Saratoga Trunk Read Free

grandpappy, old Dacey Maroon, fought the Santa Anna Mexicans along with Jim Bowie and Bill Travis and Sam Houston. That’s the stock I come from. And what did I do for my country! Stole millions from millionaires who were stealing each other blind. Another year and I’ll be ninety—the meanest old coot that ever lived to be nearly a hundred—”
    “Oh, come on now, Colonel. You know you’re a wonderful guy and everybody’s crazy about you and Mrs. Maroon. So stop kidding us and give us our story in time for the first edition.”
    “God A’mighty, I’m giving it to you, I tell you! They called us financiers. Financiers hell! We were a gang of racketeers that would make these apes today look like kids stealing turnips out of the garden patch. We stole a whole country—land, woods, rivers, metal. They’ve got our pictures in the museums. We ought to be in the rogues’ gallery. My day you could get away with wholesale robbery, bribery in high places and murder—and brag about it. I was brought up on the stories my father told about ‘em—Huntington and Stanford and Crocker. Two hundred thousand dollars is all they had amongst them in 1861. And they wanted to build a railroad across a continent. So they paid a visit to Washington, and they left that two hundred thousand there. Made no secret of it. They came away with a charter and land grants and the government’s promise to pay in bonds for work in progress. What did the Central Pacific crowd do! I heard my pa tell how in ‘63 Phil Stanford—he was brother of the Governor—drove up to the polls in a buggy when they were holding elections in San Francisco over a bond issue. Reached into a bag and began throwing gold pieces to the crowd at the polls, yelling to ‘em to vote the bond issue. They voted it, all right. Do that today and where’d you land? In jail! Lives and principles, they didn’t matter. Same thing in 1880 when I got started. Say, I was as bad as the worst of’em—”
    “Sure, Colonel, we know, we know. You were a bad hombre all right.”
    “You tell us all about that some time. Some other time. And about the day you rode your horse right up to the bar of the Perfessor Saloon in San Antone.”
    They were being good-natured about it, but they did wish Mrs. Maroon would stop the old coot’s nonsense. Pretty soon it would be too late, the races would be over and they’d have to hop back to New York without a chance to use that tip on Honey Chile.
    “Sixty years ago, young fella, I’d have wiped that grin off your face with a six-shooter. Fights and feuds and fiestas and fandangoes, that was the program back in Texas where I came from in 1880. People call it romantic now. Well, maybe it was. Anyway we had the use of our legs and arms instead of being just limbless trunks riding around in automobiles the way you softies are today. It’s got so you have to jump into a car to go down to the corner to get a pack of cigarettes. Two years ago I went down to Texas, went in an airplane from New York in less time than it used to take us to gallop into town on a Saturday night in the old days. Houston’s a stinking oil town now, Dallas sets up to be a style center, San Antonio’s full of art and they’re starting a movement to run gondolas on the San Antonio River for tourists. My God, I almost had a stroke.”
    “That’s very interesting, Mr. Maroon, but look—”
    “I can tell you things if you think that’s interesting. Ninety, or nearly. Let ‘em put me in jail. If I was to eat two pieces of chocolate cake this minute and drink a quart of champagne I’d be dead in an hour. What can death do to you at ninety that life hasn’t done to you already!”
    “You’re right, Colonel. Uh, look, we’ve got our edition to make, see. And if you’ll just give us what we came for, first, and then—”
    “You’re deaf and dumb and blind, the lot of you!” His face was dangerously red considering his age and the weather. He snatched his arm