for fair, and I
don't know whether I stand with the criminal rich or the predatory poor.

That's all on account of a little mix-up I was rung into at the hotel
Perzazzer the other day. No, we ain't livin' there reg'lar again. This
was just a little fall vacation we was takin' in town, so Sadie can catch
up with her shoppin', and of course the Perzazzer seems more or less like
home to us.

But it ain't often I've ever run against anything like this there. I've
been thinkin' it over since, and it's left me with my feet in the air.
No, you didn't read anything about it in the papers. But say, there's
more goes on in one of them big joints every week than would fill a whole
issue.

Look at the population the Perzazzer's got,--over two thousand, countin'
the help! Why, drop us down somewhere out in Iowa, and spread us around
in separate houses, and there'd be enough to call for a third-class
postmaster, a police force, and a board of trade. Bunched the way we are,
all up and down seventeen stories, with every cubic foot accounted for,
we don't cut much of a figure except on the checkbooks. You hear about
the Perzazzer only when some swell gives a fancy blow-out, or a guest
gets frisky in the public dining room.

And anything in the shape of noise soon has the muffler put on it. We've
got a whole squad of husky, two-handed, soft spoken gents who don't have
anything else to do, and our champeen ruction extinguisher is Danny
Reardon. To see him strollin' through the cafe, you might think he was a
corporation lawyer studyin' how to spend his next fee; but let some
ambitious wine opener put on the loud pedal, or have Danny get his eye on
some Bridgeport dressmaker drawin' designs of the latest Paris fashions
in the tea room, and you'll see him wake up. Nothing seems to get by
him.

So I was some surprised to find him havin' an argument with a couple of
parties away up on our floor. Anyone could see with one eye that they was
a pair of butt-ins. The tall, smooth faced gent in the black frock coat
and the white tie had sky pilot wrote all over him; and the Perzazzer
ain't just the place an out of town minister would pick out to stop at,
unless he wanted to blow a year's salary into a week's board.

Anyway, his runnin' mate was a dead give away. He looked like he might
have just left a bench in the Oriental lodgin' house down at Chatham
Square. He's a thin, gawky, pale haired youth, with tired eyes and a limp
lower jaw that