FullReads

“Did you go into the side show?”

“No, sir. I studied the oil paintings on the outside, but I didn’t go in, I met a handsome looking man there near the side show, though, that seemed to take an interest in me. There was a lottery along with the show and he wanted me to go and throw for him.”

“Capper, probably?”

“Perhaps so. Anyhow, he gave me a dollar and told me to go and throw for him.”

“Why didn’t he throw for himself?”

“O, he said the lottery man knew him and wouldn’t let him throw.”

“Of course. Same old story. He saw you were a greeney and got you to throw for him. He stood in with the game so that you drew a big prize for the capper, created a big excitement, and you and the crowd sailed in and lost all the money you had. I’ll bet he was a man with a velvet coat, and a moustache dyed a dead black and waxed as sharp as a cambric needle.”

“Yes; that’s his description to a dot. I wonder if he really did do that a-purpose.”

“Well, tell us about it. It does me good to hear a blamed fool tell how he lost his money. Don’t you see that your awkward ways and general greenness struck the capper the first thing, and you not only threw away your own money, but two or three hundred other wappy-jawed pelicans saw you draw a big prize and thought it was yours, then they deposited what little they had and everything was lovely.”

“Well, I’ll tell you how it was, if it’ll do any good and save other young men in the future. You see this capper, as you call him, gave me a $1 bill to throw for him, and I put it into my vest pocket so, along with the dollar bill father gave me. I always carry my money in my right hand vest pocket. Well, I sailed up to the game, big as old Jumbo himself, and put a dollar into the game. As you say, I drawed a big prize, $20 and a silver cup. The man offered me $5 for the cup and I took it.”

“Then it flashed over my mind that I might have got my dollar and the other feller’s mixed, so I says to the proprietor, ‘I will now invest a dollar for a gent who asked me to draw for him.’

“Thereupon I took out the other dollar, and I’ll be eternally chastised if I didn’t draw a brass locket worth about two bits a bushel.”

I didn’t say anything for a long time. Then I asked him how the capper acted when he got his brass locket.

“Well, he seemed pained and grieved about something, and he asked me if I hadn’t time to go away into a quiet place where we could talk it over by ourselves; but he had a kind of a cruel, insincere look in his eye, and I said no, I believed I didn’t care to, and that I was a poor conversationalist, anyhow; and so I came away, and left him looking at his brass locket and kicking holes in the ground and using profane language.

“Afterward I saw him talking to the proprietor of the lottery, and I feel, somehow, that they had lost confidence in me. I heard them speak of me in a jeering tone of voice, and one said as I passed by: ‘There goes the meek-eyed rural convict now,’ and he used a horrid oath at the same time.

“If it hadn’t been for that one little quincidence, there would have been nothing to mar the enjoyment of the occasion.”