He had sold out his business, and when he landed in New York he had a bank roll of twenty-one thousand dollars.
It was enough to make any ordinary man round shouldered, but he was a husky guy who was used to the long green, and it didn’t bother him any more than if it had been beef-and-bean money.
He put up at a big swell hotel, and during the evening, when time hung a bit heavy on his hands, he got it into his head that he would take a walk down the line, and then turn in among the feathers.
With a perfecto between his teeth, he got as far as Thirty-eighth street, where he met his finish.
When he arrived at his hotel at ten o’clock the next morning he asked the proprietor to loan him twenty dollars to get home.
No explanations go with this, because he was sport enough never to tell how it happened. It doesn’t even point a moral, for there are no morals on the line.
Going down the street, like a yacht under full sail, is a woman whom it cost not a cent less than $750 to put in commission. In the male vernacular she is what might be termed a peach, and there is no need to translate that for you, for the simple reason that you are familiar enough with the different kinds of fruit to know what that means.
Because of her figure and the fact that she was a good fellow she was an attraction at the beach.
She has a history, of course. They all have, to a certain extent, but this is somewhat out of the ordinary.
In her day—and her day wasn’t so many years ago—she was a noted beauty, and she had one of the most charming apartments in New York. It was frequented by what might be termed the high-class sporting crowd—lawyers with national reputations, actors whose names were in big type on the billboards, business men who posed as the bulwarks of the commercial world, and politicians who waxed sleek and fat at the public cribs. They played poker there and were entertained royally by her. She gave the choicest of dinners and served the best of wines, and she was a perfect hostess. Her rooms were more like a club than anything else, and she was never annoyed by any love-making on the part of her guests, for a very good, substantial and simple reason—the man who paid the shot and who figured as the real one in that charmed and exclusive circle was none other than a high official of New York.