A waiter came over to us grinning, for we had assumed the role of sightseers.

“Who is that, ’way back there, with his chair tipped to the wall, talking to the man with his back to us?” asked Kennedy.

“Ike the Dropper, sah,” informed the waiter with obvious pride that such a celebrity should be harboured here.

I looked with a feeling akin to awe at the famous character who, in common with many others of his type, had migrated uptown from the proverbial haunts of the gunmen on the East Side in search of pastures new and untroubled.

Ike the Dropper may have once been a strong-arm man, but at present I knew that he was chiefly noted for the fact, and he and his kind were reputed to be living on the earnings of women to whom they were supposed to afford “protection.”  I reflected on the passing glories of brutality which had sunk so low.

There were noise and life a plenty here.  At a discordant box of a piano a negro performer was playing with a keen appreciation of time if of nothing else, and two others with voices that might not have been unpopular in a decent minstrel show were rendering a popular air.  They wore battered straw hats and a make-up which was intended to be grotesque.

From time to time, as the pianist was moved, he played snatches of the same music as that which we had heard at the Futurist, and between us and Harris and Ike the Dropper several couples were one-stepping, each in their own sweet way.  As the music became more lively their dancing came more and more to resemble some of the almost brutal Apache dances of Paris, in that the man seemed to exert sheer force and the woman agility in avoiding him.  It was an entirely new phase of afternoon dancing, an entirely new “leisure class,” this strange combination of Bohemia and Senegambia.

At a table next to us, so near that we could almost rub elbows with them, sat a white man and a white woman.  They had been talking in low tones, but I could catch whole sentences now and then, for they seemed to be making no extraordinary effort at concealment.

“He was framing a sucker to get away with a whole front,” I heard the man say, “or with a poke or a souper, but instead he got dropped by a flatty and was canned for a sleep.”

“Two dips—­pickpockets,” whispered Craig.  “Someone was trying to take everything a victim had, or at least his pocketbook or watch, but instead he was arrested by a detective and locked up over night.”

“Good work,” I laughed.  “You are ‘some’ translator.”

I looked at our neighbours with a certain amount of respect.  Were they framing up something themselves?  At any rate I felt that I would rather see them here and know what they were than to be jostled by them in a street car.  The sleek proprietor kept a careful eye on them and I knew that a sort of unwritten law would prevent them from trying on anything that would endanger their welcome in a joint none too savoury already.