Shorty McCabe Part 3

Doing? Wasn't a blamed thing doing there. We were just a.s.sa.s.sinatin'

time, that's all. But the Boss thought he liked it, for a while, so I had to hang on. The Boss? Oh, he's just the Boss. Guess you wouldn't know him--he hasn't been cured by three bottles of anything, and isn't much for buyin' billboard s.p.a.ce. But he's a star all right. He's got a mint somewhere, a little private mint of his own, that runs days and nights and overtime. Scotty mine? No, better'n that--defunct grandmothers and such. It's been comin' his way ever since he was big enough to clip a coupon. Don't believe he knows how much he _has_ got, but that don't worry him. He don't even try to spend the gate receipts; just uses what he wants and lets the rest pyramid.

Course, he's out of my cla.s.s in a way; but then again, he ain't. The way we come to hook up was like this: You see, when I quits Homer, I takes the first thing that comes along, which happens to be the Jericho Lamb.

He wants me to train him for his go with Gra.s.shopper Jake, and I did.

Well, we pulls it off in Denver. The Lamb he bores in like a stone crusher for five rounds. Then he stops a cross hook with his jaw and is jarred some. That brings out the yellow. Spite of all I could say, he stops rus.h.i.+n' and plays for wind and safety. Think of that, with the Gra.s.shopper as groggy as a five days old calf! Well, I saw what was coming to _him_, right there. When the bell rings I chucks my towel to a rubber and quits. I hadn't hired out for no wet nurse, and I told the crowd so.

Just as I was makin' my sneak this quiet-speakin' chap falls in alongside and begins to talk to me. First off I sized him up for one of them English Johnnies that had lost his eyegla.s.s. But that's where I was dead wrong. He wasn't no Johnnie, and he wasn't no tinhorn sport. But he was a new one on me. They don't grow many like him, I guess, so no wonder I didn't get wise right away.

"Think the Lamb's all in?" says he.

"All in!" says I. "He never had anything to put in. He was licked before the bell tapped. And me trainin' him for five weeks! I'm goin' to kick myself all the way back to New York."

"I'll help you," says he. "I backed that Lamb of yours to win."

"How much?" says I.

"Oh, only a few hundred."

"But you ain't seen him licked yet," says I.

"I'll take your word for it," says he.

Say, that was no tinhorn play, was it? He goes off and leaves his good money up, just on a flier like that.

"You're the real goods," says I.

"I can return the sentiment," says he.

So we took the midnight East. When we got the morning papers at Omaha we saw that the Lamb only lasted half-way through the seventh, and 'possumed the count at that. Well, we got some acquainted before we hit Chicago, and by the time we'd landed in Jersey City I'd signed articles with him for a year. He calls it secretary, but I holds out for sparrin'

partner.

Oh, he can handle the mitts some, all right; none of your parlor Y. M. C. A. business, either, but give and take. He strips at one hundred and forty and can stand punishment like a stevedore. But, of course, there's no chance of ever gettin' him on the platform. He likes to go his four rounds before dinner, just to take the drab coloring off the world in general. That's the way he puts it.

Take him all around, he's a thoroughbred. I know that much, but after that I don't follow him. I used to wonder sometimes. Give most Johnnies his pile and turn 'em loose, and what would they do? They'd wear out the club window-sills, and take in pink teas, and do the society turn. But not for him. He's a mixer, the Boss is. He wants to see things, all kinds.

Sometimes he lugs me along and sometimes he don't. It all depends on whether I'd fit in. When he heads for Fifth Avenue I know I'm let out.

But when he gets into a sack coat and derby hat I'm bettin' that maybe we'll fetch up somewheres on the East Side. Perhaps it'll be the grand annual ball of the Truck Drivers' a.s.sociation, or just one of them Anarchist talkfests in the back room of some beer parlor. There's no telling. We may drink muddy coffee out of d.i.n.ky bra.s.s cups with a lot of Syrian rug sellers down on Was.h.i.+ngton Street, or drop into the middle of a gang of sailors down on Front Street.

And I'm no bodyguard, mind. The Boss ain't in much need of that. But he likes to have some one to talk to, and I guess most of his friends don't go in for such promiscuous visitin' lists as he does. I like it well enough, but where _he_ gets any fun out of it I can't see. I put it up to him once, and what do you suppose he says? Asks me if I ever heard of a duck by the name of Panzy de Lean.

"Sounds kind of familiar," says I. "Don't he run a hotel or something down to Palm Beach?"

"You're warm," says the Boss, "but you've mixed your dates. Old Panzy struck the east coast about four hundred years before our friend Flagler annexed it. And he wasn't in the hotel business. Exploring was his line.

He was looking for a new kind of mineral water that he was going to call the Elixir of Life. Well, in some ways Panzy and I are alike."

It was a josh, all right, that he was handin' out, but he meant somethin' by it, for the Boss ain't the kind to talk just for the sake of making a noise. I never let on but what I was next. Later in the season I had a chance to come back at him with it, for along in February we got under way for Palm Beach ourselves.

"Goin' to take a hack at the 'lixir business?" I says.

"No, Shorty," says he. "Just going to dodge a few blizzards and watch the mob."

But he didn't like it much, being in that push, so we took a jump over to Bermuda, where everything's so white it makes your eyes ache. That didn't suit him, either.

"Shorty," says he one day, "you didn't sign for any outside tour, but I've got the go fever bad. Can you stand it for awhile in foreign parts?"

"I'm game," says I, not knowing what I was to be up against.

So we hiked back to New York and Mister 'Ankins--he's the lady-like gent that stays home an' keeps our trousers creased, an' juggles the laundry bag and so forth, when we're there--Mr. 'Ankins he packs a couple of steamer trunks and off we starts.

Well, we hit a lot of outlandish places, like Paris and Berlin; and finally, when things began to warm up some, and I knew by the calendar that the hokey-pokey men had come out on the Bowery, we lands in Monte Carlo. Say, I'd heard a lot about Monte Carlo on and off--there was a song about it once, you know--but if that's the best imitation of Phil Daly's they can put up over there, they'd better go out of business. Not that the scenery isn't bang-up and the police protection O. K., but the game--well, I've seen more excitement over a ten-cent ante.

The Boss didn't care much for that sort of thing anyway. He touched 'em up for a stack or two, but almost went to sleep over it. It wasn't until Old Blue Beak b.u.t.ted in that our visit began to look interestin'. He was a count, or a duke, or something, with a name full of i's and l's, but I called him Blue Beak for short. The Boss said for a miniature word painting that couldn't be bettered. Never saw a finer specimen of hand-decorated frontispiece in my life. It wasn't just red, nor purple.

It was as near blue as a nose can get. Other ways, he was a tall, skinny old freak, with a dyed mustache and little black eyes as s.h.i.+fty as a fox terrier's. He was as polite, though, as a book agent, and as smooth as the business side of a banana skin.

"What's his game," says I to the Boss, after Blue Beak and him had swapped French conversation for an hour. "Is it gold bricks or green goods?"

"My friend, the count," says the Boss, "wants to rent us a castle, all furnished and found; a genuine antique, with a pedigree that runs back to Marc Antony."

"A castle!" says I. "What's that the cue to? And how did he guess you were a come-on?"

"Every American is a come-on, Shorty," says the Boss. "But this is a new proposition to me. However, I mean to find out. I've told him to come back after dinner."

And old Blue Beak had his memory with him, all right. He came back. He and the Boss had a long session of it. In the morning the Boss says to me:

"Shorty, throw out your chest; you're going to live in a castle for a while."

Then he told me how it happened. Blue Beak wasn't any con. man at all, just one of those hard-up gents whose names look well in a list of guests, but don't carry weight with the paying teller. He was in such a rush to get the ranch off his hands, though, that price didn't seem to figure much. That's what made the Boss sit up and take notice. He was a great one for wanting to know why.

"We'll start to-day," says he.

So off we goes, moseyin' down into It'ly on a b.u.m railroad, staying at b.u.mmer hotels, and switching off to a rickety old chaise behind a pair of animated frames that showed the S. P. C. A. hadn't got as far as It'ly yet. Think of riding from the Battery to White Plains in a Fifth Avenue stage! That would be a chariot race to what we took before we hove in sight of that punky castle. After that it was like climbing three sets of Palisades, one top of the other, on a road that did the corkscrew all the way.

"That's your castle, is it?" says I, rubberin' up at it. "Looks like a storage warehouse stranded on Pike's Peak. Gee, but I wouldn't like to fall out of one of those bedroom windows! You'd never hit anything for an hour. Handy place to have company, though; wouldn't have to put on the potatoes until you saw 'em coming. So that's a castle, is it? I don't wonder old Blue Beak had a lot of conversation to unload. If I live up there all summer I shall acc.u.mulate enough talk to last me the rest of my life."

"Oh, I don't imagine we'll be lonesome," puts in the Boss. "I fancy I caught sight of one or two of our neighbors on the way."

"You did?" says I. "Where?"

"Behind the rocks," says he, kind of snickering.

But I never savvied. I'd had my eyes glued to that dago Waldorf-Astoria balanced up there on that toothpick of a mountain. I had a batty idea that the next whiff of breeze would jar it loose. But when they'd opened up a gate like the double doors of an armory, and let us in, I forgot all that. Say, that castle was the solidest thing I ever run across. The walls were so thick that the windows looked like they were set at the end of tunnels. In the middle was a big court, such as they have in these swell new apartment houses, and a lot of doors and windows opened on that.

"Much as 'leven rooms and bath, eh?" says I.

"The Count a.s.sures me that there are two hundred and odd rooms, not reckoning the dungeons," said the Boss. "I hope we'll find one or two of them fit to live in."

We did, just about that. A white-headed old villain, who looked as if he'd just escaped from a "Pirates of Penzance" chorus--Vincenzo, he called himself--took our credentials and then showed us around the shop.