Argosy All-Story Weekly, Vol. 124, No. 3 — page 35: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

RAW ing near, old Heavo would be saying: “Good, Tumtum! You’ve run her to a frog’s feather, this cannery. Yeah!”’ Then Tumtum Teller sighed. The liner was nosing its way into the spume of gray sea and somber sky that lay ahead off the turbulent Pass of Unimak. This voyage that he had looked forward to as triumph- al, as a very epithalamium to his marriage to Lillian was turning out to be a funeral cortege of all his hopes: Ten tedious, drag- ging days lay ahead. Tumtum leaned his ditty-bag against the rail. Presently he would hunt up his quar- ters and stow his stuff. He wondered where he would be lodged. The ship was loaded to full capacity. In the forecastle would be lodged the Chinese. Aft, in a little cubby of a room slatted off like a cell, all by herself they would quarter Sei Densu, the picture bride. Aloft, on the hurricane deck, best state- ~ rooms on the ship,- Lillian and her aunt would lodge. - On the promenade deck would be the rooms of himself, and of the other white workers. Tumtum called to a cabin-boy, learned the number of his room, hunted it up, flung his ditty-bag into a corner, seated himself upon the edge of the bunk. Tumtum began to think about the two . thousand dollars that he owed still upon the Sound fish-trap location. . He had six- teen hundred. He would require six hun- dred of the amount to live on until the next season opened. A thousand dollars— he owed two thousand on the trap. Already, below decks, in the stadgy salon, the poker game would be going, and still would go until the liner berthed at Seattle. And it would be a poker game, no piker stuff, a game in which a Coolie Chinese slimer or -rimmer would wager his year’s pay, next year’s, and the wages ef the year after that, giving as earnest of his intent ‘to pay a “plaplod,” a bit of yellow paper with some hen-track writing on it that was as good as the wheat for the amount stated in any Chinese company store in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco. Oh, yes, a regular game. A Chinese, a Jap, a Filipino will bet his money, shirt, MATERIAL. 409 his wives, and his children, and, if he loses, pay. Tumtum was thinking. Tumtum was not what one, with propriety, could call a gambler. Perhaps once in a year, or two years, circumstances would intrigue him to sit in. But he was no gambler. Still he sat thinking of the two thousand he owed, of the one thousand only that he had to pay, and he sat thinking also of Lillian Hendricks. With Lillian’s “ no,” had tumbled his house of cards. But had it? No less an authority than Heavo Hen- dricks himself had held to the belief that when a man had been unlucky in love was the time when he was sure to be lucky at cards. Then, too, there was an Indian say- ing in which ‘Tumtum believed profoundly, that seemed to bolster up the situation: “The wind that blows shut the north door, blows open the south.’’ Unlucky in love, lucky at cards. Surely then this would be his day of days with the fateful pasteboards. Tumtum arose from the edge of the bunk, fumbled his sixteen-hundred-dollar pay-check from his pocket, stood staring at it while he repeated the spell words; “ Un- lucky in love, lucky at cards.” Entering the purser’s office, Tumtum threw down the pay-check, asked for the cash. “You going to horn in, Tumtum?” “ Yeah,” replied Tumtum. “I’m going to bend some of them Chinks and Micka- doos till they start a seam. Give me all cash.”’ At the door of the purser’s office, his great hand clasped about a wad of fifties, hundreds, twenties, Tumtum came to a stop and looked back over his shoulder. “ What you figure the steamship com- pany would ask for this boat, Charlie?”’ “Qh, about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. You hain’t thinking of buying, are you, Tumtum?’’ “Yeah. I'll give you the money when we get to Seattle—if they’s anything in signs.”’ Willie Katimura, the smart Jap sitting in the game, a sizable cylinder of gold, twenty-dollar pieces before him on the ULC OOOLK (COL (GO)