“Denver was a New Yorker all over.  I think he was out of the city just twice before the time I’m going to tell you about.  Once he went rabbit-shooting in Yonkers.  The other time I met him just landing from a North River ferry.  ’Been out West on a big trip, Sully, old boy,’ says he.  ’Gad!  Sully, I had no idea we had such a big country.  It’s immense.  Never conceived of the magnificence of the West before.  It’s gorgeous and glorious and infinite.  Makes the East seemed cramped and little.  It’s a grand thing to travel and get an idea of the extent and resources of our country.’

“I’d made several little runs out to California and down to Mexico and up through Alaska, so I sits down with Denver for a chat about the things he saw.

“‘Took in the Yosemite, out there, of course?’ I asks.

“‘Well—­no,’ says Denver, ’I don’t think so.  At least, I don’t recollect it.  You see, I only had three days, and I didn’t get any farther west than Youngstown, Ohio.’

“About two years ago I dropped into New York with a little fly-paper proposition about a Tennessee mica mine that I wanted to spread out in a nice, sunny window, in the hopes of catching a few.  I was coming out of a printing-shop one afternoon with a batch of fine, sticky prospectuses when I ran against Denver coming round a corner.  I never saw him looking so much like a tiger-lily.  He was as beautiful and new as a trellis of sweet peas, and as rollicking as a clarinet solo.  We shook hands, and he asked me what I was doing, and I gave him the outlines of the scandal I was trying to create in mica.

“‘Pooh, pooh! for your mica,’ says Denver.  ’Don’t you know better, Sully, than to bump up against the coffers of little old New York with anything as transparent as mica?  Now, you come with me over to the Hotel Brunswick.  You’re just the man I was hoping for.  I’ve got something there in sepia and curled hair that I want you to look at.’

“‘You putting up at the Brunswick?’ I asks.

“‘Not a cent,’ says Denver, cheerful.  ’The syndicate that owns the hotel puts up.  I’m manager.’

“The Brunswick wasn’t one of them Broadway pot-houses all full of palms and hyphens and flowers and costumes—­kind of a mixture of lawns and laundries.  It was on one of the East Side avenues; but it was a solid, old-time caravansary such as the Mayor of Skaneateles or the Governor of Missouri might stop at.  Eight stories high it stalked up, with new striped awnings, and the electrics had it as light as day.

“‘I’ve been manager here for a year,’ says Denver, as we drew nigh.  ‘When I took charge,’ says he, ’nobody nor nothing ever stopped at the Brunswick.  The clock over the clerks’ desk used to run for weeks without winding.  A man fell dead with heart-disease on the sidewalk in front of it one day, and when they went to pick him up he was two blocks away.  I figured out a scheme to catch the West Indies and South American