Page:Roads of Destiny (1909).djvu/220

 inspectors out the door on the toe of my shoe, and sat down to cool off on my block of disreputable glass.

“And, as I live without oats, while I sat there, homesick for money and without a cent to my ambition, there came on the breeze the most beautiful smell my nose had entered for a year. God knows where it came from in that backyard of a country—it was a bouquet of soaked lemon peel, cigar stumps, and stale beer—exactly the smell of Goldbrick Charley’s place on Fourteenth Street where I used to play pinochle of afternoons with the third-rate actors. And that smell drove my troubles through me and clinched ’em at the back. I began to long for my country and feel sentiments about it; and I said words about Salvador that you would n’t think could come legitimate out of an ice factory.

“And while I was sitting there, down through the blazing sunshine in his clean, white clothes comes Maximilian Jones, an American interested in rubber and rosewood.

“‘Great carrambos!’ says I, when he stepped in, for I was in a bad temper, ‘did n’t I have catastrophes enough? I know what you want. You want to tell me that story again about Johnny Ammiger and the widow on the train. You’ve told it nine times already this month.’

“‘It must be the heat,’ says Jones, stopping in the door, amazed. ‘Poor Billy. He’s got bugs. Sitting on ice, and calling his best friends pseudonyms. Hi!—muchacho!’ Jones called my force of employees, who was sitting in the sun, playing with his toes, and told him to put on his trousers and run for the doctor.