A LONG and limber man leaned against a doorjamb of the Blue Jug Saloon
and Short Order Restaurant, inhaling the mild dear air of the autumnal
day and, with the air of a man who amply is satisfied by the aspect
of things, contemplating creation at large as it revealed itself along
Franklin Street. In such posture he suggested more than anything else a
pair of callipers endowed with reason. For this, our disesteemed
fellow citizen of the good old days which are gone, was probably the
shortest-waisted man in the known world. In my time I have seen other
men who might be deemed to be excessively short waisted, but never one
to equal in this unique regard Old King Highpockets. A short span less
of torso, and a dime museum would have claimed him, sure.
You would think me a gross exaggerator did I attempt to tell you how
high up his legs forked; suffice it to say that, as to his suspenders,
they crossed the spine just below his back collar button. Wherefore,
although born a Magee and baptised an Elmer, it was inevitable in this
community that from the days of his youth onward he should have been
called what they did call him. To his six feet five and a half inches of
lank structural design he owed the more descriptive part of his
customary title. The rest of it--the regal-sounding part of it--had been
bestowed upon him in his ripened maturity after he achieved for himself
local dominance in an unhallowed but a lucrative calling.
Sitting down the above-named seemed a person of no more than ordinary
height, this being by reason of the architectural peculiarities just
referred to. But standing up, as at the present moment, he reared head
and gander neck above the run of humanity. From this personal eminence
he now looked about him and below him as he took the gun. There was
not a cloud in the general sky; none in his private and individual sky
either. He had done well the night before and likewise the night before
that; he expected to do as well or better the coming night. Upstairs
over the Blue Jug King Highpockets took in gambling--both plain and
fancy gambling.
There passed upon the opposite side of the street one Beck Giltner. With
him the tall man in the doorway exchanged a distant and formal
greeting expressed in short nods. Between these two no great amount of
friendliness was lost. Professionally speaking they were opponents. Beck
Giltner was by way of being in the card and dicing line himself, but he
was known as a square gambler, meaning by that, to most of mankind
he presented a plane surface of ostensible honesty and fair dealing,
whereas within an initiated circle rumour had it that his rival of the
Blue Jug was so crooked he threw a shadow like a brace and bit. Beck
Giltner made it a rule of business to strip only those who could afford
to lose their pecuniary peltries. Minors, drunkards, half-wits and
chronic losers were barred from his tables. But all was fish--I use the
word advisedly--all was fish that came to the net of Highpockets.
Beck Giltner passed upon his business. So did other and more reputable
members of society. A short straggling procession of gentlemen went by,
all headed westward, and each followed at a suitable interval by his
negro “boy,” who might be anywhere between seventeen and seventy years
of age. An hour or two later these travellers would return, bound for
their offices downtown. Going back they would mainly travel in pairs,
and their trailing black servitors would be burdened, front and back,
with “samples”--sheafs of tobacco bound together and sealed with blobs
of red sealing wax and tagged. For this was in the time before the Trust
and the Night Riders had between them disrupted the trade down in the
historic Black Patch, and the mode of marketing the weed by loose leaf
was a thing as yet undreamed of. They would be prizing on the breaks in
Key & Buckner's long warehouse pretty soon. The official auctioneer had
already reported himself, and to the ear for blocks round came distantly
a sharp rifle-fire clatter as the warehouse hands knocked the hoops off
the big hogsheads and the freed staves rattled down in windrows upon the
uneven floor.
A locomotive whistled at the crossing two squares up the street, and the
King smiled a little smile and rasped a lean and avaricious chin with
a fabulously bony hand. He opined that locomotive would be drawing the
monthly pay car which was due. The coming of the pay car meant many
sportive railroad men--shopmen, yardmen, trainmen--abroad that evening
with the good new money burning holes in the linings of their pockets.
Close by him, just behind him, a voice spoke his name--his proper name
which he seldom heard--and the sound of it rubbed the smile off his face
and turned it on the instant into a grim, long war-mask of a face.
“Mister Magee--Elmer--just a minute, please!”
Without shifting his body he turned his head and over the peak of one
shoulder he regarded her dourly. She was a small woman and she was
verging on middle age, and she was an exceedingly shabby little woman.
Whatever of comeliness she might ever have had was now and forever gone
from her. Hard years and the strain of them had ground the colour in and
rubbed the plumpness out of her face, leaving in payment therefor deep
lines and a loose skin-sac under the chin and hollows in the cheeks. The
shapeless, sleazy black garments that she wore effectually concealed
any remnant of grace that might yet abide in her body. Only her eyes
testified she had ever been anything except a forlorn and drooping
slattern. They were big bright black eyes.
This briefly was the aspect of the woman who stood alongside him,
speaking his name. She had come up so quietly that he never heard her.
But then her shoes were old and worn and had lasted long past the age
when shoes will squeak.
He made no move to raise his hat. Slantwise across the high ridge of his
twisted shoulder he looked at her long and contemptuously.
“Well,” he said at length, “back ag'in, huh? Well, whut is it now, huh?”
She put up a little work-gnarled hand to a tight skew of brown hair
streaked thickly with grey. In the gesture was something essentially
feminine--something pathetic too.
“I reckon you know already what it is, Elmer,” she said. “It's about my
boy--it's about Eddie.”
“I told you before and I tell you ag'in I ain't your boy's guardeen,” he
answered her.
“How comes you keep on pesterin' me--I ain't got that boy of yourn?”
“Yes, you have got him,” she said, her voice shaking and threatening to
break. “You've got him body and soul. And I want him--me, his mother. I
want you to give him back to me.”
His gaze lifted until he considered empty space a foot above her head.
Slowly he reached an angular arm back under his right shoulder blade
and fished about there until he had extracted from a hip pocket a long,
black rectangle of navy chewing tobacco that was like a shingle newly
dipped in creosote. It was a virgin plug--he bought a fresh one every
morning and by night would make a ragged remnant of it. With the
deliberation of a man who has plenty of time to spare, he set his
stained front teeth in a corner of it and gnawed off a big scallop of
the rank stuff. His tongue herded it back into his jaw, where it made
a lump. He put the plug away. She stood silently through this, kneading
her hands together, a most humble suppliant awaiting this monarch's
pleasure.
“You told me all that there foolishness the other time,” he said. “Ain't
you got no new song to sing this time? Ef you have I'll listen, mebbe.
Ef you ain't I'll tell you good-by.”
“Elmer,” she said, “what kind of a man are you? Haven't you got any
compassions at all? Why, Elmer, your pa and my pa were soldiers together
in the same regiment. You and me were raised together right here in this
town. We went to the same schoolhouse together as children--don't you
remember? You weren't a mean boy then. Why, I used to think you was
right good-hearted. For the sake of those old days won't you do
something about Eddie? It's wrong and it's sinful--what you're doing to
him and the rest of the young boys in this town.”
“Ef you think that why come to me?” he demanded. “Why not go to the
police with your troubles?” He split his lips back, and a double row
of discoloured snags that projected from the gums like little chisels
showed between them.
“And have 'em laugh in my face, same as you're doing now? Have 'em tell
me to go and get the evidence? Oh, I know you're safe enough there. I
reckon you know who your friends are. You shut up when the Grand Jury
meets; and once in a while when things get hot for you, like they did
when that Law and Order League was so busy, you close up your place;
and once in a while you go up to court and pay a fine and then you keep
right on. But it's not you that's paying the fine--I know that mighty
good and well. The money to pay it comes out of the pockets of poor
women in this town--wives and mothers and sisters.
“Oh, there's others besides me that are suffering this minute. There's
that poor, little, broken-hearted Mrs. Shetler, out there on Wheelis
Street--the one whose husband had to run away because he fell short
in his accounts with the brickyard. And there's that poor, old Mrs.
Postelwaite, that's about to lose the home that she's worked her fingers
to the bone, mighty near, to help pay for, and she'll be left without
a roof over her head in her old age because her husband's went and lost
every cent he can get his hands on playing cards in your place, and
so now they can't meet their mortgage payments. And there's plenty of
others if the truth was only known. And oh, there's me and my boy--the
only boy I've got. Elmer Magee, how you can sleep nights I don't see!”
“I don't,” he said. “I work nights.” His wit appealed to him, for he
grinned again. “Say, listen here!” His mood had changed and he spat the
next words out. “Ef you think I ain't good company for that son of yourn,
why don't you make him stay away from me? I ain't hankerin' none fur his
society.”
“I've tried to, Elmer--God knows I've tried to, time and time again.
That's why I've come back to you once more to ask you if you won't help
me. I've gone down on my knees alone and prayed for help and I've prayed
with Eddie, too, and I've pleaded with him. He don't run round town
carousing like some boys his age do. He don't drink and he's not wild,
except it just seems like he can't leave gambling alone. Oh, he's
promised me and promised me he'd quit, but he's weak--and he's only a
boy. I've kept track of his losings as well as I could, and I know that
first and last he's lost nearly two hundred dollars playing cards with
you and your crowd. That may not be much to you, Elmer--I reckon you're
rich--but it's a lot to a lone woman like me. It means bread and meat
and house rent and clothes to go on my back--that's what it means to me.
My feet are mighty near out of these shoes I've got on, and right this
minute there's not a cent in the house. I don't say you cheated him, but
the money's gone and you got it. And it's ruining my boy. He's only a
boy--he won't be twenty-one till the twelfth day of next April. If only
you wouldn't let him come inside your place he'd behave himself--I know
he would.
“So you see, Elmer, you're the only one that can make him go
straight--that's why I've come back to you this second time. I reckon he
ain't so much to blame. You know--yes, you've got reason to know better
than anybody else--that his father before him couldn't leave playing
cards alone. I hoped I could raise Eddie different. As a little thing I
used to tell him playing cards were the devil's own playthings. But it
seems like he can't just help it. I reckon it's in his blood.”
“Whut you need then is a blood purifier,” mocked the gamester. He
pointed a long forefinger toward the drug store across the street.
“You'd better go on over yonder to Hinkle's and git him some. I see
they're advertisn' a new brand in their window--a dollar a bottle and a
cure guaranteed or else you gits your money back. Better invest!”
He showed her his back as he turned to enter the Blue Jug. Pausing
halfway through the swinging doors he spoke again, and since he still
looked over her head perhaps he did not see the look that had come into
her eyes or mark how her hands were clenching and unclenching. Or if he
did see these things perhaps he did not care.
“That's all I've got to say to you,” he added, “exceptin' this--I want
this here to be the last time you come pesterin' me on the street.”
“It will be,” she said slowly, and her voice was steady although her
meagre frame shook. “It's the last time I'm coming to you on the
street, Elmer, for what's mine by rights.”
“Then good-day to you.” He disappeared. She turned and went away,
walking fast. Her name was Norfleet and she was a widow and alone in the
world. Except for her son, who worked at Kattersmith Brothers'
brickyards as a helper for twelve dollars and a half a week, she had no
kith or kin. She lived mainly by her needle, being a seamstress of
sorts.
King Highpockets' establishment was the nearest approach to a gilded
gambling hell--to quote a phrase current--that we had. But certainly it
was not gilded, although possibly by some it might have been likened to
a hell. Under the friendly cover of darkness you ascended a steep flight
of creaky wooden steps and when you had reached the first landing you
knocked at a locked wooden door. The lock slid back and the door opened
a cautious inch or two and a little grinning negro, whose name was Babe
Givens, peeped out at you through the opening. If you were the right
person, or if you looked as though you might be the right person, Babe
Givens opened the door wider and made way for you to enter.
Entering then, you found yourself in a big room furnished most simply
with two tables and some chairs and several spittoons upon the floor,
and a portable rack for poker checks and a dumbwaiter in a corner--and
that was all. There was no safe, the proprietor deeming it the part
of safety to carry his cash capital on his person. There was no
white-uniformed attendant to bring you wine, should you thirst, and
turkey sandwiches, if you hungered while at play. I have read that such
as these are provided in all properly conducted gambling hells in
the great city, but King Highpockets ran a sure-thing shop, not a
restaurant. Drinks, when desired, were paid for in advance, and came
from the bar below on the shelf of the creaking dumbwaiter, after Babe
Givens had called the order down a tin speaking tube. There were no rugs
upon the floor, no pictures against the walls. Except for the decks of
cards, opened fresh at each sitting, there was nothing new or bright
about the place. The King might move his entire outfit in one two-horse
wagon and put no great strain upon the team. He might lose it altogether
and be out of pocket not more than seventy-five dollars. In him the
utilitarian triumphed above the purely artistic; himself, he was not
pretty to look upon.
Of the two tables, one ordinarily was for poker and the other was for
craps. The King banked both games, and sometimes took a hand in the
poker game if conditions seemed propitious. Whether he played though or
whether he didn't, he stood by always to lift a white chip out of each
jackpot for a greedy and omnivorous kitty, whose mouth showed as a
brassbound slot in the middle of the circular cover of dirty green
baize. Trust him to minister to his kitty every pop. She was his pet and
he loved her, and he never forgot her and her needs.
This night, though, the poker table lacked for tenants. The pay car had
come and had dispensed of its delectable contents and had gone on south,
and on this particular night most of the King's guests were railroad
men. Railroad men being proverbially fond of quick action and plenty of
it, the crap table had been drawn out into the middle of the room and
here all activities centred. Here, too, the King presided, making change
as occasion demanded cards, opened fresh at each turn.
While he did this his assistant, an alert individual called Grimes--or
Jay Bird Grimes, for short--kept track of the swift-travelling dice and
of the betting, which like the dice moved from left to right, round and
round and round again.
Jay Bird had need to keep both his eyes wide open, for present players
and prospective players were ringed four deep about the table. The
smoke of their cigars and their cigarettes went upward to add stratified
richness to the thick blue clouds that crawled in layers against the
ceiling, and the sweat of their brows ran down their faces to drip in
drops upon the table as one after another they claimed the dotted
cubes and shook, rattled and rolled 'em, and snapped their finger in
importunity, calling upon Big Dick or Phoebe Dice to come and to come
right away. And then this one would fail to make his point and would
lose his turn, and the overworked ivories would go into the snatching
eager hand of that one who stood next him, and all the rest, waiting
for their chance, would breathe hard, grunting in fancied imitation of
negroes, and shouting out in a semi-hysterical fashion as the player
passed or didn't pass.
A young freight conductor laid down a ten-dollar bill and the King
covered it with another. The freight conductor ran that ten up to one
hundred and eighty dollars, ten or twenty at a dip, then shot the whole
amount and lost it; then lost ninety more on top of that, and with a
white face and a quite empty pay envelope, still held fast in a shaking
left hand, fell back out of the hunched-in, scrouging circle. But he
didn't go away; he stayed to watch the others, envious of those who
temporarily beat the game, dismally sympathetic, with an unspoken
fellow feeling, for those who, like him, went broke. Josh Herron, the
roundhouse foreman, dropped half his month's wages before he decided
that, since luck plainly was not with him, he had had about enough. A
clerk from the timekeeper's office shoved in, taking his place.
When he wasn't answering knocks at the door Babe Givens circulated about
the outskirts of the tightened group like a small, black rabbit dog
about a brush pile harbouring hares, his eyes all china and his mouth
all ivory. The sound of those small squared bones dashing together in
their worn leather cup was music to his Afric ears. The white man in the
first place stole this game from Babe's race, you know.
Babe had to answer knocks a good many times. Newcomers kept on climbing
the stair and knuckling the door.
“Game's mighty full, genelmens--but they's always room fur one mo'.
Step right in and wait yo' turn,” Babe would say, ushering in the latest
arrival. Babe was almost as happy as if he had been shooting himself.
As I say, they kept coming. At length, a few minutes before midnight,
when the pile of silver under the King's hands had grown from a
molehill to a mountain and the wadded paper money made a small shock of
yellow-and-green fodder upon the green pasture of the table-top, came
still another, and this one most strangely burdened. Very mousily indeed
this eleventh-hour visitor ascended the steps, and first trying the
doorknob, knocked with a fumbling knock against the pine panels.
Babe drew back the bolt and peered out into the darkness at the solitary
figure dimly seen. “Game's mighty full, genelmen,” he began the formula
of greeting, “but you kin----”
Babe began it but he never finished it. Some-. thing long and black,
something slim and fearsome--yes, most fearsome--slid through the
opening, and grazed his nose so that the little darky, stricken limp,
fell back.
“Please, suh, boss,” he begged, “fur Gawd's sake don't shoot--don't
shoot!”
Babe started his prayer in a babble but he ended it with a shriek--a
shriek so imploringly loud that all there, however intent they might
be, were bound to hear and take notice. Over the heads of his patrons
Highpockets looked, and he stiffened where he stood. They all looked;
they all stiffened.
There was just cause. Inside the door opening was a masked figure
levelling down a double-barrelled shotgun upon them. Lacking the mask
and the shotgun, and lacking, too, a certain rigid and purposeful pose
which was most clearly defined in all its lines, the figure would have
lacked all menace, indeed would have seemed to the casual eye a most
impotent and grotesque figure. For it was but little better than five
feet in stature and not overly broad. It wore garments too loose for it
by many inches. The sleeve ends covered the small hands to the finger
ends, and the trousers wrinkled, accordion fashion, to the tips of the
absurdly small toes. An old slouch hat threatened to slip all the
way down over the wearer's face. The mask was a flimsy thing of black
cambric, but the eyeholes, strange to say, were neatly worked with
buttonhole stitching. From beneath the hatbrim at the back a hank of
longish hair escaped. On the floor, a yard or so before the apparition
where it had been dropped, rested an ancient black handbag unlatched and
agape.
I am not meaning to claim that at the first instant of looking the
several astonished eyes of the gathering in King Highpockets' place
comprehended all these details; it was the general effect that they got;
and it was that shotgun which mainly made the difference in their point
of view. What they did note most clearly--every man of them--was that
the two hammers of the gun stood erect, ready to drop, and that a slim
trigger finger played nervously inside the trigger guard, and that the
twin muzzles, shifting and wavering like a pair, of round hard eyes
gazing every way at once, seemed to fix a threatening stare upon all of
them and upon each of them. If the heavy gun shook a bit in the grip of
its holder that but added to the common peril. Anyone there would have
taken his dying oath that the thing aimed for his shrinking vitals and
none other's. “Hands up--up high! And keep 'em up!” The command, given
in a high-pitched key, was practically unnecessary. Automatically, as
it were, all arms there had risen to full stretch, so that the clump
of their motionless bodies was fronded at the top with open palms and
tremulous outstretched fingers. But the arms of old King Highpockets
rose above all the rest and his fingers shook the shakiest.
“If anybody moves an inch I'll shoot.”
“That don't go for me--I ain't aimin' to move,” murmured Josh Herron.
Josh was scared all right, but he chuckled as he said it. “Now--boy--
you!”
The gun barrels dipped to the right an instant, including the detached
form of Babe Givens in their swing.
“Yas, suh, boss, yas!”
“You put all that money in this grip sack here at my feet.”
“W-w-which money, boss?”
“All the money that's there on that table yonder--every cent of it.”
The little darky feared the man who paid him his wages, but there were
things in this world he feared more--masked faces and shotguns, for
example. His knees smote together and his teeth became as castanets
which played in his jaws, as with rolling eyes and a skin like wet ashes
he moved shudderingly to obey. Between the table and the valise he made
two round trips, carrying the first time silver, the second time paper,
and then, his task accomplished, he collapsed against the wall because
his legs would no longer hold him up. For there was water in his knee
joints and his feet were very cold.
Through this nobody spoke; only the eyes of the armed one watched
vigilantly everywhere and the shotgun ranged the assemblage across
its front and back again. Under his breath some one made moan, as the
heaping double handful of green-and-yellow stuff was crumpled down into
the open-mawed bag. It might have been Highpockets who moaned.
“Now then,” bade the robber, when the paper had gone to join the silver,
“anybody here who's lost his money to-night or any other night can
come and get it back. But come one at a time--and come mighty slow and
careful.”
Curiously enough only two came--the young freight conductor and the
youth who was a clerk in the time-keeper's office at the yards.
Shamefacedly the freight conductor stooped, flinching away from the gun
muzzles which pointed almost in his right ear, and picked out certain
bills.
“I lost an even hundred--more'n I can afford to lose,” he mumbled. “I'm
takin' just my own hundred.” He retired rearward after the manner of a
crab.
The boy wore an apologetic air as he salvaged twenty-two dollars from
the cache. After he had crawfished back to the table where the others
were, none else offered to stir.
“Anybody else?” inquired the collector of loot.
“Well, I squandered a little coin here this evenin', but I'm satisfied,”
spoke Josh Herron, now grinning openly. “I'm gittin' my money's worth.”
He glanced sidewise toward the suffering proprietor.
“All done?”
Nobody answered.
“Here, boy, come here then!”
Babe Givens came--upon his knees.
“Close that bag.”
Babe fumbled the rusted claps shut.
“Now, shove it up close to me along the floor.”
Babe, he shoved it.
“Now get back yonder where you were.”