“You’ll notice they do that,” says Jake, “whenever a lot of these people are ready to pay their checks.  It saves fights, because no one can see if they’re added right or not.”  That was pretty gabby for Jake.  Then I listened again to Ben and his little pet.  They was talking their way up the Bowery from Atlantic Garden and over to Harry Hill’s Place which, it seemed the New Yorker didn’t remember, and Ben then recalled an old leper with gray whiskers and a skull cap that kept a drug store in Bleecker Street when Ben was a kid and spent most of his time watering down the sidewalk in front of his place with a hose so that ladies going by would have to raise their skirts out of the wet.  His eyes was quite dim as he recalled these sacred boyhood memories.

The New Yorker had unbent a mite like he was going to see the mad adventure through at all costs, though still plainly worried about the dinner check.  Ben now said that they two ought to found a New York club.  He said there was all other kinds of clubs here—­Ohio clubs and Southern clubs and Nebraska societies and Michigan circles and so on, that give large dinners every year, so why shouldn’t there be a New York club; maybe they could scare up three or four others that was born here if they advertised.  It would of course be the smallest club in the city or in the whole world for that matter.  The New Yorker was kind of cold toward this.  It must of sounded like the scheme to get money out of him that he’d been expecting all along.  Then the waiter brought the check, during another shadow number with red and purple lights, and this lad pulled out a change purse and said in a feeble voice that he supposed we was all paying share and share alike and would the waiter kindly figure out what his share was.  Ben didn’t even hear him.  He peeled a large bill off a roll that made his new suit a bad fit in one place and he left a five on the plate when the change come.  The watchful New Yorker now made his first full-hearted speech of the evening.  He said that Ben was foolish not to of added up the check to see if it was right, and that half a dollar tip would of been ample for the waiter.  Ben pretended not to hear this either, and started again on the dear old times.  I says to myself I guess this one is a real New Yorker all right.

Lon Prince now says what’s the matter with going to some corking good show because nothing good has come to Red Gap since the Parisian Blond Widows over a year ago and he’s eager for entertainment.  Ben says “Fine!  And here’s the wise boy that will steer us right.  I bet he knows every show in town.”

The New Yorker says he does and has just the play in mind for us, one that he had meant to see himself this very night because it has been endorsed by the drama league of which he is a regular member.  Well, that sounded important, so Ben says “What did I tell you?  Ain’t we lucky to have a good old New Yorker to put us right on shows our first night out.  We might have wasted our evening on a dead one.”