What could he do to make New York notice him?
Peter Pape pondered the question as Polkadot dodged through Columbus Circle’s whirligig of traffic—a feat which took all the skill acquired in cutting out steers from range round-ups. The disinterested source of the invited advice recommended its substance. Before he had walked his mount a block down The Way he had decided to follow it. Its first half—the acquirement of the outer habiliments of sophistication—easily could be acted upon through the free coinage of gold. The second half——
How make the big town wish to be friends with him?
To himself he admitted the reason back of his confidence to the friendly Medonis of the Mounted. The very seriousness of his score-squaring mission to the “cold” burg, made him ambitious to be taken for that “gay guy” who must be haberdashed into his part—a Western gold-fish come East to flap his fins in the Big Puddle. He mustn’t forget that he now was a wealthy man, with no obligations except one voluntary vow and that to himself; that he still was young enough to feel as gay as any costume could make him look; that so far in life he had proved strong enough to do whatever he had decided to do.
So what—what?
The dusk of even this daylight-saving hour was thickening. Pape urged his mount into the rack of Times Cañon. There, toward the convergence of each street, clumps of vehicles spun forward, only to stop and lose all they had gained at the command of traffic signals. Variously bound surface cars clattered through; clanged with self-importance; puffed with passengers. Pedestrians darted this way, often, to turn and dart back that, in what seemed a limb-regardless passion to get home in the fewest possible seconds. Like flour upon the other ingredients in some great mixing bowl, Evening was sifted over all, then stirred into a conglomerate, working mass—dough to be baked by dinner time.
The sensation rather than sight of an overhead flash caused the splotched horse to throw back his head with a snort and the rider to hang his gaze on high. Unexpectedly, as happen most miracles, a blaze lit the ungeometrical square and searched the lowering clouds—millions of watts bottled in bulbs—a fan-fare of nitrogen dyed red, yellow, blue, green and diamond-white—incalculable volts of power wired into legible array.
The gray eyes of the Westerner upheld, fascinated, to this sight of Broadway’s electric display, to him the marvel of the marvels of to-day. Always was his pulse stirred by it and his imagination set apace. As, when a child, he had pored over the lurid illustrations of his fairy-book, so now nightly he pored over this real-life picture. For him it lit a bridle path into byways of the unknown—into the highway of the impossible.
A moment before a problem had darkened his brow. Now the darkness was displaced by light. Over the suggested answer to the unanswerable he exulted. What was difficulty of any sort except illusion? His Fatness the Quail—that is to say, the park sparrow cop—to-day had accused him of believing too devoutly in signs. Yet what were signs for if not to point the way?
His chuckles evoked the curiosity of Polkadot. Back toward him waggled one white-tipped, enquiring ear. Willingly, as at all such requests of his quadruped pal, he leaned to oblige.
“Why not?” He laughed aloud. “I ask you that, old hoss—why not?”
CHAPTER III—THE SKY SIGN
Peter Pape sighed a chestful of relief. They pulled on like ordinary pants. But of course that was what they were expected to do. Weren’t they direct from the work room of the most expensive tailor he could locate in Gotham? Even so, he had inserted his silk-socked toes into their twin tunnels with some foreboding. They were different, these long, straight leg-sheaths of his first full-dress suit.
There. The secret is out. Our East-exiled Westerner had followed advice. Praying that news of his lapse never would wing back to Hellroaring, he had submitted himself to measurements for a claw-hammer, known chiefly by rumor on the range as a “swallow-tail.” The result had been delivered late that afternoon, one week since the signs of Broadway had directed him aright. The suit had seemed in full possession of the dressing room of his hotel suite when he had returned from his usual park-path sprint on Polkadot, an event to-day distinguished by the whipcord riding breeches of approved balloon cut which had displaced his goat-skin chaps. Somehow it helped to fill an apartment which hitherto had felt rather empty; with its air of sophistication suggested the next move in the rôle for which it was the costume de luxe.
The trousers conquered in combat, Pape essayed to don the stiff-bosomed shirt which, according to the diagram pinned on the wall picturing a conventional gentleman ready for an evening out, must encase his chest. His chief conclusion, after several preparatory moments, was that the hiring of a valet was not adequate cause for a lynching with the first handy rope. No. There were arguments pro valet which should stay the hand of any one who ever had essayed to enter the costume de luxe of said conventional gentleman. What those patent plungers of his real pearl studs couldn’t and didn’t do! With the contrariness of as many mavericks, they preferred to puncture new holes in the immaculate linen, rather than enter the eyelets of the shirt-maker’s provision.
But we won’t go into the matter. Other writers have done it so often and so soulfully. The one best thing that may be remarked about such trials of the spirit is that they have an end as well as a beginning. At last and without totally wrecking the work of the launderer, Why-Not Pape’s famed will to win won. The shirt was harnessed; hooked-up; coupled.
Now came the test of tests for his patience and persistence—for his tongue and other such equipment of the genus human for the exercise of self-control. This was not trial by fire, although the flames of suppression singed him, but by choking. Again he thought tolerantly of valets; might have asked even the loan of m’lady’s maid had he been acquainted personally with any of his fair neighbors.
“They’d ought to sell block and tackle with every box of ’em,” he assured the ripe-tomato-colored cartoon of himself published in the dresser mirror.
Smoothing out certain of his facial distortions, lest they become muscularly rooted, to the ruin of his none too comely visage, he retrieved a wandering son-of-a-button from beneath the radiator and returned to the fray with a fresh strip of four-ply. When thrice he had threatened out loud to tie on a bandanna and let it go at that, by some slip or trick of his fingers he accomplished the impossible. His neck protruded proudly from his first stiff collar since the Sunday dress-ups of Lord Fauntleroy days—before the mother and father of faint but fond memory had gone, literally and figuratively “West,” leaving their orphan to work the world “on his own.”
Around the collar the chart entitled, “Proper Dress for Gents at All Hours,” dictated that he tie a narrow, white silk tie. Anticipating difficulties here, he had ordered a dozen. And he needed most of them; tried out one knot after another of his extensive repertoire; at last, by throwing a modified diamond hitch, accomplished an effect which gratified him, although probably no dress-tie had been treated quite that way before.
His chortle of relief that he was at ordeal’s end proved to be premature. Peering coldly and pointedly at him from across the room, their twin rows of pop-eyes perpendicularly placed, stood his patent leathers. Clear through his arches he already had felt their maliciousness and, as the worst of his trials, had left them to the last. All too late he recalled the fact that brand new buttoned shoes only meet across insteps and ankles by suasion of a hook, even as range boots yield most readily to jacks. Prolific as had been the growth of his toilet articles since a week ago, that small instrument of torture was not yet a fruit thereof. Further delay ensued before response to the order which he telephoned the desk for “one shoe-hooker—quick.”
Peter Stansbury Pape had emerged from the West of his upgrowing and self-making with two projects in view—one grave, one much less so. The grave, when its time came, would involve a set-to in the street called Wall with a certain earnest little group of shearers who, seeming to take him for a woolly lamb, almost