the first thing I must write: "I am an
opium eater."

The words look very mild as I contem-
plate them "an opium eater." I say
them over and over again, for I never per-
mitted myself to say them before. I won-
der should I not presently lose my abhor-
rence of them if I repeated them ten thou-
sand times. An opium eater, an opium
eater, an

You see, a man does not become an
opium eater at once. It is a matter of
years, a matter of habit and use. It was
those headaches in the old student days
that, started the thing. I learned then
that opium could relieve me from pain,
and I used it in increasing doses, thinking
nothing of the danger of it. Long, long
afterwards I learned that a simple opera-
tion on certain muscles of the eye would
have cured me, but it was too late then.
I remember well my first taste of thee,
thou accursed, treacherous queen drug!
And ever since that first of thy embraces
I have loved thee lecherously. The col-



MR. PONDICHERRY AND THE SMUGGLERS.



275



lege yard in Cambridge was never lovelier
than on that morning when I awakened
from my first free sleep with thee.

Louisa Louisa has never known. Oh,
I have fought for my freedom and I have
never surrendered. One last protest, the
protest of protests, I shall make to-night
and this stroke, Louisa, is as much for
you as for myself. "Opium eater!" And
that is not a tithe of my sin. To-night I
have been down into Hell! Louisa

The first part of my journey to enslave-
ment was in a lovely land, a land twice
lovely because behind lay the black for-
ests of the pain I had suffered, amongst
whose roads there was eternal night yea,
thrice lovely, for it was about then that
I first saw Louisa, she with the pale blue
eyes and the breasts of snow. But the last
of my journey has been down a precipitous
road. I cannot climb my way back and
at the bottom is the pool of death.

Oh, I have tried to reform. But I
think there is no reformation possible to
me I know, indeed, that none is now
possible to me. I think I have essayed a
thousand times to reform, and Louisa has
never known. She has seen me grow daily
less master of myself; she has seen me
sink to decrepitude, and she has grown
used to my long and unheralded absences
debauches, if she but knew. But she
does not know. She ascribes my falling
off to overwork, to worry and to failing
health; and indeed my health did fail. I
have promised myself by the light of her
pale blue eyes that I would reform and
you see I have yet written myself an
"opium eater" within this hour. And I
wish that were all of my sins ugh, how
ugly it all looks ! Now have I given up
the fight, or perhaps it were fairer to
say I have chosen a new battle-field, one
as wide as infinity.

Six months ago I left Boston desper-
ately determined to free myself from this
habit. I gave it out that I intended to
go to the Far East to write a book about
Chinamen the irony of it! And then
I came here into the wilderness to fight a
long fight with myself. I built me this
cabin, I worked with my hands, I gained
in health, and muscle had commenced to
gather on my gaunt limbs. Oh, I fought
joyously with the thing, sometimes, and
sometimes I fought with a sickening sense



of suffocation in my throat; but I fought
and fought, and I thought I was winning.
My voice had grown resonant, as reson-
ant as a youth's, and I could sing at my
work.

Three hours ago I sat here where I now
sit, and I thought I was a man and master
of myself. I had suffered can any one
know what tortures had been inflicted
upon me? Can any one even guess, or
try to guess, at them? And I thought I
was free and such deeds have since been
performed! You see, it was like climb-
ing the highest cliff in the world that one
might fall the further when his hold
slackened.

I sat here three hours ago. I was alone
in the night, and I was rejoicing and prais-
ing my God. Soon I should go back, back
to Louisa, back to the company of men,
back to the things I loved and enjoyed
all my life.

For long I sat hearing no sounds save
those natural to the forest, the wild laugh-
ter of an owl, the clangorous cry of the
blue heron ; then silence, a silence so heavy
that it rang in my ears. As I sat there I
seemed to be waiting for something, and
as I waited I thought my senses grew pre-
ternaturally keen. I thought the spicy
fragrance of evergreens painfully intense.
My eyes outlined each shadow draped tree
trunk as though it were daylight, and the
silence rang rhythmic calls, whole har-
monies, even, into my ears, and my ears
magnified them until my brain was filled
with weird airs and with catches of un-
thinkably beautiful songs.

I do not know how long I sat here, but
after a time a breeze commenced lightly
and fitfully to blow amongst the tree tops,
moaning, laughing and whispering gently
to all living things of "surcease from sor-
row." I sat enchanted, listening, when
a hoarse creak from real life came to me,
and then a man's voice came muffledly
through the forest. Even then I hardly
moved. I knew the creak, it was that of
an ill-oiled pulley-block. "It cannot con-
cern me," said I. However, I directed my
eye glances out of that window that looks
upon the bay, and as I watched my gloom
accustomed eyes saw indistinctly the loom
of a schooner's hull and sails slowly enter-
ing my harbor. No lights burned on her,
and she came as silently as an eclipse, som-



376



OVERLAND MONTHLY.



berly, like a shadow, like a part of the
mechanism of night.

And then half unconsciously I rose from
my chair, sidled to my berth, buckled on
my hunting knife and walked out into
the night. I think I made no sounds, yet
my hands moved deftly, surely, and my
feet instinctively avoided leaves that
would rustle and twigs that would creak.
I, also, was part of the mechanism of
night. I moved swiftly, not stopping to
debate the path which seemed chosen for
me by another will than mine. Indeed,
I do not know by which path I traveled,
but I must have skirted the beach, for
presently I stood as near to the schooner,
which was hove to, with idly flapping sails
as the water could let me get.

A hammer on the schooner struck a pin,
the anchor dove from the billboard, the
cable roared through the hawse pipe, and
fired a salvo of harsh echoes. The schooner
was anchored. I was shaken by the noises,
my hands trembled and my heart swelled
and contracted sickeningly. I crawled into
the alder coppice, waited and looked to
seaward towards the schooner. On her
decks a few men were swiftly and silently
moving about. They lowered a boat; two
men entered it and a package was handed
to them.

As the package was passed into the
boat, I became aware almost instantly
the consciousness came, and I cannot say
how it came, perhaps through some hide-
ous, disease developed sense, I do not know
how can one know? that it contained
opium. My throat tightened it was very
horrible and a strong, gnawing gust of
desire swept all through me, down to my
finger tips, I think. My hands twitched,
and a rotten limb crushed in my grasp
with a noise that to me was magnified
thunder. The men in the boat heard it,
and paused momentarily to listen, then
shoved off for the shore.

More than ever I crouched into the cop-
pice, but never were eyes so keen as mine
to-night. I can recount each movement
of the figures in the boat, the rhythmic
swaying, each swift, silent stroke of oars,
each turn of head, twist of hand, roll of
eye. The moon had not then risen, and
the water was dark save for the narrow,
lambent pathways of stars, but I saw clear-
ly, as clearly as though my eye glances



carried a light of their own.

The boat came swiftly in to where my
path and the water flowed together, and I
saw that I should not be thirty feet away
when the boat landed. I wanted to flee,
but I could not get away. All my senses,
I think, were watching that drug package ;
it was to me the pole of all things, all
things else were subsidiary. I strained
frantically lest the sea open and swallow
it up; I feared lest it should be stolen; I
wanted to fondle the wealth yea, to taste
of it, above all else to taste of it. Other
things I did not see except as adjuncts to
the package. It was so that I heard the
boat grate upon the beach with a noise
that rattled my nerves like loose strung
wire, and it was in such wise that I
watched the bowman awkwardly leap to
the beach. Also I listened to his harsh
foot noises in the sand, and, although they
tortured my frantic ears, I accepted them
as the penalty of delights.

When the man in the boat tossed the
package to his mate on the beach I almost
gibbered and shrieked at the horror of such
needless endangerment of treasure. But
it was now closer to me and I felt faint
from the excitement of its presence, and
desire heaped desire atop of itself when
I thought of it. And when I had re-
covered from faintness, a wild, mad
strength seemed to have flowed into my
emaciated carcass.

The men did not speak to each other
even a low good-night after the package
was transferred. It was evident that all
their plans were pre-arranged. The boat
shoved off immediately and made for the
schooner, while the man on the beach
tossed the package to his shoulder and
picked his way cautiously up a rugged
path that led, close by my house, to the
interior of the island. I followed as
silently as the shadow of death follows us
all. The smuggler moved more awkward-
ly, stumbling over the fantastic tree roots
that crossed my black sylvan trail, brush-
ing his face on low-branched madronas
and falling sometimes on fallen trees. I
could see by the faint star light that he
was strong; sturdy and alert, but I cared
for his drug beyond prudence, beyond de-
cency, and though I knew that I was des-
tined to rob him, perhaps to kill him even,
yet I rejoiced. I must have been mad,



AT NOON.



277



though I remember it all very clearly.

I followed him carefully and patiently.
I made no^sound, but I remember that my
lips twisted and laid bare my clenched
teeth, and that I carried my hand on my
knife handle. I was tense, yet I was cool.
As I followed him I drew gradually closer
and I drew my knife. I drew close, so
close that he might have felt my hot
breath on his neck, and even while I con-
tinued to move, I was crouched ready to
spring. I drew so close that my hand
could have touched him; then he sud-
denly turned about with an oath. Before
the sound was out of his mouth I threw
one arm around his neck, and with the
other I stabbed and stabbed and stabbed
him. Once he cried out, and then he
grappled me, and, strangled and wounded
as he was he wrenched the knife from my
hand and then he fell dead.

I hardly noticed that he had fallen. I
was fumbling at the package of opium.
Five huge balls of it there were I ate of
them. And now only ashes of desire re-
main.



Out by the path lies the body of the
dead smuggler. I am a murderer now
another epithet for my grave-stone, if one
were needed. I am very tired. I must
cease to live, and I am glad. Dawn fires
the hilltops again, and casts her purple
robe about the shoulders of the mountain.
No further purple robes shall weary this
pair of earthly eyes. The schooner tacks
at the harbor entrance bootless to wait,
oh, schooner, if you could but know, for
the night has reaped a harvest of trans-
gressors, thy smuggler chief and me.

PONDICHERRY.

And driven firmly to the center of his
heart we found the knife that had killed
a doughty smuggler. And in the cabin's
corner were five acrid balls of opium,
swathed in their beds of poppy leaves and
wrapped in paper of a fantastic Oriental
design. And in the pathway close outside
lay the body of the "smuggler chief."

Long John and I did not bother to sleep
that night, but we sat there with Mr. Pon-
dicherry and waited for day.



AT NOON



BY IGNORE PETERS



Into the parching noon-time heat

Forth I go,
Seeking a pleasant, cool retreat

That I know.
0, the wharves and the water!

0, the ships of the sea !
And the gentle wind that stirs the air

Is balm to me.



Onto the breast of a river boat,

Broad and low,
Breathing a soothing mother-note,

Soft and slow,
0, the gulls that come flocking!

Forming her diadem ! ,
And the cradling swell of the water

Is home to them.



Back again through the parching heat

Of the noon,
Leaving my pleasant, cool retreat

All too soon!
0, the spell of the water!

0, the scent of the sea !
But the clamorous voice that I must obey

Is bread to me!



FROM NAPA TO NIPA



BY FRED A. HUNT



ON A DUSTY BO AD in the beau-
tiful Napa Valley, California,
stood a distraught, unkempt
man, whose face and raiment
were in keeping with the road whereon he
paused uncertainly. The morning carol
of the meadow-larks awoke no responsive
note in his accusatory breast, but the dis-
cordant shriek of the blue- jays seemed to
him a fitting girding at the world and its
people. The rugged mountains skirting
the valley, with their seamed crevices and
uncouth ravines, crowned by the fleecy
mist, appeared to his distempered mind
like the frown of God.

No misfortune that can be thrust upon
a man is so hard to bear or so difficult to
overcome as one that has been created by
his own vices, and culminated by his own
crass foolishness ; the latter was the plight
of the uncertain wayfarer. Traveling the
so-called primrose path, along which are
the Dead Sea apples so enticing to the
yearning eye, so bitter to the palate, mis-
appropriation of funds to palliate the
craving of his perverted taste, he had
averted the gathering storm only to have it
burst in increased intensity when the final
crash came. It had come and tossed him
a ruined and disgraced man upon the tur-
bulent waves of the world. Born of good
parentage, reared in comfort, having the
advantage of a liberal education, he was
further blessed in the love of a beautiful
and accomplished girl, and the vistas of
the future appeared pregnant with hap-
piest promise to him. But the evil nature
that is active or latent in all human-kind
the original sin of the theologians as-
sumed dominance, and in its augmenting
force dashed him, a stranded wreck, upon
the rocks of adversity and poverty. To
those who loved him, the blow came with
crushing force in the defacement of the
career they had so jubilantly and with so
much reasonable promise of its fulfillment,



mapped out for him; the actuality of the
dismal present standing out in such in-
tense blackness against the brilliance of
the aurora of Hope. He knew and felt
this: he appreciated the unhappy fact that
wrong-doing always falls with irresistible
weight on the innocent who are allied to
the miscreant by ties of affection, and the
sombre reflection but made his misery
more poignant.

Whither should he go and what should
he do? It was incumbent on him to go
to some place where his follies and crime
were unknown and where he could, upon
the oblivion of the unknown personality,
reconstruct a fairer and purer life. To his
mind recurred the lines of Alfred Tenny-
son's "In Memoriam":

"I hold it truth with him who sings
To a sweet lyre of diverse tones,
That men can rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things."

Thus he realized the advantage of edu-
cation in that when his numbed mind fails
to adjust his thought to disaster, the in-
vigorating ideas of master-minds come to
his assistance and replenish his hopes with
new ambitions. Just how this was to be
done was the dilemma that he was en-
deavoring to solve; his finances were at a
low ebb, and he was aware that he was
without character, reputation or friends.

From his business association in the
Napa Valley he was acquainted with
many people, and should he obtain em-
ployment in that locality, his abhorrent
and disgraceful past might be recalled with
deserved contumely for himself and his
resultant discharge as an unworthy em-
ployee.

Again the query recurred: "Whither
should he go?" He debated energetically
as to the possible destination where his
identity would have the least prospect of



FROM NAP A TO NIPA.



279



discovery, and sensibly decided that in the
seething maelstrom of a large city, a
worthless chip like himself would have a
very slight chance of being discovered
amid the multitude of other fragmentary
humans cast upon the seething billows.
Therefore, San Francisco should be his
destination. His penury being an un-
pleasantly prominent factor, he further
deliberated whether he should walk or re-
duce his petty stock of money by taking
the train. To walk meant that he should
ally himself with the army of undesirables
turned hoboes, and to this he was averse;
to take a pedestrian tour and pay for his
meals and lodgings would be to exceed
the cost of a ticket on the railroad ; to beg
for his subsistence would be to diminish
still further his small capital of self-re-
spect. Also, he might be unsuccessful in
the role of mendicant, and to his disor-
dered mind came the story of a wayfarer
who had solicited something edible at the
back door of a farm house. The chari-
table lady retired from the portal and re-
turned with a large piece of bread and
gave it to the suppliant with the annota-
tion that she gave it to him "for Christ's
fake." Scanning the donation, the hungry
man responded: "Well, ma'am, then for
Jesus' sake, put some butter on it." The
dividing line between pathos and bathos
is often imperceptible.

He decided that if mendicancy were
thrust upon him, it were also more desir-
able that his fall thereto should take place
where his incognito might be preserved,
and he bought a ticket to the city by the
Golden Gate. He was there submerged
and absorbed in the human flotsam and
jetsam, and instantly realized that nowhere
is a person so alone and so unnoticed as in
a large metropolis.

What to do was the next problem he
had to solve. He knew that any attempt
to obtain the kind of work whereto he was
accustomed would adjust inquiry as to
his competence, previous experience and
reliability, and to satisfactorily answer
these would be impossible. Manual labor
he was unaccustomed to, and in that en-
deavor he would have to compete with
those whose indurated muscles and prac-
ticed hands would display him incompe-
tent. Decision as to the course he should
pursue was an instant and urgent neces-



sity; to aid him in that solution of the
problem he followed the usual course of
distracted humanity and walked the
streets ; as if some beneficent genii would
come to his help and point the goal to-
ward which his vagrant and errant foot-
steps should proceed. After discursive
wanderings he attained a portion of Mar-
ket street, and above a doorway, saw Old
Glory waving in the misty air. No matter
what condition of plenitude or paucity
an American may be in, the Flag will al-
ways attract his attention and admiration.
He strolled to the doorway and descried
a placard announcing the need of the
United States for soldiers to go to the
Philippines. That way lay oblivion and
the prospect of a career or death and
to his jaundiced and regretful mind the
latter might not be the worst fate that
could befall him. He entered the door-
way, and, directed by the orderly on duty,
attained the presence of the recruiting of-
ficer, and, after the requisite formalities
had been gone through with, became
Thomas Manning of the United States
Volunteers.

Of the intermediate course necessitated
by his inexperience, whereby a raw recruit
is transformed into a skillful cavalryman,
and the hand that had wielded nothing
more formidable than a pen flashes a sabre
in the whirl of the right and left moulinet,
it is needless to recount ; the crude mater-
ial speedily becomes the finished article
under the competent tuition of the drill
sergeants and the compulsory discipline
of the army. He was sent to Manila,
where his martial education was completed
and where the temptations of the
Luneta were powerless to thwart his pur-
pose to "make a stepping-stone of -his
dead past" whereon he could achieve a
new and estimable career.

Under the gallant Henry W. Lawton
he received his baptism of fire, and with
that competent and brave commander par-
took of the forced marches through the
jungles and torrid bamboo fields; partici-
pated in the skirmishes, battles, sieges,
charges and ambushments of the virile
campaign, and discovered the wide line of
demarkation between fact and history, as
it is fancied.

He was in the rapid and fatiguing
descent upon slumbrous Filipino villages,



280



OVERLAND MONTHLY.



where the soldiers penetrated the nipa
huts in the dense darkness and groped
around ainid the natives huddled together
on the floor until a male Filipino was
found, when he was dragged from the hut
and incontinently made a prisoner. He
escaped both the malicious bolo and the
deadly bullet, and came out of the fre-
quent Filipino ambushes unscathed. He
also acquired about as fair an average of
loot as any of his compeers. He forded
rivers, swam streams and wallowed in the
rice fields and swamps, where the tena-
cious marasmic mud came to his horse's
girth. He realized the fact that whereas
the chivalrous Lawton was apotheosized
after his death, and painted as but a few
degrees lesser than a saint, while living
he had the military habit (possibly ac-
quired in the old Sixth Cavalry, where they
were desperate fighters and as desperately
addicted to profanity during their con-
tests) of using staccato language that shiv-
ered the surrounding air into blue streaks.
On one particular scout, when the objec-
tive was the surprising of a Filipino
stronghold, and the scouts and guides had
been instructed to follow the trail and
identify the topography, they failed to
properly do so, and got themselves and the
command astray in a jungle-swamp, reek-
ing with tangled thickets that bore thorns
nearly as long, and quite as sharp, as
porcupine quills; when the language of
Henry W. Lawton the command was
forbidden to disturb the quietude of the
night by speech was almost superior to
that of the "army in Flanders." Serious
doubt was cast upon the scouts' ancestry,
and the guides were similarly stigmatized.
At the time when the brave officer's life
was sacrificed on the altar of his country's
fame, he found that romance transmuted
his dying words, and after being shot
through the heart was alleged to have
made quite a verbal epilogue to his stormy
army life; he really only swore in angry

tones : " it !" So the prismatic

hues of imagination faded before the
searchlight of fact. In his own personal-
ity, however, Manning was endeavoring to
obscure the unpleasant and bitter facts of
his unhappy past by the glamour of mili-
tary service.

He performed that duty as a soldier
should, participating in the entire cam-



paign, and without hurt from the Fili-
pinos, but the exposure and the inoculat-
ing mosquitos laid him low with a perni-
cious fever, and he was invalided and sent
home to San Francisco and the Presidio
general hospital. There he received all
the attention and care that medical skill
and careful nursing could bestow, but
without avail, and the physicians feared
that the dreaded nostalgia (a disease that
pharmacy is powerless against) would
supervene. He was therefore recommend-
ed to transfer to the Napa Valley, where
his environment would be that whereto he
was accustomed. Accordingly he went to
the Veterans' Home at Yountville.

At the Home, he developed some little
physical improvement, but he appeared to
have no ambition to assist the treatment
toward his recovery, and "who can minis-
ter to a mind diseased ?" So he languished
until the query was providentially an-
swered. One day some visitors came to
the hospital, and, looking at the patients,
one of them paused at the foot of Man-
ning's cot and inspected the bed-card
whereon his name was written. He once
more critically looked at his features, and
remarked: "That man Manning is the
image of an old friend of mine named Er-
nest Walthour." At the mention of his
own proper name, Walthour flushed a deep
red, and, in a shamefaced way, stretched
out his hand and said: "If you are not
ashamed to do it, George, I should like to
shake hands with you before I die." "Die !
Nonsense!" said George, as he firmly
grasped the proffered hand; "we want you
to live and come back home, and show that
you are as good a man as you have been
a soldier." Ernest smiled a wan smile and