The best short stories of 1920, and the yearbook of the American short story
General
The best short stories of 1920, and the yearbook of the American short story
American fiction -- 20th century; Short stories -- 20th century -- Bibliography; Short stories -- 20th century -- Indexes; Short stories, American
But the dummy-chucker shook his head and shuffled ever westward. These
were good souls, but--they thought in cents. Worse than that, they
translated their financial thoughts into the pitiful coinage of their
birthplaces. And in the pocket of the dummy-chucker rested a silver
dollar.
A gaunt man, who towered high, and whose tongue held the cadences of the
wide spaces, had slipped this dollar into the receptive hand of the
dummy-chucker. True, it was almost a fortnight ago, and the man might
have gone back to his Western home--but Broadway had yielded him up to
the dummy-chucker. Broadway might yield up such another.
At Union Square, the dummy-chucker turned north. Past the Flatiron
Building he shuffled, until, at length, the Tenderloin unfolded itself
before him. These were the happy hunting-grounds!
Of course--and he glanced behind him quickly--there were more fly cops
on Broadway than on the lower East Side. One of them had dug his bony
fingers between the shabby collar of the dummy-chucker's coat and the
lank hair that hung down his neck. He had yanked the dummy-chucker to
his feet. He had dragged his victim to a patrol-box; he had taken him to
a police station, whence he had been conveyed to Jefferson Market Court,
where a judge had sentenced him to a sojourn on Blackwell's Island.
That had been ten days ago. This very day, the municipal ferry had
landed the dummy-chucker, with others of his slinking kind, upon
Manhattan's shores again. Not for a long time would the memory of the
Island menu be effaced from the dummy-chucker's palate, the locked doors
be banished from his mental vision.
A man might be arrested on Broadway, but he might also get the money.
Timorously, the dummy-chucker weighed the two possibilities. He felt the
dollar in his pocket. At a street in the Forties, he turned westward.
Beyond Eighth Avenue there was a place where the shadow of prohibition
was only a shadow.
Prices had gone up, but, as Finisterre Joe's bartender informed him,
there was more kick in a glass of the stuff that cost sixty cents to-day
than there had been in a barrel of the old juice. And, for a good
customer, Finisterre Joe's bartender would shade the price a trifle. The
dummy-chucker received two portions of the crudely blended poison that
passed for whisky in exchange for his round silver dollar. It was with
less of a shuffle and more of a stride that he retraced his steps toward
Broadway.
Slightly north of Times Square, he surveyed his field of action. Across
the street, a vaudeville house was discharging its mirth-surfeited
audience. Half a block north, laughing groups testified that the comedy
they had just left had been as funny as its press-agent claimed. The
dummy-chucker shook his head. He moved south, his feet taking on that
shuffle which they had lost temporarily.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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