The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, August 2, 1903, Page 7

meflUJNfiBEaDm AND WEIGHED 11 et he Ve have kille pig s have a feast e two we e cave und Ab set work industr with' a “couple of eces of string; in sbout ten nutes ad ‘produced sparks. Soon wigs burning filled e air-and ‘smioke rose aid diifted-al {" their: primitive. shelier. r soft bed of sk.ns, knife from a niche in cge iean the prickly a-hole in the ground and Bétween thei girl purring ey: buflt & t'had burned pe reupine in @ eov- spine «1l’ This they e hole & vered It up girl were fegst- peg which he cavern skin half b?e;?a'ecvl' }I.}.fafi'a ‘S 0 RIS WA SIS AR AU RIS R A ciety Is as Much her, and was ‘I love thee! I lov But at len k them He had . se x ar ) He i gaxed or P and ths girl was. quite .as fair. He sghed fo think that thelr yc and ' innocence could not last firever Neulah' lay nestled in the aollow of Ab's broad, niked shoulder and her charming bosom rose and subsided with the graceful undula- tions of a woman who sl.eps calmly, tran- quilly and well b The night flew on and the lovers re- mained oblivious to everything. stirring only in their sieep when they mutuall realized the wondrous fact that henc forth the cave was to be their hom that they were mated It was early morning when they awoke. The first faint rays of dawn were visible in the east. Neulah was the first to stir in their happy nest and she kissed the stalwart arm on which her lovely head had been reposing Then Ab drew from his rawhide pouch a stone that he had fpund in the biue clay @t the foot of the mountains a year before ¥nd which he had sgt for hours polishing until its rough hewn facets re- ficcted with sparkling radiance the rays of the sun. in the falling waters. Many mgidens of his tribe had besought him for it but he had always answered: “If is for the girl whom I shall make and bt it ny wife Ab had set it himself in a dirclet or rcugh, pure gold and now e put it on Neulah's finger. The glow. of the great stone filled the cavern in the early dawn. “Oh! Oh!" exclaimed Neulah, and she tcok a long breath of pure delight: “You arc my wife-now," said Ab. “Stay &t home in the cave and I will go forth and hunt for us both.” He held lier to his: heart for a long time, and then resolutely turned his back to her and strode Into the forest, oo . - @ a Mystery in ltaly as in America #s much. mystery in’ Italy ant, “as in the 1 Siates. You might live in_Palermo sing, with all your reighbors em re the Mafia, and yet never hear rd mer ned. [t is something that e circs to talk--about. We: only s extorted right and et s certain death to refuse, © cse murderers are caught ded they are rarely convicted. A ueals, as you call it in more will the relatives elp the police. If they know however, they will . i pay him in his own The essen € is opposition te gov- ernmental & ». a condition of the epirit 4 self has no recognized e P give ¢ s or pass judg e society includes -one or two ¥ er e & are vile. b e ar I believe, and certain forms of procedure instance, in the choosing of one who is to commit a mur- der. But for re secrecy they rely pon each atred ‘for established f vengeance.” is, says Collier's, ow thet there is no such word as Mafia in the Italian or any other language From two or three the writer learned that, accord- ! e Siclilan legend, Mafia is really & cryptogrem, each leiter representing one word of a five-word oath. - The first is mordo, meaning death, and the whole — is an cath which obligates the Mafiosa to put to death by *dagger, pistol or fire.” Do not_put this aside as being too melo- dramatic for our prosaic twentieth cen- tury. - The whole exiptence of this so- clety, lasting now for one century, is so fraught. with - picturesque tragedy" that, compared with its annals, the most ex- travagant fiction seems dull. Every en- terprise nndertaken by the Mafla Is out of the ordinary, whether kidnaping, mur- der, blackmail or counterfeiting. Every man ia the ordr- is prepared to fulfill his oath, too, but he demands an' even chance. ¥rom a confession alleged to have been made last year by a Mafla prisoner, charged with the killing of Catanja in Brooklyn, these murderers are described as deciding who shall put a man to death by the. tossing of cards. The - elect sit about a tabie, the cards are shuffied and one starts to deal. Ace of.diamonds Is the fatal! card, and the man to whom it Is dealt is giveu a certain time within which to accomplish his mission. By the account of a secret service man who stumbled into a Mafia crowd while looking for anarchists, the favorite meth- od is what they call “thirty-three.” In this death count the candidates, six, a dozen or twenty, put both hands on the table, but withdraw whatever fingers they choose. Each finger is counted, begin- ning from a certain point, and the owner of finger No. % is elimifated. He sits by to see the test narrow down to-two per- sons, one of whom will be surely elected. Equipped with citizen papers, these Italian outlaws scatter all through Amer- fca, Canada and Mexico. Last year, on nearly the same day, their bands mur- dered a merchant in Brooklyn, burned the house of a feilow countryman in Ha- zleton, Pa., and kidnaped a rich citizen of the City of Mexico, holding him. for $50,000 . rgnsom. For the miost part their operations are confined to counterfeiting and blackmail- ing their own countrymen. " In pursusnce of these crimes, a murder is every now and then committed. The stabbing of Benedetto Madonia is a precise illustra- tion. ¥ . This man was associated with a coun- terfeiting gang that has engaged the ef- forts of William G. Flynn. chief of the New York division of the secret service, for more than a year. Madonia’s brother- in-law, De Prima, was also of the crowd, | but is now serving a four years' sentence in Sing Sing. There Madonia visited him recently and learned that the $1000 raised to help De Prima had been appropriated by the “gang.” Enraged at this breach of horn- or in the Mafla, Benedetto Madonia came from his home In Buffglo to demand the return of the fund. His wife Implored him not to visit New York. But Madonia swore on the brass crucifix about his neck that he would compel the Mafia to accede. The threat he probably used was a prom- ise to betray the whole gang and take his punishment with the rest. 8o futile was his errand that, but for the secret service vigilance, it is éxtremely doubtful whether Madonia's body had ever béen identified. 1f the Mafia is mysterious to the point of uncanniness in its operations, hardly less s0 are those men employed by the Gov- ernment & hound its members. ‘THE SUNDAY CALL. As AV's foot struck the wsoft green sward ynder the trees it turned to stone beneath ‘him, and Scudamors found that he had cfosaed the street and was stand- ing in front of & loan office. Then he went in and pawned his watch —a Jurgensen from Amsterdam—an ex- penaive present sent by bis father on his last birthday from New York. He subd- stituted for it a cheap timeplece lent him for the occasion by the accommodating usurer. Then he went down the strest and ssek- ing out a jewsler, began to pick over some rings.. One he.particularly fancied, because of its glorious rays in the sun- light. 'He bought. it and went out to clinéh s matrimonial bargain with a girl he loved, as Ab had done with Neulah, 5000 years before. He was conscious only that he had bhad & pretty fancy while crossing the street from ourb to curb and he unoconsciously quoted from - the immortal soliloquy, *What dreams may come.” On a French fauteuil in a luxurious mansion on Van Ness avenue, & lovely girl sat half reclining. By her side was Scudamore. His ring was on her finger. “What are you looking at, dearest?” he asked. “The ring! The ring!" she cried, pass- ing her hand over her broad forehead, as 1f to revive some faint and almost van- ished memory. It was the stone which Ab had polished at the foot of the great Falls, What had been its history since? Griniy Jews had thumbed and weighed it at Telieran and Damascus, when Lon- don was a Roman camp and Indians built their wigwams on Broadway. It had adorned in turn the tlara of an empress and the collarette of a courtesan. It had been fliched from gorgeous Oriental tem- ples and Pagan devotees had pursued the filchers, slaughtered whole cities for its sake and restored it to the shrines of their fathers. It had sat on the thumb of ‘a great Itallan churchman when he passed . the polsoned wine to an unsus- pecting guest in his palace on the Arno, with ‘smiles which a Borgla might have envied. " Marco Polo- had beheld its glo- riés on the far confines of Tartary, and the beautiful Louise de la Valliers had secretly sighed for its possession at the court of & JUAg W .ot king: Tt Rad journeyed . ever| Jh##—from Peking -te Paris—from the yelli.J Tiber to the lord- ly -Hudson. - It had survived-the - gredt plague of Loridon and the firée which gave Sir Christopher Wren & place among the immortals. It had smiled serenely when, two centuries later, the greatest civil war the world ‘had “ever seen appalled. man- kind. It saw the British eémpire expand from the heptarchy. It witnessed -the genesis of the greatest of republics: So it passed down through the ages. "It had sttended the birth of both the._cara- van and the locomotive, the waterwheel and the dynamo. It had crept as & bridal Eift to the feet of some Oriental Princess through the medium of & dromedary, and had been hurled to the boudoir of a Call- fornia heiress across seas and contiments with all the magio power of modern science. It remembered the destruction of. Her- culaneum and Pompell It had beard the Goths and Vandals thundering at’'thé gates of immortal Rome. ince: it had been first polished the bomes of -Chieops, enshrined in. the most gtupendous. bufld- ing ever raised by man, had crumbled. iiito ashes, and the big California .redwoods had grown from saplings in the groves of Mariposa. Cleopatra had loved. it. Potem= kin had purchased it for Catharine—with that Empress’ money. Ivan the Terrikle had bartered it for the head of an enemy, and by it, In the form of & signet ring, Ghengls Kahn, the Scourgs of God: had promulgated his edicts td vast hordes of Mongols. . It had been cut and recut. to siit the whims of court favorites and their dainty mistresses t 1. in valie it was but the tithe of what it had been; but the soul of the stone glistened true as ever, and it glowed on a girl's white hand in a San Francisco drawing-room just as divinely as it had shone on the brown fingers of the dead cave-dweller. It had listened to the first riddle ever propounded by man, at Thebes; the birth- place of Pindar; seen religions fade into myths and myths become religlons. It had seen the Tower of Babel builded and the Creator rebuke the audacity-of human worms in the confusion of ‘tongues. It etood appalled amid the rush of -mighty waters when Pharoah was overwhelmed in the Red Sea, and was scintiliating on the finger of a danseuse at Moscow at the time De Lesseps united those historie waters with the waves of the Mediterra- nean. It had salled between the enormous Iimbs. of the Colossus of Rhodes in the greasy pouch of a trader. It had con- sorted alike with Levantines, Turks and Afbanians. Murder had been dome for it that it might glisten on the whits neck of & woman, and it had been bequesthed with solemn pomp to litigious heirs who had wasted their inheritance in legal war. fare. It had known Atlantls when .the lost city reared its graceful minarets aloft fhto the sky.. It knmew and .remémbered, when men had long forgotten, where that island lay buried fathoms deep.in brine. There was & largs wmirror just opposite Bcudamore and his flances, and ‘as they sat there the sunlight died away. and the moon becamae reflected In its' glassy sur- face. Hand clasped In hand, they ‘then beheld a wondrous vision. The queen of night was shinine softly on a rockbound aliors, which broke away at ond place where & long stretch of sandy beach led upward to & forest. To the right of thiy was a cave, and in this cave sat & barbe- rian and his bride. ‘They heard the mur- mur -of the waves; they-saw the palm trees rustling their feathery fromds to and fro in the perfunied breese. £o they sat there; twin products of ay- cles on cycles 'of progress, gasing at thetr prototypes of the long dead past; they d1a not move; they hardly hreathed Bach seemed to realize that something marvel- ous had befallen them; and lo, the tman and ‘womafn in the cave looked up; they saw their faces; and thed, in the wisdom of the ‘Infinite, who coupts & thousand years but.as yesterday and who keeps the spheres revolving ini their appalling cir- cles in the upper sky, this past was fully revealed to. them, and they fell into each ather's. arms as' the vision- in- the- mirror faded away; exclaiming: “Do: you remember- the prickly pigr*