"Impossible!"
"Isn't it bully?" said Marsh enthusiastically. "Ali Baba Court I call
it. That's what a touch of imagination can do in New York. I say, look
over here. What do you think of this for a quiet pipe at night?"
He drew him under the trees, where a table and comfortable chairs were
waiting. Above the low roofs high against the blue-black sky the giant
city came peeping down upon them from the regimented globes of fire on
the Astor roof. A milky flag drifted lazily across an aigrette of steam.
To the right, the top of the Times Tower, divorced from all the ugliness
at its feet, rose like an historic campanile played about by timid
stars. Over the roof-tops the hum of the city, never stilled, turned
like a great wheel, incessantly, with faint, detached sounds pleasantly
audible: a bell; a truck moving like a shrieking shell; the impertinent
honk of taxis; urchins on wheels; the shattering rush of distant iron
bodies tearing through the air; an extra cried on a shriller note; the
ever-recurring pipe of a police whistle compelling order in the
confusion; fog horns from the river, and underneath something more
elusive and confused, the churning of great human masses passing and
repassing.
Marsh gave a peculiar whistle and instantly at a window on the second
floor a shadowy figure appeared, the sash went up with a bang, and a
cheery voice exclaimed:
"Hello, below there! Is that Bojo with you? Come up and show your
handsome map!"
"Coming, Freddie, coming," said Bojo with a laugh, and, plunging into a
swinging entrance, he found himself in a cozy den, almost thrown off his
feet by the greetings of a little fellow who dived at him with the
frenzy of a faithful dog.
"Well, old fashion-plate, how are you?" Bojo said at last, flinging him
across the room. "Been into any more trouble?"
"Nope. That is, not lately," said DeLancy, picking himself up. "Haven't
a chance, living with two policemen. What kept you all this time? Fallen
in love?"
"None of your damned business. By George, this looks homelike," said
Bojo to turn the conversation. On the walls were a hundred mementoes of
school and college, while a couple of lounges and several great chairs
were indolently grouped about the fireplace, where a fire was laid. "I
say, Roscy, has the infant really been behaving?"
"Well, we haven't bailed, him out yet," said Marsh meditatingly.
Fred DeLancy had been in trouble all his life and out of it as easily.
Trouble, as he himself expressed it, woke up the moment he went out. He
had been suspended and threatened with expulsion for one scrape after
another more times than he could remember. But there was something that
instantly disarmed anger in the odd star-pointing nose, the twinkly
eyes, and the wide mouth set at a perpetual grin. One way or another he
wriggled through regions where angels fear to tread, assisted by much
painful effort on the part of his friends.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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