few days after the raid on the poker-room Jimmy, who had acquired a particularly legible hand, wrote: "The hem of her skirt was trimmed with pink crushed roses," and he was in no way to blame for the fact that the printer accidentally put an "h" for a "k" in skirt, though the woman's husband chased Jimmy into a culvert under Main Street and kept him there most of the forenoon, while the cheering crowd informed the injured husband whenever Jimmy tried to get out of either end of his prison.

The printer that made the mistake bought Jimmy a new suit of clothes, we managed to print an apology that cooled the husband's wrath, and for ten days, or perhaps two weeks, the boy's life was one round of joy. Everything was done promptly, accurately and with remarkable intelligence. He whistled at his work and stacked up more copy than the printers could set up in type. No man ever got in or out of town without having his name in our paper. Jimmy wrote up a railroad bond election meeting so fairly that he pleased both sides, and reported a murder trial so well that the lawyers for each side kept the boy's pockets full of ten-cent cigars. The vertical wrinkle was fading from his forehead, when one fine summer morning he brought in a paid item from a hardware merchant, and went blithely out to write up the funeral of the wife of a prominent citizen. He was so cheerful that day that it bothered him.

He told us in confidence that he never felt festive and gay that something didn't happen. He was not in the building that evening when the paper went to press, but after it was printed and the carriers had left the office he came in, singing "She's My Sweetheart, I'm Her Beau," and sat down to read the paper.

Suddenly the smile on his face withered as with frost, and he handed the paper across the table to the bookkeeper, who read this item:

DIED—MRS. LILLIAN GILSEY.

Prepare for the hot weather, my good woman. There is only one way now; get a gasoline stove, of Hurley & Co., and you need not fear any future heat.

And it wasn't Jimmy's fault. The foreman had merely misplaced a head line, but that explanation did not satisfy the bereaved family.

Jimmy was beginning to acquire a reputation as a joker. People refused to believe that such things just happened. They did not happen before Mr. James Myers came to the paper—why should they begin with his coming and continue during his engagement? Thus reasoned the comforters of the Gilseys, and those interested in our downfall. The next day the Statesman wrote a burning editorial denouncing us "for an utter lack of all sense of common decency" that permitted us "to violate the sacredest feeling known to the human heart for the sake of getting a ribald laugh from the unthinking." We were two weeks explaining that the error was not the boy's fault. People assumed that the mistake could not have occurred in any well-regulated printing office, and it didn't seem probable that it could occur—yet there it was. But Jimmy wasn't to blame. He suffered more than we did—more than the bereaved family did. He went unshaven and forgot to trim his cuffs or turn his collar. He hated to go on the streets for news, and covered with the office telephone as much of his beat as possible.

The summer wore away and the dog days came. The Democratic State campaign was about to open in our town, and orators and statesmen assembled from all over the Missouri valley. There was a lack of flags at the dry-goods stores. The Fourth of July celebration had taken all the stock. The only materials available were some red bunting, some white bunting, and some blue bunting with stars dotted upon it. With this bunting the Committee on Reception covered the speakers' stand, wrapping the canopy under which the orators stood in the solid colours and the star-spangled blue. It was beautiful to see, and the pride of the window-dresser of the Golden Eagle Clothing Store. But the old soldiers who walked by nudged one another and smiled.

About noon of the day of the speaking the City Clerk, who wore the little bronze button of the G. A. R., asked Jimmy if he didn't want someone to take care of the Democratic meeting. Jimmy, who hated politics, was running his legs off to get the names of the visitors, and was glad to have the help. He turned in the contributed copy without reading it, as he had done with the City Clerk's articles many times before, and this is what greeted his horrified eyes when he read the paper:

"UNDER THE STARS & BARS"

Democracy Opens Its State Campaign Under the

Rebel Emblem To-day

A Fitting Token

Treasonable Utterances Have a Proper Setting

And then followed half a column of most violent abuse of the Democrats who had charge of the affair. Jimmy did not appear on the street that night, but the next morning, when he came down, the office was crowded with indignant Democrats "stopping the paper."

We began to feel uneasy about Jimmy. So long as his face was in the eclipse of grief there seemed to be a probability that we would have no trouble, but as soon as his moon began to shine we were nervous.

Jimmy had a peculiar knack of getting up little stories of the town—not exactly news stories, but little odd bits that made people smile without rancour when they saw their names in the quaintly turned items. One day he wrote up a story of a little boy whose mother asked him where he got a dollar that he was flourishing on his return with his father from a visit in Kansas City. The little boy's answer was that his father gave it to him for calling him uncle when any ladies were around. It was merrily spun, and knowing that it would not make John Lusk, the boy's father, mad, we printed it, and Jimmy put at the head of it a foolish little verse of Kipling's. Miss Larrabee, at the bottom of her society column, announced the engagement of two prominent young people in town. The Saturday paper was unusually readable. But when Jimmy came in after the paper was out he found Miss Larrabee in tears, and the foreman leaning over the counter laughing so that he couldn't speak. It wasn't Jimmy's fault. The foreman had done it—by the mere transposition of a little brass rule separating the society news from Jimmy's story with the Kipling verse at the head of it. The rule tacked the Kipling verse onto Miss Larrabee's article announcing the engagement. Here is the way it read:

"This marriage, which will take place at St. Andrew's Church, will unite two of the most popular people in town and two of the best-known families in the State.

 
"And this is the sorrowful story
Told as the twilight fails,
While the monkeys are walking together,
Holding each other's tails!"
 

Now, Jimmy was no more to blame than Miss Larrabee, and many people thought, and think to this day, that Miss Larrabee did it—and did it on purpose. But for all that it cast clouds over the moon of Jimmy's countenance, and it was nearly a year before he regained his merry heart. He was nervous, and whenever he saw a man coming toward the office with a paper in his hand Jimmy would dash out of the room to avoid the meeting. For an hour after the paper was out the ringing of the telephone bell would make him start. He didn't know what was going to happen next.

But as the months rolled by he became calm, and when Governor Antrobus died, Jimmy got up a remarkably good story of his life and achievements, and though there was no family left to the dear old man to buy extra copies, all the old settlers—who are the hardest people in the world to please—bought extra copies for their scrapbooks. We were proud of Jimmy, and assigned him to write up the funeral. That was to be a "day of triumph in Capua." There being no relatives to interfere, the lodges of the town—and the Governor was known as a "jiner"—had vied with one another to make the funeral the greatest rooster-feather show ever given in the State. The whole town turned out, and the foreman of our office, and everyone in the back room who could be spared, was at the Governor's funeral, wearing a plume, a tin sword, a red leather belt, or a sash of some kind. We put a tramp printer on to make up the paper, and told Jimmy to call by the undertaker's for a paid local which the undertaker had written for the paper that day.

Jimmy's face was beaming as he snuggled up to his desk at three o'clock that afternoon. He said he had a great story—names of the pall-bearers, names of the double sextette choir, names of all the chaplains of all the lodges who read their rituals, names of distinguished guests from abroad, names of the ushers at the church. Page by page he tore off his copy and gave it to the tramp printer, who took it in to the machines. Trusting the foreman to read the proof, Jimmie rushed out to get from a United States Senator who was attending the funeral an interview on the sugar scandal, for the Kansas City Star.

The rest of us did not get back from the cemetery until the carriers had left the office, and this is what we found:

"The solemn moan of the organ had scarcely died away, like a quivering sob upon the fragrant air, when the mournful procession of citizens began filing past the flower-laden bier to view the calm face of their beloved friend and honoured townsman. In the grief-stricken hush that followed might be heard the stifled grief of some old comrade as he paused for the last time before the coffin.

"At this particular time we desire to call the attention of our readers to the admirable work done by our hustling young undertaker, J. B. Morgan. He has been in the city but a short time, yet by his efficient work and careful attention to duty, he has built up an enviable reputation and an excellent custom among the best families of the city. All work done with neatness and dispatch. We strive to please.

"When the last sad mourner had filed out, the pall-bearers took up their sorrowful task, and slowly, as the band played the 'Dead March in Saul,' the great throng assembled in the street viewed the mortal remains of Governor Antrobus start on their last long journey."

Of course it wasn't Jimmy's fault. The "rising young undertaker" had paid the tramp printer, who made up the forms, five dollars to work his paid local into the funeral notice. But after that—Jimmy had to go. Public sentiment would no longer stand him as a reporter on the paper, and we gave him a good letter and sent him onward and upward. He took his dismissal decently enough. He realised that his luck was against him; he knew that we had borne with him in all patience.

The day that he left he was instructing the new man in the ways of the town. Reverend Frank Milligan came in with a church notice. Jimmy took the notice and began marking it for the printer. As the door behind him opened and closed, Jimmy, with his head still in his work, called across the room to the new man: "That was old Milligan that just went out—beware of him. He will load you up with truck about himself. He rings in his sermons; trots around with church social notices that ought to be paid for, and tries to get them in free; likes to be referred to as doctor; slips in mean items about his congregation, if you don't watch him; and insists on talking religion Saturday morning when you are too busy to spit. More than that, he has an awful breath—cut him out; he will make life a burden if you don't—and if you do he will go to the old man with it, and say you are not treating him right."

Reverend Milligan came in with a church notice

There was a rattling and a scratching on the wire partition between Jimmy and the door. Jimmy looked up from his work and saw the sprightly little figure of Parson Milligan coming over the railing like a monkey. He had not gone out of the door—a printer had come in when it opened and shut. And then Jimmy took his last flying trip out of the back door of the office, down the alley, "toward the sunset's purple rim." It was not his fault. He was only telling the truth—where it would do the most good.

XII
"'A Babbled of Green Fields"

Our town is set upon a hillside, rising from a prairie stream. Forty years ago the stream ran through a thick woodland nearly a mile wide, and in the woodland were stately elms, spreading walnut trees, shapely oaks, gaunt white sycamores, and straight, bushy hackberries, that shook their fruit upon the ice in spots least frequented by skaters. Along the draws that emptied into the stream were pawpaw trees, with their tender foliage, and their soft wood, which little boys delighted to cut for stick horses. Beneath all these trees grew a dense underbrush of buckeyes, blackberries, raspberries, gooseberries, and little red winter berries called Indian beads by the children. Wild grapevines, "poison" grapes, and ivies of both kinds wove the woods into a mass of summer green. In the clearings and bordering the wood grew the sumach, that flared red at the very thought of Jack Frost's coming. In these woods the boys of our town—many of whom have been dead these twenty years—used to lay their traps for the monsters of the forest, and trudged back from the timber before breakfast, in winter, bringing home redbirds, and rabbits and squirrels. Sometimes a particularly doughty woodsman would report that there were wildcat tracks about his trap; but none of us ever saw a wildcat, though Enoch Haver, whose father's father had heard a wildcat scream, and had taught the boy its cry, would hide in a hollow sycamore and screech until the little boys were terrified and would not go alone to their traps for days. In summer, boys, usually from the country, or from a neighbouring town, caught 'coons, and dragged them chained through alleys for our boys to see, and 'Dory Paine had an owl which was widely sought by other boys in the circus and menagerie line. The boys of our town in that day seemed to live in the wood and around the long millpond, though little fellows were afraid that lurking Indians or camping gypsies might steal them—a boy's superstition, which experience has proved too good to be true. They fared forth to the riffle below the dam, which deepens in the shade under the water elm; this was the pool known as "baby hole," despised of the ten-year-olds, who plunged into the deepest of the thicket and came out at the limekiln, where all day long one might hear "so-deep, so-deep, so-deep," and "go-round, go-round, go-round," until school commenced in the fall. Then the rattle of little homemade wagons, and the shrilling of boy voices might be heard all over the wilderness, and the black-stained hands of schoolboys told of the day of the walnut harvest. It was nearly a mile from the schoolhouse to the woods, and yet on winter afternoons no school-ma'am could keep the boys from using school hours to dig out the screw-holes and heel-plates of their boots before wadding them with paper. At four o'clock a troop of boys would burst forth from that schoolhouse so wildly that General Durham of the Statesman, whose office we used to pass with a roar, always looked up from his work to say: "Well, I see hell's out for noon again."

In the spring the boys fished, and on Saturdays go, up the river or down, or on either side, where one would, one was never out of sight of some thoughtful boy, sitting either on a stump or on a log stretching into the stream, or squatting on a muddy bank with his worm can beside him, throwing a line into the deep, green, quiet water. Always it was to the woods one went to find a lost boy, for the brush was alive with fierce pirates, and blood-bound brother-hoods, and gory Indian fighters, and dauntless scouts. Under the red clay banks that rose above the sluggish stream, robbers' caves, and treasure houses, and freebooters' dens, were filled with boys who, five days in the week and six hours a day, could "amo amas amat, amamus amatus amant" with the best of them. On Sundays these same boys sat with trousers creeping above the wrinkles at the ankles of their copper-toed, red-topped boots, recited golden texts, sang "When He Cometh," and while planning worse for their own little brothers, read with much virtuous indignation of little Joseph's wicked brothers, who put him in a pit. After Sunday School was over these highly respected young persons walked sedately in their best clothes over the scenes of their Saturday crimes.

They say the woods are gone now. Certainly the trees have been cut away and the underbrush burned; cornfields cover the former scenes of valorous achievement; but none the less the woods are there; each nook and cranny is as it was, despite the cornfields. Scattered about the sad old earth live men who could walk blindfolded over the dam, across the millrace, around the bend, through the pawpaw patch to the grapevine home of the "Slaves of the Magic Tree;" who could find their trail under the elder bushes in Boswell's ravine, though they should come—as they often come—at the dead of night from great cities and from mountain camps and from across seas, and fore-gather there, in the smoke and dirt of the rendezvous to eat their unsalted sacrificial rabbit. They can follow the circuitous route around John Betts's hog lot, to avoid the enemy, as easily to-day as they could before the axe and the fire and the plough made their fine pretence of changing the landscape. And when Joe Nevison gets ready to signal them from his seat high in the crotch of the oak tree across the creek, the "Slaves of the Tree" will come and obey their leader. They say that the tree is gone, and that Joe is gone, but we know better; for at night, when the Tree has called us, and we hear the notes from the pumpkin-stem reed, we come and sit in the branches beneath him and plan our raids and learn our passwords, and swear our vengeance upon such as cross our pathway. There may have been a time when men thought the Slaves of the Tree were disbanded; indeed it did seem so, but as the years go by, one by one they come wandering back, take their places in the branches of the magic tree, swing far out over the world like birds, and summon again the genius loci who has slept for nearly forty years.

Of course we knew that Joe would be the first one back; he didn't care what they said—even then; he registered his oath that it made no difference what they did to him or what the others did, he would never desert the Tree. He commanded all of us to come back; if not by day then to gather in the moonlight and bring our chicken for the altar and our eggs for the ceremony, and he promised that he would be there. We were years and years in obeying Joe Nevison. Many of us have had long journeys to go; and some of us lead little children by the hand as we creep up the hollow, crawl through the gooseberry bushes, and 'coon the log over the chasm to our meeting place. But we are nearly all there now; and in the moonlight, when the corn seems to be waving over a wide field, a tree springs up as by magic and we take our places again as of old.

Many years have passed since Marshal Furgeson stood those seven Slaves of the Magic Tree in line before the calaboose door and made them surrender the feathered cork apple-stealers and the sacred chicken hooks. In those years many terrors have ridden the boys who have gone out into the world to fight its dragons and grapple with its gorgons; but never have those boys felt any happiness so sweet as that which rested on their hearts when they heard the Marshal say, "Now you boys run on home—but mind you if I ever–" and he never did—except Joe Nevison. Once it was for boring a hole in the depot platform and tapping a barrel of cider; once it was for going through a window in the Hustler hardware store and taking a box of pocketknives and two revolvers, with which to reward his gang, and finally, when the boy was in the midst of his teens, for breaking into the schoolhouse and burning the books. Joe's father always bought him off, as fathers always can buy boys off, when mothers go to the offended person and promise, and beg, and weep. So Joe Nevison grew up the town bad boy—defiant of law, reckless and unrestrained, with the blood of border ruffianism in his veins and the scorn of God and man and the love of sin in his heart. The week after he left town, and before he was twenty, his father paid for "Red" Martin's grey race horse, which disappeared the night Joe's bed was found empty. In those days the Nevisons had more money than most of the people in our town, but as the years went by they began to lose their property, and it was said that it went in great slices to Joe, to keep him out of the penitentiary.

We knew that Joe Nevison was in the West. People from our town, who seem to swarm over the earth, wrote back that they had met Joe in Dodge City, in Leoti, in No-Man's-Land, in Texas, in Arizona—wherever there was trouble. Sometimes he was the hired bad man of a desert town, whose business it was to shoot terror into the hearts of disturbers from rival towns; sometimes he was a free lance—living the devil knows how—always dressed like a fashion-plate of the plains in high-heeled boots, wide felt hat, flowing necktie, flannel shirt and velvet trousers. They say that he did not gamble more than was common among the sporting men of his class, and that he never worked. Sometimes we heard of him adventuring as a land dealer, sometimes as a cattleman, sometimes as a mining promoter, sometimes as a horseman, but always as the sharper, who rides on the crest of the forward wave of civilization, leaving a town when it tears down its tents and puts up brick buildings, and then appearing in the next canvas community, wherein the night is filled with music, and the cares that infest the day are drowned in bad whiskey or winked out with powder and shot. And thus Joe Nevison closed his twenties—a desert scorpion, outcast by society and proud of it. As he passed into his thirties he left the smoky human crystals that formed on the cow trails and at the mountain gold camps. Cripple Creek became too effete for him, and an electric light in a tent became a target he could not resist; wherefore he went into the sage brush and the short grass, seeking others of his kind, the human rattlesnake, the ranging coyote and the outlawed wolf. Joe Nevison rode with the Dalton gang, raided ranches and robbed banks with the McWhorters and held up stages as a lone highwayman. At least, so men said in the West, though no one could prove it, and at the opening of Lawton he appeared at the head of a band of cutthroats, who were herded out of town by the deputy United States marshals before noon of the first day. Not until popular government was established could they get in to open their skin-game, which was better and safer for them than ordinary highway faring. At Lawton our people saw Joe and he asked about the home people, asked about the boys—the old boys he called them—and becoming possessed of a post-office address, Joe wrote a long letter to George Kirwin, the foreman of our office. We call him old George, because he is still under forty. Joe being in an expansive mood, and with more money on his clothes than he cared for, sent old George ten dollars to pay for a dollar Joe had borrowed the day he left town in the eighties. We printed Joe's letter in our paper, and it pleased his mother. That was the beginning of a regular correspondence between the rover and the home-stayer. George Kirwin, gaunt, taciturn, and hard-working, had grown out of the dreamy, story-loving boy who had been one of the Slaves of the Magic Tree and into a shy old bachelor who wept over "East Lynne" whenever it came to the town opera house, and asked for a lay-off only when Modjeska appeared in Topeka, or when there was grand opera at Kansas City. But he ruled the back office with an iron hand and superintended the Mission Sunday-School across the track, putting all his spare money into Christmas presents for his pupils. After that first letter that came from Joe Nevison, no one had a hint of what passed between the two men. But a month never went by that Joe's letter missed. When Lawton began to wane, Joe Nevison seemed to mend his wayward course. He moved to South McAlester and opened a faro game—a square game they said it was—for the Territory! This meant that unless Joe was hard up every man had his chance before the wheel. Old George took the longest trip of his life, when we got him a pass to South McAlester and he put on his black frock coat and went to visit Joe. All that we learned from him was that Joe "had changed a good deal," and that he was "taking everything in the drug store, from the big green bottle at the right of the front door clear around past the red prescription case, and back to the big blue bottle at the left of the door." But after George came home the Mission Sunday-School began to thrive. George was not afraid of tainted money, and the school got a new library, which included "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn," as well as "Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates" for the boys, and all the "Pansy" books for the girls. It was a quaint old lot of books, and George Kirwin was nearly a year getting it together. Also he bought a new stove for his Sunday-School room, and a lot of pictures for the church walls, among others "Wide Awake and Fast Asleep," "Simply to Thy Cross," and "The Old Oaken Bucket." He gave to the school a cabinet organ with more stops than most of the children could count.

A desert Scorpion, outcast by society and proud of it

A year ago a new reporter brought in this item: "Joseph Nevison, of South McAlester, I. T., is visiting his mother, Mrs. Julia Nevison, at 234 South Fifth Street."

We sent the reporter out for more about Joe Nevison and at noon George Kirwin hurried down to the little home below the tracks. From these two searchers after truth we learned that Joe Nevison's mother had brought him home from the Indian Territory mortally sick. Half-a-dozen of us who had played with him as boys went to see him that evening, and found a wan, haggard man with burned-out black eyes, lying in a clean white bed. He seemed to know each of us for a moment and spoke to us through his delirium in a tired, piping voice—like the voice of the little boy who had been our leader. He called us by forgotten nicknames, and he hummed at a tune that we had not heard for a score of years. Then he piped out "While the Landlubbers Lie Down Below, Below, Below," and followed that with "Green Grass Growing all Around, all Around," and that with the song about the "Tonga Islands," his voice growing into a clearer alto as he sang. His mother tried to quiet him, but he smiled his dead smile at her through his cindery eyes, shook his head and went on. When he had lain quiet for a moment, he turned to one of us and said: "Dock, I'm goin' up and dive off that stump—a back flip-flop—you dassent!" Pretty soon he seemed to come up snuffing and blowing and grinning and said, "Last man dressed got to chaw beef." Then he cried: "Dock's it—Dock's it; catch 'im, hold him—there he goes—duck him, strip him. O well, let him go if he's go'n' to cry. Say, boys, I wish you fellers'd come over t' my stick horse livery stable—honest I got the best hickory horse you ever see. Whoa, there—whoa now, I tell you. You Pilliken Dunlevy let me harness you; there, put it under your arm, and back of your neck—no I ain't go'n' to let you hold it—I'll jerk the tar out of you if you don't go. Whe-e-e that's the way to go, hol—hold on, whoa there. Back up. Let's go over to Jim's and run on his track. Say, Jim, I got the best little pacer in the country here—get up there, Pilliken," and he clucked and sawed his arms, and cracked an imaginary whip. When George came in, the face on the bed brightened and the treble voice said: "Hello Fatty—we've been waitin' for you. Now let's go on. What you got in your wagon—humph—bet it's a pumpkin. Did old Boswell chase you?" and then he laughed, and turned away from us. His trembling hands seemed to be fighting something from his face. "Bushes," whispered Enoch Haver, and then added, "Now he's climbing up the bank of the ravine." And we saw the lean hands on the bed clutch up the wall, and then the voice broke forth: "Me first—first up—get away from here, Dock—I said first," and we could see his hands climbing an imaginary tree.