foot of the cross. I brushed the loose dirt from my white-capped knees and left the corpses to go about their ghastly business. I hadn’t walked fifty yards when I changed my mind and went back for my medal. Who knew? I might need it yet.
I never found a man of any race to replace Chen— excepting you. You’ve been decent and a friend. On Sunday afternoons, Chen and I would walk the length and breadth of Omaha, although, in 1866, there was nothing about it you’d call picturesque. Omaha was a machine for slaughtering, packing, and shipping cattle. For all its monotony and stink, the town had its share of amusements—drinking holes and whorehouses, naturally, but I’d have been embarrassed to be seen in either place with Chen. What I mean is, I’d have been ashamed of myself. He had more of a civilizing effect on me than all the high-and-mighty, holier-than-thou con men I’d known in my wanderings. China has an ancient civilization. It was bound to have seeped into Chen at birth and to have changed me a little during the time I was steeped in him, so to speak.
He tended to spice his remarks with epigrams. One I remember was “Stars that outshine the rest are the first to disappear.” I don’t know if it was Confucius’s saying or Chen’s own. Product of a self-effacing race, he disapproved of my inclination to show off, which he attributed to shallowness and insecurity. I was hardly more than a boy! Hethought it a dangerous folly to wear a snow-white uniform in a wilderness peopled by the Irish and the Indians. Chen’s gift was to fit himself to circumstances. I’d advocate it, if his life hadn’t been cut short.
With nothing to do anymore in my idle hours, I undertook my education. I wish I could tell you that I had Chen’s example in mind. But the truth is, I became an avid reader by chance. I was searching the depot warehouse for a case of scotch that Durant had ordered from New York, when I found a crate of books intended, by some eastern philanthropic society, for Omaha’s circulating library. A library, circulating or otherwise, had not yet been thought of for a town consisting mostly of illiterate Irishmen, foreigners, and cowboys herding steers into cattle pens by waving their Boss of the Plains hats and making their own version of Whitman’s “barbaric yawp.” I gave a coolie two bits to haul the crate to the tool car hitched behind Durant’s traveling boardroom, where I had my quarters; and in the long evenings when I wasn’t licking boots and kissing backsides, I read. In the three and a half years remaining to me as Durant’s Puppy, I read The Scarlet Letter, Silas Marner, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Pride and Prejudice, Gulliver’s Travels, The Marble Faun, Moby-Dick, Knickerbocker’s History of New York, The Red Rover, David Copperfield, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Woman in White, Adam Bede, The Age of Fable, Bleak House , illustrated by Phiz, The Origin of Species , which could have found its way into the crate only by chance or spitefulness, and The Diary of a Superfluous Man , whose title spoke to the situation of a boy no more central to the great events in which he found himself than a gnat in the halls of Congress. I had fallen inmy own estimation since leaving the army, but I’d be sitting in the catbird seat once again.
With no formal education and little experience in reading (beyond Durant’s private papers, which I would pull from his briefcase and peruse), I could never have wormed my way through all those books if it hadn’t been for Patrick Landy. He’d been sent by an eastern newspaper to write an article deploring the Johnson administration’s neglect of the Lincoln parlor car: a “national disgrace” and “the final quietus to the man who saved the Union.” I met Landy the month following Chen’s murder (for so I swear it to have been), when he visited the Union Pacific shed. One of my duties was to scare off trespassers and vandals. Personally, I
I never found a man of any race to replace Chen— excepting you. You’ve been decent and a friend. On Sunday afternoons, Chen and I would walk the length and breadth of Omaha, although, in 1866, there was nothing about it you’d call picturesque. Omaha was a machine for slaughtering, packing, and shipping cattle. For all its monotony and stink, the town had its share of amusements—drinking holes and whorehouses, naturally, but I’d have been embarrassed to be seen in either place with Chen. What I mean is, I’d have been ashamed of myself. He had more of a civilizing effect on me than all the high-and-mighty, holier-than-thou con men I’d known in my wanderings. China has an ancient civilization. It was bound to have seeped into Chen at birth and to have changed me a little during the time I was steeped in him, so to speak.
He tended to spice his remarks with epigrams. One I remember was “Stars that outshine the rest are the first to disappear.” I don’t know if it was Confucius’s saying or Chen’s own. Product of a self-effacing race, he disapproved of my inclination to show off, which he attributed to shallowness and insecurity. I was hardly more than a boy! Hethought it a dangerous folly to wear a snow-white uniform in a wilderness peopled by the Irish and the Indians. Chen’s gift was to fit himself to circumstances. I’d advocate it, if his life hadn’t been cut short.
With nothing to do anymore in my idle hours, I undertook my education. I wish I could tell you that I had Chen’s example in mind. But the truth is, I became an avid reader by chance. I was searching the depot warehouse for a case of scotch that Durant had ordered from New York, when I found a crate of books intended, by some eastern philanthropic society, for Omaha’s circulating library. A library, circulating or otherwise, had not yet been thought of for a town consisting mostly of illiterate Irishmen, foreigners, and cowboys herding steers into cattle pens by waving their Boss of the Plains hats and making their own version of Whitman’s “barbaric yawp.” I gave a coolie two bits to haul the crate to the tool car hitched behind Durant’s traveling boardroom, where I had my quarters; and in the long evenings when I wasn’t licking boots and kissing backsides, I read. In the three and a half years remaining to me as Durant’s Puppy, I read The Scarlet Letter, Silas Marner, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Pride and Prejudice, Gulliver’s Travels, The Marble Faun, Moby-Dick, Knickerbocker’s History of New York, The Red Rover, David Copperfield, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Woman in White, Adam Bede, The Age of Fable, Bleak House , illustrated by Phiz, The Origin of Species , which could have found its way into the crate only by chance or spitefulness, and The Diary of a Superfluous Man , whose title spoke to the situation of a boy no more central to the great events in which he found himself than a gnat in the halls of Congress. I had fallen inmy own estimation since leaving the army, but I’d be sitting in the catbird seat once again.
With no formal education and little experience in reading (beyond Durant’s private papers, which I would pull from his briefcase and peruse), I could never have wormed my way through all those books if it hadn’t been for Patrick Landy. He’d been sent by an eastern newspaper to write an article deploring the Johnson administration’s neglect of the Lincoln parlor car: a “national disgrace” and “the final quietus to the man who saved the Union.” I met Landy the month following Chen’s murder (for so I swear it to have been), when he visited the Union Pacific shed. One of my duties was to scare off trespassers and vandals. Personally, I
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