第34章

A block away from the hotel Barney parted from Old Jimmie. For a space Barney thought of his partner. Barney had quick eyes which were quite capable of taking in two things at once; and while he had seen the excited glow his final speech had brought back into Maggie's face, he had also caught that swift look of uncertainty in the lean, cunning face of Old Jimmie: a look of one who is eager to go on, yet sees himself frustrated by his own eagerness. To Barney it was a puzzling, suspicious look.

As Barney made his way toward a harbor of refreshment he wondered about Old Jimmie--not in the manner Larry had wondered about a father bringing his daughter up into crooked ways--but he wondered what kind of a man beneath his shrewd, yielding, placating manner Old Jimmie really was, how far he was to be trusted, whether he was in this game on the level or whether he was playing some very secret hand of his own. Though he had known and worked with Old Jimmie for years, Barney had never been admitted to the inner chambers of the older man's character. He sensed that there were hidden rooms and twisting passages; and of this much he was certain, that Old Jimmie was sly and saturnine.

Well, he would be on guard that Old Jimmie didn't put anything over on your obliging servant, Barney Palmer!

This was the era of legal prohibition, but thus far Barney had not been severely discommoded by the action of the representatives of America's free institutions in Washington, for Barney knew his New York. In an ex-saloon on Sixth Avenue, which nominally sold only the soft drinks permitted by the wise men of the Capital, Barney leaned at his ease upon the bar and remarked: "Give me some of the real stuff, Tim, and forget that eye-dropper the boss bought you last week."

Barney had a drink of the real stuff, and then another drink, in the measuring of neither of which had an eye-dropper been involved.

After that, much heartened, he put two dollars upon the bar and went his way. His course took the dapper Barney into three of the gayest restaurants in the Times Square section; and in these Barney paused long enough to speak to a few after-theater supper-parties. For this was the hour when Barney paid his social calls; he was very strict with himself upon this point. Barney was really by way of being a rising figure in this particular circle of New York society composed of people who had or believed they had an interest in the theater, of expensively gowned women the foreground of whose lives was most attractive, but whose background was perhaps wisely kept out of the picture, and of moneyed young men who gloried in the idea that they were living the life. These social calls from gay table to gay table, at all of which Barney was welcome--for here Barney showed only his most attractive surfaces, his most brilliant facets--were in truth a very important part of Barney's business.

A little later, alone at a corner table in a quieter restaurant, Barney was eating his supper and making an inventory of his prospects.

He was in a very exultant mood. The whiskey he had drunk had given broad wings to his self-satisfaction; and what he was now sipping from his tea-cup--it was not tea, for Barney was on the proper terms with his waiter here--this draught from his tea-cup tipped these broad wings at a yet more soaring angle.

Yes, he had certainly put it over so far. And Maggie would certainly prove a winner. Those fair women he had chatted with as he had moved from table to table, why, they'd be less than dirt compared to Maggie when Maggie was rigged out and readied up and the stage was set. And it had been he, Barney Palmer, who had been the first to discover Maggie's latent possibilities!