and fashionably clothed, many beautiful and of refined appearance—had been seated at little marble-topped tables. When the police burst open the door they shrieked and ran here and there like gayly plumed birds that had been disturbed in a tropical grove. Some became hysterical; one or two fainted; several knelt at the feet of the officers and besought them for mercy on account of their families and social position.
A man who had been seated behind a desk had seized a roll of currency as large as the ankle of a Paradise Roof Gardens chorus girl and jumped out of the window. Half a dozen attendants huddled at one end of the room, breathless from fear.
Upon the tables remained the damning and incontrovertible evidences of the guilt of the habituées of that sinister room—dish after dish heaped high with ice cream, and surrounded by stacks of empty ones, scraped to the last spoonful.
“Ladies,” said the captain to his weeping circle of prisoners, “I’ll not hold any of yez. Some of yez I recognize as having fine houses and good standing in the community, with hard-working husbands and childer at home. But I’ll read yea bit of a lecture before ye go. In the next room there’s a 20-to-1 shot just dropped in under the wire three lengths ahead of the field. Is this the way ye waste your husbands’ money instead of helping earn it? Home wid yez! The lid’s on the ice-cream freezer in this precinct.”
Claude Turpin’s wife was among the patrons of the
