“We have a good deal to think of here; it was your place to think of it
and ask for it. Good-by; we probably sha’n’t see you in this region for
a thousand centuries or so.”
“In that case, _o revoor_,” says I.
I hopped onto the carpet and held my breath and shut my eyes and wished I
was in the booking-office of my own section. The very next instant a
voice I knew sung out in a business kind of a way—
“A harp and a hymn-book, pair of wings and a halo, size 13, for Cap’n Eli
Stormfield, of San Francisco!—make him out a clean bill of health, and
let him in.”
I opened my eyes. Sure enough, it was a Pi Ute Injun I used to know in
Tulare County; mighty good fellow—I remembered being at his funeral,
which consisted of him being burnt and the other Injuns gauming their
faces with his ashes and howling like wildcats. He was powerful glad to
see me, and you may make up your mind I was just as glad to see him, and
feel that I was in the right kind of a heaven at last.
Just as far as your eye could reach, there was swarms of clerks, running
and bustling around, tricking out thousands of Yanks and Mexicans and
English and Arabs, and all sorts of people in their new outfits; and when
they gave me my kit and I put on my halo and took a look in the glass, I
could have jumped over a house for joy, I was so happy. “Now _this_ is
something like!” says I. “Now,” says I, “I’m all right—show me a cloud.”
Inside of fifteen minutes I was a mile on my way towards the cloud-banks
and about a million people along with me. Most of us tried to fly, but
some got crippled and nobody made a success of it. So we concluded to
walk, for the present, till we had had some wing practice.
We begun to meet swarms of folks who were coming back. Some had harps
and nothing else; some had hymn-books and nothing else; some had nothing
at all; all of them looked meek and uncomfortable; one young fellow
hadn’t anything left but his halo, and he was carrying that in his hand;
all of a sudden he offered it to me and says—
“Will you hold it for me a minute?”
Then he disappeared in the crowd. I went on. A woman asked me to hold
her palm branch, and then _she_ disappeared. A girl got me to hold her
harp for her, and by George, _she_ disappeared; and so on and so on, till
I was about loaded down to the guards. Then comes a smiling old
gentleman and asked me to hold _his_ things. I swabbed off the
perspiration and says, pretty tart—
“I’ll have to get you to excuse me, my friend,—_I_ ain’t no hat-rack.”
About this time I begun to run across piles of those traps, lying in the
road. I just quietly dumped my extra cargo along with them. I looked
around, and, Peters, that whole nation that was following me were loaded
down the same as I’d been. The return crowd had got them to hold their
things a minute, you see. They all dumped their loads, too, and we went
on.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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