“‘Now,’ says I to Solly, with a wink at myself, ‘here’s the first dinner-station we’ve struck where we can get a real good plate of beans.’ And while he was up in his room trying to draw water out of the gas-pipe, I got one finger in the buttonhole of the head waiter’s Tuxedo, drew him apart, inserted a two-dollar bill, and closed him up again.
“‘Frankoyse,’ says I, ‘I have a pal here for dinner that’s been subsisting for years on cereals and short stogies. You see the chef and order a dinner for us such as you serve to Dave Francis and the general passenger agent of the Iron Mountain when they eat here. We’ve got more than Bernhardt’s tent full of money; and we want the nose-bags crammed with all the Chief Deveries de cuisine. Object is no expense. Now, show us.’
“At six o’clock me and Solly sat down to dinner. Spread! There’s nothing been seen like it since the Cambon snack. It was all served at once. The chef called it dinnay a la poker. It’s a famous thing among the gormands of the West. The dinner comes in threes of a kind. There was guinea-fowls, guinea-pigs, and Guinness’s stout; roast veal, mock turtle soup, and chicken pate; shad-roe, caviar, and tapioca; canvas-back duck, canvas-back ham, and cottontail rabbit; Philadelphia capon, fried snails, and sloe-gin — and so on, in threes. The idea was that you eat nearly all you can of them, and then the waiter takes away the discard and gives you pears to fill on.
“I was sure Solly would be tickled to death with these hands, after the bobtail flushes he’d been eating on the ranch; and I was a little anxious that he should, for I didn’t remember his having honoured my efforts with a smile since we left Atascosa City.
“We were in the main dining-room, and there was a fine-dressed crowd there, all talking loud and enjoyable about the two St. Louis topics, the water supply and the colour line. They mix the two subjects so fast that strangers often think they are discussing watercolours; and that has given the old town something of a rep as an art centre. And over in the corner was a fine brass band playing; and now, thinks I, Solly will become conscious of the spiritual oats of life nourishing and exhilarating his system. But nong, mong frang.
“He gazed across the table at me. There was four square yards of it, looking like the path of a cyclone that has wandered through a stock-yard, a poultry-farm, a vegetable-garden, and an Irish linen mill. Solly gets up and comes around to me.
“‘Luke,’ says he, ‘I’m pretty hungry after our ride. I thought you said they had some beans here. I’m going out and get something I can eat. You can stay and monkey with this artificial layout of grub if you want to.’
“‘Wait a minute,’ says I.
“I called the waiter, and slapped ‘S. Mills’ on the back of the check for thirteen dollars and fifty cents.
“‘What do you mean,’ says I, ‘by serving gentlemen with a lot of truck only suitable for deck-hands on a Mississippi steamboat? We’re going out to get something decent to eat.’
“I walked up the street with the unhappy plainsman. He saw a saddle-shop open, and some of the sadness faded from his eyes. We went in, and he ordered and paid for two more saddles — one with a solid silver horn and nails and ornaments and a six-inch border of rhinestones and imitation rubies around the flaps. The other one had to have a gold-mounted horn, quadruple-plated stirrups, and the leather inlaid with silver beadwork wherever it would stand it. Eleven hundred dollars the two cost him.
“Then he goes out and heads toward the river, following his nose. In a little side street, where there was no street and no sidewalks and no houses, he finds what he is looking for. We go into a shanty and sit on high stools among stevedores and boatmen, and eat beans with tin spoons. Yes, sir, beans — beans boiled with salt pork.
“‘I kind of thought we’d strike some over this way,’ says Solly.
“‘Delightful,’ says I, ‘That stylish hotel grub may appeal to some; but for me, give me the husky /table d’goat.’
“When we had succumbed to the beans I leads him out of the tarpaulin-steam under a lamp post and pulls out a daily paper with the amusement column folded out.
“‘But now, what ho for a merry round of pleasure,’ says I. ‘Here’s one of Hall Caine’s shows, and a stock-yard company in “Hamlet,” and skating at the Hollowhorn Rink, and Sarah Bernhardt, and the Shapely Syrens Burlesque Company. I should think, now, that the Shapely—’
“But what does this healthy, wealthy, and wise man do but reach his arms up to the second-story windows and gape noisily.
“‘Reckon I’ll be going to bed,’ says he; ‘it’s about my time. St. Louis is a kind of quiet place, ain’t it?’
“‘Oh, yes,’ says I; ‘ever since the railroads ran in here the town’s been practically ruined. And the building-and-loan associations and the fair have about killed it. Guess we might as well go to bed. Wait till you see Chicago, though. Shall we get tickets for the Big Breeze tomorrow?’
“‘Mought as well,’ says Solly. ‘I reckon all these towns are about alike.’
“Well, maybe the wise cicerone and personal conductor didn’t fall hard in Chicago! Loolooville-on-the-Lake is supposed to have one or two things in it calculated to keep the rural visitor awake after the curfew rings. But not for the grass-fed man of the pampas! I tried him with theatres, rides in automobiles, sails on the lake, champagne suppers, and all those little inventions that hold the simple life in check; but in vain. Solly grew sadder day by day. And I got fearful about my salary, and knew I must play my trump card. So I mentioned New York to him, and informed him that these Western towns were no more than gateways to the great walled city of the whirling dervishes.
“After I bought the tickets I missed Solly. I knew his habits by then; so in a couple of hours I found him in a saddle-shop. They had some new ideas there in the way of trees and girths that had strayed down from the Canadian mounted police; and Solly was so interested that he almost looked reconciled to live. He invested about nine hundred dollars in there.
“At the depot I telegraphed a cigar-store man I knew in New York to meet me at the Twenty-third Street ferry with a list of all the saddle-stores in the city. I wanted to know where to look for Solly when he got lost.
“Now I’ll tell you what happened in New York. I says to myself: ‘Friend Heherezade, you want to get busy and make Bagdad look pretty to the sad sultan of the sour countenance, or it’ll be the bowstring for yours.’ But I never had any doubt I could do it.
“I began with him like you’d feed a starving man. I showed him the horse-cars on Broadway and the Staten Island ferryboats. And then I piled up the sensations on him, but always keeping a lot of warmer ones up my sleeve.
“At the end of the third day he looked like a composite picture of five thousand orphans too late to catch a picnic steamboat, and I was wilting down a collar every two hours wondering how I could please him and whether I was going to get my thou. He went to sleep looking at the Brooklyn Bridge; he disregarded the skyscrapers above the third story; it took three ushers to wake him up at the liveliest vaudeville in town.
“Once I thought I had him. I nailed a pair of cuffs on him one morning before he was awake; and I dragged him that evening to the palm-cage of one of the biggest hotels in the city — to see the Johnnies and the Alice-sit-by-the-hours. They were out in numerous quantities, with the fat of the land showing in their clothes. While we were looking them over, Solly divested himself of a fearful, rusty kind of laugh — like moving a folding bed with one roller broken. It was his first in two weeks, and it gave me hope.
“‘Right you are,’ says I. ‘They’re a funny lot of postcards, aren’t they?’
“‘Oh, I wasn’t thinking of them dudes