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Page 3

As Hyman had foretold, even bird guano doesn't last forever, especially when your mining activities frighten the migrating masses of avian sojourners away from their traditional stop.

So, after the last guano-freighter weighed anchor in 1899, there was not much to do on Poco Cabesa and almost everybody left -- Galveston and southeastern Florida were popular destinations.

Will the birds return?
Idle guano miners

Making do.
Nowhere else to go

But a dedicated slice of the upper-crust and a modest crowd of those laborers who had nowhere else to go stayed on. These sturdy few, these hearty souls who proudly called themselves Klinkleburgers, remained to await an accounting of the Trust.


Trusting in prayer


Heading for Haiti

Looking north on East Street, Klinkleburg, circa 1901

Klinkle House on Gull Hill, razed by citizenry in 1899 riots

To the despair of Poco Cabesans then and now, when all was said and done, the flow of funds from the Trust to the descendants of the island's plucky pioneers resembled a ripple of subsistence, as opposed to a tsunami of riches.

Not enough to invest and grow. Just enough to scratch out a meager existence, keep half a dozen saloons in business, and permit the occasional coup. As Jack Waller's daddy used to call it, "Just gettin' by money."

An emergency motion was made in the island's Parliament to change the town's name to "Suckerville." After heated debate, it failed passage by one vote. Then everyone went out and tore down Hyman's old mansion.

The Trust wasn't merely parsimonious. It had strings attached. To prevent writers and artists -- whom Hyman thought useless, frivolous, and depraved loafers and free-thinkers -- from descending upon his tiny isle and squandering his benefaction, he established a complicated resident-population limit based on a mathematical formula having, as one factor among many, the number of females on Noah's Ark.

Although this equation was soon forgotten, the residents of Klinkleburg saw the writing on the wall and wisely controlled their physical yearnings to avoid generating descendents that would further dilute the monthly Trust pay-out. And, since newcomers were ineligible for the dole and there was nothing else to attract them, no one bothered to move into the neighborhood.

Hyman's formula for population control

Klinkleburg's famous leaning house

Importing mutton during famine of 1929

Due to these factors, the population of the island settled at a few hundred or so bored residents -- not counting the happy natives of the kingdom of Medillo Grande.

As the years wound down (or up, depending upon your perspective), while World Wars raged, skirts and stock markets rose and fell, scientists split the atom, and the American League instituted the Designated Hitter rule, the white power elite of Poco Cabesa (badly addled by generations of inbreeding and always short of cash) controlled the disbursement of Trust funds and ruled their part of town with a confused iron fist.

The Klinkleburg Constabulary Corps, circa 1902

This kept the non-elite residents well-mannered but extremely paranoid due to their leaders' frequent mood swings.

If Poco Cabesa had had anything to offer besides guano (and it didn't even have that anymore) it might have attracted the attention of a superpower or maybe even Venezuela. But, that not being the case, the island lapsed into a sleepy post-industrial stupor abstemiously funded by Hyman Klinkle's benefaction.

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Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
-- Mr. Twain