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Updated: May 9, 2025
At least, it's always been that way with me. No sooner did I get together a sort of pile and start out for the old town, when some smooth stranger would come along and steer me up against some skin-game, and back I'd have to go to work. That happened a few times, and when I did manage at last to get home with the dough I found she had married another guy.
"You see, we've been overrun with 'rollers' and 'skin-game' men, and lately three expresses have been held up by Lightfoot's gang, and so I've been facing up every suspicious immigrant. I've had to do it in your case I was too brash I'll admit that but come, let's get away from the mob. Come over to my office, I want to talk with you." Mose was glad to escape the curious eyes of the throng.
"Ye tried to kill a thousand-dollar bird by a skin-game, and I'll have it out of your hide." Reeves pulled a pole out of the fence. "Don't ye come across here," he gritted. "I'll brain ye! It was your own rooster-fight. You put it up. You got licked. What's the matter with you?" A grin of pure satisfaction curled under his beard. "You never heard of true sport. You don't know what it means.
At least, so men said in the West, though no one could prove it, and at the opening of Lawton he appeared at the head of a band of cutthroats, who were herded out of town by the deputy United States marshals before noon of the first day. Not until popular government was established could they get in to open their skin-game, which was better and safer for them than ordinary highway faring.
If I give ye that twenty thousand, you'll throw it away in the first skin-game in 'Frisco, and hand it over to the first short-card sharp you'll meet. There's a thousand, enough for you to fling away, take it and get! Suppose what I'd said to you was the frozen truth, and you know'd it, would that have been the square thing to play on you?"
At other times, his long-pent bitterness found voice in passionate outbursts; for he had rubbed the world the wrong way and did not like the feel of it. "Life's a skin-game," he was fond of repeating, and on this one note he rang the changes. "I never had half a chance," he complained. "I was faked in my birth and flim-flammed with my mother's milk.
The skin-game artists and shilabers, cheaters, flimflammers, and medicine men flock to these gatherings as flies to a picnic. They are as barnacles on a fast-moving ship, flies in the ointment of circus management. Happily much of this odium has been erased. By close cooperation with local authorities, the con man and shilaber is moved out before he starts.
Bowersox, bustling out from a good meal in the officers' room. "Fall in promptly. We must hurry up to catch the Looeyville train." The car for Louisville was filled with characters as to whom there was entirely too much ground for fear gamblers, "skin-game" men, thieves, and all the human vermin that hang around the rear of a great army.
The general public never contacts the real circus people, just the ticket takers, ushers, and roustabouts. They never meet the managers and performers. And because grafters, shilabers, and skin-game artists follow circuses, the public thinks these are a part of it. It's only fair to circus people that this connection be denied."
I have looked for work all day and have utterly failed to find it. Now I have a scheme and I know it will work. Oxalic acid eats away rust. If I had five cents' worth, I could earn a dollar I know I could." He looked curiously at me for a moment, and said with an oath: "By ! I've been on the Bowery a good many years and haven't been sold once. If you're a skin-game man, I'll throw up my job!"
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