“Yes, Jimmy; they're all out there, waitin'.”
“Well, quit snifflin' and call 'em right in!” said Sergeant Bagby crisply. “I've been tryin' fur years to git somebody to set still long enough fur me to tell 'em that there story about Gin'ral John C. Breckenridge and Gin'ral Simon Bolivar Buckner; and it seems like somethin' always comes up to interrupt me. This looks like my chance to finish it, fur oncet. Call them boys all in!”
VIII. DOUBLE-BARRELLED JUSTICE
A LONG and limber man leaned against a doorjamb of the Blue Jug Saloon and Short Order Restaurant, inhaling the mild dear air of the autumnal day and, with the air of a man who amply is satisfied by the aspect of things, contemplating creation at large as it revealed itself along Franklin Street. In such posture he suggested more than anything else a pair of callipers endowed with reason. For this, our disesteemed fellow citizen of the good old days which are gone, was probably the shortest-waisted man in the known world. In my time I have seen other men who might be deemed to be excessively short waisted, but never one to equal in this unique regard Old King Highpockets. A short span less of torso, and a dime museum would have claimed him, sure.
You would think me a gross exaggerator did I attempt to tell you how high up his legs forked; suffice it to say that, as to his suspenders, they crossed the spine just below his back collar button. Wherefore, although born a Magee and baptised an Elmer, it was inevitable in this community that from the days of his youth onward he should have been called what they did call him. To his six feet five and a half inches of lank structural design he owed the more descriptive part of his customary title. The rest of it—the regal-sounding part of it—had been bestowed upon him in his ripened maturity after he achieved for himself local dominance in an unhallowed but a lucrative calling.
Sitting down the above-named seemed a person of no more than ordinary height, this being by reason of the architectural peculiarities just referred to. But standing up, as at the present moment, he reared head and gander neck above the run of humanity. From this personal eminence he now looked about him and below him as he took the gun. There was not a cloud in the general sky; none in his private and individual sky either. He had done well the night before and likewise the night before that; he expected to do as well or better the coming night. Upstairs over the Blue Jug King Highpockets took in gambling—both plain and fancy gambling.
There passed upon the opposite side of the street one Beck Giltner. With him the tall man in the doorway exchanged a distant and formal greeting expressed in short nods. Between these two no great amount of friendliness was lost. Professionally speaking they were opponents. Beck Giltner was by way of being in the card and dicing line himself, but he was known as a square gambler, meaning by that, to most of mankind he presented a plane surface of ostensible honesty and fair dealing, whereas within an initiated circle rumour had it that his rival of the Blue Jug was so crooked he threw a shadow like a brace and bit. Beck Giltner made it a rule of business to strip only those who could afford to lose their pecuniary peltries. Minors, drunkards, half-wits and chronic losers were barred from his tables. But all was fish—I use the word advisedly—all was fish that came to the net of Highpockets.
Beck Giltner passed upon his business. So did other and more reputable members of society. A short straggling procession of gentlemen went by, all headed westward, and each followed at a suitable interval by his negro “boy,” who might be anywhere between seventeen and seventy years of age. An hour or two later these travellers would return, bound for their offices downtown. Going back they would mainly travel in pairs, and their trailing black servitors would be burdened, front and back, with “samples”—sheafs of tobacco bound together and sealed with blobs of red sealing wax and tagged. For this was in the time before the Trust and the Night Riders had between them disrupted the trade down in the historic Black Patch, and the mode of marketing the weed by loose leaf was a thing as yet undreamed of. They would be prizing on the breaks in Key & Buckner's long warehouse pretty soon. The official auctioneer had already reported himself, and to the ear for blocks round came distantly a sharp rifle-fire clatter as the warehouse hands knocked the hoops off the big hogsheads and the freed staves rattled down in windrows upon the uneven floor.