“Well, you know I’ve got into trouble in my life,” he stated. “Anyhow, Slim, I’m up against it now. To make a long story short, I come of a wonderful family, I suppose, but I ran away from home, and between the years of fifteen and twenty went through a sort of hell, I guess. That’s when I met this bird Kennedy. He picked me up when I was a starving hobo, and he proceeded to use me for his own purpose. I was valuable to him in a lot of ways. He’s a sort of crooked adventurer—or was. But I’ll swear I was innocent as a baby at the time!”
“The soup begins to thicken,” I said slowly. “Well, what happened? What was his line?”
“The first thing he had me do was go around and place a bunch of punch-boards in saloons in Buffalo,” Penoch said in that fog-horn voice of his. “There were two hundred dollars’ worth of punches on each board, and the saloon-keeper was to put up a regulation number of cash prizes—so many twenty-dollar bills, so many tens, and so on, totaling two hundred bucks. When the board was punched out, I was to come around and collect ten dollars for the use of it. We furnished a list of prize-winning numbers, a board to exhibit the prizes on and the punchboard itself.”
“That seems all right,” I told him.
“Sure.” For a second his face lightened, and he was the sparkling, zestful boy again. “But Ralph went around to every saloon and punched out all the prize-winning numbers! Ho-ho-ho!”
I had scarcely started laughing, when his face suddenly turned bleak and cold again, and my laugh, somehow, died in my throat.
“I realized later that I’d been an accomplice in a good many things outside of the law—getting him acquainted with people he could fleece, and all that sort of thing. Finally, he worked the old mine salting racket; but, Slim, he worked it on me! I thought the thing was a cinch, and I persuaded two well-off men I’d got to know to invest a lot of money in it. It was a plain swindle—me innocent, and those men are looking for me yet, I guess. Slim, he can blast me right out of the Army and—well, jail’s a cinch, I think.”
I could understand all the implications in his words. My own life hasn’t been so easy. And when a man hits the open road, to lick the world from a standing start, and is thrown with the scum of that same world through necessity, often with starvation stalking at his side, there are bound to be episodes which the smug people of this world, who’ve never missed a meal or had a fight, think damn one to eternity. There are ghosts in the closet of every wanderer that ever lived.
“You think he’s out to do you dirt,” I said finally.
“Not exactly. As a matter of fact, Slim, I think he likes me a lot. But he’s for Number One all the time. As cold and unmoral a snake of a man as ever breathed. He’d throw his family, if he had one, to the lions to save himself. And from the time he caught up with me, during the war, to the time I got out, he haunted me. He got himself made a sergeant assigned to my outfit. He borrowed my money, made me introduce him to people I didn’t want to know him, because I distrusted him; he took it for granted that he could have special privileges. And now that he’s found me again, he aims to be a parasite for the rest of his life. I know it!”