Argosy All-Story Weekly, October 7, 1922 — page 69: what you’re looking at

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

THE BIRD OF PASSAGE, he would have put Johnny at work lifting leathers the day after they had got him. On that point the Professor showed a touch of reason—he knew that stealing was a fine art that required skill plus training, and that it was better to hold off until the boy could make a clean-up than to risk their whole future over a lady’s reticule. “You’ve got to look at it this way, Ga- hagan. We've invested a hull lot of thought and hard work and self-sacrifice in this boy. Suppose we start him now, and he dips into some old gentleman’s change pocket and gets pinched. He’s lost, and we don’t get no return on our invest- ment. But if we wait until he’s in a mob that knows how to pick out big game ‘and take care of the leather once the boy has it, he might last for years. Then we sit tight and clean up fifty thousand a. year be- tween us.” Nobody, much less Gahagan, could resist the logic of fifty thousand a year, and the big man took up the burden almost cheer- fully—his old stunt of taking on local wrestling champions, he to pay them five dollars a minute if they stayed with him three minutes without being thrown. The prospect of earning fifteen dollars for three minutes’ work had always brought him plenty of competition, and usually it was only necessary for him to carry his man along for two and three-quarter minutes and then pick him up and lay him on his back. All this talk of going to Mexico Johnny had found to be romance, and it was im- possible for him to escape. Gahagan had a heavy hand, which he did not hesitate to use, and the Professor as many eyes as Argus. The old man had put him to school —a school where he had to learn check- ers—and he had learned beautifully. Now Johnny knew all the openings which have taken their names from the canny land of porridge —‘ Ayrshire Lassie,” “ Kelso Cross,” ‘“ Laird and Lady ”—and while Gahagan struggled with the local wrestling champions Johnny was to be matched against the checker players. He was the drawing card, but in addition to him there were a half dozen tables in the tent where tRose who wished to spend a quiet half hour over a game could do so. 215 The kewpie man wielded a clever brush, and he had made a banner showing an in- fantile Johnny playing checkers with a half dozen men simultaneously—all patriarchs with beards at least a foot long. Each of them wore a medal of some sort and all had ducal ribbons across the bosoms of their stiff shirts. Behold Johnny sitting under this banner, flushed rose pink, for the Pro- fessor had scrubbed him until he yelped, a little thinner than he had been when with Bender, and much less impudent. His tutor had got him just the suit he needed—a dark-blue one, with knicker- bockers and a broad Eton collar. The old man in his long black coat, black silk cap, and medals, looked like an alchemist as he walked up and down the platform ringing a big bell, which he swung up and then down, up and down, over his head and between his feet, pausing now and then to rap his flat hand against the canvas picture of Johnny defeating the best checker brains of Europe. Only on the banner his name was not Johnny—it was Rafael Turino. Rumors of the boy checker player had already spread, and it did not take long for a crowd to gather whenever the Professor and his bell appeared. The tent stood at the end of the concession line away from the noise, and close to an abandoned tool shed where Johnny and his masters lived. The shed had this advantage over a tent for living purposes—Johnny could be locked up in it whenever he could not be watched. The advantage of being away under the willows was that it was quiet, and when the Professor set down his bell and stepped to the edge of the platform to address his audience he had no need to raise his voice beyond a charmingly inti- mate conversational tone. On that particular day when Springtime was working his “‘ gag ” at Tom Osborne’s, the Professor had a good crowd, for rumors concerning the boy had spread far, and it was a corner of the country where the checker champion is as great a man as Babe Ruth. The ballyhooer scanned his audience with a chuckle, for it was the biggest crowd he had collected yet, and his trained eye told him that most of them were fans and comicboooks C©