“Painted out black eyes and that sort of thing. Fact—out in Chicago.”
“My word!” said Tootles, overjoyed to see a beam of good humor breaking through the clouds. “I wonder that I associate with such persons.”
“Leaving out the dog-catcher,” said O’Leary, falling with gusto to the attack of his heaped-up plate, “I do believe, with the exception of preaching and tooth-extracting, I’ve tried them all. I’ve run a country paper. There’s a story there I’ll give you some day. Lord! I even taught school in the Philippines to the pesky heathen. Have mined for gold, silver, copper, diamonds, and zinc, from Cripple Creek to Kimberley. I’ve traded and sold everything from a thousand cattle to peddling collar-buttons at the Queen’s Jubilee. I’ve been a bartender in Paree, and into a peck of trouble, too. I’ve run a steam laundry in Porto Ricky and had the whole danged business washed away in a hurricane. I’ve dipped into a few spring revolutions in South Americky, and I rode out with Jameson in the raid that kicked out the whole African mess. Got in and out of Kimberley, and joined the Rough Riders with Teddy—here’s to him! Never was much of a sailor, but I’ve seen my time before the mast through the Southern seas (that’s how I appreciated your nautical terms, boy) when I stowed away for Chiny and Calcutta. Lord, where haven’t I been?”
“O’Leary, you’re either a hell of a big liar or a regular fellow,” said Flick, cheerfully, “and either way, I’m for you.”
“Maybe I’m blowing too much,” said O’Leary quietly. “But it’s sort o’ whistling in the wind to keep your courage up. However, I’ve laid my cards on the table. That’s me. Well, this is starting good enough to keep it going. What do you say to taking in a show? There’s something in the line of vaudeville over at the Colonial?”
“Is there so much money in the world?” said Tootles doubtfully.
“Boy, a taxi!” said King O’Leary, pounding on the table gorgeously.
“I’m beginning to feel like the Fourth of July,” said Flick, who gave in completely with this last display of magnificence.
“That’s what we’ll make it,” said King O’Leary. “Schnapps, steal the change. Come on.”
The visit to the theater was the undoing of all the good work accomplished, nor could the result have been foreseen. The orchestra was comfortably filled with an indiscriminate scattering of transients, plainly marooned, and the three friends, being resolved to laughter, applauded the opening numbers with such zest that they woke up the torpid house and had the entertainers gratefully aiming their shafts in the direction of their box for the pure joy of rousing King O’Leary’s soul-filling, rumbling laughter, to hear which was infection itself. The outer world, the season, and the calendar had been shut away as they roared over the grotesque tumbles and trippings of a comic acrobat who gyrated fearfully on a bicycle the size of a house, when the curtain went down and up again on the Lovibond Sisters. “Sweet Singers from the South,” who, according to the program, “would introduce sentimental favorites.”