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Updated: May 11, 2025
There is always some stray silver in the bead bag of a movie patron. Into the dummy-chucker's outstretched palm fell pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters. There was present to-day no big-hearted Westerner with silver dollars, but here was comparative wealth. Already the dummy-chucker saw himself again at Finisterre Joe's, this time to purchase no bottled courage but to buy decantered ease.
The boy's bow was as profound as though the quarter in his palm had been placed there by a duke. The girl who received his coat and hat smiled as pleasantly and impersonally upon the dummy-chucker as she did upon the whiskered, fine-looking old gentleman who handed her his coat at the same time. She called the dummy-chucker's attention to the fact that his tie was a trifle loose.
Gone was the debonair gentleman of a quarter of an hour ago. Instead, there leered back at him a pasty-faced, underfed vagrant, dressed in the tatters of unambitious, satisfied poverty. "Bannon," called the host, "throw him out!" For a moment, the dummy-chucker's shoulders squared, as they had been squared when the dinner jacket draped them. Then they sagged.
Past the Flatiron Building he shuffled, until, at length, the Tenderloin unfolded itself before him. These were the happy hunting-grounds! Of course and he glanced behind him quickly there were more fly cops on Broadway than on the lower East Side. One of them had dug his bony fingers between the shabby collar of the dummy-chucker's coat and the lank hair that hung down his neck.
This very day, the municipal ferry had landed the dummy-chucker, with others of his slinking kind, upon Manhattan's shores again. Not for a long time would the memory of the Island menu be effaced from the dummy-chucker's palate, the locked doors be banished from his mental vision. A man might be arrested on Broadway, but he might also get the money.
Shoot!" "About a year ago," resumed the host, "she accepted, after a long courtship, a young man by the name of oh, let's call him Jones." The dummy-chucker inhaled happily. "Call him any darned thing you like," he said cheerily. "Jones was a drunkard," said the host. "And she married him?" The dummy-chucker's eyebrows lifted slightly. "No. She told him that if he'd quit drinking she'd marry him.
"The news just reached Rio Janeiro yesterday." The dummy-chucker lifted his glass of Scotch. "To a regular feller," he said, and drank. He set his glass down gently. "And the girl? I suppose she's all shot to pieces?" "She doesn't know," said the host quietly. The dummy-chucker's eyebrows lifted again. "I begin to get you," he said.
The chauffeur obediently stopped the car. The dummy-chucker's grin was absolutely complacent now. Down below, there gleamed lights, the lights of ferries, of sound steamers, and of Blackwell's Island. This morning, he had left there, a lying mendicant. To-night, he was a gentleman. He knocked again upon the glass.
As the audience filed sadly out from the teary, gripping drama of "She Loved And Lost," the dummy-chucker's hand went from his pocket to his lips. He reeled, staggered, fell. His jaws moved savagely. Foam appeared upon his lips. A fat woman shrank away from him, then leaned forward in quick sympathy. "He's gotta fit!" she cried. "Ep'lepsy," said her companion pityingly.
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