American fiction -- 20th century; Short stories, American
“So, the next day, Luke packs a blanket and some collars and his
mileage book in a haversack, and him and me hits the breeze for New
York. It was a powerful long ride. The seats in the cars was too short
for six-footers like us to sleep comfortable on; and the conductor had
to keep us from getting off at every town that had five-story houses in
it. But we got there finally; and we seemed to see right away that he
was right about it.
“‘Luke,’ says I, ‘as office deputy and from a law standpoint, it don’t
look to me like this place is properly and legally in the jurisdiction
of Mojada County, Texas.’
“‘From the standpoint of order,’ says he, ‘it’s amenable to answer for
its sins to the properly appointed authorities from Bildad to
Jerusalem.’
“‘Amen,’ says I. ‘But let’s turn our trick sudden, and ride. I don’t
like the looks of this place.’
“‘Think of Pedro Johnson,’ says Luke, ‘a friend of mine and yours shot
down by one of these gilded abolitionists at his very door!’
“‘It was at the door of the freight depot,’ says I. ‘But the law will
not be balked at a quibble like that.’
“We put up at one of them big hotels on Broadway. The next morning I
goes down about two miles of stairsteps to the bottom and hunts for
Luke. It ain’t no use. It looks like San Jacinto day in San Antone.
There’s a thousand folks milling around in a kind of a roofed-over
plaza with marble pavements and trees growing right out of ’em, and I
see no more chance of finding Luke than if we was hunting each other in
the big pear flat down below Old Fort Ewell. But soon Luke and me runs
together in one of the turns of them marble alleys.
“‘It ain’t no use, Bud,’ says he. ‘I can’t find no place to eat at.
I’ve been looking for restaurant signs and smelling for ham all over
the camp. But I’m used to going hungry when I have to. Now,’ says he,
‘I’m going out and get a hack and ride down to the address on this
Scudder card. You stay here and try to hustle some grub. But I doubt if
you’ll find it. I wish we’d brought along some cornmeal and bacon and
beans. I’ll be back when I see this Scudder, if the trail ain’t wiped
out.’
“So I starts foraging for breakfast. For the honour of old Mojada
County I didn’t want to seem green to them abolitionists, so every time
I turned a corner in them marble halls I went up to the first desk or
counter I see and looks around for grub. If I didn’t see what I wanted
I asked for something else. In about half an hour I had a dozen cigars,
five story magazines, and seven or eight railroad time-tables in my
pockets, and never a smell of coffee or bacon to point out the trail.
“Once a lady sitting at a table and playing a game kind of like pushpin
told me to go into a closet that she called Number 3. I went in and
shut the door, and the blamed thing lit itself up. I set down on a
stool before a shelf and waited. Thinks I, ‘This is a private
dining-room.’ But no waiter never came. When I got to sweating good and
hard, I goes out again.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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