Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“I’ll be durned. Howdy, Hoake.” Because there he was, a little gray at the temples, with not jest a sunburned outdoors look but a rich sunburned outdoors look that never needed thatere dark expensive-looking city suit, let alone two waiters jumping around the table where he was at, to prove it, already setting there where Lawyer had drawed him from wherever it was out west he had located him, the same as he had drawed me for this special day. No, it wasn’t Lawyer that had drawed McCarron and me from a thousand miles away and two thousand more miles apart, the three of us to meet at this moment in a New York saloon: it was that gal that done it—that gal that never had seen one of us and fur as I actively heard it to take a oath, never had said much more than good morning to the other two—that gal that likely not even knowed but didn’t even care that she had inherited her maw’s fatality to draw four men anyhow to that web, that one strangling hair; drawed all four of us without even lifting her hand—her husband, her father, the man that was still tryg to lay down his life for her maw if he could jest find somebody that wanted it, and what you might call a bystanding family friend—to be the supporting cast while she said “I do” outen the middle of a matrimonial production line at the City Hall before getting on a ship to go to Europe to do whatever it was she figgered she was going to do in that war. So I was the one that said, “This is Lawyer Stevens, Hoake,” with three waiters now (he was evidently that rich) bustling around helping us set down.

“What’s yours?” he says to Lawyer. “I know what V.K. wants.— Bushmill’s,” he says to the waiter. “Bring the bottle.—You’ll think you’re back home,” he says to me. “It tastes jest like that stuff Calvin Bookwright used to make—do you remember?” Now he was looking at it too. “That’s an Allanovna, isn’t it?” he says. “You’ve branched out a little since Frenchman’s Bend too, haven’t you?” Now he was looking at Lawyer. He taken his whole drink at one swallow though the waiter was already there with the bottle before he could a signalled. “Don’t worry,” he says. “You’ve got my word. I’m going to keep it.”

“You stop worrying too,” I says. “Lawyer’s already got Linda. She’s going to believe him first, no matter what anybody else might forget and try to tell her.” And we could have et dinner there too, but Lawyer says,

“This is New York. We can eat dinner in Uncle Cal Bookwright’s springhouse back home.” So we went to that dining room. Then it was time. We went to the City Hall in a taxicab. While we was getting out, the other taxicab come up and they got out. He was not big, he jest looked big, like a football player. No: like a prize fighter. He didn’t look jest tough, and ruthless aint the word neither. He looked like he would beat you or maybe you would beat him but you probably wouldn’t, or he might kill you or you might kill him though you probably wouldn’t. But he wouldn’t never dicker with you, looking at you with eyes that was pale like Hub Hampton’s but they wasn’t hard: jest looking at you without no hurry and completely, missing nothing, and with already a pretty good idea beforehand of what he was going to see.

We went inside. It was a long hall, a corridor, a line of folks two and two that they would a been the last one in it except it was a line that never had no last: jest a next to the last and not that long: on to a door that said REGISTRAR and inside. That wasn’t long neither; the two taxicabs was still waiting. “So this is Grinnich Village,” I says. The door give right off the street but with a little shirttail of ground behind it you could a called a yard though maybe city folks called it a garden; it even had one tree in it, with three things on it that undoubtedly back in the spring or summer was leaves. But inside it was nice: full of folks of course, with two waiters dodging in and out with trays of glasses of champagne and three or four of the company helping too, not to mention the folks that was taking over the apartment while Linda and her new husband was off at the war in Spain—a young couple about the same age as them. “Is he a sculptor too?” I says to Lawyer.

“No,” Lawyer says. “He’s a newspaperman.”

“Oh,” I says. “Thenkely they been married all the time.”