Twenty years a fakir

by S. James Weldon

Instead of that, I gravely handed him the quarter, appeared to hesitate long over my choice, but finally selected the ball farthest away from me.

What followed was a surprise, for without examining the ball, or attempting to open it, I tossed it into the street.

“Come, doc,” I said, “you don’t mean to say you don’t remember me—Jim Weldon? How has the world been using you, old man?”

He gave me a second glance, and knew me then fast enough, so we shook hands heartily. He told me how the failure of a promising legitimate business venture had put him flat on his back, but that he had gone to work once more at the foot of the ladder, hoping by spring to be able to start on the road again in something of his old style. Poor fellow. I gave him, at parting, as big a stake as he would accept, and heard from him a few months later, when he was preparing for the campaign, but he died the next summer of yellow fever.

As I have said, the summer campaign had been successful and I had wealth galore. If I preferred to do so I could live after a modest fashion until spring came again without doing a stroke, and I was once more anxious to get into harness. I made a short visit home, where they were all glad to see me, and then started out for a visit to some of the eastern cities. I not only wanted to see their methods and style, but to get in closer touch with the men who largely produced the novelties by the sale of which I expected to make my living.

The trip paid me well. There was not, now, much of the green country youth in me or my appearance, but I cut a few eye-teeth nevertheless. By this time I had taken on age, so that I could easily pass for a man half a dozen years older than I really was, and I imagined I was pretty well up in all the tricks of the trade. But I found that I had a great many to learn, and I proceeded to learn them. I discovered that there were plenty of men in my line who sold nothing but the output of their brains, and that brought the highest kind of a price. Also that there were many lines of business, which I had always taken to be of the staidest, soberest, most legitimate nature, which, after all, were handled after the style of the greatest fakes I had ever handled on the road. Some of them I decided to try in the future when the time seemed propitious; others seemed to be a little overpowering to suit even me.

When it was all outgo and no income, of course, my sight-seeing began to get away with my money, and though my pocket could stand the stream for some time to come, I could not bear to be idle. It was not long before I had mastered the situation and drifted into an humble effort of occupation.

At first my efforts were largely for the purpose of experience, and to give me something to do. It was really in a spirit of fun that I spread my first nets to catch suckers. It was by no means the line I had ever expected to follow, but there was a fascination about it, after I once began to employ printer’s ink, which led me on until, before long, I was about as bad as the worst of the class, while I had the remarkable good fortune of not being brought up with a round turn. Once in a while a fellow who gets too fresh falls into the hands of the police and must answer to the law.

Once, in my younger days, I enclosed a dime in answer to an advertisement which promised to tell applicants how to travel without paying railroad fare. The response I got was, “Walk instead of ride.”

This is a fair pattern of many fakes; and to my great amusement, and somewhat to my profit, I tested the calibre of a number of them that winter at a trifling expense. You know the old saying, “A sucker is born every minute.” I did not consider myself a sucker by any means, and yet I did considerable “biting” while I was considering the ways and means of my brethren of the trade.