“They blacklisted me!” he confessed. “And just for playing their own game!”
The other held up a warning finger.
“Not so loud,” he interrupted. “But go on!”
“Of course, when I first came down to New York I went into the P. U. ‘carrying a fly.’ So I was treated fairly enough, in a way. But I had telegrapher’s paralysis coming on, and I knew I was losing time on my amplifier, and I had to have money for my new transmitter experiments. I tried to make it up doing over-time, and used to shoot weird codes along Continental Press Association’s leased wires until I got so neurasthenic that the hay-tossers up state would break and ask me to fill in, and then I used to lose my temper and wonder why I didn’t stab myself with a flimsy-hook. I knew I had to give it up, but I did want enough money to carry along my work with!”
He hesitated for a moment, still gazing down at his plate, until his companion looked at his watch with a brusque “Go on!”
“So I tried another way. When some of the Aqueduct races were going through, on a repeater next to my key, up to Reedy’s pool-rooms, I just reached over and held up one side of the repeater. Then, say third horse won, I strolled to the window and took out my handkerchief three times. My confederate ’phoned to our man, and when he’d had time to get his money up I let the result go through. But they discovered the trick, and called me up on the carpet. And all the rest, you know!”
He shook his head lugubriously; then he laughed aloud with a shrug of the insouciant shoulder; then he added, regretfully, “I’d have made a clear five hundred, if they’d only given me another day’s chance!”
“Well, I guess maybe you can even up, with us!” And the stranger shook his own head, knowingly, and returned the gaze of the younger man, who was peering at him narrowly, unsteady of eye, but still alertly suspicious. Even in that shadowy substratum to which he had been temporarily driven, good grafts, he knew, had to be sought for long and arduously. And he had no love for that ever-furtive underworld and its follies. It was a life that rested on cynicism, and no man could be a cynic and live. That he knew. He nursed no illusions as to the eventual triumph of evil, in the ever-shifting order of things earthly; and he remembered, with a sting of apprehension, the joy with which he had plunged into the thick of that street-corner group of untainted fellow-men.
“I think I’d rather get at something decent again,” he grumbled, pushing away his bean-plate, but still waiting, with a teasing sense of anxiety, for the other to explain more fully.
“I guess we’d all like to shy around the dirty work,—but a dead sure thing’s good enough now and then.”