Page:The Gentle Grafter (1908).djvu/185

 and the little Phine Phun oroide gold finger ring that sticks a needle in your friend’s hand.

You’d think New York people was all wise; but no. They don’t get a chance to learn. Everything’s too compressed. Even the hayseeds are baled hayseeds. But what else can you expect from a town that’s shut off from the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other?

It’s no place for an honest grafter with a small capital. There’s too big a protective tariff on bunco. Even when Giovanni sells a quart of warm worms and chestnut hulls he has to hand out a pint to an insectivorous cop. And the hotel man charges double for everything in the bill that he sends by the patrol wagon to the altar where the duke is about to marry the heiress.

But old Badville-near-Coney is the ideal burg for a refined piece of piracy if you can pay the bunco duty. Imported grafts come pretty high. The customhouse officers that look after it carry clubs, and it’s hard to smuggle in even a bib-and-tucker swindle to work Brooklyn with unless you can pay the toll. But now, me and Buck, having capital, descends upon New York to try and trade the metropolitan backwoodsmen a few glass beads for real estate just as the Vans did a hundred or two years ago. 173