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SHOWMAN
produced a few smiles on their unshaven countenances. But, as soon as the demon Rum entered the picture, they reverted to their nine months of fairly well-justified bad temper.
As soon as night fell, their environment did become extremely depressing. The whole property was littered with lumber and canvas and the disorder that goes with a big construction job. Coney Island was still closed for the winter— a few pinpoints of electric light were the only illumination. And a dirty-looking storm was blowing up out at sea. By a natural human instinct, everybody in the outfit made a bee-line for the only bar in the neighborhood that was open. It was just a little doggery out back which, in a pinch, might hold twenty men comfortably. But our boys crowded in by forties and fifties, demanding hard liquor— and Coney Island whisky was always both hard and badcoming in sober, leaving half an hour later drunk, and rapidly becoming ugly as a she-bear in March. It was just a question of time till the Boer-British feud started up and then we'd be in for a livelier night than I cared to contemplate.
So I summoned my merry men— a couple of plainclothes detectives and a handful of strong-arm artists who had been hired for just such emergencies— and marched at their head into the barroom where the damage was being done. I needed backing, for, by this time, they had a new goat to pin their troubles on. It
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