CHAPTER VI
J. RUFUS PROVES A SAD, SAD DISAPPOINTMENT TO
SOME CLEVER PEOPLE
They were glad to see Blackie Daw back on Broadway—that is, in the way that Broadway is glad; for they of the Great White Way have no sentiments and no emotions, and but scant memories. About Blackie’s companion, however, they were professionally curious.
“Who is this large, pink Wallingford person, and where did you get it?” asked Mr. Phelps, whose more familiar name was Green-Goods Harry.
Mr. Daw, standing for the moment with Mr. Phelps at the famous old cheese-and-crackers end of the Fifth Avenue bar, grinned.
“He’s an educated Hick,” he responded, “and I got him out of the heart of the hay-fever district, right after he’d turned a classy little trick on the easy producers of his childhood home. Sold ’em a bankrupt bucket-shop for eight thousand, which is going some!”
Mr. Phelps, natty and jaunty and curly-haired, though shifty of eye, through long habit of trying to watch front and back doors both at once, looked with a shade more interest across at the imposing white vest of young J. Rufus where he stood at the bar with fat and somber Badger Billy. There was a cocksure touch to the joviality of young Wallingford which was particularly aggravating to an expert like Mr. Phelps. Young Wallingford was so big, so impressive, so sure of pleasing, so certain the world was his oyster, that it seemed a shame not to give his pride a tumble—for his own sake, of course.
“Has he got the eight thousand on him, do you think?” asked the green-goods one, his interest rapidly increasing.
“Not so you could notice it,” replied Daw with conviction. “He’s a wise prop, I tell you. He’s probably lugging about five hundred in his kick, just for running expenses, and has a time-lock on the rest.”