“Well,” he said, as the young clerk-playwright seated himself, “according to my watch we are twelve minutes late leaving the Bend. And I’m pretty sure the watch is right. I’ve had this old watch eight years and only paid twenty smackers for it, and it runs just as true now like when I got it. How is that for a twenty dollar watch?”
“Pretty good,” replied Cosset.
“I’ll say it’s pretty good,” said Lacey. “They don’t make watches no more like this here. I got a friend of mine that’s in the watch game and he knows watches. That’s his game. And he says they don’t make no more watches like this here. His name’s Fox, from Lafayette. Maybe you know him.”
“No,” replied Cosset, “I don’t know him.”
“He’s in the watch game,” said Lacey. “I just happened to meet him, and I thought you might maybe know him. He gives me a ring every time he hits Chi. He’s a card. Keep you up all night telling gags and stories. And original, too. I remember one morning I met him on the train going from Chi to Benton Harbor. No, it was Niles. Well, he had a morning paper and they was a big story on the front page about the Cragin murder out in Los Angeles. You remember—Cragin, the picture director. They found him dead in his apartment, and it come out that they’d been a big party the night before where pretty near everybody there was a hophead. So this Fox, this friend of mine, he says had I saw the news in the paper and I says what news, and he says O, they’s been another snowstorm in Hollywood. He’s a card. Keeps everybody laughing. I thought maybe you might of ran across him.”
“No,” replied Cosset, “I don’t know him.”
“What game are you in?” asked Lacey.
“Dry goods,” replied Cosset.
“I got a brother-in-law in that game,” said Lacey. “He was in the insurance game, but now he’s in the dry goods game. He’s on the road for Smythe-Carter. He married my sister—that’s my youngest sister, Bertha. She wouldn’t of met him only for me. I got acquainted with him on a train coming fom Racine to Chi. No, it was Janesville. He was living in a boardinghouse and I felt kind of sorry for him, so I says when he didn’t have nothing to do, to give me a ring. So he come out to the house one night to supper. The kid sister couldn’t see him at first. They was a couple of his front teeth was discolored. But after you got used to him, you didn’t notice it so much.
“So him and the kid got married. Now they got a home of their own out in Morgan Park. Built it cheap on account of one of his brothers being in the building game. They got two of the cutest kiddies you ever seen. The boy’s named after me: Ben. That’s my name. Little Ben’s just two years old and he calls me plain Ben. He can’t say uncle. So he just calls me Ben. Smart as a whip.”
Cosset didn’t deny this or make no comment of any kind as he hoped that absolute silence on his part might prove contagious. But he was too polite not to answer when Uncle Ben asked him a direct question, was he going to the Big Town. He said yes.
“Me, too,” said Lacey. “I generally always take the Century, but I had to take this train this time on account of being tied up in Chi with a customer of mine. He’s in the cement game. I’m in the elevator game myself; with the Trunkey people. Biggest elevator concern in the U.S. Well, this customer of mine got in town and give me a ring and I had to see him and after we was all through with our business I couldn’t get away from him. Great talker. We got in a argument about Coolidge. He was panning Coolidge so I stepped in and told him where he was wrong. If a man says something I don’t like, I tell him where he’s wrong, customer or no customer. He admitted he was wrong after I’d talked to him. He says, ‘I’m wrong, Lacey, and you’re right.’ So then we wound up telling stories. I thought he’d laugh himself sick when I told him the one about the Greek and the Spaniard. Have you heard that one?”
“No,” replied Cosset.
“It’s a good one if you ain’t heard it,” said Lacey. “It seems they was a Greek and a Spaniard and they was out with a couple of fly chorus dames—”
“Would you mind telling it to me after a while?” says Cosset. “Right now, before I forget it, I want to see if my grip’s flied open. It don’t catch right.”
“Well, listen,” said Lacey, “I got a friend of mine in the Big Town in the suitcase and trunk game and I’ll give you a note to him and he’ll sell you the best suitcase you ever seen, at cost.”
“Well, I’m much obliged,” said Cosset, and hurried out of the washroom and to his seat.
He sat there over an hour, trying and trying to think. But as I said a while ago, he couldn’t even start to think unless they was a live cigarette in his mouth. And the car was half full of old women, bound for the annual banquet of the Little Rock Sorrel Growers’ Association at Rutland, Vermont.
Well, finally the man that had the lower come in and sat down in the section. He was a man either forty-two or forty-six years old, named Harrison Quolt. He observed that Cosset was acting very nervous.
“You are acting very nervous,” he said to Cosset. “What can be the matter?”
Cosset then told
