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W. C. Fields
lars apiece. When Le Baron reached Fields, he said, "How much shall I put you down for, Bill?"
"Not a dime," snarled Fields.
"Why not?" said Le Baron. "If you're that damned cheap, I'll put up a hundred for you."
Fields was so annoyed by Le Baron's generous stand that he finally came forward with a hundred dollars. But he grumbled about it all the rest of the week.
Another time one of his best friends, Charley Mack, of the blackface team of Moran and Mack, somehow found himself detained in Syracuse for nonpayment of alimony. "Please send me $500," he wired Fields. "I'm in jail up here." Mack waited eagerly for his old pal's reply, which arrived with heart-warming promptness. "If it's a good jail, I'll join you," Fields told him.
Stranded in Kent in the dead of winter, with six dollars, Fields appraised his situation carefully. His findings were negative; the situation had nothing to recommend it. He borrowed a sled from a group of boys coasting on a hill, and hauled his baggage from the hotel to the railroad station, a distance of half a mile. Then he went about trying to sell an overcoat he had recently acquired in another secondhand store. A pimply youth in a saloon, with many a leer and wink, bid two dollars for the coat on condition that Fields introduce him to the company's ingenue. Fields explained this situation to the lady, who agreed to help him out. Either her presence or the beer he had been drinking exerted a keen aphrodisiac effect on the youth, for as soon as he met her he tried to drag her upstairs in the hotel. Fields was obliged to knock the fellow down, thus forfeiting the sale of the coat. Later, quizzed about the cause of the trouble, Fields said, "He was trying to get her to adopt him."
Back in the saloon, Fields at last sold the coat, for two dollars, and proceeded to the station. And there he had an experience
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