coast for a while,’ says Mellinger, ‘till I get the screws put on these fellows here. If you don’t they’ll give you trouble. And if you ever happen to see Billy Renfrow again before I do, tell him I’m coming back to New York as soon as I can make a stake—honest.’
“Me and Henry laid low until the day the steamer came back. When we saw the captain’s boat on the beach we went down and stood in the edge of the water. The captain grinned when he saw us.
“‘I told you you’d be waiting,’ he says. ‘Where’s the Hamburger machine?’
“‘It stays behind,’ I says, ‘to play “Home, Sweet Home.”’
“‘I told you so,’ says the captain again. ‘Climb in the boat.’
“And that,” said Keogh, “is the way me and Henry Horsecollar introduced the phonograph into this country. Henry went back to the States, but I’ve been rummaging around in the tropics ever since. They say Mellinger never travelled a mile after that without his phonograph. I guess it kept him reminded about his graft whenever he saw the siren voice of the boodler tip him the wink with a bribe in its hand.”
