"'Come to taw,' replied Red. 'I want to put thirty or forty cents down on the next race. I got another good thing in it.'
"The bookmaker reluctantly passed Donnelly the $61. Red carefully folded the dollar bill and tucked it into his waistcoat pocket. Then he invested the $60, in $10 clips, with six books, on Dorah Wood, in the next race, at 15 to 1. It was a canter for Dorah Wood, and Red knocked the bookmakers silly—they all knew him well from his working around the place—by socking it to six of them for $150 each. A committee of safety was immediately formed around Donnelly, but he couldn't be held down. He tossed a quart of wine under his waist-line, purchased a package of cigarettes made in Turkey for forty cents, and looked over his dope-book carefully. Then he strolled into the ring and bet $900 on Minnie Cee in the last race. Minnie Cee was at 3 to 1, and it was something ridiculous for her. She won on the bit, and Red was $3,660 to the good on that nickel that he had salted away in his homespuns for the return trip to town.
"When Red turned up to collect, Barney Schreiber—he's a big-hearted Barney—had him, as it were, by the scruff of the neck. Barney announced to all of us that he was going to collect for Donnelly, and what Barney said went with us, for we all knew Red's propensities. Donnelly put up a weak growl, but he knew 'way down deep in him that Schreiber could and would take care of the cash better than he could or would. Barney pinched $3,500 of the wad, inserted it in a separate compartment of his wallet, and handed Red $150.
"'I'll just let you have a little change, Red, said he, 'and if you think you can run that up into a tan-yard, go ahead. But I'm a-going to handle this for you the right way. You're not tied enough in your ways to have such a vast sum on your person all at one and the same time.'
"Donnelly didn't demur much. The $150 was a huge sum itself for him, and he, of course, knew that Schreiber would do the right thing with the main bunch. As a matter of fact, Barney deposited the $3500 the next day to the credit of Donnelly's old mother, and Schreiber and the old woman were the only people who knew anything about that end of it for a long time afterward.
"We all gibed and roasted Red about the delirium-tremens finish we foresaw for him, and when he didn't turn up at the track at all on the following day, necessitating the turning of his dog-robbing work over to another man, there was a lot of talk about the tremendous barrel-house toot Red must have gone on down the levee way. That's where we were camping out. When we picked up the papers on turning out the following morning we found a scare-head story in one of them relating in great detail and elaborate diction how one Mr. John S. Donnelly, a gentleman well known on the Western turf, had swatted Ed McGuckin's faro bank, over in East St. Louis, to the tune of $16,000, playing steadily without meals from 7 o'clock on the evening of Monday until 11 o'clock on Wednesday night, when Ed turned the box on him and announced that it was all off for the present. We all shouted 'fake!' when we saw that, but a couple of us hopped into a cab and crossed over to McGuckin's place to see if there was anything in the yarn. Well, there was everything in it. We found Ed holding his fevered brow and mumbling deep, dark things about damned vagabonds slipping into his layout and running shoe tongues up into leather factories. We expressed our sympathies with Ed, for which we came perilously near being kicked, and then we went back to St. Louis to hunt up Red. We went over the barrel-house route with a fine-tooth comb, but no Donnelly. Then we decided to drive out to his mother's little old shack. Our route from the levee out there took us through the down-town district, and we both saw Red on the street at once. We drew up alongside the curb, and called him. He was cold sober, and he had $16,210 in bills in his inside waistcoat pocket. We asked him where he was going, and he nodded in the direction of the swellest tailoring establishment in St. Louis. We went along with him, and it was one lovely sight to observe the fabrics Red picked out wherewith to ornament his long, lithe person. He ordered a dozen suits, and then we went with him to the haberdasher's. He was all for green and yellow neckties, pink-striped shirts, and that sort, and we let him have his way. Then he became sleepy. We threw it into him pretty hard about that big bundle of money he had on him, and he finally consented to come along to a bank with us and deposit $14,000 of it in his name. We tried to hold out for having it put in his mother's name, but he wouldn't stand for that. After leaving the bank Red's eagle eye caught sight of the shiny things in a jeweler's window, and he decided then and there that he couldn't go to sleep without having the third finger of his left hand made conspicuous by a three-karat blue-white stone, for which he coughed $500. That left him with about $1500 in his clothes, and we dragged him then into the cab and drove out to his mother's little old shanty. The old lady had her little talk with Barney Schreiber about the $3500 by that time, and the to-do she made over her 'bye Johnnie' was worth the ride to see. When we told her about the other bunch that Red had copped and that we had plunked it into the bank for him, the quantities of corned beef and cabbage which she threw into the pot for the dinner which she wanted us to remain to share with her and her phenomenal son were amazing.
"Well, Donnelly astonished us all for a couple of weeks by his extraordinary conduct. He would ride out to the track in a hack, with a gilt-stamped cigarette in his face, attend to his job as usual around the betting-ring—that is, he'd supervise, for he quickly accumulated a staff of worshiping touts and hangers-on—and then he'd go up into the grand-stand to exhibit his cake-walk clothes and look at the races. He didn't put a bet down on a horse for two weeks. He remained pretty sober all the time, too. We joshed him about the frigid pedals he had suddenly got, but he only passed along with the remark: 'I'm letting 'em run for O'Flaherty. Nothin' doin'.'
"We waited for the crash, but it didn't seem to come on schedule time. One afternoon he called me aside and showed me his bank-book. It showed an additional deposit of $5000, making the total $19,000.
"'When did you pick up that new roll?' I asked him.
"'Went up against the wheel at Terhune's last night, and yanked it out in three hours,' he said.