“Fight!” snapped McGuire. “Puss-in-the-corner! ’Twas a hypodermic injection. Handed him just one like a squirt of dope, and he’s asleep, and no tanbark needed in front of his residence. Fight!” He rattled a bit, coughed, and went on, hardly addressing the cattleman, but rather for the relief of voicing his troubles. “No more dead sure t’ings for me. But Rus Sage himself would have snatched at it. Five to one dat de boy from Cork wouldn’t stay t’ree rounds is what I invested in. Put my last cent on, and could already smell the sawdust in dat all-night joint of Jimmy Delaney’s on T’irty-seventh Street I was goin’ to buy. And den—say, telegraph pole, what a gazaboo a guy is to put his whole roll on one turn of the gaboozlum!”
“You’re plenty right,” said the big cattleman; “more ’specially when you lose. Son, you get up and light out for a hotel. You got a mighty bad cough. Had it long?”
“Lungs,” said McGuire comprehensively. “I got it. The croaker says I’ll come to time for six months longer—maybe a year if I hold my gait. I wanted to settle down and take care of myself. Dat’s why I speculated on dat five to one perhaps. I had a t’ousand iron dollars saved up. If I winned I was goin’ to buy Delaney’s café. Who’d a t’ought dat stiff would take a nap in de foist round—say?”
“It’s a hard deal,” commented Raidler, looking down at the diminutive form of McGuire crumpled against the truck. “But you go to a hotel and rest. There’s the Menger and the Maverick, and—”
“And the Fi’th Av’noo, and the Waldorf-Astoria,” mimicked McGuire. “Told you I went broke. I’m on de bum proper. I’ve got one dime left. Maybe a trip to Europe or a sail in me private yacht would fix me up— pa-per!”
He flung his dime at a newsboy, got his Express, propped his back against the truck, and was at once rapt in the account of his Waterloo, as expanded by the ingenious press.
Curtis Raidler interrogated an enormous gold watch, and laid his hand on McGuire’s shoulder.
“Come on, bud,” he said. “We got three minutes to catch the train.”
Sarcasm seemed to be McGuire’s vein.
“You ain’t seen me cash in any chips or call a turn since I told you I was broke, a minute ago, have you? Friend, chase yourself away.”