Kid Scanlan Part 25

"Not to give you a short answer," I b.u.t.ts in, "but how about the insane asylum over there?" I points to the buildin'. "Do we see that or don't we?"

Right away he straightens up and sticks his finger at it.

"It takes exactly twelve, temptin' minutes to completely compose and accurately a.s.semble a loaf!" he shouts. "We never heard of waste, and efficiency was born in this factory. The only thing that loafs here is the bread! Each eager employee has his own particular part to perform and that accounts for the amazin' and awesome accuracy with which we bake the beautiful bread. Step this way!"

"Believe me!" says the Kid, "I wish I had a line of patter like that!

'Amazin' and awesome accuracy'!" he repeats. "Do you get that?"

Right then about a dozen dames and their consorts come breezin' in the main entrance. Offhand, they look like the hicks that gives the "Seein' New York" busses a play, and when the runt spots them he ducks and grabs my arm.

"C'mon!" he says. "Shake it up! If them b.o.o.bs see me, I'll have to show 'em all over the plant! That's a gang of them Snooks' Tourists, seein' the world for fourteen eighty-five a-piece, breakfast at hotel on third mornin' out and bus from train included! Most of them is wisenheimers from Succotash Crossin', Mo.; and they're out to see that they don't get cheated. They're gonna see everything like it says on the ticket, and some of 'em is ready to sue Snooks because they got somethin' in their eye from lookin' out the train window and missed eight telegraph poles and a water tank on account of it. The rest of them sits around knockin' everything on general principles and claimin'

the thing is a fake. Then there'll be one old guy in the party with a trick horn he holds to his ear, and, when I get all through tellin' 'em about the mixin' shop, the deef guy will say, 'Hey? What was that about the airs.h.i.+p again?' There will also be three veteran school-teachers which will want samples of the bread and hide out a couple of rolls on the side. And then one young married couple which started sayin' 'Wonderful!' when the train pulled out of the old home town and which has said nothin' else but that since! No, sir! I'm off them tourists--c'mon, sneak around here!"

He boldly walks into the buildin' where all the noise is comin' from, and not wantin' to act yellah before strangers we followed him in.

They was a lot of things in there and if you ever make the town, Joe Sapp will show 'em to you. He has to, in order to eat. But the only thing I remember was the way them lovely, luxurious loaves was artistically a.s.sembled, and I'll remember that little item till the insurance company pays off!

They was a great, big machine in the middle of the floor and that was the thing that was makin' the bread and noise. A half dozen of them skilled Scandinavians stood away up on a gallery at one end and their job was of a pourin' nature. They was all dressed in white and wore little trick hats on which it said this, "No Human Hands Touch It." I didn't know whether it meant the skilled Scandinavians or the beautiful bread.

"The most marvelous, magnificent, mammoth invention of the age!" bawls the runt so's we could hear him over the noise. "Here is where the beautiful bread is blissfully baked by the wonderful workmen! This machine cost the sensational sum of half a million dollars, and its capacity is a trifle over five hundred finely finished luscious loaves each and every--"

That's all I heard because I went in a trance from watchin' the thing.

I never seen nothin' like it before and I know darn well I never will again. Listen! Them skilled Scandinavians poured in raw wheat at one end of this here machine, and it come out the other end, steamin' hot bread! Some machine, eh? Not only that, but when it come out, it was baked, labelled, wrapped in oil paper and smellin' most heavenly from that generous gob of Gazoopis, as the runt said.

I dragged the Kid outside and we started for the railroad station without comment. As we pa.s.sed out the door, we heard the runt screamin', probably thinkin' we was still there.

"One section reduces the wheat to flour, another mixes the dough, it pa.s.ses on to the steam ovens and then what happens? _Bread_! Over here--"

The Kid stops all of a sudden, takes a hitch in his belt and looks back at the shop.

"h.e.l.l!" he says. "They _can't_ make no bread like that!"

"You seen 'em do it, didn't you?" I asks him, although I was thinkin'

the same thing myself.

"Even at that," he comes back, "I don't believe it!"

We walks on a little ways, and the Kid stops again.

"I certainly wish I could talk like that little runt!" he shoots out.

"Take it from me, that bird is there forty ways. He's got Webster lookin' like a dummy!"

He keeps on mutterin' to himself as we breeze up to the station, and, when I lean over to get an earful I hear him sayin', "They're all simple, sa.s.sy and suckers! We feed 'em oranges, oatmeal and olives!"

So, as I said before, they _may_ be such a thing as ghosts. After watchin' that bread bakin' machine at play I'll go further than that.

There may be _anything_!

One day at the trainin' camp, a couple of weeks after we hit New York, a handler comes to me and says they's two guys outside that wants to see the Kid. I hopped out to take a flash at 'em, but the Kid has been reached, and when I come on the scene he's shakin' hands with 'em. One of these guys was dressed the way the public thinks bookmakers and con men doll up and he wore one of them sweet, trustin' innocent faces like you see on the villain in a dime novel. He looked to me like he'd steal a sunflower seed from a blind parrot.

But it was the other guy that was the riot to me.

He was tall and lanky, dressed all in black like the pallbearer the undertaker furnishes, and the saddest-lookin' b.o.o.b I ever seen in my life! If he wasn't the original old Kid Kill-Joy, he was the bird that rehea.r.s.ed him, believe me! Y'know just from lookin' at this guy, a man would get to thinkin' about his past life, the time he throwed the baby down the well when but a playful child, how old his parents was gettin'

and the time Shorty Ellison run off with the red-headed dame that lived over the butcher's. You wished you had saved your money or somebody else's, suddenly findin' out that it was a tough world where a poor man didn't have a Chinaman's chance, and you wondered if death by drownin'

was painful or not.

That's the way it made you feel when you just looked at this guy. Ever see one of 'em?

He had a trick of sighin'. Not just ordinary heaves, but deep, dark and gloomy sighs that took all the life out of whoever he sighed at.

If they had that bird over in Europe, they never would have been no war, because when he started sighin', n.o.body would have had enough ambition left to fight. Every time he opened his mouth I thought he was gonna say, "Merciful Heaven help us all!" or somethin' like that.

But he didn't. He just sighed.

The Kid tells me the riot of color was Honest Dan Leduc, and that he was the best behaved guy that ever spent a week end in Sing Sing, where he had gone every now and then to study jail conditions at the request of thirteen men, the same bein' a judge and a jury. The sad-lookin'

b.o.o.b was Professor Pietro Parducci, the well known medium.

"Medium what?" I says, when the Kid pulls that one.

The Kid frowns at me and turns to his new found friends.

"Don't mind Foolish here," he tells 'em, "he's got the idea that everything is crooked. He thinks the war was a frame-up for the movies, and the Kaiser got double-crossed, but he ain't a bad guy at that. He knows more about makin' money than a lathe hand at the mint."

He jerks his thumb at Honest Dan and swings around on me. "This guy and me was brung up together," he explains, "and before I went into the fight game we was as close as ninety-nine and a hundred. He's been all over the world since then, he says so himself, but just now he's up against it. It seems he was runnin' a pool room on Twenty-Eighth Street and he give the wrong winner of the Kentucky Derby to the precinct captain. The next mornin' the captain give every cop in the station house a axe and Dan's address. His friend here is a now, whosthis and--"

Honest Dan pulls what I bet he thought was a pleasant smile. It reminded me more of a laughin' hyena.

"One minute!" he b.u.t.ts in. "My friend, the world-renowed Professor Parducci, is a medium, a mystic and a swami. He's the seventh son of a seventh son, born with a veil and spent two years in Indiana with the yogi. He can peer into the future or gaze back at the past. He is in direct communication with the spirits of the dear departed and as a crystal gazer and palmist he stands alone!"

"That's a great line of patter, Dan," says the Kid, "but we met a guy on the trip back that had the English language layin' down and rollin'

over when he snapped his fingers. Generous gobs of Gazoopis and likable, loyal Lithuanians! Can you tie that?"

I was still lookin' over the gloomy guy with the name that sounded like a brand of olive oil, and I decided he was the bunk. I asked him could he tell my fortune, and he draws himself up and claims he's not in harmony just now. That was the tip-off to me, and I figures he has come out to take the Kid for his bankroll. I knowed he couldn't tell no fortunes the minute I seen him. He didn't look to me as if he could tell his own name, and I bet all the spirits he ever communicated with was called private stock. The end of his nose was as red as a four alarm fire and the back of his collar was all wore off from where he had kept throwin' back his head so's the saloon keepers could meet expenses. Honest Dan said he couldn't speak much English, so I guess he had stopped at "I'll have the same" and "Here's a go!"

Well, I had the right dope, because the next week the Kid goes down to the bank and draws out five thousand bucks to set Honest Dan and the professor up in business with. They was gonna open a swell fortune-tellin' joint on Fifth Avenue. I said the thing sounded crooked to me, and the Kid got sore and told me Honest Dan couldn't do nothin' like that, it wasn't in him. He showed me where Dan had always got time off for good conduct, no matter what jail he was in.

The professor brightens up for a minute when the Kid hands over the roll, but after that he went right back into the gloom again.

Honest Dan gives the Kid a receipt for the sucker money and him and his trick medium goes on their way. After a while, I forgot about 'em.

The Kid fights Edwards and a couple of more tramps and knocks 'em all kickin' and we're just gonna grab one of them "See America Firsts" for the coast when some club promoter goes crazy and offers us ten thousand iron men to fight Joe Ryan. The Kid would have fought the Marines for half of that, so we run all the way to the club and signed articles whiles the guy that hung up the purse was still wis.h.i.+n' he had stayed on the wagon.

The Kid had got Professor Parducci to fix him up with a few love charms and owls' ears by which he was gonna make himself solid with Miss Vincent. In fact Scanlan fell so hard for the medium stuff that when the professor told him to get at all cost a lock of Miss Vincent's hair clipped at eighteen minutes after eleven on a rainy Sunday night, he writes out to her and asks her to send him a lock cut just that way!

When he wasn't pesterin' the professor on how to win the movie queen, he was goin' around mutterin', "Loyal, likeable Lithuanians and generous gobs of Gazoopis!" until the newspaper guys wrote that Kid Scanlan would be a mark for the first good boy he fought, because like everybody else that was a sudden success, he had took to usin'

stimulants which is only sold on a doctor's prescription. On the level, he'd git a wad of paper and sit around all night with a dictionary, writin' down all the words that begin with the same letter and then he'd git up and repeat that stuff for a hour.

One afternoon we went downtown to look over this joint run by Honest Dan and the professor. It was in one of them studio buildings on Fifth Avenue near Twenty-Eighth Street, and the rent they was payin' for it would have kept the army in rubber heels for six years. They's a long line of autos outside and the inmates was streamin' in and out of the place like a crowd goin' to see the beloved rector laid out. Some of the dames would be familiar to you, if you've been readin' the box scores in the latest divorce melees, or the lineup of the committee for the aid of the Esquimaux victims of the war.

We get in a elevator, and, floatin' up to the roof, walk down what would have been a fire trap on the East Side, and here we are at Professor Parducci's Temple of the Inner Star. A couple of West Indian hall boys, who's gag line was "Say-hib," lets us in. They was dressed in sheets and had towels twisted around their heads and smelled strongly of gin. Pretty soon Honest Dan comes out and shakes hands all around. Except for his face, you'd never know it was the same guy.

His hair is brushed all the way back like the guys that poses for the underwear ads and he's dressed in a black suit that fit him better than most of his skin. In his s.h.i.+rt front they's a diamond that looked like a young arc light, and he had enough gems on his hands to make J. P.

Morgan gnash his teeth.

He told me that him and the professor wasn't doin' no more business than a guy would do in Hades with the ice water concession, and that Barnum was wrong when he said they was a sucker born every minute.