“Yah you are, Massa, suah nuff! Done gwine me some o’ dat small change, mighty quick?”
He did give it to ’em “mighty quick.” The “greenbacks” were done up into packages of ten, twenty, fifty and a hundred dollars, and in an amazingly short time he had exchanged the entire lot of advertising notes for good money.
This little episode made it convenient for him to get out of the city. Doubtless the newspapers of Louisville will remember the affair, inasmuch as they devoted a good deal of space to it at the time. It may interest them to learn that the hero of the adventure set out at once for home, after having lost all his money to Ben before he had time to divide the spoils with the colored officers.
The job netted about twenty thousand dollars, and with this amount of money in his pocket Ben struck Chicago. Everybody was spending money freely in those days, but Hogan discounted the world. He “dropped” every dollar of his “boodle” in sixty days. How did he do it? That is more than I can tell. A hundred dollars for wine here, and five hundred for suppers there. Champagne suppers, faro—anything and everything which enters into the career of a high-toned sport when he is flush. That explains in part how the money went. Certain it is that it did go, in some manner, and at the end of the sixty days there was not a bank note left of the twenty thousand dollars.
It will be observed, therefore, that Ben added to the prosperity of Chicago by putting this money into rapid circulation. There would never have been any panic, you know, if everybody had spent money as freely. And so always goes ill-gotten gain.
His jolly spree in Chicago over, our hero set out for his old home, Syracuse. On the cars he ran across an acquaintance named Jim O’Neil, who hailed from Liverpool, a suburb of Syracuse.
“Where you bound for?” asked Ben.
“For the oil regions,” was the answer.
“The oil regions—where’s that?”
“Why, in Pennsylvania, of course. More life there than anywhere else in the world. Just the place for a fellow like you. Mints of money!”