The Kid had got Professor Parducci to fix him up with a few love charms and owls' ears by which he was gonna make himself solid with Miss Vincent. In fact Scanlan fell so hard for the medium stuff that when the professor told him to get at all cost a lock of Miss Vincent's hair clipped at eighteen minutes after eleven on a rainy Sunday night, he writes out to her and asks her to send him a lock cut just that way!
When he wasn't pesterin' the professor on how to win the movie queen, he was goin' around mutterin', "Loyal, likeable Lithuanians and generous gobs of Gazoopis!" until the newspaper guys wrote that Kid Scanlan would be a mark for the first good boy he fought, because like everybody else that was a sudden success, he had took to usin' stimulants which is only sold on a doctor's prescription. On the level, he'd git a wad of paper and sit around all night with a dictionary, writin' down all the words that begin with the same letter and then he'd git up and repeat that stuff for a hour.
One afternoon we went downtown to look over this joint run by Honest Dan and the professor. It was in one of them studio buildings on Fifth Avenue near Twenty-Eighth Street, and the rent they was payin' for it would have kept the army in rubber heels for six years. They's a long line of autos outside and the inmates was streamin' in and out of the place like a crowd goin' to see the beloved rector laid out. Some of the dames would be familiar to you, if you've been readin' the box scores in the latest divorce mêlées, or the lineup of the committee for the aid of the Esquimaux victims of the war.
We get in a elevator, and, floatin' up to the roof, walk down what would have been a fire trap on the East Side, and here we are at Professor Parducci's Temple of the Inner Star. A couple of West Indian hall boys, who's gag line was "Say-hib," lets us in. They was dressed in sheets and had towels twisted around their heads and smelled strongly of gin. Pretty soon Honest Dan comes out and shakes hands all around. Except for his face, you'd never know it was the same guy. His hair is brushed all the way back like the guys that poses for the underwear ads and he's dressed in a black suit that fit him better than most of his skin. In his shirt front they's a diamond that looked like a young arc light, and he had enough gems on his hands to make J. P. Morgan gnash his teeth.
He told me that him and the professor wasn't doin' no more business than a guy would do in Hades with the ice water concession, and that Barnum was wrong when he said they was a sucker born every minute. Honest Dan said his figures showed there was about two born every second.
He leads us into a great big hall that was filled with statues, pictures, rugs, sofas, women and fatheads. The furnishings of this joint would make Buckingham Palace look like a stable. It must have ruined the Kid's five thousand just to lay in scenery for that one room alone. The statues and pictures was nearly all devoted to one subject, and that was why should people wear clothes—especially women? The victims is all lollin' around on them plush sofas, drinkin' tea and lookin' like a ten-year-old kid at church or a guy waitin' in the doctor's office to find out if he's got consumption or chilblains. It was as quiet as a Sunday in Philadelphia and they was also a very strong smell of burnin' glue, which Honest Dan said was sacred incense that always had to be used by the professor before he could work.
Among the decorations was a very large dame sittin' over in a corner dressed within a inch of her life. I suppose she had ears, a neck and hands, but you couldn't tell right away whether she had or not, because them parts of her anatomy, as the feller says, was buried under a carload of diamonds. You could see by her face that at one time she had probably been a swell-lookin' dame, but them days was all over. Still, she was makin' a game try at comin' back, and from her complexion she must have been kept busy day and night openin' bottles and cans signed on the outside by Lillian Russell and etc.
This dame was havin' the best time of anybody in the joint. She was sittin' up very straight and solemn with both chins restin' in her glitterin' hands and from the look in her eyes some Sunday paper had just claimed she was the best lookin' woman in America and the like.
A guy wouldn't have to be no Sherlock Holmes to see that this was the bird that was bein' readied for the big killin' by Honest Dan and his trick professor. The rest of them was just what you might call the chorus.
Sittin' right beside the stout party was a kid that had just dropped in from the cover of a magazine. She was the kind of female that could come down to breakfast with the mumps and her hair in curl papers, fry the egg on the wrong side and yet make the lucky guy across the table go out whistlin' and pityin' his unwed friends. You know how them dames look when they have give some time to dollin' up, don't you? Well, this one had everything; take it from me, she was a knockout! She's tappin' the floor with a classy little foot and tryin' to see can she pull a silk handkerchief apart with her bare hands, the while registerin' this, "This-medium-thing-is-the-bunk-and-I-wish-I-was-out-of-here!"