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Can't Remember All Those Towns
. . . My travels were about to start again. Buster Brown and Alto Lane, a couple of the hottest sports New Orleans ever produced, came to Memphis broke. At that time a lady friend was helping me along, so that I was able to stake the boys in the enterprise they had in mind, which was to take the dice game at the Monarch saloon. This was a very, very difficult thing to do, because in Memphis you shot dice out of a leather horn with a string across the top to prevent the real experts from setting their shots with their hands. You were also limited to three licks with that horn. But Buster and Alto figured they could beat it. All they had to do was to substitute their loaded dice while they was shooting and then remove them when their three licks was over. You might think I was crazy to help them, but 1 did. They was my friends and they was so down on their luck that they was taking their baths by going down to father Mississippi and washing their feet occasionally. Well, I staked them to a roll and warned them not to try their loaded dice during Bad Sam's watch at the dice table; told them they'd better go while Frazier Davis was on duty. Bad Sam had an eye like an eagle, and, if he caught them, they would just die on the spot. So they heeded my warning, walked into the Monarch past all those iron bars and those guys with guns in their bosoms, stepped up to the dice game, looking so much like a couple of broken down roustabouts that nobody ever suspected them, and just naturally cleaned up. It makes me feel chilly right now to think about it. But those boys were artists, and they had all the nerve in the world. Just about 142 |
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