No Good Deed 67

The New Orleans Mint was a magnificent reminder of the demeaning effect red brick might have even on the most beautiful of architectural concepts. The Mint had the benefit of no such advantage, being of a hackneyed and uninspired design. It was in the Greek Revival style, which meant a superfluity of columns with capitals various at the front entrance. These achieved nothing save an air of incongruity, or perhaps a forbidding aspect, designed to discourage the hoi-polloi, although I doubted the most adventurous of Greek sailors would stray so far from the port of New Orleans. The brick was a plebeian red, like that of a Lancastrian mill, its only redemption lay in the fact that no sooty patina had dulled the colour to a satanic black. The grounds before it were green enough, but seemed on the point of going to seed, as though some weeks had passed since any horticultural ministration.
Ishmael looked from the building to me, and back again,

'Strickland's fault, 's if Philadelphy weren't bad enough!'

He spat after this last.

'Indeed?'

I found his statement gnomic, to say the least.

'I's a schoolmaster onc't!' he said.

Which served as confirmation that he was as mad as first I had thought him.

The building looked unoccupied: The entrance behind the grand portico of the ionic columns appeared barred and locked. I pulled at an enormous bell-pull which creaked and groaned as though it had summoned no-one since the construction of the building was finished. Ishmael sang something different although I suspected it was a song known to seamen, even so, since it seemed mainly to consist of an exhortation to 'Blow the man down. It was unclear who the man might have been, and, frankly, I did not care. I cuffed him to silence and awaited some response to the door-bell's summons.
It took an age and I raised my fist more than once to prevent a choral assault upon my ears by the cringing Ishmael. At last the sound of chains, padlocks and heavy bars preceded the opening of a door cut into the huge leaf at the right hand side of the arched portal. A hunched figure peered around the edge of said door.

'Watcha' want?'

The voice was querulous, an old man's voice. The face around the pinched mouth appeared to belong to a man of no more than forty, save that there was not a hair upon his head and his chin-whiskers were snow-white.

'Jacob Holzbein,' I said.

Before the man could answer, Ishmael threw himself to the ground in a fit of laughter, through his tears I could make out only the words 'Wooden Leg, Wooden Leg!'