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Of course, if it hadn’t been for Gargie, the thing would have come out much worse. It really began one night last February, when a couple of crooks pulled some fancy arson business on us. At that time, we hadn’t even met Gargie. There was just Mary and me. I’m Alan Trimble. Mary’s my sister. Maybe you’ve heard of the “Tumbling Trimbles?” We’re acrobats; we come from an old circus family.

That Saturday in February was a red-hot day. You get them sometimes, even here in what they call the Highlands of Florida. We live here winters, practicing new stunts and resting up for the summer circus season up north. Our house is in a fairly lonely section, palms and palmettos and a few citrus groves, with the town of Palm Ridge some two miles away. There’s a main highway passing our door, and quite a fair amount of traffic. To earn a little extra money, we had opened a small roadside lunchroom. It worked pretty well—an open-faced counter place for sandwiches, coffee, soft drinks and such.

It was about nine o’clock that hot February evening when a coupe with two young men drove up. I was back of the counter by the coffee urn. Mary went out to serve them at the car. My sister is quite a good looker. Small and trim, and in a dress she doesn’t look as muscular as she is. She was greeted by whistles.

“Thanks,” she said. “What’ll you have, boys?”

But they climbed out and came to the counter. They were the flashy dressed, wise-guy type. Both were in their early twenties. One was lanky, pimply and blond; the other small and compact.

“Nice little place you got,” the lanky one said patronizingly. “Makin’ any money? Just you two here, eh?”

He tossed me a bill, and as I opened the cash register to give him his change, it occurred to me that he gave the drawer a sharp glance. His companion had gone around to the rest room; he reappeared and they went to their car.

They were about to drive away when one of them called at me, “Hey, what’s that?”

Smoke was rising from up beside our cottage, which is about fifty feet back from the road. It was all dark up there. Well, it wasn’t much of a fire. We had left some trash on the little back porch of the house. It was burning pretty snappy when we and our two young customers dashed there; but with a couple of buckets of water from the kitchen—and me with an ax hacking away the flimsy little porch—we had it out in ten minutes or so.

“Thanks a lot,” I said to the lanky youth, who had been right with me most of the time. I hadn’t noticed that the other fellow had wandered away; I was too busy trying to keep the house from catching fire. Anyway, he was with us when we got the fire out.

“Guess you’re okay now,” the lanky one said. “C’mon, Pete, we gotta get goin’.”

They departed; and it wasn’t until an hour later that I discovered our cash register had been cleaned out!

“Well!” I said. “What will crooks think of next?”

The loss spurred us. We got an idea for making money. We brought our big twenty foot square mat from behind the house, and did our acrobatic practice in the front yard every afternoon. It worked. A lot of people stopped to watch us; and we hired a local girl to serve them from the lunchroom. The “Tumbling Trimbles” is a classy act, if I do say it myself; and Mary is a very nifty sight in spangled doublets and fleshings, with me tossing her around on that padded mat in the Florida sunlight. The thing went over big. In a month we were giving half hour shows, afternoon and evening both. The mat was on a platform, with lights. We had benches, rustic tables and chairs for the customers, with lanterns and flags strung on wires overhead.

And then came Gargie. It was a Wednesday night, sort of an off night, with maybe twenty people at the tables. Mary and I had just finished and were standing bowing to the ripple of applause, when I heard a gasp from someone in the audience. Then everybody was looking up over their heads. It was startling, to say the least. On one of the guy-wires a small figure had appeared—a monkey about a foot and a half tall, clad in a short pair of pants and a peppermint-candy striped jersey. In each outstretched hand he carried a tiny paper parasol which he waved up and down as though to balance himself.

A tight-rope walking monkey! And he sure had a good act. He walked as though he was just about to fall; and when he got close over the people’s heads, he began wobbling in earnest. You’ve seen comedians on the tight wire do it? Then the monkey’s feet slipped and he went down. The people under him gasped and ducked. But a monkey on a wire has a big advantage over a man. His tail flipped up, grabbed the wire and he hung head down, waving his little parasols as though he was still balancing himself. Laughter went up when it was so obvious that the slip was part of his act.

Then from one of the tables a man said, “Oh Gargie!” He was a little man in a dark suit; beside him on the ground he had a black wooden box with a handle. The “Oh Gargie!” was evidently a signal. When he heard it, the monkey flipped himself back onto the wire, ran along it without bothering to balance himself with the parasols. After a few feet he made a wild leap into space, and parasols and all, wrapped himself around the trunk of a pine sapling. Then he was down on the ground, a scurrying dark streak as he ran for the man at the table and got whisked into the black box.

That was our introduction to Gargie. We fended off the customers, and eventually got the place cleared. “Git them people away,” the little man had mumbled to us. “That was Gargie’s debut, see? Not bad, eh? Money in it for you, see what I mean?”

His name was Johnny Peters. He weighed maybe a hundred; and he was twenty-five, or maybe forty. You couldn’t just tell, on account of his face somehow suggested Gargie’s. He was a funny looking little fellow. I guess he’d been a sailor; a lot of tattooing was on him, and he walked with a rolling gait. He didn’t seem to want to talk much about himself, but he had plenty to say about his pal Gargie.

“He’s a rhesus monkey, see? I taught him all he knows, and he learns fast. He likes to learn, see what I mean?”

We had Gargie on the table now, and he was shaking hands with us and chattering; and trying to tip a hat which unfortunately he wasn’t wearing at the moment.

“He’s cute,” Mary said. “That’s a queer name, Gargie. How’d you happen to—”

“Well,” Johnny said, “he ain’t exactly Gargantua, is he? So I thought Gargie would fit him better.”

The upshot was, we hired Gargie and Johnny, who figured he’d have Gargie in the movies in a year. So Johnny was to get a percentage of the profits on the new business Gargie brought us. And, as a matter of fact, our business certainly did get better. Combined with our tumbling act, Gargie was a swell drawing card. Every morning Johnny trained him, and he was a born comedian, giving his burlesque of a tight-rope walker. I had a special wire rigged for him. It ran along above the edge of the spectators’ chairs and tables. Gargie would make a surprise appearance on it. And when he was hanging by his tail, head down after his fake fall, he’d reach and grab somebody’s hat, or a woman’s scarf or something, and scamper off with it. People like to laugh at other people’s discomfiture; that gag brought a big laugh.

By April we were drawing really big crowds. Sunday nights we always had quite a bit of cash on hand, which I banked on Mondays. I don’t know why I was thinking of that with a sort of uneasy feeling, one especially busy Sunday, but I did.

“Okay, let’s close up,” I said to Mary, when we had sent our employees home, and the last customer had gone. There was just Mary and me, and Johnny who was sitting on the sand beside the lunch counter, talking to Gargie. It was a chilly night. Johnny had Gargie in his box. Gargie liked it hot.

“I’ll switch off the lights,” Mary said. She did and with the big electric sign off, and no lights over the lunch counter, the darkness of the cloudy night leaped around us.

Suddenly we were startled by the sound of a car motor starting up. In the dark windless night, it was clearly audible. Not a car approaching from far away, but one close at hand.

In the dimness, Mary and I exchanged glances. We had no time to do anything else. The car appeared, not on the highway, but from a dark group of palms out beyond the parking lot. It came only a hundred feet or so into the open space, then its headlights sprang on. The yellow glare of them caught Mary and me, bathed us and clung.

It was all so quick, we just stood there transfixed. I was aware that the car motor had been shut off; the brakes went on with a grind and screech and the car stopped.

“Stand where you are!” a man’s voice said. “Reach over your heads if you don’t want to get a bullet into you!”

The headlight glare was dazzling, but I could dimly make out the blob of an open car, with a dark figure standing up in it. Mary’s fingers were on my arm. Her grip tightened; she let out a little gasping cry.

“Easy!” I murmured. “Put your hands up! Don’t let’s get shot!”

We stood together with our hands over our heads. The car wasn’t much more than fifty feet away. I could see a man in dark clothes leap from it to the ground. “Okay!” he said. “We got ’em! Come on, Sandy. Put them damn lights out an’ make it snappy.”

The car lights went out. Our captor was advancing on us, and in another few seconds I could distinguish him more plainly. He was bare-headed, a close-clipped bullet head of iron-grey hair. A black handkerchief was tied around his face so that just the eyes showed above it. In his hand was an ugly-looking black automatic, leveled at us.

“You got sense!” he said. “An’ you too,” he called at Johnny. “Come over here. Take it slow an’ keep your hands up! You won’t get hurt!”

Johnny was only a few feet away from us. He came slowly forward and joined us with his hands over his head. The other man was out of the car now, masked and with leveled gun like his companion. He was bare-headed also—a tall, thin fellow who had the look of being much younger.

“Hold ’em, Sandy,” the older man said. He chuckled. “This won’t take long. I’ll get the cash.”

“The cash register’s back of the counter,” Sandy said.

Somehow his voice was familiar. Then I remembered. He was the pimply-faced youth who had helped me put out the fire, while the young squirt who was with him, looted us. Evidently he had figured the pickings would be better now—which indeed was the truth—so he’d brought his older man to pull a regular stick-up job. And they’d hidden their car nearby, waiting for us to close up.

“Thanks for setting my house on fire,” I said suddenly.

That startled him. “So you’re a wise-guy,” he growled. “Keep reachin’ or s’elp me I’ll drill you!”

“Okay,” I said. “I don’t want that. The cash is all yours.”

It didn’t take long, as the older man had remarked. Mary, Johnny and I stood docile, with our hands up. We were midway between the edge of the group of tables, and the front of the lunch counter. Sandy stood in front of us, his nasty-looking gun muzzle describing a slow arc from one to the other of us. Behind him there was enough light so that I could see the other bandit rifling the cash drawer. I had a gun over there, parked behind the coffee urn. Not a chance in the world of getting to it. And at that, I can’t say I was too sorry. Money is one thing, but exchanging bullets with a wild-eyed bandit at close quarters is quite another.

Then the burly thug, with his pockets stuffed full of our cash, was coming back. He joined Sandy, both of them with their guns on us.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s get out of here! Back up, you three, an’ if you—”

He checked himself, startled. There was just an instant when the muzzle of his gun wavered as he flung a glance overhead. In that second I had heard a faint chattering. And there was Gargie! Balancing himself with his little parasols, he was coming along the guy-wire almost directly over us. For a second it surprised both the bandits so that they gazed up. It flashed to me then that I might have jumped them, but it was too dangerous.

“What in the devil—”

“Jus’ their damn monkey,” Sandy muttered.

Then both the bandits had circled us and were backing toward their car. “Don’t move!” the older man warned us. “You—”

“Oh, Gargie!” Johnny abruptly murmured.

Johnny took a nasty chance, doing that. He startled me, no less the bandits. Both their gun-muzzles turned on him. But they didn’t fire; they had other things to think about. Directly over them, Gargie was doing his act. His fake fall was in full swing. Far be it from me to figure out what was in that monkey’s mind. But Gargie is a conscientious little fellow, and Johnny had given him the signal to fall and hang by his tail. Which he certainly was doing.

The bandits by the table didn’t have any hats, which I guess must have annoyed Gargie very much. Nor were they women with a scarf or a shawl for him to seize. So he did the next best thing. He swung and reached, and tried to grab the black handkerchief from the face of the older thug.

And that’s when the shooting started. With a swinging monkey, head down, clawing at your face, you’re a little handicapped. Both the crooks jumped, with startled oaths, and the older one flailed his arms to knock Gargie away. Then the bullets began sizzling around. Those two gunmen weren’t much on quality, but they sure made up for it in quantity. A stack of dishes on the lunch counter crashed; an iron saucepan on the stove was drilled so that it let out a clang like a bell.

You’ve no idea what a lot of things began happening at once. Johnny and I had shoved Mary down to the sand and dropped with her, which was lucky because quite a few bullets whizzed where our heads had been an instant before. And in the midst of it, I saw that Gargie was still making valiant efforts to do his stuff, though he certainly must have been confused that things were going different from usual for him. The black handkerchief wouldn’t come loose from around the thug’s head. Then Gargie made a swing to reach for the other man, and he let go his tail-hold and dropped on Sandy’s head. He didn’t like it there, so he jumped back and landed on the older thug’s shoulder.

Now with an earnest, hard-working little monkey trying to unmask you, I imagine any stickup man would be confused. This fellow let out a roar, and staggered, flailing to knock Gargie away. And that’s approximately when I went into action. Being an acrobat from the age of five, teaches you quite a few tricks. I went up into the air from a crouch and landed with my head hitting that big thug at about his belt line. He fell over backward, with me on top of him, and his gun flying away into the darkness. Gargie had jumped into mid-air; and I guess he decided this was no place for him, because when he hit the ground he streaked away.

That was a pretty husky customer I had under me. I had time to take a couple of jabs at his face, but with a roar he rose up like a wounded bull and heaved me off. In the dimness nearby, I had a vision of Johnny in action. The skinny, sandy-haired young crook had evidently exhausted his bullets and decided that the best thing he could do was go elsewhere. He was running past, but Johnny, from the ground, took a scrambling plunge at him, caught him around the legs and brought him down. As he fell, he cracked his head against a table leg—and that was the end of Sandy for a while.

Johnny was up on his feet, ready to help me. But as it happened, I didn’t need it. The bull-like fellow was rushing me, but instead of trying to avoid him, I stooped, caught him just right by a bit of luck, and heaved him over my head. It wasn’t quite the same as tossing Mary, but I managed it. And before he could rise, I whirled, seized a heavy rustic chair and whanged him over the head with it. That did it. He sank down, and out.

Well, that was the wind-up of the affair. Mary, Johnny and I were pretty busy for a minute or two, making sure none of us were hurt. Johnny babbled out how he had released Gargie, sending him into his act, just on the chance something would happen.

“It sure did,” I commented.

“By the way, where is Gargie?” Mary wanted to know, when we had phoned for the police to come and get what was left of the thugs.

And then we saw Gargie. I guess he wasn’t a bit satisfied with the way his act had gone, because he was back up on the guy-wire. As we watched, he came running out, stopped, and made one of his very nicest little bows.

THE END

[End of Oh Gargie!, by Ray Cummings]