Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  As to my niece’s talent for singing, however, I am afraid it proved in no respect superior to her gift at the piano, though Signorina Carmella, unlike that German, would have been the last to admit it, I reckon with her fees in mind. It was funny to me that with such a melodious speaking voice as Amelia had developed, she would sing like a crow rather than a lark; but I guess there ain’t no connection. I didn’t think the worse of her for it. I even approved of her indomitable ambition to be musical, but when she and the Signorina announced that they figured she was ready to hire a hall and give a recital, well, I didn’t want my dear little relative to be mobbed by a crowd of irate ticket buyers after she got out one song, but I knowed that would sure happen unless we could scratch up an audience of deaf persons. So, for the first time, I says no.

  Amelia didn’t cry or scream about it, she just quietly fell ill, wouldn’t eat nothing for several days, and when I come into her room, give me a sad sweet smile, her wan little hands lying still upon the coverlet, and I seen she would probably die before her time unless I relented, for she had that romantic Crabb streak in her. So at length I says O.K. and rented a hall from some lodge, had programs printed, and got some boys to go about the respectable part of town giving away tickets, for it was no use trying to sell them, and the night of the recital, I loaded up a double-barreled shotgun and took a conspicuous seat down front in case of trouble.

  But I hadn’t had to worry, for only six people come, and Amelia was so nervous she hardly noticed the audience, and the Signorina, who accompanied her upon a harmonium, had belted the vino a good deal beforehand and fell off the stool a couple times and we had more difficulty in propping her upright than with any protests from the crowd.

  As I recall it, it only cost me five dollars to get a favorable review printed in next day’s newspaper, for journalists in them days was notoriously underpaid. However, that was the only bargain I got: I owed for the hall, the rented harmonium, the printer, and of course the Signorina for her services and the piano stool she broke.

  But little Amelia sure got satisfaction from her concert and bought ten or twenty copies of the paper with that commendatory notice and made sure everybody around the hotel knowed it was her; so I had no regrets though my financial obligations was growing to a magnitude not far this side of gigantic. Whereas my expectations was nil, so far as poker went, for it had now reached late August and them buffalo hunters was a-leaving for the range to start their new season, so soon there wasn’t anybody left in K.C. to get up a game with, even provided that they would have played with me, which many was now disinclined to, anyhow.

  Now what I intended to do was to hunt buffalo myself, for in one season from September to March a good man could clear two-three thousand dollars in hides, but to do that you had to go into it like a real business, which meant you must have a stake to start on. You needed a big Sharps buffalo rifle with a supply of heavy-caliber ammunition, a wagon and animals to pull it, and then you required a man to do the skinning, for no self-respecting hunter would touch a knife to the beasts he shot, I don’t know why: just snobbery, I reckon, but that’s the way it was. It might sound funny, but buffalo hunters considered themselves a type of aristocracy. Anyway, I just name the barest essentials. Most of the well-known hunters carried along a team of ten or twelve men, including wagon drivers, cook, fellow to tend the stock, etc., and an arsenal of weapons, on account of when you fired that Sharps a number of times its barrel would overheat, and you couldn’t wait for it to cool while the herd might get the smell of blood and stampede.

  Suffice it to say my problem was solved by running into a man called Allardyce T. Meriweather, in one of the drinking establishments of Kansas City, whence I had repaired one afternoon to ponder over a beaker of the grape. Just thinking of him brings to mind his type of phraseology.

  A man steps up to me while I am standing at the brass rail, and intones the following.

  “Sir,” he says, “I know you will pardon my forwardness when I say that as the only two gentlemen among this clientele of ruffians, it is my opinion that we should make common cause.”

  “Pardon?” I says.

  “Exactly,” says he, and introduces himself.

  “Crabb,” he says when he has my handle. “Is that of the Philadelphia, New York, or Boston branch of the family?”

  Now I thought he was one of them Eastern swells come out West for his weak lungs or whatnot, which a tour of the prairies was supposed to correct; and right then, bothered about money as I was, it annoyed me that this here cake-eater could roam around at his ease, all expenses paid, whereas I was denied a dishonest living, so I says to him: “Philadelphia.” What the hell did I care whether he believed me?

  “Ah,” he says. “My acquaintance, I fear, was with the New York and Boston lines.” I haven’t yet said what he looked like: well, he was the middle-size facing you, but in profile he was developing quite the potgut. He was clean-shaven with a blue jaw and a flabby mouth, and he wore or carried a deal of gewgaws: diamond stickpin, lapel flower, watch chain with dependent ornamentation, gold-headed cane, doeskin gloves, and the like. I reckon he was around my age.

  “Which was your university?” he says. “Harvard or Yale?”

  “The former,” says I.

  He says: “Mine was the latter, but I had a host of acquaintance, nay, friends of the bosom, up at Cambridge in the early sixties, which must have been your years there. Did you know Montgomery Brear or William W. Whipple or Bartley “Doc” Platt, all of the Indian Pudding Club? Or Chester “Chet” Larkin; he was a Musk Ox. Or Mansard Fitch, who belonged to the Kangaroos?”

  “No, I never,” I says. “I was an Antelope.”

  “Well, sir,” says he, “let me shake your hand again on that. I don’t require a further bona fide. I expect every gentleman in the organized world knows of the exclusivity of the Antelopes. It is no wonder then, sir, that I was able to pick you out of the crowd: breeding will tell.”

  He goes on in that vein for a time and we had another drink and while I was some amused to have put one over on him, I tired of his yapping finally and was fixing to leave, when he says: “Sir, I have no recourse but to hurl myself upon your mercy. I find myself in a desperate condition. Alas, I have not your moral fiber. I am a bending reed, sir, and I fear the grand old firm of Meriweather, bankers, to which I shall one day fall heir, will find in me a pillar of sand.

  “In short, sir, I have in two weeks squandered, in games of chance, the five thousand dollars my father put into my pocket for the first month’s expenses of my Western jaunt. I dare not wire him for more. I appeal to you as a fellow gentleman among the rabble. Twenty dollars, Mr. Crabb, a mere pittance to you, but it would save my life.

  “In exchange, you will have my note, Jack, signed with the name of Meriweather, good as the coin of the realm, and you may hold my stickpin as security.”

  I couldn’t have been less sympathetic, but mention of that jewel caused my heart to warm real sudden: it was big as an acorn, and I reckon twenty dollars wouldn’t have paid for the box it come in.

  So I could scratch up that much, and got my wallet out before he changed his mind.

  “God bless you,” he says when he took the bills and handed over the stickpin. “May we meet someday under more fortunate circumstances.”

  He was so relieved that he left the saloon directly, without giving me the IOU, which was all right by me, for that made it a sale: a half-pound of diamond for twenty dollars. I would not scruple to sell it soon as I could find a 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 exertio
n 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 & 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.”

  He had the cash with him, and when he pulled out his roll I regretted not having gone to twenty-five hundred, for it looked like he had brought along that much, but hell, even so, it wasn’t bad for my first time out. I had made a hundred times ten for a couple hours’ work. Later I met Allardyce at a saloon and we split the take down the middle.

  “I registered at the Excelsior,” he says, “and left word at the desk for Kaller that I had changed my plans and gone on a hunting trip out west of Topeka, returning in a week, at which time I trusted he and I could do business. That,” he says, “will cover my leisurely escape from town.”

  “Where are you going, Allardyce?” I asks, because he led an interesting way of life.

  “Oh, St. Louis, I suppose. I’m clean there. And what about yourself, Jack? I would advise your leaving Kansas City. It is true that Kaller has nothing on you, but he will soon get the picture and I imagine might cause you discomfort. What about coming along with me? I think you have a real talent for bunco.”

  He didn’t know about Amelia, you see, for I had kept him away from my hotel. After all, he was a crook.

  “That might well be,” I says. “But I believe my real calling lays outdoors. I’m heading down to the buffalo country for the winter hunt.”

  Allardyce stuck out his hand. “It has been a pleasure, Jack.”

  “I’m real proud, Allardyce,” says I, “and I wish you the best in whatever mischief you next take up.”

  That was the last I saw of him, standing there in that lowdown saloon, ordering a bottle of champagne, so anxious to begin the high life he couldn’t wait to get to where he could rightly practice it. I had the feeling he would be broke again within a day or so, for what he liked about bunco was the acting required rather than the money gained. What a professional he was! And a real nice fellow who helped me out in K.C.