The Loaded Gun3
I Three Gentlemen of Philadelphia
At three o’clock in the morning, Gast, McGill, and Ravant were going down Twentieth street, in the vicinity of Walnut street. They were locked together in the fashion of a Roman phalanx. And even then their going was unsteady. With the memory of his classical studies somewhat revived, Ravant repeated Cæsar’s commendation of the Roman formation.
A little later, and a little further down the street, where lived many of the city’s elect, they were protesting in over-vociferous melody that they would not go home till morning.
“Make it midday, for the sake of ver-sim-ili-tude,” begged Gast, breathless with the word, “for it is morning now. Behold!”
And thereupon he also remembered the invocations to the rising sun, in which the ancients abound, and produced one—according to his memory:
“Aurora leaped upon the nether hills
And flung a kiss to Bacchus—’twas a day!”
The officer on the corner of the square came and looked on amicably.
His applause made McGill realize that the voices of his comrades, unlike his own, had never excelled in melody. He, therefore, attached himself to a lamp-post, and, in the fashion of a precentor, proposed to instruct them in the difficulties of “Annie Laurie.”
But, in attaching himself to the lamp-post, he had detached himself from the critical right of the phalanx, which now floundered dismally and then incontinently disintegrated. The officer of the peace secured Ravant and Gast and anchored them to McGill—and “Annie Laurie” went terribly on.
It would have been hard enough to endure if it had not been mixed with liquors. But since it was so mixed it was not wonderful that anathema was belched at them from the windows of that halcyon neighborhood, and that they were then slammed violently shut.
But they were hardly prepared for a gun-shot in their direction.
“That’s right,” complained McGill; “if you can’t reform ’em, shoot ’em!”
“Mac, that man’s a pil-os-per,” argued Gast. “For, lo! these many years the sover-eign people have sought a cure for the drink evil. Well, he has found it. Shoot ’em. Eh, Ravey?”
Ravant said nothing. And now they awoke to the understanding that he had grown heavy between them.
A cab passed. The driver, an experienced nighthawker, drew up to them.
“Right this time,” said Gast. “This jag is going home imperially in a cab. It’ll be about all I’ll be able to do to walk my own to my happy home.”
The officer assisted in getting Ravant into the cab.
But suddenly his manner changed to savagery. They were under the direct light of the corner electric.
“Which of you did this?” he demanded.
Blood slowly trickled from a wound in Ravant’s head.
Gast had a drunken inspiration.
“That gun!” he whispered.
The officer caught upon this.
“Where was it fired from?”
This none of them in the least knew.
The officer took McGill and Gast to the station-house, where they were ignominiously searched. Ravant went to the hospital in a cab.
Presently, in a lucid interval, Ravant signed an affidavit setting forth that it was neither McGill nor Gast who had fired the shot. Upon this his two companions were released “under surveillance.”
And this was so odious to Gast that he swore to find out who it was had fired the shot.