“I’m afraid they don’t,” he confessed. “They take the old ones that have got the money for years, and work in new props and scenery on them, just like they do in the theaters; and that goes for Broadway.”
“It don’t go for me,” declared Wallingford. “If they come after mine again I’ll get real peevish and take their flash rolls away from them.”
“Go to it,” invited Blackie. “They need a trimming.”
“I think I’ll hand it to them,” said Wallingford savagely, and started to walk out.
“Where are you going?” asked the other.
“I don’t know,” said Wallingford, “but I am going to scare up some excitement in the only way possible for a stranger, and that is go out and hunt for it by myself. No New Yorker knows where to go.”
In the bar Wallingford found a convivial gentleman from Georgia, lonesome like himself, with whom he became firm friends in an hour, and it was after midnight when, their friendship still further fixed by plenty of liquid cement, he left the Georgian at one of the broad, bright entrances in charge of a door-man. It being but a few blocks to his own hotel, he walked, carrying with complacent satisfaction a burden of assorted beverages that would have staggered most men.
It was while he was pausing upon his own corner for a moment to consider the past evening in smiling retrospection, that a big-boned policeman tapped him on the shoulder. He was startled for a moment, but a hearty voice reassured him with:
“Why, hello, Wix, my boy! When did you come to town?”
A smile broke over Wallingford’s face as he shook hands with the bluecoat.