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Essentials of Modern Communications
Essentials of Modern Communications
Djafar K. Mynbaev
New York City College of Technology of the City University of New York
Lowell L. Scheiner
Late of New York University Tandon School of Engineering
This edition first published 2020
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Bronia
vii
Contents
5 Filters 325
Objectives and Outcomes of Chapter 5 325
5.1 Filtering – Basics 326
Objectives and Outcomes of Section 5.1 326
5.1.1 Filtering: What and Why 327
5.1.2 RC Low-Pass Filter (LPF) 330
5.1.2.1 Frequency Responses of a Resistor, R, and a Capacitor, C 330
5.1.2.2 RC Low-Pass Filter: Principle of Operation 333
5.1.2.3 Output Waveforms of an RC LPF 334
5.1.2.4 An RC LPF: Formulas for Attenuation and Phase Shift 335
5.1.2.5 Frequency Response of an RC LPF 339
5.1.2.6 Cutoff (Critical) Frequency of an RC LPF 342
Sidebar 5.1.S Filter’s Characteristics in Absolute Values and in dB 345
5.1.3 Filter Operation in Time Domain and Frequency Domain 347
5.1.3.1 Waveform Change and Frequency Response 347
5.1.3.2 Bandwidth of an RC LPF 349
5.1.3.3 Characterization of an RC LPF 349
5.1.3.4 The Role of R and C Parameters in Characterization of an RC
LPF 352
5.1.4 General Filter Specifications 354
5.1.4.1 Amplitude Specifications 354
5.1.4.2 Phase Specifications 359
Questions and Problems for Section 5.1 360
5.2 Filtering – Introduction 365
Objectives and Outcomes of Section 5.2 365
5.2.1 High-Pass Filter (HPF), Band-Pass Filter (BPF), and Band-Stop Filter
(BSF) 366
5.2.1.1 High-Pass Filter (HPF) 367
5.2.1.2 Band-Pass Filter (BPF) 371
5.2.1.3 Band-Stop Filter (BSF) 378
xii Contents
Ahead, on the trail, where the way grew steep and the horses
without stamina rested and panted, Francis overtook his party.
“Never again shall I travel without minted coin of the realm,” he
exulted, as he described what he had remained behind to see from
the edge of the deserted plantation. “Henry, when I die and go to
heaven, I shall have a stout bag of cash along with me. Even there
could it redeem me from heaven alone knows what scrapes. Listen!
They fought like cats and dogs about the mouth of the well. Nobody
would trust anybody to descend into the well unless he deposited
what he had previously picked up with those that remained at the
top. They were out of hand. The Jefe, at the point of his gun, had to
force the littlest and leanest of them to go down. And when he was
down he blackmailed them before he would come up. And when he
came up they broke their promises and gave him a beating. They
were still beating him when I left.”
“But now your sack is empty,” said Henry.
“Which is our present and most pressing trouble,” Francis agreed.
“Had I sufficient pesos I could keep the pursuit well behind us
forever. I’m afraid I was too generous. I did not know how cheap the
poor devils were. But I’ll tell you something that will make your hair
stand up. Torres, Senor Torres, Senor Alvarez Torres, the elegant
gentleman and old-time friend of you Solanos, is leading the pursuit
along with the Jefe. He is furious at the delay. They almost had a
rupture because the Jefe couldn’t keep his men in hand. Yes, sir, and
he told the Jefe to go to hell. I distinctly heard him tell the Jefe to go
to hell.”
Five miles farther on, the horses of Leoncia and her father in
collapse, where the trail plunged into and ascended a dark ravine,
Francis urged the others on and dropped behind. Giving them a few
minutes’ start, he followed on behind, a self-constituted rearguard.
Part way along, in an open space where grew only a thick sod of
grass, he was dismayed to find the hoof-prints of the two horses
staring at him as large as dinner plates from out of the sod. Into the
hoof-prints had welled a dark, slimy fluid that his eye told him was
crude oil. This was but the beginning, a sort of seepage from a side
stream above off from the main flow. A hundred yards beyond he
came upon the flow itself, a river of oil that on such a slope would
have been a cataract had it been water. But being crude oil, as thick
as molasses, it oozed slowly down the hill like so much molasses.
And here, preferring to make his stand rather than to wade through
the sticky mess, Francis sat down on a rock, laid his rifle on one side
of him, his automatic pistol on the other side, rolled a cigarette, and
kept his ears pricked for the first sounds of the pursuit.
And the beaten peon, threatened with more beatings and belaboring
his over-ridden mare, rode across the top of the ravine above
Francis, and, at the oil-well itself, had his exhausted animal collapse
under him. With his heels he kicked her back to her feet, and with a
stick belabored her to stagger away from him and on and into the
jungle. And the first day of his adventures, although he did not know
it, was not yet over. He, too, squatted on a stone, his feet out of the
oil, rolled a cigarette, and, as he smoked it, contemplated the
flowing oil-well. The noise of approaching men startled him, and he
fled into the immediately adjacent jungle, from which he peered
forth and saw two strange men appear. They came directly to the
well, and, by an iron wheel turning the valve, choked down the flow
still further.
“No more,” commanded the one who seemed to be leader. “Another
turn, and the pressure will blow out the pipes—for so the Gringo
engineer has warned me most carefully.”
And a slight flow, beyond the limited safety, continued to run from
the mouth of the gusher down the mountain side. Scarcely had the
two men accomplished this, when a body of horsemen rode up,
whom the peon in hiding recognized as the haciendado who owned
him and the overseers and haciendados of neighboring plantations
who delighted in running down a fugitive laborer in much the same
way that the English delight in chasing the fox.
No, the two oil-men had seen nobody. But the haciendado who led
saw the footprints of the mare, and spurred his horse to follow, his
crowd at his heels.
The peon waited, smoked his cigarette quite to the finish, and
cogitated. When all was clear, he ventured forth, turned the
mechanism controlling the well wide open, watched the oil
fountaining upward under the subterranean pressure and flowing
down the mountain in a veritable river. Also, he listened to and
noted the sobbing, and gasping, and bubbling of the escaping gas.
This he did not comprehend, and all that saved him for his further
adventures was the fact that he had used his last match to light his
cigarette. In vain he searched his rags, his ears, and his hair. He was
out of matches.
So, chuckling at the river of oil he was wantonly running to waste,
and, remembering the canyon trail below, he plunged down the
mountainside and upon Francis, who received him with extended
automatic. Down went the peon on his frayed and frazzled knees in
terror and supplication to the man he had twice betrayed that day.
Francis studied him, at first without recognition, because of the
bruised and lacerated face and head on which the blood had dried
like a mask.
“Amigo, amigo,” chattered the peon.
But at that moment, from below on the ravine trail, Francis heard
the clatter of a stone dislodged by some man’s foot. The next
moment he identified what was left of the peon as the pitiable
creature to whom he had given half the contents of his whiskey
flask.
“Well, amigo,” Francis said in the native language, “it looks as if they
are after you.”
“They will kill me, they will beat me to death, they are very angry,”
the wretch quavered. “You are my only friend, my father and my
mother, save me.”
“Can you shoot?” Francis demanded.
“I was a hunter in the Cordilleras before I was sold into slavery,
Senor,” was the reply.
Francis passed him the automatic, motioned him to take shelter, and
told him not to fire until sure of a hit. And to himself he mused: The
golfers are out on the links right now at Tarrytown. And Mrs.
Bellingham is on the clubhouse veranda wondering how she is going
to pay the three thousand points she’s behind and praying for a
change of luck. And——here am I,—Lord! Lord——backed up to a
river of oil....
His musing ceased as abruptly as appeared the Jefe, Torres, and the
gendarmes down the trail. As abruptly he fired his rifle, and as
abruptly they fell back out of sight. He could not tell whether he had
hit one, or whether the man had merely fallen in precipitate retreat.
The pursuers did not care to make a rush of it, contenting
themselves with bushwhacking. Francis and the peon did the same,
sheltering behind rocks and bushes and frequently changing their
positions.
At the end of an hour, the last cartridge in Francis’ rifle was all that
remained. The peon, under his warnings and threats, still retained
two cartridges in the automatic. But the hour had been an hour
saved for Leoncia and her people, and Francis was contentedly
aware that at any moment he could turn and escape by wading
across the river of oil. So all was well, and would have been well,
had not, from above, come an eruption of another body of men,
who, from behind trees, fired as they descended. This was the
haciendado and his fellow haciendados, in chase of the fugitive peon
—although Francis did not know it. His conclusion was that it was
another posse that was after him. The shots they fired at him were
strongly confirmative.
The peon crawled to his side, showed him that two shots remained
in the automatic he was returning to him, and impressively begged
from him his box of matches. Next, the peon motioned him to cross
the bottom of the canyon and climb the other side. With half a guess
of the creature’s intention, Francis complied, from his new position
of vantage emptying his last rifle cartridge at the advancing posse
and sending it back into shelter down the ravine.
The next moment, the river of oil flared into flame from where the
peon had touched a match to it. In the following moment, clear up
the mountainside, the well itself sent a fountain of ignited gas a
hundred feet into the air. And, in the moment after, the ravine itself
poured a torrent of flame down upon the posse of Torres and the
Jefe.
Scorched by the heat of the conflagration, Francis and the peon
clawed up the opposite side of the ravine, circled around and past
the blazing trail, and, at a dog-trot, raced up the recovered trail.
CHAPTER X
While Francis and the peon hurried up the ravine-trail in safety, the
ravine itself, below where the oil flowed in, had become a river of
flame, which drove the Jefe, Torres, and the gendarmes to scale the
steep wall of the ravine. At the same time the party of haciendados
in pursuit of the peon was compelled to claw back and up to escape
out of the roaring canyon.
Ever the peon glanced back over his shoulder, until, with a cry of joy,
he indicated a second black-smoke pillar rising in the air beyond the
first burning well.
“More,” he chuckled. “There are more wells. They will all burn. And
so shall they and all their race pay for the many blows they have
beaten on me. And there is a lake of oil there, like the sea, like
Juchitan Inlet it is so big.”
And Francis recollected the lake of oil about which the haciendado
had told him—that, containing at least five million barrels which
could not yet be piped to sea transport, lay open to the sky, merely
in a natural depression in the ground and contained by an earth
dam.
“How much are you worth?” he demanded of the peon with
apparent irrelevance.
But the peon could not understand.
“How much are your clothes worth—all you’ve got on?”
“Half a peso, nay, half of a half peso,” the peon admitted ruefully,
surveying what was left of his tattered rags.
“And other property?”
The wretched creature shrugged his shoulders in token of his utter
destitution, then added bitterly:
“I possess nothing but a debt. I owe two hundred and fifty pesos. I
am tied to it for life, damned with it for life like a man with a cancer.
That is why I am a slave to the haciendado.”
“Huh!” Francis could not forbear to grin. “Worth two hundred and
fifty pesos less than nothing, not even a cipher, a sheer abstraction
of a minus quantity without existence save in the mathematical
imagination of man, and yet here you are burning up not less than
millions of pesos’ worth of oil. And if the strata is loose and erratic
and the oil leaks up outside the tubing, the chances are that the oil-
body of the entire field is ignited—say a billion dollars’ worth. Say,
for an abstraction enjoying two hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of
non-existence, you are some hombre, believe me.”
Nothing of which the peon understood save the word “hombre.”
“I am a man,” he proclaimed, thrusting out his chest and
straightening up his bruised head. “I am a hombre and I am a
Maya.”
“Maya Indian—you?” Francis scoffed.
“Half Maya,” was the reluctant admission. “My father is pure Maya.
But the Maya women of the Cordilleras did not satisfy him. He must
love a mixed-breed woman of the tierra caliente. I was so born; but
she afterward betrayed him for a Barbadoes nigger, and he went
back to the Cordilleras to live. And, like my father, I was born to love
a mixed breed of the tierra caliente. She wanted money, and my
head was fevered with want of her, and I sold myself to be a peon
for two hundred pesos. And I saw never her nor the money again.
For five years I have been a peon. For five years I have slaved and
been beaten, and behold, at the end of five years my debt is not two
hundred but two hundred and fifty pesos.”
And while Francis Morgan and the long-suffering Maya half-breed
plodded on deeper into the Cordilleras to overtake their party, and
while the oil fields of Juchitan continued to go up in increasing
smoke, still farther on, in the heart of the Cordilleras, were preparing
other events destined to bring together all pursuers and all pursued
—Francis and Henry and Leoncia and their party; the peon; the
party of the haciendados; and the gendarmes of the Jefe, and, along
with them, Alvarez Torres, eager to win for himself not only the
promised reward of Thomas Regan but the possession of Leoncia
Solano.
In a cave sat a man and a woman. Pretty the latter was, and young,
a mestiza, or half-caste woman. By the light of a cheap kerosene
lamp she read aloud from a calf-bound tome which was a Spanish
translation of Blackstone. Both were barefooted and bare-armed,
clad in hooded gabardines of sackcloth. Her hood lay back on her
shoulders, exposing her black and generous head of hair. But the old
man’s hood was cowled about his head after the fashion of a monk.
The face, lofty and ascetic, beaked with power, was pure Spanish.
Don Quixote might have worn precisely a similar face. But there was
a difference. The eyes of this old man were closed in the perpetual
dark of the blind. Never could he behold a windmill at which to tilt.
He sat, while the pretty mestiza read to him, listening and brooding,
for all the world in the pose of Rodin’s “Thinker.” Nor was he a
dreamer, nor a tilter of windmills, like Don Quixote. Despite his
blindness, that ever veiled the apparent face of the world in
invisibility, he was a man of action, and his soul was anything but
blind, penetrating unerringly beneath the show of things to the heart
and the soul of the world and reading its inmost sins and rapacities
and noblenesses and virtues.
He lifted his hand and put a pause in the reading, while he thought
aloud from the context of the reading.
“The law of man,” he said with slow certitude, “is to-day a game of
wits. Not equity, but wit, is the game of law to-day. The law in its
inception was good; but the way of the law, the practice of it, has
led men off into false pursuits. They have mistaken the way for the
goal, the means for the end. Yet is law law, and necessary, and
good. Only, law, in its practice to-day, has gone astray. Judges and
lawyers engage in competitions and affrays of wit and learning, quite
forgetting the plaintiffs and defendants, before them and paying
them, who are seeking equity and justice and not wit and learning.
“Yet is old Blackstone right. Under it all, at the bottom of it all, at the
beginning of the building of the edifice of the law, is the quest, the
earnest and sincere quest of righteous men, for justice and equity.
But what is it that the Preacher said? ‘They made themselves many
inventions.’ And the law, good in its beginning, has been invented
out of all its intent, so that it serves neither litigants nor injured
ones, but merely the fatted judges and the lean and hungry lawyers
who achieve names and paunches if they prove themselves cleverer
than their opponents and than the judges who render decision.”
He paused, still posed as Rodin’s “Thinker,” and meditated, while the
mestiza woman waited his customary signal to resume the reading.
At last, as out of a profound of thought in which universes had been
weighed in the balance, he spoke:
“But we have law, here in the Cordilleras of Panama, that is just and
right and all of equity. We work for no man and serve not even
paunches. Sack-cloth and not broadcloth conduces to the equity of
judicial decision. Read on, Mercedes. Blackstone is always right if
always rightly read—which is what is called a paradox, and is what
modern law ordinarily is, a paradox. Read on. Blackstone is the very
foundation of human law—but, oh, how many wrongs are cleverly
committed by clever men in his name!”
Ten minutes later, the blind thinker raised his head, sniffed the air,
and gestured the girl to pause. Taking her cue from him, she, too,
sniffed:
“Perhaps it is the lamp, O Just One,” she suggested.
“It is burning oil,” he said. “But it is not the lamp. It is from far away.
Also, have I heard shooting in the canyons.”
“I heard nothing——” she began.
“Daughter, you who see have not the need to hear that I have.
There have been many shots fired in the canyons. Order my children
to investigate and make report.”
Bowing reverently to the old man who could not see but who, by
keen-trained hearing and conscious timing of her every muscular
action, knew that she had bowed, the young woman lifted the
curtain of blankets and passed out into the day. At either side the
cave-mouth sat a man of the peon class. Each was armed with rifle
and machete, while through their girdles were thrust naked-bladed
knives. At the girl’s order, both arose and bowed, not to her, but to
the command and the invisible source of the command. One of them
tapped with the back of his machete against the stone upon which
he had been sitting, then laid his ear to the stone and listened. In
truth, the stone was but the out-jut of a vein of metalliferous ore
that extended across and through the heart of the mountain. And
beyond, on the opposite slope, in an eyrie commanding the
magnificent panorama of the descending slopes of the Cordilleras,
sat another peon who first listened with his ear pressed to similar
metalliferous quartz, and next tapped response with his machete.
After that, he stepped half a dozen paces to a tall tree, half-dead,
reached into the hollow heart of it, and pulled on the rope within as
a man might pull who was ringing a steeple bell.
But no sound was evoked. Instead, a lofty branch, fifty feet above
his head, sticking out from the main-trunk like a semaphore arm,
moved up and down like the semaphore arm it was. Two miles away,
on a mountain crest, the branch of a similar semaphore tree replied.
Still beyond that, and farther down the slopes, the flashing of a
hand-mirror in the sun heliographed the relaying of the blind man’s
message from the cave. And all that portion of the Cordilleras
became voluble with coded speech of vibrating ore-veins, sun-
flashings, and waving tree-branches.
While Enrico Solano, slenderly erect on his horse as an Indian youth
and convoyed on either side by his sons, Alesandro and Ricardo,
hanging to his saddle trappings, made the best of the time afforded
them by Francis’ rearguard battle with the gendarmes, Leoncia, on
her mount, and Henry Morgan, lagged behind. One or the other was
continually glancing back for the sight of Francis overtaking them.
Watching his opportunity, Henry took the back-trail. Five minutes
afterward, Leoncia, no less anxious than he for Francis’ safety, tried
to turn her horse about. But the animal, eager for the
companionship of its mate ahead, refused to obey the rein, cut up
and pranced, and then deliberately settled into a balk. Dismounting
and throwing her reins on the ground in the Panamanian method of
tethering a saddle horse, Leoncia took the back-trail on foot. So
rapidly did she follow Henry, that she was almost treading on his
heels when he encountered Francis and the peon. The next moment,
both Henry and Francis were chiding her for her conduct; but in both
their voices was the involuntary tenderness of love, which pleased
neither to hear the other uttering.
Their hearts more active than their heads, they were caught in total
surprise by the party of haciendados that dashed out upon them
with covering rifles from the surrounding jungle. Despite the fact
that they had thus captured the runaway peon, whom they
proceeded to kick and cuff, all would have been well with Leoncia
and the two Morgans had the owner of the peon, the old-time friend
of the Solano family, been present. But an attack of the malarial
fever, which was his due every third day, had stretched him out in a
chill near the burning oilfield.
Nevertheless, though by their blows they reduced the peon to
weepings and pleadings on his knees, the haciendados were
courteously gentle to Leoncia and quite decent to Francis and Henry,
even though they tied the hands of the latter two behind them in
preparation for the march up the ravine slope to where the horses
had been left. But upon the peon, with Latin-American cruelty, they
continued to reiterate their rage.
Yet were they destined to arrive nowhere, by themselves, with their
captives. Shouts of joy heralded the debouchment upon the scene of
the Jefe’s gendarmes and of the Jefe and Alvarez Torres. Arose at
once the rapid-fire, staccato, bastard-Latin of all men of both parties
of pursuers, trying to explain and demanding explanation at one and
the same time. And while the farrago of all talking simultaneously
and of no one winning anywhere in understanding, made anarchy of
speech, Torres, with a nod to Francis and a sneer of triumph to
Henry, ranged before Leoncia and bowed low to her in true and
deep hidalgo courtesy and respect.
“Listen!” he said, low-voiced, as she rebuffed him with an arm
movement of repulsion. “Do not misunderstand me. Do not mistake
me. I am here to save you, and, no matter what may happen, to
protect you. You are the lady of my dreams. I will die for you—yes,
and gladly, though far more gladly would I live for you.”
“I do not understand,” she replied curtly. “I do not see life or death
in the issue. We have done no wrong. I have done no wrong, nor
has my father. Nor has Francis Morgan, nor has Henry Morgan.
Therefore, sir, the matter is not a question of life or death.”
Henry and Francis, shouldering close to Leoncia, on either side,
listened and caught through the hubble-bubble of many voices the
conversation of Leoncia and Torres.
“It is a question absolute of certain death by execution for Henry
Morgan,” Torres persisted. “Proven beyond doubt is his conviction for
the murder of Alfaro Solano, who was your own full-blood uncle and
your father’s own full-blood brother. There is no chance to save
Henry Morgan. But Francis Morgan can I save in all surety, if——”
“If?” Leoncia queried, with almost the snap of jaws of a she-leopard.
“If ... you prove kind to me, and marry me,” Torres said with
magnificent steadiness, although two Gringos, helpless, their hands
tied behind their backs, glared at him through their eyes their
common desire for his immediate extinction.
Torres, in a genuine outburst of his passion, though his rapid glances
had assured him of the helplessness of the two Morgans, seized her
hands in his and urged:
“Leoncia, as your husband I might be able to do something for
Henry. Even may it be possible for me to save his life and his neck, if
he will yield to leaving Panama immediately.”
“You Spanish dog!” Henry snarled at him, struggling with his tied
hands behind his back in an effort to free them.
“Gringo cur!” Torres retorted, as, with an open backhanded blow, he
struck Henry on the mouth.
On the instant Henry’s foot shot out, and the kick in Torres’ side
drove him staggering in the direction of Francis, who was no less
quick with a kick of his own. Back and forth like a shuttlecock
between the battledores, Torres was kicked from one man to the
other, until the gendarmes seized the two Gringos and began to beat
them in their helplessness. Torres not only urged the gendarmes on,
but himself drew a knife; and a red tragedy might have happened
with offended Latin-American blood up and raging, had not a score
or more of armed men silently appeared and silently taken charge of
the situation. Some of the mysterious newcomers were clad in
cotton singlets and trousers, and others were in cowled gabardines
of sackcloth.
The gendarmes and haciendados recoiled in fear, crossing
themselves, muttering prayers and ejaculating: “The Blind Brigand!”
“The Cruel Just One!” “They are his people!” “We are lost.”
But the much-beaten peon sprang forward and fell on his bleeding
knees before a stern-faced man who appeared to be the leader of
the Blind Brigand’s men. From the mouth of the peon poured forth a
stream of loud lamentation and outcry for justice.
“You know that justice to which you appeal?” the leader spoke
gutturally.
“Yes, the Cruel Justice,” the peon replied. “I know what it means to
appeal to the Cruel Justice, yet do I appeal, for I seek justice and
my cause is just.”
“I, too, demand the Cruel Justice!” Leoncia cried with flashing eyes,
although she added in an undertone to Francis and Henry:
“Whatever the Cruel Justice is.”
“It will have to go some to be unfairer than the justice we can
expect from Torres and the Jefe,” Henry replied in similar
undertones, then stepped forward boldly before the cowled leader
and said loudly: “And I demand the Cruel Justice.”
The leader nodded.
“Me, too,” Francis murmured low, and then made loud demand.
The gendarmes did not seem to count in the matter, while the
haciendados signified their willingness to abide by whatever justice
the Blind Brigand might mete out to them. Only the Jefe objected.
“Maybe you don’t know who I am,” he blustered. “I am Mariano
Vercara è Hijos, of long illustrious name and long and honorable
career. I am Jefe Politico of San Antonio, the highest friend of the
governor, and high in the confidence of the government of the
Republic of Panama. I am the law. There is but one law and one
justice, which is of Panama and not the Cordilleras. I protest against
this mountain law you call the Cruel Justice. I shall send an army
against your Blind Brigand, and the buzzards will peck his bones in
San Juan.”
“Remember,” Torres sarcastically warned the irate Jefe, “that this is
not San Antonio, but the bush of Juchitan. Also, you have no army.”
“Have these two men been unjust to any one who has appealed to
the Cruel Justice?” the leader asked abruptly.
“Yes,” asseverated the peon. “They have beaten me. Everybody has
beaten me. They, too, have beaten me and without cause. My hand
is bloody. My body is bruised and torn. Again I appeal to the Cruel
Justice, and I charge these two men with injustice.”
The leader nodded and to his own men indicated the disarming of
the prisoners and the order of the march.
“Justice!—I demand equal justice!” Henry cried out. “My hands are
tied behind my back. All hands should be so tied, or no hands be so
tied. Besides, it is very difficult to walk when one is so tied.”
The shadow of a smile drifted the lips of the leader as he directed
his men to cut the lashings that invidiously advertised the inequality
complained of.
“Huh!” Francis grinned to Leoncia and Henry. “I have a vague
memory that somewhere around a million years ago I used to live in
a quiet little old burg called New York, where we foolishly thought
we were the wildest and wickedest that ever cracked at a golf ball,
electrocuted an Inspector of Police, battled with Tammany, or bid
four nullos with five sure tricks in one’s own hand.”
“Huh!” Henry vouchsafed half an hour later, as the trail, from a
lesser crest, afforded a view of higher crests beyond. “Huh! and
hell’s bells! These gunny-sack chaps are not animals of savages.
Look, Henry! They are semaphoring! See that near tree there, and
that big one across the canyon. Watch the branches wave.”