“Ah,” he says. “My acquaintance, I fear, was with the New York and Boston lines.” I haven’t yet said what he looked like: well, he was the middle-size facing you, but in profile he was developing quite the potgut. He was clean-shaven with a blue jaw and a flabby mouth, and he wore or carried a deal of gewgaws: diamond stickpin, lapel flower, watch chain with dependent ornamentation, gold-headed cane, doeskin gloves, and the like. I reckon he was around my age.
“Which was your university?” he says. “Harvard or Yale?”
“The former,” says I.
He says: “Mine was the latter, but I had a host of acquaintance, nay, friends of the bosom, up at Cambridge in the early sixties, which must have been your years there. Did you know Montgomery Brear or William W. Whipple or Bartley “Doc” Platt, all of the Indian Pudding Club? Or Chester “Chet” Larkin; he was a Musk Ox. Or Mansard Fitch, who belonged to the Kangaroos?”
“No, I never,” I says. “I was an Antelope.”
“Well, sir,” says he, “let me shake your hand again on that. I don’t require a further bona fide. I expect every gentleman in the organized world knows of the exclusivity of the Antelopes. It is no wonder then, sir, that I was able to pick you out of the crowd: breeding will tell.”
He goes on in that vein for a time and we had another drink and while I was some amused to have put one over on him, I tired of his yapping finally and was fixing to leave, when he says: “Sir, I have no recourse but to hurl myself upon your mercy. I find myself in a desperate condition. Alas, I have not your moral fiber. I am a bending reed, sir, and I fear the grand old firm of Meriweather, bankers, to which I shall one day fall heir, will find in me a pillar of sand.
“In short, sir, I have in two weeks squandered, in games of chance, the five thousand dollars my father put into my pocket for the first month’s expenses of my Western jaunt. I dare not wire him for more. I appeal to you as a fellow gentleman among the rabble. Twenty dollars, Mr. Crabb, a mere pittance to you, but it would save my life.
“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.”
