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How beautifully the problem is working out! almost too beautifully." At the incoming baggage-room Indiman presented the check numbered 18329. A porter appeared with a large trunk loaded on a truck. "City transfer?" he asked. "No, I'll take it with me," said Indiman. "Thorp, will you get a hack." We were about to drive off, and I felt for my match-box. Provoking!
"There is a real difference, then?" said Indiman, thoughtfully. "One that you would recognize again?" "At any place or time," I answered, confidently. "It is an absolute means of identification, quite as much so as a glass eye would be in a man's face." "Very good. We'll find that hand-organ, then, if we have to go through 'Little Italy' with a drag-net.
"Twelve," he said, and "fifteen," answered Indiman. The crowd laughed, and Joe Bardi's vanity was sorely touched. It was not pleasant to be badgered in this unseemly manner while engaged in beating one's own preserves. Discretion forsook him forthwith. "Twenty-five," he bellowed. "Fifty." "A hundred, and be damned to you!" "Two hundred."
Such is Abingdon Square on a night in early August when first the dog-star begins to rage. Now my friend Esper Indiman is a social philosopher; life in all its phases interests him tremendously. Consequently, he likes to take long rides on trolley-cars. He calls them his vaudeville in miniature, and sometimes the performance is amusing I acknowledge it freely.
Then Abingdon Square and your entrance upon the boards of my little drama you and Mr. Bardi. Gentlemen, I thank you for your attention." "I should say, Thorp," said Indiman, "that Mr. Harding is well qualified for membership in the Utinam Club. Will you put him up and I'll second him?
An hour later Indiman came in and joined me in the library. "Now, then!" I said, impatiently, after waiting to see him mix a high-ball and light a tremendously black breva. Indiman is a little provoking at times with his infinite deliberation. "Where were we?" he began. "Ah, yes, I had my theory about finding the chap who wrote out that message.
Indiman and I stepped up, for we really thought that he was going to faint. "Much obliged, gentlemen. I'm all right now," said the young chap. "But for the minute I was that struck. Say, gentlemen, you'll think I'm a liar, but it was my own girl, Miss Mattie Townley, who wrote that there letter and twisted it around an apple-stem. And she wrote it to me me, Ben Day. What do you think of that?"
"However, that makes no difference; we had the package, and I had just started down-town to turn it in when I stopped to look at the excitement here. Lucky for me, or I'd never had a bite of this particular red apple, the sweetest pippin that orchard ever grew. Excuse me, gentlemen, if I do the saphead act by jinks! I FEEL like it." "The sentiment does you honor, Mr. Day," said Indiman, gravely.
As I have said, Indiman played solitaire and I smoked as much as I could. Dull work for all that it was the end of April, the height of the Easter season, and New York was at its gayest. A brilliant show yes, and the same old one. Did you ever eat a quail a day for thirty days? Why not for three hundred or three thousand days, supposing that one is really fond of quail?
But Miss Millefleurs was plainly a young person of instant ingenuity, and she had turned the disfigurement to good purpose by drawing a circle around it and labelling it, "One on account." "Then there's this," said Indiman, and handed me a sheet of foolscap which had been folded and sealed without an envelope, after the fashion of our great-grandfathers.
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