On arrival he exclaimed: “Jennie, what do you think of your new friend, Mr. Abraham Myers, the Beau Brummel of Myersville upstate, who is enjoying his first visit to our village?”
“I think, Buddie, that before to-night he had never been in any place worse than a church social. His evening in the Monte Carlo must have been an eyeopener. |Crooks Are Boastful.| Whenever my gaze fell on the poor innocent, the words of the Bible went through my head: ‘He is led as a lamb to the slaughter! And as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth!’ I am sorry my hero-boy stoops to take advantage of an unsophisticated Reub!”
While we ate our midnight lunch, Buddie confided his evening’s adventure. I was always inquisitive about the ways and habits of the tremendously virile—how they looked upon the mystery we call “life”—and habitually put to my numerous soul-mates a long list of questions in case they did not spontaneously overflow. But it is an earmark of crooks to be garrulous with their soul-mates. The former are proud of their sharpwittedness and gloat in unburdening their minds to some one they think they can trust. Their characteristic bragging to confidants is one of the chief means by which many of them finally fall within the toils of the law.
Secondly, Buddie was my soul-mate. At that date, we felt ourselves husband and wife. For I am myself fundamentally a woman, though possessing the male primary determinants. The relationship of knit souls—amalgamation of two separate personalities of opposite sex into ONE human being—I have discovered tends to mutual confidences. I had already several times been in Buddie’s presence when he had an intended victim (always a Reub) in tow, and saw through everything even if he had not told me. If it be asked how I, pretending to be of high morals, could associate with sharpers, I answer: Love is blind. In my subsequent Bowery period, described in my Autobiography of an |Fairies Best Stool Pigeons.| Androgyne and The Riddle of the Underworld, I was knit into one being with youthful burglars, who, to whet my admiration for themselves, have entertained me with accounts of their burgling houses and demonstrated their truthfulness by exhibiting terrible scars from gunshot wounds suffered as they were fleeing from a burglary they had “made a mess of.” I would never have thought of contributing in any way to bring them to justice; first, because I slavishly adored them, and secondly, because I knew I would be murdered if they should ever entertain the least suspicion that I would “peach.”
Experience taught me, during my six years in New York’s Underworld, that crooks are particularly prone to confess to a fairie intimate. For they considered fairies (under the legal ban of ten years’ imprisonment in New York) far worse criminals and far worse defiers of the law than themselves. Fairies—they thought—would not dare “peach.”
Fairies would serve as the best stool pigeons for ferreting out thieves, just as keen filles de joie are employed as detectives.
Buddie McDonald had already received many proofs that I idolized him and would never do anything to his detriment. True: five months later he did “shake” me definitely and emphatically. But this was because he had discovered he had wrung out of me all the money he could; he had become financially independent beyond his wildest dreams; and I had come to be a terrible bore through hanging around his room several times a week and demonstrating myself insatiable.
The Abraham Myers Adventure.
I summarize, as nearly as I can recollect, Buddie’s account of the Abraham Myers adventure.