"And I say," concluded the one whose nasal tw.a.n.g bespoke the New Englander; "I say that it was a dirty race all through."
"One paper hints that the stable was in on it; wanted to hit the bookies hard," put in his companion diffidently.
"No," argued the wise one, some alcohol and venom in his syllables, "Waterbury"s all right. He"s a square sport. I know. I ought to know, for I"ve got inside information. A friend of mine has a cousin who"s married to the brother of a friend of Waterbury"s aunt"s half-sister.
So I ought to know. Take it from me," added this Bureau of Inside Information, beating the table with an insistent fist; "it was a put-up job of Garrison"s. I"ll bet he made a mint on it. All these jockeys are crooked. I may be from Little Falls, but I know. You can"t fool me. I"ve been following Garrison"s record--"
"Then what did you bet on him for?" asked his companion mildly.
"Because I thought he might ride straight for once. And being up on Sis, I thought he couldn"t help but win. And so I plunged--heavy. And now, by Heck! ten dollars gone, and I"m mad; mad clear through. Sis was a corker, and ought to have had the race. I read all about her in the Little Falls _Daily Banner_. I"d just like to lay hands on that Garrison--a miserable little whelp; that"s what he is. He ought to have poisoned himself instead of the horse. I hope Waterbury"ll do him up.
I"ll see him about it."
Garrison slowly rose, his face white, eyes smoldering. The devil was running riot through him. His resentment had pa.s.sed from the apathetic stage to the fighting. So this was the world"s opinion of him! Not only the world, but miserable wastrels of sports who "plunged heavy" with ten dollars! His name was to be bandied in their unclean mouths! He, Billy Garrison, former premier jockey, branded as a thing beyond redemption!
He did not care what might happen, but he would kill that lie here and now. He was glad of the opportunity; hungry to let loose some of the resentment seething within him.
The Bureau of Inside Information and his companion looked up as Billy Garrison stood over them, hands in pockets. Both men had been drinking.
Drake and half the cafe"s occupants had drifted out.
"Which of you gentlemen just now gave his opinion of Billy Garrison?"
asked the jockey quietly.
"I did, neighbor. Been roped in, too?" Inside Information splayed out his legs, and, with a very blase air, put his thumbs in the armholes of his execrable vest. He owned a rangy frame and a loose mouth. He was showing the sights of Gotham to a friend, and was proud of his knowledge. But he secretly feared New York because he did not know it.
"Oh, it was you?" snapped Garrison venomously. "Well, I don"t know your name, but mine"s Billy Garrison, and you"re a liar!" He struck Inside Information a whack across the face that sent him a tumbled heap on the floor.
There is no one so dangerous as a coward. There is nothing so dangerous as ignorance. The New Englander had heard much of Gotham"s undercurrent and the brawls so prevalent there. He had heard and feared. He had looked for them, fascination in his fear, but till the present had never experienced one. He had heard that sporting men carried guns and were quick to use them; that when the lie was pa.s.sed it meant the hospital or the morgue. He was thoroughly ignorant of the ways of a great city, of the world; incapable of meeting a crisis; of apportioning it at its true value. And so now he overdid it.
As Garrison, a contemptuous smile on his face, turned away, and started to draw a handkerchief from his hip pocket, the New Englander, thinking a revolver was on its way, scrambled to his feet, wildly seized the heavy spirit-bottle, and let fly at Garrison"s head. There was whisky, muscle, sinew, and fear behind the shot.
As Billy turned about to ascertain whether or not his opponent meant fight by rising from under the table, the heavy bottle landed full on his temple. He crumpled up like a withered leaf, and went over on the floor without even a sigh.
It was two weeks later when Garrison regained full consciousness; opened his eyes to gaze upon blank walls, blank as the ceiling. He was in a hospital, but he did not know it. He knew nothing. The past had become a blank. An acute attack of brain-fever had set in, brought on by the excitement he had undergone and finished by the smash from the spirit-bottle.
There followed many nights when doctors shook their heads and nurses frowned; nights when it was thought little Billy Garrison would cross the Great Divide; nights when he sat up in the narrow cot, his hands clenched as if holding the reins, his eyes flaming as in his feverish imagination he came down the stretch, fighting for every inch of the way; crying, pleading, imploring: "Go it, Sis; go it! Take the rail!
Careful, careful! Now--now let her out; let her out! Go, you cripple, go--" All the jargon of the turf.
He was a physical, nervous wreck, and the doctors said that he couldn"t last very long, for consumption had him. It was only a matter of time, unless a miracle happened. The breath of his life was going through his mouth and nostrils; the breath of his lungs.
No one knew his name at the hospital, not even himself. There was nothing to identify him by. For Garrison, after the blow that night, had managed to crawl out to the sidewalk like a wounded beast striving to find its lair and fighting to die game.
There was no one to say him nay, no friend to help him. And hotel managements are notoriously averse to having murder or a.s.sault committed in their house. So when they saw that Garrison was able to walk they let him go, and willingly. Then he had collapsed, crumpled in a heap on the sidewalk.
A policeman had eventually found him, and with the uncanny ac.u.men of his ilk had unerringly diagnosed the case as a "drunk." From the stationhouse to Bellevue, Garrison had gone his weary way, and from there, when it was finally discovered he was neither drunk nor insane, to Roosevelt Hospital. And no one knew who or what he was, and no one cared overmuch. He was simply one of the many unfortunate derelicts of a great city.
It was over six months before he left the hospital, cured so far as he could be. The doctors called his complaint by a learned and villainously unp.r.o.nounceable name, which, interpreted by the Bowery, meant that Billy Garrison "had gone dippy."
But Garrison had not. His every faculty was as acute as it ever had been. Simply, Providence had drawn an impenetrable curtain over his memory, separating the past from the present; the same curtain that divides our presents from our futures. He had no past. It was a blank, shot now and then with a vague gleam of things dead and gone.
This oblivion may have been the manifestation of an all-wise Almighty.
Now, at least, he could not brood over past mistakes, though, unconsciously, he might have to live them out. Life to him was a new book, not one mark appeared on its clean pages. He did not even know his name--nothing.
From the "W. G." on his linen he understood that those were his initials, but he could not interpret them; they stood for nothing. He had no letters, memoranda in his pockets, bearing his name. And so he took the name of William Good. Perhaps the "William" came to him instinctively; he had no reason for choosing "Good."
Garrison left the hospital with his cough, a little money the superintendent had kindly given to him, and his clothes; that was all.
Handicapped as he was, harried by futile attempts of memory to fathom his ident.i.ty, he was about to renew the battle of life; not as a veteran, one who has earned promotion, profited by experience, but as a raw recruit.
The big city was no longer an old familiar mother, whose every mood and whimsy he sensed unerringly; now he was a stranger. The streets meant nothing to him. But when he first turned into old Broadway, a vague, uneasy feeling stirred within him; it was a memory struggling like an imprisoned bird to be free. Almost the first person he met was Jimmy Drake. Garrison was about to pa.s.s by, oblivious, when the other seized him by the arm.
"h.e.l.lo, Billy! Where did you drop from--"
"Pardon me, you have made a mistake." Garrison stared coldly, blankly at Drake, shook free his arm, and pa.s.sed on.
"Gee, what a cut!" mused the book-maker, staring after the rapidly retreating figure of Garrison. "The frozen mitt for sure. What"s happened now? Where"s he been the past six months? Wearing the same clothes, too! Well, somehow I"ve queered myself for good. I don"t know what I did or didn"t. But I"ll keep my eye on him, anyway." To cheer his philosophy, Drake pa.s.sed into the Fifth Avenue for a drink.
CHAPTER IV.
A READY-MADE HEIR.
Garrison had flattered himself that he had known adversity in his time, but in the months succeeding his dismissal from the hospital he qualified for a post-graduate course in privation. He was cursed with the curse of the age; it was an age of specialties, and he had none.
His only one, the knowledge of the track, had been buried in him, and nothing tended to awaken it.
He had no commercial education; nothing but the _savoir-faire_ which wealth had given to him, and an inherent breeding inherited from his mother. By reason of his physique he was disbarred from mere manual labor, and that haven of the failure--the army.
So Garrison joined the ranks of the Unemployed Grand Army of the Republic. He knew what it was to sleep in Madison Square Park with a newspaper blanket, and to be awakened by the carol of the touring policemen. He came to know what it meant to stand in the bread-line, to go the rounds of the homeless "one-night stands."
He came perilously near reaching the level of the sodden. His morality had suffered with it all. Where in his former days of hardship he had health, ambition, a goal to strive for, friends to keep him honest with himself, now he had nothing. He was alone; no one cared.
If he had only taken to the track, his pa.s.sion--legitimate pa.s.sion--for horse-flesh would have pulled him through. But the thought that he ever could ride never suggested itself to him.
He had no opportunity of inhaling the track"s atmosphere. Sometimes he wondered idly why he liked to stop and caress every stray horse. He could not know that those same hands had once coaxed thoroughbreds down the stretch to victory. His haunts necessarily kept him from meeting with those whom he had once known. The few he did happen to meet he cut unconsciously as he had once cut Jimmy Drake.
And so day by day Garrison"s morality suffered. It is so easy for the well-fed to be honest. But when there is the hunger cancer gnawing at one"s vitals, not for one day, but for many, then honesty and dishonesty cease to be concrete realities. It is not a question of piling up luxuries, but of supplying mere necessity.
And day by day as the hunger cancer gnawed at Garrison"s vitals it encroached on his original stock of honesty. He fought every minute of the day, but he grimly foresaw that there would come a time when he would steal the first time opportunity afforded.
Day by day he saw the depletion of his honor. He was not a moralist, a saint, a sinner. Need sweeps all theories aside; in need"s fierce crucible they are trans.m.u.ted to concrete realities. Those who have never known what it is to be thrown with Garrison"s handicap on the charity of a great city will not understand. But those who have ever tasted the bitter crust of adversity will. And it is the old blatant advice from the Seats of the Mighty: "Get a job." The old answer from the hopeless undercurrent: "How?"
There came a day when the question of honesty or dishonesty was put up to Garrison in a way he had not foreseen. The line was drawn distinctly; there was no easy slipping over it by degrees, unnoticed.
The toilet facilities of munic.i.p.al lodging-houses are severely crude and primitive. For the sake of sanitation, the whilom lodger"s clothes are put in a net and fumigated in a germ-destroying temperature. The men congregate together in one long room, in various stages of pre-Adamite costumes, and the shower is turned upon them in numerical rotation.
This public washing was one of the many drawbacks to public charity which Garrison shivered at. As the warm weather set in he accordingly took full advantage of the free baths at the Battery. On his second day"s dip, as he was leaving, a man whom he had noticed intently scanning the bathers tapped him on the arm.
He was shaped like an olive, with a pair of shrewd gray eyes, and a clever, clean-shaven mouth. He was well-dressed, and was continually probing with a quill tooth-pick at his gold-filled front teeth, evidently desirous of excavating some of the precious metal.
"My name"s Snark--Theobald D. Snark," he said shortly, thrusting a card into Garrison"s pa.s.sive hand. "I am an eminent lawyer, and would be obliged if you would favor me with a five minutes" interview in my office--American Tract Building."