“No, Lovey.”
We drifted on again. He spoke in a tone of bitter reproach.
“Ye’d rather go to the Down and Out! It’ll be the down, all right, sonny; but there’ll be no out to it. Ye’ll be a prisoner. They’ll keep at ye and at ye till yer soul won’t be yer own. Now all these other places ye can put it over on ’em. They’re mostly ladies and parsons and greenhorns that never ’ad no experience. A little repentance and they’ll fall for it every time. Besides”—he turned to me with another form of appeal—“ye’re a Christian, ain’t ye? A little repentance now and then’ll do ye good. It’s like something laid by for a rainy day. I’ve tried it, so I know. Ye’re young, sonny. Ye don’t understand. And when it’ll tide ye over a time like this—they’ll git ye a job, very likely—and ye can backslide by and by when it’s safe. Why, it’s all as easy as easy.”
“It isn’t as easy as easy, Lovey, because you say you don’t like it yourself.”
“I like it better than the Down and Out, where they won’t let ye backslide no more. Why, I was in at Stinson’s one day and there was a chap there—Rollins was his name, a plumber—just enj’yin’ of himself like—nothink wrong—and come to find out he’d been one of their men. Well, what do ye think, sonny? A fellow named Pyncheon blew in—awful ’ard drinker for a young ’and, he used to be—and he sat down beside Rollins and pled with ’im and plod with ’im, and—well, ye don’t see Rollins round Stinson’s no more. I tell ye, sonny, ye carn’t put nothing over on ’em. They knows all the tricks and all the trade. Give me kind-’earted ladies; give me ministers of the gospel; give me the stool o’ repentance two or three times a month; but don’t give me fellas that because they’ve knocked off the booze theirselves wants every one else to knock it off, too, and don’t let it be a free country.”
We came to the corner to which I had been directing our seemingly aimless steps. It was a corner where the big red and green jars that had once been the symbols for medicines within now stood as a sign for soda-water and ice-cream.
“Let’s go in here.”
Lovey hung back. “What’s the use of that? That ain’t no saloon.”
“Come on and let us try.”
Pushing open the screen door, I made him pass in before me. We found ourselves in front of a white counter fitted up like a kind of bar. As a bar of any sort was better than none, Lovey’s face took on a leaden shade of brightness.