"I'm sure going to beat it in one minute," says Jeff Tuttle, "if one of 'em don't exclaim: 'Oh, girls, here comes the little dancer!'"
"I know a black-face turn that could put this show on its feet," says Lon Price, "and that Waldo in the sport suit ain't any real reason why wives leave home—you can't tell me!"
"I dare say this leading woman needs a better vehicle," says the New Yorker in a hoarse whisper.
"I dare say it, too," says Jeff Tuttle in a still hoarser whisper. "A better vehicle! She needs a motor truck, and I'd order one quick if I thought she'd take it."
Of course this was not refined of Jeff. The New Yorker winced and loyal Ben glares at all of us that has been muttering, so we had to set there till the curtain went down on the ruined home where all was lost save honour—and looking like that would have to go, too, in the next act. But Ben saw it wasn't safe to push us any further so he now said this powerful play was too powerful for a bunch of low-brows like us and we all rushed out into the open air. Everybody cheered up a lot when we got there—seeing the nice orderly street traffic without a gripping moment in it. Lon Price said it was too late to go to a theatre, so what could we do to pass the time till morning? Ben says he has a grand idea and we can carry it out fine with this New York man to guide us. His grand idea is that we all go down on the Bowery and visit tough dives where the foul creatures of the underworld consort and crime happens every minute or two. We was still mad enough about that play to like the idea. A good legitimate murder would of done wonders for our drooping spirits. So Ben puts it up to the New Yorker and he says yes, he knows a vicious resort on the Bowery, but we'd ought to have a detective from central office along to protect us from assault. Ben says not at all—no detective—unless the joints has toughened up a lot since he used to infest 'em, and we all said we'd take a chance, so again we was in taxicabs. Us four in the second cab was now highly cynical about Ben's New Yorker. The general feeling was that sooner or later he would sink the ship.
Then we reach the dive he has picked out; a very dismal dive with a room back of the bar that had a few tables and a piano in it and a sweet-singing waiter. He was singing a song about home and mother, that in mem-o-ree he seemed to see, when we got to our table. A very gloomy and respectable haunt of vice it was, indeed. There was about a dozen male and female creatures of the underworld present sadly enjoying this here ballad and scowling at us for talking when we come in.
Jake Berger ordered, though finding you couldn't get stingers here and having to take two miner's inches of red whiskey, and the New Yorker begun to warn us in low tones that we was surrounded by danger on every hand—that we'd better pour our drink on the floor because it would be drugged, after which we would be robbed if not murdered and thrown out into the alley where we would then be arrested by grafting policemen. Even Ben was shocked by this warning. He asks the New Yorker again if he is sure he was born in the old town, and the lad says honest he was and has been living right here all these years in the same house he was born in. Ben is persuaded by these words and gives the singing waiter a five and tells him to try and lighten the gloom with a few crimes of violence or something. The New Yorker continued to set stiff in his chair, one hand on his watch and one on the pocket where his change purse was that he'd tried to pay his share of the taxicabs out of.
The gloom-stricken piano player now rattled off some ragtime and the depraved denizens about us got sadly up and danced to it. Say, it was the most formal and sedate dancing you ever see, with these gun men holding their guilty partners off at arm's length and their faces all drawn down in lines of misery. They looked like they might be a bunch of strict Presbyterians that had resolved to throw all moral teaching to the winds for one purple moment let come what might. I want to tell you these depraved creatures of the underworld was darned near as depressing as that play had been. Even the second round of drinks didn't liven us up none because the waiter threw down his cigarette and sung another tearful song. This one was about a travelling man going into a gilded cabaret and ordering a port wine and a fair young girl come out to sing in short skirts that he recognized to be his boyhood's sweetheart Nell; so he sent a waiter to ask her if she had forgot the song she once did sing at her dear old mother's knee, or knees, and she hadn't forgot it and proved she hadn't, because the chorus was "Nearer My God to Thee" sung to ragtime; then the travelling man said she must be good and pure, so come on let's leave this place and they'd be wed.
Yes, sir; that's what Ben had got for his five, so this time he give the waiter a twenty not to sing any more at all. The New Yorker was horrified at the sight of a man giving away money, but it was well spent and we begun to cheer up a little. Ben told the New Yorker about the time his dog team won the All Alaska Sweepstake Race, two hundred and six miles from Nome to Candle and back, the time being 76 hours, 16 minutes, and 28 seconds, and showed him the picture of his lead dog pasted in the back of his watch. And Jake Berger got real gabby at last and told the story about the old musher going up the White Horse Trail in a blizzard and meeting the Bishop, only he didn't know it was the Bishop. And the Bishop says, "How's the trail back of you, my friend?" and the old musher just swore with the utmost profanity for three straight minutes. Then he says to the Bishop, "And what's it like back of you?" and the Bishop says, "Just like that!" Jake here got embarrassed from talking so much and ordered another round of this squirrel poison we was getting, and Jeff Tuttle begun his imitation of the Sioux squaw with a hare lip reciting "Curfew Shall Not Ring To-night." It was a pretty severe ordeal for the rest of us, but we was ready to endure much if it would make this low den seem more homelike. Only when Jeff got about halfway through the singing waiter comes up, greatly shocked, and says none of that in here because they run an orderly place, and we been talking too loud anyway. This waiter had a skull exactly like a picture of one in a book I got that was dug up after three hundred thousand years and the scientific world couldn't ever agree whether it was an early man or a late ape. I decided I didn't care to linger in a place where a being with a head like this could pass on my diversions and offenses so I made a move to go. Jeff Tuttle says to this waiter, "Fie, fie upon you, Roscoe! We shall go to some respectable place where we can loosen up without being called for it." The waiter said he was sorry, but the Bowery wasn't Broadway. And the New Yorker whispered that it was just as well because we was lucky to get out of this dive with our lives and property—and even after that this anthropoid waiter come hurrying out to the taxis after us with my fur piece and my solid gold vanity-box that I'd left behind on a chair. This was a bitter blow to all of us after we'd been led to hope for outrages of an illegal character. The New Yorker was certainly making a misdeal every time he got the cards. None of us trusted him any more, though Ben was still loyal and sensitive about him, like he was an only child and from birth had not been like other children.
The lad now wanted to steer us into an Allied Bazaar that would still be open, because he'd promised to sell twenty tickets to it and had 'em on him untouched. But we shut down firmly on this. Even Ben was firm. He said the last bazaar he'd survived was their big church fair in Nome that lasted two nights and one day and the champagne booth alone took in six thousand dollars, and even the beer booth took in something like twelve hundred, and he didn't feel equal to another affair like that just yet.