Tony did the honors for Number Twelve. He and Mrs. Vee, surrounded by a fluttering flock of purple doves, all from aristocratic cotes, became as thick as thieves. The Dropper, who was not wanting in good looks and could spiel like a dancing master, went twice around the room with Mrs. Vee—just for a lark, you know—to a tune scraped from Tony's fiddles and thumped from that publican's piano. After which, Mrs. Vee and her flutter of followers, Willieboys and all, went their purple way.
Tony, with never flagging courtesy, escorted them to the door. What he beheld filled his somewhat sluggish soul with wonder. Pell Street was thronged with Chinamen. They were sitting or standing, all silent, faces void of meaning. The situation, too, was strange in this. A Chinaman could have told you that they were all of the Hip Sing Tong, and not a Four Brothers among them. He wouldn't of course, for a Chinaman tells a white devil nothing. Pell, by the way, was as much the home street of the Four Brothers as of the Hip Sing Tong.
Tony expressed his astonishment at the pigtailed press which thronged the thoroughfare.
“This is how it is,” vouchsafed the explanatory Tony to Mrs. Vee and her purple fluttering doves. “Big Mike's just after standin' Low Foo's wash-shop on its nut, an' these monks are sizin' up th' wreck. When anything happens to a monk his tong makes good, see?”
Tony might not have said this had he recalled that Low Foo was a Four Brothers, and understood that no one not a Hip Sing Tong was in the crowd. Tony, however, recalled nothing, understood nothing; for he couldn't tell one Chinaman from another.
“How interesting!” cooed Mrs. Vee, in response to Tony's elucidation; and with that her flock of purple doves, in fluttering agreement, cooed, “How interesting!”
“Did youse lamp th' ice on them dames?” asked Sop Henry, when the slumming Mrs. Vee and her suite were out of ear-shot.
Sop had an eye for diamonds.
“That bunch ain't got a thing but money!” observed the Wop, his eyes glittering enviously. “I wisht I had half their cush.”
“Money ain't th' whole box of tricks.”