the freshly painted front and glistening plate glass windows to this immaculately kept clerks' dressing room in the rear was neat, ultra-modern and expensive. Smythe catered to a high class clientele and kept the atmosphere accordingly. The fountain was marble, huge and shiny. Everything from ice water to nearly a full course dinner was served. The highly polished floors were filled with an ocean of gay tables and comfortable chairs. The place was open twenty-four hours a day.
After a rushing trade during the day and late into the evening, Smythe's was again filled after eleven o'clock by an after-theatre crowd that had made it a fad. Even at four o'clock in the morning you would find pleasure-seekers in evening gowns and dress suits consuming huge triple-decked sandwiches, costing a dollar apiece, and selections from the literally scores of different concoctions that a deft-handed squad of "soda dispensers" poured from the highly polished line of faucets. So many faucets that a plumber would go mad looking at them.
It was behind this soda' fountain de luxe that Speedy Swift, arrayed like the other busy members of Smythe's drink staff, now stepped. Smythe himself, watching him from behind the cashier's bars, inwardly quaked. This Swift boy was such a rattle-brain!
"Hello, Speedy. Joined the juice army at last?" a clerk asked as Speedy squeezed behind him, almost upsetting the ice-cream-filled sundae glass into which the questioner was skillfully spilling a gooey
