Us four in the second cab was now highly cynical about Ben's
New Yorker. The general feeling was that sooner or later he would sink
the ship.
Then we reach the dive he has picked out; a very dismal dive with a room
back of the bar that had a few tables and a piano in it and a
sweet-singing waiter. He was singing a song about home and mother, that
in mem-o-ree he seemed to see, when we got to our table. A very gloomy
and respectable haunt of vice it was, indeed. There was about a dozen
male and female creatures of the underworld present sadly enjoying this
here ballad and scowling at us for talking when we come in.
Jake Berger ordered, though finding you couldn't get stingers here and
having to take two miner's inches of red whiskey, and the New Yorker
begun to warn us in low tones that we was surrounded by danger on every
hand--that we'd better pour our drink on the floor because it would be
drugged, after which we would be robbed if not murdered and thrown out
into the alley where we would then be arrested by grafting policemen.
Even Ben was shocked by this warning. He asks the New Yorker again if he
is sure he was born in the old town, and the lad says honest he was and
has been living right here all these years in the same house he was born
in.
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