“Lord, but it’s good to be in New York again, Norman!” he exclaimed. “The old burg is the greatest little spot on God’s green earth, let me tell you! The sight and sound and smell of it get into a fellow’s blood. Talk about the East a-calling! It’s deaf and dumb compared to the urge of little old Manhattan!”
“Feel that way about it?” Storm’s lips curled as he remembered his own glowing, futile dreams of the Far East.
“You bet I do!” Horton shifted his umbrella to grasp more firmly the small black bag which he was carrying. “Do you know, Norman, there have been nights down in Mexico and up in Alaska and out on the plains when I would have given five years of my life for an hour here! Mind you, it isn’t so much the bright lights—I can’t afford, for more reasons than one, to cut loose as I used to—but it’s what these literary cusses call ‘atmosphere’, I guess; there’s something in life here, any phase of it, that gets under a guy’s skin and makes him itch to get back!”
“Mexico? Alaska?” repeated Storm with unconscious envy. “You’ve been about a bit, Jack, haven’t you?”
“Surest thing you know!” The other laughed, adding, as Storm halted: “This where you hang out? Oh, boy! Some class to you!”
“I took these rooms off the hands of a friend only lately,” Storm replied, wincing in spite of himself at Horton’s uncouth appreciation. “I have lived out of town for years.”
He opened the apartment door and switched on the lights, and his companion gave a low whistle.
“Some class!” he repeated admiringly. “You must have made good, Norman.”
There was an element of surprise in his tone that nettled his host.
“I’m an official of the Mammoth Trust Company, you know,” he said loftily. “Let me take your coat, Jack, and just put your bag down anywhere.”