The Project Gutenberg EBook of Probability, by Louis Trimble

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Title: Probability

Author: Louis Trimble

Release Date: June 8, 2010 [EBook #32739]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Transcriber's Note:

This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction April 1954.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.

_If you ever get to drinking beer in your favorite saloon and meet
a scared little guy who wants to buy you the joint, supply you with
fur coats and dolls and run you for Congress--listen well! That is,
if you really want the joint, the fur coats, the dolls and a seat in
Congress. Just ask Mike Murphy...._

Probability

By Louis Trimble

Illustration by Ed Emsh

The first time this little guy comes in I'm new on the job. He looks
around as if he's scared a prohibition agent will pop out of the walls
and bite him. Then he gets up his nerve and sidles to the bar. His
voice is as thin as the rest of him.

"Glass of beer."

I draw. He drinks and pays and goes out.

That keeps on, Monday through Friday at five-ten p.m., year in and
year out. He slips in, peers around, has his beer, and pops out. Even
in '33, when we become legitimate, he acts the same way--scared of his
shadow. Except he isn't big enough to have a shadow.

During the war, when we're rationed, I save him his daily glass. He
never fails to come in except for two weeks every summer when he's on
vacation. From 1922 to 1953 he drinks one daily beer.

In thirty-one years, he and I grow older together, and after the first
ten he talks a little so that over a period of time I manage to learn
something about him. That first day he'd come in, he was on his first
job out of college. Well, so was I, only I went to bartending school
to learn how to mix prohibition liquor. But even so, it gave us
something in common, and when he learned we had s