customer, and pocket the difference.
I paid the bartender then, and in the exchange I dropped the stickpin upon the floor and that gem shattered into sufficient splinters to prove it pure glass.
I run out the door and spied that thieving skunk dashing down the street and after not a long chase, I being fleet of foot whereas he was not as quick of leg as of mind, I backed him against a wall and shoved my pistol into his breastbone.
He was sweating from the exertion and gulping air through his slack mouth, but in a right casual tone he says: “Sir, you have called my bluff.”
“And I might blow out your eye,” I says. But then I laughed, for I have always liked people of spirit, and I took back my twenty and put away my weapon. “Bunco artist born and bred,” I says.
“Well,” says he, “that is perhaps an overstatement. I was absolutely square until the age of twelve.”
“What strikes me,” I says then, “is that you have made a poor thing of it. Now that I look you over, I see your arse is almost out of your pants, your cuffs is chawed as if the dogs have been set on you many a time, and don’t I notice a hole in the upper of your shoe where you have inked your ankle so it won’t show?”
“I have seen better days,” Allardyce says, with hurt pride. “But surely my present run of ill fortune is transitory. You must admit my techniques are beyond reproach. You bought the pin readily enough.”
“True,” says I. “It was just by accident I dropped it; otherwise you’d have got away.”
He sighs deeply and says: “If it is convenient, I’d just as soon we went straightway to the police station. It distresses me to mull over my failures.”
“I was thinking, Allardyce,” I says, “I ain’t really lost by this experience, and there’s nothing that pleases me so little as to see a man’s liberty took away. I don’t hold by jails. I believe in shooting a man or letting him go scot- free. Right now I stand in want of big money, but I need a scheme. Dreaming up the latter would seem to be your specialty.”
You could see the self-esteem come back into him as I talked. He tilted his hat and manipulated his cane, and somehow the shabbiness become invisible again. Allardyce was a real good actor, and could have made his fortune in the theaters.
“Sir,” he says, slapping them doeskin gloves into his left palm and extending his right hand to me, “I am your man.”
What Allardyce suggested was pulling the brooch trick. All I had to do was go to a certain jewelry shop and buy a brooch he had already sized up.
“What will that cost?” I asks, and he says, oh, a matter of three hundred dollars, and brushes his silk-faced lapels in such a supercilious fashion that the ordinary person would never have noticed how worn they was.
“If I had three hundred,” I says, “I wouldn’t have to work a bunco.”
“My dear Jack,” says Allardyce, “in an exercise of this type you must set all your standards in proportion to the sum you intend to gain. Our aim here is two thousand dollars; therefore, to obtain three hundred in working capital is but a minor matter. Among my gifts you will find a facility for pocket-picking. I can gather the amount we need in one evening-and I anticipate your question: why, if I am so deft at this art, do I not habitually make my living from it? Why, for example, did I not filch your wallet rather than vend you the stickpin?
“Ah!” he says, “therein lies the moral crux of the matter. A man has a sense of himself, a definition. I am a swindler, Jack, and I must observe the code of my profession or I cannot live with myself. I may pick pockets only in the interest of a bunco scheme; otherwise my fingers would lose their cunning, I would soon be nabbed, and imagine my shame in being hailed before the bar of justice as a petty sneakthief.”
Allardyce was a philosophical crook, and I felt he might easily while away a couple months in sheer musing on the subject, but I was impatient for cash, so told him to get into motion, and he did and in a day or two turned up with that three hundred dollars all right, which I reckon proved his devotion to the ideal, for he could easy have drunk it up or otherwise squandered it. But once you accepted the fact that he was crooked, he was square, if you get my meaning.
Now here’s where my part come in. I took the money and went to a very high-class jewelry shop named Kaller amp; Co., where I bought that brooch which he had described to me, and there was no mistaking it: being a heart formed of rubies within a wreath of gold, and in the middle of the heart was a little diamond. They was asking four hundred, but when I offered them three, take or leave it, they took. This also established that I was right casual about the purchase. Doubtless they figured me for a rancher with some free money he was spending on a whore who took his fancy, which was not unusual in K.C.
Next day Allardyce went around to the shop and pretends to throw a fit when he finds that brooch has been sold. Oh, he must have carried this off to perfection, for as I say he was a born actor and I would have loved to see it, but we wasn’t supposed to have any connection with each other. Allardyce posed as a visiting swell from the East. He had seen the gewgaw in Kaller’s window, he said, and determined to buy it for his sweetheart, but had had to wait until his monthly five thousand come in from his father the well-known banker, etc. Now having rushed to the store with the wherewithal, he felt Kaller’s had stabbed him in the back in disposing of that pretty.
Old Kaller, bald-headed and in his high-winged collar, took personal charge. “But, sir,” he says, “we had no idea that you were interested in the piece. If only-” But Allardyce cut him off and went into a tantrum, in the course of which he refused to look at any other jewelry, threatened to discontinue his trade at Kaller’s-though he had never set foot in there before-and demanded they get him a duplicate of that missing brooch. “It was one of a kind, you know,” says shrewd old Kaller, “but let me telegraph New York. Perhaps we might persuade the craftsman to do just one more for such an ardent admirer of his work.”
When Allardyce heard “New York,” he threw another fit, and the personnel was fanning him and fetching him water, and he finally makes it known that he intends to leave K.C. next day for San Francisco where his lovely girl lives, and that brooch or a duplicate of it will be worth twice, no, three times the asking price if they can put it into his hands before he boards the noon train.
Kaller almost swallows his cravat. “Ah well,” he croaks, “it might just be possible, it might just. We were asking,” he says, the crafty old goat, “we were asking, I believe, a thousand dollars.” He pops his eyes at Allardyce as if about to suffer a seizure.
And negligent as could be, Allardyce says: “Then I’ll pay you three thousand. But enough of these petty delays, my man, you had better get cracking. Your deadline is noon tomorrow. Until then you can reach me at the Excelsior Hotel.” And presenting one of his cards, he leaves the shop.
I had made my own hotel known to Kaller in the course of making my purchase, so the next thing that jeweler does is run over to see me. Not wanting to involve little Amelia in the sordid affair, I let him into my bedroom and closed the door. She was taking one of her singing lessons with Signorina Carmella, anyway, in the parlor, and that screeching did not serve to soothe old Kaller’s nerve none.
“A terrible thing has happened, my dear Mr. Crabb,” he says. “That brooch had already been purchased by another and paid for in full, I fear, to one of my associates, although I was in ignorance of the transaction. I wonder whether I might refund your money and take it along. A terrible inconvenience, I know, and I mean to make it up to you, dear sir. Please accept any other piece of jewelry at ten per cent discount.”
I was grinning to myself at a memory of what Allardyce had told me of the bunco philosophy: that in any swindle there was two crooks, both victim and victimizer, and that you couldn’t never work a confidence scheme on a square man. Then, however, he went on to say that in all his travels he had never met an individual of the latter type. But look at old Kaller: he was out to make $2700, in return for which he’d allow me a twenty-buck deduction.
So I didn’t feel no sympathy for him. I said it was out of the question, that my darling little niece in the next room, the famous concert artist, had fell in love with that pretty and I’d rather cut my throat than take it away from her now; that the sale was proper legal and not my lookout if he run an inefficient business.
Well, at length he got to offering me more, and I says money meant nothing in this circumstance, so he increased the sum by degrees, and my only worry is that the old devil would in his desperation get a heart attack and die on my carpet before he got to two thousand, which is what Allardyce and I had decided on as a reasonable amount, for if Kaller’s profit got cut down much more than that he might smell a rodent.
He reached the destination in about two hours, and I says: “Mr. Kaller, you got yourself a deal. I can’t stand to see a human being in misery.”
