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Well, they were doing fine, getting used to the dry country and beginning to get over being homesick, when one night Murph went up there and played them the Arkansaw Traveler. "Well, of course that was the come-on Old Spud stopped his story and finally one lady bit. "'Yes, but how did you lose your fortune? she asks and Spud he shakes his head. "'By playing that tune, he says.
And they laughed all the time, and that made the duke mad; and everybody left, anyway, before the show was over, but one boy which was asleep. So the duke said these Arkansaw lunkheads couldn't come up to Shakespeare; what they wanted was low comedy and maybe something ruther worse than low comedy, he reckoned. He said he could size their style.
They couldn't hit no project that suited exactly; so at last the duke said he reckoned he'd lay off and work his brains an hour or two and see if he couldn't put up something on the Arkansaw village; and the king he allowed he would drop over to t'other village without any plan, but just trust in Providence to lead him the profitable way meaning the devil, I reckon.
"There's no jobs lef for a man seventy-six years of age, Myrtle, except dyin. I run a saloon in San Antonio by the Plaza. Walked from Greenville, Mississippi, to Little Rock. An old lady give me carfare, there, when I told her I was goin' home to my wife that I'd treated so bad. There's plenty Christians in Arkansaw.
Three bold and experienced men cool, confident, and dry when they began; white, quivering, and wet when they finished their trick at those terrible wheels swung her over the great lift from Albuquerque to Glorietta and beyond Springer, up and up to the Raton Tunnel on the State line, whence they dropped rocking into La Junta, had sight of the Arkansaw, and tore down the long slope to Dodge City, where Cheyne took comfort once again from setting his watch an hour ahead.
"Very gladly," responded the other, "very gladly. You seem a good sort, and you fought fair. I'll tell you the absolute truth. "I came from England originally, and not from Arkansaw, as my friend supposes, although I don't know where Arkansaw is, I'm sure. I was long in the British Army, or Navy, I cawn't remember which. I'm quite sure it was one or the other, possibly both."
Give me the same chance, and I might know them as well as the little boy knew his pap." "You had the same chance," I put in, "but didn't want it. You were offered the Pine Ridge horses last year to take back to Dodge, and you kicked like a bay steer. But I swallowed their dust to the Arkansaw, and from there home we lived in clouds of alkali.
On this announcement, the tall foreman waded through the crowd, and drawing the darky to him, whispered something in his ear, and then fell back to his former position. The dusky artist's countenance brightened, and with a few preliminaries he struck into "The Arkansaw Traveler," throwing so many contortions into its execution that it seemed as if life and liberty depended on his exertions.
I've done most ever'thing though; used ter work on a farm, and puttered round a saw-mill some in the Arkansaw pineries. Aim ter strike a job at somethin' and go back thar where I know folks. Nobody won't give a feller nuthin' in this yer God-fer-saken country; haint asked me ter set down fer a month. Back home they're allus glad ter have a man eat with 'em. I'll sure be all right thar."
This class of reading comprises O. Henry, Bret Harte, Leonard Merrick, Ambrose Bierce, W. W. Jacobs, Daudet, de Maupassant, and possibly even On a Slow Train Through Arkansaw, that grievous classic of the railway bookstalls whereof its author, Mr. Thomas W. Jackson, has said "It will sell forever, and a thousand years afterward." To this might be added another of Mr. There are other of Mr.
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