“Good Lord!” cried the stranger, following him. “You don’t think you can tackle forty cigars on a stretch, do you? Kid, it’ll kill you!”
“It’s a beautiful death,” Coffin replied, jauntily, “you can tell mamma I died happy.” The cigar clerk grinned.
“Strikes me you’re troubled with youngness,” said the stranger, looking him over.
Coffin ruffled at his patronizing tone. “See here! D’you think I can’t get away with these forty cigars, smoking ’em in an end-to-end chain down to one-inch butts?”
“I bet you a hundred dollars you get sick as a pig first!” was the reply.
“Taken!” Coffin cried, and went at him with fire in his eye. “See here, I left all my money on my grand piano, but if you’ll trust me I’ll trust you without stakes held. We’ll get the clerk here to see fair play, and if I don’t see this box to a finish or pay up, you two can push the face off me. What d’you say?”
The green-eyed stranger, who had evidently money to spend foolishly, and a night to waste in doing it, assented jovially. It is not hard to organize an impromptu trio for any hair-brained purpose whatever in that land of careless comradeship. The two waited till the clerk had put up the screen at the front of the shop, and then walked with him round to California Street. Half way up the first block stood an old-fashioned wooden house painted drab, with green blinds, in striking contrast to the high brick buildings that surrounded it. The frame had been brought round Cape Horn in ’49, and, in pioneer days, the place had been one of the most fashionable boarding-houses in town. Chinatown now crowded it in; it had fallen into disrepute, and was visited only by the poorer class of foreigners. Over the entrance was a sign bearing the inscription, “Hotel de France.” Here the salesman had a room.
The lower part of the house was dark, but in answer to a prolonged ringing of the bell, a small boy appeared and, with many comments in a patois of the Bas Pyrenees, lighted two lamps in the barroom. The three men sat down and took off their coats and collars for comfort. James Wiswell Coffin, 3d, opened the box of Panatelas and regarded them with a sentimental eye.
He bit the end off the first cigar and struck a match. Then he bowed to the company with the theatrical air of a man about to touch off a loaded bomb. “Gentlemen, I proceed to take my degree of Bachelor of Nicotine, if I don’t flunk.” He lighted the tobacco, quoting, “Ave, Caesar! Morituri te salutant!” and blew forth a ring of smoke. It floated upward, smooth and even, hovered over his head a moment like a halo, then, writhing, scattered and drifted away. Coffin removed the cigar from his mouth and looked thoughtfully at the ash.
“It burns all right,” he said, “I won’t have to put kerosene on ’em to make ’em go. D’you know a Panatela always reminds me of a smart, tailor-made girl. It’s the most slenderly beautiful shape for a cigar; it’s gracile, by Jove, gracile and jimpriculate—I got that word in Kentucky. But I chatter, friends, I am garrulous. Besides I think I have now said all I know, and it’s your edge, stranger. How would it do for you to enliven the pink and frisky watches of the night by narrating a few of the more inflammable chapters of your autobiography?”