But Del Delano was the West Side’s favorite; and nowhere is there a more loyal Side.  Five years before our story was submitted to the editors, Del had crawled from some Tenth Avenue basement like a lean rat and had bitten his way into the Big Cheese.  Patched, half-starved, cuffless, and as scornful of the Hook as an interpreter of Ibsen, he had danced his way into health (as you and I view it) and fame in sixteen minutes on Amateur Night at Creary’s (Variety) Theatre in Eighth Avenue.  A bookmaker (one of the kind that talent wins with instead of losing) sat in the audience, asleep, dreaming of an impossible pick-up among the amateurs.  After a snore, a glass of beer from the handsome waiter, and a temporary blindness caused by the diamonds of a transmontane blonde in Box E, the bookmaker woke up long enough to engage Del Delano for a three-weeks’ trial engagement fused with a trained-dog short-circuit covering the three Washingtons—­Heights, Statue, and Square.

By the time this story was read and accepted, Del Delano was drawing his three-hundred dollars a week, which, divided by seven (Sunday acts not in costume being permissible), dispels the delusion entertained by most of us that we have seen better days.  You can easily imagine the worshipful agitation of Eighth Avenue whenever Del Delano honored it with a visit after his terpsichorean act in a historically great and vilely ventilated Broadway theatre.  If the West Side could claim forty-two minutes out of his forty-two weeks’ bookings every year, it was an occasion for bonfires and repainting of the Pump.  And now you know why Mike’s saloon is a Resort, and no longer a simple Place.

Del Delano entered Mike’s alone.  So nearly concealed in a fur-lined overcoat and a derby two sizes too large for him was Prince Lightfoot that you saw of his face only his pale, hatchet-edged features and a pair of unwinking, cold, light blue eyes.  Nearly every man lounging at Mike’s bar recognized the renowned product of the West Side.  To those who did not, wisdom was conveyed by prodding elbows and growls of one-sided introduction.

Upon Charley, one of the bartenders, both fame and fortune descended simultaneously.  He had once been honored by shaking hands with the great Delano at a Seventh Avenue boxing bout.  So with lungs of brass he now cried:  “Hallo, Del, old man; what’ll it be?”

Mike, the proprietor, who was cranking the cash register, heard.  On the next day he raised Charley’s wages five a week.

Del Delano drank a pony beer, paying for it carelessly out of his nightly earnings of $42.85-5/7.  He nodded amiably but coldly at the long line of Mike’s patrons and strolled past them into the rear room of the cafe.  For he heard in there sounds pertaining to his own art—­the light, stirring staccato of a buck-and-wing dance.

In the back room Mac McGowan was giving a private exhibition of the genius of his feet.  A few young men sat at tables looking on critically while they amused themselves seriously with beer.  They nodded approval at some new fancy steps of Mac’s own invention.