During the first act Magruder's face was a study for Stone. It was evident that the cowboy failed wholly to understand the narrow and insular satire of "Patience." When the curtain fell at last, he could contain himself no longer.
"I never see such a fool play," he said. "There ain't no sense in makin' believe that one fellow could round up a bunch of girls that way. It's the plumb-stupidest show I've seen for years and years. It's bad as Deadwood Dick 'most. 'Patience' they call it? Well, I 'ain't got none to see no more of it. What's this roof garden you told me about?"
So Stone took him up to the roof garden, and they were glad to get again into the open air, baked as the atmosphere was even at the top of the building. They had a drink and a smoke while they listened to the music.
When the variety show began on the little stage, Stone went forward in time to secure advantageous positions for Magruder and himself. Early on the programme was a French song by a highly-colored young lady wearing an enormous hat.
"That's a good enough song," the cowboy declared, "but what sort of a lingo is it she's singin' it in? Why isn't plain United States good enough for songs? Not but what she's a pretty girl, too, and lively on her feet."
The part of the performance which excited Clay Magruder's warmest appreciation was the serpentine dance of Mademoiselle Éloise. When he beheld the coiling draperies of that graceful young woman curving about in picturesque and unexpected convolutions, and heightened in effect by the changing colors of the lime-lights directed upon the stage, his enthusiasm rose to a height.
"That's some!" he cried. "It reminds me of an Eyetalian gal I saw dance once in Cheyenne. She was a daisy, too; but this is bigger. They's no doubt about it, this is a heap bigger."
Magruder joined in accomplishing the inevitable recall and the repetition of a part of the dance. Perhaps this was the reason why the next two or three numbers of the programme seemed to him to be less interesting. At all events, both the cowboy and the sailor tired of the entertainment. So they made their way through the crowd and down to the street.
As they walked back to the hotel Magruder told Stone what had brought him to New York. It was to meet the Touraine on her expected arrival in the morning, and to persuade one of the passengers to marry him.
"She's jest got to marry me," he said, earnestly. "I can't get along without her any longer. She's a sort of governess to Old Man Pettigrew's sister's kids—learns them to read and play the pianner. They was all in Miles City last winter, and that was when I first see her. I made up my mind right off on the spot that there was Mrs. Clay Magruder if I could get her. And I'm here now to get her if I can. She's as pretty as a picture—better'n that, too, for I never see no chromo half as good-lookin' as her. Once last winter they was 'most a blizzard; leastways the wind set back on its hind-legs and howled. You ought to have seen her then, with the color in her cheeks! An' everything was froze stiff, and she was skeered of fallin'. Why, she teetered along jest like a chicken with a jag." And he laughed out loud at the recollection. "She'll be here in the mornin', and you shall see her. I'm goin' to be down on that dock good an' early to-morrow, and no French sailor ain't goin' to stand me off."