unced Mrs. Inche briskly. "Shake yourself
out of that coat and into this--and hustle!"

"It's my impressionable nature makes all my troubles," observed P.
Sybarite disconsolately. "However..."

Shrugging into the coat Mrs. Inche held for him, he cocked the felt
hat jauntily on the side of his head.

"Always," he proclaimed with gesture--hand on heart--"always the
ladies' slave!"

XIII

RESPECTABILITY

But when it came to viscid second thought, alone in the gloom of an
unsympathetic taxicab, P. Sybarite inclined to concede himself more
ass than hero. It was all very well to say that, having spread his
sails to the winds of _Kismet_, he was bound to let himself drift to
their vagrant humour: but there are certain channels of New York life
into which even the most courageous mariner were ill-advised to
adventure under pilotage no more trustworthy than that of sufficient
champagne and a run of good luck.

Dutch House in Fortieth Street, West, wore the reputation of being as
sinister a dive as ever stood cheek-by-jowl with Broadway and brazenly
flaunted an all-night liquor license in the face of law-abiding New
York; of which it was said that no sober man ever went there, other
than those who went to prey, and that no drunkard ever escaped from it
unfleeced; haunt of the most deadly riff-raff to be found in Town,
barring inmates of certain negro stews on the lower West Side and of
some of the dens to which the sightseer does _not_ penetrate in the
tour of Chinatown.

Grim stories were current of men who had wandered thither in their
cups, "for the lark of it," only to return to consciousness days
afterwards, stripped, shorn, and shattered in health bodily and
mental, to find themselves in some vile kennel miles from Dutch House;
and of other men who passed once through its foul portals and--passed
out a secret way, never to return to the ken of their friends....

Yet it stood, and it stands, waxing fat in the folly of man and his
greed.

And to this place P. Sybarite was travelling to deliver a message from
a famous demi-rep to a notorious gang leader; with only a .25 calibre
Colt's automatic and his native wit and audacity to guard the moderate
fortune that he carried with him in cash--a single hundredth part of
which would have been sufficient to purchase his obliteration at the
hands of the crew that ran the place.

However, in their ignorance his safety inhered; and it was not really
necessary tha