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Updated: June 12, 2025
When work failed him at the beginning of the week Vandover was not unprepared for the contingency; the thing had happened before and he knew how to meet it. On Monday he beat up and down the Barbary Coast, picking out fifteen or twenty saloons which supported a free-lunch counter in connection with the bar. He took his breakfast Monday morning at the first of these.
Huckins was always boiling ham and tongue and cooking pig's feet and shredding cabbage for slaw, all these edibles being destined for the free-lunch counter downstairs. Bella had early made up her mind that there should be no boiling and stewing and frying in her life. Whenever she could find an excuse, she loitered about the saloon. There she found life and talk and colour.
He'd look well, they said, a-laying out there in the sage-brush plugged full of lead waiting for his friends to call for him; and they asked him how he thought he'd enjoy being a free-lunch counter for coyotes; and they told him he'd better write down on a piece of paper anything he'd like particular to have painted on the board and they just generally devilled him all round.
Into this the two were pushed by the eddying mob, and escaped. For a moment they stood against the bar that protected the window. The saloon was full of men, foul with tobacco smoke, and the floor was filthy. Flies sluggishly buzzed about the pools of beer on the bar counter. The men were talking excitedly; a few thin, ragged hangers-on were looting the free-lunch dishes surreptitiously.
While the drinks were being mixed the brown sweater called Wilbur's attention to a fighting head-dress from the Marquesas that was hung on the wall over the free-lunch counter and opposite the bar. Wilbur turned about to look at it, and remained so, his back to the barkeeper, till the latter told them their drinks were ready.
True, the nights were still aglare with torches, and the street echoes kept awake by trumpet notes and huzzas, by the tramp of feet and the delicate hint of the bell-ringing; and men on the stump and off it; in the "wigwams;" along the sidewalks, as they came forth, wiping their mouths, from the free-lunch counters, and on the curb-stones and "flags" of Carondelet street, were saying things to make a patriot's heart ache.
The free-lunch man on the corner told me where you were, quick. I was sure you'd be painting pictures yet." Keogh glanced about the studio with the shrewd eye of a connoisseur in business. "Yes, you can do it," he declared, with many gentle nods of his head. "That big one in the corner with the angels and green clouds and band-wagon is just the sort of thing we want.
But such a thing had been impossible this week. He had been forced to fall back upon the free-lunch system. In two years Vandover had learned a great deal; even his dulled wits had been sharpened when it had come to a question of food. The brute in him might destroy all his finer qualities, but even the brute had to feed.
As he ate a free-lunch after a five-cent expenditure that morning, there was something in his air which would have prevented the most obtuse barkeeper in the world from commenting upon the quantity consumed. He was not particularly depressed because his hat was old and his coat gray at the seams and his shoes cracked.
If you felt that you had to leave home this afternoon, you should have left some suitable explanation for your absence. "This soup is really impossible; it's strange that woman hasn't learned yet to make a decent soup. Any free-lunch stand in town serves a better one. Was Mrs. Belthrop here?" "Bring the tray with the cards, Joe. I don't remember who was here."
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