Lon says “Easy come, easy go!” and moves over to the next table again to help out with the silver bucket of champagne he’s ordered, taking Jeff Tuttle with him to present to his old friends that he’s known for all of twenty minutes.  The New Yorker is now more suspicious then ever of Ben; his wan beauty is marred by a cynical smile and his hair has come unglued in a couple of places.  Ben is more sensitive than ever to these suspicions of his new pal so he calls on Jake Berger to match his watch against the four.  Jake takes out his split-second repeater and him and Ben match coins and this time Ben is lucky enough to lose, thereby showing his dear old New Yorker that he ain’t a crook after all.  But the New Yorker still looks very shrewd and robbed and begins to gulp the champagne in a greedy manner.  You can hear him calling Jake a confederate.  Jake sees it plain enough, that the lad thinks he’s been high-graded, so he calls over our waiter and crowds all five watches onto him.  “Take these home to the little ones,” says Jake, and dismisses the matter from his mind by putting a wine glass up to his ear and listening into it with a rapt expression that shows he’s hearing the roar of the ocean up on Alaska’s rockbound coast.

The New Yorker is a mite puzzled by this, but I can see it don’t take him long to figure out that the waiter is also a confederate.  Anyway, he’s been robbed of his watch forever and falls to the champagne again very eager and moody.  It was plain he didn’t know what a high-powered drink he was trifling with.  And Ben was moody, too, by now.  He quit recalling old times and sacred memories to the New Yorker.  If the latter had tried to break up the party by leaving at this point I guess Ben would of let him go.  But he didn’t try; he just set there soggily drinking champagne to drown the memory of his lost watch.  And pretty soon Ben has to order another quart of this twelve-dollar beverage.  The New Yorker keeps right on with the new bottle, daring it to do its worst and it does; he was soon speaking out of a dense fog when he spoke at all.

With his old pal falling into this absent mood Ben throws off his own depression and mingles a bit with the table of old New York families where Lon Price is now paying the checks.  They was the real New Yorkers; they’d never had a moment’s distrust of Lon after he ordered the first time and told the waiter to keep the glasses brimming.  Jeff Tuttle was now dancing in an extreme manner with a haggard society bud aged thirty-five, and only Jake and me was left at our table.  We didn’t count the New Yorker any longer; he was merely raising his glass to his lips at regular intervals.  He moved something like an automatic chess player I once saw.  The time passed rapidly for a couple hours more, with Jake Berger keeping up his ceaseless chatter as usual.  He did speak once, though, after an hour’s silence.  He said in an audible tone that the New Yorker was a human hangnail, no matter where he was born.