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Show rJM&?r' V SIXG of me n t h e ;-;yW- ' ' boaats. r;;'. Many have held that E . in momenta of tenre, V; A tight stress the nature ?y y of an individual 'rofi''' changes the meek be-corner be-corner a lion, the shrewd becomes a lliinflammed fool, the rrnel becomes a purring kitten or the coward cow-ard becomes a bully. This is all upside down. There is a little lit-tle of the lion in the meek to start with, and the coward is a bully all the time, In his heart. ' 1 claim that the coward remains a coward, cow-ard, no matter whether he cringes or drives, and that when you take on a shrewd man, look out. For the man may change, but the beast is unwavering. And nothing will bring out the base metal in the blend like a deck of cards or a pair of dice. Gambling revolves about a psychology sui generis applicable to nothing noth-ing else. Men who toss off thousands with a smile in business or recreation will steal a ten-spot from the discard and risk Ignominy, Ig-nominy, disgrace, murder for a dollar. Men who are of nature low and vile become be-come snarling, muttering, cursing, superstitious super-stitious brutes over a poker hand. Most of all Is the professional card sharper a distorted being. There have been picturesque fictions about his gen-oroslty. gen-oroslty. He would rob a dying blind man the best of him would. Plays have been done around his nobility. He is the coyote, coy-ote, the wolf, the skunk, the mongrel, the rat, the hyena rolled in one take his nobility no-bility from that. Romantic fakers have endowed him with that honor that Is fabled fa-bled as the entente cordiale of thieves. His honor, like his business, is dealt off the bottom. There is no personal venom In this. No dry-lipped, pudgy-handed houseman ever took my scads. But I have known many and watched more. It is a filthy calling. Yet even the tawdry wheel-spinner and tho warped, jackpot dealer are human. They have wives and they have children, often. Thpy have had mothers and they may even have religion- Po. since these are human and brothers, and slnoe they comprise entitles In the combined units of cities, it came about that a young reporter' had a chance to unveil un-veil a typical one, see him bare of greed and grasping if ever one of them could be, walk with htm through those vales where his lower personality might well have stayed outside the door. Tret's see what happened. T shall tell you how. You may tell me why. . . It wasn't the plcasantest sort of an assignment. as-signment. An automobie.,triU'k had run down and killed a little girl, a sunny little girl of 7. who a moment before had started, laughing laugh-ing and merry, across a busy street toward the shims school. It turned out to be the little daughter of Pete the Piker, a notorious low caste gambler, who lived off swindling the sweaty suckers who came to his foul rooms on the seamy side of the underworld. "Who h:n wife had been no one distinctly distinct-ly remembered. But lots of us knew in a . casual way that he had a little girl, and that as nearly as a gross animal like Pete could love, he loved the child. She lived with him in the rearest room of the rear rooms that constituted his home and his smelly gaming dive. And tha t was the little girl who had been killed crushed by the tons of truck speeding down the narrow, nasty highway t'f the congested section just outside the gHttering bad lands the region peopled by cheap thieves, sure-shot dollar gamblers, gam-blers, visiting cattle drovers and teamsters with a fortnight's pay in their frazzled jeans. I was sent for a "human interest' story. My paper didn't print much about gamblers, (Treat or small, and the fact that a child was slain by a minotaur of cartage was no novelty. But Pete the Piker was a classic in his own dirty, dishonest way every community has that kind of classics and the death of his baby, the only touch of color or decency or softness in any picture pic-ture with him in the foreground or background, back-ground, was. a story. Our city editor had me on the way half a mimUe after the little lit-tle body was identified at the morgue. m My instructions were to get a picture a photn.crit ph of the child and a characteristic char-acteristic interview with Pete. We were net given to writing thieves' slang or t ran scribing conversation in the oblique argot of the poker den or the gutter. But this was such a picturesque and exceptional excep-tional opportunity that I was forewarned to get realism. So I drilled to the dive of Pete the PikT. Xo one was there. I waited on the d'-orstep until I saw the stooped figure of the heavy, lumbering gamester coming. I had talked to him on several occasions occa-sions and I knew him from all angles, so 1 made no great ceremony over addressing him. A reporter soldem quivfrs at the approach ap-proach of or to any mrui on business. And least of all would T hnvo usr-d circumlocution circumlocu-tion with Pete. 7 l "ii his number. So T stopped up with assurance and haiWl him. Ue lif!"---! his bad. I recoiled a step. The swarthy checks had grown gray. V y if' WWi if i , . y 4 4 x v ' There were pouches under his little, shifty eyes. His double chin seemed to have grown suddenly into a flabby bag that oscillated os-cillated lifelessly. His hands hung llmply at his side. He motioned me to come In, unlocked tho door and gestured me to a seat at the handiest table a round poker table, home made, topped with green broadcloth. "Whaddeye want?" he asked in a voice that seemed to come from somewhere down below, like a ventriloquist's attempt at vocal illusion. "I want a picture, first," said I. He arose, walked Into an Inner room and came out with a photograph. He pushed it, face up. across the table toward me "That was her," said he. "That was my kid. Wasn" she putty? They tvasn' a kid aroun' here could stack up besides thet likes o' my li'l Fanny. An, oh, God she's dead. She's gone. She was all what I . had, an' they went an tooken her away f'm me." And he dropped his head and he rocked and shook. "You ought to a saw her the way I just seen her," he said, his chin still down. "You wouldn' 'a' knew her. Nobody would 'a' knew her nobody epseptin' me me, her ol' daddy. I'd 'a knew her no matter what happened. I'd 'a' knew one hair outta her head if it was laid wit' fifty thousan' others. I knew every hair in her head by heart. I strokes every hair a million times. An" now I won' never stroke 'em no more never no more oh, God!" I said nothing. There was nothing for me to say. What could I have said? He swung his bent head some more. His bNg hands came up on the table for support. One of them fell on a deck of cards, lyinghere. -f Mechanically his other hand came over. The two hands began to cut and shuffle the cards. Again and again he cut them and he shuffled them, unconscious of the acts, doing them by the expert touch of long habit and .constant practice. "She's dead," said he. "Dead. Huh I am' got that Trough me yet, I guess. But when them times comes every day, them times when I was used to bein' wit' her time to kiss er good night, time to eat breakfast together, time for me to kiss 'er before she goes to school, time for me to wait for er to come runnin' back f'm school that's when it's gonna be hell. Them is when I'm gonna know she's gone gone, never to come back no more, never. 9 "Y'see, my play runs pretty even an' steady here. It starts about 9 at night. So I used to be able to put my Fanny to bed before I got busy, an' sit wit' 'er an' tell 'er li'l funny stories, maybe, before she said 'er prayers an' shut 'er eyes. "Then I'd come out here an' run the place as long as a boob was left to deal to or a chip was loose f'm the rake. That'd be 'till about 5 in the mornin'. Then I'd do my figurin' an' such, an' that'd' keep me goin' till it was time for the kid to wake up. "Then she an' me we'd have our breakfast break-fast together, an' I'd kiss 'er good-by an she'd start off for school an' I'd go to bed. I kissed r like that this mornin'. An' good-by it was. "But I ain't sleepin now like other days. A bull wakes me up an' he breaks this to me. "An' at half past 3 this afternoon, when I oughta be sleepin', waitin for my baby to come wake me wit' a kiss where'U I be? What'll I be doin'? An' tonight, at'ler supper, when I need 'er to sit on my knee an' pull my hair like she always used to, where'll I be? She won' be here. What'll I do?" And he rut and shuffled frantically with hectic hands until the process slowed, down, his fingers grew numb, the shuffle-cut-shu tile-cut grew measured, rythmic, orderly. The guy what he was drivin' that there truck," he said through a sigh that rocked and choked, "he used to come here nights once in a while. I know 'im putty gr.od. He's a wild Indian. I guess he drove that murderin' bus like he played cards. Ho was always takin' a chance always plungin' again the run o' the cards, an' always losin always hittin' somethin' what he didn' know was there beeus he didn' stop to look or stop to think. "Tie was always bull in' his Hick an' . between me an" you, he never had none, lie didn' have nu much chance in here if his hands run betier'n what they has a j-ight to. Hut not h in couldn' convince that boy. He'd speed up on high on' go out to make it. "Now he's in jail. Now my kid's down In Finnigan's on a slab, an' part o his dough in my bank roll '11 go to bury 'er." And the cutting and shuffling were accelerated ac-celerated again, rose to the high peak of his accomplished speed and died down again to level normal. "An' to think only las' night I'm in this here room, breakin' my neck to rake in another two-bits piece, schemin, cheat-In', cheat-In', workln', worryin' about every rotten "But I was gonna cut away f'm all this . queer work, thought I'd maybe get a saloon somewheres In a quiet spot some-wheres, some-wheres, an' we could live near there maybe may-be in a cottage, maybe, or somethin' like that. An then my Fanny she could 'a' grew up an' people wouldn 'a' pointed 'er out as the daughter o' Pete the Piker, the low-down levee shark. "But what's the use talkin' about that now?" ular as his breathing, and this he kept up as he talked, intensifying it as his voice quickened, abating It as he spoke In even tempo. "They am no use o' my hollerin to you or nobody else. I've stood here an' grinned at rums what they plays the game an' they loses an' they lets out a roar. Nobody No-body wan's to listen. Nobody ain' got no time to listen. Nobody can understand JV, ' M&Z I IMff He came up, out , , , , ' , i f !', ' Is- ( W - of his impressive, , t t I i M i !, ' ' ' -eloquent reverie. . V-.,r , , . Hesneaketa i trim''11 f .Qi r !- i$r A shiny jitney that hits the cloth like it was " ' - 5 Vi " J really worth while. An' this is the morn- ; s; " i- - Kifr in' after. An' now it don' make no dirt"- ' ., l. 4 rence no more. I don' guess nothin' makes ' ""v y no diff'rence now. - ' f 1 shiny jitney that hits the cloth like it was really worth while. An' this is the mornin' morn-in' after. An' now it don' make no diff'rence diff'-rence no more. I don' guess nothin' makes no diff'rence now. "What good is dough? What can I do wit'- it? I was bankin' it for her Fanny. I had dreams that when she grew up I'd pull away f'm these corners an' go somewhere some-where wit' grass an' air an', good schools, where she could grow up wit' decent kids an' get a chancet to be somebody. Oh, I don' kid myself. I knows I'm a backroom dealer 'for dirty dough, -an a crooked one at that. I knows I ain' no society guy, an' I ain' no fancy citizen. And he deftly separated the deck into two piles, ran the edges together, and shuffled them into each other with never a riffle nor a flash of the bottom cards-just cards-just dovetailed them in, pile into pile. Then ho cut them again, and this time the maneuver was faster; and so on, until tho motion of his agile hands almost hid the actual manipulations. Then he let down gradually until again the gait was as reg- the other feller's squeal. When a guy drops his bundle I don know what he needs it for. I can't tell if it means his wife is got 4.0 starve or his mother is got to do a extra week's washin'. So what do I know what's behind a sticker's yelp? "So what do you know about what's behind be-hind mine? I can't tell you what I lost. You wouldn' git me. You'd only grin. An' you'd put me down for a tough loser. Well, maybe I am. But what's the use o' lcttin' you In on that? I wouldn' never give back to nobody what they lose. An' you couldn' give me back what I lose. "So, what's the use?" I couldn't answer him. I could only s? as he shuffled and cut in silence. 'No, it ain' no use," ho emphasized, and I saw him shake tils head solemnly and with resignation. He drew a sigh that was akin to a groan. His hands almost al-most stopped monkeying with the cards. They just kept up with dying momentum like a pendulum after the mainspring has run out. My eyes were fastened on the cards and on his hands. He came up, out of his Impressive, eloquent elo-quent reverie. He sneaked a glance toward me. I looked up sharply. My eyes w ere half up, half down, in the act of finding find-ing the new focus. As they were passinj-jj the cards they caught just one jigger, ne almost Imperceptible tremble that was unfamiliar un-familiar in the unbroken half hour of cut ting and shuffling, fast and slow, that they had witnessed. And as my eyes cam up they saw in the eyes of Pete the Piker a facet that was unfamiliar there after the unbroken half hour of animal grief. "I'll tell you what," said Pete. I leaned forward to hear. "If you've got a two-case note in your kick," said he, "I'll deal you a little stud." Copyright, 1916, by J. Kecley |