A doorman opened the door for them. “Good morning, gentlemen,” he greeted them.
Johnny nodded acknowledgment. “A good morning to you.”
They passed into a wide hall. On the left was the casino, a room at least eighty by one hundred feet, containing more than a score of tables for various games, all at this time covered with felt cloth. Johnny stepped to the door of the room and glanced in. Around the walls were more than a hundred slot machines.
“Nice,” he said to Sam.
He turned back. Straight ahead was a huge dining room with a dance floor and bandstand. And on the right was the hotel lobby and beyond it, a coffee shop and grill. Every piece of furniture in sight, in all of the rooms, was the best that craftsmen could make. The carpeting was thick and soft.
Johnny strode to the desk. The clerk, a short man of about forty-five, came forward.
“A suite,” said Johnny.
The clerk shook his head sadly.
“Crowded, eh? Well, how about a nice room with twin beds?”
The clerk shook his head again.
“Then what about a room with one bed?”
“Not a thing,” the clerk finally said, “not a room of any kind. Not even in the bunkhouse. We’re booked up.”
Johnny exclaimed. “But you’ll have some checkouts today.”
“Yes, we probably will,” the clerk admitted, “but we have four reservations for every checkout.”
Johnny smiled and leaned over the counter. “Look, chum, I’ve been around. I know the hotel racket. It’s hard to keep things straight and to prove it, I’ll bet if you looked real hard you could find a room for us.” He fixed the clerk with a meaning look. “I’ll bet ten bucks.”
The clerk snorted. “A man wanted to bet me fifty dollars yesterday...”
“All right,” said Johnny through his teeth, “I’ll bet you fifty.”
“You didn’t let me finish. I said the man wanted to bet me fifty. But I couldn’t do it...” He smiled thinly. “Because I really didn’t have the room.”
Johnny shook his head sadly. “So things are that tough?”
“Not only here, but at all the other hotels. You might find a motel room, but you’d probably have to go out quite a way. Of course if you wish to make a reservation, I might have something for you in about ten days.”
Johnny sighed. “No thanks.” Then he drew the purple check from his pocket. “This is one of yours, isn’t it?”
“No, ours are brown. That is, the five dollars ones. The twenty-five are yellow.”
“Know anyone named Nick?”
“I believe one of the bellboys is named Nick.” The clerk frowned. “What’s he done?”
“Nothing. A friend of mine told me to say hello to him, if I stopped here.”
“He doesn’t come on duty today until noon.”
“Oh! Well, I’ll probably drop in sometime during the afternoon or evening.” Johnny and Sam left the hotel. As they climbed into the car, Sam exclaimed. “Fifty bucks...!”
“Fifty was the bet; the selling price wasn’t reached. Well, we’ll try The Last Frontier and El Rancho Vegas.”
They did; neither had rooms and neither used purple checks. Johnny drove back into Las Vegas where the gambling houses were beginning to open for the day’s play.
They entered the Pioneer Club, a huge room, open to the sidewalk. The crap table was already receiving a good play. This early in the morning the players were mostly workers and men in from the outlying ranches, so silver dollars were used mainly, but the croupiers had checks in their racks. They weren’t purple.
They tried the Frontier Club, Joe’s Club, Mike’s Club, Pete’s Club, Jake’s Club — all the clubs on both sides of Fremont Street and a few on 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th Streets. They found purple checks in four clubs, but the designs didn’t match that of the check the dying man in Death Valley had given them.
At every place Johnny asked if Nick had been in yet. The reply in three-fourths of the place was, “Nick who?”
The other fourth knew Nicks. Nick Brown, Nick Jones, Nick Smith, Nick Pappas, Nick Genualdi, Nick Schick and Nick the Greek.
As the French would say, it was all quite décourageant.
“Well,” said Johnny, when they had completed the rounds of the gambling places that were open, “there’s only one thing left to do... work!”
“I’m willing,” Sam said, “but where can we get a crowd?”
“Where are all the people?”
“In the gambling joints...”
“Well?”
Sam exclaimed. “They’d throw you out.”
“The sidewalks are still free.”
Sam hesitated, then went to the car, and opening the luggage compartment took out an armful of books. Each had a nice dust jacket, with a picture of himself, wearing a leopard skin and nothing else. Above the picture was the title, Every Man a Samson. He also took out of the car a six-foot length of one-inch iron chain and returned to Johnny, who was standing before the open front of Mike’s Club.
“Here?”
“There’s fifty people inside. Forty-five of them will come out.”
“Okay,” said Sam, but he wasn’t happy about it. He took off his coat, folded it neatly and placed it on the sidewalk. He removed his tie and shirt and placed them on top of the coat. Three people came out of Mike’s Club to watch. Four people, passing, stopped. Sam picked up the chain and putting it about his massive chest, twisted the ends into a tight knot.
You know about Sam Cragg — he’s five feet eight inches tall, weighs 220 pounds, every ounce of it muscle and bone.
Johnny looked admiringly at Sam’s torso and threw up his hands.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he bellowed in a voice that rolled across Fremont Street on the one side and into Mike’s Club on the other. “Ladies and gentlemen, give me your attention for a moment...”
That was as far as he got. The cop who had caught him making a U-turn earlier in the day darted out of Mike’s Club and grabbed one of Johnny’s arms.
“Here, you, what do you think you’re doing?”
“Why, I’m going to give a little spiel,” Johnny replied calmly.
“And then?”
“Then my friend, Young Samson here, is going to break that logging chain merely by expanding his chest and after that I hope to sell these books at $2.95 per each.”
“You’ve got a license to sell on the street?”
“Oh, so it’s like that in Las Vegas.”
“That’s the way it is.”
“How much is the license?”
“I don’t even know if the chief d give you one, but if he did it’d probably cost you fifty or a hundred dollars.”
“In that case, let’s just forget the whole thing.”
“It’s just as well, because even if you did get a license to sell, we wouldn’t let you pull any phony chain-breaking stuff.”
“Phony? Sam, take off the chain.”
Sam obeyed and Johnny took the chain from him. He handed it to the policeman. “Look it over and if you find a weak link in it, I’ll eat the chain — without salt.”
The policeman dropped the chain to the sidewalk. “There’s a trick to it, somewhere, but I haven’t got time to work it out. No man could break a chain like that on the square.”
“Sam can. He does it right along.”
The policeman looked at Sam with jaundiced eyes. “Strong, huh?”
“Only the strongest man in the world,” Sam admitted.
“M’bongo, the gorilla I caught in the Congo, could tear you to pieces.”