41 Stories (21 page)

“One evening Andy failed to come to the hotel for dinner. About 11 o‘clock he came into my room.

“ ‘Landed one, Jeff,' says he. ‘Twelve millions. Oil, rolling mills, real estate and natural gas. He's a fine man; no airs about him. Made all his money in the last five years. He's got professors posting him up now on education—art and literature and haberdashery and such things.

“ ‘When I saw him he'd just won a bet of $10,000 with a Steel Corporation man that there'd be four suicides in the Allegheny rolling mills to-day. So everybody in sight had to walk up and have drinks on him. He took a fancy to me and asked me to dinner with him. We went to a restaurant in Diamond Alley and sat on stools and had sparkling Moselle and clam chowder and apple fritters.

“ ‘Then he wanted to show me his bachelor apartment on Liberty Street. He's got ten rooms over a fish market with privilege of the bath on the next floor above. He told me it cost him $18,000 to furnish his apartment, and I believe it.

“ ‘He's got $40,000 worth of pictures in one room, and $20,000 worth of curios and antiques in another. His name's Scudder, and he's 45, and taking lessons on the piano and 15,000 barrels of oil a day out of his wells.'

“ ‘All right,' says I. ‘Preliminary canter satisfactory. But, kay vooly, voo? What good is the art junk to us? And the oil?'

“ ‘Now, that man,' says Andy, sitting thoughtfully on the bed, ‘ain't what you would call an ordinary scutt. When he was showing me his cabinet of art curios his face lighted up like the door of a coke oven. He says that if some of his big deals go through he'll make J. P. Morgan's collection of sweatshop tapestry and Augusta, Me., beadwork look like the contents of an ostrich's craw thrown on a screen by a magic lantern.

“ ‘And then he showed me a little carving,' went on Andy, ‘that anybody could see was a wonderful thing. It was something like 2,000 years old, he said. It was a lotus flower with a woman's face in it carved out of a solid piece of ivory.

“ ‘Scudder looks it up in a catalogue and describes it. An Egyptian carver named Khafra made two of 'em for King Rameses II about the year B.C. The other one can't be found. The junkshops and antique bugs have rubbered all Europe for it, but it seems to be out of stock. Scudder paid $2,000 for the one he has. '

“ ‘Oh, well,' says I, ‘this sounds like the purling of a rill to me. I thought we came here to teach the millionaires business, instead of learning art from 'em?'

“ ‘Be patient,' says Andy, kindly. ‘Maybe we will see a rift in the smoke ere long.'

“All the next morning Andy was out. I didn't see him until about noon. He came to the hotel and called me into his room across the hall. He pulled a roundish bundle about as big as a goose egg out of his pocket and unwrapped it. It was an ivory carving just as he had described the millionaire's to me.

“ ‘I went in an old second-hand store and pawnshop a while ago,' says Andy, ‘and I see this half hidden under a lot of old daggers and truck. The pawnbroker said he'd had it several years and thinks it was soaked by some Arabs or Turks or some foreign dubs that used to live down by the river.

“ ‘I offered him $2 for it, and I must have looked like I wanted it, for he said it would be taking the pumpernickel out of his children's mouths to hold any conversation that did not lead up to a price of $335. I finally got it for $25.

“ ‘Jeff,' goes on Andy, ‘this is the exact counterpart of Scudder's carving. It's absolutely a dead ringer for it. He'll pay $2,000 for it as quick as he'd tuck a napkin under his chin. And why shouldn't it be the genuine other one, anyhow, that the old gypsy whittled out?'

“ ‘Why not, indeed?' says I. ‘And how shall we go about compelling him to make a voluntary purchase of it?'

“Andy had his plan all ready, and I'll tell you how we carried it out.

“I got a pair of blue spectacles, put on my black frock coat, rumpled my hair up and became Prof. Pickleman. I went to another hotel, registered, and sent a telegram to Scudder to come to see me at once on important art business. The elevator dumped him on me in less than an hour. He was a foggy man with a clarion voice, smelling of Connecticut wrappers and naphtha.

“ ‘Hello, Profess!' he shouts. ‘How's your conduct?'

“I rumpled my hair some more and gave him a blue glass stare.

“ ‘Sir,' says I. ‘Are you Cornelius T. Scudder? Of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania?'

“ ‘I am,' says he. ‘Come out and have a drink.'

“ ‘I have neither the time nor the desire,' says I, ‘for such harmful and deleterious amusements. I have come from New York,' says I, ‘on a matter of busi—on a matter of art.

“ ‘I learned there that you are the owner of an Egyptian ivory carving of the time of Rameses II. , representing the head of Queen Isis in a lotus flower. There were only two of such carvings made. One has been lost for many years. I recently discovered and purchased the other in a pawn—in an obscure museum in Vienna. I wish to purchase yours. Name your price.'

“ ‘Well, the great ice jams, Profess!' says Scudder. ‘Have you found the other one? Me sell? No. I don't guess Cornelius Scudder needs to sell anything that he wants to keep. Have you got the carving with you, Profess?'

“I shows it to Scudder. He examines it careful all over.

“ ‘It's the article,' says he. ‘It's a duplicate of mine, every line and curve of it. Tell you what I'll do,' he says. ‘I won't sell, but I'll buy. Give you $2,500 for yours.'

“ ‘Since you won't sell, I will,' says 1. ‘Large bills please. I'm a man of few words. I must return to New York to-night. I lecture to-morrow at the aquarium.'

“Scudder sends a check down and the hotel cashes it. He goes off with the piece of antiquity and I hurry back to Andy's hotel, according to arrangement.

“Andy is walking up and down the room looking at his watch.

‘Well?' he says.

“ ‘Twenty-five hundred,' says I. ‘Cash.'

“ ‘We've got just eleven minutes,' says Andy, ‘to catch the B. & O. westbound. Grab your baggage.'

“ ‘What's the hurry?' says I. ‘It was a square deal. And even if it was only an imitation of the original carving it'll take him some time to find it out. He seemed to be sure it was the genuine article.'

“ ‘It was,' says Andy. ‘It was his own. When I was looking at his curios yesterday he stepped out of the room for a moment and I pocketed it. Now, will you pick up your suit case and hurry?'

“ ‘Then,' says I, ‘why was that story about finding another one in the pawn—'

“ ‘Oh,' says Andy, ‘out of respect for that conscience of yours. Come on.' ”

The Ethics of Pig

On an east-bound train I went into the smoker and found Jefferson Peters, the only man with a brain west of the Wabash River who can use his cerebrum and cerebellum, and medulla oblongata at the same time.

Jeff is in the line of unillegal graft. He is not to be dreaded by widows and orphans; he is a reducer of surplusage. His favorite disguise is that of the target-bird at which the spendthrift or the rockless investor may shy a few inconsequentional dollars. He is readily vocalized by tobacco; so, with the aid of two thick and easy-burning brevas, I got the story of his latest Autolycan adventure.

“In my line of business,” said Jeff, “the hardest thing is to find an upright, trustworthy, strictly honorable partner to work a graft with. Some of the best men I ever worked with in a swindle would resort to trickery at times.

“So, last summer, I thinks I will go over into this section of country where I hear the serpent has not yet entered, and see if I can find a partner naturally gifted with a talent for crime, but not yet contaminated by success.

“I found a village that seemed to show the right kind of a layout. The inhabitants hadn't found out that Adam had been dispossessed, and were going right along naming the animals and killing snakes just as if they were in the Garden of Eden. They call this town Mount Nebo, and it's up near the spot where Kentucky and West Virginia and North Carolina corner together. Them States don't meet? Well, it was in that neighborhood, anyway.

“After putting in a week proving I wasn't a revenue officer, I went over to the store where the rude fourflushers of the hamlet lied, to see if I could get a line on the kind of man I wanted.

“ ‘Gentlemen,' says I, after we had rubbed noses and gathered ‘round the dried-apple barrel. 'I don't suppose there's another community in the whole world into which sin and chicanery has less extensively permeated than this. Life here, where all the women are brave and propitious and all the men honest and expedient, must, indeed, be an idol. It reminds me,' says I, ‘of Goldstein's beautiful ballad entitled ”The Deserted Village,” which says:

“ ‘Why, yes, Mr. Peters,' says the storekeeper. ‘I reckon we air about as moral and torpid a community as there be on the mounting, according to censuses of opinion; but I reckon you ain't ever met Rufe Tatum.'

“ ‘Why, no,' says the town constable, ‘he can't hardly have ever. That air Rufe is shore the monstrousest scalawag that has escaped hangin' on the galluses. And that puts me in mind that I ought to have turned Rufe out of the lockup day before yesterday. The thirty days he got for killin' Yance Goodloe was up then. A day or two more won't hurt Rufe any, though.'

“ ‘Shucks, now,' says I, in the mountain idiom, ‘don't tell me there's a man in Mount Nebo as bad as that.'

“ ‘Worse,' says the storekeeper. ‘He steals hogs.'

“I think I will look up this Mr. Tatum; so a day or two after the constable turned him out I got acquainted with him and invited him out on the edge of town to sit on a log and talk business.

“What I wanted was a partner with a natural rural make-up to play a part in some little one-act outrages that I was going to book with the Pitfall & Gin circuit in some of the Western towns; and this R. Tatum was born for the rôle as sure as nature cast Fairbanks for the stuff that kept Eliza from sinking into the river.

“He was about the size of a first baseman; and he had ambiguous blue eyes like the china dog on the mantelpiece that Aunt Harriet used to play with when she was a child. His hair waved a little bit like the statue of the dinkus-thrower in the vacation at Rome, but the color of it reminded you of the ‘Sunset in the Grand Canon, by an American Artist,' that they hang over the stove-pipe holes in the salongs. He was the Reub, without needing a touch. You'd have known him for one, even if you'd seen him on the vaudeville stage with one cotton suspender and a straw over his ear.

“I told him what I wanted, and found him ready to jump at the job.

“ ‘Overlooking such a trivial little peccadillo as the habit of manslaughter,' says I, ‘what have you accomplished in the way of indirect brigandage or non-actionable thriftiness that you could point to, with or without pride, as an evidence of your qualifications for the position?'

“ ‘Why,' says he, in his kind of Southern system of procrastinated accents, ‘hain't you heard tell? There ain't any man, black or white, in the Blue Ridge that can tote off a shoat as easy as I can without bein' heard, seen, or cotched. I can lift a shoat,' he goes on, ‘out of a pen, from under a porch, at the trough, in the woods, day or night, anywhere or anyhow, and I guarantee nobody won't hear a squeal. It's all in the way you grab hold of 'em and carry ‘em afterwards. Some day,' goes on this gentle despoiler of pig-pens, ‘I hope to become reckernized as the champion shoat-stealer of the world.'

“ ‘It's proper to be ambitious,' says I; ‘and hog-stealing will do very well for Mount Nebo; but in the outside world, M. Tatum, it would be considered as crude a piece of business as a bear raid on Bay State Gas. However, it will do as a guarantee of good faith. We'll go into partnership. I've got a thousand dollars cash capital; and with that homeward-plods atmosphere of yours we ought to be able to win out a few shares of Soon Parted, preferred, in the money market.'

“So I attaches Rufe, and we go away from Mount Nebo down into the lowlands. And all the way I coach him for his part in the grafts I had in mind. I had idled away two months on the Florida coast, and was feeling all to the Ponce de Leon, besides having so many new schemes up my sleeve that I had to wear kimonos to hold ‘em.

“I intended to assume a funnel shape and mow a path nine miles wide through the farming belt of the Middle West; so we headed in that direction. But when we got as far as Lexington we found Binkley Brothers' circus there, and the blue-grass peasantry romping into town and pounding the Belgian blocks with their hand-pegged sabots as artless and arbitrary as an extra session of a Datto Bryan duma. I never pass a circus without pulling the valve-cord and coming down for a little Key West money; so I engaged a couple of rooms and board for Rufe and me at a house near the circus grounds run by a widow lady named Peevy. Then I took Rufe to a clothing store and gent‘s-outfitted him. He showed up strong, as I knew he would, after he was rigged up in the ready-made rutabaga regalia. Me and old Misfitzky stuffed him into a bright blue suit with a Nile-green visible plaid effect, and riveted on a fancy vest of a light Tuskegee Normal tan color, a red necktie, and the yellowest pair of shoes in town.

“They were the first clothes Rufe had ever worn except the gingham layette and the butternut top-dressing of his native kraal, and he looked as self-conscious as an Igorrote with a new nose-ring.