Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: In Mizzoura | Page 5

knees arranging some of his cargo, he
found a pistol muzzle against his cheek, and his smiling visitor
prepared to bind and gag him. Having done this, the stranger packed
one hundred and twenty thousand dollars into a valise; and dropped off
into the dark, when the train made its accustomed stop at a water-tank.
The whole enterprise was so gentle, that the messenger was arrested
and held as an accomplice, while the Pinkertons looked for the man
with the money.
The robber was a kind-hearted person; and, being really grieved over
the detention of an innocent man, wrote several exculpating letters to
the papers, enclosing rifled express envelopes to prove his peripatetic
identity. These letters were signed "Jim Cummings," a nom de guerre
borrowed from an older and an abler offender of the Jesse James
vintage.

After he was arrested and in his cell in the St. Louis jail, "Jim
Cummings" and I became friends, as criminals and newspaper men
sometimes do, and as criminals and I always have done, everywhere,
most easily. The details of his arrangements, both before and after his
draft on the company, were minutely in my mind, and were so very
vital that, with the first need for a drama criminal, I took him.
Goodwin's rival should be Jim Cummings; a glorified and beautiful and
matinée Cummings, but substantially he.
This adoption rescued the girl and the sheriff from the hazy geography
of the mining camps, and fixed the trio in Missouri.
After Cummings had dropped from the express car, he had walked
some fifteen miles to the Missouri River, near St. Charles, and had then
gone north on a train through Pike County. I had more than once made
the same trip on freight trains; and I had a liking for the county as the
home district of Champ Clark, a politico-newspaper comrade of several
legislative sessions and conventions. Newspaper experience in those
days, before the "flimsy" and the "rewrite," emphasized the value of
going to the place in order to report the occurrence; and I knew that,
aside from these three characters and their official and sentimental
relationships, the rest of my people and my play were waiting for me in
Bowling Green.
In those days, Mrs. Thomas and I used to hold hands on our evening
promenades; but I think it was really our foolish New York clothes that
made the blacksmith smile. At any rate, we stopped at his door and
talked with him. He knew Champ Clark and Dave Ball--another
Missouri statesman--and had the keenest interest in the coming
convention for the legislative nomination. It was fine to hear him
pronounce the state name, _Mizzoura_, as it was originally spelt on
many territorial charts, and as we were permitted to call it in the public
schools until we reached the grades where imported culture ruled. The
blacksmith's helper, who was finishing a wagon shaft with a draw knife,
was younger and less intelligent, and preferred to talk to Mrs. Thomas.
It is distracting to listen at the same time to three persons; but I learned
that "You kin make anything that's made out o' wood with a draw
knife;" and over the bench was the frame for an upholstered chair. A
driver brought in a two-horse, side seated, depot wagon on three wheels
and a fence rail. The fourth wheel and its broken tire were in the wagon;

and the blacksmith said he'd weld the tire at five-thirty the next
morning.
We went without breakfast to see him do it. He was my heroine's father
by that time; a candidate for the legislature; and I was devising for him
a second comedy daughter, to play opposite to the boy with a draw
knife. That day I also found the drug-store window and the "lickerish"
boxes that Cummings should break through in his attempted escape;
and I recovered the niggers, the "dog fannell," the linen dusters, and the
paper collars which, in my recent prosperity, I'd forgotten. I also
nominated Goodwin for the legislature, which increased his importance,
and gave him something to sacrifice for the girl's father. But it was all
so poverty-stricken, as I glimpsed it through the blacksmith shop and
the little house I'd chosen for its consort. I yearned for some money; not
much, but enough to afford "a hired girl," and for some means of
bringing the money into the story. When we left Bowling Green, I had
given Goodwin a substantial reward for the robber's capture; but he
wouldn't accept it. That was a mere dramatist's device; and my quiet
sheriff was already above it; besides, he wasn't sure that he'd hold the
fellow. His wish to please the girl was already debating the matter with
his duty.
On the way back to St. Louis, the