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I'm not quite ready for that yet.
"Or I could go back to Missouri and go to work with that friend of mine
with the Zolliger Church Goods Company. I have heard that he is badly in need
of an assistant to sell Saint Christopher relics. That big skeleton broke up
into so many thousand genuine relics that there will he good business in them
for as long as one can see into the future. But I know that I'd have a
dog-faced feeling if I went into that line of work.
"Or I could go back to Greely Gulch and check in at the Outworker
Agency. Then I would go to one of the nearby towns and get three jobs and draw
three pay checks. But great howling thunder! I don't want three jobs. I don't
want hardly one.
"But what will I do? There must be something for me. I am, after all, a
charming man."
He went out of his boarding house and to the variety store.
"Let me see that small suitcase," he said. "Fine, fine, it's just what I
want. Let me have three of them. No, no, what am I thinking about. Let me have
just one of them."
John Woolvbear took the small suitcase back to his boarding house and
set it on the floor in his bedroom. Then the little suitcase seemed to become
three little suitcases on the floor.
"I am a charming man," John Woolybear reassured himself again. "Three
persons in this world have found me especially so. It maybe that I won't have
to work at all, not if I spread myself properly. And all three of those
special persons are well-fixed now, so I have heard."
John T. Woolybear who had once been the King of the Sunday Magazine
Section Fabricators began to fill the three little suitcases out of the one
big suitcase. And, by leaving out the Fat Air suit and the folding
man-carrying kite and the bicycle pump and a few other items, he made the
transfer perfectly.
Just before dawn the next morning, three men took their places at a good
hitch-hiking highway nexus just outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania... The three
men looked somewhat alike. Each of them had pale blue eyes. Each of them was
flecked with large tan freckles, and each of the freckles had a slight blue
ring about it as if it had been drawn by a cartoonist.
The three suitcases of the three men were just alike, almost just alike.
Each of the suitcases had a lettered sign on it.
The lettered sign on one of the suitcases read TO ILLINOIS.
The second one here the sign TO NEBRASKA.
And the third one had the sign TO TEXAS.
GRAY GHOST: A REMINISCENCE
There are a lot of people who don't even remember the old Electric Park
that was south of Tulsa, between the Peoria Road and the Arkansas River. It
was the dog-racing track complete with electric rabbit.
The palmy days of Electric Park were 1920 to 1928. The grandstands
seated eight thousand people until the northern half of the east-side
grandstand collapsed in 1925. After that, the grandstands seated only six
thousand people.
It was on Halloween night of 1924 that Anselm Sheen took four of us
boys, his son Barnaby Sheen, and Hector 0'Day, Grover Whelk and myself, all of
us ten years old -- and he took us out to Electric Park in his Overland
touring car. Halloween night was always the last (and highest-stake) night of
the dog-racing season.
"It's up to you boys," Anselm Sheen said when we got there. "I'll buy
each of you boys a ticket to the dog races, even though the tickets are forty
cents each. Or, it being Halloween when the ghosts walk, you can go looking
for thrills in the old Holy Ghost Burial Ground just a quarter mile south of
here. I'm going to watch the races myself, but if I were twenty-five years
younger I'd go to the burial grounds for my fun. Ah, I see that you're already
starting south for them! Meet me here in an hour and a half. The races will be
over by then, and your grisly fun should be over by then too. Be careful if
you try the Devil's Handshake. About nine years ago the devil got a good hold
on a little boy and pulled him all the way down to Hell."
"We won't be taken in by that, Mr. Sheen," Hector O'Day said. "We're too
smart for that."
"So was the little boy who got pulled all the way down to Hell nine
years ago, Anselm Sheen said. "He was a really smart boy. He reminds me of
you, Hector."
It was all weed-covered hard sand there as we walked south just a little
bit after sundown. And the area had a sad scattering of runt apple trees on
whose branches no apple had ever grown. As though drawn by some big magnet,
all four of us headed for Devil's Handshake Dune. We felt more than heard the
giggling of several medium-sized boys coming from a ditch. We even recognized
one of them by his giggle. And we heard from the very middle of Devil's
Handshake Dune (which was a sinkhole and not a dune at all) the horrified
screaming of a little boy in death agony.
Now, the mechanism by which the Devil grabs a little boy by the hand and
pulls him all the way down to Hell is this: Devil's Handshake Dune is only
twenty feet from where the river-bank drops suddenly down to the verge of the
river. The point of the drop is the face of a cliff about twelve feet high.
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