CHAPTER I BARNABY LEARNS HIS NAME

It was towards the end of a very hot summer, and all the human population of that crowded square of the great city had spent the first half of the night in the streets. Either that, or in leaning halfway out of their windows to get a breath of fresh air.

Now that sunrise was again so near at hand, however, and the breeze from the sea had done so much to make the world more comfortable to live in, the closely-built “hotels” and tenement houses were all asleep.

The former were mostly of the sort that sell lager beer and other things in the basement, and the latter were just the kind of places in which men and women ought not to live.

[Pg 8]Up in the third-story front room of one of those hotels, however, a boy of about seventeen—a well-built, dark-eyed, curly-headed, handsome boy—sat on a wooden-seated chair, wide-awake, and seemed to be studying the condition of somebody who lay on the bed near him.

There was a curiously-set expression of determination on the bright, young face, very much as if he had made up his mind to do something, and did not mean to be very long in going about it.

Such a ludicrously disreputable looking mess of a man was the large figure that now began to kick about so clumsily among the bedclothes!

He had not taken off his clothes on lying down, and every one might have wondered what need he had of extra blankets in such weather.

But now a grizzled head and a bloated face rose slowly from the pillow—one of those faces which defy any guess of within twenty years of their actual age.

“Jack—Jack Chills!”

“That isn’t my name, but here I am,” responded the boy in the chair.

“No more it is. Alas, for all my sins!” exclaimed the man, “but you cannot deceive[Pg 9] your old uncle, my boy. I know what you’re up to. You mean to take advantage of my temporary indisposition and abandon me!”

“That’s it,” said the boy, curtly. “It’ll be two or three days before you get sober enough to follow me, and I’m off.”

“I deserve it, I do,” was the mournful whine of the man on the bed. “I ought never to have brought you to this.”

“I’ve seen you before,” said the boy, “when you were sick and sorry. You brought me, years and years ago, but I’m older now and I don’t mean to stay any longer.”

“What will Monsieur Prosper say when he knows it? He expects great things of you now the troupe’s broken up.”

“Glad it’s gone to pieces,” half savagely remarked the youngster. “I don’t want any more of that. What’s more, I won’t pick pockets or cheat at cards, or that sort of thing, for old Prosper or you either.”

“Oh! alas!” came from the bed, but whether in repentance or disappointment it would be hard to say.

“Now,” said the boy, in a tone of quiet determination,[Pg 10] “I’ve been Jack Chills long enough; tell me what my real name is.”

“My dear nephew——”

“If you’re really my uncle, you must know, and if you won’t tell, I’ll empty the ice water all over you.”

“And kill me?”

“No; it won’t kill you, but it’s awful cold,” said the boy, as he advanced towards the bed with a large pitcher in his hand. “Come, now, I must be off before sunrise. Don’t tell me any whopper now. Out with it.”

“Oh!” burst in half-frightened accents from the helpless red-face; but then a very different look began to creep across it.

“Barnaby Vernon, my boy.”

“Is that my name?”

“It was your father’s before you, and you’re coming out just like him. I reckon it’s that that fetches me now. Bar Vernon, if you make me one promise, I’ll be fair with you.”

“Now that I know my own name, I’ll promise anything,” excitedly exclaimed Barnaby.

“Well, then—quick now, listen, before I change my mind—you see that little black valise?”

[Pg 11]“Seen it a thousand times,” said Bar.

“That’s yours, but you must promise not to open it for a year and a day. I’ll be either dead or a thousand miles from here then.”

“Most likely dead,” growled Bar, who evidently bore small affection to his big relative. “But I’ll promise. Will it tell me anything?”

“Everything; but, Barnaby, not for a year and a day! You always kept your word, just like your father.”

“I’ll keep it,” said Bar, firmly, “and now, good-bye, Major Montague, if that’s your name—only it isn’t. I can’t say I forgive you exactly, but we’ll part friends. No more acrobat and juggling and tight-rope and wonderful performances for me.”

“But what’ll you do? ’Twon’t be long before you’ll be hunting me up again.”

“Guess not,” said Bar. “My clothes are pretty good, and I’ve collected my last six months’ wages out of the money you gave me when you came in last night. There’s a receipt for it, and there’s the rest of the money. You’ll find it all right.”

“Wages? Receipt? Jack Chills!” almost screamed Major Montague.

“Exactly,” said Bar. “I’ve stopped working[Pg 12] for nothing and being knocked down for it; good-bye, old fellow.”

So saying, Barnaby Vernon, for he somehow felt safe about so calling himself, picked up a very well-filled leather traveling bag with one hand and the mysterious little valise with the other, and started for the door.

“Jack Chills! Barnaby! Come back with that money! I’ll have you arrested! I’ll strangle you!”

“Stop that noise,” replied Bar, “or I’ll douse you all over.”

“Barnaby!”

“There, then if I must!”

Barnaby had put down the valise and caught up the pitcher, and the voice of the man on the bed died away in a wretched sort of shivering whine as the chilly flood came swashing down upon him.

“How he does hate water,” muttered Bar, as he again seized his new-found property, and glided out into the passageway. Neither voice nor pursuing feet came after him, for Major Montague was struggling frantically, like a man with the hydrophobia, to divest himself of his saturated[Pg 13] habiliments, and his rum-destroyed strength was by no means equal to the task.

“That’s what rum’ll do if it gets a fair hold of a man,” said Barnaby to himself, on the stairs. “He must have been a gentleman once, and look at him now! None of it for me. I don’t like that kind of an ending, if you please.”

He stepped into the bar-room office on the first floor, for he had no intention of “sneaking,” but not a soul was there, and in another moment he was in the deserted, gloomy, sordid-looking street.

“Plenty of time,” he said to himself. “I’m going to start fair. I must go to my hotel from the ferry, in the regular coach with the passengers from the Philadelphia morning train.”

Barnaby Vernon had taken his lesson of life in a hard school, thus far, and he had done an amount of thinking for himself which does not often fall to the share of boys of his age. He knew very well that no questions would be asked of a “regular passenger” who looked well, and who brought his baggage with him.

Two hours later, he came out from breakfast at a respectable, but not too expensive hotel, on the[Pg 14] other side of the city, as quiet and self-possessed a young fellow as the sharp-eyed clerk had ever seen in his life.

“Looks as if he knew his own business, and meant to mind it,” was the sufficient commentary of the latter.

If any of the sharpers who lie in wait for the young and unwary set his eyes on Barnaby that morning, he speedily took them off again, for his instincts must have told him plainly, “Not a cent to be made out of that fellow.”

Under Barnaby’s external composure, however, there was more than a little of inner fermentation.

“All right, so far,” he said to himself. “The old rascal will take it for granted that I’ve left the city. Once his penitent fit is over, he’ll be sure to go for me again. I ain’t half sure but what I’d better go to Europe or California, only a hundred dollars isn’t quite enough for that. What’ll I do?”

He was not so unwise as to spend his time around the hotel, however, and he carried his mental puzzle with him on two or three short trips on the Sound steamers and up the Hudson.

[Pg 15]“I’ve a name of my own,” he said to himself, as he returned to his hotel from the last of these, “and I’ve got rid forever of that horrible old time, but what shall I do with my ‘New Time’? I must settle that before my funds run out. They’d last longer in the country.”

No doubt of that, but what was he to do in the country?

There had been work enough cut out for him in town, of a kind that he knew how to go about, and very remarkable had been the discussion thereof by the bedside of “Major Montague,” some three or four hours after Barnaby’s escapade.

“Might set the police after him, on account of that money,” said a tall, thin, foreign-looking man, in a tone of deep dejection.

“The police, Prosper?” exclaimed the major. “I guess not. The less you say to them the better. They understand your kind of French.”

“He’d make a better hand than any of us, in time,” groaned Prosper.

“He’s cut his stick, though, as far as we are concerned,” added a third, a dapper little fellow, who stood by Prosper’s chair. “I’m glad he’s gone before he learned too much.”

[Pg 16]“He knows enough now,” said the major, “but I don’t believe he’ll do us any harm. He isn’t any common kind of boy, and we never could have kept him in hand. I tell you, he’ll be bossing a crowd of his own before a great while.”

“But I mean to have the use of him for a while first,” said Prosper, “if I can only lay my hands on him!”

“Better not try,” said the major.

“He may come back of his own accord,” said the third man.

“You hold your breath till he does,” kindly remarked the major.

It was a doleful sort of conference; and the high opinion of Barnaby Vernon’s, alias Jack Chills’s, capacity in their peculiar line which that trio entertained was expressed in language decidedly too powerful to be reported.