customers. If I don't click off a fortune in my first twelve months in this back yard I'm willing to admit I've got a personality like a handful of stewed prunes. Let me shove you up there for a couple of weeks and I'll show you the way to handle an up-to-date health factory. You'll be surprised!”
“I've read of Wellington in histories,” I said, “but never in geographies. Just about where is it hidden?”
Ottie admired the latest trick in light-blue shirts and collars in an opposite mirror and curled a lip.
“Don't you know nothing? I've got the best location in the world—if you don't count Cuba. Wellington is convenient to White Plains, Albany, Staten Island and Lake Erie. It might be farther away from Crimes Square and nearer than it is. But you can bet your sour life it's planted just right for me. It's on the main road and I'll have the dollar boys dropping in to get improved if I have to go out and trap them with nets. Wait and see.”
Blithely pivoting the conversation around, he went on to tell me all about how quickly he expected to be entertaining the upper Fifth Avenue clique and a few other millionaires listed in both the telephone and the “Blue” books.
According to Scandrel the big grift came in the weekly rent handed over by those clients who were suffering from too much Wall Street, a deep friendship with bootleggers and an overabundance of Broadway. From the gab I gathered Ottie expected to rent his Indian clubs out at a dollar fifty a swing and the other instruments to increase the muscles and decrease the bank balance at rates that were equally as usurious. To diminish a long story, his patter was of such interest that when he turned the nose of his latest horseless carriage north the next day I was in the front seat beside him.
With only a mere half dozen warnings from traffic officials who failed to take to my boy friend's driving, we hit White Plains in the main boulevard, went this way, that way and forty minutes later were in that part of Westchester that was more country than the country itself.
There were hills and rills, high spots and low spots, farmhouses and charm houses on every hand and along every foot.
“This here Wellington trap is eight minutes ahead,” Ottie informed me at length, “Listen. It's apt to tear the shirt off your back with laughter but don't smile when we steam through. The jobbies who hang out there are terrible sensitive. Honest, the bunch of them are so narrow-minded that you could button their ears at the back of their necks. I gave the post office a snicker the first day I come up to look the property over, the sheriff heard about it and it cost me three dollars and a pint of Brooklyn rye to keep out of the box. That's the kind of a slab it is.”
And it was.
Wellington, once we gassed in, proved to be rural to the extreme. It's principal thoroughfare had been left unpaved for the benefit of the six or eight chickens that escaped disaster by inches. There were two stores on one side of the way and one and a half on the other, to say nothing of a photo-drama shop that advertised “The Four Horsemen of the Covered Wagon.”
Groups of village loungers stood here and there and gaped as we went past. During the ordeal Ottie's face was as severe as a boarding-house gas bill.
“Get on to them yicks, Joe,” he mumbled. “Look at that big clown who's resting his feet by the laundry and slant his clothes. For a fact, a fashion plate like him belongs in a dinner set. I'll bet he thinks musical comedy is something you spread on crackers!”
Accompanied by as many stares as the average immigrant gives Ellis Island, we shot up a hill, turned to the right and running under a big new sign that read “Five Acres,” pulled up to the porch of a rambling, white colonial homestead that had enough pillars for a couple of dozen twin beds.
“This is it!” Ottie exclaimed with no small degree of pride. “And if it ain't the kitten's cookies then George Washington never buckled on a sword. Wait until I turn this car out to pasture and then I'll show you around the premises.”
He had hardly finished speaking before Looie Pitz rode up on a bicycle. followed closely by Dangerous Dave McFinn, a big set-up in a white sweater who would have given any toad a run for first honors in a contest for frightful faces. Pitz steered the front wheel of the bicycle into Ottie's leg, fell off, picked himself up and arranged his cravat.
“Five miles up the dales and down the
