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The Ethics of Pig

Short Stories

"Fox-in-the-Morning"

A Bird of Bagdad

A Blackjack Bargainer

A Call Loan

A Chaparral Christmas Gift

A Chaparral Prince

A Comedy in Rubber

A Cosmopolite in a Cafe

A Departmental Case

A Dinner at--------*

A Double-Dyed Deceiver

A Fog in Santone

A Harlem Tragedy

A Lickpenny Lover

A Little Local Colour

A Little Talk about Mobs

A Madison Square Arabian Night

A Matter of Mean Elevation

A Midsummer Knight's Dream

A Midsummer Masquerade

A Municipal Report

A Newspaper Story

A Night in New Arabia

A Philistine in Bohemia

A Poor Rule

A Ramble in Aphasia

A Retrieved Reformation

A Ruler of Men

A Sacrifice Hit

A Service of Love

A Snapshot at the President

A Strange Story

A Technical Error

A Tempered Wind

According to Their Lights

After Twenty Years

An Adjustment of Nature

An Afternoon Miracle

An Apology

An Unfinished Christmas Story

An Unfinished Story

Aristocracy Versus Hash

Art and the Bronco

At Arms With Morpheus

Babes in the Jungle

Best-Seller

Between Rounds

Bexar Scrip No. 2692

Blind Man's Holiday

Brickdust Row

Buried Treasure

By Courier

Calloway's Code

Caught

Cherchez La Femme

Christmas by Injunction

Compliments of the Season

Confessions of a Humorist

Conscience in Art

Cupid a La Carte

Cupid's Exile Number Two

Dickey

Dougherty's Eye-Opener

Elsie in New York

Extradited from Bohemia

Fickle Fortune or How Gladys Hustled

Friends in San Rosario

From Each According to His Ability

From the Cabby's Seat

Georgia's Ruling

Girl

He Also Serves

Hearts and Crosses

Hearts and Hands

Helping the Other Fellow

Holding Up a Train

Hostages to Momus

Hygeia at the Solito

Innocents of Broadway

Jeff Peters as a Personal Magnet

Jimmy Hayes and Muriel

Law and Order

Let Me Feel Your Pulse

Little Speck in Garnered Fruit

Lord Oakhurst's Curse

Lost on Dress Parade

Madame Bo-Peep, of the Ranches

Makes the Whole World Kin

Mammon and the Archer

Man About Town

Masters of Arts

Memoirs of a Yellow Dog

Modern Rural Sports

Money Maze

Nemesis and the Candy Man

New York by Camp Fire Light

Next to Reading Matter

No Story

October and June

On Behalf of the Management

One Dollar's Worth

One Thousand Dollars

Out of Nazareth

Past One at Rooney's

Phoebe

Proof of the Pudding

Psyche and the Pskyscraper

Queries and Answers

Roads of Destiny

Roses, Ruses and Romance

Rouge et Noir

Round the Circle

Rus in Urbe

Schools and Schools

Seats of the Haughty

Shearing the Wolf

Ships

Shoes

Sisters of the Golden Circle

Smith

Sociology in Serge and Straw

Sound and Fury

Springtime a La Carte

Squaring the Circle

Strictly Business

Strictly Business

Suite Homes and Their Romance

Telemachus, Friend

The Admiral

The Adventures of Shamrock Jolnes

The Assessor of Success

The Atavism of John Tom Little Bear

The Badge of Policeman O'Roon

The Brief Debut of Tildy

The Buyer From Cactus City

The Caballero's Way

The Cactus

The Caliph and the Cad

The Caliph, Cupid and the Clock

The Call of the Tame

The Chair of Philanthromathematics

The Champion of the Weather

The Church with an Overshot-Wheel

The City of Dreadful Night

The Clarion Call

The Coming-Out of Maggie

The Complete Life of John Hopkins

The Cop and the Anthem

The Count and the Wedding Guest

The Country of Elusion

The Day Resurgent

The Day We Celebrate

The Defeat of the City

The Detective Detector

The Diamond of Kali

The Discounters of Money

The Dog and the Playlet

The Door of Unrest

The Dream

The Duel

The Duplicity of Hargraves

The Easter of the Soul

The Emancipation of Billy

The Enchanted Kiss

The Enchanted Profile

The Ethics of Pig

The Exact Science of Matrimony

The Ferry of Unfulfilment

The Fifth Wheel

The Flag Paramount

The Fool-Killer

The Foreign Policy of Company 99

The Fourth in Salvador

The Friendly Call

The Furnished Room

The Gift of the Magi

The Girl and the Graft

The Girl and the Habit

The Gold That Glittered

The Greater Coney

The Green Door

The Guardian of the Accolade

The Guilty Party - An East Side Tragedy

The Halberdier of the Little Rheinschloss

The Hand that Riles the World

The Handbook of Hymen

The Harbinger

The Head-Hunter

The Hiding of Black Bill

The Higher Abdication

The Higher Pragmatism

The Hypotheses of Failure

The Indian Summer of Dry Valley Johnson

The Lady Higher Up

The Last Leaf

The Last of the Troubadours

The Lonesome Road

The Lost Blend

The Lotus And The Bottle

The Love-Philtre of Ikey Schoenstein

The Making of a New Yorker

The Man Higher Up

The Marionettes

The Marquis and Miss Sally

The Marry Month of May

The Memento

The Missing Chord

The Moment of Victory

The Octopus Marooned

The Passing of Black Eagle

The Pendulum

The Phonograph and the Graft

The Pimienta Pancakes

The Plutonian Fire

The Poet and the Peasant

The Pride of the Cities

The Princess and the Puma

The Prisoner of Zembla

The Proem

The Purple Dress

The Ransom of Mack

The Ransom of Red Chief

The Rathskeller and the Rose

The Red Roses of Tonia

The Reformation of Calliope

The Remnants of the Code

The Renaissance at Charleroi

The Roads We Take

The Robe of Peace

The Romance of a Busy Broker

The Rose of Dixie

The Rubaiyat of a Scotch Highball

The Rubber Plant's Story

The Shamrock and the Palm

The Shocks of Doom

The Skylight Room

The Sleuths

The Snow Man

The Social Triangle

The Song and the Sergeant

The Sparrows in Madison Square

The Sphinx Apple

The Tale of a Tainted Tenner

The Theory and the Hound

The Thing's the Play

The Third Ingredient

The Trimmed Lamp

The Unknown Quantity

The Unprofitable Servant

The Venturers

The Vitagraphoscope

The Voice of the City

The Whirligig of Life

The World and the Door

Thimble, Thimble

Tictocq

To Him Who Waits

Tobin's Palm

Tommy's Burglar

Tracked to Doom

Transformation of Martin Burney

Transients in Arcadia

Two Recalls

Two Renegades

Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen

Ulysses and the Dogman

Vanity and Some Sables

What You Want

While the Auto Waits

Whistling Dick's Christmas Stocking

Witches' Loaves







On an east-bound train I went into the smoker and found Jefferson
Peters, the only man with a brain west of the Wabash River who can use
his cerebrum cerebellum, and medulla oblongata at the same time.

Jeff is in the line of unillegal graft. He is not to be dreaded by
widows and orphans; he is a reducer of surplusage. His favorite
disguise is that of the target-bird at which the spendthrift or the
reckless investor may shy a few inconsequential dollars. He is readily
vocalized by tobacco; so, with the aid of two thick and easy-burning
brevas, I got the story of his latest Autolycan adventure.

"In my line of business," said Jeff, "the hardest thing is to find an
upright, trustworthy, strictly honorable partner to work a graft with.
Some of the best men I ever worked with in a swindle would resort to
trickery at times.

"So, last summer, I thinks I will go over into this section of country
where I hear the serpent has not yet entered, and see if I can find a
partner naturally gifted with a talent for crime, but not yet
contaminated by success.

"I found a village that seemed to show the right kind of a layout. The
inhabitants hadn't found that Adam had been dispossessed, and were
going right along naming the animals and killing snakes just as if
they were in the Garden of Eden. They call this town Mount Nebo, and
it's up near the spot where Kentucky and West Virginia and North
Carolina corner together. Them States don't meet? Well, it was in that
neighborhood, anyway.

"After putting in a week proving I wasn't a revenue officer, I went
over to the store where the rude fourflushers of the hamlet lied, to
see if I could get a line on the kind of man I wanted.

"'Gentlemen,' says I, after we had rubbed noses and gathered 'round
the dried-apple barrel. 'I don't suppose there's another community in
the whole world into which sin and chicanery has less extensively
permeated than this. Life here, where all the women are brave and
propitious and all the men honest and expedient, must, indeed, be an
idol. It reminds me,' says I, 'of Goldstein's beautiful ballad
entitled "The Deserted Village," which says:

'Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
What art can drive its charms away?
The judge rode slowly down the lane, mother.
For I'm to be Queen of the May.'

"'Why, yes, Mr. Peters,' says the storekeeper. 'I reckon we air about
as moral and torpid a community as there be on the mounting, according
to censuses of opinion; but I reckon you ain't ever met Rufe Tatum.'

"'Why, no,' says the town constable, 'he can't hardly have ever. That
air Rufe is shore the monstrousest scalawag that has escaped hangin'
on the galluses. And that puts me in mind that I ought to have turned
Rufe out of the lockup before yesterday. The thirty days he got for
killin' Yance Goodloe was up then. A day or two more won't hurt Rufe
any, though.'

"'Shucks, now,' says I, in the mountain idiom, 'don't tell me there's
a man in Mount Nebo as bad as that.'

"'Worse,' says the storekeeper. 'He steals hogs.'

"I think I will look up this Mr. Tatum; so a day or two after the
constable turned him out I got acquainted with him and invited him out
on the edge of town to sit on a log and talk business.

"What I wanted was a partner with a natural rural make-up to play a
part in some little one-act outrages that I was going to book with the
Pitfall & Gin circuit in some of the Western towns; and this R. Tatum
was born for the role as sure as nature cast Fairbanks for the stuff
that kept /Eliza/ from sinking into the river.

"He was about the size of a first baseman; and he had ambiguous blue
eyes like the china dog on the mantelpiece that Aunt Harriet used to
play with when she was a child. His hair waved a little bit like the
statue of the dinkus-thrower at the Vacation in Rome, but the color of
it reminded you of the 'Sunset in the Grand Canon, by an American
Artist,' that they hang over the stove-pipe holes in the salongs. He
was the Reub, without needing a touch. You'd have known him for one,
even if you'd seen him on the vaudeville stage with one cotton
suspender and a straw over his ear.

"I told him what I wanted, and found him ready to jump at the job.

"'Overlooking such a trivial little peccadillo as the habit of
manslaughter,' says I, 'what have you accomplished in the way of
indirect brigandage or nonactionable thriftiness that you could point
to, with or without pride, as an evidence of your qualifications for
the position?'

"'Why,' says he, in his kind of Southern system of procrastinated
accents, 'hain't you heard tell? There ain't any man, black or white,
in the Blue Ridge that can tote off a shoat as easy as I can without
bein' heard, seen, or cotched. I can lift a shoat,' he goes on, 'out
of a pen, from under a porch, at the trough, in the woods, day or
night, anywhere or anyhow, and I guarantee nobody won't hear a squeal.
It's all in the way you grab hold of 'em and carry 'em atterwards.
Some day,' goes on this gentle despoiler of pig-pens, 'I hope to
become reckernized as the champion shoat-stealer of the world.'

"'It's proper to be ambitious,' says I; 'and hog-stealing will do very
well for Mount Nebo; but in the outside world, Mr. Tatum, it would be
considered as crude a piece of business as a bear raid on Bay State
Gas. However, it will do as a guarantee of good faith. We'll go into
partnership. I've got a thousand dollars cash capital; and with that
homeward-plods atmosphere of yours we ought to be able to win out a
few shares of Soon Parted, preferred, in the money market.'

"So I attaches Rufe, and we go away from Mount Nebo down into the
lowlands. And all the way I coach him for his part in the grafts I had
in mind. I had idled away two months on the Florida coast, and was
feeling all to the Ponce de Leon, besides having so many new schemes
up my sleeve that I had to wear kimonos to hold 'em.

"I intended to assume a funnel shape and mow a path nine miles wide
though the farming belt of the Middle West; so we headed in that
direction. But when we got as far as Lexington we found Binkley
Brothers' circus there, and the blue-grass peasantry romping into town
and pounding the Belgian blocks with their hand-pegged sabots as
artless and arbitrary as an extra session of a Datto Bryan drama. I
never pass a circus without pulling the valve-cord and coming down for
a little Key West money; so I engaged a couple of rooms and board for
Rufe and me at a house near the circus grounds run by a widow lady
named Peevy. Then I took Rufe to a clothing store and gent's-outfitted
him. He showed up strong, as I knew he would, after he was rigged up
in the ready-made rutabaga regalia. Me and old Misfitzky stuffed him
into a bright blue suit with a Nile green visible plaid effect, and
riveted on a fancy vest of a light Tuskegee Normal tan color, a red
necktie, and the yellowest pair of shoes in town.

"They were the first clothes Rufe had ever worn except the gingham
layette and the butternut top-dressing of his native kraal, and he
looked as self-conscious as an Igorrote with a new nose-ring.

"That night I went down to the circus tents and opened a small shell
game. Rufe was to be the capper. I gave him a roll of phony currency
to bet with and kept a bunch of it in a special pocket to pay his
winnings out of. No; I didn't mistrust him; but I simply can't
manipulate the ball to lose when I see real money bet. My fingers go
on a strike every time I try it.

"I set up my little table and began to show them how easy it was to
guess which shell the little pea was under. The unlettered hinds
gathered in a thick semicircle and began to nudge elbows and banter
one another to bed. Then was when Rufe ought to have single-footed up
and called the turn on the little joker for a few tens and fives to
get them started. But, no Rufe. I'd seen him two or three times
walking about and looking at the side-show pictures with his mouth
full of peanut candy; but he never came nigh.

"The crowd piked a little; but trying to work the shells without a
capper is like fishing without a bait. I closed the game with only
forty-two dollars of the unearned increment, while I had been counting
on yanking the yeomen for two hundred at least. I went home at eleven
and went to bed. I supposed that the circus had proved too alluring
for Rufe, and that he had succumbed to it, concert and all; but I
meant to give him a lecture on general business principles in the
morning.

"Just after Morpheus had got both my shoulders to the shuck mattress I
hears a houseful of unbecoming and ribald noises like a youngster
screeching with green-apple colic. I opens my door and calls out in
the hall for the widow lady, and when she sticks her head out, I says:
'Mrs. Peevy, ma'am, would you mind choking off that kid of yours so
that honest people can get their rest?'

"'Sir,' says she, 'it's no child of mine. It's the pig squealing that
your friend Mr. Tatum brought home to his room a couple of hours ago.
And if you are uncle or second cousin or brother to it, I'd appreciate
your stopping its mouth, sir, yourself, if you please.'

"I put on some of the polite outside habiliments of external society
and went into Rufe's room. He had gotten up and lit his lamp, and was
pouring some milk into a tin pan on the floor for a dingy-white, half-
grown, squealing pig.

"'How is this, Rufe?' says I. 'You flimflammed in your part of the
work to-night and put the game on crutches. And how do you explain the
pig? It looks like back-sliding to me.'

"'Now, don't be too hard on me, Jeff,' says he. 'You know how long
I've been used to stealing shoats. It's got to be a habit with me. And
to-night, when I see such a fine chance, I couldn't help takin' it.'

"'Well,' says I, 'maybe you've really got kleptopigia. And maybe when
we get out of the pig belt you'll turn your mind to higher and more
remunerative misconduct. Why you should want to stain your soul with
such a distasteful, feeble-minded, perverted, roaring beast as that I
can't understand.'

"'Why, Jeff,' says he, 'you ain't in sympathy with shoats. You don't
understand 'em like I do. This here seems to me to be an animal of
more than common powers of ration and intelligence. He walked half
across the room on his hind legs a while ago.'

"'Well, I'm going back to bed,' says I. 'See if you can impress it
upon your friend's ideas of intelligence that he's not to make so much
noise.'

"'He was hungry,' says Rufe. 'He'll go to sleep and keep quiet now.'

"I always get up before breakfast and read the morning paper whenever
I happen to be within the radius of a Hoe cylinder or a Washington
hand-press. The next morning I got up early, and found a Lexington
daily on the front porch where the carrier had thrown it. The first
thing I saw in it was a double-column ad. on the front page that read
like this:

FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS REWARD

The above amount will be paid, and no questions asked, for the
return, alive and uninjured, of Beppo, the famous European
educated pig, that strayed or was stolen from the side-show tents
of Binkley Bros.' circus last night.

Geo. B. Tapley, Business Manager.
At the circus grounds.


"I folded up the paper flat, put it into my inside pocket, and went to
Rufe's room. He was nearly dressed, and was feeding the pig the rest
of the milk and some apple-peelings.

"'Well, well, well, good morning all,' I says, hearty and amiable. 'So
we are up? And piggy is having his breakfast. What had you intended
doing with that pig, Rufe?'

"'I'm going to crate him up,' says Rufe, 'and express him to ma in
Mount Nebo. He'll be company for her while I am away.'

"'He's a mighty fine pig,' says I, scratching him on the back.

"'You called him a lot of names last night,' says Rufe.

"'Oh, well,' says I, 'he looks better to me this morning. I was raised
on a farm, and I'm very fond of pigs. I used to go to bed at sundown,
so I never saw one by lamplight before. Tell you what I'll do, Rufe,'
I says. 'I'll give you ten dollars for that pig.'

"'I reckon I wouldn't sell this shoat,' says he. 'If it was any other
one I might.'

"'Why not this one?' I asked, fearful that he might know something.

"'Why, because,' says he, 'it was the grandest achievement of my life.
There ain't airy other man that could have done it. If I ever have a
fireside and children, I'll sit beside it and tell 'em how their daddy
toted off a shoat from a whole circus full of people. And maybe my
grandchildren, too. They'll certainly be proud a whole passel. Why,'
says he, 'there was two tents, one openin' into the other. This shoat
was on a platform, tied with a little chain. I seen a giant and a lady
with a fine chance of bushy white hair in the other tent. I got the
shoat and crawled out from under the canvas again without him
squeakin' as loud as a mouse. I put him under my coat, and I must have
passed a hundred folks before I got out where the streets was dark. I
reckon I wouldn't sell that shoat, Jeff. I'd want ma to keep it, so
there'd be a witness to what I done.'

"'The pig won't live long enough,' I says, 'to use as an exhibit in
your senile fireside mendacity. Your grandchildren will have to take
your word for it. I'll give you one hundred dollars for the animal.'

"Rufe looked at me astonished.

"'The shoat can't be worth anything like that to you,' he says. 'What
do you want him for?'

"'Viewing me casuistically,' says I, with a rare smile, 'you wouldn't
think that I've got an artistic side to my temper. But I have. I'm a
collector of pigs. I've scoured the world for unusual pigs. Over in
the Wabash Valley I've got a hog ranch with most every specimen on it,
from a Merino to a Poland China. This looks like a blooded pig to me,
Rufe,' says I. 'I believe it's a genuine Berkshire. That's why I'd
like to have it.'

"'I'd shore like to accommodate you,' says he, 'but I've got the
artistic tenement, too. I don't see why it ain't art when you can
steal a shoat better than anybody else can. Shoats is a kind of
inspiration and genius with me. Specially this one. I wouldn't take
two hundred and fifty for that animal.'

"'Now, listen,' says I, wiping off my forehead. 'It's not so much a
matter of business with me as it is art; and not so much art as it is
philanthropy. Being a connoisseur and disseminator of pigs, I wouldn't
feel like I'd done my duty to the world unless I added that Berkshire
to my collection. Not intrinsically, but according to the ethics of
pigs as friends and coadjutors of mankind, I offer you five hundred
dollars for the animal.'

"'Jeff,' says this pork esthete, 'it ain't money; it's sentiment with
me.'

"'Seven hundred,' says I.

"'Make it eight hundred,' says Rufe, 'and I'll crush the sentiment out
of my heart.'

"I went under my clothes for my money-belt, and counted him out forty
twenty-dollar gold certificates.

"'I'll just take him into my own room,' says I, 'and lock him up till
after breakfast.'

"I took the pig by the hind leg. He turned on a squeal like the steam
calliope at the circus.

"'Let me tote him in for you,' says Rufe; and he picks up the beast
under one arm, holding his snout with the other hand, and packs him
into my room like a sleeping baby.

"After breakfast Rufe, who had a chronic case of haberdashery ever
since I got his trousseau, says he believes he will amble down to
Misfitzky's and look over some royal-purple socks. And then I got as
busy as a one-armed man with the nettle-rash pasting on wall-paper. I
found an old Negro man with an express wagon to hire; and we tied the
pig in a sack and drove down to the circus grounds.

"I found George B. Tapley in a little tent with a window flap open. He
was a fattish man with an immediate eye, in a black skull-cap, with a
four-ounce diamond screwed into the bosom of his red sweater.

"'Are you George B. Tapley?' I asks.

"'I swear it,' says he.

"'Well, I've got it,' says I.

"'Designate,' says he. 'Are you the guinea pigs for the Asiatic python
or the alfalfa for the sacred buffalo?'

"'Neither,' says I. 'I've got Beppo, the educated hog, in a sack in
that wagon. I found him rooting up the flowers in my front yard this
morning. I'll take the five thousand dollars in large bills, if it's
handy.'

"George B. hustles out of his tent, and asks me to follow. We went
into one of the side-shows. In there was a jet black pig with a pink
ribbon around his neck lying on some hay and eating carrots that a man
was feeding to him.

"'Hey, Mac,' calls G. B. 'Nothing wrong with the world-wide this
morning, is there?'

"'Him? No,' says the man. 'He's got an appetite like a chorus girl at
1 A.M.'

"'How'd you get this pipe?' says Tapley to me. 'Eating too many pork
chops last night?'

"I pulls out the paper and shows him the ad.

"'Fake,' says he. 'Don't know anything about it. You've beheld with
your own eyes the marvelous, world-wide porcine wonder of the four-
footed kingdom eating with preternatural sagacity his matutinal meal,
unstrayed and unstole. Good morning.'

"I was beginning to see. I got in the wagon and told Uncle Ned to
drive to the most adjacent orifice of the nearest alley. There I took
out my pig, got the range carefully for the other opening, set his
sights, and gave him such a kick that he went out the other end of the
alley twenty feet ahead of his squeal.

"Then I paid Uncle Ned his fifty cents, and walked down to the
newspaper office. I wanted to hear it in cold syllables. I got the
advertising man to his window.

"'To decide a bet,' says I, 'wasn't the man who had this ad. put in
last night short and fat, with long black whiskers and a club-foot?'

"'He was not,' says the man. 'He would measure about six feet by four
and a half inches, with corn-silk hair, and dressed like the pansies
of the conservatory.'

"At dinner time I went back to Mrs. Peevy's.

"'Shall I keep some soup hot for Mr. Tatum till he comes back?' she
asks.

"'If you do, ma'am,' says I, 'you'll more than exhaust for firewood
all the coal in the bosom of the earth and all the forests on the
outside of it.'

"So there, you see," said Jefferson Peters, in conclusion, "how hard
it is ever to find a fair-minded and honest business-partner."

"But," I began, with the freedom of long acquaintance, "the rule
should work both ways. If you had offered to divide the reward you
would not have lost--"

Jeff's look of dignified reproach stopped me.

"That don't involve the same principles at all," said he. "Mine was a
legitimate and moral attempt at speculation. Buy low and sell high--
don't Wall Street endorse it? Bulls and bears and pigs--what's the
difference? Why not bristles as well as horns and fur?"




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