Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
Ladies and Gentlemen

“That, madam,” he says, “is the broad general idea.”

“How dare you!” she says. Then she says it again: “How dare you! Think of the poor brute’s agony!” she says.

“Madam,” he says right back at her, “you do me a grave injustice. Not for worlds would I inflict suffering upon any living creature. The point is, madam, that the instant this here chunk of obstinacy feels the heat singeing of him he will move. Observe, madam!” And before she can say anything more he has lighted the match and stuck it in the paper and the flames shoot up and, just as he’s predicted, Whiz Bollinger’s balked cayuse responds to the appeal to a dormant better nature.

You never saw a horse move forward more briskly or more willingly than that one did. There was just one drawback to the complete success of the plan and, as everybody agreed afterwards when the excitement had died down and there was time for sober reason, this Goodhue party as we called him then, or Good Sam as we took to calling him afterwards, couldn’t really be held responsible for that. The hoss moved forward but he stopped again when he’d gone just exactly far enough for the fire to get a good chance at Whiz’s shiny beautiful new buckboard, which it blazed up like a summer hotel, the paint being fresh and him having only that morning touched up the springs with coal-oil. A crate of celluloid hair combs burning up couldn’t have thrown off any prettier sparks or more of them. Before the volunteer fire department could put their uniforms on and get there that ill-fated buckboard was a total loss with no insurance.

This was Good Sam’s first appearance amongst us in, as you might say, a business capacity. It wasn’t long, though, before he was offering us more and more and still more evidences of his injurious good toward afflicted humanity. It was no trouble to show samples. With that misguided zealot it amounted to a positive passion.

For instance, one night in December little Al Wingate came into Billy Grimm’s where a gang of us were doing our Christmas shopping early and, as usual when he had a load aboard, he was leaking tears and lamentations with every faltering step he took. Talk about your crying jags, when this here Little Al got going he had riparian rights. It made you wonder where he kept his reservoirs hid at, him not weighing more than about ninety pounds and being short-waisted besides. Maybe he had hydraulic legs; I don’t know. Likewise always on such occasions, which they were frequent, he acted low and suicidal in his mind. He was our official melancholihic.

So he drifted in out of the starry night and leaned up against the bar, and between sobs he says to Billy Grimm, “Billy,” he says, “have you got any real deadly poison round here?”

“Only the regular staple brands,” says Billy. “What’ll it be – rye or Bourbon?”

“Billy,” he says, “don’t trifle with a man that’s already the same as dead. Licker has been my curse and downfall. It’s made me what I am tonight. Look at me – no good to myself or anybody else on this earth. Just a poor derelick without a true friend on this earth. But this is the finish with me. I’ve said that before but now I mean it. Before tomorrow morning I’m going to end everything. If one of you boys won’t kindly trust me with a pistol I’d be mighty much obliged to somebody for the loan of a piece of rope about six or seven or eight feet long. Just any little scrap of rope that you happen to have handy will do me,” he says.

I put in my oar. “Why, you poor little worthless sawed-off-and-hammered-down,” I says to him, “don’t try to hang yourself without you slip an anvil into the seat of your pants first.”

One of the other boys – Rawhide Rawlings, I think it was – speaks up also and says, “And don’t try jumping off a high roof, neither; you’d only go up!”

You see we were acquainted with Little Al’s peculiarities and we knew he didn’t mean a word he said, and so we were just aiming to cheer him up. But Good Sam, who’d joined our little group of intense drinkers only a few minutes before, he didn’t enter into the spirit of it at all. He motioned to us to come on down to the other end of the rail and he asks us haven’t we got any sympathy for a fellow being that’s sunk so deep in despondency he’s liable to drown himself in his own water-works plant any minute?

“You don’t want to be prodding him that-away,” he says; “what you want to do is humor him along. You want to lead him so close up to the Pearly Gates that he can hear the hinges creaking; that’ll make him see things different,” he says. “That’ll scare him out of this delusion of his that he wants to be a runt angel.”

“I suppose then you think you could cure him yourself?” asks one of the gang.

“In one easy lesson,” says Good Sam, speaking very confident. “All I ask from you gents is for one of you to let me borrow his six-gun off of him for a little while and then everybody agree to stand back and not interfere. If possible I’d like for it to be a big unhealthy-looking six-gun,” he says.

Well, that sounded plausible enough. So Rawhide passes over his belt, which it’s got an old-fashioned single-action Colt’s swinging in its holster, and Good Sam buckles this impressive chunk of hardware around him and meanders back to where Little Al is humped up with his shoulders heaving and his face in his hands and a little puddle forming on the bar from the salty tears oozing out of his system and running down his chin and falling off.

“My poor brother,” says Good Sam, in a very gentle way like a missionary speaking, “are you really in earnest about feeling a deep desire to quit this here vale of tears?”

“I sure am,” says Little Al; “it’s the one ambition I’ve got left.”

“And I don’t blame you none for it neither,” says Good Sam. “What’s life but a swindle anyhow – a brace game – that nobody ever has beaten yet? And look at the fix you’re in – too big for a midget in a side-show and too little for other laudable purposes. No sir, I don’t blame you a bit. And just to show you my heart’s in the right place I’m willing to accommodate you.”

“That’s all I’m craving,” says Little Al. “Just show me how – ars’nic or a gun or the noose or a good sharp butcher-knife, I ain’t particular. If it wasn’t for the river being frozen over solid I wouldn’t be worrying you for that much help,” he says.

“Now hold on, listen here,” says Good Sam, “you mustn’t do it that way – not with your own hands.”

“How else am I going to do it, then?” says Little Al, acting surprised.

“Why, I’m going to do it for you myself,” says Good Sam, “and don’t think I’m putting myself out on your account neither. Why, it won’t be any trouble – you might almost say it’ll be a pleasure to me. Because if you should go and commit suicide you’ll be committing a mortal sin that you won’t never get forgiveness for. But if I plug you, you ain’t responsible, are you? I’ve already had to kill seven or eight fellows in my time,” says this amiable liar of a Good Sam, “or maybe the correct count is nine; I forget sometimes. Anyhow, one more killin’ on my soul won’t make a particle of difference with me. And to bump off a party that’s actually aching to be done so, one that’ll thank me with his last expiring breath for the favor – why, brother,” he says, “it will be a pleasure! Just come on with me,” he says, “and we can get this little matter over and done with in no time at all.”

With that he leads the way to a little shack of a room that Billy Grimm’s got behind his saloon. Al follows along but I observe he’s quit weeping all of a sudden and likewise it looks to me like he’s lost or is losing considerable of his original enthusiasm. He’s beginning to sort of hang back and lag behind by the time they’ve got to the doorway, and he casts a sort of pitiful imploring look backwards over his shoulder; but Good Sam takes him by the arm and leads him on in and closes the door behind them. The rest of us wait a minute and then tiptoe up to the door and put our ears close to the crack and listen.

First we hear a match being struck. “Now then, that’s the ticket,” we hear Good Sam say very cheerfully; “we don’t want to take any chances on messing this job up by trying to do it in the dark.” So from that we know he’s lighted the coal-oil lamp that’s in there. Then he says: “Wait till I open this here back window, so’s to let the smoke out – these old black powder cartridges are a blamed nuisance, going off inside a house.” There’s a sound of a sash being raised. “Suppose you sit down here on this beer box and make yourself comfortable,” is what Good Sam says next. There’s a scuffling sound from Little Al’s feet dragging across the floor. “No, that won’t hardly do,” goes on Good Sam, “sitting down all caved in the way you are now, I’d only gut-shoot you and probably you’d linger and suffer and I’d have to plug you a second time. I’d hate to botch you all up, I would so.

“Tell you what, just stand up with your arms down at your sides… There, that’s better, brother. No, it ain’t neither! I couldn’t bear afterwards to think of that forlorn look out of your eyes. The way they looked out of their eyes is the only thing that ever bothers me in connection with several of the fellows I’ve had to shoot heretofore. Maybe you’ll think I’m morbid but things like that certainly do prey on a fellow’s mind afterward – if he’s kind-hearted which, without any flattery, I may say I’m built that way. So while I hate to keep pestering you with orders when you’re hovering on the very brink of eternity, won’t you please just turn around so you’ll have your back to me? Thank you kindly, that’ll do splendid. Now you stay perfectly still and I’ll count three, kind of slow, and when I get to ‘three’ I’ll let you have it slick as a whistle right between the shoulders… One!” And we can hear that old mule’s ear of a hammer on that six-gun go click, click. Then: “Two-o-o!… Steady, don’t wiggle or you’re liable to make me nervous… Thr —”

Somebody lets out the most gosh-awful yell you ever heard and we shove the door open just in time to see Little Al sailing out of that window, head first, like a bird on the wing; and then we heard a hard thump on the frozen ground ’way down below, followed by low moaning sounds. In his hurry Little Al must have plumb forgot that while Billy Grimm’s saloon was flush with the street in front, at the far end it was scaffolded up over a hollow fifteen or twenty feet deep.

So we swarmed down the back steps and picked him up and you never saw a soberer party in your life than what that ex-suicider was, or one that was gladder to see a rescue party arrive. Soon as he got his wind back he clung to us, pleading with us to protect him from that murdering scoundrel of a man-killer and demanding to know what kind of a fellow he was not to be able to take a joke, and stating that he’d had a close call which it certainly was going to be a lesson to him, and so on. Pretty soon after that he began to take note that he was hurting all over. You wouldn’t have believed that a man who wasn’t over five-feet-two could be bunged up and bruised up in so many different localities as Little Al was. Even his hair was sore to the touch.

When he got so he could hobble around he joined an organization which up until then it’d only had one other charter member in good standing, the same being Whiz Bollinger, former owner and chief mourner of that there late-lamented buckboard. It was a club with just one by-law – which was entertaining a profound distrust for Samson Goodhue, Esquire – but there were quite a good many strong rich cuss-words in the ritual.

Still, any man who devotes himself to the public welfare is bound to accumulate a few detractors as he goes along. Good Sam went booming ahead like as if there wasn’t a private enemy on his list or a cloud in his sky. He’d do this or that or the other thing always, mind you, with the highest and the purest motives and every pop it would turn out wrong. Was he discouraged? Did he throw up his hands and quit in the face of accumulating ingratitude? Not so as to be visible to the naked eye. The milk of human kindness that was sloshing about inside of him appeared to be absolutely curdle-proof. I wish I knew his private formula – I could invent a dandy patent churn.

Let’s see, now, what was his next big outstanding failure? I’m passing over the little things such as him advising Timber-Line Hance about what was the best way to encourage a boil on his neck that wouldn’t come to a head and getting the medicines mixed in his mind and recommending turpentine instead of hog-lard. I’m trying to pick out the high points in his career. Let’s see? Now I’ve got it. Along toward spring, when the thaws set in, somebody told him how Boots Darnell and Babe Louder had been hived up all winter in a shanty up on the Blue Shell with nobody to keep them company except each other, and how Babe was laid up with a busted leg and Boots couldn’t leave him except to run their traps. So nothing would do Good Sam but what he must put out to stay a couple of days with that lonesome pair and give ’em the sunshine of his presence.

They welcomed him with open arms and made him right to home in their den, such as it was. I ought to tell you before we go any further that this here Babe and this here Boots were a couple of simple-minded, kind-hearted old coots that had been baching it together for going on fifteen or twenty years. It was share and share alike with those two. Living together so long, they got so they divided their thoughts. One would know what was on the other’s mind before he said it and would finish the sentence for him. They’d actually split a word when it was a word running into extra syllables. “Well, I’ll be dad – ” Boots would say; “ – gummed,” Babe would add, signifying that they were going partners even on the dad-gumming. Their conversation would put you in mind of one of these here anthems.

They certainly were glad to see Good Sam. In honor of the occasion Boots cooked up a muskrat stew and made a batch of sour-dough biscuits for supper and Babe sat up in his bunk and told his favorite story which Boots had already heard it probably two or three million times already but carried on like he enjoyed it. They showed him their catch of pelts and, taking turn and turn about, they told him how they’d been infested all winter by a worthless stray hound-dog. It seems this hound-dog happened along one day and adopted them and he’d been with ’em ever since and he’d just naturally made their life a burden to them – getting in the way and breeding twice as many fleas as he needed for his own use and letting them have the overflow; and so on.

But they said his worst habit was his appetite. He was organized inside like a bottomless pit, so they said. If they took him along with them he’d scare all the game out of the country by chasing it but never caught any; and if they left him behind locked up in the cabin he’d eat a side of meat or a pack-saddle or something before they got back. A set of rawhide harness was just a light snack to him, they said – sort of an appetizer. And his idea of a pleasant evening was to sit on his haunches and howl two or three hours on a stretch with a mournful enthusiasm and after he did go to sleep he’d have bad dreams and howl some more without waking up, but they did. Altogether, it seemed he had more things about him that you wouldn’t care for than a relative by marriage.

They said, speaking in that overlapping way of theirs, that they’d prayed to get shut of him but didn’t have any luck. So Good Sam asked them why somebody hadn’t just up and killed him. And they hastened to state that they were both too tender-hearted for that. But if he felt called upon to take the job of being executioner off their hands, the hound being a stranger to him and he not a member of the family as was the case with them, why, they’d be most everlastingly grateful. And he said he would do that very little trick first thing in the morning.

Now, of course, the simplest and the quickest and the easiest way would have been for Good Sam to toll the pup outdoors and bore him with Boots’ old rifle. But no, that wouldn’t do. As he explained to them, he was sort of tender himself when it came to taking life, but I judge the real underlying reason was that he liked to go to all sorts of pains and complicate the machinery when he was working at being a philanthropist. Soon as supper was over he reared back to figure on a plan and all at once his eye lit on a box of dynamite setting over in a corner. During the closed season on fur those two played at being miners.

“I’ve got it now,” he told them. “I’ll take a stick of that stuff there with me and I’ll lead this cussed dog along with me and take him half a mile up the bottoms and fasten him to a tree with a piece of line. Then I’ll hitch a time-fuse onto the dynamite and tie the dynamite around his neck with another piece of rope and leave him there. Pretty soon the fuse will burn down and the dynamite will go off —kerblooie!– and thus without pain or previous misgivings that unsuspecting canine will be totally abolished. But the most beautiful part of it is that nobody – you nor me neither – will be a witness to his last moments.”

So they complimented him on being so smart and so humane at the same time and said they ought to have thought up the idea themselves only they didn’t have the intellect for it – they admitted that, too – and after he’d sopped up their praise for a while and felt all warm and satisfied, they turned in, and peace and quiet reigned in that cabin until daylight, except for some far-and-wide snoring and the dog having a severe nightmare under the stove about two-thirty A. M.

Up to a certain point the scheme worked lovely. Having established the proper connections between the dog and the tree, the fuse and the dynamite, Good Sam is gamboling along through the slush on his way back and whistling a merry tune, when all of a sudden his guiding spirit makes him look back behind him – and here comes that pup! He’s either pulled loose from the rope or else he’s eaten it up – it would be more like him to eat it. But the stick of dynamite is dangling from his neck and the fuse is spitting little sparks.

Good Sam swings around and yells at the animal to go away and he grabs up a chunk of wood and heaves it at him. But the dog thinks that’s only play and he keeps right on coming, with his tail wagging in innocent amusement and his tongue hanging out like a pink plush necktie and his eyes shining with gratefulness for the kind gentleman who’s gone to all the trouble of thinking up this new kind of game especially on his account. So then Good Sam lights out, running for the cabin, and the dog, still entering heartily into the sport, takes after him and begins gaining at every jump. It’s a close race and getting closer all the time and no matter which one of ’em finishes first it looks like a mortal cinch that neither winner nor loser is going to be here to enjoy his little triumph afterwards.

Inside the cabin Boots and Babe hear the contestants drawing nearer. Mixed in with much happy frolicsome barking is a large volume of praying and yelling and calls for help, and along with all this a noise like a steam snow-plow being driven at a high rate of speed. Boots jumps for the door but before he can jerk it open, Good Sam busts in with his little playmate streaking along not ten feet behind him, and at that instant the blast goes off and the pup loses second money, as you might say, by about two lengths.

It’s a few minutes after that when Boots and Babe reach the unanimous conclusion that they’ve been pretty near ruined by too much benevolence. Boots is propping up the front side of the cabin, the explosion having jarred it loose, and Babe is still laying where he landed against the back wall and nursing his game leg. The visiting humanitarian has gone down the ridge to get his nerves ca’mmed.

“Babe,” says Boots, “you know what it looks like to me?”

“What it looks like to us two, you mean,” says Babe.

“Sure,” says Boots; “well, it looks like to both of us that we’ve been dern near killed with kindness.”

“As regards that there pup,” says Babe, continuing the clapboarded conversation, “we complained that he was all over the place and – ”

“Now he’s all over us,” states Boots, combing a few more fine fragments of dog-hash out of his hair.

“I’d say we’ve had about enough of being helped by this here obliging well-wisher, wouldn’t you?” says Babe.

“Abso – ” says Boots.

“ – lutely!” says Babe.

“I’ve run plum out of hospi – ” says Boots.

“ – tality!” says Babe. “What we ought to do is take a gun and kill him good – ”

“ – and dead!” says Boots.

But they didn’t go that far. They make it plain to him though, when he gets back, that the welcome is all petered out and he takes the hint and pikes out for town, leaving those two still sorting what’s left of their house-keeping junk out of the wreckage.

So it went and so it kept on going. Every time Good Sam set his willing hands to lifting some unfortunate fellow citizen out of a difficulty he won himself at least one more sincere critic before he was through. Even so, as long as he stuck to retailing it wasn’t so bad. Certain parts of town he was invited to stay out of but there were other neighborhoods that he could still piroot around in without much danger of being assassinated. It was only when he branched out as a jobber that his waning popularity soured in a single hour. That was when the entire community clabbered on him, as you might say, by acclamation.

It happened this way: Other towns east and west of us were having booms, but our town, seemed like, was being left out in the cold. She wasn’t growing a particle. So some of the leading people got up a mass-meeting to decide on ways and means of putting Triple Falls on the map. One fellow would rise up and suggest doing this and another fellow would rise up and suggest doing that; but every proposition called for money and about that time money was kind of a scarce article amongst us. So far as I was concerned, it was practically extinct.

Along toward the shank of the evening Good Sam took the floor.

“Gents,” he said, “I craves your attention. There’s just one sure way of boosting a town and that’s by advertising it. Get its name in print on all the front pages over the country. Get it talked about; stir up curiosity; arouse public interest. That brings new people in and they bring their loose coinage with ’em and next thing you know you’ve got prosperity by the tail with a down-hill pull. Now, I’ve got a simple little scheme of my own. I love this fair young city of ours and I’m aiming to help her out of the kinks and I ain’t asking assistance from anybody else neither. Don’t ask me how I’m going about it because in advance it’s a secret. I ain’t telling. You just leave it to me and I’ll guarantee that inside of one week or less this’ll be the most talked-about town of its size in the whole United States; with folks swarming in here by every train – why, they’ll be running special excursions on the railroad. And it’s not going to cost a single one of you a single red cent, neither.”

Of course his past record should have been a plentiful warning. Somebody ought to have headed him off and bent a six-gun over his skull. But no, like the misguided suckers that we were, we let him go off and cook up his surprise.

I will say this: He kept his promise – he got us talked about and he brought strangers in. Inside of forty-eight hours special writers from newspapers all over the Rocky Mountains were pouring in and strangers were dropping off of through trains with pleased, expectant looks on their faces; and Father Staples was getting rush telegrams from his bishop asking how about it, and the Reverend Claypool – he was the Methodist minister – was hurrying back from conference all of a tremble, and various others who’d been away were lathering back home as fast as they could get here.

What’d happened? I’m coming to that now. All that happened was that Good Sam got the local correspondent for the press association stewed, and seduced him into sending out a dispatch that he’d written out himself, which it stated that an East Indian sun worshiper had lighted in Triple Falls and started up a revival meeting, and such was his hypnotic charm and such was the spell of his compelling fiery eloquence that almost overnight he’d converted practically the entire population – men, women, children, half-breeds, full-bloods, Chinks and Mexies – to the practice of his strange Oriental doctrines, with the result that pretty near everybody was engaged in dancing in the public street – without any clothes on!

So it was shortly after that, when cooler heads had discouraged talk of a lynching, that Good Sam left us – by request. And I haven’t seen him since.

The Native Genius pointed up the trail. Toward us came Eagle Ribs, titular head of the resident group of members of the Blackfeet Confederacy, now under special retainers by the hotel management to furnish touches of true Western color to the adjacent landscape. The chief was in civilian garb; he was eating peanut brittle from a small paper bag.

“You’ll observe that old Ribs has shucked his dance clothes,” said my friend, “which means the official morning reception is over and the latest batch of sight-seers from all points East have scattered off or something. I guess it’ll be safe for us to go back.”

We fell into step; the path was wide enough for two going abreast.

“So you never heard anything more of the Good Samaritan?” I prompted, being greedy for the last tidbitty bite of this narrative.

“Nope. I judge somebody who couldn’t appreciate his talents must have beefed him. But I’m reasonably certain he left descendants to carry on the family inheritance. One of ’em is in this vicinity now, I think.”

“You’re referring to what’s-his-name who started the second fire last night – aren’t you?” I asked.

“Not him. If he’d had a single drop of the real Good Sam blood in him his fire would be raging yet and my camp would be only a recent site.

“No, the one I’ve got in mind is the party with the saxophone. Did you get some faint feeble notion of the nature of the tune he was trying to force out of that reluctant horn of his? Well, it would be just like Good Sam’s grandson to practice up on some such an air as that – and then play it as a serenade at midnight under the window of a sick friend.”