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 gentlemens, boss,” skeeter said uneasily; “but i ain’t got de ten dollars, an’ so i cain’t affode to lend it.”
without a word the man turned away, walked back to the table, and sat down. once more there was a period of silence and deep meditation, while a nervous colored man polished glasses and watched the white man from the corner of his eye. mr. nuhat had the trick of sitting as motionless as a stone dog on a lawn, while even his eyes were fixed in a stony stare, oblivious to what went on around him and looking out across the spaces unseeingly.
“dope!” skeeter muttered to himself; but skeeter was wrong.
there was twenty minutes of this ponderous thinking, and then the man came to skeeter and made a proposition.
“i’ve got one thing i can sell, skeeter. i rode to town on a horse that is worth one hundred dollars, intending to take him to shongaloon, to enter him in the races at the fair; but i am broke. if you had lent me the ten dollars i would have gone on; but now, if i went, i would have no money to bet. so i am going to sell and go out of the racing business.”
“you don’t talk like no race-hoss man to me,” skeeter said.
“i ain’t a race-horse man,” was the reply. “i am a scholar and a gentleman.”
“i ain’t got no hundred dollars,” skeeter butts said next. “dar ain’t no nigger in dis town wid dat much money in one lump. you’ll have to sell out to de white folks.”
“couldn’t you find ten colored people who had ten dollars each?” the white man asked. “all ten of you can own the horse, and when you make a win you can divide your earnings.”
“what kind of hoss you got?” skeeter asked with a new interest.
“he’s a hard looker, skeeter. he’s a hound dog. he limps in all four feet, but not in all at the same time, you know. he swaps from one foot to the other. every time he stops he goes lame in a different foot, because he can’t remember which foot he was limping on before. he has an awful short memory that way. you never can tell what foot he is going to cripple in next, and he don’t know himself.”
“dat’s a kind of trick hoss,” skeeter snickered.
“exactly,” dick agreed. “i can make a killing with him at every race-track, for one look at him is aplenty. i can get all sorts of odds against him; but don’t make any mistake, little yeller nigger—that horse can run!”
“dat sounds good to me,” skeeter replied after a moment’s thought. “how much do i git fer makin’ de trade?”
“get nine negroes to give you ten dollars each for the horse, and i’ll be satisfied with the ninety dollars. that will give you a ten-dollar share in the animal without costing you a cent.”
“kin i try out de hoss an’ see if he is all right?” skeeter asked eagerly.
“certainly.”
“all right, boss,” skeeter replied. “i’ll take you up!”
