Читать книгу Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford - Chester George Randolph - Страница 8

As the lights of the railroad yard, red and white and green, slid by, so passed out of the ken of these fugitives all those who had contributed to their luxury through the medium of the Universal Covered Carpet Tack Company. Lamb, Jasper, Lewis, Nolting, Ella; what were all these people to them? What were any living creatures except a part of the always moving panorama which composed the background of their lives? Nomads always since their marriage, when Mrs. Wallingford as a girl had run away from home that was no home to join this cheerful knave of fortune, they had known no resting place, no spot on earth that called to them; had formed no new ties and made no new friendships. Where all the world seemed anchored they were ever flitting on, and the faces that they knew belonged but to the more or less vivid episodes by which the man strove after such luxurious ideals as he had. Only a few of the dubious acquaintances which Wallingford had formed in his earlier days of adventure remained for them to greet as they paused before fresh flights afield. "Blackie" Daw, who had recently removed his "office" from Boston to New York, was the most constant of these, and him they entertained in one of the most exclusive hostelries in the metropolis soon after their arrival. Mr. Wallingford's face still bore traces of the recent conflict.

"Fanny's the girl!" he declared with his hand resting affectionately on his wife's shoulder, after he had detailed to Mr. Daw how he had squeezed the covered carpet tack dry of its possibilities. "She's little Mamie Bright, all right. For once we got away with it. I'm a piker, I know, but twenty-eight thousand in yellow, crinkly boys to the good, all sewed up in Fanny's skirt till we ripped it out and soused it in a deposit vault, isn't so bad for four months' work; and now we're on our way to ruin Monte Carlo."

"You're all to the mustard," admired Blackie; "you're the big noise and the blinding flash. As I say, I'd go into some legitimate line myself if I wasn't honest. What bites me, though, is that you got all that out of my little Lamb and his easy friends."

"Easy! Um – m – m – m," commented Mr. Wallingford frowningly, as he unconsciously rubbed the tips of his fingers over the black puff under his right eye. "You've got it wrong. I like to sting the big people best. They take it like a dentist's pet; but when you tap one of these pikers for a couple of mean little thousands he howls like a steam calliope. One old pappy guy started to take it out of my hide, and he tried so hard it gave him paralysis."

Mr. Daw laughed in sympathy.

"You must have had a lively get-away, to judge from the marks the mill left on you; but why this trip across the pond? Are they after you?"

"After me!" scorned J. Rufus. "There's no chance! Why, I never did a thing in my life that stepped outside the law!"

"But you lean way over the fence," charged Blackie with a knowing nod, "and some of these days the palings will break."

"By that time I'll have enough soft money in front of me to ease my fall," announced Wallingford confidently. "I'm for that get-rich-quick game, and you can just bank on me as a winner."

"You'll win all right," agreed Blackie confidently, looking at his watch, "but you're like the rest of us. You'll have to die real sudden if you want to leave anything to your widow. That's the trouble with this quick money. It's lively or you wouldn't catch it on the wing, and it stays so lively after you get it."

He arose as he concluded this sage observation and buttoned his coat.

"But you're going to stay to dinner with us?" insisted Mrs. Wallingford.

"No," he returned regretfully. "I'd like to, but business is business. I have an engagement to trim a deacon in Podunk this evening. Give my regards to the Prince of Monaco."

It was scarcely more than a week afterwards when he somberly turned in at the bar room of that same hotel, and almost bumped into Wallingford, who was as somberly coming out. For a moment they gazed at each other in amazement and then both laughed.

"You must have gone over and back by wireless," observed Blackie. "What turned up?"

"Stung!" exclaimed J. Rufus with deep self-scorn. "I got an inside tip on some copper stock the evening you left, and the next morning I looked up a broker and he broke me. He had just started up in the bucket-shop business and I was his first customer. He didn't wait for any more. That's all."

Daw laughed happily, and he was still laughing when they entered the drawing room of Wallingford's suite.

"It's the one gaudy bet that the biggest suckers of all are the wise people," he observed. "Here you go out West and trim a bunch of come-ons for twenty-five thousand, and what do you do next? Oh, just tarry here long enough to tuck that neat little bundle into the pocket of a bucket-shop broker that throws away the bucket! You'd think he was the wise boy, after that, but he'll drop your twenty-five thousand on a wire-tapping game, and the wire tapper will buy gold bricks with it. The gold-brick man will give it to the bookies and the bookies will lose it on stud poker. I'm a Billy goat myself. I clean up ten thousand last week on mining stock that permits Mr. Easy Mark to mine if he wants to, and I pay it right over last night for the fun of watching a faro expert deal from a sanded deck! Me? Cleaned with-out