The Gilded Age - Mark Twain [48]
CAXTON’S BOOK OF CURTESYE.
In the party of which our travelers found themselves members, was Duff Brown, the great railroad contractor, and subsequently a well-known member of congress; a bluff, jovial Bost’n man, thick-set, close shaven, with a heavy jaw and a low forehead—a very pleasant man if you were not in his way. He had government contracts also, custom houses and dry docks, from Portland to New Orleans, and managed to get out of congress, in appropriations, about weight for weight of gold for the stone furnished.
Associated with him, and also of this party, was Rodney Schaick, a sleek New York broker, a man as prominent in the church as in the stock exchange, dainty in his dress, smooth of speech, the necessary complement of Duff Brown in any enterprise that needed assurance and adroitness.
It would be difficult to find a pleasanter traveling party, one that shook off more readily the artificial restraints of Puritanic strictness, and took the world with good-natured allowance. Money was plenty for every attainable luxury, and there seemed to be no doubt that its supply would continue, and that fortunes were about to be made without a great deal of toil. Even Philip soon caught the prevailing spirit; Harry did not need any inoculation, he always talked in six figures. It was as natural for the dear boy to be rich as it is for most people to be poor.
The elders of the party were not long in discovering the fact, which almost all travelers to the west soon find out, that the water was poor. It must have been by a lucky premonition of this that they all had brandy flasks with which to qualify the water of the country; and it was no doubt from an uneasy feeling of the danger of being poisoned that they kept experimenting, mixing a little of the dangerous and changing fluid, as they passed along, with the contents of the flasks, thus saving their lives hour by hour. Philip learned afterwards that temperance and the strict observance of Sunday and a certain gravity of deportment are geographical habits, which people do not usually carry with them away from home.
Our travelers stopped in Chicago long enough to see that they could make their fortunes there in two weeks’ time, but it did not seem worth while; the west was more attractive; the further one went the wider the opportunities opened. They took railroad to Alton and the steamboat from there to St. Louis, for the change and to have a glimpse of the river.
“Isn’t this jolly?” cried Henry, dancing out of the barber’s room, and coming down the deck with a one, two, three step, shaven, curled and perfumed after his usual exquisite fashion.
“What’s jolly?” asked Philip, looking out upon the dreary and monotonous waste through which the shaking steamboat was coughing its way.
“Why, the whole thing; it’s immense I can tell you. I wouldn’t give that to be guaranteed a hundred thousand cold cash in a year’s time.”
“Where’s Mr. Brown?”
“He is in the saloon, playing poker with Schaick, and that long haired party with the striped trousers, who scrambled aboard when the stage plank was half hauled in, and the big Delegate to Congress from out west.”
“That’s a fine looking fellow, that delegate, with his glossy black whiskers; looks like a Washington man; I shouldn’t think he’d be at poker.”
“Oh, it’s only five cent ante, just to make it interesting, the Delegate said.”
“But I shouldn’t think a representative in Congress would play poker any way in a public steamboat.”
“Nonsense, you’ve got to pass the time. I tried a hand myself, but those old fellows are too many for me. The Delegate knows all the points. I’d bet a hundred dollars he will ante his way right into the United States Senate when his territory comes in. He’s got the cheek for it.”
The Delegate’s Interesting Game.
“He has the grave and thoughtful manner of expectoration of a public man, for one thing,” added Philip.
“Harry,” said Philip, after a pause, “what