Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

‘Tell him he can go then. Tell him he had the wrong address. That there aint nothing on the books here against him. Tell him his note was lost—if there ever was one. Tell him we had a flood, even a freeze.’

ߢHe wont go, not without his—’

‘Turn him out. Eject him.’

‘How?’ they says. ‘He’s got the law.’

‘Oho,’ the Prince says. ‘A sawmill advocate. I see. All right,’ he says. ‘Fix it. Why bother me?’ And he set back and raised his glass and Mowed the flames offen it like he thought they was already gone. Except they wasn’t gone.

‘Fix what?’ they says.

‘His bribe!’ the Prince hollers. ‘His bribe! Didn’t you just tell me he come in here with his mouth full of law? Did you expect him to hand you a wrote-out bill for it?’

‘We tried that,’ they says. ‘He wont bribe.’

Then the Prince set up there and sneered at them, with his sharp bitter tongue and no talkback, about how likely what they thought was a bribe would be a cash discount with maybe a trip to the Legislature throwed in, and them standing there and listening and taking it because he was the Prince. Only there was one of them that had been there in the time of the Prince’s pa. He used to dandle the Prince on his knee when the Prince was a boy; he even made the Prince a little pitchfork and learned him how to use it practising on Chinees and Dagoes and Polynesians, until his arms would get strong enough to handle his share of white folks. He didn’t appreciate this and he drawed hisself up and he looked at the Prince and he says,

‘Your father made, unreproved, a greater failure. Though maybe a greater man tempted a greater man.’

‘Or you have been reproved by a lesser,’ the Prince snaps back. But he remembered them old days too, when the old fellow was smiling fond and proud on his crude youth fid inventions with BB size lava and brimstone and such, and bragging to the old Prince at night about how the boy done that day, about what he invented to do to that little Dago or Chinee that even thegrown folks hadn’t thought of yet. So he apologised and got the old fellow smoothed down, and says, ‘What did you offer him?’

‘The gratifications.’

‘And——?’

‘He has them. He says that for a man that only chews, any spittoon will do:

‘And then?’

‘The vanities. ‘

‘And——?’

‘He has them. He brought a gross with him in the suitcase, specially made up for him outen asbestos, with unmeltable snaps.’