Changing guise to that of a herbalist (purveying the "Omni-Balsamic Rejuvenator"), he inveigles a sick man into purchasing his cures. "Then you give me hope?" the "juiceless, joyless" man asks. "Hope is proportionate to confidence," he responds, "how much confidence you give me, so much hope do I give you."
The sick man's plea: "only make me so I can walk about in the sun and not draw flies to me, as lured by the coming of decay."
The herbalist encounters a fellow deceiver: a man whose health has been destroyed by the New York legal system but -- as the real cause of his infirmity would earn no charity -- begs as a casuality of the Mexican war.
Introduction of the gun-toting, animal-skin clad Missourian Pitch, a "hard case" who will dispute with three avatars of the confidence man in a row
Pitch suspicious of nature and a hater of humanity -- and boys in particular. He is seeking a machine that can replace the boys (thirty to date) he has been hiring to do his farm work.
"I'm now on the road to get me made some sort of machine to do my work. Machines for me. My cider mill -- does that ever steal my cider? My mowing machine -- does that ever lay a-bed mornings? My corn husker -- does that ever give my insolence? No: cider-mill, mowing-machine, corn-husker -- all faithfully attend to their business. Disinterested too; no board, no wages; yet doing good all their lives long; shining examples that virtue is its own reward -- the only practical Christians I know."
"What a difference in a moral point of view between a corn-husker and a boy. . . . A corn- husker, for its patient continuance in well doing, might not unfairly go to heaven. Do you suppose a boy will?"
Seeking to counter this anti-boy argument, the confidence man posits that a boy always has the potential to be good ("boys outgrow what is amiss in them") and that one must wait for the good to emerge. To which Pitch responds: "The butterfly is the caterpillar in a gaudy cloak; stripped of which, there lies the impostor's long spindle of a body, pretty much worm-shaped as before."
When the confidence man seeks to argue the benefits of natural cures, Pitch counters by saying that his cough was "natural" in the first place, as is cholera, deadly-nightshade, and killing winters. To which the herbalist replies: "you would seem to have little confidence in nature; which really, in my way of thinking, looks like carrying the spirit of distrust pretty far."
Pitch: "Look you nature! I don't deny but your clover is sweet, and your dandelions don't roar; but whose hailstones smashed my window?"
Further: "I have confidence in nature? I? I say again there is nothing I am more suspicious of. I once lost ten thousand dollars by nature. Nature embezzled that amount from me; absconded with ten thousand dollars' worth of my property; a plantation on this stream, swept clean away by one of those sudden shiftings of the banks in a freshet; ten thousand dollars' of alluvion thrown broad off upon the waters."
The confidence man, as the herbalist, asks what Pitch has confidence in if he has "no confidence in boys, no confidence in men, no confidence in Nature." Pitch replies: "I have confidence in distrust."
Pitch sees in the confidence man's studied neutrality on the question of abolition an offensive moderation: "Pickled and prudent sentiments. You are the moderate man, the invaluable understrapper of the wicked man. You, the moderate man, may be used for wrong, but are useless for right."
Pitch: "Boy or man, the human animal is, for most work purposes, a losing animal. Can't be trusted; less trustworthy than oxen. . . . Hence these thousand new inventions -- carding machines, horse-shoe machines, tunnel-boring machines, reaping machines, apple-paring machines, boot-blacking machines, sewing machines, shaving machines, run-of-errand machines, dumb-waiter machines, and the Lord-only-knows-what machines; all of which announce the era when that refractory animal, the working or serving man, shall be a buried bygone, a superseded fossil. Shortly prior to which glorious time, I doubt not that a price will be out upon their peltries as upon the knavish 'possums, especially the boys. Yes, sir (ringing his rifle down on the deck), I rejoice to think that the day is at hand, when, prompted to it by law, I shall shoulder this gun and go out a boy-shooting."
Observes the confidence man (now in the guise of the man with the brass plate, an officer of the Philosophical Intellgence Office, which seems to also conduct a kind of orphan-placement service): "Shocking, shocking. . . . You seem to have very little confidence in boys."
Pitch, objecting to the confidence man's politeness: "Don't try to oil me."
Again, Pitch who finds machines more worthy of entry into heaven than humans: "Truth is like a thrashing-machine; tender sensibilities must keep out of the way."
Upon completion of the deal with Pitch to send him a thirty-first boy: "Thank you. Confidence is the indispensable basis of all sorts of business transactions. Without it, commerce between man and man, as between country and country, would, like a watch, run down and stop."
When the confidence man in his latest guise purportedly disembarks at Cairo, his influence on Pitch is dispelled as well "like one beginning to rouse himself from a dose of chloroform treacherously given."
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
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