“I detest ‘Harvey’ because two acquaintances of that name were such poor specimens of men. Since you are to be my own personal sledge-hammer-slinger, I change your name to ‘Tom.’ That is the most masculine of names, and because you are the most masculine of young fellows—indeed the Supreme Man—you must |Common Type of Sexual Insanity.| be decorated with it. For you appear to be even more than man. A wonderful visitant from some other world. A super-man!
“I am afraid, Tom, you may be only a dream. I am afraid you may be only an apparition with me a brief hour, then to return, like Lohengrin, to the heavenly realm where the hero is immeasurably beyond anything we have on earth.
“So from to-night on, your legal first name is ‘Tom.’ And after I have tried you out, you will take my own legal surname. But my pet name is ‘Prince Wonderful!’ Can you feel, Prince Wonderful, that you charm me as a serpent a bird that it creeps upon in order to swallow? I know I am doing something crazy in letting you swallow me; in turning my back on all my own pleasures and prospects in order that you may get more out of life. For I would rather be the instrument through which a demigod like yourself enjoys some good before my eyes than myself to enjoy it. It is crazy of me; but my instincts lead that way, and I have the will to act that way. Muscular prodigy! Sky-scraper dare-devil! Your prodigious strength and muscles cement me to you as with hoops of steel!”
We soon took a stroll of half-a-mile to the East River, to a neighborhood of gas-houses, closed factories, and store-yards. No one ventured here after dark except homeless gutter-snipes in summer to sleep. I myself would not have ventured at night anywhere near these dingy and desolate blocks except under the protection of a Strong Hans.
On female-impersonation sprees in the Rialto and Stuyvesant Square, I was always richly clad and wore jewelry. While during my year’s female-impersonation |The Ultra-Unexpected Happens.| apprenticeship on Mulberry Street my pockets were rifled every night, I had not now for nearly a year suffered the theft of even a copper. And why should I entertain even the shadow of a suspicion of “Tom” whom I wholeheartedly accepted as an unsophisticated youth recently from the Mohawk valley and to whom I had pledged the usufruct of my fairly good earning capacity to enable him to live like a nabob? For more than an hour, on the park bench, he had demonstrated himself supergenial. He had seemed so glad and so grateful over what I had promised: To lift him from the slums to an honored professional career. The story of his life did contain some inconsistencies but I realized it only too late.
As soon as we arrived in an unlighted stone-yard and there was not another soul within hearing—at least we had seen no one for the last five hundred feet—Harvey Green suddenly changed to just the opposite of his supergenial and ultra-grateful mask. Only at the moment that he had me completely at his mercy did he disclose himself as a dyed-in-the-wool criminal—a fiend who would never give a second thought to having just committed a murder.
Since I had expected to take him under my own roof and acquaint him with my every-day professional personality, I had not gone to the extremes of frivolous female-impersonation customary before young bloods who would never meet me in every-day life. I had feared I would forfeit his respect. Thus I had bidden him call me “Ralph”—not “Jennie.”
“Ralph, what a ya think when I say I’ve served time in Elmira Reformatory? I kin prove what kinder man I am! Reach your hand here and feel this terrible |A Seance with a Burglar.| scar. And then reach it here and feel this other. Ralph, I got these scars from bein’ shot while runnin’ away after havin’ made a mess of burglin’ houses in villages. For it’s better ter be shot than caught. And I didn’t dare go ter any doctor. My pal dressed the wounds the best he could, and it hurt awful—I tell you! And both times the buggers bled and bled till I close ter croaked. But luck was with me; me guts escaped the pepperin’. And after I recovered from loss of blood and after the wounds began ter heal, I was as strong and husky as you see me to-night.
“But just to-night I happened ter be broke. I was just loafin’ in the park waitin’ for a sissie like you, Ralph, ter walk inter me trap, so I could git hold of some dough.”
“Harvey,” I could only stammer, being next to speechless because of surprise and terror, “I am stunned at what you say. I never believed you could so deceive me. Can I say nothing to bring you to your senses? Don’t you realize you have ten thousand times more to gain by being my friend?”