George Chester - Young Wallingford

“A natural again!” exulted Jonathan Reuben Wix, as the dice bounded from his plump hand and came to rest upon the billiard-table in Leiniger’s Select Café, with a five and a deuce showing. “Somebody ring the bell for me, because I’m a-going to get off.”

He was a large young man in every dimension, broad of chest and big and pink of face and jovial of eye, and he chuckled as he passed the dice to his left-hand neighbor. There was a hundred dollars on the table and he gathered it up in a wad.

“Good-by, boys, and many merry thanks for these kind contributions,” he bantered as he stuffed the money into his pocket. “It’s me for Bunkville-amidst-the-ferry-boats, on the next Limited.”

He was back in less than three days, having spent just twenty-four hours in New York. The impulsively decided journey was nothing unusual for him, but it had an intimate bearing upon his future in that it forced upon him the confidence of secretive Clifford Gilman, who lived next door.

“Home so soon?” inquired Gilman in surprise. “They must have robbed you!”

“Robbed!” laughed Wix. “I should say not. I didn’t waste a cent. Railroad ticket, sleepers, meals and extra fare on the Limited cost twenty-five each way. That left fifty. My room at the hotel cost five dollars. Breakfast was two dollars; morning drive through Central Park, four; lunch, three-fifty; matinée ticket, with cab each way, five; dinner, eight, with the ordinary champagne of commerce; theater and cab hire, five-fifty; supper, twelve, including a bottle of real champagne at eight dollars, and the balance in tips.”

Clifford gasped as he hungrily reviewed these luscious items.

Young Gilman was not one of those who had been in the game by which Wix had won a hundred. He never played dice, did young Gilman, nor poker, nor bet on a horse race, nor drank, nor even smoked; but wore curly, silken sideburns, and walked up the same side of Main Street every morning to the bank, with his lunch in a little imitation-leather box. He walked back down the same side of Main Street every evening. If he had happened to take the other side on any morning, before noon there would have been half a dozen conservative depositors to ask old Smalley, who owned the bank, why Clifford had crossed over.

Young Gilman was popularly regarded as a “sissy,” but that he had organs, dimensions and senses, and would bleed if pricked, was presently evidenced to Mr. Wix in a startling proposition.

“Look here, Wix,” said Gilman, lowering his voice to a mystery-fraught undertone, “I’m going to take a little trip and I want you to come along.”

“Behave!” admonished Wix. “It would be awful reckless in me to go with a regular little devil like you; and besides, sarsaparilla and peanuts tear up my system so.”

“I’ve got three hundred dollars,” stated Gilman calmly. “Does that sound like sarsaparilla and peanuts?”

“I’m listening,” said Wix with sudden interest. “Where did you get it, mister?”

Gilman looked around them nervously, then spoke in an eager whisper, clutching Wix by the arm.

“Saved it up, but like you do. I saw the wisdom of your way long ago. Old Smalley makes me put half my salary in the bank, but I pinch out a little more than that, and every time I get twenty dollars on the side, I invest it in margin wheat, by mail. Most often I lose, but when I do win I keep on until it amounts to something. Of course, I’m laying myself open to you in this. If old Smalley found it out he’d discharge me on the spot.”

Wix chuckled.

“I know,” he agreed. “My mother once wanted me to apply for that job. I went to see old Smalley, and the first thing he did was to examine my fingers for cigarette stains. ‘You won’t find any,’ I told him, ‘for I use a holder,’ and I showed him the holder. Of course, that settled my case with Smalley; but do you know that he smokes after-dinner cigarettes away from home, and has beer and whisky and three kinds of wine in his cellar? I’ve got his number, all right, but I didn’t have little Clifford’s. Where do you hide it?”

“In the bank and here at home,” returned Gilman with a snarl; “and I’ve been at it so long I’m beginning to curdle. You’ve worked in every mercantile establishment, factory and professional office in town, and never cared to hold a job. Yet everybody likes you. You drink, smoke, gamble and raise the dickens generally. You don’t save a cent and yet you always manage to have money. You dress swell and don’t amount to a tinker’s cuss, yet you’re happy all day long. Come along to the Putnam County Fair and show me how.”

“The Putnam County Fair!” repeated Wix. “Two hundred miles to get a drink?”

“I can’t take one any closer, can I?” demanded Gilman savagely. “But the real reason is that Uncle Thomas lives there. I can go to visit Uncle Thomas when I wouldn’t be allowed to ‘go on the cars alone’ anywhere else. But uncle is a good fellow and his wife don’t write to my mother. He tells me to go ahead; and I don’t need go near him unless I’m in trouble.”

“Some time I’ll borrow your Uncle Tom,” laughed Wix. “He sounds good to me.”

Mrs. Gilman came to the door. She was a thin, nervous, little woman, with a long chin and a narrow forehead.

“Come in, Cliffy,” she urged in a shrill, wheedling voice. “You must have a good, long night’s rest for your trip in the morning.” In reality she was worried to have her Clifford talking with the graceless Wix – though secretly she admired Jonathan Reuben.

“I must go in now,” said Gilman hastily. “Go down to the train in the morning and get in on the other side, so mother won’t see you. And don’t tell your mother where you’ve gone.”

“She won’t ask,” responded Wix, laughing. “Nothing ever worries mother except our name. I don’t like it myself, but I don’t worry over it. It isn’t my fault, and it was hers.”

If Wix felt any trace of bitterness over his mother’s indifference he never confessed it, even to himself. Mrs. Wix, left a sufficient income by the late unloved, lived entirely by routine, with a separate, complacent function for every afternoon of the week. She was very comfortable, and plump, and placid, was Mrs. Wix, and Jonathan Reuben was merely an excrescence upon her scheme of life. Jonathan Reuben, however, had no lack of feminine sympathy. Quite a little clique of dashing young matrons, with old or dryly preoccupied husbands, vied with the girls to make him happy.

In the present instance, young Wix was quite right about his mother’s indifference. He called to her as he went down to early breakfast that he might not be back for a few days, and she sleepily answered. “All right.” So Clifford and his instructor went to the fair, and the more experienced spendthrift showed the amateur how to get rid of his money, to their mutual gratification.

Back of the Streets of Cairo, on the closing day, Wix and Gilman, hunting a drink, found a neat young man with piercing black eyes and black hair, who upon the previous days had been making a surreptitious hand-book on the races. Just now he was advising an interested group of men that money would not grow in their pockets.

“If your eye is quicker than my hand you get my dollars,” he singsonged as he deftly shifted three English walnut shells about on a flimsy folding stand. “If my hand is quicker than your eye, I get your dollars. Here they go, three in a row. They’re all set, and here’s a double sawbuck for some gentleman with a like amount of wealth and a keen eye and a little courage. Where, oh, where, is the little pea?”