go home and hide.
On the way, I ast her how much she was in so far.
“Just ten thousand,” she says.
“Ten thousand!” I said. “Why, they was only one piece of scenery and that looked like they’d bought it secondhand from the choir boys’ minstrels. They couldn’t of spent one thousand, let alone ten.”
“We had to pay the theater a week’s rent in advance,” she says. “And Jimmy give five thousand to a man for the idear.”
“The idear for what?” I ast.
“The idear for the play,” she said.
“That stops me!” I says. “This baby furnishes idears for all the good actors in the world, but when he wants one for himself, he goes out and pays $5,000 for it. And if he got a bargain, you’re Mrs. Fiske.”
“Who sold him the idear?” ast Ella.
“He wouldn’t tell me,” says Kate.
“Ponzi,” I said.
Ralston called Kate up the next noon and made a date with her at the theater. He said that he was sorry he’d been rough. Before she went I ast her to give me a check for the forty thousand she had left so’s I could buy back some of her bonds.
“I haven’t got only $25,000,” she says. “I advanced Jimmy fifteen thousand for his own account, so’s he wouldn’t have to bother me every time they was bills to meet.”
So I said: “Listen: I’ll go see him with you and if he don’t come clean with that money, I’ll knock him deader’n his play.”
“Thank you!” she says. “I’ll tend to my own affairs alone.”
She come back late in the afternoon, all smiles.
“Everything’s all right,” she said. “I give him his choice of letting me be in the play or giving me my money.”
“And which did he choose?” I ast her.
“Neither one,” she says. “We’re going to get married.”
“Bridget” went into the ashcan Saturday night and the wedding come off Monday. Monday night they left for Boston, where the Follies was playing. Kate told us they’d took Ralston back at the same salary he was getting before.
“How much is that?” I ast her.
“Four hundred a week,” she says.
Well, two or three days after they’d left, I got up my nerve and says to the Mrs.:
“Do you remember what we moved to the Big Town for? We done it to see Life and get Katie a husband. Well, we got her a kind of a husband and I’ll tell the world we seen Life. How about moseying back to South Bend?”
“But we haven’t no home there now.”
“Nor we ain’t had none since we left there,” I says. “I’m going down and see what’s the first day we can get a couple of lowers.”
“Get uppers if it’s quicker,” says the Mrs.
So here we are, really enjoying ourselfs for the first time in pretty near two years. And Katie’s in New York, enjoying herself, too, I suppose. She ought to be, married to a comedian. It must be such fun to just set and listen to him talk.
A Frame-Up
I
I suppose you could call it a frame. But it wasn’t like no frame that was ever pulled before. They’s been plenty where one guy was paid to lay down. This is the first I heard of where a guy had to be bribed to win. And it’s the first where a bird was bribed and didn’t know it.
You know they’ve postponed the match with Britton. Nate said at first that his boy wasn’t ready yet, but the papers all kidded him. Because anybody that seen Burke in the Kemp fight knows he’s ready. So Nate had to change his story and say Burke had hurt one of his hands on Kemp’s egg, and he wasn’t going to take no chance boxing again till he was OK, which mightn’t be for a couple of months. Say, Kemp’s head may be hard, but it ain’t hard enough to hurt one of them hands of Burkey’s. He could play catch with Big Bertha.
No, they’s another reason why Nate ast for a postponement of the Britton date. It’s got to be another frame-up that may take a long w’ile to fix, and he ain’t got no plans made yet. And till he’s all set, he’d be a dumbbell to send Burke against a man as good as Jack Britton.
The papers has printed a lot of stuff about Burke—how he ain’t only been boxing a little over a year, and won’t be twenty-one till next July, and five or six bouts is all he’s been in, and now look at him, offered a match for the welterweight championship and $10,000 win, lose or draw! But if they knew Burke like some of us knows him, they could write a book. Because he certainly is Duke of the Cuckoos and the world’s greatest sap. How they got him ready for the Kemp bout is a story in itself, but it won’t come out till he’s through with the game. So what I tell you is between you and I.
It was one afternoon about a year ago. Bill Brennan was in Kid Howard’s gymnasium in Chi, working out, and they was a gang looking on. Howard seen one boy in the crowd that you couldn’t help from noticing. He was made up for one of the hicks in Way Down East. He’d bought his collar in Akron and his coat sleeves died just south of his elbow. From his pants to his vest was a toll call. He hadn’t never shaved and his w’iskers was just the right number and len’th to string a violin. Thinks Howard to himself: “If you seen a stage rube dressed like that, you’d say it was overdone.”
Well, it got late and the gang thinned out till finally they wasn’t nobody left but Howard and this sap. So Howard ast him if he wanted to see somebody.
“Yes,” said the kid. “I want to see a man that can learn me to fight.”
So Howard
