Here they were! The two police officers strolled in slowly, smiling. In
their blue and their gold buttons they looked very respendent against
the somewhat shabby scene. Ranged along before the bar were a number of
young men in the uniform of private soldiers. There were several
sailors. Here was a postman cheering himself on his rounds. There was a
huge fellow the nickel plate on whose cap announced that he was a piano
mover. The centre of a group, there was a very large man who looked as
though he had something darkly to do with ward politics. At one place in
the line was a very dapper little Japanese, who produced his money from
a wallet carried in his breast pocket. But mostly the motley company was
of the riff-raff order of humanity. That is another one of the curious
developments of "prohibition." Here, in all places of this character,
you may find an endless number of the sort of men who used to be
accustomed to paying as little as ten cents for a drink of very fiery
and inferior whiskey, now standing before the bar by the hour and paying
from fifty to seventy-five cents for whiskey (if you can call it that)
considerably worse. How on earth can they do it? I do not know.
The two policemen moved the length of the room, and came to a halt at
the open end of the bar. Here they stood for a couple of moments,
observing (I felt with some amusement) Harry and Ed serving their
beakers of beer. Then, as though suddenly having a bright idea, one of
them made his way along back of the bar to the cigar case at the front
end. He stooped, opened the sliding panel at the bottom of this and
poked around inside with his club. As he came along behind the bar back
to the open end he stooped several times to peer at the shelf below. He
joined his comrade, the two of them thrust their heads into the back
room, and then moved out through the side door.
"Well, we're safe for another hour," said Pete. "Why couldn't they find
the stuff?" I asked him. "I'll bet you couldn't find it if you'd go
behind the bar yourself," he answered. Harry and Ed had found it within
two seconds after the shadow of the law had lifted. And the room was
humming with the sound of renewed, and somewhat hectic, conviviality.
"We'll get caught pretty soon though, I guess," observed Johnnie, the
Italian "chef," who on week-days served the economical lunch of roast
beef sandwiches and "hot dogs." Harry and Ed laughed in a rather
uncomfortable way. But for the present, at least, business was too brisk
for their thoughts to be distracted more than a second or two from the
job.
"The old man," remarked Pete, referring to the proprietor, "is on a toot
again. Been under the weather for about a week now. He always gets that
way whenever one of the new law scares comes along. Gets worried or sore
or something and that upsets him."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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