A white man entered the Hen-Scratch saloon and sat down at one of the little tables. He looked around him curiously. The glory of the Hen-Scratch had departed. Nothing remained of the saloon but its name. There was dust upon the tables. The mirror behind the bar was written all over with the unedifying literature of soft drinks. There were no patrons in the place. A little yellow barkeeper was wiping glasses and trying to arrange grape-juice bottles in an enticing array upon his shelves, glancing up from his task at intervals to gaze into the tragic face of Abraham Lincoln, which looked out from a fly-specked frame hung crookedly upon the wall. Skeeter Butts laid down a bottle which contained one of the softest of soft drinks, came from behind the bar, and murmured politely into the ear of the white man:
“Us ain’t sellin’ no drinks to white men, boss. Endurin’ of de barroom time, it wusn’t allowed. De law made us hab sep’rate barrooms fer de whites an’ blacks. Dar ain’t no saloons no mo’, but——”
“I ain’t buying drinks,” the white man answered. “I have no money, no credit, no friends, no business.”
“Escuse me fer sayin’ it, boss,” Skeeter chuckled, “but dem is my fixes, an’ you is mighty nigh as bad off as a nigger.”
“I’m worse off than a nigger,” the white man responded, and he seemed to get a lugubrious satisfaction from a realization of the fact. “More is expected of my race than of yours.”
“Dat’s right,” Skeeter agreed. “Dey lets us blacks down easy; but neither de whites nor de blacks is up to expectations.”
The white man sat for a while in deep thought. Skeeter noticed that the top of his head was overdeveloped, like an infant’s; that his fingers were stained with cigarettes; that his clothes were of good material but badly worn. He decided that the man was an animated slosh in the desert of total abstinence, mourning the demise of John Barleycorn, and hopefully looking for a damp cloud on the horizon in the shape of a blind tiger.
Skeeter returned to his task of polishing glasses and wiping his bar, the habit acquired through twenty years of service to men who put one foot upon the brass rail. Meantime he watched the stranger from the corner of his eyes, and when the silence was prolonged he became nervous and fidgety. At last the man came to the bar and spoke.
“Can you lend me ten dollars?”
In all Skeeter’s varied career no such request had ever been uttered in his astonished ears. Skeeter wondered if this extraordinary thing was attributable to prohibition. Surely the old order changeth!
“I ain’t know yo’ favor or yo’ face, an’ I ain’t met de ’quaintance of yo’ name, boss,” Skeeter replied.
“My name is Dick Nuhat,” the white man responded promptly. “I am not altogether an honest man, but I am a gentleman. This is a request of one gentleman to another.”
“I likes to ’commodate white gentlemen............