About two hours later I saw an excited crowd besieging the front of a drug store.  In a desert where nothing happens this was manna; so I wedged my way inside.  On an extemporized couch of empty boxes and chairs was stretched the mortal corporeality of Major Wentworth Caswell.  A doctor was testing him for the immortal ingredient.  His decision was that it was conspicuous by its absence.

The erstwhile Major had been found dead on a dark street and brought by curious and ennuied citizens to the drug store.  The late human being had been engaged in terrific battle—­the details showed that.  Loafer and reprobate though he had been, he had been also a warrior.  But he had lost.  His hands were yet clinched so tightly that his fingers would not be opened.  The gentle citizens who had know him stood about and searched their vocabularies to find some good words, if it were possible, to speak of him.  One kind-looking man said, after much thought:  “When ‘Cas’ was about fo’teen he was one of the best spellers in school.”

While I stood there the fingers of the right hand of “the man that was” which hung down the side of a white pine box, relaxed, and dropped something at my feet.  I covered it with one foot quietly, and a little later on I picked it up and pocketed it.  I reasoned that in his last struggle his hand must have seized that object unwittingly and held it in a death grip.

At the hotel that night the main topic of conversation, with the possible exceptions of politics and prohibition, was the demise of Major Caswell.  I heard one man say to a group of listeners: 

“In my opinion, gentlemen, Caswell was murdered by some of these no-account niggers for his money.  He had fifty dollars this afternoon which he showed to several gentlemen in the hotel.  When he was found the money was not on his person.”

I left the city the next morning at nine, and as the train was crossing the bridge over the Cumberland River I took out of my pocket a yellow horn overcoat button the size of a fifty-cent piece, with frayed ends of coarse twine hanging from it, and cast it out of the window into the slow, muddy waters below.

I wonder what’s doing in Buffalo!

XIV

PSYCHE AND THE PSKYSCRAPER

If you are a philosopher you can do this thing:  you can go to the top of a high building, look down upon your fellow-men 300 feet below, and despise them as insects.  Like the irresponsible black waterbugs on summer ponds, they crawl and circle and hustle about idiotically without aim or purpose.  They do not even move with the admirable intelligence of ants, for ants always know when they are going home.  The ant is of a lowly station, but he will often reach home and get his slippers on while you are left at your elevated station.

Man, then, to the housetopped philosopher, appears to be but a creeping, contemptible beetle.  Brokers, poets, millionaires, bootblacks, beauties, hod-carriers and politicians become little black specks dodging bigger black specks in streets no wider than your thumb.