The Big Town | Page 7

mind to take it away from us."
"Oh, shut up!" said the Mrs. "He's all right and I'm for him, and I hope
Sis is too. They'd make a stunning couple. I wished I knew what they're
talking about."
"Well," I said, "they're both so reserved that I suppose they're telling
each other how they're affected by cucumbers."
When they come back and joined us Ella said: "We was just
remarking how well you two young things seemed to be getting along.
We was wondering what you found to say to one another all this time."
"Well," said Francis, "just now I think we were discussing you. Your
sister said you'd been married five years and I pretty near felt like
calling her a fibber. I told her you looked like you was just out of high
school."
"I've 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