Portsmouth. But Old Jack wasn’t working for the furniture and glass factories that night. He sat down quiet and sang “Ramble” in a half-hearted way. His feelings had been hurt, so the twenty told me, because his offer to the church had been refused.
But the wassail went on; and Brady himself couldn’t have hammered the thirst mob into a better imitation of the real penchant for the stuff that you screw out of a bottle with a napkin.
Old Jack paid the twenty above me for a round, leaving me on the outside of his roll. He laid the roll on the table and sent for the proprietor.
“Mike,” says he, “here’s money that the good people have refused. Will it buy of your wares in the name of the devil? They say it’s tainted.”
“I will,” says Mike, “and I’ll put it in the drawer next to the bills that was paid to the parson’s daughter for kisses at the church fair to build a new parsonage for the parson’s daughter to live in.”
At 1 o’clock when the hod-carriers were making ready to close up the front and keep the inside open, a woman slips in the door of the restaurant and comes up to Old Jack’s table. You’ve seen the kind—black shawl, creepy hair, ragged skirt, white face, eyes a cross between Gabriel’s and a sick kitten’s—the kind of woman that’s always on the lookout for an automobile or the mendicancy squad—and she stands there without a word and looks at the money.
[246]
