What did we do with Homer, eh? Ah, forget it! Say, soon's he got back to
town and found he could navigate 'round by himself, he begins to count
up expenses. Then he asks us to put in a bill.
"Bill!" says I. "What for? I'm no hired man. I've been doin' this for
fun." Leonidas says the same.
But Homer wouldn't have it that way. He says we've done him a lot of
good, and lost our valuable time, and he'll feel hurt if we don't let
him make us a little present. With that he pries open a fat leather
green goods case, paws over a layer of yellow backs two or three inches
thick--and fishes out a couple of ten spots.
"Stung!" says Leonidas, under his breath.
"Homer," says I, shovin' 'em back at him, "if you're as grateful as all
that, I'll tell you what you'd better do--keep these, and found a Home
for Incurable Tight-wads."
Then we loses him in the crowd, and each of us strikes out for himself.
Blessed if I know where Leonidas strayed to, but I'm dead sure of the
place I fetched up at. It was It'ly, North It'ly. Ever been there? Well,
don't. Nothin' but dagoes and garlic and roads that run up hill. Say,
some day when my roll needs the anti-fat treatment, I'm goin' to send
over there and have 'em put a monument that'll read: "Here's where
Shorty McCabe was buried alive for five weeks."
Doing? Wasn't a blamed thing doing there. We were just assassinatin'
time, that's all. But the Boss thought he liked it, for a while, so I
had to hang on. The Boss? Oh, he's just the Boss. Guess you wouldn't
know him--he hasn't been cured by three bottles of anything, and isn't
much for buyin' billboard space. But he's a star all right. He's got a
mint somewhere, a little private mint of his own, that runs days and
nights and overtime. Scotty mine? No, better'n that--defunct
grandmothers and such. It's been comin' his way ever since he was big
enough to clip a coupon. Don't believe he knows how much he _has_ got,
but that don't worry him. He don't even try to spend the gate receipts;
just uses what he wants and lets the rest pyramid.
Course, he's out of my class in a way; but then again, he ain't. The way
we come to hook up was like this: You see, when I quits Homer, I takes
the first thing that comes along, which happens to be the Jericho Lamb.
He wants me to train him for his go with Grasshopper Jake, and I did.
Well, we pulls it off in Denver. The Lamb he bores in like a stone
crusher for five rounds. Then he stops a cross hook with his jaw and is
jarred some. That brings out the yellow. Spite of all I could say, he
stops rushin' and plays for wind and safety. Think of that, with the
Grasshopper as groggy as a five days old calf! Well, I saw what was
coming to _him_, right there. When the bell rings I chucks my towel to a
rubber and quits. I hadn't hired out for no wet nurse, and I told the
crowd so.
Just as I was makin' my sneak this quiet-speakin' chap falls in
alongside and begins to talk to me. First off I sized him up for one of
them English Johnnies that had lost his eyeglass. But that's where I was
dead wrong. He wasn't no Johnnie, and he wasn't no tinhorn sport. But he
was a new one on me. They don't grow many like him, I guess, so no
wonder I didn't get wise right away.
"Think the Lamb's all in?" says he.
"All in!" says I. "He never had anything to put in. He was licked before
the bell tapped. And me trainin' him for five weeks! I'm goin' to kick
myself all the way back to New York."
"I'll help you," says he. "I backed that Lamb of yours to win."
"How much?" says I.
"Oh, only a few hundred."
"But you ain't seen him licked yet," says I.
"I'll take your word for it," says he.
Say, that was no tinhorn play, was it? He goes off and leaves his good
money up, just on a flier like that.
"You're the real goods," says I.
"I can return the sentiment," says he.
So we took the midnight East. When we got the morning papers at Omaha we
saw that the Lamb only lasted half-way through the seventh, and
'possumed the count at that. Well, we got some acquainted before we hit
Chicago, and by the time we'd landed in Jersey City I'd signed articles
with him for a year. He calls it secretary, but I holds out for sparrin'
partner.
Oh, he can handle the mitts some, all right; none of your parlor
Y. M. C. A. business, either, but give and take. He strips at one hundred
and forty and can stand punishment like a stevedore. But, of course,
there's no chance of ever gettin' him on the platform. He likes to go his
four rounds before dinner, just to take the drab coloring off the world in
general. That's the way he puts it.
Take him all around, he's a thoroughbred. I know that much, but after
that I don't follow him. I used to wonder sometimes. Give most Johnnies
his pile and turn 'em loose, and what would they do? They'd wear out the
club window-sills, and take in pink teas, and do the society turn. But
not for him. He's a mixer, the Boss is. He wants to see things, all
kinds.
Sometimes he lugs me along and sometimes he don't. It all depends on
whether I'd fit in. When he heads for Fifth Avenue I know I'm let out.
But when he gets into a sack coat and derby hat I'm bettin' that maybe
we'll fetch up somewheres on the East Side. Perhaps it'll be the grand
annual ball of the Truck Drivers' Association, or just one of them
Anarchist talkfests in the back room of some beer parlor. There's no
telling. We may drink muddy coffee out of dinky brass cups with a lot of
Syrian rug sellers down on Washington Street, or drop into the middle of
a gang of sailors down on Front Street.
And I'm no bodyguard, mind. The Boss ain't in much need of that. But he
likes to have some one to talk to, and I guess most of his friends don't
go in for such promiscuous visitin' lists as he does. I like it well
enough, but where _he_ gets any fun out of it I can't see. I put it up
to him once, and what do you suppose he says? Asks me if I ever heard of
a duck by the name of Panzy de Lean.
"Sounds kind of familiar," says I. "Don't he run a hotel or something
down to Palm Beach?"
"You're warm," says the Boss, "but you've mixed your dates. Old Panzy
struck the east coast about four hundred years before our friend Flagler
annexed it. And he wasn't in the hotel business. Exploring was his line.
He was looking for a new kind of mineral water that he was going to call
the Elixir of Life. Well, in some ways Panzy and I are alike."
It was a josh, all right, that he was handin' out, but he meant
somethin' by it, for the Boss ain't the kind to talk just for the sake
of making a noise. I never let on but what I was next. Later in the
season I had a chance to come back at him with it, for along in February
we got under way for Palm Beach ourselves.
"Goin' to take a hack at the 'lixir business?" I says.
"No, Shorty," says he. "Just going to dodge a few blizzards and watch
the mob."
But he didn't like it much, being in that push, so we took a jump over
to Bermuda, where everything's so white it makes your eyes ache. That
didn't suit him, either.
"Shorty," says he one day, "you didn't sign for any outside tour, but
I've got the go fever bad. Can you stand it for awhile in foreign
parts?"
"I'm game," says I, not knowing what I was to be up against.
So we hiked back to New York and Mister 'Ankins--he's the lady-like gent
that stays home an' keeps our trousers creased, an' juggles the laundry
bag and so forth, when we're there--Mr. 'Ankins he packs a couple of
steamer trunks and off we starts.
Well, we hit a lot of outlandish places, like Paris and Berlin; and
finally, when things began to warm up some, and I knew by the calendar
that the hokey-pokey men had come out on the Bowery, we lands in Monte
Carlo. Say, I'd heard a lot about Monte Carlo on and off--there was a
song about it once, you know--but if that's the best imitation of Phil
Daly's they can put up over there, they'd better go out of business. Not
that the scenery isn't bang-up and the police protection O. K., but the
game--well, I've seen more excitement over a ten-cent ante.
The Boss didn't care much for that sort of thing anyway. He touched 'em
up for a stack or two, but almost went to sleep over it. It wasn't until
Old Blue Beak butted in that our visit began to look interestin'. He was
a count, or a duke, or something, with a name full of i's and l's, but I
called him Blue Beak for short. The Boss said for a miniature word
painting that couldn't be bettered. Never saw a finer specimen of
hand-decorated frontispiece in my life. It wasn't just red, nor purple.
It was as near blue as a nose can get. Other ways, he was a tall, skinny
old freak, with a dyed mustache and little black eyes as shifty as a fox
terrier's. He was as polite, though, as a book agent, and as smooth as
the business side of a banana skin.
"What's his game," says I to the Boss, after Blue Beak and him had
swapped French conversation for an hour. "Is it gold bricks or green
goods?"
"My friend, the count," says the Boss, "wants to rent us a castle, all
furnished and found; a genuine antique, with a pedigree that runs back
to Marc Antony."
"A castle!" says I. "What's that the cue to? And how did he guess you
were a come-on?"
"Every American is a come-on, Shorty," says the Boss. "But this is a new
proposition to me. However, I mean to find out. I've told him to come
back after dinner."
And old Blue Beak had his memory with him, all right. He came back. He
and the Boss had a long session of it. In the morning the Boss says to
me:
"Shorty, throw out your chest; you're going to live in a castle for a
while."
Then he told me how it happened. Blue Beak wasn't any con. man at all,
just one of those hard-up gents whose names look well in a list of
guests, but don't carry weight with the paying teller. He was in such a
rush to get the ranch off his hands, though, that price didn't seem to
figure much. That's what made the Boss sit up and take notice. He was a
great one for wanting to know why.
"We'll start to-day," says he.
So off we goes, moseyin' down into It'ly on a bum railroad, staying at
bummer hotels, and switching off to a rickety old chaise behind a pair
of animated frames that showed the S. P. C. A. hadn't got as far as
It'ly yet. Think of riding from the Battery to White Plains in a Fifth
Avenue stage! That would be a chariot race to what we took before we
hove in sight of that punky castle. After that it was like climbing
three sets of Palisades, one top of the other, on a road that did the
corkscrew all the way.
"That's your castle, is it?" says I, rubberin' up at it. "Looks like a
storage warehouse stranded on Pike's Peak. Gee, but I wouldn't like to
fall out of one of those bedroom windows! You'd never hit anything for
an hour. Handy place to have company, though; wouldn't have to put on
the potatoes until you saw 'em coming. So that's a castle, is it? I
don't wonder old Blue Beak had a lot of conversation to unload. If I
live up there all summer I shall accumulate enough talk to last me the
rest of my life."
"Oh, I don't imagine we'll be lonesome," puts in the Boss. "I fancy I
caught sight of one or two of our neighbors on the way."
"You did?" says I. "Where?"
"Behind the rocks," says he, kind of snickering.
But I never savvied. I'd had my eyes glued to that dago Waldorf-Astoria
balanced up there on that toothpick of a mountain. I had a batty idea
that the next whiff of breeze would jar it loose. But when they'd opened
up a gate like the double doors of an armory, and let us in, I forgot
all that. Say, that castle was the solidest thing I ever run across. The
walls were so thick that the windows looked like they were set at the
end of tunnels. In the middle was a big court, such as they have in
these swell new apartment houses, and a lot of doors and windows opened
on that.
"Much as 'leven rooms and bath, eh?" says I.
"The Count assures me that there are two hundred and odd rooms, not
reckoning the dungeons," said the Boss. "I hope we'll find one or two of
them fit to live in."
We did, just about that. A white-headed old villain, who looked as if
he'd just escaped from a "Pirates of Penzance" chorus--Vincenzo, he
called himself--took our credentials and then showed us around the shop.
There was a dining-room about the size of the Grand Central train shed.
Say, a Harlem man would have wept for joy at sight of it. And there was
a picture gallery that had Steve Brodie's collection beat a mile. As for
bedrooms, there was enough to accommodate a State convention. The only
running water in sight, though, was in the fountain out in the court,
and the place looked as though when the gas man made his last call he'd
taken the fixtures along with the meter.
Yet the Boss seemed to be tickled to death with the whole shooting
match. At dinner that night he made me sit at one end of the dining-room
table while he sat at the other, and we were so far apart we had to
shout at each other when we talked. The backs of some of those
dining-room chairs were more than eight feet tall. It was like leaning
up against a billboard. The waiters looked like stage villains out of a
job, and whenever they passed the potatoes I peeled my eye for a knife
play. It didn't come though. Nothing did.
We put in nearly a week rummaging through that moldy old barracks. It
was three days before I could come down to breakfast without getting
lost. The Boss found a lot to look at and paw over; old books and
pictures, rusty tin armor and such truck. He even poked around in the
coal cellars that they called dungeons.
I liked being up in the towers best. I'd go up there and look about due
west, where New York was the last time I saw it. I never wanted wings
quite so bad as I did then. And, say, I'd given up a month's salary for
a sporting extra some nights. Dull? Why, there are crossroads up in
Sullivan County that would seem like the Tenderloin alongside of that
place.
Funny thing, though, was that the Boss was so stuck on it. He'd gas
about the lakes, and the mountains, and the sky, and all that, pointing
'em out to me as if they were worth seeing, when I'd seen better'n that
many a time, painted on back drops--and could get away from 'em when I
wanted. But here it was a case of nowhere to stay but in. You couldn't
go pikin' around the landscape without falling off the edge.
Guess I'd have gone clean nutty if it hadn't been for the little glove
play we did every afternoon. We had some of the chorus hands fix up a
nice lot of straw in a corner of the courtyard, so's to sort of
upholster the paving stones, and after we got used to the new foot-work
it was almost as good as a rubber mat.
We'd been having a gingery little go one day, with the whole crew of the
castle, from head purser down to the second assistant pan wrastler,
holding their breath in the background, and I was playing shower bath
for the Boss with a leather bucket, dipping out of the fountain pool and
sousing it over him, when I spots a deadhead in the audience.
She'd been playin' peek-a-boo behind one of them big stone pillars, but
I guess she had got so interested that she forgot and stepped out into
the open. She was a native, all right; but say, she wasn't any back-row
dago girl. She was in the prima donna class, she was. Ever see Melba
made up for the "Carmen" act? Well, this one was about half Melba's
size, but for shape and color she had her stung to a whisper; and as for
wardrobe, she had it all on. Gold hoops in her ears, tinkly things on
her jacket, and a rainbow dress with the reds and greens leading the
field. Eyes were her strong point, though--regular forty candle powers.
She had the current all switched on, too, and a plumb centre range on
the Boss.
Now he wasn't exactly in reception costume, the Boss wasn't. When he'd
knocked off his runnin' shoes it left him in a pair of salmon trunks
that cleared the knees considerable. He'd made a fine ad. for a physical
culture school, just as he stood; for he's well muscled, and his
underpinning mates up, and he don't interfere when he walks. The cold
water had brought out the baby pink all over him, and he looked like one
of these circus riders does on the four sheet posters. He had the
lime-light, too, for a streak of sun comin' down between the towers just
hit him. I see the girl wasn't missin' any of these points. It wasn't
any snap-shot she was takin', it was a time exposure.
"Who's your lady friend in the wings?" says I to the Boss.
"Where?" says he.
I jerks my thumb at her. For a minute there wasn't a word said. The Boss
wasn't able, I guess, and the girl never moved an eyelash. Then he yells
for the bath towel and makes a break inside, me after him. When we'd
rubbed down and got into our Broadway togs, we chases back and organizes
ourselves into a board of inquiry. Who was she--regular boarder, or just
transient? Where did she come from? And why? Likewise how, trolley,
subway, or balloon?
But I'm blessed if that whole gang didn't go as mum as a lot of railroad
hands after a smash-up. Why, they hadn't seen no such lady, cross their
hearts they hadn't. Maybe it was old Rosa, yes? And Rosa a sylph that
would fit tight in a pork barrel! A goat, then?
"Let's give 'em the third degree," says I.
So we done it, locked 'em all in a room and put 'em on the carpet one by
one. They was scared stiff, too stiff to talk. All but old Vincenzo, the
white-haired old pirate the count had left in charge. He was a lovely
peagreen under the gills, but he made a stagger at putting up a game of
talk. No, he hadn't seen no one. He had been watching their excellencies
in their little affair of honor. Still, he couldn't swear that _we_
hadn't seen some one. Folks did see things at the castle; he had seen
sights himself, though generally after dark. He remembered a song about
a beautiful young lady who, back in the seventeen hundred and something,
had--
But I shut him off there. This fairy might have seen seventeen summers,
or maybe eighteen, but she was no antique. I could kiss the Book on
that. She was a regular Casino broiler. I made a point of this. It
didn't feaze the old sinner, though. He went on perjuring himself as
cheerful as a paid witness, and he'd have broken the Ananias record if
he'd had time.
"That will do for now," says the Boss, in a kind of
"step-up-front-there" tone. "If you don't know who she was just now,
we'll let it go at that. But by to-morrow you'll know the whole story.
It'll be healthier for all hands if you do."
Vincenzo, though, didn't have a proper notion of what he was up against.
Next day he knew less than the day before. He was ready to swear the
whole outfit, by all the saints in the chapel, that there hadn't been a
girl on the premises.
"Bring him along, Shorty," says the Boss, starting downstairs. "There's
a hole in the sub-cellar that I want this old pirate to look through."
If that hole had been cut for an ash chute it was a dandy, for the
muzzle of it was a mile more or less from anything solider'n air. We
skewered Vincenzo's arms to the small of his back and let him down by
the heels until he had a bird's-eye view of three counties. Then we
pulled him up and tested his memory.
It worked all right. That upside-down movement had shook up his thought
works. He was as anxious to testify as the front benchers at a Bowery
mission on soup day. We loosened the cords a bit, set him where he could
see the chute plain, and told him to blaze away.
Lucky the Boss knows Eye-talyun, for old Vincenzo couldn't separate
himself from English fast enough. But they had me guessing what it was
all about. I couldn't make out why the old chap had to use up all the
dago words in the box just to tell who was the lady that had the private
view. Once in a while the Boss would jab in a question, and then old
Vincenzo would work his jaw all the faster. When it was all over the
Boss looks at me as pleased as though he'd got money from home, and
says:
"Shorty, how's your nerve?"
"Not much below par," says I. "Why?"
"Because," says he, "they're after us--brigands."
"Brigands!" says I. "Tut, tut! Don't tell me that this dead and alive
country can show up anything like that."
"It can," says he. "The woods are full of 'em."
Then he gives me the framework of what old Vincenzo had been telling
him. The prima donna girl, it seems, was a lady brigandess, daughter of
the heavy villain that led the bunch. She'd come in to size us up and
make an estimate as to what we'd fetch on a forced sale. They had
spotted us from the time we registered and had been hangin' around
outside laying for us to separate. Their game was to pinch one of us and
do business with the other on a cash basis--wanted some one left who
could go away and cash a check, you see. When we didn't show no
disposition to take after dinner promenades or before breakfast rambles
they ups and tell Vincenzo that they wants the run of the castle and
promises to toast his toes if they don't get it.
They don't have to promise but once, for Vincenzo has been through the
mill. It was this kind of work that had queered the count. According to
Vincenzo, old Blue Beak had been Pat-Crowed regular every season for
five summers, and the thing had got on his nerves.
Well, Vincenzo lets three or four of 'em in one day just as the Boss and
me were swappin' uppercuts and body punches in the courtyard. Maybe they
didn't like the looks of things. Anyway, they hauled off and sent for
the main guy, who was busy down the line a-ways. He comes up with the
reserves, and his first move is to send the girl in to get a line on us.
And that was the way things stood up to date.
"Who'd a thought it?" says I. "The way she looked at you I suspicioned
she'd marked you out as something good to eat."
That turned the Boss red behind the ears. "I'm afraid we'll have to ask
for her visiting card the next time she calls," says he. "Come,
Vincenzo, I want you to show me about locking up."
After that no one came or went without showing a pass, and I lugged
about four pounds of brass keys around, for we didn't want to be stood
up by a gang of moth-eaten brigands loaded with old hardware. They
covered close by day, but at night we could see 'em sneakin' around the
walls, like a bunch of second-story men new to their job. Neither the
Boss nor I had a gun, never having had a call for such a thing, but we
found a couple of old blunderbusses hung up in the hall, reg'lar
junkshop relics, and we unlimbered them, loading with nails, scrap iron,
and broken glass. 'Course, we couldn't hit anything special, but it
broke the monotony for both sides. Once in a while they'd shoot back,
just out of politeness, but I don't believe any of 'em ever took any
medal at a schuetzenfest.
This lasted for two or three nights. It wasn't such bad fun, either, for
us. The party of the second part, though, wasn't off on a vacation, like
we were. They were out rustling for money to pay the landlord and the
butcher, and they were losing time. Hard working lot of brigands they
were, too. I wouldn't have monkeyed around after dark on that
perpendicular landscape for twice the money, and I don't believe any of
'em drew more than union rates. Fact is, I was getting to feel almost
sorry for 'em, when one night something happened to give me the marble
heart.
I'd been making my rounds with the brass foundry, seeing that all the
tramp chains were on, putting out the cat, and coming the "Shore Acres"
act, when I sees something dark skiddoo across the court to where the
Boss stood smoking in the moonshine by the fountain. I does a sprint,
too, and was just about to practise a little Eleventh Avenue jiu-jitsu
on whoever it was--when flip goes a piece of black lace, and there was
the lady brigandess, some out of breath, but still in the game.
She opens up on the Boss in a stage whisper that whirls him around as if
he'd been on a string. Not wantin' to butt in ahead of my number, I sort
of loafed around just outside the ropes, but near enough to block a
foul. Now, I don't know just all they said, nor how they said it, but
from what the Boss told me afterward they must have had a nice little
confab there that would be the real thing for grand opera if some one
would only set it to music.
Seems that she'd found out, the lady brigandess had, that the old man's
gang had run across a bricked-up passageway down in one corner of the
basement, a kind of All-Goods-Must-Be-Delivered-Here gate that had been
thrown into the discards. Of course, they'd gone to work to open it up,
and they'd got as far as some iron bars that called for a hack-saw.
They'd sent off for their breaking and entering kit, meaning to finish
the job next day. The following night they'd planned to drop in
unexpected, sew the Boss up in his blanket before he could make a move,
and cart him off until I could bail him out with a peck or so of real
money.
The rest of the scene the Boss never would fill in just as it came off
the bat, but I managed to piece out that the brigandess, sizing us up
for a couple of pikers, reckoned that we wouldn't pan out much cash, and
that the Boss might be used some rough by the gang. That prospect not
setting well on her mind, she rolls out the back door of their camp,
makes a swift trip around to our new private entrance, squeezes through
the bars, and comes up to put us wise.
Must have been just as she'd got to them lines that the Boss began
taking a good look at her. I saw him gazin' into her eyes like he'd
taken out a search warrant. Don't know as I could blame him much,
either. She was a top liner. Wasn't anything coy or kittenish about her.
She stood up and gave him as good as he sent. Next I see him make the
only fool play but one that I ever knew the Boss to make--reg'lar kid
trick.
"Here," says he, pulling off the big carbuncle ring he always wears,
"that's to remember me by."
She didn't even look at it. No joolry for hers. Instead, she says
something kind of low and sassy, pokes her face up, and begins to
pucker.
The Boss he sort of side steps and squints over his shoulder at me. Now,
I'm not sayin' what I'd do if a girl like that gave me the Cissy Loftus
eye. It ain't up to me. But I know what I'd want the crowd to do--and I
did it.
When I turned around again they was just at the breakaway, so it must
have been one of the by-by forever kind, such as you see at the dock on
sailing day. Then she took us down to show us how she came in, and
squeezed herself through the bars. They shook hands just once, and that
was all.
That night there was a grand howl from the brigands. They had put in
hours of real work, the kind they'd figured on cutting out after they
got into the brigand business, only to run into a burglar-proof shutter
which we had put up. They pranced around to the front gate and shook
their fists at us, and called us American pigs, and invited us to come
out and have our ears trimmed, and a lot of nonsense like that. I wanted
to turn loose the blunderbusses, but the Boss said: "No, let 'em enjoy
themselves."
"How long do you suppose they'll keep that sort of thing up?" says I.
"Vincenzo says some of them will stay around all summer unless we buy
them off," says he.
"That's lovely," says I, "for anyone that's dead gone on the life here."
"I'm not," says he. "I can't get out of here too quick, now."
"Oh, ho!" says I, meaning not much of anything.
Being kept awake some by their racket that night, I got to thinking how
we could give that gang of grafters the double cross. There wasn't any
use making a back-alley dash for it, as we didn't know the lay of the
land and they were between us and New York. But most of the fancy
thinking I've ever done has been along that line--how to get back to
Broadway. Along toward morning I throws five aces at a flip--turns up an
idee that had been at the bottom of the deck. "It's a winner!" says I,
and goes to sleep happy.
After breakfast I digs through my steamer trunk and hauls out a
four-ounce can of aluminum paint that the intelligent Mr. 'Ankins had
mistook for shavin' soap and put in before we left home. Then I picks
out a couple of suits of that tin armor in the hall, a medium-sized one,
and a short-legged, forty-fat outfit, and I gets busy with my brush.
"What's up?" says the Boss, seeing me slinging on the aluminum paint.
"Been readin' a piece on 'How to Beautify the House' in the 'Ladies'
Home Companion,'" says I. "Got any burnt-orange ribbon about you?"
It was a three-hour job, but when I was through I'd renovated up that
cast-off toggery so that it looked as good as if it had been just picked
from the bargain counter. Then I waited for things to turn up. The
brigands opened the ball as soon as it was dark. They'd rigged up a
battering-ram and allowed they meant to smash in our front door. The
Boss laughed.
"That gate looks as if it had stood a lot of that kind of boy's play,
and I guess it's good for a lot more," says he. "Now, if they were not
hopelessly medieval they would try a stick of dynamite."
We could have poured hot water down on them, or dropped a few bricks,
but we didn't. We just let them skin their knuckles and strain their
backs on the battering-ram. About moonrise I sprung my scheme.
"What do you say to throwing a scare into that bunch of back numbers?"
says I.
"How?" says the Boss.
I led him down to the court, where I'd laid out the plated tinware to
dry.
"Think you can fit yourself into some of that boiler plate?" says I.
That hit the Boss in the short ribs. We tackled the job off-hand, me
strappin' a section on him, and he clampin' another on me. It was like
dressing for a masquerade in the dark, neither of us ever having worn
steel boots or Harveyized vests before. Some of the joints didn't seem
to fit any too close, and a lot of it I suppose we got on hindside front
and upside down, but in the course of half an hour we were harnessed for
fair, including a conning tower apiece on our heads. Then we did the
march past just to see how we looked.
"With a little white muslin you'd do to go on as the ghost in 'Hamlet,'"
says the Boss, through his front bars.
"You sound like a junk wagon comin' down the street," says I, "and
you're a fair imitation of a tinshop on parade. Shall we go for a
midnight stroll?"
"I'm ready," says the Boss.
Grabbing up a couple of two-handed skull splitters that I'd laid out to
finish our costumes, we swung open the gate and sasshayed out, calm and
dignified, into the middle of that bunch of brigands.
It wasn't hardly a square deal, of course, they being brought up on a
steady diet of ghost stories; and I reckon there was a spooky look about
us that sent a frappe wireless up and down those dago spines. But, after
all, it was the banana oil the aluminum paint was mixed with that turned
the trick. Smelled it, haven't you? If there's any perfume fitter for a
lost soul than attar of banana oil, it hasn't been discovered. First
they went bug-eyed. Next they sniffed. At the second sniff one big
duffer, with rings in his ears and a fine assortment of second-hand
pepper-boxes in his sash, digs up a scared yell that would have done
credit to one of these Wuxtre-e-e! Wuxtre-e-e! boys, and then he
skiddoos into the rocks like some one had tied a can to him. That set
'em all off, same's when you light the green cracker at the end of the
bunch. Some yelled, some groaned, and some made no remarks. But they
faded. Inside of two minutes by the clock we had the front yard to
ourselves.
"Curtain!" says I to the Boss. "This is where we do a little
disappearing ourselves, before they get curious and come back."
We hustled into the castle, pried ourselves out of our tin roofing,
chucked our dunnage into old Blue Beak's best carryall, hitched a
couple of auction-house steppers, and lit out on the town trail without
so much as stopping to shake a da-da to old Vincenzo.
I didn't breathe real deep, though, until we'd fetched sight of a little
place where the mountain left off and the dago police were supposed to
begin. Just before we got to the first house we sees something up on a
rock at one side of the road. Day was comin', red and sudden, and we saw
who it was on the rock--the lady brigandess. Sure thing!
Now don't tax me with how she got there. I'd quit trying to keep cases
on her. But there she was waiting for us. As we got in line she glued
her eyes on the Boss and tossed him a lip-thriller with a real
Juliet-Roxane movement. And the Boss blew one back. Well, that suited
me, all right, so far as it went. But as we made for a turn in the road
the Boss reached out for the lines and pulled in our pair of skates.
Then he turns and looks back. So did I. She was still there, for a fact,
and it kind of looked as if she was holding her arms out toward him.
"By God, Shorty," says the Boss, breathing quick and talking through his
teeth, "I'm going back."
"Sure," says I, "to New York," and I had a half-Nelson on him before he
knew it was coming. We went four miles that way, too, the horses
finding the road, before I dared let him up. I looked for trouble then.
But it had been all over in a breath, just an open-and-shut piece of
battiness, same as fellers have when they jump a bridge. He was meek
enough the rest of the way, but sore. I couldn't pry a word out of him
anyway. Not until we got settled down in the smoking-room of a
Mediterranean steamer headed for Sandy Hook did he shake his trance.
"Shorty," says he, givin' me the friendly palm, "I owe you a lot more
than apologies."
"Well, I ain't no collection agency," says I. "Sponge it off."
"I was looking for the Elixir," says he, "and--and I found it."
"I can get all the 'Lixir I want," says I, "between the East River and
the North, and I don't need no cork-puller, either."
That's me. I've been back a week now, and even the screech of the L
trains sounds good. Everything looks good, and smells good, and feels
good. You don't have to pinch yourself to find out whether or not you're
alive. You know all the time that you're in New York, where there's
somethin' doin' twenty hours in the day.
It'ly! Oh, yes, I want to go there again--when I get to be a mummy.