“I heard it from a king,” said Finch “the white king of a tribe of Indians in South America.”
I was interested but not surprised. The big city is like a mother`s knrr to many who have strayed far and found the roads rough beneath their uncertain feet. At dusk they come home and sit upon the door-step. I know a piano player in a cheap cafe who has shot lions in Africa, a bellboy who fought in the British army against the Zulus, an express-driver whose left arm had been cracked like a lobster`s claw for a stew-pot of Patagonian cannibals when the boat of his rescuers hove in sight. So a hat-cleaner who had been a friend of a king did not oppress me.
“A new band?” asked Finch, with his dry, barren smile.
“Yes,” said I, “and half an inch wider.” I had had a new band five days before.
Every pocket
“I meets a man one night,” said Finch, beginning his story “a man brown as snuff, with money in every pocket, eating schweinerknuckel in Schlagel`s. That was two years ago, when I was a hose-cart driver for No. His discourse runs to the subject of gold. He says that certain mountains in a country down South that he calls Gaudymala is full of it. He says the Indians wash it out of the streams in plural quantities.
“`Oh, Geronimo!` says I. `Indians! There`s no Indians in the South,` I tell him, `except Elks, Maccabees, and the buyers for the fall dry- goods trade. The Indians are all on the reservations,` says I.
`“I`m telling you this with reservations,` says he. `They ain`t Buffalo Bill Indians; they`re squattier and more pedigreed. They call `em Inkers and Aspics, and they was old inhabitants when Mazuma was King of Mexico. They wash the gold out of the mountain streams,` says the brown man, `and fill quills with it; and then they empty `em into red jars till they are full; and then they pack it in buckskin sacks of one arroba each an arroba is twenty-five pounds and store it in a stone house, with an engraving of a idol with marceled hair, playing a flute, over the door.`
“`How do they work off this unearth increment?` I asks.
“`They don`t,` says the man. `It`s a case of “He fares the land with the great deal of velocity where wealth accumulates and there ain`t any reciprocity.”`
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