Do you know that fiction, without side-tracking interest, can often teach a man what he will never learn in a class-room or from a text-book? It can, and the lesson sticks, because the human mind is so constituted that it will retain and assimilate a moral wrapped up in a story, whereas the moral naked and unadorned would be forgotten in fifteen minutes or rejected at once.

I wonder how many men have been saved from selling old lamps for new by the story of Aladdin!

I, like hosts of other men, am a nervy and imaginative individual, and the devil of the thing is that with us our imagination is our worst enemy, keeps us awake at night counting up our losses instead of our profits, fills us with fantastic fears of the future, and, should any of us ever find ourselves in an incriminating position—which God forbid—would, were we innocent, ten to one make us look or act like criminals.

Here is the story of a man who acted like an ass, a highly moral married man whose imagination betrayed him, the story of Billy Broke of Los Angeles, told me by Brent.

Brent had a little fishing boat he kept at a slip near Circular Wharf and he and I used often to go out fishing in Sydney Harbour. One day we were out late, fishing off Farm Cove, so late that on our return a huge moon was rising, flooding the harbour and city with its light. We left the boat tied up in charge of the wharf keeper and tramped off with our fish. Coming up along Halkin Street we saw something like a bundle of old clothes lying in the moonlight right before us, and when we got to it we found it was a dead Chink.

It was a narrow street of tenement houses and not a soul to be seen. There was a big Labour demonstration on that night, so I suppose the inhabitants were all off demonstrating and that accounted for the desolation of the place.

Brent knelt down to inspect. Then he rose up:

“Stabbed,” said he, “and as dead as mutton.”

“What are we to do?” I asked.

“Well,” said Brent, “we can’t be of any use to him, and we don’t want to be mixed up in the business—come along.”

He took me by the arm and led me off. He was a practical man and right enough, I suppose, we could give no clue, the murderer, whoever he might be, was well away, a thousand to one he was a brother Chink and we knew all the bother there would be over the inquest,—still I felt a qualm, but it was so slight I easily drowned it in a whisky and soda at a bar we stopped at. Then I went home and went to bed and put out the light, and with the darkness the moonlit street showed up before my mind’s eye—and the Chink.

“Suppose,” I thought, “suppose someone saw us leaving that street, suppose by any chance we got connected with the business—what would people say? Might they say we had committed the murder?” Absolute nonsense, but there you are, my imagination had got away with me. I couldn’t sleep, and next morning when I met Brent he asked me what was wrong with me and I told him. He took me out for a sail in the harbour where we spent the day cruising about, and after luncheon Brent tackled me over the stupidity of “fancying things.”

“What’s the use of fancying things?” said Brent, “ain’t there enough troubles in the world without breeding them. Suppose you were had over that Chink, where’s the damage, you didn’t kill him—and you ain’t going to be. Forget it. Lord o’ mercy, I’ve seen more guys fooled by their fancies than I can remember the names of. Did I ever tell you of Billy Broke? Brooke was the real name, only some fool of an English ancestor or another left out one of the o’s, so the poor chap was saddled with a nameplate only fit for a hoodoo. Nature not to be behind in the business, fitted him with a set of nerves and an imagination worse than yours and then turned him out into the cold world to make his living. On top of everything he was pious beyond the ordinary, bashful beyond believing and trusting in every man, which isn’t a quality which makes for success in American business circles.

“He’d gone bankrupt four or five times when the Almighty, thinking maybe it was a shame that one of his creatures should be used like that, married him to a common-sense woman with a bit of money and they started a dry goods store in Los Angeles and would have done well enough only for Billy’s nerves and imagination.

“He wouldn’t speculate a bit in his business for fear of ruining himself, an’ his fear of what was going to happen in the future took all the pep and energy out of him. Worst of it was he would be boss of the show and not leave things to his wife. I’m not meaning anything personal, but chaps with high-geared nerves and X-ray imaginations generally have a pretty good opinion of themselves in private. Billy had, and the result was that he’d near brought the dry goods store to bankruptcy when one day a wholesale firm in ’Frisco began to give trouble over a bill that was owing and Billy determined to go and interview them.

“Mrs. B. wanted to go, but he wouldn’t let her, and the unfortunate woman, knowing the fool he was, got in such a temper, she wouldn’t even pack his grip. The hired girl did the packing. She was Irish and given to mistakes, one of them dreamy, acushla sort of red-headed Irishwomen with her heart on her sleeve and her head in the clouds, regular at attending mass and smashing china and dependable to shove anything that came handy into the pie she was making or the bag she was packing.

“The Irish girl did the packing and Billy with the grip in his hand kissed the back of his wife’s neck, for she wouldn’t give him her lips, and started off for the station. He got to ’Frisco without losing himself and put up at the ‘Paris.’

“Now that day me and Slane were at Long Wharf, ’Frisco, on board the Greyhound ready to put out. We’d got five thousand dollars’ worth of trade under the hatch, and we were bound for Nanuti in the Gilberts, that’s to say right under the Line.

“We were due out next morning at sun up, and that night, under a blazing big moon we were sitting on deck having a smoke and talking things over. Long Wharf was pretty quiet and you couldn’t more’n hear the drunks and such yelling in Third and Fourth Streets. There was a timber schooner outside of us and we could hear a fellow snoring in her cabin and a big clock somewhere striking eleven. The strokes were all equally loud, which showed there was no wind to speak of, and Buck was wondering if we’d get enough in the morning to take us out when along the wharfside comes running a chap, and, seeing us there on deck in the moonlight and the sparks of our cigars, he comes bounding down the gang plank and lands on the deck on his hands and knees without losing grip of a parcel he was carrying.

“‘Save me,’ cries the chap. ‘Get me out of ’Frisco, the police are after me.’ Then he goes limp and Buck bends down and stirs him up.

“‘Drunk,’ says Buck.

“He was, and battered at that. His coat was torn up the back, he was mud all over and his hat was gone, and yet, for all that, he looked to have been respectable. You can’t batter the respectability out of a man in five minutes, not even if you roll him in the gutter and fill him with drink, this chap’s hands were clean where they weren’t dirty, and I could see his nails had been attended to, his pants were muddy and had a tear in them, but they weren’t frayed at the heels and the cloth was good.

“‘What are we going to do with him?’ I asks.

“Buck scratches his head for a minute, then he says:

“‘Get him below.’

“I was none too anxious for extra cargo of that sort, but I knew by Buck’s voice he wasn’t in the humour for arguing, and, fearing that maybe the police might come along and find the chap and hold us up maybe next morning as witnesses of Lord knows what, I grabbed the guy by the heels whilst Buck took the head and between us we slithered him down below and shoved him in a spare bunk, putting his parcel beside him.

“We reckoned that maybe he’d have slept his liquor off before morning, and we could give him a wash up and shove him ashore.

“I got into my own bunk and slept like a dead policeman till Buck dragged me out.

“‘Tug’s along,’ says he, ‘and there’s a good wind, but I can’t wake that blighter. He’s still in the arms of Bacchus and I’m just going to take him along, Bacchus and all.’

“I came on deck and there was a little tinpot tug hauling the timber schooner out so’s to free us, with the dawn breaking over the bay.

“‘But Lord, Buck!’ I says. ‘What are you going to do with him if you take him along, he’s no mascot by the look of him, and no sailor-man neither. What are you going to do with him?’

“‘Save him from the police,’ says he, ‘and from liquor and make a man of him or kill him, he’s no tough, by his face, just a softy that’s got into bad hands maybe, or just run crooked because of the drink. Curse the drink,’ says Buck, ‘I’ve seen its black work in my family and that’s why I’ve always steered clear of it, and if it was only to spite John Barleycorn I’d take a dozen guys like that, let alone one.’

“I didn’t argue. I had my hands full directing the crew, and I had it in my mind that Buck was as keen of cheating the Penitentiary as he was of spiting John Barleycorn. Like most Irishmen he had a mortal hatred of policemen and prisons, and I don’t blame him, neither.

“We were kept on deck till we were clear of the bar and running on a sou’-west course, doing seven knots, with the sea piling up and more wind coming, then I dropped below for a cup of coffee and a bite of food, and looking at the chap in the bunk saw he was still snoring.

“The parcel had dropped out of the bunk owing to the rolling in crossing the bar, and the brown paper covering had got a bit loose and I couldn’t for the life of me help poking round with my finger and loosening it a bit more so’s to have a look at what might be inside. I was thinking it might be banknotes or boodle of some sort, but what I come on was a female’s silk petticoat. I was more shook up than if I’d hit on a rattlesnake, and, calling Buck down, I says to him, ‘Buck, this sleeping beauty of yours has been murdering a female.’ That’s how the business struck me first. Why else should he have been running away with the thing and the police after him?

“Buck takes one squint, then he begins the Sherlock Holmes business, looking for dagger marks and bloodstains, but there weren’t none, the article looked pretty new, with nothing a Sherlock Holmes could lay hold of but the letters J.B. worked in black thread very small on the band of it, and no doubt the initials of the party owning the concern. Buck puts the thing away in a locker and we sits down to breakfast, arguing and talking all the time, the professor of somnology snoring away in his bunk, the schooner getting further to sea and the sea piling bigger behind her, with the wind rising to a tearing gale.

“I was kept on deck all that morning, at the wheel most of the time, for we were running before it and if she’d broached to we’d have gone truck over keel to perdition.

“Buck comes up at eight bells, saying the petticoat man had woke up wanting to know where he was and asking to be taken to Los Angeles. I didn’t bother about the chap, didn’t see him till next morning, when I turned out to find the gale gone into a six-knot breeze and Buck and him sitting at breakfast.

“He’d washed and brushed and looked more like a human being, and he’d given up wantin’ to be taken to Los Angeles and he’d settled down to his gruel.

“We were keen to have his story out of him and know what the crime was, but we had no time for tale-telling with the damage on deck, for we’d lost several spars in the blow, so we just left him to smoke and think over his sins and didn’t tackle him till two days later, when he told us the whole yarn right off, and without winking, so’s that we couldn’t help believing him.

“This is it, as far as I can remember, with nothing left out that matters.

“Billy Broke was his name and he’d left Los Angeles as I’ve told you on a visit to ’Frisco to see a wholesale firm on some business. He put up at the ‘Paris’ and went to his room to change his necktie and brush his hair, and when he opened his grip to fetch out the tie and the hairbrush, he come on a woman’s red silk petticoat rolled up and stuck in anyhow. At first he thought it was his wife’s, but he couldn’t remember ever seeing her in possession of such a garment, she being a woman of quiet tastes and not given to violent colours. Then he thought the thing must have been shoved in for fun by some joking young chaps that had been on the train. The more he considered this, the more he was sure of it, and down he sits to think things over.

“First of all he says to himself that if the thing was shoved in by them guys for fun it must have been stolen, then it came to him that maybe they didn’t put it in for fun but to get rid of it as evidence against them of some crime they’d committed. That made him sweat, but he got a clutch on himself, telling himself it was only in magazine stories things like that happened and that the chances were it belonged to his wife. Then he told himself that no matter who it belonged to or who put it there, he’d got to get rid of it.

“He wouldn’t risk bringing it back home, not much, and he wouldn’t risk keeping it an instant longer in his possession for fear of detectives arriving whilst it was still in his possession, so down he goes to the office and begs, borrows or steals a piece of brown paper and a yard and a half of string and back he comes to his room and wraps the evidence up and ties the string round it.

“‘There,’ says Billy to himself, ‘that’s done. Now the only thing I’ve got to do is take it out and lose it. Just throw it away. Some poor woman will pick it up and grateful she’ll be for it.’

“He comes down and goes out with the parcel under his arm and then he finds himself in the street. He’d thought to drop the parcel in the street casually as he walked along, it seemed the easiest thing in the world to do, but no sooner had he left the hotel with the parcel under his arm than he felt that everyone was watching him. That wasn’t stupidity either. Everyone was watching him. Everyone in every street is watching everyone else, doing it unbeknown to themselves most of the time, but doing it; it’s maybe a habit that has come down to us from the time we were hunters, and our lives depended on our eyes, but it’s there and if you fall down in any street half a dozen people will see you fall who otherwise would never have known of your existence, passing you without seeing you, consciously.

“That truth hit Billy between the eyes. He felt if he were to drop that parcel, not only would some guy see him drop it, but he’d know he’d dropped it purposefully, so he walks along with it under his arm trying to find an empty street, and somehow or another failing, till he comes on a narrow lane, and ‘Here’s my chance,’ says he and dives down it. Half way down, with no one in front or behind, he drops the parcel and walks on, but he couldn’t help turning his head like a fool, and there behind him, just come into the lane, was a man. The parcel was between Billy and the man, and Billy in a flash saw that the man would know he’d dropped it seeing Billy was walking away from it, not towards it. So, having turned his head, he had to complete the business and turn back and pick up the durned thing and walk on with it. He was in Market Street now and beginning to set his teeth. There was a good few people going and coming and they all seemed so busy and full of themselves that Billy took heart, and, walking along close to the houses, dropped the thing again. He didn’t turn his head this time, but just walked on, stopping here and there to look in at the shop windows and feeling he’d done the trick this time. He’d gone a good way and was looking in at a jeweller’s thinking which of the rings he’d buy for his wife if he had the money, when an old chap comes panting up to him with the parcel.

“‘I saw you drop it,’ says the old guy, and I ran after you with it, but you walk so quick I couldn’t catch you.’ Then he has a fit of coughing and Billy sees he’s nearly in rags and hands out a quarter and takes the parcel. Billy was beginning to find out the truth that if you want to lose a thing that’s of no value to you, you can’t, not in a city anyhow, but he was only beginning, else he’d have quitted the business right there and have knuckled under to that petticoat.

“Instead of that what does he do but go on with his peregrinations and his fool attempts to get rid of the thing, he makes it a present to a beggar woman and when she’d seen what was in it, she runs after him saying she’s taking no stolen goods and suggesting a dollar commission for not showing it to the police.

“Then getting along for four in the afternoon, Billy, feeling he’s married to the thing, begins to celebrate his connubial state with drinks. He wasn’t used to the stuff and he goes from saloon to saloon, warming up as he went and making more attempts at divorce till he strikes a bar tender notorious for his married unblessedness, offers the thing as a present for the B.T.’s wife and gets kicked flying into the street when a policeman picks him and his parcel up and starts them off again on their ambulations.

“The drink was working in him now strong—you see, he’d always been an abstemious man and you never know what whisky will do with a guy like that till it’s done with him. Billy cruises into another bar, planks down a quarter, swallows a high ball, gets a clutch on himself and starts on the king of all jags. He wasn’t trying to lose the parcel now. He was proud of it. He remembered in one saloon undoing it and showing the petticoat to an admiring audience. He remembered in another saloon saying the thing was full of bonds and banknotes. Then he was down in the dock area tumbling into gutters and singing songs. Chaps tried to rob him of the thing and he fought them like a wild cat. He’d begun the day with the parcel sticking to him, and he was ending the day by sticking to the parcel and resisting all attempts on it by armed force, so to speak. Then he believed he had a dust up with some Chinks who tried to nab the thing and there seemed to be police mixed up with it, for it ended with him running to escape policemen. Then he couldn’t remember anything more, and we told him how he had come running along the dockside till he struck the Greyhound and came bounding on board, as per invoice.

“That was the yarn Billy spun, and there he sat when he’d finished asking us what he was to do.

“‘Well, I says to him, ‘you’re asking that question a bit too late; to begin with, you should never have trusted yourself alone in ’Frisco with them nerves of yours. Second, you went the wrong way about getting rid of the thing.’

“‘Oh, did I?’ said Billy. ‘And how would you have done—put yourself in my position, and what would you have done to get rid of it?’

“That flummoxed me.

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘to begin with, I wouldn’t have been such an ass as to want to get rid of it.’

“‘S’posing you were,’ said he, ‘and I allow I was an ass to fancy all them things, but supposing you were, will you tell me where I went wrong? Wouldn’t you have done everything I did just as I did it? Of course you would. I tell you I was fixed to that thing by bad luck and I only got rid of it after it had done me in with the drink.’

“‘But you haven’t got rid of it,’ says Buck.

“‘Whach you mean?’ asks Billy, his hair standing on end.

“‘You brought it on board,’ says Buck, and he goes to the locker and takes the parcel out. Billy looked at it, took it in his hands and turned it over.

“‘Then he says: ‘That does me.’ He says no more than that. The life seemed to go out of him for a bit as if the hunch had come on him that it wasn’t no use to fight any more.

“‘I says to Buck: ‘Come on up on deck and leave him with the durned thing,’ and up we went and there we saw a big freighter pounding along and coming up from south’ard, ’Frisco bound and making to pass us close.

“‘There’s his chance,’ says Buck; ‘run down and fetch him up and we’ll flag her to stop, it’s better than taking him off to hell or Timbuctoo, seeing he’s a married man.’

“Down I went and up I brought him. There was a fair sea still running, but nothing to make a bother about, and we could easy have got him off in a boat. But do you think that chap would go, not he; he said he’d sure be drowned if he put off in a boat in that sea, said the thing was out to drown him if it could. Then he went below and got into his bunk with his inamorata, and we let the freighter pass, and that was his last chance of getting to Los Angeles for many a long day.

“I was pretty sick with him, so was Buck. It wasn’t so much because he was afraid of drowning as because he was afraid of being drowned by that rotten parcel, but we weren’t so free of superstitions ourselves as to be too hard on the poor chap, so we didn’t do more than make his life a hell till he was ashamed of himself to the soles of his boots and taking a hand in the working of the ship. We wanted to shy parcel and petticoat overboard, but he wouldn’t let us. We’d shown him the initials on the belt of the thing and he said they were his wife’s and it was plain now that some mistake had been made in packing it among his things by the servant maid he gave us the specification of. He said he reckoned he’d keep it to bring back to her, so she might know his story was true.

“But it was many a day before he was likely to see Los Angeles again and so we told him.

“From the day we passed that freighter till the day we lifted Howland Island, which lies nor’-west of Nanuti, we only sighted three ships hull down and beyond signalling.

“After passing Howland we passed a brig bound for Java and a freighter from Rangoon bound for South American ports—Nothing for anywhere near ’Frisco.

“Billy like a good many landsmen seemed to fancy that ships were all over the sea close as plums in a pudding. He got to know different by the time we reached Nanuti and, more than that, he got to know that every ship wasn’t bound for ’Frisco.

“‘Why,’ he says one day, ‘if I’ve got to wait for a ship back,’ he says, ‘I’m thinking it’s an old man I’ll be before we sight one.’

“‘And you’re thinking right,’ says Buck. ‘You had your chance and you missed it because the sea was a bit rough and your head was stuffed with that blessed petticoat and the idea it was going to drown you. You’ll just have to stick to the old Greyhound till she fetches up again at Long Wharf and that’s God knows when, for we don’t run by time-table.’

“And that was the fact; we touched at Nanuti and discharged cargo and took on copra. Then we came along down by the New Hebrides and shaving New Caledonia put into Sydney and discharged and took a cargo along to Auckland, and then from North Island we took a cargo down for Dunedin. The only way to make money with ships is to know where to go for your cargoes. Buck had some sort of instinct that way and he was backed with friends in the shipping trade, but it wasn’t for eight months from starting that he got the chance of a cargo to ’Frisco, and it wasn’t till two months later that we passed the whistling buoy and saw the tumble of the bar.

“I looked at Billy that morning and I thought to myself that it was worth it to him. He looked twice the man he was when he fetched on board and, more than that, he could handle sails and steer and take an observation as good as me or Buck, besides which Buck had treated him well about payment and he’d have a good few dollars waiting for him when we tied up at the wharf.

“Which was that day. I’d business which kept me running about all the day after and it wasn’t till the day after that Billy took heart and come to me and asked me to go with him to Los Angeles so’s to break him to his wife, so to speak.

“I’d got to like the chap and I agreed. I won’t say that I wasn’t anxious to see how he’d make out when he got back and what Mrs. Billy would say to him, but however that may be, I packed a bag and Billy shouldered his dunnage and off we started by the night train, getting into Los Angeles next morning.

“It wasn’t as big a place in those days as it is now. We left our traps at the station and set off on foot to find Mrs. B., Billy back in his old nervous state and almost afraid to ask questions as to how his wife and the shop had been doing in his absence. The shop was on Pine Tree Avenue, and half way along to it Billy’s nerves got so bad we stopped at a restaurant for some breakfast, fixing it that I should go off after the meal and hunt up Mrs. B. and find out what had become of her. Billy could scarcely eat his food for talking of what might have happened to her, fearing maybe she might have committed suicide or gone bankrupt or starved to death or gone out of her mind at the loss of him. The woman that ran the restaurant served us at table and it came to me sudden to ask her did she know anything of a Mrs. Broke of Pine Tree Avenue who had a dry goods store.

“‘Burstall, you mean?’ said she. ‘She’s married again since Broke ran off and left her. He was a little no good chap and skipped with all the money they had, which wasn’t much, and she got a divorce against him for illegally deserting her or incompatibility of temper or something and ran the store herself and made it pay. Y’ see, he’d been boss of the thing up to that, and near made it bankrupt, but once she took charge, she made it pay. I’ve never seen Broke, I only came to the town six months ago, but I’ve seen Burstall often. He’s a fine man and between them they’re making that store hum.’

“I got Billy on his feet and out of that place and wanted to get him to the station to see about the next train for ’Frisco, but he said he wanted to see things for himself and make sure; so the funeral procession started for Pine Tree Avenue.

“‘That’s the place,’ said Billy, pointing to a big shop with J. Burstall and Co. painted along the front in gold letters. ‘There’s my old home—Well, I wish her happiness.

“That seemed to me a pretty weak thing to do, and I says to him: ‘Ain’t you going to kick Burstall?’

“He didn’t hear me, he was so occupied looking at his old home, till a big fellow in his shirt-sleeves comes out and begins looking at the contents of the shop window to see how they showed.

“Billy goes up to him.

“‘You belong to this store?’ says Billy.

“‘Yep,’ says the chap.

“‘Then will you give Mrs. Broke, I mean Burstall, this parcel,’ says Billy, ‘and ask her to see me about it, there’s been a big mistake.’

“‘No use troubling her,’ says the big chap. ‘I’m Burstall and running this store. What’s this you’ve brought back—we don’t change no goods once bought.’

“‘It’s a petticoat,’ says Billy.

“‘Well, what’s wrong with it?’ asks the other, taking the goods.

“‘What’s wrong with it!’ cries Billy, then he begins to laugh like a crazy man, till I thought Burstall would have gone for the both of us.

“‘Come on, Billy,’ I says, catching him by the arm, then I turns to Burstall: ‘You big stiff,’ I says, for all my bristles were up at the beefy look of the chap and the carried on. ‘You big stiff,’ I says, ‘for two pins,’ I says, ‘I’d kick you from here to Santa Barbara.’

“Burstall drops the parcel to go for me, when along comes a policeman, and explanations begins; Burstall saying how we’d been trying to land him some old goods we’d never bought in his shop and the policeman asking us for our address.

“‘We don’t belong here,’ I says. ‘We’ve come from ’Frisco.’

“‘Well,’ says the bull, ‘if I find you about town trying any more of your dodges by noon to-day. I’ll run you in, sure as my name’s Bill Adams. Pick up your parcel and off with you.’

“I picked the damned thing up and stuffed it in the side pocket of Billy’s coat and led him off, the bull following us two or three blocks to make sure we were moving.

“We found a train was starting at the station, and I got Billy in, all broke down. Getting towards ’Frisco he pulled himself together, he’d been thinking a lot on the journey, and I got the surprise of my life to find him cheerful all of a sudden.

“‘Do you know what I’m thinking?’ says he. ‘I’m thinking this thing is my mascot, and I’ve been trying to get rid of my luck all this time. It got me free of that woman, for we never pulled together proper, it got me in with you and Slane, and you’ve made a man of me. Every time I tried to lose it, bad luck came to me, and look at the luck she’s had since she lost it, married to that brute of a Burstall. It’s my luck I’ve been trying to get rid of, and now I know, I’m going to do big things.’

“I left him at the station, and met him a year later all broke down and half in rags.

“‘Why, Billy.’ I said, ‘what ails you?’

“‘I lost my mascot,’ says he. ‘I was getting on fine and making money hand over fist when a damn landlady pinched it out of my wardrobe, though I never could bring it home to her. It took all the heart out of me and things went wrong all round.’

“I gave him a dollar and never saw him again,” finished Brent, “and I’ve just told you about him to show you what nerves and fancies and such like may bring a man to.—Now as to that dead Chink.”

But I wasn’t bothering any more about the Chink, maybe because of the fresh air of the harbour, maybe because of the awful warning contained in the story of Billy Broke.