Shorty McCabe Part 4

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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sistant 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 cla.s.s, 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 pa.s.s, and I lugged about four pounds of bra.s.s 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, sc.r.a.p iron, and broken gla.s.s. '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 bra.s.s foundry, seeing that all the tramp chains were on, putting out the cat, and coming the "Sh.o.r.e 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 b.u.t.t 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 pa.s.sageway down in one corner of the bas.e.m.e.nt, 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 sa.s.sy, 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.