The Old Colts Read Online Free Page B

round the table as though that explained everything.
    Hype Igoe strummed a discordant chord on his ukulele. “Oh my God,” he groaned, “here we go again.”
    Bat took up the slack. “And the reason they can earn a lot of money poling hogs is because of the nature of the mud in Arkansas. It balls up easy, and hardens up like a brick.”
    “The mud! What in hell does mud have to do with—” Damon Runyon checked himself and glared through his glasses.
    “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Cobb reproved in his grits-and-hominy drawl. “It is no use asking questions or exercising ourselves. Let us allow Mr. Masterson to proceed in his own obfuscatory way—I am sure he will edify us to our satisfaction.”
    Bat nodded a bow. “That’s right. Hold your horses, gents, and I’ll uncomplicate things. Now here’s this kid, eighteen or so, tall, still on mother’s milk and still growing. He hires himself out to a neighbor and gets a big basket and fills it full of little shoats.”
    “Shoats?” This was Wilson Mizner, himself a raconteur but at the same time an urban type who would not have known one end of a pitchfork from the other.
    “Little pigs.” Bat was patient. “Then he puts the basket on his head and walks around under the acorn trees and the shoats reach up and, say, don’t they gobble those acorns. And of course, the taller he is the more acorns they can reach and the more acorns they eat the faster they fatten and the more neighbors hire ‘im and the more money he makes. And that’s called ‘poling hogs.”
    The seven looked at each other. Then they looked at Bat, whose face was poker. George M. sat down slowly. “But what keeps the shoats in the basket? Why don’t they jump out?”
    Bat rose, frowning at the ignorance the question implied. “Because after he puts ‘em in the basket, he pulls the tail of each and every one through a hole in the basket and puts a dob of mud around the end of it.”
    They gaped at him.
    “The mud,” said Runyon.
    “In northwest Arkansas,” said Cobb.
    “Balls up easy,” said Walker.
    “Hard as a brick,” said Mizner.
    “Goodnight, gents,” said Bat, and strolled away humming “Hello, Hawaii, How Are You?”
    He stopped to tell Harry, the headwaiter, to put breakfast for everybody on his bill, but Harry shook his head.
    “Sorry, Bat.”
    “Sorry?”
    “Jack says no more.”
    “You don’t mean it.”
    “You’re up to three hundred.”
    “Chickenfeed.”
    “That’s the limit. He says he’s a sap if he takes any more of your tickets.”
    He was marching home under the rattling trestles of the Sixth Avenue elevated and madder than a wet hen when the back of his neck told him to stop, to turn. He stopped, turned. He waited until a Pierce-Arrow passed. There he was, the tall grim outlander in the slouch hat again, lugging the valise and following him on the opposite side of the street and also stopping. They stared. This time Bat had a strange sensation. It was as though they were locked in a silent struggle for recognition. It was as though each knew the other, or had known the other, but could not make the remotest connection between the man he had known, whether friend or enemy, and the man he now perceived. And after a minute Bat gave up the effort, tipped his hat to the stranger who was not, somehow, a stranger, and went on his solitary way.
    His humble abode is a three-room apartment on the second floor of a brick-backed, brownstone-fronted row house numbered 300 on West 49th Street. Designed in the Italianate style of the 1850’s, these buildings, block upon block, were once fashionable one-family residences which typified midtown Manhattan from 14th Street north to Central Park; but now, gone to seed, they have been converted to rooming or apartment houses. They are a sore to the eye and a monotony to the mind. Signs sell music lessons from windows. A bottle of milk sours on a windowsill. Garbage cans lack lids. Cats vs. rats.
    Bat begins to mount the