第21章

THE GIRL AND THE GRAFT.

The other day I ran across my old friend Ferguson Pogue.Pogue is a conscientious grafter of the highest type.His headquarters is the Western Hemisphere, and his line of business is anything from speculating in town lots on the Great Staked Plains to selling wooden toys in Connecticut, made by hydraulic pressure from nutmegs ground to a pulp.

Now and then when Pogue has made a good haul he comes to New York for a rest.He says the jug of wine and loaf of bread and Thou in the wilderness business is about as much rest and pleasure to him as sliding down the bumps at Coney would be to President Taft."Give me," says Pogue, "a big city for my vacation.

Especially New York.I'm not much fond of New Yorkers, and Manhattan is about the only place on the globe where I don't find any."While in the metropolis Pogue can always be found at one of two places.One is a little second-hand bookshop on Fourth Avenue, where he reads books about his hobbies, Mahometanism and taxidermy.I found him at the other--his hall bedroom in Eighteenth Street--where he sat in his stocking feet trying to pluck "The Banks of the Wabash" out of a small zither.Four years he has practised this tune without arriving near enough to cast the longest trout line to the water's edge.On the dresser lay a blued-steel Colt's forty-five and a tight roll of tens and twenties large enough around to belong to the spring rattlesnake-story class.Achambermaid with a room-cleaning air fluttered nearby in the hall, unable to enter or to flee, scandalized by the stocking feet, aghast at the Colt's, yet powerless, with her metropolitan instincts, to remove herself beyond the magic influence of the yellow-hued roll.

I sat on his trunk while Ferguson Pogue talked.No one could be franker or more candid in his conversation.Beside his expression the cry of Henry James for lacteal nourishment at the age of one month would have seemed like a Chaldean cryptogram.He told me stories of his profession with pride, for he considered it an art.

And I was curious enough to ask him whether he had known any women who followed it.

"Ladies?" said Pogue, with Western chivalry."Well, not to any great extent.They don't amount to much in special lines of graft, because they're all so busy in general lines.What? Why, they have to.Who's got the money in the world? The men.Did you ever know a man to give a woman a dollar without any consideration? A man will shell out his dust to another man free and easy and gratis.But if he drops a penny in one of the machines run by the Madam Eve's Daughters' Amalgamated Association and the pineapple chewing gum don't fall out when he pulls the lever you can hear him kick to the superintendent four blocks away.Man is the hardest proposition a woman has to go up against.He's the low-grade one, and she has to work overtime to make him pay.Two times out of five she's salted.She can't put in crushers and costly machinery.He'd notice 'em and be onto the game.They have to pan out what they get, and it hurts their tender hands.Some of 'em are natural sluice troughs and can carry out $1,000 to the ton.The dry-eyed ones have to depend on signed letters, false hair, sympathy, the kangaroo walk, cowhide whips, ability to cook, sentimental juries, conversational powers, silk underskirts, ancestry, rouge, anonymous letters, violet sachet powders, witnesses, revolvers, pneumatic forms, carbolic acid, moonlight, cold cream and the evening newspapers.""You are outrageous, Ferg," I said."Surely there is none of this 'graft' as you call it, in a perfect and harmonious matrimonial union!""Well," said Pogue, "nothing that would justify you every time in calling Police Headquarters and ordering out the reserves and a vaudeville manager on a dead run.But it's this way: Suppose you're a Fifth Avenue millionaire, soaring high, on the right side of copper and cappers.

"You come home at night and bring a $9,000,000 diamond brooch to the lady who's staked your for a claim.You hand it over.She says, 'Oh, George!' and looks to see if it's backed.She comes up and kisses you.You've waited for it.You get it.All right.It's graft.

"But I'm telling you about Artemisia Blye.She was from Kansas and she suggested corn in all of its phases.Her hair was as yellow as the silk; her form was as tall and graceful as a stalk in the low grounds during a wet summer; her eyes were as big and startling as bunions, and green was her favorite color.

"On my last trip into the cool recesses of your sequestered city Imet a human named Vaucross.He was worth--that is, he had a million.He told me he was in business on the street.'A sidewalk merchant?' says I, sarcastic.'Exactly,' says he, 'Senior partner of a paving concern.'

"I kind of took to him.For this reason, I met him on Broadway one night when I was out of heart, luck, tobacco and place.He was all silk hat, diamonds and front.He was all front.If you had gone behind him you would have only looked yourself in the face.

I looked like a cross between Count Tolstoy and a June lobster.Iwas out of luck.I had--but let me lay my eyes on that dealer again.

"Vaucross stopped and talked to me a few minutes and then he took me to a high-toned restaurant to eat dinner.There was music, and then some Beethoven, and Bordelaise sauce, and cussing in French, and frangipangi, and some hauteur and cigarettes.When Iam flush I know them places.

"I declare, I must have looked as bad as a magazine artist sitting there without any money and my hair all rumpled like I was booked to read a chapter from 'Elsie's School Days' at a Brooklyn Bohemian smoker.But Vaucross treated me like a bear hunter's guide.He wasn't afraid of hurting the waiter's feelings.

"'Mr.Pogue,' he explains to me, 'I am using you.'

"'Go on,' says I; 'I hope you don't wake up.'