On the morning after our arrival at Ogden City, Mr. Dusante took me
aside. "Sir," he said, "I wish to confide to you my intentions
regarding the jar containing the money left by your party in my house,
and I trust you will do nothing to thwart them. When your baggage
arrives, you, with your party, will doubtless continue your eastern
way, and we shall return to San Francisco. But the jar, with its
contents, shall be left behind to be delivered to Mrs. Lecks. If you
will take charge of the jar and hand it to her, sir, I shall be
obliged greatly."
I promised Mr. Dusante that I would not interfere with his intentions,
but asserted that I could, on no account, take charge of the jar. The
possession of that piece of pottery, with its contents, was now a
matter of dispute between him and Mrs. Lecks, and must be settled by
them.
"Very well, then, sir," he said. "I shall arrange to depart before you
and your company, and I shall leave the jar, suitably packed, in the
care of the clerk of this hotel, with directions to hand it to Mrs.
Lecks after I am gone. Thus there will be nothing for her to do but to
receive it."
Some one now came into the smoking-room, where we were sitting, and no
more was said, on this subject. Mr. Dusante's statement of his
intention very much amused me, for Mrs. Lecks had previously taken me
into her confidence in regard to her intentions in this matter. "Mr.
Dusante," she had said, "hasn't dropped a word more about the money in
that ginger-jar, but I know just as well as he does what he is goin'
to do about it. When the time comes to go, he's goin' to slip off
quietly, leavin' that jar behind him, thinkin' then I'll be obliged to
take it, there bein' nobody to give it back to. But he'll find me just
as sharp as he is. I've got the street and number of his business
place in Honolulu from his sister,--askin' about it in an off-hand
way, as if it didn't mean anything,--an' if that jar is left for me,
I'll pack it in a box, money and all, and I'll express it to Mr.
Dusante; and when he gets to Honolulu he'll find it there, and then
he'll know that two can play at that sort of game."
Knowing Mr. Dusante, and knowing Mrs. Lecks, I pictured to myself
a box containing a ginger-jar, and covered with numerous
half-obliterated addresses, traveling backward and forward between the
Sandwich Islands and Pennsylvania during the lifetime of the
contestants, and, probably, if testamentary desire should be regarded,
during a great part of the lifetime of their heirs. That the wear and
tear of the box might make it necessary to inclose it in a keg, and
that, eventually, the keg might have to be placed in a barrel, and
that, after a time, in a hogshead, seemed to me as likely as any other
contingencies which might befall this peregrinating ginger-jar.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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