The lad doesn’t say a word but begins to walk in a brittle manner toward the labourers.  We saw him stop and point a threatening finger at them, then instantly freeze once more.  It was our last look at him.  We got everybody on a north-bound car with some trouble.  Lon Price had gone to sleep standing up and Jeff Tuttle, who was now looking like the society burglar after a tough night’s work at his trade, was getting turbulent and thirsty.  He didn’t want to ride on a common street car.  “I want a tashicrab,” he says, “and I want to go back to that Louis Chateau room and dance the tangle.”  But we persuaded him and got safe up to a restaurant on Sixth Avenue where breakfast was had by all without further adventure.  Jeff strongly objected to this restaurant at first, though, because he couldn’t hear an orchestra in it.  He said he couldn’t eat his breakfast without an orchestra.  He did, however, ordering apple pie and ice cream and a gin fizz to come.  Lon Price was soon sleeping like a tired child over his ham and eggs, and Jeff went night-night, too, before his second gin fizz arrived.

Ben ordered a porterhouse steak, family style, consuming it in a moody rage like a man that has been ground-sluiced at every turn.  He said he felt like ending it all and sometimes wished he’d been in the cab that plunged into one of the forty-foot holes in Broadway a couple of nights before.  Jake Berger had ordered catfish and waffles, with a glass of Invalid port.  He burst into speech once more, too.  He said the nights in New York were too short to get much done.  That if they only had nights as long as Alaska the town might become famous.  “As it is,” he says, “I don’t mind flirting with this city now and then, but I wouldn’t want to marry it.”

Well, that about finished the evening, with Lon and Jeff making the room sound like a Pullman palace car at midnight.  Oh, yes; there was one thing more.  On the day after the events recorded in the last chapter, as it says in novels, there was a piece in one of the live newspapers telling that a well-dressed man of thirty-five, calling himself Clifford J. Hotchkiss and giving a Brooklyn address, was picked up in a dazed condition by patrolman Cohen who had found him attempting to direct the operations of a gang of workmen engaged in repairing a crosstown-car track.  He had been sent to the detention ward of Bellevue to await examination as to his sanity, though insisting that he was the victim of a gang of footpads who had plied him with liquor and robbed him of his watch.  I showed the piece to Ben Sutton and Ben sent him up a pillow of forget-me-nots with “Rest” spelled on it—­without the sender’s card.

No; not a word in it about the street-car track being wrongfully tore up.  I guess it was like Ben said; no one ever would find out about that in New York.  My lands! here it is ten-thirty and I got to be on the job when them hayers start to-morrow A.M.  A body would think I hadn’t a care on earth when I get started on anecdotes of my past.