Well, I got the long night’s rest that was coming to me and started out early in the A.M. to pit my cunning against the wiles of the New York department stores, having had my evil desires inflamed the day before by an afternoon gown in chiffon velvet and Georgette crepe with silver embroidery and fur trimming that I’d seen in a window marked down to $198.98.  I fell for that all right, and for an all-silk jersey sport suit at $29.98 and a demi-tailored walking suit for a mere bagatelle, and a white corduroy sport blouse and a couple of imported evening gowns they robbed me on—­but I didn’t mind.  You expect to be robbed for anything really good in New York, only the imitation stuff that’s worn by the idle poor being cheaper than elsewhere.  And I was so busy in this whirl of extortion that I forgot all about the boys and their troubles till I got back to the hotel at five o’clock.

I find ’em in the palm grill, or whatever it’s called, drinking stingers.  But now they was not only more cheerful than they had been the night before but they was getting a little bit contemptuous and Western about the great city.  Lon had met a brother real estate shark from Salt Lake and Jeff had fell in with a sheep man from Laramie—­and treated him like an equal because of meeting him so far from home in a strange town where no one would find it out on him—­and Ben Sutton had met up with his old friend Jake Berger, also from Nome.  That’s one nice thing about New York; you keep meeting people from out your way that are lonesome, too.  Lon’s friend and Jeff’s sheep man had had to leave, being encumbered by watchful-waiting wives that were having ’em paged every three minutes and wouldn’t believe the boy when he said they was out.  But Ben’s friend, Jake Berger, was still at the table.  Jake is a good soul, kind of a short, round, silent man, never opening his head for any length of time.  He seems to bring the silence of the frozen North down with him except for brief words to the waiter ever and anon.

As I say, the boys was all more cheerful and contemptuous about New York by this time.  Ben had spent another day asking casual parties if they was born in New York and having no more luck than a rabbit, but it seemed like he’d got hardened to these disappointments.  He said he might leave his own self to a museum in due time, so future generations would know at least what the male New Yorker looked like.  As for the female, he said any of these blondes along Broadway could be made to look near enough like his mate by a skilled taxidermist.  Jeff Tuttle here says that they wasn’t all blondes because he’d seen a certain brunette that afternoon right in this palm grill that was certainly worth preserving for all eternity in the grandest museum on earth—­which showed that Jeff had chirked up a lot since landing in town.  Ben said he had used the term “blonde” merely to designate a species and they let it go at that.