A STARTLING DISCOVERY
As for Johnny and Mazie, they had visited the park many times before. The
amusements were an old story, but the crowd was not. No crowd is ever
tiresome to a person who has a keen mind and a true interest in the study
of his fellowman.
For these two it was enough to watch the actions of these people—of this
crowd in their disguises. Many of them were dressed in ridiculous
costumes and nearly all were masked. Thus, with their true natures for
the time apparently hidden by a mask, each person gave himself over to
the seeking of pleasure in the way most natural to him. Many were truly
merry; some merely sordid, and a few were brutal in their manner of
extracting pleasure from those about them.
As they drifted in and out among the throngs, Johnny and Mazie were
finally caught in a narrow place and forced along against their will.
When, at last, the throng broadened and separated, they found themselves
before another table of chance. This time, instead of the spindle wheel
there was a board. In the lower end of this board, which was perhaps two
feet wide by four long, there were eight holes. Beside each of these
holes were numbers. At the top of the board were four balls. The balls
rested upon a narrow board. To play, one has but to tip the narrow board
and allow the balls to roll to the bottom, where they settle themselves
in holes. One then adds up the numbers before the balls and consults a
table of numbers before him. This table is composed of red and black
numbers. If the sum reached by adding up chances to correspond to a red
number, the player wins a watch, a camera, a silver cream pitcher or any
other article he may choose.
“Looks easy enough,” smiled Johnny as he watched the operator roll the
balls. “Too easy. There’s a trick somewhere.”
Now Johnny got a lot of fun out of discovering tricks. “Mind if we watch
him a little while?” he asked.
“Not a bit,” answered Mazie, putting a hand on his shoulder as the crowd
pressed about them. The man in the booth, a tall, broad shouldered man,
gave them a quick look. Johnny blinked under that look.
“But after all,” he told himself, “we’re masked. If he has seen us before
he’ll not recognize us now.”
He looked at the man and started. There was something vaguely familiar
about him. Yet he, too, was heavily masked. There was little chance of
telling who he might be.
For fifteen minutes Johnny studied the game. Men played, women played and
boys as well. There were plenty of red numbers; but only once in all that
time, while the operator hauled in the money, did red turn up. Yet, when
for a moment the business lulled, the man behind the table could make red
come up easily enough.
“It’s strange,” said Johnny, scratching his head. “It seems so absurdly
simple. One would say it couldn’t be doctored at all, and yet it is. Ah
well, what’s the use? Let’s go on.”
He was turning to go when a long arm reached out from behind the board
and touched his shoulder. It was the operator. There was greed shining
from the small black eyes that peeped evilly through the holes in the
mask.
“See, mister,” the man was saying, “I give you a roll. It don’t cost you
noding. I don’t gives you noding. See! It is free.”
“No, I don’t want a roll,” said Johnny, starting away again.
“Dot’s fair enough, mister,” replied the man.
This last remark went through the boy like an electric shock. Those
words, that accent, the whole thing—where had he heard it before? Strive
as he might, rake down the walls of his memory as he did, he could not
recall. And yet something within told him that he should recall, that
here was a key to something important; something tremendously big.
“No,” he whispered to himself, “I can’t recall it now, but I can stick
around. It may come to me all of a flash.”
“All right,” he thought to himself, “if I have to, I’ll play.”
Fortune favored him. He was not obliged to play, but could watch.
“Set ’em up!” said a stranger, producing a shiny quarter.
“Count ’em,” he said a moment later as the last ball dropped into its
hole.
“Four, nine, sexteen, zwenty-zree. Dot’s black. Try again. Anoder times
you are lucky.”
The man did try again, again and yet again, and always he lost.
And then, like a flash, the trick of the game came to Johnny. If the
balls were carefully placed in certain definite positions on the narrow
board, they would always escape falling into holes marked 7 and 11. These
numbers were needed if the result was to be a red number.
As if by accident, he brushed the board with his elbow. This moved a ball
slightly to the right.
The result was another black number. But by a sudden movement the
operator showed that he was startled.
The stranger fed in two more quarters before Johnny tried the trick
again.
This time the operator looked at him and uttered an audible snarl before
he began to count. He knew he was beaten.
“Three, nine, fifteen, zwenty-zoo. Dot’s red,” he muttered.
And at the sound of that low mutter Johnny remembered.
So struck was he at this revelation, that he could barely repress an
audible exclamation. The stranger chose a small pocket camera, and the
game went on.
From this time on the question of whether the stranger won or lost did
not count. Johnny was trying to think; to plan a course of action. He
knew now where he had heard that man’s voice before—at the fire in which
Mazie barely missed losing her life.
As he looked at the man he knew he could not be mistaken. The hooked nose
was covered by the mask, but the stoop was there and the voice was the
same. If he needed further proof it was not long in coming. As the man
stepped back to take down the small camera, Johnny noticed that he walked
with a decided limp.
“He’s the man,” Johnny thought to himself. “He’s the man who burned the
school houses, the welfare center and the zoo, who attempted to kill me,
and did kill poor old Ben Zook!” As he thought of Ben Zook he found it
difficult to hold himself in hand. He wanted to leap across the board and
throttle the man where he stood.
“No! No!” he told himself. “I must not. I must be calm. I must remain
here. I must watch the play until I have thought what next to do. One
thing sure, I must not bungle my chances now. Too much hinges on doing
the right thing.”