Chapter VIII: A Third Arm to the Old-Fashioned Double Cross

"The fresh Hick!" observed Mr. Pickins savagely. "I'd like to hand him a bunch of knuckles."

Mr. Pickins was not now in character, but was clad in quite ordinary good clothes; his prominent cheek-bones, however, had become two white spots in the midst of an angrily red countenance.

"I don't know as I blame him so much," said Phelps. "The trouble is we sized him for about the intelligence of a louse. Anybody who would stand for your Hoop-pole County line of talk wouldn't need such a careful frame-up to make him lay down his money."

"There's something to that," agreed Short-Card Larry. "I always did say your work was too strong, Pick."

"There ain't another man in the crowd can play as good a Rube," protested Mr. Pickins, touched deeply upon the matter of his art. "I don't know how many thousands we've cleaned up on that outfit of mine."

"Ye-e-es, but this Wallingford person called the turn," insisted Phelps. "The only times we ever made it stick was on the kind of farmers that work in eleven-story office buildings. You can fool a man with a stuffed dog, but you can't fool a dog with it; and you couldn't fool Yap Wallingford with a counterfeit yap."

"Well," announced Mr. Pickins, with emphatic finality, "you may have my part of him. I'm willing to let him go right back to Oskaloosa, or Oshkosh, or wherever it is."

"Not me," declared Phelps. "I want to get him just on general principles. He's handed me too much flossy talk. You know the last thing he had the nerve to say? He invited us up to play stud poker with him."

"Why don't you?" asked Pickins.

"Ask Larry," said Phelps with a laugh, whereat Larry merely swore.

Badger Billy, who had been silently listening with his eyes half closed, was possessed of a sudden inventive gift.

"Yes, why don't you?" he repeated. "If I read this village cut-up right, and I think I do, he'll take a sporting chance. Get him over to the Forty-second Street dump on a proposition to play two-handed stud with Harry there, then pull off a phoney pinch for gambling."

"No chance," returned Phelps. "He'd be on to that game; it's a dead one, too."

"Not if you work it this way," insisted Billy, in whom the creative spirit was still strong. "Tell him that we're all sore at Harry, here; that Harry threw the gang last night and got me put away. I'll have McDermott take me down and lock me up on suspicion for a couple of hours, so you can bring him down and show me to him. Tell him you've found a way to get square. Harry's supposed to have a grouch about that stud poker taunt and wants to play Wallingford two-handed, five thousand a side. Tell him to go into this game, and that just when they have the money and the cards on the table, you'll pull off a phoney pinch and have your fake officer take the money and cards for evidence, then you'll split up with him."

Billy paused and looked around with a triumphant eye. It was a long, long speech for the Badger, and a vivid bit of creative work of which he felt justly proud.

"Fine!" observed Larry in deep sarcasm. "Then I suppose we give him the blackjack and take it all away from him?"

"No, you mutt," returned Billy, having waited for this objection so as to bring out the clever part of his scheme as a climax. "Just as we have Dan pull off the pinch, in jumps Sprig Foles and pinches Dan for impersonating an officer. Then Sprig cops the money and the cards for evidence, while we all make a get-away."

A long and thoughtful silence followed the exposition of this great scheme of Billy's. It was Phelps who spoke first.

"There's one thing about it," he admitted: "it's a new one."

"Grandest little double cross that was ever pulled over," announced Billy in the pride of authorship.

It was a matter of satisfaction, to say nothing of surprise, to Short-Card Larry to note the readiness, even the alacrity, with which young Wallingford fell into the trap. Would he accept the traitorous Mr. Phelps' challenge if guaranteed that he would win? He would! There was nothing young Wallingford detested so much as a traitor. Moreover, he had a grouch at Mr. Phelps himself.

Short-Card Larry had expected to argue more than this, and, having argument still lying heavily upon his lungs, must rid himself of it. It must be distinctly understood that the crowd wanted nothing whatever out of this. They merely wished to see the foresworn Mr. Phelps lose all his money, so that he could not hire a lawyer to defend him, and when he was thus resourceless they intended to have him arrested on an old charge and "sent over." They were very severe and heartless about Mr. Phelps, but they did not want his money. They would not touch it! Wallingford could have it all with the exception of the two hundred and fifty dollars he would have to pay to the experienced plain-clothes-man impersonator whom Larry, having a wide acquaintance, would secure.

Mr. Wallingford understood perfectly. He appreciated thoroughly the motives that actuated Mr. Larry Teller and his friends, and those motives did them credit. He counted himself, moreover, highly fortunate in being on hand to take advantage of the situation. Still moreover, after the trick was turned he would stand a fine dinner for the entire crowd, including Mr. Pickins, to whom Mr. Teller would kindly convey his, Mr. Wallingford's, respects.

Accepting this commission with some inward resentment but outward pleasure, Mr. Teller suggested that the game be played off that very afternoon. Mr. Wallingford was very sorry. That afternoon and evening he had business of grave importance. To-morrow evening, however, say at about nine o'clock, he would be on hand with the five thousand, in bills of convenient denomination. Mr. Teller might call for him at the hotel and escort him to the room, although, from having had the location previously pointed out to him, Mr. Wallingford was quite sure he could find Mr. Teller's apartment, where the contest was to take place. Left alone, Mr. Wallingford, in the exuberance of his youth, lay back in his big chair and spent five solid minutes in chuckling self-congratulation, to the great mystification of the incoming Mr. Daw, whom J. Rufus would not quite trust with his reason for mirth. Feeling the need of really human companionship at this juncture, young Wallingford called up his convivial friend from Georgia and they went out to spend another busy and pleasant afternoon and evening, amid a rapidly widening circle of friends whom these two enterprising and jovial gentlemen had already managed to attach to them. With an eye to business, however, Wallingford carefully timed their wanderings so that he should return, alone, on foot, to his own hotel a trifle after midnight.

As Mr. Teller and Mr. Wallingford, on the following evening at a few minutes before nine, turned into the house on Forty-second Street, they observed a sturdy figure helping a very much inebriated man up the stone steps just before them, but as the sturdy figure inserted a latch-key in the door and opened it with one hand while supporting his companion with the other arm, the incident was not one to excite comment. Just inside the door the inebriated man tried to raise a disturbance, which was promptly squelched by the sturdy gentleman, who held his charge firmly in a bearlike grip while Mr. Teller and Mr. Wallingford passed around them at the foot of the stairs, casting smiling glances down at the face of the perpetually-worried landlady, who had come to the parlor door to wonder what she ought to do about it.

In the second floor back room Mr. Phelps and Mr. Badger already awaited them. Mr. Badger's greeting to Larry was the ordinary greeting of one man who had seen the other within the hour; his greeting to Mr. Wallingford was most cordial and accompanied by the merest shade of a wink. Mr. Phelps, on the other hand, was most grim. While not denying the semblance of courtesy one gentleman should bestow upon another, he nevertheless gave Mr. Wallingford distinctly to understand by his bearing that he was out for Mr. Wallingford's financial blood, and after the coldest of greetings he asked gruffly:

"Did you bring cards?"

"One dollar's worth," said Wallingford, tossing four packs upon the table. "Ordinary drug-store cards, bought at the corner."

"You see them bought, Larry?" inquired Phelps.

"They're all right, Phelps," Mr. Teller assured him.

"Good," said Mr. Phelps. "Then we might just as well get to work right away," and from his pocket he drew a fat wallet out of which he counted five thousand dollars, mostly in bills of large denomination.

In the chair at the opposite side of the little table Wallingford sat down with equal grimness, and produced an equal amount of money in similar denominations.

"I don't suppose we need chips," said Phelps. "The game may not last over a couple of deals. Make it table stakes, loser of each hand to deal the next one."

They opened a pack of cards and cut for the deal, which fell to Wallingford, and they began with a mutual five-dollar ante. Upon the turn card of the first deal each placed another five. Upon the third card, Phelps, being high, shoved forward a five-dollar bill, which Wallingford promptly raised with fifty. Scarcely glancing at his hole-card, Phelps let him take the pot, and it became Phelps' deal.

It was a peculiar game, in that Phelps kept the deal from then on, betting mildly until Wallingford raised, in which case Wallingford was allowed to take down the money. By this means Wallingford steadily won, but in such small amounts that Mr. Phelps could have kept playing for hours on his five thousand dollars in spite of the annoyance of maudlin quarreling from the next room. It was not necessary to enter such a long test of endurance to gain mere time, however, for in less than a half-hour the door suddenly burst open, its latch-bar losing its screws with suspicious ease, and a gaunt but muscular-looking individual with a down-drooping mustache strode in upon them, displaying a large shining badge pinned on his vest underneath his coat.

"Every man keep his seat!" commanded this apparition. "The place is pinched as a gambling joint."

Mr. Phelps made a grab for the money on the table.

"Drop that!" said the new-comer, making a motion toward his hip pocket, and Mr. Phelps subsided in his chair.

The others had posed themselves most dramatically, and now they sat in motionless but trembling obedience to the law, while the man with the tin badge produced from his pocket a little black bag into which he stuffed the cards and all the money on the table.

"It's a frame-up!" shouted Mr. Phelps.

Loud voices and the overturning of chairs from the room just ahead interrupted them at this moment, and not only Mr. Badger and Mr. Teller and Mr. Phelps looked annoyed, but the man with the shining badge glanced apprehensively in that direction, especially as, added to the sudden uproar, there was the unmistakable clang of a patrol-wagon in the street.

Simultaneously with this there bounded into the room a large gentleman with a red face and a husky voice, who whipped a revolver from his pocket the minute he passed the threshold and leveled it at the man with the badge, while all the others sprang from their chairs.

"Hands up!" said he, in a hurried but businesslike manner, himself apparently annoyed with and apprehensive of the adjoining disturbance and the clanging in the street. "This is a sure-enough pinch, but it ain't for gambling, you can bet your sweet life! You're all pulled for a bunch of cheap sure-thing experts, but this guy has got the lock-step comin' to him for impersonating an officer. You've played that gag too long, Dan Blazer. Give me that evidence!" and he snatched the black bag from the hand of the man with the badge.

Short-Card Larry, standing near what was apparently a closet door, now took his cue and threw it open, and, grabbing Wallingford by the arm, suddenly pulled him forward. "This is the real thing," he said in a hoarse whisper. "We've got to make a get-away or go up. They're fierce on us here if the pinch once comes."

"Hello, boys," broke in a third new voice, and then the real shock came. The third new voice was not in the play at all, and the consternation it wrought was more than ludicrous.

Wallingford, drawing back for a moment, was nearly knocked off his feet by fat Badger Billy's dashing past him through that door to the back stairway, closely followed by Mr. Phelps, and Mr. Phelps was trailed almost as closely by the gaunt man of the badge. Glancing toward the door, Mr. Wallingford smiled beatifically. The cause of all this sudden exodus was huge Harvey Willis, in his blue suit and brass buttons and helmet, with a club in his hand, who, making one dive for the husky red-faced man as he, too, was bent on disappearing, whanged him against the wall with a blow upon the head from his billy; and as the red-faced man fell over, Harvey grabbed the black bag. The crash of a breaking water-pitcher from the adjoining room, the shrill voice of a protesting and frightened landlady as she came tearing up the stairs, and the clamor of one of those lightning-collected mobs in front of the house around the patrol-wagon, created a diversion in the midst of which Harvey Willis started out into the hall, a circumstance which gave the dazed red-faced man an opportunity to stagger down the back stairway and out through the alley after his companions, whom Wallingford had already followed. They were not waiting for him, by any means, but this time were genuinely interested in getting away from the law, each man darkly suspicious of all the others, and Wallingford, alone, serene in mind.

In the hall, Willis, with a grin, thrust the black bag into his big pocket, and turned his attention to the terrified landlady and his brother officer of the wagon, who was just then mounting the stairs.

"Case of plain coke jag," he explained, and burst into the noisy room, from which the two presently emerged with the shrieking and inebriated man who had been brought up-stairs but a short while before.

In Wallingford's room that night, Blackie Daw was just starting for Boston when Harvey Willis, now off duty, came up with the little black bag, which he dropped upon the table, sitting down in one of the big chairs and laughing hugely.

"Mr. Daw, shake hands with Mr. Willis, a friend of mine from Filmore," said Wallingford. "Order a drink, Daw."

As he spoke, he untied the bag, and, taking its lower corners, sifted the mixture of cards and greenbacks upon the table. Daw, in the act of shaking hands, stopped with gaping jaws.

"What in Moses is that?" he asked.

"Merely a little contribution from your Broadway friends," Wallingford explained with a chuckle. "Harvey, what do I owe out of this?"

"Well," said Harvey, sitting down again and naming over the cast of characters on his fingers, "there's seven dollars for the room, and the tenner I gave Sawyer to go down on Park Row and hunt up a coke jag. Sawyer gets fifty. We ought to slip a twenty to the wagon-man. Sawyer will have to pay about a ten-case note for broken furniture, and I suppose you'll want to pay this poor coke dip's fine. That's all, except me."

"Ninety-seven dollars, besides the fine," said Wallingford, counting it up. "Suppose we say a hundred and fifty to cover all expenses, and about three hundred and fifty for you. How would that do?"

"Fine!" agreed Harvey. "Stay right here and keep me busy at the price."

"Not me," said Wallingford warmly. "I only did this because I was peevish. I don't like this kind of money. It may not be honest money. I don't know how Phelps and Banting and Teller got this money."

Blackie Daw came solemnly over and shook hands with him.

"Stay amongst our midst, J. Rufus," he pleaded. "We need an infusion of live ones on Broadway. Our best workers have grown jaded and effete, and our reputation is suffering. Stay, oh, stay!"

"No," refused J. Rufus positively. "I don't want to have anything more to do with crooks!"