Kid Scanlan

by H. C. Witwer

CHAPTER VI

THE UNHAPPY MEDIUM

They may be such a thing as a ghost, but I don't believe it! At the same time, I'm willin' to admit that my feelin's in the matter ain't gonna prove the ruin of the haunted house promoters. They's a whole lot of things which I look on as plain and simple bunk, that the average guy studies at college. But the reason I say they may be, is because when me and Kid Scanlan come back East this year we stopped off somewheres in the hurrah for prohibition part of the country and was showed over what the advertisin' matter admitted to be the greatest bakery in the world.

I think them ad writers was modest fellers. That joint was not only the world's greatest bakery, it was the world's greatest anything!

I never really knowed a thing about bread, except that you put butter on it, until I give that place the up and down.

What I don't know about the staff of life now would never get you through Yale. I might go farther than that and come right out with the fact that I have become a abandoned bread fiend and got to have it or I foam at the mouth, since I seen how it was made at this dough foundry.

A accommodatin' little guy took hold of me and the Kid and showed us all over the different machine shops where this here bread was mixed, baked and what-notted for the trade. Our charmin' guide must have come from a family of auctioneers and circus barkers and he never heard of no sums under ten or eleven thousand in his life. He knowed more about figures than Joe Grady, who once filled in a summer with a Russian ballet, and he had been wound up and set to deliver chatter at the rate of three words a second, provided the track was fast and he got off in front. He talked with his whole body, waggin' his head, movin' his arms and shufflin' his feet. When he got warmed up and goin' good, he pushed forward at you with his hands like he was tryin' to insert his chatter right into you.

He leads us to a spot about half a mile from where we come in, holds up his hands to Heaven, coughs, blows his nose and gives a little shiver.

"Over there!" he bellers, without no warnin'. "Over there is our marvelous, mastadon, mixin' shop. We use 284,651 pounds of scrupulously sifted and freshly flavored flour, one million cakes of elegant yeast and 156,390 pounds of bakin' powder each and every year! We employ 865 magnificent men there and they get munificent money. We don't permit the use of drugs, alcoholics, tobacco or unions! The men works eight easy hours a delightful day, six days a week and they are happy, hardy and healthy! Promotion is regular, rapid and regardless! Our employees is all loyal, likable and Lithuanians! They own their own cottages, clothes and chickens, bein' thrifty, temperate and—"

"Tasty!" I yells. I couldn't, keep it in no longer!

"What?" snaps the little guy, kinda sore.

"Lay off, Stupid!" says the Kid to me, with a openly admirin' glance at the runt. "Go on with your story," he nods to him. "Never mind Senseless, here, I'm gettin' every word of it!"

The little hick glares at me and points to a shack on the left.

"Over there," he pipes. "Over there is our shippin' plant where the freshly finished and amazingly appetizin' loaves are carefully counted and accurately assembled! For this painstakin' performance we employ 523 more men. None but the skilled, superior and—and—eh—Scandinavian are allowed in that diligent department, and each and every day a grand, glorious total of ten thousand lovely loaves is let loose with nothin' missin' but the consumer's contented cackle as he eagerly eats! We even garnish each loaf with a generous gob of Gazoopis—our own ingenuous invention—before they finally flitter forth! Would you like to see the shop?"

"I certainly wish I could sling chatter like that!" answers the Kid with a sigh. "But I guess it's all in the way a guy was brung up. Gobs of generous Gazoopis!" he mutters, turnin' the words over in his mouth like they was sweet morsels. "Gobs of generous Gazoopis! Oh, boy!"

The little guy throws out his chest and bows with a "I-thank-you" look all over his face. He got me sore just watchin' him. Y'know that runt hated himself!

"Say!" I says to him. "If all that stuff you claim for this roll foundry is on the level, it must take a lot of dough to run it, eh?"

"Are you tryin' to kid me?" he sneers.

"No!" I comes back. "But speakin' of bakeries, I'd sacrifice my sacred silk socks for a flash at them skilled Scandinavians assemblin' that bread, before I move on to nasty New York!"

The Kid slaps me on the back and grins.

"Go on, Foolish!" he says. "You got this bird on the ropes!" He turns to the runt. "All I want," he goes on, "is one peep at them likable Lithuanians—can I git that?"

"You guys is as funny as pneumonia to me!" snorts the little guy, gettin' red in the face. "That stuff may pass for comedy in Yonkers or wherever you hicks blowed in from, but it don't git no laugh outa me! D'ye wanna see this shop or don't you—yes or no?"

"Let's go!" I tells him. "You got me all worked up about it!"

"Same here!" says the Kid. "I only wish I could talk like you can, but I guess it's a gift, ain't it?"

The little guy grunts somethin' and nods for us to fall in behind him, and we lock step along till we come to another joint from which was issuin' what I'll lay eight to five was all the noise in the world. How they ever gathered it up and got it in the buildin' I don't know, but I do know it was there! If you'd take a bowlin' alley on Turnverein night, a boiler factory workin' on a rush order and the battle of Gettysburg, wind 'em up and set 'em all off at once, you might get a faint idea of how the inmates of that buildin' was ruinin' the peace and quiet of the surroundin' country. A dynamite explosion in the next block would have attracted as much attention as a whisper in a steamfittin' shop.

"I thought the war was all over!" hollers the Kid, holdin' his ears. "Has the police been tipped off about this?"

"What d'ye mean the police?" screams back the runt. "That there is the mixin' and bakin' shop."

"Yeh?" I cuts in. "Well, I don't know what them skilled Scandinavians of yours is at, but, believe me, they're tryin' all right!"

The runt sneers at us.

"You must be a fine pair of hicks!" he says. "D'ye mean to say you never heard of the Eureka Mixin' and Bakin' machine?"

"I can hear it now, all right!" I tells him, noddin' to the buildin' where the boilermakers was havin' a field day, "but—"

"Sufferin' salmon, what boobs!" he interrupts me. Then he gives us both the once over and starts his sneerer workin' again. "Say!" he asks me. "Who d'ye like to win the battle of Santiago and d'ye think Lincoln will git elected again?"

"I don't know," I comes back. "I'm gonna vote for Jefferson myself!" I looks him right in the eye. "I think Washington is a sucker to hang around Valley Forge all winter, don't you?" I asks him.

"Couple of small time cut-ups, eh?" he says, shakin' his head. "Where d'ye come from?"

"New York," the Kid tells him, "and listen—will you do me a favor and let's hear some more about them likable Lithuanians and gobs of generous Gazoopis?"

"I figured you come from some hick burg like New York," says the runt, ignorin' the Kid's request. "I can spot a guy from New York ten miles away! He knocks Brooklyn, thinks walkin' up Broadway is seein' life, was born in Memphis and is the only thing that keeps the mail order houses in Oshkosh from goin' to the wall! New Yorkers, eh?" he winds up with another insultin' sneer. "I got you!"

"Gobs of generous Gazoopis!" mutters the Kid like he's in a trance. "Sweet Papa!"

The runt looks at him.

"How does that bird fool the almshouse?" he asks me.

I bent down so's I could whisper in the side of his little dome. Them skilled Scandinavians in the buildin' had gone crazy or else some of the night shift had come in with more boilers and things to hit 'em with.

"That's Kid Scanlan, welterweight champion of the world!" I hisses in his ear.

"Ha, ha!" laughs the runt. "That's who he'd like to be, you mean!"

"Our employees is all hale, hearty and hilarious!" grins the Kid at him. "We pay 'em off in money, music and mush! Wow!"

"If that big stiff is tryin' to kid me," begins the runt, gettin' red again, "he—"

"All right, all right!" I butts in quickly. "Don't let's have no violence. Show us what makes that shop go, and we'll grab the next rattler for New York. Y'know the Kid fights Battlin' Edwards on the twenty-first and—"

"Are you on the level with that stuff?" interrupts the runt, still lookin' at the Kid. "Is that really Kid Scanlan?"

I calls the Kid over.

"Kid," I says, "meet Mister—er—"

"Sapp," says the runt. "Joe Sapp!" He sticks out his hand. "I remember you now," he tells the Kid. "I seen you fight some tramp in Fort Wayne last year. I think you hit this guy with everything but the referee and that's why I like your work. When I send in three bucks for a place to sit down at a box fight, I expect to see assault and batter and not the Virginia Reel! Why—"

"Not to give you a short answer," I butts in, "but how about the insane asylum over there?" I points to the buildin'. "Do we see that or don't we?"

Right away he straightens up and sticks his finger at it.

"It takes exactly twelve, temptin' minutes to completely compose and accurately assemble a loaf!" he shouts. "We never heard of waste, and efficiency was born in this factory. The only thing that loafs here is the bread! Each eager employee has his own particular part to perform and that accounts for the amazin' and awesome accuracy with which we bake the beautiful bread. Step this way!"

"Believe me!" says the Kid, "I wish I had a line of patter like that! 'Amazin' and awesome accuracy'!" he repeats. "Do you get that?"

Right then about a dozen dames and their consorts come breezin' in the main entrance. Offhand, they look like the hicks that gives the "Seein' New York" busses a play, and when the runt spots them he ducks and grabs my arm.

"C'mon!" he says. "Shake it up! If them boobs see me, I'll have to show 'em all over the plant! That's a gang of them Snooks' Tourists, seein' the world for fourteen eighty-five a-piece, breakfast at hotel on third mornin' out and bus from train included! Most of them is wisenheimers from Succotash Crossin', Mo.; and they're out to see that they don't get cheated. They're gonna see everything like it says on the ticket, and some of 'em is ready to sue Snooks because they got somethin' in their eye from lookin' out the train window and missed eight telegraph poles and a water tank on account of it. The rest of them sits around knockin' everything on general principles and claimin' the thing is a fake. Then there'll be one old guy in the party with a trick horn he holds to his ear, and, when I get all through tellin' 'em about the mixin' shop, the deef guy will say, 'Hey? What was that about the airship again?' There will also be three veteran school-teachers which will want samples of the bread and hide out a couple of rolls on the side. And then one young married couple which started sayin' 'Wonderful!' when the train pulled out of the old home town and which has said nothin' else but that since! No, sir! I'm off them tourists—c'mon, sneak around here!"

He boldly walks into the buildin' where all the noise is comin' from, and not wantin' to act yellah before strangers we followed him in. They was a lot of things in there and if you ever make the town, Joe Sapp will show 'em to you. He has to, in order to eat. But the only thing I remember was the way them lovely, luxurious loaves was artistically assembled, and I'll remember that little item till the insurance company pays off!

They was a great, big machine in the middle of the floor and that was the thing that was makin' the bread and noise. A half dozen of them skilled Scandinavians stood away up on a gallery at one end and their job was of a pourin' nature. They was all dressed in white and wore little trick hats on which it said this, "No Human Hands Touch It." I didn't know whether it meant the skilled Scandinavians or the beautiful bread.

"The most marvelous, magnificent, mammoth invention of the age!" bawls the runt so's we could hear him over the noise. "Here is where the beautiful bread is blissfully baked by the wonderful workmen! This machine cost the sensational sum of half a million dollars, and its capacity is a trifle over five hundred finely finished luscious loaves each and every—"

That's all I heard because I went in a trance from watchin' the thing. I never seen nothin' like it before and I know darn well I never will again. Listen! Them skilled Scandinavians poured in raw wheat at one end of this here machine, and it come out the other end, steamin' hot bread! Some machine, eh? Not only that, but when it come out, it was baked, labelled, wrapped in oil paper and smellin' most heavenly from that generous gob of Gazoopis, as the runt said.

I dragged the Kid outside and we started for the railroad station without comment. As we passed out the door, we heard the runt screamin', probably thinkin' we was still there.

"One section reduces the wheat to flour, another mixes the dough, it passes on to the steam ovens and then what happens? Bread! Over here—"

The Kid stops all of a sudden, takes a hitch in his belt and looks back at the shop.

"Hell!" he says. "They can't make no bread like that!"

"You seen 'em do it, didn't you?" I asks him, although I was thinkin' the same thing myself.

"Even at that," he comes back, "I don't believe it!"

We walks on a little ways, and the Kid stops again.

"I certainly wish I could talk like that little runt!" he shoots out. "Take it from me, that bird is there forty ways. He's got Webster lookin' like a dummy!"

He keeps on mutterin' to himself as we breeze up to the station, and, when I lean over to get an earful I hear him sayin', "They're all simple, sassy and suckers! We feed 'em oranges, oatmeal and olives!"

So, as I said before, they may be such a thing as ghosts. After watchin' that bread bakin' machine at play I'll go further than that. There may be anything!

One day at the trainin' camp, a couple of weeks after we hit New York, a handler comes to me and says they's two guys outside that wants to see the Kid. I hopped out to take a flash at 'em, but the Kid has been reached, and when I come on the scene he's shakin' hands with 'em. One of these guys was dressed the way the public thinks bookmakers and con men doll up and he wore one of them sweet, trustin' innocent faces like you see on the villain in a dime novel. He looked to me like he'd steal a sunflower seed from a blind parrot.

But it was the other guy that was the riot to me.

He was tall and lanky, dressed all in black like the pallbearer the undertaker furnishes, and the saddest-lookin' boob I ever seen in my life! If he wasn't the original old Kid Kill-Joy, he was the bird that rehearsed him, believe me! Y'know just from lookin' at this guy, a man would get to thinkin' about his past life, the time he throwed the baby down the well when but a playful child, how old his parents was gettin' and the time Shorty Ellison run off with the red-headed dame that lived over the butcher's. You wished you had saved your money or somebody else's, suddenly findin' out that it was a tough world where a poor man didn't have a Chinaman's chance, and you wondered if death by drownin' was painful or not.

That's the way it made you feel when you just looked at this guy. Ever see one of 'em?

He had a trick of sighin'. Not just ordinary heaves, but deep, dark and gloomy sighs that took all the life out of whoever he sighed at. If they had that bird over in Europe, they never would have been no war, because when he started sighin', nobody would have had enough ambition left to fight. Every time he opened his mouth I thought he was gonna say, "Merciful Heaven help us all!" or somethin' like that. But he didn't. He just sighed.

The Kid tells me the riot of color was Honest Dan Leduc, and that he was the best behaved guy that ever spent a week end in Sing Sing, where he had gone every now and then to study jail conditions at the request of thirteen men, the same bein' a judge and a jury. The sad-lookin' boob was Professor Pietro Parducci, the well known medium.

"Medium what?" I says, when the Kid pulls that one.

The Kid frowns at me and turns to his new found friends.

"Don't mind Foolish here," he tells 'em, "he's got the idea that everything is crooked. He thinks the war was a frame-up for the movies, and the Kaiser got double-crossed, but he ain't a bad guy at that. He knows more about makin' money than a lathe hand at the mint." He jerks his thumb at Honest Dan and swings around on me. "This guy and me was brung up together," he explains, "and before I went into the fight game we was as close as ninety-nine and a hundred. He's been all over the world since then, he says so himself, but just now he's up against it. It seems he was runnin' a pool room on Twenty-Eighth Street and he give the wrong winner of the Kentucky Derby to the precinct captain. The next mornin' the captain give every cop in the station house a axe and Dan's address. His friend here is a now, whosthis and—"

Honest Dan pulls what I bet he thought was a pleasant smile. It reminded me more of a laughin' hyena.

"One minute!" he butts in. "My friend, the world-renowed Professor Parducci, is a medium, a mystic and a swami. He's the seventh son of a seventh son, born with a veil and spent two years in Indiana with the yogi. He can peer into the future or gaze back at the past. He is in direct communication with the spirits of the dear departed and as a crystal gazer and palmist he stands alone!"

"That's a great line of patter, Dan," says the Kid, "but we met a guy on the trip back that had the English language layin' down and rollin' over when he snapped his fingers. Generous gobs of Gazoopis and likable, loyal Lithuanians! Can you tie that?"

I was still lookin' over the gloomy guy with the name that sounded like a brand of olive oil, and I decided he was the bunk. I asked him could he tell my fortune, and he draws himself up and claims he's not in harmony just now. That was the tip-off to me, and I figures he has come out to take the Kid for his bankroll. I knowed he couldn't tell no fortunes the minute I seen him. He didn't look to me as if he could tell his own name, and I bet all the spirits he ever communicated with was called private stock. The end of his nose was as red as a four alarm fire and the back of his collar was all wore off from where he had kept throwin' back his head so's the saloon keepers could meet expenses. Honest Dan said he couldn't speak much English, so I guess he had stopped at "I'll have the same" and "Here's a go!"

Well, I had the right dope, because the next week the Kid goes down to the bank and draws out five thousand bucks to set Honest Dan and the professor up in business with. They was gonna open a swell fortune-tellin' joint on Fifth Avenue. I said the thing sounded crooked to me, and the Kid got sore and told me Honest Dan couldn't do nothin' like that, it wasn't in him. He showed me where Dan had always got time off for good conduct, no matter what jail he was in.

The professor brightens up for a minute when the Kid hands over the roll, but after that he went right back into the gloom again.

Honest Dan gives the Kid a receipt for the sucker money and him and his trick medium goes on their way. After a while, I forgot about 'em. The Kid fights Edwards and a couple of more tramps and knocks 'em all kickin' and we're just gonna grab one of them "See America Firsts" for the coast when some club promoter goes crazy and offers us ten thousand iron men to fight Joe Ryan. The Kid would have fought the Marines for half of that, so we run all the way to the club and signed articles whiles the guy that hung up the purse was still wishin' he had stayed on the wagon.

The Kid had got Professor Parducci to fix him up with a few love charms and owls' ears by which he was gonna make himself solid with Miss Vincent. In fact Scanlan fell so hard for the medium stuff that when the professor told him to get at all cost a lock of Miss Vincent's hair clipped at eighteen minutes after eleven on a rainy Sunday night, he writes out to her and asks her to send him a lock cut just that way!

When he wasn't pesterin' the professor on how to win the movie queen, he was goin' around mutterin', "Loyal, likeable Lithuanians and generous gobs of Gazoopis!" until the newspaper guys wrote that Kid Scanlan would be a mark for the first good boy he fought, because like everybody else that was a sudden success, he had took to usin' stimulants which is only sold on a doctor's prescription. On the level, he'd git a wad of paper and sit around all night with a dictionary, writin' down all the words that begin with the same letter and then he'd git up and repeat that stuff for a hour.

One afternoon we went downtown to look over this joint run by Honest Dan and the professor. It was in one of them studio buildings on Fifth Avenue near Twenty-Eighth Street, and the rent they was payin' for it would have kept the army in rubber heels for six years. They's a long line of autos outside and the inmates was streamin' in and out of the place like a crowd goin' to see the beloved rector laid out. Some of the dames would be familiar to you, if you've been readin' the box scores in the latest divorce mêlées, or the lineup of the committee for the aid of the Esquimaux victims of the war.

We get in a elevator, and, floatin' up to the roof, walk down what would have been a fire trap on the East Side, and here we are at Professor Parducci's Temple of the Inner Star. A couple of West Indian hall boys, who's gag line was "Say-hib," lets us in. They was dressed in sheets and had towels twisted around their heads and smelled strongly of gin. Pretty soon Honest Dan comes out and shakes hands all around. Except for his face, you'd never know it was the same guy. His hair is brushed all the way back like the guys that poses for the underwear ads and he's dressed in a black suit that fit him better than most of his skin. In his shirt front they's a diamond that looked like a young arc light, and he had enough gems on his hands to make J. P. Morgan gnash his teeth.

He told me that him and the professor wasn't doin' no more business than a guy would do in Hades with the ice water concession, and that Barnum was wrong when he said they was a sucker born every minute. Honest Dan said his figures showed there was about two born every second.

He leads us into a great big hall that was filled with statues, pictures, rugs, sofas, women and fatheads. The furnishings of this joint would make Buckingham Palace look like a stable. It must have ruined the Kid's five thousand just to lay in scenery for that one room alone. The statues and pictures was nearly all devoted to one subject, and that was why should people wear clothes—especially women? The victims is all lollin' around on them plush sofas, drinkin' tea and lookin' like a ten-year-old kid at church or a guy waitin' in the doctor's office to find out if he's got consumption or chilblains. It was as quiet as a Sunday in Philadelphia and they was also a very strong smell of burnin' glue, which Honest Dan said was sacred incense that always had to be used by the professor before he could work.

Among the decorations was a very large dame sittin' over in a corner dressed within a inch of her life. I suppose she had ears, a neck and hands, but you couldn't tell right away whether she had or not, because them parts of her anatomy, as the feller says, was buried under a carload of diamonds. You could see by her face that at one time she had probably been a swell-lookin' dame, but them days was all over. Still, she was makin' a game try at comin' back, and from her complexion she must have been kept busy day and night openin' bottles and cans signed on the outside by Lillian Russell and etc.

This dame was havin' the best time of anybody in the joint. She was sittin' up very straight and solemn with both chins restin' in her glitterin' hands and from the look in her eyes some Sunday paper had just claimed she was the best lookin' woman in America and the like.

A guy wouldn't have to be no Sherlock Holmes to see that this was the bird that was bein' readied for the big killin' by Honest Dan and his trick professor. The rest of them was just what you might call the chorus.

Sittin' right beside the stout party was a kid that had just dropped in from the cover of a magazine. She was the kind of female that could come down to breakfast with the mumps and her hair in curl papers, fry the egg on the wrong side and yet make the lucky guy across the table go out whistlin' and pityin' his unwed friends. You know how them dames look when they have give some time to dollin' up, don't you? Well, this one had everything; take it from me, she was a knockout! She's tappin' the floor with a classy little foot and tryin' to see can she pull a silk handkerchief apart with her bare hands, the while registerin' this, "This-medium-thing-is-the-bunk-and-I-wish-I-was-out-of-here!"

I doped her as the stout dame's daughter, hittin' .1000 on the guess as I found out later.

"Well," whispers Honest Dan to the Kid, "what d'ye think of the place?"

"Some joint!" says the Kid. "Listen—I got a new one. The most magnificently, male mauler on earth! How's that—poor, eh?"

"What does it mean?" asks Honest Dan.

"It means me, Stupid!" pipes the Kid. "I'm havin' some cards made up with that on it. The sagacious, sanguine and scandalous Scanlan, welterweight walloper of the world! Where's the professor?"

"Sssh!" whispers Honest Dan. "Lay off that professor gag here. That's small town stuff—he's a mahatma now! He's in one of his silences, but if you keep quiet I'll take you around and show you how he works."

He takes us through a little door that leads into a dark room which was a steal on the old chamber of horrors at the Eden Musee. It was full of ghost pictures drawed by artists who had no use for prohibition, and they was plenty of skulls and stuff like that layin' around where they would do the most good. At the far end is a small wire gratin' with a Morris chair on the other side of it. Honest Dan explains that that's where the come-ons sit while the professor massages their soul. They never see him, Dan figurin' in that way it would be harder to pick the professor out at police headquarters when the district attorney got around to him. We hadn't been there a minute, when the curtain at the other end of the room opens and in blows the stout dame, floppin' down in the chair with a sigh as the professor pulls open the grate to feed her the oil. Dan pulls us back in the dark, and I notice she was so excited that she shook all over like a ten cent portion of cornstarch or Instant Desserto and her breath was comin' in short little gasps.

Honest Dan is takin' a inventory of the couple of quarts of diamonds she wore and figurin' the list price on his shirt cuffs. When he got through, he dug me in the ribs and says it looks like a big winter.

The professor starts to talk with a strong Ellis Island dialect, tellin' the dame that he's just been in a trance, give the sacred crystal the once over and took up her case with a few odd ghosts. The result was that a spirit which was in the know had just give him a tip that she was no less than the tenth regular reincarnation of Cleopatra, who did a big time act in one with a guy called Marc Anthony which was now doin' a single or had jumped to the movies or somethin' like that.

The stout dame gets up off the chair and waves her handkerchief.

"Merciful Heavens!" she remarks loudly. "I knew it!"

Then she pulls a funny fall and faints!

The professor hisses at Dan to get him a cigarette, and the West Indian hall boys drag the stout dame into the chair from which she had slipped followin' the professor's sure-fire stuff about Cleopatra. He snatches a few drags out of the cigarette before the dame comes to and when she does, he goes on and says yes she is Cleopatra, they ain't no doubt about that part of it and she must have noticed the strange power she had over men all her life, hadn't she? The stout dame sighs and nods her head. The professor then tells her that she has been in wrong and unhappy all her life, because she had never met her mate. The same bein' a big, husky, red-blooded cave man which would club her senseless and carry her off to his lair. Had she ever met anybody like that? The stout dame says not lately, but when poor Henry and her had first got wed he was a Saturday night ale-hound and once or twice he had—but never mind, she won't speak ill of the dead. The professor says he can see that nobody of the real big-league calibre has crossed her path as yet and that her husband's spirit had told him in confidence only the other day that one night he got to thinkin' what a poor worm he was to be married to Cleopatra, and it had been too much for his humble soul which bust.

The dame nods and starts to weep.

"Poor Hennerey!" she says. "He ain't stopped lyin' yet. I should never have wed him, but how did I know that my fatal beauty would prove his undoing?"

"Ain't that rich?" pipes Honest Dan in my ear.

The professor has a coughin' spell, and when he calmed himself, he says he has just got in touch with Marc Anthony and he's pullin' the wires to have him come back to earth so's their souls can be welded together again and if she will come back in a week, he'll be able to tell her some big news. He said it was bein' whispered around among the spirits that Marc Anthony was on earth now, eatin' his noble heart out because he couldn't find her.

Then he suddenly shuts the gate, and the dame staggers out, overcome with joy and the smell of that incense which would have made a glue factory quit. Honest Dan beats it around and opens the door for her. They wouldn't take a nickel off her then, because they was savin' her for the big play.

About a week after our visit to the Temple of the Inner Star, the Kid comes runnin' up to my room at the hotel one mornin' and busts in the door. He's got a newspaper in his hand and he slams it down on the bed and kicks a innocent chair over on its side.

"I hope they give him eighty years!" he hollers.

"Who's your friend?" I asks him.

"Friend!" he screams. "Why, the big psalm-singin' stiff, I'll murder him!"

"They's just one thing I'd like to know, Kid," I says. "Who?"

"That cheap, pan-handlin' crook that Dan Leduc wished on me!" he yells. "That rotten snake I kept from dyin' in the gutter, that baby-stealin' rat which claims he's a medium! Professor Bunko—that's who!"

I grabbed up the paper and all over the front page is a picture of Miss Vincent. Underneath it says this,

"Famous Film Star Rumored Engaged to Millionaire."

"Well," I says, "what has this here social note got to do with the Professor?"

"What has a jockey got to do with horse-racin'?" bellers the Kid. "Why the big hick, I'll go down there and strangle him right out loud before them high-brow simps of his! I'll have him pinched and I hope he gets life! I'll—"

He went on like that for half an hour, and when he finally cools off he explains that the professor had guaranteed to dust off his charmers and charm Miss Vincent so hard that she wouldn't even give a pleasant smile to nobody but the Kid. All Scanlan had to do was follow the professor's dope and they'd be nothin' to it but slippin' the minister and payin' the railroad people for the honeymoon. The Kid had gone ahead and done like the professor said, startin' off with the letter requestin' a lock of her hair clipped at eleven eighteen on a rainy Sunday night. Then he telegraphed her to bathe her thumbs in hot oolong tea every Friday at noon and send him the leaves in a red envelope. He followed that up with a note demandin' a ring that she had first dipped in the juice of a stewed poppy, and then held in back of her while she said, "Alagazza, gazzopi, gazzami" thirteen times.

I guess the professor overplayed the thing a bit, because the only action the Kid got was a short note from Miss Vincent in which she said that as long as he had started right in to drink the minute he hit New York, their friendship was all over. The next thing was that notice in the paper.

The Kid's idea was to go right down and wreck the Temple of the Inner Star, windin' up by havin' Honest Dan and his bunk medium pinched. I showed him where it would do no good, because he had set 'em up in business and if they was crooked the jury would figure that and put the Kid's name on one of them indictments. He calmed off finally and said he'd be satisfied to let it go at half killin' 'em both and makin' a bum out of the Temple of the Inner Star.

We got down there in a few minutes, and Honest Dan meets us at the door. He's all excited and says the time has come for the big hog killin', after which they're gonna blow New York, because they been tipped off that the new police commissioner is about to startle the natives with a raid. The Kid starts to bawl him out, when the big stout dame is ushered into the room and Dan hustles us into the professor's shrine in the rear.

As soon as she gets inside, the professor tells her to prepare for a shock. She shivers all over, grabbin' the side of the chair and takin' a long whiff out of a little green bottle. Then she says she'll try and be brave, and to let her have the works. The professor says he has finally dug up Marc Anthony, and all the spirits is in there tryin' for them, so's they can be brought together. He told her to go right back to her rooms at the Fitz-Charlton and he would send out the old thought waves for Marc. Just when he'd get him, he didn't know—it might be a day, a week or a month, but she was to sit there all dolled up to receive him and wait. He said she would know Marc, because he would have a snake tattooed on the third finger of his right hand in memory of the way Cleopatra kissed off. That's all he was allowed to give out just now, he winds up.

Well, the stout dame thanks him about six hundred times and waddles out darn near hysterical. She grabs hold of her daughter and hisses in her ear,

"Oh, Gladys, they've found him! My beloved Marc Anthony is coming to claim me for his own. Then we will return to Egypt, and, sitting upon a golden throne—"

Friend daughter pulls a weary smile and leads Cleopatra to the door.

"Oh, don't, mother!" she says. "Don't! If you only knew how all this sickens me! This man has hypnotized you! Why don't you listen to me and take that trip to California where—"

"What!" squeals the stout dame. "What? Be away when my Marc comes? How dare you think of such a thing! I did that once and if you have read your ancient history, you must remember the terrible result!"

Daughter sighs, shakes her head and they go out.

Now the Kid has been takin' all this stuff in without lettin' a peep out of him and when the stout dame has left, I figured he'd tear right in to the plotters, so I got ready to hold up my end and reached for a chair. But what d'ye think the Kid did? He falls down on a sofa and starts to laugh! On the level, I bet he snickered out loud for a good fifteen minutes and then he gets up and walks to the door without sayin' a single word to either Dan or the professor, after all that stuff he pulled on me at the hotel!

While we're goin' down in the elevator, Honest Dan tells us that they got a handsome actor who just now is playin' in a show called "Standin' on the Corners, Waitin' for a Job," and they're gonna have him get a snake painted on the third finger of his right hand and shoo him up to the stout dame the next day. After he has been welcome homed, Marc Anthony is gonna say that he's makin' out a check for the professor which throwed them together, and don't she think she ought to send in somethin' also? When she asks what he thinks would be about right, Marc Anthony is gonna say that he guesses she ought to keep the pen she wrote the check with as a souvenir, but that everything else she had, includin' anything a pawnbroker would give a ticket on, would do!

I didn't say nothin' to that, but I was doin' a piece of thinkin' and as soon as we got our feet on Fifth Avenue again, I let go. I told the Kid what I thought of his friend Honest Dan in language that Billy Sunday could have been proud of. When I got through with Dan, I took up the professor and give him a play. I said it was my belief that a couple of safety-first crooks, who would deliberate trim a simple old stout dame out of her dough in that coarse manner, should be taken up to the Metropolitan tower and eased off.

The Kid just grins and starts hummin' under his breath.

By this time I had worked myself up to such a pitch that my goat was chasin' madly about the streets, and to have the Kid act that way was about all I needed. I carefully explained to him just how many kinds of a big, yellah tramp he was, to let the professor crab him with Miss Vincent and get away with it clean. I showed him where he should have at least bent a chair over that guy's head, if he was a real gentleman whose honor had been trifled with and not a four flushin' false alarm.

"Gobs of generous Gazoopis!" he snickers at me when I get through. "Our employees is all new, noisy and Norwegians!"

They was a queer look in his eye, and I figured he must have slipped out in the mornin' at that and dug up a place where prohibition hadn't carried. I stopped right in the middle of the traffic and told him I was goin' up to the Fritz-Charlton the next mornin' and tip the stout dame off, if it was the last thing I did.

He just grins!

The next mornin' I beat it up to Cleopatra's hotel, and, after I have waited an hour, she sends a maid down to see me. The maid tells me to spread my hands out flat on a little table that's standin' there and she examines every finger like a sure enough mechanic looks over a second-hand automobile he's gonna buy to hack with. Finally, she throws my hands down with a disappointed look and her shoulders begins one of them hula dances.

"Viola!" she remarks. "That leetle snake, he is not there! Madame she is not at home—away wit' you!"

Well, I figures I did what I could, so I breezed out and left Cleopatra flat.

Failin' to locate the Kid anywheres, I went on down to the studio and walk right in on the professor and Honest Dan givin' Marc Anthony a dress rehearsal. He was a handsome guy, all right, sickenin'ly so, with one of them soft, mushy faces and wavin' blonde hair. He's had the snake tattooed on his finger, like the part called for, and the way he carries on about how he's gonna give the stout dame the work makes me foam at the mouth. My once favorably known left had all it could do to keep from bouncin' off his chin! Finally, they start him away and Honest Dan tells me how they got it framed up for him to meet Cleopatra. He was to go to the Fritz-Charlton and send up a card that claimed he was the editor of "Society Seethings," and when she comes down to see him, he was to ask her what was her plans for the winter season and a lot of bunk like that. In no way was he to make a crack about bein' Marc Anthony—that would be too raw, but as he was leavin' he was to carelessly let her see that snake on his finger. That was all!

They knowed Cleopatra would do the rest.

I couldn't stand no more, so I hustled back to our hotel, and the minute I get in, the clerk tells me the Kid has been chasin' around lookin' for me all morning so I beat it right up to our suite. The Kid is doin' his road work by canterin' around the room when I come in, and he rushes over and grabs me by the arm.

"When are them yeggmen gonna send Marc Anthony up to Cleopatra?" he demands, all excited.

"He just left a few minutes ago!" I tells him. "Why?"

The Kid gives a yell and jumps over to the door leadin' to our sittin'-room, yankin' it open with one jerk. I thought I'd pass away when I got a flash at what was inside. They was about twenty of the roughest lookin' guys I ever seen in my life, all dolled up in new suits, shoes and hats. Some of them I recognized as ex-heavy-weights, they was a few strikin' longshoremen, a fair sprinklin' of East Side gunmen and here and there what had passed for a actor in the tanks.

"Some layout, eh?" pipes the Kid, rubbin' his hands together. "It took me all mornin' and nearly three hundred bucks to rib them guys up, but they're all desperate, darin' and dolled up!"

"What the—what's the big idea?" I gasps.

"Hold up your hands!" roars the Kid at his rough and readys.

They did—and I got it!

Each and every one of them guys had a snake tattooed on the third finger of his right hand!

The Kid had probably put in the mornin' rehearsin' 'em, because all he had to say now was, "Go to it!" and they beat it. He told me they was all goin' up to the Fritz-Charlton and ask for the stout dame at three minute intervals, show their right hand and claim they was Marc Anthony!

"If that don't show the stout dame that the professor is the bunk and if she don't let out a moan that'll be plainly heard at police headquarters, I'll make Dan a present of the five thousand he took me for!" says the Kid.

In about a hour the telephone begins to ring and I answers it. When the ravin' maniac on the other end of the wire got to where he could control the English language, I found out it was no less than Honest Dan. The main thing he said was for us to come down to the Temple of the Inner Star right away, because him and the professor has got in a terrible jam. We hopped in a taxi and did like he said. Honest Dan is waitin' in the elevator for us, and he looked like the loser in a battle royal. He says the stout dame has just left, and she's in a terrible state. I could believe that easy, because they is nothin' more vicious in the land of the free than a enraged come-on. I'd rather face a nervous wildcat than face a angry boob!

"Somebody put the bee on us!" howls Honest Dan, wringin' his hands. "And a truckload of guys went up to the hotel claimin' they was Marc Anthony in voices that disturbed people in China. They throwed the real Marc out on his lily white ear, and seven of 'em got pinched for disorderly conduct. I understand they was a mêlée up there that would make a football game look like chess and the papers is havin' a field day with the thing! We got to grab Cleopatra's gems and go away from here before the whole plant is uncovered."

"Why," I says, "how are you gonna take the stout dame now? She knows it's a fake, don't she?"

"Fake, hell!" hollers Dan. "She thinks it's on the level! The only thing that bothers her is which one is the right Marc Anthony. She says two of them had such patrician faces that she thinks some of the Caesars has got mixed up with the lot. She's gonna put it up to her late husband, and she's comin' back here any minute to talk with his spirit!" He begins walkin' the floor. "I never seen no dame like that!" he busts out. "She wants to be trimmed! The only thing she seemed to be sore about was the fact that she couldn't pick out the right Marc Anthony. Now we git the chance of a lifetime to grab a roll when she comes back and we ain't got no ghost! If I could only get the guy that sent all them Marc Anthonys up there," he winds up with a yell, "I'd make a ghost out of him!"

He never seemed to think the Kid might have done it, because the Kid was the boy that had set him and the professor up in business and why should he crab his own play?

A little electric buzzer makes good while Honest Dan is ravin' away, and Dan, gettin' white, grabs the Kid by the arm and begs him to come to the rescue.

"Jump in that cabinet there!" he whispers to him. "And when this dame asks if you're Henry, say yes, and tell her the real Marc Anthony is the guy with the blonde hair, and he's now at the City Hospital. That's all you got to say and—"

He shoves the Kid back of the cabinet and me back of a curtain just as Cleopatra blows in with her daughter. Honest Dan tells them to be seated quick, because the professor has just got the spirit of her husband where he's ready to talk to the reporters. The West Indian hall boys sneak around in the back, rattlin' chains and bangin' on pans. Then Dan reaches back and opens the mechanical bellows, and a blast of cold air comes into the room while a white light flashes over the cabinet.

"Now!" whispers Dan to the stout dame, "speak quick!"

At that minute, Dan looked like a guy with a ticket on a hundred to one shot, watchin' it breeze into the stretch leadin' by by a city block.

"Is—is that you Henery?" squeaks Cleopatra in a tremblin' voice.

They's a rustle in the cabinet and then this comes out over the top.

"Generous gobs of Gazoopis! Our employees is ready, reckless and Russian. This guy is crooked, crazy and careless. He will take you for your beautiful, bulgin' bankroll and—"

"Why, Henery!" squawks the dame, jumpin' up off the chair.

I heard the well known dull thud on the other side of the cabinet, and I guess it was Professor Parducci fallin' senseless on the floor. I thought Honest Dan had dropped dead from the way he was hung over a sofa.

"Each and every day," goes on the voice in the cabinet, "each and every day we ship a million lovely loaves—"

"Merciful Heavens!" yells the dame. "A sign! Henery, shall I go back?"

"Back is right!" says the voice. "These guys is cheap crooks and they ain't no Marc Anthony!"

The lights go out and Honest Dan comes to, rushin' over to the stout dame with a million alibis tryin' to be first out of his mouth. I beat it around to the back, but the professor has gone somewheres else while the goin' was fair to medium.

"You have deceived me, you wretch!" screams the stout dame. "You have—"

That's as far as she got, because right in the middle of it she pulls a faint, and daughter eases her to the floor. The Kid hops out of the cabinet and grabs Honest Dan.

"Beat it, you rat," bawls Scanlan, "before I commit mayhem!"

From the way Honest Dan went out of that room, he must have passed Samoa, the first hour!

Daughter reaches up and grabs the Kid's hand.

"I—I—want to thank you," she says, "for saving my mother. I—I don't know what might have happened, if you hadn't been here!"

"That's all right!" pipes the Kid. "D'ye want us to do anything else?"

"Yes," she says. "Will you tell me where you heard that—that description of the—the million lovely loaves?"

"Sure," answers the Kid. "When we was comin' East, we stopped off at a hick burg somewheres and a guy took us over a bakery—"

Daughter claps her hands and laughs.

"Poetic justice!" she says. "That explains everything. My poor, dear father founded that bakery, and those were the last advertisements for it he wrote!"