'Come along,' said I to Charlie. 'That's our exit cue.'
And we walked off the floor amidst applause.
'Well,' says Charlie, taking out his handkerchief and attending to his
brow, which was like the village blacksmith's, 'we didn't do so bad,
did we? We didn't do so bad, I guess! We--'
And he looked up at the balcony, expecting to see the dear little wife,
draped over the rail, worshipping him; when, just as his eye is moving
up, it gets caught by the sight of her a whole heap lower down than he
had expected--on the floor, in fact.
She wasn't doing much in the worshipping line just at that moment. She
was too busy.
It was a regular triumphal progress for the kid. She and her partner
were doing one or two rounds now for exhibition purposes, like the
winning couple always do at Geisenheimer's, and the room was fairly
rising at them. You'd have thought from the way they were clapping that
they had been betting all their spare cash on her.
Charlie gets her well focused, then he lets his jaw drop, till he
pretty near bumped it against the floor.
'But--but--but--' he begins.
'I know,' I said. 'It begins to look as if she could dance well enough
for the city after all. It begins to look as if she had sort of put one
over on somebody, don't it? It begins to look as if it were a pity you
didn't think of dancing with her yourself.'
'I--I--I--'
'You come along and have a nice cold drink,' I said, 'and you'll soon
pick up.'
He tottered after me to a table, looking as if he had been hit by a
street-car. He had got his.
I was so busy looking after Charlie, flapping the towel and working on
him with the oxygen, that, if you'll believe me, it wasn't for quite a
time that I thought of glancing around to see how the thing had struck
Izzy Baermann.
If you can imagine a fond father whose only son has hit him with a
brick, jumped on his stomach, and then gone off with all his money, you
have a pretty good notion of how poor old Izzy looked. He was staring
at me across the room, and talking to himself and jerking his hands
about. Whether he thought he was talking to me, or whether he was
rehearsing the scene where he broke it to the boss that a mere stranger
had got away with his Love-r-ly Silver Cup, I don't know. Whichever it
was, he was being mighty eloquent.
I gave him a nod, as much as to say that it would all come right in the
future, and then I turned to Charlie again. He was beginning to pick
up.
'She won the cup!' he said in a dazed voice, looking at me as if I
could do something about it.
'You bet she did!'
'But--well, what do you know about that?'
I saw that the moment had come to put it straight to him. 'I'll tell
you what I know about it,' I said. 'If you take my advice, you'll hustle
that kid straight back to Ashley--or wherever it is that you said you
poison the natives by making up the wrong prescriptions--before she
gets New York into her system. When I was talking to her upstairs, she
was telling me about a fellow in her village who got it in the neck
just the same as you're apt to do.'