On an east-bound train I went into the and found Jefferson Peters, the only man with a brain west of the Wabash River who can use his cerebrum, cerebellum, and medulla oblongata at the same time.
Jeff is in the line of unillegal . He is not to be by widows and ; he is a reducer of surplusage. His favorite disguise is that of the target-bird at which the spendthrift or the reckless may shy a few inconsequential dollars. He is readily vocalized by tobacco; so, with the aid of two thick and easy-burning brevas, I got the story of his latest Autolycan adventure.
"In my line of business," said Jeff, "the hardest thing is to find an upright, trustworthy, honorable partner to work a graft with. Some of the best men I ever worked with in a swindle would resort to trickery at times.
"So, last summer, I thinks I will go over into this section of country where I hear the serpent has not yet entered, and see if I can find a partner naturally gifted with a talent for crime, but not yet contaminated by success.
"I found a village that seemed to show the right kind of a layout. The inhabitants hadn't found that Adam had been dispossessed, and were going right along naming the animals and snakes just as if they were in the Garden of Eden. They call this town Mount Nebo, and it's up near the spot where Kentucky and West Virginia and North Carolina corner together. Them States don't meet? Well, it was in that neighborhood, anyway.
"After putting in a week proving I wasn't a revenue officer, I went over to the store where the rude fourflushers of the hamlet lied, to see if I could get a line on the kind of man I wanted.
"'Gentlemen,' says I, after we had rubbed noses and gathered 'round the dried-apple barrel. 'I don't suppose there's another community in the whole world into which sin and has less extensively than this. Life here, where all the women are brave and and all the men honest and , must, indeed, be an . It reminds me,' says I, 'of Goldstein's beautiful entitled "The Village," which says:
'Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a ,
What art can drive its charms away?
The judge rode slowly down the lane, mother.
For I'm to be Queen of the May.'
"'Why, yes, Mr. Peters,' says the storekeeper. 'I reckon we air about as moral and a community as there be on the mounting, according to of opinion; but I reckon you ain't ever met Rufe Tatum.'
"'Why, no,' says the town , 'he can't hardly have ever. That air Rufe is shore the monstrousest scalawag that has escaped hangin' on the galluses. And that puts me in mind that I ought to have turned Rufe out of the lockup before yesterday. The thirty days he got for killin' Yance Goodloe was up then. A day or two more won't hurt Rufe any, though.'
"'Shucks, now,' says I, in the mountain idiom, 'don't tell me there's a man in Mount Nebo as bad as that.'
"'Worse,' says the storekeeper. 'He steals .'
"I think I will look up this Mr. Tatum; so a day or two after the constable turned him out I got acquainted with him and invited him out on the edge of town to sit on a log and talk business.
"What I wanted was a partner with a natural rural make-up to play a part in some little one-act that I was going to book with the & Gin circuit in some of the Western towns; and this R. Tatum was born for the role as sure as nature cast Fairbanks for the stuff that kept Eliza from sinking into the river.
"He was about the size of a first baseman; and he had ambiguous blue eyes like the china dog on the mantelpiece that Aunt Harriet used to play with when she was a child. His hair waved a little bit like the statue of the dinkus-thrower at the Vacation in Rome, but the color of it reminded you of the 'Sunset in the Grand Canon, by an American Artist,' that they hang over the stove-pipe holes in the salongs. He was the Reub, without needing a touch. You'd have known him for one, even if you'd seen him on the stage with one cotton suspender and a straw over his ear.
"I told him what I wanted, and found him ready to jump at the job.
"'Overlooking such a trivial little as the habit of manslaughter,' says I, 'what have you in the way of indirect or nonactionable that you could point to, with or without pride, as an evidence of your qualifications for the position?'
"'Why,' says he, in his kind of Southern system of accents, 'hain't you heard tell? There ain't any man, black or white, in the Blue that can tote off a shoat as easy as I can without bein' heard, seen, or cotched. I can lift a shoat,' he goes on, 'out of a pen, from under a porch, at the trough, in the woods, day or night, anywhere or anyhow, and I guarantee nobody won't hear a . It's all in the way you grab hold of 'em and carry 'em atterwards. Some day,' goes on this gentle of pig-pens, 'I hope to become reckernized as the champion shoat-stealer of the world.'
"'It's proper to be ambitious,' says I; 'and -stealing will do very well for Mount Nebo; but in the outside world, Mr. Tatum, it would be considered as crude a piece of business as a bear raid on Bay State Gas. However, it will do as a guarantee of good faith. We'll go into . I've got a thousand dollars cash capital; and with that homeward-plods atmosphere of yours we ought to be able to win out a few shares of Soon Parted, preferred, in the money market.'
"So I attaches Rufe, and we go away from Mount Nebo down into the lowlands. And all the way I coach him for his part in the I had in mind. I had idled away two months on the Florida coast, and was feeling all to the Ponce de Leon, besides having so many new schemes up my sleeve that I had to wear kimonos to hold 'em.
"I intended to assume a shape and a path nine miles wide though the farming belt of the Middle West; so we headed in that direction. But when we got as far as Lexington we found Binkley Brothers' circus there, and the blue-grass peasantry into town and pounding the Belgian blocks with their hand-pegged sabots as artless and arbitrary as an extra session of a Datto Bryan drama. I never pass a circus without pulling the valve-cord and coming down for a little Key West money; so I engaged a couple of rooms and board for Rufe and me at a house near the circus grounds run by a widow lady named Peevy. Then I took Rufe to a clothing store and gent's-outfitted him. He showed up strong, as I knew he would, after he was rigged up in the ready-made rutabaga regalia. Me and old Misfitzky stuffed him into a bright blue suit with a Nile green visible plaid effect, and on a fancy vest of a light Tuskegee Normal tan color, a red necktie, and the yellowest pair of shoes in town.
"They were the first clothes Rufe had ever worn except the gingham layette and the butternut top-dressing of his native kraal, and he looked as self-conscious as an Igorrote with a new nose-ring.
"That night I went down to the circus tents and opened a small shell game. Rufe was to be the capper. I gave him a roll of phony currency to bet with and kept a bunch of it in a special pocket to pay his winnings out of. No; I didn't mistrust him; but I simply can't manipulate the ball to lose when I see real money bet. My fingers go on a strike every time I try it.
"I set up my little table and began to show them how easy it was to guess which shell the little pea was under. The unlettered gathered in a thick semicircle and began to nudge elbows and one another to bet. Then was when Rufe ought to have single-footed up and called the turn on the little joker for a few tens and fives to get them started. But, no Rufe. I'd seen him two or three times walking about and looking at the side-show pictures with his mouth full of peanut candy; but he never came nigh.
"The crowd piked a little; but trying to work the shells without a capper is like fishing without a bait. I closed the game with only forty-two dollars of the unearned , while I had been counting on yanking the yeomen for two hundred at least. I went home at eleven and went to bed. I supposed that the circus had proved too for Rufe, and that he had to it, concert and all; but I meant to give him a lecture on general business principles in the morning.
"Just after Morpheus had got both my shoulders to the shuck I hears a houseful of unbecoming and ribald noises like a youngster with green-apple colic. I opens my door and calls out in the hall for the widow lady, and when she sticks her head out, I says: 'Mrs. Peevy, ma'am, would you mind choking off that kid of yours so that honest people can get their rest?'
"'Sir,' says she, 'it's no child of mine. It's the pig that your friend Mr. Tatum brought home to his room a couple of hours ago. And if you are uncle or second cousin or brother to it, I'd appreciate your stopping its mouth, sir, yourself, if you please.'
"I put on some of the polite outside habiliments of external society and went into Rufe's room. He had gotten up and lit his lamp, and was pouring some milk into a tin pan on the floor for a dingy-white, half-grown, squealing pig.
"'How is this, Rufe?' says I. 'You flimflammed in your part of the work to-night and put the game on . And how do you explain the pig? It looks like back-sliding to me.'
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