Young Wallingford

CHAPTER VII

Into the back room of a flashy saloon just off Broadway Mr. Phelps led the way, after pausing outside to post Wallingford carefully on all their new names, and here they found Billy Banting and Larry Teller in company with a stranger, one glance at whom raised Wallingford’s spirits quite appreciably, for he was so obviously made up.

He was a raw-boned young fellow who wore an out-of-date derby, a cheap, made cravat which rode his collar, a cheap suit of loud-checked clothes that was entirely too tight for him, and the trousers of which, two inches too short, were rounded stiffly out below the knees, like stove-pipes, by top-boots which were wrinkled about the ankles. Moreover, the stranger spoke with a nasal drawl never heard off the stage.

Wallingford, with a wink from Phelps, was introduced to Mr. Pickins as Mr. Mombley. Then, leaning down to Mr. Pickins with another prodigious wink at Wallingford, Phelps said in a stage-whisper to the top-booted one:

“Mr. Mombley is our engraver. Used to work in the mint.”

“Well, I’ll swan!” drawled Mr. Pickins. “I’d reckoned to find such a fine gove’ment expert a older man.”

With a sigh Wallingford took up his expected part.

“I’m older than I look,” said he. “Making money keeps a man young.”

“I reckon,” agreed Mr. Pickins, and “haw-hawed” quite broadly. “And did you really make this greenback?” he asked, drawing from his vest pocket a crinkled new ten-dollar-bill which he spread upon the table and examined with very eager interest indeed.

“This is one of that last batch, Joe,” Short-Card Larry negligently informed Wallingford, with a meaning wink. “I just gave it to him as a sample.”

“By jingo, it’s scrumptious work!” said Mr. Pickins admiringly.

“Yes, they’ll take that for a perfectly good bill anywhere,” asserted Wallingford. “Just spend it and see,” and he pushed the button. “Bring us a bottle of the best champagne you have in the house,” he directed the waiter, and with satisfaction he noted the startled raising of heads all around the table, including the head of Mr. Pickins.

“I don’t like to brag on myself,” continued Wallingford, taking on fresh animation as he began to see humor in the situation, “but I think I’m the grandest little money-maker in the city, in my special line. I don’t go after small game very often. A ten is the smallest I handle. Peters,” he suddenly commanded Phelps, “show him one of those lovely twenties.”

“I don’t think I have one of the new ones,” said Phelps, moistening his lips, but nevertheless reaching for his wallet. “I think the only twenties I have are those that we put through the aging process.”

Wallingford calmly took the wallet from him and as calmly leafed over the bills it contained.

“No, none of these twenties is from the new batch,” he decided, entering more and more into the spirit of the game, “but this half-century is one that we’re all proud of. Just examine that, Mr. Pickins,” and closing the wallet he handed it back to Phelps, passing the fifty-dollar bill to the stranger. “Billy, give me one of those twenties. I’m bound to show Mr. Pickins one of our best output.”

Badger Billy, being notorious even among his fellows as a tight-wad, swallowed hard, but he produced a small roll of bills and extracted the newest twenty he could find. During this process it had twice crossed Billy’s mind to revolt; but, after all, Wallingford was evincing an interest in the game that might be worth while.

“That’s it,” approved Wallingford, running it through his fingers and passing it over to Pickins. He got up from his place and took the vacant chair by that gentleman. “I just want you to look at the nifty imitation of engine work in this scroll border,” he insisted with vast enthusiasm, while Mr. Pickins cast a despairing glance, half-puzzled and half-bored, at the others of the company, themselves awed into silence.

He was still explaining the excellent work in the more intricate portions of the two designs when the waiter appeared with the wine, and Wallingford only interrupted himself long enough nonchalantly to toss the ten-dollar bill on the tray after the glasses were filled. Then, with vast fervor, he returned to the counterfeiting business, with the specimens before him as an inspiring text.

The waiter brought back two dollars in silver.

“Just keep the change,” said Wallingford grandly, and then, as the waiter was about to withdraw, he quickly handed up the fifty and the twenty-dollar bills to him. “Just take this twenty, George,” said he to the waiter, “and run down to the cigar-store on the corner and buy some of those dollar cigars. You might as well get us about three apiece. Then take this fifty and get us a box for The Prince of Pikers to-night. Hustle right on, now,” and he gave the waiter a gentle but insistent shove on the arm that had all the effect of bustling him out of the room. “We’ll show Mr. Pickins a good time,” he exultantly declared. “We’ll show him how easy it is to live on soft money like this.”

Wallingford had held the floor for fifteen solid minutes. Now he paused for some one else to offer a remark, his eager eye glowing with the sense of a duty not only well, but brilliantly, performed, as it roved from one to the other in search of approval. But feeble encouragement was in any other eye. Four men could have throttled him, singly and in company. Wallingford was too enthusiastic an actor. He was taking the part entirely too well, and a vague doubt began to cross the minds of the other gentlemen in the party as to whether he would do or not. It was Short-Card Larry who first recovered his poise and broke the dismal silence.

“Show him one or two of those new hundreds, Mombley,” he invited Wallingford with almost a snarl.

Wallingford merely smiled in a superior way.

“You know I never carry any but the genuine,” he said in mild reproach. “It wouldn’t do, you know. Anyhow, are we sure that Mr. Pickins wants to invest?”

Mr. Pickins drew a long breath and once more plunged into the character which he had almost doffed.

“Invest? Well, I reckon!” he nasally drawled. “If I can get twenty thousand dollars as good money as that for five, I’d be a blame fool not to take it. And I got the five thousand, too.”

Things were coming back to a normal basis now, and the others cheered up.

“Look here,” Mr. Pickins went on, and, reaching down, he drew off with much tugging one of the high boots, in the top of which had reposed a package of greenbacks: ten crisp, nice-looking five-hundred-dollar bills.

For just a moment Wallingford eyed that money speculatively, then he picked up one of the bills and slid it through his fingers.

“It’s good money, I suppose,” he observed. “You can hardly tell the good from the bad these days, except by offering to spend it. We might break one of these – say for an automobile ride.”

“No, you don’t,” hurriedly interposed Mr. Pickins, losing his nasal drawl for the moment and reaching for the bill, which he put back in the package, snapping a weak rubber band around it. “I reckon I don’t let go of one of these bills till I see something in exchange. I – I ain’t no greenhorn!”

His nasal drawl had come back, and now seemed to be the cue for all the others to affect laughter.

“To be sure he’s not,” said Mr. Phelps, reaching over to slap him on the back in all the jovial heartiness with which a greenhorn is supposed to be encouraged. “You’re wise, all right, Pickins. We wouldn’t do business with you if you weren’t. You see, we’re putting ourselves in danger of the penitentiary and we have to be careful. More than that, wise people come back; and, with a dozen or so like Mr. Pickins shoving the queer for us, we put out about all we can make. Nobody in the business, Mr. Pickins, gets as high a price for green-goods as we do, and nobody in the business keeps all their customers as we do. That’s because our output is so good.”

This, which was one of the rehearsed speeches, went off very well, and they began to feel comfortable again.

“That’s me, by Jinks!” announced Pickins, slapping his leg. “I’ll be one of your steady customers, all right. When’ll I get this first twenty thousand?”

“Right away,” said Mr. Phelps, rising. “Just wait a moment till I talk it over with the engraver and see if he has the supply ready.”

“The supply’s all right,” declared Wallingford. “These boys will ’tend to the business with you, Mr. Pickins. I’m very glad to have met you. I’ll probably see you to-night at the show. I have to go back and look after a little more engraving just now.” And, shaking hands cordially with Mr. Pickins, he rose to go.

“Wait a minute, Mombley,” said Phelps amidst a general scowl, and he walked outside with Wallingford. “Fine work, old man,” he complimented, keeping his suavity with no little effort. “We can go right in and pick our bunch of posies any minute.”

“Go right ahead!” said Wallingford heartily. “I’m glad to have helped you out a little.”

Mr. Phelps looked at him in sour speculation.

“Of course you’re in on it,” he observed with a great air of making a merely perfunctory remark.

“Me?” inquired Wallingford in surprise. “Not on your life. I only played engraver for accommodation. I thought I did a grand little piece of work, too.”

“But we can’t go through without you,” insisted Mr. Phelps desperately, ignoring the other’s maddening complacency and sticking to the main point. “It takes twenty thousand and we only have five thousand apiece. We’re looking to you for the other five.”

Wallingford looked him squarely in the eyes, with an entire change of manner, and chuckled.

“There are four reasons, Phelps, why I won’t,” he kindly explained. “The first is, I never do anything in partnership; second, I never pike; third, I won’t take a fall out of any game that has the brown-and-white-striped clothes at the end of it; fourth, Billy might not get the satchels switched right; extra, I won’t fool with any farmer that strikes a match on the sole of his boot!”

The fifth and extra reason was so unexpected and was laid before Mr. Phelps with such meaning emphasis that that gentleman could only drop his jaw and gape in reply. Wallingford laid both hands on his shoulders and chuckled in his face.

“You’re a fiercely unimaginative bunch,” he said. “Let’s don’t try to do any more business together. Just come up to my room to-night and have a friendly game of stud poker.”

At last Green-Goods Harry found his tongue.

“You go to hell!” said he.

Back in their common sitting-room, Wallingford found Daw studying some gaudy samples of stock certificates. “Blackie, did you tell this gang of yours that they didn’t drink enough to suit me?” Wallingford demanded.

Blackie grinned.

“They wanted to know why you wouldn’t warm up,” he admitted.

“I see the pretty, pretty lights at last,” Wallingford chuckled. “I was sure there was something doing when Curly Harry came up here claiming a thirst, and went so far as to drink champagne on top of a highball.”

“He’s taking stomach and liver dope right now,” Blackie guessed. “You see, these Broadway boys are handicapped when they run across a man who still has a lining. They lost theirs years ago.”

“They lost everything years ago. I’m disappointed in them, Blackie. I had supposed that these people of the metropolis had Herman the Great looking like a Bowery waiter when it came to smooth work; but they’ve got nothing but thumbs.”

“You do them deep wrong, J. Rufus Wallingford Wix,” admonished Blackie. “I’ve trailed with this crowd four or five years. They’re always to be found right here and they always have coin – whether they spend it or not.”

“They get it gold-bricking New Yorkers, then,” declared Wallingford contemptuously. “They couldn’t cold deck anybody on the rural free delivery routes. They wear the lemon sign on their faces, and when one of their kind comes west of the big hills we padlock all our money in our pockets and lock ourselves in jail till they get out of town.”

“What have they been doing to you?” asked Blackie. “You’ve got a regular Matteawan grouch.”

“They had the nerve to try to ring me in for the fall guy on a green-goods play, baited up with a stage farmer from One Hundred and Sixtieth Street,” asserted Wallingford. “Don’t they ever spring a new one here?”

Mr. Blackie Daw only laughed.

“I’m afraid they don’t,” he confessed. “They take the old ones that have got the money for years, and work in new props and scenery on them, just like they do in the theaters; and that goes for Broadway.”

“It don’t go for me,” declared Wallingford. “If they come after mine again I’ll get real peevish and take their flash rolls away from them.”

“Go to it,” invited Blackie. “They need a trimming.”

“I think I’ll hand it to them,” said Wallingford savagely, and started to walk out.

“Where are you going?” asked the other.

“I don’t know,” said Wallingford, “but I am going to scare up some excitement in the only way possible for a stranger, and that is go out and hunt for it by myself. No New Yorker knows where to go.”

In the bar Wallingford found a convivial gentleman from Georgia, lonesome like himself, with whom he became firm friends in an hour, and it was after midnight when, their friendship still further fixed by plenty of liquid cement, he left the Georgian at one of the broad, bright entrances in charge of a door-man. It being but a few blocks to his own hotel, he walked, carrying with complacent satisfaction a burden of assorted beverages that would have staggered most men.

It was while he was pausing upon his own corner for a moment to consider the past evening in smiling retrospection, that a big-boned policeman tapped him on the shoulder. He was startled for a moment, but a hearty voice reassured him with:

“Why, hello, Wix, my boy! When did you come to town?”

A smile broke over Wallingford’s face as he shook hands with the bluecoat.

“Hello, Harvey,” he returned. “I never would have looked for you in this make-up. It’s a funny job for the ex-secretary of the Filmore Coal Company.”

“Forget it,” returned Harvey complacently. “There’s three squares a day in this and pickings. Where are you stopping?”

Wallingford told him, and then looked at him speculatively.

“Come up and see me when you go off watch,” he invited. “But don’t ask for me under the name of Wix. It’s Wallingford now, J. Rufus Wallingford.”

“No!” said Harvey. “What did you do at home?”

“Not a thing,” protested Wallingford. “I can go right back to Filmore and play hop-scotch around the county jail if I want to. I just didn’t like the name, that’s all. But I want to talk with you, Harvey. I think I can throw about a hundred or so in your way.”

“Not me,” returned Harvey with a grin. “That’s the price of a murder in this town.”

“Come up, and I’ll coax you,” laughed Wallingford.

He walked away quite thoughtfully. Harvey Willis, who had left Filmore on account of his fine sense of honor – he had embezzled to pay a poker debt – seemed suddenly to fit an empty and an aching void.

CHAPTER VIII

“The fresh Hick!” observed Mr. Pickins savagely. “I’d like to hand him a bunch of knuckles.”

Mr. Pickins was not now in character, but was clad in quite ordinary good clothes; his prominent cheek-bones, however, had become two white spots in the midst of an angrily red countenance.

“I don’t know as I blame him so much,” said Phelps. “The trouble is we sized him for about the intelligence of a louse. Anybody who would stand for your Hoop-pole County line of talk wouldn’t need such a careful frame-up to make him lay down his money.”

“There’s something to that,” agreed Short-Card Larry. “I always did say your work was too strong, Pick.”

“There ain’t another man in the crowd can play as good a Rube,” protested Mr. Pickins, touched deeply upon the matter of his art. “I don’t know how many thousands we’ve cleaned up on that outfit of mine.”

“Ye-e-es, but this Wallingford person called the turn,” insisted Phelps. “The only times we ever made it stick was on the kind of farmers that work in eleven-story office buildings. You can fool a man with a stuffed dog, but you can’t fool a dog with it; and you couldn’t fool Yap Wallingford with a counterfeit yap.”

“Well,” announced Mr. Pickins, with emphatic finality, “you may have my part of him. I’m willing to let him go right back to Oskaloosa, or Oshkosh, or wherever it is.”

“Not me,” declared Phelps. “I want to get him just on general principles. He’s handed me too much flossy talk. You know the last thing he had the nerve to say? He invited us up to play stud poker with him.”

“Why don’t you?” asked Pickins.

“Ask Larry,” said Phelps with a laugh, whereat Larry merely swore.

Badger Billy, who had been silently listening with his eyes half closed, was possessed of a sudden inventive gift.

“Yes, why don’t you?” he repeated. “If I read this village cut-up right, and I think I do, he’ll take a sporting chance. Get him over to the Forty-second Street dump on a proposition to play two-handed stud with Harry there, then pull off a phoney pinch for gambling.”

“No chance,” returned Phelps. “He’d be on to that game; it’s a dead one, too.”

“Not if you work it this way,” insisted Billy, in whom the creative spirit was still strong. “Tell him that we’re all sore at Harry, here; that Harry threw the gang last night and got me put away. I’ll have McDermott take me down and lock me up on suspicion for a couple of hours, so you can bring him down and show me to him. Tell him you’ve found a way to get square. Harry’s supposed to have a grouch about that stud poker taunt and wants to play Wallingford two-handed, five thousand a side. Tell him to go into this game, and that just when they have the money and the cards on the table, you’ll pull off a phoney pinch and have your fake officer take the money and cards for evidence, then you’ll split up with him.”

Billy paused and looked around with a triumphant eye. It was a long, long speech for the Badger, and a vivid bit of creative work of which he felt justly proud.

“Fine!” observed Larry in deep sarcasm. “Then I suppose we give him the blackjack and take it all away from him?”

“No, you mutt,” returned Billy, having waited for this objection so as to bring out the clever part of his scheme as a climax. “Just as we have Dan pull off the pinch, in jumps Sprig Foles and pinches Dan for impersonating an officer. Then Sprig cops the money and the cards for evidence, while we all make a get-away.”

A long and thoughtful silence followed the exposition of this great scheme of Billy’s. It was Phelps who spoke first.

“There’s one thing about it,” he admitted: “it’s a new one.”

“Grandest little double cross that was ever pulled over,” announced Billy in the pride of authorship.

It was a matter of satisfaction, to say nothing of surprise, to Short-Card Larry to note the readiness, even the alacrity, with which young Wallingford fell into the trap. Would he accept the traitorous Mr. Phelps’ challenge if guaranteed that he would win? He would! There was nothing young Wallingford detested so much as a traitor. Moreover, he had a grouch at Mr. Phelps himself.

Short-Card Larry had expected to argue more than this, and, having argument still lying heavily upon his lungs, must rid himself of it. It must be distinctly understood that the crowd wanted nothing whatever out of this. They merely wished to see the foresworn Mr. Phelps lose all his money, so that he could not hire a lawyer to defend him, and when he was thus resourceless they intended to have him arrested on an old charge and “sent over.” They were very severe and heartless about Mr. Phelps, but they did not want his money. They would not touch it! Wallingford could have it all with the exception of the two hundred and fifty dollars he would have to pay to the experienced plain-clothes-man impersonator whom Larry, having a wide acquaintance, would secure.

Mr. Wallingford understood perfectly. He appreciated thoroughly the motives that actuated Mr. Larry Teller and his friends, and those motives did them credit. He counted himself, moreover, highly fortunate in being on hand to take advantage of the situation. Still moreover, after the trick was turned he would stand a fine dinner for the entire crowd, including Mr. Pickins, to whom Mr. Teller would kindly convey his, Mr. Wallingford’s, respects.

Accepting this commission with some inward resentment but outward pleasure, Mr. Teller suggested that the game be played off that very afternoon. Mr. Wallingford was very sorry. That afternoon and evening he had business of grave importance. To-morrow evening, however, say at about nine o’clock, he would be on hand with the five thousand, in bills of convenient denomination. Mr. Teller might call for him at the hotel and escort him to the room, although, from having had the location previously pointed out to him, Mr. Wallingford was quite sure he could find Mr. Teller’s apartment, where the contest was to take place. Left alone, Mr. Wallingford, in the exuberance of his youth, lay back in his big chair and spent five solid minutes in chuckling self-congratulation, to the great mystification of the incoming Mr. Daw, whom J. Rufus would not quite trust with his reason for mirth. Feeling the need of really human companionship at this juncture, young Wallingford called up his convivial friend from Georgia and they went out to spend another busy and pleasant afternoon and evening, amid a rapidly widening circle of friends whom these two enterprising and jovial gentlemen had already managed to attach to them. With an eye to business, however, Wallingford carefully timed their wanderings so that he should return, alone, on foot, to his own hotel a trifle after midnight.

As Mr. Teller and Mr. Wallingford, on the following evening at a few minutes before nine, turned into the house on Forty-second Street, they observed a sturdy figure helping a very much inebriated man up the stone steps just before them, but as the sturdy figure inserted a latch-key in the door and opened it with one hand while supporting his companion with the other arm, the incident was not one to excite comment. Just inside the door the inebriated man tried to raise a disturbance, which was promptly squelched by the sturdy gentleman, who held his charge firmly in a bearlike grip while Mr. Teller and Mr. Wallingford passed around them at the foot of the stairs, casting smiling glances down at the face of the perpetually-worried landlady, who had come to the parlor door to wonder what she ought to do about it.