“I’m on the trail of a steamboat captain by the name of Holstrom, and he
is two-thirds pickled, and has money on him. Do you think you know the
places where a man like that would be likely to drop in?”
“What’s the lay--a touch and a divvy?”
“Nothing of the kind. I’m his friend, and I want to catch him and take
him home out of trouble.”
“The same old stall,” he sneered. “You’ve got to let me be a friend,
too.”
I reached out and got my crowbar clutch on that fellow. “I don’t suppose
you ever had a man tell you the truth, son,” I said, “so I’m not going
to blame you much. I say that I’m after this man to take him home to his
daughter. That’s truth, and it’s on my say-so. If you propose to call me
a liar, out with it, and we’ll settle the thing.”
“She stands as you say--and you needn’t pinch so,” he whined.
There’s nothing like a good grip to press home conviction in a sneak.
“I’ll give you ten dollars if you’ll locate that man for me before the
evening is over,” I told him. “I’ll make it twenty dollars if you’ll
turn the trick inside of an hour.”
“I know all the joints--I know the steamboat hangouts.”
“It ought to be an easy trick. He is with an old belay-ing-pin who
has enough hair on his head and face to stuff a bolster--and I heard
somebody call him Ike.”
“Aw, that’s ‘Ingot Ike.’ Everybody between Dupont Street and Telegraph
Hill knows that old hornbeam and his everlasting hum about three million
dollars’ worth of buried gold ingots. Come along! I ought to pull down
that twenty easy.”
“Let me tell you one thing,” I said, chasing along with him. “I’m not
worth robbing. I’m going to keep close to you, and if you put me against
any frame-up I’ll get you first, and I’ll get you quick.” And I grabbed
him by the wrist and let him have that honest old grip once more. I kept
hold of him. And led thus like a blind man through this street and
that, by short cuts along dark alleys, across courts, and now and then
skirting vacant lots, we came at last into purlieus that my ears,
eyes, and nose told me must be that “Barbary Coast so gay,” as Captain
Holstrom had caroled.
Out of open doors came liquor fumes and music blended, if there is any
such thing as blending noise and odors; the two seemed to be associated
there so regularly and invariably that my senses told me that they were
blended.
The women sauntered on the sidewalks; the men loafed there. We two
seemed to be about the only ones who were headed for something definite.
“We’ll tap the regular joints first,” said Beason. “If he’s pretty drunk
he won’t be using his mind much to think up new places to go. He’ll fall
into the rut like a ball in a crooked pin-game.”
I was young enough to be interested in that panorama of iniquity. I
would have gaped longer than I did in those places, but Mr. Beason
proved to be a very active guide. That matter of twenty dollars proved
to be like a bur under a bronco’s saddle. He would gallop into a place,
leave me to goggle at the antics on the dance floor; he would weasel his
way through the crowd, chop out a few staccato questions, and then yank
me out with my eyes behind me and my chin hanging over my shoulder like
the tailboard of a cart.
Beason rattled me down another length of street--and if the folks we
bumped hadn’t known him I reckon we would have had a few things on our
hands besides that man hunt. They all seemed to know Beason. He snapped
questions right and left.
All at once my guide got a clue. He barked a few more questions at this
illuminative party, and turned and scooted back along our trail.
“The old cuss has taken to a back room,” he gasped. “I ought to have
figured that he would be hiding.”
He rushed me around comers, across streets, down alleys, and into more
streets. We came up against a saloon at last where the front window was
lettered in red paint, “Holding Ground Cove.” Knowing, as a deep-sea
diver, that a good holding ground means a mud bottom, I could have
thought up a highly moral and somewhat humorous apothegm on that name
for a saloon if I had had the time; but Mr. Beason was cutting comers on
Time that night. He rushed me into the saloon, into a back room at the
rear, and when he didn’t see what we were looking for up-stairs we went.
There were cribs of private rooms, furnished with bare tables and hard
chairs--drinking-rooms. From the half-open door of one came the cackle
of much laughter, and we peeped in.
A girl, whose face was painted in almost as gaudy hues as her red
stockings, was standing on a table in the middle of the little room.
Capt. Rask Holstrom was seated in a chair, straddling the back, and was
busily engaged in tickling the girl’s nose with the tip of a very long
peacock feather--and wherever he secured that feather I never found out.
But always leave it to a hilarious drunken man to find something odd
to carry around with him. In the room was the human belaying-pin, also
seated. But his chair had evidently slipped from under him when he tried
to lean against the wall, and he was jack-knifed down in a corner,
with his broomstick legs waving in the air, and was surveying the scene
between that frame. He was squealing laughter in a key that would have
put a guinea-hen out of business.
“There’s Ingot Ike,” affirmed Beason, “and if t’other one is your
pertickler friend then I’ll cash in.”
He held up his cheap watch, with his dirty forefinger indicating the
hour.
“I get the twenty with nine minutes’ ‘velvet,’ if that’s your friend.”
But Captain Holstrom did not display any very ardent friendship for any
one just then. He turned an especially malevolent stare in my direction
and poised his peacock feather like lance in rest. I could see that
something was going to break loose there mighty soon, and after what I
had told Beason I didn’t want that young sneak to overhear. It would be
like him to come back with a gang and “do” me on the excuse that I was a
stranger who was “frsking” Captain Holstrom for his pocketful.
I hauled out two ten-dollar bills mighty quick, and passed them to
Beason. He held one in each hand, pinched between thumb and forefinger,
and looked at them in turn, wrinkling his nose with as much disgust as
though he were holding lizards by the tails.
“Soft money,” said he, “and the stink of the East still on it! I’ll
bet you both of these poultices that you haven’t been in San Francisco
twenty-four hours--and how do you happen to be such a pertickler friend
of a China Basin steamboat cap’n, hey?”
A freshly arrived Easterner is always given away by his paper money.
“Who’s a friend?” inquired Captain Holstrom, the one eye I could see as
staring and as baleful as the “eye” on the peacock feather.
“Look-a-here,” said I, bracing up to him savagely, for I knew that soft
soap wouldn’t grease the ways, “I want to know what you mean by running
away from me after my telegrams to you.”
I whirled on Beason, pushed him out of the room, and slammed the door in
his face.
“You have been paid,” I yelled at him through the crack. “Now, keep your
nose out of the rest of the thing, or I’ll pinch it off.”
“See here,” growled Captain Holstrom, vibrating the feather as
menacingly as though it were a sled stake, “don’t you know a private
party when you see one?”