I
A white man entered the Hen-Scratch saloon and sat down at one of the
little tables. He looked around him curiously. The glory of the
Hen-Scratch had departed. Nothing remained of the saloon but its name.
There was dust upon the tables. The mirror behind the bar was written
all over with the unedifying literature of soft drinks. There were no
patrons in the place. A little yellow barkeeper was wiping glasses and
trying to arrange grape-juice bottles in an enticing array upon his
shelves, glancing up from his task at intervals to gaze into the tragic
face of Abraham Lincoln, which looked out from a fly-specked frame hung
crookedly upon the wall.
Skeeter Butts laid down a bottle which contained one of the softest of
soft drinks, came from behind the bar, and murmured politely into the
ear of the white man:
“Us ain’t sellin’ no drinks to white men, boss. Endurin’ of de barroom
time, it wusn’t allowed. De law made us hab sep’rate barrooms fer de
whites an’ blacks. Dar ain’t no saloons no mo’, but——”
“I ain’t buying drinks,” the white man answered. “I have no money, no
credit, no friends, no business.”
“Escuse me fer sayin’ it, boss,” Skeeter chuckled, “but dem is my fixes,
an’ you is mighty nigh as bad off as a nigger.”
“I’m worse off than a nigger,” the white man responded, and he seemed to
get a lugubrious satisfaction from a realization of the fact. “More is
expected of my race than of yours.”
“Dat’s right,” Skeeter agreed. “Dey lets us blacks down easy; but
neither de whites nor de blacks is up to expectations.”
The white man sat for a while in deep thought. Skeeter noticed that the
top of his head was overdeveloped, like an infant’s; that his fingers
were stained with cigarettes; that his clothes were of good material but
badly worn. He decided that the man was an animated slosh in the desert
of total abstinence, mourning the demise of John Barleycorn, and
hopefully looking for a damp cloud on the horizon in the shape of a
blind tiger.
Skeeter returned to his task of polishing glasses and wiping his bar,
the habit acquired through twenty years of service to men who put one
foot upon the brass rail. Meantime he watched the stranger from the
corner of his eyes, and when the silence was prolonged he became nervous
and fidgety. At last the man came to the bar and spoke.
“Can you lend me ten dollars?”
In all Skeeter’s varied career no such request had ever been uttered in
his astonished ears. Skeeter wondered if this extraordinary thing was
attributable to prohibition. Surely the old order changeth!
“I ain’t know yo’ favor or yo’ face, an’ I ain’t met de ’quaintance of
yo’ name, boss,” Skeeter replied.
“My name is Dick Nuhat,” the white man responded promptly. “I am not
altogether an honest man, but I am a gentleman. This is a request of one
gentleman to another.”
“I likes to ’commodate white gentlemens, boss,” Skeeter said uneasily;
“but I ain’t got de ten dollars, an’ so I cain’t affode to lend it.”
Without a word the man turned away, walked back to the table, and sat
down. Once more there was a period of silence and deep meditation, while
a nervous colored man polished glasses and watched the white man from
the corner of his eye. Mr. Nuhat had the trick of sitting as motionless
as a stone dog on a lawn, while even his eyes were fixed in a stony
stare, oblivious to what went on around him and looking out across the
spaces unseeingly.
“Dope!” Skeeter muttered to himself; but Skeeter was wrong.
There was twenty minutes of this ponderous thinking, and then the man
came to Skeeter and made a proposition.
“I’ve got one thing I can sell, Skeeter. I rode to town on a horse that
is worth one hundred dollars, intending to take him to Shongaloon, to
enter him in the races at the fair; but I am broke. If you had lent me
the ten dollars I would have gone on; but now, if I went, I would have
no money to bet. So I am going to sell and go out of the racing
business.”
“You don’t talk like no race-hoss man to me,” Skeeter said.
“I ain’t a race-horse man,” was the reply. “I am a scholar and a
gentleman.”
“I ain’t got no hundred dollars,” Skeeter Butts said next. “Dar ain’t no
nigger in dis town wid dat much money in one lump. You’ll have to sell
out to de white folks.”
“Couldn’t you find ten colored people who had ten dollars each?” the
white man asked. “All ten of you can own the horse, and when you make a
win you can divide your earnings.”
“What kind of hoss you got?” Skeeter asked with a new interest.
“He’s a hard looker, Skeeter. He’s a hound dog. He limps in all four
feet, but not in all at the same time, you know. He swaps from one foot
to the other. Every time he stops he goes lame in a different foot,
because he can’t remember which foot he was limping on before. He has an
awful short memory that way. You never can tell what foot he is going to
cripple in next, and he don’t know himself.”
“Dat’s a kind of trick hoss,” Skeeter snickered.
“Exactly,” Dick agreed. “I can make a killing with him at every
race-track, for one look at him is aplenty. I can get all sorts of odds
against him; but don’t make any mistake, little yeller nigger—that horse
can run!”
“Dat sounds good to me,” Skeeter replied after a moment’s thought. “How
much do I git fer makin’ de trade?”
“Get nine negroes to give you ten dollars each for the horse, and I’ll
be satisfied with the ninety dollars. That will give you a ten-dollar
share in the animal without costing you a cent.”
“Kin I try out de hoss an’ see if he is all right?” Skeeter asked
eagerly.
“Certainly.”
“All right, boss,” Skeeter replied. “I’ll take you up!”