The Big Town | Page 7

heard about you New Yorkers before," said the Mrs. "You're always trying to flatter somebody."
"Not me," said Francis. "I never say nothing without meaning it."
"But sometimes," says I, "you'd ought to go on and explain the meaning."
Along about Schenectady my appetite begin to come back. I'd made it a point this time to find out when the diner was going to open, and then when it did our party fell in with the door.
"The wife tells me you're on the stock exchange," I says to Francis when we'd give our order.
"Just in a small way," he said. "But they been pretty good to me down there. I knocked out twenty thousand last year."
"That's what he told us this morning," said Ella.
"Well," said I, "they's no reason for a man to forget that kind of money between Rochester and Albany, even if this is a slow train."
"Twenty thousand isn't a whole lot in the Big Town," said Francis, "but still and all, I manage to get along and enjoy myself a little on the side."
"I suppose it's enough to keep one person," I said.
"Well," says Francis, "they say two can live as cheap as one."
Then him and Kate and Ella all giggled, and the waiter brought in a part of what he thought we'd ordered and we eat what we could and ast for the check. Francis said he wanted it and I was going to give in to him after a long hard struggle, but the gals reminded him that he'd paid for breakfast, so he said all right, but we'd all have to take dinner with him some night.
I and Francis set a wile in the washroom and smoked, and then he went to entertain the gals, but I figured the wife would go right to sleep like she always does when they's any scenery to look out at, so I stuck?where I was and listened to what a couple of toothpick salesmen from Omsk would of done with the League of Nations if Wilson had of had sense enough to leave it to them.
Pulling into the Grand Central Station, Francis apologized for not being able to steer us over to the Baldwin and see us settled, but said he had to rush right downtown and report on his Chicago trip before the office closed. To see him when he parted with the gals you'd of thought he was going clear to Siberia to compete in the Olympic Games, or whatever it is we're in over there.
Well, I took the heiresses to the Baldwin and got a regular Big Town welcome. Ella and Kate set against a pillar wile I tried different tricks to make an oil-haired clerk look at me. New York hotel clerks always seem to of just dropped something and can't take their eyes off the floor. Finally I started to pick up the register and the guy give me the fish eye and ast what he could do for me.
"Well," I said, "when I come to a hotel I don't usually want to buy a straw hat."
He ast me if I had a reservation and I told him no.
"Can't do nothing for you then," he says. "Not till to-morrow morning anyway."
So I went back to the ladies.
"We'll have to go somewhere else," I said. "This joint's a joint. They won't give us nothing till to-morrow."
"But we can't go nowhere else," said the Mrs. "What would Mr. Griffin think, after recommending us to come here?"
"Well," I said, "if you think I'm going to park myself in a four-post chair all night just because we got a tip on a hotel from Wall Street you're Queen of the Cuckoos."
"Are you sure they haven't anything at all?" she says.
"Go ask them yourself!" I told her.
Well, she did, and in about ten minutes she come back and said everything was fixed.?
"They'll give us a single room with bath and a double room with bath for fifteen dollars a day," she said.
"'Give us' is good!" said I.
"I told him we'd wired for reservations and it wasn't our fault if the wire didn't get here," she said. "He was awfully nice."
Our rooms was right close to each other on the twenty-first floor. On the way up we decided by two votes to one that we'd dress for dinner. I was still monkeying with my tie when Katie come in for Ella to look her over. She had on the riskiest dress she'd bought in Chi.
"It's a pretty dress," she said, "but I'm afraid maybe it's too daring for just a hotel dining room."
Say we hadn't no sooner than set down in the hotel dining room when two other gals come in that made my team look like they was dressed for a sleigh ride with Doc Cook.
"I guess you don't feel