Page:The Gentle Grafter (1908).djvu/184

 seventy-five cents and calling it a Business Men’s Lunch.

“Now I can go into a square, honest business, and give all them queer jobs the shake. I’m going to Cincinnati and start a palm reading and clairvoyant joint. As Madame Saramaloi, the Egyptian Sorceress, I shall give everybody a dollar’s worth of good honest prognostication. Good-by, boys. Take my advice and go into some decent fake. Get friendly with the police and newspapers and you’ll be all right.”

So then we all shook hands, and Miss Malloy left us. Me and Buck also rose up and sauntered off a few hundred miles; for we didn’t care to be around when them marriage certificates fell due.

With about $4,000 between us we hit that bumptious little town off the New Jersey coast they call New York.

If there ever was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson. Cosmopolitan they, call it. You bet. So’s a piece of fly-paper. You listen close when they’re buzzing and trying to pull their feet out of the sticky stuff. “Little old New York’s good enough for us”—that’s what they sing.

There’s enough Reubs walk down Broadway in one hour to buy up a week’s output of the factory in Augusta, Maine, that makes Knaughty Knovelties 172