THIS is a tale of pitiless and persistent vengeance, and it shows by what simple means a very small and unimportant person may bring about the undoing of the rich, great and influential. It was told to me by my good friend, the Doctor, as we strolled through the pleasant suburbs of a pretty little city that is day by day growing into greatness and ugliness, as what they call a manufacturing centre.

We had been watching the curious antics of a large man who would have attracted attention at any time on account of his size, his luxuriant hair and whiskers, and the strange condition of the costly clothing he wore—a frock-coat and trousers of the extremest fashion, a rolling white waist-coat, gray-spatted patent-leathers, and a silk hat. But all these fine articles of apparel were much soiled in places, his coat-collar was half turned up, the hat had met with various mishaps, his shoes were scratched and dusty, his cravat ill-tied, and altogether his appearance suggested a puzzling combination of prosperity and hard luck. His doings were stranger than his looks. He tacked cautiously from side to side of the way, peered up a cross-street here; went slowly and cautiously up another for a few yards, only to return and to efface himself for a moment behind a tree or in a doorway.

“Such as you see that man to-day,” continued the Doctor, as we strolled toward the town, “he is entirely the creation of one small and insignificant man; not the man you just saw watching for him, but another so very insignificant that his name even is forgotten by the few who have heard it. I alone remember his face. Nobody knows anything else that throws light on his identity, except the fact that he was on one occasion addressed as ‘Mr. Thingumajig,’ and that he is or was a writer for the press, in no very great way of business. Now let us turn down Main Street, and I will show you the man he reduced to the ignominious object we have just been watching.”

We soon stopped at a photograph gallery, and the Doctor led me, in a way that showed that his errand was not a rare one, to a little room in the rear, where, on a purple velvet background, hung a nearly life-size crayon portrait. It represented a large gentleman—the large gentleman whom we had just seen—attired in much similar garments, only that in the picture his neatness was spotless and perfect. Not a wrinkle, not a stain marred him from top to toe. He stood in the graceful and dignified attitude of one who has been set up by his fellow-citizens to be looked at and admired, and who knows that his fellow-citizens are only doing the right thing by him. His silk hat was jauntily poised upon his hip, and the smile that illuminated his moustache and whiskers was at once genial, encouraging, condescending, and full of deep religious and political feeling. It was hardly necessary to look at the superb gilt inscription below to know that that portrait was “Presented by the Vestry of St. Dives Church, on the Occasion of his Retirement from their Body to Assume the Burden of Civic Duties in the Assembly of the State that Counts Him Among her Proudest Ornaments.”

“Mr. Silo,” said the Doctor; “but he did not go to the Assembly, and that picture has never been presented. When you saw him to-day he was running away from his brother-in-law, to get to New York to go on any sort of a spree to drown his misery. Come along, and you shall hear the tale of a fallen idol. And if, as you listen, an ant should cross your path, do not step on it. Mr. Silo stepped upon an ant, and the ant made of him the thing you saw.”

I do not tell this story exactly in the Doctor’s own words, though I will let it look as if I did. The trouble of letting non-literary people tell stories in their own language is that the “says I’s,” and the “says he’s,” and the “well, this man” passages, and “then this other man I was telling you about” interpolations take up so much of the narrative that a story like this could not be read while a pound of candles burned.

But here is about the way the Doctor ought to have told it:

I do not wish to undervaluate the good influence of Mr. Silo in our city. He has been a large and enterprising investor. He has built up the town in many ways. He has been charitable and patriotic. He was a good man; but he was not a saint. And a man has to be a saint to boom town lots and keep straight. No; I’ll go further than that—it can’t be done! George Washington couldn’t have boomed town lots and kept straight. And Silo, as you can see by those whiskers, was no George Washington. Real estate isn’t sold on the Golden Rule, you know. There were times when it was mighty lucky for Silo that he was six feet high and weighed two hundred pounds.

I don’t know the details of the transaction, but I am afraid that Silo treated the little newspaper man pretty shabbily. He was a decent, hard-working, unobtrusive little fellow, and he and his wife had been scraping and saving for years and years to buy a house with a garden to it, in just such a town as this. Well, no, that’s not the way to put it. They had fixed on a particular house in this particular town, and they had been waiting several years for the lease of it to fall in. They were ready with the price, and I do not doubt that Silo or his agents had at one time accepted their offer for the place. But when the time came, Silo backed out, refused to sell, and disowned the whole transaction.

That, in itself, was a mean act. It was a trifling matter to Silo, but it was a biggest kind of matter to the other man and his wife. They had set their hearts on that particular house; they had stinted themselves for a long, long time to lay up the money to buy it; and probably no other house in the whole world could ever be so desirable to those two people. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The man might have put up with his disappointment, and perhaps even have forgiven Silo for the shabby trick. But Silo, I suppose, felt ashamed of himself and went further than he had meant to, in trying to lash himself into a real good, honest indignation. At least, that is my guess at it; for Silo was neither brutal nor stupid by nature; but on this occasion he had the incredible cussedness to twit the little man on his helplessness. It was purely a question of veracity between the two, and Silo pointed out that, as against him, nobody would take the stranger’s word. That was true; but, good Lord! Silo himself told me subsequently that it was the meanest thing, under the circumstances, that he ever heard one man say to another. He always maintained that he was right about the sale; but he admitted that his roughing of the poor fellow was inexcusable; and the thing that graveled him most and frightened him most in the end was that he had called the poor man “Mr. Thingumajig.” He had not caught the real name; he only remembered that it had some sort of a foreign sound that suggested “Thingumajig” to his mind.

Now, all that Silo had had before him previous to that outburst was only a plain case of angry man; but from that time on he had ahead of him through his pathway in life an incarnation of human hatred, out for vengeance, and bound to have it.

“Well, now the fun of the thing comes in,” said the Doctor.

“I should think it was high time,” said I.

* * *

There was nothing very unusual in that little episode; but somehow it got public, and was a good deal talked about; although, as I said, hardly anybody knew the stranger, even by name. But, of course, it was well nigh forgotten six months later, when the newspaper man came to the front again.

His reappearance took the form of such a singular exhibition of meekness that it ought to have made Silo suspicious, to say the least. But he was a bit of a bully; and, like all bullies, it was hard for him to believe that a man who did not bluster could really mean fight. Perhaps he had no chance of mercy at that time; but if he did he threw it away.

The stranger wrote to the local paper a polite, even modest letter, stating, very moderately, his grievance against Mr. Silo. He further proposed a scheme, the adoption of which would obviate all possibilities of such misunderstanding. I have forgotten what the scheme was. It was not a good one, and I know now that it was not meant to be. The local paper was the Echo. It was run by a shiftless young man named Meecham; and, of course, Silo had him deep in his debt; and, of course, again, Silo more or less ran the paper. So, when that letter arrived, Meecham showed it to Silo, and Silo gave new cause of offense by violating the honorable laws of newspaper controversy, and answering back in the very same number of the paper. The matter of his reply was also injudicious. He lost his temper at once when he saw that the letter was signed “Mr. Thingumajig,” and he characterized both the plan and its proposer as “preposterous.” I am inclined to think that that word “preposterous” was just the word that the other man was setting a trap for. At any rate, he got it, and he wanted nothing better. Here is his reply:

That was all. Nothing more. But, as the lineman said of the two-thousand volt shock, “it isn’t necessary to see some things to know that they’re there.”

Now I want you to note the devilish ingenuity of that phraseology. To speak of “pink trousers” would serve only to call up an unattractive mental picture. “Pink breeches” would only suggest the satin knee-breeches of a page in a comic opera; but “pink pants” is a combination you can’t get out of your head. It is not English; the word “pants” is a vulgar contraction of the word pantaloons, and we don’t wear pantaloons in these days. But “pants” is the funniest word of its size that ever was invented, and it is just about the right word for the hideous garment it belongs to. And whether there’s any reason or logic in it or not, when I put those two little cheap words together and say “pink pants,” I am certain of two things. First, you have got to smile; second, you can’t forget it to save your neck. And that’s what Mr. Thingumajig knew. I think he had everything laid out in his mind just as it was going to happen.

Meecham got that letter, and laid it aside to show to Silo; but as he sat at his desk and worked, the salient phrase kept bobbing around in his mind; and, finally, he said aloud:

“Pink pants! What in thunder are pink pants, anyway?”

His foreman heard him, and looked at him in amazement.

“Pink pants,” he repeated; “that’s a new one on me.”

Meecham picked up the letter again, and knit his brows as he studied it.

“That’s right,” he said; “that’s what it is.”

The foreman came and looked over his shoulder.

“‘Pink pants,’” he repeated; “that’s right.”

A man who had just come into the office looked at the two speakers with astonishment. Meecham knew that he had come to put an advertisement in the paper, and so he showed him the letter.

“Well, I’m damned!” he said. “That’s right, though. It’s ‘pink pants,’ on your life. But where in blazes would a man get pink pants, anyway?”

When Mr. Silo saw the letter he told Meecham to “burke” it; and Meecham put it in the waste-basket. The next day Silo made him take it out of the waste-basket and print it. He explained that so many people had asked him about the letter—and he said something to Meecham as to his methods of running the office—that he thought it better to print it and let the people see for themselves how absurd it was, or else they might magnify it and think he was afraid to print it. Meecham did not say anything at the moment. He did not like being blown up any more than the rest of us do, however; and, when he had got the letter safely printed and out before the public, he said to Silo:

“You did just right about that letter. It wouldn’t have done for a man of your position to have folks going around asking where you were on any particular Thursday evening.”

“Why, no!” said Silo; “of course it wouldn’t. Lemme see; was that the day the infernal crank picked out?”

“Thursday night, the eleventh,” said Meecham, his finger on the calendar; “between nine and ten o’clock at night. Now, of course, Mr. Silo, you know just where you were then.”

“Why, of course!” said Silo. “Lemme see, now. Thursday the eleventh, nine, ten at night. Why, I was—no—why, Thursday, the eleventh!—Oh, thunder!—no—it can’t be! Oh, certainly! yes; that’s all right, of course! Is that Mr. Smith over there, the other side of the street? I’ve got to speak to him a minute. I’ll see you to-morrow. Good-night, my boy!”

* * *

How much of an expert in human nature are you? If I tell you that Mr. Silo insisted on having every first impression of an edition of the Echo sent to his house by special messenger the instant it was printed, whether he was at home or not, and that he did this just to make Meecham feel the bitterness of the servitude of debt, what do you deduce or infer from that? That somebody else was tyrannizing over Silo? Quite right! Mrs. Silo was a woman who opened all of her husband’s letters—that came to the house. And she looked at Silo’s paper before he saw it himself.

And when Silo got home that day, Mrs. Silo was waiting for him. Mrs. Silo and the copy of the Echo, with the letter concerning Mr. Silo and the pink pants. Mrs. Silo wanted to know about it. If Mr. Silo was in any doubt about Thursday night, the eleventh, Mrs. Silo was not. On that night Mr. Silo had been expected out on the train leaving New York at eight o’clock. He had arrived on the train leaving New York at ten o’clock. There was no trouble at all in identifying the night. Mrs. Silo reminded him that it was the night of the day when he took in a certain hank of red Berlin wool to be delivered to Mrs. Silo’s mother, who lived in 14th Street; which, as Mrs. Silo remarked, is not a quiet street. She also reminded Mr. Silo that on his appearance that evening she had asked him if he had delivered that hank of red Berlin wool at the house of his mother-in-law, and he had answered that he had; that his lateness was due to that cause; and, furthermore, that his dear mother-in law was very well.

Then Mrs. Silo told him that since the arrival of the paper she had made a trip to New York to inform herself as to the true condition of affairs. And, furthermore, on Thursday the eleventh, Mrs. Silo’s mother had been confined to her bed all day with a severe neuralgic headache, all the other members of the family being absent at the bedside of a sick relative; the cook had had a day off, and the aged waitress, who had been in the family twenty-five years, was certain that no one had entered the house up to the return of the absent members at eight, sharp, when, the sick relative being by that time a dead relative, the house was closed. So much for furthermore. Now, moreover, the hank of red Berlin wool had arrived at the house in Fourteenth Street four days after the date in question. It came through the United States mail, wrapped up in a sheet of tinted notepaper, scented with musk, and addressed in a sprawling but unmistakably feminine hand.

* * *

It had long been known in the town that suspicion was rife in the Silo household. It was now known that suspicion had ripened into certainty. Events of that kind belong to what may be classed as the masculine or strictly necessary and self-protective scandal. News of the event goes in hushed whispers through the masculine community—the brotherhood of man, as you might say. One man says to his neighbor, “Let’s get Johnston and go down to Coney Island this afternoon.” “Johnston isn’t going down to Coney Island this week,” says the neighbor. “Johnston miscalculated his wine last night, and Mrs. Johnston is good people to leave alone this morning.”

In a case so much more serious than a mere case of intoxication as Silo’s was supposed to be, you can readily understand that the scandal of the pink pants spread through the town like wildfire. Silo had already resigned from the vestry, so all the vestry could do was to pitch in and see that he did not get the ghost of a show as a candidate for assembly. It was not much of a job, under the circumstances, and the vestry did it very easily.

* * *

“Well, but what had Silo done?” I asked the Doctor. “And what were the pink pants, anyway?”

“Silo hadn’t done a thing,” replied the Doctor. “Not a blessed thing—except to tell a tiny little bit of a two-for-one-cent fib about that hank of worsted. I met Mr. Thingumajig in Chicago last year, and he told me how he worked the whole scheme. The gist of the invention lay in the ‘pink pants.’ Any fool can put up a job to make a man’s wife jealous; but it takes the genius of deathless malevolence to invent a phrase sure to catch every ear that hears it; sure to interest and puzzle and excite every mind that gives it lodgment, and to tie that phrase up to an individuality in such a way that it conveys an accusation almost without form and void, and yet hideously suggestive of iniquity.

“That is just what the little newspaper cuss did with Silo. He was bent on revenge, and he gave up a certain portion of his time to shadowing him. You must remember that, while he had reason to remember Silo, Silo had hardly any to remember him. Well, he told me that he dogged Silo for days—months, even—trying to catch him in some wrong-doing. But Silo, big and blustering as he looked, with his whiskers and his knowing air, was an innocent, respectable, henpecked ass. Outside of business, all that he ever did in New York was to go to his mother-in-law’s house at his wife’s bidding to execute shopping commissions and the like. For instance, this hank of Berlin wool the old lady had bought for her daughter; the shade was wrong, and the daughter sent it back. Mr. Thingumajig—never mind his name now—had been tracking Silo on his trips to Fourteenth Street for weeks, and had just learned their innocent nature. His soul was full of rage. He got into a green car with Silo, going to the ferry. The evening was hot. Silo dozed in the corner of the car. The hank of red Berlin wool lay on the seat beside him. Mr. Thingumajig saw it, and saw the letter pinned to it, addressed by Mrs. Silo to her mother. In that instant he conceived the crude basis of his plot—to appropriate the hank, suppress the letter, souse the wool with cheap perfume, get his wife to readdress the parcel in her worst hand—and to rely in pretty good confidence on Silo’s telling a lie at one end or both ends of the line about the missing wool. Silo was not much of a sinner, but a man who loses his wife’s hank of Berlin wool and goes home and owns up about it is a good deal of a saint. The chances were all in Mr. Thingumajig’s favor.”

* * *

“But,” said I, “when you had met Mr. Thingumajig and became possessed of the plot, why didn’t you come back here and tell all about it, and clear up poor Silo?”

“My dear fellow,” he said, as if he were talking to a child, “what was my word to those pink pants? I tried it on, until I found that people simply began to suspect me, and to think that I might be Silo’s accomplice in iniquity. There wasn’t the least use in it. If I talked to a man, he would hear me through; and then he would wag his head and say, ‘That’s all very well; but how about those pink pants? If there weren’t any pink pants how did they come to be mentioned?’ And that was the way everywhere. I could explain all about poor Silo’s foolish little lie, and they would say, ‘Oh, yes, that’s possible; a man might lie about a hank of wool if he had the kind of wife Silo’s got; but how about those pink pants?’ And when it wasn’t those pink pants, it was them pink pants. And after a while I gave it up. Silo had got to drinking pretty hard by that time, in order to drown his miseries; and of course that only confirmed the earlier scandal. Now, Silo never was a man that could drink; it never did agree with him, and he has got so wild recently that Mrs. Silo has her two brothers take turns to come out here and try to control him. Of course that makes him all the wilder.”

At the end of Main Street I parted from my friend, the Doctor, and shortly I crossed the pathway of another citizen who had seen the two of us bidding good-by.

“He’s a nice man, the Doctor is,” said the citizen; “but the trouble with him is, he’s altogether too credulous and sympathetic. Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d been making some defense to you of the goings on of that man Silo. He’s a sort of addled on that subject. May be it’s just pure charity, of course; and may be, equally, he was in with Silo when Silo wasn’t so openly disgraceful; but if you want to know what that man Silo is, I’ll tell you. The people around here, sir—the people who ought to know—do you know what they call him, sir? Well, sir, they call him, ‘The Man with the Pink Pants.’ And do you suppose for one minute, sir, that a man gets a name fixed on him like that without he’s deserved it? No, sir; your friend there is a good man, and a charitable man, but as for judgement of character, he ain’t got it. And if you’re a friend of his, you’ll tell him that the less he has to say about ‘The Man with the Pink Pants’—the better for him.”