“’S my elbow, sir,” he said, haughtily, stopping and staring down.

“Well, why in thunder don’t you keep it where it belongs?” snapped the man, and Billy caught him by the sleeve.

“Lil’ sir,” he said impressively, “if you should bite off my elbow, you saucy baggage”—­and the thought was too much for him.  Tears filling his eyes he turned to Rex.  “Recky, you spank that lil’ sir,” he pleaded brokenly.  “He’s too lil’ for me—­I’d hurt him”—­and Rex meditated again.  A shock came when they reached the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street.  “Up’s’ daisy,” crowed Billy Strong, and swung Fairfax facing uptown with a mighty heave.

“The Elevated station’s down a block, old chap,” explained the sober contingent.  “We have to take the Elevated to Seventy-second you know, and walk across to your place.”

Billy looked at him pityingly.  “You poor lil’ pup,” he crooned.  “Didn’ I keep tellin’ you had to go Chris’pher Street ferry meet a girl?  Goin’ theater with girl.”  He tipped his derby one-sided and started off on a cakewalk.

Rex had to march beside him willy-nilly.  “Look here, Billy,” he reasoned, exasperated at this entirely fresh twist in the corkscrew business of getting Strong home.  “Look here, Billy, this is tommy-rot.  You haven’t any date with a girl, and if you had you couldn’t keep it.  Come along home, man; that’s the place for you.”

But Billy was suddenly a Gibraltar of firmness.  “Got date with lovely blue-eyed girlie—­couldn’t dish’point her.  Unmanly deed—­Recky, d’ you want bes’ fren’ ev’ had to do unmanly deed, and dish’point trustin’ female?  Nev’, Recky—­nev’, ol’ man.  Lesh be true to th’ ladies till hell runs dry—­Oh, ’scuse me Recky—­f’got you was parson—­till well runs dry, meant say.  That all right?  Come on t’ Chris’pher Street.”  And in spite of desperate attempts, of long argument and appeal on Rex’s part, to Christopher Street they went.

The ministering angel had no hankering to risk his charge in a street-car, so, as the distance was not great, they walked.

Fairfax’s dread was that, having saved his friend so far, he should attract the attention of a policeman and be arrested.  So he kept a sharp lookout for bluecoats and passed them studiously on the other side.  What was his horror therefore, turning a corner, to turn squarely into the majestic arm of the law, and what was his greater horror, to hear Billy Strong suavely address him.  Billy lifted his hat to the large, fat officer as he might have lifted it to his sweetheart in her box at the Horse Show.

“Would you have the g—­goodness to tell me,” he inquired, with distinguished courtesy, “if this is”—­Billy’s articulation was improving, but otherwise he was just as tipsy as ever—­“if this is—­Chris-to-pher Street—­or—­or Wednesday?”

“Hey?” inquired the policeman, and stared.  Repartee seemed not to be his forte.

“Thank you—­thank you very much”—­Billy’s gratitude spilled over conventional limits—­“very, very much—­old rhinoceros,” he finished, and shot suddenly ahead, dragging Rex with him into the whirlpool of a moving crowd, and it dawned on the policeman five minutes later that the courtly gentleman was drunk.