This dense stupidity was almost more than Offitt could bear.  But a ready lie came to his aid.

“Looky here!” he continued, “I’ll tell you a secret.  I’m writin’ a story for the ‘Irish Harp,’ and I want to describe the residence of jess such a vampire as this here Farnham.  Now, writin’, as I do, in the cause of humanity, I naturally want to git my facts pretty near right.  You kin help me in this.  I’ll call to-morrow to see you while you’re there, and I’ll get some p’ints that’ll make Rome howl when they come out.”

Sam was hardly educated up to the point his friend imagined.  His zeal for humanity and the “rehabitation” of labor was not so great as to make him think it a fine thing to be a spy and a sneak in the houses of his employers.  He was embarrassed by the suggestion, and made no reply, but sat smoking his pipe in silence.  He had not the diplomatist’s art of putting a question by with a smile.  Offitt had tact enough to forbear insisting upon a reply.

He was, in fact, possessed of very considerable natural aptitude for political life.  He had a quick smile and a ready tongue; he liked to talk and shake hands; he never had an opinion he was not willing to sell; he was always prepared to sacrifice a friend, if required, and to ask favors from his worst enemies.  He called himself Andrew Jackson Offitt—­a name which, in the West, is an unconscious brand.  It generally shows that the person bearing it is the son of illiterate parents, with no family pride or affections, but filled with a bitter and savage partisanship which found its expression in a servile worship of the most injurious personality in American history.  But Offitt’s real name was worse than Andrew Jackson—­it was Ananias, and it was bestowed in this way:  When he was about six years old, his father, a small farmer in Indiana, who had been a sodden, swearing, fighting drunkard, became converted by a combined attack of delirium tremens and camp-meeting, and resolved to join the church, he and his household.  The morning they were going to the town of Salem for that purpose, he discovered that his pocket had been picked, and the money it contained was found on due perquisition in the blue jeans trousers of his son Andrew Jackson.  The boy, on being caught, was so nimble and fertile in his lies that the father, in a gust of rage, declared that he was not worthy the name of the great President, but that he should be called Ananias; and he was accordingly christened Ananias that morning in the meeting-house at Salem.  As long as the old man lived, he called him by that dreadful name; but when a final attack of the trembling madness had borne him away from earth, the widow called the boy Andrew again, whenever she felt careless about her spiritual condition, and the youth behaved himself, but used the name of Sapphira’s husband when the lad vexed her, or the obligations of the christening came strongly back to her superstitious mind.  The two names became equally familiar to young Offitt, and always afterward he was liable to lapses of memory when called on suddenly to give his prenomen; and he frequently caused hateful merriment among his associates by signing himself Ananias.