, Byron and Morris (the
only five we had handy) in relays to support his fervent song of love,
for behind the scene with my pen Jim said I was a wonder in stringing
this fetching gush together. But I tried to be modest about it. There
was enough in those five to marry the inhabitants of Europe to those of
Africa. I understood that anything Jim said to a woman would be taken in
good part, and those love letters in which the green fields of his soul
must have appeared well irrigated by those bubbling springs of joy,
undoubtedly pleased the fair dames and, I supposed, did no harm. But a
joke is the most dangerous thing a middleman in the love business can
engage in. The business is full of danger anyhow, but joking is worse
than dynamite.

If the mechanical part of our arrangements had been seen by the young
women--Jim generally asleep and I copying the poetry from a clumsy, big
book and scratching my tousled head for sentiment enough to glue the
verses together in a prose somewhere near the same temperature--I don't
suppose there would have been many victories. Perhaps there were none;
Jim never spoke of results; he kept them to himself and I don't know
what he did with them. All the margin there was in it for me was the
literary exercise which in value hardly covered the cost of the ink.
Perhaps he had married each one of the women and had killed them off,
because he enjoyed the excitement of courtship's gamble more than the
sure thing of matrimony. If so, I was undoubtedly an accomplice,
although entirely innocent. A jury, however, might not take that
comfortable view of it, if a handwriting expert were called and took
seven weeks to tell them his story. They would certainly hang me to get
home.

So first my grief and loneliness recalled the lines of the poet whose
music I had used to Jim's advantage, and then followed the matters
attached to the same chain of thought. The moment was ripe for one of
those coincidences that occasionally arise to startle us. It came sure
enough, and gave me the worst shock of all, for when I afterward
considered its full meaning, I realized that I had for ten years been
the innocent tool of the criminal whom Tescheron had discovered after an
investigation of six hours. Had the truth been revealed to the world,
thought I, with evidence of Hosley's guilt, my bust would be lined up on
the same shelf with his in the Hall of Infamy.

"Must I to the lees
Drain thy bitter chalice,