The old bourb’ helped me save money the next morning, as I didn’t care for no breakfast. Ella and Kate went in with Griffin and you could of knocked me over with a coupling pin when the Mrs. come back and reported that he’d insisted on paying the check. “He told us all about himself,” she said. “His name is Francis Griffin and he’s in Wall Street. Last year he cleared twenty thousand dollars in commissions and everything.”
“He’s a piker,” I says. “Most of them never even think under six figures.”
“There you go!” said the Mrs. “You never believe nothing. Why shouldn’t he be telling the truth? Didn’t he buy our breakfast?”
“I been buying your breakfast for five years,” I said, “but that don’t prove that I’m knocking out twenty thousand per annum in Wall Street.”
Francis and Katie was setting together four or five seats ahead of us.
“You ought to of seen the way he looked at her in the diner,” said the Mrs. “He looked like he wanted to eat her up.”
“Everybody gets desperate in a diner these days,” I said. “Did you and Kate go fifty-fifty with him? Did you tell him how much money we got?”
“I should say not!” says Ella. “But I guess we did say that you wasn’t doing nothing just now and that we was going to New York to see Life, after being cooped up in a small town all these years. And Sis told him you’d made us put pretty near everything in bonds, so all we can spend is eight thousand a year. He said that wouldn’t go very far in the Big Town.”
“I doubt if it ever gets as far as the Big Town,” I said. “It won’t if he makes up his mind to take it away from us.”
“Oh, shut up!” said the Mrs. “He’s all right and I’m for him, and I hope Sis is too. They’d make a stunning couple. I wished I knew what they’re talking about.”
“Well,” I said, “they’re both so reserved that I suppose they’re telling each other how they’re affected by cucumbers.”
When they come back and joined us Ella said: “We was just remarking how well you two young things seemed to be getting along. We was wondering what you found to say to one another all this time.”
“Well,” said Francis, “just now I think we were discussing you. Your sister said you’d been married five years and I pretty near felt like calling her a fibber. I told her you looked like you was just out of high school.”
“I’ve heard about you New Yorkers before,” said the Mrs. “You’re always trying to flatter somebody.”
“Not me,” said Francis. “I never say nothing without meaning it.”
“But sometimes,” says I, “you’d ought to go on and explain the meaning.”
Along about Schenectady my appetite begin to come back. I’d made it a point this time to find out when the diner was going to open, and then when it did our party fell in with the door.
“The wife tells me you’re on the stock exchange,” I says to Francis when we’d give our order.
“Just in a small way,” he said. “But they been pretty good to me down there. I knocked out twenty thousand last year.”
“That’s what he told us this morning,” said Ella.
“Well,” said I, “they’s no reason for a man to forget that kind of money between Rochester and Albany, even if this is a slow train.”
“Twenty thousand isn’t a whole lot in the Big Town,” said Francis, “but still and all, I manage to get along and enjoy myself a little on the side.”
“I suppose it’s enough to keep one person,” I said.
“Well,” says Francis, “they say two can live as cheap as one.”
Then him and Kate and Ella all giggled, and the waiter brought in a part of what he thought we’d ordered and we eat what we could and ast for the check. Francis said he wanted it and I was going to give in to him after a long hard struggle, but the gals reminded him that he’d paid for breakfast, so he said all right, but we’d all have to take dinner with him some night.
I and Francis set a wile in the washroom and smoked, and then he went to entertain the gals, but I figured the wife would go right to sleep like she always does when they’s any scenery to look out at, so I stuck where I was and listened to what a couple of toothpick salesmen from Omsk would of done with the League of Nations if Wilson had of had sense enough to leave it to them.
Pulling into the Grand Central Station, Francis apologized for not being able to steer us over to the Baldwin and see us settled, but said he had to rush right downtown and report on his Chicago trip before the office closed. To see him when he parted with the gals you’d of thought he was going clear to Siberia to compete in the Olympic Games, or whatever it is we’re in over there.
Well, I took the heiresses to the Baldwin and got a regular Big Town welcome. Ella and Kate set against a pillar wile I tried different tricks to make an oil-haired clerk look at me. New York hotel clerks always seem to of just dropped something and can’t take their eyes off the floor. Finally I started to pick up the register and the guy give me the fish eye and ast what he could do for me.
“Well,” I
