Jake Berger ordered, though finding you couldn’t get stingers here and having to take two miner’s inches of red whiskey, and the New Yorker begun to warn us in low tones that we was surrounded by danger on every hand—­that we’d better pour our drink on the floor because it would be drugged, after which we would be robbed if not murdered and thrown out into the alley where we would then be arrested by grafting policemen.  Even Ben was shocked by this warning.  He asks the New Yorker again if he is sure he was born in the old town, and the lad says honest he was and has been living right here all these years in the same house he was born in.  Ben is persuaded by these words and gives the singing waiter a five and tells him to try and lighten the gloom with a few crimes of violence or something.  The New Yorker continued to set stiff in his chair, one hand on his watch and one on the pocket where his change purse was that he’d tried to pay his share of the taxicabs out of.

The gloom-stricken piano player now rattled off some ragtime and the depraved denizens about us got sadly up and danced to it.  Say, it was the most formal and sedate dancing you ever see, with these gun men holding their guilty partners off at arm’s length and their faces all drawn down in lines of misery.  They looked like they might be a bunch of strict Presbyterians that had resolved to throw all moral teaching to the winds for one purple moment let come what might.  I want to tell you these depraved creatures of the underworld was darned near as depressing as that play had been.  Even the second round of drinks didn’t liven us up none because the waiter threw down his cigarette and sung another tearful song.  This one was about a travelling man going into a gilded cabaret and ordering a port wine and a fair young girl come out to sing in short skirts that he recognized to be his boyhood’s sweetheart Nell; so he sent a waiter to ask her if she had forgot the song she once did sing at her dear old mother’s knee, or knees, and she hadn’t forgot it and proved she hadn’t, because the chorus was “Nearer My God to Thee” sung to ragtime; then the travelling man said she must be good and pure, so come on let’s leave this place and they’d be wed.

Yes, sir; that’s what Ben had got for his five, so this time he give the waiter a twenty not to sing any more at all.  The New Yorker was horrified at the sight of a man giving away money, but it was well spent and we begun to cheer up a little.  Ben told the New Yorker about the time his dog team won the All Alaska Sweepstake Race, two hundred and six miles from Nome to Candle and back, the time being 76 hours, 16 minutes, and 28 seconds, and showed him the picture of his lead dog pasted in the back of his watch.  And Jake Berger got real gabby at last and told the story about the old musher going up the White Horse Trail in a blizzard and meeting the Bishop, only he didn’t know it was the Bishop.  And the Bishop says, “How’s the trail back