Often as I have seen it, Broadway at night is still a fascinating place to me, with its blazing signs, its changing crowds, its clanging street traffic, its bright shop-windows. Grady was right in saying that "gay Paree" had nothing like it; nor has any other city that I know. It is, indeed, unique and thoroughly American; and I walked along it that night in the most leisurely fashion, savouring it to the full; pausing, now and then, for a glance at a shop-window, and stopping at the Hoffman House—now denuded, alas! of its Bouguereau—to replenish my supply of cigarettes.
Reaching Madison Square, at last, I walked out under the trees, as I almost always do, to have a look at the Flatiron Building, white against the sky. Then I glanced up at the Metropolitan tower, higher but far less romantic in appearance, and saw by the big illuminated clock that it was nearly half-past eleven.
I crossed back over Broadway, at last, and turned down Twenty-third Street in the direction of the Marathon, when, just at the corner, I came face to face with three men as they swung around the corner in the same direction, and, with a little start, I recognised Grady and Simmonds, with M. Pigot between them. Evidently Grady had felt it incumbent upon himself to make good his promise in the most liberal manner, and to display the wonders of the Great White Way from end to end—the ceremony no doubt involving the introduction of the stranger to a number of typical American drinks—and the result of all this was that Grady's legs wobbled perceptibly. As a matter of racial comparison, I glanced at M. Pigot's, but they seemed in every way normal.
"Hello, Lester," said Simmonds, in a voice which showed that he had not wholly escaped the influences of the evening's celebration; and even Grady condescended to nod, from which I inferred that he was feeling very unusually happy.
"Hello, Simmonds," I answered, and, as I turned westward with them, he dropped back and; fell into step beside me.
"Piggott is certainly a wonder," he said. "A regular sport—wanted to see everything and taste everything. He says Paris ain't in the same class with this town."
"Where are you going now?" I asked.
"We're going round to the station. Piggott says he's got a sensation up his sleeve for us—it's got something to do with that cabinet."
"With the cabinet?"
"Yes—that shiny thing Godfrey got me to lock up in a cell."