Little Big Man (52 page)

“In exchange, you will have my note, Jack, signed with the name of Meriweather, good as the coin of the realm, and you may hold my stickpin as security.”

I couldn’t have been less sympathetic, but mention of that jewel caused my heart to warm real sudden: it was big as an acorn, and I reckon twenty dollars wouldn’t have paid for the box it come in.

So I could scratch up that much, and got my wallet out before he changed his mind.

“God bless you,” he says when he took the bills and handed over the stickpin. “May we meet someday under more fortunate circumstances.”

He was so relieved that he left the saloon directly, without giving me the IOU, which was all right by me, for that made it a sale: a half-pound of diamond for twenty dollars. I would not scruple to sell it soon as I could find a customer, and pocket the difference.

I paid the bartender then, and in the exchange I dropped the stickpin upon the floor and that gem shattered into sufficient splinters to prove it pure glass.

I run out the door and spied that thieving skunk dashing down the street and after not a long chase, I being fleet of foot whereas he was not as quick of leg as of mind, I backed him against a wall and shoved my pistol into his breastbone.

He was sweating from the exertion and gulping air through his slack mouth, but in a right casual tone he says: “Sir, you have called my bluff.”

“And I might blow out your eye,” I says. But then I laughed, for I have always liked people of spirit, and I took back my twenty and put away my weapon. “Bunco artist born and bred,” I says.

“Well,” says he, “that is perhaps an overstatement. I was absolutely square until the age of twelve.”

“What strikes me,” I says then, “is that you have made a poor thing of it. Now that I look you over, I see your arse is almost out of your pants, your cuffs is chawed as if the dogs have been set on you many a time, and don’t I notice a hole in the upper of your shoe where you have inked your ankle so it won’t show?”

“I have seen better days,” Allardyce says, with hurt pride. “But surely my present run of ill fortune is transitory. You must admit my techniques are beyond reproach. You bought the pin readily enough.”

“True,” says I. “It was just by accident I dropped it; otherwise you’d have got away.”

He sighs deeply and says: “If it is convenient, I’d just as soon we went straightway to the police station. It distresses me to mull over my failures.”

“I was thinking, Allardyce,” I says, “I ain’t really lost by this experience, and there’s nothing that pleases me so little as to see a man’s liberty took away. I don’t hold by jails. I believe in shooting a man or letting him go scot-free. Right now I stand in want of big money, but I need a scheme. Dreaming up the latter would seem to be your specialty.”

You could see the self-esteem come back into him as I talked. He tilted his hat and manipulated his cane, and somehow the shabbiness become invisible again. Allardyce was a real good actor, and could have made his fortune in the theaters.

“Sir,” he says, slapping them doeskin gloves into his left palm and extending his right hand to me, “I am your man.”

What Allardyce suggested was pulling the brooch trick. All I had to do was go to a certain jewelry shop and buy a brooch he had already sized up.

“What will that cost?” I asks, and he says, oh, a matter of three hundred dollars, and brushes his silk-faced lapels in such a supercilious fashion that the ordinary person would never have noticed how worn they was.

“If I had three hundred,” I says, “I wouldn’t have to work a bunco.”

“My dear Jack,” says Allardyce, “in an exercise of this type you must set all your standards in proportion to the sum you intend to gain. Our aim here is two thousand dollars; therefore, to obtain three hundred in working capital is but a minor matter. Among my gifts you will find a facility for pocket-picking. I can gather the
amount we need in one evening—and I anticipate your question: why, if I am so deft at this art, do I not habitually make my living from it? Why, for example, did I not filch your wallet rather than vend you the stickpin?

“Ah!” he says, “therein lies the moral crux of the matter. A man has a sense of himself, a definition. I am a swindler, Jack, and I must observe the code of my profession or I cannot live with myself. I may pick pockets only in the interest of a bunco scheme; otherwise my fingers would lose their cunning, I would soon be nabbed, and imagine my shame in being hailed before the bar of justice as a petty sneakthief.”

Allardyce was a philosophical crook, and I felt he might easily while away a couple months in sheer musing on the subject, but I was impatient for cash, so told him to get into motion, and he did and in a day or two turned up with that three hundred dollars all right, which I reckon proved his devotion to the ideal, for he could easy have drunk it up or otherwise squandered it. But once you accepted the fact that he was crooked, he was square, if you get my meaning.

Now here’s where my part come in. I took the money and went to a very high-class jewelry shop named Kaller & Co., where I bought that brooch which he had described to me, and there was no mistaking it: being a heart formed of rubies within a wreath of gold, and in the middle of the heart was a little diamond. They was asking four hundred, but when I offered them three, take or leave it, they took. This also established that I was right casual about the purchase. Doubtless they figured me for a rancher with some free money he was spending on a whore who took his fancy, which was not unusual in K.C.

Next day Allardyce went around to the shop and pretends to throw a fit when he finds that brooch has been sold. Oh, he must have carried this off to perfection, for as I say he was a born actor and I would have loved to see it, but we wasn’t supposed to have any connection with each other. Allardyce posed as a visiting swell from the East. He had seen the gewgaw in Kaller’s window, he said, and determined to buy it for his sweetheart, but had had to wait until his monthly five thousand come in from his father the well-known banker,
etc.
Now having rushed to the store with the wherewithal, he felt Kaller’s had stabbed him in the back in disposing of that pretty.

Old Kaller, bald-headed and in his high-winged collar, took personal charge. “But, sir,” he says, “we had no idea that you were interested in the piece. If only—” But Allardyce cut him off and went into a tantrum, in the course of which he refused to look at any other jewelry, threatened to discontinue his trade at Kaller’s—though he had never set foot in there before—and demanded they get him a duplicate of that missing brooch. “It was one of a kind, you know,” says shrewd old Kaller, “but let me telegraph New York. Perhaps we might persuade the craftsman to do just one more for such an ardent admirer of his work.”

When Allardyce heard “New York,” he threw another fit, and the personnel was fanning him and fetching him water, and he finally makes it known that he intends to leave K.C. next day for San Francisco where his lovely girl lives, and that brooch or a duplicate of it will be worth twice, no, three times the asking price if they can put it into his hands before he boards the noon train.

Kaller almost swallows his cravat. “Ah well,” he croaks, “it might just be possible, it might just. We were asking,” he says, the crafty old goat, “we were asking, I believe, a thousand dollars.” He pops his eyes at Allardyce as if about to suffer a seizure.

And negligent as could be, Allardyce says: “Then I’ll pay you three thousand. But enough of these petty delays, my man, you had better get cracking. Your deadline is noon tomorrow. Until then you can reach me at the Excelsior Hotel.” And presenting one of his cards, he leaves the shop.

I had made my own hotel known to Kaller in the course of making my purchase, so the next thing that jeweler does is run over to see me. Not wanting to involve little Amelia in the sordid affair, I let him into my bedroom and closed the door. She was taking one of her singing lessons with Signorina Carmella, anyway, in the parlor, and that screeching did not serve to soothe old Kaller’s nerve none.

“A terrible thing has happened, my dear Mr. Crabb,” he says. “That brooch had already been purchased by another and paid for in full, I fear, to one of my associates, although I was in ignorance of the transaction. I wonder whether I might refund your money and take it along. A terrible inconvenience, I know, and I mean to make it up to you, dear sir. Please accept any other piece of jewelry at ten per cent discount.”

I was grinning to myself at a memory of what Allardyce had told me of the bunco philosophy: that in any swindle there was two
crooks, both victim and victimizer, and that you couldn’t never work a confidence scheme on a square man. Then, however, he went on to say that in all his travels he had never met an individual of the latter type. But look at old Kaller: he was out to make $2700, in return for which he’d allow me a twenty-buck deduction.

So I didn’t feel no sympathy for him. I said it was out of the question, that my darling little niece in the next room, the famous concert artist, had fell in love with that pretty and I’d rather cut my throat than take it away from her now; that the sale was proper legal and not my lookout if he run an inefficient business.

Well, at length he got to offering me more, and I says money meant nothing in this circumstance, so he increased the sum by degrees, and my only worry is that the old devil would in his desperation get a heart attack and die on my carpet before he got to two thousand, which is what Allardyce and I had decided on as a reasonable amount, for if Kaller’s profit got cut down much more than that he might smell a rodent.

He reached the destination in about two hours, and I says: “Mr. Kaller, you got yourself a deal. I can’t stand to see a human being in misery.”

He had the cash with him, and when he pulled out his roll I regretted not having gone to twenty-five hundred, for it looked like he had brought along that much, but hell, even so, it wasn’t bad for my first time out. I had made a hundred times ten for a couple hours’ work. Later I met Allardyce at a saloon and we split the take down the middle.

“I registered at the Excelsior,” he says, “and left word at the desk for Kaller that I had changed my plans and gone on a hunting trip out west of Topeka, returning in a week, at which time I trusted he and I could do business. That,” he says, “will cover my leisurely escape from town.”

“Where are you going, Allardyce?” I asks, because he led an interesting way of life.

“Oh, St. Louis, I suppose. I’m clean there. And what about yourself, Jack? I would advise your leaving Kansas City. It is true that Kaller has nothing on you, but he will soon get the picture and I imagine might cause you discomfort. What about coming along with me? I think you have a real talent for bunco.”

He didn’t know about Amelia, you see, for I had kept him away from my hotel. After all, he was a crook.

“That might well be,” I says. “But I believe my real calling lays outdoors. I’m heading down to the buffalo country for the winter hunt.”

Allardyce stuck out his hand. “It has been a pleasure, Jack.”

“I’m real proud, Allardyce,” says I, “and I wish you the best in whatever mischief you next take up.”

That was the last I saw of him, standing there in that lowdown saloon, ordering a bottle of champagne, so anxious to begin the high life he couldn’t wait to get to where he could rightly practice it. I had the feeling he would be broke again within a day or so, for what he liked about bunco was the acting required rather than the money gained. What a professional he was! And a real nice fellow who helped me out in K.C.

I give a pittance to my creditors to show good faith and to quiet their baying for a spell, and I laid down an advance payment on a girls’ boarding school that I finally found for Amelia—it was a snob place where the students lived in, with a headmistress so stuck up she could hardly say a word.

Now I know that with the normal dirtiness of mind in which a person picks up someone else’s reminiscences, you are expecting to find sooner or later that Amelia went back to her earlier ways. People just hate to see others reform. I just have to disappoint you. There wasn’t no force on earth that could have kept Amelia from becoming a fine lady now she had got a taste of it. To give an example, if while eating in a restaurant she dropped her fork, she wouldn’t lean over and pick it off the floor, not her. That’s what servitors was for, she said. And it got so she applied the same principle to everything she done, so that if in our rooms she let a book slip from her lap to the carpet, why, she’d yank the bellpull for one of them boys in his monkey suit to run upstairs, pick up the volume, and hand it to her.

Now the only thing that worried me was she might resist being put into Miss Wamsley’s Academy for Young Ladies, which would seem right austere after that luxurious summer in the hotel, with the German, Signorina Carmella, and all, but my apprehensions proved false, for Miss Wamsley come out of England, or maybe just Boston, anyway she said stuff like “hoff” for “half,” and that was something new for Amelia to take up, and after our first trip over there to get registered, I says to my niece: “You won’t miss the Signorina?” And she says: “Don’t make me loff.”

I didn’t put the query as to whether she would miss Uncle Jack. I did not expect she would, but had no desire to hear either a lie or a painful truth. I was not so big a fool as to fail to realize that the more she become what I wanted her to be, the less thrilled she would be by my presence.

So I felt the time would never be riper for me to go buffalo hunting, freeing Amelia from association with me and also making more money with which to support her in style. I would not be back till the following spring; then maybe I would just look in at the school every other Sunday, when visitors could come for tea, and try to remember to remove the spoon before sipping. I didn’t have no other long-range plans at the moment.

After paying in advance for a half-year of that school, along with pocket money for Amelia, I didn’t have much money left again, but was able to get most of the necessary gear and supplies on credit from an outfitter, and hired me a skinner, who would not have to be paid till we come back in the spring and sold our hides. I done this at Caldwell, Kansas, which was headquarters at that time for the buffalo business. As to K.C., I had blown town in the middle of the night, leaving all my bills behind, including the hotel account. So far as I know, I owe them yet.