It seems that the two New Yorkers happened to be on the same train a month later, northward bound from Jacksonville.
“Hello, there,” said Walters.
“Fine,” replied Fretts, regarding the other somewhat vaguely.
“I come down on the same train with you a month ago,” said Walters.
“That’s right,” said Fretts. “We come down on the same train together.”
“Well, what do you think of Florida?”
“No place like it in the world!” said Fretts, warming up. “Say, I could write a book! I wished I’d kept a diary of the month I been there. Only nobody would believe it.”
“Where was you? Palm Beach?”
“No, Miami. That is, I guess we drove up to Palm Beach one night. I don’t know.”
“Where did you stop in Miami?”
“Over at the Beach, at the Flamingo.”
“What did they charge you there?”
“I’ve got no idear. I paid them with a check,” said Fretts.
“It’s American plan, ain’t it?”
“No. Yes, yes, it’s American plan.”
“And how was the meals?”
“Meals! I don’t know. I didn’t hear anybody say anything about them.”
“I thought—”
“After this, I’m going to take all my vacations in the winter and spend them right there. That’s the Garden Spot of God’s Green Footstool!”
“So you bought yourself a place?”
“No, I didn’t buy nothing; that is, no real estate. I met some guy the second day that was talking about a big bargain in some development he was interested in, and I promised I’d go out and look at it. He called up a couple of times to remind me of my promise, so to keep him from pestering me, I finally did go out there, but they was no moon, so I couldn’t tell much about it.”
“I thought—”
“Listen till you hear something funny. When I got to the hotel, they told me my room was still occupied, but the guy was just moving out and I could move in inside of an hour. Well, they made the fella pack up in a hurry and he overlooked two bottles of Plymouth gin. So there was the two bottles staring me in the eye and I was afraid he’d come back after them, so I phoned up to another fella’s room that had rode over with me in the taxi from the station and he come down and we had ten, eleven Tom Collinses just as fast as we could drink them.
“Then we filled up the both bottles with water and fixed them like they hadn’t been opened, and sure enough, the bird come back for his treasure. He said he was on his way to Key West and had got clear over near to Miami station when he recalled leaving the gin and he had enough time to come back for it and still catch his train yet. That’s one thing about Florida trains—you can’t miss them no matter what time you get there. He said it was a good thing for him that his room had been inherited by an honest man. I’d like to heard what he said when he took his first swig out of those bottles.
“Well, I and the other fella, the fella that split the gin with me—he’s a fella named Leo Hargrave, from Cleveland; got a foundry there or something—the two of us went up in his room and polished off a bottle of Scotch and then it was time to dress for dinner. That’s all I done about dinner the whole month I was in Miami—I dressed for it, but I never got it. Hargrave said he knew a swell jernt out near Hialeah and we hired a car and drove out there and it was a place where you dined and danced, but we wasn’t hungry and we didn’t have nobody to dance with. So we just ordered some drinks—”
“Did you have any trouble getting drinks?”
“Yes. You had to call a waiter. Well, we stayed there till pretty close to midnight and then drove back towards the beach and stopped at another jernt where you play roulette. There’s a game I always been wild about and I’d of been satisfied to send for my baggage and settle right down for the month. But Hargrave was dance mad and he said we would have to find some girls to travel around with. He said he knew one girl; he would call her up in the morning, and maybe she had a friend.
“I told him to never mind about a friend, because it’s been my experience that when you ask a girl to bring along a girlfriend, the girlfriend generally always looks like she had charge of the linen room at a two dollar hotel. So we stayed up till the telegraph office was open and then I sent a letter to New York, to a girl I been going around with, a girl named Bonnie Werner, and told her to jump in an upper and jern me.”
“Did she come?”
“Sure, she come. She thinks I’m going to marry her. But she couldn’t get there till two, three days later and in the meanwhile, I run around with Hargrave and his dame. I wasn’t lonesome, though; not as long as they was plenty of Scotch and a roulette w’eel, and besides that, I found a poker game, to say nothing about a couple dandy fellas lives there at the Beach and love to just sit around and hit up the old barber shop harmony—Jim Allison and Jess Andrew.
“But I didn’t really strike my stride till Miss Werner got in. From that time on, I went some pace! And of course it was even worse when Ben Drew showed up. He’s a pal of mine, in partners with his brother in the furniture business in Brooklyn. He was going to come down with me, but his brother got sick and held him up a week. He brought a girl named Stevens that he picked up somewheres, and with Miss Werner and I, and Ben Drew and the Stevens dame, and Hargrave and his
