“Some! And it ought to be the hot stuff, too. Took me the best part of ten days to frame it! There’s better comin’, too. Just take a slant at this, will you?”
*
If you think you could fall for me, Kiddo, say the word and you’re on, for life! Cupid has went and handed you my whole flock of goats, that’s no pipe. What do you say we bunch our play, from now on? You’d sure be some Classy pal for me! Any time you want to frame up with me, working Double harness, I’m your Pippin. Can’t you see me, Dovey? If we hitch, I know we can give the Census and the course of Human events a right Sassy push, all right, so don’t Shy off. But be my Molasses Bunch, till death us do pry Apart!
All I ask is your Heart and hand, and a Continuation of the swell Eats, as per this last month.
*
Ben started suddenly, with a quick glance at Pod, but the latter was far too absorbed in his reading to notice anything.
*
No use for you to be a side stem in this Hashery, when you can be the main tent in a Cottage with Ivory — Ivy — round the door. Shed that apron, kid, and I’ll show you the real silks, cut on the Bias, with fringe and doll-fixings all from Paris. Get me? Cut out the tay-ta-tay confabs with that fresh new Night clerk, same as I’ve been wise to, the past Week, and accept a Loving heart that beats only for you.
*
Ben leaned forward, his face darkening, fist clenched, and eyes staring. His mouth was set in a thin line. Pod blissfully pursued the letter.
*
Your blue lamps and hair and the Way you Double up on the rice pudding have won my heart, Baby. The coin I’ve staked you to, for that stock-game, and the eats-money I’ve slipped you, is only a taste beside what I’ll slide your way when we’re Hitched, So say the word, and —
*
The letter was never finished, for with a wordless cry Ben started up. His fist fell on the table with a bang. The dishes rattled. A cup fell crashing to the floor.
Pod, startled, dropped the letter and stared, wide-eyed.
“Wh — wh — why, what th —” he stammered blankly.
“You — you!” hissed Ben, shaking a passionate forefinger right under Pod’s nose. “So that’s your game, is it, you scab? Rat! You — I —”
“For Gawd’s sake, Ben!”
“Copping my girl right under my very eyes, you sneak!”
“Your — your —”
“Yes, mine! For three weeks now —”
“But — first thing we blew in here, Ben, I slid her a V! Every week since, another one! An’ I’ve slipped her coin for a stock-deal she’s in — an’ these here classy feeds she sends up are all for me, an’ she’s mine —”
“Ah-ha! So, eh?” Ben’s fist shook violently in the huge fellow’s astonished face. “So? But we’ll see about that, we’ll see! These feeds are for you, are they? Why, you poor boob, they’re mine! Ten a week she’s had from me — ten bucks per, you tumble? An’ as for the deal in stocks —”
“You been touched, too?”
“Have I? Why, sure! But — I didn’t know you — you — had! Why— er — see here, Pod —”
“Huh?”
Ben’s fist fell, and over his pale face a strange expression passed. His eyes sought Pod’s, and for the space of ten heartbeats their looks met in silence.
At last Ben spoke:
“Pod!”
“Ben?”
“Whoa, back! Back up, both of us!”
“You mean —”
Pod was leaning forward now, gripping the table-edge with a fat though powerful hand. On his brow the sweat had started thicker than ever, and his breath was coming hard.
“Ben, you mean we — we’re in wrong?”
“Wrong — dead wrong, so help me! There’s more behind all this soft-soap biz and all this swell night-lunch racket than we’re wise to yet.
“Pod, we’re being played against each other, both ends toward the middle! A skirt is trying to do the oceana roll over us and con each of us into thinking we’re it!
“I had it all doped to land solid with Birdy two or three weeks ago. So did you. Each of us has been passing the gilt to her —”
“Don’t, Ben — don’t!” Pod’s eyes were leaking and he stretched out an imploring hand. “I’m wise a plenty, so cut that explanation stuff! But — it hurts, Ben; hurts like — jus’ same; when I had it all doped I was goin’ to bust into married bliss — ivy round the door —”
“No more o’ that now! We’re both leery, now we’ve got a peek at the works. Just a throw-off she was steering us, Pod — that’s all. How big a haymow of the green has she raked off you already?”
“Oh, maybe four, five hundred — on Consolidated Copper. She said her cousin in Wall Street —”
“I’m in for a thousand. Only it was her uncle!”
“Ben! An’ we, we are — supposed to be — the smoothest con-workers in the U. S. A. or out!”
Bender stared a moment, then burst into a laugh of mingled bitterness and relief.
“My feed I thought it was all the time!” he cried. “You thought it was yours. Both wrong — just as wrong as in our size-up of Birdy and her affections. Who’s nuts now? Pod, Bender & Co.! And the answer is —”
Pod Slattery arose, with all the dignity of his three hundred and fifty-seven pounds, and faced his old-time pal. In his eyes still gleamed the dew of heartfelt disappointment, but his lips were smiling as he spoke.
“Ben, old boss,” said he, “the answer is, a new deal and reorganization of the film on a long lease Birdy’s. smooth O. K.
“We’ve let a skirt near trim us and if it gets out our rep ain’t worth a hoot in Tophet. She’s no ordinary poke-getter or cold hand worker, Birdy ain’t. No, this was no penny ante game she was up to, she was stakin’ to make a kill, what with all them kind woids an’ — an’ juicy raisins an’ cream —
“A classy hex, all right aimin’ to fetch down a big bundle when she had us hog tied right. In a while longer she’d had our whole roll an’ us spoutin’ our sparks for pad-money! Oh an onion, kid! But now we’re hep — an’ it’s one big hike for ours!”
“ ‘Hike’!” echoed Ben enthusiastically. “The quicker, the sooner — far, far away!”
“Pack your keister!” Pod directed dramatically, with a sweep of his arm. “This very night we flit! See her again after all them ivy visions? Nix! Us for the big getaway, P.D.Q!
“I can’t pull much of this here sentimental stuff on friendship, kid, but you know what I mean.”
“That time you dug me out o’ Sing Sing I ain’t passin’ up. No, nor the times we carried the banner in India, did a Marathon on the African veldt, dodged a smash in Yokohama, an’ — an all the hundreds of other times, some velvet, some sand paper, we been through together.
“What? Let a peek-a-boo and a hobble pry us apart? Nix not! We must ha’ been pipes, Ben, you an’ me, to even think it! All over kid! It’s you an’ me again, with no Buttinskies, to the finish! An’ my mitt to bind it!” In silence Ben took the huge and generous hand. For a minute their eyes met. Then Pod turned away.
“Ivy, hell,” he whispered under his breath and with a kind of savage joy began routing his effects out of closet and chiffonier and hurling them into his suitcase.
Untouched, the tempting night lunch stood on the table. The savory pot of tea grew cold, the sherbet melted, and the fat raisins oozed out their juice forsakenly into the thick cream, which now had lost all its charm.
Half an hour later an envelope lay on the table, addressed to the hotel management. Within it reposed coin of the realm to pay the bill up to and including the following Saturday night.
Down the fire escape, meanwhile, Pod, Ben, and the suitcases wended their way to the alley at the rear of the hotel.
And the friendly September night received them; and the great world opened out once more ahead of them — the world of ventures and of games, of losses and of winnings, of honest grafts and touches — best of a
ll, of friendship and the brotherhood of long-tried pals.
Damon and Pythias, David and Jonathan, Pylades and Orestes, Nisus and Euryalus had nothing on these two incomparable running mates as they hailed a taxi on the avenue and sped toward the Grand Central in time for the Bombshell Limited for Chicago and all points West.
Midnight found them still consuming fat cigars in the luxurious smoking-compartment of the Pullman and basking in the newfound joy of freshly consolidated partnership.
“Some getaway this time!” murmured Ben, lighting another panatela. “Speaking of narrow cracks, this latest riffle sure has all past performances riveted to the post. I seem to be sitting on a leather cushion, bo; but really I’m down on all fours, thanking Heaven!”
Pod smiled, drew from his pocket a scented, lavender sheet of paper, set it afire with a match and with it fired up afresh his smoldering cigar. He held the paper carefully till it was but a crinkling bit of black, run through with crawling sparks.
Then with great precision and gusto he dropped it into the cuspidor.
Leaning back with a huge sigh of comfort and relief he exhaled a cloud of smoke and cheerfully contemplated the roof in eloquent silence.
The pals’ great joy would without fail have leaped up one thousand per cent had they known this simple fact, viz.: that in the rice pudding on the table, back in the De Luxe, reposed at that moment enough chloral hydrate or knock-out drops to have put them sound asleep for many hours.
The drops had been considerately added unto the pudding by said Birdy McCue, in view of a large prospective reward from the new night-clerk, who — let me tell you confidentially — was none other than William J. Shearns of the Cosmos Detective Agency, which had long “wanted” them for several little matters.
“Where ignorance is bliss,” eh?
You’re on!
A FLYER IN JUNK
THE STOUT, EXPANSIVE MAN with the pompadour lighted still another cigar, leaned back against the leather cushion of the Pullman, smiling.
“As a deal, it was some deal, believe me!” he remarked, contemplating the serious-looking man with the horn spectacles, who sat opposite. “It ain’t every day o’ the week you can pull off a stunt like that, an’ get away with it!”
“You say the guy that fell for it, and that you wished the old boat off onto, claimed to be wise to cars?” asked the young fellow in the striped suit, inhaling a lungful of Egyptian smoke.
“An’ then some!” chuckled the stout man. “He wasn’t after it, for himself. No, he was buyin’ for another guy — man by the name of Robinson, from Boston. The way he put it to me, this Robinson didn’t claim to be no Solomon in the buzz-buggy-business. Didn’t trust his own judgment in buyin’ no second-hand wagon, an’ so got him to O.K. the machine. That’s what makes me laugh, even now, when I think of it!”
The stout man cachinnated, and blew smoke. He of the horn spectacles fixed an interested gaze upon him.
“‘I know ’em from tires to top,’ says this duck, when he comes to give Liz the once-over. Liz was her name. Just Liz. ‘What I say to Robinson, goes. I have cart blonk,’ says he. Well, when I got through with him, it wasn’t cart blonk he had, but cart junk. Say! They don’t slip anything much over on Jimmy Dill — that’s me!”
“Was she really on the fritz?” asked the young fellow, while the serious-looking man lent an interested ear.
“Fritz? You said somethin’! Fritziest ever! She was an old Buick model seventeen, to begin with, crop of 1912. Seven-pass., rebuilt to runabout shape. Sixth-hand when I got her from a guy that had gave her up in despair. I paid him a hundred an’ give him five three-dollar meal-tickets in my cafe. I run the Alarm Cafe in Revere, see? Battleship gray, she was. Sixty H. P., with cylinders as big as pails, an’ took a pail o’ gas, too, every time she coughed.”
“Some baby, eh?” inquired the young man, with approbation.
“Oh, boy! Two men to crank her — one to throw her an’ the other to hold his hand over the intake — an’ throwin’ her was a Sandow job, or a Gotch, at that. You had to pump up the gas by hand, every few miles, when the pump was working, which it most usually wasn’t, an’ then you’d stall till you got her patched. An’ no emergency. Only a foot brake; an’ one time she busted her universal on the downgrade in a traffic-jam. An’ maybe I didn’t sweat blood, skiddin’ her through — but she coasted right to a garage an’ stopped outside, an’ all they had to do was come out an’ haul her in!”
“So you sold her, did you?” interrogated the horn spectacles. “Unloaded her on some sucker?”
“Did I? But wait till I tell you some more about her. She had her faults, even when I got her, a-plenty. But travel? Say! I never did dare open her up, full. When she really got goin’ — an’ sometimes she could be started in less ’n fifteen minutes — why, there wasn’t no such things as hills to her. She went wild, simply wild over hills. An’ on the level stretches she dusted ’em all, Just a gray streak. Zowie! Never needed no horn, nor nothin’. Make a noise like a pewmatic riveter on a jag. Hear her two-mile off. Some boat!”
Jimmy Dill puffed smoke-arrows, heavily, and nodded strong confirmation. The serious-looking man’s interest seemed growing ever greater. Dill continued with enthusiasm:
“Liz was good, ’spite of all her kick-ups, till last spring. Then she slumped sudden, though she still kept flyin’. She was a flyer, even if she begun to show signs of bein’ junk. Tires begun to go bad, with a slow leak in one that we couldn’t fix, noway — all wearin’ down, an’ no more o’ them bolted-on kind to be had. One lug of her cylinder-casin’ cracked off, too. That was bad. Supposin’ another went, while she was doin’ sixty, an’ the engine dropped out? Flowers for yours truly.
“Magneto went on the blink, too, an’ cylinders wore crooked, so oil worked up, an’ she’d only run a few miles hittin’ on four. Then she begin coughin’ till you’d clean the plugs again. Who the devil can clean plugs every five miles? Her feed got leakin’, too, so you couldn’t pump her up without lamin’ yourself. An’ her gearshift busted, some way or ’nother, so for a while she’d only run on low — I once brought her home, sixteen mile, on low — an’ then all of a sudden she’d only run on high. After a lot o’ tinkerin’, we got her to run on low an’ high, but no second. An’ boy! The times I used to have, tryin’ to coax her from low to high!
“I begun to think I’d have to scrap her. But it was only after her radiator blew out, while I was to Ellengone out in the country, an’ I had to plug it with chewin’ gum, an’ then she took to back-firin’, an’ I had to be towed in by a fliv, on the end of thirty foot o’ barb-wire that we cut off’n a farmer’s fence, that I phoned Levitsky.
“Levitsky, the junkman, come an’ said fifty beans on the hoof, as she stood. I was strong for the fifty, but Bill Hemingway, friend o’ mine — he’s in the garridge business, Bill is — says I can maybe do better. So I canned Levitsky an’ put an ad in the paper, no price set. An’ several guys come an’ give her the o.o., an’ then blow. Till at last this here wise duck, sent by this here Robinson, arrives.
II.
“I HAS LIZ already runnin’ an’ I’m loaded for bear, when he shows up, ’cause he’s already phoned me he’s comin’, an’ I’m not takin’ no chances on not bein’ able to start her. It’s kind of noisy, down by the Alarm Cafe, with lots of electrics and et cet, so Liz don’t sound so awful conspicuous. She’s all washed an’ polished, anyhow, an’ that’s half a sale. The wise duck gives her the up-an’-down, an’ then he says, says he:
“‘Demonstrate her, will you?’
“‘Demonstrate is my middle name,’ says I. ‘All goods strictly as represented, or no sale. I wouldn’t take a dollar of any man’s money on no false misrepresentations,’ I says. ‘Money back if not sound an’ kind. Get right in, mister, an’ we’ll hop to it!’
“So the wise guy gets in, an’ I prepares to make Liz do or die, or perish in the attempt.
“I h
as her all loaded for bear, o’ course, like I said before. Got enough gas pumped inta the tank on the dash to last her five mile, an’ the plugs all clean, an’ tires all pumped hard — I’m prayin’ harder than the tires is, they won’t blow — an’ I got a new set o’ batt’ries in, an’ got her wired so that when I let on to throw her onta the mag., she’ll still be on bats. The mag.’s out o’ commission, total.
“An’ I has her on the stiff down-grade front o’ the cafe, so she’ll slip from low inta high, without makin’ no kick-up. So that’s all right. So he’s gets in, the wise duck does, an’ away we blows.
“Half-way down the grade, I shift her an’ get away with it, O. K. The noisy street camouflages the kick-up in the engine so it ain’t very raw. I pushes her out onta the boulevard, an’ lets her out, an’ boy! Does she hike? Some! The wise duck has to take his dicer off an’ hold it in his lap, to keep it, an’ the way we passes everythin’ is a wonder.
“So far, it’s pie with ice-cream on top, but my heart’s in my mouth about the big hill. Everybody always has to go into second, on that doggone hill, you see, an’ Liz ain’t got no second. I try to turn off toward the beach road, but the wise duck says, ‘No, let’s try her out on the hill,’ so that’s all off. So I decides I’ll try to rush the hill, an’ trust to prayer an’ luck, when flap-flap-flap somethin’ begins goin’, on her right hind leg.
“‘What’s that?’ asks the w. d., anxious.
“‘Oh, nothin’,’ says I, easy-like. ‘She’s maybe picked up a piece o’ hoop, or a lath, or somethin’.’
“‘Better stop an’ have a look, hadn’t you?’
“I’m sweatin’ blood. If I stop, I can’t never make that hill, an’ if I don’t, Lord knows what’ll bust. I takes chances — there ain’t nothin’ else to do — an’ charges the hill. Man! How noble old Liz answers me! Up an’ over she goes, full lung-power, an’ straightens out on the level again. Whew! But there’s more sweat on my manly brow than what the thermometer could account for!”
“You had a hard time disposing of your bunch of fossilized pig-iron, on a guarantee to return the money if not as represented, didn’t you?” inquired the gentleman with the horn glasses, a bit cynically. “Your narrative interests me, decidedly. What happened next?”
THE SUPREME GETAWAY AND OTHER TALES FROM THE PULPS Page 2
