The man who talked too much
Date: 2023-08-11T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Short stories; Voyages and travels -- Fiction

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Title: The man who talked too much

Author: Roy Norton

Release date: August 11, 2023 [eBook #71388]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Street & Smith Corporation, 1920

Credits: Roger Frank and Sue Clark (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAN WHO TALKED TOO MUCH ***

The Man Who Talked Too Much

By Roy Norton

Author of “David and Goliath,” “Merely Business,” Etc.

“Lucky” Cochran they called him. Also he was eloquent—very. Too much so, felt David and Goliath. However, they came to think that he was not the only one that way.

The Westbound Overland on the Santa Fe Railway, although doing its splendid fifty miles an hour, seemed to two of its passengers to be moving at a snail’s pace; for the journey ahead of them was long, and their destination, which was far northward from San Francisco, the only spot on earth worth reaching. To increase boredom they had for so long been partners and fellow adventurers that all ordinary topics of conversation between them had long been exhausted, and the barren scenery through which they passed was too familiar to be worthy of interest.

Furthermore, they had, but a few days previously, escaped from a certain district in Mexico where for a brief time they had gambled their lives, and were still too glad of escape to indulge in foolish conversation. The veriest fool could not have mistaken them for other than what they were; miners, prospectors, men of still places where life is crude and hard. There was nothing to distinguish them or attract a second glance, other than their incongruity of size; for one was a magnificent giant, and the other a blocky, stocky runt, with shoulders much too large for his stature and a flaming red head that seemed to have defied even the bleaching of the sun. That these two were known to frontiersmen and men of their ilk, over many thousands of miles, as “David and Goliath,” meant nothing to them, nor to any of their fellow passengers; but that they had casually reversed a seat in the smoking car and thus sprawled over two seats instead of one did, as a magnet, attract the attention of a man who wandered inward with a very large and very new alligator-skin suit case that he dropped in the aisle beside them.

“You boys mind if I sit in this seat?” he demanded, and, although they very much did, they promptly lowered their feet to the floor, doubled their tired legs back into cramped postures, and told him to “set in.”

“Goin’ far?” he asked, before his weight had settled.

“Clean through to Los Angeles, then to San Francisco,” David, the smaller man, replied after a moment’s pause.

“I’m bound for Frisco myself,” the man said, and then as if considering an introduction necessary, added, “I’m Cochran. ‘Lucky’ Cochran, as they call me.”

The partners did not appear impressed, or act as if they deemed it incumbent on them to either register surprise, curiosity, or tell him their own names.

“Reckon you’ve heard of me—Lucky Cochran?” the newcomer asked with a grin that was entirely self-complacent.

The partners studied him for a moment and then the smaller man said, not without a suggestion of disapproval, “Nope. Can’t say I ever did. Why?”

“Never heard tell of me? Lucky Cochran? I’m the man that owned the ranch at Placides, where they struck oil. I’m the boy they paid twenty thousand to last week and— By gosh!—if things go right, I’ll get a million more.”

Goliath yawned openly, stretched his long legs out into the aisle, and David unblinkingly gazed at him as if taking stock of all his new clothing, his diamond stud screwed into a flannel shirt, the diamond ring on his heavy, thick-knuckled hands, and thence downward to his big feet that were incased in patent-leather shoes of a design affected by “sporting gents” of the previous decade.

“Humph! He looks it, don’t he?” David said, turning toward his partner. As if his attention had just been casually called to something outside, Goliath, in turn, appraised Mr. Cochran and then rumbled, “He sure does!”

Entirely unabashed by their comments, Mr. Cochran seemed, on the contrary, to be highly pleased.

“That’s me!” he remarked. “Lucky Cochran! That’s me, boys.” And then, as if stimulated to speech, he began talking. He told them the history of his new wealth, of his lean years, of where he had originated. He even told them stories. His tongue wagged as if on a pivot, pendulous, and the fact that neither of them evidenced the slightest interest, or interpolated any remarks, did not in the least curb his loquacity.

The partners moved into the emigrant sleeping car, where they breathed deeply, thanking Heaven that they had lost Mr. Lucky Cochran. Two hours later Mr. Cochran also moved in and greeted them like long-lost brothers. The partners fled to the smoking compartment, and Cochran pursued them. The tiny cabin was filled with men and smoke, and to their relief Cochran began telling his story to those therein assembled, and the partners fled to the smoking car at the front end of the train. They sat quietly, glad of the fact that no conversation was hurled at them; for they were wonderfully skilled as listeners, although short in words. One man was telling another of how much cheaper it was to travel to San Francisco from San Diego by steamer than by rail, and how much more comfortable if one had time to spare. The partners listened and weighed his words.

“Goliath, what’s the matter with our takin’ the boat up?” David asked, after the man and his companion had gone.

“Just the thing, provided we can lose that lucky guy,” said Goliath with a grin.

“Right! Anything to lose him,” David agreed, and they considered their information fortunate when Mr. Cochran found them again and opened up his verbal batteries with, “By gosh! Been lookin’ for you boys. It’s mighty lucky we’re to keep company all the way to Frisco. Where do we stop in Los Angeles?”

“We don’t stop,” said David sourly. “We’ve got business down in San Diego.”

“San Dieger, eh? Come to think of it, I ain’t never been to San Dieger. Tell you what I’ll do, I’ll go along with you!” he added benignantly, as if doing them a great favor.

It was on the tip of Goliath’s tongue to say, “Not by a dam sight, you won’t,” but David broke in hurriedly with, “Come to think of it we ain’t so sure. Maybe we won’t go that way. We’re thinkin’ it over.”

By skillful dodging they succeeded in losing Cochran, when they arrived at Los Angeles, and went to an obscure hotel, where they intended to stop overnight and break their journey; for railways to men of their stamp were like temporary prisons. Unfortunately, after dining, they sat in the rotunda which was ablaze with lights. In from the street rushed Mr. Cochran with great jubilation.

“Mighty nice I found you!” he roared. “Been lookin’ everywhere for you. A fool nigger grabbed my suit case there at the deepot, and while I was chasin’ him I lost you. Reckon you were worried about me, too, wa’n’t you?”

“We were! We were!” David declared, most fervently and truthfully.

Cochran bolted from them to the desk, held a conversation with the clerk, produced a wad of bills as big as a Mohave maiden’s leg, and then rushed back to them and seized a vacant chair.

“It’s all right! Got her fixed up now. Sent over to the Willard House for my things and got a room here. By gosh! It’s a lonesome thing to be travelin’ alone. I’m tickled as stiff as a burro’s ears just to be with you two fellers, because it seems as if we was real old friends. But it’s all right now, don’t you worry none!”

“We wasn’t; but we are!” growled Goliath, but Cochran took not the slightest notice. He wanted to take them to a show. Failing in that, he wanted to buy drinks. Failing in that, he bought three cigars at a dollar each. They could find no complaint regarding his liberality. He would have gladly paid their traveling expenses to continue in their company.

And then, when they were ripe to murder him, he did something that at least gained their tolerance. A terribly bent and crippled old man came timorously into the rotunda with a tray of collar buttons and shoe laces. The clerk spotted the vender, called harshly, and a burly porter rushed forward to eject such an objectionable intruder. Cochran rose to the occasion.

“You git to hell out of this!” he roared, planting himself between the porter and the derelict, and poking a hard, huge fist under the bouncer’s nose. “This old feller’s a friend of mine. You let him alone. Come over here and sit down, old hoss. Here—take my cheer!”

Much to the partners’ interest in the proceedings, Lucky Cochran seated the old man and said to him reassuringly, “Never mind, old feller. It’s me that’s lookin’ after you. Me—Lucky Cochran. What I say goes, back in Texas, where I’m known. I know tough luck when I see it. Had a heap of it myself. What’s ailin’ your legs and back? Rheumatiz? U-m-m-mh! I know what that is, too. Had it myself.”

The partners watched Cochran with a dawning respect and—as usual—listened. Cochran certainly had sympathy for one who was in what he called “tough luck.” He asked personal questions that made the partners wince, and then smoothed the wincing with his kindly drawl. They were gradually getting bored when Cochran suddenly said: “See here, uncle, I was goin’ off on a bust. I got money, I have; but I reckon I couldn’t blow in all I got comin’ to me, if I took twenty years for the job. And I reckon I can cut out a few things I was goin’ to do, anyhow. You said just now that if you had a thousand you could buy a cigar shop you know of, where you wouldn’t have to worry no more.”

He dug out that huge roll of bills again, wet his heavy thumb on the tip of his tongue, and proceeded to laboriously count off some bills. He went over them twice, while the partners, aghast, watched him. He thrust the bills into the old man’s half-reluctant hands.

“Now,” he said, “you hustle out and buy that cigar place. I hate to see a busted up old feller like you peddlin’ things in hotels and saloons. Always makes me think of what might have happened to me. Come on. I’ll walk out to the door with you so’s no one can bother you.”

And he did escort the derelict to the exit and for a few minutes disappeared with him. The partners stared at each other, as if doubting their senses.

“Well—well—what do you think of that!” exclaimed Goliath.

“Think of it? Can’t quite say—yet! But it looks to me as if there was some good streaks in this piece of bad bacon after all,” David said, and then added, “The big boob!”

It may have been the somewhat kindly feeling engendered by Cochran’s liberality that caused the partners, after much consultation, to leave a note to be delivered to him after their departure on the following morning. It read:

Impossible for us to wait to say good-by and good luck to you. Found we have to hustle to catch the train. Better not take the trouble to wait for us to come back, but go on to San Francisco. May your good luck continue.

David was very proud of his note.

“She don’t tell lies, nor nothin’, and don’t give nothin’ away,” he remarked, as he sealed it into a hotel envelope, carried it down to the desk, after carefully reconnoitering to make sure that Cochran, the loquacious, was not in the lobby, paid their bills, and gleefully joined Goliath who appeared with their suit cases.

In San Diego they had to wait twenty-four hours for the northbound steamer, during which time they lived in some slight apprehension lest Cochran appear; but once they had climbed the gangplank and been shown to their cabin, they felt secure and jubilant. They went back on the deck to see the steamer cast off, interested, as landsmen usually are, in anything so novel. The “all off” had been given, the last of the stewards had come aboard, and the order had been given to clear the gangway, when there was a whirl of excitement in the outskirts on the dock, and there appeared, breathless, but loudly yelling an appeal to hold fast until he could get aboard, a belated passenger.

“Good Lord! It’s him all right!” groaned David.

“His luck holds good; but—hang it all!—ours is out!” Goliath growled, as Cochran climbed aboard, discovered them, and, dropping his big alligator suit case to which he had clung, rushed upon them.

“Ain’t I the lucky one, eh? Lucky Cochran! That’s me. You spoke in your letter about troublin’ to wait for you; but, pshaw! It wasn’t any trouble to me, although it was right thoughtful and kind of you fellers to say so. Nothin’ ever troubles me. So I just found out from the boss porter at the hotel how you’d been makin’ inquiries about trains to San Dieger, and about the boat, and says I, ‘I’ll just pop down and join ’em, and won’t they be surprised to see that I’m goin’ to keep ’em company.’”

“We’re surprised, all right!” David remarked, but Cochran did not observe that he had omitted any reference to the happiness his arrival had caused.

Their sole remaining chance for peace now rested upon wind, wave, and weather. They hoped, earnestly, that Mr. Cochran would be as sick as the whale that swallowed Jonah; but Cochran’s luck held, and if the ship had turned somersaults, he would have merely laughed. For an hour they watched him solicitously before they gave way to despair. He talked as joyously as ever, roaring with laughter at his own jokes, and bubbling over with human kindness in sufficient quantities to deter them from murdering him. If he could have but kept his mouth shut, the partners would have rather liked him. And then Goliath suddenly gave a groan, clutched himself around the abdomen and said, “I got to get below. I feel awful, I do!” And away he went.

“Pore feller! I’m awful sorry for him. Anybody sick or ailin’ always gits my goat,” said Cochran sympathetically. “I couldn’t kill a rattlesnake, if it was hurted. One time I had a burro that busted its foreleg right above the pastern joint, and I couldn’t shoot it. Didn’t have the heart! And every time I tried to nuss it the damn thing bit me.”

David failed to draw the sympathetic connection between rattlers, mules, and his partner. Indeed, at the moment, he was solicitous for Goliath, and after a time went to investigate, and try to help, having much difficulty in dissuading Cochran from accompanying him. He found the giant on his back in the lower berth, calmly reading a dime novel.

“Thought you was seasick?” David blurted through the half-opened door.

“Seasick? Hell! I was talk sick!”

“Good! Never thought of that. I reckon I’m seasick, too. But what are we goin’ to do? Stay shut up here all the way to Frisco?”

“Either that, or chuck the perpetual-motion talkin’ machine overboard,” growled Goliath.

“Got another one of them dime novels? Gimme it. I’m sick, too,” David said as he climbed into the upper berth.

At intervals for the first few hours Cochran called on them, bringing various remedies that he had solicited from their fellow passengers; but when dusk came the partners ventured out, trusting to the darkness to escape the attention of their well-wisher. As time went on they gained courage, and began to enjoy their freedom. They even dared to saunter along the decks. From the smoke room, which was forward under the bridge, came inviting sounds of conversation, merriment, and human society. They paused and looked enviously through the open window and breathed more freely, for they discerned Cochran absorbed in a game of poker, but still talking steadily.

“That’s me. Lucky Cochran!” they heard him explode, as he raked in a pot.

“Good old sport! Hope he plays poker from now until this boat ties up at the dock,” David remarked. “That’ll keep him busy, and make it a lot nicer for us.”

Their hopes seemed justified when, after the deck lights were turned out they retired to their cabin, for Cochran was still playing and still winning—and still garrulous. It was a late session, they learned on the following morning. They were leaning up against a deck cabin, staring at the sea and, as usual, saying nothing because there was nothing to talk about, when through the open window near them they heard a yawn, as some late sleeper turned in his berth, and then an answering yawn.

“Gad! I dreamed that sucker Cochran was talking to me in my sleep. Bad enough to have to sit up until three o’clock and listen to him. We certainly do have to work hard to earn our money. What?”

The other voice yawned and said, “Yep; but what we want to watch out for most is the howl he’ll make when we collar his bank roll. Rubes like him always yelp the loudest.”

“He’s got no friends aboard, I reckon; and he’s too much of a mutt to make a gun play, and, besides, we don’t want to pull it off, if we can help it, until just about the time the boat is ready to land. He can yell all he wants to then, and we can stand it.”

“‘’Tis music to the gambler’s ears to hear the loser squeal,’” the other voice quoted the old proverb.

David looked across at Goliath, gestured for silence, and slipped cautiously away. Goliath, with equal care, followed him until they were well aft, but from where they could keep an observant eye on the door of the cabin occupied by the complacent “Sure-thing men.”

“So that’s the way of it, eh?” Goliath rumbled.

“Looks like it.”

“Reckon we ought to wise him up. I’d not do that, if it wasn’t for—ummh!—the way he acted there in the hotel and—it’s better for him to give his money away where it’ll do some good, than pass it over to a couple of sharks.”

After a time, the door they had under observation opened, and two men sauntered out who were neither over nor underdressed, but had the appearance of being nothing more than possibly a pair of small-town merchants. The partners marked them well for future identification and patiently waited for Lucky Cochran to appear. He came after a further interval, and David, with characteristic bluntness, opened up on him.

“You played poker until three o’clock this mornin’ with some strangers,” he said, staring at the prosperous one. “And me and my pardner have found out that they’re nothin’ but a pair of sharps out to do you.”

“Out to do me? Out to do Lucky Cochran? It’s a joke! Why, boys, I won fifteen hundred dollars last night. Nobody can beat me. I’m Cochran. Lucky Cochran!”

And his “Haw, haw, haw!” was so loud it startled even the deck steward, who barely missed dropping a cup of hot coffee he was carrying to an invalid, and prompted an A. B. on the boat deck to peer over, to learn whether there was a menagerie aboard.

“Oh, you’re lucky, are you?” David answered with a badly concealed sneer. “And you’ve won at the first sitting, have you? Well, see here, Cochran, I’m goin’ to tell you something. The boob always wins at first—until the stakes get high. After that his luck changes. If we’re either locoed, or talkin’ through our hats, I’ll tell you what we overheard this mornin’.” And then, in confidential tones, he repeated all the conversation that had come through the cabin window shutters, and ended with, “If you’ll take a little pasear with me I’ll point the two crooks out to you, so that you can steer clear of another game with them, and quit fifteen hundred to the good.”

“Psho!” said Lucky Cochran. “You don’t mean it! Come on and show ’em to me.”

The three men promenaded the deck, casually looked into the smoke room, and finally discovered their quarry in the bows holding earnest conversation.

“There they are,” David said, pointing at them.

“That’s them, all right,” Cochran agreed. “And right nice sociable fellers they are, too. Don’t see how it kin be that two such nice fellers as them could be out to skin a good old feller like me. Think I’ll go over and tell ’em what I think of ’em, right now.”

“Suit yourself,” said David. “We’ll come along and see you through.”

Cochran moved as if to carry out an intention, then stopped, looked at the partners and wagged his head slowly and solemnly.

“Nope,” he said, then paused and grinned. “I reckon I’ve got the best of it as it is—got their fifteen hundred, so I’ll just hang on to it and leave ’em alone, and stick around with you two fellers. I was mighty lonesome yisttiday without you two and— By heck! I’m glad you ain’t seasick any more. Reminds me of a story about a feller that—”

And the partners glanced at each other, as if admitting a great mistake; for the garrulous one was on again, had promised to stay with them indefinitely, closely, intimately, and—talk their heads off! He clung to them like a loving leach, or as a bride of seventy adheres to a bridegroom of twenty, or as does the unbreakable limpet to its gray rock. His sole virtue was that he never repeated himself. Their sole hope was that some time he would run down, get hoarse, or have paralysis of the tongue. He tried indirectly to learn all about them, where they had been, their business, whither bound, and what luck they had endured or profited by; but the partners, bored, surfeited with words, and casting about for means of escape, maintained their customary reticence.

David was the first to escape and most callously deserted his partner; but Goliath, being less diplomatic, eventually invented an excuse and ran, rather than walked, to a distant part of the ship. The partners met in their cabin and took turns in imprecating the kindliness that had inspired their well-meant interference.

“I don’t give a cuss what happens to him now. He’s been warned, and if he loses his wad it’s not our fault,” David asserted.

“Neither do I care what happens to him,” Goliath growled. “I ain’t no hero, nor Christian martyr, nor nothin’ like that. All I want is to have him keep away from me. I’m goin’ to read from now on, right here in this cabin. I’m afraid to go out on the deck.”

“So’m I!” David asserted; but their resolution broke, after some hours, and the craving for open space, habitual with such men of outdoors, overcame their fears of Cochran, and they slipped away to the decks again. Almost surreptitiously they looked through a window of the smoke room and then frowned. Cochran was sitting at the same table with the same pair of gamblers, playing with what was probably the same deck of cards and talking Just as steadily as ever before. Even as the partners looked they caught signs of undoubted signals between the two card sharps, saw a bet brought to a finale, and by the interchange of money discerned that Lucky Cochran’s luck seemed to be out, and that he was passing over considerable sums of his accidental wealth. Save for these three earnest players, the smoke room was deserted.

“Think we ought to go in and bust up that combination?” Goliath asked.

“Humph! That old boob would think we were hornin’ into his business. The pair of cutthroats he’s playin’ with would yell to the skipper of the ship for help, and—no!—all we can do is to get him outside and tell him he’s bein’ trimmed by good sign work.”

David sauntered in through the door and said, with an attempt at suavity: “Cochran, I’d like to talk to you a minute outside. It’s somethin’ right urgent. Sorry to disturb your game, but—”

“Sure, pardner, sure!” said Cochran, lumbering to his feet and sweeping his money into his pockets. “See you fellers later,” he said to the two gamblers who glared at David, exchanged glances of inquiry, and then resignedly began pocketing their own money. But David and Goliath gained nothing by their warning. Cochran merely grinned and then chuckled, and finally laughed.

“You boys just let me alone,” he said. “Me lose? Lucky Cochran? Not by the mill by the damsite. Why—say!—I’m still winner by nigh onto four hundred dollars. Can’t beat that, kin you?”

They exhorted him for his own protection to stop and call his four hundred an ample winning. He appeared to ponder it, and then blurted: “But what’s a feller to do when he’s out on the fust vacation he’s had for more’n forty year, if he can’t play a few keerds—huh? Here! Tell you what me’ll and you’ll do! We’ll go in and play penny ante and cut them fellers out. What say?”

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 The Popular Magazine.

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Table of Contents

- The Man Who Talked Too Much

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE