further adventure. Jeff strongly objected to this restaurant at first,
though, because he couldn't hear an orchestra in it. He said he couldn't
eat his breakfast without an orchestra. He did, however, ordering apple
pie and ice cream and a gin fizz to come. Lon Price was soon sleeping
like a tired child over his ham and eggs, and Jeff went night-night,
too, before his second gin fizz arrived.

Ben ordered a porterhouse steak, family style, consuming it in a moody
rage like a man that has been ground-sluiced at every turn. He said he
felt like ending it all and sometimes wished he'd been in the cab that
plunged into one of the forty-foot holes in Broadway a couple of nights
before. Jake Berger had ordered catfish and waffles, with a glass of
Invalid port. He burst into speech once more, too. He said the nights in
New York were too short to get much done. That if they only had nights
as long as Alaska the town might become famous. "As it is," he says, "I
don't mind flirting with this city now and then, but I wouldn't want to
marry it."

Well, that about finished the evening, with Lon and Jeff making the room
sound like a Pullman palace car at midnight. Oh, yes; there was one
thing more. On the day after the events recorded in the last chapter, as
it says in novels, there was a piece in one of the live newspapers
telling that a well-dressed man of thirty-five, calling himself Clifford
J. Hotchkiss and giving a Brooklyn address, was picked up in a dazed
condition by patrolman Cohen who had found him attempting to direct the
operations of a gang of workmen engaged in repairing a crosstown-car
track. He had been sent to the detention ward of Bellevue to await
examination as to his sanity, though insisting that he was the victim
of a gang of footpads who had plied him with liquor and robbed him of
his watch. I showed the piece to Ben Sutton and Ben sent him up a pillow
of forget-me-nots with "Rest" spelled on it--without the sender's card.

No; not a word in it about the street-car track being wrongfully tore
up. I guess it was like Ben said; no one ever would find out about that
in New York. My lands! here it is ten-thirty and I got to be on the job
when them hayers start to-morrow A.M. A body would think I hadn't a care
on earth when I get started on anecdotes of my past.

***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOMEWHERE IN RED GAP***

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