R. Holmes & Co. by John Kendrick Bangs

Author:John Kendrick Bangs [Bangs, John Kendrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Humorous, Short Stories
Publisher: Feedbooks
Published: 1906-04-08T05:00:00+00:00

THE REDEMPTION OF YOUNG BILLINGTON RAND

“Jenkins,” said Raffles Holmes, lighting his pipe and throwing himself down upon my couch, “don’t you sometimes pine for those good old days of Jack Sheppard and Dick Turpin? Hang it all— I’m getting blisteringly tired of the modern refinements in crime, and yearn for the period when the highwayman met you on the road and made you stand and deliver at the point of the pistol.”

“Indeed I don’t!” I ejaculated. “I’m not chicken-livered, Raffles, but I’m mighty glad my lines are cast in less strenuous scenes. When a book-agent comes in here, for instance, and holds me up for nineteen dollars a volume for a set of Kipling in words of one syllable, illustrated by his aunt, and every volume autographed by his uncle’s step-sister, it’s a game of wits between us as to whether I shall buy or not buy, and if he gets away with my signature to a contract it is because he has legitimately outwitted me. But your ancient Turpin overcame you by brute force; you hadn’t a run for your money from the moment he got his eye on you, and no percentage of the swag was ever returned to you has in the case of the Double-Cross Edition of Kipling, in which you get at least fifty cents worth of paper and print for every nineteen dollars you give up.”

“That is merely the commercial way of looking at it,” protested Holmes. “You reckon up the situation on a basis of mere dollars, strike a balance and charge the thing up to profit and loss. But the romance of it all, the element of the picturesque, the delicious, tingling sense of adventure which was inseparable from a road experience with a commanding personality like Turpin— these things are all lost in your prosaic book-agent methods of our day. No man writing his memoirs for the enlightenment of posterity would ever dream of setting down upon paper the story of how a book-agent robbed him of two-hundred dollars, but the chap who has been held up in the dark recesses of a forest on a foggy night by a Jack Sheppard would always find breathless and eager listeners to or readers of the tale he had to tell, even if he lost only a nickel by the transaction.”

“Well, old man,” said I, “I’m satisfied with the prosaic methods of the gas companies, the book-agents, and the riggers of the stock-market. Give me Wall Street and you take Dick Turpin and all his crew. But what has set your mind to working on the Dick Turpin end of it anyhow? Thinking of going in for that sort of thing yourself?”

“M-m-m yes,” replied Holmes, hesitatingly. “I am. Not that I pine to become one of the Broom Squires myself, but because I— well, I may be forced into it.”

“Take my advice, Raffles,” I interrupted, earnestly. “Let fire-arms and highways alone. There’s too much of battle, murder, and sudden death in loaded guns, and surplus of publicity in street work.

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