The Spenders Part 36

"Can't you talk to him, and tell him better?"

"I could. I know it all by heart--all the things to say to a man on the downward path. Heaven knows I've heard them often enough, but I'd feel ashamed to talk that way to Uncle Peter. If he were my son, now, I'd cut off his allowance and send him back to make something of himself, like Sile Higbee with little Hennery; but I'm afraid all I can do is to watch him and see that he doesn't marry one of those little pink-silk chorus girls, or lick a policeman, or anything."

"You're carryin' on the same way yourself," ventured his mother.

"That's different," replied her perspicacious son.

Uncle Peter had refused to live at the Hightower after three days in that splendid and populous caravansary.

"It suits me well enough," he explained to Percival, "but I have to look after Billy Brue, and this ain't any place for Billy. You see Billy ain't city broke yet. Look at him now over there, the way he goes around b.u.t.ting into strangers. He does that way because he's all the time looking down at his new patent-leather shoes--first pair he ever had. He'll be plumb stoop-shouldered if he don't hurry up and get the new kicked off of 'em. I'll have to get him a nice warm box-stall in some place that ain't so much on the band-wagon as this one. The ceilings here are too high fur Billy. And I found him shootin' c.r.a.ps with the bell-boy this mornin'. The boy thinks Billy, bein' from the West, is a stage robber, or somethin' like he reads about in the Cap'

Collier libr'ies, and follows him around every chance he gets. And Billy laps up too many of them little striped drinks; and them French-cooked dishes ain't so good fur him, either. He caught on to the bill-of-fare right away. Now he won't order anything but them allas--them dishes that has 'a la' something or other after 'em," he explained, when Percival looked puzzled. "He knows they'll always be something all fussed up with red, white, and blue gravy, and a little paper bouquet stuck into 'em. I never knew Billy was such a fancy eater before."

So Uncle Peter and his charge had established themselves in an old-fas.h.i.+oned but very comfortable hotel down on one of the squares, a dingy monument to the time when life had been less hurried. Uncle Peter had stayed there thirty years before, and he found the place unchanged.

The carpets and hangings were a bit faded, but the rooms were generously broad, the chairs, as the old man remarked, were "made to sit in," and the _cuisine_ was held, by a few knowing old epicures who still frequented the place, to be superior even to that of the more pretentious Hightower. The service, it is true, was apt to be slow.

Strangers who chanced in to order a meal not infrequently became enraged, and left before their food came, trailing plain short words of extreme dissatisfaction behind them as they went. But the elect knew that these delays betokened the presence of an artistic conscience in the kitchen, and that the food was worth tarrying for. "They know how to make you come back hungry for some more the next day," said Uncle Peter Bines.

From this headquarters the old man went forth to join in the diversions of his grandson. And here he kept a watchful eye upon the uncertain Billy Brue; at least approximately. Between them, his days and nights were occupied to crowding. But Uncle Peter had already put in some hard winters, and was not wanting in fort.i.tude.

Billy Brue was a sore trouble to the old man. "I jest can't keep him off the streets nights," was his chief complaint. By day Billy Brue walked the streets in a decent, orderly trance of bewilderment. He was properly puzzled and amazed by many strange matters. He never could find out what was "going on" to bring so many folks into town. They all hurried somewhere constantly, but he was never able to reach the centre of excitement. Nor did he ever learn how any one could reach those high clothes-lines, strung forty feet above ground between the backs of houses; nor how there could be "so many shows in town, all on one night;" nor why you should get so many good things to eat by merely buying a "slug of whiskey;" nor why a thousand people weren't run over in Broadway each twenty-four hours.

At night, Billy Brue ceased to be the astounded alien, and, as Percival said Dr. Von Herzlich would say, "began to mingle and cooperate with his environment." In the course of this process he fell into adventures, some of them, perhaps, unedifying. But it may be told that his silver watch with the braided leather fob was stolen from him the second night out; also that the following week, in a Twenty-ninth Street saloon, he accepted the hospitality of an affable stranger, who had often been in Montana City. His explanation of subsequent events was entirely satisfactory, at least, from the time that he returned to consciousness of them.

"I only had about thirty dollars in my clothes," he told Percival, "but what made me so darned hot, he took my breastpin, too, made out of the first nugget ever found in the Early Bird mine over Silver Bow way.

Gee! when I woke up I couldn't tell where I was. This cop that found me in a hallway, he says I must have been give a dose of Peter. I says, 'All right--I'm here to go against all the games,' I says, 'but pa.s.s me when the Peter comes around again,' I says. And he says Peter was knockout drops. Say, honestly, I didn't know my own name till I had a chanst to look me over. The clothes and my hands looked like I'd seen 'em before, somehow--and then I come to myself."

After this adventure, Uncle Peter would caution him of an evening:

"Now, Billy, don't stay out late. If you ain't been gone through by eleven, just hand what you got on you over to the first man you meet--none of 'em'll ask any questions--and then pike fur home. The later at night it gets in New York the harder it is fur strangers to stay alive. You're all right in Wardner or h.e.l.landgone, Billy, but in this here camp you're jest a tender little bed of pansies by the wayside, and these New Yorkers are terrible careless where they step after dark."

Notwithstanding which, Mr. Brue continued to behave uniformly in a manner to make all judicious persons grieve. His place of supreme delight was the Hightower. Its marble splendours, its myriad lights, the throngs of men and women in evening dress, made for him a scene of unfailing fascination. The evenings when he was invited to sit in the _cafe_ with Uncle Peter and Percival made memories long to be cherished.

He spent such an evening there at the end of their first month in New York. Half a dozen of Percival's friends sat at the table with them from time to time. There had been young Beverly Van Arsdel, who, Percival disclosed, was heir to all the Van Arsdel millions, and no end of a swell. And there was big, handsome, Eddie Arledge, whose father had treated him shabbily. These two young gentlemen spoke freely about the inferiority of many things "on this side"--as they denominated this glorious Land of Freedom--of many things from horses to wine. The country was rapidly becoming, they agreed, no place for a gentleman to live. Eddie Arledge confessed that, from motives of economy, he had been beguiled into purchasing an American claret.

"I fancied, you know," he explained to Uncle Peter, "that it might do for an ordinary luncheon claret, but on my sacred honour, the stuff is villainous. Now you'll agree with me, Mr. Bines, I dare say, that a Bordeaux of even recent vintage is vastly superior to the very best so-called American claret."

Whereupon Beverly Van Arsdel having said, "To be sure--fancy an American Burgundy, now! or a Chablis!" Uncle Peter betrayed the first sign of irritation Percival had detected since his coming.

"Well, you see, young men, we're not much on vintages in Montana.

Whiskey is mostly our drink--whiskey and spring water--and if our whiskey is strong, it's good enough. When we want to test a new barrel, we inject three drops of it into a jack-rabbit, and if he doesn't lick a bull clog in six seconds, we turn down the goods. That's as far's our education has ever gone in vintages."

It sounded like the old Uncle Peter, but he was afterward so good-natured that Percival concluded the irritation could have been but momentary.

CHAPTER XXIX.

Uncle Peter Bines Threatens to Raise Something

Uncle Peter and Billy Brue left the Hightower at midnight. Billy Brue wanted to walk down to their hotel, on the plea that they might see a fight or a fire "or something." He never ceased to feel cheated when he was obliged to ride in New York. But Uncle Peter insisted on the cab.

"Say, Uncle Peter," he said, as they rode down, "I got a good notion to get me one of them first-part suits--like the minstrels wear in the grand first part, you know--only I'd never be able to git on to the track right without a hostler to harness me and see to all the buckles and cinch the straps right. They're mighty fine, though."

Finding Uncle Peter uncommunicative, he mused during the remainder of the ride, envying the careless ease with which Percival and his friends, and even Uncle Peter, wore the prescribed evening regalia of gentlemen, and yearning for the distinguished effect of its black and white elegance upon himself.

They went to their connecting rooms, and Billy Brue regretfully sought his bed, marvelling how free people in a town like New York could ever bring themselves to waste time in sleep. As he dozed off, he could hear the slow, measured tread of Uncle Peter pacing the floor in the next room.

He was awakened by hearing his name called. Uncle Peter stood in a flood of light at the door of his room. He was fully dressed.

"Awake, Billy?"

"Is it gittin'-up time?"

The old man came into the room and lighted a gas-jet. He looked at his watch.

"No; only a quarter to four. I ain't been to bed yet."

Billy Brue sat up and rubbed his eyes.

"Rheumatiz again, Uncle Peter?"

"No; I been thinkin', Billy. How do you like the game?"

He began to pace the floor again from one room to the other.

"What game?'! Billy Brue had encountered a number in New York.

"This whole game--livin' in New York."

Mr. Brue became judicial.

"It's a good game as long as you got money to buy chips. I'd hate like darnation to go broke here. All the pay-claims have been located, I guess."

"I doubt it's bein' a good game any time, Billy. I been actin' as kind of a lookout now fur about forty days and forty nights, and the chances is all in favour of the house. You don't even get half your money on the high card when the splits come."

Billy Brue pondered this sentiment. It was not his own.

"The United States of America is all right, Billy."

This was safe ground.

"Sure!" His mind reverted to the evening just past. "Of course there was a couple of Clarences in high collars there to-night that made out like they was throwin' it down; but they ain't the whole thing, not by a long shot."

"Yes, and that young shrimp that was talkin' about 'vintages' and 'trouserings.'" The old man paused in his walk.

"What _are_ 'trouserings,' Billy?"