  As for Johnny and Mazie, they had visited the park many times before. The amusements were an old story, but the crowd was not. No crowd is ever tiresome to a person who has a keen mind and a true interest in the study of his fellowman. For these two it was enough to watch the actions of these people—of this crowd in their disguises. Many of them were dressed in ridiculous costumes and nearly all were masked. Thus, with their true natures for the time apparently hidden by a mask, each person gave himself over to the seeking of pleasure in the way most natural to him. Many were truly merry; some merely sordid, and a few were brutal in their manner of extracting pleasure from those about them. As they drifted in and out among the throngs, Johnny and Mazie were finally caught in a narrow place and forced along against their will. When, at last, the throng broadened and separated, they found themselves before another table of chance. This time, instead of the spindle wheel there was a board. In the lower end of this board, which was perhaps two feet wide by four long, there were eight holes. Beside each of these holes were numbers. At the top of the board were four balls. The balls rested upon a narrow board. To play, one has but to tip the narrow board and allow the balls to roll to the bottom, where they settle themselves in holes. One then adds up the numbers before the balls and consults a table of numbers before him. This table is composed of red and black numbers. If the sum reached by adding up chances to correspond to a red number, the player wins a watch, a camera, a silver cream pitcher or any other article he may choose. “Looks easy enough,” smiled Johnny as he watched the operator roll the balls. “Too easy. There’s a trick somewhere.” Now Johnny got a lot of fun out of discovering tricks. “Mind if we watch him a little while?” he asked. “Not a bit,” answered Mazie, putting a hand on his shoulder as the crowd pressed about them. The man in the booth, a tall, broad shouldered man, gave them a quick look. Johnny blinked under that look. “But after all,” he told himself, “we’re masked. If he has seen us before he’ll not recognize us now.” He looked at the man and started. There was something vaguely familiar about him. Yet he, too, was heavily masked. There was little chance of telling who he might be. For fifteen minutes Johnny studied the game. Men played, women played and boys as well. There were plenty of red numbers; but only once in all that time, while the operator hauled in the money, did red turn up. Yet, when for a moment the business lulled, the man behind the table could make red come up easily enough. “It’s strange,” said Johnny, scratching his head. “It seems so absurdly simple. One would say it couldn’t be doctored at all, and yet it is. Ah well, what’s the use? Let’s go on.” He was turning to go when a long arm reached out from behind the board and touched his shoulder. It was the operator. There was greed shining from the small black eyes that peeped evilly through the holes in the mask. “See, mister,” the man was saying, “I give you a roll. It don’t cost you noding. I don’t gives you noding. See! It is free.” “No, I don’t want a roll,” said Johnny, starting away again. “Dot’s fair enough, mister,” replied the man. This last remark went through the boy like an electric shock. Those words, that accent, the whole thing—where had he heard it before? Strive as he might, rake down the walls of his memory as he did, he could not recall. And yet something within told him that he should recall, that here was a key to something important; something tremendously big. “No,” he whispered to himself, “I can’t recall it now, but I can stick around. It may come to me all of a flash.” “All right,” he thought to himself, “if I have to, I’ll play.” Fortune favored him. He was not obliged to play, but could watch. “Set ’em up!” said a stranger, producing a shiny quarter. “Count ’em,” he said a moment later as the last ball dropped into its hole. “Four, nine, sexteen, zwenty-zree. Dot’s black. Try again. Anoder times you are lucky.” The man did try again, again and yet again, and always he lost. And then, like a flash, the trick of the game came to Johnny. If the balls were carefully placed in certain definite positions on the narrow board, they would always escape falling into holes marked 7 and 11. These numbers were needed if the result was to be a red number. As if by accident, he brushed the board with his elbow. This moved a ball slightly to the right. The result was another black number. But by a sudden movement the operator showed that he was startled. The stranger fed in two more quarters before Johnny tried the trick again. This time the operator looked at him and uttered an audible snarl before he began to count. He knew he was beaten. “Three, nine, fifteen, zwenty-zoo. Dot’s red,” he muttered. And at the sound of that low mutter Johnny remembered. So struck was he at this revelation, that he could barely repress an audible exclamation. The stranger chose a small pocket camera, and the game went on. From this time on the question of whether the stranger won or lost did not count. Johnny was trying to think; to plan a course of action. He knew now where he had heard that man’s voice before—at the fire in which Mazie barely missed losing her life. As he looked at the man he knew he could not be mistaken. The hooked nose was covered by the mask, but the stoop was there and the voice was the same. If he needed further proof it was not long in coming. As the man stepped back to take down the small camera, Johnny noticed that he walked with a decided limp. “He’s the man,” Johnny thought to himself. “He’s the man who burned the school houses, the welfare center and the zoo, who attempted to kill me, and did kill poor old Ben Zook!” As he thought of Ben Zook he found it difficult to hold himself in hand. He wanted to leap across the board and throttle the man where he stood. “No! No!” he told himself. “I must not. I must be calm. I must remain here. I must watch the play until I have thought what next to do. One thing sure, I must not bungle my chances now. Too much hinges on doing the right thing.” |
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