The Adventures of Million Dollar Smith/The First Hundred Thousand
The First Hundred Thousand
CANFIELD SMITH was easily moved to laughter. He laughed at other people and at himself, with a flash of white, even teeth, a twinkling of intensely brown eyes, a curling of his nose that, starting in a haughty Wellingtonian curve, finished disconcertingly in an undignified tilt to starboard, with all his homely, ruddy, freckled features, with every inch of his muscular, rather short body. He laughed louder than usual that day when Garrett C. Findlater gave him the assay of the Dixie Glory’s quartz samples.
The Dixie Glory was situated in a sweep of hogback hills in the Idaho Panhandle appropriately named the Hoodoos, for once they had been famed for their rich placer claims that daily washed into the thousands; then a misleading outcropping of gold-studded rock, and a mad wave of adventurers, shaking off their dismay as a spaniel shakes off water, had followed the gold lure into farther and more lucrative fields.
They had left the Hoodoos empty of life except for a few aged Chinese from California who were satisfied with washing their daily five dollars dole in a forgotten claim; some optimistic Boise City amateur prospectors who, temporarily cured of the gold complex, now dreamt glittering mirages of mica; and Robert M’Gregor, known as “Old Man” M’Gregor throughout the Inland Empire, who was less a human individuality than a harmonious and integral part of the mountains.
He still was sure that some day he would strike it rich, and he was halfowner in Canfield Smith’s prospect hole that was grandiloquently called the Dixie Glory and was the standing joke of every mining man from Nome to Silver City.
Not that Canfield Smith was a miner either by profession or by inclination! He had been born thirty years earlier in the Palouse, had never been west of Spokane nor east of Butte, and had followed the range all his life. As a boy, he had not been called Canfield. It was Jack then. The Canfield came later—when the lure of a possible quick fortune held him in its vise. But as Canfield was he known during the days of the story, He helped his father in a decade’s losing fight against the fencing of free land, the sprouting of grain and the nibbling of sharp-toothed sheep. Later he rode herd for various cattlemen. He was a typical Man on Horseback, an atavistic reversion to an earlier age when men rode free and large in the days before steam and electricity came to cumber, but some say to lighten, the world’s burden.
He remembered how the Dixie Glory had come into his possession at the end of a memorable day-and-night stud poker Pi-Mi-Li-Ki, an ancient and disreputable Nez Perce Indian nicknamed “Rock of Ages” be cause of his Bibilical span of years and the rock-like lining of his stomach which was affected neither by grain nor by the deadly wood alcohol.
THAT night he had won steadily until finally Rock of Ages called it a day and fished a greasy, thumb-stained paper from a fold of his blanket.
“I’m flat, Canfield,” the aborigine announced. “What d’you want—my old squaw or this paper?”
“I’ve seen your squaw. I guess I’ll take the paper. What is it?”
“The Dixie Glory.”
“Gosh!”
“Somebody stuck me with it when I wasn’t lookin’, and now she’s yours.”
“Say!” Smith exclaimed. “If crust was worth anything you’d be a sure enough pie!”
Laughingly he took the title certificate—the mine was patented—in payment of Rock of Ages’ debt.
THE Dixie Glory had had a variegated, picaresque and not altogether honest career. It had been sold and resold to capitalists from New York, London and Boston; abandoned and picked up again; disposed of at auction in Spokane amid roaring laughter for an exorbitant thirty cents. Money had been lavished on it for blasting, tunneling and assaying, and not a speck of gold or silver, copper or galena, had ever been discovered in its hopeless depths.
Men out there spoke of “passing the Dixie Glory” as men in other places speak of “passing the buck.” But though Canfield had several chances of palming it off on newcomers fresh from the East, he always stoutly refused to sell.
“It isn’t that I mind sticking them,” he said, “but I’m going to develop this property, see? Why? Call it a hunch!”
He had formed a partnership with “Old Man” M’Gregor by the terms of which the latter contributed labor and tools, while Smith gave an occasional sum of money whenever he won at poker or saved it out of his munificent wage of sixty dollars a month.
Then one day he received a succinct and profane telegram which made him sit up and take notice.
Get here in helluva hurry struck it powerful
“Look a-here, young ’un,” said Old Man M’Gregor late that night. “What d’ye reckon ye’re goin’ t’do with yer share o’ them opprobrious riches down yonder in the Dixie Glory?” He waved a hand through the window toward the Hoodoos that coiled back to the starlit firmament in a great surge of carved, black granite.
“Sure it isn’t fool’s gold?” Canfield asked with a laugh.
M’Gregor shook his head hopelessly.
“I’ll take some ore samples along,” Smith continued, “and give them to Findlater to assay.”
“That bird can’t tell me nothing I don’t know. We struck it rich!”
“Better make sure, Mac.”
“All right.”
“Know what I’m going to do if the mine pans out O. K.?”
“Well?”
“I’m going to Europe. Paris first.”
“Paree, eh? Where the gals’ dresses are too low at the neck and too high at the ankles! I get ye now. Ye’re goin’ to paint the town red—goin’ to keep the best table and the worst company in Paree. Go to it, boy!” M’Gregor yawned. “Good night. In the mornin’ I’ll give ye them ore samples.”
FINDLATER had become a pessimist through a long career as chemist and assayer. Miners came to him offering large certified checks, asking nothing in return except that he rectify his reports by taking a couple of figures from the section entitled Silica and adding them to that entitled Gold. Other miners proposed to kill him on the spot when he told them that what they had taken for virgin gold was only shimmering, deceptive iron-crystals. So he was morose and silent.
“It would take another Treadwell to make me excited,” he used to say, “and those days are over. Why, today a man thinks he’s all the Guggenheims when his stuff runs two ounces to the ton.”
But a few days later when Canfield ambled into his office, he smiled all over his large puttyish face and held out his flabby fingers.
“Mr. Smith,” he said in his well-modulated diction that, after a lifetime in the Northwest, still smacked of Harvard, “permit me to shake your hand.”
“Why this exuberance of come-hitherness, Findlater?”
“The Dixie Glory!” replied the other. “The jest of the decade has turned into the marvel! of the decade, my dear sir. See for yourself!”
He held out to him a typewritten assay report which Canfield read.
“All this is Siwash to me. What does she mean?” Canfield exclaimed with a laugh.
“It means that you are rich beyond the dreams of avarice. It means that the Dixie Glory, if the vein runs true—”
“Mac says it does!”
“He ought to know. He is an expert at blocking out ore in his own crude way—” Findlater stopped; then made up his mind. “You will need capital to develop the mine. Have you any money of your own?”
“Eleven bucks cash and a bunch of poker I.O.U.’s.”
“And M’Gregor?”
“About the same minus the I.O.U.’s.”
“Look here. I’ll examine the mine, and it I like it as much as I think I shall—well—want me for a partner? My capital and technical experience for a third interest?”
“You’ve made a trade if Mac’s agreeable."
M’Gregor was agreeable, and Findlater went to work with such speed and efficiency that within a short time even the most skeptical on the local mining-stock exchange became con vinced that the strike of pay ore was not an elaborate hoax but a fact. Consequently there was many a man who groaned at the remembrance that once he had been the owner of the prospect and had been in a hurry to pass it on.
There was, too, many a man who consulted a lawyer and the dusty files at the county office to see what, if anything, might be wrong with the mine patent.
But it seemed to be flawless.
Within five months the Hoodoos were ringing again to the clangor of pickaxes, the dramatic rumble of dynamite, the thunder of heavy sledges bearing down on the hand drills, the protesting creak of the long timbers, deftly wedged between top and bottom rocks to form props for the augers.
WITHIN seven months, true to his decision. Canfield Smith—the name seemed to have become legitimately his—struck Paris; struck it with the enthusiasm of a typhoon, arrayed in the most expensive finery that he had been able to buy on his rapid flight through New York.
An average of three thousand dollars a month, youth, leisure, an unimpaired digestion—and Paris in Maytime; the eastern heavens covered with a vivid cloud plumage of pink and orchid and to the west, beyond the lacy tracery of the elm trees and the tawny glimpse of the Champ de Mars, the sunset tints of mysterious gold and purple, like the door to some passionate Old World secret—all these were his!
So he went the rounds. The boulevards acclaimed him. The Bois respected him. The staff of the Hôtel de Loire where he had a three-room suite bowed deferentially when he passed. And Henri’s bar honored him, for Monsieur Jean McCafferty, the genuine imported Coney Island barkeeper, named a cocktail after him!
Yet he was not exactly happy; he was in fact a trifle disappointed. Perhaps, after the first thrill had passed, he felt the chilly, unfriendly diamond-hardness of the city’s ancient Gallic soul and resented it deep down in his own warm, generous Saxon soul. Perhaps a life of complete leisure did not agree with his active personality, not only because of his years of work on the range, but also because of inherited instincts. At all events Smith thought seriously of going home when, on an evening in early September, he met the girl.
RETURNING from the races, he adjourned to his chop and beer, metaphorically speaking. Fate had a hand in this dinner and appoint the head-waiter deputy providence. For when Laurette de Roza, née Bridget O’Mahoney—the one and only Laurette whose meteoric rise from the Barbary Coast to Pantages’ circuit, from Pantages’ to Broadway and thence to the London Alhambra and the Casino de Paris, had been the talk of all the theatrical green rooms and half the Sunday supplements—when Laurette sauntered into the restaurant she found every table occupied.
The diplomatic head-waiter with the high nose and the honey-colored side whiskers looked at her tight-fitting toque, short vamp pumps and super-Paris frock. Then, searching for a likely place, he caught sight of Smith’s tweed Norfolk. He decided that by secret sign of dress and square chin the two belonged to the same race in humor and prejudice. So he went to Canfield.
“Pardon, m’sieur,” he said politely, “Would you mind if a young lady shared this table with you?”
“Er—no, not at all,” Canfield replied.
Two seconds later Laurette sat facing him.
She looked at him from beneath drooping eyelids. Perhaps she liked his appearance, perhaps she felt just the least bit homesick. Whatever the reason, she broke the social ice with a hammer of considerable weight.
“Are you camping on that sugar bow1?” she inquired. “For if you aren’t I’d like to have some.” And this in spite of the fact that she had ordered thin soup, filet of sole and no coffee. So what was she going to do with the bowl of sugar?
Smith looked up. He saw a piquant, delightfully irregular, snub-nosed little face, sea-green, utterly fearless eyes, and intensely red lips. He was pleased and touched and affected. Nor was it because of her pretty features, but because, in the soft rolling of the r's and the bold, rich diction, he read the high signs of his far western homeland.
“Sure!” came his reply; curt, monosyllabic, yet holding, somehow, a world of enthusiasm and welcome. He passed the sugar, and asked politely if the lady hailed from the state of Washington—or perhaps Idaho?
“Not so’s you’d notice it! San Francisco is my middle name, and it’s good enough for me, see?”
“Never been there,” he countered gracefully, “but if you’re a fair sample, I’m for it strong, Miss—?”
“Laurette de Roza.”
“Pleased to meet you. I’m Canfield Smith.”
They shook hands.
THE majority of Smith’s acquaintances in Paris were Frenchmen with a miscellany of other Continentals and a few Englishmen whom he had met at random in cafés, at the races, and in hotel and theater lobbies. They were not exactly nice men, to use a trite word. One does not meet nice men in Europe, that is, not at random. The nice men there have their homes, their clubs, their offices, their funny little favorite restaurants where the waiters frown on transients, their own tight, clannish circles, chillily inhospitable to newcomers from younger and more enthusiastic lands. The men whom Canfield knew were the odds and ends, the, strays who herded together not in friendship but in a queer, slightly pathetic sort of garrulous and rather vicious loneliness. But they amused him mildly, and he hated to be alone. So he went about with them, footing most of the bills. Occasionally he joined them at poker. But he did not play with his old western zest. As he put it, he felt sorry for “those poor suckers—don’t want their cash—too easy. Why even Rock of Ages could skin them out of their eyeteeth if he tried hard!”
He also knew a couple of New Yorkers and Bostonians, harmless, if snobbish expatriates, polite cadgers who reminded him of the British remittance men in the Northwest. But with them as well as with the Europeans he had, after all, very little in common except the pleasures, tame or hectic, of the passing moment.
Here now, for the first time since he had left home, was one who spoke his language. So he went to it with spirit.
By the time he helped her on with her coat he said that the moment he saw her he felt like having her “wrapped up and sent home C.O.D.” By the time they walked out of the restaurant he allowed that one look at her “knocked all the Paris dames for a row of geraniums.”
“Miss de Roza,” he wound up with supreme eloquence, “I’m not very good at dishing out the soft stuff, but if you’ll give me your address I’m going to say it with large bouquets of orchids every morning.”
“Some fast little worker, aren’t you, Mr. Smith?”
“My friends call me Canfield.”
That same night he accompanied her to the Casino de Paris, where from a seat in the wings, nonchalantly tilted back against a pile of scenery, he watched her as she fascinated the Parisians with the latest transatlantic wrinkles in the cracking of joints and the wriggling of shoulders. And there was a suspicion of jealousy in his heart as he heard remarks of sprightly Latin appreciation floating up from the stalls and orchestra loges:
"Elle est charmanle, la petite Americaine! Ah,qu'elle est rigolo—mais elle est bien. …”
After the first night they met nearly every afternoon in one of the cafés of the Champ Elysees or the Bois until one day he discovered that he was heels over head in love with this glittering little butterfly who had danced her way from the Barbary Coast to the star dressing-room of Continental music halls.
“I’m nuts about you, kid,” he told her.
“I know. Think I’m blind?”
“Going to marry me?” And, when she shook her head: “Don’t you care for me, Laurette?”
“Suppose I did? Even then I wouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“You’re too flighty.”
“Me—flighty? Where do you get that stuff?”
“The way you live here in Paris.”
“So do you!”
“Sure. But I’m working darned hard, let me tell you, while you—”
“I got enough. Why should I work when I don’t have to?”
“Because it’s decent—and—oh, American.”
“Gosh! You talk like those revivalist guys I heard in Spokane!” Then, when he saw her lips tightening, he added hurriedly: “All right. I’ll buckle down to work when I get home.”
“By that time you’ll have lost the habit. And suppose something happens to your mine?”
“Not a chance!” He laughed. “You should have seen my last check!”
“Blew it in, didn’t you, on that bunch of cadging coyotes that’s sticking to you like flies to honey?”
“They’re all right, Laurette!”
“Like my foot! They’re a lot of free-lunch-artists dreed up in high hats and monocles. I know their breed. You’re the easy mark, always paying—”
“Why not? I got the dough. And they amuse me. They’re not exactly my friends but I like them, and they like me.”
“As the devil likes holy water! They don’t like you one little bit. You’re too American for them.”
“They’ve other American friends.”
“Not your sort. You’re home folks at heart in spite of your canary spats and that pig-tail mustache you’ve been sprouting of late. You ain’t the other kind—the sort that’s been born in a hotel lobby and whose wet-nurse was a Rolls-Royce. And the bunch you herd with is on to the difference and resents it. They laugh at you behind your back—all those Monsoors and Honorable Marmadukes with the processional noses and the recessional chins!”
Canfield laughed.
“Ain’t no laughing matter,” she continued sternly. “Why don’t you make something of yourself? Why don’t you use your bean for something else besides a barber’s playground? Why don’t you work? I know you got the pesetas but even so—”
“I guess you do care for me a little, don’t you?” he cut in, reading between the lines of her emotional outburst.
“I ain’t saying.”
“Let’s try and find out.”
He attempted to kiss her, but found himself rewarded by a resounding left-hander. He rubbed his cheek and grinned sheepishly.
He had arrived at no conclusion as to what he would do when he entered his hotel, where the desk clerk gave him his weekly bill and a cablegram. He opened the cable, looked first at the signature.
“M’Gregor.” He smiled. “Good old Mac! Let’s see what he has to say for himself.”
He read the message.
LAURETTE was hurt when Canfield did not show up the next day, nor the day following, nor the rest of the week. She was lonely and unhappy, and she missed her afternoon walks with him when the golden Paris air cried for them to go out to garden and wood. Then one day she conquered her pride and telephoned to his hotel.
“I regret, mademoiselle,” said a suave voice from the other end of the wire. “But Monsieur Smith is with us no longer.”
“What d’you mean, no longer?” she demanded excitedly. “Did he change hotels? Did he go to America? Did he go to—”
“Jail!” cut in the suave voice.
“Eh?”
“Monsieur Smith went to jail!” And the receiver at the other end clicked down with hard, dry finality.
It was nearly forty-eight hours later before Laurette, unwinding the tight spool of French bureaucratic red tape, found out what had happened to Canfield and heard what had been in M’Gror’s message, the root of the trouble.
Not exactly so. For the series of events which began with the cablegram reached still further to four Spokane business men, former owners of the Dixie Glory, sticking their heads together, consulting files and lawyers, spending money and forensic wisdom, pyramiding it all into a decision of the Supreme Court of the State of Washington which enjoined the further working of the mine by the three partners until the litigation over its title brought by the four complainants had been settled. M’Gregor explained that he and Findlater had not wanted to worry Canfield before, as they had not imagined their opponents had a leg to stand on. The message ended:
Now you got to know. Our case is going up to the Supreme Court in Washington if we can raise the wind. Meantime the injunction holds. Hope you got some of your last check left as Findlater and I are flat. Had to borrow to send this cable.
Canfield read and reread. “Hope you got some of your last check left …” He had—about a hundred francs.
Of course the news came as a shock. But at first he was not really worried. He had been broke before, back home. Then, suddenly, it dawned upon him that this was not home, but Paris. Well, he said to himself, the main thing was to get some ready cash—enough so that he could turn round and make plans. It would help him to think more clearly. It was like a poker game. He always bought a large stack of chips the moment he sat down. It encouraged him and discouraged the others.
There were several men who owed him money; he would telephone them and explain the situation.
He did so, calling number after number, and always with the same, though differently worded, negative result.
Laurette had been right. These people did not like him; they seemed amused at his misfortune.
It embittered him momentarily. Gosh, he thought, it was not easy to carry around the milk of human kindness when they’d pretty well kicked the bottom out of the can! And what was he going to do? He felt quite helpless; he hated himself for feeling helpless.
T hen the door opened. The hotel manager. Monsieur Marandat, entered without an apology. He spoke without the customary bow:
“Monsieur, we need your rooms after tonight. Be kind enough to settle your bill in full.”
The demand was stark crude; Canfield put two and two together: the telephone girl at the switchboard downstairs must have listened in on his conversations.
“Settle my bill, eh?” he echoed.
“If you will be so kind.”
“And then—clear out?”
“I regret. But”—an eloquent spreading of hairy hands—“another party engaged this suite several weeks in advance and—”
“Don’t bother to lie. I can see through you as a bell-hop sees through a keyhole!”
He took the bill from his pocket and looked at the total: a little over two thousand francs. “Sorry,” he said, “but I can’t pay.”
“Then we shall keep your luggage.”
“What? Keep my things? Look here!” “The rules of the house, monsieur!”
Monsieur Marandat turned to go when all at once Canfield’s wrath and bitterness exploded. He ran after the other, caught him by the shoulders, and twirled him about.
“You’re a rotten little second-hand piece of cheese, that’s what you are!”
“Monsieur!”
“Stop monsieuring me! Gosh, and you guys accuse us Americans of being crazy after the dollars! Well, at least it’s dollars with us, not measly five-centime bits! When it comes to being on the square, you’re the snail’s toenails—not there—not there at all, get me? I guess you can’t help it, though. Must have been the way your parents brought you up. But if I’d been your dad I’d have paddled you till you learnt what it means to be decent and—”
“How dare you?” Monsieur Marandat trembled with rage. He stuck out his beard like a battering ram, his face close against Canfield’s.
The latter turned his head away mockingly.
“Say it with flowers, not with a mouth full of garlic!” Then with sudden fury: “Beat it! Get out of here before I forget myself! Rub me the wrong way and I roughen up, see?”
And when the other stood there, stammering inarticulately, gesticulating, he took him by the collar and the seat of the trousers and pitched him across the threshold.
The manager picked himself up.
“Au secours—help, help!” he cried. “Call the police! I am being assassinated!”
He ran down the corridor, yelling, “Au secours! Au secours!" while Canfield looked after him, laughing at the sight of the little stout legs moving rapidly up and down, the tails of his respectable, black frock coat flag standing out horizontally like a battle in full retreat. Half a minute later porters, waiters and clerks came bounding up the stairs. They made a rush toward Smith.
FOR a while he did well, employing tactics unknown to the late Marquis of Queensberry. He dodged and danced and grappled, at one and the same time trying to land blows, to parry blows, to sidestep kicking feet and crashing elbows, and succeeded splendidly.
But finally three policemen appeared on the scene.
“Surrender in the name of the law!”
“Sure!” replied Canfield, landing one last blow flush on the point of Monsieur Marandat’s jaw.
He was led downstairs and through the lobby. Near the threshold he turned, thumbed his nose derisively at the whole personnel of the hotel, thereby shocking three elderly Scotch women, and laughed with frank amusement as the outside porter, gorgeous in braided cap and gold galloons, opened the door, bowed, and instinctively held out a white-gloved tip-itching palm.
Twenty minutes later, with Monsieur Marandat as complaintant, a French police magistrate gave draconic judgment:
“Assault and battery. A thousand francs fine or thirty days. Your choice, monsieur!”
“No choice at all,” commented Canfield. “I’m broke. May I have the thirty days?”
“Please yourself. Next case!”
They marched him off to jail where, at the end of the week, Laurette found him, paid the fine in spite of his protests and took him home. There she laid down the law, spiced with feminine “I told you so’s.”
“Be a good boy,” she concluded, “and go home to America; I’ll stake you to the ticket.”
He answered never a word. He got up and kissed her square on the lips, and this time she was too surprised to resist.
“Going home, aren’t you?” she asked.
“You’re a sweet kid, and I’m much obliged. But nothing doing!”
“Why?”
“Two reasons. First, I’m going.to stick around Europe as long as you’re here. And second”—he smiled thinly, rather cruelly—“I’m going to pay back this bunch over here with their own medicine.”
“How?”
“Where it hurts them most. In their pocket-books.”
“What d’you mean, Canfield?”
“I’m going to make them disgorge—going to earn a whole flock of coin!”
“Here in Paris? Tell it to the marines!”
“A whole flock of coin,” he repeated. “And when I’ve—well, a million—”
“Dollars, not francs, I suppose?” she interrupted sarcastically.
“You’ve said it. When I’ve a million dollars laid by I’ll ask you again to marry me. Not before!”
He turned to the door.
“Look here,” she begged. “Listen—”
“No use. My mind’s made up.”
“But you’re broke. What’ll you live on in the meantime?”
“I’ve still a hundred francs and the clothes I stand in and”—he laughed—“the gall I inherited from my dad. You know, before the old man reformed and turned rancher, he used to fleece the Siwashes something fierce!” And he strode out of the room whistling “Casey Jones.”
He called on her as before, day after day. She wondered how he lived. By this time he could hardly have any money left and she offered him help, first indirectly and delicately, then directly and indelicately.
“Aren’t we pals?” she insisted when he refused.
“None better. And I got no scruples borrowing from you if I need it. But I don’t.”
He laughed, kissed her pouting lips—it had become a habit with him—and left, pleading an urgent business engagement.
“What business?” she called after him.
“Darn well-paying business,” he replied. “Get the big vase ready. I’m going to send you a herd of orchids.” And he hurried downstairs two steps at a time.
SHE wondered, speculated; wondered and speculated even more than Old Man M’Gregor did as he receipted for three thousand dollars which Canfield had wired, and read the latter’s cablegram. It told him to use the money as he saw fit, for himself or for mine litigation costs. He would send more from time to time; but he wanted M’Gregor to cable to him in Paris, in care of the Hōtel de Loire, notifying him that the Dixie Glory was once more in the unchallenged possession of the three partners.
M’Gregor sent the message as directed, but Smith, who had not been near the hotel since his arrest, did not call for it. He was making an experiment in Gallic psychology. Instead of going to the hotel, he went to what he was pleased to call his business premises, a cozy back room in Henri’s bar where Monsieur Jean McCafferty, the imported Coney Island bar-keeper, presided during off-hours over a poker table.
He had gone there on the very evening of his release from jail, and McCafferty, at a whispered word, had introduced him to a few Parisian men about town who had an idea that they could play the Great American Game and were willing to back their opinion with hard coin.
Perhaps, subsconsciously, he felt in his soul the Siwash-empoverishing instinct inherited from his father. Here were his enemies, the natives, the French aborigines; and here was he, the pioneer, the adventurer. The Covered Wagon had given place to turbine and Pullman, the coonskin cap to a silk hat. But the spirit remained the same.
The first night he did not plunge, not being one of those who think that they must win because they can’t afford to lose. He hugged his pile, squeezed it, nursed it along, and was satisfied to leave fifty francs to the good. He returned night after night, winning steadily and as steadily increasing his bets until at the end of two weeks he was playing them high and wide.
Finally he made a killing: several tens of thousands of francs. This was the cause of the orchids, and, too, the cablegram to Old Man M’Gregor.
After the others left, McCafferty turned to him with succinct words:
“These boids are gettin’ kinda leery. Ye’re ruinin’ my game, Canfield. Better find yerself a bigger one.”
“Gladly. Where’ll I find it?”
“It’ll find you. Only ye gotta have the right sorta address. This pangsiong where ye live is the piker stuff.”
“A big hotel?”
“Sure. But ye got kicked outa yer old one.”
“I’ve paid them since.”
“All the same, there’s an underground wire between them hotel people. Ye’re on the black list. And it’s them same hotel guys wot’s the runners-in for the big games. How are ye goin’ to—”
“I’ve an idea,” Canfidd replied; and he cabled to M’Gregor, experimenting in Gallic psychology.
DURING the rest of the week he visited McCafferty’s back room, deliberately losing a few hundred francs to please his host. Then, on a Saturday afternoon, he decided to see what had been the result of his psychological experiment. First, he telephoned to the telegraph company and learned that a cablegram for him had come from Spokane and was received by the Hōtel de Loire, which kept it, not knowing his address. Then he went to the hotel, sauntering leisurely into the lobby.
He saw at once that his experiment was a complete success, for Monsieur Marandat rushed up with outstretched arms.
“Ah, monsieur, what happiness it is to see you! I hope you will reoccupy your suite?”
“Well, I don’t know, after what happened—”
“Oh, just a little argument, monsieur!”
“Call jail an argument?”
“Forgive me! It was a regrettable misunderstanding.”
“Got a cable for me?”
“Yes, monsieur.” Monsieur Marandat spoke to a clerk, who produced a blue envelope. “Here you are.”
Jack’s sharp eyes saw at once that, as he had hoped and expected, it had been opened and regummed. He hid a smile.
“You will come back to us?” insisted the manager.
“All right, if you promise not to kiss me.”
When he told Laurette she asked how he could afford it.
“Business reasons,” he replied. “Expensive rooms—sure. Well, call it overhead.”
“What is your mysterious business? Tell me!”
“General notions,” he laughed. “French notions.”
“What sort?”
“Painted pasteboards, and ivory and bone discs—”
“Does it pay?”
“I’ll tell the world! And it’ll pick up more and more.”
During the next days he cultivated Monsieur Marandat’s friendship, and when once, quite casually, he let drop that he liked an occasional small game of poker the other rose to the bait. That same day Monsieur Marandat confided to a suave gentleman of debatable ancestry that he had a guest, an American, a fool, an idiot, but very wealthy—un richissime—part owner of a great and wonderful mine called, for some ridiculous transatlantic reason, the Dixie Glory. Had he not read a certain cablegram? Ah, name of a curly-tailed guinea pig, but this American was the French equivalent for a sucker!
“Lead me to him!” said the suave gentleman.
Monsieur Marandat did; and the next evening Canfield was a member in good standing of the Cercle Richelieu where, it is said by people who know, they play the highest poker in the world. It is also truthfully said, that the play is on a strict cash basis. Canfield was grateful for this, for he won steadily.
It would be doing him an injustice to say that it was luck. He could play the game. There exists a distinct genius for poker, not registered by scientists, as there exists genius for music and writing and polo and love-making. Canfield had the poker genius to an amazing degree.
His face, when he picked up his cards, was a study in complete lack of expression; his voice, when he asked for cards, was as void of human emotion as a bagpipe. His elocution when he said, “I play these!” was a pure product of art—a soft, gentle purr blended to a steely threat. His strategy was never twice alike; and when once in a while the others abandoned a pot to him without calling his hand and then, with the spirit and intonation of early Christian martyrs, inquired what he had had, he could either tell the truth in such a way that they believed he lied, or lie in such a way that they believed he told the truth. Occasionally he let himself be bluffed on purpose. And the very next deal the man who had bluffed him successfully would rise to the naked hook with the alacrity of folly and greed, and he would be therewith the goods, playing for blood, merciless, iron-visaged. Again he would play a slow, lackadaisical game until the others had a conception of him as of one who was sick of bad luck. Then, suddenly, magnificently, he would shatter these conceptions with a thumping fact: a high full or some such trifle. Also, though rarely, he would smile when he picked up his hand, since there is in scientific poker the triumphant practice of perfect hypocrisy.
IT TOOK the members of the Cercle Richelieu a week to discover that instead of a sucker they had caught a Tartar. They did not cheat. They played an honest game as they saw honesty. But, like the waiters of the Hōtel de Loire on the day of his arrest, they made a mass attack against his pile across the green felt; and, again like the waiters, they interfered with each other, tripped and involuntarily misled each other, while Canfield, the lone wolf, could bite and maul whom he pleased.
That winter Canfield Smith made history in Paris sporting circles. The tale of it is still being told with awe and envy and admiration:
“Messieurs, there was once an American who …”
Then winter passed, and spring came again with golden days and blue nights, brushing into the Paris streets on quivering, gauzy pinions; hovering birdlike over the tarred, peaked roof tops; dropping liquid silver over the toil and maze of the ancient faubourgs; adding music to the strident calls of pavement and gutter; and there came a soft night when after the show, Laurette and he were having a leisurely supper in an open-air restaurant of the Bois.
The French waiters were trying hard to speak English; the French band was trying hard to bring Latin logic into a lawless American jazz; and Laurette looking very small and sweet and rather pathetic, was trying hard to force back her tears.
“The season’s over,” she said. “Monday I’m due in Rome.”
“Got your tickets?”
“Yes.”
“So have I.”
“Oh! You going, too?”
“You bet!”
She hesitated. “Too bad!” she went on. “If we were married we could—” she stopped.
“Travel in the same compartment?”
“You’ve said it. Well—”
“Well?” he echoed.
“What about?”
“What about what?”
“Getting married, Canfield!”
“Not just yet awhile.”
“Don’t you love me any more?”
“More than ever, Laurette!”
“Then why won’t you …?”
“Remember my promise?”
“Don’t be a silly goof, boy!”
“I’m serious.”
“I won’t marry anybody else,” she sighed. “You’re all the sheik I want. And—waiting for your million—I guess I’ll die an old maid.”
“Not a chance! You see, I got a fair start.”
“Toward the million?”
“Aha!”
“How much. Canfield?”
“Greedy little devil!”
“Greedy for love! How much? Tell me!”
“One hundred thousand bucks, after paying my expenses and cabling quite a wad to 'Old Man’ M’Gregor.”
“You don’t say so?”
“I do!”
“And you made it all in—what did you say? Notions?”
“Yes,” he laughed. “French notions—and a few English! French and English notions about themselves, and Americans, as poker players.”
“You,” she stammered, “you don’t mean to say you made all that dough playing poker?”
“That’s just what I did!”
“You—you really mean it?”
“Absotively! Poker! One hundred thousand silver fish! Didn’t I tell you I’d make them disgorge?”
“Gee!” she exclaimed. “I’m proud of you, boy!”
“Thanks. I’m proud of myself.”
“And what are you going to do in Rome?”
“Make love to you.”
“I mean—about increasing your pile?”
“Don’t know yet,” he said, “except—”
“Yes?”
“I may turn barber.”
“Barber?” she echoed.
“Sure! You just wait until we get there. Going to trim the wops, see?”