The Christmas mummer, flushed with success, had tucked Betsy under his arm, and was about to depart to the filling of impromptu dates elsewhere.

“Say, ’Bo,” said Black Riley to him, “where did you cop out dat doll?”

“This doll?” asked Fuzzy, touching Betsy with his forefinger to be sure that she was the one referred to.  Why, this doll was presented to me by the Emperor of Beloochistan.  I have seven hundred others in my country home in Newport.  This doll—­”

“Cheese the funny business,” said Riley.  “You swiped it or picked it up at de house on de hill where—­but never mind dat.  You want to take fifty cents for de rags, and take it quick.  Me brother’s kid at home might be wantin’ to play wid it.  Hey—­what?”

He produced the coin.

Fuzzy laughed a gurgling, insolent, alcoholic laugh in his face.  Go to the office of Sarah Bernhardt’s manager and propose to him that she be released from a night’s performance to entertain the Tackytown Lyceum and Literary Coterie.  You will hear the duplicate of Fuzzy’s laugh.

Black Riley gauged Fuzzy quickly with his blueberry eye as a wrestler does.  His hand was itching to play the Roman and wrest the rag Sabine from the extemporaneous merry-andrew who was entertaining an angel unaware.  But he refrained.  Fuzzy was fat and solid and big.  Three inches of well-nourished corporeity, defended from the winter winds by dingy linen, intervened between his vest and trousers.  Countless small, circular wrinkles running around his coat-sleeves and knees guaranteed the quality of his bone and muscle.  His small, blue eyes, bathed in the moisture of altruism and wooziness, looked upon you kindly, yet without abashment.  He was whiskerly, whiskyly, fleshily formidable.  So, Black Riley temporized.

“Wot’ll you take for it, den?” he asked.

“Money,” said Fuzzy, with husky firmness, “cannot buy her.”

He was intoxicated with the artist’s first sweet cup of attainment.  To set a faded-blue, earth-stained rag-doll on a bar, to hold mimic converse with it, and to find his heart leaping with the sense of plaudits earned and his throat scorching with free libations poured in his honor—­could base coin buy him from such achievements?  You will perceive that Fuzzy had the temperament.

Fuzzy walked out with the gait of a trained sea-lion in search of other cafes to conquer.

Though the dusk of twilight was hardly yet apparent, lights were beginning to spangle the city like pop-corn bursting in a deep skillet.  Christmas Eve, impatiently expected, was peeping over the brink of the hour.  Millions had prepared for its celebration.  Towns would be painted red.  You, yourself, have heard the horns and dodged the capers of the Saturnalians.

“Pigeon” McCarthy, Black Riley, and “One-ear” Mike held a hasty converse outside Grogan’s.  They were narrow-chested, pallid striplings, not fighters in the open, but more dangerous in their ways of warfare than the most terrible of Turks.  Fuzzy, in a pitched battle, could have eaten the three of them.  In a go-as-you-please encounter he was already doomed.