He would have been prepared to see the thing through by himself, but there was no doubt that John as an ally would be a distinct comfort.
Nevertheless, he felt compelled to give his friend a last chance of withdrawing.
"You know," he said, "there is really no reason why you should—"
"But I'm going to," interrupted John. "That's all there is to it. What's going to happen, anyway? I don't know anything about these gangs. I thought they spent all their time shooting each other up."
"Not all, unfortunately, Comrade John. They are always charmed to take on a small job like this on the side."
"And what does it come to? Do we have an entire gang camping on our trail in a solid mass, or only one or two toughs?"
"Merely a section, I should imagine. Comrade Parker would go to the main boss of the gang—Bat Jarvis, if it was the Groome Street gang, or Spider Reilly and Dude Dawson if he wanted the Three Points or the Table Hill lot. The boss would chat over the matter with his own special partners, and they would fix it up among themselves. The rest of the gang would probably know nothing about it. The fewer in the game, you see, the fewer to divide the Parker dollars. So what we have to do is to keep a lookout for a dozen or so aristocrats of that dignified deportment which comes from constant association with the main boss, and, if we can elude these, all will be well."
It was by Smith's suggestion that the editorial staff of Peaceful Moments dined that night at the Astor roof-garden.
"The tired brain," he said, "needs to recuperate. To feed on such a night as this in some low-down hostelry on the level of the street, with German waiters breathing heavily down the back of one's neck and two fiddles and a piano hitting up ragtime about three feet from one's tympanum, would be false economy. Here, fanned by cool breezes and surrounded by passably fair women and brave men, one may do a certain amount of tissue-restoring. Moreover, there is little danger up here of being slugged by our moth-eaten acquaintance of this afternoon. We shall probably find him waiting for us at the main entrance with a black-jack, but till then—"