girl, that made six of us that stuck together all the w’ile; that is, for the first few nights. After that, we’d get the girls all wore out by one, two o’clock and chase them home and then I and Ben and Hargrave, we’d play the w’eel or sit in a game of stud.
“It was the same schedule, day after day, the whole time I was there. The party would start out along about seven, eight o’clock in the evening and go to whatever place we hadn’t been to the night before. We’d dance till, say, one o’clock and then chase the women home and do a little serious gambling. The poker game generally broke up a little before noon. That would give us fellas the afternoon to sleep, w’ile the girls would do their shopping or go to the polo or waste their time some way another. About six o’clock, I’d get up and have the barber come in and shave me and then I’d dress and be all set for the roll-call.”
“But I thought—”
“From the first day, I didn’t wear nothing but dinner clothes. And I brought along a trunk full of white pants and knickers that I never even unpacked.
“You’d have to get Miss Werner or one of the other girls to tell you the different places we went. They all looked alike to me—just jernts, with tables and waiters and an orchestra.”
“But the weather was beautiful—”
“So I heard somebody say. I guess it’s a great climate, if that’s what a man is looking for. They say California’s another garden spot and that’s another place I’ve always intended to go. But of course it takes longer.”
“The California climate,” said Walters, “is probably just as good—”
“I’ve always intended to go out there. But of course it takes longer. Four, five days on a train is too much. A fella don’t get no sun or air. I always feel cooped up on a train.”
“How was the golf?”
“I didn’t get to play golf; never had my clubs out of the bag. But I heard somebody telling Ben Drew that they had four, five fine courses around Miami.”
“Play any tennis?”
“No, I didn’t have time for tennis. They got some swell courts right by the hotel, but even at that, when you change into your tennis clothes and play four, five sets and then take a bath and dress again, why, it means a waste of two hours.”
“Go fishing?”
“Fishing! That’s a whole day! And as far as bathing is concerned, why, it looks like they was a law that you couldn’t swim only at noon time, just when a man’s ready for the hay.”
“How far is the ocean from the hotel where you stopped?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t get over there. You see you can’t do everything at a place like that. It would wear you out. I’m thirty-eight years old and when a man gets that age, you’ve got to watch your step. You can’t go in for athaletics like you was a kid.
“I’m in the insurance business in Brooklyn, and one of the things we learn in our business is that a man is taking chances if he goes in too strong for sports after a certain age. You can’t be a youngster all your life.”
“Did your friends go home ahead of you?”
“Do you mean Ben Drew and Miss Werner and the Stevens girl? No, Ben, he’s back there in a compartment dead to the world and he said he’d shoot anybody that woke him up this side of Manhattan Transfer.
“And the girls—they look like they’d just stepped out of a wastepipe.”
“You look pretty good yourself, better than last time I seen you.”
“I should! A trip like this was just what I needed—away from the office a whole month and longer and ain’t even given business a thought.
“That’s where so many men make mistakes—not taking a vacation; or if they do take one, they keep in touch with their office all the time and sperl the whole trip, worrying. I got a girl that can run my business pretty near as good as I can myself—not a girl, either; a woman about fifty-three years old; a Miss Clancy.
“She’s the one that realized the shape I was in and insisted on me taking this trip. And how her face will light up when I walk in that office Monday morning—or maybe Monday afternoon—and she sees what this has done for me!”
Hurry Kane
It says here: “Another great race may be expected in the American League, for Philadelphia and New York have evidently added enough strength to give them a fighting chance with the White Sox and Yankees. But if the fans are looking for as ‘nervous’ a finish as last year’s, with a climax such as the Chicago and New York clubs staged on the memorable first day of October, they are doubtless in for a disappointment. That was a regular Webster ‘thrill that comes once in a lifetime,’ and no oftener.”
“Thrill” is right, but they don’t know the half of it. Nobody knows the whole of it only myself, not even the fella that told me. I mean the big sap, Kane, who you might call him, I suppose, the hero of the story, but he’s too dumb to have realized all that went on, and besides, I got some of the angles from other sources and seen a few things with my own eyes.
If you wasn’t the closest-mouthed bird I ever run acrost, I wouldn’t spill this to you. But I know it won’t go no further and I think it may give you a kick.
Well, the year before last, it didn’t take no witch to figure out what was going to happen to our club if Dave couldn’t land a pitcher or two to help out Carney and Olds. Jake Lewis hurt his arm and was never no good after that and the rest of the staff belonged in the Soldiers’ Home. Their aim
