“What do you think I would be doing, or the ‘prof’ would be doing, while
the jethros were crowded around you? We wouldn’t be doing a thing in the
line of the regular graft. The main idea of this concern is to get ’em
in here where there’s nothing to take up their minds after they’ve had
one look around the place. Then they begin to feel that they want to
get something for their money. So the ‘prof’ hands ’em the dome
dope--feels their bumps--and I feed ’em the gazara stuff. How many
times have I got to tell you what this place is?”
“Oh, I’m wise,” I said, trying hard to look that way. “But of course I’m
anxious to do all I can to help.”
“The zeal of youth! The zeal of youth!” prattled the professor. He
seemed to me to be pretty much of an old fool. He had that smug, cooing
way with him--all put on like the airs of a country undertaker. He came
across to me before I could understand what he was about and stuck his
thumb onto a spot on the top of my head and pressed with his forefinger
a little lower down. “Yes, approbativeness well developed and
conscientiousness--this where my finger--”
“Oh, shut up!” snorted Mr. Dawlin. “Don’t cry to put that stuff over
among friends.”
“However,” the professor went on, continuing to fondle my head, “the
development of the brain upward, forward, and backward, from the
medulla--”
“Save it for the cud-wallopers, I tell you!”
“If this young man is going to have his say about me in front, I want
him to know that the science of phrenology has a good exponent here,”
said the professor.
I reckon he had seen me looking him over without a great amount of
liking and was anxious to put on a bit of a front.
“He’ll say that you’ll read all heads free of charge, and that’s _all_
he’ll say,” stated Mr. Dawlin. “It isn’t necessary for him to know
the difference between a medulla and a free-lunch pickle--and I don’t
believe _you_ know, yourself. Ross, we want to open the doors again
to-morrow. Do you think you can get the gist of that patter into your
head overnight?”
I thumbed the dirty sheets and said I’d do my best. Therefore, I went
to my room and applied myself. There was a lot of extravagant guff about
the curiosities, flowery flapdoodle of the usual barker sort.
The next morning I was able to make some sort of a try at it from the
stand, for I have said before that I always was more or less cheeky.
A sort of a fluffy-ruffle damsel with bleached hair was in the
ticket-office and there never was a young fellow yet who did not try
on a little extra swagger when a girl was hard by. She smiled at me
encouragingly when I had arrested the attention of a few passers, some
of whom bought tickets and went in. I guess I must have smiled back, for
Dawlin, who was standing in the doorway, appraising my first efforts,
came and climbed up beside me and growled in my ear.
“You’re breaking in fine. Only put a little more punch and
sing-song into it! And, by the way, the dame who is shuffling the
pasteboards--she’s private goods--mine!”
“I don’t want her,” I said, with considerable heat.
“I don’t say you do--but a lot of trouble has sometimes been made in
partnerships by women. So that’s why I have flipped the buried card at
the start-off. Now tune up and let it went! If your voice gets husky
I’ll send out a handful of bird-seed and a hunk of cuttlefish.” I
reckoned he was trying his cheap humor on me to smooth the insult about
the girl. It seemed to me like an insult, and he understood pretty well
how I felt.
So I went to my job and minded my own business most exclusively.
Day after day, for several weeks, I stood up on my rostrum and cajoled
folks into that joint, and I say frankly and honestly that for a long
time I did not have full understanding of just what went on inside.
Possibly that statement makes me out a mighty stupid chap.
But I was ashamed to ask any more questions after what Dawlin had yapped
out about his suspicions that I was a greenhorn.
I did not have any special conversation with him, anyway. I was still
ugly when I thought upon his warning about that painted girl--as if I
wanted her! And I was careful that she should have no word to carry to
him about me; I never looked in her direction.
Furthermore, I did not want to know very much about what they were up to
inside. I was ashamed of my job. It struck me that if I came to know
all the fraud of the thing I’d jack the proposition. An ostrich sort
of attitude, to be sure, a foolish evasion, but that’s just how it
was, like other things which came up in my life, things not lending
themselves readily to explanation as I look back on them now.
I saw patrons come out, some angry and with red faces, some ashamed,
some laughing--but only a few of the last, and they were plainly chaps
who took it as a joke when anybody could put something across in their
case.
Man after man came out with a broad piece of paper in his hand, crumpled
it up, swore, and dashed it down on the sidewalk.
It was a chart purporting to be a reading of bumps, as Professor Jewelle
sized up the patron’s cranium. Nobody seemed to be very well pleased.
A lot of them pitched into me and said that I had promised that the
reading was free.
Well, the reading was free.
But once the victim had ventured inside the curtains and after the free
reading, the professor handed over the chart and demanded three dollars
for it.
Disputes ended promptly, for Big Mike was always present. The vocabulary
of that bellowing bull was limited to two words in those séances--“Three
dollars!”
Of course I had to find this out before long or stand convicted in these
records as liar and half-wit combined.