The Specter at Serpent’s Cut
By Frank L. Packard
Author of “The Blood of
Kings”
“Spitzer,” Etc.
From The
Popular Magazine October 1911, No. 6, Vol. 21.
Digitized for Stillwoods.Blogspot.Ca by Doug
Frizzle April 2018.
Our research
has so far not attached this story to any of Frank Packard’s books /drf.
The “spook doctor” drops into Big Cloud and adds
one more topic for the expatiation of the talkative railroad man, Matthew
Agamemnon. He is
still
a talker, but the occult is taboo. There’s a reason.
SUMMED
up short, the Hill Division is a vicious piece of track; also, it is a classic
in its profound contempt for the stereotyped equations and formulas of
engineering. And it is that way for the very simple reason that it could not be
any other way. The mountains objected, and objected strenuously, to the process
of manhandling. They were there first, the mountains, that was all, and their
surrender was a bitter matter.
So,
from Big Cloud, the divisional point, at the eastern fringe of the Rockies, to
where the foothills of the Sierras on the western side merge with the more
open, rolling country, the right of way performs gyrations that would not shame
an acrobatic star. It sweeps through the rifts in the range like a freed bird
from the open door of its cage, clings to cañon edges where a hissing stream
bubbles and boils eighteen hundred feet below, burrows its way into the heart
of things in long tunnels and short ones, circles a projecting spur in a dizzy
whirl, and shoots from the higher to the lower levels in grades whose percentages
the passenger department does not deem it policy to specify in its advertising
literature, but before which the men in the cabs and the cabooses shut their
teeth and try hard to remember the prayers they learned at their mothers’ knees.
Some
parts of it are worse than others naturally; but no part of it, to the last
inch of its mileage, is pretty—leaving out the scenery, which is grand.
And
what with cuts and fills and borings and trestles and
bridges, in an effort to unsnarl a few knots in the tangle, the company has
been tinkering with it pretty well ever since the last spike was sent home and
the small army of consulting scientists, with a flourish of trumpets, bowed
gracefully to the managing director of the Transcontinental —and withdrew to
seek other worlds to conquer. However—
This is Terhune’s story; and it goes back to the
time when “Royal” Carleton was superintendent and Tommy Regan, big-hearted as
he was gruff, was master mechanic. Terhune was an engineer. His full name was
Matthew Agamemnon Terhune—the only excuse for which seems to have been that
his parents were possessed of a sense of euphony, or one of them, maybe, a
first-grammar education in Greek.
Anyway,
Terhune was dutifully appreciative—he signed in full.
Clarihue,
the turner, swore at him at first for usurping more than the allotted space
ruled off on the grease-smeared pages of the book in the roundhouse that
recorded the goings and comings of the engine crews; but eventually he became
wise enough to content himself with a snort of disgust amplified by a spurt of
black-strap juice pitward. Terhune, given an opportunity, would
argue that, or any other matter under
the sun, with a calm and dispassionate
flow of words that had Tennyson’s brook
for continuity beaten seven ways for
Sunday.
“Matthew
Aggie-mem-gong
Terhune!” choked Clarihue. “The fathead wind bag!”
Regan
put it a little differently.
“Talk!”
said the master mechanic. “Talk! The man’s a debating society, that’s what he
is. He’ll talk when he’s dead. I don’t know what kind of springs he’s got on
his tongue. I wish I did. I’d equip the motive power department with them.
What?”
The
division, however, being generally in a hurry, called him plain “Matt.”
With
the exception of Clarihue, perhaps, no one ever got mad at Terhune. If it is
true that obesity is a sign of good nature, Terhune is simply a case in point.
He exuded it from every pore of his fat, dumpy body; and he dispensed it alike
on the just and on the unjust.
Certainly,
the man was more or less of a consummate ass; but any inclination to kick him
on that score vanished with one glance at his great babyish moon face, with its
two little, round blue eyes that stared out from under a straggling collection
of sandy hairs, which fringed, much after the fashion of a monk’s tonsure, an
otherwise bald and shiny head. After that glance it was all off. There was no
getting mad at Matt.
Professionally,
Terhune was all right as far as he went. Nothing startling, nothing out of the
way—not even a regular run. Regan used him as a sort of ever-ready substitute
for anything that might turn up. And, as far as Matthew Agamemnon Terhune was
concerned, it appeared to be all one to him. Switching, yard work, local
freight, double heading, anything—he took it as it came, complacently,
good-naturedly. So that it did not bar him from talking, he was happy.
He
could talk in a cab; and there, perforce, he had an audience. The fireman had
his choice between being the target for Matt’s views and theories on an
astounding range of subjects—or jumping! From the Alaskan Boundary Question to
the Fresh Air Movement Matt was posted—and, if not profoundly posted, his
ideas, at least, had the merit of being original.
Now
all of the above is, on the face of
it, extraneous to the fact that, during a winter of pretty heavy running, the
Serpent’s Cut had netted an appalling number of disasters, even for that bedeviled
piece of construction that never under any circumstances was known to
behave itself for better than a month at
a stretch; but, extraneous as it may
appear, it had, for all that, a very direct
bearing on Matthew Agamemnon and his propensity for argument
and talk.
However,
in any event, the driven-to-desperation directors down East, when
they got the cold figures that totaled up
the claims and represented the amount of rolling stock
reposing on the scrap heap
from six months’ running in the Serpent’s
Cut, voted, though they bit their
lips when they did it, some sweeping and extensive alterations on that
particular stretch of track. And when
the plans came out in the spring, they called for a new
bridge across the Muskrat River at the foot of
the grade, and a rock cut from the
mouth of Number One Tunnel to straighten
the bridge approach.
It
was a big piece of work—about the biggest
the company had ever undertaken;
everybody realized that. So, once
the improvements were decided upon, they went at it with a rush; and
the lower slopes and stretches
of the mountains were just
beginning to shed their winter coats, when
a brigade of engineers, bridgemen,
foremen, Polacks, Swedes, Russians,
and what not moved into construction
camp on the banks of the Muskrat.
Then
the bridge material and the
thousand and one other odds and ends of
supplies began to pour into the Big Cloud
yards—it was all out from the East
then—and there followed, in the natural
order of things, a daily-work special
to the camp. Regan gave it to Terhune,
of course; and gave him, besides,
the various engines as they came out
of the shops to break in after their overhauling.
Also he gave him as fireman
young Charlie Spence, brother, by the way, of the chief dispatcher.
Take
it all around, it was an incongruous-looking
outfit that Matt pulled out
of the yards those days. Generally a big ten-wheeler, spick and span, glistening
in fresh paint, with Terhune obliterating the cab window and bouncing up and
down on his seat like a cheerful rubber ball; and little Spence, who had never
run anything but “spare” before, expanding his chest in the gangway fit to
bust the buttons off his undershirt; while trailing behind, slewing, rattling,
bumping, came a hybrid conglomeration of gondolas, reversible gravel dumps,
flats groaning under blocked and shored-up steel bridge girders; maybe a box
car here and there, by way of picturesqueness; and, to wind things up, on the
tail end, a caboose that was out of the ark, and not much bigger than a baby
carriage. That was Work Special 117 west, 118 east.
So,
west to the Muskrat in the morning, lugging back the empties at night, became,
for the time being, Terhune’s run—and it suited him as no job had ever suited
him before. Except for the trip to the water tank and turntable at Beaver Tail,
two miles west of the camp, he had the day pretty much to himself; and there
were new men on the work, men he did not know. Or, perhaps, to put the matter
in a truer perspective, men who did not know Matthew Agamemnon Terhune—for the
engineer corps, like the material, came out from the East.
Matt
buttonholed Ferguson, the chief, on the first morning, and opened on him with
the Newfoundland Fisheries Dispute.
Ferguson,
who was a receptive Scot, lifted his scraggy eyebrows and rose to the bait—Terhune’s
introduction invariably carried a glimmer of sense; but, being busy at the
moment, he invited Terhune to dinner to hear the rest of it; where incidentally
he introduced his staff, which consisted of a couple of seasoned assistants
and another couple of embryonic engineers, whose names, plus a small edition of
the alphabet recently forged on by a fond and trusting Alma Mater, were Podger
and Clark.
It
wasn’t an expensive invitation from the viewpoint of the exchequer of the
engineers’ mess—Terhune was too busy to eat—and for about a week Matt had a
standing invitation; but after that, whether some one tipped the Scotchman off,
or the combined galaxy of mathematical talent got the answer for themselves,
Terhune’s midday repast consisted of what he fished out of his own dinner pail.
Terhune
might have been a little puzzled at this change of front; but certainly he was
not abashed. Nothing, so far, in all of Matthew Agamemnon Terhune’s forty-three
years of life had ever abashed him. Furthermore, if the construction engineers’
mess renounced him as an organization, certain units of it did not; for, while
the canny Scotchman and his two assistants politely and unostentatiously
avoided Matthew, the guileless and demure Podger and Clark continued to hang,
and to all appearances to hang breathlessly, upon the words that fell from the
engineer’s lips.
Things
went on this way for some two weeks; and then suddenly, coincident with the
advent to Big Cloud of one Senorita Vera Cabello, the Alaskan Boundary
Question, the Fresh Air Movement, the Newfoundland Fisheries Dispute, and all
other subjects of character, scope, and vital import similar, were blown away,
as fluff is blown before a gale of wind, in the face of a new and weightier
matter for research and discussion. That is, it was new, and therefore
weightier to Terhune.
Regan,
with ungracious bluntness, called her a “spook doctor”—but the master mechanic
was always blunt. Miss Cabello—pardon, Senorita Vera Cabello, in her
advertisements in the Big Cloud Weekly World’s Era,
announced herself as a “seeress renowned on two hemispheres,” and followed with
a modest compilation of her qualifications and attainments.
She
was the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter—of course. Under the great
teacher Yagagama, she had studied the mystic laws of crystal gazing in the far
Orient. At her command were, not one, but two
familiars of the dread other world, with whom she was in constant communion for
the benefit of those who consulted her; and further, by special arrangement and
appointment —for which there was an extra fee— she would, for a brief space,
recall the ethereal forms of any dear departed on request—always provided that
the “rapport,” whatever that meant, was propitious and favorable, a risk to
which the client subscribed in his accompanied-by-the-fee application for the
seance.
The
Senorita Cabello was clever— whatever else might be said of her, let that be
understood. She gave a free public performance in the fire hall on the night of
her arrival. Terhune attended this—and was impressed. There was a black cabinet
on the stage and black hangings and misty, white shapes moving about, potent tributes
to the senorita’s powers. Terhune bulked large in a front chair, his moon face
puckered, his little, round eyes like pin points, as he stared into the
Egyptian blackness in front of him.
For
a wonder he didn’t say much that night; but the next night he presented himself
at the senorita’s apartments, which she had meanwhile opened over Dinkelman’s
clothing emporium on Main Street.
There
wasn’t any silly business about it as far as the engineer was concerned; that
is, there wasn’t any glamour of feminine charms exerting any undue influence
upon him—the senorita was neither comely nor in the flower of her youth.
Brought down to a simple equation, the idea of the occult and its mysteries
caught Matthew Agamemnon hard; and the latter part of the senorita’s
advertisement caught him harder.
Terhune
had never forgiven his twin brother Sime for the inopportune and fatal attack
of heart failure, some five years previous, with which the defunct had so
arbitrarily terminated, at its most crucial moment, the argument upon which
they had been engaged at the time. He most earnestly desired to converse with
Sime.
The
senorita agreed. It took her a few seconds to get the line clear and warm up to
her work; but, inside of three minutes by the watch, she was writhing around on
the floor like a serpent stung by bees, choking and squealing and foaming at
the mouth.
Terhune had seen a cat in a fit once; and there
was one thing about him that was common to every engineer on the Hill
Division—which was to act promptly in an emergency. There was a pitcher of
water on the table. Terhune seized it, and heaved the contents violently into
her face.
The
stiffening limbs relaxed with amazing mobility, and the Senorita Vera Cabello
sat up with surprising suddenness. What she said is not recorded, because
Terhune didn’t quite get the rights of it himself; but when he left, he carried
with him a sort of hazy realization that he had only himself to blame for
sidetracking the “rapport” with Sime—and just at the psychological instant when
it was about to be consummated, too.
Therefore,
he tried it again the following evening. This time he sternly refrained from
even a thought of the water pitcher—which incidentally had been removed—but
Sime, perhaps because he had got close enough to witness the proceedings of the
night before, seemed a little diffident about taking a chance on getting mixed
up with the turmoil and strife of things terrestrial. Sime did not appear; but
Matthew was still optimistic.
Blow
much of the engineer’s last pay check, in a very brief interval of time, became
the property of Senorita Vera Cabello is a personal matter, and Terhune’s own
business. Terhune never said. If Sime was stubborn, so was Matthew Agamemnon.
Being twins, it was natural; but let that go.
And
the senorita was clever. Pending connections with Sime, she fascinated Matthew
by initiating him into the first degree of the mysteries of the Beyond—and
hinted at much more. She spoke in a far-away voice of dwellers within the first
and second and third spheres, wise counselors and mentors to mankind; of
apparitions, wraiths, and specters, who appeared to mortals when something of
dire moment was impending. But—the world was blind and gross and crass—few,
very few, could see or
understand. It was necessary to be attuned,
to be sensitive.
“Zar are many t’ings in heaven an’
earth—” she quoted; and sold Matthew Agamemnon a little literature on the
subject.
At first, Terhune, like a man feeling his
way on a new run, and wary of getting his signals mixed, confined his reflections
on this now all-engrossing matter to young Spence, his fireman.
Spence listened incredulously.
“I dunno what you mean,” said he, “ ‘bout
visitations from the other world an’ appuritshuns an’ wreaths an’ that sort;
but if it’s ghosts you’re drivin’ at, I don’t take no stock in ’em. Never saw
one; did you?”
This was the challenge direct. Terhune
blinked his little eyes fast, and proceeded to get his hand, or, rather, his
tongue, in on Spence—and scored cleanly. Spence, on the evening run back that
night, took to dodging, between shovelfuls, the shadows of the telegraph poles
as they flitted across the gangway; and, as Work Special 118 pulled into the
Big Cloud yards, he confessed to a “creepy, cricidy feelin’ up an’ down his
spine.”
With this victory as a credential of
proficiency, Terhune opened fire the following day on the construction camp.
And on that day, and for some ensuing ones, he bombarded it pitilessly. He
caught Ferguson on the narrow ledge of an excavation where the chief couldn’t get
away. He cornered the assistants more than once. He labored patiently with
excitable Russians, staring Swedes, and half-witted Polacks, whose knowledge of
English was summed up in the few choice and polite phrases with which they were
accustomed to be addressed by their lords and masters, the road bosses and
foremen. He talked to everybody; and no man, except perhaps Sime, who was dead,
could pace Matthew Agamemnon on talk.
But of all his audience, Podger and Clark
alone were solicitious and sympathetic. At the start, like Spence, they asked
him if he had ever seen a ghost himself. Matthew regretted that he had not;
but, in lieu of personal testimony, offered an imposing array of authentic
statistics, which he now had at his fingers’ ends, of people who had.
Clark was unquestionably impressed. So
was Podger. But their conversion was a lower and more stubborn matter than
Spence’s. They yielded a point here and there from time to time, as men whose
convictions are reluctantly overridden; but it was several days before they
made a full and unconditional surrender.
However, if it took longer than it did
with Spence, once converted, having been trained in a mathematical school of
hard fact, their conversion was not the passive conversion of the fireman.
Instead, it was practical, and—but the red is against us, and we’ll have to
slow up till we get the track.
To-day, now that Ferguson has built his
bridge and gouged his cut through the mountain walls, you can see the mouth of
Number One Tunnel staring at you like a little black eye up the grade all the
way from the bridge; but you couldn’t then, for the right of way swept out of
the tunnel into a long half-mile curve close up against the bare gray rock of
the mountainside following the river bend; and, still curving at the bottom,
where it crossed the Muskrat, hit the old wooden trestle on the tangent.
This didn’t leave much room for a siding
anywhere; but, what with Terhune and his dump carts and the work in general, a
siding there had to be from the first, so they tapped the main line as far up
as they could squeeze in, paralleled it down to the trestle, and left the last
two rails bent up and sticking out over the water, with the river for a bumper.
About the only rights Terhune and his
Work Special had were this same Muskrat siding and the three-mile stretch from
there to Blazer, the first station east of the camp; the latter because, once
Matt had pulled out, he was in the clear, with nothing on earth to reach him
till the operator at Blazer could wave a tissue in his face.
So, also, because there was quiet in the
Serpent’s Cut and a lull in the traffic for
an hour or so around six o’clock, Terhune was scheduled to leave the Muskrat at
six-fifteen each night and run to Blazer for orders. After that, if he wasn’t laid
out more than two or three times by the wayside, he would eventually make the
Big Cloud yards by eight or eight-thirty—in time to keep a one-sided
appointment with his tantalizingly elusive relation, and imbibe mystic lore from
the senorita, after her customary earnest, if unproductive, fit was at an end.
Matthew
Agamemnon Terhune had become a busy man, take it all round; for the more he
listened to the senorita on subjects touching the dread familiars across the
Styx, the firmer became his belief and the stronger grew his desire to
enlighten the unenlightened—so the harder he talked.
And
possibly there is a moral here. Certainly no one ever had a less fertile soil
for the sowing of seed than was the field wherein Matthew Agamemnon labored;
and yet, to-day, the first canon in the creed of the Hill Division, bar no man
among them, not even the pick-swinging Russians and Swedes and Polacks, is
ghosts.
It
simply goes to show what sincerity and unbounded perseverance will do; for, on
the Friday night when Terhune pulled out from the Muskrat siding, a week after
Senorita Vera Cabello’s arrival at Big Cloud, the only disciples he had were
young Spence, his fireman, and those two learned bachelors of science, Clark
and Podger.
In
the first flush of spring the days are still short, and it had already shut
down pretty black when Terhune, on the dot of six-fifteen, moved up the siding
and cautiously negotiated the mainline switch for the bumping, groaning,
rattling string that trailed behind him.
You
can come down the stretch from the tunnel to the trestle at a fairly stiff
clip, for the arc of the curve is wide; but going up is quite another matter,
with a trifle better than a four-per-cent grade to climb. Terhune had a heavier
load than usual that night; and his pace was little faster than a man’s walk as
he crawled up for the tunnel’s mouth, his engine entering her protest in long,
hoarse, growling barks from her exhaust, and coughing a hemorrhage of sparks
and red-hot cinders from her stack.
There
wasn’t much of the right of way in sight, for the beam of the electric
headlight, with the curve of the track, just cut the left-hand rail a few yards
ahead, and then shot away like a truant child to play among the trees and
foliage of the Muskrat Valley that was opening up below. The effect of this
might have been pretty, but it did not appeal to Terhune—he had seen it before;
and, besides, he had other things on his mind. So, by the time they were well
up to the tunnel, having got snugly and comfortably settled on his seat, he
cast, after a professional glance at his gauges, an introspective eye across
the cab at Spence,
“There’s
none so blind,” said he, with originality, “as them as won’t see. There’s
hundreds and hundreds of cases with evidence enough to back ‘em up that no one
with any sense could turn down. Now take that drummer ghost somewheres over in
Scotland that always plays his drum as a warning when one of the family’s going
to die. No one disputes that, do they? Well, then, how about that?”
“I
think they’re horrid things,” said young Spence uncomfortably.
“I
don’t say they’re not,” admitted Terhune, wagging his head sapiently. “I don’t
say they’re not, but— What’s that!”
The words burst from his lips in a dull, frozen gasp of terror, followed on the
instant by a wild, incoherent yell from the fireman.
With
a lurch as it struck the straight, and the roar of the deep-toned exhaust
swelling into a thousand thunders that reverberated hollow and cavernous from
the vaulted roof, the big ten-wheeled mogul had shoved her nose into the round,
inky black mouth of the tunnel; and the headlight, wavering back to its duty,
was throwing its beam far into the opening. And there, where the shaft of light
focused ahead upon the rails, was a sight that made Terhune’s blood run cold.
Full
in the right of way, facing the train, one hand upheld, as though in warning,
the light shimmering through his ghostly body onto the rail beyond, stood the
white, shadowy specter figure of a man.
Great
clammy beads of perspiration sprang to Terhune’s forehead, his fat, florid
cheeks paled to ivory, and the fringe of hair around his head seemed to rise up
until it stood out straight and stiff; then, working like a madman, he jammed
in the throttle, applied the “air,” shot the reversing lever over the full
segment into the last notch, whipped the throttle wide open again, released the
“air,” and, for all the world like huge pinwheels, the sparks flying from the
tires, the drivers began to race backward.
No
train before or since on the Hill Division ever came to as abrupt a stop as did
Work Special 118 east on that night. The jerk threw Spence halfway up the coal
on the tender; and Terhune spit blood from loosened teeth for a week afterward.
With any initial speed, the flats and the gravel dumps and the box cars would
have telescoped themselves to splinters. As it was, they came together with a
rattle and bang and crunch and grind of battered buffers that would have put a
park of artillery in the toy pistol class.
Then
the mogul began to bite into the rails, and the train began to back out of the
tunnel and down the grade; but, ahead of it, leading the way, the coupler
shivered like a bit of pastry from the terrific snap-the-whip wrench it had received,
sailed the ancient caboose. And swaying, writhing, squeaking, squealing,
followed the rest of the Work Special, with Terhune, all flabby fat now, hanging
from the cab window, his whistle, from pure nervousness, going like a
chattering magpie, and his teeth, after one last sight of the apparition as
they swung clear of the tunnel, going like a pair of castanets.
The
train crew in the caboose, by the time they got their scattered senses together
from the shock that had bowled them like ninepins over the stove and left them
wrestling with the stovepipe, found themselves halfway back to the trestle,
with the speed of their crazy conveyance increasing at every foot. They let out
a concerted yell, and jumped.
Down
below, at the din infernal, lights were flashing all around the camp. Some one
rushed to the switch, and threw it for the siding. The caboose, for all its
age, took it like a young colt, whisked the length of it, shot off the up-canted
end rails, and, describing a neat parabola in the air, plumped, in a clean
dive, into the bosom of the Muskrat. And it was only the fierce swing and jolt
of the engine as it took the switch, and the wild yell of the man beside it as
he swung the main line open again, that momentarily restored Terhune’s wits
sufficiently to check the train and save the rest of his outfit from the same
fate.
As
he came to a stop, men clustered around him; but for the first time in his life
Matthew Agamemnon’s tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, and he was dumb. He
could only hang weakly in the gangway as the volley of questions came at him
thick and fast.
Then
suddenly, from the tunnel’s mouth, came the long, shrill siren scream of a 1600
class mountain racer, then the pur of steel, the dull rumble of beating trucks
growing louder and louder; and, bursting like a cannon’s tongue flame from the
curve, the glare of a headlight shot streaming into the
night. A roar, a whirl, a row of lights
flashing like diamonds from a solid
string of brass-vestibuled Pullmans swept
by, took the trestle with a tattoo that
echoed far up and down the valley, and was gone. And behind
her, the questions silenced, men with blanched, awed faces saw Matthew
Agamemnon Terhune, with a hysterical sob, collapse limply on the floor of his
cab.
Just
a series of illogical, disconnected
happenings? Perhaps. It depends on
the way you look at it. Queer
things happen in life. If it had not
been for the mechanical bent that
enabled Podger and Clark to tinker so effectually
with bits of wire and gauze sheeting, and Matthew Agamemnon’s propensity for talk
that inspired them to do so, and the advent of Senorita Vera Cabello, who inspired
Matthew Agamemnon, the be-Pullmaned Convention Special with clear rights to
Glacier Junction, twenty miles west of the Muskrat, which would, none the less,
have hit Blazer on the tick of her schedule, with no reason on earth for
holding her up, since she had time and to spare to get past the siding before
Terhune pulled out, and which would just as surely have had a breakdown a mile
west of Blazer, delaying her fifteen minutes, a delay that, in the face of her
rights through, her crew were concerned only in making up, would—but what’s the
use!
Chance,
or luck, or something more than that, if you’d rather, whatever you like to
call it; that was all that stood between three hundred conventionites, to say
nothing of two train and engine crews, and a shambles quick and absolute, that
night.
However,
that as it may be, it was a week before Matthew Agamemnon climbed into a cab
again; and in the meantime, at the polite solicitation of the town marshal
incident to a few unpaid bills, the senorita had departed from Big Cloud. This,
from the standpoint of the psychologist, was a misfortune. His visits perforce
ended. There was no telling whether the Specter of Serpent’s Cut, as they came
to call it, had enhanced or shattered Terhune’s belief in her and, concretely,
in the occult. Not that Matthew Agamemnon was silenced; far from it. He talked
harder than ever, as far as that goes, only he talked exclusively
on such subjects as the Alaskan Boundary Question, the Fresh Air Movement, and
the Newfoundland Fisheries Dispute.
THE
SCIENCE OF THE FLAPJACK
NOW twist your wrist
And bow your back,
And
learn to turn
The
good flapjack.
Give
it a flip
When
rich and brown,
Catch
it kerslap!
When
it comes down.
Give
it a coat
Of
sorghum thick,
Or
bacon grease
Will
do the trick;
Or
even plain—
Not
near half bad,
If
a day’s tramp
Or
hunt you've had.
Flapjack,
you helped
The
trail to clear
Through
all the wilds
Of
the frontier.
Well
your humble
Part
you played,
For
by your strength
The
West was made.
Robert V.
Carr.
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