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+Project Gutenberg's The Life of the Party, by Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Life of the Party
+
+Author: Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
+
+Illustrator: James M. Preston
+
+Release Date: November 9, 2008 [EBook #27212]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE OF THE PARTY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Bryan Ness, Martin Pettit and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+_The Life of the Party_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+BY IRVIN S. COBB
+
+FICTION
+
+THE LIFE OF THE PARTY
+THOSE TIMES AND THESE
+LOCAL COLOR
+OLD JUDGE PRIEST
+FIBBLE, D. D.
+BACK HOME
+THE THUNDERS OF SILENCE
+THE ESCAPE OF MR. TRIMM
+
+WIT AND HUMOR
+
+EATING IN TWO OR THREE LANGUAGES
+"SPEAKING OF OPERATIONS----"
+EUROPE REVISED
+ROUGHING IT DE LUXE
+COBB'S BILL OF FARE
+COBB'S ANATOMY
+
+MISCELLANY
+
+THE GLORY OF THE COMING
+PATHS OF GLORY
+"SPEAKING OF PRUSSIANS----"
+
+GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
+NEW YORK
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Illustration: "ARE YOU PAYIN' AN ELECTION BET THREE WEEKS AFTER THE
+ELECTION'S OVER? OR IS IT THAT YOU'RE JEST A PLAIN BEDADDLED IJIET?"]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_The Life of the Party
+
+By
+
+Irvin S. Cobb
+
+Author of "Back Home," "Old Judge Priest," etc., etc.
+
+Illustrated By James M. Preston_
+
+[Illustration: Publisher's logo]
+
+_New York George H. Doran Company_
+
+
+_Copyright, 1919,
+By George H. Doran Company
+
+Copyright, 1919, by the Curtis Publishing Company
+Printed in the United States of America_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+TO
+
+MISTRESS MAY WILSON PRESTON
+
+A LADY OF GREAT DRAWING QUALITIES
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_ILLUSTRATIONS_
+
+
+"Are you payin' an election bet three weeks after the
+  election's over? Or is it that you're jest a plain
+  bedaddled ijiet?"                          _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                       PAGE
+"That's nice," spake the fearsome stranger. "Now
+  stay jest the way you are and don't make no
+  peep or I'll have to plug you wit' this here gat"      24
+
+Mr. Leary's gait became a desperate gallop, and as
+  he galloped he shouted: "Wait, please, here I
+  am.--Here's your passenger"                            32
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_The Life of the Party_
+
+
+I
+
+It had been a successful party, most successful. Mrs. Carroway's parties
+always were successes, but this one nearing its conclusion stood out
+notably from a long and unbroken Carrowayian record. It had been a
+children's party; that is to say, everybody came in costume with intent
+to represent children of any age between one year and a dozen years. But
+twelve years was the limit; positively nobody, either in dress or
+deportment, could be more than twelve years old. Mrs. Carroway had made
+this point explicit in sending out the invitations, and so it had been,
+down to the last hair ribbon and the last shoe buckle. And between
+dances they had played at the games of childhood, such as drop the
+handkerchief, and King William was King James' son and prisoner's base
+and the rest of them.
+
+The novelty of the notion had been a main contributory factor to its
+success; that, plus the fact that nine healthy adults out of ten dearly
+love to put on freakish garbings and go somewhere. To be exactly
+truthful, the basic idea itself could hardly be called new, since long
+before some gifted mind thought out the scheme of giving children's
+parties for grown-ups, but with her customary brilliancy Mrs. Carroway
+had seized upon the issues of the day to serve her social purposes,
+weaving timeliness and patriotism into the fabric of her plan by making
+it a war party as well. Each individual attending was under pledge to
+keep a full and accurate tally of the moneys expended upon his or her
+costume and upon arrival at the place of festivities to deposit a like
+amount in a repository put in a conspicuous spot to receive these
+contributions, the entire sum to be handed over later to the guardians
+of a military charity in which Mrs. Carroway was active.
+
+It was somehow felt that this fostered a worthy spirit of wartime
+economy, since the donation of a person who wore an expensive costume
+would be relatively so much larger than the donation of one who went in
+for the simpler things. Moreover, books of thrift stamps were attached
+to the favours, the same being children's toys of guaranteed American
+manufacture.
+
+In the matter of refreshments Mrs. Carroway had been at pains to comply
+most scrupulously with the existing rationing regulations. As the
+hostess herself said more than once as she moved to and fro in a
+flounced white frock having the exaggeratedly low waistline of the sort
+of frock which frequently is worn by a tot of tender age, with a wide
+blue sash draped about her almost down at her knees, and with fluffy
+skirts quite up to her knees, with her hair caught up in a coquettish
+blue bow on the side of her head and a diminutive fan tied fast to one
+of her wrists with a blue ribbon--so many of the ladies who had attained
+to Mrs. Carroway's fairly well-ripened years did go in for these
+extremely girlishly little-girly effects--as the hostess thus attired
+and moving hither and yon remark, "If Mr. Herbert Hoover himself were
+here as one of my guests to-night I am just too perfectly sure he could
+find absolutely nothing whatsoever to object to!"
+
+It would have required much stretching of that elastic property, the
+human imagination, to conceive of Mr. Herbert Hoover being there,
+whether in costume or otherwise, but that was what Mrs. Carroway said
+and repeated. Always those to whom she spoke came right out and agreed
+with her.
+
+Now it was getting along toward three-thirty o'clock of the morning
+after, and the party was breaking up. Indeed for half an hour past, this
+person or that had been saying it was time, really, to be thinking about
+going--thus voicing a conviction that had formed at a much earlier hour
+in the minds of the tenants of the floor below Mrs. Carroway's studio
+apartment, which like all properly devised studio apartments was at the
+top of the building.
+
+It was all very well to be a true Bohemian, ready to give and take, and
+if one lived down round Washington Square one naturally made allowances
+for one's neighbours and all that, but half past three o'clock in the
+morning was half past three o'clock in the morning, and there was no
+getting round that, say what you would. And besides there were some
+people who needed a little sleep once in a while even if there were some
+other people who seemed to be able to go without any sleep; and finally,
+though patience was a virtue, enough of a good thing was enough and too
+much was surplusage. Such was the opinion of the tenants one flight
+down.
+
+So the party was practically over. Mr. Algernon Leary, of the firm of
+Leary & Slack, counsellors and attorneys at law, with offices at Number
+Thirty-two Broad Street, was among the very last to depart. Never had
+Mr. Leary spent a more pleasant evening. He had been in rare form, a
+variety of causes contributing to this happy state. To begin with, he
+had danced nearly every dance with the lovely Miss Milly Hollister, for
+whom he entertained the feelings which a gentleman of ripened judgment,
+and one who was rising rapidly in his profession, might properly
+entertain for an entirely charming young woman of reputed means and
+undoubted social position.
+
+A preposterous ass named Perkins--at least, Mr. Leary mentally indexed
+Perkins as a preposterous ass--had brought Miss Hollister to the party,
+but thereafter in the scheme of things Perkins did not count. He was a
+cipher. You could back him up against a wall and take a rubber-tipped
+pencil and rub him right out, as it were; and with regards to Miss
+Hollister that, figuratively, was what Mr. Leary had done to Mr.
+Perkins. Now on the other hand Voris might have amounted to something as
+a potential rival, but Voris being newly appointed as a police
+magistrate was prevented by press of official duties from coming to the
+party; so Mr. Leary had had a clear field, as the saying goes, and had
+made the most of it, as the other saying goes.
+
+Moreover, Mr. Leary had been the recipient of unlimited praise upon the
+ingenuity and the uniqueness expressed in his costume. He had not
+represented a Little Lord Fauntleroy or a Buster Brown or a Boy Scout or
+a Juvenile Cadet or a Midshipmite or an Oliver Twist. There had been
+three Boy Scouts present and four Buster Browns and of sailor-suited
+persons there had been no end, really. But Mr. Leary had chosen to
+appear as Himself at the Age of Three; and, as the complimentary comment
+proved, his get-up had reflected credit not alone upon its wearer but
+upon its designer, Miss Rowena Skiff, who drew fashion pictures for one
+of the women's magazines. Out of the goodness of her heart and the
+depths of her professional knowledge Miss Skiff had gone to Mr. Leary's
+aid, supervising the preparation of his wardrobe at a theatrical
+costumer's shop up-town and, on the evening before, coming to his
+bachelor apartments, accompanied by her mother, personally to add those
+small special refinements which meant so much, as he now realised, in
+attaining the desired result.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Leary, I must tell you again how very fetching you do look!
+Your costume is adorable, really it is; so--so cute and everything. And
+I don't know what I should have done without you to help in the games
+and everything. There's no use denying it, Mr. Leary--you were the life
+of the party, absolutely!"
+
+At least twice during the night Mrs. Carroway had told Mr. Leary this,
+and now as he bade her farewell she was saying it once more in
+practically the same words, when Mrs. Carroway's coloured maid, Blanche,
+touched him on the arm.
+
+"'Scuse me, suh," apologised Blanche, "but the hall man downstairs he
+send up word jes' now by the elevator man 'at you'd best be comin' right
+on down now, suh, effen you expects to git a taxicab. He say to tell you
+they ain't but one taxicab left an' the driver of 'at one's been
+waitin' fur hours an' he act like he might go way any minute now. 'At's
+whut the hall man send word, suh."
+
+Blanche had brought his overcoat along and held it up for him, imparting
+to the service that small suggestion of a ceremonial rite which the
+members of her race invariably do display when handling a garment of
+richness of texture and indubitable cost. Mr. Leary let her help him
+into the coat and slipped largess into her hand, and as he stepped
+aboard the waiting elevator for the downward flight Mrs. Carroway's
+voice came fluting to him, once again repeating the flattering phrase:
+"You surely were the life of the party!"
+
+
+II
+
+It was fine to have been the life of the party. It was not quite so fine
+to discover that the taxicab to which he must entrust himself for the
+long ride up to West Eighty-fifth Street was a most shabby-appearing
+vehicle, the driver of which, moreover, as Mr. Leary could divine even
+as he crossed the sidewalk, had wiled away the tedium of waiting by
+indulgence in draughts of something more potent than the chill air of
+latish November. Mr. Leary peered doubtfully into the illuminated
+countenance but dulled eyes of the driver and caught a whiff of a breath
+alcoholically fragrant, and he understood that the warning relayed to
+him by Blanche had carried a subtle double meaning. Still, there was no
+other taxicab to be had. The street might have been a byway in old
+Pompeii for all the life that moved within it. Washington Square, facing
+him, was as empty as a graveyard generally is at this hour, and the
+semblance of a conventional graveyard in wintertime was helped out by a
+light snow--the first of the season--sifting down in large damp flakes.
+
+Twice and thrice he repeated the address, speaking each time sharply and
+distinctly, before the meaning seemed to filter into the befogged
+intellect of the inebriate. On the third rendition the latter roused
+from where he was slumped down.
+
+"I garcia, Steve," he said thickly. "I garcia firs' time only y'
+hollowed s'loud I couldn und'stancher."
+
+So saying he lurched into a semiupright posture and fumbled for the
+wheel. Silently condemning the curse of intemperance among the working
+classes of a great city Mr. Leary boarded the cab and drew the skirts of
+his overcoat down in an effort to cover his knees. With a harsh grating
+of clutches and an abrupt jerk the taxi started north.
+
+Wobbling though he was upon his perch the driver mechanically steered a
+reasonably straight course. The passenger leaning back in the depths of
+the cab confessed to himself he was a trifle weary and more than a
+trifle sleepy. At thirty-seven one does not dance and play children's
+games alternately for six hours on a stretch without paying for the
+exertion in a sensation of let-downness. His head slipped forward on his
+chest.
+
+
+III
+
+With a drowsy uncertainty as to whether he had been dozing for hours or
+only for a very few minutes Mr. Leary opened his eyes and sat up. The
+car was halted slantwise against a curbing; the chauffeur was jammed
+down again into a heap. Mr. Leary stepped nimbly forth upon the
+pavement, feeling in his overcoat pocket for the fare; and then he
+realised he was not in West Eighty-fifth Street at all; he was not in
+any street that he remembered ever having seen before in the course of
+his life. Offhand, though, he guessed he was somewhere in that mystic
+maze of brick and mortar known as Old Greenwich Village; and, for a
+further guess, in that particular part of it where business during these
+last few years had been steadily encroaching upon the ancient residences
+of long departed Knickerbocker families.
+
+The street in which he stood, for a wonder in this part of town, ran a
+fairly straight course. At its western foot he could make out through
+the drifting flakes where a squat structure suggestive of a North River
+freight dock interrupted the sky line. In his immediate vicinity the
+street was lined with tall bleak fronts of jobbing houses, all dark and
+all shuttered. Looking the other way, which would be eastward, he could
+make out where these wholesale establishments tailed off, to be
+succeeded by the lower shapes of venerable dwellings adorned with the
+dormered windows and the hip roofs which distinguished a bygone
+architectural period. Some distance off in this latter direction the
+vista between the buildings was cut across by the straddle-bug structure
+of one of the Elevated roads. All this Mr. Leary comprehended in a quick
+glance about him, and then he turned on the culprit cabman with rage in
+his heart.
+
+"See here, you!" he snapped crossly, jerking the other by the shoulder.
+"What do you mean by bringing me away off here! This isn't where I
+wanted to go. Oh, wake up, you!"
+
+Under his vigorous shaking the driver slid over sideways until he
+threatened to decant himself out upon Mr. Leary. His cap falling off
+exposed the blank face of one who for the time being has gone dead to
+the world and to all its carking cares, and the only response he offered
+for his mishandling was a deep and sincere snore. The man was hopelessly
+intoxicated; there was no question about it. More to relieve his own
+deep chagrin than for any logical reason Mr. Leary shook him again; the
+net results were a protesting semiconscious gargle and a further
+careening slant of the sleeper's form.
+
+Well, there was nothing else to do but walk. He must make his way afoot
+until he came to Sixth Avenue or on to Fifth, upon the chance of finding
+in one of these two thoroughfares a ranging nighthawk cab. As a last
+resort he could take the Subway or the L north. This contingency,
+though, Mr. Leary considered with feelings akin to actual repugnance. He
+dreaded the prospect of ribald and derisive comments from chance fellow
+travellers upon a public transportation line. For you should know that
+though Mr. Leary's outer garbing was in the main conventional there were
+strikingly incongruous features of it too.
+
+From his neck to his knees he correctly presented the aspect of a
+gentleman returning late from social diversions, caparisoned in a
+handsome fur-faced, fur-lined top coat. But his knees were entirely
+bare; so, too, were his legs down to about midway of the calves, where
+there ensued, as it were, a pair of white silk socks, encircled by pink
+garters with large and ornate pink ribbon bows upon them. His feet were
+bestowed in low slippers with narrow buttoned straps crossing the
+insteps. It was Miss Skiff, with her instinct for the verities, who had
+insisted upon bows for the garters and straps for the slippers, these
+being what she had called finishing touches. Likewise it was due to that
+young lady's painstaking desire for appropriateness and completeness of
+detail that Mr. Leary at this moment wore upon his head a very
+wide-brimmed, very floppy straw hat with two quaint pink-ribbon
+streamers floating jauntily down between his shoulders at the back.
+
+For reasons which in view of this sartorial description should be
+obvious, Mr. Leary hugged closely up to the abutting house fronts when
+he left behind him the marooned taxi with its comatose driver asleep
+upon it, like one lone castaway upon a small island in a sea of
+emptiness, and set his face eastward. Such was the warmth of his
+annoyance he barely felt the chill striking upon his exposed nether
+limbs or took note of the big snowflakes melting damply upon his thinly
+protected ankles. Then, too, almost immediately something befell which
+upset him still more.
+
+He came to where a wooden marquee, projecting over the entrance to a
+shipping room, made a black strip along the feebly lighted pavement. As
+he entered the patch of darkness the shape of a man materialised out of
+the void and barred his way, and in that same fraction of a second
+something shiny and hard was thrust against Mr. Leary's daunted bosom,
+and in a low forceful rumble a voice commanded him as follows: "Put up
+your mitts--and keep 'em up!"
+
+Matching the action of his hands everything in Mr. Leary seemed to
+start skyward simultaneously. His hair on his scalp straightened, his
+breath came up from his lungs in a gasp, his heart lodged in his throat,
+and his blood quit his feet, leaving them practically devoid of
+circulation and ascended and drummed in his temples. He had a horrid,
+emptied feeling in his diaphragm, too, as though the organs customarily
+resident there had caught the contagion of the example and gone north.
+
+"That's nice," spake the fearsome stranger. "Now stay jest the way you
+are and don't make no peep or I'll have to plug you wit' this here gat."
+
+[Illustration: "THAT'S NICE," SPAKE THE FEARSOME STRANGER. "NOW STAY
+JEST THE WAY YOU ARE AND DON'T MAKE NO PEEP OR I'LL HAVE TO PLUG YOU
+WIT' THIS HERE GAT"]
+
+His right hand maintained the sinister pressure of the weapon against
+the victim's deflated chest, while his left dexterously explored the
+side pockets of Mr. Leary's overcoat. Then the same left hand jerked the
+frogged fastenings of the garment asunder and went pawing swiftly over
+Mr. Leary's quivering person, seeking the pockets which would have been
+there had Mr. Leary been wearing garments bearing the regulation and
+ordained number of pockets. But the exploring fingers merely slid along
+a smooth and unbroken frontal surface.
+
+"Wot t'ell? Wot t'ell?" muttered the footpad in bewilderment. "Say,
+where're you got yore leather and yore kittle hid? Speak up quick!"
+
+"I'm--I'm--not carrying a watch or a purse to-night," quavered Mr.
+Leary. "These--these clothes I happen to be wearing are not made with
+places in them for a watch or anything. And you've already taken what
+money I had--it was all in my overcoat pocket."
+
+"Yep; a pinch of chicken feed and wot felt like about four one-bone
+bills." The highwayman's accent was both ominous and contemptuous. "Say,
+wotcher mean drillin' round dis town in some kinder funny riggin'
+wit'out no plunder on you? I gotta right to belt you one acrost the
+bean."
+
+"I'd rather you didn't do that," protested Mr. Leary in all seriousness.
+"If--if you'd only give me your address I could send you some money in
+the morning to pay you for your trouble----"
+
+"Cut out de kiddin'," broke in the disgusted marauder. His tone changed
+slightly for the better. "Say, near as I kin tell by feelin' it, dat
+ain't such a bum benny you're sportin'. I'll jest take dat along wit'
+me. Letcher arms down easy and hold 'em straight out from yore sides
+while I gits it offen you. And no funny business!"
+
+"Oh, please, please, don't take my overcoat," implored Mr. Leary,
+plunged by these words into a deeper panic. "Anything but that!
+I--you--you really mustn't leave me without my overcoat."
+
+"Wot else is dere to take?"
+
+Even as he uttered the scornful question the thief had wrested the
+garment from Mr. Leary's helpless form and was backing away into the
+darkness.
+
+Out of impenetrable gloom came his farewell warning: "Stay right where
+you are for fi' minutes wit'out movin' or makin' a yelp. If you wiggle
+before de time is up I gotta pal right yere watchin' you, and he'll sure
+plug you. He ain't no easy-goin' guy like wot I am. You're gittin' off
+lucky it's me stuck you up, stidder him."
+
+With these words he was gone--gone with Mr. Leary's overcoat, with Mr.
+Leary's last cent, with his latchkey, with his cardcase, with all by
+which Mr. Leary might hope to identify himself before a wary and
+incredulous world for what he was. He was gone, leaving there in the
+protecting ledge of shadow the straw-hatted, socked-and-slippered,
+leg-gartered figure of a plump being, clad otherwise in a single
+vestment which began at the line of a becomingly low neckband and
+terminated in blousy outbulging bifurcations just above the naked knees.
+Light stealing into this obscured and sheltered spot would have revealed
+that this garment was, as to texture, a heavy, silklike, sheeny,
+material; and as to colour a vivid and compelling pink--the exact colour
+of a slice of well-ripened watermelon; also that its sleeves ended
+elbow-high in an effect of broad turned-back cuffs; finally, that adown
+its owner's back it was snugly and adequately secured by means of a
+close-set succession of very large, very shiny white pearl buttons; the
+whole constituting an enlarged but exceedingly accurate copy of what,
+descriptively, is known to the manufactured-garment trade as a one-piece
+suit of child's rompers, self-trimmed, fastening behind; suitable for
+nursery, playground and seashore, especially recommended as summer wear
+for the little ones; to be had in all sizes; prices such-and-such.
+
+Within a space of some six or seven minutes this precisely was what the
+nearest street lamp did reveal unto itself as its downward-slanting
+beams fell upon a furtive, fugitive shape, suggestive in that deficient
+subradiance of a vastly overgrown forked parsnip, miraculously endowed
+with powers of locomotion and bound for somewhere in a hurry; excepting
+of course no forked parsnip, however remarkable in other respects, would
+be wearing a floppy straw hat in a snowstorm; nor is it likely it would
+be adorned lengthwise in its rear with a highly decorative design of
+broad, smooth, polished disks which, even in that poor illumination,
+gleamed and twinkled and wiggled snakily in and out of alignment, in
+accord with the movements of their wearer's spinal column.
+
+But the reader and I, better informed than any lamp post could be as to
+the prior sequence of events, would know at a glance it was no parsnip
+we beheld, but Mr. Algernon Leary, now suddenly enveloped, through no
+fault of his own, in one of the most overpowering predicaments
+conceivable to involve a rising lawyer and a member of at least two good
+clubs; and had we but been there to watch him, knowing, as we would
+know, the developments leading up to this present situation, we might
+have guessed what was the truth: That Mr. Leary was hot bent upon
+retreating to the only imaginable refuge left to him at this
+juncture--to wit, the interior of the stranded taxicab which he had
+abandoned but a short time previously.
+
+
+IV
+
+Nearly all of us at some time or other in our lives have dreamed awful
+dreams of being discovered in a public place with nothing at all upon
+our bodies, and have awakened, burning hot with the shame of an enormous
+and terrific embarrassment. Being no student of the psychic phenomena of
+human slumber I do not know whether this is a subconscious
+harking-back to the days of our infancy or whether it is merely a
+manifestation to prove the inadvisability of partaking of Welsh rabbits
+and lobster salads immediately before retiring. More than once Mr. Leary
+had bedreamed thus, but at this moment he realised how much more dread
+and distressing may be a dire actuality than a vision conjured up out of
+the mysteries of sleep.
+
+One surprised by strangers in a nude or partially nude state may have
+any one of a dozen acceptable excuses for being so circumstanced. An
+earthquake may have caught one unawares, say; or inopportunely a
+bathroom door may have blown open. Once the first shock occasioned by
+the untoward appearance of the victim has passed away he is sure of
+sympathy. For him pity is promptly engendered and volunteer aid is
+enlisted.
+
+But Mr. Leary had a profound conviction that, revealed in this ghastly
+plight before the eyes of his fellows, his case would be regarded
+differently; that instead of commiseration there would be for him only
+the derision which is so humiliating to a sensitive nature. He felt so
+undignified, so glaringly conspicuous, so--well, so scandalously
+immature. If only it had been an orthodox costume party which Mrs.
+Carroway had given, why, then he might have gone as a Roman senator or
+as a private chief or an Indian brave or a cavalier. In doublet or jack
+boots or war bonnet, in a toga, even, he might have mastered the dilemma
+and carried off a dubious situation. But to be adrift in an alien
+quarter of a great and heartless city round four o'clock in the morning,
+so picturesquely and so unseasonably garbed, and in imminent peril of
+detection, was a prospect calculated to fill one with the frenzied
+delirium of a nightmare made real. Put yourself in his place, I ask you.
+
+His slippered feet spurned the thin snow as he moved rapidly back toward
+the west. Ahead of him he could detect the clumped outlines of the
+taxicab, and at the sight of it he quickened to a trot. Once safely
+within it he could take stock of things; could map out a campaign of
+future action; could think up ways and means of extricating himself from
+his present lamentable case with the least possible risk of undesirable
+publicity. At any rate he would be shielded for the moment from the life
+which might at any moment awaken in the still sleeping and apparently
+vacant neighbourhood. Finally, of course, there was the hope that the
+drunken cabman might be roused, and once roused might be capable, under
+promise of rich financial reward, of conveying Mr. Leary to his bachelor
+apartments in West Eighty-fifth Street before dawn came, with its
+early-bird milkmen and its before-day newspaper distributors and its
+others too numerous to mention.
+
+Without warning of any sort the cab started off, seemingly of its own
+volition. Mr. Leary's gait became a desperate gallop, and as he galloped
+he gave voice in entreaty.
+
+[Illustration: MR. LEARY'S GAIT BECAME A DESPERATE GALLOP, AND AS HE
+GALLOPED HE SHOUTED: "WAIT, PLEASE. HERE I AM--HERE'S YOUR PASSENGER!"]
+
+"Hey there!" he shouted. "Wait, please. Here I am--here's your
+passenger!"
+
+His straw hat blew off, but this was no time to stop for a straw hat.
+For a few rods he gained upon the vehicle, then as its motion increased
+he lost ground and ran a losing race. Its actions disclosed that a
+conscious if an uncertain hand guided its destinies. Wabbling this way
+and that it wheeled skiddingly round a corner. When Mr. Leary, rowelled
+on to yet greater speed by the spurs of a mounting misery, likewise
+turned the corner it was irrevocably remote, beyond all prospect of
+being overtaken by anything human pursuing it afoot. The swaying black
+bulk of it diminished and was swallowed up in the snow shower and the
+darkness. The rattle of mishandled gears died to a thin metallic
+clanking, then to a purring whisper, and then the whisper expired, dead
+silence ensuing.
+
+
+V
+
+In the void of this silence stood Mr. Leary, shivering now in the
+reaction that had succeeded the nerve jar of being robbed at a pistol's
+point, and lacking the fervour of the chase to sustain him. For him the
+inconceivable disaster was complete and utter; upon him despair
+descended as a patent swatter upon a lone housefly. Miles away from
+home, penniless and friendless--the two terms being practically
+synonymous in New York--what asylum was there for him now? Suppose
+daylight found him abroad thus? Suppose he succumbed to exposure and was
+discovered stiffly frozen in a doorway? Death by processes of
+congealment must carry an added sting if one had to die in a suit of
+pink rompers buttoning down the back. As though the thought of freezing
+had been a cue to Nature he noted a tickling in his nose and a chokiness
+in his throat, and somewhere in his system, a long way off, so to speak,
+he felt a sneeze forming and approaching the surface.
+
+To add to his state of misery, if anything could add to its distressing
+total, he was taking cold. When Mr. Leary took cold he took it
+thoroughly and throughout his system. Very soon, as he knew by past
+experience, his voice would be hoarse and wheezy and his nose and his
+eyes would run. But the sneeze was delayed in transit, and Mr. Leary
+took advantage of the respite to cast a glance about him. Perhaps--the
+expedient had surged suddenly into his brain--perhaps there might be a
+hotel or a lodging house of sorts hereabouts? If so, such an
+establishment would have a night clerk on duty, and despite the
+baggageless and cashless state of the suppliant it was possible the
+night clerk might be won, by compassion or by argument or by both, to
+furnish Mr. Leary shelter until after breakfast time, when over the
+telephone he could reach friends and from these friends procure an
+outfit of funds and suitable clothing.
+
+In sight, though, there was no structure which by its outward appearance
+disclosed itself as a place of entertainment for the casual wayfarer.
+Howsomever, lights were shining through the frosted panes of a row of
+windows stretching across the top floor of a building immediately at
+hand, and even as he made this discovery Mr. Leary was aware of the
+dimmed sounds of revelry and of orchestral music up there, and also of
+an illuminated canvas triangle stuck above the hallway entrance of the
+particular building in question, this device bearing a lettered
+inscription upon it to advertise that here the members of the Lawrence
+P. McGillicuddy Literary Association and Pleasure Club were holding
+their Grand Annual Civic Ball; admission One Dollar, including Hat
+Check; Ladies Free when accompanied by Gents. Evidently the Lawrence P.
+McGillicuddys kept even later hours at their roisterings than the
+Bohemian sets in Washington Square kept.
+
+Observing these evidences of adjacent life and merry-makings Mr. Leary
+cogitated. Did he dare intrude upon the festivities aloft there? And if
+he did so dare would he enter cavortingly, trippingly, with intent to
+deceive the assembled company into the assumption that he had come to
+their gathering in costume; or would he throw himself upon their charity
+and making open confession of his predicament seek to enlist the
+friendly offices of some kindly soul in extricating him from it?
+
+While he canvassed the two propositions tentatively he heard the thud of
+footsteps descending the stairs from the dance hall, and governed by an
+uncontrollable impulse he leaped for concealment behind a pile of
+building material that was stacked handily upon the sidewalk almost at
+his elbow. He might possibly have driven himself to face a multitude
+indoors, but somehow could not, just naturally could not, in his present
+apparel, face one stranger outdoors--or at least not until he had
+opportunity to appraise the stranger.
+
+It was a man who emerged from the hallway entrance; a stockily built man
+wearing his hat well over one ear and with his ulster opened and flung
+back exposing a broad chest to the wintry air. He was whistling a
+sprightly air.
+
+Just as this individual came opposite the lumber pile the first
+dedicatory sneeze of a whole subsequent series of sneezes which had been
+burgeoning somewhere in the top of Mr. Leary's head, and which that
+unhappy gentleman had been mechanically endeavouring to suppress, burst
+from captivity with a vast moist report. At the explosion the passer-by
+spun about and his whistle expired in a snort of angered surprise as the
+bared head of Mr. Leary appeared above the topmost board of the pile,
+and Mr. Leary's abashed face looked into his.
+
+"Say," he demanded, "wotcher meanin', hidin' there and snortin' in a
+guy's ear?"
+
+His manner was truculent; indeed, verged almost upon the menacing.
+Evidently the shock had adversely affected his temper, to the point
+where he might make personal issues out of unavoidable trifles.
+Instinctively Mr. Leary felt that the situation which had arisen called
+for diplomacy of the very highest order. He cleared his throat before
+replying.
+
+"Good evening," he began, in what he vainly undertook to make a casual
+tone of voice. "I beg your pardon--the sneeze--ahem--occurred when I
+wasn't expecting it. Ahem--I wonder if you would do me a favour?"
+
+"I would not! Come snortin' in a guy's ear that-a-way and then askin'
+him would he do you a favour: You got a crust for fair!" Here, though, a
+natural curiosity triumphed over the rising tides of indignation. "Wot
+favour do you want, anyway?" he inquired shortly.
+
+"Would you--would you--I wonder if you would be willing to sell me that
+overcoat you're wearing?"
+
+"I would not!"
+
+"You see, the fact of the matter is I happened to be needing an overcoat
+very badly at the moment," pressed Mr. Leary. "I was hoping that you
+might be induced to name a price for yours."
+
+"I would not! M. J. Cassidy wears M. J. Cassidy's clothes, and nobody
+else wears 'em, believe me! Wot's happened to your own coat?"
+
+"I lost it--I mean it was stolen."
+
+"Stole?"
+
+"Yes, a robber with a revolver held me up a few minutes ago just over
+here in the next cross street and he took my coat away."
+
+"Huh! Well, did you lose your hat the same way?"
+
+"Yes--that is to say, no. I lost my hat running."
+
+"Oh, you run, hey? Well, you look to me like a guy wot would run. Well,
+did he take your clothes, too? Is that why you're squattin' behind them
+timbers?" The inquisitive one took a step nearer.
+
+"No--oh, no! I'm still wearing my--my--the costume I was wearing,"
+answered Mr. Leary, apprehensively wedging his way still farther back
+between the stack of boards and the wall behind. "But you see----"
+
+"Well then, barrin' the fact that you ain't got no hat, ain't you jest
+as well off without no overcoat now as I'd be if I fell for any
+hard-luck spiel from you and let you have mine?"
+
+"I wouldn't go so far as to say that exactly," tendered Mr. Leary
+ingratiatingly. "I'm afraid my clothing isn't as suitable for outdoor
+wear as yours is. You see, I'd been to a sort of social function and on
+my way home it--it happened."
+
+"Oh, it did, did it? Well, anyway, I should worry about you and your
+clothes," stated the other. He took a step onward, then halted; and now
+the gleam of speculative gain was in his eye. "Say, if I was willin' to
+sell--not sayin' I would be, but if I was--wot would you be willin' to
+give for an overcoat like this here one?"
+
+"Any price within reason--any price you felt like asking," said Mr.
+Leary, his hopes of deliverance rekindling.
+
+"Well, maybe I'd take twenty-five dollars for it just as it stands and
+no questions ast. How'd that strike you?"
+
+"I'll take it. That seems a most reasonable figure."
+
+"Well, fork over the twenty-five then, and the deal's closed."
+
+"I'd have to send you the money to-morrow--I mean to-day. You see, the
+thief took all my cash when he took my overcoat."
+
+"Did, huh?"
+
+"Yes, that's the present condition of things. Very annoying, isn't it?
+But I'll take your address. I'm a lawyer in business in Broad Street,
+and as soon as I reach my office I'll send the amount by messenger."
+
+"Aw, to hell with you and your troubles! I might a-knowed you was some
+new kind of a panhandler when you come a-snortin' in my ear that-a-way.
+Better beat it while the goin's good. You're in the wrong neighbourhood
+to be springin' such a gag as this one you just now sprang on me.
+Anyhow, I've wasted enough time on the likes of you."
+
+He was ten feet away when Mr. Leary, his wits sharpened by his
+extremity, clutched at the last straw.
+
+"One moment," he nervously begged. "Did I understand you to say your
+name was Cassidy?"
+
+"You did. Wot of it?"
+
+"Well, curious coincidence and all that--but my name happens to be
+Leary. And I thought that because of that you might----"
+
+The stranger broke in on him. "Your name happens to be Leary, does it?
+Wot's your other name then?"
+
+"Algernon."
+
+Stepping lightly on the balls of his feet Mr. Cassidy turned back, and
+his mien for some reason was potentially that of a belligerent.
+
+"Say," he declared threateningly, "you know wot I think about you? Well,
+I think you're a liar. No regular guy with the name of Leary would let a
+cheap stiff of a stick-up rob him out of the coat offen his back without
+puttin' up a battle. No regular guy named Leary would be named Algernon.
+Say, I think you're a Far Downer. I wouldn't be surprised but wot you
+was an A. P. A. on the top of that. And wot's all this here talk about
+goin' to a sociable functure and comin' away not suitably dressed? Come
+on out of that now and let's have a look at you."
+
+"Really, I'd much rather not--if you don't mind," protested the
+miserable Mr. Leary. "I--I have reasons."
+
+"The same here. Will you come out from behind there peaceable or will I
+fetch you out?"
+
+So Mr. Leary came, endeavouring while coming to wear a manner combining
+an atmosphere of dignified aloofness and a sentiment of frank
+indifference to the opinion of this loutish busybody, with just a touch,
+a mere trace, as it were, of nonchalance thrown in. In short, coming out
+he sought to deport himself as though it were the properest thing in
+the world for a man of years and discretion to be wearing a bright pink
+one-piece article of apparel on a public highway at four A. M. or
+thereabouts. Undoubtedly, considering everything, it was the hardest
+individual task essayed in New York during the first year of the war.
+Need I add that it was a failure--a total failure? As he stood forth
+fully and comprehensively revealed by the light of the adjacent
+transparency, Mr. Cassidy's squint of suspicion widened into a pop-eyed
+stare of temporary stupefaction.
+
+"Well, for the love of---- In the name of---- Did anywan ever see the
+likes of----!"
+
+He murmured the broken sentences as he circled about the form of the
+martyr. Completing the circuit, laughter of a particularly boisterous
+and concussive variety interrupted his fragmentary speech.
+
+"Ha ha, ha ha," echoed Mr. Leary in a palpably forced and hollow effort,
+to show that he, too, could enter into the spirit of the occasion with
+heartiness. "Does strike one as rather unusual at first sight--doesn't
+it?"
+
+"Why, you big hooman radish! Why, you strollin' sunset!" thus Mr.
+Cassidy responded. "Are you payin' an election bet three weeks after the
+election's over? Or is it that you're just a plain bedaddled ijiet? Or
+wot is it, I wonder?"
+
+"I explained to you that I went to a party. It was a fancy-dress party,"
+stated Mr. Leary.
+
+Sharp on the words Mr. Cassidy's manner changed. Here plainly was a
+person of moods, changeable and tempersome.
+
+"Ain't you ashamed of yourself, and you a large, grown man, to be
+skihootin' round with them kind of foolish duds on, and your own country
+at war this minute for decency and democracy?" From this it also was
+evident that Mr. Cassidy read the editorials in the papers. "You should
+take shame to yourself that you ain't in uniform instid of baby
+clothes."
+
+It was the part of discretion, so Mr. Leary inwardly decided, to ignore
+the fact that the interrogator himself appeared to be well within the
+military age.
+
+"I'm a bit old to enlist," he stated, "and I'm past the draft age."
+
+"Then you're too old to be wearin' such a riggin'. But, by cripes, I'll
+say this for you--you make a picture that'd make a horse laugh."
+
+Laughing like a horse, or as a horse would laugh if a horse ever
+laughed, he rocked to and fro on his heels.
+
+"Sh-sh; not so loud, please," importuned Mr. Leary, casting an uneasy
+glance toward the lighted windows above. "Somebody might hear you!"
+
+"I hope somebody does hear me," gurgled the temperamental Mr. Cassidy,
+now once more thoroughly beset by his mirth. "I need somebody to help me
+laugh. By cripes, I need a whole crowd to help me; and I know a way to
+get them!"
+
+He twisted his head round so his voice would ascend the hallway. "Hey,
+fellers and skoirts," he called; "you that's fixin' to leave! Hurry on
+down here quick and see Algy, the livin' peppermint lossenger, before he
+melts away with his own sweetness."
+
+Obeying the summons with promptness a flight of the Lawrence P.
+McGillicuddy's, accompanied for the most part by lady friends, cascaded
+down the stairs and erupted forth upon the sidewalk.
+
+"Here y'are--right here!" clarioned Mr. Cassidy as the first skylarkish
+pair showed in the doorway. His manner was drolly that of a showman
+exhibiting a rare freak, newly captured. "Come a-runnin'!"
+
+They came a-running and there were a dozen of them or possibly fifteen;
+blithesome spirits, all, and they fenced in the shrinking shape of Mr.
+Leary with a close and curious ring of themselves, and the combined
+volume of their glad, amazed outbursts might be heard for a distance of
+furlongs. On prankish impulse then they locked hands and with skippings
+and prancings and impromptu jig steps they circled about him; and he,
+had he sought to speak, could not well have been heard; and, anyway, he
+was for the moment past speech, because of being entirely engaged in
+giving vent to one vehement sneeze after another. And next, above the
+chorus of joyous whooping might be heard individual comments, each
+shrieked out shrilly and each punctuated by a sneeze from Mr. Leary's
+convulsed frame; or lacking that by a simulated sneeze from one of the
+revellers--one with a fine humorous flare for mimicry. And these
+comments were, for example, such as:
+
+"Git onto the socks!"
+
+"Ker-chew!"
+
+"And the slippers!"
+
+"Ker-chew!"
+
+"And them lovely pink garters!"
+
+"Ker-chew!"
+
+"Oh, you cutey! Oh, you cut-up!"
+
+"Ker-chew!"
+
+"Oh, you candy kid!"
+
+"And say, git onto the cunnin' elbow sleeves our little playmate's
+sportin'."
+
+"Yes, but goils, just pipe the poilies--ain't they the greatest ever?"
+
+"They sure are. Say, kiddo, gimme one of 'em to remember you by, won't
+you? You'll never miss it--you got a-plenty more."
+
+"Wot d'ye call wot he's got on 'um, anyway?" The speaker was a male,
+naturally.
+
+"W'y, you big stoopid, can't you see he's wearin' rompers?" The answer
+came in a giggle, from a gay youthful creature of the opposite sex as
+she kicked out roguishly.
+
+"Well, then be chee, w'y don't he romp a little?"
+
+"Give 'um time, cancher? Don't you see he's blowin' out his flues? He's
+busy now. He'll romp in a minute."
+
+"Sure he will! We'll romp with 'um."
+
+A waggish young person in white beaded slippers and a green sport skirt
+broke free from the cavorting ring, and behind Mr. Leary's back the
+nimble fingers of the madcap tapped his spinal ornamentations as an
+instrumentalist taps the stops of an organ; and she chanted a familiar
+counting game of childhood:
+
+"Rich man--poor man--beggar man--thief--doctor--loiryer----"
+
+"Sure, he said he was a loiryer." It was Mr. Cassidy breaking in. "And
+he said his name was Algernon. Well, I believe the Algernon part--the
+big A. P. A."
+
+"Oh, you Algy!"
+
+"Algernon, does your mother know you're out?"
+
+"T'ree cheers for Algy, the walkin' comic valentine!"
+
+"Algy, Algy--Oh, you cutey Algy!" These jolly Greenwich Villagers were
+going to make a song of his name. They did make a song of it, and it was
+a frolicsome song and pitched to a rollicksome key. Congenial newcomers
+arrived, pelting down from upstairs whence they had been drawn by the
+happy rocketing clamour; and they caught spirit and step and tune with
+the rest and helped manfully to sing it. As one poet hath said, "And now
+reigned high carnival." And as another has so aptly phrased it, "There
+was sound of revelry by night." And, as the second poet once put it, or
+might have put it so if so be he didn't, "And all went merry as a
+marriage bell." But when we, adapting the line to our own descriptive
+usages, now say all went merry we should save out one exception--one
+whose form alternately was racked by hot flushes of a terrific
+self-consciousness and by humid gusts of an equally terrific sneezing
+fit.
+
+
+VI
+
+"Here, here, here! Cut out the yellin'! D'you want the whole block up
+out of their beds?" The voice of the personified law, gruff and
+authoritative, broke in upon the clamour, and the majesty of the law,
+typified in bulk, with galoshes, ear muffs and woollen gloves on, not to
+mention the customary uniform of blue and brass, ploughed a path toward
+the centre of the group.
+
+"'S all right, Switzer," gaily replied a hoydenish lassie; she, the
+same who had begged Mr. Leary for a sea-pearl souvenir. "But just see
+wot Morrie Cassidy went and found here on the street!"
+
+Patrolman Switzer looked then where she pointed, and could scarce
+believe his eyes. In his case gleefulness took on a rumbling thunderous
+form, which shook his being as with an ague and made him to beat himself
+violently upon his ribs.
+
+"D'ye blame us for carryin' on, Switzer, when we seen it ourselves?"
+
+"I don't--and that's a fact," Switzer confessed between gurgles. "I
+wouldn't a blamed you much if you'd fell down and had a fit." And then
+he rocked on his heels, filled with joviality clear down to his rubber
+soles. Anon, though, he remembered the responsibilities of his position.
+"Still, at that, and even so," said he, sobering himself, "enough of a
+good thing's enough." He glared accusingly, yea, condemningly, at the
+unwitting cause of the quelled commotion.
+
+"Say, what's the idea, you carousin' round Noo York City this hour of
+the night diked up like a Coney Island Maudie Graw? And what's the idea,
+you causin' a boisterous and disorderly crowd to collect? And what's the
+idea, you makin' a disturbance in a vicinity full of decent hard-workin'
+people that's tryin' to get a little rest? What's the general idea,
+anyhow?"
+
+At this moment Mr. Leary having sneezed an uncountable number of times,
+regained the powers of coherent utterance.
+
+"It is not my fault," he said. "I assure you of that, officer. I am
+being misjudged; I am the victim of circumstances over which I have no
+control. You see, officer, I went last evening to a fancy-dress party
+and----"
+
+"Well, then, why didn't you go on home afterwards and behave yourself?"
+
+"I did--I started, in a taxicab. But the taxicab driver was drunk and he
+went to sleep on the way and the taxicab stopped and I got out of it and
+started to walk across town looking for another taxicab and----"
+
+"Started walkin', dressed like that?"
+
+"Certainly not. I had an overcoat on, of course. But a highwayman held
+me up at the point of a revolver, and he took my overcoat and what money
+I had and my card case and----"
+
+"Where did all this here happen--this here alleged robbery?"
+
+"Not two blocks away from here, right over in the next street to this
+one."
+
+"I don't believe nothin' of the kind!"
+
+Patrolman Switzer spoke with enhanced severity; his professional honour
+had been touched in a delicate place. The bare suggestion that a footpad
+might dare operate in a district under his immediate personal
+supervision would have been to him deeply repugnant, and here was this
+weirdly attired wanderer making the charge direct.
+
+"But, officer, I insist--I protest that----"
+
+"Young feller, I think you've been drinkin', that's what I think about
+you. Your voice sounds to me like you've been drinkin' about a gallon of
+mixed ale. I think you dreamed all this here pipe about a robber and a
+pistol and an overcoat and a taxicab and all. Now you take a friendly
+tip from me and you run along home as fast as ever you can, and you get
+them delirious clothes off of you and then you get in bed and take a
+good night's sleep and you'll feel better. Because if you don't it's
+goin' to be necessary for me to run you in for a public nuisance. I
+ain't askin' you--I'm tellin' you, now. If you don't want to be locked
+up, start movin'--that's my last word to you."
+
+The recent merrymakers, who had fallen silent the better to hear the
+dialogue, grouped themselves expectantly, hoping and waiting for a yet
+more exciting and humorous sequel to what had gone before--if such a
+miracle might be possible. Nor were they to be disappointed. The
+dénouement came quickly upon the heels of the admonition.
+
+For into Mr. Leary's reeling and distracted mind the warning had sent a
+clarifying idea darting. Why hadn't he thought of a police station
+before now? Perforce the person in charge at any police station would be
+under requirement to shelter him. What even if he were locked up
+temporarily? In a cell he would be safe from the slings and arrows of
+outrageous ridicule; and surely among the functionaries in any station
+house would be one who would know a gentleman in distress, however
+startlingly the gentleman might be garbed. Surely, too, somebody--once
+that somebody's amazement had abated--would he willing to do some
+telephoning for him. Perhaps, even, a policeman off duty might be
+induced to take his word for it that he was what he really was, and not
+what he seemed to be, and loan him a change of clothing.
+
+Hot upon the inspiration Mr. Leary decided on his course of action. He
+would get himself safely and expeditiously removed from the hateful
+company and the ribald comments of the Lawrence P. McGillicuddys and
+their friends. He would get himself locked up--that was it. He would now
+take the first steps in that direction.
+
+"Are you goin' to start on home purty soon like I've just been tellin'
+you; or are you ain't?" snapped Patrolman Switzer, who, it would appear,
+was by no means a patient person.
+
+"I am not!" The crafty Mr. Leary put volumes of husky defiance into his
+answer. "I'm not going home--and you can't make me go home, either." He
+rejoiced inwardly to see how the portly shape of Switzer stiffened and
+swelled at the taunt. "I'm a citizen and I have a right to go where I
+please, dressed as I please, and you don't dare to stop me. I defy you
+to arrest me!" Suddenly he put both his hands in Patrolman Switzer's
+fleshy midriff and gave him a violent shove. An outraged grunt went up
+from Switzer, a delighted whoop from the audience. Swept off his balance
+by the prospect of fruition for his design the plotter had technically
+been guilty before witnesses of a violent assault upon the person of an
+officer in the sworn discharge of his duty.
+
+He felt himself slung violently about. One mitted hand fixed itself in
+Mr. Leary's collar yoke at the rear; the other closed upon a handful of
+slack material in the lower breadth of Mr. Leary's principal habiliment
+just below where his buttons left off.
+
+"So you won't come, won't you? Well then I'll show you--you pink
+strawberry drop!"
+
+Enraged at having been flaunted before a jeering audience the patrolman
+pushed his prisoner ten feet along the sidewalk, imparting to the
+offender's movements an involuntary gliding gait, with backward jerks
+between forward shoves; this method of propulsion being known in the
+vernacular of the force as "givin' a skate the bum's rush."
+
+"Hey, Switzer, lend me your key and I'll ring for the wagon for you,"
+volunteered Mr. Cassidy. His care-free companions, some of them, cheered
+the suggestion, seeing in it prospect of a prolonging of this delectable
+sport which providence without charge had so graciously deigned to
+provide.
+
+"Never mind about the wagon. Us two'll walk, me and him," announced the
+patrolman. "'Taint so far where we're goin', and the walk'll do this
+fresh guy a little good--maybe'll sober him up. And never mind about any
+of the rest of you taggin' along behind us neither. This is a pinch--not
+a free street parade. Go on home now, the lot of youse, before you wake
+up the whole Lower West Side."
+
+Loath to be cheated out of the last act of a comedy so unique and so
+rich the whimsical McGillicuddys and their chosen mates fell reluctantly
+away, with yells and gibes and quips and farewell bursts of laughter.
+
+
+VII
+
+Closely hyphenated together the deep blue figure and the bright pink one
+rounded the corner and were alone. It was time to open the overtures
+which would establish Patrolman Switzer upon the basis of a better
+understanding of things. Mr. Leary, craning his neck in order to look
+rearward into the face of his custodian, spoke in a key very different
+from the one he had last employed.
+
+"I really didn't intend, you know, to resist you, officer. I had a
+private purpose in what I did. And you were quite within your rights.
+And I'm very grateful to you--really I am--for driving those people
+away."
+
+"Is that so?" The inflection was grimly and heavily sarcastic.
+
+"Yes. I am a lawyer by profession, and generally speaking I know what
+your duties are. I merely made a show--a pretence, as it were--of
+resisting you, in order to get away from that mob. It was--ahem--it was
+a device on my part--in short, a trick."
+
+"Is that so? Fixin' to try to beg off now, huh? Well, nothin' doin'!
+Nothin' doin'! I don't know whether you're a fancy nut or a plain souse
+or what-all, but whatever you are you're under arrest and you're goin'
+with me."
+
+"That's exactly what I desire to do," resumed the schemer. "I desire
+most earnestly to go with you."
+
+"You're havin' your wish, ain't you? Well, then, the both of us should
+oughter be satisfied."
+
+"I feel sure," continued the wheedling and designing Mr. Leary, "that as
+soon as we reach the station house I can make satisfactory atonement to
+you for my behaviour just now and can explain everything to your
+superiors in charge there, and then----"
+
+"Station house!" snorted Patrolman Switzer. "Why, say, you ain't headin'
+for no station house. The crowd that's over there where you're headin'
+for should be grateful to me for bringin' you in. You'll be a treat to
+them, and it's few enough pleasures some of them gets----"
+
+A new, a horrid doubt assailed Mr. Leary's sorely taxed being. He began
+to have a dread premonition that all was not going well and his brain
+whirled anew.
+
+"But I prefer to be taken to the station house," he began.
+
+"And who are you to be preferrin' anything at all?" countered Switzer.
+"I'll phone back to the station where I am and what I've done; though
+that part of it's no business of yours. I'll be doin' that after I've
+arrainged you over to Jefferson Market."
+
+"Jeff--Jefferson Market!"
+
+"Sure, 'tis to Jefferson Market night court you're headin' this minute.
+Where else? They're settin' late over there to-night; the magistrate is
+expectin' some raids somewheres about daylight, I dope it. Anyhow,
+they're open yet; I know that. So it'll be me and you for Jefferson
+Market inside of five minutes; and I'm thinkin' you'll get quite a
+reception."
+
+Jefferson Market! Mr. Leary could picture the rows upon rows of gloating
+eyes. He heard the incredulous shout that would mark his entrance, the
+swell of unholy glee from the benches that would interrupt the
+proceedings. He saw stretched upon the front pages of the early editions
+of the afternoon yellows the glaring black-faced headlines:
+
+
+                          WELL-KNOWN LAWYER
+                          CLAD IN PINK ROMPERS
+                          HALED TO NIGHT COURT
+
+
+He saw--but Switzer's next remark sent a fresh shudder of apprehension
+through him, caught all again, as he was, in the coils of accursed
+circumstance.
+
+"Magistrate Voris will be gettin' sleepy what with waitin' for them
+raids to be pulled off, and I make no doubt the sight of you will put
+him in a good humour."
+
+And Magistrate Voris was his rival for the favours of Miss Milly
+Hollister! And Magistrate Voris was a person with a deformed sense of
+humour! And Magistrate Voris was sitting in judgment this moment at
+Jefferson Market night court. And now desperation, thrice compounded,
+rent the soul of the trapped victim of his own misaimed subterfuge.
+
+"I won't be taken to any night court!" he shouted, wresting himself
+toward the edge of the sidewalk and dragging his companion along with
+him. "I won't go there! I demand to be taken to a station house. I'm a
+sick man and I require the services of a doctor."
+
+"Startin' to be rough-house all over again, huh?" grunted Switzer
+vindictively. "Well, we'll see about that part of it, too--right now!"
+
+Surrendering his lowermost clutch, the one in the silken seat of the
+suit of his writhing prisoner, he fumbled beneath the tails of his
+overcoat for the disciplinary nippers that were in his righthand rear
+trousers pocket.
+
+With a convulsive twist of his body Mr. Leary jerked himself free of the
+mittened grip upon his neckband, and as, released, he gave a deerlike
+lunge forward for liberty he caromed against a burdened ash can upon the
+curbstone and sent it spinning backward; then recovering sprang onward
+and outward across the gutter in flight. In the same instant he heard
+behind him a crash of metal and a solid thud, heard a sound as of a
+scrambling solid body cast abruptly prone, heard the name of Deity
+profaned, and divined without looking back that the ash can,
+conveniently rolling between the plump legs of the personified Arm of
+the Law, had been Officer Switzer's undoing, and might be his salvation.
+
+
+VIII
+
+With never a backward glance he ran on, not doubting as a hare before
+the beagle, but following a straight course, like unto a hunted roebuck.
+He did not know he could run so fast, and he could not have run so fast
+any other time than this. Beyond was a crossing. It was blind instinct
+that made him double round the turn. And it was instinct, quickened and
+guided by desperation, that made him dart like a rose-tinted flash up
+the steps to the stoop of an old-fashioned residence standing just
+beyond the corner, spring inside the storm doors, draw them to behind
+him, and crouch there, hidden, as pursuit went lumbering by.
+
+Through a chink between the door halves he watched breathlessly while
+Switzer, who moved with a pronounced limp and rubbed his knees as he
+limped, hobbled halfway up the block, slowed down, halted, glared about
+him for sight or sign of the vanished fugitive, and then misled by a
+false trail departed, padding heavily with a galoshed tread, round the
+next turn.
+
+With his body still drawn well back within the shadow line of the
+overhanging cornice Mr. Leary, coyly protruded his head and took visual
+inventory of the neighbourhood. So far as any plan whatsoever had
+formed in the mind of our diffident adventurer he meant to bide where he
+was for the moment. Here, where he had shelter of a sort, he would
+recapture his breath and reassemble his wits. Even so, the respite from
+those elements which Mr. Leary dreaded most of all--publicity,
+observation, cruel jibes, the harsh raucous laughter of the
+populace--could be at best but a woefully transient one. He was not
+resigned--by no means was he resigned--to his fate; but he was helpless.
+For what ailed him there was no conceivable remedy.
+
+Anon jocund day would stand tiptoe on something or other; Greenwich
+Village would awaken and bestir itself. Discovery would come, and forth
+he would be drawn like a shy, unwilling periwinkle from its shell, once
+more to play his abased and bashful role of free entertainer to
+guffawing mixed audiences. For all others in the great city there were
+havens and homes. But for a poor, lorn, unguided vagrant, enmeshed in
+the burlesque garnitures of a three-year-old male child, what haven was
+there? By night the part had been hard enough--as the unresponsive
+heavens above might have testified. By the stark unmerciful sunlight; by
+the rude, revealing glow of the impending day how much more scandalous
+would it be!
+
+His haggard gaze swept this way and that, seeking possible succour where
+reason told him there could be no succour; and then as his vision pieced
+together this outjutting architectural feature and that into a coherent
+picture of his immediate surroundings he knew where he was. The one bit
+of chancy luck in a sequence of direful catastrophes had brought him
+here to this very spot. Why, this must be West Ninth Street; it had to
+be, it was--oh joy, it was! And Bob Slack, his partner, lived in this
+identical block on this same side of the street.
+
+With his throat throbbing to the impulse of new-born hope he emerged
+completely from behind the refuge of the storm doors, backed himself out
+and down upon the top step, and by means of a dubious illumination
+percolating through the fanlight above the inner door he made out the
+figures upon the lintel. This was such and such a number; therefore Bob
+Slack's number must be the second number to the eastward, at the next
+door but one.
+
+
+IX
+
+Five seconds later a fleet apparition of a prevalent pinkish tone gave a
+ranging house cat the fright of its life as former darted past latter to
+vault nimbly up the stone steps of a certain weatherbeaten
+four-story-and-basement domicile. Set in the door jamb here was a
+vertical row of mail-slots, and likewise a vertical row of electric push
+buttons; these objects attesting to the fact that this house, once upon
+a time the home of a single family, had eventually undergone the
+transformation which in lower New York befalls so many of its kind, and
+had become a layer-like succession of light-housekeeping apartments, one
+apartment to a floor, and the caretaker in the basement.
+
+Since Bob Slack's bachelor quarters were on the topmost floor Bob
+Slack's push button would be the next to the lowermost of the battery of
+buttons. A chilled tremulous finger found that particular button and
+pressed it long and hard, released it, pressed it again and yet again.
+And in the interval following each period of pressing the finger's owner
+hearkened, all ears, for the answering click-click that would tell him
+the sleeper having been roused by the ringing had risen and pressed the
+master button that released the mechanism of the street door's lock.
+
+But no welcome clicking rewarded the expectant ringer. Assuredly Bob
+Slack must be the soundest sleeper in the known world. He who waited
+rang and rang and rerang. There was no response.
+
+Eventually conviction was forced upon Mr. Leary that he must awaken the
+caretaker--who, he seemed dimly to recall as a remembrance of past
+visits to Bob Slack, was a woman; and this done he must induce the
+caretaker to admit him to the inside of the house. Once within the
+building the refugee promised himself he would bring the slumberous
+Slack to consciousness if he had to beat down that individual's door
+doing it. He centred his attack upon the bottom push button of all.
+Directly, from almost beneath his feet, came the sound of an areaway
+window being unlatched, and a drowsy female somewhat crossly inquired to
+know who might be there and what might be wanted.
+
+"It's a gentleman calling on Mr. Slack," wheezed Mr. Leary with his head
+over the balusters. He was getting so very, very hoarse. "I've been
+ringing his bell, but I can't seem to get any answer."
+
+"A gentleman at this time o' night!" The tone was purely incredulous.
+
+"Yes; a close friend of Mr. Slack's," assured Mr. Leary, striving to put
+stress of urgency into his accents, and only succeeding in imparting an
+added hoarseness to his fast-failing vocal cords. "I'm his law partner,
+in fact. I must see him at once, please--it's very important, very
+pressing indeed."
+
+"Well, you can't be seein' him."
+
+"C-can't see him? What do you mean?"
+
+"I mean he ain't here, that's what. He's out. He's went out for the
+night. He's ginerally always out on Friday nights--playin' cards at his
+club, I think. And sometimes he don't come in till it's near breakfast
+time. If you're a friend of his I sh'd think it'd be likely you'd know
+that same."
+
+"Oh, I do--I do," assented Mr. Leary earnestly; "only I had forgotten
+it. I've had so many other things on my mind. But surely he'll be coming
+in quite soon now--it's pretty late, you know."
+
+"Don't I know that for myself without bein' told?"
+
+"Yes, quite so, of course; naturally so." Mr. Leary was growing more and
+more nervous, and more and more chilled, too. "But if you'll only be so
+very kind as to let me in I'll wait for him in his apartment."
+
+"Let you in without seein' you or knowin' what your business is? I
+should guess not! Besides, you couldn't be gettin' inside his flat
+anyways. He's locked it, unless he's forgot to, which ain't likely, him
+bein' a careful man, and he must a-took the key with him. I know I ain't
+got it."
+
+"But if you'll just let me inside the building that will be sufficient.
+I would much rather wait inside if only in the hall, than out here on
+the stoop in the cold."
+
+"No doubt, no doubt you would all of that." The tone of the unseen
+female was drily suspicious. "But is it likely I'd be lettin' a stranger
+into the place, that I never seen before, and ain't seen yet for that
+matter, just on the strength of his own word? And him comin'
+unbeknownst, at this hour of the mornin'? A fat chancet!"
+
+"But surely, though, you must recall me--Mr. Leary, his partner. I've
+been here before. I've spoken to you."
+
+"That voice don't sound to me like no voice I ever heard."
+
+"I've taken cold--that's why it's altered."
+
+"So? Then why don't you come down here where I can have a look at you
+and make sure?" inquired this careful chatelaine.
+
+"I'm leaning with my head over the rail of the steps right above you,"
+said Mr. Leary. "Can't you poke your head out and see my face? I'm quite
+sure you would recall me then."
+
+"With this here iron gratin' acrost me window how could I poke me head
+out? Besides, it's dark. Say, mister, if you're on the level what's the
+matter with you comin' down here and not be standin' there palaverin'
+all the night?"
+
+"I--I--well, you see, I'd rather not come for just a minute--until I've
+explained to you that--that my appearance may strike you as being a
+trifle unusual, in fact, I might say, queer," pleaded Mr. Leary, seeking
+by subtle methods of indirection to prepare her for what must surely
+follow.
+
+"Never mind explainin'--gimme a look!" The suspicious tenseness in her
+voice increased. "I tell you this--ayther you come down here right this
+secont or I shut the window and you can be off or you can go to the
+divil or go anywheres you please for all of me, because I'm an
+overworked woman and I need my rest and I've no more time to waste on
+you."
+
+"Wait, please; I'm coming immediately," called out Mr. Leary.
+
+He forced his legs to carry him down the steps and reluctantly, yet
+briskly, he propelled his pink-hued person toward the ray of light that
+streamed out through the grated window-opening and fell across the
+areaway.
+
+"You mustn't judge by first appearances," he was explaining with a false
+and transparent attempt at matter-of-factness as he came into the zone
+of illumination. "I'm not what I seem, exactly. You see, I----"
+
+"Mushiful Evans!" The exclamation was half shrieked, half gasped out;
+and on the words the window was slammed to, the light within flipped
+out, and through the glass from within came a vehement warning.
+
+"Get away, you--you lunatic! Get away from here now or I'll have the
+cops on you."
+
+"But please, please listen," he entreated, with his face close against
+the bars. "I assure you, madam, that I can explain everything if you
+will only listen."
+
+There was no mercy, no suggestion of relenting in the threatening
+message that came back to him.
+
+"If you ain't gone from here in ten seconts I'll ring for the night
+watchman on the block, and I'll blow a whistle for the police. I've got
+me hand on the alarm hook right now. Will you go or will I rouse the
+whole block?"
+
+"Pray be calm, madam, I'll go. In fact, I'm going now."
+
+He fell back out of the areaway. Fresh uproar at this critical juncture
+would be doubly direful. It would almost certainly bring the vengeful
+Switzer, with his bruised shanks. It would inevitably bring some one.
+
+
+X
+
+Mr. Leary retreated to the sidewalk, figuratively casting from him the
+shards and potsherds of his reawakened anticipations, now all so rudely
+shattered again. He was doomed. It would inevitably be his fate to cower
+in these cold and drafty purlieus until----
+
+No, it wouldn't either!
+
+Like a golden rift in a sable sky a brand-new ray of cheer opened before
+him. Who were those married friends of Slack's, who lived on the third
+floor--friends with whom once upon a time he and Slack had shared a
+chafing-dish supper? What was the name? Brady? No, Braydon. That was
+it--Mr. and Mrs. Edward Braydon. He would slip back again, on noiseless
+feet, to the doorway where the bells were. He would bide there until the
+startled caretaker had gone back to her sleep, or at least to her bed.
+Then he would play a solo on the Braydons' bell until he roused them.
+They would let him in, and beyond the peradventure of a doubt, they
+would understand what seemed to be beyond the ken of flighty and
+excitable underlings. He would make them understand, once he was in and
+once the first shock of beholding him had abated within them. They were
+a kindly, hospitable couple, the Braydons were. They would be only too
+glad to give him shelter from the elements until Bob Slack returned
+from his session at bridge. He was saved!
+
+Within the coping of the stoop he crouched and waited--waited for five
+long palpitating minutes which seemed to him as hours. Then he applied
+an eager and quivering finger to the Braydons' button. Sweet boon of
+vouchsafed mercy! Almost instantly the latch clicked. And now in another
+instant Mr. Leary was within solid walls, with the world and the weather
+shut out behind him.
+
+He stood a moment, palpitant with mute thanksgiving, in the hallway,
+which was made obscure rather than bright by a tiny pinprick of
+gaslight; and as thus he stood, fortifying himself with resolution for
+the embarrassing necessity of presenting himself, in all his show of
+quaint frivolity, before these comparative strangers, there came
+floating down the stair well to him in a sharp half-whisper a woman's
+voice.
+
+"Is that you?" it asked.
+
+"Yes," answered Mr. Leary, truthfully. It was indeed he, Algernon Leary,
+even though someone else seemingly was expected. But the explanation
+could wait until he was safely upstairs. Indeed, it must wait. Attempted
+at a distance it would take on rather a complicated aspect; besides, the
+caretaker just below might overhear, and by untoward interruptions
+complicate a position already sufficiently delicate and difficult.
+
+Down from above came the response, "All right then. I've been worried,
+you were so late coming in, Edward. Please slip in quietly and take the
+front room. I'm going on back to bed."
+
+"All right!" grunted Mr. Leary.
+
+But already his plan had changed; the second speech down the stair well
+had caused him to change it. Safety first would be his motto from now
+on. Seeing that Mr. Edward Braydon apparently was likewise out late it
+would be wiser and infinitely more discreet on his part did he avoid
+further disturbing Mrs. Braydon, who presumably was alone and who might
+be easily frightened. So he would just slip on past the Braydon
+apartment, and in the hallway on the fourth floor he would cannily bide,
+awaiting the truant Slack's arrival.
+
+On tiptoe then, flight by flight, he ascended toward the top of the
+house. He was noiselessly progressing along the hallway of the third
+floor; he was about midway of it when under his tread a loose plank gave
+off an agonized squeak, and, as involuntarily he crouched, right at his
+side a door was flung open.
+
+What the discomfited refugee saw, at a distance from him to be measured
+by inches rather than by feet, was the face of a woman; and not the face
+of young Mrs. Edward Braydon, either, but the face of a middle-aged lady
+with startled eyes widely staring, with a mouth just dropping ajar as
+sudden horror relaxed her jaw muscles, and with a head of grey hair
+haloed about by a sort of nimbus effect of curl papers. What the strange
+lady saw--well, what the strange lady saw may best perhaps be gauged by
+what she did, and that was instantly to slam and bolt the door and then
+to utter a succession of calliopelike shrieks, which echoed through the
+house and which immediately were answered back by a somewhat similar
+series of outcries from the direction of the basement.
+
+
+XI
+
+Up the one remaining flight of stairs darted the intruder. He flung
+himself with all his weight and all his force against Bob Slack's door.
+It wheezed from the impact, but its stout oaken panels held fast. Who
+says the impossible is really impossible? The accumulated testimony of
+the ages shows that given the emergency a man can do anything he just
+naturally has to do. Neither by training nor by habit of life nor yet by
+figure was Mr. Leary athletically inclined, but a trained gymnast might
+well have envied the magnificent agility with which he put a foot upon
+the doorknob and sprang upward, poising himself there upon a slippered
+toe, with one set of fingers clutching fast to the minute projections of
+the door frame while with his free hand he thrust recklessly against the
+transom.
+
+The transom gave under the strain, moving upward and inward upon its
+hinges, disclosing an oblong gap above the jamb. With a splendid wriggle
+the fugitive vaulted up, thrusting his person into the clear space thus
+provided. Balanced across the opening upon his stomach, half in and half
+out, for one moment he remained there, his legs kicking wildly as though
+for a purchase against something more solid than air. Then convulsive
+desperation triumphed over physical limitations. There was a rending,
+tearing sound as of some silken fabric being parted biaswise of its
+fibres, and Mr. Leary's droll after sections vanished inside; and
+practically coincidentally therewith, Mr. Leary descended upon the
+rugged floor with a thump which any other time would have stunned him
+into temporary helplessness, but which now had the effect merely of
+stimulating him onward to fresh exertion.
+
+In a fever of activity he sprang up. Pawing a path through the
+encompassing darkness, stumbling into and over various sharp-cornered
+objects, barking his limbs with contusions and knowing it not, he found
+the door of the inner room--Bob Slack's bedroom--and once within that
+sanctuary he, feeling along the walls, discovered a push bulb and
+switched on the electric lights.
+
+What matter though the whole house grew clamorous now with a mounting
+and increasing tumult? What mattered it though he could hear more and
+more startled voices commingled with the shattering shrieks emanating
+from the Braydon apartment beneath his feet? He, the hard-pressed and
+sore-beset and the long-suffering, was at last beyond the sight of
+mortal eyes. He was locked in, with two rooms and a bath to himself, and
+he meant to maintain his present refuge, meant to hold this fort against
+all comers, until Bob Slack came home. He would barricade himself in if
+need be. He would pile furniture against the doors. If they took him at
+all it would be by direct assault and overpowering numbers.
+
+And while he withstood siege and awaited attack he would rid himself of
+these unlucky caparisons that had been his mortification and his
+undoing. When they broke in on him--if they did break in on him--he
+would be found wearing some of Bob Slack's clothes. Better far to be
+mistaken for a burglar than to be dragged forth lamentably yet
+fancifully attired as Himself at the Age of Three. The one thing might
+be explained--and in time would be; but the other? He felt that he was
+near the breaking point; that he could no more endure.
+
+
+XII
+
+He stopped where he was, in the middle of the room, with his eyes and
+his hands seeking for the seams of the closing of his main garment. Then
+he remembered what in his stress he had forgotten--the opening or
+perhaps one should say the closing was at the back. He twisted his arms
+rearward, his fingers groping along his spine.
+
+Now any normal woman has the abnormal ability to do and then to undo a
+garment hitching behind. Nature, which so fashioned her elbows that she
+cannot throw a stone at a hen in the way in which a stone properly
+should be thrown at a hen, made suitable atonement for this articular
+oversight by endowing her joints with the facile knack of turning on
+exactly the right angle, with never danger of sprain or dislocation, for
+the subjugation of a back-latching frock. Moreover, years of practice
+have given her adeptness in accomplishing this achievement, so that to
+her it has become an everyday feat. But man has neither the experience
+to qualify him nor yet the bodily adaptability.
+
+By reaching awkwardly up and over his shoulder Mr. Leary managed to tug
+the topmost button of his array of buttons out of its attendant
+buttonholes, but below and beyond that point he could not progress. He
+twisted and contorted his body; he stretched his arms in their sockets
+until twin pangs of agony met and crossed between his shoulder blades,
+and with his two exploring hands he pulled and fumbled and pawed and
+wrenched and wrested, to make further headway at his task. But the
+sewing-on had been done with stout thread; the buttonholes were taut and
+snug and well made. Those slippery flat surfaces amply resisted him.
+They eluded him; defied him; outmastered him. Thanks be to, or curses be
+upon, the passionate zeal of Miss Rowena Skiff for exactitudes, he,
+lacking the offices of an assistant undresser, was now as definitely and
+finally inclosed in this distressful pink garment as though it had been
+his own skin. Speedily he recognised this fact in all its bitter and
+abominable truth, but mechanically, he continued to wrestle with the
+obdurate fastenings.
+
+While he thus vainly contended, events in which he directly was
+concerned were occurring beneath that roof. From within his refuge he
+heard the sounds of slamming doors, of hurrying footsteps, of excited
+voices merging into a distracted chorus; but above all else, and from
+the rest, two of these voices stood out by reason of their augmented
+shrillness, and Mr. Leary marked them both, for since he had just heard
+them he therefore might identify their respective unseen owners.
+
+"There's something--there's somebody in the house!" At the top of its
+register one voice was repeating the warning over and over again, and
+judging by direction this alarmist was shrieking her words through a
+keyhole on the floor below him. "I saw it--him--whatever it was. I
+opened my door to look out in the hall and it--he--was right there. Oh,
+I could have touched him! And then it ran and I didn't see him any more
+and I slammed the door and began screaming."
+
+"You seen what?"
+
+The strident question seemed to come from far below, down in the depths
+of the house, where the caretaker abided.
+
+"Whatever it was. I opened the door and he was right in the hall there
+glaring at me. I could have touched it. And then he ran and I----"
+
+"What was he like? I ast what was he like--it's that I'm astin' you!"
+The janitress was the one who pressed for an answer.
+
+For the moment the question, pointed though it was, went unanswered. The
+main speaker--shrieker, rather--was plainly a person with a mania for
+details, and even in this emergency she intended, as now developed, to
+present all the principal facts in the case, and likewise all the
+incidental facts so far as these fell within her scope of knowledge.
+
+"I was awake," she clarioned through the keyhole, speaking much faster
+than any one following this narrative can possibly hope to read the
+words. "I couldn't sleep. I never do sleep well when I'm in a strange
+house. And anyhow, I was all alone. My nephew by marriage--Mr. Edward
+Braydon, you know--had gone out with the gentleman who lives on the
+floor above to play cards, and he said he was going to be gone nearly
+all night, and my niece--I'm Mrs. Braydon's unmarried aunt from
+Poughkeepsie and I'm down here visiting them--my niece was called to
+Long Island yesterday by illness--it's her sister who's ill with
+something like the bronchitis. And he was gone and so she was gone, and
+so here I was all alone and he told me not to stay up for him, but I
+couldn't sleep well--I never can sleep in a strange house--and just a
+few minutes ago I heard the bell ring and I supposed he had forgotten
+to take his latchkey with him, and so I got up to let him in. And I
+called down the stairs and asked him if it was him and he answered back.
+But it didn't sound like his voice. But I didn't think anything of that.
+But, of course, it was out of the ordinary for him to have a voice like
+that. But all the same I went back to bed. But he didn't come in and I
+was just getting up again to see what detained him--his voice really
+sounded so strange I thought then he might have been taken sick or
+something. But just as I got to the door a plank creaked and I opened
+the door and there it was right where I could have touched him. And then
+it ran--and oh, what if----"
+
+"I'm astin' you once more what it was like?"
+
+"How should I know except that----"
+
+"Was it a big, fat, wild, bare-headed, scary, awful-lookin' scoundrel
+dressed in some kind of funny pink clothes?"
+
+"Yes, that's it! That's him--he was all sort of pink. Oh, did you see
+him too? Oh, is it a burglar?"
+
+"Burglar nothin'! It's a ravin', rampagin' lunatic--that's what it is!"
+
+"Oh, my heavens, a lunatic!"
+
+"Sure it is. He tried to git me to let him in and----"
+
+"Oh, whatever shall we do!"
+
+
+XIII
+
+"Hey, what's all the excitement about?"
+
+A new and deeper voice here broke into the babel, and Mr. Leary
+recognising it at a distance, where he stood listening--but not failing,
+even while he listened, to strive unavailingly with his problem of
+buttons--knew he was saved. Knowing this he nevertheless retreated still
+deeper into the inner room. The thought of spectators in numbers
+remained very abhorrent to him. So he did not hear all that happened
+next, except in broken snatches.
+
+He gathered though, from what he did hear, that Bob Slack and Mr. Edward
+Braydon were coming up the stairs, and that a third male whom they
+called Officer was coming with them, and that the janitress was coming
+likewise, and that divers lower-floor tenants were joining in the march,
+and that as they came the janitress was explaining to all and sundry how
+the weird miscreant had sought to inveigle her into admitting him to Mr.
+Slack's rooms, and how she had refused, and how with maniacal craft--or
+words to that effect--he had, nevertheless, managed to secure admittance
+to the house, and how he must still be in the house. And through all her
+discourse there were questions from this one or that, crossing its flow
+but in no-wise interrupting it; and through it all percolated hootingly
+the terrorised outcries of Mr. Braydon's maiden aunt-in-law, issuing
+through the keyhole of the door behind which she cowered. Only now she
+was interjecting a new harassment into the already complicated mystery
+by pleading that someone repair straightway to her and render
+assistance, as she felt herself to be on the verge of fainting dead
+away.
+
+With searches into closets and close scrutiny of all dark corners passed
+en route, the procession advanced to the top floor, mainly guided in its
+oncoming by the clew deduced from the circumstances of the mad intruder
+having betrayed a desire to secure access to Mr. Slack's apartment,
+with the intention, as the caretaker more than once suggested on her way
+up, of murdering Mr. Slack in his bed. Before the ascent had been
+completed she was quite certain this was the correct deduction, and so
+continued to state with all the emphasis of which she was capable.
+
+"He couldn't possibly have got downstairs again," somebody hazarded; "so
+he must be upstairs here still--must be right round here somewhere."
+
+"Didn't I tell you he was lookin' for Mr. Slack to lay in wait for him
+and destroy the poor man in his bed?" shrilled the caretaker.
+
+"Watch carefully now, everybody. He might rush out of some corner at
+us."
+
+"Say, my transom's halfway open!" Mr. Bob Slack exclaimed. "And, by
+Jove, there's a light shining through it yonder from the bedroom. He's
+inside--we've got him cornered, whoever he is."
+
+Boldly Mr. Slack stepped forward and rapped hard on the door.
+
+"Better step on out peaceably," he called, "because there's an officer
+here with us and we've got you trapped."
+
+"It's me, Bob, it's me," came in a wheezy, plaintive wail from somewhere
+well back in the apartment.
+
+"Who's me?" demanded Mr. Slack, likewise forgetting his grammar in the
+thrill of this culminating moment.
+
+"Algy--Algernon Leary."
+
+"Not with that voice, it isn't. But I'll know in a minute who it is!"
+Mr. Slack reached pocketward for his keys.
+
+"Better be careful. He might have a gun or something on him."
+
+"Nonsense!" retorted Mr. Slack, feeling very valiant. "I'm not afraid of
+any gun. But you ladies might stand aside if you're frightened. All
+ready, officer? Now then!"
+
+"Please come in by yourself, Bob. Don't--don't let anybody else come
+with you!"
+
+
+XIV
+
+If he heard the faint and agonised appeal from within Mr. Slack chose
+not to heed it. He found the right key on his key ring, applied it to
+the lock, turned the bolt and shoved the door wide open, giving back
+then in case of an attack. The front room was empty. Mr. Slack crossed
+cautiously to the inner room and peered across the threshold into it,
+Mr. Braydon and a grey-coated private watchman and a procession of
+half-clad figures following along after him.
+
+Where was the mysterious intruder? Ah, there he was, huddled up in a far
+corner alongside the bed as though he sought to hide himself away from
+their glaring eyes. And at the sight of what he beheld Mr. Bob Slack
+gave one great shocked snort of surprise, and then one of recognition.
+
+For all that the cowering wretch wore a quaint garment of a bright and
+watermelonish hue, except where it was streaked with transom dust and
+marked with ash-can grit; for all that his head was bare, and his knees,
+and a considerable section of his legs as well; for all that he had
+white socks and low slippers, now soaking wet, upon his feet; for all
+his elbow sleeves and his pink garters and his low neck; and finally for
+all that his face was now beginning, as they stared upon it, to wear
+the blank wan look of one who is about to succumb to a swoon of
+exhaustion induced by intense physical exertion or by acutely prolonged
+mental strain or by both together--Mr. Bob Slack detected in this
+fabulous oddity a resemblance to his associate in the practice of law at
+Number Thirty-two Broad Street.
+
+"In the name of heaven, Leary----" he began.
+
+But a human being can stand just so many shocks in a given number of
+minutes--just so many and no more. Gently, slowly, the gartered legs
+gave way, bending outward, and as their owner collapsed down upon his
+side with the light of consciousness flickering in his eyes, his figure
+was half-turned to them, and they saw how that he was ornamentally but
+securely buttoned down the back with many large buttons and how that
+with a last futile fluttering effort of his relaxing hands he fumbled
+first at one and then at another of these buttons.
+
+"Leary, what in thunder have you been doing? And where on earth have you
+been?" Mr. Slack shot the questions forth as he sprang to his partner's
+side and knelt alongside the slumped pink shape.
+
+Languidly Mr. Leary opened one comatose eye. Then he closed it again and
+the wraith of a smile formed about his lips, and just as he went sound
+asleep upon the floor Mr. Slack caught from Mr. Leary the softly
+whispered words, "I've been the life of the party!"
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Life of the Party, by Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
+
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's The Life of the Party, by Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Life of the Party
+
+Author: Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
+
+Illustrator: James M. Preston
+
+Release Date: November 9, 2008 [EBook #27212]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE OF THE PARTY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Bryan Ness, Martin Pettit and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h1><i>The Life of the Party</i></h1>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<div class="center"><img src="images/cover.jpg" width='466' height='700' alt="Cover - The Life of the Party Irvin S. Cobb" /></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center"><img src="images/002.jpg" width='410' height='700' alt="BY IRVIN S. COBB FICTION
+The Life of the Party, Those Times and These, Local Color, Old Judge Priest, Fibble, D. D.,
+ Back Home, The Thunders of Silence, The Escape of Mr. Trimm. WIT AND HUMOR Eating In Two or Three Languages,
+ Speaking of Operations, Europe Revised, Roughing It De Luxe, Cobb's Bill of Fare, Cobb's Anatomy,
+ MISCELLANY The Glory of the Coming, Paths of Glory, Speaking of Prussians. GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY NEW YORK" /></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center"><a name="frontispiece.jpg" id="frontispiece.jpg"></a><img src="images/frontispiece.jpg" width='454' height='700' alt="ARE YOU PAYIN' AN ELECTION BET THREE WEEKS AFTER THE
+ELECTION'S OVER? OR IS IT THAT YOU'RE JEST A PLAIN BEDADDLED IJIET?" /></div>
+
+<h4>"ARE YOU PAYIN' AN ELECTION BET THREE WEEKS AFTER THE
+ELECTION'S OVER? OR IS IT THAT YOU'RE JEST A PLAIN BEDADDLED IJIET?"</h4>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center"><img src="images/005.jpg" width='398' height='700' alt="The Life of the Party By Irvin S. Cobb
+ Author of Back Home, Old Judge Priest, etc., etc. Illustrated By James M. Preston New York George H. Doran Company" /></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Copyright, 1919,<br />By George H. Doran Company</i></p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Copyright, 1919, by the Curtis Publishing Company<br />
+Printed in the United States of America</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">To</span><br /><span class="smcap">Mistress May Wilson Preston</span></h3>
+
+<h4>A LADY OF GREAT DRAWING QUALITIES</h4>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><i>ILLUSTRATIONS</i></h2>
+
+<p><a href="#frontispiece.jpg">"Are you payin' an election bet three weeks after the election's over? Or is it
+that you're jest a plain bedaddled ijiet?"</a>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <i>Frontispiece</i></p>
+
+<p><a href="#fig_001.jpg">"That's nice," spake the fearsome stranger. "Now stay jest the way you are and don't make no
+peep or I'll have to plug you wit' this here gat"</a></p>
+
+<p><a href="#fig_002.jpg">Mr. Leary's gait became a desperate gallop, and as he galloped he shouted: "Wait, please, here I
+am.&mdash;Here's your passenger"</a></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1><i>The Life of the Party</i></h1>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>It had been a successful party, most successful. Mrs. Carroway's parties
+always were successes, but this one nearing its conclusion stood out
+notably from a long and unbroken Carrowayian record. It had been a
+children's party; that is to say, everybody came in costume with intent
+to represent children of any age between one year and a dozen years. But
+twelve years was the limit; positively nobody, either in dress or
+deportment, could be more than twelve years old. Mrs. Carroway had made
+this point explicit in sending out the invitations, and so it had been,
+down to the last hair ribbon and the last shoe buckle. And between
+dances they had played at the games of childhood, such as drop the
+handkerchief, and King William was King James' son and prisoner's base
+and the rest of them.</p>
+
+<p>The novelty of the notion had been a main contributory factor to its
+success; that, plus the fact that nine healthy adults out of ten dearly
+love to put on freakish garbings and go somewhere. To be exactly
+truthful, the basic idea itself could hardly be called new, since long
+before some gifted mind thought out the scheme of giving children's
+parties for grown-ups, but with her customary brilliancy Mrs. Carroway
+had seized upon the issues of the day to serve her social<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> purposes,
+weaving timeliness and patriotism into the fabric of her plan by making
+it a war party as well. Each individual attending was under pledge to
+keep a full and accurate tally of the moneys expended upon his or her
+costume and upon arrival at the place of festivities to deposit a like
+amount in a repository put in a conspicuous spot to receive these
+contributions, the entire sum to be handed over later to the guardians
+of a military charity in which Mrs. Carroway was active.</p>
+
+<p>It was somehow felt that this fostered a worthy spirit of wartime
+economy, since the donation of a person who wore an expensive costume
+would be relatively so much larger than the donation of one who went in
+for the simpler things. Moreover, books of thrift stamps were attached
+to the favours, the same being children's toys of guaranteed American
+manufacture.</p>
+
+<p>In the matter of refreshments Mrs. Carroway had been at pains to comply
+most scrupulously with the existing rationing regulations. As the
+hostess herself said more than once as she moved to and fro in a
+flounced white frock having the exaggeratedly low waistline of the sort
+of frock which frequently is worn by a tot of tender age, with a wide
+blue sash draped about her almost down at her knees, and with fluffy
+skirts quite up to her knees, with her hair caught up in a coquettish
+blue bow on the side of her head and a diminutive fan tied fast to one
+of her wrists with a blue ribbon&mdash;so many of the ladies who had attained
+to Mrs. Carroway's fairly well-ripened years did go in for these
+extremely girlishly little-girly effects&mdash;as the hostess thus attired
+and moving hither<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> and yon remark, "If Mr. Herbert Hoover himself were
+here as one of my guests to-night I am just too perfectly sure he could
+find absolutely nothing whatsoever to object to!"</p>
+
+<p>It would have required much stretching of that elastic property, the
+human imagination, to conceive of Mr. Herbert Hoover being there,
+whether in costume or otherwise, but that was what Mrs. Carroway said
+and repeated. Always those to whom she spoke came right out and agreed with her.</p>
+
+<p>Now it was getting along toward three-thirty o'clock of the morning
+after, and the party was breaking up. Indeed for half an hour past, this
+person or that had been saying it was time, really, to be thinking about
+going&mdash;thus voicing a conviction that had formed at a much earlier hour
+in the minds of the tenants of the floor below Mrs. Carroway's studio
+apartment, which like all properly devised studio apartments was at the
+top of the building.</p>
+
+<p>It was all very well to be a true Bohemian, ready to give and take, and
+if one lived down round Washington Square one naturally made allowances
+for one's neighbours and all that, but half past three o'clock in the
+morning was half past three o'clock in the morning, and there was no
+getting round that, say what you would. And besides there were some
+people who needed a little sleep once in a while even if there were some
+other people who seemed to be able to go without any sleep; and finally,
+though patience was a virtue, enough of a good thing was enough and too
+much was surplusage. Such was the opinion of the tenants one flight down.</p>
+
+<p>So the party was practically over. Mr. Algernon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> Leary, of the firm of
+Leary &amp; Slack, counsellors and attorneys at law, with offices at Number
+Thirty-two Broad Street, was among the very last to depart. Never had
+Mr. Leary spent a more pleasant evening. He had been in rare form, a
+variety of causes contributing to this happy state. To begin with, he
+had danced nearly every dance with the lovely Miss Milly Hollister, for
+whom he entertained the feelings which a gentleman of ripened judgment,
+and one who was rising rapidly in his profession, might properly
+entertain for an entirely charming young woman of reputed means and
+undoubted social position.</p>
+
+<p>A preposterous ass named Perkins&mdash;at least, Mr. Leary mentally indexed
+Perkins as a preposterous ass&mdash;had brought Miss Hollister to the party,
+but thereafter in the scheme of things Perkins did not count. He was a
+cipher. You could back him up against a wall and take a rubber-tipped
+pencil and rub him right out, as it were; and with regards to Miss
+Hollister that, figuratively, was what Mr. Leary had done to Mr.
+Perkins. Now on the other hand Voris might have amounted to something as
+a potential rival, but Voris being newly appointed as a police
+magistrate was prevented by press of official duties from coming to the
+party; so Mr. Leary had had a clear field, as the saying goes, and had
+made the most of it, as the other saying goes.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, Mr. Leary had been the recipient of unlimited praise upon the
+ingenuity and the uniqueness expressed in his costume. He had not
+represented a Little Lord Fauntleroy or a Buster Brown or a Boy Scout or
+a Juvenile Cadet or a Midshipmite or an Oliver Twist. There had been
+three Boy Scouts<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> present and four Buster Browns and of sailor-suited
+persons there had been no end, really. But Mr. Leary had chosen to
+appear as Himself at the Age of Three; and, as the complimentary comment
+proved, his get-up had reflected credit not alone upon its wearer but
+upon its designer, Miss Rowena Skiff, who drew fashion pictures for one
+of the women's magazines. Out of the goodness of her heart and the
+depths of her professional knowledge Miss Skiff had gone to Mr. Leary's
+aid, supervising the preparation of his wardrobe at a theatrical
+costumer's shop up-town and, on the evening before, coming to his
+bachelor apartments, accompanied by her mother, personally to add those
+small special refinements which meant so much, as he now realised, in
+attaining the desired result.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Mr. Leary, I must tell you again how very fetching you do look!
+Your costume is adorable, really it is; so&mdash;so cute and everything. And
+I don't know what I should have done without you to help in the games
+and everything. There's no use denying it, Mr. Leary&mdash;you were the life
+of the party, absolutely!"</p>
+
+<p>At least twice during the night Mrs. Carroway had told Mr. Leary this,
+and now as he bade her farewell she was saying it once more in
+practically the same words, when Mrs. Carroway's coloured maid, Blanche,
+touched him on the arm.</p>
+
+<p>"'Scuse me, suh," apologised Blanche, "but the hall man downstairs he
+send up word jes' now by the elevator man 'at you'd best be comin' right
+on down now, suh, effen you expects to git a taxicab. He say to tell you
+they ain't but one taxicab left an' the driver of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> 'at one's been
+waitin' fur hours an' he act like he might go way any minute now. 'At's
+whut the hall man send word, suh."</p>
+
+<p>Blanche had brought his overcoat along and held it up for him, imparting
+to the service that small suggestion of a ceremonial rite which the
+members of her race invariably do display when handling a garment of
+richness of texture and indubitable cost. Mr. Leary let her help him
+into the coat and slipped largess into her hand, and as he stepped
+aboard the waiting elevator for the downward flight Mrs. Carroway's
+voice came fluting to him, once again repeating the flattering phrase:
+"You surely were the life of the party!"</p>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>It was fine to have been the life of the party. It was not quite so fine
+to discover that the taxicab to which he must entrust himself for the
+long ride up to West Eighty-fifth Street was a most shabby-appearing
+vehicle, the driver of which, moreover, as Mr. Leary could divine even
+as he crossed the sidewalk, had wiled away the tedium of waiting by
+indulgence in draughts of something more potent than the chill air of
+latish November. Mr. Leary peered doubtfully into the illuminated
+countenance but dulled eyes of the driver and caught a whiff of a breath
+alcoholically fragrant, and he understood that the warning relayed to
+him by Blanche had carried a subtle double meaning. Still, there was no
+other taxicab to be had. The street might have been a byway in old
+Pompeii for all the life that moved within it. Washington Square, facing
+him, was as empty as a graveyard generally is at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> this hour, and the
+semblance of a conventional graveyard in wintertime was helped out by a
+light snow&mdash;the first of the season&mdash;sifting down in large damp flakes.</p>
+
+<p>Twice and thrice he repeated the address, speaking each time sharply and
+distinctly, before the meaning seemed to filter into the befogged
+intellect of the inebriate. On the third rendition the latter roused
+from where he was slumped down.</p>
+
+<p>"I garcia, Steve," he said thickly. "I garcia firs' time only y'
+hollowed s'loud I couldn und'stancher."</p>
+
+<p>So saying he lurched into a semiupright posture and fumbled for the
+wheel. Silently condemning the curse of intemperance among the working
+classes of a great city Mr. Leary boarded the cab and drew the skirts of
+his overcoat down in an effort to cover his knees. With a harsh grating
+of clutches and an abrupt jerk the taxi started north.</p>
+
+<p>Wobbling though he was upon his perch the driver mechanically steered a
+reasonably straight course. The passenger leaning back in the depths of
+the cab confessed to himself he was a trifle weary and more than a
+trifle sleepy. At thirty-seven one does not dance and play children's
+games alternately for six hours on a stretch without paying for the
+exertion in a sensation of let-downness. His head slipped forward on his
+chest.</p>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>With a drowsy uncertainty as to whether he had been dozing for hours or
+only for a very few minutes Mr. Leary opened his eyes and sat up. The
+car was halted slantwise against a curbing; the chauffeur was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> jammed
+down again into a heap. Mr. Leary stepped nimbly forth upon the
+pavement, feeling in his overcoat pocket for the fare; and then he
+realised he was not in West Eighty-fifth Street at all; he was not in
+any street that he remembered ever having seen before in the course of
+his life. Offhand, though, he guessed he was somewhere in that mystic
+maze of brick and mortar known as Old Greenwich Village; and, for a
+further guess, in that particular part of it where business during these
+last few years had been steadily encroaching upon the ancient residences
+of long departed Knickerbocker families.</p>
+
+<p>The street in which he stood, for a wonder in this part of town, ran a
+fairly straight course. At its western foot he could make out through
+the drifting flakes where a squat structure suggestive of a North River
+freight dock interrupted the sky line. In his immediate vicinity the
+street was lined with tall bleak fronts of jobbing houses, all dark and
+all shuttered. Looking the other way, which would be eastward, he could
+make out where these wholesale establishments tailed off, to be
+succeeded by the lower shapes of venerable dwellings adorned with the
+dormered windows and the hip roofs which distinguished a bygone
+architectural period. Some distance off in this latter direction the
+vista between the buildings was cut across by the straddle-bug structure
+of one of the Elevated roads. All this Mr. Leary comprehended in a quick
+glance about him, and then he turned on the culprit cabman with rage in his heart.</p>
+
+<p>"See here, you!" he snapped crossly, jerking the other by the shoulder.
+"What do you mean by <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>bringing me away off here! This isn't where I
+wanted to go. Oh, wake up, you!"</p>
+
+<p>Under his vigorous shaking the driver slid over sideways until he
+threatened to decant himself out upon Mr. Leary. His cap falling off
+exposed the blank face of one who for the time being has gone dead to
+the world and to all its carking cares, and the only response he offered
+for his mishandling was a deep and sincere snore. The man was hopelessly
+intoxicated; there was no question about it. More to relieve his own
+deep chagrin than for any logical reason Mr. Leary shook him again; the
+net results were a protesting semiconscious gargle and a further
+careening slant of the sleeper's form.</p>
+
+<p>Well, there was nothing else to do but walk. He must make his way afoot
+until he came to Sixth Avenue or on to Fifth, upon the chance of finding
+in one of these two thoroughfares a ranging nighthawk cab. As a last
+resort he could take the Subway or the L north. This contingency,
+though, Mr. Leary considered with feelings akin to actual repugnance. He
+dreaded the prospect of ribald and derisive comments from chance fellow
+travellers upon a public transportation line. For you should know that
+though Mr. Leary's outer garbing was in the main conventional there were
+strikingly incongruous features of it too.</p>
+
+<p>From his neck to his knees he correctly presented the aspect of a
+gentleman returning late from social diversions, caparisoned in a
+handsome fur-faced, fur-lined top coat. But his knees were entirely
+bare; so, too, were his legs down to about midway of the calves, where
+there ensued, as it were, a pair of white<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> silk socks, encircled by pink
+garters with large and ornate pink ribbon bows upon them. His feet were
+bestowed in low slippers with narrow buttoned straps crossing the
+insteps. It was Miss Skiff, with her instinct for the verities, who had
+insisted upon bows for the garters and straps for the slippers, these
+being what she had called finishing touches. Likewise it was due to that
+young lady's painstaking desire for appropriateness and completeness of
+detail that Mr. Leary at this moment wore upon his head a very
+wide-brimmed, very floppy straw hat with two quaint pink-ribbon
+streamers floating jauntily down between his shoulders at the back.</p>
+
+<p>For reasons which in view of this sartorial description should be
+obvious, Mr. Leary hugged closely up to the abutting house fronts when
+he left behind him the marooned taxi with its comatose driver asleep
+upon it, like one lone castaway upon a small island in a sea of
+emptiness, and set his face eastward. Such was the warmth of his
+annoyance he barely felt the chill striking upon his exposed nether
+limbs or took note of the big snowflakes melting damply upon his thinly
+protected ankles. Then, too, almost immediately something befell which
+upset him still more.</p>
+
+<p>He came to where a wooden marquee, projecting over the entrance to a
+shipping room, made a black strip along the feebly lighted pavement. As
+he entered the patch of darkness the shape of a man materialised out of
+the void and barred his way, and in that same fraction of a second
+something shiny and hard was thrust against Mr. Leary's daunted bosom,
+and in a low forceful rumble a voice commanded him as follows: "Put up
+your mitts&mdash;and keep 'em up!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span></p><p>Matching the action of his hands everything in Mr. Leary seemed to
+start skyward simultaneously. His hair on his scalp straightened, his
+breath came up from his lungs in a gasp, his heart lodged in his throat,
+and his blood quit his feet, leaving them practically devoid of
+circulation and ascended and drummed in his temples. He had a horrid,
+emptied feeling in his diaphragm, too, as though the organs customarily
+resident there had caught the contagion of the example and gone north.</p>
+
+<p>"That's nice," spake the fearsome stranger. "Now stay jest the way you
+are and don't make no peep or I'll have to plug you wit' this here gat."</p>
+
+<div class="center"><a name="fig_001.jpg" id="fig_001.jpg"></a><img src="images/fig_001.jpg" width='496' height='700' alt="THAT'S NICE, SPAKE THE FEARSOME STRANGER. NOW STAY
+JEST THE WAY YOU ARE AND DON'T MAKE NO PEEP OR I'LL HAVE TO PLUG YOU WIT' THIS HERE GAT" /></div>
+
+<h4>"THAT'S NICE," SPAKE THE FEARSOME STRANGER. "NOW STAY
+JEST THE WAY YOU ARE AND DON'T MAKE NO PEEP OR I'LL HAVE TO PLUG YOU
+WIT' THIS HERE GAT"</h4>
+
+<p>His right hand maintained the sinister pressure of the weapon against
+the victim's deflated chest, while his left dexterously explored the
+side pockets of Mr. Leary's overcoat. Then the same left hand jerked the
+frogged fastenings of the garment asunder and went pawing swiftly over
+Mr. Leary's quivering person, seeking the pockets which would have been
+there had Mr. Leary been wearing garments bearing the regulation and
+ordained number of pockets. But the exploring fingers merely slid along
+a smooth and unbroken frontal surface.</p>
+
+<p>"Wot t'ell? Wot t'ell?" muttered the footpad in bewilderment. "Say,
+where're you got yore leather and yore kittle hid? Speak up quick!"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm&mdash;I'm&mdash;not carrying a watch or a purse to-night," quavered Mr.
+Leary. "These&mdash;these clothes I happen to be wearing are not made with
+places in them for a watch or anything. And you've already taken what
+money I had&mdash;it was all in my overcoat pocket."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span></p><p>"Yep; a pinch of chicken feed and wot felt like about four one-bone
+bills." The highwayman's accent was both ominous and contemptuous. "Say,
+wotcher mean drillin' round dis town in some kinder funny riggin'
+wit'out no plunder on you? I gotta right to belt you one acrost the bean."</p>
+
+<p>"I'd rather you didn't do that," protested Mr. Leary in all seriousness.
+"If&mdash;if you'd only give me your address I could send you some money in
+the morning to pay you for your trouble&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Cut out de kiddin'," broke in the disgusted marauder. His tone changed
+slightly for the better. "Say, near as I kin tell by feelin' it, dat
+ain't such a bum benny you're sportin'. I'll jest take dat along wit'
+me. Letcher arms down easy and hold 'em straight out from yore sides
+while I gits it offen you. And no funny business!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, please, please, don't take my overcoat," implored Mr. Leary,
+plunged by these words into a deeper panic. "Anything but that!
+I&mdash;you&mdash;you really mustn't leave me without my overcoat."</p>
+
+<p>"Wot else is dere to take?"</p>
+
+<p>Even as he uttered the scornful question the thief had wrested the
+garment from Mr. Leary's helpless form and was backing away into the
+darkness.</p>
+
+<p>Out of impenetrable gloom came his farewell warning: "Stay right where
+you are for fi' minutes wit'out movin' or makin' a yelp. If you wiggle
+before de time is up I gotta pal right yere watchin' you, and he'll sure
+plug you. He ain't no easy-goin' guy like wot I am. You're gittin' off
+lucky it's me stuck you up, stidder him."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span></p><p>With these words he was gone&mdash;gone with Mr. Leary's overcoat, with Mr.
+Leary's last cent, with his latchkey, with his cardcase, with all by
+which Mr. Leary might hope to identify himself before a wary and
+incredulous world for what he was. He was gone, leaving there in the
+protecting ledge of shadow the straw-hatted, socked-and-slippered,
+leg-gartered figure of a plump being, clad otherwise in a single
+vestment which began at the line of a becomingly low neckband and
+terminated in blousy outbulging bifurcations just above the naked knees.
+Light stealing into this obscured and sheltered spot would have revealed
+that this garment was, as to texture, a heavy, silklike, sheeny,
+material; and as to colour a vivid and compelling pink&mdash;the exact colour
+of a slice of well-ripened watermelon; also that its sleeves ended
+elbow-high in an effect of broad turned-back cuffs; finally, that adown
+its owner's back it was snugly and adequately secured by means of a
+close-set succession of very large, very shiny white pearl buttons; the
+whole constituting an enlarged but exceedingly accurate copy of what,
+descriptively, is known to the manufactured-garment trade as a one-piece
+suit of child's rompers, self-trimmed, fastening behind; suitable for
+nursery, playground and seashore, especially recommended as summer wear
+for the little ones; to be had in all sizes; prices such-and-such.</p>
+
+<p>Within a space of some six or seven minutes this precisely was what the
+nearest street lamp did reveal unto itself as its downward-slanting
+beams fell upon a furtive, fugitive shape, suggestive in that deficient
+subradiance of a vastly overgrown forked parsnip, miraculously endowed
+with powers of locomotion and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> bound for somewhere in a hurry; excepting
+of course no forked parsnip, however remarkable in other respects, would
+be wearing a floppy straw hat in a snowstorm; nor is it likely it would
+be adorned lengthwise in its rear with a highly decorative design of
+broad, smooth, polished disks which, even in that poor illumination,
+gleamed and twinkled and wiggled snakily in and out of alignment, in
+accord with the movements of their wearer's spinal column.</p>
+
+<p>But the reader and I, better informed than any lamp post could be as to
+the prior sequence of events, would know at a glance it was no parsnip
+we beheld, but Mr. Algernon Leary, now suddenly enveloped, through no
+fault of his own, in one of the most overpowering predicaments
+conceivable to involve a rising lawyer and a member of at least two good
+clubs; and had we but been there to watch him, knowing, as we would
+know, the developments leading up to this present situation, we might
+have guessed what was the truth: That Mr. Leary was hot bent upon
+retreating to the only imaginable refuge left to him at this
+juncture&mdash;to wit, the interior of the stranded taxicab which he had
+abandoned but a short time previously.</p>
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>Nearly all of us at some time or other in our lives have dreamed awful
+dreams of being discovered in a public place with nothing at all upon
+our bodies, and have awakened, burning hot with the shame of an enormous
+and terrific embarrassment. Being no student of the psychic phenomena of
+human slumber I do not know whether this is a subconscious
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>harking-back to the days of our infancy or whether it is merely a
+manifestation to prove the inadvisability of partaking of Welsh rabbits
+and lobster salads immediately before retiring. More than once Mr. Leary
+had bedreamed thus, but at this moment he realised how much more dread
+and distressing may be a dire actuality than a vision conjured up out of
+the mysteries of sleep.</p>
+
+<p>One surprised by strangers in a nude or partially nude state may have
+any one of a dozen acceptable excuses for being so circumstanced. An
+earthquake may have caught one unawares, say; or inopportunely a
+bathroom door may have blown open. Once the first shock occasioned by
+the untoward appearance of the victim has passed away he is sure of
+sympathy. For him pity is promptly engendered and volunteer aid is
+enlisted.</p>
+
+<p>But Mr. Leary had a profound conviction that, revealed in this ghastly
+plight before the eyes of his fellows, his case would be regarded
+differently; that instead of commiseration there would be for him only
+the derision which is so humiliating to a sensitive nature. He felt so
+undignified, so glaringly conspicuous, so&mdash;well, so scandalously
+immature. If only it had been an orthodox costume party which Mrs.
+Carroway had given, why, then he might have gone as a Roman senator or
+as a private chief or an Indian brave or a cavalier. In doublet or jack
+boots or war bonnet, in a toga, even, he might have mastered the dilemma
+and carried off a dubious situation. But to be adrift in an alien
+quarter of a great and heartless city round four o'clock in the morning,
+so picturesquely and so unseasonably garbed, and in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>imminent peril of
+detection, was a prospect calculated to fill one with the frenzied
+delirium of a nightmare made real. Put yourself in his place, I ask you.</p>
+
+<p>His slippered feet spurned the thin snow as he moved rapidly back toward
+the west. Ahead of him he could detect the clumped outlines of the
+taxicab, and at the sight of it he quickened to a trot. Once safely
+within it he could take stock of things; could map out a campaign of
+future action; could think up ways and means of extricating himself from
+his present lamentable case with the least possible risk of undesirable
+publicity. At any rate he would be shielded for the moment from the life
+which might at any moment awaken in the still sleeping and apparently
+vacant neighbourhood. Finally, of course, there was the hope that the
+drunken cabman might be roused, and once roused might be capable, under
+promise of rich financial reward, of conveying Mr. Leary to his bachelor
+apartments in West Eighty-fifth Street before dawn came, with its
+early-bird milkmen and its before-day newspaper distributors and its
+others too numerous to mention.</p>
+
+<p>Without warning of any sort the cab started off, seemingly of its own
+volition. Mr. Leary's gait became a desperate gallop, and as he galloped
+he gave voice in entreaty.</p>
+
+<div class="center"><a name="fig_002.jpg" id="fig_002.jpg"></a><img src="images/fig_002.jpg" width='457' height='700' alt="MR. LEARY'S GAIT BECAME A DESPERATE GALLOP, AND AS HE
+GALLOPED HE SHOUTED: WAIT, PLEASE. HERE I AM HERE'S YOUR PASSENGER!" /></div>
+
+<h4>MR. LEARY'S GAIT BECAME A DESPERATE GALLOP, AND AS HE
+GALLOPED HE SHOUTED: WAIT, PLEASE. HERE I AM&mdash;HERE'S YOUR PASSENGER!</h4>
+
+<p>"Hey there!" he shouted. "Wait, please. Here I am&mdash;here's your
+passenger!"</p>
+
+<p>His straw hat blew off, but this was no time to stop for a straw hat.
+For a few rods he gained upon the vehicle, then as its motion increased
+he lost ground and ran a losing race. Its actions disclosed that a
+conscious if an uncertain hand guided its destinies.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> Wabbling this way
+and that it wheeled skiddingly round a corner. When Mr. Leary, rowelled
+on to yet greater speed by the spurs of a mounting misery, likewise
+turned the corner it was irrevocably remote, beyond all prospect of
+being overtaken by anything human pursuing it afoot. The swaying black
+bulk of it diminished and was swallowed up in the snow shower and the
+darkness. The rattle of mishandled gears died to a thin metallic
+clanking, then to a purring whisper, and then the whisper expired, dead
+silence ensuing.</p>
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<p>In the void of this silence stood Mr. Leary, shivering now in the
+reaction that had succeeded the nerve jar of being robbed at a pistol's
+point, and lacking the fervour of the chase to sustain him. For him the
+inconceivable disaster was complete and utter; upon him despair
+descended as a patent swatter upon a lone housefly. Miles away from
+home, penniless and friendless&mdash;the two terms being practically
+synonymous in New York&mdash;what asylum was there for him now? Suppose
+daylight found him abroad thus? Suppose he succumbed to exposure and was
+discovered stiffly frozen in a doorway? Death by processes of
+congealment must carry an added sting if one had to die in a suit of
+pink rompers buttoning down the back. As though the thought of freezing
+had been a cue to Nature he noted a tickling in his nose and a chokiness
+in his throat, and somewhere in his system, a long way off, so to speak,
+he felt a sneeze forming and approaching the surface.</p>
+
+<p>To add to his state of misery, if anything could add<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> to its distressing
+total, he was taking cold. When Mr. Leary took cold he took it
+thoroughly and throughout his system. Very soon, as he knew by past
+experience, his voice would be hoarse and wheezy and his nose and his
+eyes would run. But the sneeze was delayed in transit, and Mr. Leary
+took advantage of the respite to cast a glance about him. Perhaps&mdash;the
+expedient had surged suddenly into his brain&mdash;perhaps there might be a
+hotel or a lodging house of sorts hereabouts? If so, such an
+establishment would have a night clerk on duty, and despite the
+baggageless and cashless state of the suppliant it was possible the
+night clerk might be won, by compassion or by argument or by both, to
+furnish Mr. Leary shelter until after breakfast time, when over the
+telephone he could reach friends and from these friends procure an
+outfit of funds and suitable clothing.</p>
+
+<p>In sight, though, there was no structure which by its outward appearance
+disclosed itself as a place of entertainment for the casual wayfarer.
+Howsomever, lights were shining through the frosted panes of a row of
+windows stretching across the top floor of a building immediately at
+hand, and even as he made this discovery Mr. Leary was aware of the
+dimmed sounds of revelry and of orchestral music up there, and also of
+an illuminated canvas triangle stuck above the hallway entrance of the
+particular building in question, this device bearing a lettered
+inscription upon it to advertise that here the members of the Lawrence
+P. McGillicuddy Literary Association and Pleasure Club were holding
+their Grand Annual Civic Ball; admission One Dollar, including Hat
+Check; Ladies Free when accompanied by Gents. Evidently the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> Lawrence P.
+McGillicuddys kept even later hours at their roisterings than the
+Bohemian sets in Washington Square kept.</p>
+
+<p>Observing these evidences of adjacent life and merry-makings Mr. Leary
+cogitated. Did he dare intrude upon the festivities aloft there? And if
+he did so dare would he enter cavortingly, trippingly, with intent to
+deceive the assembled company into the assumption that he had come to
+their gathering in costume; or would he throw himself upon their charity
+and making open confession of his predicament seek to enlist the
+friendly offices of some kindly soul in extricating him from it?</p>
+
+<p>While he canvassed the two propositions tentatively he heard the thud of
+footsteps descending the stairs from the dance hall, and governed by an
+uncontrollable impulse he leaped for concealment behind a pile of
+building material that was stacked handily upon the sidewalk almost at
+his elbow. He might possibly have driven himself to face a multitude
+indoors, but somehow could not, just naturally could not, in his present
+apparel, face one stranger outdoors&mdash;or at least not until he had
+opportunity to appraise the stranger.</p>
+
+<p>It was a man who emerged from the hallway entrance; a stockily built man
+wearing his hat well over one ear and with his ulster opened and flung
+back exposing a broad chest to the wintry air. He was whistling a
+sprightly air.</p>
+
+<p>Just as this individual came opposite the lumber pile the first
+dedicatory sneeze of a whole subsequent series of sneezes which had been
+burgeoning somewhere in the top of Mr. Leary's head, and which that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>
+unhappy gentleman had been mechanically endeavouring to suppress, burst
+from captivity with a vast moist report. At the explosion the passer-by
+spun about and his whistle expired in a snort of angered surprise as the
+bared head of Mr. Leary appeared above the topmost board of the pile,
+and Mr. Leary's abashed face looked into his.</p>
+
+<p>"Say," he demanded, "wotcher meanin', hidin' there and snortin' in a
+guy's ear?"</p>
+
+<p>His manner was truculent; indeed, verged almost upon the menacing.
+Evidently the shock had adversely affected his temper, to the point
+where he might make personal issues out of unavoidable trifles.
+Instinctively Mr. Leary felt that the situation which had arisen called
+for diplomacy of the very highest order. He cleared his throat before
+replying.</p>
+
+<p>"Good evening," he began, in what he vainly undertook to make a casual
+tone of voice. "I beg your pardon&mdash;the sneeze&mdash;ahem&mdash;occurred when I
+wasn't expecting it. Ahem&mdash;I wonder if you would do me a favour?"</p>
+
+<p>"I would not! Come snortin' in a guy's ear that-a-way and then askin'
+him would he do you a favour: You got a crust for fair!" Here, though, a
+natural curiosity triumphed over the rising tides of indignation. "Wot
+favour do you want, anyway?" he inquired shortly.</p>
+
+<p>"Would you&mdash;would you&mdash;I wonder if you would be willing to sell me that
+overcoat you're wearing?"</p>
+
+<p>"I would not!"</p>
+
+<p>"You see, the fact of the matter is I happened to be needing an overcoat
+very badly at the moment,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> pressed Mr. Leary. "I was hoping that you
+might be induced to name a price for yours."</p>
+
+<p>"I would not! M. J. Cassidy wears M. J. Cassidy's clothes, and nobody
+else wears 'em, believe me! Wot's happened to your own coat?"</p>
+
+<p>"I lost it&mdash;I mean it was stolen."</p>
+
+<p>"Stole?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, a robber with a revolver held me up a few minutes ago just over
+here in the next cross street and he took my coat away."</p>
+
+<p>"Huh! Well, did you lose your hat the same way?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;that is to say, no. I lost my hat running."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you run, hey? Well, you look to me like a guy wot would run. Well,
+did he take your clothes, too? Is that why you're squattin' behind them
+timbers?" The inquisitive one took a step nearer.</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;oh, no! I'm still wearing my&mdash;my&mdash;the costume I was wearing,"
+answered Mr. Leary, apprehensively wedging his way still farther back
+between the stack of boards and the wall behind. "But you see&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Well then, barrin' the fact that you ain't got no hat, ain't you jest
+as well off without no overcoat now as I'd be if I fell for any
+hard-luck spiel from you and let you have mine?"</p>
+
+<p>"I wouldn't go so far as to say that exactly," tendered Mr. Leary
+ingratiatingly. "I'm afraid my clothing isn't as suitable for outdoor
+wear as yours is. You see, I'd been to a sort of social function and on
+my way home it&mdash;it happened."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, it did, did it? Well, anyway, I should worry about you and your
+clothes," stated the other. He took a step onward, then halted; and now
+the gleam<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> of speculative gain was in his eye. "Say, if I was willin' to
+sell&mdash;not sayin' I would be, but if I was&mdash;wot would you be willin' to
+give for an overcoat like this here one?"</p>
+
+<p>"Any price within reason&mdash;any price you felt like asking," said Mr.
+Leary, his hopes of deliverance rekindling.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, maybe I'd take twenty-five dollars for it just as it stands and
+no questions ast. How'd that strike you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'll take it. That seems a most reasonable figure."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, fork over the twenty-five then, and the deal's closed."</p>
+
+<p>"I'd have to send you the money to-morrow&mdash;I mean to-day. You see, the
+thief took all my cash when he took my overcoat."</p>
+
+<p>"Did, huh?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, that's the present condition of things. Very annoying, isn't it?
+But I'll take your address. I'm a lawyer in business in Broad Street,
+and as soon as I reach my office I'll send the amount by messenger."</p>
+
+<p>"Aw, to hell with you and your troubles! I might a-knowed you was some
+new kind of a panhandler when you come a-snortin' in my ear that-a-way.
+Better beat it while the goin's good. You're in the wrong neighbourhood
+to be springin' such a gag as this one you just now sprang on me.
+Anyhow, I've wasted enough time on the likes of you."</p>
+
+<p>He was ten feet away when Mr. Leary, his wits sharpened by his
+extremity, clutched at the last straw.</p>
+
+<p>"One moment," he nervously begged. "Did I understand you to say your
+name was Cassidy?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span></p><p>"You did. Wot of it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, curious coincidence and all that&mdash;but my name happens to be
+Leary. And I thought that because of that you might&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The stranger broke in on him. "Your name happens to be Leary, does it?
+Wot's your other name then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Algernon."</p>
+
+<p>Stepping lightly on the balls of his feet Mr. Cassidy turned back, and
+his mien for some reason was potentially that of a belligerent.</p>
+
+<p>"Say," he declared threateningly, "you know wot I think about you? Well,
+I think you're a liar. No regular guy with the name of Leary would let a
+cheap stiff of a stick-up rob him out of the coat offen his back without
+puttin' up a battle. No regular guy named Leary would be named Algernon.
+Say, I think you're a Far Downer. I wouldn't be surprised but wot you
+was an A. P. A. on the top of that. And wot's all this here talk about
+goin' to a sociable functure and comin' away not suitably dressed? Come
+on out of that now and let's have a look at you."</p>
+
+<p>"Really, I'd much rather not&mdash;if you don't mind," protested the
+miserable Mr. Leary. "I&mdash;I have reasons."</p>
+
+<p>"The same here. Will you come out from behind there peaceable or will I
+fetch you out?"</p>
+
+<p>So Mr. Leary came, endeavouring while coming to wear a manner combining
+an atmosphere of dignified aloofness and a sentiment of frank
+indifference to the opinion of this loutish busybody, with just a touch,
+a mere trace, as it were, of nonchalance thrown in. In short, coming out
+he sought to deport himself as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> though it were the properest thing in
+the world for a man of years and discretion to be wearing a bright pink
+one-piece article of apparel on a public highway at four <span class="smaller">A. M.</span> or
+thereabouts. Undoubtedly, considering everything, it was the hardest
+individual task essayed in New York during the first year of the war.
+Need I add that it was a failure&mdash;a total failure? As he stood forth
+fully and comprehensively revealed by the light of the adjacent
+transparency, Mr. Cassidy's squint of suspicion widened into a pop-eyed
+stare of temporary stupefaction.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, for the love of&mdash;&mdash; In the name of&mdash;&mdash; Did anywan ever see the
+likes of&mdash;&mdash;!"</p>
+
+<p>He murmured the broken sentences as he circled about the form of the
+martyr. Completing the circuit, laughter of a particularly boisterous
+and concussive variety interrupted his fragmentary speech.</p>
+
+<p>"Ha ha, ha ha," echoed Mr. Leary in a palpably forced and hollow effort,
+to show that he, too, could enter into the spirit of the occasion with
+heartiness. "Does strike one as rather unusual at first sight&mdash;doesn't
+it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, you big hooman radish! Why, you strollin' sunset!" thus Mr.
+Cassidy responded. "Are you payin' an election bet three weeks after the
+election's over? Or is it that you're just a plain bedaddled ijiet? Or
+wot is it, I wonder?"</p>
+
+<p>"I explained to you that I went to a party. It was a fancy-dress party,"
+stated Mr. Leary.</p>
+
+<p>Sharp on the words Mr. Cassidy's manner changed. Here plainly was a
+person of moods, changeable and tempersome.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span></p><p>"Ain't you ashamed of yourself, and you a large, grown man, to be
+skihootin' round with them kind of foolish duds on, and your own country
+at war this minute for decency and democracy?" From this it also was
+evident that Mr. Cassidy read the editorials in the papers. "You should
+take shame to yourself that you ain't in uniform instid of baby
+clothes."</p>
+
+<p>It was the part of discretion, so Mr. Leary inwardly decided, to ignore
+the fact that the interrogator himself appeared to be well within the
+military age.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm a bit old to enlist," he stated, "and I'm past the draft age."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you're too old to be wearin' such a riggin'. But, by cripes, I'll
+say this for you&mdash;you make a picture that'd make a horse laugh."</p>
+
+<p>Laughing like a horse, or as a horse would laugh if a horse ever
+laughed, he rocked to and fro on his heels.</p>
+
+<p>"Sh-sh; not so loud, please," importuned Mr. Leary, casting an uneasy
+glance toward the lighted windows above. "Somebody might hear you!"</p>
+
+<p>"I hope somebody does hear me," gurgled the temperamental Mr. Cassidy,
+now once more thoroughly beset by his mirth. "I need somebody to help me
+laugh. By cripes, I need a whole crowd to help me; and I know a way to
+get them!"</p>
+
+<p>He twisted his head round so his voice would ascend the hallway. "Hey,
+fellers and skoirts," he called; "you that's fixin' to leave! Hurry on
+down here quick and see Algy, the livin' peppermint lossenger, before he
+melts away with his own sweetness."</p>
+
+<p>Obeying the summons with promptness a flight of the Lawrence P.
+McGillicuddy's, accompanied for the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> most part by lady friends, cascaded
+down the stairs and erupted forth upon the sidewalk.</p>
+
+<p>"Here y'are&mdash;right here!" clarioned Mr. Cassidy as the first skylarkish
+pair showed in the doorway. His manner was drolly that of a showman
+exhibiting a rare freak, newly captured. "Come a-runnin'!"</p>
+
+<p>They came a-running and there were a dozen of them or possibly fifteen;
+blithesome spirits, all, and they fenced in the shrinking shape of Mr.
+Leary with a close and curious ring of themselves, and the combined
+volume of their glad, amazed outbursts might be heard for a distance of
+furlongs. On prankish impulse then they locked hands and with skippings
+and prancings and impromptu jig steps they circled about him; and he,
+had he sought to speak, could not well have been heard; and, anyway, he
+was for the moment past speech, because of being entirely engaged in
+giving vent to one vehement sneeze after another. And next, above the
+chorus of joyous whooping might be heard individual comments, each
+shrieked out shrilly and each punctuated by a sneeze from Mr. Leary's
+convulsed frame; or lacking that by a simulated sneeze from one of the
+revellers&mdash;one with a fine humorous flare for mimicry. And these
+comments were, for example, such as:</p>
+
+<p>"Git onto the socks!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ker-chew!"</p>
+
+<p>"And the slippers!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ker-chew!"</p>
+
+<p>"And them lovely pink garters!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ker-chew!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you cutey! Oh, you cut-up!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ker-chew!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span></p><p>"Oh, you candy kid!"</p>
+
+<p>"And say, git onto the cunnin' elbow sleeves our little playmate's
+sportin'."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but goils, just pipe the poilies&mdash;ain't they the greatest ever?"</p>
+
+<p>"They sure are. Say, kiddo, gimme one of 'em to remember you by, won't
+you? You'll never miss it&mdash;you got a-plenty more."</p>
+
+<p>"Wot d'ye call wot he's got on 'um, anyway?" The speaker was a male,
+naturally.</p>
+
+<p>"W'y, you big stoopid, can't you see he's wearin' rompers?" The answer
+came in a giggle, from a gay youthful creature of the opposite sex as
+she kicked out roguishly.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then be chee, w'y don't he romp a little?"</p>
+
+<p>"Give 'um time, cancher? Don't you see he's blowin' out his flues? He's
+busy now. He'll romp in a minute."</p>
+
+<p>"Sure he will! We'll romp with 'um."</p>
+
+<p>A waggish young person in white beaded slippers and a green sport skirt
+broke free from the cavorting ring, and behind Mr. Leary's back the
+nimble fingers of the madcap tapped his spinal ornamentations as an
+instrumentalist taps the stops of an organ; and she chanted a familiar
+counting game of childhood:</p>
+
+<p>"Rich man&mdash;poor man&mdash;beggar man&mdash;thief&mdash;doctor&mdash;loiryer&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure, he said he was a loiryer." It was Mr. Cassidy breaking in. "And
+he said his name was Algernon. Well, I believe the Algernon part&mdash;the
+big A. P. A."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you Algy!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span></p><p>"Algernon, does your mother know you're out?"</p>
+
+<p>"T'ree cheers for Algy, the walkin' comic valentine!"</p>
+
+<p>"Algy, Algy&mdash;Oh, you cutey Algy!" These jolly Greenwich Villagers were
+going to make a song of his name. They did make a song of it, and it was
+a frolicsome song and pitched to a rollicksome key. Congenial newcomers
+arrived, pelting down from upstairs whence they had been drawn by the
+happy rocketing clamour; and they caught spirit and step and tune with
+the rest and helped manfully to sing it. As one poet hath said, "And now
+reigned high carnival." And as another has so aptly phrased it, "There
+was sound of revelry by night." And, as the second poet once put it, or
+might have put it so if so be he didn't, "And all went merry as a
+marriage bell." But when we, adapting the line to our own descriptive
+usages, now say all went merry we should save out one exception&mdash;one
+whose form alternately was racked by hot flushes of a terrific
+self-consciousness and by humid gusts of an equally terrific sneezing
+fit.</p>
+
+<h3>VI</h3>
+
+<p>"Here, here, here! Cut out the yellin'! D'you want the whole block up
+out of their beds?" The voice of the personified law, gruff and
+authoritative, broke in upon the clamour, and the majesty of the law,
+typified in bulk, with galoshes, ear muffs and woollen gloves on, not to
+mention the customary uniform of blue and brass, ploughed a path toward
+the centre of the group.</p>
+
+<p>"'S all right, Switzer," gaily replied a hoydenish <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>lassie; she, the
+same who had begged Mr. Leary for a sea-pearl souvenir. "But just see
+wot Morrie Cassidy went and found here on the street!"</p>
+
+<p>Patrolman Switzer looked then where she pointed, and could scarce
+believe his eyes. In his case gleefulness took on a rumbling thunderous
+form, which shook his being as with an ague and made him to beat himself
+violently upon his ribs.</p>
+
+<p>"D'ye blame us for carryin' on, Switzer, when we seen it ourselves?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't&mdash;and that's a fact," Switzer confessed between gurgles. "I
+wouldn't a blamed you much if you'd fell down and had a fit." And then
+he rocked on his heels, filled with joviality clear down to his rubber
+soles. Anon, though, he remembered the responsibilities of his position.
+"Still, at that, and even so," said he, sobering himself, "enough of a
+good thing's enough." He glared accusingly, yea, condemningly, at the
+unwitting cause of the quelled commotion.</p>
+
+<p>"Say, what's the idea, you carousin' round Noo York City this hour of
+the night diked up like a Coney Island Maudie Graw? And what's the idea,
+you causin' a boisterous and disorderly crowd to collect? And what's the
+idea, you makin' a disturbance in a vicinity full of decent hard-workin'
+people that's tryin' to get a little rest? What's the general idea,
+anyhow?"</p>
+
+<p>At this moment Mr. Leary having sneezed an uncountable number of times,
+regained the powers of coherent utterance.</p>
+
+<p>"It is not my fault," he said. "I assure you of that,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> officer. I am
+being misjudged; I am the victim of circumstances over which I have no
+control. You see, officer, I went last evening to a fancy-dress party
+and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, why didn't you go on home afterwards and behave yourself?"</p>
+
+<p>"I did&mdash;I started, in a taxicab. But the taxicab driver was drunk and he
+went to sleep on the way and the taxicab stopped and I got out of it and
+started to walk across town looking for another taxicab and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Started walkin', dressed like that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly not. I had an overcoat on, of course. But a highwayman held
+me up at the point of a revolver, and he took my overcoat and what money
+I had and my card case and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Where did all this here happen&mdash;this here alleged robbery?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not two blocks away from here, right over in the next street to this
+one."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't believe nothin' of the kind!"</p>
+
+<p>Patrolman Switzer spoke with enhanced severity; his professional honour
+had been touched in a delicate place. The bare suggestion that a footpad
+might dare operate in a district under his immediate personal
+supervision would have been to him deeply repugnant, and here was this
+weirdly attired wanderer making the charge direct.</p>
+
+<p>"But, officer, I insist&mdash;I protest that&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Young feller, I think you've been drinkin', that's what I think about
+you. Your voice sounds to me like you've been drinkin' about a gallon of
+mixed ale.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> I think you dreamed all this here pipe about a robber and a
+pistol and an overcoat and a taxicab and all. Now you take a friendly
+tip from me and you run along home as fast as ever you can, and you get
+them delirious clothes off of you and then you get in bed and take a
+good night's sleep and you'll feel better. Because if you don't it's
+goin' to be necessary for me to run you in for a public nuisance. I
+ain't askin' you&mdash;I'm tellin' you, now. If you don't want to be locked
+up, start movin'&mdash;that's my last word to you."</p>
+
+<p>The recent merrymakers, who had fallen silent the better to hear the
+dialogue, grouped themselves expectantly, hoping and waiting for a yet
+more exciting and humorous sequel to what had gone before&mdash;if such a
+miracle might be possible. Nor were they to be disappointed. The
+d&eacute;nouement came quickly upon the heels of the admonition.</p>
+
+<p>For into Mr. Leary's reeling and distracted mind the warning had sent a
+clarifying idea darting. Why hadn't he thought of a police station
+before now? Perforce the person in charge at any police station would be
+under requirement to shelter him. What even if he were locked up
+temporarily? In a cell he would be safe from the slings and arrows of
+outrageous ridicule; and surely among the functionaries in any station
+house would be one who would know a gentleman in distress, however
+startlingly the gentleman might be garbed. Surely, too, somebody&mdash;once
+that somebody's amazement had abated&mdash;would he willing to do some
+telephoning for him. Perhaps, even, a policeman off duty might be
+induced to take his word for it that he was what he really was, and not
+what he seemed to be, and loan him a change of clothing.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span></p><p>Hot upon the inspiration Mr. Leary decided on his course of action. He
+would get himself safely and expeditiously removed from the hateful
+company and the ribald comments of the Lawrence P. McGillicuddys and
+their friends. He would get himself locked up&mdash;that was it. He would now
+take the first steps in that direction.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you goin' to start on home purty soon like I've just been tellin'
+you; or are you ain't?" snapped Patrolman Switzer, who, it would appear,
+was by no means a patient person.</p>
+
+<p>"I am not!" The crafty Mr. Leary put volumes of husky defiance into his
+answer. "I'm not going home&mdash;and you can't make me go home, either." He
+rejoiced inwardly to see how the portly shape of Switzer stiffened and
+swelled at the taunt. "I'm a citizen and I have a right to go where I
+please, dressed as I please, and you don't dare to stop me. I defy you
+to arrest me!" Suddenly he put both his hands in Patrolman Switzer's
+fleshy midriff and gave him a violent shove. An outraged grunt went up
+from Switzer, a delighted whoop from the audience. Swept off his balance
+by the prospect of fruition for his design the plotter had technically
+been guilty before witnesses of a violent assault upon the person of an
+officer in the sworn discharge of his duty.</p>
+
+<p>He felt himself slung violently about. One mitted hand fixed itself in
+Mr. Leary's collar yoke at the rear; the other closed upon a handful of
+slack material in the lower breadth of Mr. Leary's principal habiliment
+just below where his buttons left off.</p>
+
+<p>"So you won't come, won't you? Well then I'll show you&mdash;you pink
+strawberry drop!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span></p><p>Enraged at having been flaunted before a jeering audience the patrolman
+pushed his prisoner ten feet along the sidewalk, imparting to the
+offender's movements an involuntary gliding gait, with backward jerks
+between forward shoves; this method of propulsion being known in the
+vernacular of the force as "givin' a skate the bum's rush."</p>
+
+<p>"Hey, Switzer, lend me your key and I'll ring for the wagon for you,"
+volunteered Mr. Cassidy. His care-free companions, some of them, cheered
+the suggestion, seeing in it prospect of a prolonging of this delectable
+sport which providence without charge had so graciously deigned to
+provide.</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind about the wagon. Us two'll walk, me and him," announced the
+patrolman. "'Taint so far where we're goin', and the walk'll do this
+fresh guy a little good&mdash;maybe'll sober him up. And never mind about any
+of the rest of you taggin' along behind us neither. This is a pinch&mdash;not
+a free street parade. Go on home now, the lot of youse, before you wake
+up the whole Lower West Side."</p>
+
+<p>Loath to be cheated out of the last act of a comedy so unique and so
+rich the whimsical McGillicuddys and their chosen mates fell reluctantly
+away, with yells and gibes and quips and farewell bursts of laughter.</p>
+
+<h3>VII</h3>
+
+<p>Closely hyphenated together the deep blue figure and the bright pink one
+rounded the corner and were alone. It was time to open the overtures
+which would establish Patrolman Switzer upon the basis of a better
+understanding of things. Mr. Leary, craning his neck<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> in order to look
+rearward into the face of his custodian, spoke in a key very different
+from the one he had last employed.</p>
+
+<p>"I really didn't intend, you know, to resist you, officer. I had a
+private purpose in what I did. And you were quite within your rights.
+And I'm very grateful to you&mdash;really I am&mdash;for driving those people
+away."</p>
+
+<p>"Is that so?" The inflection was grimly and heavily sarcastic.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. I am a lawyer by profession, and generally speaking I know what
+your duties are. I merely made a show&mdash;a pretence, as it were&mdash;of
+resisting you, in order to get away from that mob. It was&mdash;ahem&mdash;it was
+a device on my part&mdash;in short, a trick."</p>
+
+<p>"Is that so? Fixin' to try to beg off now, huh? Well, nothin' doin'!
+Nothin' doin'! I don't know whether you're a fancy nut or a plain souse
+or what-all, but whatever you are you're under arrest and you're goin'
+with me."</p>
+
+<p>"That's exactly what I desire to do," resumed the schemer. "I desire
+most earnestly to go with you."</p>
+
+<p>"You're havin' your wish, ain't you? Well, then, the both of us should
+oughter be satisfied."</p>
+
+<p>"I feel sure," continued the wheedling and designing Mr. Leary, "that as
+soon as we reach the station house I can make satisfactory atonement to
+you for my behaviour just now and can explain everything to your
+superiors in charge there, and then&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Station house!" snorted Patrolman Switzer. "Why, say, you ain't headin'
+for no station house. The crowd that's over there where you're headin'
+for should be grateful to me for bringin' you in. You'll be a treat<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> to
+them, and it's few enough pleasures some of them gets&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>A new, a horrid doubt assailed Mr. Leary's sorely taxed being. He began
+to have a dread premonition that all was not going well and his brain
+whirled anew.</p>
+
+<p>"But I prefer to be taken to the station house," he began.</p>
+
+<p>"And who are you to be preferrin' anything at all?" countered Switzer.
+"I'll phone back to the station where I am and what I've done; though
+that part of it's no business of yours. I'll be doin' that after I've
+arrainged you over to Jefferson Market."</p>
+
+<p>"Jeff&mdash;Jefferson Market!"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure, 'tis to Jefferson Market night court you're headin' this minute.
+Where else? They're settin' late over there to-night; the magistrate is
+expectin' some raids somewheres about daylight, I dope it. Anyhow,
+they're open yet; I know that. So it'll be me and you for Jefferson
+Market inside of five minutes; and I'm thinkin' you'll get quite a
+reception."</p>
+
+<p>Jefferson Market! Mr. Leary could picture the rows upon rows of gloating
+eyes. He heard the incredulous shout that would mark his entrance, the
+swell of unholy glee from the benches that would interrupt the
+proceedings. He saw stretched upon the front pages of the early editions
+of the afternoon yellows the glaring black-faced headlines:</p>
+
+<h3>WELL-KNOWN LAWYER<br />CLAD IN PINK ROMPERS<br />HALED TO NIGHT COURT</h3>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span></p><p>He saw&mdash;but Switzer's next remark sent a fresh shudder of apprehension
+through him, caught all again, as he was, in the coils of accursed
+circumstance.</p>
+
+<p>"Magistrate Voris will be gettin' sleepy what with waitin' for them
+raids to be pulled off, and I make no doubt the sight of you will put
+him in a good humour."</p>
+
+<p>And Magistrate Voris was his rival for the favours of Miss Milly
+Hollister! And Magistrate Voris was a person with a deformed sense of
+humour! And Magistrate Voris was sitting in judgment this moment at
+Jefferson Market night court. And now desperation, thrice compounded,
+rent the soul of the trapped victim of his own misaimed subterfuge.</p>
+
+<p>"I won't be taken to any night court!" he shouted, wresting himself
+toward the edge of the sidewalk and dragging his companion along with
+him. "I won't go there! I demand to be taken to a station house. I'm a
+sick man and I require the services of a doctor."</p>
+
+<p>"Startin' to be rough-house all over again, huh?" grunted Switzer
+vindictively. "Well, we'll see about that part of it, too&mdash;right now!"</p>
+
+<p>Surrendering his lowermost clutch, the one in the silken seat of the
+suit of his writhing prisoner, he fumbled beneath the tails of his
+overcoat for the disciplinary nippers that were in his righthand rear
+trousers pocket.</p>
+
+<p>With a convulsive twist of his body Mr. Leary jerked himself free of the
+mittened grip upon his neckband, and as, released, he gave a deerlike
+lunge forward for liberty he caromed against a burdened ash can upon the
+curbstone and sent it spinning backward; then recovering sprang onward
+and outward<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> across the gutter in flight. In the same instant he heard
+behind him a crash of metal and a solid thud, heard a sound as of a
+scrambling solid body cast abruptly prone, heard the name of Deity
+profaned, and divined without looking back that the ash can,
+conveniently rolling between the plump legs of the personified Arm of
+the Law, had been Officer Switzer's undoing, and might be his salvation.</p>
+
+<h3>VIII</h3>
+
+<p>With never a backward glance he ran on, not doubting as a hare before
+the beagle, but following a straight course, like unto a hunted roebuck.
+He did not know he could run so fast, and he could not have run so fast
+any other time than this. Beyond was a crossing. It was blind instinct
+that made him double round the turn. And it was instinct, quickened and
+guided by desperation, that made him dart like a rose-tinted flash up
+the steps to the stoop of an old-fashioned residence standing just
+beyond the corner, spring inside the storm doors, draw them to behind
+him, and crouch there, hidden, as pursuit went lumbering by.</p>
+
+<p>Through a chink between the door halves he watched breathlessly while
+Switzer, who moved with a pronounced limp and rubbed his knees as he
+limped, hobbled halfway up the block, slowed down, halted, glared about
+him for sight or sign of the vanished fugitive, and then misled by a
+false trail departed, padding heavily with a galoshed tread, round the
+next turn.</p>
+
+<p>With his body still drawn well back within the shadow line of the
+overhanging cornice Mr. Leary, coyly protruded his head and took visual
+inventory<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> of the neighbourhood. So far as any plan whatsoever had
+formed in the mind of our diffident adventurer he meant to bide where he
+was for the moment. Here, where he had shelter of a sort, he would
+recapture his breath and reassemble his wits. Even so, the respite from
+those elements which Mr. Leary dreaded most of all&mdash;publicity,
+observation, cruel jibes, the harsh raucous laughter of the
+populace&mdash;could be at best but a woefully transient one. He was not
+resigned&mdash;by no means was he resigned&mdash;to his fate; but he was helpless.
+For what ailed him there was no conceivable remedy.</p>
+
+<p>Anon jocund day would stand tiptoe on something or other; Greenwich
+Village would awaken and bestir itself. Discovery would come, and forth
+he would be drawn like a shy, unwilling periwinkle from its shell, once
+more to play his abased and bashful role of free entertainer to
+guffawing mixed audiences. For all others in the great city there were
+havens and homes. But for a poor, lorn, unguided vagrant, enmeshed in
+the burlesque garnitures of a three-year-old male child, what haven was
+there? By night the part had been hard enough&mdash;as the unresponsive
+heavens above might have testified. By the stark unmerciful sunlight; by
+the rude, revealing glow of the impending day how much more scandalous
+would it be!</p>
+
+<p>His haggard gaze swept this way and that, seeking possible succour where
+reason told him there could be no succour; and then as his vision pieced
+together this outjutting architectural feature and that into a coherent
+picture of his immediate surroundings he knew where he was. The one bit
+of chancy luck in a sequence of direful catastrophes had brought him
+here<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> to this very spot. Why, this must be West Ninth Street; it had to
+be, it was&mdash;oh joy, it was! And Bob Slack, his partner, lived in this
+identical block on this same side of the street.</p>
+
+<p>With his throat throbbing to the impulse of new-born hope he emerged
+completely from behind the refuge of the storm doors, backed himself out
+and down upon the top step, and by means of a dubious illumination
+percolating through the fanlight above the inner door he made out the
+figures upon the lintel. This was such and such a number; therefore Bob
+Slack's number must be the second number to the eastward, at the next
+door but one.</p>
+
+<h3>IX</h3>
+
+<p>Five seconds later a fleet apparition of a prevalent pinkish tone gave a
+ranging house cat the fright of its life as former darted past latter to
+vault nimbly up the stone steps of a certain weatherbeaten
+four-story-and-basement domicile. Set in the door jamb here was a
+vertical row of mail-slots, and likewise a vertical row of electric push
+buttons; these objects attesting to the fact that this house, once upon
+a time the home of a single family, had eventually undergone the
+transformation which in lower New York befalls so many of its kind, and
+had become a layer-like succession of light-housekeeping apartments, one
+apartment to a floor, and the caretaker in the basement.</p>
+
+<p>Since Bob Slack's bachelor quarters were on the topmost floor Bob
+Slack's push button would be the next to the lowermost of the battery of
+buttons. A chilled tremulous finger found that particular button and
+pressed it long and hard, released it, pressed it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> again and yet again.
+And in the interval following each period of pressing the finger's owner
+hearkened, all ears, for the answering click-click that would tell him
+the sleeper having been roused by the ringing had risen and pressed the
+master button that released the mechanism of the street door's lock.</p>
+
+<p>But no welcome clicking rewarded the expectant ringer. Assuredly Bob
+Slack must be the soundest sleeper in the known world. He who waited
+rang and rang and rerang. There was no response.</p>
+
+<p>Eventually conviction was forced upon Mr. Leary that he must awaken the
+caretaker&mdash;who, he seemed dimly to recall as a remembrance of past
+visits to Bob Slack, was a woman; and this done he must induce the
+caretaker to admit him to the inside of the house. Once within the
+building the refugee promised himself he would bring the slumberous
+Slack to consciousness if he had to beat down that individual's door
+doing it. He centred his attack upon the bottom push button of all.
+Directly, from almost beneath his feet, came the sound of an areaway
+window being unlatched, and a drowsy female somewhat crossly inquired to
+know who might be there and what might be wanted.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a gentleman calling on Mr. Slack," wheezed Mr. Leary with his head
+over the balusters. He was getting so very, very hoarse. "I've been
+ringing his bell, but I can't seem to get any answer."</p>
+
+<p>"A gentleman at this time o' night!" The tone was purely incredulous.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; a close friend of Mr. Slack's," assured Mr. Leary, striving to put
+stress of urgency into his accents, and only succeeding in imparting an
+added<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> hoarseness to his fast-failing vocal cords. "I'm his law partner,
+in fact. I must see him at once, please&mdash;it's very important, very
+pressing indeed."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you can't be seein' him."</p>
+
+<p>"C-can't see him? What do you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"I mean he ain't here, that's what. He's out. He's went out for the
+night. He's ginerally always out on Friday nights&mdash;playin' cards at his
+club, I think. And sometimes he don't come in till it's near breakfast
+time. If you're a friend of his I sh'd think it'd be likely you'd know
+that same."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I do&mdash;I do," assented Mr. Leary earnestly; "only I had forgotten
+it. I've had so many other things on my mind. But surely he'll be coming
+in quite soon now&mdash;it's pretty late, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't I know that for myself without bein' told?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, quite so, of course; naturally so." Mr. Leary was growing more and
+more nervous, and more and more chilled, too. "But if you'll only be so
+very kind as to let me in I'll wait for him in his apartment."</p>
+
+<p>"Let you in without seein' you or knowin' what your business is? I
+should guess not! Besides, you couldn't be gettin' inside his flat
+anyways. He's locked it, unless he's forgot to, which ain't likely, him
+bein' a careful man, and he must a-took the key with him. I know I ain't
+got it."</p>
+
+<p>"But if you'll just let me inside the building that will be sufficient.
+I would much rather wait inside if only in the hall, than out here on
+the stoop in the cold."</p>
+
+<p>"No doubt, no doubt you would all of that." The tone of the unseen
+female was drily suspicious. "But is it likely I'd be lettin' a stranger
+into the place, that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> I never seen before, and ain't seen yet for that
+matter, just on the strength of his own word? And him comin'
+unbeknownst, at this hour of the mornin'? A fat chancet!"</p>
+
+<p>"But surely, though, you must recall me&mdash;Mr. Leary, his partner. I've
+been here before. I've spoken to you."</p>
+
+<p>"That voice don't sound to me like no voice I ever heard."</p>
+
+<p>"I've taken cold&mdash;that's why it's altered."</p>
+
+<p>"So? Then why don't you come down here where I can have a look at you
+and make sure?" inquired this careful chatelaine.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm leaning with my head over the rail of the steps right above you,"
+said Mr. Leary. "Can't you poke your head out and see my face? I'm quite
+sure you would recall me then."</p>
+
+<p>"With this here iron gratin' acrost me window how could I poke me head
+out? Besides, it's dark. Say, mister, if you're on the level what's the
+matter with you comin' down here and not be standin' there palaverin'
+all the night?"</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;I&mdash;well, you see, I'd rather not come for just a minute&mdash;until I've
+explained to you that&mdash;that my appearance may strike you as being a
+trifle unusual, in fact, I might say, queer," pleaded Mr. Leary, seeking
+by subtle methods of indirection to prepare her for what must surely
+follow.</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind explainin'&mdash;gimme a look!" The suspicious tenseness in her
+voice increased. "I tell you this&mdash;ayther you come down here right this
+secont or I shut the window and you can be off or you can go to the
+divil or go anywheres you please for all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> of me, because I'm an
+overworked woman and I need my rest and I've no more time to waste on
+you."</p>
+
+<p>"Wait, please; I'm coming immediately," called out Mr. Leary.</p>
+
+<p>He forced his legs to carry him down the steps and reluctantly, yet
+briskly, he propelled his pink-hued person toward the ray of light that
+streamed out through the grated window-opening and fell across the
+areaway.</p>
+
+<p>"You mustn't judge by first appearances," he was explaining with a false
+and transparent attempt at matter-of-factness as he came into the zone
+of illumination. "I'm not what I seem, exactly. You see, I&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Mushiful Evans!" The exclamation was half shrieked, half gasped out;
+and on the words the window was slammed to, the light within flipped
+out, and through the glass from within came a vehement warning.</p>
+
+<p>"Get away, you&mdash;you lunatic! Get away from here now or I'll have the
+cops on you."</p>
+
+<p>"But please, please listen," he entreated, with his face close against
+the bars. "I assure you, madam, that I can explain everything if you
+will only listen."</p>
+
+<p>There was no mercy, no suggestion of relenting in the threatening
+message that came back to him.</p>
+
+<p>"If you ain't gone from here in ten seconts I'll ring for the night
+watchman on the block, and I'll blow a whistle for the police. I've got
+me hand on the alarm hook right now. Will you go or will I rouse the
+whole block?"</p>
+
+<p>"Pray be calm, madam, I'll go. In fact, I'm going now."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span></p><p>He fell back out of the areaway. Fresh uproar at this critical juncture
+would be doubly direful. It would almost certainly bring the vengeful
+Switzer, with his bruised shanks. It would inevitably bring some one.</p>
+
+<h3>X</h3>
+
+<p>Mr. Leary retreated to the sidewalk, figuratively casting from him the
+shards and potsherds of his reawakened anticipations, now all so rudely
+shattered again. He was doomed. It would inevitably be his fate to cower
+in these cold and drafty purlieus until&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>No, it wouldn't either!</p>
+
+<p>Like a golden rift in a sable sky a brand-new ray of cheer opened before
+him. Who were those married friends of Slack's, who lived on the third
+floor&mdash;friends with whom once upon a time he and Slack had shared a
+chafing-dish supper? What was the name? Brady? No, Braydon. That was
+it&mdash;Mr. and Mrs. Edward Braydon. He would slip back again, on noiseless
+feet, to the doorway where the bells were. He would bide there until the
+startled caretaker had gone back to her sleep, or at least to her bed.
+Then he would play a solo on the Braydons' bell until he roused them.
+They would let him in, and beyond the peradventure of a doubt, they
+would understand what seemed to be beyond the ken of flighty and
+excitable underlings. He would make them understand, once he was in and
+once the first shock of beholding him had abated within them. They were
+a kindly, hospitable couple, the Braydons were. They would be only too
+glad to give him shelter from the elements until Bob<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> Slack returned
+from his session at bridge. He was saved!</p>
+
+<p>Within the coping of the stoop he crouched and waited&mdash;waited for five
+long palpitating minutes which seemed to him as hours. Then he applied
+an eager and quivering finger to the Braydons' button. Sweet boon of
+vouchsafed mercy! Almost instantly the latch clicked. And now in another
+instant Mr. Leary was within solid walls, with the world and the weather
+shut out behind him.</p>
+
+<p>He stood a moment, palpitant with mute thanksgiving, in the hallway,
+which was made obscure rather than bright by a tiny pinprick of
+gaslight; and as thus he stood, fortifying himself with resolution for
+the embarrassing necessity of presenting himself, in all his show of
+quaint frivolity, before these comparative strangers, there came
+floating down the stair well to him in a sharp half-whisper a woman's
+voice.</p>
+
+<p>"Is that you?" it asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," answered Mr. Leary, truthfully. It was indeed he, Algernon Leary,
+even though someone else seemingly was expected. But the explanation
+could wait until he was safely upstairs. Indeed, it must wait. Attempted
+at a distance it would take on rather a complicated aspect; besides, the
+caretaker just below might overhear, and by untoward interruptions
+complicate a position already sufficiently delicate and difficult.</p>
+
+<p>Down from above came the response, "All right then. I've been worried,
+you were so late coming in, Edward. Please slip in quietly and take the
+front room. I'm going on back to bed."</p>
+
+<p>"All right!" grunted Mr. Leary.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span></p><p>But already his plan had changed; the second speech down the stair well
+had caused him to change it. Safety first would be his motto from now
+on. Seeing that Mr. Edward Braydon apparently was likewise out late it
+would be wiser and infinitely more discreet on his part did he avoid
+further disturbing Mrs. Braydon, who presumably was alone and who might
+be easily frightened. So he would just slip on past the Braydon
+apartment, and in the hallway on the fourth floor he would cannily bide,
+awaiting the truant Slack's arrival.</p>
+
+<p>On tiptoe then, flight by flight, he ascended toward the top of the
+house. He was noiselessly progressing along the hallway of the third
+floor; he was about midway of it when under his tread a loose plank gave
+off an agonized squeak, and, as involuntarily he crouched, right at his
+side a door was flung open.</p>
+
+<p>What the discomfited refugee saw, at a distance from him to be measured
+by inches rather than by feet, was the face of a woman; and not the face
+of young Mrs. Edward Braydon, either, but the face of a middle-aged lady
+with startled eyes widely staring, with a mouth just dropping ajar as
+sudden horror relaxed her jaw muscles, and with a head of grey hair
+haloed about by a sort of nimbus effect of curl papers. What the strange
+lady saw&mdash;well, what the strange lady saw may best perhaps be gauged by
+what she did, and that was instantly to slam and bolt the door and then
+to utter a succession of calliopelike shrieks, which echoed through the
+house and which immediately were answered back by a somewhat similar
+series of outcries from the direction of the basement.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>XI</h3>
+
+<p>Up the one remaining flight of stairs darted the intruder. He flung
+himself with all his weight and all his force against Bob Slack's door.
+It wheezed from the impact, but its stout oaken panels held fast. Who
+says the impossible is really impossible? The accumulated testimony of
+the ages shows that given the emergency a man can do anything he just
+naturally has to do. Neither by training nor by habit of life nor yet by
+figure was Mr. Leary athletically inclined, but a trained gymnast might
+well have envied the magnificent agility with which he put a foot upon
+the doorknob and sprang upward, poising himself there upon a slippered
+toe, with one set of fingers clutching fast to the minute projections of
+the door frame while with his free hand he thrust recklessly against the
+transom.</p>
+
+<p>The transom gave under the strain, moving upward and inward upon its
+hinges, disclosing an oblong gap above the jamb. With a splendid wriggle
+the fugitive vaulted up, thrusting his person into the clear space thus
+provided. Balanced across the opening upon his stomach, half in and half
+out, for one moment he remained there, his legs kicking wildly as though
+for a purchase against something more solid than air. Then convulsive
+desperation triumphed over physical limitations. There was a rending,
+tearing sound as of some silken fabric being parted biaswise of its
+fibres, and Mr. Leary's droll after sections vanished inside; and
+practically coincidentally therewith, Mr. Leary descended upon the
+rugged floor with a thump which any other time would have stunned him
+into <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>temporary helplessness, but which now had the effect merely of
+stimulating him onward to fresh exertion.</p>
+
+<p>In a fever of activity he sprang up. Pawing a path through the
+encompassing darkness, stumbling into and over various sharp-cornered
+objects, barking his limbs with contusions and knowing it not, he found
+the door of the inner room&mdash;Bob Slack's bedroom&mdash;and once within that
+sanctuary he, feeling along the walls, discovered a push bulb and
+switched on the electric lights.</p>
+
+<p>What matter though the whole house grew clamorous now with a mounting
+and increasing tumult? What mattered it though he could hear more and
+more startled voices commingled with the shattering shrieks emanating
+from the Braydon apartment beneath his feet? He, the hard-pressed and
+sore-beset and the long-suffering, was at last beyond the sight of
+mortal eyes. He was locked in, with two rooms and a bath to himself, and
+he meant to maintain his present refuge, meant to hold this fort against
+all comers, until Bob Slack came home. He would barricade himself in if
+need be. He would pile furniture against the doors. If they took him at
+all it would be by direct assault and overpowering numbers.</p>
+
+<p>And while he withstood siege and awaited attack he would rid himself of
+these unlucky caparisons that had been his mortification and his
+undoing. When they broke in on him&mdash;if they did break in on him&mdash;he
+would be found wearing some of Bob Slack's clothes. Better far to be
+mistaken for a burglar than to be dragged forth lamentably yet
+fancifully attired as Himself at the Age of Three. The one thing might
+be explained&mdash;and in time would be; but the other?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> He felt that he was
+near the breaking point; that he could no more endure.</p>
+
+<h3>XII</h3>
+
+<p>He stopped where he was, in the middle of the room, with his eyes and
+his hands seeking for the seams of the closing of his main garment. Then
+he remembered what in his stress he had forgotten&mdash;the opening or
+perhaps one should say the closing was at the back. He twisted his arms
+rearward, his fingers groping along his spine.</p>
+
+<p>Now any normal woman has the abnormal ability to do and then to undo a
+garment hitching behind. Nature, which so fashioned her elbows that she
+cannot throw a stone at a hen in the way in which a stone properly
+should be thrown at a hen, made suitable atonement for this articular
+oversight by endowing her joints with the facile knack of turning on
+exactly the right angle, with never danger of sprain or dislocation, for
+the subjugation of a back-latching frock. Moreover, years of practice
+have given her adeptness in accomplishing this achievement, so that to
+her it has become an everyday feat. But man has neither the experience
+to qualify him nor yet the bodily adaptability.</p>
+
+<p>By reaching awkwardly up and over his shoulder Mr. Leary managed to tug
+the topmost button of his array of buttons out of its attendant
+buttonholes, but below and beyond that point he could not progress. He
+twisted and contorted his body; he stretched his arms in their sockets
+until twin pangs of agony met and crossed between his shoulder blades,
+and with his two exploring hands he pulled and fumbled and pawed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> and
+wrenched and wrested, to make further headway at his task. But the
+sewing-on had been done with stout thread; the buttonholes were taut and
+snug and well made. Those slippery flat surfaces amply resisted him.
+They eluded him; defied him; outmastered him. Thanks be to, or curses be
+upon, the passionate zeal of Miss Rowena Skiff for exactitudes, he,
+lacking the offices of an assistant undresser, was now as definitely and
+finally inclosed in this distressful pink garment as though it had been
+his own skin. Speedily he recognised this fact in all its bitter and
+abominable truth, but mechanically, he continued to wrestle with the
+obdurate fastenings.</p>
+
+<p>While he thus vainly contended, events in which he directly was
+concerned were occurring beneath that roof. From within his refuge he
+heard the sounds of slamming doors, of hurrying footsteps, of excited
+voices merging into a distracted chorus; but above all else, and from
+the rest, two of these voices stood out by reason of their augmented
+shrillness, and Mr. Leary marked them both, for since he had just heard
+them he therefore might identify their respective unseen owners.</p>
+
+<p>"There's something&mdash;there's somebody in the house!" At the top of its
+register one voice was repeating the warning over and over again, and
+judging by direction this alarmist was shrieking her words through a
+keyhole on the floor below him. "I saw it&mdash;him&mdash;whatever it was. I
+opened my door to look out in the hall and it&mdash;he&mdash;was right there. Oh,
+I could have touched him! And then it ran and I didn't see him any more
+and I slammed the door and began screaming."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span></p><p>"You seen what?"</p>
+
+<p>The strident question seemed to come from far below, down in the depths
+of the house, where the caretaker abided.</p>
+
+<p>"Whatever it was. I opened the door and he was right in the hall there
+glaring at me. I could have touched it. And then he ran and I&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"What was he like? I ast what was he like&mdash;it's that I'm astin' you!"
+The janitress was the one who pressed for an answer.</p>
+
+<p>For the moment the question, pointed though it was, went unanswered. The
+main speaker&mdash;shrieker, rather&mdash;was plainly a person with a mania for
+details, and even in this emergency she intended, as now developed, to
+present all the principal facts in the case, and likewise all the
+incidental facts so far as these fell within her scope of knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>"I was awake," she clarioned through the keyhole, speaking much faster
+than any one following this narrative can possibly hope to read the
+words. "I couldn't sleep. I never do sleep well when I'm in a strange
+house. And anyhow, I was all alone. My nephew by marriage&mdash;Mr. Edward
+Braydon, you know&mdash;had gone out with the gentleman who lives on the
+floor above to play cards, and he said he was going to be gone nearly
+all night, and my niece&mdash;I'm Mrs. Braydon's unmarried aunt from
+Poughkeepsie and I'm down here visiting them&mdash;my niece was called to
+Long Island yesterday by illness&mdash;it's her sister who's ill with
+something like the bronchitis. And he was gone and so she was gone, and
+so here I was all alone and he told me not to stay up for him, but I
+couldn't sleep well&mdash;I never can sleep in a strange house&mdash;and just a
+few<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> minutes ago I heard the bell ring and I supposed he had forgotten
+to take his latchkey with him, and so I got up to let him in. And I
+called down the stairs and asked him if it was him and he answered back.
+But it didn't sound like his voice. But I didn't think anything of that.
+But, of course, it was out of the ordinary for him to have a voice like
+that. But all the same I went back to bed. But he didn't come in and I
+was just getting up again to see what detained him&mdash;his voice really
+sounded so strange I thought then he might have been taken sick or
+something. But just as I got to the door a plank creaked and I opened
+the door and there it was right where I could have touched him. And then
+it ran&mdash;and oh, what if&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm astin' you once more what it was like?"</p>
+
+<p>"How should I know except that&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Was it a big, fat, wild, bare-headed, scary, awful-lookin' scoundrel
+dressed in some kind of funny pink clothes?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, that's it! That's him&mdash;he was all sort of pink. Oh, did you see
+him too? Oh, is it a burglar?"</p>
+
+<p>"Burglar nothin'! It's a ravin', rampagin' lunatic&mdash;that's what it is!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, my heavens, a lunatic!"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure it is. He tried to git me to let him in and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, whatever shall we do!"</p>
+
+<h3>XIII</h3>
+
+<p>"Hey, what's all the excitement about?"</p>
+
+<p>A new and deeper voice here broke into the babel, and Mr. Leary
+recognising it at a distance, where he stood listening&mdash;but not failing,
+even while he listened,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> to strive unavailingly with his problem of
+buttons&mdash;knew he was saved. Knowing this he nevertheless retreated still
+deeper into the inner room. The thought of spectators in numbers
+remained very abhorrent to him. So he did not hear all that happened
+next, except in broken snatches.</p>
+
+<p>He gathered though, from what he did hear, that Bob Slack and Mr. Edward
+Braydon were coming up the stairs, and that a third male whom they
+called Officer was coming with them, and that the janitress was coming
+likewise, and that divers lower-floor tenants were joining in the march,
+and that as they came the janitress was explaining to all and sundry how
+the weird miscreant had sought to inveigle her into admitting him to Mr.
+Slack's rooms, and how she had refused, and how with maniacal craft&mdash;or
+words to that effect&mdash;he had, nevertheless, managed to secure admittance
+to the house, and how he must still be in the house. And through all her
+discourse there were questions from this one or that, crossing its flow
+but in no-wise interrupting it; and through it all percolated hootingly
+the terrorised outcries of Mr. Braydon's maiden aunt-in-law, issuing
+through the keyhole of the door behind which she cowered. Only now she
+was interjecting a new harassment into the already complicated mystery
+by pleading that someone repair straightway to her and render
+assistance, as she felt herself to be on the verge of fainting dead
+away.</p>
+
+<p>With searches into closets and close scrutiny of all dark corners passed
+en route, the procession advanced to the top floor, mainly guided in its
+oncoming by the clew deduced from the circumstances of the mad intruder
+having betrayed a desire to secure access to Mr.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> Slack's apartment,
+with the intention, as the caretaker more than once suggested on her way
+up, of murdering Mr. Slack in his bed. Before the ascent had been
+completed she was quite certain this was the correct deduction, and so
+continued to state with all the emphasis of which she was capable.</p>
+
+<p>"He couldn't possibly have got downstairs again," somebody hazarded; "so
+he must be upstairs here still&mdash;must be right round here somewhere."</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't I tell you he was lookin' for Mr. Slack to lay in wait for him
+and destroy the poor man in his bed?" shrilled the caretaker.</p>
+
+<p>"Watch carefully now, everybody. He might rush out of some corner at
+us."</p>
+
+<p>"Say, my transom's halfway open!" Mr. Bob Slack exclaimed. "And, by
+Jove, there's a light shining through it yonder from the bedroom. He's
+inside&mdash;we've got him cornered, whoever he is."</p>
+
+<p>Boldly Mr. Slack stepped forward and rapped hard on the door.</p>
+
+<p>"Better step on out peaceably," he called, "because there's an officer
+here with us and we've got you trapped."</p>
+
+<p>"It's me, Bob, it's me," came in a wheezy, plaintive wail from somewhere
+well back in the apartment.</p>
+
+<p>"Who's me?" demanded Mr. Slack, likewise forgetting his grammar in the
+thrill of this culminating moment.</p>
+
+<p>"Algy&mdash;Algernon Leary."</p>
+
+<p>"Not with that voice, it isn't. But I'll know in a minute who it is!"
+Mr. Slack reached pocketward for his keys.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span></p><p>"Better be careful. He might have a gun or something on him."</p>
+
+<p>"Nonsense!" retorted Mr. Slack, feeling very valiant. "I'm not afraid of
+any gun. But you ladies might stand aside if you're frightened. All
+ready, officer? Now then!"</p>
+
+<p>"Please come in by yourself, Bob. Don't&mdash;don't let anybody else come
+with you!"</p>
+
+<h3>XIV</h3>
+
+<p>If he heard the faint and agonised appeal from within Mr. Slack chose
+not to heed it. He found the right key on his key ring, applied it to
+the lock, turned the bolt and shoved the door wide open, giving back
+then in case of an attack. The front room was empty. Mr. Slack crossed
+cautiously to the inner room and peered across the threshold into it,
+Mr. Braydon and a grey-coated private watchman and a procession of
+half-clad figures following along after him.</p>
+
+<p>Where was the mysterious intruder? Ah, there he was, huddled up in a far
+corner alongside the bed as though he sought to hide himself away from
+their glaring eyes. And at the sight of what he beheld Mr. Bob Slack
+gave one great shocked snort of surprise, and then one of recognition.</p>
+
+<p>For all that the cowering wretch wore a quaint garment of a bright and
+watermelonish hue, except where it was streaked with transom dust and
+marked with ash-can grit; for all that his head was bare, and his knees,
+and a considerable section of his legs as well; for all that he had
+white socks and low slippers, now soaking wet, upon his feet; for all
+his elbow sleeves and his pink garters and his low neck; and finally for
+all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> that his face was now beginning, as they stared upon it, to wear
+the blank wan look of one who is about to succumb to a swoon of
+exhaustion induced by intense physical exertion or by acutely prolonged
+mental strain or by both together&mdash;Mr. Bob Slack detected in this
+fabulous oddity a resemblance to his associate in the practice of law at
+Number Thirty-two Broad Street.</p>
+
+<p>"In the name of heaven, Leary&mdash;&mdash;" he began.</p>
+
+<p>But a human being can stand just so many shocks in a given number of
+minutes&mdash;just so many and no more. Gently, slowly, the gartered legs
+gave way, bending outward, and as their owner collapsed down upon his
+side with the light of consciousness flickering in his eyes, his figure
+was half-turned to them, and they saw how that he was ornamentally but
+securely buttoned down the back with many large buttons and how that
+with a last futile fluttering effort of his relaxing hands he fumbled
+first at one and then at another of these buttons.</p>
+
+<p>"Leary, what in thunder have you been doing? And where on earth have you
+been?" Mr. Slack shot the questions forth as he sprang to his partner's
+side and knelt alongside the slumped pink shape.</p>
+
+<p>Languidly Mr. Leary opened one comatose eye. Then he closed it again and
+the wraith of a smile formed about his lips, and just as he went sound
+asleep upon the floor Mr. Slack caught from Mr. Leary the softly
+whispered words, "I've been the life of the party!"</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Life of the Party, by Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
+
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+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg's The Life of the Party, by Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Life of the Party
+
+Author: Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
+
+Illustrator: James M. Preston
+
+Release Date: November 9, 2008 [EBook #27212]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE OF THE PARTY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Bryan Ness, Martin Pettit and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+_The Life of the Party_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+BY IRVIN S. COBB
+
+FICTION
+
+THE LIFE OF THE PARTY
+THOSE TIMES AND THESE
+LOCAL COLOR
+OLD JUDGE PRIEST
+FIBBLE, D. D.
+BACK HOME
+THE THUNDERS OF SILENCE
+THE ESCAPE OF MR. TRIMM
+
+WIT AND HUMOR
+
+EATING IN TWO OR THREE LANGUAGES
+"SPEAKING OF OPERATIONS----"
+EUROPE REVISED
+ROUGHING IT DE LUXE
+COBB'S BILL OF FARE
+COBB'S ANATOMY
+
+MISCELLANY
+
+THE GLORY OF THE COMING
+PATHS OF GLORY
+"SPEAKING OF PRUSSIANS----"
+
+GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
+NEW YORK
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Illustration: "ARE YOU PAYIN' AN ELECTION BET THREE WEEKS AFTER THE
+ELECTION'S OVER? OR IS IT THAT YOU'RE JEST A PLAIN BEDADDLED IJIET?"]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_The Life of the Party
+
+By
+
+Irvin S. Cobb
+
+Author of "Back Home," "Old Judge Priest," etc., etc.
+
+Illustrated By James M. Preston_
+
+[Illustration: Publisher's logo]
+
+_New York George H. Doran Company_
+
+
+_Copyright, 1919,
+By George H. Doran Company
+
+Copyright, 1919, by the Curtis Publishing Company
+Printed in the United States of America_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+TO
+
+MISTRESS MAY WILSON PRESTON
+
+A LADY OF GREAT DRAWING QUALITIES
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_ILLUSTRATIONS_
+
+
+"Are you payin' an election bet three weeks after the
+  election's over? Or is it that you're jest a plain
+  bedaddled ijiet?"                          _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                       PAGE
+"That's nice," spake the fearsome stranger. "Now
+  stay jest the way you are and don't make no
+  peep or I'll have to plug you wit' this here gat"      24
+
+Mr. Leary's gait became a desperate gallop, and as
+  he galloped he shouted: "Wait, please, here I
+  am.--Here's your passenger"                            32
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_The Life of the Party_
+
+
+I
+
+It had been a successful party, most successful. Mrs. Carroway's parties
+always were successes, but this one nearing its conclusion stood out
+notably from a long and unbroken Carrowayian record. It had been a
+children's party; that is to say, everybody came in costume with intent
+to represent children of any age between one year and a dozen years. But
+twelve years was the limit; positively nobody, either in dress or
+deportment, could be more than twelve years old. Mrs. Carroway had made
+this point explicit in sending out the invitations, and so it had been,
+down to the last hair ribbon and the last shoe buckle. And between
+dances they had played at the games of childhood, such as drop the
+handkerchief, and King William was King James' son and prisoner's base
+and the rest of them.
+
+The novelty of the notion had been a main contributory factor to its
+success; that, plus the fact that nine healthy adults out of ten dearly
+love to put on freakish garbings and go somewhere. To be exactly
+truthful, the basic idea itself could hardly be called new, since long
+before some gifted mind thought out the scheme of giving children's
+parties for grown-ups, but with her customary brilliancy Mrs. Carroway
+had seized upon the issues of the day to serve her social purposes,
+weaving timeliness and patriotism into the fabric of her plan by making
+it a war party as well. Each individual attending was under pledge to
+keep a full and accurate tally of the moneys expended upon his or her
+costume and upon arrival at the place of festivities to deposit a like
+amount in a repository put in a conspicuous spot to receive these
+contributions, the entire sum to be handed over later to the guardians
+of a military charity in which Mrs. Carroway was active.
+
+It was somehow felt that this fostered a worthy spirit of wartime
+economy, since the donation of a person who wore an expensive costume
+would be relatively so much larger than the donation of one who went in
+for the simpler things. Moreover, books of thrift stamps were attached
+to the favours, the same being children's toys of guaranteed American
+manufacture.
+
+In the matter of refreshments Mrs. Carroway had been at pains to comply
+most scrupulously with the existing rationing regulations. As the
+hostess herself said more than once as she moved to and fro in a
+flounced white frock having the exaggeratedly low waistline of the sort
+of frock which frequently is worn by a tot of tender age, with a wide
+blue sash draped about her almost down at her knees, and with fluffy
+skirts quite up to her knees, with her hair caught up in a coquettish
+blue bow on the side of her head and a diminutive fan tied fast to one
+of her wrists with a blue ribbon--so many of the ladies who had attained
+to Mrs. Carroway's fairly well-ripened years did go in for these
+extremely girlishly little-girly effects--as the hostess thus attired
+and moving hither and yon remark, "If Mr. Herbert Hoover himself were
+here as one of my guests to-night I am just too perfectly sure he could
+find absolutely nothing whatsoever to object to!"
+
+It would have required much stretching of that elastic property, the
+human imagination, to conceive of Mr. Herbert Hoover being there,
+whether in costume or otherwise, but that was what Mrs. Carroway said
+and repeated. Always those to whom she spoke came right out and agreed
+with her.
+
+Now it was getting along toward three-thirty o'clock of the morning
+after, and the party was breaking up. Indeed for half an hour past, this
+person or that had been saying it was time, really, to be thinking about
+going--thus voicing a conviction that had formed at a much earlier hour
+in the minds of the tenants of the floor below Mrs. Carroway's studio
+apartment, which like all properly devised studio apartments was at the
+top of the building.
+
+It was all very well to be a true Bohemian, ready to give and take, and
+if one lived down round Washington Square one naturally made allowances
+for one's neighbours and all that, but half past three o'clock in the
+morning was half past three o'clock in the morning, and there was no
+getting round that, say what you would. And besides there were some
+people who needed a little sleep once in a while even if there were some
+other people who seemed to be able to go without any sleep; and finally,
+though patience was a virtue, enough of a good thing was enough and too
+much was surplusage. Such was the opinion of the tenants one flight
+down.
+
+So the party was practically over. Mr. Algernon Leary, of the firm of
+Leary & Slack, counsellors and attorneys at law, with offices at Number
+Thirty-two Broad Street, was among the very last to depart. Never had
+Mr. Leary spent a more pleasant evening. He had been in rare form, a
+variety of causes contributing to this happy state. To begin with, he
+had danced nearly every dance with the lovely Miss Milly Hollister, for
+whom he entertained the feelings which a gentleman of ripened judgment,
+and one who was rising rapidly in his profession, might properly
+entertain for an entirely charming young woman of reputed means and
+undoubted social position.
+
+A preposterous ass named Perkins--at least, Mr. Leary mentally indexed
+Perkins as a preposterous ass--had brought Miss Hollister to the party,
+but thereafter in the scheme of things Perkins did not count. He was a
+cipher. You could back him up against a wall and take a rubber-tipped
+pencil and rub him right out, as it were; and with regards to Miss
+Hollister that, figuratively, was what Mr. Leary had done to Mr.
+Perkins. Now on the other hand Voris might have amounted to something as
+a potential rival, but Voris being newly appointed as a police
+magistrate was prevented by press of official duties from coming to the
+party; so Mr. Leary had had a clear field, as the saying goes, and had
+made the most of it, as the other saying goes.
+
+Moreover, Mr. Leary had been the recipient of unlimited praise upon the
+ingenuity and the uniqueness expressed in his costume. He had not
+represented a Little Lord Fauntleroy or a Buster Brown or a Boy Scout or
+a Juvenile Cadet or a Midshipmite or an Oliver Twist. There had been
+three Boy Scouts present and four Buster Browns and of sailor-suited
+persons there had been no end, really. But Mr. Leary had chosen to
+appear as Himself at the Age of Three; and, as the complimentary comment
+proved, his get-up had reflected credit not alone upon its wearer but
+upon its designer, Miss Rowena Skiff, who drew fashion pictures for one
+of the women's magazines. Out of the goodness of her heart and the
+depths of her professional knowledge Miss Skiff had gone to Mr. Leary's
+aid, supervising the preparation of his wardrobe at a theatrical
+costumer's shop up-town and, on the evening before, coming to his
+bachelor apartments, accompanied by her mother, personally to add those
+small special refinements which meant so much, as he now realised, in
+attaining the desired result.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Leary, I must tell you again how very fetching you do look!
+Your costume is adorable, really it is; so--so cute and everything. And
+I don't know what I should have done without you to help in the games
+and everything. There's no use denying it, Mr. Leary--you were the life
+of the party, absolutely!"
+
+At least twice during the night Mrs. Carroway had told Mr. Leary this,
+and now as he bade her farewell she was saying it once more in
+practically the same words, when Mrs. Carroway's coloured maid, Blanche,
+touched him on the arm.
+
+"'Scuse me, suh," apologised Blanche, "but the hall man downstairs he
+send up word jes' now by the elevator man 'at you'd best be comin' right
+on down now, suh, effen you expects to git a taxicab. He say to tell you
+they ain't but one taxicab left an' the driver of 'at one's been
+waitin' fur hours an' he act like he might go way any minute now. 'At's
+whut the hall man send word, suh."
+
+Blanche had brought his overcoat along and held it up for him, imparting
+to the service that small suggestion of a ceremonial rite which the
+members of her race invariably do display when handling a garment of
+richness of texture and indubitable cost. Mr. Leary let her help him
+into the coat and slipped largess into her hand, and as he stepped
+aboard the waiting elevator for the downward flight Mrs. Carroway's
+voice came fluting to him, once again repeating the flattering phrase:
+"You surely were the life of the party!"
+
+
+II
+
+It was fine to have been the life of the party. It was not quite so fine
+to discover that the taxicab to which he must entrust himself for the
+long ride up to West Eighty-fifth Street was a most shabby-appearing
+vehicle, the driver of which, moreover, as Mr. Leary could divine even
+as he crossed the sidewalk, had wiled away the tedium of waiting by
+indulgence in draughts of something more potent than the chill air of
+latish November. Mr. Leary peered doubtfully into the illuminated
+countenance but dulled eyes of the driver and caught a whiff of a breath
+alcoholically fragrant, and he understood that the warning relayed to
+him by Blanche had carried a subtle double meaning. Still, there was no
+other taxicab to be had. The street might have been a byway in old
+Pompeii for all the life that moved within it. Washington Square, facing
+him, was as empty as a graveyard generally is at this hour, and the
+semblance of a conventional graveyard in wintertime was helped out by a
+light snow--the first of the season--sifting down in large damp flakes.
+
+Twice and thrice he repeated the address, speaking each time sharply and
+distinctly, before the meaning seemed to filter into the befogged
+intellect of the inebriate. On the third rendition the latter roused
+from where he was slumped down.
+
+"I garcia, Steve," he said thickly. "I garcia firs' time only y'
+hollowed s'loud I couldn und'stancher."
+
+So saying he lurched into a semiupright posture and fumbled for the
+wheel. Silently condemning the curse of intemperance among the working
+classes of a great city Mr. Leary boarded the cab and drew the skirts of
+his overcoat down in an effort to cover his knees. With a harsh grating
+of clutches and an abrupt jerk the taxi started north.
+
+Wobbling though he was upon his perch the driver mechanically steered a
+reasonably straight course. The passenger leaning back in the depths of
+the cab confessed to himself he was a trifle weary and more than a
+trifle sleepy. At thirty-seven one does not dance and play children's
+games alternately for six hours on a stretch without paying for the
+exertion in a sensation of let-downness. His head slipped forward on his
+chest.
+
+
+III
+
+With a drowsy uncertainty as to whether he had been dozing for hours or
+only for a very few minutes Mr. Leary opened his eyes and sat up. The
+car was halted slantwise against a curbing; the chauffeur was jammed
+down again into a heap. Mr. Leary stepped nimbly forth upon the
+pavement, feeling in his overcoat pocket for the fare; and then he
+realised he was not in West Eighty-fifth Street at all; he was not in
+any street that he remembered ever having seen before in the course of
+his life. Offhand, though, he guessed he was somewhere in that mystic
+maze of brick and mortar known as Old Greenwich Village; and, for a
+further guess, in that particular part of it where business during these
+last few years had been steadily encroaching upon the ancient residences
+of long departed Knickerbocker families.
+
+The street in which he stood, for a wonder in this part of town, ran a
+fairly straight course. At its western foot he could make out through
+the drifting flakes where a squat structure suggestive of a North River
+freight dock interrupted the sky line. In his immediate vicinity the
+street was lined with tall bleak fronts of jobbing houses, all dark and
+all shuttered. Looking the other way, which would be eastward, he could
+make out where these wholesale establishments tailed off, to be
+succeeded by the lower shapes of venerable dwellings adorned with the
+dormered windows and the hip roofs which distinguished a bygone
+architectural period. Some distance off in this latter direction the
+vista between the buildings was cut across by the straddle-bug structure
+of one of the Elevated roads. All this Mr. Leary comprehended in a quick
+glance about him, and then he turned on the culprit cabman with rage in
+his heart.
+
+"See here, you!" he snapped crossly, jerking the other by the shoulder.
+"What do you mean by bringing me away off here! This isn't where I
+wanted to go. Oh, wake up, you!"
+
+Under his vigorous shaking the driver slid over sideways until he
+threatened to decant himself out upon Mr. Leary. His cap falling off
+exposed the blank face of one who for the time being has gone dead to
+the world and to all its carking cares, and the only response he offered
+for his mishandling was a deep and sincere snore. The man was hopelessly
+intoxicated; there was no question about it. More to relieve his own
+deep chagrin than for any logical reason Mr. Leary shook him again; the
+net results were a protesting semiconscious gargle and a further
+careening slant of the sleeper's form.
+
+Well, there was nothing else to do but walk. He must make his way afoot
+until he came to Sixth Avenue or on to Fifth, upon the chance of finding
+in one of these two thoroughfares a ranging nighthawk cab. As a last
+resort he could take the Subway or the L north. This contingency,
+though, Mr. Leary considered with feelings akin to actual repugnance. He
+dreaded the prospect of ribald and derisive comments from chance fellow
+travellers upon a public transportation line. For you should know that
+though Mr. Leary's outer garbing was in the main conventional there were
+strikingly incongruous features of it too.
+
+From his neck to his knees he correctly presented the aspect of a
+gentleman returning late from social diversions, caparisoned in a
+handsome fur-faced, fur-lined top coat. But his knees were entirely
+bare; so, too, were his legs down to about midway of the calves, where
+there ensued, as it were, a pair of white silk socks, encircled by pink
+garters with large and ornate pink ribbon bows upon them. His feet were
+bestowed in low slippers with narrow buttoned straps crossing the
+insteps. It was Miss Skiff, with her instinct for the verities, who had
+insisted upon bows for the garters and straps for the slippers, these
+being what she had called finishing touches. Likewise it was due to that
+young lady's painstaking desire for appropriateness and completeness of
+detail that Mr. Leary at this moment wore upon his head a very
+wide-brimmed, very floppy straw hat with two quaint pink-ribbon
+streamers floating jauntily down between his shoulders at the back.
+
+For reasons which in view of this sartorial description should be
+obvious, Mr. Leary hugged closely up to the abutting house fronts when
+he left behind him the marooned taxi with its comatose driver asleep
+upon it, like one lone castaway upon a small island in a sea of
+emptiness, and set his face eastward. Such was the warmth of his
+annoyance he barely felt the chill striking upon his exposed nether
+limbs or took note of the big snowflakes melting damply upon his thinly
+protected ankles. Then, too, almost immediately something befell which
+upset him still more.
+
+He came to where a wooden marquee, projecting over the entrance to a
+shipping room, made a black strip along the feebly lighted pavement. As
+he entered the patch of darkness the shape of a man materialised out of
+the void and barred his way, and in that same fraction of a second
+something shiny and hard was thrust against Mr. Leary's daunted bosom,
+and in a low forceful rumble a voice commanded him as follows: "Put up
+your mitts--and keep 'em up!"
+
+Matching the action of his hands everything in Mr. Leary seemed to
+start skyward simultaneously. His hair on his scalp straightened, his
+breath came up from his lungs in a gasp, his heart lodged in his throat,
+and his blood quit his feet, leaving them practically devoid of
+circulation and ascended and drummed in his temples. He had a horrid,
+emptied feeling in his diaphragm, too, as though the organs customarily
+resident there had caught the contagion of the example and gone north.
+
+"That's nice," spake the fearsome stranger. "Now stay jest the way you
+are and don't make no peep or I'll have to plug you wit' this here gat."
+
+[Illustration: "THAT'S NICE," SPAKE THE FEARSOME STRANGER. "NOW STAY
+JEST THE WAY YOU ARE AND DON'T MAKE NO PEEP OR I'LL HAVE TO PLUG YOU
+WIT' THIS HERE GAT"]
+
+His right hand maintained the sinister pressure of the weapon against
+the victim's deflated chest, while his left dexterously explored the
+side pockets of Mr. Leary's overcoat. Then the same left hand jerked the
+frogged fastenings of the garment asunder and went pawing swiftly over
+Mr. Leary's quivering person, seeking the pockets which would have been
+there had Mr. Leary been wearing garments bearing the regulation and
+ordained number of pockets. But the exploring fingers merely slid along
+a smooth and unbroken frontal surface.
+
+"Wot t'ell? Wot t'ell?" muttered the footpad in bewilderment. "Say,
+where're you got yore leather and yore kittle hid? Speak up quick!"
+
+"I'm--I'm--not carrying a watch or a purse to-night," quavered Mr.
+Leary. "These--these clothes I happen to be wearing are not made with
+places in them for a watch or anything. And you've already taken what
+money I had--it was all in my overcoat pocket."
+
+"Yep; a pinch of chicken feed and wot felt like about four one-bone
+bills." The highwayman's accent was both ominous and contemptuous. "Say,
+wotcher mean drillin' round dis town in some kinder funny riggin'
+wit'out no plunder on you? I gotta right to belt you one acrost the
+bean."
+
+"I'd rather you didn't do that," protested Mr. Leary in all seriousness.
+"If--if you'd only give me your address I could send you some money in
+the morning to pay you for your trouble----"
+
+"Cut out de kiddin'," broke in the disgusted marauder. His tone changed
+slightly for the better. "Say, near as I kin tell by feelin' it, dat
+ain't such a bum benny you're sportin'. I'll jest take dat along wit'
+me. Letcher arms down easy and hold 'em straight out from yore sides
+while I gits it offen you. And no funny business!"
+
+"Oh, please, please, don't take my overcoat," implored Mr. Leary,
+plunged by these words into a deeper panic. "Anything but that!
+I--you--you really mustn't leave me without my overcoat."
+
+"Wot else is dere to take?"
+
+Even as he uttered the scornful question the thief had wrested the
+garment from Mr. Leary's helpless form and was backing away into the
+darkness.
+
+Out of impenetrable gloom came his farewell warning: "Stay right where
+you are for fi' minutes wit'out movin' or makin' a yelp. If you wiggle
+before de time is up I gotta pal right yere watchin' you, and he'll sure
+plug you. He ain't no easy-goin' guy like wot I am. You're gittin' off
+lucky it's me stuck you up, stidder him."
+
+With these words he was gone--gone with Mr. Leary's overcoat, with Mr.
+Leary's last cent, with his latchkey, with his cardcase, with all by
+which Mr. Leary might hope to identify himself before a wary and
+incredulous world for what he was. He was gone, leaving there in the
+protecting ledge of shadow the straw-hatted, socked-and-slippered,
+leg-gartered figure of a plump being, clad otherwise in a single
+vestment which began at the line of a becomingly low neckband and
+terminated in blousy outbulging bifurcations just above the naked knees.
+Light stealing into this obscured and sheltered spot would have revealed
+that this garment was, as to texture, a heavy, silklike, sheeny,
+material; and as to colour a vivid and compelling pink--the exact colour
+of a slice of well-ripened watermelon; also that its sleeves ended
+elbow-high in an effect of broad turned-back cuffs; finally, that adown
+its owner's back it was snugly and adequately secured by means of a
+close-set succession of very large, very shiny white pearl buttons; the
+whole constituting an enlarged but exceedingly accurate copy of what,
+descriptively, is known to the manufactured-garment trade as a one-piece
+suit of child's rompers, self-trimmed, fastening behind; suitable for
+nursery, playground and seashore, especially recommended as summer wear
+for the little ones; to be had in all sizes; prices such-and-such.
+
+Within a space of some six or seven minutes this precisely was what the
+nearest street lamp did reveal unto itself as its downward-slanting
+beams fell upon a furtive, fugitive shape, suggestive in that deficient
+subradiance of a vastly overgrown forked parsnip, miraculously endowed
+with powers of locomotion and bound for somewhere in a hurry; excepting
+of course no forked parsnip, however remarkable in other respects, would
+be wearing a floppy straw hat in a snowstorm; nor is it likely it would
+be adorned lengthwise in its rear with a highly decorative design of
+broad, smooth, polished disks which, even in that poor illumination,
+gleamed and twinkled and wiggled snakily in and out of alignment, in
+accord with the movements of their wearer's spinal column.
+
+But the reader and I, better informed than any lamp post could be as to
+the prior sequence of events, would know at a glance it was no parsnip
+we beheld, but Mr. Algernon Leary, now suddenly enveloped, through no
+fault of his own, in one of the most overpowering predicaments
+conceivable to involve a rising lawyer and a member of at least two good
+clubs; and had we but been there to watch him, knowing, as we would
+know, the developments leading up to this present situation, we might
+have guessed what was the truth: That Mr. Leary was hot bent upon
+retreating to the only imaginable refuge left to him at this
+juncture--to wit, the interior of the stranded taxicab which he had
+abandoned but a short time previously.
+
+
+IV
+
+Nearly all of us at some time or other in our lives have dreamed awful
+dreams of being discovered in a public place with nothing at all upon
+our bodies, and have awakened, burning hot with the shame of an enormous
+and terrific embarrassment. Being no student of the psychic phenomena of
+human slumber I do not know whether this is a subconscious
+harking-back to the days of our infancy or whether it is merely a
+manifestation to prove the inadvisability of partaking of Welsh rabbits
+and lobster salads immediately before retiring. More than once Mr. Leary
+had bedreamed thus, but at this moment he realised how much more dread
+and distressing may be a dire actuality than a vision conjured up out of
+the mysteries of sleep.
+
+One surprised by strangers in a nude or partially nude state may have
+any one of a dozen acceptable excuses for being so circumstanced. An
+earthquake may have caught one unawares, say; or inopportunely a
+bathroom door may have blown open. Once the first shock occasioned by
+the untoward appearance of the victim has passed away he is sure of
+sympathy. For him pity is promptly engendered and volunteer aid is
+enlisted.
+
+But Mr. Leary had a profound conviction that, revealed in this ghastly
+plight before the eyes of his fellows, his case would be regarded
+differently; that instead of commiseration there would be for him only
+the derision which is so humiliating to a sensitive nature. He felt so
+undignified, so glaringly conspicuous, so--well, so scandalously
+immature. If only it had been an orthodox costume party which Mrs.
+Carroway had given, why, then he might have gone as a Roman senator or
+as a private chief or an Indian brave or a cavalier. In doublet or jack
+boots or war bonnet, in a toga, even, he might have mastered the dilemma
+and carried off a dubious situation. But to be adrift in an alien
+quarter of a great and heartless city round four o'clock in the morning,
+so picturesquely and so unseasonably garbed, and in imminent peril of
+detection, was a prospect calculated to fill one with the frenzied
+delirium of a nightmare made real. Put yourself in his place, I ask you.
+
+His slippered feet spurned the thin snow as he moved rapidly back toward
+the west. Ahead of him he could detect the clumped outlines of the
+taxicab, and at the sight of it he quickened to a trot. Once safely
+within it he could take stock of things; could map out a campaign of
+future action; could think up ways and means of extricating himself from
+his present lamentable case with the least possible risk of undesirable
+publicity. At any rate he would be shielded for the moment from the life
+which might at any moment awaken in the still sleeping and apparently
+vacant neighbourhood. Finally, of course, there was the hope that the
+drunken cabman might be roused, and once roused might be capable, under
+promise of rich financial reward, of conveying Mr. Leary to his bachelor
+apartments in West Eighty-fifth Street before dawn came, with its
+early-bird milkmen and its before-day newspaper distributors and its
+others too numerous to mention.
+
+Without warning of any sort the cab started off, seemingly of its own
+volition. Mr. Leary's gait became a desperate gallop, and as he galloped
+he gave voice in entreaty.
+
+[Illustration: MR. LEARY'S GAIT BECAME A DESPERATE GALLOP, AND AS HE
+GALLOPED HE SHOUTED: "WAIT, PLEASE. HERE I AM--HERE'S YOUR PASSENGER!"]
+
+"Hey there!" he shouted. "Wait, please. Here I am--here's your
+passenger!"
+
+His straw hat blew off, but this was no time to stop for a straw hat.
+For a few rods he gained upon the vehicle, then as its motion increased
+he lost ground and ran a losing race. Its actions disclosed that a
+conscious if an uncertain hand guided its destinies. Wabbling this way
+and that it wheeled skiddingly round a corner. When Mr. Leary, rowelled
+on to yet greater speed by the spurs of a mounting misery, likewise
+turned the corner it was irrevocably remote, beyond all prospect of
+being overtaken by anything human pursuing it afoot. The swaying black
+bulk of it diminished and was swallowed up in the snow shower and the
+darkness. The rattle of mishandled gears died to a thin metallic
+clanking, then to a purring whisper, and then the whisper expired, dead
+silence ensuing.
+
+
+V
+
+In the void of this silence stood Mr. Leary, shivering now in the
+reaction that had succeeded the nerve jar of being robbed at a pistol's
+point, and lacking the fervour of the chase to sustain him. For him the
+inconceivable disaster was complete and utter; upon him despair
+descended as a patent swatter upon a lone housefly. Miles away from
+home, penniless and friendless--the two terms being practically
+synonymous in New York--what asylum was there for him now? Suppose
+daylight found him abroad thus? Suppose he succumbed to exposure and was
+discovered stiffly frozen in a doorway? Death by processes of
+congealment must carry an added sting if one had to die in a suit of
+pink rompers buttoning down the back. As though the thought of freezing
+had been a cue to Nature he noted a tickling in his nose and a chokiness
+in his throat, and somewhere in his system, a long way off, so to speak,
+he felt a sneeze forming and approaching the surface.
+
+To add to his state of misery, if anything could add to its distressing
+total, he was taking cold. When Mr. Leary took cold he took it
+thoroughly and throughout his system. Very soon, as he knew by past
+experience, his voice would be hoarse and wheezy and his nose and his
+eyes would run. But the sneeze was delayed in transit, and Mr. Leary
+took advantage of the respite to cast a glance about him. Perhaps--the
+expedient had surged suddenly into his brain--perhaps there might be a
+hotel or a lodging house of sorts hereabouts? If so, such an
+establishment would have a night clerk on duty, and despite the
+baggageless and cashless state of the suppliant it was possible the
+night clerk might be won, by compassion or by argument or by both, to
+furnish Mr. Leary shelter until after breakfast time, when over the
+telephone he could reach friends and from these friends procure an
+outfit of funds and suitable clothing.
+
+In sight, though, there was no structure which by its outward appearance
+disclosed itself as a place of entertainment for the casual wayfarer.
+Howsomever, lights were shining through the frosted panes of a row of
+windows stretching across the top floor of a building immediately at
+hand, and even as he made this discovery Mr. Leary was aware of the
+dimmed sounds of revelry and of orchestral music up there, and also of
+an illuminated canvas triangle stuck above the hallway entrance of the
+particular building in question, this device bearing a lettered
+inscription upon it to advertise that here the members of the Lawrence
+P. McGillicuddy Literary Association and Pleasure Club were holding
+their Grand Annual Civic Ball; admission One Dollar, including Hat
+Check; Ladies Free when accompanied by Gents. Evidently the Lawrence P.
+McGillicuddys kept even later hours at their roisterings than the
+Bohemian sets in Washington Square kept.
+
+Observing these evidences of adjacent life and merry-makings Mr. Leary
+cogitated. Did he dare intrude upon the festivities aloft there? And if
+he did so dare would he enter cavortingly, trippingly, with intent to
+deceive the assembled company into the assumption that he had come to
+their gathering in costume; or would he throw himself upon their charity
+and making open confession of his predicament seek to enlist the
+friendly offices of some kindly soul in extricating him from it?
+
+While he canvassed the two propositions tentatively he heard the thud of
+footsteps descending the stairs from the dance hall, and governed by an
+uncontrollable impulse he leaped for concealment behind a pile of
+building material that was stacked handily upon the sidewalk almost at
+his elbow. He might possibly have driven himself to face a multitude
+indoors, but somehow could not, just naturally could not, in his present
+apparel, face one stranger outdoors--or at least not until he had
+opportunity to appraise the stranger.
+
+It was a man who emerged from the hallway entrance; a stockily built man
+wearing his hat well over one ear and with his ulster opened and flung
+back exposing a broad chest to the wintry air. He was whistling a
+sprightly air.
+
+Just as this individual came opposite the lumber pile the first
+dedicatory sneeze of a whole subsequent series of sneezes which had been
+burgeoning somewhere in the top of Mr. Leary's head, and which that
+unhappy gentleman had been mechanically endeavouring to suppress, burst
+from captivity with a vast moist report. At the explosion the passer-by
+spun about and his whistle expired in a snort of angered surprise as the
+bared head of Mr. Leary appeared above the topmost board of the pile,
+and Mr. Leary's abashed face looked into his.
+
+"Say," he demanded, "wotcher meanin', hidin' there and snortin' in a
+guy's ear?"
+
+His manner was truculent; indeed, verged almost upon the menacing.
+Evidently the shock had adversely affected his temper, to the point
+where he might make personal issues out of unavoidable trifles.
+Instinctively Mr. Leary felt that the situation which had arisen called
+for diplomacy of the very highest order. He cleared his throat before
+replying.
+
+"Good evening," he began, in what he vainly undertook to make a casual
+tone of voice. "I beg your pardon--the sneeze--ahem--occurred when I
+wasn't expecting it. Ahem--I wonder if you would do me a favour?"
+
+"I would not! Come snortin' in a guy's ear that-a-way and then askin'
+him would he do you a favour: You got a crust for fair!" Here, though, a
+natural curiosity triumphed over the rising tides of indignation. "Wot
+favour do you want, anyway?" he inquired shortly.
+
+"Would you--would you--I wonder if you would be willing to sell me that
+overcoat you're wearing?"
+
+"I would not!"
+
+"You see, the fact of the matter is I happened to be needing an overcoat
+very badly at the moment," pressed Mr. Leary. "I was hoping that you
+might be induced to name a price for yours."
+
+"I would not! M. J. Cassidy wears M. J. Cassidy's clothes, and nobody
+else wears 'em, believe me! Wot's happened to your own coat?"
+
+"I lost it--I mean it was stolen."
+
+"Stole?"
+
+"Yes, a robber with a revolver held me up a few minutes ago just over
+here in the next cross street and he took my coat away."
+
+"Huh! Well, did you lose your hat the same way?"
+
+"Yes--that is to say, no. I lost my hat running."
+
+"Oh, you run, hey? Well, you look to me like a guy wot would run. Well,
+did he take your clothes, too? Is that why you're squattin' behind them
+timbers?" The inquisitive one took a step nearer.
+
+"No--oh, no! I'm still wearing my--my--the costume I was wearing,"
+answered Mr. Leary, apprehensively wedging his way still farther back
+between the stack of boards and the wall behind. "But you see----"
+
+"Well then, barrin' the fact that you ain't got no hat, ain't you jest
+as well off without no overcoat now as I'd be if I fell for any
+hard-luck spiel from you and let you have mine?"
+
+"I wouldn't go so far as to say that exactly," tendered Mr. Leary
+ingratiatingly. "I'm afraid my clothing isn't as suitable for outdoor
+wear as yours is. You see, I'd been to a sort of social function and on
+my way home it--it happened."
+
+"Oh, it did, did it? Well, anyway, I should worry about you and your
+clothes," stated the other. He took a step onward, then halted; and now
+the gleam of speculative gain was in his eye. "Say, if I was willin' to
+sell--not sayin' I would be, but if I was--wot would you be willin' to
+give for an overcoat like this here one?"
+
+"Any price within reason--any price you felt like asking," said Mr.
+Leary, his hopes of deliverance rekindling.
+
+"Well, maybe I'd take twenty-five dollars for it just as it stands and
+no questions ast. How'd that strike you?"
+
+"I'll take it. That seems a most reasonable figure."
+
+"Well, fork over the twenty-five then, and the deal's closed."
+
+"I'd have to send you the money to-morrow--I mean to-day. You see, the
+thief took all my cash when he took my overcoat."
+
+"Did, huh?"
+
+"Yes, that's the present condition of things. Very annoying, isn't it?
+But I'll take your address. I'm a lawyer in business in Broad Street,
+and as soon as I reach my office I'll send the amount by messenger."
+
+"Aw, to hell with you and your troubles! I might a-knowed you was some
+new kind of a panhandler when you come a-snortin' in my ear that-a-way.
+Better beat it while the goin's good. You're in the wrong neighbourhood
+to be springin' such a gag as this one you just now sprang on me.
+Anyhow, I've wasted enough time on the likes of you."
+
+He was ten feet away when Mr. Leary, his wits sharpened by his
+extremity, clutched at the last straw.
+
+"One moment," he nervously begged. "Did I understand you to say your
+name was Cassidy?"
+
+"You did. Wot of it?"
+
+"Well, curious coincidence and all that--but my name happens to be
+Leary. And I thought that because of that you might----"
+
+The stranger broke in on him. "Your name happens to be Leary, does it?
+Wot's your other name then?"
+
+"Algernon."
+
+Stepping lightly on the balls of his feet Mr. Cassidy turned back, and
+his mien for some reason was potentially that of a belligerent.
+
+"Say," he declared threateningly, "you know wot I think about you? Well,
+I think you're a liar. No regular guy with the name of Leary would let a
+cheap stiff of a stick-up rob him out of the coat offen his back without
+puttin' up a battle. No regular guy named Leary would be named Algernon.
+Say, I think you're a Far Downer. I wouldn't be surprised but wot you
+was an A. P. A. on the top of that. And wot's all this here talk about
+goin' to a sociable functure and comin' away not suitably dressed? Come
+on out of that now and let's have a look at you."
+
+"Really, I'd much rather not--if you don't mind," protested the
+miserable Mr. Leary. "I--I have reasons."
+
+"The same here. Will you come out from behind there peaceable or will I
+fetch you out?"
+
+So Mr. Leary came, endeavouring while coming to wear a manner combining
+an atmosphere of dignified aloofness and a sentiment of frank
+indifference to the opinion of this loutish busybody, with just a touch,
+a mere trace, as it were, of nonchalance thrown in. In short, coming out
+he sought to deport himself as though it were the properest thing in
+the world for a man of years and discretion to be wearing a bright pink
+one-piece article of apparel on a public highway at four A. M. or
+thereabouts. Undoubtedly, considering everything, it was the hardest
+individual task essayed in New York during the first year of the war.
+Need I add that it was a failure--a total failure? As he stood forth
+fully and comprehensively revealed by the light of the adjacent
+transparency, Mr. Cassidy's squint of suspicion widened into a pop-eyed
+stare of temporary stupefaction.
+
+"Well, for the love of---- In the name of---- Did anywan ever see the
+likes of----!"
+
+He murmured the broken sentences as he circled about the form of the
+martyr. Completing the circuit, laughter of a particularly boisterous
+and concussive variety interrupted his fragmentary speech.
+
+"Ha ha, ha ha," echoed Mr. Leary in a palpably forced and hollow effort,
+to show that he, too, could enter into the spirit of the occasion with
+heartiness. "Does strike one as rather unusual at first sight--doesn't
+it?"
+
+"Why, you big hooman radish! Why, you strollin' sunset!" thus Mr.
+Cassidy responded. "Are you payin' an election bet three weeks after the
+election's over? Or is it that you're just a plain bedaddled ijiet? Or
+wot is it, I wonder?"
+
+"I explained to you that I went to a party. It was a fancy-dress party,"
+stated Mr. Leary.
+
+Sharp on the words Mr. Cassidy's manner changed. Here plainly was a
+person of moods, changeable and tempersome.
+
+"Ain't you ashamed of yourself, and you a large, grown man, to be
+skihootin' round with them kind of foolish duds on, and your own country
+at war this minute for decency and democracy?" From this it also was
+evident that Mr. Cassidy read the editorials in the papers. "You should
+take shame to yourself that you ain't in uniform instid of baby
+clothes."
+
+It was the part of discretion, so Mr. Leary inwardly decided, to ignore
+the fact that the interrogator himself appeared to be well within the
+military age.
+
+"I'm a bit old to enlist," he stated, "and I'm past the draft age."
+
+"Then you're too old to be wearin' such a riggin'. But, by cripes, I'll
+say this for you--you make a picture that'd make a horse laugh."
+
+Laughing like a horse, or as a horse would laugh if a horse ever
+laughed, he rocked to and fro on his heels.
+
+"Sh-sh; not so loud, please," importuned Mr. Leary, casting an uneasy
+glance toward the lighted windows above. "Somebody might hear you!"
+
+"I hope somebody does hear me," gurgled the temperamental Mr. Cassidy,
+now once more thoroughly beset by his mirth. "I need somebody to help me
+laugh. By cripes, I need a whole crowd to help me; and I know a way to
+get them!"
+
+He twisted his head round so his voice would ascend the hallway. "Hey,
+fellers and skoirts," he called; "you that's fixin' to leave! Hurry on
+down here quick and see Algy, the livin' peppermint lossenger, before he
+melts away with his own sweetness."
+
+Obeying the summons with promptness a flight of the Lawrence P.
+McGillicuddy's, accompanied for the most part by lady friends, cascaded
+down the stairs and erupted forth upon the sidewalk.
+
+"Here y'are--right here!" clarioned Mr. Cassidy as the first skylarkish
+pair showed in the doorway. His manner was drolly that of a showman
+exhibiting a rare freak, newly captured. "Come a-runnin'!"
+
+They came a-running and there were a dozen of them or possibly fifteen;
+blithesome spirits, all, and they fenced in the shrinking shape of Mr.
+Leary with a close and curious ring of themselves, and the combined
+volume of their glad, amazed outbursts might be heard for a distance of
+furlongs. On prankish impulse then they locked hands and with skippings
+and prancings and impromptu jig steps they circled about him; and he,
+had he sought to speak, could not well have been heard; and, anyway, he
+was for the moment past speech, because of being entirely engaged in
+giving vent to one vehement sneeze after another. And next, above the
+chorus of joyous whooping might be heard individual comments, each
+shrieked out shrilly and each punctuated by a sneeze from Mr. Leary's
+convulsed frame; or lacking that by a simulated sneeze from one of the
+revellers--one with a fine humorous flare for mimicry. And these
+comments were, for example, such as:
+
+"Git onto the socks!"
+
+"Ker-chew!"
+
+"And the slippers!"
+
+"Ker-chew!"
+
+"And them lovely pink garters!"
+
+"Ker-chew!"
+
+"Oh, you cutey! Oh, you cut-up!"
+
+"Ker-chew!"
+
+"Oh, you candy kid!"
+
+"And say, git onto the cunnin' elbow sleeves our little playmate's
+sportin'."
+
+"Yes, but goils, just pipe the poilies--ain't they the greatest ever?"
+
+"They sure are. Say, kiddo, gimme one of 'em to remember you by, won't
+you? You'll never miss it--you got a-plenty more."
+
+"Wot d'ye call wot he's got on 'um, anyway?" The speaker was a male,
+naturally.
+
+"W'y, you big stoopid, can't you see he's wearin' rompers?" The answer
+came in a giggle, from a gay youthful creature of the opposite sex as
+she kicked out roguishly.
+
+"Well, then be chee, w'y don't he romp a little?"
+
+"Give 'um time, cancher? Don't you see he's blowin' out his flues? He's
+busy now. He'll romp in a minute."
+
+"Sure he will! We'll romp with 'um."
+
+A waggish young person in white beaded slippers and a green sport skirt
+broke free from the cavorting ring, and behind Mr. Leary's back the
+nimble fingers of the madcap tapped his spinal ornamentations as an
+instrumentalist taps the stops of an organ; and she chanted a familiar
+counting game of childhood:
+
+"Rich man--poor man--beggar man--thief--doctor--loiryer----"
+
+"Sure, he said he was a loiryer." It was Mr. Cassidy breaking in. "And
+he said his name was Algernon. Well, I believe the Algernon part--the
+big A. P. A."
+
+"Oh, you Algy!"
+
+"Algernon, does your mother know you're out?"
+
+"T'ree cheers for Algy, the walkin' comic valentine!"
+
+"Algy, Algy--Oh, you cutey Algy!" These jolly Greenwich Villagers were
+going to make a song of his name. They did make a song of it, and it was
+a frolicsome song and pitched to a rollicksome key. Congenial newcomers
+arrived, pelting down from upstairs whence they had been drawn by the
+happy rocketing clamour; and they caught spirit and step and tune with
+the rest and helped manfully to sing it. As one poet hath said, "And now
+reigned high carnival." And as another has so aptly phrased it, "There
+was sound of revelry by night." And, as the second poet once put it, or
+might have put it so if so be he didn't, "And all went merry as a
+marriage bell." But when we, adapting the line to our own descriptive
+usages, now say all went merry we should save out one exception--one
+whose form alternately was racked by hot flushes of a terrific
+self-consciousness and by humid gusts of an equally terrific sneezing
+fit.
+
+
+VI
+
+"Here, here, here! Cut out the yellin'! D'you want the whole block up
+out of their beds?" The voice of the personified law, gruff and
+authoritative, broke in upon the clamour, and the majesty of the law,
+typified in bulk, with galoshes, ear muffs and woollen gloves on, not to
+mention the customary uniform of blue and brass, ploughed a path toward
+the centre of the group.
+
+"'S all right, Switzer," gaily replied a hoydenish lassie; she, the
+same who had begged Mr. Leary for a sea-pearl souvenir. "But just see
+wot Morrie Cassidy went and found here on the street!"
+
+Patrolman Switzer looked then where she pointed, and could scarce
+believe his eyes. In his case gleefulness took on a rumbling thunderous
+form, which shook his being as with an ague and made him to beat himself
+violently upon his ribs.
+
+"D'ye blame us for carryin' on, Switzer, when we seen it ourselves?"
+
+"I don't--and that's a fact," Switzer confessed between gurgles. "I
+wouldn't a blamed you much if you'd fell down and had a fit." And then
+he rocked on his heels, filled with joviality clear down to his rubber
+soles. Anon, though, he remembered the responsibilities of his position.
+"Still, at that, and even so," said he, sobering himself, "enough of a
+good thing's enough." He glared accusingly, yea, condemningly, at the
+unwitting cause of the quelled commotion.
+
+"Say, what's the idea, you carousin' round Noo York City this hour of
+the night diked up like a Coney Island Maudie Graw? And what's the idea,
+you causin' a boisterous and disorderly crowd to collect? And what's the
+idea, you makin' a disturbance in a vicinity full of decent hard-workin'
+people that's tryin' to get a little rest? What's the general idea,
+anyhow?"
+
+At this moment Mr. Leary having sneezed an uncountable number of times,
+regained the powers of coherent utterance.
+
+"It is not my fault," he said. "I assure you of that, officer. I am
+being misjudged; I am the victim of circumstances over which I have no
+control. You see, officer, I went last evening to a fancy-dress party
+and----"
+
+"Well, then, why didn't you go on home afterwards and behave yourself?"
+
+"I did--I started, in a taxicab. But the taxicab driver was drunk and he
+went to sleep on the way and the taxicab stopped and I got out of it and
+started to walk across town looking for another taxicab and----"
+
+"Started walkin', dressed like that?"
+
+"Certainly not. I had an overcoat on, of course. But a highwayman held
+me up at the point of a revolver, and he took my overcoat and what money
+I had and my card case and----"
+
+"Where did all this here happen--this here alleged robbery?"
+
+"Not two blocks away from here, right over in the next street to this
+one."
+
+"I don't believe nothin' of the kind!"
+
+Patrolman Switzer spoke with enhanced severity; his professional honour
+had been touched in a delicate place. The bare suggestion that a footpad
+might dare operate in a district under his immediate personal
+supervision would have been to him deeply repugnant, and here was this
+weirdly attired wanderer making the charge direct.
+
+"But, officer, I insist--I protest that----"
+
+"Young feller, I think you've been drinkin', that's what I think about
+you. Your voice sounds to me like you've been drinkin' about a gallon of
+mixed ale. I think you dreamed all this here pipe about a robber and a
+pistol and an overcoat and a taxicab and all. Now you take a friendly
+tip from me and you run along home as fast as ever you can, and you get
+them delirious clothes off of you and then you get in bed and take a
+good night's sleep and you'll feel better. Because if you don't it's
+goin' to be necessary for me to run you in for a public nuisance. I
+ain't askin' you--I'm tellin' you, now. If you don't want to be locked
+up, start movin'--that's my last word to you."
+
+The recent merrymakers, who had fallen silent the better to hear the
+dialogue, grouped themselves expectantly, hoping and waiting for a yet
+more exciting and humorous sequel to what had gone before--if such a
+miracle might be possible. Nor were they to be disappointed. The
+denouement came quickly upon the heels of the admonition.
+
+For into Mr. Leary's reeling and distracted mind the warning had sent a
+clarifying idea darting. Why hadn't he thought of a police station
+before now? Perforce the person in charge at any police station would be
+under requirement to shelter him. What even if he were locked up
+temporarily? In a cell he would be safe from the slings and arrows of
+outrageous ridicule; and surely among the functionaries in any station
+house would be one who would know a gentleman in distress, however
+startlingly the gentleman might be garbed. Surely, too, somebody--once
+that somebody's amazement had abated--would he willing to do some
+telephoning for him. Perhaps, even, a policeman off duty might be
+induced to take his word for it that he was what he really was, and not
+what he seemed to be, and loan him a change of clothing.
+
+Hot upon the inspiration Mr. Leary decided on his course of action. He
+would get himself safely and expeditiously removed from the hateful
+company and the ribald comments of the Lawrence P. McGillicuddys and
+their friends. He would get himself locked up--that was it. He would now
+take the first steps in that direction.
+
+"Are you goin' to start on home purty soon like I've just been tellin'
+you; or are you ain't?" snapped Patrolman Switzer, who, it would appear,
+was by no means a patient person.
+
+"I am not!" The crafty Mr. Leary put volumes of husky defiance into his
+answer. "I'm not going home--and you can't make me go home, either." He
+rejoiced inwardly to see how the portly shape of Switzer stiffened and
+swelled at the taunt. "I'm a citizen and I have a right to go where I
+please, dressed as I please, and you don't dare to stop me. I defy you
+to arrest me!" Suddenly he put both his hands in Patrolman Switzer's
+fleshy midriff and gave him a violent shove. An outraged grunt went up
+from Switzer, a delighted whoop from the audience. Swept off his balance
+by the prospect of fruition for his design the plotter had technically
+been guilty before witnesses of a violent assault upon the person of an
+officer in the sworn discharge of his duty.
+
+He felt himself slung violently about. One mitted hand fixed itself in
+Mr. Leary's collar yoke at the rear; the other closed upon a handful of
+slack material in the lower breadth of Mr. Leary's principal habiliment
+just below where his buttons left off.
+
+"So you won't come, won't you? Well then I'll show you--you pink
+strawberry drop!"
+
+Enraged at having been flaunted before a jeering audience the patrolman
+pushed his prisoner ten feet along the sidewalk, imparting to the
+offender's movements an involuntary gliding gait, with backward jerks
+between forward shoves; this method of propulsion being known in the
+vernacular of the force as "givin' a skate the bum's rush."
+
+"Hey, Switzer, lend me your key and I'll ring for the wagon for you,"
+volunteered Mr. Cassidy. His care-free companions, some of them, cheered
+the suggestion, seeing in it prospect of a prolonging of this delectable
+sport which providence without charge had so graciously deigned to
+provide.
+
+"Never mind about the wagon. Us two'll walk, me and him," announced the
+patrolman. "'Taint so far where we're goin', and the walk'll do this
+fresh guy a little good--maybe'll sober him up. And never mind about any
+of the rest of you taggin' along behind us neither. This is a pinch--not
+a free street parade. Go on home now, the lot of youse, before you wake
+up the whole Lower West Side."
+
+Loath to be cheated out of the last act of a comedy so unique and so
+rich the whimsical McGillicuddys and their chosen mates fell reluctantly
+away, with yells and gibes and quips and farewell bursts of laughter.
+
+
+VII
+
+Closely hyphenated together the deep blue figure and the bright pink one
+rounded the corner and were alone. It was time to open the overtures
+which would establish Patrolman Switzer upon the basis of a better
+understanding of things. Mr. Leary, craning his neck in order to look
+rearward into the face of his custodian, spoke in a key very different
+from the one he had last employed.
+
+"I really didn't intend, you know, to resist you, officer. I had a
+private purpose in what I did. And you were quite within your rights.
+And I'm very grateful to you--really I am--for driving those people
+away."
+
+"Is that so?" The inflection was grimly and heavily sarcastic.
+
+"Yes. I am a lawyer by profession, and generally speaking I know what
+your duties are. I merely made a show--a pretence, as it were--of
+resisting you, in order to get away from that mob. It was--ahem--it was
+a device on my part--in short, a trick."
+
+"Is that so? Fixin' to try to beg off now, huh? Well, nothin' doin'!
+Nothin' doin'! I don't know whether you're a fancy nut or a plain souse
+or what-all, but whatever you are you're under arrest and you're goin'
+with me."
+
+"That's exactly what I desire to do," resumed the schemer. "I desire
+most earnestly to go with you."
+
+"You're havin' your wish, ain't you? Well, then, the both of us should
+oughter be satisfied."
+
+"I feel sure," continued the wheedling and designing Mr. Leary, "that as
+soon as we reach the station house I can make satisfactory atonement to
+you for my behaviour just now and can explain everything to your
+superiors in charge there, and then----"
+
+"Station house!" snorted Patrolman Switzer. "Why, say, you ain't headin'
+for no station house. The crowd that's over there where you're headin'
+for should be grateful to me for bringin' you in. You'll be a treat to
+them, and it's few enough pleasures some of them gets----"
+
+A new, a horrid doubt assailed Mr. Leary's sorely taxed being. He began
+to have a dread premonition that all was not going well and his brain
+whirled anew.
+
+"But I prefer to be taken to the station house," he began.
+
+"And who are you to be preferrin' anything at all?" countered Switzer.
+"I'll phone back to the station where I am and what I've done; though
+that part of it's no business of yours. I'll be doin' that after I've
+arrainged you over to Jefferson Market."
+
+"Jeff--Jefferson Market!"
+
+"Sure, 'tis to Jefferson Market night court you're headin' this minute.
+Where else? They're settin' late over there to-night; the magistrate is
+expectin' some raids somewheres about daylight, I dope it. Anyhow,
+they're open yet; I know that. So it'll be me and you for Jefferson
+Market inside of five minutes; and I'm thinkin' you'll get quite a
+reception."
+
+Jefferson Market! Mr. Leary could picture the rows upon rows of gloating
+eyes. He heard the incredulous shout that would mark his entrance, the
+swell of unholy glee from the benches that would interrupt the
+proceedings. He saw stretched upon the front pages of the early editions
+of the afternoon yellows the glaring black-faced headlines:
+
+
+                          WELL-KNOWN LAWYER
+                          CLAD IN PINK ROMPERS
+                          HALED TO NIGHT COURT
+
+
+He saw--but Switzer's next remark sent a fresh shudder of apprehension
+through him, caught all again, as he was, in the coils of accursed
+circumstance.
+
+"Magistrate Voris will be gettin' sleepy what with waitin' for them
+raids to be pulled off, and I make no doubt the sight of you will put
+him in a good humour."
+
+And Magistrate Voris was his rival for the favours of Miss Milly
+Hollister! And Magistrate Voris was a person with a deformed sense of
+humour! And Magistrate Voris was sitting in judgment this moment at
+Jefferson Market night court. And now desperation, thrice compounded,
+rent the soul of the trapped victim of his own misaimed subterfuge.
+
+"I won't be taken to any night court!" he shouted, wresting himself
+toward the edge of the sidewalk and dragging his companion along with
+him. "I won't go there! I demand to be taken to a station house. I'm a
+sick man and I require the services of a doctor."
+
+"Startin' to be rough-house all over again, huh?" grunted Switzer
+vindictively. "Well, we'll see about that part of it, too--right now!"
+
+Surrendering his lowermost clutch, the one in the silken seat of the
+suit of his writhing prisoner, he fumbled beneath the tails of his
+overcoat for the disciplinary nippers that were in his righthand rear
+trousers pocket.
+
+With a convulsive twist of his body Mr. Leary jerked himself free of the
+mittened grip upon his neckband, and as, released, he gave a deerlike
+lunge forward for liberty he caromed against a burdened ash can upon the
+curbstone and sent it spinning backward; then recovering sprang onward
+and outward across the gutter in flight. In the same instant he heard
+behind him a crash of metal and a solid thud, heard a sound as of a
+scrambling solid body cast abruptly prone, heard the name of Deity
+profaned, and divined without looking back that the ash can,
+conveniently rolling between the plump legs of the personified Arm of
+the Law, had been Officer Switzer's undoing, and might be his salvation.
+
+
+VIII
+
+With never a backward glance he ran on, not doubting as a hare before
+the beagle, but following a straight course, like unto a hunted roebuck.
+He did not know he could run so fast, and he could not have run so fast
+any other time than this. Beyond was a crossing. It was blind instinct
+that made him double round the turn. And it was instinct, quickened and
+guided by desperation, that made him dart like a rose-tinted flash up
+the steps to the stoop of an old-fashioned residence standing just
+beyond the corner, spring inside the storm doors, draw them to behind
+him, and crouch there, hidden, as pursuit went lumbering by.
+
+Through a chink between the door halves he watched breathlessly while
+Switzer, who moved with a pronounced limp and rubbed his knees as he
+limped, hobbled halfway up the block, slowed down, halted, glared about
+him for sight or sign of the vanished fugitive, and then misled by a
+false trail departed, padding heavily with a galoshed tread, round the
+next turn.
+
+With his body still drawn well back within the shadow line of the
+overhanging cornice Mr. Leary, coyly protruded his head and took visual
+inventory of the neighbourhood. So far as any plan whatsoever had
+formed in the mind of our diffident adventurer he meant to bide where he
+was for the moment. Here, where he had shelter of a sort, he would
+recapture his breath and reassemble his wits. Even so, the respite from
+those elements which Mr. Leary dreaded most of all--publicity,
+observation, cruel jibes, the harsh raucous laughter of the
+populace--could be at best but a woefully transient one. He was not
+resigned--by no means was he resigned--to his fate; but he was helpless.
+For what ailed him there was no conceivable remedy.
+
+Anon jocund day would stand tiptoe on something or other; Greenwich
+Village would awaken and bestir itself. Discovery would come, and forth
+he would be drawn like a shy, unwilling periwinkle from its shell, once
+more to play his abased and bashful role of free entertainer to
+guffawing mixed audiences. For all others in the great city there were
+havens and homes. But for a poor, lorn, unguided vagrant, enmeshed in
+the burlesque garnitures of a three-year-old male child, what haven was
+there? By night the part had been hard enough--as the unresponsive
+heavens above might have testified. By the stark unmerciful sunlight; by
+the rude, revealing glow of the impending day how much more scandalous
+would it be!
+
+His haggard gaze swept this way and that, seeking possible succour where
+reason told him there could be no succour; and then as his vision pieced
+together this outjutting architectural feature and that into a coherent
+picture of his immediate surroundings he knew where he was. The one bit
+of chancy luck in a sequence of direful catastrophes had brought him
+here to this very spot. Why, this must be West Ninth Street; it had to
+be, it was--oh joy, it was! And Bob Slack, his partner, lived in this
+identical block on this same side of the street.
+
+With his throat throbbing to the impulse of new-born hope he emerged
+completely from behind the refuge of the storm doors, backed himself out
+and down upon the top step, and by means of a dubious illumination
+percolating through the fanlight above the inner door he made out the
+figures upon the lintel. This was such and such a number; therefore Bob
+Slack's number must be the second number to the eastward, at the next
+door but one.
+
+
+IX
+
+Five seconds later a fleet apparition of a prevalent pinkish tone gave a
+ranging house cat the fright of its life as former darted past latter to
+vault nimbly up the stone steps of a certain weatherbeaten
+four-story-and-basement domicile. Set in the door jamb here was a
+vertical row of mail-slots, and likewise a vertical row of electric push
+buttons; these objects attesting to the fact that this house, once upon
+a time the home of a single family, had eventually undergone the
+transformation which in lower New York befalls so many of its kind, and
+had become a layer-like succession of light-housekeeping apartments, one
+apartment to a floor, and the caretaker in the basement.
+
+Since Bob Slack's bachelor quarters were on the topmost floor Bob
+Slack's push button would be the next to the lowermost of the battery of
+buttons. A chilled tremulous finger found that particular button and
+pressed it long and hard, released it, pressed it again and yet again.
+And in the interval following each period of pressing the finger's owner
+hearkened, all ears, for the answering click-click that would tell him
+the sleeper having been roused by the ringing had risen and pressed the
+master button that released the mechanism of the street door's lock.
+
+But no welcome clicking rewarded the expectant ringer. Assuredly Bob
+Slack must be the soundest sleeper in the known world. He who waited
+rang and rang and rerang. There was no response.
+
+Eventually conviction was forced upon Mr. Leary that he must awaken the
+caretaker--who, he seemed dimly to recall as a remembrance of past
+visits to Bob Slack, was a woman; and this done he must induce the
+caretaker to admit him to the inside of the house. Once within the
+building the refugee promised himself he would bring the slumberous
+Slack to consciousness if he had to beat down that individual's door
+doing it. He centred his attack upon the bottom push button of all.
+Directly, from almost beneath his feet, came the sound of an areaway
+window being unlatched, and a drowsy female somewhat crossly inquired to
+know who might be there and what might be wanted.
+
+"It's a gentleman calling on Mr. Slack," wheezed Mr. Leary with his head
+over the balusters. He was getting so very, very hoarse. "I've been
+ringing his bell, but I can't seem to get any answer."
+
+"A gentleman at this time o' night!" The tone was purely incredulous.
+
+"Yes; a close friend of Mr. Slack's," assured Mr. Leary, striving to put
+stress of urgency into his accents, and only succeeding in imparting an
+added hoarseness to his fast-failing vocal cords. "I'm his law partner,
+in fact. I must see him at once, please--it's very important, very
+pressing indeed."
+
+"Well, you can't be seein' him."
+
+"C-can't see him? What do you mean?"
+
+"I mean he ain't here, that's what. He's out. He's went out for the
+night. He's ginerally always out on Friday nights--playin' cards at his
+club, I think. And sometimes he don't come in till it's near breakfast
+time. If you're a friend of his I sh'd think it'd be likely you'd know
+that same."
+
+"Oh, I do--I do," assented Mr. Leary earnestly; "only I had forgotten
+it. I've had so many other things on my mind. But surely he'll be coming
+in quite soon now--it's pretty late, you know."
+
+"Don't I know that for myself without bein' told?"
+
+"Yes, quite so, of course; naturally so." Mr. Leary was growing more and
+more nervous, and more and more chilled, too. "But if you'll only be so
+very kind as to let me in I'll wait for him in his apartment."
+
+"Let you in without seein' you or knowin' what your business is? I
+should guess not! Besides, you couldn't be gettin' inside his flat
+anyways. He's locked it, unless he's forgot to, which ain't likely, him
+bein' a careful man, and he must a-took the key with him. I know I ain't
+got it."
+
+"But if you'll just let me inside the building that will be sufficient.
+I would much rather wait inside if only in the hall, than out here on
+the stoop in the cold."
+
+"No doubt, no doubt you would all of that." The tone of the unseen
+female was drily suspicious. "But is it likely I'd be lettin' a stranger
+into the place, that I never seen before, and ain't seen yet for that
+matter, just on the strength of his own word? And him comin'
+unbeknownst, at this hour of the mornin'? A fat chancet!"
+
+"But surely, though, you must recall me--Mr. Leary, his partner. I've
+been here before. I've spoken to you."
+
+"That voice don't sound to me like no voice I ever heard."
+
+"I've taken cold--that's why it's altered."
+
+"So? Then why don't you come down here where I can have a look at you
+and make sure?" inquired this careful chatelaine.
+
+"I'm leaning with my head over the rail of the steps right above you,"
+said Mr. Leary. "Can't you poke your head out and see my face? I'm quite
+sure you would recall me then."
+
+"With this here iron gratin' acrost me window how could I poke me head
+out? Besides, it's dark. Say, mister, if you're on the level what's the
+matter with you comin' down here and not be standin' there palaverin'
+all the night?"
+
+"I--I--well, you see, I'd rather not come for just a minute--until I've
+explained to you that--that my appearance may strike you as being a
+trifle unusual, in fact, I might say, queer," pleaded Mr. Leary, seeking
+by subtle methods of indirection to prepare her for what must surely
+follow.
+
+"Never mind explainin'--gimme a look!" The suspicious tenseness in her
+voice increased. "I tell you this--ayther you come down here right this
+secont or I shut the window and you can be off or you can go to the
+divil or go anywheres you please for all of me, because I'm an
+overworked woman and I need my rest and I've no more time to waste on
+you."
+
+"Wait, please; I'm coming immediately," called out Mr. Leary.
+
+He forced his legs to carry him down the steps and reluctantly, yet
+briskly, he propelled his pink-hued person toward the ray of light that
+streamed out through the grated window-opening and fell across the
+areaway.
+
+"You mustn't judge by first appearances," he was explaining with a false
+and transparent attempt at matter-of-factness as he came into the zone
+of illumination. "I'm not what I seem, exactly. You see, I----"
+
+"Mushiful Evans!" The exclamation was half shrieked, half gasped out;
+and on the words the window was slammed to, the light within flipped
+out, and through the glass from within came a vehement warning.
+
+"Get away, you--you lunatic! Get away from here now or I'll have the
+cops on you."
+
+"But please, please listen," he entreated, with his face close against
+the bars. "I assure you, madam, that I can explain everything if you
+will only listen."
+
+There was no mercy, no suggestion of relenting in the threatening
+message that came back to him.
+
+"If you ain't gone from here in ten seconts I'll ring for the night
+watchman on the block, and I'll blow a whistle for the police. I've got
+me hand on the alarm hook right now. Will you go or will I rouse the
+whole block?"
+
+"Pray be calm, madam, I'll go. In fact, I'm going now."
+
+He fell back out of the areaway. Fresh uproar at this critical juncture
+would be doubly direful. It would almost certainly bring the vengeful
+Switzer, with his bruised shanks. It would inevitably bring some one.
+
+
+X
+
+Mr. Leary retreated to the sidewalk, figuratively casting from him the
+shards and potsherds of his reawakened anticipations, now all so rudely
+shattered again. He was doomed. It would inevitably be his fate to cower
+in these cold and drafty purlieus until----
+
+No, it wouldn't either!
+
+Like a golden rift in a sable sky a brand-new ray of cheer opened before
+him. Who were those married friends of Slack's, who lived on the third
+floor--friends with whom once upon a time he and Slack had shared a
+chafing-dish supper? What was the name? Brady? No, Braydon. That was
+it--Mr. and Mrs. Edward Braydon. He would slip back again, on noiseless
+feet, to the doorway where the bells were. He would bide there until the
+startled caretaker had gone back to her sleep, or at least to her bed.
+Then he would play a solo on the Braydons' bell until he roused them.
+They would let him in, and beyond the peradventure of a doubt, they
+would understand what seemed to be beyond the ken of flighty and
+excitable underlings. He would make them understand, once he was in and
+once the first shock of beholding him had abated within them. They were
+a kindly, hospitable couple, the Braydons were. They would be only too
+glad to give him shelter from the elements until Bob Slack returned
+from his session at bridge. He was saved!
+
+Within the coping of the stoop he crouched and waited--waited for five
+long palpitating minutes which seemed to him as hours. Then he applied
+an eager and quivering finger to the Braydons' button. Sweet boon of
+vouchsafed mercy! Almost instantly the latch clicked. And now in another
+instant Mr. Leary was within solid walls, with the world and the weather
+shut out behind him.
+
+He stood a moment, palpitant with mute thanksgiving, in the hallway,
+which was made obscure rather than bright by a tiny pinprick of
+gaslight; and as thus he stood, fortifying himself with resolution for
+the embarrassing necessity of presenting himself, in all his show of
+quaint frivolity, before these comparative strangers, there came
+floating down the stair well to him in a sharp half-whisper a woman's
+voice.
+
+"Is that you?" it asked.
+
+"Yes," answered Mr. Leary, truthfully. It was indeed he, Algernon Leary,
+even though someone else seemingly was expected. But the explanation
+could wait until he was safely upstairs. Indeed, it must wait. Attempted
+at a distance it would take on rather a complicated aspect; besides, the
+caretaker just below might overhear, and by untoward interruptions
+complicate a position already sufficiently delicate and difficult.
+
+Down from above came the response, "All right then. I've been worried,
+you were so late coming in, Edward. Please slip in quietly and take the
+front room. I'm going on back to bed."
+
+"All right!" grunted Mr. Leary.
+
+But already his plan had changed; the second speech down the stair well
+had caused him to change it. Safety first would be his motto from now
+on. Seeing that Mr. Edward Braydon apparently was likewise out late it
+would be wiser and infinitely more discreet on his part did he avoid
+further disturbing Mrs. Braydon, who presumably was alone and who might
+be easily frightened. So he would just slip on past the Braydon
+apartment, and in the hallway on the fourth floor he would cannily bide,
+awaiting the truant Slack's arrival.
+
+On tiptoe then, flight by flight, he ascended toward the top of the
+house. He was noiselessly progressing along the hallway of the third
+floor; he was about midway of it when under his tread a loose plank gave
+off an agonized squeak, and, as involuntarily he crouched, right at his
+side a door was flung open.
+
+What the discomfited refugee saw, at a distance from him to be measured
+by inches rather than by feet, was the face of a woman; and not the face
+of young Mrs. Edward Braydon, either, but the face of a middle-aged lady
+with startled eyes widely staring, with a mouth just dropping ajar as
+sudden horror relaxed her jaw muscles, and with a head of grey hair
+haloed about by a sort of nimbus effect of curl papers. What the strange
+lady saw--well, what the strange lady saw may best perhaps be gauged by
+what she did, and that was instantly to slam and bolt the door and then
+to utter a succession of calliopelike shrieks, which echoed through the
+house and which immediately were answered back by a somewhat similar
+series of outcries from the direction of the basement.
+
+
+XI
+
+Up the one remaining flight of stairs darted the intruder. He flung
+himself with all his weight and all his force against Bob Slack's door.
+It wheezed from the impact, but its stout oaken panels held fast. Who
+says the impossible is really impossible? The accumulated testimony of
+the ages shows that given the emergency a man can do anything he just
+naturally has to do. Neither by training nor by habit of life nor yet by
+figure was Mr. Leary athletically inclined, but a trained gymnast might
+well have envied the magnificent agility with which he put a foot upon
+the doorknob and sprang upward, poising himself there upon a slippered
+toe, with one set of fingers clutching fast to the minute projections of
+the door frame while with his free hand he thrust recklessly against the
+transom.
+
+The transom gave under the strain, moving upward and inward upon its
+hinges, disclosing an oblong gap above the jamb. With a splendid wriggle
+the fugitive vaulted up, thrusting his person into the clear space thus
+provided. Balanced across the opening upon his stomach, half in and half
+out, for one moment he remained there, his legs kicking wildly as though
+for a purchase against something more solid than air. Then convulsive
+desperation triumphed over physical limitations. There was a rending,
+tearing sound as of some silken fabric being parted biaswise of its
+fibres, and Mr. Leary's droll after sections vanished inside; and
+practically coincidentally therewith, Mr. Leary descended upon the
+rugged floor with a thump which any other time would have stunned him
+into temporary helplessness, but which now had the effect merely of
+stimulating him onward to fresh exertion.
+
+In a fever of activity he sprang up. Pawing a path through the
+encompassing darkness, stumbling into and over various sharp-cornered
+objects, barking his limbs with contusions and knowing it not, he found
+the door of the inner room--Bob Slack's bedroom--and once within that
+sanctuary he, feeling along the walls, discovered a push bulb and
+switched on the electric lights.
+
+What matter though the whole house grew clamorous now with a mounting
+and increasing tumult? What mattered it though he could hear more and
+more startled voices commingled with the shattering shrieks emanating
+from the Braydon apartment beneath his feet? He, the hard-pressed and
+sore-beset and the long-suffering, was at last beyond the sight of
+mortal eyes. He was locked in, with two rooms and a bath to himself, and
+he meant to maintain his present refuge, meant to hold this fort against
+all comers, until Bob Slack came home. He would barricade himself in if
+need be. He would pile furniture against the doors. If they took him at
+all it would be by direct assault and overpowering numbers.
+
+And while he withstood siege and awaited attack he would rid himself of
+these unlucky caparisons that had been his mortification and his
+undoing. When they broke in on him--if they did break in on him--he
+would be found wearing some of Bob Slack's clothes. Better far to be
+mistaken for a burglar than to be dragged forth lamentably yet
+fancifully attired as Himself at the Age of Three. The one thing might
+be explained--and in time would be; but the other? He felt that he was
+near the breaking point; that he could no more endure.
+
+
+XII
+
+He stopped where he was, in the middle of the room, with his eyes and
+his hands seeking for the seams of the closing of his main garment. Then
+he remembered what in his stress he had forgotten--the opening or
+perhaps one should say the closing was at the back. He twisted his arms
+rearward, his fingers groping along his spine.
+
+Now any normal woman has the abnormal ability to do and then to undo a
+garment hitching behind. Nature, which so fashioned her elbows that she
+cannot throw a stone at a hen in the way in which a stone properly
+should be thrown at a hen, made suitable atonement for this articular
+oversight by endowing her joints with the facile knack of turning on
+exactly the right angle, with never danger of sprain or dislocation, for
+the subjugation of a back-latching frock. Moreover, years of practice
+have given her adeptness in accomplishing this achievement, so that to
+her it has become an everyday feat. But man has neither the experience
+to qualify him nor yet the bodily adaptability.
+
+By reaching awkwardly up and over his shoulder Mr. Leary managed to tug
+the topmost button of his array of buttons out of its attendant
+buttonholes, but below and beyond that point he could not progress. He
+twisted and contorted his body; he stretched his arms in their sockets
+until twin pangs of agony met and crossed between his shoulder blades,
+and with his two exploring hands he pulled and fumbled and pawed and
+wrenched and wrested, to make further headway at his task. But the
+sewing-on had been done with stout thread; the buttonholes were taut and
+snug and well made. Those slippery flat surfaces amply resisted him.
+They eluded him; defied him; outmastered him. Thanks be to, or curses be
+upon, the passionate zeal of Miss Rowena Skiff for exactitudes, he,
+lacking the offices of an assistant undresser, was now as definitely and
+finally inclosed in this distressful pink garment as though it had been
+his own skin. Speedily he recognised this fact in all its bitter and
+abominable truth, but mechanically, he continued to wrestle with the
+obdurate fastenings.
+
+While he thus vainly contended, events in which he directly was
+concerned were occurring beneath that roof. From within his refuge he
+heard the sounds of slamming doors, of hurrying footsteps, of excited
+voices merging into a distracted chorus; but above all else, and from
+the rest, two of these voices stood out by reason of their augmented
+shrillness, and Mr. Leary marked them both, for since he had just heard
+them he therefore might identify their respective unseen owners.
+
+"There's something--there's somebody in the house!" At the top of its
+register one voice was repeating the warning over and over again, and
+judging by direction this alarmist was shrieking her words through a
+keyhole on the floor below him. "I saw it--him--whatever it was. I
+opened my door to look out in the hall and it--he--was right there. Oh,
+I could have touched him! And then it ran and I didn't see him any more
+and I slammed the door and began screaming."
+
+"You seen what?"
+
+The strident question seemed to come from far below, down in the depths
+of the house, where the caretaker abided.
+
+"Whatever it was. I opened the door and he was right in the hall there
+glaring at me. I could have touched it. And then he ran and I----"
+
+"What was he like? I ast what was he like--it's that I'm astin' you!"
+The janitress was the one who pressed for an answer.
+
+For the moment the question, pointed though it was, went unanswered. The
+main speaker--shrieker, rather--was plainly a person with a mania for
+details, and even in this emergency she intended, as now developed, to
+present all the principal facts in the case, and likewise all the
+incidental facts so far as these fell within her scope of knowledge.
+
+"I was awake," she clarioned through the keyhole, speaking much faster
+than any one following this narrative can possibly hope to read the
+words. "I couldn't sleep. I never do sleep well when I'm in a strange
+house. And anyhow, I was all alone. My nephew by marriage--Mr. Edward
+Braydon, you know--had gone out with the gentleman who lives on the
+floor above to play cards, and he said he was going to be gone nearly
+all night, and my niece--I'm Mrs. Braydon's unmarried aunt from
+Poughkeepsie and I'm down here visiting them--my niece was called to
+Long Island yesterday by illness--it's her sister who's ill with
+something like the bronchitis. And he was gone and so she was gone, and
+so here I was all alone and he told me not to stay up for him, but I
+couldn't sleep well--I never can sleep in a strange house--and just a
+few minutes ago I heard the bell ring and I supposed he had forgotten
+to take his latchkey with him, and so I got up to let him in. And I
+called down the stairs and asked him if it was him and he answered back.
+But it didn't sound like his voice. But I didn't think anything of that.
+But, of course, it was out of the ordinary for him to have a voice like
+that. But all the same I went back to bed. But he didn't come in and I
+was just getting up again to see what detained him--his voice really
+sounded so strange I thought then he might have been taken sick or
+something. But just as I got to the door a plank creaked and I opened
+the door and there it was right where I could have touched him. And then
+it ran--and oh, what if----"
+
+"I'm astin' you once more what it was like?"
+
+"How should I know except that----"
+
+"Was it a big, fat, wild, bare-headed, scary, awful-lookin' scoundrel
+dressed in some kind of funny pink clothes?"
+
+"Yes, that's it! That's him--he was all sort of pink. Oh, did you see
+him too? Oh, is it a burglar?"
+
+"Burglar nothin'! It's a ravin', rampagin' lunatic--that's what it is!"
+
+"Oh, my heavens, a lunatic!"
+
+"Sure it is. He tried to git me to let him in and----"
+
+"Oh, whatever shall we do!"
+
+
+XIII
+
+"Hey, what's all the excitement about?"
+
+A new and deeper voice here broke into the babel, and Mr. Leary
+recognising it at a distance, where he stood listening--but not failing,
+even while he listened, to strive unavailingly with his problem of
+buttons--knew he was saved. Knowing this he nevertheless retreated still
+deeper into the inner room. The thought of spectators in numbers
+remained very abhorrent to him. So he did not hear all that happened
+next, except in broken snatches.
+
+He gathered though, from what he did hear, that Bob Slack and Mr. Edward
+Braydon were coming up the stairs, and that a third male whom they
+called Officer was coming with them, and that the janitress was coming
+likewise, and that divers lower-floor tenants were joining in the march,
+and that as they came the janitress was explaining to all and sundry how
+the weird miscreant had sought to inveigle her into admitting him to Mr.
+Slack's rooms, and how she had refused, and how with maniacal craft--or
+words to that effect--he had, nevertheless, managed to secure admittance
+to the house, and how he must still be in the house. And through all her
+discourse there were questions from this one or that, crossing its flow
+but in no-wise interrupting it; and through it all percolated hootingly
+the terrorised outcries of Mr. Braydon's maiden aunt-in-law, issuing
+through the keyhole of the door behind which she cowered. Only now she
+was interjecting a new harassment into the already complicated mystery
+by pleading that someone repair straightway to her and render
+assistance, as she felt herself to be on the verge of fainting dead
+away.
+
+With searches into closets and close scrutiny of all dark corners passed
+en route, the procession advanced to the top floor, mainly guided in its
+oncoming by the clew deduced from the circumstances of the mad intruder
+having betrayed a desire to secure access to Mr. Slack's apartment,
+with the intention, as the caretaker more than once suggested on her way
+up, of murdering Mr. Slack in his bed. Before the ascent had been
+completed she was quite certain this was the correct deduction, and so
+continued to state with all the emphasis of which she was capable.
+
+"He couldn't possibly have got downstairs again," somebody hazarded; "so
+he must be upstairs here still--must be right round here somewhere."
+
+"Didn't I tell you he was lookin' for Mr. Slack to lay in wait for him
+and destroy the poor man in his bed?" shrilled the caretaker.
+
+"Watch carefully now, everybody. He might rush out of some corner at
+us."
+
+"Say, my transom's halfway open!" Mr. Bob Slack exclaimed. "And, by
+Jove, there's a light shining through it yonder from the bedroom. He's
+inside--we've got him cornered, whoever he is."
+
+Boldly Mr. Slack stepped forward and rapped hard on the door.
+
+"Better step on out peaceably," he called, "because there's an officer
+here with us and we've got you trapped."
+
+"It's me, Bob, it's me," came in a wheezy, plaintive wail from somewhere
+well back in the apartment.
+
+"Who's me?" demanded Mr. Slack, likewise forgetting his grammar in the
+thrill of this culminating moment.
+
+"Algy--Algernon Leary."
+
+"Not with that voice, it isn't. But I'll know in a minute who it is!"
+Mr. Slack reached pocketward for his keys.
+
+"Better be careful. He might have a gun or something on him."
+
+"Nonsense!" retorted Mr. Slack, feeling very valiant. "I'm not afraid of
+any gun. But you ladies might stand aside if you're frightened. All
+ready, officer? Now then!"
+
+"Please come in by yourself, Bob. Don't--don't let anybody else come
+with you!"
+
+
+XIV
+
+If he heard the faint and agonised appeal from within Mr. Slack chose
+not to heed it. He found the right key on his key ring, applied it to
+the lock, turned the bolt and shoved the door wide open, giving back
+then in case of an attack. The front room was empty. Mr. Slack crossed
+cautiously to the inner room and peered across the threshold into it,
+Mr. Braydon and a grey-coated private watchman and a procession of
+half-clad figures following along after him.
+
+Where was the mysterious intruder? Ah, there he was, huddled up in a far
+corner alongside the bed as though he sought to hide himself away from
+their glaring eyes. And at the sight of what he beheld Mr. Bob Slack
+gave one great shocked snort of surprise, and then one of recognition.
+
+For all that the cowering wretch wore a quaint garment of a bright and
+watermelonish hue, except where it was streaked with transom dust and
+marked with ash-can grit; for all that his head was bare, and his knees,
+and a considerable section of his legs as well; for all that he had
+white socks and low slippers, now soaking wet, upon his feet; for all
+his elbow sleeves and his pink garters and his low neck; and finally for
+all that his face was now beginning, as they stared upon it, to wear
+the blank wan look of one who is about to succumb to a swoon of
+exhaustion induced by intense physical exertion or by acutely prolonged
+mental strain or by both together--Mr. Bob Slack detected in this
+fabulous oddity a resemblance to his associate in the practice of law at
+Number Thirty-two Broad Street.
+
+"In the name of heaven, Leary----" he began.
+
+But a human being can stand just so many shocks in a given number of
+minutes--just so many and no more. Gently, slowly, the gartered legs
+gave way, bending outward, and as their owner collapsed down upon his
+side with the light of consciousness flickering in his eyes, his figure
+was half-turned to them, and they saw how that he was ornamentally but
+securely buttoned down the back with many large buttons and how that
+with a last futile fluttering effort of his relaxing hands he fumbled
+first at one and then at another of these buttons.
+
+"Leary, what in thunder have you been doing? And where on earth have you
+been?" Mr. Slack shot the questions forth as he sprang to his partner's
+side and knelt alongside the slumped pink shape.
+
+Languidly Mr. Leary opened one comatose eye. Then he closed it again and
+the wraith of a smile formed about his lips, and just as he went sound
+asleep upon the floor Mr. Slack caught from Mr. Leary the softly
+whispered words, "I've been the life of the party!"
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Life of the Party, by Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
+
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