title: Quest of the Silver Fleece
author: W E B Dubois
description: 434 pages, student historical edition. History and Literature of the Black man in America.
zlib_text: ![](images/00001.jpg)
  
  
  ##### www.blackmask.com
  
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  # LEVELLING WITH ELISHA
  
  
  ### Charles E. Van Loan
  
  
  This page copyright © 2001 Blackmask Online.
  
  
  http://www.blackmask.com  
    
  
  
  The Bald-faced Kid shivered as he roosted on the paddock fence, for the dawn
  was raw and cold and his overcoat was hanging in the back room of a
  pawnbroker's establishment some two hundred miles away. Circumstances which he
  had unsuccessfully endeavored to control made it a question of the overcoat or
  the old-fashioned silver stop watch. The choice was not a difficult one. "I
  can get along without the benny," reflected the Kid, "because I'm naturally
  warmblooded, but take away my old white kettle and I'm a soldier gone to war
  without his gun."
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  In the language of the tack rooms, the Bald-faced Kid was a hustler — a free
  lance of the turf, playing a lone hand against owner and bookmaker, matching
  his wits against secret combinations and operating upon the wheedled capital
  of the credulous. He wa