"I see the pretty, pretty lights at last," Wallingford chuckled. "I was sure there was something doing when Curly Harry came up here claiming a thirst, and went so far as to drink champagne on top of a highball." "He's taking stomach and liver dope right now," Blackie guessed. "You see, these Broadway boys are handicapped when they run across a man who still has a lining. They lost theirs years ago." "They lost everything years ago. I'm disappointed in them, Blackie. I had supposed that these people of the metropolis had Herman the Great looking like a Bowery waiter when it came to smooth work; but they've got nothing but thumbs." "You do them deep wrong, J. Rufus Wallingford Wix," admonished Blackie. "I've trailed with this crowd four or five years. They're always to be found right here and they always have coin--whether they spend it or not." "They get it gold-bricking New Yorkers, then," declared Wallingford contemptuously. "They couldn't cold deck anybody on the rural free delivery routes. They wear the lemon sign on their faces, and when one of their kind comes west of the big hills we padlock all our money in our pockets and lock ourselves in jail till they get out of town." "What have they been doing to you?" asked Blackie. "You've got a regular Matteawan grouch." "They had the nerve to try to ring me in for the fall guy on a green-goods play, baited up with a stage farmer from One Hundred and Sixtieth Street," asserted Wallingford. "Don't they ever spring a new one here?" Mr. Blackie Daw only laughed. "I'm afraid they don't," he confessed. "They take the old ones that have got the money for years, and work in new props and scenery on them, just like they do in the theaters; and that goes for Broadway." "It don't go for me," declared Wallingford. "If they come after mine again I'll get real peevish and take their flash rolls away from them." "Go to it," invited Blackie. "They need a trimming." "I think I'll hand it to them," said Wallingford savagely, and started to walk out. "Where are you going?" asked the other. "I don't know," said Wallingford, "but I am going to scare up some excitement in the only way possible for a stranger, and that is go out and hunt for it by myself. No New Yorker knows where to go." In the bar Wallingford found a convivial gentleman from Georgia, lonesome like himself, with whom he became firm friends in an hour, and it was after midnight when, their friendship still further fixed by plenty of liquid cement, he left the Georgian at one of the broad, bright entrances in charge of a door-man. It being but a few blocks to his own hotel, he walked, carrying with complacent satisfaction a burden of assorted beverages that would have staggered most men. It was while he was pausing upon his own corner for a moment to consider the past evening in smiling retrospection, that a big-boned policeman tapped him on the shoulder. He was startled for a moment, but a hearty voice reassured him with: