“He doesn't recall you,” I repeated.
“And that's ingratitude,” said Ed, “if he only knew it. I saved the old man's life once.”
And Ed limped over to the table and resumed his seat opposite me. He has a bullet under one kneecap, and at times it makes him very lame. He would never tell me how it came there; to this day I do not know.
“From what did you save his life?” I asked. “From a man,” said Ed moodily. “From a man who had a notion to bean him one night. And to this day I ask myself: 'Did I do right, or did I do wrong?'”
“Tell me about it,” I insisted,
“Drink up,” said Ed, manipulating the Scotch bottle and the siphon of seltzer. “This is one of the last highballs you'll ever have, unless you sneak around and take it on the sly. I don't know that I should have another one myself; it settles in this damned knee of mine if I get a little too much.”
“Tell me when, where and how you knew Old Man Singleton,” I demanded again.
“This knee of mine,” went on Ed, disregarding me, “is a hell of a handicap. We were talking about prohibition—what's prohibition going to do to me? Hey? It puts me out of a job in a barroom like this the first thing. And what else can I do? With this game leg, you can see me going on the stage as a Russian dancer, can't you? Or digging trenches to lay gas pipes in, or carrying a Hod? Huh? And I can't even get a job in a swell restaurant uptown; they don't want any gamelegged waiters sticking around, falling over the chairs. This was about the only kind of a joint and the only kind of a job I was fit for, this chop-house thing down here, and it's going to close in two weeks. What then? Be somebody's housemaid? I can't see it. I don't wish anybody any bad luck, but I hope the guy that put over this prohibition thing gets stiff in all his joints and lives forever.”
I sympathized and waited, and finally he began. “Old Man Singleton's fad,” said Ed, “as I re marked before, is money. And as you remarked, another of his fads is corned beef and cabbage—especially cabbage. He will eat corned beef with his cabbage, and like it; or he will eat pork with his cabbage, and like it; or he will eat cabbage without either; it is the cabbage he likes—or kale. In fact, you could reduce his two fads to one, and say what he likes is kale—kale in the slang sense of money, and kale that is cabbage. And all his life he has been stuffing himself with kale.
“His fad is kale that he can see and feel and handle and show and carry about with him. Not merely money in the bank and stocks and bonds and property and real estate, but actual cash. He likes to carry it with him, and he does carry it with him. I guess he likes the feel of it in his billfolder, and the thought that he has got it on him—on him, the poor boy that came out of New England with the red knitted mittens on that everybody has heard so much about. I can understand the way he feels about it; with a folder full of thousand-dollar and ten-thousand-dollar bills he feels safe, somehow; feels like he'll never have to go back to that little New England town and saw cordwood and shovel snow again.