of you, my friend?” and the old musher just swore with the utmost profanity for three straight minutes.  Then he says to the Bishop, “And what’s it like back of you?” and the Bishop says, “Just like that!” Jake here got embarrassed from talking so much and ordered another round of this squirrel poison we was getting, and Jeff Tuttle begun his imitation of the Sioux squaw with a hare lip reciting “Curfew Shall Not Ring To-night.”  It was a pretty severe ordeal for the rest of us, but we was ready to endure much if it would make this low den seem more homelike.  Only when Jeff got about halfway through the singing waiter comes up, greatly shocked, and says none of that in here because they run an orderly place, and we been talking too loud anyway.  This waiter had a skull exactly like a picture of one in a book I got that was dug up after three hundred thousand years and the scientific world couldn’t ever agree whether it was an early man or a late ape.  I decided I didn’t care to linger in a place where a being with a head like this could pass on my diversions and offenses so I made a move to go.  Jeff Tuttle says to this waiter, “Fie, fie upon you, Roscoe!  We shall go to some respectable place where we can loosen up without being called for it.”  The waiter said he was sorry, but the Bowery wasn’t Broadway.  And the New Yorker whispered that it was just as well because we was lucky to get out of this dive with our lives and property—­and even after that this anthropoid waiter come hurrying out to the taxis after us with my fur piece and my solid gold vanity-box that I’d left behind on a chair.  This was a bitter blow to all of us after we’d been led to hope for outrages of an illegal character.  The New Yorker was certainly making a misdeal every time he got the cards.  None of us trusted him any more, though Ben was still loyal and sensitive about him, like he was an only child and from birth had not been like other children.

The lad now wanted to steer us into an Allied Bazaar that would still be open, because he’d promised to sell twenty tickets to it and had ’em on him untouched.  But we shut down firmly on this.  Even Ben was firm.  He said the last bazaar he’d survived was their big church fair in Nome that lasted two nights and one day and the champagne booth alone took in six thousand dollars, and even the beer booth took in something like twelve hundred, and he didn’t feel equal to another affair like that just yet.

So we landed uptown at a very swell joint full of tables and orchestras around a dancing floor and more palms—­which is the national flower of New York—­and about eighty or a hundred slightly inebriated debutantes and well-known Broadway social favourites and their gentlemen friends.  And here everything seemed satisfactory at last, except to the New Yorker who said that the prices would be something shameful.  However, no one was paying any attention to him by now.  None of us but Ben cared a hoot where he had been born and most of us was sorry he had been at all.