"Keep that a while for me, mister," he said, chewing at the end of a
virulent claybank cigar. "I'll be back after I knock around a spell. And
keep your eye on it, for there's $950 inside of it, though maybe you
wouldn't think so to look at me."

Somewhere outside a phonograph struck up a band piece, and Haylocks was
off for it, his coat-tail buttons flopping in the middle of his back.

"Divvy, Mike," said the men hanging upon the bar, winking openly at one
another.

"Honest, now," said the bartender, kicking the valise to one side. "You
don't think I'd fall to that, do you? Anybody can see he ain't no jay.
One of McAdoo's come-on squad, I guess. He's a shine if he made himself
up. There ain't no parts of the country now where they dress like that
since they run rural free delivery to Providence, Rhode Island. If he's
got nine-fifty in that valise it's a ninety-eight cent Waterbury that's
stopped at ten minutes to ten."

When Haylocks had exhausted the resources of Mr. Edison to amuse he
returned for his valise. And then down Broadway he gallivanted, culling
the sights with his eager blue eyes. But still and evermore Broadway
rejected him with curt glances and sardonic smiles. He was the oldest of
the "gags" that the city must endure. He was so flagrantly impossible,
so ultra rustic, so exaggerated beyond the most freakish products of the
barnyard, the hayfield and the vaudeville stage, that he excited only
weariness and suspicion. And the wisp of hay in his hair was so genuine,
so fresh and redolent of the meadows, so clamorously rural that even a
shell-game man would have put up his peas and folded his table at the