A Reversible Santa Claus
I
Mr. William B. Aikins, _alias_ "Softy" Hubbard, _alias_ Billy The Hopper,
paused for breath behind a hedge that bordered a quiet lane and peered out
into the highway at a roadster whose tail light advertised its presence to
his felonious gaze. It was Christmas Eve, and after a day of unseasonable
warmth a slow, drizzling rain was whimsically changing to snow.
The Hopper was blowing from two hours' hard travel over rough country. He
had stumbled through woodlands, flattened himself in fence corners to
avoid the eyes of curious motorists speeding homeward or flying about
distributing Christmas gifts, and he was now bent upon committing himself
to an inter-urban trolley line that would afford comfortable
transportation for the remainder of his journey. Twenty miles, he
estimated, still lay between him and his domicile.
The rain had penetrated his clothing and vigorous exercise had not greatly
diminished the chill in his blood. His heart knocked violently against his
ribs and he was dismayed by his shortness of wind. The Hopper was not so
young as in the days when his agility and genius for effecting a quick
"get-away" had earned for him his sobriquet. The last time his Bertillon
measurements were checked (he was subjected to this humiliating
experience in Omaha during the Ak-Sar-Ben carnival three years earlier)
official note was taken of the fact that The Hopper's hair, long carried
in the records as black, was rapidly whitening.
At forty-eight a crook--even so resourceful and versatile a member of the
fraternity as The Hopper--begins to mistrust himself. For the greater part
of his life, when not in durance vile, The Hopper had been in hiding, and
the state or condition of being a fugitive, hunted by keen-eyed agents of
justice, is not, from all accounts, an enviable one. His latest experience
of involuntary servitude had been under the auspices of the State of
Oregon, for a trifling indiscretion in the way of safe-blowing. Having
served his sentence, he skillfully effaced himself by a year's siesta on
a pine-apple plantation in Hawaii. The island climate was not wholly
pleasing to The Hopper, and when pine-apples palled he took passage from
Honolulu as a stoker, reached San Francisco (not greatly chastened in
spirit), and by a series of characteristic hops, skips, and jumps across
the continent landed in Maine by way of the Canadian provinces. The Hopper
needed money. He was not without a certain crude philosophy, and it had
been his dream to acquire by some brilliant _coup_ a sufficient fortune
upon which to retire and live as a decent, law-abiding citizen for the
remainder of his days. This ambition, or at least the means to its
fulfillment, can hardly be defended as praiseworthy, but The Hopper was a
singular character and we must take him as we find him. Many prison
chaplains and jail visitors bearing tracts had striven with little
success to implant moral ideals in the mind and soul of The Hopper, but he
was still to be catalogued among the impenitent; and as he moved southward
through the Commonwealth of Maine he was so oppressed by his poverty, as
contrasted with the world's abundance, that he lifted forty thousand
dollars in a neat bundle from an express car which Providence had
sidetracked, apparently for his personal enrichment, on the upper waters
of the Penobscot. Whereupon he began perforce playing his old game of
artful dodging, exercising his best powers as a hopper and skipper. Forty
thousand dollars is no inconsiderable sum of money, and the success of
this master stroke of his career was not to be jeopardized by careless
moves. By craftily hiding in the big woods and making himself agreeable
to isolated lumberjacks who rarely saw newspapers, he arrived in due
course on Manhattan Island, where with shrewd judgment he avoided the
haunts of his kind while planning a future commensurate with his new
dignity as a capitalist.
