There’s nothing like a good grip to press home conviction in a sneak.
“I’ll give you ten dollars if you’ll locate that man for me before the evening is over,” I told him. “I’ll make it twenty dollars if you’ll turn the trick inside of an hour.”
“I know all the joints—I know the steamboat hangouts.”
“It ought to be an easy trick. He is with an old belay-ing-pin who has enough hair on his head and face to stuff a bolster—and I heard somebody call him Ike.”
“Aw, that’s ‘Ingot Ike.’ Everybody between Dupont Street and Telegraph Hill knows that old hornbeam and his everlasting hum about three million dollars’ worth of buried gold ingots. Come along! I ought to pull down that twenty easy.”
“Let me tell you one thing,” I said, chasing along with him. “I’m not worth robbing. I’m going to keep close to you, and if you put me against any frame-up I’ll get you first, and I’ll get you quick.” And I grabbed him by the wrist and let him have that honest old grip once more. I kept hold of him. And led thus like a blind man through this street and that, by short cuts along dark alleys, across courts, and now and then skirting vacant lots, we came at last into purlieus that my ears, eyes, and nose told me must be that “Barbary Coast so gay,” as Captain Holstrom had caroled.
Out of open doors came liquor fumes and music blended, if there is any such thing as blending noise and odors; the two seemed to be associated there so regularly and invariably that my senses told me that they were blended.
The women sauntered on the sidewalks; the men loafed there. We two seemed to be about the only ones who were headed for something definite.
“We’ll tap the regular joints first,” said Beason. “If he’s pretty drunk he won’t be using his mind much to think up new places to go. He’ll fall into the rut like a ball in a crooked pin-game.”
I was young enough to be interested in that panorama of iniquity. I would have gaped longer than I did in those places, but Mr. Beason proved to be a very active guide. That matter of twenty dollars proved to be like a bur under a bronco’s saddle. He would gallop into a place, leave me to goggle at the antics on the dance floor; he would weasel his way through the crowd, chop out a few staccato questions, and then yank me out with my eyes behind me and my chin hanging over my shoulder like the tailboard of a cart.