Chance Elson

by Ballard, Todhunter, 1903-1980

  "That's like John. Suppose you gave him a song and dance about how good you are? Well, I ain't John Kern, and I ain't like the flash boys across the way. They just come lately from the big time to hear them tell it."

  He broke off, opened a desk drawer, rummaged thiough a disordered mass of bills and dug out a fresh deck of cards. He tossed them to Doc. "Deal me two tens, yourself twenty-one.

  Doc's lips under the edge of his trim mustache curved in

  pleasure. He deliberately broke the seal on the pack. He took out the joker and the advertising dummies. He riliied the cards, bunched the deck and laid it on the desk for the man to cut.

  Hombone cut it twice, his eyes bright with malice. Doc grinned. To him this was an old story, something he could do in his sleep.

  He picked up the deck in his left hand, covering it for an instant, reversing the cut as he shielded the act with his right, so rapidly that Hombone could not be certain what he did. Then he dealt two cards face down before the club-owner.

  Hornbone turned them carelessly, the ten of diamonds and the ten of spades. His leather face showed no emotion. "Now give yomself twenty-one."

  Doc dealt himself five cards, put the rest of the pack on the top of the old safe. Then he tm-ned his cards up one at a time —a deuce, a trey, a five, a six, a second five.

  Hornbone chuckled again. "You're a showman. I would have been satisfied with a king-ace. I thought all the real mechanics were dead."

  "Do I get the job?"

  "Sixty a week. It ain't much, but then, neither is business. Those damn chiseiers from L.A. have hurt us bad."

  "AU right."

  Hombone spat again, squinted at him. "Now you've shov^ni me what you can do, don't try it here. We run a straight game. I want to keep my license."

  Doc hesitated. "I've got a friend. He isn't much of a card man, but he is honest."

  Hombone thought it over. "Fifty," he said. "I'll put him on the China Lottery. My dealer left town this afternoon. His girl caught a bum shde and the cops floated her."

  Doc always hated to admit ignorance of anything, but he couldn't help himself. "What the hell is the China Lottery?"

  Hombone looked at him for a long moment, then pushed back his chair and moved to the door. "Come here."

  Doc followed. They crossed the main room to the far rear comer and paused before the counter. There were shps of paper stacked on the counter. Hombone picked up one and

  handed it to Doc. It was ruled into small squares, each square filled with a Chinese character.

  "It's something like bingo," Hombone said. "They tell me the Chinks brought it over from Canton when they come to the gold rush." He picked up a bamboo-handled brush, dipped it in a dish which held a chunk of thick, black ink and used it to daub out several of the spots.

  "See, you pay a dime. You get one spot right, you collect a dollar; two spots, two bucks; three, three bucks and so on." "How do you know which spots win?"

  Hombone turned to a metal cylinder made of chrome rods. Inside the cyhnder were ping-pong balls, on each ball a Chinese character. "We draw every hour at night from eight until two. You can mark as many tickets as you hke, or you can pay more than a dime for your ticket. Get a ten-spot on a dollar ticket and we give you the town." "What are the odds against a ten-spot?'* Hornbone shrugged. "Never bothered to figure it out, but if the Chinese invented it, you can bet the house has a nice break. Can you start tonight?" "What time?"

  "Eight until morning. You get an hour's break to eat and five minutes every hour to smoke." He turned back to the office without another word. Doc watched after him for a minute, then left the place. At least both he and Dutch had jobs. Something better would turn up. They wouldn't stay too long at the Club Grandee.

  He came home after getting the jobs to find that much had been accomplished at the ranch, as Judy now called it. Chance was ensconced on his sleeping porch, and Judy had squandered three dollars left over from her traveling money on four hens which she had cooped in a comer of the old barn.

  Dutch met him in the front yard. Dutch had his coat off and was attacking the stand of weeds with an ancient lawn mower.

  "Any luck?"

  "Jobs for both of us in the damnest rat-trap you ever saw. This guy hasn't changed his ideas or his operation since the

  Alaska gold rush. I just hope he makes enough to pay us."

  Dutch said, "That doctor you sent out wants us to bring Chance in for X-rays tomorrow morning."

  "Schultz came out already?" Doc was surprised.

  "He was here." Dutch wheeled the lawn mower over, leaned it against the side of the house. "He spent nearly an hour talking to Chance."

  "Do him any good?"

  Dutch shrugged. "I don't get it. Hell, you know how Chance was from the first night I saw him, always driving, always wanting something. Now there ain't a thing in the world he's interested in except maybe Judy. I don't know what we'd do without that kid. So help me, she brought one of her lousy chickens up on the porch this afternoon and damned if it didn't lay an egg, right on Chance's bed."

  Doc laughed.

  "Sure," said Dutch. "Chance laughed too. It's the first time I've seen him crack a smile since New Year's."

  "I'll go in and tell him about the town." Doc went up onto the porch. He walked to the bed and sat on a box that Joe had put there for a stool.

  "What did the doc have to say?"

  Chance shrugged. "I stay in bed. I eat eggs and cream and get fat as hell."

  "I hear one of the hens delivered an egg personally."

  He saw Chance's lips twist slightly and was encouraged.

  "That Judy. She was in here chattering this afternoon. She's found a half-grown pig she can buy. She's been all over the neighborhood, met all the people for a couple of miles up and down the road."

  "What's wrong with that?"

  "Nothing, I guess, but hell, she wouldn't speak to a soul back in Cleveland."

  "She was scared there," said Doc, "scared that we'd send her away, or the cops would find her or something. Here she knows different. She's safe."

  Chance was silent.

  "I got jobs for Dutch and me tonight, a place called the Club Grandee."

  "What kind of a joint?"

  Doc told him. "It came over on the ark," he finished. "I never saw such a dump, but I cased the town and there's not much choice. The spots are divided into two groups, the old-timers like Hornbone who used to run a place in Gold-field during the camp's heyday, and the new crowd in from the Coast. And I got a tip, both crowds are afraid that the Syndicate boys from the East might move in, any time." Chance's face was very still. "You mean Cellini's mob?" "The men he worked for, yes."

  "That will be the day." Chance sounded listless. "Look, Doc, you're kidding yourself. Christ, I'm not going to get any better. Why the hell should you hang around? Go back to the boats where you belong."

  "Nuts," said Doc. "I'm beginning to like it here." He went into the kitchen, his nose twitching a httle at the smell of fresh enamel. "God, this place stinks."

  Joe beamed at him. "Looks nice, huh? Gimme two weeks and I'll have it fixed up so you don't know the joint."

  "You've got two weeks," Doc said. "You've probably got twenty years if we all live that long. Come on, feed us. Dutch and I are laboring men. We have to go to work."

  Doc had been kidding, but he found when they arrived

  at the club that he had been right. They were laboring men.

  Dutch listened closely as Hornbone explained how the

  lottery worked. This was old stuflF to Dutch. He was famihar

  with slum wheels and flash games and bingo.

  Doc took a twenty-one table. He dealt mechanically. By ten o'clock there was a surprising crowd in the narrow room. But the bets were small. It was hardly worth the effort of dealing the cards.

  Out of sheer boredom he began to study customers. There were dam workers still wearing their work clothes and metal safety helmets, riders from nearby ranches, two me
n in patched overalls who talked to each other about sheep and smelled hke them, and an Indian princess.

  She came to the roulette wheel while Doc was working relief for the regular dealer, out for his midnight supper. Hornbone, who was drifting around the floor, apparently

  having no interest except to speak to friends, worked his way to Doc's side.

  "Watch it. Here comes Princess Mack." Doc did a double take. She was a striking figure in a purple silk dress draped to her ankles. Her black hair was oily and stringy, pulled down and around on both sides of her forehead from a center part, making a kind of V frame for her face. The face had been grayed with heavy powder until the coppery skin looked dead.

  Ten or fifteen strands of heav}^ beads hung nearly to her waist and her talonlike hands were barnacled with ornate rings, encircling every finger and one thumb. To comphcate the effect her feet were covered by worn moccasins. Doc stared. "In Christ's name. What is that?" "Indian, from the reservation. You've got to watch her. She'll claim every bet she sees."

  Four times the Princess tried to claim bets which had been placed by other players. On the fifth attempt she made so much noise that Hombone came again to the table. "That's all. Princess. Good night."

  She broke into a language Doc could not understand, but if the crowd failed to know the meaning of every word, they did not miss the over-all tirade.

  Hombone listened with no change of expression. At length she took herself out. As he watched, Doc felt the strange dignity with which she handled herself. When she was gone, Hombone breathed deeply. "It will be two or three weeks before she comes back in here. It's always the same." "Why do you let her in?"

  "I've known her fifty years," Hombone said, and walked away.

  ^A^i^en^ 5

  Afterward Doc would identify their first SLunmer in Vegas by four events: the day he went to work at the Grandee, the day Judy started school, the day Chance's

  tests showed negative, the day they met with Kern and the men who ran the state.

  Judy started school the third week after Doc began at the Grandee. The thought of school was revolting to her. It meant confinement and discipline, both of which she dreaded from her experience in other years.

  But fear was also part of her reluctance, fear that she would not be able to keep up, that she could not hold her own with the local children.

  The school was old, a stucco building now badly overcrowded by the influx of new population, and the registration was casual.

  Judy Elson she signed herself. She was not the only new student to lack records from her previous school. Doc had coached her. She was to say that she was a sophomore, that she had had the records of her freshman year from Cleveland but that they had been lost in the move. She was to promise to send for a copy.

  "By the time they wake up that your grades haven't come you'll have established yourself," Doc said. "Just remember, schools are all difl^erent so you may be behind in some things, ahead in others. There's nothing to be afraid of."

  That afternoon she sat in the study hall with her new books, whispering to two other girls. One was from San Diego. Her father had dealt in Mexico. The other's father drove a truck for a local bakery and had been born here. Her name was Helen and she was a little flattered by the questions the new girls were asking her.

  After the first week, Judy found that she did not really mind school. She made no close friends. Her years at the home and at reform school had given her a deep suspicion of close friends. It was this reticence that tended to build a stronger bond between herself and Chance.

  She had changed in many ways in the short weeks since they had come West. She had filled out. Her face now had a broader, more solid look. Sun had put glints into her blond hair.

  She now had fourteen chickens, which produced nearly as many eggs as they used, and three pigs in a pen she

  built behind the old bam. She told Chance about them, she told him about the school and the happenings of the town. It developed into a routine. When she came home from school she gathered the eggs, cleaned the chicken house and fed her pigs. Then she came in and sat on the floor beside Chance's bed with her schoolbooks around her.

  It was the second week that she brought home the book about Virginia City. She was taking a course on the history of Nevada, and she found that she was utterly ignorant of the state in which she lived.

  It was characteristic of Judy that she was never content to let anyone excel her, and she had gone to the hbrary, asking for books on the state's pioneer days.

  The stories of the early mining camps read like novels, and the idea that such great wealth had been wrenched from the ground enthralled her.

  "Listen to this." She was beside Chance's bed, the book open on her crossed legs. "Did you know that if it hadn't been for the silver they took from Sun Mountain, San Francisco wouldn't have been near as big? Why, some of them mines produced millions, and the dam fools that found the stuff in the first place threw away the silver because it got in the way of their gold ore. There was a guy called old Comstock. He wasn't much but a drunk, but the whole lode got named for him, just because he bluffed some of them into giving him a share."

  "Did he get rich?"

  "Naw. He sold out for a few bottles of whisky or something. Honest, Chance, it's fun to read, hke an adventure story."

  "Judy." It was Joe, calling her to help with dinner. She left the book on Chance's bed table and forgot it. The next afternoon when she came home from school Chance said, "They got any more books about Virginia City in that library?"

  She looked at him in surprise. "I guess so."

  "Get 'em, will you? I read most of this one."

  She nodded.

  "How far is it to Virginia City?"

  "Four or five hundred miles maybe." She wasn't exacdy certain. "It's up by Reno."

  "I'd like to see it, what's left I mean. When I get better, maybe you and I can take a ride up there."

  She was really startled. It was the first time since the beating that Chance had mentioned wanting to do anything. "Why, sure. But there isn't much left, I guess."

  "I'd hke to see the old buildings and the opera house. You know, Judy, it's a funny thing. I've never felt like other people do. You take Doc and Dutch. All Dutch really wants is enough dough to keep him in liquor until he dies. He doesn't really get any pleasure out of being a big shot. And Doc. Doc wants things, nice things, clothes and furniture, and good food, and to mix with people. That's why he liked it on the boats, but Doc is a sm.all boy. He's got to brag about what he's done and the people he knows. That's all he wants."

  "And what do you want?"

  He looked out across the yard, across the desert, then passed a thin hand over his tired eyes. "That's the hell of it, kid. I don't know what I want exactly. I guess I want the things those guys on the Comstock wanted. I guess I want power. Sure I want power, and money. You got to have money in this world to be anybody. But I want more than that. I want to do things better than anyone else who is doing them, just for the pleasure of knowing that I can. You take those men on the Comstock. Sure they were after silver, but they also had to prove that they could get it out where others had missed. Maybe I should have hved back in those days. I seem to feel closer to those people than to the ones I know."

  Judy told Doc about it at the supper table. "I think he's better," she said. "He never talked about anything as much as he did about that book."

  "Get him others," said Doc. "It doesn't matter what he's interested in, as long as he's interested in something. You get a list from the hbrary, all the books about Nevada they can dig up. The ones they don't have we'll buy."

  Chance always claimed afterward that he got more out of

  Judy's high-schooling than she did. Actually, although Chance did not realize it at the time, he was coming to associate himself with Nevada in a way that neither Doc nor Dutch ever would.

  He began to see the desert country in a different light, not through his own eyes but through the ey
es of men like Lazy Jim Butler, who went looking for a stray burro and found a fortune in Tonopah, like Sandy Bowers, who married the town washerwoman and took her on a trip around the world which cost milhons.

  Judy, who had had the first enthusiasm for the stories of the old camps, shared his interest fully. They laughed together over the story of how Tex Rickard, trying to promote a new mining camp, put a huge sign on an abandoned church in Goldfield: "Church closed. God has moved to Rawhide."

  "They had fun in those days," Chance said. "It must have been tough living in the early camps, but they had fun." "Because they were free." Judy said it seriously. He nodded. "You know something, that's it. You hit it right on the head. They were free. They ran their games and their businesses without a lot of law looking down their necks. The trouble with Hving today is that no one's free. We're all chained to something."

  Judy shook her young head. "I'm not. I'm never going to be chained to anything. I'm going to do exactly as I please." She meant it too. All of her life she had been ordered around, shut in, browbeaten. She would do exactly as she pleased. The first thing she did was buy a cow. It was very gentle and would stand perfectly quiet without being tied while Judy milked it in the side yard.

  School closed for the summer, the weather was hot, a record heat that raised temperatures at the dam close to the hundred-and-fifty mark. Workers died, the tourist trade vanished, the town drowsed and Doc and Dutch worked only part time.

  The heat got everyone, especially Joe, but Chance seemed to thrive on it. The wheezing sound when he breathed was gone. He seldom coughed, and he had gained forty pounds.

  One day Doc brought John Kern out from town. Doc had run into Kern on Fremont by accident, and after a few words had suggested to Kern that he ride out and take a look at his property. Doc had a reason. Doc seldom did things without a reason.

  He apologized for the old Ford and Kern laughed. "You should see some of the jalopies we have around the ranches. How do you like Nevada by now, Doc?"