Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/295

Rh center of the room were punching machines to tempt the Bowery's strong right arm, blowing machines for the lungs, lifting machines for the back, grip machines for the hands, automatic phonographs, weighing machines, and mutascopes—all waiting in vain for the unwary penny. The owners of the pennies evidently knew by heart the automatic record of their physical prowess. They walked up and down the rows of machines listlessly, with the blasé air of the true Boweryite when he is trying to be amused—that air of wandering about in the vague hope of arriving somewhere else, with the certain knowledge that he will find there nothing new.

The Professor stood upon a platform watching them. Redney watched the Professor.

He was the floor-manager, the lecturer, the announcer, the general "spieler" of the Musée—a black little man in a black little suit of evening clothes that looked as old and rusty as he. He wore them always, and his manner became them always, for he had a dignified, high manner of public ease. He had dyed his mustache—a mustache that writhed up on each side of an overhanging nose as if it felt pinched uncomfortably between the nose and the lip. He had dyed the greasy black strings of hair that were combed across his bald top. He had dyed his rising eyebrows. (He was sandy Scotch by nature and his name was MacFinn.) But every one who knew him understood that he dyed for professional reasons, and not because he wished to disguise his evident age; he had too much tolerant