MORE THAN MELCHISEDECH
	VOLUME ONE:
	TALES OF CHICAGO

	Book One:
	Early Boyhood of a Magus

We know the sign athwart the wreck
The sign that hangs about your neck,
Where One more than Melchisedech
Is Dead and never dies.

G. K. Chesterton
Ballad of the White Horse

	CHAPTER I

	Well, what do you think is maintaining the world on even its wobbly
ways if it is not the extraordinary work of a few prodigious and special
people in it? These people are known as magicians or sorcerers or magi: and
this is the daily life of one of them. 
	He was Melchisedech Duffey. Like every magus, he arrived with many
mantles of magic. Like every magus, he would lose most of them during his
life. And such payments as he would receive for his losses would seem
trivial or incomprehensible. 
	"d do not understand the value of these trifles d receive for the
splendid things that d give up," another magus had complained once. 
	"df you are a true magus, you will understand it," one in higher
authority said.
	"And d go all my life in fear of assassination or even more mortal
things," the magus complained. 
	"df you a true magus, you will not let these small things bother
you," the Higher Authority said. 
	The True Magus Melchisedech Duffey had the golden touch. He could
bang his hands together and produce graven gold or bar gold or coin gold. He
was an invader of minds, moving in and out of the people with whom he was in
accord as well as some with whom he was in clashing discord. To a limited
extent, he was a Lord of Time, moving back and forth in the streams of it
almost at will. And he commanded invisible giants. 
	By talismanic device, he was able to manufacture persons, or at
least to put his own fabricator's mark on unfinished human clay. This was
his most powerful gift. 
	"Without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither
beginning of days nor end of life --" -- these specifications seemed
improbale for a mortal person like Duffey; and there was confusion about
each of the items as applied to himself. 
	Duffey remembered three different childhoods in the present or
twentieth century. dt was hard to reconcile them because they occupied the
same years. Duffey also remembered a much older and continuing life that was
always with his like a backdrop. This older backdrop contained camel's hair
tents flapping in the wind in a rocky country that was green with grass and
golden with sunlight. 	And there was a background sound that fit in
imperfectly with the semi-desert atmosphere. dt was the hooting of a
particular ship's horn, a strong, golden and pleasant sound that could be
produced by one ship only. Other people could not hear this ship's horn
however loud it sounded. 
	dn all other ways, Duffey was a pretty normal person. He had sorrel
hair and fire-blue eyes. He would be a solid but not overly large man. He
had a month that might start to grin before his eyes did. And he was
constantly banging his hands together and shouting "Yes, yes, my creature,
we will do this thing right away." He might be shouting this to a clay
chicken he had made with his hands, and to no one else at all. 

	For a very brief moment here, we dip into the latter-middle life of
Duffey just before that life breaks up and moves in several directions, but
mostly back in time from that latter diy. For this one brief moment that we
watch now, he is in his own 'Duffey's Walk-in Art Bijou' in New Orlcins. He
is eating and drinking with a frend there, and he is contemplating an urn
full of ashes that is on his cluttered table. 
	The urn is old and ornate and it had once belonged to a King of
Spain. There is nothing odd about keeping an urnful of ashes on one's table,
perhaps, but this case was a little different, The ashes were Duffey's own. 
	"The people whom you make, Duffey," said Mr. X who was the friend
Duffey was eating and drinking with, "you haven't any real control over
them, have you?" 
	"Over them? It's over you, X. You're one of the people I made. No, I
haven't much control over the bunch of you. You're a 'how sharper than a
serpent's tooth' crew." 
	"And someday you'll have to settle on one of your three childhoods
to be the real one, Duffey," X said.
	"Yes, but I won't settle on it yet. I'll keep my options open. What
kind of man I can bee today or tomorrow will always depend on what kind of
boy I was yesterday. I really wish that I had more than three childhoods to
choose from. But beyond these three I come on only fragments. 

	CHAPTER II

	Melchisedech Duffey, for one of his most likely childhoods, appeared
in either Harrison or Shelby or Pottawattamie County in lowa. The seven
cities that disputed the honor of being his birthplace were Minden,
Underwood, Beebee Town, Neola, Crescent, Avoca, and Union Township which was
not properly a city at all. 
	Melchisedech used to say that he arrived on the night of the turn of
the century, a night that also was claimed by the Papadiaboloi and Mr. X and
other potentous persons. Duffey may have lied about this: he may have been
several years younger than the century. And X may have lied about his own
case. Likely he was several years younger than Duffey even. 
	A fact given by all older relitive or pretended relative is that
Melchisedech's mother had died when he was five years old and that
thereafter he had lived with cousins until finally he came to live alone.
When Duffey was twelve years old, he began to go to boarding schools, and
that was the beginning of his living alone. 
	Duffey, between the ages of five and twelve, lived with cousins in
little towns and on big farms in Iowa, and he lived with kindred in a number
of cities: Dubuque, Sioux City, Council Bluffs, Omaha, Kansas City, St.
Louis, Chicago, and Boston. The older relative also said that Duffey, far
from being without kindred, had many relatives: the Duffeys themselves, the
Kellys, Byrnes, McGuires, Crooks, Bagbys, Haleys, Healeys, Haydens, Kanes,
Whites, Hughes, Kennedys, Thompsons, Clancys. This older relative also said
that Duffey's original name was Michael and not Melchisedech. 
	"She is probably remembering my twin and not myself," Melchisedech
said when told about it. "Those supposed kindred that she mentions are good
people, and I know some of them. But they are not my kindred, and I have no
genealogy through them. I was born without father and without mother, and I
was five years old when I was born." 
	Here is a scene when Duffey was in Council Bluffs when five years
old ("The year when I was born," said Duffey). It was in a park on Lake
Manawa. People there were indulging in that weirdest of all total-body
masquerades, 'going swimming'. There was a high diving board over one part
of the lake and people were diving off of that board and disappearing into
the water. Duffey believed that the words 'diving' and 'dying' indicated the
same thing, as he had not observed either of them before. 
	"So thit is the way they do it," said Duffey, and he whacked his
hands together. "I always thought that people died in the house, but how
would you get rid of them if they died there? This is right, that the people
disappear into Lake Manawa when they die." 
	Other people were appearing from under the water, and this was a
more frightening thing. The new people were coming up out of the lake.
Duffey began to count the people who disappeared and those who appeared, and
he found that their numbers were almost the same. 	A strong man with
black moustache and black hair and with a blue bathing suit dived into the
water. After a very little while, a different strong man with black
moustache and hair came up out of the water. This second man had an evil
look, and he had flowing or blurred features. But he looked something like
the first man, like a caricature or deformity of the first man. It was
apparent now that the people who came up out of the water were evil people.
They would have to be watched. 
	It went on. Those who dived in were bright and pleasant looking.
Those who came out were mean, bad, twisted, with their faces half washed
away or only half formed, just not shaped right. The good persons on the
like shore made uneasy way for these evil persons who came up out of the
water. 
	One of the most evil of them all climbed up the ladder to the high
diving board. It was as if he himself intended to dive into the lake as the
good people were doing. Did they not notice that he was one of the bad ones
who had come up out of the lake and had then sneaked into the line with the
good ones? It made the flesh crawl. 
	That 'thing' that was going out now to dive off the board was the
evil strong man who had come out of the water after the first strong man had
gone in. What could such an evil creature change into a second time? Why was
nobody strong enough to prevent him doing it? 
	Then Duffey knew that he himself was strong enough to prevent it.
Should the monster come up out of the water after he had dived in, Duffey
would enforce the condition that he should come out of it dead. There was
spirit-wrenching on Duffey's part to come to this decision to intervene. 
	The monster dived into the witer. Duffey prevented him from coming
out of it again. There was a death struggle going on, inside the mind of the
monster and inside the mind of Duffey, inside that water that was Lake
Manawa and inside the water that is the oceanic matrix of everybody. Duffey
kept the monster in his watery prison. He kept him there till he knew that
he was dead. Then Duffey let go. "I just don't care any more," he said. 
	He couldn't see just what did happen afterwards. People gathered on
the lake shore and in the waters of the lake itself. They were taking a
great interest in a darkish form that they pulled out. People said that a
man had drowned and that he looked absolutely dreadful, that he was
strangled and horrifying. 
	Of course he was horrifying. But imagine how much more horrifying he
woould have been if he was alive when he came out of that water. That was
the first time that Duffey ever killed. 
	In that park in Council Bluffs the squirrels are coal black. It is
the only place in the world that has coal black squirrels. 

	There is another early scene. It's in Boston at about the same time.
It is almost the only Boston scene in the Iowa-based childhood, though in
later years, Duffey often passed himself off coming from Boston. 
	It was in a narrow park surrounded with buildings, and with a blue
sky over it. White clouds were sliding into the blue of that sky.
Melchisedech Duffey was with an older person, an uncle or cousin who called
him Mikey. 
	"You can mke clouds disappear by pointing at them, Mikey," the older
person said. "Pick out one, the smallest one you can see till you learn how
to do it. Now hate it with your whole mind, and you will make it dissapear."

	Melchisedech did point his finger at a little split-off fringe of
cloud. He did concentrate on it in the spirit of hatred and extermination.
And he did make it disappear. He was startled by his new-found power. This
was the first real thing that he had ever made to disappear. Give a power
like this room to operate and there was no limit to what it could do. 
	Melchisedech picked out a larger cloud fragment and made it
disappear. And then he picked a still larger one. He could do it every time,
and he felt the power standing up in him. If he picked out too large a
cloud, it would leave the scene and slide behind buildings before he could
finish with it. But every cloud that escaped his power was greatly
diminished when it escaped. 
	"Is it working, Mikey?" the older person asked. 
	"Oh sure. Every time. Can all people do it?" 
	"All very smart people can do it. And some dogs can. Pointer dogs
can do it best. They get rid of a lot of clouds. When you're wanting rain,
then you always have to shut up the pointers in a shed where they can't see
the clouds. There wouldn't be a cloud left in the sky otherwise." 
	Melchisedech diminished or completely destroyed about forty clouds
that day. And the next day, he came back to the park again and destroyed
about half that many. He had thought it would be easier the second day, but
it was more difficult. The clouds were thicker and tougher that second day,
and small pieces of cloud were hard to find. 
	The third day in the park was disaster for Duffey. The clouds
covered almost the entire sky. It was hard to find small clouds to
exterminate. All were rolling around and joining themselves to bigger
clouds. Then Melchisedech found one and fastened onto it with pointing
finger and pointing mind. He commanded it to melt and disappear. It refused.

	Duffey then used a word that compels obedience. He obliterated that
cloud. Then he pushed all the clouds back from the center of the sky and
left a sunny interval. 
	"Don't do that!" came a warning from somewhere. It was the voice of
a demiurge. 
	"I will do it!" Melchisedech Duffey insisted. But it took more and
more strength to hold the clouds apart. Then a lightning eye appeared right
in the middle. Lightning came out of that eye and slashed open a tree in the
park and buckled the pavement on the edge of the park, this not twenty feet
from Duffey. 
	"Oh, if you're going to do that," Duffey said, "do it to these."
Duffey held up a handful of sticks that he had taken from his pocket. Then,
to horrified observers, it seemed that the lightning came down and struck
the little boy's hand with blinding bolts, again and again, twelve times at
least. 
	"Now they will have some fire and juice in them," Melchisedech said.
"dIwondered how I was going to get it into them." 
	People came and got Duffey and pulled him out of that little park
and to the shelter of a nearby building. He yowled in fury at being drigged
away. He wasn't beaten. He could have continued to hold the clouds apart, to
push them even further apart, to destroy them all. He had just eased up on
it for a moment to get the lightning to animate his sticks. 
	There's a sort of explanation to this. When damp and traveling air
moves over dry and standing air, there will be masses and scatterings of
white clouds produced. But these clouds will all melt back into the dry,
standing air within minutes. You can watch the clouds fade on such a day.
You can predict, when you learn the trick of it, just how rapidly they will
melt. So it is no great trick, when conditions are right, to pick out a thin
cloud and point a finger at it, and make it fade. Every cloud will be fading
away into the air, and new clouds will be formingg and moving in, to fade in
their turn. 
	But, on the following day, the dry standing air will have become
less dry because of the clouds it has absorbed. Clouds may still fade away,
but it will be a much slower process. Then (and it is usually in the night
when the changeover comes) there is a dividing line after which the clouds
will be growing instead of shriveling. They will grow and grow. They will
swell up with lightning and noise. Then they'll break open in rain. 
	That is a neat explanation of the thing. It is even true, to a
limited extent. And yet there were and would always be times when
Melchisedech could command the winds and clouds and rains. He could do it
all. But sometimes he was afraid of it, and he held back. 
	But an important thing had been done in that early encounter. The
talisman sticks had been imbued with lightning. 

	On Duffey's first day in school (his first day in any school) he
always found that the class was very unorganized. So he would bang his hands
together and say: "It just seems that we are wasting our time here unless we
introduce a little bit of system. I have some good ideas on the subject.
We'll use them now." 
	"Oh Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, don't let there be a smart kid again
this year!" Sister Mary Sabina prayed to herself out loud. This was Duffey's
first day in school ever, and he was a little bit direct about things. "Why
does there have to be a smart one every year?" Sister asked her heavenly
friends. 
	"We can break the class up into mixed groups of fours," Melchisedech
said, "with a responsible leader for each group. And we can --" This was
insufferable from a five year old boy who shouldn't have been allowed into
school for another year. 
	"Go ahead and organize it then," Sister said. "You will anyhow.
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, remember, when I come to my last agony, that I bore
these things cheerfully." 
	So Duffey orginized his first class. He did a pretty good job of it
too. 

	CHAPTER III
 
	Now here's a bit about the three slant-faced persons. Duffey saw
them the first time when he was about six years old. 
	They were three boys who were two years older and two years bigger
than himself. They had slack mouths and slant faces, and they slouched along
with their hands in their pockets and with knives in their hands. This was
in the big town house where Duffey was living with some of his pretended
kindred. It was the second largest house in town, and was on the top of the
second highest hill. 
	Duffey was looking out of the Prisoner John Window when he first saw
those three persons. That was a little, peaked, fourth-floor or attic window
that was off of the high room where Melchisedech had his domain. It was not
in the main attic room as were the other three high windows that looked out
in three directions. The Prisoner John Window was in a little closet or cell
off the main attic room. Duffey heard the three slant-faced boys in the road
down below though they thought that they moved in silence. He came to the
window to watch them. He saw them come to the door, and he heard his
aunt-of-that-season open the door to talk to them. 	"That little boy in
this house, can he come out and play?" one of the slant-faces asked. And the
other two slant-faces formed silent words "We want to kill him". But Duffey
could read mouth. 
	"Oh yes, yes," said the aunt, And she came back into the house
calling "Melky, Melky!" But Melchiscdech Duffey was out of the opposite
attic window and he swung by his vine-covered rope to a corner downspout,
and then down it to the ground like a hot-footed squirrel. He was out
through the squash rows and the corn rows of the garden, and off into
Mayfield's Meadow. And he stayed there for a couple of hours. 
	"There were three nice little boys here while you were gone. They
wanted you to play with them but I couldn't find you," the aunt said when he
returned. 
	"Oh nice little boys you nanny goat! " Melchisedech howled. "They're
mean ones. They came to kill me." 
	"Oh Melky, what all imagination you have," the aunt exclaimed. 
	It was about two months later that Melchisedech saw the same
slant-faced boys again. He had been for a morning walk, and he came back to
the house. He looked up, and there were the three of them, inside the house,
looking out of the Prisoner John Window. It was called the Prisoner John
Window by Duffey if by no one else, because Prisoner John had once been held
captive for twenty years in that little closet. He used to look out of that
window all day. That was back in the Civil War days. 
	But now these three boys were inside the house itself, looking out
of that high window and waiting for Duffey to come so that they might kill
him. 
	"He sees us," one of the boys said. 
	"No. The sun's in his eyes. He can't see us," the second one said. 
	"We'll wait for him here, and we'll kill him when he comes up," the
third boy mouthed. Melchisedech was still some distance off, but he could
read mouth. In fear and trembling he came up to the house. They'd kill him
of course, but it was better to be killed than to let any of the big people
know that you were afraid of anything. 
	"Melky, where were you?" the aunt asked suddenly from somewhere.
"Your trunk is already in the buggy. You didn't forget that you were going
to the country this morning, did you? It's time to get in the buggy now." 
	"I forgot it for just a little while," Melchisedech said. 
	"Is there anything you wint to get from the attic before you leave?"

	"No, there sure isn't anything I want to go up there for," he said.
He got in the buggy to go and spend three months in the country, and he was
chortling inside. He laughed at those boys spending all day and all night
there for three months waiting for him to come back so they could kill him. 
	It was two months later that they heard in the country that the
house in town had burned down. Everybody had gotten out of it all right, and
nobody knew what had caused the fire. 
	"They knocked over the old wobbly lamp up there, that's what caused
the fire," Melchisedech said, "and I hope that they didn't get out all
right. If they rake the ashes good, they ought to find three strings of
bones in them." But he was wrong. 
	Melchisedech hoped that he was rid of his three slant-faced enemies.
And he thought that he was -- for five years. 

	When Melchiscdech was eight yeirs old, he was living one winter in a
middle-sized Iowa town with people who pretended to be his relations. He was
one of the boys who served 6:30 mass every morning. The pretended relations
lived right across the road from the church, so Melchisedech was able to get
there no matter how deep the snow might be or how severe the storm. 
	The church had an old rope-operated bell. When pulled with
sufficient force or weight, the rope would rock the bell into movement to
send its heavy booming voice out over the whole town. This would be heard
with a wakening delight by all persons except some of the Protestants. 
	But if the rope was pulled with insufficient force, there was no way
that the bell could be set into motion. It would not stir or move at all to
a light pull. It followed a quantum law. Too little was nothing at all to
it. 
	So the institution of the 'fat altar boy' had come about. One of the
four young boys who served every morning had to be heavy enough to set the
bell into motion when he swung on the rope. 
	But there came a day when the fat altar boy was sick with pneumonia,
and there was consternation among the other three of them. None of them was
heavy enough to set the bell into motion when he swung on the rope. The
other two cowards pointed at Melchisedech. So he had to be the 'fat altar
boy' and he weighed only sixty-three pounds. The genuine fat altar boy had
weighed a hundred and twenty pounds before he got the pneumonia. 
	Melchisedch said silent prayers. Then he made a mighty leap and
caught the end of the rope. He danlgled there and was unable to budge the
mighty bell an inch. He dangled there, and he was impassioned with a golden
fury. Was he a magician for nothing? 
	"I am the golden boy! I am the boy king!" he roared. He roared it
not in sound but in some other medium. "It is mine to order. It is mine to
command. I command that the hand of an invisible giant come down and help me
to pull the rope." 
	It happened. The giant hand came down and seized the rope. The bell
was rocked three times, higher ind deeper each time, and then it broke into
its beautifil and  roaring sound. The people all over town woke with the
secure feeling that it was a giant hand on the rope, and that it was the
hand of a sanctioned giant. The giant was invisible, but the hand was
visible. It was seen clearly by the other three boys. 
	"Who does the hand belong to?" they asked Duffey. "How could a hand
be that big?" 
	"It belongs to one of my giants," Duffey told them. "They have to do
anything I command them, but I'm always reasonable." 
	"How many of them are there?" the boys asked. 
	"There's about a dozen that I've used. I think there will always be
as many as I need." 
	Well, Melchisedech was a boy magician and a boy-king, and he proved
it several times. Many who saw his proofs have since died, or have forgotten
about them. But several still remember. 

	Melchisedech was shunted from place to plice quite a bit. Did he
really have three separate and discrete childhoods at the same time, one of
them mostly in Iowa, one of them in St. Louis, and one of them in Boston?
This does not seem possible, but doubting it or denying it is not a real
impediment to its having happened. 
	There is one explanation: that Melchisedech did have (in some
context or other) a brother one year younger than himself and a sister or
step-sister two years older than himself. These were living, in those years,
with other kindred in other places. And the children were taken a great
distance to visit each other almost every vear. Some of the pretended
kindred worked for railroads, and they and their families could travel free
on all the lines so that there was no great expense involved on the trips. 
	Now the fact was that Melchisedech was an invader and ransacker and
pirate of minds. He would visit with brother or sister for a week, and he
could appropriate and keep every experience that brother or sister
(step-sister) had had for a whole year, every touch and seeing and feeling
and smell and notion 	and daydream. Or at least one of the three young
persons could do such things, could be such a pirate as to steal all the
experiences of the other two. And this one of them, whichever he was, bore
the group name of Melchisedech. 
	This may explain some of the anomalies about the St. Louis
childhood. This is the most intricate of all of them and it is wrapped in
baffling symbolism and allegories. This was mainly the childhood of the
sister-person, which doesn't prevent it being the authentic childhood.
Everything seems to have a second meaning here: it is one rich tangle. When,
in later yeers, Melchisedech had himself analyzed, this particular rich
tangle became a prime target for the analyst. There was concatenated
strangeness in it. There were motifs of high artistry running all through
it. There was sublimity of concept, and something new in transference and
understanding. Yes, and there was a slightly bovine element in it that was
not in Melchisedech Prime. Then, under the forceful pursuit of the analyst,
the tangle quacked once, laid an addled egg, and expired. 
	"I do not know how it came about," the analyst said, "but at one
period of your life, for half a dozen of the early years, you were a girl. I
mean it. You were a girl physically and mentally and psychically. Can you
fill me in on that?" 
	"Nah," Duffey had said. He had asked for his bill, paid it, left the
analyst without another word. But he laughed a lot about it privately. 
	But it was true that Melchisedech was an invader and ransacker and
pirate of minds. There could be forty Melchisedech-aged children in a small
town, and Melchisedech would have entered the minds of all of them and
appropriated the contents. He would know every detail of the insides of
every one of their families, and in great fullness and feeling. He knew so
much about people and places that both people and places came to fear him.
Oh how he had the details!
	There was a shingle-block that served as a back step for one house.
There was a wooden 'crossing' on a street that he did not use (the
'Crossings' bridged the mud gutters from dirt paths to dirt roads) that was
of wood a little different from its fellows, ind Melchisedech would remember
details of grain and color of that crossing for more than fifty years. There
was a notched ear on one of the big coach horses in the livery stable; there
was box-elder wood in the wood box of one of the houses, and elm wood in the
wood box of the next house. Some of these things were known by acute
observation and memory, and some of them were robbed from other minds. But
it was all one realm to Melchisedech. 
	There were sacks of hazel nuts on the back porches of some houses,
and sacks of walnuts on the back porches of others. But in St. Louis,
sometimes, they had gunny sacks full of pecans. There were red squirrels in
Iowa and gray sqirrels in St. Louis. But in Boston they didn't even know
what a squirrel was.
 	And there were the iron words of household things, many of the words
stolen out of minds. There were pump handles with the iron words 'Acme Pump
Company' on them, and pump handles with the words 'Rock Island Pump
Company". There were other iron letters on other handles and bodies:
'Binghampton' or 'Wisconsin' or 'Burn' or 'Cheese Factory' on covers of milk
cans, 'Peerless' or 'Sears' on the handles of cream separators, 'Sturgis' or
'Curtis Improved' or 'Star Barrel' on churns, 'Armstrong's' on cheese
presses, 'S.R. & Co.' or 'Peter Wright' on anvils, 'Schofleids' or 'Auto
Ball Bearing' on grindstones, 'Rdd Ridge' or 'Hubbard's' or 'Jamestown' on
axe heads. Melchiscdech loved stolen iron words that really belonged to
other households than his own. He loved everything that was noticed by
anyone else, and he appropriated it to himself. In McGuire's house, they had
a potty that came all the way from Philadelphia. Melchisedech could see it
plainly, with the scrolled porcelain words on it. And he had never been in
McGuire's house. But enough of that.

	Behind all these flimsy things in the temporal world, there was a
more genuine childhood in which Melchisedech was the Boy King, in which he
had been the Boy King for thousands of years. This was the solid base behind
all the lives. The other and later things are the shadows of it. The Boy
King with the golden hands was real. His dromedary hide tents were real. His
flocks and his green pastures and his silver rivers were genuine. His groves
of figs and dates and olives and apricots and pomegranates were more real
than were the apple trees of Iowa or the plum and peach trees of Missouri.
His fields of sesame and millet were more real than the wheat and corn
fields of Iowa and Nebraska. His tobacco bushes and incense bushes and
coffee bushes were living reality. His grape vines were authentic, and his
silk worms were valid. His silk from camel and ass and ewe and gazelle and
cow and India buffalo was milk in actuality. He had meat from all these
animals, and from all harts and stags, from the swift pigs of Persia, and
from a hundred sorts of fowl. He was the Boy King with the golden hands. He
set out bread and wine for all visitors, sometimes more than a million of
them a day, and he performed miracles without seeming to do so. 
	Mostly he called up giants, both visible and invisible, to effect
his miracles. They could break up rocks and boulders and permit springs and
rivers to flow. They also could bring about the 'Slaughter of the Kings', of
rival kings. For cures of blindness and lameness, Melchisedech would place
his own golden hands on the ailing parts, and the physician could then
effect cures. Melchisedech could turn stories into birds and set them to
flying. The world would long since have run out of birds if it had not been
for this. 
	Mostly Melchisedech kept his powers hidden. He was always there in
his full powers, but one of his powers was invisibility. Melchisedech kept
his person as the Boy King invisible most of the time. The body he wore was
known as the 'urchin disguise'. 
	And Melchiscdech had talismans: nobody knows how many of them. Every
time he gave one away, he somehow received or made another one to take its
place. He had given the first one away when he was no more than three years
old, to an Italian man who was selling little cakes out of a hokey-pokey
pushcart. And this was to bring about or create the first of the persons who
would make up the Duffey Nation. These talismans, which represented special
gifts or blessings or graces or formations, especially to one not yet born,
cannot be easily described. 
	"He got the first of them out of a box of crackerjacks," said Aunt
Mary Ellen Hart (one of the pretended kindred), "but it's much bigger now
than it was when he got it out of the box, and I just don't know how that
came about. I don't know what he made all the others out of, but he made
them to look quite a bit like the first one. And he keeps other things,
Charles. He keeps jars full of blood and such things." 
	"I used to do that too," said Charles Hart, one of the pretended
uncles. "There's no harm in having jars of blood. You can catch weasels if
you have blood around. They'll come to it. There's no harm at all in that
boy." 
	Melchisedech gave these talismans to various persons, mostly on
sudden impulse to persons he had never seen before. They were always to
powerful effect, working their way on unborn kindred of these people. This
was part of the process by which Duffey actually manufactured people. 

	Here is a bit when Duffey was about eleven years old. For several
weeks he had been visiting kindred on a farm where he had never been before.
It was early summer and early morning. Melchisedech had gone out through
orchards to a field of timothy hay. He lay down there, just about a rod from
a fence corner and within the hay. The timothy was tall, and Melchisedcch
was completely hidden. 
	He heard several sounds. Two sounds were from the bush-grown
fence-rows. One was from the extent of timothy hay toward the center of the
field. These three sounds were intended to be muffled. 
	Then there was another sound so soft that it needed no muffling at
all. It was followed by a little yelping bark that was rusty from disuse. It
was a fox bark. Melchisedech knew foxes, but this one he knew in a different
wiy from the regular foxes of the field. The yelping bark came again, more
insistently. 
	Melchisedech sat up. Then he lcpt to his feet and was running. 	A
person maty live all his life in kit-fox country and see none or maybe one
of these smallest foxes. And he would have to live ten lives in kit-fox
country before he heard the rusty yap of one of them. But Melchisedech saw
and heard the kit-fox now. He knew what it was, for it was his totem animal.
And he knew that it had come to warn him. 
	The kit-fox was as sorrel of hair as was Duffey. He was as grinning
of month and as apprehensive of eye as Duffey was. "But for size, we look
about the same," Duffey took time to think as he ran and as he weighed other
things with his own apprehensive eyes. Two of the slack-mouthed,
slanted-faced boys were coming over the two corner jags of the fence.
Another of them was coming out of the deep timothy ahead of Duffey, and
Duffey was surrounded. Melchlscdech Duffey had grown since he had seen these
boys before, but they had grown faster. They were still quite a bit older
and quite a bit bigger than he was. They intended to kill him, and they had
caught him cold. Which way to go? Duffey was already going. He was going the
way the kit-fox went. 
	The kit-fox, which avoids humans more than does any other of North
America, made for one of the boys who was clearing the fence. So Duffey made
for him too. Any way that Duffey should veer off, the boys would have the
interceptors' angle on him, and they would hivc his back or flank undefended
to their knives. 
	The kit-fox took the slant-faced boy low to make him suitable, and
Duffey took him high to bowl him over. Then Duffey cleared the fence with a
leap as high is his own head, and he had all three of the boys behind him.
They'd not catch him now if he could outrun his own blood loss. What blood
loss? Duffey was startled to find how badly he was bleeding. 
	That slant-faced boy had knifed Duffey deeply, and he knew how to
use a knife. He'd have killed Duffey if the kit-fox hadn't slashed him as
sharply is to make him stumble and to give Duffey the edge to bowl him over.

	Duffey very nearly bled to death from that one, but his fortune
held. He was staunched and saved, and in ten days he was well. It had been a
providential kit-fox thatt Duffey had seen, of course. No other kind is ever
seen. 
	CHAPTER IV 

	But childhoods, even gold or sorrel-colored childhoods, are quickly
lived through. (This doesn't apply to the basic childhood which goes on for
thousands of years.) There are simply not very many years to a regular
childhood. When he was twelve years old, Melchiscdech Duffey was sent away
to the first of his boarding schools. So, by his own count at least, his
young manhood had begun. 
	Other things being equal, it is only the difficult child-people who
are sent away to boarding schools for their early high school years. And
when the difficult child-people go, there is always an odd sound behind
them, the sound of hands being washed. The hands are being washed, by
parents, by guardians, by kindred, by (in a special case here) well-meaning
pretended kindred. 
	The more difficult children, of course, are those who are sent away
even before they reach the high school years, so Melchisedech had not been
one of the outrageously difficult ones. He had never given people trouble.
He had only given them unease, as being something out of the cuckoo's nest
and not out of their own. 
	But Duffey's three new friends, with whom he now formed a conspiracy
and consensus, would fall into the outrageously difficult class by this
test. It had an advantage. They knew their way around boarding schools. Yet
they seemed to be the three brightest and most intelligent and most pleasant
persons ever. Well, Charley Murray was sleepy a lot of the time, and yet he
was bright. 
	This Chirley Murray was from St. Louis. Charley and Melchisedech
discovered that they knew many of the same people there. That Melchisedech
knew them only out of the mind of his sister or stepsister and not from his
own encounters was something that he did not tell Murray. Murray did magic
tricks. He had a dozen magic sets and a score of magic trick books. When he
discovered that Melchisedech was apt with his hands and with tools, he had
him make many props for new magic acts. Melchisedech was a born carpcntcr
and joiner and cabinet maker. He was a born machinist and pattern maker: and
lathes and such were available in the Manual Training section of the school.
Melchisedech was a good metal spinner and wood turner and mold caster. 
	There were some things that could not be made by any of the trades
or techniques however. And yet they were made. They were made after
Melchiscdech had received Murray's request that he needed them. And they
were made in the middle of the night. But there were no tools sophisticated
enough to make them with, none available there. 
	"What do you use to make them, Melky, brownies?" Charley Murray
demanded once. And this seemed to perturb Melchisedech. 'Brownie' is a vague
word, but as a popular description it might have hit just what Melcilisedech
did use. Very large brownies, if you want to call them that. 
	"Why do you ask how this was made," Melchisedech growled as he gave
that new-made prop to Charley Murray. "It was made to order. It was made to
my order. That's how it was made. Ask no more about it." 
	The order by which the most extreme things were trade was sometimes
an order given by Melchisedech to one of those ebony giants. So a thing
might have been made by giant hands that are stronger than a drill press and
cannier than a mortising machine. It was only by accident that Chirley
Murray soon discovered that Duffey had faber-giants under his command. And
it was only by accident that he discovered that as he Murray could work
magic tricks, so he Duffey could work real magic that was not trickery. This
discovery did not completely reverse their relationship to each other
(Charley was inventive in ways that Duffey could never be, and Charley was
an older boy, and he had developed early leadership qualities), but it did
compel in Charley a new and permanent respect for Melchisedech Duffey. 
	Another of the intimates was John Rattigan from Chicago. John was a
scrambler and money-maker. He, like Murray, was about two years older than
Duffey. He had a witty look, and the look sufficed. You'd spot him that
'I'm-going-to-take-you' grin, and you'd be wary of him, and he'd take you
anyhow. He knew every wholesaler of gadgets and sundried in town, sellers of
candy and fruit and tobacco and such. He bought from them all, and he sold
clandestinely to the two hundred boarding school boys and the three hundred
and fifty day students of the school. He made fast and happy money out of
his enterprises. He cut corners. And he sold the corner-cuys far more than
the full pieces were worth. 
	There was Sebastian Hilton who was the first of them in so many
ways. Sebastian already had fast and happy money and didn't have to make it.
He was the de-luxe rich kid, he was even younger than Melchsedech, the only
one out of the hundred and fifty boys in the ninth grade who was younger.
And he was slight. He had what the ladies call a 'not-long-for-this-world'
look. Naw, he wasn't long for this world. He had ai better world on order
and it was being built for him. It would be very expensive and parts of it
were being brought from France and Italy. But Sebastian did look puny with
his pale, greenish complexion. 
	Well, he was like a puny panther. You would put on the gloves with
him at your peril. He was the fastest kid with his hands that you ever saw,
and to fight him with gloves was suicide. To fight him bare-fisted was
worse. He was a diabolical schemer and he took unfair advantage of the
bullies. He had a whole assembly of come-ons, a bait box to hook the most
rancid bully. He had a simper he could use when he chose. He had effeminate
gestures that he could slio into. He could even go into tears at a moment's
notice, and what bully-boy could resist that? 
	"Don't do it, Sebash, don't do it!" Charley Murray used to bet.
"It's cruel and unusual." Charley had a lot of compassion, and Charley and
Sebastian had previously been to school together elsewhere. "Don't do it,
Sebash. He's too big and awkwird. He'll get hurt." 
	But Sebastian would stalk his prey with simpering and tears. And
what a sickening, sissy, sleasy kid Sebastian could be when he wanted to!
And the climax woudd always be well witnessed, for Sebastian Hilton had a
perfect sense of the theatrical. He could lay almost any face open, but
especially a fat face, with his fast angling fists and the sharply embossed
rings that he wore on each hand. He could rack a big boy completely with
body punches that were only about eight inches too low. He knew all the
tricks out of the special combat books. 
	And a slight boy is always lionized after he takes the measure of a
larger boy, after identifying thit larger boy so conspicuously as a bully.
"Baw, lemmy alone, you big bully!" was Sebastian's favorite squawl. It was
sickening. 
	"I wish he'd traade that in for another line!" Charley Murray used
to moan. But Sebastian knew better thin to change a good line before it was
worn out. Sebastian shed a lot of blood. He entrapped and scuttled a number
of hulking kids before both the boarders and the day students got onto his
game. And, if he ever over-matched himself, Sebastian was as fast afoot as
he was with his hands. 
	In the gymnasium, Duffey found that he could take Sebastian with his
fists, or with borrowed giant fists. But Duffey wasn't big, and Sebastian
had never entrapped him. They were friends and they fought only for fun in
the gym. 
	But there was another way that Duffey could never take Sebastian,
never in this world. And it hurt. Duffey had to admit that Sebastian was
smarter than himself. Duffey had never before met a boy that was smarter
than himself, and he was unprepared for such a thing. This would be the only
clear-cut case in Duffey's life or lives that he would find anyone
absolutely smarter thin himself. There would be half a dozen close ones, but
no other case of clear Superiority.
	John Rattigan wanted a talisman from Duffey, and Duffey won t give
it to him. 
	"No, no, it just won't work, John," Duffey insisted. "It just isn't
meant to be. Something would go wrong, I know it would. You are not one of
the people I'm supposed to give a talisman to." 
	"But I don't beheve in them," Rattigan insisted. "There is nothing
can go wrong if I don't beheve in them." 
	"I won't do it, John," Duffey still protested. "I do beheve in them,
and something will go wrong. They're not to play with." 
	Then one day Rattigan gave Duffey a wrapped package. "Hold this for
a minute, Melky," he said. And Duffey held it, but he felt through the
wrappings that something was wrong. Then Rattigan took it back from Duffey
and unwrapped it. It was a talisman that Rattigan had made as a copy of
Duffey's talismans, and it was a good copy. 
	"Good! It's a perfect copy," Rattigan crowed, "and I tricked you
into holding it in your hands. Now your power has gone into it. It will
work!" 
	"If it works, it will work wrong," Duffey said darkly. Rattigan
understood only about half on the matter of the talismans. Duffey himself
understood only about two-thirds. But Sebastian, with his quick and
unearthly mind, understood it all from the beginning. 

	Well, where was this school that Melchisedech Duffey was now
attending? And what was its name? Well, there isn't any one set of answers
to those questions. 
	Possibly it was Creighton in Omaha. Did they not have a high school
as well as a college in those years. Or it may have been Loras in Dubuque,
or Rockhurst in Kansas City, or it might have been that boys' boarding
school in the shadow of St. Louis University. Really, there wasn't two
nickles' worth of difference in those places. And, as a matter of fact, the
'school' was at least two of the places named. 
	Melchisedech's four years of boarding school high school, while it
was all a single experience, did not all happen in the same place. He
changed schools at least once, and possibly twice. And those other difficult
boys were used to changing schools. Melchisedech Duffey and Charley Murray
were together all those four years, but there was a year or so when John
Rattigan turned into Delbert Dugan and when Sebastian Hilton turned into
Martin Troyat, this to preserve the group of four. Sebastian reappcared in
the last year, however. He'd been to school in Europe in the interval. He
was with Melchisedech the first and last year of their four year experience.

	The four boys, being good students who didn't have to spend a lot of
extra time over books, went out a lot. They all had money. Melchisedech had
some of that hand-washing money with which his false kindred had stuffed him
off, and he had money that he made in ventures with John Rattigan. Rattigan
had money from his own scrambling and scheming. Sebastian had money because
he was a rich kid. And Charley Murray had money beciiise he was one of the
St. Louis Murrays. 
	The boys would catch the movies first-run downtown. They saw every
vaudeville bill that came to the city. They ate at downtown restaurants
where the meals might run as high as sixty cents. And they sat on stools at
that short bar between the kitchen and the long bar in Traveler's Saloon. 
	Traveler had no objection to serving twelve and thirteen year old
boys when he knew them to be sensible. He served them small glasses of
whisky at five cents a gliss, and John Rattigan bought a full quart to
retail to his school mates in money-making mixtures. He did this twice a
week. 
	They ate German lunches. They rode streetcars, and went to ice cream
parlors. And only when it was after ten o'clock at night and they knew that
all the doors were locked at the school did they return there along
California Street, or along whatever street it might be in whatever town was
the scene that year. 
	They would climb over the walls that surrounded the school area.
Then they would climb the walls of their own building within the area. John
Rattigan the scrambler climbed like a monkey. Sebastian Hilton climbed like
a squirrel. Melchisedech Duffey climbed like a competent and careful boy of
intelligence and agility, and one who knew that he could call on giant hands
for support if he needed them. 
	But Charley Murray climbed in nightly terror. He was the tallest of
them and had the greatest reach. But sometimes, mid-way in a climb, he would
freeze in fear. And yet he would force himself to it. He would make it all
the way up with them, up the walls and through the windows. 
	Then it would be low-wick lamp time in the rooms, and
stuff-the-door-crack time. The merchants Rattigan and Duffey would set out
their merchandise for the ten-thirty market if it was a store night. And
Charley Murray and Sebastian Hilton would fling themselves feverishly into
their books, for a very little while. 
	Sebastian was as fast of mind and eye as he was of hand and foot. He
devoured books in every tongue of the world, as he said. Really he had
travelled in France and Italy, ind he was far and away the best first-year
French Student in the school. He was the best first-year student at
everything: Latin, Greek, English Composition, Algebra, American History,
Religion. And he was the best customer that Rattigan and Duffey had for
their book sales.
	Rattigan and Duffey bought and sold a hundred or so books, new and
used every week. Rattigan had a feel for value and profit in books. Duffey
didn't have it at first, but he pirated the mind and thinking fingers and
eyes of Rattigan till he had a pretty good feel for money worth. 
	Melchiscdech also ransacked and pirated the minds of Charley Murray
and Sebastian Hilton. From Murray he received a great good nature and an
easy honesty, and the Lace Curtain Irish elegance. He would go back and dip
into that mind for the rest of his life whenever he felt himself becoming
despondent, whenever he felt himself becoming dishonest. 
	From Sebastian he pirated a really extensive and light-suffused
intelligence and infallible taste. There was no way he could appropriate the
complete swiftness of the Sebastian mind, and there were things in that mind
that assumed their proper shape only under the conditions of high speed. But
Duffey could handle very much of what he found there. But to the store
again. 
	If it was a store night, the boys would come in with the merchandise
about twenty minutes after ten o'clock. The boys brought stuff they wished
to sell, and Rattigan and Duffey would take the things and sell them on
commission. They didn't make a great amount on the commission sales: they
were mostly an accommodation. But these floating items did add to the
attractiveness and volume of the merchandise ad they gave a good setting to
the profit items. 
	The sales rail front ten-thirty to midnight on sale nights, about
three nights a week. Candy and sandwiches were on sale every night, but not
the full line of merchandise. The sales were held by candle light or by
kerosene lanip. After curfew bell, at ten minutes to ten, the gas was turned
off to the boys' roomns from ten o'clock at night till five o'clock in the
morning. Boys were not to have gas lights available during the hours for
sleep. 
	So it was always dim light for the sales, and Rtttigan didn't really
ned his green eye shade in that faint light. But it had become his trade
mark. There was lots of food for sale. There was new sheet music and new
magazines as well as books. There were carbonated drinks, and there were
water-mix sweet drinks. They had root beer and ginger beer, California Fruit
chewing gum, coffee and tea and cocoa, candies and sweet bulls. There were
the always popular pigs' feet. 
	At about mid-point in a sale, Charley Murray would put aside his
reading and would do several new and stunning magic tricks for the
customers. Candle light and low-wick kerosene light give great advantage to
magic acts that might be exposed as trickery by the strong, white
illumination of gaslight fixtures. 
	There was a whisky bar for the older boys. Thirteen year old John
Rattigan was firm in his refusal to sell to anyone under sixteen years old.
They sold the small glasses of watered whisky for ten cents each and seven
cents of that was profit. There would be as many as a hundred boys coming to
some of the sales, and as much as ten dollars profit. But when midnight rang
on the ghostly bell across the area, no more transactions might begin. 
	"Time, gentlemen!" John Rattigan would announce. "Quickly, quickly,
let us wind it up quickly. " And they would wind it up as quickly is they
could. When the last of the customers was gone, the four boys who lived in
the room would pray, and then they'd go to bed. Rattigan was always the last
one. He would blow Out the final candle. he would undress in the dark, for
he was curiously modest. He would take off his green eye shade last of all.
Then he would go to bed. 
	So they lived out their days in enterprise and diligence and
happiness and learning and purity. 
 
	CHAPTER V 

	'Chastity is the lily among virtues and makes men almost equal to
angels. Nothing is beautiful but what is plire, and the purity of men is
chastity. Chastity is called honesty, and its possession honor. It is also
called integrity, and its opposite, corruption. In short, it has its own
peculiar glory of being the fair and unspotted virtue of both soul and
body.' 
	St. Francis de Sales 

	Castitas, castitas, and the peculiar chastity of mind that is the
requirement of the highest intelligence! These were correct definitions and
statements. Not one of the boys ever became so base as to depart from these
definitions or to use words to mean their opposites. These four were good
boys who had never been corrupted, and several of them would never be
corrupted in any of their world or lives. Melchisedech Duffey would suffer a
little corruption now and then, but he never repudiated the definitions or
defended corruption as anything other thin the opposite of integrity. 
	Everybody his lived in a golden age. Quite a number of persons
continue to live in one. 
	As to his special state in life, Duffey had already made all the
explanations possible. He had selected an older priest of the school as his
confessor, and he had explained that he was a true magician and sorcerer and
magus. This was accepted, and was always taken into account. Melchisedech
was told that a magus was subjected to peculiar temptations in life:
overweening pride and other things; and he was given much good advice. 
	There was, as it happened, in the neighborhood and in the
acquaintence of the boys, a Lily among the virtues who was also a beauty
without blemish. The boys held Sunday afternoon sales that were licit. These
were allowed and approved by the Jestuit masters of the school. To the
Sunday sales would come many of the day students is well as the borders. And
also nonstudents would come, and students from other schools, friends,
visitors, grown-up people, even girls. One of the girls who came most often
was Lily Koch. 
	As a merchant, Lily was the counterpart of Rattigan and Duffey. She
merchandised at St. Mary Major's School for Girls, a combination boarding
school and day school. And Lily was a combination student. She was a
boarding student when she wished to be, and she had a private room such is
only the richer students had. And she was also a day student when she wished
to be, for she had rich and powerful kindred who lived in a mansion that was
directly across the road from the front gate of St. Mary Major's. In her
room at school, she held a Wednesday night sale which was private, and in
the house of her kindred she held a Saturday morning sale which was public.
This Saturday morning sale was sometimes in the big living room and
sometimes on the veranda, depending on the weather. 
	Lily lacked one item for her Wednesday night sales and she asked the
boys to get it for her. Boys could go in some places where girls couldn't.
So Duffey began, once a week, to buy Lily a quart of better whisky than he
and Rattigan sold to their own customers. Lily could get shaved ice. She
could get French bitters and such things. She served her classmates classier
drinks than the boys ever knew the names of. 
	Lily sold art at the Saturday morning public sales. Duffey had
hardly known what art was. But it came to him now like a revelation, and he
would have to know all about it. 
	One Saturday morning, Sebastian Hilton bought a small piece of
statuary from Lily Koch for one hundred dollars. He paid her in cash after
findig that he had left his check book back it school. Rich kids can pay
other rich kids such sums without turning the least shade green. And
Melchisedech knew with furious exasperation that the statuette was really
worth the hundred dollars, and that the taste of these two young persons was
worth all the hammered gold in the world. There were other art things there:
pictures, lockets, statues, weavings to hang on the wall, porcellain
figures, iron figures, bronzes. There were also insufferably cute pieces to
be sold to insufferably cute grown-up customers, and Duffey felt the
laughing disdain of Lily when she sold such. 
	Melchisedech invaded, ransacked, and pirated the minds of Sebastian
Hilton and Lily Koch for this new thing. He also ransacked the minds of
several grown-up persons who came to some of Lily's sales. And
Melchiseciech, with what he pirited and ransacked, and with what he already
possessed unknowingly, became an instant art expert. Art expert was one of
the vocations to which he would be faithful all his life. The part that he
lifted from Sebastian did not have the high-speed condition of other things
that he lifted from that mind. The judgments he got there on this were in
absolute balance at any speed or at no speed it all. 
	He encountered other things in the mind of Lily Koch. She knew when
he was there. She came and talked with him there in in old way that is
closer than words. She told him to come any time he wished, that she would
put up a pavilion for him there, and that he should put up a dromedary-hide
tent for her there. But would she remember in the world what she told him in
her mind? Yes, she would and she did. She was very friendly and very easy
with Melchisedech. 
	At her sales, Lily did not use a green eye shade as John Rattigan
did. For her trademark as merchant, she used to snap on celluloid cuffs or
gauntlets. They were more common than they are now. And when high noon
struck on Saturday, she would cry, "Time, ladies and gentlemen! Quicckly,
quickly!" And after the customers were all gone, she would put away her
things and unsnap her celluloid cuffs until next Saturday. 
	One Saturday morning, Melchisedech Duffey brought one of his
talismans and gave it to Lily Koch. 
	"It is for you," he said simply, and then he attempted to bolt out
of the room. Lily hooked him by the collar and jerked him back.
"Wait, wait, wait!" she cried. "This can't be for sale. It isn't allowed to
sell them. This is real. Anyone can see that this is something special and
cannot be sold." 
	"No, it's not to sell, Lily. I want to give it to you so you can
give it to somebody else someday. Take it. I have to leave now." 
	"Wait, wait!" she jerked him back. "But this is genuine. Who is it
from?" 
	"It's from myself, Lily. You will give it to someone. I don't know
how to say it, and you don't know what I mean." 
	"Oh, I know what you mean. Sebastian told me that you were one of
the magi, and I had already about guessed it. They are the only ones who
could give something shaped like this. One could form an extraordinary
person with one of these. One cpuld pour almost everything into such a
person. But there's nothing that I can do with it, Melky. I'm already born
and, beyond that, I'm already finished. And I will never have any children
of my own." 
	"I thought that you might give it, well, to --" 
	"Oh, to her? I didn't know you even knew about her. Why couldn't it
have been me instead? I don't think that it'll work, but we'll try it if you
wish. She is already born, but she sure is empty-headed. So this is what
she's been waiting for! I love her, and you will also. Trust me. I'll do
what I can. It may work. 	Sure it'll work." 
	"You do what you can with it, Lily," Melchisedech said. "I guess
they might not work every time." 
	"Why couldn't it have been you and I, Melky?" Lily asked. Two twelve
year old persons, and they were asking, 'Why couldn't it have been you you
and I' as if something were irrevocable. And it was irrevocable. 
	Lily looked at Melchisedech with level eyes ind then kisssed him on
the mouth. 
	"You get out of here now," she said. "You hand out magic like that,
and you don't even know what it is."
	No, Duffey didn't yet understand very much about his own talismans.
He was glad that Lily Koch seemed to understand part of it at least. 
	CHAPTER VI
 
	In one thing and by latter standards, the four boys were not very
precocious. Forty or fifty years later, it would be a case that baseball and
sex and kindred subjects were organized and regimented and made compulsory
from the third grade of school on. The things have backfired, but the
failures have not been recognized. "I tell you," a man said just the other
day, "they organize it all too early. I tell you that early regimentation
turned me against both baseball and sex forever." That was a double ruin. In
the childhood of Duffey, it was not quite so organized as it later became,
and yet it was organized. 
	Even in those old decades the compulsion had begun. A series of
dances was arranged every year and attendance was compulsory. Duffey and
Rattigan and Murray knew girls, but they didn't know 'girls'. Sebastian, who
had been in France and Italy, knew a little bit more about 'girls'. He had,
in fact, had an affair with a countess, he said. And affairs with countesses
are closely regimented. This claim was something for the other boys to hoot
at him for, and they hooted. But Sebastian wasn't at all abashed. It was
true, he insisted. And yes, he admitted it had been funny. he wished that he
was at liberty to tell just how funiny it really was. 
	And Duffey, dipping into the Sebastian mind, found that there really
was a countess and that she was now twelve years old. Duffey even extracted
the information (not from Sebastian -- he couldn't have known it -- but from
the fates somewhere) that he Duffey would someday make the acquaintance of
this Countess and that she would be his close friend. 
	But that didn't solve the problem of the dances. The first of the
series was to be held in the fine home of Lily Koch's kindred as this was a
very large house and very handy to the girls' school, and as the family was
very pushy about such things. Twenty-five of the boarding boys of Duffey's
school were to escort twenty-five girls from St. Mary Major's. 
	"Oh, there has to be a way out of it," Charley Murray would mutter,
and he would chew off all his fingernails and half of his fingers. 
	"They can't make mne do it. They can't make me go," Duffey would
growl. 
	"If we're going to our doom, then let us go elegantly," Sebastian
Hilton offered. "And sharpen up a little bit, boys. Wear gloves if you have
any. And scarves. Y've hired a carriage for this evening. We'll do it in
style." 
	It was early October and still warm, and they really didn't need
either gloves or scarves. 
	"It's only three blocks to the girls' school," said Rattigan who was
Parsimonious. But the others jeered him down. If they had any chance at all,
it would be to go in style. One other rich kid in school had hired an
automobile and driver to take himself and his party, but what possible style
was there in an automobile? 
	So Sebastian's hired carriage with liveried driver pulled up for
them that night. The carriige had style and the coachman had style. It even
had a post-boy's horn on which Charley Murray blew rousing notes. The horses
were Cleveland Bays, and there were no more stylish horses in the world. The
carriage and the jouncing ride in it were enough to lift the spirits of any
condemned persons. 
	Even at St. Mary Mtjors where they arrived with their style drooping
only a little bit, the situation was cased by their friend Lily Koch being
one of the four girls the boys were to pick up. 
	"Who will squire whom?" Sebastian asked out of his orderly mind.
	"Nobody will squire anybody," Lily stated. "They think they can make
us do it that way, but they can't. We will all be together, and nobody will
be with anyone else." 
	That was like new life being given to dying people. They went out,
and the four girls got into the carriage. What, got into the carriage just
to go across the street? Sure, to ride around a dozen blocks and then to end
up across the street. The carriage was made to hold four, and there were
eight of them. The four guys piled in too, and they went for a happy and
whopping ride. Charley Murray was very good on that post-horn, and he gave
them some hectic tunes. They were fox-hunting tunes. The boys were only with
girls on that carriage ride. They were not yet with 'girls'. 
	The fun remained till they made their circuit of quite a few blocks
and arrived at their destination across the road from the girls' school and
dismounted and entered the big house. And then, in the face of the
arrangements and formality and scrutiny, it all shriveled. 
	Oh flushing horror, they were going to make them pair off! And they
were going to make the boys shake hands with the girls. The boys had sat on
the girls' laps in the carriage, but they were too flustered to shake hands
with them in public. And some of the girls were even more shook. 
	"I'm going to write my mother to take me out of this school," Mary
Anne Michaels said. "I'm going to tell her that I'll kill myself if I can't
get out of this school and go home. And I will kill myself if she says no.
But how will that help tonight?" 
	"I know how I can get out of it," said the girl named Sedalia
Schoefeld. "I know a trick so I can vomit whenever I want to. I'll play real
sick. Then they'll have to let me go back across the road and go to bed." 
	"Wait! Turn this way. Get some on me!" Lily Koch cried. "Then
they'll have to let me go across the road to change my dress, and I won't
come back." But Lily was laughing. 
	"Wait kids," she said. "There's better ways. Follow me. I know
places to go."
	Lily knew that house. They went through big rooms and down long
hallways. They went up back stairways. Somehow they were up in the
sound-proofed billiard room in the attic. (The sound of ivory balls striking
against each other affected the lady of that house perishingly, so this was
the most sound-proof room in town.) 
	They had a good time up there, the eight of them. They played Kelly
pool and rotation. They had two victrolas there, one with the old cylinder
records, one with the new disc records. They played rag music and they
danced rag dances. But they sure wouldn't have endured the formalized horror
of dancing at the dance downstairs. There was food and drink there, from
Lily's stock from across the street and from a couple of stores and pickic
houses and confectioners in Germantown. And just from the big kitchen
downstairs. It was good eating. All the boys and girls had been too nervous
and upset in the stomachs to cat before coming to the dance. 
	There was some of that Germantown wine. There was rag music and jazz
music and even honey-bunny music on the victrolas, and they had a fine time
of it. 
	But why, persons of a cruder era might ask, could they not have had
a fine time at the formalized dance downstairs? Oh, such people don't know
anything, not anything. 
	Mary Anne Michaels became very friendly with Charley Murray. Sedalia
Schoefeld became very friendly with Rattigan. Edith O'Dwyer made
conversation with Duffey but Lily Koch teased about Duffey really being her
boy. Sebastian shot the best pool, but perhaps it wouldn't always be so. It
was just that he had shot more of it. Duffey felt the talent for that table
rising in him, and Charley Murray said that they would have a pool table put
in their house at home for Christmas of that year. 
	Oh, the hours went by pleasantly enough. And when their sense of
time started to come around (Sebastian had a gold watch, but the cover on it
was stuck and wouldn't open, so they didn't know for sure what time it was),
they cracked the door of the sound-proof room so they could hear the
break-ups and departures. 
	When that turmoil had crested but was not quite completed, the eight
young persons went down the back stairs and out the back door and then
around to their carriage, and piled in it, and were away again. Duffey had
the post-horn this time, abd he blew it with vigor. 
	"Stay with it, Melky," said Lily who held him on her knees and who
was very fond of him. "Enthusiasm beats talent every time. Blow dear, blow."
They went around another dozen blocks with singing and squealing and
horn-blowing, and they stopped right across the road from where they had
started, in front of the big iron front gate of St. Mary Major's. 
	They all kissed in the carriage. Then, when they came through the
gate and through the door, they could truthfully say that they had already
done it. Their words were accepted and that was good. None of them could
have done it under scrutiny. 
	It wasn't too fearsome going to dances, if only you could avoid
going to the dances, themselves. 
	CHAPTER VII

	That was only in the first part of the first year. But things got
better afterwards till they reached a thousand-tentacled perfection. And
there was a lot of educating going on at the school or schools. It was all
high quality. It was a great success and a great pleasure. Yes education is,
like sex, an ultimate thing, and nobody will ever speak or write the details
of it. That would be an uneducated aberration. But education is one of the
great and passionate things, and there can hardly he enough of it. 
	There were lots of encounters going on and about the schools,
encounters between persons and groups of persons, between persons and
events, between persons and surroundings, between persons and memories and
premonitions and ideas. There were encounters between different areas of the
same person. Duffey even had an encounter with some soupe aux grenouilles in
France. 
	Melchisedech, once, just before he reached his thirteenth birthday,
ate soupe aux grenouilles in France. He had ordered the soup in genuinely
throaty and proper French and he had not disgraced himself in any way. This
was at Colmar in Alsace. That was not properly in France at that time, and
yet it was France. The chances are that he was staying it the Hotel du Champ
de Mars at 2, Avenue de la Marna. He ate this soup at the Rotisserie
Schillinger. He also ate Tournedos au Poivre Vert. He felt pleasant and
worldly about the whole thing. 
	That's really all there is to the episode. Two elder persons whom he
did not know were approaching him. He didn't know them because they hadn't
been in any dipperful that he had dipped out of other minds or other
environments. He could have dipped them up fresh at that moment and known
them, but he didn't. And, since he accepted the fact that he didn't know
these older persons, the scene faded and was gone. 
	Duffey, of course, had stolen this scene from the mind and memory of
Sebastian Hilton. But it was a valid scene. He could savor every flick of
salt in the soupe aux grenouilles. He could see and smell every grain of
pepper on the peppercorns. The scene became a part of Duffey. It was an item
in the Melchisedech memory forever. 
	Melchisedech gave a talisman to Charley Murray, and he gave one to
Sebastian. 
	"But I will never have a son," Charley said. 
	"Nor I," Sebastian said. "But there is some one for each of us to
give our talisman to, or Duff would not have given them to us. Art-in-life,
like art-in-art, must be planned for a long time before it is born. And the
most rational way, if one is a magician and a magus, is to give a talisman.
I believe that one of these will work, Duffey, and one of them will half
work. Murray's will work. But the one I give my talisman for will never be
completely your man, or anybody's." 

	Sebastian Hilton met Duffey at dusk one evening outside the main
gate of the school. It was the last day but one of their last year in
school. The next morning they were to leave. But Sebastian was white and
shaking, and his dark eyes had purgatorial gleams. And this was the boy who
was not scared of anything, 
	"Melchisedech, they've found their way here," he said. "They came
within a little of killing me. And if they had killed me, there would have
been no one to prevent their killing you too. They've gone for double here.
The only ones they could be after are myself and yourself. We are their only
possible prey, their only authentic targets. I have been absolutely careful.
Have you? 
	"Have I what, Sebastian?" Duffey asked. But he knew. It was the
three slack-mouthed and slanted-faced young men who were here. They were the
ones who had haunted Duffey from his early childhood. Had they found this
place because Duffey had somehow been careless? 	Duffey saw them on
the roof then. He hadn't seen them before, but he had sensed that they were
here. The three saw Duffey, and they fastened their eyes on him and on
Sebastian. They were still about two years older and two years larger than
Melchisedech was, but likely they didn't age or grow in an ordinary way. 
	School friends were climbing up the walls after the menacing three.
These friends were going fearlessly up the stippled bricks and castellated
window corbels to catch the three slanty youths on the roof and deal with
them. They had the school boy sense that the three were unmitigated enemies.

	"You know who they are, don't you?" Sebastian asked with the sharp
tone that impHed that Melchisedech should know, though of course the other
boys wouldn't. 
	"I suppose so," Duffey said. But he didn't, not the names for them,
not in words. He would never know that. Duffey could have found out front
Sebastian at that moment if he had asked. But he was too proud. "It's
dangerous for the two of us to be together ever," Sebastian said. "They can
use the two of us as a base line and triangulate in on us. There are fewer
than a hundred of us targets in the world, and two of us in one place will
register too strongly on their receptors. We attract talent too much, and
they'd kill us both. I have been careful, and I know that you have been. But
I knew that you were one. And you didn't know that I was. So you have not
been as careful as I have. And yet we will be together very much, however
dangerous it is. The greater thing should never give in to the lesser." 
	The last of those slant-faces disappeared from the edge of the high
roof. The face left an after-image of absolute malevolence and a promise of
blood still to be spilled. Half a dozen of the school mates were up there on
the roof then, and they should have surrounded the slant-faced youths
somewhere in the steeps and valleys of the roof. The school nates hunted
fearlessly. They knew out of their intuitions that the knife-wielding
slant-faccs could kill only those they were sent to kill. 
	"Well, they didn't find us for several years," Sebastian said. "They
didn't find us till our last day but one at this school. Tomorrow we'll go
from here. You know that they won't be caught on the roof though." 
	"I know it," Duffey said. But why wouldn't they be caught. The three
sleazy youths couldn't be found on that twilight roof at all. And there was
no way they could have gotten off of it. 
 
	Book Two:
	Late Boyhood of a Magus

	"Then Melchisedech, the king of Salem, brought out bread and
wine..." 
	Genesis: 14-18 

	This is not leaving those earlier years forever. Neither those years
nor the accounts of them are complete. Only a little bit of one of them and
a hint of the other three have been given, but there was never any reason
for these years to stand in strict sequence. 
	Melchisedech one day had the feeling of coming to himself in an
obscure place where the clear way was lost. He was in a large city, on a
street that bordered a green park, and he was burdened with a very heavy
suitcise. He was without instructions, but this was his case: 
	Melchisedech had been told that everything had been done for him
that could be expected. With all fine wishes and recommendations, he was on
his own now. He had been given, in a final act of the hand-washing ceremony,
one hundred dollars. This was quite a bit of money then. One could live on
that for three or four months. It had also been pointed out to him that a
willing worker could find a job without much trouble. This was true. 
	Melchisedech Duffey was fifteen years old and he had just finished a
good high school education. He came to this crossroads of life a little
earlier than did many boys. He had a big suitcase full of clothes and tools,
and he had six hundred and fifty dollars in money (this included the hundred
dollars given him by the well-wishing kindred). Melchisedech had been a good
merchant during his boarding school days, and he had sold out all those
businesses to a consortium of other boys. 
	It was the last day of May of the Year of the Lord 1915. It was on
this day also that Melchisedech began to grow the first of his beards to
make himself look older. He had an uncontrollable urge to travel, to go to
one or another of his cities, to go to Chicago, to go to Boston, to go to
New York. He began to snap his fingers, and golden sparks cascaded from
them. This really happened. Melchisedech had the golden touch at his fullest
then. A sturdy little girl saw it and ran over to him out of the park. 
	"How do you do it?" she asked. "I'm a fan of yours, you know." 	"I'm
magic," Duffey said, "but I haven't any fans." He snapped his fingers once
more and made another shower of gold sparks. From this he knew that he would
have good fortune in all his enterprises for a while. 
	"If I was magic I'd make a golden coin instead of golden sparks,"
the sturdy little girl said. "I think you need a manager. You can make
coins, you know." 
	"I love a practical woman," Duffey said, and he kissed her. He
snappcd his fingers again, and a gold coin danced in the air and rang on the
sidewalk. There is nothing that has so mellow a tone as a gold coin ringing
its signature. "It's yours," Duffey said, and the little girl picked up the
five dollar gold piece. "You are my luck, you are my love," Duffey said, and
he kissed her again. 
	"Why don't you do it all the time if you can do it?" she asked. 
	"Because I forgct that I can do it. I am always forgetting the
wonderful things that I can do. It's nice to have one fan in the world." 
	"I'm Gretchen Sisler," the girl said. "I'm almost nine. My mother
works in restaurants, but she's just been fired. We can live for a while on
this though." 
	"I'm almost sixteen," Duffey grinned. "We will meet again,
Gretchen." 
	"We certainly will," she agreed. "I'll see to that." 
	Duffey set out traveling, on foot, with his suitcase that weighed a
hundred pounds. He went downtown. He could have taken a street car, but
there were certain thoughts and speculations that he could only experience
while walking. He walked around for half a day with that heavy suitcase.
This was to give fortune a chance to arrange things for him, to shift the
scenery where needed, and to marshal the prospects and strike the tone. He
went into the Dublin and had cheese and black bread and beer. He had tricked
himself out of his traveling urge by his long walking, so he had saved train
fare. He needn't go anywhere. He was already there, in one of his half dozen
cities. He was a very strong boy, but he was tired now. 
	One of the Dublin girls (she was named Evelyn London) came and sat
with him. Oh, she was probably young. About ten years older than Duffey.
What she reilly was was Duffey's second fan of that day, and both of them
would be forever. 
	"You are my boy, you are my love, you are my prince," this Evelyn
said as she played with Melchisedech's sorrel hair. "You are a gold star." 
	"Do you know anybody with a building to sell, Evelyn?" he asked her.

	"The building just across the street and down a block," she said. "I
will write down the name of the man who owns it, and where he is. And I will
walk to it with you. It's just what you want. I knew you would come today to
buy it." 
	The building was a large and rickety horse barn or livery stable,
and it was empty. This was on Walnut Street downtown in St. Louis, Missouri.

	 "It's just what you want," Evelyn told him again. "It is big enough
for you, and you can get it cheap. Oh you can get rich and glorious here,
Melky! It will fit every one of your needs perfectly. To anyone else it
looks like old horse manture there. It looks like that stable that Hercules
had to clean. But for you it will be gold dust." 
	Duffey didn't quite know what his needs were. He was operating
somewhere between impulse and intuition. The prospects were churning around
in his head, but he couldn't see the answers yet. 
	"You are my boy, you are my love," Evelyn London said. She kissed
him and left him for a while. And Duffey gazed at the horse barn, knowing
that horse barns were not red hot items right then. 
	The decline in horses had already begun in deep downtown. The
streetcars had contributed to the decline in horses, and now the automobiles
were contributing to it. Oh, there were still twelve thousand horses for
hire downtown, but once there had been eighteen thousand. 
	Duffey found the owner of the building. They made up a contract and
a bill of sale and a deed. The price of the building was two thousand
dollars. It was five hundred dollars now, and five hundred in six, twelve,
and eighteen months. Melchisedech moved into the building by putting his
suitcase on the slate-stone floor inside. He had a hundred and fifty dollars
left after making the down payment, and there were people in St, Louis that
he could have money from if he needed it. He wouldn't need it, but he wasn't
friendless. Nobody who can snap his fingers and make gold sparks and golden
coins shower out will ever be friendless. 
	Duffey got the gas turned on, and he bought twelve mantles for gas
fixtures, three for the torch-like post lamps in the horse barn itself, nine
for the nine ramshackle rooms that were upstairs. He bought himself a cigar
and he smoked it till he let it go out. He went to a junk store to buy an
iron bed with mattress. They were so cheap that he bought three of each. He
bought a table and a gas cook stove, a gallon can of red paints, and a
swivel stool. He had a drayman bring the things to the building. 
	There were several long loafers benches both outside and inside the
building. Such benches were common around livery stables. There were
fifty-five stalls and mangers in the horse barn, and twelve carriage bays.
There was a lot of lumber in all that. Melchisedech plumbed up the cook
store. A small vise, a hack saw, and a pipe die were among the tools that
weighted down his suitcase. 
	He went out and bought a five gallon jar of pigs feet, a five gallon
jar of spiced polish sausage, a five gallon jar of apple butter, ten pounds
of cheese, ten loaves of black bread, a hundred pounds of potatoes, a dozen
cups, a dozen glasses, a dozen plates, a gallon of whisky, five gallons of
wine, a thirty gallon keg of beer. The same drayman brought these things to
Duffey's place. Then Duffey painted a sign in red letters on a board he took
from a horse stall. Paint brush and turpentine were other things that he
carried in his suitcase. 
	"Ten thousand items at reduced prices!" the sign read. "Food and
lodging. Whisky, wine, and beer in convivial surroundings. Shaves, haircuts,
and baths. Entertainment around the clock. A quality gentlemens' bar and
club. Melchisedech Duffey Proprietor." It was a well-lettered sign. Duffey
was perfect on lettering. 
	There was a cistern hand-pump that worked after a little priming.
There were a few old buckets and pots and hand basins around. Duffey set
potatoes to bake in the oven, and he set potato soup to simer on top of the
stove. There were old horse shoes and horse collars and various pieces of
harness. There were two broken carriages that did not need to remain broken.
There was probably five tons of livery stable junk around there. It couldn't
be classified, it couldn't be described, but there were surely ten thousand
items of it. 
	Melchisedech Duffey was a fifteen year old man with a good start on
a red or sorrel beard. He had his own residence and his own store and
establishment. He was in business, though he could not say for certain what
business it was. He had his prime stock already bought, and he had a little
more thin sixty dollars left in his pocket. 
	A monster came in. He was the first customer, and he turned out to
be a monster instead of a man. The monster might not have been much older
than Melchisedech, or he might have been three thousand years old. But then
so might Melchiscdech have been three thousand years old. The monster was
very dark and powerful, but he was put together carelessly. He wasn't
completely ugly, but nobody else had ever looked like that. His shoes were
serviceable though. They were very wide. Monsters have wider feet than do
people. His pants and jacket were rough stuff in rivermans-blue, and they
were sound. 
	"Do you need something, sir?" Duffey called ringingly, for this was
his first customer in his establishment. 
	"Oh yes, I need so many things, so many!" the monster said. 
	"A shave and a haircut?" 
	"No, things like that don't do me any good." 
	"Something to eat and drink?" 
	"Yes. And a place to take a bath. And a place to sleep," the monster
said. 
	Melchisedech give the monster coffee, whisky, cheese, bread with
apple butter, Polish sausage, pigs feet, and a plate of baked potatoes. And,
while the monster was eating and drinking, Duffey began to heat buckets of
water on the cook stove. He had selected the biggest of the horse troughs
(livery stables alway had such large and sectioned water troughs), and he
spread old horse blankets on the stones around it. He would get the city
water turned on tomorrow. The cistern pump was helpful but it would not be
sufficient. He would buy a gas heater tomorrow and install it. He would have
hot and cold running water. But for now he pumped and heated bucket after
bucket of water, and began to fill one of the big sections of the watering
trough with it. 
	He set out his own white soap, almost a new bar of it, and a very
big glob of the yellow, harness-and-horse soap that was already in the
building. He put the cleanest of the horse blankets on the best of the iron
beds with the best of the mattresses. 
	The monster finished eating. He asked for more whisky, and Duffey
gave him a full water glass of it. He asked for a cigar. 
	"All I have is a cigar that is half-smokcd," Duffey said and he
pulled it from his pocket. 
	"That will be fine," the monster said. He sipped whisky and smoked,
and he seemed to find some peace there. 
	"I am Melchisedech Duffey and I would like to make your
acquaintance." 
	"I'm Giulio," the monster said. "I work on the river boats
sometimes. And other times I work on the ocean ships. Or on the docks. I
don't know at what hour I will rise from my bed. How much is the count? I
pay it all now." 
	"A dollar," Duffey said.
	The monster paid Duffey a silver dollar. Then he went, taking whisky
and cigar with him, to the watering trough where he took off his shoes and
clothes. He dropped his clothes to the horse-blanketed floor, and he hung
his brown scapulars on a peg on the wall there. He climbed into the warm
water of the horse trough with a sigh of relief and pleasure 
	Another man came in. He looked familiar. Oh, he was an Irishman.
Duffey remembered the saying, "The Irish haven't handsome faces, but they
have memorable faces: it's hard to forget one." This man had a memorable
face, but whom was it remindful of? 
	"I intended to buy this building," the man said. "I was playing with
that man who owned it. I didn't think there was another person in the city
who was fool enough to pay eight hundred dollars for this building." 
	"Nah, man, man, be good," Duffey chided him. "There was no eight
hundred dollar price. There was never anything except the two thousand
dollar price. And we were the only two persons in the city wise enough to
see what an outstanding bargain it was. How can I serve you, sir?" 
	"Shave and a haircut," the man said. He was a humorously
rough-looking man with beetling brows and a beetling belly. Young Duffey
pulled up the swivel stool that he had bought that day, and he flapped a
huge bib in the air in preparation for tying it around the man's neck. 
	"Haven't you a proper barber chair?" 
	"No. I'll get one soon," Duffey said. 
	"I have one," the man told him. "I'll bring it over tomorrow. I'm
Bagby." 
	"I'm Melchisedech Duffey." 
	"There can't be too many of that name. I believe that I knew your
father." 
	"I had none."
	"Can you be sure that you hadn't? What is your entertainment around
the clock?" 
	"Pitching horse shoes. And I also do magic." 
	"Magic tricks?" 
	"No. Real magic." 
	"Oh yes. I know who you are now. You don't have a pool table?" 	"No,
not yet. I'll get one soon perhaps." 
	"I have one. I'll bring it over tomorrow. Have you only three beds?"

	Duffey was shearing the rough hair off of Bagby and turning him into
a dude. Other people were in the doorways sizing up the place. 
	"Yes," Duffey said. "I'll get more beds as trade improves." 
	People had seen the sign, and the word had already gone out that a
new man in the block was selling whisky in both nickle and dime shots. One
of the loafer benches soon had eight drinking gentlemen of the shabby sort.
They sipped very slowly, and they talked low and pleasantly. There would be
no loneliness in the establishment from now on. Those men could sit there
and drink almost forever. 
	"The mann who last used this horse barn for a flop house, he didn't
use beds at all," Bagby began to unflex his tongue for this new proprietor.
But Duffey knew oil-of-the-tongee better than most boys of his age. This man
was a loose one. "What did he use?" Duffey asked. 
	"See those rafters running to the tops of the horse stalls from the
front wall," Bagby pointed. "There are fifty-five of them. Calculate the
length of them now. Would you not say that each of them was a ten-man
raftcr? Notice the several hooks hanging from some of them by leather
thongs. See where the other hooks might have hung before they were taken
down or lost. Allowing ten of them to a rafter, there would have been five
hundred and fifty of those hooks dangling overhead." 
	"That's right," said Duffey, and he lathered Bagby. The monster had
now got out of the horse trough bath tub. He had rolled his clothes and
shoes into a pillow and had stretched out on the bed and pulled the clean
horse blanket over him. This was for modesty, not for the cold. 
	"Now see those several padded leather straps in your junk pile,"
Bagby said to Duffey. "Be advised that there were once five hundred and
fifty of them. Are they not padded nicely? There is no way that they could
hurt anything with such fine padding. And have they not fine adjustable
buckles? They would never creep. They would never slip. Simplicity is the
answer. Do you understand how they were used, Duffey?" 
	Say, this man was a ruddy kidder! Well, what were those several
padded leather straps for anyhow? They were some part of horse harness or
rigging, but Duffey had harnessed lots of horses and he had never used any
straps like that. He cut Bagby gently on the check with the razor just to
keep the man from getting too far ahead of him. 
	"Oh sure," Duffey said as a hint of an answer was whispered to him
by an ebony giant. "Right around a man's neck would one of them go. They are
too well padded to give injury and too well buckled to slip. They wouldn't
strangle a man all the way, but they'd insure that he slept deeply. Strap
their necks into the straps and then hang the gentlemen up on hooks for the
night. And five hundred and fifty men could be accommodated in this
comparatively small area in that manner. What did he get for each one,
Bagby? Is ten cents too much?" 
	"He got ten cents each per ordinary, but he never slept more than
about two hundred a night at that.
	"That isn't bad: twenty dollars a night almost clear. All, but then
there were the Wednesday Night Specials! That was nickle night in the old
horse barn: and I tell you, Duffey, there was always a sell-out. There was
never an empty berth on Wednesday night. Ah, it was a beautiful sight to
gaze at five hundred and fifty snoring gentlemen each hanging on his hook!
And that nickle potato whisky that he sold them for each slumber was three
cents profit a shot." 
	Duffey had finished shaving and haircutting Bagby. He untied the big
bib and snapped and popped it like a pistol. "Twenty cents sir," he said
briskly. Bagby paid promptly and in cash. How else can one make so much
money so easily and so quickly? 
	Duffey picked up one of those padded leather straps and whicked it
across the palm of his hand several times as he walked past the bemused
drinkers on the loafers bench. 
	"Nay, boy, nay," they said. "It was a joke. It wasn't really that
way." 
	Most of them knew Bagby, and they knew his jokes. But bemused
drinkers always have the worry that such jokes might take a turn to their
peril. One of those drinkers on the bench said that the leather straps went
with Greely Pack Saddles. Pack horses and pick mules used to be rented out
of the livery stable to people who wanted to pack into the hills and woods
for a few days to get away from it all. And the former proprietor had
provided Greely Pack Saddles which were the best kind, the aristocrats of
the field. He rented these to go with his pack horses and mules. 
	But another man said that the padded leather straps were what were
called California Bucking Rolls, and that they could be put onto any saddle
to make a horse-breaking saddle out of it. 

	Duffey had driven long steel stakes between the slab stones at two
places in the room. Several men had then filled buckets with dirt and with
fine old manure from the stable yard. They brought in the friable mixture to
build up horseshoe pitching pits. And soon there was the clang of metal on
metal. 
	"Have you a trade, Duffey?" Bagby asked. 
	"I have. I'm the best carpenter in St. Louis." 
	"No you're not. I am. But I need an assistant. My cabinet shop is in
the building right next to this. There is a boarded-up door between the two,
and it can be unboarded. You could put a big clang-for-service bell here and
come back through the door whenever you had a customer. And you could be
busy in my place whenever you weren't busy in your own. Or you could set up
a twin of my own workbench here on your side and work on furniture and
cabinets and such. I am the best joiner and cabinet man in St. Louis." 
	"No you're not. I am," Duffey grinned back at him. This Bagby wasn't
a very old man for all his comic swagger and swank. Duffey had cut and
shaved ten years off him and now he was a young dude. He was no more than
five or six years older than Duffey, twenty or twenty-one or twenty-two
years old. He did have a fine building and shop next door. What walls! What
walls, what ceilings, what rafters! They were all of walnut. Both Bagby's
and Duffey's buildings were built entirely of fine walnut wood. 
	"The buildings were built a hundred and twenty-five years ago,"
Bagby said. "This was a walnut grove before Walnut Street was laid out and
named. All the buildings of this block were built of the wood from that
felled grove, but all except our two buildings have been replaced. A very
little cleaning and polishing will wake up the hidden walnut splendor of
your own walls and ceilings and stair-ways." 
	The afternoon was gone and evening come while Duffey had been busy
establishing his business. 
	"You'll have to learn to delegate, Duffey," Bagby slid. "All men who
are big in business have learned to delegate. There's no success without it.
Pick out a likely man and hire him to tend your business for the night. Then
we will go out and celebrate. Often, when a man does not take the time and
effort to celebrate his success, God will believe that such a man does not
deserve that success, and he will take that success away from him." Duffey
picked out a man and gave him fifty cents to work the twelve hours till full
dawn. The man said he would need a dozen beer mugs and some more whisky if
he were to run the business properly through the night. Duffey went out and
bought a dozen quality mugs for a dollar. He bought more whisky, and brought
the purchases back to his establishment. He lit the three big gas torches:
the torch at the front door, the torch at the back door which led to the old
stable yard. (Duffey already saw that old stable yard as a beer garden and
courtyard cafe and an open air market), and the big torch in the middle of
the main area of the old horse barn.
	And Duffey and Bagby went out to celebrate Duffey's success in
business. They went to Meinkmueller's French Restaurant and had zwiebelsuppe
and rinerbrater and all such things as one gets at the top French
restaurants in St. Louis. Then walnuts and brandy and cigars. 
	They went to a burlesque show at the Star and Garter. Then they went
to the Bavarian Club to drink and sing, where those strong laughing blonde
girls, all in peasant costume, would give gentlemen rides on their backs.
You had but to ask. Duffey made friends with one of them named Helen. They
went to the Dublin where Evelyn London had already spread the word about
Duffey and his new place. Then back to that place. 
	Things were going nicely there, but the monster was roaring and
asleep. 
	"He's a troubled creature," Bagby said. "I know him a bit. He works
on the river boats, and he comes around here about once a year." 
	Two other customers were sleeping in the other two iron beds, and a
dozen were sleeping on horse blankets on the floor. Others were sleeping or
half-sleeping on the loafers benches, all still holding drinks. But there
were lively customers also, wining and dining and horseshoe patching
customers. They had set up two more horseshoe courses. Duffcy's first night
in the new business looked like a good one. 
	The monster rose from sleep still roaring. He flung on clothes and
shoce as if pursued, and he came to Diiffey. "Have you not something to give
me?" asked this monster who was named Giulio, "something for one of my
unborn sons that he be not as I have been?" 
	"Yes, yes, my creature, I give that thing right now," Duffey said.
"It's so hard to recognize one of the right ones when he comes." 
	"I guess I am a little bit unlikely," monster Giulio said. Duffey
got a talisman and gave it to him. The monster took it and bolted out into
the night. He was a pursued person, and what sleep he had got at Duffey's he
had stolen from his pursuers. But he would sleep no more that night. 
	Bagby whistled a curious tune after the monster. It was cruel and
comical at once. It was bristly. It had the clatter of hooves in it, but
they weren't horses' hooves. 
	"What is the tune?" Duffey isked him. 
	"I made it. I'm still making it," Bagby said. "I started it some
months ago when your monster was last in the neighborhood. It's the Gadarene
Swine Song. Your monster is one of the Gadarene Swine, and he'll be pursued
till he drowns himself in the water." 
	"No, I think he's a good man," Duffey said. 
	"Some of the Gadarenes are good, but their lineage is against them.
But how did you know he was a person to give a talisman to? Is that how you
have your luck so quickly, Duffey? Have you a talisman for this building
also?" 
	"Yes, I have a talisman for this building. And I have giants for
helpers." Bagby shuffled out into the night singing the Swine Song. 
	The monster is accursed by fate! 
	Hi ho! 
	The monster's saving comes too late. 
	Hi ho! 
	Perhaps fate changes yet, or worps. 
	Make hymns for him on golden horps 
	With rangle-tang of flats and shorps... 
	... You'll save him not," the death bird chorps, 
	He'll drown until he is a corpse. 
	Hi ho the gollie wol! 

	That was one of the numerous verses of the Gadarene Swine Song. 
	CHAPTER II 

	But while Melchisedech was establishing his business in one
afternoon and night, it took him several weeks to stabilize it and institute
it property. Even with invisible giants for helpers, it took him several
weeks. But all went well for him, and he knew that he was in the years of
luck that could never return. This King, this Melchisedech, had never known
defeat. He already had the surety that he would not know either total nor
eternal defeat. But he saw, by both pre-vision and post-vision device, that
he would suffer a few paralyzing catastrophes before he finally came to
port, catastrophes such as ordinary people have no idea of. 
	(Ordinary people have more grubby, and often more severe
catastrophes.) 
	But now, as he came to his sixteenth birthday, it was all well. He
owned the "Rounders' Club)" ("For Gentlemen Rounders of the World"). This
was, as the sign said "Restaurant, Bar, Resident Club, with Horse Carriages
and Automobiles for Rent. Games on the Elegant Riverboat Deck. Tuxedos for
hire. Rounders' String Band playing in the main dining room every night
except Tuesday. Patrons become Automatic Members of the Famous Steeplechase
Club. The House of Ten Thousand Duty-Fre Bargains. Raquects. Whist. Poker.
Horseshoes." 
	Lucille Sisler, the mother of young Gretchen, had gone to work for
Duffey at Rounder's. People began to call Lucille Duffey's mother-in-law,
though she was only twenty-eight years old and cute. But Gretchen had told
everybody that Duffey belonged to her. And Olga Sanchez of the torchy
shoulders had come to work there. Oh, Olga! Duffey brought horses back into
the horse barn again. Yes, he brought horses into the great central room
itself, into a divided-off part of it. Really elegant people do not mind the
smell of truly superior horses while they dine. They were the most noble
horses in town, with red and gold harnesses, and incredible carriages. The
place grew to fast opulence. Duffey added import items and art items to his
ten thousand bargains. He added whole groups of entertainments and
elegances. But other things must go on while this was going on. 

	Duffey couldn't allow the summer to run away and leave him. He was
already educated by most standards, but he was not yet up to Duffey
standards. He enrolled for courses at several institutions and colleges and
universities, for there was not any one of them that was big enough to hold
him by itself. In that summer of 1915, he took courses at St. Louis
University from the familiar Jesuits, at Washington University, and at
Concordia. He took classes at a school of pharmacy and at a school of music.
He was busy. He totalled off the hours of his activity one day and found
that it came to twenty-eight hours, without hours of sleep. But he knew
tricks with time already. 
	For such sleep is he took, he slept on the wonderful streetcars. He
rode them all over town to his various destinations, and he slept (though
sometimes he read or studied instead) for several hours every day. He also
had several sparky and elegant trolley car romances, for there is nothing
like a streetcar for meeting girls. Early elegance was in the air for him
that summer. For that summer, and fitftilly for ever after. 
	Oh, time had to be found for other things! One evening a week was
devoted to attending the Star and Garter. And Duffey also went to legitimate
drama theatres. Then there was pugilism and the whole nimbus that surrounded
it. 
	Bagby was a prize fighter and he fought about once a month. His
success had slowed a little towirds the end of summer when he had grown into
the heavyweight class. They hit a lot harder among the heavyweights. But he
was still one of the most promising young fighters of the city. And he knew
that publicity, high and flamboyant publicity, was one of the names of
boxing. Whether or not he could whip an opponent in the ring, Bagby could
almost always whip that opponent in the newspapers before they came into the
ring. He always composed ringing battle statements and sent them to those
Heavenly Twins, the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the St. Louis Globe. 
	"How long has this been going on?" Duffey asked. "I could whip
almost anyone the ring way, and I could absolutely whip anyone the newspaper
way." 
	Bagby took Duffey to Hammerschmidt's Gymnasium and got a few of the
canny managers and promoters to watch the boy as he worked out. Duffey was
now a heavy middleweight and still growing. He had the large and powerful
hands of a much bigger man. He had the telling shoulder slope that wise men
always talk about when judging the fighting potential of a lad. Duffey had
boxed in school and he was handy in the ring. 
	They scheduled Duffey for the third preliminary fight on the Monday
Night bill. He would get nine dollars if he won, six dollars if he lost but
made a good fight of it, and only three dollars if he lost miserably or was
knocked out. It was a four rounder he fought and his opponent was Dandy Dan
Dillard. Melchisedech put himself into a state of mind that would insure
victory. He summoned invisible giants to aid him if he should need aid. He
ransacked the distant mind and movements of his talented friend Sebastian
Hilton who was so fast of foot and hand and heart, and he felt the
high-speed moves and mentality come into him. He understood all the tricks
of getting the jump on the other boy and drawing first blood. He rushed out
at the clang of the bell for the first round. 
	And Dandy Dan began to give him an unmerciful beating. 
	Four rounds of that. It was the just equivalent of four hours of
Hell itself. Once Duffey thought that he might have it all ended by one
lucky stroke, but even the fastest feet and hands in the world weren't
enough to finish it. Duffey called on every device, but Dandy Dan sent
Duffey's invisible giants whimpering away like beaten puppies. Or like
giggling goofs, it really seemed. Duffey thought "Strong Victory", but he
found it very hard to maintain any sort of thought with his head being
hammered like that. 
	Then it was over with, and Duffey had gone the distance, though that
last round seemed mercifully shortened. Duffey simply didn't understand how
he had survived the thing. He was quite surprised to find then that he had
won, that he had taken the first three rounds by wide margins and was far
ahead in the fourth. And that fourth round had been mercifully shortened.
The fight had been stopped because Dandy Dan had been out on his feet and in
danger of grave injury. Duffey was unmerked, and he had his breath back
within seconds. The memory of the terrible beating that he thought he was
getting faded awiy. Dandy Dan was a livid hulk, and Duffey was hooked
forever on the high sport. He had rosin and alum in his blood now and
henceforth, and he was scheduled for another fight the next Monday night. 
	Well, Duffey was hooked on it, but not on the fighting end. He could
count a house, and he could figure. He would have a few more fights, but he
ready knew where the success was. Within six months, Duffey was promoting
his own fight bills and doing well. Duffey discovered music late that
summer, or possibly it was the summer after that one. Now he became a banjo
man in a straw-hatted string band. Duffey had been studying musical theory
in one of the schools, and notation and harmony and construction, and the
history of all of them. And he played the piano. Everybody who took any of
the courses in musical theory has to take some instrument at the same time. 
	In the Rounders' String Band, to which he was paying good money,
Duffey had a banjo player from whom he wasn't getting optimum. 
	"Here, let me show you how it ought to be done," Duffey said once,
and he took the banjo. It was the first time he had ever held a banjo.
Duffey achieved a few extra effects on it, and then he gave it back to the
man. But, a very little bit later, there was wide-open opportunity for other
extra effects, and the man did not take that opportunity. He did not even
know it was there. 
	"Here, let me have it," Duffey said. He took it and he kept it, and
he played till evening. He played all the evenings thereafter unless he was
busy with something else. And, whenever that was the case, one of the
bemused drinking men off the loafers' bench would play. Some of them were
pretty good banjo players. And that first slimmer, or possibly it was the
summer after that, the Rounders' String Band received an award for being the
third best string band in the city. Playing the banjo was one of the things
that Melchisedech continued for the rest of his life. He realized from the
first the correlation between wearing one of those flat straw hats and
playing the banjo. Can you imagine a person playing a banjo wilile wearing
some other kind of head covering? Can you imagine a person playing a banjo
while bare-headed? 
	Can you imagine gloomy music-picking from a banjo? From a mandolin,
yes. From a guitar, yes. Almost all guitar music is gloomy. But no note of
gloom can ever be picked from a banjo. 
	Ah, the songs and tunes that the Rounders' String Band used to play.
"Rock Island Rag", "Cincinnati Zoo Rag", "Missouri Valley Shuffle",
"Gadarene Swine Song" (that was adapted from a tune that Bagby used to
whistle and sing), "Whistle Stop Jump", "Morgan County Fair Strut", "The
King Shall Ride", "Show Boat Shuffle", "Honeysuckle Hop", "River Road",
"Gloria! Gloria!", "Sawdust Trail Drag", "Startime Trolley Car". Those were
the sweet old songs, and no other string band in town played them all. 
	"The King Shall Ride" became Duffey's instant favorite one night
when Duffey became the King and he did ride. Olga Sanchez took him up on her
torchy shoulders for a ride all around the big main room. And thereafter,
whenever that tune was played, she took him on her shoulders to ride, or
else Lucille Sisler took him on hers. Duffey was King to these two. They
were very intense partisans of his. 

	Charley Murray, the old friend, lived there in St. Louis. He lived
in the west end and attended St. Louis University as a day student. He was
not in any of Duffey's classes, but the two saw a lot of each other. About
once a week, Charley would come downtown to the Rounders' Club and perform
some of his magic tricks. Duffey knew that he was a better magic man than
was Charley, and with real magic, not with tricks, but wild horses tearing
him apart would not get him to let Charley know that. Besides, he didn't yet
have such an entertaining patter as Charley had. 
	Wild horses! Duffey had now, in his head, achieved the ultimate in a
magic act, The magician is torn apart literally by eight wild horses, and
his torn-off limbs and gurgling trunk are offered to all for examination.
And, a little later, many of the non-essential difficulties being worked
out, the magician will appear whole and unsundered again. 
	Duffey didn't know flow the trick could be effected by even real
magic. But one of the magic trick books said that any trick that could be
conceived of could be performed, whether by trumpery or illusion or trick
prop or whatever. It was certainly a challenge. Duffey still ponders this
trick sometimes. He'll figure a way to do it yet. Charley Murray came up
with a sum of money and became half owner of Rounders' Club. This would give
Duffey freedom to travel to other places and to other metiers, and it would
bring intelligent direction to the next stage of growth. Duffey was better
at originating things and getting them going than he was at carrying them to
their higher stages. And as soon as Charley was out of college, Duffey would
be able to take up really serious wandering without leaving ventures behind
him to fall to riiin. 

	That autumn, or anyhow one of those autumns in one of those years,
Duffey added attendance at art school to his other activities. It may have
been at this time that he dropped his classes at the school of pharmacy. No
one can do everything. 
	Duffey was good at all crafts. There was no better carpenter or
machinist to be found. Now he came quickly to all the art techniques. He
learned to draw in pencil and ink and dry brush and charcoal. He learned the
crayons and pastels. He took to oil paint like a ducklings to pond water. As
a rock sculptor, he was a natural. He had cast metals before. Now he became
an excellent caster of 	bronze statuary. 
	He was good at everything. He excelled at everything. But there is
something that comes after excellence. It can't be named, but one will know
it when he meets it. And Duffey wasn't meeting it very often in his own
work. He ordered his invisible giants to assist him with their hands. He
could not feel their hands, and he ordered them still more loudly. 
	"We are here, we are here," they answered, but he could hardly tell
where the answers were coming from. These art giants were of a different and
more exterior sort than other giants that he called up. He followed their
voices to various places. And, in each case, he did find the thing that
comes after excellence. It was always there with them, and he could always
touch it. But it was something that had already been done by other hands
than his. 
	So Duffey knew that he must always be more of an art dealer than an
artist. He would be an artist for the love of it, but only a few times in
his life would he touch in his own work that something that is beyond
excellence. But he knew it when he saw it. 
	Bagby said that Duffey cheated on himself though. He had divined
that there was much more money in being an art dealer than in being an
artist, and he had suppressed his slim money proclivities. 
	Duffey won seven of his first nine fights in those his palniy days
as a fighter. He was pretty good and he worked up to where he was making as
much as a hundred dollars a fight. But here also he would be a better dealer
than an artist. 

	CHAPTER III
 
	Duffey sometimes saw his sister, if she were indeed his sister,
there in St. Louis. It is almost certain that she was his step-sister and
had always been. At these new encounters she was a flaming stranger to him.
Yet he had already, some years before this, absorbed her personality and the
continuing flow of her memories and her life. That being so, it seemed that
her person itself should be somehow superfluous to him. Duffey told her that
she was superfluous, and she laughed. She was two years older than he was,
and she tried to deal with him as if he were still a child. But not even
this new flame-top, false kindred could deal with Melchisedech as if he were
a child. 
	She was a likeable person. Duffey knew that she was very much like
himself, and he counted this as totally in her favor. She was his own anima
made animate. She was the flame-red part of his own soul. She had fire-red
hair, redder than his own. She had fire-blue eyes that were his exactly. He
could see out of them without distortion. With all other eyes that Duffey
looked out of during his personality ransacking, there was distortion. She
gave the impression of body strength beyond her size, and she wasn't small.
She had the very large and strong hands and the swinging shoulders of Duffey
himself. And she had a strong touch of the bovine. This might be counted
against some persons. It couldn't be counted against this Mary Louise. This
was the royal bovine, this was the sacred cow that all chthonic goddesses
become and are and pass through at some stage of their story. 
	Mary Louise was intelligent and proud and friendly. She was very
ghostly; yes, that was the word. She was much in the manner of an
apparition. 
	"What if she is the prime and she has made me superfluous?" Duffey
worried in one of his flashes. You'd shiver to behold her every time, and
there would be awe and fear as well as deliglit at her appearance. One does
not meet one's own personality pieces without some trepidation. 
	Duffey's sister now bore the name of Mary Louise Byrne. She had been
given the surname of the kindred or pretended kindred who raised her. Duffey
now loved her with a suddenness that scared him. He realized that she was
the near perfect person, and at the same time he realized that she was a fit
portion of himself. She was himself without the abysses. And no, she should
never have been exteriorized. But that direction of thought ran into a
vortex. If none of the parts of him should be exteriorized, then there
wouldn't be any world. Everything in the world was to some extent a part of
Melchisedech. 
	"If this be arrogance, let it be so," he said resolutely. He made
jolly and kidding and hilarious love to Mary Louise much of the time, but
sometimes... 
	"I will have to get me a handmaid," Mary Louise said. "I think it's
cheating, but the sisterly wives of the patriarchs always had handmaids for
the diversion of their consorts." 
	"We are a royal family," Melclhsedech said, "and besides that, I
have never been sure that you were my real sister. The Kings of Egypt had
their sisters to wife, and I'm not sure that the Kings of Judah did not.
Should not the King of Salem have his? There's a love between us that is a
plain outrage, but should it be bridied?" 
	"It should be, yes. It will be. Oh, Melky, stop that! I will get me
a handmaid." 
	Mary Louise had a close girl friend that she decided to bestow on
Duffey. But could Mary Louise be trusted? And could any handmaid of hers be
trusted? The almost perfect Mary Louise had slanted humor, and the handmaid
was sure to echo it. This handmaid was Elizabeth Keegan. At first meetings
Beth Keegin came into Duffey's room ahead of Mary Louise. She came with arms
wide open and she gave Duffey a large kiss. 
	"I love him. I'll keep him," she said to Mary Louise as that royal
sister entered. This Keegan girl was so handsome that one felt she had to be
kidding. Nobody could be that pretty. It had to be a joke. It was, of
course. 
	Beth had the blackest hair ever, and the lightest ivory skin. No one
could be built as she was. It was architecturally impossible. It was a
beautiful burlesque, a pleasant fraud. Even the ideas of such a form can
only be found in cartoons, or digged up from under five thousand years of
soil deposit in some illicit part of the world. But time stopped when she
came. All the observation of her took place in a fragment of ail instant. 
	She was small. She had child's feet. But there was more than full
contour to her calves and thighs. The waist of the girl was so small that it
seemed unsafe for her to be walking about, but her hips were ample and her
breasts were superb. Her neck and shoulders and arms passed belief. "How did
the ancients make them so?" one wanted to ask. But Beth wasn't an ancient.
Duffey discovered that he was looking at her as at a work of art. He also
realized that he had been more excited by works of art than he had ever been
by live people, a situation that was perhaps temporary with him. 
	Duffey had to know something. He put his hands upon her. She was
cold to the touch. He had to know something else. He put all his weight on
her. She scarcely swiyed. She was unbreakable. She was a piece of ivory
statuary. She was not real. She would always have this elegant coldness of
body and strength of grained ivory, for all of her clowning and her torrid
behavior. 
	No one could be dressed as Beth was. Duffey found out later, about
three minutes later, that she was wearing a costume for a play she was in.
But she had made it herself, and nobody else could have filled it that way.
And what passion was the voice of Beth Keegan when she cried out: 
	"Oh my love, my prince, my boy, be with me forever!" Real passion,
yes. But there was a strong touch of something else. And then, at that first
meeting between the dumbfounded Duffey and the confounding Keegan, Beth
broke up onto total laughter and was joined by Mary Louise. Beth Keegan
didn't really have any such passion voice as that. She didn't have any such
walk as that. (Her walk had seemed to be a thing that hadn't happened in
thirty centuries, not since the fall of Tarshish: her walk was unfair
enticement.) And she almost didn't look like that. 
	Her shattering beauty was only something that she put on for a lark,
as though it were a funny hat. The voice and walk were put-ons. They were
among the things that she was practicing for the school play. But if she had
really been like that, and no put-on, then she would have been one of the
great ones of the ages. She would have been the great love of Duffey's life,
if he could have won her. And if he coulf not have won her, she would have
been the great lost love of his life. 
	Somebody (herself and a consortium of friends) had contrived the
whole of her. Someone had made her up. Almost the only words that she ever
said were lines taken out of plays, but she had her own superbness. "If only
she were real flesh and blood," Duffey said sometimes. "If only she were
real ivory," he said other times. She flustered Duffey so much that be would
never get over it. She scared him. The stories of living statues are all
really ghost stories. 
	Duffey would play it brash and showy with her sometimes, and then he
would fall into confusion again. He, a man of the world, was confounded by
this little figurine that somebody had created for fun, and perhaps he
became her final creator. But what to do with her when she was created? 
	Often Duffey would kiss her or fumble with her or sit on her lap
because he didn't know what to say to her. And what he did say was always
trivial stuff, and he would flush hotly at the shallowness of it as soon as
it was out. He was afraid to be alone with her, he a successful businessman
and a practioner of all the arts. And this was a big joke with Beth herself
and with Mary Louise. 
	"She is solid ivory," Mary Louise would say. "Why are you afraid of
an ivory doll?" 
	"She is solid artifact, yes," Duffey answered. 
	"Think how many billiard balls you could cut me up into," Beth said.
"You could be rich, honey. And I cut so easily." 
	But when they were gone that time, Duffey said a curious thing. 
	"If only she weren't alive! If only she weren't alive she would be
worth a million and a half dollars." His art-dealing eye was appraising her
correctly as a life-sized ivory statuette. Sometimes Duffey with another
young man, Charley Murray, or Edward Ranwick of the art school, or Philip
Manford of the school of music, would pick up Mary Louise and Beth at the
little college they attended and take them for rides or to dinner and
theatre. They would go in one of Duffey's own rigs, a carriage or a buggy.
Or sometimes they would go in Philip Manford's overland automobile.
There was real pride in being with such handsome girls. Mary Louise was
large and red-headed and of a sandy serenity, and she was lightly frecklcd.
And Elizabeth Keegin was small and statuesque, and she was all ivory and
midnight in her coloration. Oh, they did make an animated tableau when they
swung around the town! 
	They would dine at Meinkmueller's French Restaurant. Or at Duffey's
own Rounders' Club "Golden Buffet", or at his small "Bread and Wine Room".
For class combined with rowdiness, there was nothing like Rounders in all
St. Louis. Or they would eat at Schotts, or at Kelly's Steak House. Then
they would go to the Roxie or the Music Hall or the Broadway Theatre or the
Star and Garter. Beth and Mary Louise would often go up on the stage at the
Star and Garter and mix in the skits. Piccone, the littfe Italian who ran
the S & G, said that he would give them both jobs there any time. He had
known Beth and her family forever. 
	"I will do my thesis in innovative stagecraft at the Star and
Garter," Beth told him in her stagey voice. 
	"Just walk like that, just talk like that, just look like that,"
Piccone would say. "You yourself are innovation enough." 
	Later the party might go to the Bavarian Club to drink and sing. Oh,
those chubby, breasty, costumed, Germanish blonde girls at the Bavarian
Club. Duffey was very good friends with one of them, Helen Platner. 
	"Like brewery horses!" Edward Ranwick used to laugh at the sturdy
girls it the Bavarian. Aw, that wasn't true. They were powerful but trim
young girls, not like brewery horses at all. This Edward Ranwick had already
made quite a name for himself at the art school, but his art didn't empress
art expert Duffey. It was "skinny art", as Duffey called it, and there were
things lacking in it. 
	Or they might go to the Dublin where Evelyn London would chide
Duffey for leaving her for this new girl Beth. 
	"Oh my love, my prince, my boy," Evelyn would say. "You have left me
for this little figurine who isn't even real flesh. She is Dresden China.
She is crockery. Come back to me, love." 
	Evelyn and Beth used to take each other off, and both did good
imitations. They achieved a sort of blending of styles. 
	The party would often go back to Schott's or Kelly's late. Those
places had fine music bars that adjoined their restaurants. And sometimes
they would go back to Duffey's own Rounders' Club which was really the most
entertaining place in town. Where else could one pitch horseshoes in a music
bar? Where else did they have live horses and circuses in the divided-off
part of the main dining room? Where else did they have a flea market with
ten thousand import-free bargains in an old stable yard? Where else was
there an Olga Sanchez with her torchy shoulders. She mixed drinks at the
main bar. 
	And sometimes they would gather in Duffey's own rich walnut rooms
upstairs and lie on the sofas and on the floor before the old fireplace. 
	But once Duffey came on Beth, alone and crying. She was never alone,
and it would be impossible that she would cry. 
	"It's that bird," she said. "Hear what it sings? 'The year is almost
over with.' That's what." 
	"What bird, Beth?" 
	"Don't you know anything? The catbird, the one that didn't go south.
It's in a draft corner of your own fireplace chimney here." 
	"I use a calendar myself. Yes, I know that the year is almost over
with. What is that to thee and to me?" 
	"It means that my youth has fled," Beth sniffled. "There's no way to
slow things down." "I know a hundred ways to slow time down," Duffey told
her, and I'll show some of them to you. But, Beth, you're only seventeen." 
	"I will be eighteen in another month, and you will still be sixteen.
I think you cheat at it somehow. It's going, Melky, it's going, it's almost
gone." 
	Beth Keegan had made the most horrifying of discoveries, that it
isn't going to last forever. 

	"We haven't had much 'family' together, Melky," Mary Louise said
once, "and we should have." I am your sister, in some respect anyhow. Oh
sure, I am your passionate consort also, and yet we hardly know each other.
There is, of course, that other life in which you know me completely, but we
will keep that below the threshold. I insist that we have these party
evenings together for the sake of the 'family' that we comprise. And they
are fun. We all love each other. I love Beth, and also all the boy and girl
friends who make up our set. And if Beth will not love you, I will pull all
her hair out. And if you will not love her, then I will kill you and strew
your limbs for the buzzards to play with. She is the prettiest girl I can
find or make and the most exciting. Make love to her more, romp on her more,
kiss her more." Well, the Keegan loved to be kissed and romped on and ridden
on. But it was all joke-romps and joke-rides and joke-kisses. And it wasn't
true that everything that Beth said was lines out of a play. A lot of it was
lines out of comic magazines. 
	"This is my telephone operetor's kiss," she would say. "Smooch,
smooch, smooch, your three minutes are up, please." Or... 
	"This is my watermelon-eater's kiss," and she'd give slurping kisses
overflowing with sweet juice to Duffey, and then break up in laughter. Beth
could never help laughing when she was being kissed. It ruined some kisses
but it improved others. Or she would say "This is my sclioolteacher's role.
We're going to get this right if it takes all night." 
	Or she might call out "Pony Express" and bend her statuesque back to
be ridden. Duffey liked to ride her. But Beth was not real. She was a piece
of ivory statuiry that laughed. She was Etruscan, she was Cretan with all
that three-thousand-year-old color and freshness. The living statue is one
of the archetypes of the deep universal unconscious. It is one of the
primordial dreams, and so was Beth Keegan. Duffey modeled one of his
talismans on Beth. It was already authentic and lightning-struck. Now it
would be Beth Keegan-struck, for she carried it with her for six months. To
whom would Duffey give that one? 
	The slightly changing group of young people held together in season
and out of season, swimming in the summertime and sledding in the winter,
touring and celebrating at all seasons. All of these young people (there
were other girls, Dorothy Tarkington, Mary Marinoni, and there were other
fellows) were delighted with each other. They were young -- it is easy to
forget just how young -- and talented. Some of them were successful far
beyond their years. And they all saw each other, correctly, as brighter than
life. 
	"Now that the April of your youth adorns..." as the poet said. 
	Sometimies it seemed is though Bagby were a part of Duffey's person,
a pirt of his grosser future person. A few people in the Rounders' Club
neighborhood on Walnut Street had always believed that Bagby and Duffey were
brothers, and there was no persuading them out of it. And Duffey's sister
Mary Louise was already acquainted with Bagby before Duffey ever created the
Rounders' Club. How, in a city is large as St. Louis, could such different
kinds of people as Mary Louise and Bagby, living in such different parts of
town, maintaining such different kinds of lives, have become acquainted?
This was something that neither of them would ever tell Duffey. And just how
well had they been acquainted? "But I know everyone just as you know
everyone, Melky," Mary Louise said once. "I'm as royal as you are, and I
also have my attributes and talismans. Mine cannot bring about the creation
of persons as easily as yours can, but mine can bring about the coincidence
of persons and things. Do you believe that it was an accident that you met
the old horse barn and that you met Bagby? And I can create. Who do you
think it was who made Beth Keegan? But don't you know that Bagby is a part
of our own person? Oh, there are some gross ones who share it with us!" How
would Bagby and Duffey be taken for brothers? They didn't look alike. Bagby
was black of hair and whiskers and swarthy of skin. Duffey was russet-haired
and red-bearded and freckled and blue-eyed. Both were a little broad for
their height, but Bagby was a bit the bigger man. Oh, they both had
oversized hands and swinging quite shoulders; they both had that swigger
stride. They both had that voice that was strong and of good range, clear
and high sometimes, bulky and broad often; theirs were muscular voices if
you want to call them that. Duffey could invade and ransack the mind of
Bagby as he could that of everyone he encountered. But often he had the
feeling that Bagby was growling in the Duffey mind, and that Bagby held at
least a faintly scribbled permit to be there. 
	Well, there were whole shanty notions in Bzlgt)y, that's what it
was. The Bagby mind couldn't be despoiled in quick raids as could most other
minds. One couldn't carry that loot away in the hands or in a suitcase. It
would take drays, it would take trucks, it would take box cars and whole
trains, it would take barges and flat-boats, it would take ships to haul
away the Bagby mind-freight. It was mostly shanty stuff, but it was of
immense bulk. 
	How could Bagby have devoured and become possessed of this living
population, this extensiveness of whole nations, in his short years? He
wasn't eternal nor extensible. He didn't even have the thin golden dust of
touched-eternity that Duffey and Mary Louise had, that Sebastian Hilton and
others had. How could he have known the interiors of eighty thousand houses
in St. Louis itself. Oh, Duffey had free entry into the big and shabby
warehouses of Bagby's mind, but he hadn't the means of hauling the material
away. He hadn't the depots to store it in. He had magic methods of handling
materials, but here was a bulk that defied his magic. 
	Bagby was a baroque, a flawed pearl. The pearly sickness was all
over him. He was a friend and a sort of business associate of Melchisedech
Duffey. He was a person of surpassing depth and scope. But he was a slob. He
frequented the fleshpots of Chestnut Street, and he brawled in every section
of town. There is always room in the world for a royal brawler, but Bagby
missed the royalty by a bit. He had a bad name in many places. 
	Art critic Duffey said that Bagby's St. Louis was a series of Dore
drawings. All views of the physical world are the subjective views of
somebody, and Duffey could watch even the subjective views of Bagby and
others. He loved these ink drawings that made up the Bagby City, those black
and white and gray sketches (due to technical difficulties there were no
colors in Bagby's mind), and he loved the Bagby-esque shape of the people
and the town. 
	Bagby's battling had sometimes been of a murderous and evil sort.
There are men who love to battle even to death. In that era, there was a
sort of shanty deuling ground by the river, on a lone patch of sandy clay
under the bluffs and edged in by a sand bog. There were vicious bare-hand
and rough-shod fights there, fights for the sake of fighting, and to finish.
Bagby had once left a man for dead in such a fight. And Bagby had once been
left for dead himself. 
	"It's those three slanted-faced men that he brawls with the most,"
Mary Louise told Duffey once. 
	"Oh my God!" Duffey said. 
	Bagby had violent ideas on politics and economics and religion. He
believed that all the parishes in the city, including the cathedral parish,
had lost their orthodoxy. He beleved that most of the pastors and all the
assistants were it bunch of Judas Priests. He went to mass at St. Malachy's
clear across town, this being the church that came nearest to preserving the
true faith. 
	Bagby was a mess. If he were indeed a part of Duffey, then perhaps
it was best that that part was externalized and that it could be segregated.

	Mary Louise liked Bagby pretty well in spite of all this. She ran
around with him a little bit. She said that he was usually right in his
opinions, but that he was so rock-headedly right that he defeeted himself. 
	"Oh really, I wouldn't mind Bagby so much," she said once, "if only
he didn't work so hard it being Bagby." 
	And Bagby was to Duffey, and to Mary Louise also, a sullen and
magnificent piece of shanty, monochrome art. 
 
	CHAPTER IV 

	And then there was the ballooning. Duffey joined (according to one
version, he founded it) The World-Wide Argonauts Argo Balloon Club. This was
a club of very rich sportsmen. and the entry fee paid to join the club was
three thousand dollars. Well, Duffey had three thousand dollars and quite a
bit more of loose money at that time, but he may not have paid it for his
membership. Bagby said years later (and Bagby was the only one who could
remember the balloon adventures in detail in later years) that Duffey did
not pay anything at all for his membership, that he rather collected three
thousand dollars from each one of twenty three sportsmen, he acting as North
American Bursar of the World-Wide Argonauts Argo Balloon Club. Duffey was
supposed to transmit this money to the World Headquarters at Geneva. So he
would have done, but the World Headquarters at Geneva did not then exist and
would not ever exist. So Duffey was stuck with the money. 
	Duffey paid twice three thousand dollars for a custom-made balloon,
and that was more money then than it has ever been since. It was a large
silk-bag balloon. It ran on hydrogen gas and sand bags. The great silk-bag
would be inflated with hydrogen, and at about the same time four thousand
pounds weight would be loadcd into the basket or gondola. With this balance,
the balloon would rise resolutely but not too swiftly as soon as it was
uncabled from its mooring. Part of this weight always consisted of
hundred-pound sand bags, and part of it was people and supplies for them.
Duffey would sometimes take as many as nine or ten persons up on an
ascension. With them and with water and food for them, that would be more
than two thousand pounds of the four thousand pounds ballast. 
	The balloon would descend when Duffey would let part of the hydrogen
out of the bag. It ascended again when Duffey threw some of the sand bags
Out; or, in extreme case, when he threw some of the people out. It went,
generally, where the wind went. Duffey did have it sort of tacking sail
rigged up by which, in theory, he could depart from the direction of the
wind somewhat. In practice though, that tacking sail merely made the wind
angry, and it would tear the sail to pieces and then blow the balloon where
it had intended to blow it originally. And Duffey also installed a gasoline
engine and a propeller, but it would influence the balloon only about five
miles an hour. But Duffey, and Bagby even more, learned to select winds by
ascending and descending and by controlled drift. They learned to see the
different winds, to know their speeds and strengths and directions. They
learned to sidle into them. 
	Duffey first named his magnificent balloon "The Argo Twelve" for a
reason that he was not able to explain to any of his companions. Then a
misty person of great power and status came to him and told him that the
Argo Twelve was currently active, that he Duffey should have known that it
was, and that Duffey would not be able to use the name Argo Twelve for his
balloon. But this person told him that the balloon might sometimes be used
its a pinnace or ship's boat for the Argo of the Twelfth Voyage. Duffey
thereupon changed the name of his balloon to "The Argo Twelve and Half', a
name still harder to explain than the original name. 
	Duffey used to ascend with Bagby, with Mary Louise, with Charley
Murray, with Beth Keegan, with Dorothy Tarkington, with other friends and
acquaintances and employees, with young Gretchen Sisler, with Papa Piccone,
with Evelyn London. At first they would go up only in the sunny daytime.
They had not yet settled on proper lighting for "Argo Twelve and a Half".
Duffey was all for electric lights to be powered by well-cell electric
batteries. Charley Murray thought they should use kerosene lights or
compressed gas lights. Bagby was in favor of carbide lights or lime lights.
Duffey finally won when he showed them reports on other balloonists. 
	Other balloonist sportmen had been blown to Kingdom Come when using
nonelectric lights on their balloons. Balloon descent involved releasing
large amounts of hydrogen gas right out of the bottom of the balloon sack,
right into and around the balloon gondola. 

	Duffey and his friends would go about two miles high and would fly
as much as two hundred miles on the long days; and they had good luck it
coming back to their starting point. They were lucky in leaving such a
starting point. The prevailing westerlies blew above St. Louis, and the Gulf
southerlies blew there; and local 'river winds' were generated by the
Mississippi itself, by the Missouri River that spilled into it from the west
a little above the town, by the Ohio River that merged with it from the east
a few miles below the town. St. Louis was not the windiest city in the
country (though it was one of the five windiest), but it had the best
selection of winds of any town in the country. 
	There is just no touring like touring in a balloon. It is open, it
is fresh, but it isn't unpleasantly windy: you go generally at the same
speed is the wind goes. It is cloud cruising. Sometimes it is storm
cruising. It was the highest and most classy sporting activity that had ever
been. 

	Beth Keegan proposed a balloon dinner party. She insisted on it, and
it was brought about. There were four couples of them at the dinner party,
and a serving man to wait on tables. There were Duffey and Beth, Mary Louise
and Bagby, Charley Murray and a girl named Monica, and Cyrus and Edith
Summerfield. The serving man was off one of the loafers' benches at the
Rounders' Club, but he looked splendid in livery; and he had served elegant
persons before, counts, earls, a duchess, barons, even the late Duke of
Kent. The Summerfields were members of St. Louis high society as well as
commentators on that same high society in both the Globe and the Post
Dispatch. They were a young couple full of glitter; Edith was a sort of
cousin of Beth Keegan, and they responded readily to the invention to attend
a formal dinner party in the gondola of a balloon two miles high. 
	A little modification of the gondola was necessary for it to carry
an eight-llace table, and another bulky object, but the modification was
made. The supper itself was catered from Duffey's own kitchen at the
Rounders' to the balloon at ascension time. Then they dined high in the sky,
in candle-lit splendor, as the late-ish darkness settled first on the earth
below them and then above to enfold them on high. Listen, that was only part
of it! Another thing they had with them in the gondola was a player piano.
The serving man pumped it after he had served dinner to them. And Beth
herself pumped it when it was time for the serving man to serve the
after-dinner wine. It was all excellent Rag Time on the player piano. 
	"The next time we have formal dinner up here, we will have a small
but sufficient dance floor installed," Beth said. That part, somehow, never
came to pass. Even so, we ask you, did you yourself ever dine in conditions
of such unusual elegance? And Cyrus and Edith Summerfield would give it
elegant treatment in the press. 
	Duffey, however, was a little bit worried about their candle-lit
splendor when it came time to descend. He put the roll "Black Midnight Rag"
into the player piano, blew out the candles, accidently knocked Charley
Murray's cigar overboard, and opened the gate valve to let the hydrogen gas
whoof out and the balloon come down. 
	That was not the list time they went up in the wonderful balloon,
but it was the most memorable time. 

	In later years, when Duffey had left St. Louis and Bagby was the
custodian of the baloon, Bagby severa] times wrote to Duffey that ghosts had
inflated the balloon and taken it up for nonscheduled voyages. 
	"It is all right," Duffey would write back. "I know who they are." 
	CHAPTER V 

	So things went for somc months (most of two years anyhow) after
Duffey had exploded into enterprises and affairs in St. Louis. And then it
ended. 
	What ended? Oh, only the world. The world that we have now isn't the
same is the world that we had then. Or it may have been only the
multitudinous, golden-touch world of Melchisedech-in-St.-Louis that ended. 
	"I'm freudian now," Beth Keegan announced one evening. "All of us
superior persons have become freudians. I want superior dreams from all of
you right now. Mary Louise, you stuffy sister of the King, do you dream?" 
	"I dream passionately about every one of you here, though Melky says
that my passions are bovine," Mary Louise said. "My dreams are superior, and
all of you here are in them, and I'll not reveal them." 
	"Charley," Beth said to the Murray, "tell me one of your dreams. You
are my second love. You are my second passion and pride. Please do not
disappoint me. Come up with something good." 
	"No I won't," Charley Murray said. "You have no business analyzing
my dreams, since they are mostly about you. Sometimes you are a pea-hen,
sometimes you are a talking statue, sometimes you are a bicycle. I won't
tell you my dreams. I won't be uncovered before you." 
	"Melchisedech, my king and my concupiscence, tell me a dream."
"Yes. Here's the just-before-morning dream of today. I was in my own person
as the Boy King or Boy Magician. I was making birds, which isn't difficult
if you're a Boy Magician. I was making them out of clay and setting them in
the sun to dry. Then I would transmute them to the color of living gold and
i'd set them to flying. Other colors would come to them as they rose in the
air. They were brilliant Paradise Birds. Then someone began to shoot them
down. 
	"I called the royal game warden to stop the depredations. He notched
an arrow to his bow-string and came along with me to kill anyone who was
transgressing against the bird law. And we found the transgressors
immediately. 
	"'They are killing Birds of Paradise,' I said. 'Explain to them that
it's against the law to kill them.' 'It's against the bird law,' the game
warden told one of the rough men who were shooting the birds down. 'They're
Birds of Paradise.' 'Birds of Paradise, my slanted face!' one of the rough
men cried. 'These are clay pidgeons and I can prove it. Here! Look what's
raining down from the sky from the last ones we shot!' 
	He was right. It was clay. My birds had turned from Birds of
Paradise into clay pidgeons, and clay pidgcons were always in season. The
game warden shot the rough men and killed them, but he wasn't happy about
it. 'I don't care whether you are the king,' he told me. 'You call me out on
one more clay pidgeon chase and you're going to get shot with my next
arrows."' 
	"Oh, that's an easy dream," Beth said. "It means that you're
beginning to doubt your own powers and your own creations. Yes, I know that
you do make people, and you put some pretty fine features on them. But you
have to make them out of clay. There's nothing else to make them out of.
What really happens is that you collect people like you collect pictures or
statues. Then why will it shock you when some of your brightest people turn
out to be forgeries? But that wasn't your main dream for last night. Tell me
the real one now, since you tried dishonestly to hide it." 
	"There was a big division in my central dream of last night," Duffey
said then, "and I believe that it will prove to be a watershed of my life.
It was at first a conventional apocalyptical dream. A pythoness voice was
giving explanation of it in a running narration as it went along; and I
believe that it was you, Beth Keegan, who were taking the pythoness role... 
	"A chasm opened up and began to undercut all the tall structures and
all the towns also. I went down into the chasm to halt this attrition, for
it was eating up everything. Multitudes of people were filling into the
hole, and especially children and young people. 'It's lucky that I'm on the
spot here,' I said. 
'For this requires deep magic.' But I found that my magic was paralyzed. I
was helpless and I could not find any bottom to the chasm. But I was able to
to cross the bottomless ditch to the other side. I'm on this other side now,
and the rest of you are on the other side where you were, and there's a veil
between us." 
	"I called on my giants to impose a stasis on the chasm and prevent
its spreading. I called for giant's hands to come and perform prodigies.
They came, but they were severed hands, lopped off bloodily at the forearms,
and with their strength dead. They were joined together with manacles. 
	"Then I saw that they weren't giant's hands at all. They were a pair
of little boy's mittens, and the manacles that fastened them together were
only the drawstring of the mittens. Then I heard a voice (and it was your
own exaggerated voice practicing for the pythoness role, Beth) 'These are
the years that the cows have eaten'. That is it, Beth. Do you know what it
means?"
	"Of course. When are you going away, Melchisedech, tonight or in the
morning?" 
	"I didn't know that I was going away. Does the dream say that I
will?" 
	"Of course. You can't impose a stasis on a chasm from here." 
	"Then you will have to take over the Rounders' Club, Charley,"
Duffey said. 
	"All right. When will you be back, Melchisedech?" 
	"When will I be back, Beth?" Melchisedech asked her. 
	"In seven years, I suppose. That's a common period. And the 'years
that the cows have eaten' are almost certainly the seven sheaves of grain.
Will you be all right for seven years? I can't wait for you, you know. I
love you a lot, but not for seven years' absence. No, no, not me to wait for
seven yeirs." 
	"Will I get my magic back after the seven years, Beth? Will I be
able to command the hands again?"
	"I think so. But you haven't lost much of your magic. Only a part of
it." They went to Meinkmucllers for a good supper, and both friends and
strangers came to Duffey and sad that they had heard that he was going away.
But Duffey hadn't told anybody; nobody had told anybody. 
	At Meinkmuellers, Charley Murray and the rest of them were joined by
the two Monicas, Monica Drexel who was sometimes Charley's girl, and Monica
Murray who was Charley's sister. Both of them said that they had come there
because they wanted to see Melchisedech for the last time. And yet nobody
had told them that Duffey was going away, and nobody had told them that the
group was going to Meinkmuellers for supper. 
	It was there that Melchisedech give a talisman to one of the
Monicas, to the wrong one it first, apparently. He was confused by these two
since they were named alike and ran around together and looked alike. 
	"I don't know what this thing is," said the Monica to whom Duffey
first gave the talisman. "I don't understand it at all. I never saw anything
like that before." 
	"On, I think it's for me," the other Monica said. "I think I know
wheat it is. Thank you, Duffey."
	The bunch of them went to the Star and Garter after that, and the
skits there seemed to be better than usual. Duffey was called up onto the
stage, and the proprietor Papa Piccone announced that their good friend was
going away on a seven year assignment. Some of the burlesque girls came out
and kissed Duffey. 
	The bunch of them went to Schotts and to Kelly's and to the Bavarian
Club. Everybody told Duffey that he would be missed, and he was treated like
a king everywhere. 
	They went to the Dublin. All the men shook Duffey's hand there and
all the women kissed him. They said that they would miss him, but they knew
that it was a grand opportunity he was accepting, secret though the details
were; and then it's a great thing just to travel and see the world. But
neither Duffey nor Beth nor any of them had told that he was going away.
Really, none of them except Beth believed it yet. 
	"You are my boy, you are my love," Evelyn London said, "and you are
going away."
	When it was quite late, they went back to Duffey's own Rounders'
Club, and the string band begin to play "The King Shall Ride". Olga Sanchez
took Duffey through all the rooms of the club, and out into the streets, and
into the club again. Many people gathered to see Melchisedech in his club
then, musicians and artists and dealers, politicians and monsignori and
parish priests, show people and club people, bookish people. A dozen of
Duffey's ladies came in, Francis O'Brien and Mary Marinoni, that slim
Chinese girl Angela Ching, Gretchen Sisler and Gabriella O'Conner who were
young grade-school girls, Dorothy Tarkinggtron, Helen Platner from the
Bavarian Club, two of the girl acrobats from the Star and Garter. They all
kissed Duffey goodbye. 
	And the men came in to shake his hand and wish him well, almost
everyone who had ever sat on the loafers' benches, Bagby and his shanty
sort, straight businessmen of the neigliborhood, priests and levites, young
men from the different colleges in town, prize fighters and newspaper guys.
There were a lot of drinks around till very late, and a lot of singing. 
	CHAPTER VI

	There were those, mostly from among Melchisedech's pretended
kindred, who said that the St. Louis adventures could not have happened,
that there was no room in the years of his life for those adventures. The
only unaccountable years, they said, were the seven hidden years that came
later; and it was agreed by everybody that Duffey was not in St. Louis (not
for any conspicuous time anyhow) during the hidden years. But the
Duffey-St.-Louis adventures had to have happened. 
	"It's a little bit dreamy," Beth Keegan would say in later years,
"but I surely knew him then. I knew him later, of course, and I know him
now. But yes, I remember him in those earlier years also. Those are like
years separated off from others and put away in a box somewhere. But they
are still there when you get the box down and open it." 
	"Of course I remember him then," Mary Louise said years later. "He
is my brother. But those were royal years, and they will not be rememered
completely about him by non-royal persons. They happened; it all happened;
but I can understand why the 'relatives' don't believe that they happened.
They have, to them, clear evidence that Melchisedech was still in high
school in Omaha in the years 1915 and 1916." 
	"There are certain unholy persons or beings who want it to be that
these things never happened," Bagby said. "Sometimes I don't understand the
workings of unholy minds. Sure, he was here for right at two years. I
remember him every day of that time. He happened. Those times happened. This
is the business that started here. It is still thriving." 
	And there are old men still sitting on the same loafers' benches who
remember it all and can verify it. But there are un-royal persons who still
maintain that there were no years when those things could have happened,
that Duffey could not have been a thriving businessman in St. Louis at age
of sixteen. He was still in boarding school in either Omaha or Kansas City
at that age. 

	Oh well, back to the night of the great leave-taking and to the next
morning. Well, how was it the next morning? 
	Oh, Duffey was gone in the morning, of course, and he was gone for
seven years. There were a few second-hand rumors picked up as to his
whereabouts, but nothing more. He had disappeared. But, from his own point
of view, he couldn't have disappeared, Could he? 
	Do not be so sure of that. Apparently the later Duffey either did
not know or did not want to know where he had been in those years. There was
something the matter with his own point of view. For him, there was some
change made in earth and sky. He had gone out of normal places. 
	In another codicil of the circular log of the Melchisedech voyages,
this is given: "There had been one very early morning in Melchisedech's
youth, in his fifth or sixth youth really, when Melchisedech had walked out
on the river shorc in St. Louis, just below the Eads Bridge, and had walked
right onto a low-lying boat; and it had been the Ship Argo in disguise. 
	"Melchisedech had then traveled in that ship for seven years, but
not all of them in consecutive time. There was much time out for land
adventures. The land adventures do not count in the Seven Lost Years.
Neither are they deducted from the years of the life." 
	Well, there are many entries in the logs of the Ship Argo that have
to be taken with a pinch of iodine. Beth Keegan had visions of a boy killed
by a boar. Oh, there was mythological basis for such a death, and many
things are hoary in mythology before they happen in fact. But, with Beth, it
may have been the case of not knowing where her own mythology began and
ended. 
	There is precedent, of course, for losing seven years out of a life,
or for having seven years hidden. There are a number of persons with seven
hidden or dark years in their lives: Caesar and Diocletian, Boethus and Carl
the Great, Wellington and Lincoln and Sam Houston. George Barrow had a seven
year hiatus, and Hans Schultz would have such an hiatus a few years after
this time. Inconvincing details can be invented to fill the holes in every
one of those lives. 
	And inconvincing details are invented to fill the hole in Duffey's
life. Some of those details were intvented by Duffey himself, and some of
them were invented by other people. 
	Was Duffey ever in the war? Was he ever in the army in World War
One? He later said that he had been. And he also said that, before he was
old enough to get into the A.E.F., he had been an ambulance driver in Italy
with Hemingway and in France with E.E. Cummings. He said that he returned to
the United States from France, and then went overseas again, with the army
in 1917. He may have been in a New England army camp very briefly in 1917,
but even this is doubtful. Of course, everything that Duffey claimed as
happening to him did happen to somebody with whom he was in accord. That is
nearly the same as it happening to him. 
	Duffey's young friend Sebastian Hilton was an ambulance driver in
France and in Italy in those early years. And he was the companion of
high-ranking persons, in spite of his youth. Duffey may have lifted these
scenes from Sebastian's mind where he always had entree. But they were valid
scenes, and Duffey lived to the full every scene that he ever lifted from
anybody. 
	And yet there were several persons of repute who said that they had
seen Duffey in Belgium and France and Italy in those years. "He was with an
international organization nimed ARGO," one person said. "It was a little
bit like the Red Cross. He worked off a ship that -- well, I don't know
exactly what they did. I thought that everybody would remember about the
ARGO group, but hardly anybody seems to recall it now." 
	And so it may have been with seven years full of scenes, some
lifted, some stolen, all vivid, covering those years threefold and four-fold
deep. (There wasn't room in seven years nor in seventy for all the scenes
that Duffey assigned to them.) Some of them had been genuine Duffey scenes,
but not all. But he made them all his own. And part of this mystery may not
have been so mysterious as that. "Duffey, my beloved brother, is near as
phoney as I am myself," Bagby once said about the interval. "If he can't
remember those times, it's because he doesn't went to remember them. If he
recalls them in wrong form, it's because there was a different wrong form
about the originals. If he won't say what he was doing, maybe he was doing
something he shouldn't have been doing." 

	Eleven of the prime creations of Duffey, eleven of the twelve human
persons that he made, were conceived and born during those seven hidden
years. Had Duffey something further to provide to the talismanic clay? Was
his presence in various places a series of necessities? 
	Part of the mystery of the years will be raveled out later, but only
a minor part of it. And no human person, not even Duffey himself, will know
the whole of that interval until the afternoon of judgment day. 
	CHAPTER VII

	After seven years, Duffey came back. It was in the year 1923 that he
reappeared. He didn't come to St. Louis at first, but the St. Louis people
began to hear from him again. He was wandering around the other cities of
his old territory, Dubuque and Sioux City and Omaha and Kansas City. He
would visit some of his pretended kindred for a week or two, and then he
would not be seen for several months. It was said that he had money, but he
was in an unsettled state. 
	He came to St. Louis finally. He found that his sister Mary Louise
had married. Who would beheve it? She was married to Bagby! That was a
little bit like a goddess being married to an earthling or a mortal. That
was exactly what it was. 
	"Bagby is my dark object, he is My uncleansed stables, he is the
lower part of me," Duffey said, "and I sincerely love the shanty freak. But
what's this about him being married to my sister?" 
	Duffey found that his old girl Beth Keegan was married. And Charley
Murray had done well for himself as well as for Duffey at the Rounders'
Club. No, Duffey didn't want to take an active role in the club again,
Duffey said, not just yet. 
	"My love, my boy my prince, you are back!" Olga Sanchez of the
torchy shoulders said. She still worked at the Rounders' Club. She was now
married to a beautiful Mexican man who had become high chef of the Rounders'
Club Main Dining Room. "But, my love, you are not quite all back," Olga said
to Duffey. 
	Duffey stayed with Mary Louise and Bagby while he was in St. Louis. 
	"Where were you really, Melky?" Mary Louise asked him. "I get only
murky glimpses of it. It seems to be a valley you were in." 
	"I think it was the 'Valley of Lost Boyhood'," he said. 
	"All well, you kept yours longer than most do. What are you
listening for, Melky?" 
	"For wings, I think, Mary Louise." 
	"And what kind of wings are they?" 
	"I'm not sure, Mary Louise. Not quite butterfly wings. I'm not sure
at all." 

	Duffey went to visit Beth Keegan and her family. She was now Beth
Erlenbaum. On come on, Beth, you had to get a name like that out of a play.
You had to get a husband like that out of a play. Indeed, Beth was now in
plays, of a sort. She really worked at the Star and Garter now. She wrote
many of the skits that Piccone put on, and she played comic roles in some of
them. 
	Duffey still loved her, and she still loved him almost as much as
she used to. And she still flustered him unaccountably. She had her husband
and two daughters, and they did not know what to make of Melchisedech. Beth
said that she had a recent goddaughter who would understand him though. This
was the infant of Piccone at the Star and Garter. But Duffey did not meet
that infant for another twenty-three years. 
	Duffey did not, at this time or ever, realize that Beth, though a
little bit on the pretty side, was quite an ordinary person. He wouldn't
have believed it even if it were explained to him. "What are you listening
for, Duff, my prince, my love?" Beth asked him just as Mary Louise had asked
him. 
	"Wings, I think, Beth." 
	"And what kind of wings?" "Moth wings, it seems. Can one hear moth
wings for three hundred or four hundred miles?" 
	"Oh sure. I do it all the time." 
 
	Book Three:
	Hog-Butcher & Gadarene Swine

	CHAPTER I

Tu Melchisedech secundum 
Surgens nimis nunc jucundum 
Deus tam dilexit mundum 

	Henri Salvatore. Archipelago. 

	Giovanni A. Solli (Finnegan) had been born June 1, 1919 in New
Orleans, Louisiana.
	Vincent J. Stranahan had been born April 5, 1921 in St. Louis,
Missouri. 
	Henry Francis Salvatore was born December 8, 1920 in Morgan City,
Louisiana. 
	Kasimir W. Szymansky (Casey) was born October 7, 1921 in Chicago,
Illinois. 
	John Gottfried Schultz (Hans) was born January 2, 1915 at St.
Gallen, Wisconsin. 

	What had these persons in common? How was it destined, even before
they were born, that they should be companions? And then there were these: 
	Absalom Stein 
	Dotty Yekouris 
	Teresa Piccone 
	Mary Virginia Schaeffer 
	Mary Catheriiie Carruthers 
	Marie Monaghan. 
	These latter six were born in approximately the same years as the
first five, in Chicago, in New Orleans, in St. Louis, in Galveston, in
Chicago again, and in Sydney Australia. Yes, all this information is
pertinent. 
	Eleven of them named there. In all, there should be twelve in that
caiinon, but there is some dispute over who the twelfth one was. 
	How are things done in this world and in other worlds like it? Does
God indeed create and effect through deiniurges and giants and magi and such
creatures? Yes, from one point of view that is what happens. And from a
dozen other points of view it may appear that a dozen different things
happen. 
	The complete truth of it is many dimensions beyond us, and yet every
one of these different points of view may be authentic. From one of the
dozen, or the billion points of view, demiurges and giants and magi do
indeed create and effect. Not one of these viewpoints, not even the
extravagant magi-creators view, may be subtracted from the world affair. The
world would not be authentic without it. 
	Yes, Melchisedech Duffey was a Magus. And, yes, he created people.
We will come back to this subject many times. 

	After the missing years, after his reappearance, Duffey had been
around his circuit of midwest cities for a year or more. He started three
separate businesses, and he sold them one after the other when he got them
going. He made money out of every deal, but there was something that he
missed getting from the deals. He had become an entertaining and interesting
man, and he was still a good man. He had the savor of a man who had retained
virtue, by however chancy a margin. 
	But he still had the air of a man listening intently for something
that was just over the edge. 
	It was in Omaha, in the year 1925, that Duffey felt a powerful
directional urge and call. Someone was requiring or compelling his presence
over a distance of four or five hundred miles. It was urgent. It was a moth
call, and it had plenty of flame to it. It was the moth wings that he had
been listening to for many months, and now he had the direction and distance
of them. 
	Duffey took a night train to Chicago. He sat in a day coach all
night, when he was not wandering up and down the aisles of the train. He had
only a suitcase with him. He had left his trunks and heavier possessions to
be sent to him from various towns when he should finally find a destination.
He had a quart bottle of good Canadian in his coat pocket and another one in
his suitcase, for the dry years were on the country then. 
	A chubby little girl in the day coach kept flirting with him. But
Duffey was looking at the mother of the little girl. "I wonder whether she
knows that she has a terminal illness?" he asked himself. "A very, very
terminal illness. I wonder what it is?" Duffey had these scrippy intuitions
sometimes, and they were always correct as far as they went. 
	Still and all, the little girl was more interesting than her mother,
in spite of the death mystery on the mother. 
	"My daughter is so awful," said the mother of the little girl. "I
just don't know what to do with her. What can anybody do with a little girl
who loves the men so much?" 
	"They can sit down and play cards with me," the little girl said.
She was playing some kind of solitaire: Duffey sat down and began to play
two-handed cards with her. She said that her name was Charlotte Mullens and
that she was nine years old. That flirty little girl knew how to handle
cards, and she knew how to handle men. She played footsie and kneesie and
kissie with Duffey while they played cards. 
	"I don't know what to do with my little daughter," the mother said.
"She is so forward." These two suddenly reminded Duffey of Gretchen Sister
and her mother Lucille in St. Louis. Gretchen manipulated her mother into
going to work for Duffey. She manipulated her into having dates with Duffey:
but they always ended with Duffey and Gretchen carrying on together on the
old Sister living room sofa. The little girl Charlotte was the manipulator
here, and her mother was her puppet. So Duffey and Charlotte played cards
and they kissed for games. And no nine year old girl kisses like that. 
	Mrs. Mullens had big quantities of lunch with her, and the three of
them ate between hands. She had paper cups and they drank Duffey's good
Canadian whisky out of them and got mellow. The mother was a little bit
sparing of it, but Charlotte was into it like an old toper. 
	"I am in love with you, Charlotte," Duffey said, and he kissed her
specially. 
	"Do you always fall in love with nine year old girls?" Mrs. Mullens
asked. 
	Always Duffey said, "and sometimes with their mothers." He kissed
Mrs. Mullens and she seemed pleased enough with it, but she just hadn't the
style of Charlotte in these things. After a while, they played some sort of
three-handed cards with kisses for stakes. 	"It's more fun when you play
for something," Mrs. Mullens said. Mrs. Mullens had a certain brisk way with
the cards. Duffey was glad that they were not playing for money. Mrs.
Mullens (well, her name was Gloria) had a certain brisk way of kissing also:
friendly and full of value her kisses were, but brisk nevertheless. Kissing
her was like biting into an apple, cool and juicy and flavorsome. Yes, but
Charlotte had her beat. 
	"We're completely destitute," Gloria Mullens said as if she were
reciting a lesson. "Our husband and father died two months ago and he seems
to have left nothing but debts. He was always a fast man with the buck. He
was a grasshopper; he was a butterfly; but he had to have left something, he
handled so much money. He never ran out of tricks. I'm still not sure that
his dying wasn't a trick. I expect him to come in grinning one day with his
hands full of money and him crowing about the way he took those insurance
folks." 
	A youngish man who had been popping around the coach for a long
while now approached as if to join their party. Nine year old Charlotte
turned him aside with an imperious gesture, but surely the Mullenses knew
the man. 
	"He also has the terminal illness," Duffey told himself. "Strange,
strange." 
	"But I found that my husband had borrowed double and even triple on
what insurance he had," Gloria Mullens was continuing. "And the insurance is
attached where I can't touch it. He had borrowed double on the house and on
everything. There are more debts of his turning up every day. I'll never
clear them all. And I found that I had co-signed with him on a dozen notes,
things that I had never paid any attention to at the time. They attached my
salary where I worked, so Charlotte and I are skipping.  Aren't you kissing
Chirlotte more than that last score called for? I still think that my good
man left a stash of money somewhere and that he is trying to tell me where
it is. His voice comes to me, but faintly. I am a psychic, but nobody is
psychic as to his own closest affairs." 
	"Are you a professional psychic, Gloria?" Melchisedech asked. 
	"Yes, sometimes. You also are a psychic, as I divine, Mr. Duffey,
and you may be able to help us. We're running blind and we're about broke.
I'll have to get a job in Chicago for a while, and I'm not even sure that
that's where the stash is. My man used to take a lot of quick trips to
Chicago. He would get stuff off the boats and bring it to Omaha and other
places. Oh, we both love him so and we miss him so much, terribly! But how
can you back track on a butterfly?" 
	"I don't quite know," Duffey said. "Me, I'm on the trail of a moth."

	They played another hand of cards, and Duffey kissed Charlotte quite
a bit. She was no little girl. She was something else. 
	"What kind of moth?" Charlotte asked him. 
	"Oh, I believe that it is the tinea evocata, the evoking moth,"
Duffey said, "or it is the indignatio, the seeking moth. Or maybe it will
happen to be the tinea letitia, the joyful moth." 
	"Sum etiam erudita ipse", Charlotte said, and Duffey's suspicions
were confirmed that this creature wasn't a little girl at all. "I'm educated
myself", she had said, and she hadn't got that way in nine years. And now
and then she set her little girl's voice aside, especially when she
whispered to Duffey, and used a woman's voice. "We'll find her for you,
Duffey," she said now. "Evoking moths are always female, and we'll find her
for you." 
	"She misses her father so much," Gloria said. "He had red whiskers
too. I believe that she has fastened on you is a father image." 
	"Father image, my eye!" Charlotte scoffed. "Duffey is my
sweetheart." 
	"How old are you really, Charlotte?" Duffey asked her. "Sometimes
you don't talk quite like a nine year old girl." 
	"Sometimes I get damned tired of talking like a nine year old girl,"
she said. "You told Gloria that you were Melchisedech and that you had never
had any father or mother. Well, I have my mystery and paradox too. I am
older than my father and I am older than my mother, and that is as much as I
will tell you. Possibly I am old enough to have been your mother, Duffey.
I'm precocious about things like that, having sons and such." 
	"How old are you, Charlotte?" 
	"Oh, thirty-eight. That isn't really very old. And, as Gloria says,
what can anybody do with a little girl who loves the men so much." 
	"What's Gloria?" 
	"My sister. That's usually the part I give to the other woman, after
it's found out that she isn't my mother." 
	"And the man who was about to join us when you gestured him off?" 
	"He's my son. But by the time he came by accident to take a fourth
hand at cards, I had come to like you and didn't want to fleece you." 
	"Do the bunch of you live by playing cards?" "Oh no, but it helps.
We make a lot from it, but we make a lot from everything. There really is a
stash in Chicago though. All the psychics we know are on the other side now.
He's hired them against us. We need a good psychic, a mind-prober, to find
the stash for us, We're too close to do it ourselves, though I'm a strong
psychic. Duffey, find this butterfly nest for us, and we'll find your moth
for you. I can find her for you, Duffey." 
	A little later in the night, Duffey taught Charlotte and her mother
the Gadarene Swine Song. They sang it resoundingly, and Charlotte was
particularly apt it inventing verses for it. She was smart. Some of the
people in the day coach were trying to sleep and they protested the loud
singing. But the Mullenses, and Duffey under the influence of Charlotte
Mullens, were rude and just didn't care whether they kept those people awake
or not. 
	CHAPTER II
 
	In Clicago, Duffey said that he was going to a little north-side
hotel that he knew. 
	"That's as good a place as any," Charlotte said. "If they look for
us in our old haunts, maybe they won't be finding us in a north-side
hideaway. Charlotte and her sister Gloria and her son Manolo went with
Duffey in a taxi to the little north-side hotel. It was bright morning. 

	Duffey did several things that day while he listened to the sound of
wings that were close. He was not a total stranger to Chicago. He had surely
been there several times for a week or more. Once he had spent a Christmas
vacation there in the rich home of Sebastian Hilton. Once he had lived there
for a month or so with false kindred who shucked him off to other false
kindred when they found out just how unsettling a boy he was. Several times
he had been there looking into business deals, possibly in the hidden years,
certainly in the subsequent years. 
	He went to see Gabriel Szymansky who was a businessman who lacked
the personality to get along with the public. Gabriel had two shops back to
back, with a foot passage under the alley between them. The shops faced on
two different streets. On the rich street, Gabriel was an antique dealer. On
the poor street he was a pawnbroker. This man Gabriel had made big sums of
money, but he always used associates to maintain the confidence of the
public. There was never a more honest nor a more upright man than Gabriel,
but the public can never accept an absolutely honest man as really honest.
There is nothing in the absolutely honest man that the public can relate to.
The public insists on an open man who is at least one-third rogue and
one-third blow-mouth. Duffey could always force himself to be such a person.

	About six months previously, Duffey had talked to this man Szymansky
about coming into business with him and adding a book store and an art
store. Duffey had also talked to Szymansky about six years previously,
apparently during the hidden years, and he had given him a talisman. Six
months ago, Duffey had hesitated on the deal of going into business with the
man. Now he wanted it. 
	"I'll start today, Gabriel," Duffey said. "I can throw in the first
ten thousand today and the second half of it within six months." Duffey
could have thrown it all in that day, but he liked double-jointed deals. "I
will take the full six rooms over the back shop, and I will be available day
and night. I myself will move in tomorrow, and my wife will move in within a
week." 
	"Duffey, I didn't know that you had a wife." 
	"I haven't. But within a week, I will have. She is a wonderful
woman, I am sure of that. And ours will be a long and steady life together."

	"Is she a Chicago girl?" 
	"She presently resides in Chicago." 
	They closed the deal. Duffey didn't have any wife, and he had no
idea whom he would marry. He hadn't seen her. He had no notion what she was
like. He only felt an overiding compulsion to find her somewhere nearby. For
that, he had been called to Chicago over the miles. 
	"What is she like, Duffey?" Gabriel asked. "What are her outstanding
qualities?" 
	"Fire and finesse," Duffey said. And he left Szymansky satisfied
with what he had done so far. 
	There was a girl living in Chicago, Lily Koch, who had used to be
the girl merchant at the school near Duffey's own school. Duffey phoned for
her, and he was told by a pleasantly haunting voice that she was not in, but
that she would get in contact with him, or he could call again, or they
would both call, or anyhow they would get together, God willing. Duffey
loved that pleasantly haunting voice on the phone. 
	He called for Sebastian Hilton who still maintained one of his
several residences in Chicago. Sebastian was not in, but he would be at his
club at one o'clock the following day. Yes, he would absoltutely be there,
though at present he was out of town. Yes, he would surely see Melchisedech
Duffey there. Mr. Duffey was on the list of people who Mr. Hiiton would
always see. It was quite a short list, the voice said. 
	Out and about, a little girl was skipping circles around him on the
sidewalk with a skipping rope. No, he was wrong. It wasn't a little girl. It
was Charlotte Mullens. 
	"Are you finding the butterfly nest for me, Duffey?" she asked him,
and they went over and sat on a bench where one waited for street cars. 
	"Yes, yes, my little creature, we will find this thing for you right
away," Duffey said, and he popped his hands together. 
	"About your creatures, my dear," Charlotte said. "On yes, I know
about your creatures. They are almost the most interesting things that I
find in your mind. I make creatures also, or figures, but I use a different
process. Your figures, your creatures, dear, you need lessons in stagecraft.
Your people, while you are making them, are static. You have not put them
into motion at all. 
	"They are quite young," Duffey said. 
	"It's getting time that you devised scenes and scenarios for them. I
will help you with it in a few years if we are both still around. The world
has too many static people now. Do not add to them. My own, while they are
often short-lived, are always quite kinetic." 
	"What do you use, Charlotte?" Duffey asked her. "I already had the
idea that your sister and your son were projections of you, that they were
ventriloquist's figures that you had made, or that they were mere lumps of
your aura. Are they?" 
	"Oh, I use flesh and blood people, Duffey, but I select rather empty
and pliable ones, usually actors. Then I do make them into compliant figures
yes, and I do make them into lumps of my own aura. But there is nothing
beyond nature in my creations. Is there in yours?"
	"I don't know," Duffey said. "Well, I'm having more luck at finding
the butterfly's nest than at finding the moth. The stash doesn't belong to
you, Charlotte, but it did not belong to the man who put it there either.
That man is away in durance, but he expected the stash to be inviolable in
his absence." 
	"That man is coming out of durance today or tomorrow," Charlotte
said. "That is what makes it so edgy." 
	"I want to know his name, Charlotte. I can't psyche this unless I
know his name." 
	"Aga Gonof is his name, and his son is Orestes Gonof. He has boats.
He brings liquor from Canada to Chicago and Detroit and Cleveland. I had a
husband who was involved with him, and part of the stash does belong to me,
a small part of it, Duffey, but you don't need the details. I'll take the
other ninety-five percent for interest on the five percent that's been
withheld from me." 
	"Does Gonof know what you look like?"
	"No. Nobody knows what I look like. He called me the 'Disembodied
Brain', so I have heard. I used to play the role of my own daughter. But
even as my own daughter, I'd have to be quite a bit older and larger now
than I was whenever he might possibly have seen me. And I'm still the same
age and size. Work on it, darling. You won't have to tell me what you find.
It will all be open to me. But I love to talk to you at every opportunity." 
	That little girl skipped away with her skipping rope. 
	Well, there was a key to unlock the box where the stash was, and
Duffey got (from what mind he did not know) a figure replica of the key.
Duffey knew about keys. He had made keys and matched them. And keys can be
number coded for their reproduction. Duffey was able to write down the base
or stock number of that key just by looking at it with his inner eye. And he
was able to write down the several cluster numbers that define the
modification of that basic stock, the little notches and kerfs and dips. It
was a typical safety deposit box key, if only he knew the number and
location of the box. That was the crux, of course. Boxes can be
strong-opened without keys, but they can't be found without data to go on. 
	"And the location and number of the box will come to me," Duffey
said. 
	"Of course it will," Charlotte told him. She wasn't physically
present just then, but that didn't prevent them from communicating. "And
I'll be right there when it comes to you. But you missed your moth for
today. We'll have to get her early in the morning, I believe."
	"Where?" 
	"Not more than two blocks from our hotel. She is at a place very
early in the mornings, and then she goes somewhere else. We got to town too
late for her this morning. We'll catch her tomorrow sure. There is no moth
that can escape Charlotte and Melchisedech. I'll go get the key made now." 
	It was easy, since they were in accord and since they were both full
of powers, to talk to each other out of presence. Except that Charlotte had
such a fund of pleasure and carnality accoinpinying her presence. 
	CHAPTER III
 
	Very late that night, after Duffey had gone to bed in his hotel
room, Charlotte visited him there. Whether this visit was in the body or out
of it is not certain, but most likely it was an out-of-the-bocly interlude. 
	Duffey had been juggling the names and numbers while he slept and
woke and slept again. He was in a wasteland. The sky and soil were much
different from those of ordinary earth. They were more in the conditions
that had prevailed in the seven-year land, during the dark years or the lost
years. 
	It was a shore, but the ocean at that place was empty. There were
bales on a dock, but they could not be loaded until a ship could find water
to come by. A stevedore and his two brothers were guarding the bales, but
they were nervous and pacing as if they had something else on their minds.
They made sudden decisions. They left the bales abruptly and strode rapidly
to the place where the wheels of three gate valves came out of the ground.
And that is where they made their mistake. 
	Duffey was onto those bales as soon as the stevedores had gone a
little distance. He broke several of the bales open and let them scatter.
They were bales of numbers and letters, and Duffey fumbled feverishly into
their bulk for the right numbers and letters. 
	The stevedores turned the three gate valves that came out of the
ground. This turned on the ocean and harbor and let the water flow in and
fill things up. A ship on the other side of a hill or promontory blew its
whistle as a signal that it was coming for the bales. Then the three
slant-faced stevedores turned back toward their bales and saw that they had
been broken open. The foremost of them came at Duffey murderously with a
boat hook to kill him. "These will have to do," Duffey cried is he backed
off with a handful of numbers and letters that he had selected. "The right
ones ]lave to be imong these, or all is lost." The three Mullens people were
there together then, though Charlotte had been there all the time. 
	"Stop the one with the hook!" little Charlotte Mullens cried out.
"Gloria, Manolo my son, divert him, throw him down, stop him even if he
kills you! Here, give me those, Duffey!" Charlotte swept the numbers and
letters into her hands and arranged them like a hand of cards. "Perfect,"
she cried then, "absolutely perfect. This will tell me everything I need to
know. Split, Duffey! Split, everybody! But divert him for a moment, Gloria
and Manolo, and watch out for the other two. Maybe they won't really use the
hooks on you. Oh, it spells it all out, and numbers it all out so perfectly:
the bank building, the deposit box number, everything! Wonderful! Aw, ugh!
It always sickens me to hear a boat hook crunch a skull like that." 
	"Will you be all right, Charlotte?" Duffey cried in a fleeting
moment, knowing that they had to get away, knowing that Gloria and Manolo
were already dead. 
	"Oh sure. I know how to go to ground, Duff," little girl Charlotte
said. "In Chicago, I always take refuge in St. Angela Orba Orphanage. All
but two of the sisters there think that I'm a little girl. And those two who
know what I am, they will always provide me with commitment papers and love.
You dnd your moth come out sometime and adopt me if you want to."
	Duffey was running through Dead Man's Meadow then. It was a
notorious stretch of seven-year land. But he felt the anguish of the three
slanted-faced stevedores behind him. The ship was already at the dock for
their bales. But some of the bales had been broken open, and some of them
had blood on them. 

	Duffey's phone rang then. He was in bed in his hotel room. It was
Charlotte who was piloting. "Get up, Duffey," she was singing. "We go moth
hunting in just five minutes. Who'd have thought that moths got up so early,
but I know where she is now. You have located the butterfly's nest for me
and have given me the key to it, and you have given me its location and
number just now. So I will find your moth for you." 
	"Ah, Charlotte, I was just dreaming about --" 
	"Dreaming my nine year old fanny! Don't you know the difference
between a dream and a psychosomatic trance? We used to use the tranccs a lot
when we did our mentalist acts. They almost always worked. And yours worked,
Duffey! Why, all I needed was the name of the bank and the number of the
safety deposit box. Box? It's a walk-in, isn't it? I'll make the pick-up
today. I'm worried about those stevedores with the boat hooks though.
They're killers." 
	"How did you enter my dream literally?" 
	"I told you that it was a psychosomatic trance, not a dream. I
opened the door and walked into it, of course. This isn't getting you up and
dressed. I'll be at your door in two minutes." She hung up. 
	But she was at his door in half a minute and into his room. 
	"Does it always take you that long to put your pants on?" she asked.
"Your moth will be at that little stone church just two blocks from here
north. I want to go to confession before mass. It's an even flip whether
I'll get murdered on the swipe I'm on today, and I want to be prepared for
death. On come on! You don't need to wash this morning. Lots of people don't
wash any more. It's kind of out." 
	"What do nine year old con women have to confess?" Duffey asked. He
was tickled over the affair. 
	"Oh, robbing widows and orphans, things like that," Charlotte said.
"Whenever I get a likely gentleman, I ask him whether he's a widow or an
orphain. If he is, I go easy on him. I fleece him, of course, but I leave a
few tufts. But sometimes we get greedy. And then I always have a lot of
carnality to confess; and there's a few of our badger games that go over the
line. Mama Gloria will have a gentleman in at night,and I will come out of
the bathroom towelling myself in the buff. "Oh my little girl, she never
remembers," Gloria says. "She is so artless. She is so guileless. She comes
out of her bath at night just as natural as that. You'd think that a nine
year old girl would begin to be aware of things." And the man is very heated
and he doesn't know why. Then he fondles me, and Gloria goes out of the room
for a while. She comes back with witnesses. Oh, you can scare a lot of money
out of a man when you catch him in something like that! This is a form of
the badger game that always works. There are lots of laws to protect us
little nine year old girls from evil men; and when Mama Gloria and a couple
of friends start talking that prison-bar talk to a poor man, he'll shell out
all the money he has." 
	They were in the street now and going north towards the stone
Church. The sign said that it was St. Malachy's Church. Duffey knew about
St. Malachy's in St. Louis where Bagby used to go, but he hadn't even known
that there was a St. Malachy's in Chicago. 
	Wings! There were wings all over it. The stone itself was quivering
with the beat of wiilgs. The whole south front had three spread-winged
archangels, and the east and west sides each had nine big-wingcd angels. Who
could feel a moth winging through that great wingedness? 
	"There's a priest in his rose garden," Charlotte said. "Oh they are
red! But I'll have to call him away from them for redder things. I'll have
to --" and Charlotte was gone over there -- 
	"--to get myself straight before I do other things this day,"
Charlotte was still jabbering. "And when I steal that stash at the opportune
moment, I will steal it with a clean and pure heart. Oh there, father, come
along now. You have some high absolving to do in a hurry." 
	"You, little girl, you cannot have anything that requires a hurry." 
	"Oh 'Little Girl' your reverend wrongheadedness! There are big-girl
things that I have been about. Come along, servant of the servants!"
Charlotte and the priest entered the church, and other people were beginning
to arrive and enter. 
	Yes, the moth power was very heavy around there. Ruddy St. Malachy's
on the northside was catching the morning sun on its rose and winged
turrets, and all the holy and giant things were working for Duffey again.
But why did the moth not define itself! 
	Oh, maybe sixty or seventy people went in, women and men and
children. There was a stunningly beautiful Italian girl who elevated
Duffey's soul. She was not the moth. Whatever her role, she was something
else. if the moth must be female, why three quarters of the people who
entered the church were so. These were the beautiful holy women of early
morning. There was a rather chubby young woman with blond hair under a black
veil, and with half-shut, smiling eyes. Duffey loved her instantly. Thre was
a regal lady with a high fling to her head. She was either a queen or a show
girl. There were Polish ladies and German ladies, and Irish and Italians and
Greeks. And the moth was among them. 
	Half an hour later, when mass was over with, Duffey still didn't
know. 
	"Oh, you look so anticipating!" the beautiful Italian girl said to
him then. "A happy thing will come to you today." 
	"You will meet her today, will you?" a German lady asked him. "And
you will be very happy together. Live so that you will deserve the happiness
that comes to you." 
	"You saw your wife for the first time a half hour ago," a gypsy
woman said to Duffey. "You saw her first over your left shoulder. All luck
to you, red-headed man." 
	"What is your father looking for so hard?" the chubby young woman
with the smiling eyes asked Charlotte. "Nothing is worth looking that hard
for." 
	"He thinks she's worth it," Charlotte said. "She's a moth. And he
isn't my father." 
	"Why how stuffy of him to be chasing moths!" the young woman said in
a voice that had a familiar sound. "When you catch her, will you stick a pin
through her head and hang her on the wall, man?" 
	"Only when she defies me," Duffey said. The chubby young woman
helped herself to a red rose from the rose patch then. So did the regal lady
who was either a queen or a show girl. All the people were gone soon, and
the moth presence was gone with their going. But which one has she been?
Duffey and Charlotte went to eat breakfast at a little cafe twist the Church
and the hotel. 
	"By the pink stone angels of St. Malachy's, I don't know which she
is!" Duffey moaned. 
	"Whoops, whoops, my love and my boy, I'll help you no more,"
Charlotte chortled. "I have brought you to her this morning and you have
talked to her. I'll do no more for you. There are things that a man must do
for himself." 
	Charlotte fell asleep over breakfast. When she went to sleep, all
the orneriness went out of her face and left it sheerly beautiful: as she
was then, so should she be forever. She would be one of the supreme pieces
in Duffey's Uncollectable Art Collection, along with that ivory figurine
Beth Keegan, along with -- well, with several others who are still to
appear. 
	She woke up, and the orneriness came back into her face, but it
could only partly displace her beauty. They made a date, to meet again at
noon that day, at another litle cafe that was across the street from a
certain club. All the Mullenses were to be there, and Duffey was to bring
the moth if he could find her by noon. Charlotte who was a mentalist assured
him that he would have the moth by that time. 
	They kissed when they left the cafe. And there wasn't any way to
take the orneriness out of Charlotte's kisses. 
	Duffey's phone was ringing when he got back to his hotel room. And
the voice on the phone was now doubly familiar. 
	"Miss Lily Koch is in today," said that half-haunting voice, "and
she wonders if you would like to come by her shop at once. She is most
anxious to see you." 
	CHAPTER IV

	The voice gave Duffey the address of the shop. Duffey went out of
his room and downstairs and out of the building, and tumbled into a cab to
go there. He was excited, for he remembered Lily with almost total pleasure.
He also found that the moth presence was strong as he came to the
neighborhood of the shop. It wasn't far. Chicago is miles and miles, but all
the places that one would want to go are within about six blocks of each
other. Duffey would never find out what the rest of the city was good for.
When he came to the ornate stoop and door of the shop (it was all
Art-and-Elegance shop) Melchisedech knew absolutely that the evoking moth
was inside it. 
	Was Lily herself the moth? Duffey had always loved her a little when
he used to see her during his school days. He loved her a bit more in memory
when he didn't see her any more. And now in his expectation he loved her
almost totally. Well, almost... 
	And it was Lily who met him in the doorway. She threw her arms wide
for him and gave him the biggest kiss in town. 
	"Oh, it's my bashful schoolboy!" she cried. "Melky, Melky, I love
you. I was alrways so fond of you, and I still am. Oh come in, conic in. I
almost hate to give you up." 
	"Don't ever give me up, Lily. I've just found you again." 
	"Oh, l'Ill not the one, dumbhead. Our magic wouldn't mesh together,
don't you remember? Letzy, look what a fine lout we have here! Ah c'mon
Melky, why couldn't it have been me? Why do guys always have to go further
and do better? Oh, you came all the way to Chicago on a signal that went out
over the sly media, and now you don't know who she is! Don't you remember
that one of your talismans was rib-shaped and that you gave it to me? Don't
you remember that we said it might not work very well? Now you've even come
to the right shop, and you still don't know it when you've found her. What
do you think of him, Letzy?" 
	"Are you the moth, Lily?" Melchisedech asked her. There was a puzzle
here. 
	Me? A moth? Do you think it's a motli who's called you to Chicago?
Oh, Duffey, she's a butterfly who's exploded into the next stage, Psyche
herself. You really are, Letzy!" 
	Duffey had known that some laughing person was watching them there,
someone with a half-haunting voice, someone who was chubby and had smiling
eyes and a dazzling soul. He wouldn't look, but he felt the whole world
enhanced by that watchful presence. 
	"What sort of moth were you looking for, Duffey my love?" Lily
asked. 
	"Tinea Evocata, the evoking moth," he said as he had said once
before. "Tinea Indagatio, the seeking moth. Tinea Letitia, the joyful moth.
Where is she? Lily, why aren't you the moth?" 
	"Letitia!" Lily howled. "Oh, oh, what a name! Letzy, don't you think
that Letitia is the silliest name in the world?" 
	"My name is Letitia Koch," said that chubby girl Letzy who had been
looking at them and laughing at them. "Why won't I do? Why can't I be your
moth?" 
	And that is the way that Melchisedech Duffey met his wife. 
	Oh, all the details had been at hand for anyone to recognize them.
Letitia was the chubby young woman with the smiling eyes who, that morning,
had asked Charlotte "What is your father looking for so hard?" Charlotte had
known who she was. Why hadn't Duffey known it? Letitia was the half-haunting
voice that Duffey had spoken to on the telephone several times. Well, she
was Lily's partner and sister. Why shouldn't she have answered the phone
there? 
	"Do you remember when you gave me that talisiman when we were kids?"
Lily was asking. "But I couldn't use it myself. It wouldn't work that way.
We have things here in our elegant shop that people look at and see nothing
to them. Why is it priced so high when it's crooked?' they ask me about that
talisman. 'Why is it priced even higher than the beautiful pieces?' 'It is
because God will not allow me to put the PRICELESS tag on it,' I say
sometimes, but it is priceless. And it isn't crooked. It's rib-shaped. Oh
Melky, Sebastian and I both used to try to awaken the art sense in you, and
you already had it. How incredible of you to have selected Letzy a dozen
years before you saw her! How discerning of you to know that she was really
priceless!" 
	"Will we live over the bookstore?" Letitia asked Duffey. 
	"Yes. We can start moving things in today," Duffey said. Things were
going very fast for him, for them all. "Do you know about the bookstore?" 
	"Yes. It isn't a bookstore yet, but I used to walk by there often
and I knew that it would be a bookstore. And last week I had Gabriel show me
through all the shops and all those upstairs roou where we will live. I've
made sketches of how things should be arranged there, and I'm sure that they
will fit in exactly with your plans. I felt your suggestions several times
while I was making the sketches last week. We will be marricd the day after
tomorrow. I've already made most of the arrangements at St. Malachy's." 
	"It's magic," said Lily Koch, "and it belongs to you dumb bums. It
doesn't come to smarty people like me. You came five hundred miles to her,
Duffey, and then you didn't know her when you were three feet from her. And
Letzy won't be working for you. She'll still be working with me here. You
can't afford her at your place. And she wouldn't be able to afford your
inevitable follies if she didn't keep her half interest in Koch's
Galleries." 
	"Do you always shake like that, Duffey?" Letitia was asking. "It's
the delayed action shakes that you have. There's nothing to be afraid of.
It's only me, and you already love me. Now we must get to work. I've already
hired a truck. You haven't much at your hotel, but we'll move in what there
is, and then we'll move in the first loads from my place. Then it will be
time to meet that mendacious midget of yours. Do you know that she is
pulling grand robbery at this very moment and that it runs into several
millions? Duffy has a mendacious midget, Lily?" 
	"I shouldn't wonder." 
	Well, actually the whole thing was arranged by a couple of astute
and invisible senescals. Royal persons can't be trusted to arrange marriages
for themselves. 
	Duffey and Letitia left the shop then, and they began to move things
into their new home up over the new book store that still hadn't any books.
Letitia hadn't cut her hair as many had done in that year. She had great
cascades of it, and it was somewhere between blond and scarlet and walnut in
color. She had a pleasant ruddiness of complexion and a really high comedy
look to her. Her chubbiness was an asset, an extra-ness, a surpassing part
of her perfection. Not chubby: she was full-bodied. She was priceless, yes,
but only to the very deep-seeing would she appear so at first encounter. Her
eyes were somewhere between sea-green and Melchisedech blue. She was younger
than Lily, and she was taller than Duffey. They moved things for a couple of
hours. Then they went to be keeping their noontime date. 

	It wasn't the little cafe they were really going to. It was the
Colony Club across the street from it. The Mullens bunch was waiting, and
Duffey arrived with the two beautiful Koch sisters. 
	"You wouldn't have fooled me, Charlotte, not for a minute," Lily
said. "Nine year old girl, not You!" 
	"She fooled me for a moment this morning," Letitia confessed. 
	The Colony was none of your little, dimly-lit clubs. It was
sun-bright in the noontime with the curtains drawn back from the grand sky
lights. It had splendid vulgarity in everything. There was fast money that
was as good as wealth at the Colony, and there was a cheap-shot artistry
that spelled success. The Colony represented Chicago noon-time beef dinners
and sly-boat Canadian whisky. There were gaming rooms, and drinking lounges
with loaded sideboards. The Mullenses, except Manolo who must have been a
pretty new son, were known in the Colony Club, but they were known as the
Cavendishes; and they were known as show people. The Kochs were known there
as art people. But the two families had not met before. 
	"I am a millionaire now, Duffey," Charlotte told him as she enticed
him into a corner away from the others. "I pulled it off, though I believe
that there was one of those mind-alarms in the walk-in, and I triggered it.
No matter: that mind-alarm couldn't have known me. Oh, I've been a
millionaire before, for short times, but not this big a millionaire. I am a
natural-born pirate. Now I've stolen and reburied a bigger loot than any
Kidd or Blackbeard ever saw. But it's become quite dangerous. There was an
alarm somewhere, given to someone. It wasn't a physical alarm, but still it
was given. And now l'm followed, but they don't know what I look like. The
mind-alarm picked up the name Mullens somehow, but that's only a throwaway
name with me. This is the last day I'll use it anywhere. 
	"I love your affianced wife. How could you not have known who she
was this morning, since she is at least partly of your making. Don't you
even recognize your own handiwork and signature? Duffey, do you know that
she does not count as one of your twelve prime creations? She is a bonus.
The rib-shaped talisman is extra, the once-in-a-lifetime gift to a creating
magician. You're still allowed the royal twelve. 
	"This place is full of psychics. Your affianced is a very good one,
and the skinny Countess is one. That dark-and-secret-eyed Sebastian over
there is one. But Lily isn't. We have never met your friend Sebastian,
though we all come to this club when we are in town. He seems to have been
abroad every time we have been in town. We understand that he is very rich
and that he fancies himself as a gamer. Thse are two things that we love in
a man. He'll not miss what we take, Duffey' " 
	"But will you miss what he might take, Charlotte? I warn you:
Sebastian is good at everything." 
	"How enviable. And I and mine are only good at half a dozen things,
but we are very, very good at them. Ah, we kiss here, and your new wife only
chuckles. Can't I even make that one jealous? She knows I'm a midget. She
knows that I'm not a little girl. Oh my God, either my sister or one of your
ladies has ordered the Harvesters' Dinner for everyone. Oh, I suppose that's
all right in the Colony Club. After all, this is Chicago." 
	Roasting ears were central to the Harvesters' Dinner. There were
mountains of them. And every kind of beef and potato and bread. Oh Lord save
us, cabbage and kale and sauerkraut. Cheeses and sausages and Polish
sausage, hot biscuits. No, that was only the beginning outline of the
Harvesters' Dinner. They would keep bringing stuff in. 
	Sebastian Hilton was at table with them, though he was supposed to
have dined earher somewhere. He kissed the four ladies. He already knew Lily
and Letitia well. Did he know that Charlotte Mullens or Cavendish was not
really a nine year old girl? He must have known it from the way she kissed. 
	Sebastian still had the dark-and-secret-eyes and the
not-long-for-this-world look. He still brought expertise and joy wherever he
went. And nobody could remember, after he had dominated a conversation and
after he was gone, what words he had used, though no one ever forgot the
effect of him. He always spoke well and excitingly, but did he really speak
in words? 
	Later, after the heavy Harvesters' Dinner had been put away,
Sebastian came to Duffey and Letitia when they were on the roof observatory,
and he added to their togetherness. He was of one mind with them both, as
Duffey and Sebastian had been of one mind in their earher years, as Duffey
and Letitia were of one mind presently and forever hence. 
	Later still, Duffey and Sebastian were together in one of the 
private rooms of the club. Certainly Sebastian knew all about the wedding,
more of the details than Duffey knew. Two days before this, Letitia had
engaged him to be best man. Certainly he knew that Duffey was going into
business with Gabriel Szymansky. It would be a good business. Oh, Duffey
would lose his golden touch some day, but his money barns should be pretty
well full by that time. And of course there would be disasters. It was good
that he would have the priceless Letitia. Besides, she was rich. Duffey
hadn't thought of that part. Lily Koch had had the name of being a very rich
girl during her school days. And Letitia was her sister. It was not a main
thing, but yes, it was a good thing. Sebastian and Duffey talked together
for an hour. Theirs was an exceptional friendship. 
	Then Letitia came to them again. She said that they must be off.
There was very much to do. They found Charlotte and Gloria Mullens playing
bridge against Lily Koch and a strange, ashen-haired, smiling, slim girl.
Duffey was startled. He had heard her mentioned as being in the club, but he
hadn't been able to spot her before. he knew who she was: the skinny
countess to whom Charlotte had referred, and the earlier countess of
mind-plundering encounter. Duffey knew her from Sebastian's mind. He even
knew how it would be to kiss her. 
	"This is a friend," Sebastian said of her to Duffey. "She is someone
I used to speak of, Melchisedech, and you never believed in her. But she is
real. She is the Girl Countess." 
	Duffey kissed the Girl Countess and she kissed him. It was just as
he had remembered it. 
	"We must go," Letitia said. 
	"And I must go," Lily told them. "Take my hand, Sebastian, but
beware. This small Charlotte is weird beyond anything in the world." 
	Duffey kissed the girls: Gloria (somehow he knew it would be the
last time he would ever see her), Charlotte (there would never be a last
time for his seeing her), and the countess again (after all, she was
special; she was the only countess that Duffey had ever kissed). And he left
with his Koch girls. 
	But Duffey and Lily and Letitia were all in laughing wonder in the
street. 
	"The Mullenses, that is to say the Cavendishes, make their living as
card sharks," Duffey explained. 
	"Of course they do," Lily said. 
	"And Sebastian is the absolute expert at everything," Duffey added. 
	"Of course he is, and so is his countess," Lily said. "And she's as
much a mentalist as your Mullens girls. They love each other, I can tell,
but it will be bloody cutthroat. It will be the battle of the century, and
we are missing out on it. Do you know what the Countess said about the two
of you? She said that it was so nice when a couple share the same psychoses,
especially when they're all about the belief that you can create the scenes
and people who are around you. She says that the only danger is that the
bottoms of both of your worlds will fall out at the same time." 	"Oh
I know that," Letitia said, "but it's always the same world with us and the
same bottom. But the Countess has her own psychotic behefs. She believes
that she's red. But Sebastian made her up a long time ago, and Duffey took
her up then. And it was myself who projected her into the Chicigo scene.
Sebastian was clear thunderstruck when she appeared in Chicago, and he still
is." 	"Oh Letzy," Lily worried, "sometimes you really believe in your
private fancies. And Melky will not be a corrective to you. I He'll abet
you. And finally you won't even know what objective truth is." 
	"I don't know what it is now. I only know that it isn't. There is no
such thing, my gilded Lily, is objective truth or objective fact. The whole
world is made out of subjective private projections. Some of them become
consensus projections, but they aren't really objective even then." 
	"Oh Duffey, cut her tongue out if you can do it without scandal,"
Lily said. "The rest of her is priceless, but sometimes her tongue isn't
worth fifteen cents a pound. You two are my treasures and you are made out
of pure gold. But there are individual coins in you that are counterfeits
even if they are made out of true metal. Some of those coins have the Crown
and Image of 'The Royal Malarky of Salem' on them. We will eat together late
tonight, and then we will go to a late show somewhere. Oh, You don't know
how much you are loved, you two!" 
	Lily left them then, and then went about the appointing of their new
house. Duffey bought tools and lumber and good cherry wood panelling. With a
few hundred deft strokes he would be able to do wonders to those upstairs
rooms. 
	They took time off to visit City Hall, and St. Malachy's, and an
insurgence company, and a bank, and a lawyer. Then they cleaned up...
	"Damn it, Duffey, the hot water doesn't work," Letitia protested. 
	"Did I say it worked?" 
	...and changed clothes and went back to the old Lily/Letitia
apartment... 
	("Oh, it will be so lonesome and desolate here," the spirit of the
apartment was moaning, "Where can I get me another sister? Where can I get
me a husband? How will I live alone?") 
	... where the spirit Lily had a candle-light supper set out for
them. 
	It was a wonderful supper. Lily cried and blew her nose. And Letzy
said that it was the most wonderful condiment spread over everything and
that they should market it. "But how much can you produce a month, Lily? We
have to know." 
	They went out to Morgenstein's Comedy Music Box on Randolph Street
and saw an extravaganza. When they came out of there, a paper boy was
calling the midnight edition 'Double Murder in North-Side Hotel'. 
	"Get me one, Duffey," Lily said. "I love murders. I so envy those
whose lifestyles allow them to indulge." 
	"I don't love this one," said Letitia who was prescient. 
	"Neither do I," Duffey moaned. He got a paper from the boy. His
hands shook so much that he spilled coins all over the pavement. Then Lily
had to take the paper from him to read the story. 
	Yes, it wis Gloria and Manolo Mullens who had been murdered in that
same little hotel that Duffey had moved out of that day. It was a
particularly savage assault. The two had been tortured first. Then the two
skulls had been crushed as though great spikes had been driven into them,
but the murder weapon was not found. And there was no trace of the girl
about nine years old who was believed to have been with the Mullens since
their coming to town. 
	The Mullens were known gamblers, the paper said, and it was surmised
that there might be underworld connections. Three slant-faced men had been
seen about the hotel, and people said that they did not belong there. 
	"Do you think that Charlotte got away?" Lily asked. 
	"Of Course she did," Letitia said, "but she shouldn't have pulled
the other two into her danger. They were tortured to get information that
they didn't have. But Charlotte was already away. The killers didn't know
that their target was a little girl or a little midget. To them she was only
the mysterious 'brain'. They somehow had the name 'Mullens' from the mind
alarm, and the name of the Mullens' hotel. Charlotte is in a pre-selected
hideout, and I bet she gives the nuns there holy hell." 
	"Did she really steal the millions?" Lily asked her usually psychic
sister. 
	"Yes, and she will own it all securely when the coast is clear. Then
she will be the fascinating millionare mendacious midget of our
acquaintenance." "What was the weapon?" 
	"I can't quite see that part," Letitia said. "There's a sort of sea
spray that comes between. I can't tell what the cruel hooked thing is."
	But Duffey recognized the destruction of the cruel hooked thing. It
was the boat hook in the hands of one of the three slant-faced stevedores of
Duffey's dream or psychosomatic trance of that very morning. And he recalled
with nausea Charlotte's dream-or-trance words: 
	"Aw, ugh, it always sickens me to hear a boat hook crunch into a
skull like that."
	CHAPTER V 

	Melchisedech Duffey and Letitia Koch got married. It was a nice
wedding. 

	Has there ever been on earth a true golden age, either particular or
general? Yes, there have been dozens and dozens of particular golden ages.
These usually involve small areas and small numbers of persons, but they can
be absolutely authentic. 
	One of them was in a portion of North Chicago in the years 1925 to
1935. Then it continued as an electrum age (gold and silver mixed) till
about 1946. There were some minor disasters in this electrum section of it,
but there were none in the pure gold first section. 
	Some of the persons who made up that golden age were Melchisedech
Duffey and his wife Letitia (they were central to it, and in a sense
co-creators of it), her sister Lily Koch, their parents August and Elinore
Koch. And their friends Sebastian Hilton, Margaret Hochfelsen (she was the
ever-young countess), and the associate Gabriel Szymansky and his wife
Miriam and his son Kasmir. This Kasmir or Casey was one of Duffey's prime
'creations'. 	There were the arty friends of the golden ape: Hierome
Groben, Nicky and Vicky Van Horn, Fanny Warneke, Mordecai and Elvira Scott,
Cassius and Mona Greatheart, Bruno Schnabel, Otis and Sheryl Pentecost, Leo
Ring. There were the bookish and literary friends generally, some of them
being newspaper people as well: Christopher Tompkinson, Demetrio Glauch,
Clarence Schrade, Leo Crowley, Tony and Evelyn Apostolo, Rollo and Josephine
McSorley, Norman Shipman, Januirius and Elena O'Higgins. 
	There were the musical friends going from the operatics to the
rag-timers and the Chicago-hots and the string-band people, composers,
players, stagers: Linus Aloysia, Basil and Dorothy Noah, Rufus Weaver,
Enniscorhy and Mary Sweeny, Newbold and Audery McGeehan, Andy Paige, Vitis
and Emily Karger, Cletus Kenaly. All those were good people. 
	There were the ecclesial or vinyard or churchy people: Thomas
Chroniker S.J., Tim and Gale Tuthill, Sister Mary Cornelia (Sullivan),
Foster and Alma Ruch, Dan and Nan Donovan, Sister Mary Aurora (Rittenhouse),
Martin and Katherine Redwine, Frantz and Elair St. Clair. It was the vinard
people who kept the world turning. All other persons in the world were
parasites upon the labor of the vinyard workers. 
	There were the theatrical people: Nemo Cobb, Anna Louise McCutcheon,
Duke and Jenny Colfax, Leander Crane, Jim and Rosemary Flogan, Beverly Boyd,
John and Fisher Nolan. 
	There was the Monster Giulio who was outside of categories. 
	There were the people of a scientific bent: Mark McClatchy, Cyril
Holland, Catherine Quick, Morris Poor, Horatio and Mildred Burgandy, Sherman
Slick, Silas and Maud Whiterice. You just don't meet people like that every
day. 
	There were the confidence and gamine friends: Charlotte Garfield
(yes, she's the millionaire mendacious midget again), Gideon Sedgewick, Mary
Regina Toast, Ralph Kirby, Ira and Rebecca Spain, Victor Ryan, Homer and
Evangeline Durban, Fred and Helen Batavia. These were all of the better
grade of confidence people. 
	There were the very young friends who came into the book store or
were around the neighborhood: Mary Francis Rattigan (Ah, look out for that
one, she was one of Duffey's quasi-creattues created by a talisman that only
half-worked), Mary Catherine Carruthers (Ah, look out there again, she was
one of Duffey's true creations by a true talisman), Hugo Stone (Dann that
kid anyhow!), Ethyl Ellenberger, Margaret Stone (She was not Hugo's sister
as she used to brag sometimes; she was just barely his cousin). 
	There were the sporty people: Tom (Big Bear) Rogers, Herbert Conger,
Calvin Bonner, Enos Dorn, Angelo Cato, Henry Chadwick, Mike and Peggy Conner
(golf), and Peter and Jenny Reid (tennis). 
	There were the college and university people: Jerome and Grace
Plunkett, David and Dinah Joyce, Susan Parker, Cicero Brazil, Jasper and
Jane Howe, Isaac and Mary Lightfoot, Judley and Pauline Peacock. 
	There were the money and commerce people, or anyhow the rich people:
Adrian Hiltoh (he was an older brother of Sebastian), Shawn Mallow, Pat and
Lois Tyrone, Mary Kay Pack, Julian and Bernice Edgewater, Mary Carmel
Hooligan, Clement and Irene Temple, Vincent Finnerty. 
	And then there were the slippery people. Pleasant they were,
competent they were, interesting they were. And slippery they were. Larry
and Olivia Hallanah, Ben and Shirley Israel, Marjory Redfox, Elmo Sheehan,
John and Alive Calumet, Hermoine (she was so slippery that nobody ever did
know her last name). 
	The heart of the near-north side Chicago golden age was the seven
rooms of Melchisedecnh and Letitia Duffey, and the shops below them. And the
Koch's galleries two blocks down the rich street, not the poor street. Yet
it was around the doorways of the poor street that the people and their
interests coalesced. 
	Above the poor shops on the poor street there were many apartments
that were fine on the inside, and many of the golden age people lived there.
There were little ratty eating places on that street. There were other
eating places that looked almost the same on the outside, but the rats in
them picked their teeth with gold toothpics. There were a number of sly pigs
along there, for as long as prohibition lasted, and some of them were good
music and good entertainment places. 
	The people of the Duffey nations found themselves interesting. They
found their gatherings and meetings their comings and goings and
entertainments, their cafes and shows and studios and saloons and
open-handed houses and apartments, their small part of the city all to be
highly interesting. And they set their seals forever on those streets and
corners and buildings and parks. A stranger there even today will know that
people of peculiar awareness were once there. 
	Melchisedech and Letitia designed that shanty-and-gold neighborhood
as they designed other things, events and life scenarios and persons
themselves. Duffey had a natural gift for creating people complete with
their surroundings; and one of his creations, Letitia, had the gift even
more strongly than he had. 
	"The purpose of life is the creation, arrangement, and staging of
interesting and awareful scenes, and then entering into them to play vivid
parts," Duffey said. 
	"Luffy Duffey, you say that all so well and you say it all so
often," Letitia told him. Duffey never had a disagreement with any of the
Kochs, not with father August, not with mother Elmore, not with Lily,
certainly not with Letitia. Melchisedech fell in love with his mother-in-law
Elinore at first sight when she threw her arms wide tnd give him the biggest
kiss in town. This was the gesture and act that all three of the Koch ladies
had. Lily would sometimes do it with walk-in customers in the Gallery. And
it is alweys good luck to be in love with your mother-in-law. Elinore had
style. 
	And the father-in-law August Koch had a pleasant sort of integrity
and a rich competence. He also had many old European ideas, such as dowery. 
	"It is one of the things that we must not neglect," he told Duffey.
"it is good to settle these things; it is good to make the transfers of
money and property early. I am very pleased with you, Mr. Duffey. The figure
I have in mind..." 
	"I know the figlure you have in mind," Duffey said. "I'm a
mentalist. Set it at one quarter of that. And set it so that we can draw
only the interest on it for a period of twenty-five years." "I hate to do
that," August Koch. "You will have difficulty reaching your proper station
of life under those conditions, and I believe that persons should reach
their proper stations while they are still young. There are also certiin
pieces of art that must fall to your share. You are something of an art
dealer and you may be able to make those choices by yourself." 
	"I will make the choices with the help of Letitia and Lily." 
	"Yes, of course," August said. He was an extremely muscular man in
the German style. Very neat, very imposing, very proper. 
	"There is one other thing, Melchisedech," August said. "Let us walk
in the back street and talk about it. You are the only other man in the
family so you must help me decide things." 
	They went out and walked in the back street, the poor street that
Duffey's shop opened on. There was the smell of lilacs there. Many of the
poor people along the street grew lilacs. These were dust-covered bushes,
and often they were broken and bruised by poeople coming and going. But it
is the bruised bushes that have the sweetest smell. 
	"It's about Lily," August Koch said. "Somewhere we will have to find
a husband for her. I know that she wants to marry and is pained that she has
not found a husband." 
	"But Lily cin marry anyone she wants to. She has everything." 
	"Prospects for a husband she does not have. Oh, she has beauty and
brains and charm and goodness and wealth. It would seem that these things
would be enough. They aren't. I do not know why men will marry one sort of
woman and not another. It really seems that none of the women whom men marry
are really of top quality, excepting my wife, and yours, of course. What do
you think it will take, Melchisedech, to get a husband for Lily?" 
	"Only a little willingness on her part. I can think of a hundred
good men who'd marry her if she'd have them." 
	"Think of a hundred and first man then, Melchisedech. I am sure that
the one hundred are somehow rejected, by whom I do not know. I will lay out
a dowery of one million dollars for a good man who will marry her. If that
sounds crass, then I am a crass man. But I love that daughter. Think of the
man for her, Melchisedech." 
	"A million dollars wouldn't matter to the one I think of, Sebastian
Hilton." 
	"They were engaged once, in a sort of way, I believe. Possibly they
still are. But they will not marry. It's the fashion of young people of
their circle to believe that Sebastian will die young. But I am assured by
his father and uncles tgat he is in near perfect health." 
	"Maybe he will die in near perfect health then," Melchisedech said,
"but I'm one of those who believe that he will die young. I get things out
of his future, up to a point, and then I do not get any more of them. That
cut-off point isn't very far in the future." 	"Be careful of the mentalist
bit, Melchisedech. You won't know your own future, and you won't know any
other future effectively either. I get things out of your future. Many
things that you have always depended on will collapse. There's a bridge
nearby that's an allegory of you. The props will be and are being knocked
out from under that bridge one by one. And the props will be knocked out
from under you at the same time. You and Letitia also get your pick of the
town houses, you know." 
	"We'll make our selection of that soon, but we won't live in it for
the first few decades." 
	"And think about a husband for Lily, Melchisedech. As the only other
man in the family, you must counsel me on these things. Oh yes, and I've
brought you a Christ." 
	August and Melchisedech went and got it. They put it with seven
other Christs in Duffey's Priceless ltem Room. 
	"Etenim Pascha nostrum immolatus est Christus!" Duffey said in
sudden amazement is he saw it there with the others, "Christ our passover is
sacrificed for us." 
	"Yes it is powerful and it is sacrificial," August Koch said, "but
you will still ask, as Kipling's devil asked 'Is it art?' Were the other
seven from the first?" 
	"Not all of them," Duffey said, "not at first, but all of them are
now." 
	Among the things that Duffey had to show for the seven dark years or
lost years of his life were Seven Christs. He had found them in strange
places of the world and dispatched them to himself back in the more ordinary
world. And now they had all arrived from the various places. Now they had
all been assembled together like seven thunders; some of them joyful, some
of them agonizing. 
	There was the Danish-bread Christ. Yes, it had been baked out of
wheat and rye flour mixed. It had been made into a dough, formed into a
Christ-head, baked, and then varnished. It was the case of someone making a
better loaf than he knew. In some parts of Denmark such Christ-heads were
baked for Corptis Christi Day. But how had this one happened to be such an
ashtonishing work of art, and how had it been recognized and saved? 
	There was a tavern sign Christ from Hungary of the time of Bela Kun.
Hungary had been communist then briefly for the first time, and Christ
things were hated. But there was no hatred in this picture, only total
hartiness. The Christ was drinking off a huge mug of beer, and the mug was
ornamented with spinning worlds. It was a powerful and pleasant face, and it
was unmistakeably Christ. 
	There was a Christ figurehead from an old Goanese ship that had used
to sail on the Indian Occan. There was no other figurehead art that could
stand beside it. 
	There was a cigar store Christ from the island of St. Kitts. Yes,
that's right. It was like a cigar store Indian of the United States of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the fingers of the right hand
formed into a cone or cup to hold cigars. Some negro artist of the island
had done it in imitation of that convention. It was Indian-colored. But it
was bare-headed, and it had Christ's face. The artist had known that face
without knowing what person it belonged to. 
	There was a staghorn Christ from Mesa Negra that was done in hard
stone nine thousand years before Christ was born. It was of a man impaled on
the antlers of a giant stag. The posture was that of a crucified man, and
that man was Christ. 
	There was a negroid Christ from Bahr El Chazal in the Sudan. It was
of a tall person with a cattle herder's crooked rod in his hand, and it was
Christ without any doubt. It was a freestanding, life-sized statue in tufa
stone, and it couldn't have represented anyone else. 
	There was a turbaned and laughing Christ from Turkish Anatolia. It
was done in monumental marble, reused from some earlier thing. It was fresh
painted not fifty years before, but it had been carved a thousand years
before. 
	There was something so intricate about that laughing figure that it
could be studied and laughed with for a lifetime. It was a thunder piece.
All seven of them were. 
	All were representations of the same person, there was no doubt at
all about that. And all seven of them were once-in-a-lifetime discoveries. 
	Together they were stunning, and there was no way that a price could
be put on any of them. 
	The Christ of August Koch was set with the others. It was the 
once-in-a-lifetime discovery of August. It had cost much more than any of
the others. And possibly it had less thunder in it. But it wis outstanding.
Let it be there with the others for a few years. Then we will judge it.
Nobody can judge such a thing immediately. 
	August Koch had a yacht on Lake Michigan. It was named The Argo. 
	"What a coincidence!" Duffey howled when he heard the name. Then he
was puzzled at himself. What was Koch's yacht's name coincident with? 

	There was a small bridge or viaduct on the near-north side. It
didn't look a lot like the bridge that August Koch had said was an allegory
to Duffey. It ran above street car tracks or perhaps train tracks, and it
also ran above a trafficway that carried heavy trucks. It was wide, to carry
the traffic of a busy street; but it was not much longer than it was wide.
The little bridge even had a name. It was the Pont du Sable Traffic Trestle.

	Someone knocked out a minor support of it only a week after Duffey
began to notice it and to tic himself in with it. A heavy truck going at
high speed had hit it during the night. This support was not repaired or
replaced. An engineer told Duffey that it was merely ornamental, that it
hadn't been a weight-carrying support. They disguised its appearance with a
little bit of stone gimcrackery. And yet that support had carried weight,
with Duffey anyhow. 
	It was five years before the next underpinning was knocked out of
that bridge. 
	CHAPTER VI 

	Giulio the Monster came to Chicago. 
	Duffey had known Giulio for the first time on the night of Duffey's
going into business in St. Louis. He had seen him several times since, at
intervals of a year or several years. But how did Giulio find them in
Chicago? Giulio was not particularly literate and might not have been able
to follow the most simple directions. He did not know Duffey's name: he paid
very little attention to names. But he and Duffey were weirdly in accord,
and Duffey had once given him a talisman. 
	First off, Duffey heard a roaring on the stairway. 
	"Oh my God!" he cried Out. "I'd know that roaring anywhere!" 
	It was late, about three in the morning. Duffey and Letitia had been
in bed, but she was not in bed now. Where was she? And what would she make
of the monster? The Monster Giulio would take some explaining, even to a
person as good as Letitia was. 
	Duffey rose to prevent what clash there might be, though he
recognized Giulio's roaring as more joyful than agoilized. It was a greeting
really. He also heard the yelping of a mean and demented dog receding
outside. And Letitia's glad voice was heard on the stairs also: 
	"Giulio, is it really you? Oh, you are welcome! I've wanted so much
to see you all the time. I knew you would be in town sometime and I couldn't
think of any way of letting you know where we were."

	Duffey, coming to the head of the stairs, saw Letitia throw her arms
wide in that gesture that all the Koch ladies have, and then hug the Monster
Giulio heartily and give him the biggest kiss in town. Why had Duffey
worried? How could there possibly be a clash between Letitia and any good
person anywhere? 
	"Giulio, how did you get in?" Duffey called from above them. 
	"By the door. Only when l'm in a savage mood do I come through the
walls." 
	"But I'd locked the door carefully. There have been three burglaries
of shops in this block this week, and I made sure I locked the door."
	"Nah, man, nah, the door was not locked. Doors are not locked to
Giulio when he comes to see you. It would bring on all my sickness if I
found the door locked." 
	"Your dog, Giulio, bring your dog in," Letitia said. "We want to
meet him too, and we will feed him. And we will feed you." 
	"Nah, woman, nah," Giulio said. "I haven't any dog. What you heard
howling and growling was a devil that afflicts me. He knows that he cannot
come into a house where good people live. But he growls and grumbles about
it."
	"Oh, Giulio, you haven't any devil," Letitia told him. They were in
the kitchen now and she set out everything: coffee, whisky, cheese, bread,
sausages beef, beer and wine and pie. "Why, you can't afford a devil,
Giulio." 
	"Nah, this is a poor guy's devil," he said, "and I haven't even got
clear title to him. I'm a Gadarene Swine, as Duffy's brother used to say.
It's a devil who comes to live with me when he no other place to stay. He
eats my soul up, and now there are only crumbs left to me. Whenever I do
throw him out, he comes back with those seven devils worse than himself. Oh,
there is howling then." 
	"I have heard it," Duffey said. Ah, it was good to have the big
fellow come and visit them, however he had found them. Duffey was whistling
a tune thit Bagby used to whistle every time Giulio showed up in their
neighborhood in St. Louis. Bagby, as a fact, had used to call it the
Gadarene Swine Song. The tune of it was cruel and comical at the same and
funny. Oh yes, there was a devil associated with big Guilio.
	Giulio stiyed with the Duffeys a week that first time he came to
them in Chicago. All the friends accepted him and all of them knew what he
was. Mona Greatheart did him again and again in clay. Groben did dore-like
engravings of him. Elena O'Higgins came to talk to him. She said that she
would do a feature story on him in the Chicago Jerald and Examiner. 
	Sebastian and his countess came to see Giulio, and they gave him
their respect. They made it seem that, if he were a monster, he was a royal
monster at least. There must have been at least one of his kindred in the
cellar of every castle in Transylvania, the Countess said. There was one,
anyhow, in the castle in which she was raised. But the Countess said that
Giulio was not a Troll, that he wis a Teras. 
	"Yes, I am a Teras," Giulio confirmed it. 
	Sebastian and the Countess Margaret and Letitia and Melchisedech
sang the ballad 'Hi, Ho! The Gadarene Swine!' that was based partly on
Bagby's old tune and partly on a Transylvanian stringed melody that the
Countess remembered. They sang it in four voices and Giulio, who could not
sing, howled a to it. 
	"Oh Giulio is a Teras weird. 
	Hi, Ho! 
	He raises possums in his beard. 
	Hi, Ho! 
	He works the rivers and the brine. 
	The way he gobbles joints of kine 
	I'd never have him in to dine 
	Except he is a friend of mine 
	Hi, Ho! The Gadarene Swine!" 

	"Have you wife or children yet?" Letitia asked him. 
	"We don't even know your full name, do we?" the Countess Margaret
asked. 
	"Giulio Solli is my full name," the Monster said. "Yah, I have a
wife and two sons and a daughter. And I gave the talisman, Duffey, the
talisman that you gave me to give. I held it to my wife's belly at the
proper times. And I put it in the son's hands at the moment of his birth,
and he would not let go of it for a month." 
	"Which son, Giulio?" Melchisedech asked him. 
	"The dago son, of course. You wouldn't give a thing like that to an
Irish son, would you? Ah, it's a dark and lonesome road he'll have to
travel, he has so much of me in him. And who will hold a lantern for him on
that road?" "I will, Teras," the Countess Margaret said. 
	"I will, Giulio," Sebastian Hilton said. 

	They sang another stanza with chorus of the Gadarene Swine Song
then, and Giulio himself roared out the invention of the tenth line of it. 
	"The Teras had a mane and crine. 
	Hi, Ho! 
	His back is like a porcupine. 
	Hi, Ho! 
	His eyes have got the runny blears. 
	He has such awful hairy ears 
	They drive me all the way to tears. 
	Hi, Ho! 
	His brow it has a low incline. 
	His instrument's of knotty pine. 
	Hi, Ho! The Gadarene Swine!" 

	Then Sebastian and the Countess Margaret left the Duffeys and Giulio
with an all-persons embrace. 

	Late one night, Giulio rose suddenly and burst out of the house.
There was a defiant roaring outside in the street when he stood there. And
then there was the cry of rending agony is Giulio's devil came back into him
again. 
	Then he was gone. 
 
	Book Four:
	Tales of Chicago

"The Lord has sworn and he will not repent: You are a priest forever
according to the order of Melchisedech." 
			Psalms 109,4 

	Chicago is a lot like purgatory. Well, that is better than many
cities that are a lot like hell. There is usually blssed salvation at the
end of the Chicago ordeal. 

	Duffey lost his facility for making money. It was the first of his
major facilities that he lost, and he would miss it the least. The magic of
making money is, after all, a boyish trick. It hardly becomes a grown man. 
	Duffey's virtue had become a little bit scrappy before this, but he
had nevet lost it. Duffey had wakened one morning knowing that he had lost
his extraordinary talent for making money. He would never get it back to the
full. The riddle of the camel and the needle's eye was solved. Duffey had
always wondered how he was going to get to Heaven. That he might not always
be rich hadn't occurred to him. 
	On that early morning, he walked to the Pont du Sable Traffic
Trestle. It was still an hour before sunrise. Lanterns were blinking around
the tracks and the trafficway below the bridge. An underpinning had been
knocked out by a heavy and berserk truck during the night. So the bridge was
weakened. And the golden touch was gone. 
	Duffey's loss-of-the-gold-touch feeling had been preceded by a dream
of worms getting into his gold and eating it out, leaving the coins and bars
as no more than empty shells. There had not been in the dream, and there
would not be in reality, any sharp sense of loss over the devoured gold. 
	In the world generally, the worms had been getting into the gold
pretty badly. Duffey's dream of lost gold had been illuminated by an actual
mass of gold in Duffey's place several years before this. His father-in-law,
August Koch, had asked if he might store a quantity of gold at Duffey's
place. Duffey had reinforced the upstairs floors to take the weight of it.
This had been at the beginning of the fourth quarter of the year 1929.
August Koch had put something more than twenty tons of gold in Duffey's
place, about twelve million dollars worth of it. Of course August Koch had
other storage places. He sold pretty much everything he had and put it into
gold. It would be immnune to bank collapse and to the depredations of rust
and moth. And, when he decided to spend it again, he would be able to buy a
lot more with it. Twenty tons of gold will not like take up nearly the space
of twenty tons of wood or steel or even lead, but it made the Duffey
quarters a little crowded for a while. 
	Of course Duffey and Letitia had known what was going to happen, and
Sebastian and his brother and his countess, and Charlotte Garfield the
mendacious midgct, and Mary Regina Toast and Irene Temple and Vincent
Finnerty had known. These people were all mentalists as far as money was
concerned. The Duffeys made a good thing out of the tricky years, and they
would still have a good thing. That was why it was not too serious for
Melchisedech to lose the particular facility for making money. He already
had plenty of money. 
	As to Duffey's virtue having become scruffy, he was still as
scrupulously and even offensively honest as ever. His man's courage was
still strong. His charity had holes in it, but he hadn't really lost too
much ground there. He had really gained a little bit in charity and
understinding from his natural stite. He wasn't a boozer nor a vaunter to
excess. He did not even belong to those most sulfur of people, the bores. He
would still do things for strangers that he would not even undertake to do
for himself. He was a firm friend to all good men and a gallant partisan of
all good women. And that may have been the trouble. 
	Duffey loved his wife Letitia and her sister Lily and her mother
Elinore. He loved them seriously and he loved them clownishly, and he may
even have loved them illicitly, even Letitia. He loved his sister in St.
Louis, and his old girl Beth Kegan, and Olga Sanchez of the torchy shoulders
who still worked at his Rounders' Club, and Evelyn London. He still loved a
younger girl there, Gretchen Sisler, though she wrote him that she wasn't as
young as all that now. And he got to St. Louis at least once a year, to take
care of business with his St. Louis partner Charley Murray, but also to see
the ladies. 
	He loved many ladies from the seven hidden years of his life also,
but there was no way he could return to visit them. 
	He loved the Countess Margaret Hochfclscn and the mendacious midget
Charlotte Garfield. And Mona Greatheart and Shirley Israel ("Duffey, how
could you!" the words about Shirley rang out of the future and had to do
with a photograph), and Josephine McSorley and Catherine Quick and Elena
O'Higgins and Beverly Boyd and Mary Lightfoot and Jenny Reid. 
	He also loved several younger girls, especially from that bunch who
used to come into his book store. They came in from the time they were eight
or nine years old: Mary Frances Rattigan, Mary Catherine Carruthers, Mary
Jean (what was her name anyhow before she married Sebastian's nephew Hillary
Hilton?), Margaret Stone. Ethyl Ellenberger. It was all hearty fun with the
little girls, of course (hell is made out of such hearty fun), and Duffey
played the funny uncle with them. There was an old, black leather sofa in
the book store, and Duffey would wrestle the little girls on it. Mary
Frances and Ethyl were usually in the store together, and what Duffey did to
one of them he did to the other. In their double number was safety. Really,
it was all right with them, but maybe it wasn't all right when Mary Francis
was there by herself. 
	And it probably wasn't all right with Mary Jean (she was a hot
little vixen from her childhood) and with Mary Catherine Carruthers who was
in love with Duffey. They were very friendly little girls for about ten
yeirs, from the time they were eight or nine years old. 
	He felt that he was watched with them, when he could not be. In
particular he felt that he was watched by that fat-faced, four-eyed little
boy Hugo Stone (Damn that kid anyhow!). "Duffey, baby, how are you?" Hugo
would say from the time he was a nine year old freak. Hugo often carried a
camera slung around his neck. What? Was there a threat in that? Maybe, but
not an immediate threat. We leave the little girls for a while. 
	Was this Hugo Stone the same person who turned up later as Absalom
Stein? Once it wis settled without doubt that he was. But later a doubt
returned 
	"There wasn't any Hugo Stone," Margaret Stone sad just the other
day. 
	"That was just a joke name." 
	"There was a Hugo Stone," Melchisedech Duffey insisted. "He used to
come into my book store in Chicago from the time he was eight years old. I
know him. And he was the same person as Absalom Stein who walked out of here
only five minutes ago." 
	"No, no, Duffey, he was hardly ever the same person," Margaret said.
"I don't believe that he was ever the same person at all. That branch of the
family always used the name of Stein, though Absalom ran around quite a bit
with one group of his Stone cousins. I will tell you what Stone boys there
were. They were David, Hershel, Jacob, Samuel, Max, Nathan, Avram, Yosef,
Stuart, Isaac, Myron, Efram, Barnard, Sidney, Joel, Robert, Milton, another
David, another Nathan, another Robert, twenty boys in four famihes of first
cousins. They all lived within three blocks of your old book store. I was
first cousin once removed from all of them. Absalom Stein who lived half a
dozen miles north was a second cousin of them all. I'm sure he was never in
your place." 
	"But who was Hugo then?" Duffey asked. 
	"There wasn't any Hugo. That's just a name they made up because they
knew you couldn't tell one of those kids from another. Sometimes Hugo was
Nathan, sometimes he was Avram. Most of the times he was the twins Myron and
Efram. They would always be in your store at the same time, and you would
always think there was only one of them who got around awful fast. They
could steal from you easier, there being two of them." 
	"But Which one of those damned little kids used to say 'Duffey,
baby, how are you'?" 
	"I don't know who used it first," Margaret said. "There were half a
dozen of them who took it up later when they found out that it bugged you." 
	"Margaret, I am a mentalist and perhaps I am a sorcerer," Duffey
said. (All this conversation took place just the other day, many years after
the Chicago era.) "I know what constitutes a person. And Hugo Stone (damn
that kid anyhow!) was the same person as Absalom Stein who is present almost
too often in these later years." 
	"Duffey, you are a moth-eaten sorcerer and I don't believe that you
do know what constitutes a person," Margaret said. 
	"I know who he was. I made him!" Duffey insisted. 
	There was also the fact that Casey Szymansky insisted that he hadn't
known Absalom Stein until he met him in New Guinea along about 1943 in the
army, and that he hadn't known him in Chicago at all. He had heard though
that Absalom Stein had been a Communist in Chicago under the name of Hugo
Stone. This had always puzzled Duffey. Casey Szymansky used to be in
Duffey's book store every day (after all, his father owned the building and
was a sort of partner of Duffey in the businesses), and Casey had many
crashes with Hugo Stone there. There had been a natural anupathy between the
boys and sometimes it broke open. Twice Casey had fist fights with Hugo in
the book store, and Casey lost both fights. 
	Would it not be a rum thing if Hugo had indeed been non-Hugo twins,
and both of them had gotten their knocks in on Casey? 
	CHAPTER II

	Toward the end of the year 1931, about three hundred prominent
citizens of Chicago began to receive a well-printed news letter named 'The
Answer'. It touched on economics, it touched on ethics, it touched on
municipal and federal government, it touched on education and religion and
militarism. Mostly it touched on the theory of government and on the voices
of the poor crying aloud to be fed. And it was very quippy. Some of the
things in it were good, and even the bad ones were startling. 
	It gave a post office box to which comments and rebuttals might be
sent. It was a north side post office box. 'The Answer' was to come out
thrice weekly, on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. That startling first issue
was out on Monday morning, and it was delivered by U.S. Mail.
	In those diys, the more deeply populated areas of large cities, and
all the downtown areas of them, received four mail deliveries a day. Less
densely populated areas received only two mail deliveries a day, and this
was felt by some to be an injustice. A mailing dumped into any mail box by
seven o'clock in the morning would be delivered anywhere in the city by ten
o'clock of the same morning. Postige was two cents for first class and one
cent for second class. 'The Answer' with stenciled addresses and its one
cent stamp on every publication was it morning newsletter.
	Melchisedech Duffey, being one of the three hundred most prominent
citizens of ChIcago, received 'The Answer' in the first mail one Monday
morning, and he read it with his breakfast. He gasped in wonder as he gazed
at it. There was something damnably familiar about it, and yet it was a
first issue, and its name "The Answer' was not what struck a responsive
cord. Melchisedech perused it. 
	And within one minute he was howling in wrath mixed with other
things. "I have never seen such an astonishing mixture of perspicacity of a
truly brilliant order mixed with double-damned-foolishness!" he roared.
"Letzy, have a look at this devilish stuff! It is inflammatory, and three
quarters of the time it is right! Look at it! Read it out Ioud! This
pastiche is destined for the rise and fall of many, mostly the wrong ones." 
	Letitia Duffey read things out of it aloud. She had a fine scanning
eye and a beautiful and haunting voice. Her voice was so good that she had
recorded little time-and-temperature advertisements for the radio. People
would almost cry when her voice said 'It is seven fifteen this morning, and
seventy-one degrees'. Her voice could move a stone person. And now she read
with astonishment and buried laughter. 
	"Letzy, Letzy," Melchisedech gave the left-handed voice to her
recital. "How is it possible for a person to be so sage and so silly at the
same time?" 
	"You manage that trick very well yourself, dear," Letitia said with
kindness. 
	"I am a special case," Melciiisedech clarified. "This is a mad man
writing that stuff. Oh, how he will hook the unthinking! How he will latch
onto followers!" 
	Melchisedech was slow in catching onto it, but Letzy had caught it
already. 
	There were things out of the wisdom of Augustine and Aquinas and
Pope Benedict. There were worse things out of Nietzsche and Shaw and the
Webbs and Machiavelli and the old and the new Roosevelt. This was ponderous
hodge-podge. "But it will catch on!" Melchisedech moaned. "See if it
doesn't, Letzy." "Oh, I can stop it any time I want to," she said. "How,
bride of my breast, how?" he wanted to know. But Letitia simply looked at
the palm of her hand and smiled. 
	"The Answer is the Leder!" The Answer proclaimed. "Make yourselves
worthy. The Leader will appear this very week, if you are ready for him."
	Listen, that initial Monday edition was nothing compared to the
second publication of Wedneday morning. It was expanded from a four page to
it sixteen page journal. There were more than a hundred letters lrom the
prominent citizens in that Wednesday morning edition. The letters were
favorable. People were howling their agreement. And there was the stunning
lead article 'The Quest for Leadership is Ended; the Leader has been Found:
I Am the Leader!!' That was a thumper. Why, there was something magnetic
about all of this! The leader was hypnotic. He made it felt that the need
for leadership was the most striking need in the city and the nation and the
world, and that the need was being met. This was happening all too fast.
"Why wait till next year for a leader who cannot lead. As it shapes up now,
the contest will be between a good but inept man, Hoover, and an evil and
even more inept man, Roosevelt. That almost turns the stomach against the
whole idea of leadership. Do not let it do that. The world is crying for
leadership. Well, that cry will be answered Friday night with the
'Appearance'. First Cliicigo, then the Nation, then the World." 
	"Letitia!" Melchisedech cried. "Did you ever hear of such a case of
ego in all your life? Did you believe that in all the world there could be
such an egomaniac as the writer of this stuff? Have you ever encountered
such an egotistical person in all your short life?" 
	"Only one," she said. "You." 
	"I'm a special case," Duffey said. 
	"You must admit, Duffey my pride, that he sounds more and more like
you. He is coming to be you almost exactly --" 
	"Me, with the brains knocked out, yes. I've wondered why he sounded
like me and still lacked my sense." 
	"Perhaps on some level, dear, unbeknownst to you..." 
	"No. I have not done this thing, Letitia, not on any level of my
being, not in my conscious or in my unconscious. But there is a stunning
similarity." 
	"It's done on your little press, you know." 
	"It is? Oh, of corse it is. Why didn't I realize it? That's why it
looked so familiar from the very first glance. Why, why, why? Who is doing
this?" 
	"I can't answer the 'why, why, why' part of it. I'm not a good
enough psychologist for that," Letitia said. "But it's quite plain who is
doing it. How many confounded geniuses are there in this block anyhow?"
	"Only myself, Letitia. I can't think of another one." 
	"Oh, you blind man!" 
	"But I believe that somebody has been entering the shop at night. A
box of medals his been stolen." 
	"What medals?" 
	"Mostly world war medals, a residue from Gabriel's old pawn shop,
and I've been selling a few of them to collectors. There are all things from
congressional medals of honor to French honorifics and the German Blue Max
with the old Emperor Maximillian's seal on it. There are generals' and
admirals' insignia gone. Could the coming 'leader' want such things?" 
	"Yes, I think he could," Letitia said. 
	The Friday morning The Answer was a rouser. It got down to what the
quippy publisher called the 'crushed louse' by which he meant the 'nitty
gritty'. It gave the time and place where 'the leader' would appear that
night. It would be at seven o'clock in the evening. It would be in Henry
Horner Park beside the big equestrian statue. It was asked that a dozen or
so bands should volunteer their services. 'It will be better, in the day of
wrath, that we knew you' was a warning. It was asked that each of the
recipients of The Answer should see to it that at least a thousand people of
their rousing should attend the Appearance. 'Yes, ten thousand each. Three
million persons will not be too many to see the great thing.' There were
other exhortations, and then there were many articles of uncommonly good
points. 
	"It worries me that he makes such good sense," Duffey said in
exasperation. 
	"That is what has always worried me about you, dear," Letitia said. 
	"How can anybody be so intelligent, and then reach such irrational
conclusions?" 
	"People ask the same thing about you, dear." 
	"But he is so much like me. It's weird." 
	"Don't worry about it, Duffey. I think he'll outgrow it," Letitia
said. 

	There weren't any three million people in Henry Horner Park that
evening, but there were about a hundred thousand of them, in the park itself
and in the adjacent street. The three hundred copies of The Answer must have
been read by quite a few persons and word-of-mouth had been at work. And the
Chicago daily papers had been playing the thing up for several days. There
weren't any dozen bands there, but there were three of them. It would be
better for those three in the Day of Wrath. 
	By the great equestrian statue in the park there was a live white
horse. It was clothed in gold lame and such things and was beautiful. Duffey
knew that horse. It lived in his own neighborhood. It had been a fire horse.
It had had a proud way of holding its head 'like a Roman Emperor' as
somebody had said of it. And one man had been so impressed by its dignity
that he had bought it from the fire department, which was doing away with
horses anyhow, and bad given it a pleasant home in a double vacant lot. And
there it had reigned as the pride of the whole neighborhood. It wasn't
really an old horse, no more than nine or ten years old. It was large and
solid. It was itself a living statue. 
	There were signs about there. 'When the Leader comes and mounts the
horse, then the world will recover its strength'. 'At Seven O'clock the
Leader Comes: Be Ye Ready for Him'. 'The High Rider of this Horse will
Become the Leader of this World: Perheps He Will Also Be An Angel Out of
Heaven'. That was extravagant stuff. It was almost time for the leader to
make his appearance. The three bands were playing military and inspirational
music. There was an air of expectations.
	"This is too much in my style to be a total hoax," Melchisedech
Duffey said. "Letzy, do you think it will be a qualified hoax then? Letzy,
Letzy?" But Letitia had slipped off. She intended, for reasons of her own,
to intercept 'The Leader' and not allow him to arrive in full regalia. 
	And he was in full regalia when she blocked his path. Croix de la
Legion D'honneur, Croix de Guerre, Medal of Honor, and Navy Medal of Honor,
lron Cross, Order of the Golden Fleece Medallion, Crown of St. Stephen, Star
of the Ninth Fusillers, many more decorations. Some of them were
nonmilitary, some of them were of Chicago lodges, but that didn't matter. He
was in scarlet tunic, belted and bandoliered. He wore a shako on his head.
He had a hussar sabre and his father's Knights of Columbus Fourth Degree
sword belted on him. He was booted and spurred. And he was walking in a
transport with nearly closed eyes. This was the leader who would take over
the world as soon as he got on the noble white horse. But Letitia Duffey
stood in his way. 
	"Oh, don't spoil it, Aunt Letitia, don't spoil it," the Leader said.

	"I'm not spoiling it, I'm saving it," she told him. "After you get
on the white horse, You won't have any idea what to do then, will you? You
haven't thought beyond that point, have you?" 
	"Sure I have. Plan 'Beta' goes into effect as soon as I mount, and
plan 'Alpha' becomes past history. I will take over Chicago and then America
and then the world." 
	"Nonsense, Casey, it'd never work." 
	"If you stop me, Aunt Letitia, you'll be sorry in the years to
come." 
	"How so, little Leader?" 
	"You'll get a look at some of the leaders who are really in line to
take over the world if I don't. You'll realize in that day that you should
have let me go ahead with it." 
	"But my opinion in this day is that I should not let you. All right,
put all the medals in this paper sack, Casey. And take off that tunic and
all those belts and wrap them up together." 
	"All right, if I can go on to the park then and see the horse. Oh he
does look magnificent! And see the bands up close." All right," Letitia
said. They wrapped up all the regalia so that it looked like a package of
almost anything, and went to the park. 
	So 'The Leader' did not appear that night, and The Answer did not
publish again. The bands played merry music, and many of the people lingered
in the pleasant park for several hours and bought coney islands and hot dogs
and candy and pop and bevo and ice cream from the hokey pokey men. Well, it
was a good outing, and perhaps it was a hoax on all of them. 
	Kasimir (Cisey) Szymansky was ten years old then. He was the son of
Gabriel Szymansky the owner of the building where the Duffeys lived and a
sort of partner of Melchisedech. And Melchisedech himself had taught Casey
to print on the press in the back of the book store. He had also transmitted
many of his ideas to the boy. That was Casey's first grab for universal
power. 
	Of course he was a genius. He was one of Duffey's creations, though
Duffey had pretty much neglected him so far. Now he would have to be
accepted as something anyhow, as a churn in which butter of a particular
flavor was churning and coagulating. 
	In later years, Cisey always said that the 'Leader' bit was an antic
and a hoax all the way. It wasn't though. Letitia who saw his face as he
came towards the park that evening knew that it was for real. 

	One day, it was eight or ten years after the Leader and the White
Horse episode, Duffey looked at this Kasmir (Casey) Szymansky more closely
than usual. He saw that Casey was a young man and no longer a boy. This was
the day that Casey's father, Gabriel Szymansky, had died. Casey had already
been to college, off and on, for some time. 
	This business of the kids growing up when Duffey wasn't looking had
infected quite a few of the youngsters. In the true and non-lineal accounts,
there is never observed a strict sequence of the years, and all the Chicago
years were non-lineal. The Chicago series really ran for twenty-one years,
from 1925 to 1946, but it never pretended to sequence. People change hardly
at all over the years, and then in one minute, they are greatly changed.
Attitudes and towns do not change gradually, and neighborhoods and people
groups do not. They change suddenly after long times of changelessness. And
so it was with the young people. 
	Duffey did not always have excellent rapport with Casey wilile the
boy was growing up. Kasimir W. (Casey) Szyminsky was born on October 7,
1921, so Duffey was about twenty years his senior. Casey thought more of
Duffey than he did of his own father (Duffey had made him, and Casey was
somewhat aware of that), but he still didn't think very much of him. 
	During Casey's college years, in and out of Notre Dame and Depaul
and Northwestern and Marquette and the University of Chicago, he had always
published a college magazine. This was invariably known as the 'Crock' or
some variation of that name. And when Casey went no more to college, for he
never finished, he moved the last of the 'Crocks' to the back room of
Duffey's book store and brought it out there on the little press. It quickly
reached a few dozen people around the country with eyes for issues and
tendencies. It even became known, in a sort of a way, so that Casey was
ticketed by recruiters for future reference. Casey, at this time, had come
into money and property from his father's estate. 
	So much for that. But the Crock would play a part in the
difficulties of Duffey as well as in the difficulties of Casey Szymansky. 

	Now, twas a fact that Casey was a talismanic child of Melchisedech
Duffey. And just how much reality was there in this business of talismanic
persons? Is there a difference between a person made out of ordinary clay
and a person made out of talismanic clay? Was Duffey more than a Pate, a
Kumanek, a Nonos, a Nasho, an Athair Baiste, a Sponsor, a Padrino, a
Godfather? There are hints forever of non-species sponsors, fairy godmothers
and such who have special power over infants. Is that of a creating sorcerer
to his creatures the same relationship? God knows. But it is a relationship
that is not without its effect. 

	Well Duffey did have, much of the time, special talents. No human
person can see the future clear and uncompromised, but many persons can see
pieces of it: scenes, congrhencies, cardinal happenings, particular glimpses
of the minutae of special persons, fateful crossroads, tides of persons and
groups, disasters, vignettes total and detailed many years before their
happening. Melchisedech Duffey had this prescient quality very strongly. 
	And one who can see coming happenings, even a little bit, may come
to believe that he is causing those happenings. Duffey believed, somewhere
in an uncensored or unaccountable part of his mind, that he had caused and
was causing a certain number of people to happen and to continue to happen.
These were the talisman people, and it did seem as though Duffey had some
part in their creation. 
	Duffey was not an ordinary person. He was the Unique, the One, the
Only Melchisedech. He was more than twice as old as the Wandering Jew. So he
was not necessarily wrong in believing that he had special powers. 
	One of the faculties that Duffey would lose, for the duration of the
particular episode of life that he was in, was the faculty of effectively
bestowing totems or tokens or talismans. So another prop will be gone from
under the bridge. Another power will be lost to him. But he was in full
possession of his totemic facility when he gave out the twelve primary
talismans. 
	The talismans were small magic objects. They were small, graven,
flat, gold sticks, maybe in inch wide and eight inches long. That is one
description given of a Melchisedech talisman by one designated person who
said that he had seen his own talisman. But mostly, a talisman was absorbed
by the small child who gripped it in his tight hand for some days until it
became a part of him. And just what was graven on the talisman? "The being,
the personality, the encounters, the scenario, the fate, the destiny of the
person designated by the talisman, all were graven on it," so said this
particular designated person. 
	Some time before the year 1920 or 1921, before young Casey was
conceived or born, Melchisedech Duffey had given a talisman to Gabriel
Szymansky for his son. This giving was within Duffey's hidden years. 
	Once in St. Louis, Duffey had given a talisman to his friend and
associate Charley Murray to be bestowed on Charley's sister's child, a child
as yet unnamed, unborn, unthought of. 
	It was also in St. Louis that Duffey had given a talisman to Giulio
Solli the monster. Giulio, as far is can be remembered, was the only person
sane enough to ask for the object, the fetish, the talisman. He was the only
one who understood from the beginning just what he was supposed to do with
it: hold it to his wife's belly at the time of conception and often during
the months of her gestation, and put it into the hands of the special son
the moment he was born. 
	And Duffey had once given a talisman to Lily Koch to bestow on her
younger sister. This sister was already born but was not fulfilled. It was a
special case. That talisman was of a different shape, and it did not count
in the primary twelve. 
	And somewhere, sometime, in the hidden years most likely or even
before them, Duffey had left a talisman for a yet unborn boy in Wisconsin,
and another for in unborn boy in Morgan City, Louisiana. He had given one to
a job printer in New Orleans for a daughter, and one to a truckline operator
in Galveston. And he had given several in Chicago, and one to a seaman from
Australia. 
	Duffey often wondered how all this progeny of his would get
together, for it was a group that he was creating. He wasn't, so far, very
good at making up scenes and scenirios for these talismanic children to
play.
	Absalom Stein, one of the talismanic children developed a theory
about all of this. It was Steins Diminishing Theory of the Duffeys and the
Groups. He said that a Melchisedech had made a group anciently, that this
group had then made another Melchisedech after its own preferences, that
this new Melchisedech had made a new group, and with each step the persons
involved were slightly diminished. But how far down that series are we now?,
Absalom would ask. If we diminish even slightly at each step, what giants we
must have been once! 
	CHAPTER III 

	The golden melon that had been Chicago in the good years had begun
to show spots of rancidness and oiliness and even rot along about the year
1933. Oh, most of that thing would be good for many years yet, but there
were soft spots. 
	The depression began on March 6, 1933. That was the symbol and arena
of the new rancidness. It was, as Tony Apostolo said, a contrived thing
created by a group of crooked men playing at being crooked gods. 
	But hadn't the depression begun back in 1929? What, have we one of
those in here. No, it didn't begin back then, not really. Here, let Tony
Apostolo tell how it all went. Tony was a partisan of very many things. He
was extravitgant in his opinions and statements; but most often he was able
to back up his extravagant statements with facts or with three-quarters
facts. 
	"There is the black legend that the depression began in October or
November of 1929. It's a manufactured legend of unsavory instigation, but
today it stands almost unchallenged. I challenge the legend right now. It's
astonishing that it could ever have been accepted. Here is a nation that has
lived through these sharp and bright and recent years. Here is a people who
should have known what happened to them in their day-to-day awareness. But
then somebody conics along and tell them 'It wasn't that way at all: it was
this way'. And the nation listens to the screed of false history and says
'Well, we don't remember anything like that, but if you say it happened,
that way then we will have to accept it. We are wrong and you are right and
our memories ere false. Who are you anyhow? Oh, we aren't allowed to know
that?' The question of who these falsifiers are is still not answered, but
the falsifications are accepted." 
	"You talk tripe!" Rollo McSorley swore savagely. Rollo was a
partisan of all things opposite to Tony's things. There were about a dozen
persons talking together this day at Melchisedech Duffey's. 	"It's said
that the depression began with the stock market crash in 1929," Tony
continued. "I was in New York then working for the old International News
Service, and I noticed that the reports of certain persons as to what was
happening did not have much point of contact with what really was happening.
Oh, the market busted, but it didn't carry very much with it when it went
down. In particular it didn't carry any jumpers-out-of-the-windows with it,
though the window-jumping suicides remain a showy part of the legend. 
	"I was there. I checked out that part of it at the time. We used to
get an average of about sixteen suicides a day in New York. The numbers rose
and fell, and I knew why they did. People kill themselves out of boredom
when it verges onto hysteria, and for no other reason. When there was
something interesting going on, people did not kill themselves in great
numbers. When there was not much of interest going on, people did tend to
kill themselves more readily. The market bust was interesting, as a world
series is interesting, as a big flood or a big fire or a big murder is
interesting, or the beginning of a war. 
	"On October 24, 1929, the day of the market bust, there were eleven
suicides in New York, none of them by jumping out of windows. The next day,
October 25, when it was realized that something interesting was happening in
the market, the suicides fell to four. On the 26th, there were two, on the
27th, there were three (but that was a three-way suicide pact of a personal
nature), on the 28th there was one, and on the 29th and 30th, there were
none at all. The first time in eleven years that the city had gone two days
in a row without a suicide. On the 31st, there were five, on the first of
November, there were seven, and thereafter, they rose back to normal. There
had not been any suicide that could be traced to losses on the market." 
	"You are going to get hurt talking like that," Rollo McSorley said. 
	"You're sure going to get hurt talking like that." McSorley and
Apostolo were both newspapermen. 
	"But there is a legend of ten thousand suicides caused by the market
crash in New York," Tony continued. "It's true that there were ten thousand
cartoons of men suicide-jumping out of windows. And there were ten thousand
cheap shot orators and politicians screaming about the suicides. But there
weren't any suicides." 
	"You sure can get hurt talking like that," McSorley said, and he was
serious. "You can get killed talking like that." 

	"The depression finally came on March 6 of 1933, this year," said
Adrian Hilton, a banker and an older brother of Sebastian Hilton, "and were
those vested interests ever glad to see it come! They had worked so hard to
bring it about! The depression came with the bank moratorium of March 6th to
9th." 
	"You know the comic strip of the wild detective tracking down the
purchasers of cans of poisoned beans to keep them from eating them. He
shoots all of them through the head just in time to stop them. The
purchasers are all dead then, but they aren't dead from eating poisoned
beans. That's the way it was with the banks last spring. 
	"Some of the banks were shakey. Some of them were overloaded. A very
few were in actual danger of failure. So all of the banks were forced to
close. And only the political pure and amenable banks were ever allowed to
open again. Quite a few thousand of the banks were looted completely; the
new dynasty that had taken over the country had to get billions of sly money
from somewhere. And most of the banks that were not allowed to reopen have
never seen their records or assets since then. Some of the bankers objected
to being robbed so summarily. Those who objected the loudest were murdered."

	"You lie in your fool throat, Adrian!" Rollo McSorley howled out. 
	"Maybe the legend of the murdered bankers is on par with the legend
of the market-bust suicides, Adrian," Melchisedech Duffcy suggested. "Were
there really any cases of it?" 
	"Yes there were, Duffey," Hilton said. "More than four hundred such
cases." 
	"Name one," McSorley cried out. "Name just one who was murdered for
making a noise about it." 
	"My father," said Adrian Hilton. "They killed his favorite bank. And
then they killed him. We have other banks in our family, but we haven't any
other father." 
	"You lie again," McSorley charged. "Your father was killed by a
husband who was jaalous of him. And he had a reason to be jealous." 
	Adrian Hilton and Rollo McSorley had a fist fight then. It was a
large and free-swinging fight. Both of these men were gymnasium fighters and
the fight was a whanger. And after Melchisedech and others had broken up the
fight, the whole subject was dropped as being an incitement to violence. So
this particular group never did arrive at a clear history of what happened
to the nation in those years. And even today, there is much to be said on
each side of it. The truth is on one side, and all the wordiness is on the
other. 
	But with the coming of the depression, no matter when it began,
there was one change that only the more civilized of the people noticed. One
of the ancient joys had been weakened, and perhaps it was weakened forever.
This was the joy of money, the joyfulness and joyousness of money. It became
at Ieast a deferred joy. And pray that it may not be deferred forever! 
	Joy in money is one of the primordial joys. Melchisedech had known
this in his fundamental being of Boy King; and it was not entirely an evil
joy. Shakespeare wrote of "Africa and golden joys". And Clough has it "How
pleasant it is to have money, heigh- ho! / How pleasant it is to have
money!" And God the Father tells it "in the day of Prosperity be joyful."
His crony Belloc has the version "I'm tired of life, I'm even tired of rime
/ But money gives me pleasure all the time." 
	Wealth and weal are things that are well. They are joys. And was
there ever a more golden verse than, "The king was in his counting house /
Counting out his money"? In the Litany of the Blessed Virgin, she is called
"Tower of Ivory" and "House of Gold". These things are not allegories. They
are holy and joyous wealths. Is it a vanity of God or is it a joy of God to
be touched only by the gold of the gold-lined chalice? 
	What of Holy Poverty then? Do you still not understand, you of the
leather ears? It is the best things that Holy Poverty sacrifices, and not
the worst. And money is one of the best things, one of the seven joys. There
is a Holy Poverty, and there is a Holy Wealth. Only devils will ever regard
an unholy poverty or an unholy wealth. 
	"An aenemmia I'll suffer if there is a dearth of gold dust in my
veins," Melchisedech said once. "Well then, I'll suffer it if I must, but it
will be a suffering ind a dearth." 
	Have we forgotten what it means to be fortunate? To be fortuned,
that is one of the good things. 
	And yet, money wise or materiality wise, the depression wasn't
important from any viewpoint. But there came a depression in immaterial and
aesthetic and spiritual things that was degrading and depressing. There were
other sorts of lavishness that disappeared out of the good life along with
the lavishness of money. Lavishness in art was straited, and in music. The
grandeur had paled. Lavishness in food and drink was lost and was not to be
recovered. And even wisdom and goodness seemed to be dealt out with more
miserly hands now. 

	"There is nothing wrong with fleshpots so long its Irish Stew is
what is served in those fleshpots," Rollo McSorley used to say. There had
come a time when Rollo and Josephine McSorley were forever urging Duffey to
indulge in the fleshpots. There was a row of particularly gaudy fleshpots on
Randolph Street. Yes, they were the opposite of grand; they were gaudy.
Letitia went along with Duffey and a bunch of them a few times, and then she
would refuse it. 
	"There is something quite a bit wrong with those places," she would
say. "You can talk all you want to about the broad view and the narrow view,
but those places are stifling bogs. I am going to have to take some third
looks at a lot of things around here if my friends are hanging out in places
like those." 
	"These are the green years that we're living in now, aren't they?"
Duffey asked, trying to reason with himself and his wife and some of his
friends. "Well then, we should provide ourselves with green places for our
amusement. But are these prices 'Fiddlers' Greens'? Are they 'Thelemes'?" 
	"Duffey, those places are old fashioned," Shirley Israel told him.
"They just aren't in it with 'Herm's' and the 'Curley Q' and 'Seven Steps
Down' and 'Blow Brass' and "The Farmer's Daughter' and the 'Dung Heap'.
These places are where all the real people are going now. These, and a few
other places make up 'Fleshpot Row'." 
	"And the only place where they still have real Chicago-Hot Jazz is
on 'Fleshpot Row'," Rollo McSorley said. Rollo had wooden ears, as a matter
of fact, and he didn't know one jazz from another. But there was some slight
truth in his statement. Since the speakeasies had turned or closed into
legal salloons (this was probably in 1934 or 1935 that Rollo and his gang
used to lead Duffey to the pots) there weren't a lot of places where one
could still hear really bad music. There never had been any doubt about the
worthlessness of Chicago-hot: "But it's our kind of worthlessness," Elmo
Sheehan used to say. The Hot had just been kicked out of the back door
labeled 'To the Trash Cans' when it came back in again by another door
labeled 'Nostalgia'. 
	"I understand that your own place in St. Louis is quite like this,"
Ben Israel said once as several of them atc supper at the 'Curley Q'. 
	"No, it is not," Duffey maintained. "Though that place had nearly
passed out of my hands now, yet I know that it would never indulge in some
of the things that are indulged in here. Better things and just possibly
worse things it might indulge, but these particular sicknesses it would not
accept." 
	But there was a wit with a new flavor about those places. There was
a fever for newness all along the row. The food was good, though sometimes
of a squeamish aspect that was hard to define. The drinks were good when
they did not have an illicit needle in them. The music was Chicago-hot right
enough, but it emphasized everything that was wrong with the Hot. The loose
people drifting about were really loose. 
	"I'll come no more to this place nor to any of them on the row,"
Demetrio Gulch announced suddenly one evening, and he rose from the table.
"It's nothing but a stifling bawdy house. There are good supper clubs to be
had; there are good music halls and dance halls; there are good saloons and
good honkey beer halls. There are places where fine talk may still be found.
But this place is good for nothing. I've had my fill." 
	Demetrio rose to go, and they derided him with their wit and
contempt that had toggle barbs on it. Olivia Hallshan, Shirley Israel, Alice
Calumet, Josephine McSorley, those women hissed at him like she-addcrs. All
of them except Margery Redfox. 
	"Coming, Duffey?" Demetrio asked as he stood in that archway between
the dining room and the entrance hall. 
	"Ah, not quite yet, Demetrio," Duffey told him. "I'll just finish my
supper first." And Demetrio looked at Duffey with a weird sort of doubt and
disappointment that would stand between these two henceforth. 
	Larry and Olivia Hallahan, Ben and Shirley Israel, Margery Redfox,
Elmo Sheehan, John and Alice Calumet, Rollo and Josephine McSorley, and
Duffey, they finished a really good supper. There was a comedian who was
fair funny there. He was a natural, and yet he picked up a raunchy style
that was unnatural. He had a tortured face behind some of his twisted jokes,
a laugh-clown-laugh flesh mask. 
	Duffey had enough of the libertine in him already. This organized
enticement was dangerous for him. He had enough trouble handling the liquor
and the girls. The dope and the boys must not ever be for him. There had
been certain sorcerers of these two advocacies whom he had not allowed to
live when he had been Boy King so long ago. And if he had to let them live
now, at least he wouldn't live with them. 
	Duffey rose, tardily it's true, and left in disgust. So those women
and their slightly womanish men hissed at Duffey as they had at Demetrio a
few moments before, with literal venom. 
	But later they would come after Duffey again with enticements and
strings. They had designs on Duffey and they would not let him get clear. 
	Duffey performed his last public act of magic on November 8 of the
year 1935. Oh, and it was almost his first public act of magic too, after
his childhood or childhoods. Duffey was not a Charley Murray, to be doing
magic tricks always. He was a real magician who concealed his magic. Real
magic is not the sort of thing that one does for the public unless one is a
Messiah. Magic is not given for the entertainment of swine or of the swine
that is in everybody. The showboat stuff simply isn't in accord with the
genuine article. 	A mixed company was talking at Duffey's one evening,
and Morris Poor (Doctor Morris Poor, he had recently become) was expressing
doubts as to Duffey having any of his hinted unusual powers. 
	"Melchisedech, I believe that you are insane," Doctor Morris Poor
said. "There are little pieces of insanity floating up to the surface of you
constantly. You have a doubled, even a tripled personality. You believe
special and legendary things about yourself. Those things will split you
wide open. They will kill you. No person can maintain too many realities.
There's no other possibility to be considered: you are insane, Duffey." 
	The people of this mixed company looked at Morris with some distaste
and astonishment. Judley and Pauline Peacock were present, Charlotte
Garfield, Mary Lightfoot, Helen Batavia, Dan and Nan Donovan, two younger
persons whose names will not be given at the moment, Mary Kay Pack, Hierome
Groben, Demetrio Glauch, Tony and Evelyn Apostolo, Sebastian Hilton and his
Countess Margaret, Rollo and Josephine McSorley, Elena O'Higgins, Ben and
Shirley Israel, d'Alesandro, Margery Redfox. And Letitia Duffey and Lily
Koch. And of course Melchisedech himself. They all looked at this Morris
Poor who had thrown a sort of challenge. 
	"I believe that I am as sane as most persons, as sane as anybody
here," Duffey said. "But I can understand why there should be doubts about
me. Yes, I do believe some special and legendary things about myself, but
they are not imaginary things. Yes, it is difficult to maintain several
realities, but I do it as well as I can. As many realities as are given to
me cannot be too many realities. And persons have been split open before and
have been killed. But I will not accept it from you that I am insane." 
	"You told the once of fantasies that you had about giant hands that
would come to your aid when commanded, and that could perform almost
anything that was required," Morris Poor said. 
	"I didn't tell you any such fantasy. I told you such a fact." 
	"You maintain that it's true!" Morris demanded in a forensic sort of
manner. 
	"True, yes, true," Duffey and. "I am a magus and I have magic
powers. But I may not use them without a reason. You are not a reason,
Morris." 
	"My challenge is a reason," the newly-doctored Poor said. "You claim
that you can order the navigable giant hands to move things." 	"Things.
Yes, I suppose so. Things," Melchisedech said. 
	"To move mountains, Duffey, you fake?" 
	"A mountain's a little big, Morris, though I suppose it could be
done. I coould move a mule, maybe, if there was good reason to move a mine.
Now drop the subject." 
	"No. Continue the subject, Morris," Rollo McSorley instigated.
"There is good reason to move a mule, Duffey," Doctor Poor said. "And the
reason is that you're a fraud if you don't do it." 
	"Ah, I'm a fraud nine times a day," Duffey said, "but I'm not a
fraud in this." Shirley lsrael had been plying the company with a new liquor
or mixture. She decided that things should get riper here. 
	"I will bet one hundred dollars that he can't do it," Rollo said. 
	"I will bet one hundred dollars that he can," Tony Apostolo covered
the bet. "I take you on it, Rollo. You are wrong in this is you are wrong in
everything." 
	"Fascist, it is a bet!" Rollo spat. 
	Lily and Letitia led the conversation to other channels, but it kept
coming back. 
	"Does anybody know where the nearest mule can be found?" Margery
Redfox asked. 
	"Now we're getting somewhere," Tony Apostolo said. "Over by the
Traffic Trestle. The street department still uses a few of them to pull the
slip-shovels, and they're using some of them there this week. They're moving
dirt and putting it in some new kind of reinforcements. The underpinnings of
the Trestle keep getting wrecked." 
	"Drink up, folks," Shirley said. "I have something new I want you
all to try." 
	"I thought this was new," Lily said. 
	"One more additive will make it perfect, I believe," Shirley said.
"You will all love it." 
	"Not for a bet, Luffy Duffey," sister-in-law Lily said. "Not for a
notion. Only for need. And I don't believe there is a real need for you to
move a mule by magic." 
	"I know," Duffey said. "But there may be need to blow down the
blow-mouths." 
	"There's no such need, man of my heart," Letitia assured him. "And
besides there will not be any proof. Oh, you will do it, and the crowd will
see you do it. But someone will addle the wits of all of them, because such
private powers are not meant to be published outside of the kingdom." 
	"Let it go, Duffey," said Mary Lightfoot who was always a
peacemaker, as was her husband Isaac who was absent this evening however.
"We are supposed to let the blow-mouths bloom along with the good people
until the harvest time at the end of the world. And then they will be cut
and bundled apart ind burned in inquenchable fire." 
	"It's too long to wait," Duffey said. 
	"But let us not disregard how the blow-mouths come to be among us,"
the Countess Margaret contributed. "Let us remember who sowed them. Do not
forget that 'an enemy has done this'." 
	"Hold your mouth, skinny woman," Morris Poor said to the Countess. 
	"And you keep yours shut too, skinny man," Rollo McSorley said to
the companion of the countess who was Sebistian Hiltoh. (Watch it there,
Rollo, you don't know what you're doing.) 
	"Duffey, you are less than a man if you don't come and move a mule,"
Doctor Morris Poor declared. This new drink of Shirley Israel had struck
with the force of a natural catastrophe. 
	"He is less than a man if he doesn't come to the Traffic Trestle
right now," Rollo McSorley stated in red-eyed wrath. 
	"Ah well, maybe I'm less than a man then, but I'm more of a man than
the two of you together, Morris and Rollo. Little creatures, we will go over
to the Traffic Trestle right now, and I will do one of two things. I will
cause the mule to be moved. Or I will whup Rollo and Morris both at the same
time. I will do whichever of these things comes first. One of them is as
easy as the other." 
	"I'll want this thing verified and witnessed," Morris Poor said.
"I'll want representatives of the press present." 
	"Was there ever a more pressy crowd?" Tony Apostolo asked. "I'm a
reporter. So is Rollo. And so is Elena O'Higgins. I'll call a photographer
to come at once and cover it." 
	I'lI not trust your photographer, Tony," said Rollo. "I'll call one
of my own I can trust."
	"Sometimes three heads are better than two," Elena told them. "I'll
call a lensman also." And these three calls and appointments were quickly
made. 
	Twenty-seven persons piled out of the Duffey establishment in loud
and unsteady fashion. They went to the Pont du Sable Traffic Trestle.
Fortunately it was only a few blocks, and the party came to the lower level
down under the trestle. Yes, there were three mules there, inside a little
fence with the grading equipment. The three photographers arrived within
half a minute of each other, and the stage was set. 
	"All right, Duffey, you fink, order the giant hands to come down and
lift the mule and transport him across that little traffic island!" Doctor
Morris Poor crackled. 
	"Take it easy, Mule-Doctor," the Countess said. "Duffey is no fink."

	"Shut your mouth, skinny crow," Morris Poor said drunkenly. 
	"Duffey, you're not fit to be under a mule's tail," Rollo McSorley
bawled out. "You can't do it, and that's not all you can't do." 
	"Blow it easier, loud-mouth," Sebastian Hilton spoke softly. "We all
know who does belong under a mule's tail." 
	"Shut up completely, you damned runt," Rollo barked. "I whipped your
lying brother and I'll whip you. Hold off that skin-and-bones harpy,
Morris." 
	"Easy, men, easy," Sebastian whined in that sissy half-sob that he
used to pull so long ago. Duffey could almost hear the old words now, "Baw,
lemmy alone, you big bully!", so Duffey knew that one part of the project
would be taken care of by Sebastian, and the other would fall to himself. 
	Duffey lifted his head to look at the lower or Fortean sky. And he
ordered a silent order. It happened just as he ordered it. It's too bad that
Rollo and Morris, the two who had challenged it so loud, missed seeing it.
It was their own fault.
	"Don't touch my girl there," Sebastian Hilton had whined in that
simulated, sissy way. And then two remarkable things happened in the same
instant. 
	As to the one happening, twenty-four pairs of eyes and three cameras
recorded twcnty-four and three slightly different versions of it. Giant
hands did come down. They were seen by some and sensed by all. They took the
largest of the mules under the belly. The mule howled the horrible,
clattering sound that only a frightened mule can give. 
	"Easy there, little fellow, easy there," a huge, black-man voice
whispered from the low sky, and the mule relaxed with the certainty that
these were authorized hands taking him up. The mule arched his back, and he
was lifted through the air; or anyhow he moved through the air, up over the
fence and out of that little pen. And he came down again in that traffic
island across a half-street. 
	The other things that happened at the same moment was Morris Poor
and Rollo McSor;ey being blinded and felled by slashing blows from the
lightning-like Sebastian Hilton. Sebastian still wore a sharply embossed
ring on either hand as he had when he was a school boy. Ah, those things
could cut! Ah, Sebastian was fast with his hands! What a cocky sadist
Sebastian was anyhow! 
	The piece in the Chicago Herald and Examiner (of November 14) was a
modest one, and it tried to be factual. It was done by Elena O'Higgins. It
made the simple statement that a mule had been transported thirty feet,
before a score of witnesses, on the night before, under the Pont du Sable
Traffic Trestle, transported through the air by mysterious conveyance. It
said that the witnesses gave conficting statements, but all agreed that the
mule moved thirty feet through the air. The photograph that accompanied her
story showed the mule in the air, but it did not show any giant hands
supporting it. 
	The piece in the Daily News for November 14 was written by Rollo
McSorley and was a bitterly facetious piece titled, "I was kicked by a
flying mule." Rollo claimed that he was really kicked by a drink known as
The Green Mule. He said that this drink was given to a party of people by a
nefarious Jewess, and that damned if he didn't think that he wanted another
drink of it sometimes. Rollo wrote: "Whatever it was that I bet, I lost my
bet. Whoever I said I could whip, I couldn't. Whatever I said that somebody
couldn't do, he did it." And the photo that accompanied this light-hearted
story showed the mule in the air, and it showed giant hands holding it
there. There were also brightish blurs here and there that might indicate
some kind of double exposure. The three photographers had exchanged
pictures, but the Tribune was the only paper that used all three of them. 
	The piece in the November 14 Chicago Tribune was done by Toiiy
Apostolo. It had quite a bit of everything in it. It had statements from
most of the witnesses: 
	"How did that mule get over the fence?" Judley Peacock had asked.
"He jumped over it, that's how. I tended mules in the army and I know that a
mule can outjump any horse. And the fence around that little pen wasn't more
than seven feet tall. The mule jumped over the fence, and he got to the
traffic island in two more jumps. On yes, there was a big black man up on
the trestle, the biggest man I ever saw in my life. And he called something
down to the mule. That's why the mule jumped. But the big man didn't lift
the mule with his hands. It looked as if he did, and I thought at the time
that he did. But he didn't. That would be silly. That mule got there in
three big jumps." 
	"When does a jump turn into a flight?" asked that beautiful and
vulgar midget Charlotte Garfield. "That mule went thirty feet in the air,
and that's all there was to it. No, it didn't exactly break it up into three
jumps. It started to come down two times in between, but each time it got
the elemental goad and it went up again without ever coming down to earth.
Yeah, it was that big shine up there who did it. He reached down (his arm
must have been fifty feet long) and put a three-stage firecracker under the
mule's tail. He detonated that firecracker by voice, and every time the big
coon honored, the firecracker blew another stage and the mule went up in the
air again before he had come down. I tell you, you could smell burnt mule
all over the place." 
	Really though, the evidence was pretty consistent. Three quarters of
the witnesses said that it was a clear case that giant hands came down,
lifted the mule, and transported it thirty feet and set it down again. That
is what happened -- a quite impossible thing.
	Shirley Israel never did rediscover that combination of liquors to
bring them all so near to the living edge. 
	CHAPTER IV 

	Oh no, no, that wasn't Duffey's last public act of magic. We forgot
about the frequent puppet acts that he put on, mostly for children.
Melchisedech and Letitia Duffey would give these little magic puppet shows
for the children. They would give them in fire stations, in community
buiidings of city parks, in lodge halls, in cauldrons' homes, in hospitals,
in library meeting rooms, in special auditoriums, and in schools. Letitia
would make some very good stringed puppets, and she could manipulate them
and ventriloquise them well. Well, hers was a good puppet show in itself,
and she had been putting it on for children ever since she was a child
herself. 
	Duffey would bring only his banjo with him, and the flat-boater
straw hat that went with it. For his puppets, he used local talent. He used
mice. 
	There was an exciting difference between the actors in these Puppet
Shows. The puppets of Letitia were wooden, or they were made out of twasted
wire and pieces of tin cans, or they were made out of cloth. But the puppets
of Melchisedech were alive and real. Mice. 
	Yes, mice. Local mice. Is there a place anywhere that does not have
a few mice, inside its walls or under its floors or in its dark corners? It
is no odd thing at all. It is almost universal. 
	Duffey would call for mice to come out of their crannies. And they
would come, however many of them he commanded to come. Duffey had dominion
over mice. They would come out, squealing fearfully. And Duffey would pick
them up and place them on the table of the performance. Letitia would have
token mouse costumes made, and would put them onto the mice who would now
have been sweet-talked into friendly cooperation. There would be a funny hat
put on one of the mice, a little jacket on another, a pair of mouse eye
glasses on the third. This was to identify them in the characters they were
playing. And then, the mice would take over the show and give superb
performances. The Letitia Puppets would be only minor characters over
against the mice majors. There is a lot of ham in all mice, and there was
inspired hain in these Diffey-infused creations/contrivances. The mice would
speak their lines in voice roles that could be understood perfectly. This
was either first or second or third degree magic. That the mice should talk
indeed would be magic of the first degree. That the voices of Melchisedech
or Letitia should talk through the mice was second or third degree magic.
And the way that the mice followed voice commands and made the right motions
in the puppet dramas, and struck the right attitudes, that was first degree
magic. 
	The mice were good. The puppet plays were good. The children knew
that it was all magic, and they were right. And when all the plays were
finished, the mice would take off their attributes and bits of costume and
set them in front of Letitia. Then, at the hand-clap command of
Melchisedech, the mice would all jump off the table and scamper into the
walls again, or into their places under the floors. 
	Duffey would end up the shows with a few tunes on his banjo. That
also was magic, the noises he could get out of that little pluck-box. 
	The Duffeys had been giving a lot of shows in the parish schools.
Then a lively little female teacher came and asked them to give a show in
one of the public schools. This was the Gurdon S. Hubbard Elementary School,
absolutely the newest school on the north side. 
	"It is so clein, it is so tight, it is so perfect, it is so new,"
the little teacher said, "and it would be so if you would give one of your
exquisite little shows for our children." 
	"A public school?" Duffey questioned. "But we are not sent except to
the children of the House of Israel." 
	"Listen, you flaming Irishman," that little teacher said. "You have
it all backwards. We are of the House of Israel. You aren't. Sixty-three
percent of our students are of the House of Israel. You come." 
	The Duffeys came. And the show started off well enough, with Letitia
putting her un-live puppets through some of their stringed antics, and with
Melchisedech making his banjo produce noises that were very like the fanfare
of trumpets. Then a malfunction developed. 
	They ran into a snag as they had never run into before. Duffey had
dominion over mice, and he commanded seven of them to come out and perform.
And they did not come. He commanded again. Nothing. There wa no refusal.
What was it then? 
	There were no mice. 
	"What is the matter, Melchisedech?" Letitia asked. 
	"What is the matter, Mr. Duffey," the lively little female teacher
asked. "You seem very perturbed over something. What is the trouble?" 
	"No mice." 
	"But I have seen your act before. There are no mice, and then you
call them out of the vasty void as you say." 
	"That is what I say for my patter, but I really call them out of the
walls and out of the floor spaces and out of the crannies. I call them here,
and there are none of them to come. In this brand new, squeaky-clean
abomination there is not even one mouse, not one in the whole building."
"Oh, I am very proud of that," the little teacher said, "but I see the
difficulty now. What is to be done?" 
	"Only prayer and fasting and virtual miracle will bring them when
there are none," Duffey said. "I pray, I fast now for several minutes, but
will they come? Open the auditorium doors and the corridor doors and the
front and back door of the building. Then we will see." 
	"But we are very careful to keep the doors closed," the little
teacher said, "or things might get in." 
	"I certainly hope that things will get in," Duffey said. Then he
went into an intensity of concentration or prayer. The little teacher did
have all the doors opened. And Letitia took Duffey's banjo and gave a little
entertainment while they waited. She was good on the banjo, but she wasn't
Duffey. There was some apprehension that not even the happy banjo-plucking
could dispel. Five minutes went by, then seven, then nine. 
	Then there came into the room seven of the most out-of-breath mice
you ever saw. They must have come from a long ways, more than a block, for
they would never have lived anywhere in the area of the Gurdon S. Hubbard
Elementary School. Those were tired and foot-sore mice. Mice usually don't
travel very far in a hurry. 
	Duffey picked up the seven out-of-breath mice ind put them on the
table. 
	"Quick," he told Letitia, "make seven little mouse-sized oxygen
masks. I will have to revive these little fellows." Letitia made the seven
little masks and put them on the mice. "But we haven't any oxygen tank with
fittings small enough for these masks," Letitia said. "And there aren't any
fittings on the masks anyhow. They are only paper masks, and no oxygen to go
with them." 
	"The mice think they are real," Duffey said. "So do I. There is real
oxygen going to them now or I am a rodent's uncle. See, they revive. Why had
you so little faith, Letitia?" 
	"I don't know," she said. "I should have learned by now to have
faith." 
	The mice were revived and were bright-eyed and eager. They suffered
their token costumes to be put on them, and they went into their roles with
great verve. It was one of the best presentations the Duffeys ever gave. 
	But just what had happened? 
	"Those mice don't come from around here," said a zoology teacher,
teacher of the class 'Our Happy World, Zoology for the Grade School
Students' as it was listed in the school prospectus. "And they don't come
from a couple of blocks awiy either. These are Central American mice." 
	"We take what we can get," Melchisedech Duffey said, 
	Magic it had been, little touches of magic, bit handfuls of magic. 
	CHAPTER V 

	Shirley Israel (Damn that woman anyhow!) was at the heart of the
rumor that there were salons around the near north side that were more witty
and more informative than the salon of the Duffeys. Shirley's own salon was
said to be one of them. The Israels and the McSorleys and the Calumets and
the Hallahaans and their crowd did not want to dump Duffey. They wanted to
keep him. They were convinced, though they denied it, that there really was
magic in him. They wanted to use him. 
	The stuff that was pushed in the more witty salons was dismal, but
it stuck like cockleburs and it itched like nettles. It disturbed one. It
caused swellings and sores and blood, and that was only the dragonheaded tip
of the iceberg. 
	The whole complex, and the way it savaged Duffey, was so trashy that
it will only be given in bare abridgement. Some of the persons who had
sordid roles in this affair later repented of their parts. Others did not
repent, either here or hereafter. They are still unrepentant in Hell to this
diy, and they have the reputations of being very bad actors there. 
	The agressive element of the Red Decade itself (the 1930's) was
strong in Chicago, but its mind sets cut across all cities and persons. It
was only one of the many heads of the old monster, not the largest nor the
most fearsome head. But all of those heads are deadly. Most of the
university people were besworn to the red thing, and most of the newspaper
people. But a person with a stout hide could repel most of the lances cast.
So it went on for some years. 

	Casey Szymansky, the son of Duffey's old associate Gabriel and a
talisman child of Melchisedech Duffey, had stopped attending colleges. The
only thing that he brought out of his university experience was a small
circulation magazine newspaper named The Crock. This magizine had some
intellectual and cultural pretensions, and it was very opinionated. So the
red rovers had tried to take it over. 
	They hadn't any handle to take hold of it by then, and Casey battled
them, sometimes energetically, sometimes fitfully. But there was something
fearsome in their persistence in trying to board and scuttle the sheet. The
attempts were annoying in the way that a housefly is annoying. And then one
noticed that the supposed housefly was another kind of flying creiture,
deadly, deadly. But things still went on for a while, and the deadly midges
weren't able to harm the Casey. 
	There had been a little bit of world political unease in those
years. One of its earlier climaxes came a short time after the close of the
Red Decade, with the entry of the United States into the global war in
December of 1941. Hardly anybody remembers this minor bit of history, but it
did happen. 
	Casey joined the U.S. Army in April of 1942 and went away to the now
forgotten war. He asked Duffey to run The Crock for him while he was in
service, and Duffey did so. When Duffey had the magazine, there were many
talented contributors, d'Alesandro the masterly engraver, Demetrio Glauch,
Hierome Groben, Ethyl Ellenberger, Thos. J. Chronicker S.J., Christopher
Tompkinson, Mary Frances Rattigan (her translations were done under the name
of Polly Polyglot), Mary Lightfoot, others. Some of these had contributed to
the sheet when Casey had it, but now they worked with more aim and
direction. And others of them were brought in by Duffey. 
	The peculiar people still tried to take The Crock over, and Duffey
laughed at them. This went on for several years. Then a man out of left
field came to talk to Duffey. He had a portfolio. The man quickly told
Duffey that it would do him no good to destroy the portfolio as there were
only copies in it and the originals were in another place. He also devised
that it would do no good for Duffey to destroy him, the man with the
portfolio, as friends knew where he had gone, and they were standing by. In
fact, the man said, if they did not hear from him by telephone every five
minutes while he was in Duffey's place, they would break down the doors and
come to the rescue. 
	This was a peculiar business. The man with the portfolio was larger
than Duffey and no more than his age. Duffey was something of a battler, but
he seldom assaulted visitors. Dufrey threw open the door of his place and
propped it open. The friends of the man wouldn't need to break down the
doors to come in to the rescue. Then Duffey pulled his phone out of the
phone jack and carried it to another room. Duffey had a nonstandard phone
that coupled by a plug-in phone jack to the lines. This meant that the
friends would not get any calls and that they would come in five minutes or
so. Then Duffey took the portfolio away from the man and sat down to examine
it. 
	It was mostly full of photographs. Duffey went through them with a
sort of puzzled laughter. "Why?" he asked, "Why, who would be so interested
in my private doings? I'm not that interesting a person." The puzzlement
grew stronger ind the laughter weaker. Duffey himself was in every one of
the pictures, or at least (in the case of several of the dimmer ones) there
was writing on the face of the photograph identifying Duffey as being in
them. Some of the photographs had to be more than ten years old. "Why, why?"
Duffey asked Some of the pictures showed Duffey in middling compromising
situations. 
	Many of the pictures were of Duffey and the various young girls
carrying on upon that old black leather sofa in the book store. They showed
him having dirty fun with Mary Frances Rattigan and Mary Catherine
Carruthers, and Mary Jean, and Ethyl Ellenberger. It showed him playing the
funny uncle with them from the time they were eight or ten years old. 
	"It had to be that little kid Hugo Stone," Duffey said. "He always
had a camera with him, and he was always popping up in odd corners of the
store. But how could he have known then, so long ago, that you could have
use of these to blackmail me now?" 
	"Hugo was always a smart boy," the man said. "He is of my own
kindred. He knew enough to accumulate and keep everything that might
possibly be of future use." 
	There were later pictures of Duffey with grown women in various
places, some of them in his very own rooms. Who had planted a camera in his
own place? Who could come and go in the Duffey quarters? Only about two
hundred persons, that's all. The pictures showed Duffey carrying on a little
bit with Countess Margaret Hochfelsen and with that mendacious midget
Charlotte Garfield. But it wasn't serious carrying on with those two. Others
showed him playing the funny lover with Mona Greatheart and Shirley Israel
and Josephine McSorley and Catherine Quick and Elena O'Higgins and Beverly
Boydl and Mary Lightfoot and Jenny Reid. And yet, there wasn't anything so
very outrageous about any of them either. "Who was the assiduous cameraman
of these," Duffey said. "They are taken in a dozen places. Who has been so
busy with this hobby?" 
	And one of the pictures showed (Oh, no, no, no, that wasn't at all
what it seemed to be: why cannot a photograph show what is all in fun and
what isn't?) Duffey entangled in a very funny manner of loving with his
sister-in-law Lily Koch. The only flagrante picture in the whole portfolio
was of Duffey and Shirley Israel. And that was an entrapment, a badger game
trick, a sneak attack. But several of the others had a little bit of heat in
them and they did not seem to have any innocent explanations. 
	"Well, what are you going to do with them?" Duffey asked stiffly. 
	"Oh, we hope that we will not do anything with them," the man said.
"It is just that some of us want to join with you in the excellent little
magazine you are running, and you have not welcomed us with open arms. We do
not want to join in from hope of money gain. We will bring in money, not
take it out. And we will enlarge the magazine. But it is an idea magazine,
and we want our ideas to be in it." 
	"Who are you going to blackmail me to?" 
	"Oh, to your wife, and to others." 
	"You're wasting your time," Duffey said. "My wife can read my mind.
She knows the things I have done. These things cannot be held against me,
however they may look. I have confessed the few guilty things among them and
I have been absolved of them. And any guilt I ever had in them, either in
fact or in appearance, is gone now. It is all past." 
	"Some of these pictures, you most know, are not too old." 
	"Some of my confessings and absolvings are not too old either." 
	"Ah, but will your wife absolve you?" 
	"Certainly she will. I will explain to her that I am clear of all
these things now, and that she must hold me clear of them. But she already
knonws this. I am, in fact, a changed man for some two years now."
	"Changed man, you had not yet changed when these pictures were
taken. And I will bet that your wife takes a very unchanged view of them
when she sees them."
	The friends of the portfolio man came in then. They had not got a
call from him, and they came to see whether he and Duffey had proceeded to
violence. Rollo McSorley and Elmo Sheehan were among those friends, and
several others who were still half-friends of Duffey. 
	"Get out, all of you," Duffey said. "I'll not be blackmailed."
"Then your wife will see some of these pictures this evening," the portfolio
man said. 
	"Why won't she see all of them?" Duffey asked. "Show all of them to
her at once. Why not?" 
	"Oh, we will keep some of them still hanging over you," the man
said. "It is more effective that way. Besides, I haven't even brought all of
them in. There will always be others, until you cooperate." 
	"Out, all of you," Duffey ordered. 
	Theere are sterner measures that we can take also," said one of the
half-friends. 
	"You mean the three preternatural slant-faced killers?" Duffey
asked. "I wonder, do you carry spares for them?" 
	"Spares?" 
	"Yes. At least one of them will be killed at our next encounter. I
thought you might want to keep the number at three. Out, all of you, out!" 
	"You'll be sorry, Duff," Rollo McSorley warned. 
	"Of course I will be. I'll become a man of sorrows for a while. But
I'll not let your camel's nose into the tent that is The Crock. And I'll not
do worse things than I have been pictured as doing."

	When Duffey got all of them out of there, he went for a walk. This
thing was an irksome threat over him, but something was also threatening to
destroy a shadow of his. To a primitive, and Duffey was always that, the
destruction of a shadow is a mortal wounding of the Self.
	Duffey had his shadows, and they were fleshed much of the time, or
he believed that they were. He had shadows, he had fetches, he had doubles
of himself. One of these doubles, who was often in a shabby sort of empathy
with Duffey, lived there in Chicago. He lived only about six bIocks from
Duffey, but in a poorer neighborhood. And he was a poor man. 
	Duffey went to that house to talk to the overwhelmed man. There was
nobody at the house. Then Duffey, following an intuitive path as a bound dog
might, came to a shabby north end tavern and was called 'McFadden's North
End Tavern'. He went in and found a despondent man who looked slightly like
himself. 
	The man was sitting alone at a table with a half-full glass of beer
in front of him. He was maybe forty years old, with short-cut hair between
the colors of sandy and orange. His eyes were fire-blue, but the fire in
them was tired this afternoon. His hands were always busy. They were weaving
patterns in the air, and banging into each other with little jolting claps. 
	"Of this I am entirely innocent," the man was muttering. "I haven't
done these things, and yet witnesses have seen me coming and going about
them. I don't understand it at all. I am an innocent man and I don't want to
understand it." 
	Duffey shivered, for the man's voice was quite like his own. 
	"You are half-shaded over," Duffy told the man. "So am I. Together
we can form a window to let a little light in." 
	"No," the man said, but he didn't look at Duffey. "You're a devil.
You bugged me once before, several years ago, or a man very like you did.
There is something wrong about you. Do not sit down, I'm telling you,
fellow!" And the man banged his hands together loudly and nervously. But
Duffey was already sitting down at the table with him. 
	"I will sit here, man," Duffey said, "and I will talk to you. You
owe me an explanation, though neither of uss can say why." The man looked at
Duffey angrily. 
	"A pitcher here, young McFadden," Duffey called them. It was one of
those seveny-two ounce pitchers that young McFadden brought, and a glass for
Duffey and a fresh glass for the other man. "And onions and other things,"
Duffey ordered of McFadden. "You are sure that you are innocent of it all?"
Duffey asked his table mate then. "How have witnesses seen you going and
coming about things if you are innocent of them?" 
	"It's as if there were a devil associated with me and the devil had
done the things and they were reported of me," the man said. "But my wife
believes the reports. This is the blow. Why have you broken off that layer
of onion and cast it aside? I have a care what you do there. Isn't that
layer as good as the rest of the onion?" 
	"The onion?" Duffey asked "Why, I wasn't noticing. I eat it a bit,
then I open it up a bit, and I toy with it. You were saying that there were
things about your own conduct that you don't understand, and --" 
	"I was saying that you cast one layer of the onion aside as if it
weren't as good as the rest. Do you believe that I'm only an onion layer to
you? Do yoy believe that I'm an inferior layer to be cast off like nothing?
Well, we may go to fist bailiwack to decide which of us is the onion and
which of us is the layer. I am a tornao, and you are one of my spinoffs,
that's what you are, man. Oh, the other thing, is regards my wife and our
relationship. I have never done one wrong thing, not one. And now I have.
This afternoon I have." 
	"What have you done this afternoon. And what is your name?" Duffey
asked. 
	"Mike. Mike Melchiades, that is." 
	"What did you mean when you said that you had never done one wrong
thing as regards your wife, but now you had?" Duffey asked. 
	"When she left the, I immediately went down and pulled everything
out of our joint account. It wasn't much, a little over three hundred
dollars. And she had probably put more into it than I had. But I was back in
our rooms thirty minutes later and I got a call from the bank. My wife was
there and wanting to make a twenty dollar withdrawal. I said no. I could
hear her crying near the other end of the line, but I said no again. What
will she do with no money at all, and her on the town with just a little
suitcase? She is shy. She doesn't know how to make out. And she is broken up
in the false belief that I am untrue to her. Poor people have a hard time of
it. Getting mad and pulling out are luxuries that they csn never really
afford. A man is like an onion there, fellow, yes. He has layers to him, and
the layer doesn't care to be discarded like that. You think I'm only a layer
of it. You're wrong. I'm not that. Leave me here, Devil. But if you should
happen to see my wife -- Oh, but you wouldn't know my wife if you saw her --

	"I would know her," Duffey said. 
	"Tell her to come home," the man said. "Tell her that this thing is
not really broken off between us." 

	Duffey went out of McFaddens and walked. He suspected that the man
was right. The man was the tornado, and Duffey was only a spinoff from him.
Or that was the way it was part of the time. Poor people, ignorant people,
low class people often have tremendous psychic power. They are tornados
indeed; blind tornados. They generate terrible power, and richer people
steal it from them and use it themselves. 
	Duffey knew that the Chicago interlude was about finished, and it
had been a tolerably bright complexity of awareness and styles and livings
and enjoyments and arts and immediacies. He was not overly proud, but he
knew that his own dimming out from this scene would dim it a little bit for
everyone there. Melchisedech and Letitia had designed their own part of
Chicago as they had designed other things, other events, life scenarios, and
other persons themselves. Now, as they would soon be leaving the city, one
way or another, all those things would become undesigned again. 
	Duffey walked by the Pont du Sable Traffic Trestle that had become
interior to him, a universal bridge. Several cars had just accomplished a
real-life crash against some of its abutments. That meant that another part
of Duffey was crippled. 
	"Mike!" a woman cried. "Oh, Mike!" Then she stopped confused. "I
thought you were my Mike," she said. 
	"Go home to him," Duffey told her. "It was all a misunderstanding.
He hadn't abused your relationship at all, and now he is sorry that he
closed out the account." 
	"Somehow I couldn't possibly face him before tomorrow," the woman
said, and there isn't any place that I could go." 
	"There are rooms on the other end of the block," Duffey said, "and
low-cost eating places. You can make it till tomorrow easily." 	Duffey gave
her twenty dollars. 
	"But I couldn't take money from a man in the street," the woman
said. 
	"Be quiet, woman," Duffey told her. "It is given to you. It is not
yours to ask whether you will take it. Take it and go somewhere. And
tomorrow go home. And do not wonder too much about the congruence of
events." 
	Duffey knew then that Letitia was gone, or was going from their
place at that very moment. He knew that she had divined much of what had
happened, though she had not yet been approached by the man with the
portfolio. She didn't want to see what it all was, and she wouldn't. But she
had gone away for a while. She would have supplied, though, a good cover
story for her going away, an account of a very necessary trip. What else
would a priceless wife, who reads her husband's brain and heart, do? 
	
	CHAPTER VI 

	About a month after this, there was a little meeting of the
stockholders of the Crock. Duffey himself had a big piece of the stock of
the magazine, and he had been in nice control of it all with Casey's proxy
votes. But now a strange man pressented a dated and signed proxy from Casey
Szymansky who was still across the APO Oceans. And this proxy preempted the
earlier proxy that Casey had given to Duffey before he went overseas. 
	The money involved, the stock involved, the equipment involved were
none of them very much. The Crock was capitalized for only five thousand
dollars; and Duffey, even though he had lost part of his facility for making
and handling money, could have covered that quite a few times. But there
wouldn't be any buying out. The strange man and his group took over the
Crock and they changed its orientation. 
	Of course, Letitia Duffey had returned from her necessary trip
before this. She still did not see the portfolio or the material in it, and
she was without any interest in it. And the group had already forced Duffey
out of the way on this deal. Well, there would be other deals. They would
keep the portfolio of pictures, and perhaps they could find use for them
some day. 
	It was about a year or fourteen months after the taking over of the
Crock that Casey Szymansky came home. He confirmed that the orientation of
the Crock had changed, that he himself would be running it again with help
and suggestions from the 'group', and that Duffey was severed from it
forever. 
	Casey said that every damned thing in the world had changed for him
now. He said that he had traded souls either with the devil or with a
virtual devil, and that he would maintain an entirely different way in the
world thenceforth. And Duffey understood just what he was up to and how big
the change in him really was. 
	But it couldn't be a total break between Casey and Duffey even then.
Casey was one of the Duffey creatures, and Duffey couldn't repent of having
made him. But Casey had grown larger than Duffey and more contrary. The
Casey moon had grown bigger and heavier than the Duffey planet, and that had
set up one hell of an eccentric. The whole business of Casey Szymansky must
be investigated in depth pretty soon. 

	Melchisedech Duffey, in his 'time of trial' here, had sustenance
from his quasi-brother Bascom Bagby in St. Louis. Duffey received weekly
letters from Baghy. He had also received weekly letters from Bagby during
his seven hidden years (there was something inexplicable about that part of
it). The letters were of great intelligence and compassion. They were
written in a good hand on old lined tablet paper. These letters seemed to be
a part of Duffey's introspection, but they were real enough and exterior
enough. And now, Bagby understood the situation without Duffey ever
mentioning it to him. 
	"It was the revolt of the Titan was it, the first of them to revolt
and attempt to overturn you? And this phase of it has been successful for
him. He has thrown you out of your Chicago Olympia, and now you must descend
into the world or else seek another mountain top. 'It was probably for the
best,' as the man said when he had lost both arms and legs and been blinded
in an accident, 'it will keep me home nights and out of trouble'. You will
be coming here very soon now. You will be meeting most of the rest of this
titan race that you created in moments of abstraction or absent mindedness.
We never will know what you were thinking when you did it. Most of them will
like you though. I will see you in St. Louis in about thirteen days. Oh, you
didn't know you were coming here then? You are." 

	As it had been both fashionable and expensive, during the Chicago
interlude to be analyzed, Melchisedech had been analyzed by Doctor Saul
Rafelson. Duffey never was released as cured by Rafelson (or Doctor Raffles,
as both Melchisedech and Letitia called him). The doctor went so far as to
say that there never was any such thing was a cure in these matters. This
was at variance with the stated opinions of most of the other
psychoanalysts. 
	Here are a few notes, though, that Doctor Rafelson made on the case
of Melchisedech Duffey: 
	"The types of Duffey's fantasies are not extraordinary. They are the
'Child of God', 'Child of Gold', 'Master of Ebony Slaves', 'Master of
Giants', 'The Riding King', 'The Boy King', 'The Miracle Worker', 'I am many
thousands of years old', 'Successive Lives', 'Parallel Lives', 'The
many-layered myself, 'The monster within', 'Living shadows of myself, 'My
power to confer power', 'My power to make people', 'The company of the
elites', 'The conferring of talismans and lives', and the 'But for my
intervention, the world would be in deadly peril' fantasy. Who has not had
all these fantasies? They are the things that are entertained by every boy
of unhealthy mind. 
	"In only one way was Duffey out of the ordinary in his relationship
to his own fantasies: He was able to articulate them exteriorily. Or to put
it in layman's words, 'He makes them happen!' I have to accept this as fact.
I have encountered the same thing in two other patients in past years, but
not nearly so powerfully as in Duffey. Duffey believes that there are other
aspects and persons of himself: and so, in consequence, there are. These may
be psychic projections, or they may the real persons captured by Duffey as
satellites, possibly never having seen him. Or they may be valid and living
images that have split off from him for independent existence. This was the
'Splitting Image' of popular lore. I have examined two of these freestanding
images of Duffey and had them under analysis. There was no doubt that they
are flesh and blood (one of them has a citation for his faithfulness as a
blood donor). They are young people far above the average in mentality and
body. Duffey may have wrought better in them than he has been wrought in
himself. 
	"Duffey believes that he has made twelve of these young people
(twelve was the most frequent 'works and days' number). These are not the
same as Duffey's 'shadows'. Duffey must have intended these twelve
independent satellites to express twelve aspects of himself. Yes, his
egomania was monumental.
	"Duffey believes that he was a magician and sorcerer. Of course he
was. There are a lot of them active in the world, and the world does not
seem to be too much the worse for it. 
	"Duffey was one of those rare persons who might be able to impose
topological inversion on the world. This was possible both mathematically
and psyclically. This would be bringing about the case that the world was
contained in Duffey and not Duffey in the world. Many of us in this
discipline have known about such possibilities, and we have even recognized
several momentary happenings of it. We call it the case of the world
spending three days in the belly of Jonah, though there has never been
anything like a three-day period. (In the year 1848, the whole world was
contained within a young goat herder in Anatolia for twelve minutes, but
mostly it was only three or four seconds on even a major inversion.) The
thing may even have happened, for very brief periods, in the case of Duffey.

	"Yes, Duffey beheves that he molds and even creates persons. This
was part of his talisman-conferring and life-conferring fantasies, but still
there was slippery fact to it. It really seems as though a group of Duffey's
contingent creations were presently rustling towards congruent fulfillment.
If this happens, if they get to know each other in their fullness, then
these contingent creations will be living persons in life situations, and
they will have been so all along. If this blows up, then they will not be,
and they will not have been. If they are, then the world will have to
accommodate and provide antecedents and contexts for them. This will require
a terrific amount of ingenious and preternatural plot construction on the
part of someone. 
	"I have told Duffey that he must get rid of the unrealities that
surround and infest him. But a peculiarty of his unrealities was that they
are solid and bodied. Duffey may well be murdered by a group of three of his
unrealities. They've tried it before. 
	"I have been asked several times by professional colleagues to make
a statement about the Duffey phenomena. They all know about them, but how
could they have any except intuitive knowledge about them? How do they know
that there are Duffey phenomena, and how could they have known that I might
have entree to this knowledge? All right, this is a statement: 
	"'We cannot leave this phenomena out of account or all our
psychological statements will be worthless. No study of human
inter-reactions, of human relations to the exocosmos, of the variable human
functions of the creator-created rolcs, of the overlapping of the human
persons in individuals and groups, of the sharing of 'persons' by
individuals and groups, of the gaining and losing of reility by phenomenal
persons, no such investigations call be complete if they omit evidence of
the prototypical Duffey matter. It will lead right to the heart of the
meaning of matter itseff. It will lead there, but I will not follow it
there. I'm spooked.' 
			Doctor Saul Rafelson"