Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/121

Rh that led to her dressing-room; and he stood to watch her mount to the first turn of the steps. She climbed slowly, an almost boyish figure, as pretty as a court page in satin doublet and hose, but lifting herself from step to step with a discouraged weariness that reflected itself in a caricature of pity on Sutley's grotesque face. She smiled wanly down at him as she disappeared, and he remained there staring up at nothing until he was pushed aside by a troop of chorus girls.

He returned to his dressing-room to change his costume for another "entry." He was busy with his wardrobe when Burls came in, triumphant to announce: "It 's the goods, Hen. Sashay the girl home t'-night. I got business with th' ol' geezer. She 's put the hog ring in her fair young snoot all right, all right."

They were Hen Sutley and Harry Burls to their friends, but they had been, in the days of their youth, Henrik Sutley and Henry Berlitz—the first the son of a bird-fancier and taxidermist on the Bowery, and the other, as he said, "the heir of a kosher barber" on Canal Street. They had been doing "comic entries" together for thirteen years—beginning with a night at the old Columbia Music Hall when Sutley had given some shrill "vocal imitations" of birds and beasts while Burls had "executed" buck and wing dances and nasalized comic songs; and they were bound now in their partnership by all the years of hardship they had endured, by the prosperity they had achieved, by the