CHAPTER XXVII

Major Mite

By now, Golden-Tongue had reached a gorgeous purple trailer with horizontal orange stripes so vivid he had to blink his eyes, and through a half-open window in it he called loudly:

“Hi, Animalcule—you in there?”

“Come in—come in,” called a piping, high-pitched threadlike voice.

Golden-Tongue opened the door and stepped up in. This was a trailer in which bunks hung from all sides; and even midway, today, stood a couple of canvas cots with blankets awry. The trailer, in fact, for the tent crew. But one individual was in it just now; obviously one who conveniently utilized a bunk which the tent crew failed to utilize; he was a little creature whose round, childlike, hairless face belied his known age of thirty-five, and who sat right now, in tiny green bathrobe carelessly shrouding his small form clad in special-made b.v.d.’s, and slippered feet, on the edge of an extremely low bunk, under the light from the very window through which Golden-Tongue had called. Thirty-one inches high he was, when standing, and when sitting, as now, the “Major” did not reach even one-third of the way to the next bunk above. In front of him, on a canvas suitcase laid over the bunk, was a small hand printing-press, now open—and a little spirit lamp, over whose flame he was carefully passing a sheet of paper.

He could be estimated to be about twenty-two pounds in weight, could Zagorus Khaskovics, born in Bulgaria, and reared in a Pennsylvania coal-mining town, and his close-set little black eyes and black hair matched his face, though his wide flopping ears seemed to suggest some alien strain to the Slavic.

“Do a good job on it?” demanded Golden-Tongue immediately, “For if you smooshed it, I’ve no more—”

“Perfect,” came the midget’s high-pitched voice, minus the slightest trace of European accent—with, rather, a faint flavour of Bowery in it. “But who wouldn’t, who was a member of the physiological tribe which included Philetus of Cos of the reign of Phillip of Macedonia, and Sir Geoffrey Hudson, court jester of King Charles I of England, and Alypsis of Alexandria, and—”

“—and who was so small when he was born,” recited Golden-Tongue, “that he had to use a midget goat for a wet-nurse.”

“Damn it!” raged the midget. “That story is true, I tell you! It—”

Golden-Tongue calmed him, with a wave of his hand.

“All right, all right. It sure goes with the crowds, though. Sells ’em on—well, hows-about it? I typed my stuff in mighty neatly—but now what have you done—for your part?”

“Aw, setting up the hotel head, and making the imprint at the top was a push-over,” said Major Mite. “All I wonder is how in hell did you ever get a sheet of paper with his signature at the bottom?”

Golden-Tongue sighed.

“He signed it once so’s I could take in a registered surveying-book—and fill out the receipt the postman would direct—only it came in without registration—and I told him later I tore the blank up. What’s the difference, anyway? It—”

“Here ’tis,” the Major ended the argument.

And while Golden-Tongue, reaching out and seizing it, and dropping down on a bunk edgewise, proceeded to read it, the Major blew out his spirit lamp flame, removed lamp and press from the suitcase, raised the cover and placed both articles inside. Bringing cover closed again on them.

Golden-Tongue read with great satisfaction the now hundred per cent, contrived “letter”. Which, with its typewriting and its printed head ran:

THE HOTEL WOODWARD

Detroit Michigan

June the 11th

“Dear Major,

“Just a line to wish you congratulations on your birthday which, I believe, comes this week. Or am I misinformed? If not, many happy returns.

“Major, would you do something for me? Here ’tis. Would you—but providing only that my sister Erlys seems to be in good condition and all—no flu or sickness—no convalescing from anything like that—no nerves from having failed to sleep over some hard trek—if, in short, she seems to be in the pink—well will you tell her then—show her this, in fact—that I reached that certain town okay—a couple of hours it was after writing to Mac that I’d connect back with the route at Pricetown, some hours after the pullout there, and would—well tell her that I found the birth-certificate in question, but that, alas, the footprint on it doesn’t tally. Therefore, tell her, my hypothesis was all wet. And I have now what I had before: one very nice sister.

“Tell her, also, if you think she can take a sort of a jolt, that I married a waitress tonight here in the hotel—a case of love at first sight—and that I send Erlys my very best for her and Golden-Tongue, and will see them in Chicago, later in the season.

“Thanks a lot, Major,

“Yours,

“Pell Barneyfield.”

Golden-Tongue looked up.

“Perfect, Mite! Perfect! You see she does know, from Mac, that he was in Detroit night before last—and is to join up, back at Pricetown. And to—”

“One question,” said Major Mite, businesslike. “If he was to join up at Pricetown, and fetch through the popgun—”

“He’s not,” said Golden-Tongue. “He has an engagement—in the Valley.”

“Oh—I see,” said the Bulgarian-born midget. “You’re aiming to delay him a bit, eh? And have somebody else—bring the gun on through? Well, well, well! Say, just to get out of brotherly objections to your marriage, you go to a lot of trouble. You sure must love that Bulgarian girl—”

“She’s not Bulgarian. She’s as Anglo-Saxon as—”

“She couldn’t be as pretty as she is if not Bulgarian,” said the midget. “But let it go. All right. He’s not coming through then. Then proceed?”

“There’s nothing more to be said,” declared Golden-Tongue. “Except to ask you if you’re prepared to flash this letter when the moment comes?”

“Of course, of course!” said the other petulantly. “Flash it, encased in the very P.O.-cancelled envelope from Detroit that the louse did send me greetings in. A stinking five cent printed card only, however. I arranged to do all this, didn’t I? So why not?”

“Very well, then,” Golden-Tongue was rising. “Sit tight then, where you are, till I sig—”

“Now wait, Eel-Throat,” said Major Mite. “Wait! You say you positively and absolutely can get me on at Riverview Park there in Chi—where I can make real dough—and out of this lousy trick. But I read in Trooper’s Weekly they got a midge lined up for the show—one two inches smaller than me—even your Producer Finch won’t want two—”

“No, of course not. But that General Pee-Wee is temperamental as hell. I worked with him at Coney. He listens closely to all the publicity being spilled out on the platform, and—well, if I neglect him altogether in my spiel, he’ll get full of rage. Will stalk out and thrust at me his contract. And I’ll grab it pronto—and he’ll be out—O-U-T. And you’ll be in—via wire.”

“But Finch—”

“Oh, Finch defers to me, in everything. He knows that I have to feel attuned to everyone in the troupe, else I can’t spiel the show. He’s for me, in anything I do. I tell you that you’re the same as on contract there, in no more than a week. If—” He glowered. “—if you go through with this—as agreed.”

“Hah!” snorted the midget. “If—is good. Do you think I’m sheer nuts—to pass up seventy-five berries a week—to jolt around with this outfit at twenty-five—plus beans? Besides, I got a midget dame there in Chi—she’s not in show biz—her old man’s a Florida banker who stays in Chi from June to September every year—and I’m hungry as hell to see her, and—skip it. Anyway, I don’t like Barneyfield. He’s said to have said that all deviations from normality involve degeneration of some kind—oh, not to me—to Baron Munchausen—”

“Hah! Baron Munchau—”

Golden-Tongue stopped. Realizing that anything like this, from Baron’s mouth, that could be attributed to Pell, was, for him, Golden-Tongue, money in the till!

“He shouldn’t have said that,” he commented gravely, and sympathetically. “Because deviations—uh—are Mother Nature’s way of improving the race.”

Major Mite almost beamed.

“Right. How true!”

Golden-Tongue had turned toward the trailer door.

“On I go now. To do the job. And you keep on your mark And remember that from now on you travel where I travel—onward and upward. Where I’m spieling, you’ll be back of the canvas curtain. Always.”

“God forbid,” said Major Mite. “Riverview Park, Chi, will be enough. Three months—at seventy-five the week. And chance to be with my Teenie-Belle. And after that, it’ll be me who’ll go on to bigger and better things. Luna Park, Coney, itself. Yowsah!”