Detective Philo Gubb: Collected Mysteries. Ellis Parker Butler

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      “I told you I’d got to learn it better, didn’t I?” asked Mr. Critz impatiently. “You’d be capper, and you’d guess which shell the pea was under. No matter which you guessed, I’d leave it under that one, so’d you’d win, and you’d win ten dollars every time you bet—but not for keeps. That’s why I’ve got to have an honest capper.”

      “I can see that,” said Mr. Gubb; “but what’s the use lettin’ me win it if I’ve got to bring it back?”

      “That starts the boobs bettin’,” said Mr. Critz. “The boobs see how you look to be winnin’, and they want to win too. But they don’t. When they bet, I win.”

      “That ain’t a square game,” said Mr. Gubb seriously, “is it?”

      “A crook ain’t expected to be square,” said Mr. Critz. “It stands to reason, if a crook wants to be a crook, he’s got to be crooked, ain’t he?”

      “Yes, of course,” said Mr. Gubb. “I hadn’t looked at it that way.”

      “As far as I can see,” said Mr. Critz, “the more I know how a detective acts, the better off I’ll be when I start in doin’ real business. Ain’t that so? I guess, till I get the hang of things better, I’ll stay right here.”

      “I’m glad to hear you say so, Mr. Critz,” said Mr. Gubb with relief. “I like you, and I like your looks, and there’s no tellin’ who I might get for a roommate next time. I might get some one that wasn’t honest.”

      So it was agreed, and Mr. Critz stood over the washstand and manipulated the little rubber pea and the three shells, while Mr. Gubb sat on the edge of the bed and studied Lesson Eleven of the “Rising Sun Detective Agency’s Correspondence School of Detecting.”

      When, presently, Mr. Critz learned to work the little pea neatly, he urged Mr. Gubb to take the part of capper, and each time Mr. Gubb won he gave him a five-dollar bill. Then Mr. Gubb posed as a “boob” and Mr. Critz won all the money back again, beaming over his spectacle rims, and chuckling again and again until he burst into a fit of coughing that made him red in the face, and did not cease until he had taken a big drink of water out of the wash-pitcher. Never had he seemed more like a kindly old gentleman from behind the candy counter of a small village. He hung over the washstand, manipulating the little rubber pea as if fascinated.

      “Ain’t it curyus how a feller catches onto a thing like that all to once?” he said after a while. “If it hadn’t been that I was so anxious, I might have fooled with that for weeks and weeks and not got anywheres with it. I do wisht you could be my capper a while anyway, until I could get one.”

      “I need all my time to study,” said Mr. Gubb. “It ain’t easy to learn deteckating by mail.”

      “Pshaw, now!” said Mr. Critz. “I’m real sorry! Maybe if I was to pay you for your time and trouble five dollars a night? How say?”

      Mr. Gubb considered. “Well, I dunno!” he said slowly. “I sort of hate to take money for doin’ a favor like that.”

      “Now, there ain’t no need to feel that way,” said Mr. Critz. “Your time’s wuth somethin’ to me—it’s wuth a lot to me to get the hang of this gold-brick game. Once I get the hang of it, it won’t be no trouble for me to sell gold-bricks like this one for all the way from a thousand dollars up. I paid fifteen hundred for this one myself, and got it cheap. That’s a good profit, for this brick ain’t wuth a cent over one hundred dollars, and I know, for I took it to the bank after I bought it, and that’s what they was willin’ to pay me for it. So it’s easy wuth a few dollars for me to have help whilst I’m learnin’. I can easy afford to pay you a few dollars, and to pay a friend of yours the same.”

      “Well, now,” said Mr. Gubb, “I don’t know but what I might as well make a little that way as any other. I got a friend—” He stopped short. “You don’t aim to sell the gold-brick to him, do you?”

      Mr. Critz’s eyes opened wide behind their spectacles.

      “Land’s sakes, no!” he said.

      “Well, I got a friend may be willing to help out,” said Mr. Gubb. “What’d he have to do?”

      “You or him,” said Mr. Critz, “would be the ‘come-on,’ and pretend to buy the brick. And you or him would pretend to help me to sell it. Maybe you better have the brick, because you can look stupid, and the feller that’s got the brick has got to look that.”

      “I can look anyway a’most,” said Mr. Gubb with pride.

      “Do tell!” said Mr. Critz, and so it was arranged that the first rehearsal of the gold-brick game should take place the next evening, but as Mr. Gubb turned away Mr. Critz deftly slipped something into the student detective’s coat pocket.

      It was toward noon the next day that Mr. Critz, peering over his spectacles and avoiding as best he could the pails of paste, entered the parlor of the vacant house where Mr. Gubb was at work.

      “I just come around,” said Mr. Critz, rather reluctantly, “to say you better not say nothing to your friend. I guess that deal’s off.”

      “Pshaw, now!” said Mr. Gubb. “You don’t mean so!”

      “I don’t mean nothing in the way of aspersions, you mind,” said Mr. Critz with reluctance, “but I guess we better call it off. Of course, so far as I know, you are all right—”

      “I don’t know what you’re gettin’ at,” said Mr. Gubb. “Why don’t you say it?”

      “Well, I been buncoed so often,” said Mr. Critz. “Seem’s like any one can get money from me any time and any way, and I got to thinkin’ it over. I don’t know anything about you, do I? And here I am, going to give you a gold-brick that cost me fifteen hundred dollars, and let you go out and wait until I come for it with your friend, and—well, what’s to stop you from just goin’ away with that brick and never comin’ back?”

      Mr. Gubb looked at Mr. Critz blankly.

      “I’ve went and told my friend,” he said. “He’s all ready to start in.”

      “I hate it, to have to say it,” said Mr. Critz, “but when I come to count over them bills I lent you to cap the shell game with, there was a five-dollar one short.”

      “I know,” said Gubb, turning red. “And if you go over there to my coat, you’ll find it in my pocket, all ready to hand back to you. I don’t know how I come to keep it in my pocket. Must ha’ missed it, when I handed you back the rest.”

      “Well, I had a notion it was that way,” said Mr. Critz kindly. “You look like you was honest, Mr. Gubb. But a thousand-dollar gold-brick, that any bank will pay a hundred dollars for—I got to get out of this way of trustin’ everybody—”

      Mr. Critz was evidently distressed.

      “If ’twas anybody else but you,” he said with an effort, “I’d make him put up a hundred dollars to cover the cost of a brick like that whilst he had it. There! I’ve said it, and I guess you’re mad!”

      “I ain’t mad,” protested Mr. Gubb, “’long as you’re goin’ to pay me and Pete, СКАЧАТЬ