This fellow was good to the girls, and could be relied on for a five-case note on a hurry touch at any time, for he had no buttons on his pockets, and he knew that safe deposit vaults in heaven are only used for the storing of golden crowns in hot weather.
“If I can’t take my money with me,” he said once, “then I’ll spend it here, for if there’s anything in the world that I hate it is to think that there’s going to be a lot of hungry relatives picking over the bones of my estate before I get comfortably settled in the six feet of real estate that no one can beat me out of. The money’s got to be spent some time, and I’m going to be the one to get the credit for it because it’s mine.”
But there came a time in his life when he felt that he wanted to get away from the mob. He had been stung by the bee of domesticity and didn’t know it. What he did know was that he wanted a place with a real woman in it, where he could hang his hat and that he could call his own. If he had wanted to put his brains at work he would have known that it was nothing more nor less than the law of nature which had him fast—that same law which makes a bird build a nest in a tree, or a wild animal pre-empt a bed of moss under the roots of a certain tree.
It was the home instinct.
So he began to cast his eye around for a side partner whom he could have and hold, even if he had to coax her up to the altar with a marriage license printed in red and gold and lasso her with a wedding ring. From that time on he was always on the alert for the right one to come along, and every time he heard a sound like a skirt he made an investigation. In about ten days he turned down all the Dollies and Mauds of the Line, for he couldn’t see where they would have a look-in if the cook happened to leave in a hurry and he arrived home with a backwoods appetite. You see he wanted a gas-stove performer who could in an emergency tell the difference between a roast and a ragout in the raw state, and who could juggle with a lot of cold grub in the ice box, and turn out a square meal that was not only hot but nourishing. He was tired of restaurant hash, anyhow, and he was longing for the kind of biscuits that mother used to make.
He figured for awhile on a girl named Elsie, who could make a cocktail to beat the band, and who could also drink more and get away with it than any of the rest. She was a good looker, too, and she had trotted in double harness before, but he found out that she was a bit promiscuous in her tastes, and he didn’t care to feel that he had to stay at home all the time in order to keep her from entertaining any stranger in a pair of trousers who happened along. So he put a red cross, which means “Danger, Keep Off,” opposite her name, and began looking in another direction.
He changed his tactics completely.
“I’m on now,” he said to himself. “I’ll hunt up some nice little innocent girl who doesn’t know anything of the world, and who has taken a course in a cooking school. I want the kind whose ambition in life is to be boss of a nice three-story house, and who doesn’t care any more for Broadway than a hobo does for a hot bath. I’ll just hunt up some mother’s girl who has her hair hanging down her back in a big, thick braid, and I’ll sing her a song that’ll make her think I’m the real thing on wheels.”
So with that very laudable and commendable idea he started out. He didn’t figure that a tough old nut like he was had any right to go up against a game like that, and that his play was to mix with people of his own class. But you’ll find in nine cases out of ten that the worse a man is or has been the more innocence and purity he wants when he is figuring on giving a sky pilot a chance to make a dollar or two.
But having made up his mind the kind of a field he was going to hunt, the next question was how to break in. All the girls he knew were, without exception, of the brand which are at their best when the lights are turned on, who rent flats for business purposes, and who change quarters when an intimation is made by the captain of a police precinct that the change will do them good. To save his life he couldn’t figure out this new proposition, and he was like the man who bought a new double-barreled shotgun and then found out he couldn’t get a permit to hunt the birds the old farmer owned.