Billy Baxters Letters | Page 6

get wealthy. I switched over and took a couple of gin fizzes, and then it hit me I was richer than Jay Gould ever was; I had the Rothschilds backed clear off the board; and I made William H. Vanderbilt look like a hundred-to-one shot. You understand, Jim, this was yesterday. I got a little red spot in each cheek, and then I leaned over the bar and whispered, "Mr. Bartender, break a bottle of that Pommery." Ordinarily I call the booze clerk by his first name, but when you are cutting into the grape at four dollars per, you always want to say Mr. Bartender, and you should always whisper, or just nod your head each time you open a new bottle, as it makes it appear as though you were accustomed to ordering wine. You see, Jim, that's where I go off my dip. That wine affair is an awful stunt for a fellow who makes not over two thousand a year, carries ten thousand life, and rooms in a flat that's fifteen a month stronger than he can stand. But to continue, I lost the push I started out with, and got mixed up with a fellow named Thorne, or Thorpe, or something like that, and we got along great for a while. He knew a lot of fellows in Boston that I did, and every time we struck a new mutual friend we opened another bottle. I don't know just what the total population of Boston is, but we must have known everybody there. Finally Thorne got to crying because his mother had died. You know I am a good fellow, so I cried, too. I always cry some time during a bat, and there was an opening for your life. I cried so hard that the bartender had to ask me to stop three different times. I made Niobe look like a two spot. Between sobs I asked him about the sad affair, and found that his mother had died when he was born. I guess it had just struck him. Then there were doings.
I had wasted a wad of cries that would float the Maine, and I was sore for fair. A fat fellow cut into the argument, and some one soaked him in the eye, and then, as they say in Texas, "there was three minutes rough house." In the general bustle a seedy looking man pinched the Fresh Air Fund, box and all. You know I'm not much for the bat cave, and to avoid such after-complications as patrol wagons and things, I blew the bunch and started up street. I guess the wind must have been against me, as I was tacking.
I met Johnny Black, and he was going to keep a date with a couple of swell heiresses at one of the hotel dining-rooms. I saw them on the street to-day, and they won't do. One of them wore an amethyst ring that weighed about sixty carats, and the other had on white slippers covered with little beads.
I don't know anything about them, but I'll gamble that they are the kind of people that have pictures of the family and wreaths in the parlor. They looked fine and daisy last night, though. Probably the grape. My girl's name was Estelle. Wouldn't that scald you? Estelle handed me a lot of talk about having seen me on the street for the last two years, and how she had always been dying to meet me, and I got swelled up and bought wine like a horse owner. Johnny was shaking his head and motioning for me to chop, but what cared I? Estelle was saying, "He done it," "I seen it," and "Usen't you?" right along, but the grape stood for everything.
Estelle's friend was talking about her piano, and how hard it was to get good servants nowadays, and say, Jim, I've heard knockers in my time, but Estelle is the original leader of the anvil chorus. She just put everybody in town on the pan and roasted them to a whisper. She could build the best battleship Dewey ever saw with her little hammer. Estelle's friend, after much urging, then sang a pathetic ballad entitled, "She Should Be Scolded, but Not Turned Adrift," and I sat there with one eye shut, so that I could see single, and kept saying, "Per'fly beauf'ful."
About this time I commenced to forget. I remember getting an awful rise out of Estelle by remarking that her switch didn't match her hair. She came up like a human yeast cake. Johnny sided with the dame, and said I might at least try to act like a gentleman, even if I weren't one. Perhaps the grape wasn't getting to Johnny by this time. He was nobby and boss.