Local Color Part 9

He flipped the deuce end for end, revealing its bottom: "Five!"

He reached for the remaining die--the four-spot. Dragging it toward him, his large fingers encompa.s.sed it for one fleeting instance, hiding it from view entirely; then he raised his hand: "Six!"

"Makin' twenty-one in all," stuttered Gash Tuttle. He reached for the stakes.

"Nix on that quick stuff!" yelled his opponent, and dashed his hand aside. "The tops come to nine and the bottoms to fifteen--that's twenty-four, the way I figger. You lose!" He pouched the money gleefully.

Stunned, Gash Tuttle contemplated the upturned facets of the three dice.

It was true--it was all too true! Consternation, or a fine imitation of that emotion, filled the countenances of Flem and of Fox.

"That's the first time I ever seen that happen," Fox whispered in the loser's ear. "Bet him again--bet high--and git it all back. That's the ticket!"

Mr. Tuttle shook his head miserably, but stubbornly. For this once, in the presence of crushing disaster, the divine powers of retort failed him. He didn't speak--he couldn't!

"Piker money! Piker money!" chanted the winner. "Still, ever' little bit helps--eh, boys?"

And then and there, before Gash Tuttle's bulging and horrified eyes, he split up the winnings in the proportion of five for Flem and five for Fox and five for himself. Of a sudden the loser was shouldered out of the group. He looked not into friendly faces, but at contemptuous backs and heaving shoulders. The need for play acting being over, the play actors took their ease and divided their pay. The mask was off.

Treachery stood naked and unashamed.

Reaching blindly for his valise, Gash Tuttle stumbled for the door, a load lying on his daunted spirit as heavy as a stone. Flem hailed him.

"Say, hold on!" He spoke kindly. "Ain't that your quarter yonder?"

He pointed to a coin visible against the flat gla.s.s cover of the cigar case.

"Sure it is--it's yourn. I seen you leave it there when I give you the change out of that dollar and purposed to tell you 'bout it at the time, but it slipped my mind. Go on and pick it up--it's yourn. You're welcome to it if you take it now!"

Automatically Gash Tuttle reached for the quarter--small salvage from a great and overwhelming loss. His nails sc.r.a.ped the gla.s.s, touching only gla.s.s. The quarter was cunningly glued to its underside. Surely this place was full of pitfalls. A guffawed chorus of derision rudely smote his burning ears.

"On your way, sucker! On your way!" gibed the perfidious Fox, swinging about with his elbows braced against the bar and a five-dollar bill held with a touch of cruel jauntiness between two fingers.

"Whut you got in the gripsack--hay samples or punkins?" jeered the exultant Slit-Eye.

"Yes; whut is the valise fur?" came Flem's parting taunt.

Under their goadings his spirit rallied.

"Cat's fur, to make kittens' britches!" he said. Then, as a final shot: "You fellers needn't think you're so derned smart--I know jest exactly how you done it!"

He left them to chew on that. The parting honours were his, he felt, but the spoils of war--alas!--remained in the camp of the enemy. Scarcely twenty minutes at the outside had elapsed since his advent into city life, and already one-half of the h.o.a.rded capital he had meant should sustain him for a whole gala week was irretrievably gone, leaving behind an emptiness, a void as it were, which ached like the socket of a newly drawn tooth.

Vague, formless thoughts of reprisal, of vengeance exacted an hundredfold when opportunity should fitly offer, flitted through his numbed brain. Meantime though adventure beckoned; half a mile away or less a Great White Way and a street fair awaited his coming. That saffron flare against the sky yonder was an invitation and a promise.

Sighing, he shifted his valise from one hand to the other.

The Belt Line car, returning stationward, bore him with small loss of time straightway to the very centre of excitement; to where bunting waved on store fronts and flag standards swayed from trolley poles, converting the County Square into a Court of Honour, and a myriad lights glowed golden russet through the haze of dust kicked up by the hurrying feet of merrymaking thousands. Barkers barked and bra.s.s bands brayed; strange cries of man and beast arose, and crowds eddied to and fro like windblown leaves in a gusty November. And all was gaiety and abandon. From the confusion certain sounds detached themselves, becoming intelligible to the human understanding. As for example:

"Remembah, good people, the cool of the evenin' is the time to view the edgycated ostritch and mark his many peculiarities!"

And this:

"The big red hots! The g-e-r-reat big, juicy, sizzlin' red hots! The eriginal hot-dog sand-wige--fi' cents, halluf a dime, the twentieth part of a dollah! Here y'are! Here y'are! The genuwine Mexican hairless Frankfurter fer fi' cents!"

And this:

"Cornfetti! Cornfetti! All the colours of the rainbow! All the pleasures of the Maudie Graw! A large full sack for a nickel! Buy cornfetti and enjoy yourselves."

And so on and so forth.

The forlorn youth, a half-fledged school-teacher from a back district, who had purchased the county rights of a patent razor sharpener from a polished gentleman who had had to look at the map before he even knew the name of the county, stood on a dry-goods box at the corner of Jefferson and Yazoo, dimly regretful of the good money paid out for license and unsalable stock, striving desperately to remember and enunciate the patter taught him by the gifted promoter. For the twentieth time he lifted his voice, essaying his word-formula in husky and stuttering accents for the benefit of swirling mult.i.tudes, who never stopped to listen:

"Friends, I have here the Infallible Patent Razor Sharpener. 'Twill sharpen razors, knives, scissors, scythe blades or any edged tool. If you don't believe it will----" He paused, forgetting the tag line; then cleared his throat and improvised a finish: "If you don't believe it will--why, it will!" It was a lame conclusion and fruitful of no sales.

How different the case with a talented professional stationed half a block down the street, who nonchalantly coiled and whirled and threw a la.s.so at nothing; then gathered in the rope and coiled and threw it again, always at nothing at all, until an audience collected, being drawn by a desire to know the meaning of a performance seemingly so purposeless. Then, dropping the rope, he burst into a stirring panegyric touching on the miraculous qualifications of the Ajax Matchless Cleaning and Washing Powder, which made bathing a sheer pleasure and household drudgery a joy.

Never for one moment abating the flow of his eloquence, this person produced a tiny vial, held it aloft, uncorked it, shook twenty drops of its colourless fluid contents on the corrugated surface of a seemingly new and virgin sponge; then gently kneaded and ma.s.saged the sponge until--lo and behold!--lather formed and grew and mounted and foamed, so that the yellow lump became a ma.s.s of creamy white suds the size of a peck measure, and from it dripped huge bubbles that foamed about his feet and expired prismatically, as the dolphin was once believed to expire, leaving smears upon the boards whereon the operator stood.

Thereat dimes flowed in on him in clinking streams, and bottles of the Matchless flowed from him until, apparently grown weary of commerce, he abandoned his perch, avowedly for refreshment, but really--this being a trade secret--to rub shavings of soft yellow soap into the receptive pores of a fresh sponge and so make it ready against the next demonstration.

Through such scenes Gash Tuttle wandered, a soul apart. He was of the carnival, but not in it--not as yet. With a pained mental jolt he observed that about him men of his own age wore garments of a novel and fascinating cut. By contrast his own wardrobe seemed suddenly grown commonplace and prosaic; also, these city dwellers spoke a tongue that, though lacking, as he inwardly conceded, in the ready pungency of his own speech, nevertheless had a saucy and attractive savour of novelty in its phrasing. Indeed, he felt lonely. So must a troubadour of old have felt when set adrift in an alien and hostile land. So must the shining steel feel when separated from the flint on which it strikes forth its sparks of fire. I take it a steel never really craves for its flint until it parts from it.

As he wormed through a group of roistering youth of both s.e.xes he tripped over his own valise; a wadded handful of confetti struck him full in the cheek and from behind him came a gurgle of laughter. It was borne in on him that he was the object of mirth and not its creator. His neck burned. Certainly the most distressing situation which may beset a humourist follows hard on the suspicion that folks are laughing--not with him, but at him!

He hurried on as rapidly as one might hurry in such crowded ways. He was aware now of a sensation of emptiness which could not be attributed altogether to the depression occasioned by his experience at the First and Last Chance Saloon; and he took steps to stay it. He purchased and partook of hamburger sandwiches rich in chopped onions.

Later it would be time to find suitable lodgings. The more alluring of the pay-as-you-enter attractions were yet to be tested. By way of a beginning he handed over a ten-cent piece to a swarthy person behind a blue pedestal, and mounting eight wooden steps to a platform he pa.s.sed behind a flapping canvas curtain. There, in company with perhaps a dozen other patrons, he leaned over a wooden rail and gazed downward into a shallow tarpaulin-lined den where a rather drowsy-appearing, half-nude individual, evidently of Ethiopian antecedents, first toyed with some equally drowsy specimens of the reptile kingdom and then partook sparingly and with no particular avidity of the tail of a very small garter snake.

Chance, purely, had led Gash Tuttle to select the establishment of Osay rather than that of the Educated Ostrich, or the Amphibious Man, or Fatima the Pearl of the Harem, for his first plunge into carnival pleasures; but chance is the hinge on which many moving events swing. It was so in this instance.

Osay had finished a light but apparently satisfying meal and the audience was tailing away when Gash Tuttle, who happened to be the rearmost of the departing patrons, felt a detaining touch on his arm. He turned to confront a man in his shirtsleeves--a large man with a pock-marked face, a drooping moustache and a tiger-claw watch charm on his vest. It was the same man who, but a minute before, had delivered a short yet flattering discourse touching the early life and manners and habits of the consumer of serpents--in short, the manager of the show and presumably its owner.

"Say!" began this gentleman.

"Say yourself," flashed Gash, feeling himself on safe ground once more; "your mouth's open."

The man grinned in appreciation of the thrust--a wincing grin, as though owning himself beaten in the very first sally.

"All right, old scout," he said jovially, "I will. Come back here where n.o.body can't hear me while I say it." He drew the younger man to the inner side of the platform and sank his voice to a confidential rumble.

"Soon as I seen you comin' in I says to myself, 'That's the party I'm lookin' for.' You don't live here in this town, do you?"

Gash Tuttle shook his head and started to speak, but the big man was going on. Plainly he was not one to waste time in idle preliminaries:

"That's the way I doped it. You're in the profesh, ain't you? You've been workin' this street-fair game somewhere, ain't you?"

"No," Gash Tuttle confessed, yet somehow at the same time feeling flattered.

"Well, that just goes to show how a guy can be fooled," said the Osay man. "I'd 'a' swore you was on to all the ropes in this biz. Anyway, I know just by the cut of your jib you're the party I'm lookin' for.

That's why I braced you. My name's Fornaro; this here is my outfit. I want somebody to throw in with me--and I've made up my mind you're the party I'm lookin' for."