Where Your Treasure Is. Holman Day
entering or what pay he was going to get for his labor.
“You say your name is Ross Sidney,” said the boss, remembering what I had told him. “Mine is Jeff Dawlin, Ross, and there’s no mistering among partners.” He gave me a few dirty sheets of paper. “There’s your spiel all written out. You can add your own talk as you work into the spirit of the thing. The idea is get them to stop, look, listen—and then coax till they come in. If they come out squealing, you go on and bawl them—bawl them down! There’s some good work to be done in that line—and you’re husky and can scare ’em, providing Big Mike hasn’t already scared ’em enough. There isn’t a thing in the show but what’s a fake—of course you understand that. Most of ’em are too ashamed to squeal.”
He was leading me into the inner mysteries of the place while he talked. He made no reference to the objects which were ranged around the sides of the big room, plainly despising them as curiosities which could not possibly interest anybody. But they interested me mightily and I lagged behind to give each one a glance in passing.
“Siamese Susie” was made up of a couple of big wax dolls confined in a single dress. “The Peruvian Cockatoo” manifestly had been, when he was alive, the humble master of some up-country barn-yard; now he was tricked out with all sorts of dyed false feathers, including an enormous topknot. The “Mormon Giant” was a papier-mâché figure, and there was a hideous thing labeled “Mermaid” constructed of the same material as the giant. There were a few other nondescript exhibits in dingy glass cases or mounted on stands draped in dirty hangings. I had never seen a collection of more shameless frauds. I began to understand that I had not been let in on the main proposition for money-making.
On one side of the room there were curtains lettered: “Professor Jewelle, the World’s Greatest Seer.” The professor came out when Dawlin called for him. He wore a wig and false white whiskers, and had watery eyes, and a breath like a whiff from a distillery chimney. A big brute of a man was loafing in one corner of the room, and I reckoned that this person must be Big Mike; I had seen many such of the bouncer sort when I had made my rounds, hunting for experiences.
Mr. Dawlin introduced me, and I seemed to make a good impression.
When he slyly slid out the information that I, too, had been having troubles which had kept me under cover for some weeks, I noted that I stood even higher in their estimation.
As we talked on I began to feel a bit ambitious. I thought I might be able to improve business.
“Look here,” I suggested, “why not put a tank in here and let me do some of my diving stunts? It would be a novelty—there really doesn’t seem to be much to the show as it stands.”
“Say, I haven’t pulled a greenhorn into camp, have I?” inquired Mr. Dawlin with a good deal of tartness. “Show? Good gad! who ever said we wanted a show?”
I did not know what to say to that and so I did not answer.
“What do you think I would be doing, or the ‘prof’ would be doing, while the jethros were crowded around you? We wouldn’t be doing a thing in the line of the regular graft. The main idea of this concern is to get ’em in here where there’s nothing to take up their minds after they’ve had one look around the place. Then they begin to feel that they want to get something for their money. So the ‘prof’ hands ’em the dome dope—feels their bumps—and I feed ’em the gazara stuff. How many times have I got to tell you what this place is?”
“Oh, I’m wise,” I said, trying hard to look that way. “But of course I’m anxious to do all I can to help.”
“The zeal of youth! The zeal of youth!” prattled the professor. He seemed to me to be pretty much of an old fool. He had that smug, cooing way with him—all put on like the airs of a country undertaker. He came across to me before I could understand what he was about and stuck his thumb onto a spot on the top of my head and pressed with his forefinger a little lower down. “Yes, approbativeness well developed and conscientiousness—this where my finger—”
“Oh, shut up!” snorted Mr. Dawlin. “Don’t cry to put that stuff over among friends.”
“However,” the professor went on, continuing to fondle my head, “the development of the brain upward, forward, and backward, from the medulla—”
“Save it for the cud-wallopers, I tell you!”
“If this young man is going to have his say about me in front, I want him to know that the science of phrenology has a good exponent here,” said the professor.
I reckon he had seen me looking him over without a great amount of liking and was anxious to put on a bit of a front.
“He’ll say that you’ll read all heads free of charge, and that’s all he’ll say,” stated Mr. Dawlin. “It isn’t necessary for him to know the difference between a medulla and a free-lunch pickle—and I don’t believe you know, yourself. Ross, we want to open the doors again to-morrow. Do you think you can get the gist of that patter into your head overnight?”
I thumbed the dirty sheets and said I’d do my best. Therefore, I went to my room and applied myself. There was a lot of extravagant guff about the curiosities, flowery flapdoodle of the usual barker sort.
The next morning I was able to make some sort of a try at it from the stand, for I have said before that I always was more or less cheeky. A sort of a fluffy-ruffle damsel with bleached hair was in the ticket-office and there never was a young fellow yet who did not try on a little extra swagger when a girl was hard by. She smiled at me encouragingly when I had arrested the attention of a few passers, some of whom bought tickets and went in. I guess I must have smiled back, for Dawlin, who was standing in the doorway, appraising my first efforts, came and climbed up beside me and growled in my ear.
“You’re breaking in fine. Only put a little more punch and sing-song into it! And, by the way, the dame who is shuffling the pasteboards—she’s private goods—mine!”
“I don’t want her,” I said, with considerable heat.
“I don’t say you do—but a lot of trouble has sometimes been made in partnerships by women. So that’s why I have flipped the buried card at the start-off. Now tune up and let it went! If your voice gets husky I’ll send out a handful of bird-seed and a hunk of cuttlefish.” I reckoned he was trying his cheap humor on me to smooth the insult about the girl. It seemed to me like an insult, and he understood pretty well how I felt.
So I went to my job and minded my own business most exclusively.
Day after day, for several weeks, I stood up on my rostrum and cajoled folks into that joint, and I say frankly and honestly that for a long time I did not have full understanding of just what went on inside. Possibly that statement makes me out a mighty stupid chap.
But I was ashamed to ask any more questions after what Dawlin had yapped out about his suspicions that I was a greenhorn.
I did not have any special conversation with him, anyway. I was still ugly when I thought upon his warning about that painted girl—as if I wanted her! And I was careful that she should have no word to carry to him about me; I never looked in her direction.
Furthermore, I did not want to know very much about what they were up to inside. I was ashamed of my job. It struck me that if I came to know all the fraud of the thing I’d jack the proposition. An ostrich sort of attitude, to be sure, a foolish evasion, but that’s just how it was, like other things which came up in my life, things not lending themselves readily to explanation as I look back on them now.
I saw patrons come out, some angry and with red faces, some ashamed, some laughing—but only a few of the last, and they were plainly chaps who took it as a joke when anybody could put something across in their case.
Man after man came out with a broad piece of paper in his hand, crumpled it up, swore, and dashed it down on the sidewalk.
It was a chart purporting to be a reading