“We’d have to split with them if we did,” the show lady objected practically. “Oh, mister, we’re stuck worse than when we was back there in the mud! We’d only have to pay five dollars for a six months’ theater license, which would let us give all the shows we wanted to. It’s a new law that I guess you didn’t know anything about,” she added kindly. “You certainly wouldn’t have insisted on us coming if you’d knew about the license—”
“It’s two years, almost, since I was here,” Casey admitted. “I been out prospecting.”
“Well, we can just work it fine! Can’t we go somewhere and talk it over? I’ve got a swell idea, mister, if you’ll just listen to it a minute, and it’ll certainly be a godsend to us to be able to give our show. We’ve got some crutches among our stage props, and some scar patches, mister, that would certainly make you up fine as a cripple. Wouldn’t they believe it, mister, if it was told that you had been in an accident and got crippled for life?”
In spite of his perturbation Casey grinned. “Yeah, I guess they’d believe it, all right,” he admitted. “They’d likely be tickled to death to see me goin’ around on crutches.” He cast a hasty thought back into his past, when he had driven a careening stage between Pinnacle and Lund, strewing the steep trail with wreckage not his own. “Yeah, it’d tickle ’em to death. Them that’s rode with me,” he concluded.
“Oh, mister, you certainly are a godsend! Duck outa sight somewhere while I go tell Jack, dear, that we’ve found a way open for us to show, after all!” While Casey was pulling the sag out of his jaw so that he could protest, could offer her money, do anything save what she wanted, the show lady disappeared. Casey turned and went back into The Club, remained five minutes perhaps and then walked very circumspectly across the street to Bill’s garage. It was there that the Barrymores found him when they came a-seeking with their dilapidated old car, their crutches, their grease paint and scar patches, to make a cripple of Casey, whether he would or no.
Bill fell uproariously in with the plan, and Dwyer, stopping at the garage on his way home to dinner, thought it a great joke on Lund, and promised to help the benefit along. Casey, with three drinks under his belt and his stomach otherwise empty, wanted to sing something which he had forgotten. Casey couldn’t have recognized Trouble if it had walked up and banged him in the eye. He said sure, he’d be a cripple for the lady. He’d be anything once, and some things several times, if they asked him the right way.
Casey looked very bad when the show people were through with him. He had expected bandages wound picturesquely around his person, but the Barrymores were more artistic than that. Casey’s right leg was drawn up at the knee so that he could not put his foot on the ground when he tried, and he did not know how the straps were fastened. His left shoulder was higher than his right shoulder, and his eyes were sunken in his head and a scar ran down along his temple to his left cheek bone. When he looked in the glass which Bill brought him, Casey actually felt ill. They told him that he must not wash his face, and that his week’s growth of beard was a blessing from Heaven. The show lady begged him, with dew on her lashes, to play the part faithfully, and they departed very happy over their prospects.
Casey did not know whether he was happy or not. With Bill to encourage him and give him a lift over the gutters, he crossed the street to a restaurant and ordered largely of sirloin steak and French-fried potatoes. After supper there was a long evening to spend quietly on crutches, and The Club was just next door. A man can always spend an evening very quickly at The Club—or he could in the wet days—if his money held out. Casey had money enough, and within an hour he didn’t care whether he was crippled or not. There were five besides himself at that table, and they had agreed to remove the lid. Moreover, there was a crowd ten deep around that particular table. For the news had gone out that here was Casey Ryan back again, a hopeless cripple, playing poker like a drunken Rockefeller and losing as if he liked to lose.
At eight o’clock the next morning Bill came in to tell Casey that the show people had brought up their car to be fixed, and was the pay good? Casey replied without looking up from his hand, which held a pair of queens which interested him. He’d stand good, he said, and Bill gave a grunt and went off.
At noon Casey meant to eat something. But another man had come into the game with a roll of money and a boastful manner. Casey rubbed his cramped leg and hunched down in his chair again and called for a stack of blues. Casey, I may as well confess, had been calling for stacks of blues and reds and whites rather often since midnight.