RARELY invaded Jigger Masters' quarters. The chief reason for this was that my friend had invited me only once. I knew that he disliked company or even casual acquaintances, as a general rule, but because he had taken to dropping into my studio nearly every day, I felt that I could exempt myself from the restrictions to a certain degree.
I went because I really was becoming curious. As I said, Jigger had been dropping in to smoke a stogie with me while I painted. He would drape his long legs over the arms of one of my cane rockers and sit for an hour or so, hardly speaking a word. Usually I was busy, and I think that was why he came, for he seemed to concentrate better with another person in the room, provided that other person also was intent upon some task.
There is an urge to adventure in me, though, which lets me work only a certain period of days. Then I must go out and walk the sidewalks looking for diversion, even if it is but a mild flirtation with a little Italian girl at one of the fish-carts of Hester Street. I make romance out of little, and people pictures I am going to paint with the personalities I rub elbows with on these rambles, and so I am tolerant of my weakness.
The adventures I had enjoyed in Masters' company, however, had made these genre incidents tame in comparison. Just as long as Masters visited my studio regularly, I knew that there was nothing in the wind. But the moment I missed him, my imagination got busy, and I could see him gallivanting off on the most lurid cases, leaving me to bite the ends of my brushes in unsatiated excitement. I just had to visit him to ease my own mind.
I found him hunched over his hideous teakwood desk, with his bony elbows jammed down upon a chart of some kind. His person was in as bad disarray as his desk. The latter had a multitude of small reference-books piled about, some opened to a place, some opened and turned over, while others were just sprawled among the ash-trays, looking as if they had just fallen from the top of the unsteady heap at one corner.
Masters himself was clad in an atrocious flesh-colored fuzzy bathrobe, under which he wore the sloppy semi-attire often affected by bachelors during the hours they do not expect visitors. His wild shock of black hair was uncombed, and it had become so snarled that a pencil, poked into it, stood at an acute angle upward near his left ear.
“Glad to see you, Bert,” he rumbled in a far-away tone, reaching up an aim- less hand to mine without lifting his eyes. “Just the man I wanted to see! Sit down!” He leaned over and pulled up a straight-backed chair near to his own swivel seat. I obeyed silently, for I knew from the blankness of his expression that he had been intent upon some problem when I interrupted.
“There isn't any game of billiards that you play with just one ball, is there?” he queried, abandoning his concentration suddenly and wheeling about to face me.
I shook my head slowly, trying hard to think of the different pastimes I had played and seen on the green cloth. “No, I don't believe so,” I answered. “The nearest to that I can name is golf-pool; that takes a cue-ball and one object-ball.”
“No, this is played on a regulation billiard table. Say, Bert, if you saw a man with a cue and just one red ball, shooting earnestly away at the cushions with that one red ball, stopping his shots, trying them over, and sometimes helping them along when they do not go exactly as he desires—”
“I'd say he was practicing the use of English, or testing the cushions or just plain nutty,” I broke in.
Masters nodded almost imperceptibly, but his wide mouth curved in a smile. “And if you saw him doing that same thing day after day? And if he never seemed to have any difficulty getting a 'gallery' to watch him? And if sometimes one of the 'gallery' stepped up and did the same thing for a few minutes?”
That surely was a puzzler. I hesitated. “Well, Jigger,” I replied, “if I saw that myself, or some one else asked me that, I should simply recommend the services of an alienist for the crowd. However, I know that you think there must be something more back of it than just foolishness. What's the idea, anyway?”
Masters shrugged his hunched shoulders and then straightened slowly in his chair. “Well,” he began quizzically, “are you looking for another chance at being knocked over the head?”
“You bet!” I don't know what it is about the man, but whenever I am in Masters' company, I would contract to attempt most anything. He inspires rashness, but confidence at the same time.