irk, with friendly
geniality, "it's springtime, by the watch."

XVIII

THE FOOL-KILLER

Down South whenever any one perpetrates some particularly monumental
piece of foolishness everybody says: "Send for Jesse Holmes."

Jesse Holmes is the Fool-Killer. Of course he is a myth, like Santa
Claus and Jack Frost and General Prosperity and all those concrete
conceptions that are supposed to represent an idea that Nature has
failed to embody. The wisest of the Southrons cannot tell you whence
comes the Fool-Killer's name; but few and happy are the households
from the Roanoke to the Rio Grande in which the name of Jesse Holmes
has not been pronounced or invoked. Always with a smile, and often
with a tear, is he summoned to his official duty. A busy man is Jesse
Holmes.

I remember the clear picture of him that hung on the walls of my
fancy during my barefoot days when I was dodging his oft-threatened
devoirs. To me he was a terrible old man, in gray clothes, with a
long, ragged, gray beard, and reddish, fierce eyes. I looked to see
him come stumping up the road in a cloud of dust, with a white oak
staff in his hand and his shoes tied with leather thongs. I may yet--

But this is a story, not a sequel.

I have taken notice with regret, that few stories worth reading
have been written that did not contain drink of some sort. Down go
the fluids, from Arizona Dick's three fingers of red pizen to the
inefficacious Oolong that nerves Lionel Montressor to repartee in
the "Dotty Dialogues." So, in such good company I may introduce an
absinthe drip--one absinthe drip, dripped through a silver dripper,
orderly, opalescent, cool, green-eyed--deceptive.

Kerner was a fool. Besides that, he was an artist and my good friend.
Now, if there is one thing on earth utterly despicable to another, it
is an artist in the eyes of an author whose story he has illustrated.
Just try it once. Write a story about a mining camp in Idaho. Sell
it. Spend the money, and then, six months later, borrow a quarter (or
a dime), and buy the magazine containing it. You find a full-page
wash drawing of your hero, Black Bill, the cowboy. Somewhere in your
story you employed the word "horse." Aha! the artist has grasped the
idea. Black Bill has on the regulation trousers of the M. F. H. of
the Westchester County Hunt. He carries a parlor rifle, and wears a
monocle. In the distance is a section of Forty-second Street during a
search for a lost gas-pip