Lewis Alfred Henry
Sandburrs and Others
“Bowl, I I I I I I.”
“Burg, I I I I.”
It was Bowlder’s deal. He riffled the cards with the deftness of one who plays often and well.
“Bound to settle it this time!” said the burglar. “The score stands 6 to 4. You bet your life! I’ll stand on the bare jack if I get it.”
Bowlder threw the cards around and turned trump with a snap. It was the jack of clubs.
The burglar looked at it wistfully, even sadly.
“That’s square, is it?” he said to Bowlder in a tone of half reproach. “You ain’t the party to go and turn a jack on a poor crook from the bottom of the deck, and you only one to go?”
Bowlder assured him the transaction was perfectly honest.
“Yes, I guess it was,” said the burglar, rising. “I was watching you, and I guess it was straight. It’s just my luck, that’s all. Well! I must go; it’s getting along towards 4: 30 o’clock.”
“Have a drink!” said Bowlder, “and take another cigar!”
The cracksman took a drink. Then he selected a cigar from Bowlder’s proffered case.
“If it’s all the same to youse,” said the burglar, “I’ll smoke this later on – after breakfast.” And he put the cigar in his pocket.
“Here; let me show you out this way,” said Bowlder, leading the way to the front basement door.
“I hates to ask it of a stranger,” said the burglar, as he hesitated just outside the door, “but the Eight’ Avenoo cars’ll be runnin’ in a little while now, and would you mind lendin’ me a nickel? I lives down be the Desbrosses Ferry.”
Of course Bowlder would lend him car-fare. This somewhat raised the burglar’s spirits, made sad by seven-up. As he closed the door behind him, the burglar looked back at Bowlder.
“Do you know, pard,” he said, “if it wasn’t for my weakness for gamblin’, I’d been a rich man a dozen times.”
ANGELINA McLAURIN
(By the Office Boy)
Angelina McLaurin’s was a rare face; a beautiful face. It had but one defect: Angelina’s nose was curved like the wing of a gull. This gave her an air of resolution and command that affected the onlooker like a sign which says: “Look out for the engine.”
Still, Angelina McLaurin was bewitchingly lovely, a result much aided in its coming about by a form so admirably upholstered that to look upon her would have made Diana tired.
It was a soft, sensuous September afternoon. Angelina McLaurin was impatiently holding down a richly cushioned chair in the library of the noble McLaurin mansion – one of those stately piles which are the pride of Washington Heights. She was awaiting the coming of her affianced husband, George Maurice St. John.
“Why does he prove so dilatory?” she murmured. “Methinks true love would not own such leaden feet!”
As Angelina McLaurin arose to gaze from the window she rocked on the tail of the ample Angora cat.
The cat made it a point to hang out in the library every afternoon. On this occasion, while Angelina McLaurin was dreaming of her lover, the cat had taken advantage of her abstraction to deftly bestow his tail beneath the rocker of her chair. When Angelina arose, as stated, the cat got the worst of it.
As the rocker came down on the cat’s tail, the cat exploded into observations in Angorese that are unfit for these pages. Angelina was not only startled out of herself, but almost out of her frock. Angelina and the cat arose hastily, and stood there panting.
As the shrieks of the wronged exile from Angora were uplifted into space, the door of the library burst violently open.
“What is the matter, dearest? Are you injured? Why do you cry for help?”
It was George Maurice St. John who asked the question. As he did so, he caught Angelina McLaurin in his powerful arms, while the Angora cat, his worst fears now realised, chased himself down the hall with tail excited to lamp-cleaner size.
“What is it, love?” asked George Maurice St. John, as he tenderly unloaded his delicious burden onto a sofa, “Speak! it is the voice of your George who bids you. Has any one dared to insult the coming bride of a St. John?”
“Bear with me, George!” she whispered. “Believe me, I will be better anon!”
After a few moments she recovered, and was able to smile through her tears at the alarm of her dear one. Then she told George all: how the cat had been ass enough to leave his tail lying around loose while asleep; how, in the intensity of her waiting, she had put a crimp in it with the fell rocker of the chair; and how the cat had been drawn into statements, by sheer dint of agony, which it was impolitic as well as useless to repeat.
“So I was just in time, Angelina, to relieve both you and the cat of what was doubtless an awkward situation.” And George Maurice St. John laughed gaily.
Then he kissed her with a fervour that left nothing to be wished for, and Angelina took a brace and sat erect on the sofa.
“I feel better now!” she remarked.
George tried to get in another kiss, but she stood him off.
“Don’t crowd your luck, dear!” she said, with a sweet softness. “I am yours for ever, and there is not the slightest need for any excess of osculatory zeal. You are to have me with you always, so set a brake or two and take the grades easy.”
Thus repulsed, George Maurice St. John sat abashed. A pained look seamed his features; he bit his lips and was silent.
Daylight became twilight, and twilight retreated into the darkness of a new night. It struck eight o’clock in the adjoining tower, and George Maurice St John was a-hungered. His stomach was the first to tip it off to him.
“Don’t we feed to-night?” asked George Maurice St. John.
The lovers for two hours had chattered aimlessly, as ones wandering in a wilderness of bliss. This was the first pointed remark.
“Anon! love; we will feed anon!” replied Angelina McLaurin dreamily. “But, George, before we get in our gustatory work, I would a word with you – indeed! sundry words.”
“Aim low, and send ‘em along!” said George. “What is it my Queen would learn from her slave?”
In his ecstacy he achieved a “half Nelson” on the lovely girl, and caught her in the back of the neck with a kiss.
The Angora cat, who was stealthily threading the hall, intending to play a return game with the library rug, gave a great convulsive start, at the kiss, which carried him out of the mansion, and over the alley fence.
“They’re a mark too high for me!” said the Angora to himself.
Then inflating his lungs to the last limit of expansion, the Angora sent a song of invitation down the line that set every Tabby in the block to washing her face and combing her ears.
“Your Queen wants a square heel-and-toe talk, George,” said the sweet girl, as she tucked up her silken locks, dishevelled by his caresses into querulous little rings. “And your Queen wants straight goods this time, and no guff! Oh, darling!” continued Angelina McLaurin in a passionate outburst, “be square with me, and make me those promises upon which my life’s happiness depends!”
George Maurice St. John strained Angelina to his bosom.
“I’ll promise anything!” he said. “What wouldst thou have me do? My life, my fortune, my honour – my all, I lay at your feet! Monkey with them as thou wilt.”
“Then listen!” said Angelina.
“George, we are to be wedded in a month, are we not?”
“We are!” he cried exultantly; and again he essayed the “half Nelson,” and attempted to bury his nose in her mane.
“Don’t get gay, George!” she said mournfully, as she broke George’s lock, and gently but firmly pushed his bows off a point; “don’t get funny! but hear me.”
“Go on,” said George, and his tones showed that his failure pierced him like a javelin. “We are to be wedded in a month. What then, lady?”
“George,” said Angelina McLaurin, and the tear-jewels shone in her eyes, “don’t think me unwomanly, but you know how I am fixed; – father and mother both dead! I am an orphan, George, and must heel-and-handle myself.”
“Even so!” said George, and his face showed his sympathy.
“Then, George, before we take that step to the altar,” she went on steadily enough, but with a quaver in her voice which his ear, made sensitive by great love, did not fail to detect: “before we take that step, I say, from which there is no retreat, I must know certain things. You must make me certain promises.”
“Name them,” he whispered, and his deep voice overran her like a melody.
“Then, George,” she said, “is it too much to ask that $100,000 worth of property be settled upon me at this time?”
“My solicitors have already received my instructions to make it a million.” George Maurice St. John’s voice dwelt fondly on the settlement. “It is but a beggarly ante in such a game of table-stakes as this!” This time Angelina McLaurin did not decline his endearments. When he let up, she continued:
“And it’s dead sure I go to the Shore each summer?”
“It is a welded cinch,” he replied, as he drew her nearer to him. “You take in the coast from Bar Harbour to the Florida Keys.”
“And servants?”
“A mob shall minister unto thee,” he said.
“Then I have but one more boon, George,” she murmured, “grant that, and I am thine forever.”
“Board the card!” cried George; “I promise before you ask.”
“Say not so,” she said with a sweet sadness; “but muzzle your lips and listen. You must quit golf.”
“What!” shrieked George, with an energy that sent the Angora backward off a shed-roof of dubious repute, from which he was carolling to his low companions; “what!” he repeated. “Woman, think!”
“I have thought, George,” responded Angelina Mc-Laurin, with an air of sorrowful firmness. “There is but one alternative: saw short off, – saw short off on golf, or give me up forever!”
“Is this some horrid dream?” he hissed, as he strode up and down the library.
At last he paused before her.
“Woman,” he said sternly, “look on me! Is this some lightsome bluff, or does it go? Dost mean it, woman?”
“Ay! I mean it!” answered Angelina, while her cheek paled and her breath came quick and fast. “Don’t make any mistake on that; I mean it. My talk goes. And my hand is off my chips.”
“Is this your love?” he sneered, bitterly.
“It is,” she faltered. “I have spoken, and I abide your answer.”
“Then, girl,” said George Maurice St. John, and his words were cold and hard, “all is over between us. You would drive me into a corner and take away my golf! I say No! No! a thousand times, No!”
At this outbreak the curve in Angelina’s nose became more intense. She dried her eyes. Her features, too, became as flint. She even cut loose a low, mocking laugh.
“Be it so!” she said; “sirrah, take your ring!”
He seized the bauble and ground it beneath his heel. As he did so her strength failed her, and she sank to the floor.
“That knocked her out!” he muttered, and he started to count: “One! – Two! – Three – Four! – ”
“Oh, not necessarily!” she said, struggling to her feet. “I’m still in it; and I say again, give up golf, or give up me!”
“The die is cast!” and as he spoke the fatal words, the eyes of George Maurice St. John took on the firm, irrevocable expression of a fish’s set in death. “I wouldn’t give up golf for the best woman that ever put a dress on over her head. Maiden, you ask too much; you come too high! Damsel, I quit you cold!”
George Maurice St. John rushed from the scene. The ponderous door, as it slammed behind him, echoed and re-echoed through the vaulted apartments of the McLaurin mansion. Angelina McLaurin listened until his footsteps died away far up the street.
“He has flew the coop on me!” she wailed.
Then she gave way to a torrent of tears. In her distress Angelina McLaurin was more beautiful than ever. Two minutes! Five minutes! Ten minutes went by! Her tears still fell like rain.
“I have turned the hose on my hopes!” she said.
This was the thought that crossed her mind; but she desperately womanned (word coined since advent of new woman) herself to bear it.
Still afloat on the sad currents of her tears, her head bowed, a light sound beat upon the tympanum of Angelina McLaurin. She looked quickly up and squared herself to emit a glad cry, if one should be necessary.
What was it?
Something had come back.
True! it was the Angora cat.
As the Angora flung himself upon the rug with an air of reckless abandon, Angelina McLaurin gazed at him with a wistful fixedness. One eye was closed, his fur was torn, blood dripped from his lacerated ears. He was, in good sooth, but a tattered Angora! Angelina McLaurin laughed long and wildly.
“He, too,’ has got it in the neck!”
DINKY PETE
(Annals of The Bend)
Do we have romances on t’ East Side!” and Chucky’s voice was vibrant with the scorn my doubts provoked. “Do we have romances! Well, I don’t t’ink! Say! there’s days when we don’t have nothin’ else.”
At this crisis Chucky called for another glass; did it without invitation. This last spoke of and betrayed a sense of injury.
“Let me tell youse,” continued Chucky, “an’ d’ yarn don’t cost you a cent, see! how Dinky Pete sends Jimmy d’ barkeep back to his wife. It’s what I calls romantic for a hundred plunks.
“Not that Jimmy ever leaves her, for that matter; that is, he don’t leave her for fair! But he’s sort o’ organisin’ for d’ play when Dinky Pete puts d’ kybosh on d’ notion, an’ wit’ that Jimmy don’t chase at all, see!
“Jimmy d’ barkeep is some soft in d’ nut, see! Nit, he ain’t really got w’eels; ain’t bad enough for d’ bug house; but he’s a bit funny in his cocoa – mostly be way of bein’ dead stuck on himself.
“An’ bein’ weak d’ way I says, Jimmy is a high roller for clothes; always sports a w’ite t’ree-sheet, wit’ a rock blazin’ in d’ centre, big enough to trip a dog. An’ say! his necktie’s a dream, an’ his hat’s d’ limit!
“What’s a t’ree-sheet? an’ what’s a rock? I don’t want to give you no insultin’ tips, but on d’ square! youse ought to take a toim at night school. Why! a t’ree-sheet is his shirt, an’ d’ rock I names is Jimmy’s spark! Of course, d’ spark ain’t d’ real t’ing; only a rhinestone; but it goes in d’ Bend all d’ same for a 2-carat headlight.
“Jimmy makes a tidy bit of dough, see! He gets, mebby it’s fifteen bones a week, an’ I makes no doubt he shakes down d’ bar for ten more, which is far from bad graft. So it ain’t s’prisin’ one day when Jimmy gets it stuck in his frizzes he’ll be married.
“Jimmy’s Bundle is all right at that. Her name’s Annie, an’ she’s a proper straight chip. An’ that ain’t no song an’ dance; square as a die she was. An’ a bute! She was d’ pick of d’ Bowery crush, an’ don’t youse doubt it.
“Well, Jimmy an’ Annie goes on wit’ their courtships, I takes it, same as if dey lives on Fift’ Avenoo. Annie’s a mil’ner, an’ while she don’t have money to t’row to d’ boids, she woiks for enough so it’s as good as a stan’-off on livin’, which is all her hand calls for an’ all she asts. If she don’t quit winner after trimmin’ hats a week, at any rate she don’t get in d’ hole, see!
“Oh, yes; she an’ Jimmy gets action on d’ sights. Now an’ then it’s Coney Island; then ag’in it’s a front seat at d’ People’s; or mebby if some of d’ squeeze has a dance, dey pulls on their skates an’ steps in on d’ spiel. An’ say! as a spieler Annie’s a wonder, an’ don’t youse forget it. I has d’ woid for it from me own Rag, an’ when it comes to pickin’ out a dancer, you can trust me Rag to be dead on in a minute. D’ loidy can do a dizzy stunt or two on a wax floor herself when it comes to a show-down.
“But about me romance. Jimmy has chased around wit’ Annie, say it’s t’ree mont’s. An’ all this time his strong play is voylets, see! Annie is gone on voylets, so each evenin’ Jimmy toins in on Dinky Pete, who sells poipers an’ peanuts, an’ some of this hard, bum candy you breaks your teet’s on. Dinky also deals a little flower game, wit’ about a 5-cent limit, an’ that’s what gets Jimmy. Just as I says, each evenin’ Jimmy sticks in a nickel for a bunch of voylets at Dinky’s an’ sends some kid – Dinky’s joint is a great hang-out for d’ kids – to take ‘em up to Annie.
“An’ them voylets tickles Annie to death.
“At last all goes well, an’ Jimmy an’ Annie gets spliced. An’ it’s all right at that! Me Rag, who calls on ‘em, says Jimmy an’ Annie’s d’ happiest ever, an’ gettin ‘d’ boss run for their money.
“It’s about a year when Annie don’t do a t’ing but have a kid. At foist Jimmy likes it, an’ lets on it’s d’ racket of his career. But after a while Jimmy gets chilly – sort o’ gets sore on d’ kid. Me Rag gives me a pointer it’s mostly Annie’s fault. She stars d’ kid too heavy, an’ it makes Jimmy feel like a deuce in a bum deck; makes him t’ink he ain’t so strong – ain’t so warm as he was. An’ it toins out’ Annie, bein’ always busy monkeyin’ wit ‘d’ young-one, an’ givin’ Jimmy d’ languid eye, d’ nex’ news you get, Jimmy is back on d’ street when he is off watch, tryin’ to pipe off some fun.
“I never knows where she catches on wit’ Jimmy, but it ain’t no time when one of them razzle-dazzle blondes has him on d’ string. She’s doin’ d’ grand at that, see! an’ givin’ him d’ haughty stand-off.
“Mebby Jimmy met her on d’ street onct or twict, when for d’ foist time, Goldie – which is this blonde tart’s name – says Jimmy can come an’ see her.
“It’s been mont’s since Jimmy’s done d’ flower act at Dinkey Pete’s. But d’ sucker t’inks it’s d’ night of his life, an’ so he chases in an’ goes ag’inst Pete’s counter for a bunch.
“This Dinky Pete’s a dead queer little mug. He’s a short, sawed-off mark, wit’ a humpy back an’ a bum lamp. But you can gamble your life Î Dinky Pete’s heart is on straight, whether his back is or not.
“It’s be chanct I’m in Dinky Pete’s meself d’ time Jimmy is out to meet this blonde mash. Now, at d* time I ain’t onto Jimmy’s curves; I don’t tumble to d’ play till a week later, when me Rag puts me on.
“W’at was I doin’ in Dinky Pete’s? Flowers? Nit; not on your life! Naw; I wants to change me luck. I’d got d’ gaff at draw poker d’ night before, an’ I’m layin’ for Dinky Pete for to rub his hump on d’ sly. Sure! Youse’ll have luck out of sight. Only you mustn’t let d’ humpback guy get on. If he notices you rubbin’ his hump it’ll give youse bad luck, see!
“Jimmy comes in, an’ at foist, be force of habit, I s’spose, he’s goin’ to plunge on voylets. But he t’inks of Annie, an’ he can’t stand for it. Wit’ that, Jimmy shifts his brush an’ tells Dinky Pete to toin him out some roses.
“‘An’ make ‘em d’ reddest in d’ joint, see!’ says Jimmy.
“Dinky Pete’s got his mits on some voylets, but when Jimmy says ‘roses’ Dinky comes to a stan’ still.
“’ W’at! roses?’ says Dinky Pete, an’ his ratty eyes – one of ‘em on d’ hog, as I states – looks dead sharp at Jimmy. ‘Roses?’ he repeats.
“‘That’s what I says!’ is d’ way Jimmy comes back.
“’ Better take voylets,’ says Dinky, an’ he stops foolin’ wit ‘d’ flowers an’ gives Jimmy d’ gimlet eye.
“‘Nit,’ declares Jimmy; * I’m dead onto me needs. Give me roses.’
“‘But roses won’t last,’ says Dinky, an’ his look is sharp an’ soft an’ sad all at onct. ‘Roses won’t last, an’ that’s for fair,’ says Dinky, ‘while voylets is stayers. Better take voylets, Jimmy!’
“But Jimmy gets sullen an’ won’t have no voylets, see! An’ he swings an’ rattles wit’ Dinky that he wants roses – roses red as blood.
“‘Roses has thorns,’ goes on Dinky, still holdin’ his lamps on Jimmy in d’ same queer way; ‘you don’t want roses, Jimmy; you just t’inks you want roses! Be a square bloke, Jimmy; be yourself an’ take voylets!’
“An’ I’m damned!” declares Chucky, “if Jimmy don’t begin to look like a whipped kid, an’ d’ foist t’ing I knows, he welches on roses, grabs off a bunch of voylets big enough to make a salad, an’ goes chasin’ home to Annie. Me Rag is there when Jimmy pours in.
“Say! It’s d’ finish of d’ blonde! She ain’t in it! Me rag, on d’ quiet, gives Annie d’ chin-chin of her existence, an’ shows her Jimmy ain’t gettin’ a square deal. An’ Annie – who, for all she’s nutty about d’ kid, is a dead wise fowl just d’ same – takes a tumble, an’ from that time she makes d’ bettin’ even money on* bot ‘d’ young-one an’ Jimmy. D’ last time I sees Jimmy he stops to tell me that Annie’s a peach, an’ d’ kid’s a wonder. An’ he’s lookin’ like a nine-times winner himself. Now don’t youse call that a romance for Dinky Pete to get onto Jimmy’s game so quick, an’ stickin’ to him till he takes d’ voylet steer? Ain’t it a romance? Well! I should kiss a pig!”
