"I am sure."
"If you aren't, I have a headholder outside. Stand it up behind you out of sight—clamps your head like a vise."
"I said I am sure."
"Fine. Now one last thing, Mr. Books. Stand erect, please. And if you won't take offense—please put your hands in your trouser pockets—to draw back the lapels of your coat."
"Why?"
"Well, sir, they tell me you carry your weapons in a most unusual manner. If we could catch just a glimpse—just a glimpse, mind you—of the handles, it would add—what shall I say?—a certain style to the portrait."
Books scowled but shoved his hands in his pockets, squared his shoulders, and Skelly ducked once more under his focusing cloth.
"There they are! Perfect, sir! Now, by George!"
He folded the green cloth, tucked it away in his case, pulled the slide from the plateholder, and striking a match on the seat of his pants, lit the wick atop the bottle. In his left hand he grasped the squeeze bulb, in his right the flash-pan, tilting it at a forty-five-degree angle.
"Ready, Mr. Books? Assume whatever expression you think appropriate, sir—something on the—what shall we say?— threatening side, perhaps. Don't move now—this is for American history!"
Skelly stuck one end of the brass pipe in his mouth and squeezed the bulb and puffed into the pipe and his exhalation blew the alcohol flame through a hole at the rear of the tin trough and ignited the magnesium powder and for one twenty-fifth of a second, while the shutter opened, the room was lit celestially. Instantly thereafter it was darkened by a pall of acrid smoke, and by the time Books had blinked, Skelly had put down the flashpan, extinguished the flame, whisked two cardboard squares from his case, flung up the windows, and was fanning smoke as his subject hacked and coughed and further profaned the atmosphere with curses.
"Sorry, sir! A small price to pay—for the photographic art!"
Beaming, eyes shut, he fanned with might and main till visibility was restored. When it was, gratification vanished from his countenance in much less than one twenty-fifth of a second. Books's face was close to his, and the expression on the gun man's face was, whether appropriate or not, unmistakably threatening.
"You are giving me a dozen pictures, is that right, Skelly?"
"Yes, sir," Skelly swallowed.
"All I need is one."
"Yes, sir."
"How many more can you make?"
"From the negative? Why, as many as I care to—I guess."
"And you will care to make one hell of a number, won't you?"
"Why, why should I, Mr. Books?"
"Because I am dying and you know God damned well I am, don't you?"
"I—I heard something of that—what shall I say?—nature, sir. I regret—"
"And you will turn out pictures of the famous man-killer like sausages, won't you? And peddle 'em for a dollar a crack, won't you?"
"Oh, Mr. Books—how could you think—a man in my position—"
"So here's what you do, Skelly. You send me over my one as damn soon as you can, and fifty dollars cash with it. Or I will come down to your place of business and ram some of that powder up your rear end and put the end of a cigar to it and there will be a hot time in your ass that night. Do you follow me, you cheapskate?"
"Yes, sir!"
Jan. 22: Peter Donley, an old-time Arizonan, killed himself with a revolver at Briggs in Yavapai County. He asked a man who was stopping with him to go and get him some whiskey. While he was gone Donley placed a Colt's revolver in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The bullet was a big one and broke his jawbone and neck. It is supposed that he killed himself because he was suffering with the grippe.
He stopped reading to take laudanum. He resorted to it every two hours now, night and day, and had used half the twelve-ounce bottle.
Before picking up the paper he listened to the high ringing sound, iron on iron, like that of clapper on bell, as the nine o'clock streetcar passed the corner on its last run.
He was bone lonesome. Once, years ago, up in the Dakotas, he and three others had staked out a claim, and while his partners had gone off to Deadwood to register it and obtain tools and provisions, he had lived alone on the claim. For two weeks he roughed it in the rain, under a black sky. Later, he had had to kill one of his partners to get his share of the dust, a middling amount but rightfully his. But here, tonight, with a roof over his head, reading by an electric light and listening to a streetcar, people sleeping above him, in the heart of a city, he was lonesomer than he had been up in the Dakotas in the rain, under a black sky.
Jan. 22: An Albuquerque dispatch says: Francis Schlader, the "Healer," who is attracting so much attention in the Territory and elsewhere because of his marvelous power to heal the sick and cause the blind to see, yesterday calmly and bluntly announced that he is Christ. Among his callers night before last was Rev. Charles L. Bovard. Rev. Bovard tells of the interview in the following letter:
"My object was to settle from his own statements just what he claims to be and do. It seemed to me that the Christian people and sensible people in general ought to know what he avows. After several questions of less import, I asked him plainly: 'Do you claim to be Jesus Christ returned to earth?' Looking me steadily in the eye with a demoniac glare, he answered: 'I am. Since you have asked me, sir, I say plainly, I am!' I did not argue with him. Life is too short to waste time trying to teach a jackass to sing soprano."
He slept soundly, but only for an hour. Discomfort waked him then, and though he dozed, on and off, resisting the succor of the drug, in half an hour he could endure the torment no longer. He sat up in bed, and in the dark reached for the bottle with such clumsy desperation that he knocked the glass candy compote off the table to the floor. He swore and, fumbling, found the bottle and put his mouth to the top like a child to the breast.
He thought: For babies and grown men: Ol' Doc Hostetler's El Paso Paregoric.
He had to wait now. The effect of the laudanum was not only of shorter duration but each dose took longer to bring him surcease. He got out the chamber pot and tried for several minutes to use it, but in vain. His bladder was distended; it hung in his guts like a great rock. "You will gradually become uremic," the physician had said when pressed. "Poisoned by your own waste, due to a failure of the kidneys."
He thought: The hell I will. I will stay up as long as I have to. Piss or bust.
After a time the quaking tendons of his calves and thighs would not support him. By means of the bed he hauled himself to his feet, despairing. Any dog could lift a leg. This was what he had come to. A shell of a man squatting over a slop-jar in the dark, praying not for happiness or fame or nerve or fortune but the simple animal ability to unload.
He went to an open window and let himself down on his knees before it. It was snowing. He put out his hands and was pleased by the melt of flakes upon his flesh. Somewhere, out in the night close by, earning his three dollars, a man guarded him, some poor bastard who would rather be home in bed than watch over the life of one who was soon to lose it. He heard a mockingbird, astonished by the snow, singing in a tree. Its song was lovely. For some reason it reminded him of the four lines of poetry Hostetler had recited for him, but he could recall only the first: "Weave a circle round him thrice…" Two other lines were all the poetry he knew:
"Under the spreading chestnut tree/ the village smithy stands…"
He thought: When we were kids, we used to play a game. "I Wish." Well, I wish I had listened to birds more often.
I wish I had more schooling.