Humorous stories; Washington (State) -- Fiction; Western stories
Lon says "Easy come, easy go!" and moves over to the next table again to
help out with the silver bucket of champagne he's ordered, taking Jeff
Tuttle with him to present to his old friends that he's known for all of
twenty minutes. The New Yorker is now more suspicious then ever of Ben;
his wan beauty is marred by a cynical smile and his hair has come
unglued in a couple of places. Ben is more sensitive than ever to these
suspicions of his new pal so he calls on Jake Berger to match his watch
against the four. Jake takes out his split-second repeater and him and
Ben match coins and this time Ben is lucky enough to lose, thereby
showing his dear old New Yorker that he ain't a crook after all. But the
New Yorker still looks very shrewd and robbed and begins to gulp the
champagne in a greedy manner. You can hear him calling Jake a
confederate. Jake sees it plain enough, that the lad thinks he's been
high-graded, so he calls over our waiter and crowds all five watches
onto him. "Take these home to the little ones," says Jake, and dismisses
the matter from his mind by putting a wine glass up to his ear and
listening into it with a rapt expression that shows he's hearing the
roar of the ocean up on Alaska's rockbound coast.
The New Yorker is a mite puzzled by this, but I can see it don't take
him long to figure out that the waiter is also a confederate. Anyway,
he's been robbed of his watch forever and falls to the champagne again
very eager and moody. It was plain he didn't know what a high-powered
drink he was trifling with. And Ben was moody, too, by now. He quit
recalling old times and sacred memories to the New Yorker. If the latter
had tried to break up the party by leaving at this point I guess Ben
would of let him go. But he didn't try; he just set there soggily
drinking champagne to drown the memory of his lost watch. And pretty
soon Ben has to order another quart of this twelve-dollar beverage. The
New Yorker keeps right on with the new bottle, daring it to do its worst
and it does; he was soon speaking out of a dense fog when he spoke at
all.
With his old pal falling into this absent mood Ben throws off his own
depression and mingles a bit with the table of old New York families
where Lon Price is now paying the checks. They was the real New Yorkers;
they'd never had a moment's distrust of Lon after he ordered the first
time and told the waiter to keep the glasses brimming. Jeff Tuttle was
now dancing in an extreme manner with a haggard society bud aged
thirty-five, and only Jake and me was left at our table. We didn't count
the New Yorker any longer; he was merely raising his glass to his lips
at regular intervals. He moved something like an automatic chess player
I once saw. The time passed rapidly for a couple hours more, with Jake
Berger keeping up his ceaseless chatter as usual. He did speak once,
though, after an hour's silence. He said in an audible tone that the New
Yorker was a human hangnail, no matter where he was born.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account