Part 2

The partners flatly refused this proffered amusement, remembering that Mr. Cochran would have them completely at the mercy of his interminable, unquenchable drawl. Anxious as they were to protect him, they thought the price in self-sacrifice too great, and found difficulty enough, as it was, to finally shake him off.

Something went amiss in the engine room, and for a couple of hours the steamer hove to, lolling gently, on a gentle sea. It was conducive to sleep, although rendering it certain that their landing in San Francisco must be made late at night. The partners were awakened by the supper gong and on arriving at the table discovered that not only Lucky Cochran, but the two card sharps, were not to be seen. Nor did they appear in the smoke room afterward, and as the hours passed, the partners began to be apprehensive. They made inquiries of the deck steward, and learned that he had served sandwiches and coffee to three gentlemen who were now playing cards in one of the deck cabins, which he pointed out, and the partners promptly retired to the rail in wrath and disgust.

“I’m through!” declared David. “Let ’em trim him for all I care.”

“That goes for me, too,” Goliath snorted.

Lights became visible, and passengers crowded the decks waiting for the first big spread of glowing points that would open out after the ship had rounded the Golden Gate. Luggage had all been packed and stewards were bringing out and heaping up piles of traveling impedimenta. And then what the partners had expected, happened. A very gloomy man came through the crowd, stumbled into contact with them, and said: “Well, what do you think of that! You was right about them two fellers bein’ regular cheaters and crooks!”

“Got you, did they?” David inquired sarcastically. “Well, it’s your own fault. We did all we could to pry you loose from ’em, and it serves you darned well right.”

“Yep. And the fact is if you hadn’t talked so much they’d never have gone after you the way they did,” Goliath added. “Did they get all that twenty thousand dollars you was blowin’ about?”

“Not all of it,” said Cochran dolefully. “I got enough to get back home on, anyhow. My luck didn’t altogether leave me, but--”

“The only thing for you to do is to go and get a cop the minute the boat lands, and nail ’em!” David declared.

“I reckon maybe they’d fork over, if you did that,” Goliath seconded.

“Think so?” said Cochran hopefully. “But--how in tarnation can we keep ’em here till I find a cop?”

“We’ll keep ’em for you, all right,” growled Goliath. “You be the first one off that gangplank when she goes down, and get a hustle on you. And mind this--that if it’d been a square game me and my pardner wouldn’t turn a hand to help you, because--we both hates a squealer. It’s only because you’re such a dam old simpleton that we do anything at all. Maybe this’ll teach you a lesson!”

“It will! It will!” groaned the now “unlucky” Cochran, with great humility. “But--but--how you goin’ to hold ’em aboard this here ship?”

“We’re goin’ to horn into their cabin with a gun and just naturally keep ’em there,” said David as the plan slipped into his agile mind.

“By gosh! That’ll be good!” Cochran gleefully chortled. “Me for the head of that gangplank!”

David and Goliath stationed themselves outside the cabin door of the two sharpers and waited. They seemed to be in no hurry. Indeed, from the few sounds that could be overheard from within, they were indulging in a hot altercation and mutual recriminations.

“They’re fightin’ over the split, I got an idea,” David mumbled to his partner.

“Let ’em fight! Saves us trouble,” said Goliath.

The gangplank fell and the passengers began to pass away, in an orderly procession, before the cabin door opened, and the first of the sharks appeared. Instantly he was confronted by a determined little red-headed man, who said: “Just a minute. I want to talk to you two fellers. We’ll just step inside, if you don’t mind.”

With an oath of surprise the man fell back, and both Goliath and David entered, and closed the door behind them.

“You’ve got to wait here a few minutes. It won’t be long,” David remarked in a voice that forbade any light reply. “You might as well sit down and take it cool--unless you’re lookin’ for trouble.”

The card sharpers looked at each other helplessly, and, quite evidently believing themselves held up by officers of the law for some of their misdeeds.

“We’re in for it, Crump!” one of them growled at the other.

“You sure are, and the less you have to say the better it’ll be for you,” David announced sharply. Whereupon the evil pair settled disconsolately to the edges of the lower berth and stared at their captors.

“Goliath, keep an eye out of the door for the cop and call him this way,” said David, still acting as master of ceremonies.

The two crooks scowled apprehensively, and one of them inquired savagely: “You might at least tell us what it’s all about?”

“You’ll find that out soon enough,” David snapped back at him, after which there was no further conversation, while outside the shuffling of feet began to diminish, the running of porters slowed down to mere walking strides, and the voices of officers could be heard calling to one another. In the doorway Goliath’s broad back began to twist this way and that, and with an impatient “Humph! Wonder if that boob’s got lost?” he disappeared. The wait continued, and sounds indicated that the very last of the passengers had departed not only from the ship, but from the dock. David felt like expressing his impatience with the tardy Mr. Cochran aloud, and himself looked out of the door just as Goliath reappeared with a man in uniform--not a policeman’s garb, but that of the ship’s chief officer.

“The mate says we can’t hold these fellers here all night, but must take ’em out to the police office at the end of the docks,” Goliath announced. “I’ll get our suit cases and you can make ’em tote theirs, and we’ll go.”

“Come on!” David ordered his prisoners, and the chief officer scowled at them as if to identify them for future reference as they descended the gangplank. They made their way to the little building at the end of the wharf, which, to their astonishment, was filled with harbor police. It did seem as if Cochran must have been blind not to find it himself. A plain-clothes man, evidently of authority, looked up and smiled with great satisfaction and lighted eyes, as he said: “Hello! ‘Crump’ Smith and ‘Slippery’ Murdock, eh? Hope you’ve got somethin’ on ’em, this time, that we can put ’em over for. I’ve been tryin’ to get the goods on them for a long time now.”

The disconsolate sharpers scowled like a pair of pirates and sank down on a bench, while the detective called David into an inner office to question him. He listened to David’s story and then shook his head doubtfully.

“Something funny about this,” he said at last. “This man Cochran’s been gone more than an hour. He’s the complaining witness. We can’t hold this pair of sharks without him. Not but that I’d like to, right enough. We can detain ’em for a few hours, but no longer. You two men better go and see if you can find your friend that they skinned out of his wad. If I don’t hear from you before morning and have to turn ’em loose, I’ve got a way of keepin’ track of ’em so that we can pick ’em up again, when you find your man. What hotel you going to stop at?”

He wrote down the address David gave, and ushered him out. The partners caught a nighthawk taxi and went to their hotel first, and then instituted such inquiries as they could for the missing Mr. Cochran--all without success. Alarmed over his disappearance, and fearing that ill had befallen him, they arose, after a few hours’ sleep, prepared to resume their philanthropic quest. They pictured him as having wandered off the dock and having been sandbagged. They feared he might have fallen even into more merciless hands than those of the two callous crooks who had rooked him aboard the steamer. They recalled tales of doping, of shanghaiing, of murders done on the Barbary Coast, and dead men thrown into the bay. They forgot the boredom of his gabbling tongue, his tiresome and unquenchable garrulity, and remembered only that he was a simple and unsophisticated old fellow who had shown a touching and homely liberality to a derelict whom he had accidentally met. As their apprehensions increased, so did their sense of helplessness.

“The only thing left for us to do,” said David wisely, “is to go down to the harbor police and see if they’ve learned anything about what became of him.”

“Good!” said Goliath. “And if they ain’t, don’t you reckon we ought to kind of stir ’em up by offerin’ a reward or somethin’?”

“Sure! We can’t balk at blowin’ in a little money for that poor old cuss. I reckon we’re the only friends he’s got in this whole blamed town to look after him and help him out. But-- By the great horn spoon! He ought to be in an orphan asylum or hire a guardian, I reckon.”

Glum with anxiety they boarded a Market Street car and rode to the ferry. Glum with anxiety they trudged from there to the police office and, glum with anxiety they entered. The same plain-clothes man they had interviewed in the night lowered a paper he had been reading, looked at them, recognized them, and grinned.

“Well,” he inquired pleasantly, “did you find your man Cochran? No? Humph! Guess you didn’t; but I did!”

And then, as if unable to restrain himself, he indulged in a great laugh.

“This,” he declared, again looking up at their amazed faces, “is one of the best jokes that’s blown along the water front for the past year. Sit down and have a smoke. Tell you about it.”

The partners subsided limply into two worn and shiny old chairs and gravely eyed him.

“One time,” he said, as if to give his story a true narrative flavor, “there was two of the slickest crooks and card sharks who ever flimmed a mutt, sailed on a ship. They’d done it before--lots of times, and got away with many a hick’s vacation money. That’s Crump Smith and Slippery Murdock. They pick up a rube calling himself Lucky Cochran. Regular backwoods goat. Moss on his back an inch thick. Hay in his whiskers. Birds’ nests in his hair. Nice old man that talks all about himself every time he can get any one to listen long enough. Funny old cuss with a sense of humor. Some of the time he’s been in Texas. Some of the time, mind you. For--say--the last five or six years.

“This pair of slick guys set out to do him until a busted and dried bladder would look bigger than a circus tent in comparison with what he’ll be like when they get through with him. Now, what I guess is that this fine old gentleman thought that he’d found a couple of miners who were worth lookin’ after and so hung on to them; but when they didn’t prove worth his while, he grins to himself and says, ‘I’ll devote a few idle hours to this pair of smart Alecks that are cruising the seas of adventure, because it’s a rule of mine to make somebody else pay my traveling expenses.’”

He stopped, grinned again, threw his paper to one side, and, lowering one leg that had been crossed over the other, leaned toward them.

“Settling down to business, and all fooling aside,” he said with an abrupt change to seriousness, “the man you knew as Lucky Cochran, the rancher, is nobody but ‘Peerless’ Carfield, the sharpest, cleverest, coolest, shrewdest man who ever skinned a sucker and then sympathized with him over his loss. He’d gamble with a rabbit for its winter’s nest. The only thing that’s to his credit is that he’d most likely hand it back after he’d won it. He’d win a squatter’s farm, and then, if he wasn’t short himself, hand it back to the squat, and tell him how to clear the title.

“Nobody can put anything across with him. He’s had ’em all, from New York to New South Wales, and from London to Lima. Crump Smith and Slippery Murdock were a pair of infants in his mitts. He won everything they had, from their bank roll down to their shoe buttons, and then, just as a joke, left ’em hung up with you two standin’ guard over ’em when he got off the boat and grabbed a taxicab for the most expensive hotel in this town, and rode away.

“Sorry for him, were you? Well, you needn’t be sorry any more. He’s most likely forgotten all about you two by now, and is living up at the most swell hotel in this town, in a suite of rooms for which he pays about fifty bucks a day; same rooms that a Russian prince had a year or two ago. If you’ve got sympathy to waste you’d better hang some of it on to Crump Smith and Slippery Murdock; because if skins were overcoats and this was nothing but mid-summer, they’d shiver in the wind.”

The partners, in a daze, got up and walked outside. The docks were busy. Masts showed here and there against the sky line. Teamsters drove straining horses hauling highly piled wagons into the caverns, and the rumble of hoofs and wheels echoed like a song of export in the morning air. The screech of a hundred steam winches told of cargoes being lowered into holds. Off toward the ferry nave the clanging of street cars joined ragged symphony. The giant looked away toward the north, as if scenting forests and mountains and cabins, and then said, “Humph! So that’s that! We’re always buttin’ into somethin’ that ain’t worth while. And--we thought he was the man that talked too much, and didn’t sabe how to take care of himself.”

“It’s me and you that ought to have a nurse leadin’ us by the ears,” David replied, then paused, seemed to quest for some excuse, and then scowled upward at his stalwart and time-tried partner, and said admonishingly: “Goliath, you’re all right; but--but--it’s you that talks too damn much!”

And Goliath, whose habitual conversation consisted of a mere “yes” or “no” cogitated with the utmost seriousness, pondered as if reviewing all the words he had ever uttered, remembering them all, and uttered a long speech. He blinked, wet his lips with his tongue, hesitated, and then very gravely said, “Yep!”

THE END

[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the November 7, 1920 issue of Adventure magazine.]