A Reversion to Type
Schuster was too damned cheeky. He was the floor-walker in a department store on Kearny street, and I had opportunity to observe his cheek upon each of the few occasions on which I went into that store with—let us say my cousin. A floor-walker should let his communications be “first aisle left,” or “elevator, second floor front,” or “third counter right,” for whatsoever is more than this cometh of evil. But Schuster used to come up to—my cousin, and take her gently by the hand and ask her how she did, and if she was to be out of town much that season, and tell her, with mild reproach in his eye, that she had been quite a stranger of late, while I stood in the background mumbling curses not loud but deep.
However, my cousin does not figure in this yarn, nor myself. Paul Schuster is the hero—Paul Schuster, floor-walker in a department-store that sold ribbons and lace and corsets and other things, fancy, now! He was hopelessly commonplace, lived with a maiden aunt and a parrot in two rooms, way out in the bleak streets around Lone Mountain. When on duty he wore a long black cutaway coat, a white pique four-in-hand and blue-grey “pants” that cost four dollars. Besides this he parted his hair on the side and entertained ideas on culture and refinement. His father had been a barber in the Palace Hotel barber shop.
Paul Schuster had never heard anything of a grandfather.
Schuster came to that department-store when he was about thirty. Five years passed; then ten—he was there yet—forty years old by now. Always in a black cutaway and white tie, always with his hair parted on one side, always with the same damned cheek. A floor-walker, respectable as an English barrister, steady as an eight-day clock, a figure known to every woman in San Francisco. He had lived a floor-walker; as a floor-walker he would die. Such he was at forty. At forty-one he fell. Two days and all was over.
It sometimes happens that a man will live a sober, steady, respectable, commonplace life for forty, fifty or even sixty years, and then, without the least sign of warning, suddenly go counter to every habit, to every trait of character and every rule of conduct he has been believed to possess. The thing only happens to intensely respectable gentlemen, of domestic tastes and narrow horizons, who are just preparing to become old. Perhaps it is a last revolt of a restrained youth—the final protest of vigorous, heady blood, too long dammed up. This bolting season does not last very long. It comes upon a man between the ages of forty and fifty-five, and while it lasts the man should be watched more closely than a young fellow in his sophomore year at college. The vagaries of a sophomore need not be taken any more seriously than the skittishness of a colt, but when a fifty-year-old bolts, stand clear!
On the second of May—two months and a day after his forty-first birthday—Paul Schuster bolted. It came upon him with the quickness of a cataclysm, like the sudden, abrupt development of latent mania. For a week he had been feeling ill at ease—restless; a vague discomfort hedged him in like an ill-fitting garment; he felt the moving of his blood in his wrists and his temples. A subtle desire to do something, he knew not what, bit and nibbled at his brain like the tooth of a tiny unfamiliar rodent.
On the second of May, at twenty minutes after six, Schuster came out of the store at the tail end of the little army of home-bound clerks. He locked the door behind him, according to custom, and stood for a moment on the asphalt, his hands in his pockets, fumbling his month’s pay. Then he said to himself, nodding his head resolutely:
“To-night I shall get drunk—as drunk as I possibly can. I shall go to the most disreputable resorts I can find—I shall know the meaning of wine, of street fights, of women, of gaming, of jolly companions, of noisy mid-night suppers. I’ll do the town, or by God, the town will do me. Nothing shall stop me, and I will stop at nothing. Here goes!”
Now, if Paul Schuster had only been himself this bolt of his would have brought him to nothing worse than the Police Court, and would have lasted but twenty-four hours at the outside. But Schuster, like all the rest of us, was not merely himself. He was his ancestors as well. In him as in you and me, were generations—countless generations—of forefathers. Schuster had in him the characteristics of his father, the Palace Hotel barber, but also, he had the unknown characteristics of his grandfather, of whom he had never heard, and his great-grandfather, likewise ignored. It is rather a serious matter to thrust yourself under the dominion of unknown, unknowable impulses and passions. This is what Schuster did that night. Getting drunk was an impulse belonging to himself; but who knows what “inherited tendencies,” until then dormant, the alcohol unleashed within him? Something like this must have happened to have accounted for what follows.
Schuster went straight to the Palace Hotel bar, where he had cocktails, thence to the Poodle Dog, where he had a French dinner and champagne, thence to the Barbary Coast on upper Kearny street, and drank whiskey that rasped his throat like gulps of carpet tacks. Then, realising that San Francisco was his own principality and its inhabitants his vassals, he hired a carriage and drove to the Cliff House, and poured champagne into the piano in the public parlor. A waiter remonstrated, and Paul Schuster, floor-walker and respectable citizen, bowled him down with a catsup bottle and stamped upon his abdomen. At the beginning of that evening he belonged to that class whom policemen are paid to protect. When he walked out of the Cliff House he was a free-booter seven feet tall, with a chest expansion of fifty inches. He paid the hack-driver a double fare and strode away into the night and plunged into the waste of sand dunes that stretch back from the beach on the other side of the Park.
It never could be found out what happened to Schuster, or what he did, during the next ten hours. We pick him up again in a saloon on the waterfront about noon the next day, with thirty dollars in his pocket and God knows what disorderly notions in his crazed wits. At this time he was sober as far as the alcohol went. It might be supposed that now would have been the time for reflection and repentance and return to home and respectability. Return home! Not much! Schuster had began to wonder what kind of an ass he had been to have walked the floor of a department-store for the last score of years. Something was boiling in his veins. B-r-r-r! Let ’em all stand far from him now.
That day he left San Francisco and rode the blind baggage as far as Colfax on the Overland. He chose Colfax because he saw the name chalked on a freight car at the Oakland mole. At Colfax, within three hours after his arrival, he fought with a restaurant man over the question of a broken saucer, and the same evening was told to leave the town by the sheriff.
Out of Colfax, some twenty-eight miles into the mountains, are placer gold mines, having for headquarters a one-street town called Iowa Hill. Schuster went over to the Hill the same day on the stage. The stage got in at night and pulled up in front of the postoffice. Schuster went into the postoffice, which was also a Wells-Fargo office, a candy store, a drug store, a cigar store, and a lounging-room, and asked about hotels.
Only the postmaster was in at that time, but as Schuster leaned across the counter, talking to him, a young man came in, with a huge spur on his left boot-heel. He and the postmaster nodded, and the young man slid an oblong object about the size of a brick across the counter. The object was wrapped in newspaper and seemed altogether too heavy for anything but metal—metal of the precious kind, for example.
“He?” answered the postmaster to Schuster, when the young man had gone. “He’s the superintendent of the Little Bear mine on the other side of the American River, about three miles by the trail.”
For the next week Schuster set himself to work to solve the problem of how a man might obtain a shotgun in the vicinity of Iowa Hill without the fact being remembered afterward and the man identified. It seemed good to him after a while to steal the gun from a couple of Chinamen who were washing gravel along the banks of the American River about two miles below the Little Bear. For two days he lay in the tarweed and witch hazel, on the side of the canyon overlooking the cabin, noted the time when both Chinamen were sufficiently far away, and stole the gun, together with a saw and a handful of cartridges loaded with buckshot. Within the next week he sawed off the gun-barrels sufficiently short, experimented once or twice with the buckshot, and found occasion to reconnoiter every step of the trail that led from the Little Bear to Iowa Hill. Also, he found out at the bar of the hotel at the Hill that the superintendent of the Little Bear amalgamated and reported the cleanup on Sundays. When he had made sure of this Schuster was seen no more about that little one-street mining town.
“He says it’s Sunday,” said Paul Schuster to himself; “but that’s why it’s probably Saturday or Monday. He ain’t going to have the town know when he brings the brick over. It might even be Friday. I’ll make it a four-night watch.”
There is a nasty bit on the trail from the Little Bear to the Hill, steep as a staircase, narrow as a rabbit-run, and overhung with manzanita. The place is trumpet-mouthed in shape, and sound carries far. So, on the second night of his watch, Schuster could at last plainly hear the certain sounds that he had been waiting for—sounds that jarred sharply on the prolonged roll of the Morning Star stamps, a quarter of a mile beyond the canyon. The sounds were those of a horse threshing through the gravel and shallow water of the ford in the river just below. He heard the horse grunt as he took the slope of the nearer bank, and the voice of his rider speaking to him came distinctly to his ears. Then silence for one—two—three minutes, while the stamp mill at the Morning Star purred and rumbled unceasingly and Schuster’s heart pumped thickly in his throat. Then a blackness blacker than that of the night heaved suddenly against the grey of “the sky, close in upon him, and a pebble clicked beneath a shod hoof.
“Pull up!” Schuster was in the midst of the trail, his cheek caressing the varnished stock.
“Whoa! Steady there! What in hell——”
“Pull up. You know what’s wanted. Chuck us that brick.”
The superintendent chirped sharply to the horse, spurring with his left heel.
“Stand clear there, God damn you! I’ll ride you down!”
The stock leaped fiercely in Schuster’s arm-pit, nearly knocking him down, and, in the light of two parallel flashes, he saw an instantaneous picture—rugged skyline, red-tinted manzanita bushes, the plunging mane and head of a horse, and above it a Face with open mouth and staring eyes, smoke-wreathed and hatless. The empty stirrup thrashed across Schuster’s body as the horse scraped by him. The trail was dark in front of him. He could see nothing. But soon he heard a little bubbling noise and a hiccough. Then all fell quiet again.
“I got you, all right!”
Thus Schuster, the ex-floor-walker, whose part hitherto in his little life-drama had been to say, “first aisle left,” “elevator, second floor,” “first counter right.”
Then he went down on his knees, groping at the warm bundle in front of him. But he found no brick. It had never occurred to him that the superintendent might ride over to town for other reasons than merely to ship the week’s cleanup. He struck a light and looked more closely—looked at the man he had shot. He could not tell whether it was the superintendent or not, for various reasons, but chiefly because the barrels of the gun had been sawn off, the gun loaded with buckshot, and both barrels fired simultaneously at close range.
Men coming over the trail from the Hill the next morning found the young superintendent, and spread the report of what had befallen him.
When the Prodigal Son became hungry he came to himself. So it was with Schuster. Living on two slices of bacon per day (eaten raw for fear of kindling fires) is what might be called starving under difficulties, and within a week Schuster was remembering and longing for floor-walking and respectability. Within a month of his strange disappearance he was back in San Francisco again knocking at the door of his aunt’s house on Geary street. A week later he was taken on again at his old store, in his old position, his unexcused absence being at length, and under protest, condoned by a remembrance of “long and faithful service.”
Schuster picked up his old life again precisely where he had left it on the second of May, six weeks previously—picked it up and stayed by it, calmly, steadily, uneventfully. The day before he died he told this story to his maiden aunt, who told it to me, with the remark that it was, of course, an absurd lie. Perhaps it was.
One thing, however, remains to tell. I repeated the absurd lie to a friend of mine who is in the warden’s office over at the prison of San Quentin. I mentioned Schuster’s name.
“Schuster! Schuster!” he repeated; “why we had a Schuster over here once—a long time ago, though. An old fellow he was, and a bad egg, too. Commuted for life, though. Son was a barber at the Palace Hotel.”
“What was old Schuster up for?” I asked.
“Highway robbery,” said my friend.