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He felt himself slung violently about. One mitted hand fixed itself in Mr. Leary’s collar yoke at the rear; the other closed upon a handful of slack material in the lower breadth of Mr. Leary’s principal habiliment just below where his buttons left off.

“So you won’t come, won’t you? Well then I’ll show you–you pink strawberry drop!”

Enraged at having been flaunted before a jeering audience the patrolman pushed his prisoner ten feet along the sidewalk, imparting to the offender’s movements an involuntary gliding gait, with backward jerks between forward shoves; this method of propulsion being known in the vernacular of the force as “givin’ a skate the bum’s rush.”

“Hey, Switzer, lend me your key and I’ll ring for the wagon for you,” volunteered Mr. Cassidy. His care-free companions, some of them, cheered the suggestion, seeing in it prospect of a prolonging of this delectable sport which providence without charge had so graciously deigned to provide.

“Never mind about the wagon. Us two’ll walk, me and him,” announced the patrolman. “‘Taint so far where we’re goin’, and the walk’ll do this fresh guy a little good–maybe’ll sober him up. And never mind about any of the rest of you taggin’ along behind us neither. This is a pinch–not a free street parade. Go on home now, the lot of youse, before you wake up the whole Lower West Side.”

Loath to be cheated out of the last act of a comedy so unique and so rich the whimsical McGillicuddys and their chosen mates fell reluctantly away, with yells and gibes and quips and farewell bursts of laughter.

VII

Closely hyphenated together the deep blue figure and the bright pink one rounded the corner and were alone. It was time to open the overtures which would establish Patrolman Switzer upon the basis of a better understanding of things. Mr. Leary, craning his neck in order to look rearward into the face of his custodian, spoke in a key very different from the one he had last employed.

“I really didn’t intend, you know, to resist you, officer. I had a private purpose in what I did. And you were quite within your rights. And I’m very grateful to you–really I am–for driving those people away.”

“Is that so?” The inflection was grimly and heavily sarcastic.

“Yes. I am a lawyer by profession, and generally speaking I know what your duties are. I merely made a show–a pretence, as it were–of resisting you, in order to get away from that mob. It was–ahem–it was a device on my part–in short, a trick.”

“Is that so? Fixin’ to try to beg off now, huh? Well, nothin’ doin’! Nothin’ doin’! I don’t know whether you’re a fancy nut or a plain souse or what-all, but whatever you are you’re under arrest and you’re goin’ with me.”

“That’s exactly what I desire to do,” resumed the schemer. “I desire most earnestly to go with you.”

“You’re havin’ your wish, ain’t you? Well, then, the both of us should oughter be satisfied.”

“I feel sure,” continued the wheedling and designing Mr. Leary, “that as soon as we reach the station house I can make satisfactory atonement to you for my behaviour just now and can explain everything to your superiors in charge there, and then—-“

“Station house!” snorted Patrolman Switzer. “Why, say, you ain’t headin’ for no station house. The crowd that’s over there where you’re headin’ for should be grateful to me for bringin’ you in. You’ll be a treat to them, and it’s few enough pleasures some of them gets—-“

A new, a horrid doubt assailed Mr. Leary’s sorely taxed being. He began to have a dread premonition that all was not going well and his brain whirled anew.

“But I prefer to be taken to the station house,” he began.

“And who are you to be preferrin’ anything at all?” countered Switzer. “I’ll phone back to the station where I am and what I’ve done; though that part of it’s no business of yours. I’ll be doin’ that after I’ve arrainged you over to Jefferson Market.”