“Come on,” Doherty cried. “Let’s blow off up the island together. I’m lookin’ fer a job boostin’ er ballyhooin’ er somethin’.”
It was the voice of temptation sweetly tuned to “Shine’s” own inclination. He could, in fact, get back to the fire-boat more quickly by rail than by water; and even if he did not—if he “stopped over” long enough to call on “Goldy” and the “gang”—the Leo would carry back word of his accident in the forepeak, and he could invent more excuses to explain his further delay.
He said, “Let’s get the boots.” And when the Leo tied up at her pier on the Coney Island beach, he was helped ashore by Doherty and a deck-hand who had lent him a hat, a coat and a pair of shoes for two dollars.
XIX
THE Coney Island that they landed on is gone now. It was a shouting gypsy fair of side shows, beer gardens, dance halls, chowder tents, shooting galleries and unsavory “joints.” It was not a sweet resort, but “Shine” walked through it, like an old graduate through the corridors of his college, fondly reminiscent. He laughed at the “ballyhoo man” drawing the crowd to a booth with his sword-swallowing and his fire-eating. He listened appreciatively to the art of a “spieler” praising a “performance inside;” and he turned to smile on a “booster” who put a shoulder behind him and gently impelled him towards the ticket office. He sniffed the odor of steaming frankfurters and fried crabs. He stood grinning before a merry-go-round that ground out a deafening cacophany from a German organ. And Doherty, beside him, had to stand and listen, grin and comment, with a hypocritical pretence of delight—working his toes secretly in his broken shoes, meanwhile, to ease the itch of his impatience to get on.
They got on, at last, to a saloon which Doherty had been heading for. It was a pine “front” with a sign that pictured a beer glass as big as a pail, marked “My Size! Five Cents!” They went past the bar to the deserted little drinking room beyond it, and sat down at a table beside a door which “Shine” did not notice—and Doherty did. The walls were covered with colored tissue papers, cut and folded in fans and circles, and with printed invitations to the public not to forget the “receptions” of some half-dozen “associations.” These were a “Welcome Home” to “Shine”; and he read them almost sentimentally while Doherty was gone to speak to the “barkeep” who was a “frien’” of his.
When he came back with two glasses of beer, “Shine” received his glass with a “Here’s lookin’ at yuh” that was warm. He drank a deep libation, open-throated, without tasting. He put the glass down and smiled. “Bum booze,” he said, clucking over a bitterness that burned his tongue.
Doherty kept his snub nose in his “schooner.”