With a drowsy uncertainty as to whether he had been dozing for hours or
only for a very few minutes Mr. Leary opened his eyes and sat up. The
car was halted slantwise against a curbing; the chauffeur was jammed
down again into a heap. Mr. Leary stepped nimbly forth upon the
pavement, feeling in his overcoat pocket for the fare; and then he
realised he was not in West Eighty-fifth Street at all; he was not in
any street that he remembered ever having seen before in the course of
his life. Offhand, though, he guessed he was somewhere in that mystic
maze of brick and mortar known as Old Greenwich Village; and, for a
further guess, in that particular part of it where business during these
last few years had been steadily encroaching upon the ancient residences
of long departed Knickerbocker families.
The street in which he stood, for a wonder in this part of town, ran a
fairly straight course. At its western foot he could make out through
the drifting flakes where a squat structure suggestive of a North River
freight dock interrupted the sky line. In his immediate vicinity the
street was lined with tall bleak fronts of jobbing houses, all dark and
all shuttered. Looking the other way, which would be eastward, he could
make out where these wholesale establishments tailed off, to be
succeeded by the lower shapes of venerable dwellings adorned with the
dormered windows and the hip roofs which distinguished a bygone
architectural period. Some distance off in this latter direction the
vista between the buildings was cut across by the straddle-bug structure
of one of the Elevated roads. All this Mr. Leary comprehended in a quick
glance about him, and then he turned on the culprit cabman with rage in
his heart.
"See here, you!" he snapped crossly, jerking the other by the shoulder.
"What do you mean by bringing me away off here! This isn't where I
wanted to go. Oh, wake up, you!"
Under his vigorous shaking the driver slid over sideways until he
threatened to decant himself out upon Mr. Leary. His cap falling off
exposed the blank face of one who for the time being has gone dead to
the world and to all its carking cares, and the only response he offered
for his mishandling was a deep and sincere snore. The man was hopelessly
intoxicated; there was no question about it. More to relieve his own
deep chagrin than for any logical reason Mr. Leary shook him again; the
net results were a protesting semiconscious gargle and a further
careening slant of the sleeper's form.
Well, there was nothing else to do but walk. He must make his way afoot
until he came to Sixth Avenue or on to Fifth, upon the chance of finding
in one of these two thoroughfares a ranging nighthawk cab. As a last
resort he could take the Subway or the L north. This contingency,
though, Mr. Leary considered with feelings akin to actual repugnance. He
dreaded the prospect of ribald and derisive comments from chance fellow
travellers upon a public transportation line. For you should know that
though Mr. Leary's outer garbing was in the main conventional there were
strikingly incongruous features of it too.
From his neck to his knees he correctly presented the aspect of a
gentleman returning late from social diversions, caparisoned in a
handsome fur-faced, fur-lined top coat. But his knees were entirely
bare; so, too, were his legs down to about midway of the calves, where
there ensued, as it were, a pair of white silk socks, encircled by pink
garters with large and ornate pink ribbon bows upon them. His feet were
bestowed in low slippers with narrow buttoned straps crossing the
insteps. It was Miss Skiff, with her instinct for the verities, who had
insisted upon bows for the garters and straps for the slippers, these
being what she had called finishing touches. Likewise it was due to that
young lady's painstaking desire for appropriateness and completeness of
detail that Mr. Leary at this moment wore upon his head a very
wide-brimmed, very floppy straw hat with two quaint pink-ribbon
streamers floating jauntily down between his shoulders at the back.
For reasons which in view of this sartorial description should be
obvious, Mr. Leary hugged closely up to the abutting house fronts when
he left behind him the marooned taxi with its comatose driver asleep
upon it, like one lone castaway upon a small island in a sea of
emptiness, and set his face eastward. Such was the warmth of his
annoyance he barely felt the chill striking upon his exposed nether
limbs or took note of the big snowflakes melting damply upon his thinly
protected ankles. Then, too, almost immediately something befell which
upset him still more.
He came to where a wooden marquee, projecting over the entrance to a
shipping room, made a black strip along the feebly lighted pavement. As
he entered the patch of darkness the shape of a man materialised out of
the void and barred his way, and in that same fraction of a second
something shiny and hard was thrust against Mr. Leary's daunted bosom,
and in a low forceful rumble a voice commanded him as follows: "Put up
your mitts--and keep 'em up!"
Matching the action of his hands everything in Mr. Leary seemed to
start skyward simultaneously. His hair on his scalp straightened, his
breath came up from his lungs in a gasp, his heart lodged in his throat,
and his blood quit his feet, leaving them practically devoid of
circulation and ascended and drummed in his temples. He had a horrid,
emptied feeling in his diaphragm, too, as though the organs customarily
resident there had caught the contagion of the example and gone north.
"That's nice," spake the fearsome stranger. "Now stay jest the way you
are and don't make no peep or I'll have to plug you wit' this here gat."
[Illustration: "THAT'S NICE," SPAKE THE FEARSOME STRANGER. "NOW STAY
JEST THE WAY YOU ARE AND DON'T MAKE NO PEEP OR I'LL HAVE TO PLUG YOU
WIT' THIS HERE GAT"]
His right hand maintained the sinister pressure of the weapon against
the victim's deflated chest, while his left dexterously explored the
side pockets of Mr. Leary's overcoat. Then the same left hand jerked the
frogged fastenings of the garment asunder and went pawing swiftly over
Mr. Leary's quivering person, seeking the pockets which would have been
there had Mr. Leary been wearing garments bearing the regulation and
ordained number of pockets. But the exploring fingers merely slid along
a smooth and unbroken frontal surface.
"Wot t'ell? Wot t'ell?" muttered the footpad in bewilderment. "Say,
where're you got yore leather and yore kittle hid? Speak up quick!"
"I'm--I'm--not carrying a watch or a purse to-night," quavered Mr.
Leary. "These--these clothes I happen to be wearing are not made with
places in them for a watch or anything. And you've already taken what
money I had--it was all in my overcoat pocket."
"Yep; a pinch of chicken feed and wot felt like about four one-bone
bills." The highwayman's accent was both ominous and contemptuous. "Say,
wotcher mean drillin' round dis town in some kinder funny riggin'
wit'out no plunder on you? I gotta right to belt you one acrost the
bean."
"I'd rather you didn't do that," protested Mr. Leary in all seriousness.
"If--if you'd only give me your address I could send you some money in
the morning to pay you for your trouble----"
"Cut out de kiddin'," broke in the disgusted marauder. His tone changed
slightly for the better. "Say, near as I kin tell by feelin' it, dat
ain't such a bum benny you're sportin'. I'll jest take dat along wit'
me. Letcher arms down easy and hold 'em straight out from yore sides
while I gits it offen you. And no funny business!"
"Oh, please, please, don't take my overcoat," implored Mr. Leary,
plunged by these words into a deeper panic. "Anything but that!
I--you--you really mustn't leave me without my overcoat."
"Wot else is dere to take?"
Even as he uttered the scornful question the thief had wrested the
garment from Mr. Leary's helpless form and was backing away into the
darkness.
Out of impenetrable gloom came his farewell warning: "Stay right where
you are for fi' minutes wit'out movin' or makin' a yelp. If you wiggle
before de time is up I gotta pal right yere watchin' you, and he'll sure
plug you. He ain't no easy-goin' guy like wot I am. You're gittin' off
lucky it's me stuck you up, stidder him."
With these words he was gone--gone with Mr. Leary's overcoat, with Mr.
Leary's last cent, with his latchkey, with his cardcase, with all by
which Mr. Leary might hope to identify himself before a wary and
incredulous world for what he was. He was gone, leaving there in the
protecting ledge of shadow the straw-hatted, socked-and-slippered,
leg-gartered figure of a plump being, clad otherwise in a single
vestment which began at the line of a becomingly low neckband and
terminated in blousy outbulging bifurcations just above the naked knees.
Light stealing into this obscured and sheltered spot would have revealed
that this garment was, as to texture, a heavy, silklike, sheeny,
material; and as to colour a vivid and compelling pink--the exact colour
of a slice of well-ripened watermelon; also that its sleeves ended
elbow-high in an effect of broad turned-back cuffs; finally, that adown
its owner's back it was snugly and adequately secured by means of a
close-set succession of very large, very shiny white pearl buttons; the
whole constituting an enlarged but exceedingly accurate copy of what,
descriptively, is known to the manufactured-garment trade as a one-piece
suit of child's rompers, self-trimmed, fastening behind; suitable for
nursery, playground and seashore, especially recommended as summer wear
for the little ones; to be had in all sizes; prices such-and-such.
Within a space of some six or seven minutes this precisely was what the
nearest street lamp did reveal unto itself as its downward-slanting
beams fell upon a furtive, fugitive shape, suggestive in that deficient
subradiance of a vastly overgrown forked parsnip, miraculously endowed
with powers of locomotion and bound for somewhere in a hurry; excepting
of course no forked parsnip, however remarkable in other respects, would
be wearing a floppy straw hat in a snowstorm; nor is it likely it would
be adorned lengthwise in its rear with a highly decorative design of
broad, smooth, polished disks which, even in that poor illumination,
gleamed and twinkled and wiggled snakily in and out of alignment, in
accord with the movements of their wearer's spinal column.
But the reader and I, better informed than any lamp post could be as to
the prior sequence of events, would know at a glance it was no parsnip
we beheld, but Mr. Algernon Leary, now suddenly enveloped, through no
fault of his own, in one of the most overpowering predicaments
conceivable to involve a rising lawyer and a member of at least two good
clubs; and had we but been there to watch him, knowing, as we would
know, the developments leading up to this present situation, we might
have guessed what was the truth: That Mr. Leary was hot bent upon
retreating to the only imaginable refuge left to him at this
juncture--to wit, the interior of the stranded taxicab which he had
abandoned but a short time previously.